WHY ARE SOME LA RIOTERS WEARING HAMAS GEAR?
What does the Palestinian jihad against Israel have to do with allowing illegal migrants to remain in Los Angeles?
On the face of it, absolutely nothing, and yet there the jihadis are, out burning down the City of Angels along with their leftist allies.
The immediate explanation for this is that both leftists and jihadis have a common enemy — the United States of America — and while that is certainly true, this is much more than just an alliance of convenience. What we are seeing in Los Angeles is just the latest manifestation of a deep affinity between leftists and jihadis.
The pro-Hamas contingent appears to be well represented in L.A. One photo shows a masked man with a Hamas armband and a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine headband, waving a Mexican flag next to a car that had been graffitied all over with leftist slogans and set on fire.
In a video, rioters sporting keffiyehs throw burning material from an overpass onto police cars below, trying to set them on fire.
Another keffiyeh-wearing rioter says that the U.S. is the “enemy” and that Los Angeles should burn down. [pictured]
The deeper reason why jihadis as well as leftists are out on the streets of Los Angeles is that both rely on terror as the source of their power.
RETURNING THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS TO GREAT BRITAIN
The right to self-defense, and by extension the right to bear arms, has a long and complex history in Britain.
Today, many see strict gun control as a hallmark of British law, but this was not always the case.
Indeed, Britain has a robust tradition of armed citizenry, rooted in common law, enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and eroded only in the modern era.
British society faces unprecedented strains, from mass immigration, rising crime and public disorder to distrust of the State, so it is worth re-examining whether Britain has moved too far from its historic principles.
The roots of Britain’s approach to bearing arms can be found in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The overthrow of King James II and the ascension of William III and Mary II resulted in the English Bill of Rights in 1689.
Mostly focused on the abuses of State (Royal) power, it contained a clause declaring:
“That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”
While limited by religious qualification (reflecting the Protestant-Catholic tensions of the time), the Bill of Rights enshrined a foundational acknowledgment of the citizen’s right to bear arms.It was not an unlimited right. It was conditioned by status and subject to the law, but it established that the government could not arbitrarily disarm the population.
Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the English militia system required men to possess and train with weapons to ensure that defense was a civic responsibility, not a purely professional one.
Far from fearing private firearm ownership, the State encouraged it, not least because it lacked a standing army and viewed armed citizens as vital to national defense.
This tradition continued well into the 19th century. Gun ownership was common; regulation was minimal.
This changed after World War I, which left Britain with a surplus of weapons, a newly politicized working class that knew how to use them, and an Establishment fearful of a Bolshevik revolution, culminating in the Firearms Act of 1920, the first major piece of modern gun control legislation.
THE INDIA LESS TRAVELED
This is Mysore Palace, home of the Wadiyar Rajas who ruled Mysore from 1399 to 1950. It is one of the many wonders of Southern India that’s far less known than traveler’s meccas up north like Agra and Rajasthan.
There’s the Nagarhole Tiger Sanctuary, more Asian elephants than anywhere else in the world, over 100 tigers, scores of leopards, their prey in profusion. Christian churches founded by Christ’s disciple St. Thomas in the 1st century AD. Towering Hindu temples covered with tens of thousands of eye-popping multi-colored sculptures. The gorgeous beaches of Goa, the serene peace of the Kerala Backwaters – “one of the most beautiful locations on earth” according to National Geographic, that you explore by luxury houseboat. It goes on and on.
And here also you find the business metropolis of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. We did all of this and more a few years ago, and may yet again before very long. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #81 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
MEXICAN NAZIS
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on May 26, 2005. There's an old saying, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Unfortunately this has been so very true as evidenced in LA and other cities right now. Let's hope the current political cycle can see some permanent change in our relationship with Mexico.]
Two weeks ago on May 14, a small group of folks staged a peaceful rally in Baldwin Park, a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles suburb. It was to demand the removal of a monument to anti-white racist hatred and bigotry, which is on public property and was erected by the city council at taxpayer expense. Here is one of its inscriptions:
They, of course, are the hated “Anglos,” the white European-Americans who “stole” the land from Mexico - who stole it from Spain who stole it from Indian tribes such as the Chumash (not the Aztecs, whose empire was in central Mexico, 2,000 miles away from LA), who stole it from other Indian tribes like the Shoshone.
The rally was met by a far larger, violent counter-demonstration led by an organization of Mexican Nazis who call themselves Reconquistas. These are people who want to “reconquer” the entire American Southwest ceded to the US in 1848 and have it become part of Mexico again.
One of the Reconquista chants was “Go back to Europe, go back to England, Gringos.” Another was, “Viva (long live) Zarqawi, the Gringo Killer,” in praise of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s killing American soldiers in Iraq.
I first wrote about the Reconquistas two years ago in America’s Curse. Since then, they have become ever more explicitly and virulently pro-terrorist. The Baldwin Park incident this month is simply the latest example of how impossibly dangerous Mexican illegal immigration has become to America’s national security.
