HALF-FULL REPORT 09/22/23
It’s All About The Spectacle
It really is all about the spectacle according to the New Left, and whether critical systems can be disrupted such as city services or military avionics software.
We follow up on Skye’s Links from yesterday concerning the strange F-35 aircraft crash and what it means.
Ukraine’s survival might depend on gearing up the Arsenal of Democracy but the West no longer has a machine tools industry. These are the tools used to make the machines that produce goods. The problem needs urgent attention.
The fourth installment of leftist theory outlined in Beautiful Trouble, the modern replacement for Rules for Radicals, continues. The hand of Russian military doctrine in modern leftism becomes self-evident.
Please join us for this week’s HFR, and as always, your insights are greatly appreciated on the forum.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – ON THE MATTERHORN SUMMIT AGAIN WITH MY SON
When my son Brandon turned 14, he asked me, “Dad, you climbed the Matterhorn at 14. Could we climb the Matterhorn together now that I’m 14?” It was 1998 and I was 54. I didn’t think I could do it, but his request meant more than the world to me, so I agreed. Each with our own bergführer guide, he breezed up, but it was a real struggle for me.
He made it, my guide didn’t think I could, so after summiting, Brandon came back down to get me. We climbed the last 500 feet together. Thus here we both are on the summit of the world’s most famous mountain. There are no words to come close to expressing what this means to each of us. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #35 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
OFF THE CLIFF
THE REGISTAN
The public square of The Registan, the center of the ancient Silk Road city oasis of Samarkand, is arguably the most magnificent sight in all Central Asia. The Ulugh Beg Madrasa (college or school) on the left was built in 1420 by The Sultan Astronomer, the Sher-Dor Madrasa (1636) on the right you learned about in The Tigers of Samarkand, and most recently, last Friday’s Glimpse was about the Golden Madrasa (1660) in the center.
Here are all three in the splendor of entire Registan illuminated at night. It took my breath away yet again to be here once more – and will do the same for you once you stand here to make this sight a part of your life. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #224 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 09/21/23
The Great Decentralization
A battle is being fought over control of A.I.
Who will control the technology? The decentralized billions of people, or the few and powerful?
With control comes the power of the global narrative and the ability to separate right-think from wrong-think. Throughout human history, the good guys have seldom been the thought police.
Or, as many are beginning to realize:
The Right of the People to Keep and Deploy Computer Models Shall Not Be Infringed.
Information control runs far and deep. Something caused the computer on a Marine F-35B aircraft to eject the very surprised pilot while the plane was in level flight. The Marines are taking this very seriously. Did something malfunction? Is the software buggy, or did someone send a digital signal to the aircraft?
By this time next year, billions, or maybe tens of billions of election campaign messages will have been computer-generated and sent. Most messaging will be ephemeral, meaning it appears briefly and then vanishes without a trace. George Soros is investing much money into mass brainwashing via TikTok. Even the candidates will appear as computer-generated images, making fake and inflammatory statements.
Truth is under automated assault as the narrative reaches beyond hospitals killing grandma for fedbucks and global interests inventing a climate crisis. Just how deep is the deep state? It continues to fear Trump at all levels.
Economic conditions are concerning as the Federal Reserve is losing ground to inflation. If the A.I. technology behind the manipulation of the 2024 election is used to create a financial panic, we might experience Weimar Germany, Version 2.0.
The narrative is too powerful to be in the hands of a few.
WHERE AN ANCIENT WONDER ONCE WAS
This is where The Colossus of Rhodes once stood, at the entrance to the Old Harbor of Rhodes. Standing as high as today’s Statue of Liberty – 108 feet from feet to crown – it was of the Greek god of the Sun, Helios. Completed in 280 BC, travelers from all over the Mediterranean flocked to see it – as they did all Seven Wonders of their world.
They marveled at the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Lighthouse of Pharos at the entrance to Alexandria, both in Ptolemaic Egypt; the massive Tomb of King Mausolus or Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, on the Ionian (western) coast of present-day Turkey; the giant Temple of Zeus at Olympia in mainland Greece; and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – in addition to The Colossus on the Greek island of Rhodes, now still Greek right off the coast of Turkey.
The Colossus only stood for sixty years, and was then toppled by a great earthquake. One by one, the others were destroyed by earthquakes, floods, fires and other disasters, until only one of the Seven is left – the Great Pyramid, already over 2,000 years old when the other six were built.
All seven sites where the wonders stood are worth visiting today. We’ll be organizing such an exploration soon. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #132 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
DEADLY CONSEQUENCES OF BIDEN’S OPEN BORDERS POLICY
It’s hard to look at the photo of 1-year-old Nicholas Feliz-Dominici, who died from fentanyl exposure at a Bronx day care Friday. So handsome with his little suspenders and blue bow tie, his crisp white shirt and tiny sneakers, he looks directly into the camera with a purposeful air. You can tell, just by looking at him, that this was a well-loved child.
Just imagine his poor mother, packing his bag for the day, getting him dressed, dropping him off at the new day-care center, giving him a kiss and maybe feeling a little guilty as she heads off to work. It’s what working mothers do every day across this city.
Cops found a kilo of fentanyl and a kilo press in a room at the day-care center that belonged to a “new arrival” from the Dominican Republic, who was renting, and two people were held responsible for little Nicholas’ death.
But there is a wider culpability. President Biden’s open border kills.
It kills the poor souls seeking a better life who answer its siren call and make the hazardous journey from more than 150 countries to cross illegally into the United States.
It kills more than 100,000 Americans each year with drug overdoses from the fentanyl sent here by the Mexican drug cartels.
Joe Biden and the Democratic politicians who abet him have ensured New York is awash with fentanyl and overwhelmed with an influx of illegal migrants.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES AMERICA
Once again, Mark Levin has done a great service to the Republic by writing a fully documented, highly pointed book on a topic of vital national interest. Published today by the Threshold Editions imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Democrat Party Hates America is required reading for anyone who follows politics in America. That most assuredly includes those who identify as Democrats, though most will shun the book because it is too much of a challenge to their sense of self-worth and virtue.
For the few who have the courage to read it, the book will be a revelation. I make no secret that I was born into a family of active Democrats, and until reality intruded well into adulthood, I shared that political attachment. I have since regarded it as a mistaken affiliation, but after reading this book I now have a sense of shame.
If it is widely enough read, and I predict that it will be a runaway best-seller, the book will change the way the public understands one of our two major political parties, forever tainting the Democrats for the racism, hypocrisy, lack of principle, and sheer ruthless pursuit of power at any cost that have permeated their party throughout its history.
If you have family members, colleagues, associates, or friends who are vocal Democrats and who do not shy away from political discussions, The Democrat Party Hates America is a cornucopia of evidence that you can use to persuade them out of their delusion that they are supporting a worthwhile political movement.
A KYRGHIZ EAGLE HUNTER
A Kyrghiz eagle-hunter doesn’t hunt for eagles to eat. He hunts with an eagle he has trained from infancy to hunt food for his family.
Female eagles adapt to training the best and are fierce huntresses. Retrieved as a young chick from their mother’s nest when she’s out hunting, it takes one or two years to train them. The eagle the hunter is holding is age six. When they are too old to hunt at around age 20, they are released back into the wild, where they can live free for up to age 50.
That would be among the high rock outcroppings dotting the high grasslands of Kyrghizstan in Central Asia. That’s where the hunter’s assistant (usually his son) climbs up with the eagle gripping his forearm high enough to launch. Upon the hunter waves thee command on horseback, the hood is removed from the eagle’s head so he can see and is released.
Soaring high, the eagle searches for game like rabbits which are plentiful in the grasslands. Upon spotting one, the eagle swoops down to snare it on the run with her amazingly powerful talons. Allowing her to eat a bite or two as her reward, she’s re-hooded and the rabbit soon to be on the family dinner table. If you want to see this for yourself, come with us to Kyrghizstan on our next exploration of Central Asia. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #228 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
POST-POSTMODERN WOKE AMERICA
Woke Revolution depends on its advocates never having to experience firsthand any of the nonsense they inflict on others
When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.
Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.
Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.
Then border states finally wised up.
They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.
So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.