DODGING RAINBOWS
FLASHBACK FRIDAY: NESOPHILIA
Tristan da Cunha ©2019 Jack Wheeler
All right, I confess. I am a nesophile. I’m addicted to nesophilia. It’s not on any list of psychiatric disorders, however. The term was invented – a “neologism” – by one of the 20th century’s most eminent philosophers, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) in 1938 while in Ireland.
When there, he combined the Greek word nesos – island, with philia – love, and declared he was a nesophile – a lover of islands. That’s me.
I suppose that’s obvious by now – for I’ve lost count of the number of islands I’ve written about on TTP.
And there are so many more to go! Yet I’ll be writing only about ones that are interesting, not even if they’re famous. I just got back from Majorca and Ibiza, for example. Nice enough, pretty enough – but, frankly, boring. There’s no real there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California.
So let’s take a quick look at some islands that would blow Gertrude Stein away – such as the one that has the bed Napoleon died in.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/06/25
Crush Depth: Total War in the Drone Age
Eighty-one years ago today, after the Allied landings on D-Day, warfare has shifted from amphibious invasions to algorithmic strikes.
Military drones, driven by open-source ingenuity and accelerated by tools like Starlink, are now the decisive factor in modern combat.
Ukraine and Russia are racing to adapt, but Ukraine holds the edge through distributed manufacturing, rapid innovation, and real-time command via satellite.
Fragging incidents among Russian troops, systemic command failures, and Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russian logistics show a war not just of machines but a Psyop war of morale and cohesion.
Drones and this week’s Black Swan Event called Operation Spiderweb have redefined the battlefield as a three-dimensional, always-connected space where latency, speed, and real-time adaptability determine survival. From cheap FPV kamikaze drones to high-end ISR platforms, drone warfare now merges the economic and the strategic.
Russia is hemorrhaging both money and leadership, while Ukrainian forces are turning $500 drones into tank-killers. Fiber optic tethers, AI-driven targeting, and booby-trapped sleeper drones signal that the fight is no longer linear, it’s volumetric and economic. Victory is going to the distributed, the fast, the cheap, and the networked.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical chessboard is shifting. Trump’s diplomatic sidelining of Elon Musk, paired with his Ukraine Recovery Fund push, signals a post-oligarchic war reconstruction effort. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against Mexican lawsuits on U.S. firearms preserves the legal foundation for drone and dual-use tech exports.
The Ukraine war is not just a contest of arms, but a struggle between collapsing autocracies and adaptive democracies.
As with D-Day, the question isn’t just who has the weapons, but who has the will, the system, and the speed to wield them.
THE TIDE HAS FINALLY TURNED AGAINST SCIENTIFIC ATHEISM
On a recent podcast episode, Joe Rogan and his guest Cody Tucker found themselves in a discussion that was clearly skeptical of the atheistic consensus among prominent thinkers of the past few generations.
That atheistic consensus generally states that the following is true. There was obviously once a Great Nothingness that suddenly became our universe and the existence of everything within it -- and all of this happened for no reason whatsoever.
Rogan asks a question that every person has likely asked themselves countless times, “wouldn’t it be crazy if there wasn’t something at some point in time? That seems even crazier than [to think] there has always been something.”
He's not wrong.
To believe that nothing suddenly became everything for no reason whatsoever is an act of pure faith based upon no observable data.
What’s more, the proclamation itself an act of heresy for scientific atheists.
BEAUTY AND LUNACY ON THE ADRIATIC SEA
Saranda, Albania. Standing on a hilltop here overlooking the Adriatic arm of the Mediterranean, you can’t help but be mesmerized by the beauty of the scene, the Adriatic coastline, “the wine-dark sea” as Homer so often described it, and off the coast the Greek island of Corfu. Yet you can’t help being puzzled by the small mound of concrete in the foreground. What is that, you ask?
It’s a one-man pillbox bunker with a slit in front for the soldier to fire at Albania’s enemies about to invade during the Cold War. Stalinist madman Enver Hoxha ruled Albania for forty years, from the end of WWII to his death in 1985. During which he built 750,000 of these bunkers in a country barely bigger than Massachusetts (11,000 square miles). He maintained his Fascist-Communist rule of total control by constantly claiming that Albania was surrounded by neighbor enemies – Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy – all of whom were preparing to militarily invade, seize, and destroy Albania at any moment. For forty years.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Albania quickly liberated itself from its Communist past. Today it is stunningly gorgeous, a delight to travel through. The mushroom bunkers still litter the countryside, kept as a reminder of how history can go lunatic, and for Albanians to make sure such madness never happens to them ever again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #296, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE MOST IMPORTANT MOMENT
A marriage, a friendship, a close family relationship… all of our important relationships are built on countless moments, innumerable interactions that either build qualities of trust, joy, and respect - or undermine those qualities.
Today I want to show you what is arguably the most important moment for building a trusting, satisfying, loving relationship.
We can often think that what makes a difference in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our kids, or other friends and relatives, are the big things; the romantic getaway for the weekend, or the great gift that we buy.
…but there is a moment that packs more leverage, more meaning, and more potential for doing good – or harm – than almost any other: