THE PILLARS OF HERCULES
On either side of the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar there are two small mountains known since great antiquity as the Pillars of Hercules. The pillar on the northern, European side is the famous Rock of Gibraltar. That on the southern, African side is Mount Abyla, Phoenician for “lofty mountain.”
The legend for the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans was that Hercules pushed the two pillars apart to join the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. We think today of Hercules as a comic-book bodybuilder, while the truth is opposite. The entire ancient Mediterranean world very seriously worshipped him. For the Phoenicians, he was Melqart, King of the Earth. For the Greeks, he was Heracles, Divine Protector of Mankind. He was the same for the Romans, who pronounced his name as Hercules.
The Phoenician trading port of Abyla has a history of 3,000 years, from Phoenician to Carthaginian to Roman to Byzantine to Christian Visigoths to Islamic Berbers to Portuguese – and since 1668 to Spain, which continues to govern it today as the Spanish Autonomous City of Ceuta on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.
Ceuta is a charming European city with beautiful beaches, open air cafés with great sangria, very relaxed and pleasant. It is here you find the statue of Hercules separating his Pillars commemorating the legend pictured above. Easy to get to with high-speed ferries from Algeciras near Gibraltar, Ceuta is definitely worth your while to experience. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #137 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
MICHELLE OBAMA CALLS GIVING BIRTH THE LEAST SIGNIFICANT THING A WOMAN CAN DO
Another Democrat former first lady is taking her contempt for children way beyond her distaste for baking cookies.
It might explain why the Obama children never looked very happy, and why young Malia Obama no longer wants to use her mom and dad's last name in the career she is trying to build in film.
But more broadly, it highlights the moral disorder seen among Democrat opinionmakers. To downgrade motherhood, the one thing only women can do to perpetrate the human race, is an outrageous take on the vital role of women and the role they play most naturally.
It's like a war against human civilization, obvious enough in that thoughtless yet deeply felt opinion of Michelle Obama, a remark bound to be met by approval by Democrats who will clap like seals at its mention.
RUSSIA IS JUST NOT VERY GOOD AT FIGHTING WARS
One of the 10,000 Russian tanks destroyed in Ukraine
Last month (6/25), Russian casualties climbed through the one million mark after three and a half years of Putin’s “special military operation”, originally expected to last three days.
For an army of such size in manpower and equipment this seems a remarkable price to pay for less than a fifth of Ukrainian territory, fighting against an army which was minuscule in comparison on the day of the illegal invasion – 24th Feb 22.
What are the reasons for this ineptitude, and is this purely a problem of the modern Russian army – or a reflection of systemic failures across the centuries? A soldier (Hamish) and a historian (James) will try to answer these questions today.
When it comes down to it, the Russian military has always relied on mass and brutality. It has aspired historically to ambitious intellectual underpinnings for its military power but this has tended to falter on first contact with reality.
Which leads to Ukraine.
THE VOODOO MARKET OF TOGO
The Akodessawa Fetish Market in Lomé, Togo has to be seen to be believed. Here on display is a vast array of animal parts -- heads, skulls, bones, horns, skins et al – for sale to the adherents of Togo’s official religion of Voodoo. They are used to communicate with and pray to the huge variety of spirits and deities they believe in.
What you see here is a very small fraction of the market – there are thousands of animal parts here from entire elephant skulls to small mummified rodents. Behind the displays are stalls where voodoo priests cater to devotees for healing potions or being an interlocutor to the spirits. This is not sticking pins in dolls of enemies. The people of Togo and neighboring Benin believe deeply in their religion. Togo in West Africa is the size of New Jersey and has over 130 fetish markets in the country, with the largest here. This is an experience you never forget.
(Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #273 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE AFRICANIZATION OF AMERICA
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on March 21, 2012. Then we were suffering under the rule of an America-hating autocrat from Kenya. Today, New Yorkers may soon be under the rule of an America-hating autocrat from Uganda. It was written while in Ghana, West Africa, and recounts how a Marxist named Kwame “Africanized” Ghana’s economy into ruin. Zohan Kwame Mamdani threatens to do exactly that to New York, as it is who his Marxist father named him after to be his model, The description below of Ghana’s Kwame fits New York’s Kwame to a T.]
TTP, March 21, 2012
Accra, Ghana. By independence in 1952, Ghana was the richest tropical country in the world, with huge foreign currency reserves from massive sales of cocoa, coffee, gold, timber, and bauxite. The Brits had provided the new nation with an efficient civil service, an impartial judiciary, a fair electoral system with competent elected politicians, and a prosperous middle class.
Its rule Nkrumah was wildly popular, promising hope and change that would solve everyone’s grievances. The world press fawned on him just as obsequiously, starting with a Time Magazine cover story in 1953.
Nkrumah’s true identity was plain for anyone to see – a charismatic charlatan, an intellectual lightweight, a self-proclaimed Marxist who hated capitalism, a self-worshipping narcissist of the highest order, and a black racist who hated whites and the West. So radical left the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962.
To the surprise of no one with unblinkered vision, but to the shocked surprise and denial of every fawning liberal on the planet, he proceeded to run Ghana straight into the ground. As he built a personality cult around him -- Ghana’s soldiers, e.g., marched to the cadence “Nkrumah can do no wrong, Nkrumah can do no wrong” – Ghana’s fabulous economy collapsed and sunk into a morass of corruption.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – SLEEPING IN AN IGLOO
April 1990. When our oldest son Brandon was six years old, I took him with me to the North Pole. It was my 14th expedition there, and as always, we stopped to visit friends at Canada’s northernmost community, the Inuit hunting village of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. Brandon thought it would be cool to sleep in an igloo, which the Inuit do only when they’re hunting seals or walrus far out on the ice.
So the villagers happily complied, showing him how they built one, carving out blocks of wind-blown snow, shaping and placing them in an inward-sloped spiral with one block on top, and packing snow as mortar between the blocks. When it was bedtime – still daylight with 24-hour sunshine by April – they lined the inside with caribou skins, which shed like crazy with hairs everywhere but sure are warm. Snuggled into our arctic down sleeping bags, we slept like stones.
It was an experience both of us will never forget. Never pass up an opportunity to have an adventure with your kids they’ll always remember. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #50 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Jack Wheeler is Escape Artist’s World Exploration Expert. He is the founder of Wheeler Expeditions at WheelerExpeditions.com.
OBAMA DISTRAUGHT AS TRUMP BOMBS COOL NUKE FACTORY HE PAID FOR
EDGARTOWN, MA — With the news that the U.S. military had carried out a successful bombing operation in Iran over the weekend, former President Barack Obama was reportedly distraught that President Donald Trump had bombed the cool nuke factory he had paid for.
After several days of speculation, Trump revealed that the U.S. had carried out air strikes to destroy several of Iran's key nuclear research sites, leaving Obama despondent that the facilities he had fronted the Iranians billions of dollars to build were now gone.
"All those years of money and hard work just blown to bits," Obama was overheard saying after hearing the news of the bombings. "It took a long time to build up those cool nuke factories with the huge pallets of stacked cash we gave them. I had high hopes for that nuclear program, but now Trump has undone all of my efforts. Welp, I guess we'll head back to the drawing board to help evil governments around the globe move closer to their horrifying goals. Somebody get me Soros on the line."
A staff member at Obama's palatial Martha's Vineyard estate confirmed that the former president was saddened by Iran's failure to carry out mass death and destruction.
"He canceled his scheduled appointment at the bathhouse because he wasn't in the mood," the source said. "And when it was time for dinner last night, he wouldn't even touch his adrenochrome cocktail. I haven't seen him this disappointed since Kamala was chosen to take Biden's place."
At publishing time, Obama was reportedly looking to lift his spirits by killing off a member of his household staff during a paddleboarding trip.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/27/25
Good grief – how much winning can we take in a week? Somehow we’ll handle it, comforted by knowing that all of America’s enemies foreign and domestic are in a deep dark hole of depression.
From last Saturday night’s (6/21) epic obliteration of Mullah Iran’s nuke dreams…
…to SCOTUS 6-3 scuttling Demtard universal injunction dreams by Trump-hating judges this morning (6/27)…
🚨 LMAO — SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: "You can tell from Justice Jackson's dissent that she's as mad as a bag of cats... and that's probably a good thing for the American people"
"The Supreme Court has turned the universal injunction into FISH FOOD."Freaking love this guy 🤣 pic.twitter.com/2Z2L9OoYDX
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) June 27, 2025
…President Badass is having quite a week – but Team Trump is stepping up to the plate as well. Enjoy this quartet sample:
And we’re only just getting started for this HFR.
THE CHRISTIAN CATHEDRAL OF A COUNTRY THAT DOESN’T EXIST
Banja Luka, Srpska. You may never have of this country, the Republic of Srpska, that takes up half the size and 40% of the population of the Balkan country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The entire country was conquered and ruled for centuries by the Islamic Ottoman Empire, thus after the Ottomans fell in WWI and Yugoslavia broke apart after the Soviet Union fell, those Bosnians who retained adherence to Christianity through those centuries of Islamic occupation found themselves greatly outnumbered by those who had converted to Islam (“Bosniaks”). So they (Bosnian Serbs) formed their own country which remains unrecognized by every other country on the planet.
They rebuilt their beautiful Cathedral of Christ the Savior – destroyed in WWII and never allowed rebuilding by Communist Yugoslavia – in their capital of Banja Luka. You can see how gorgeous the interior is from the photo. The whole country is beautiful with its lakes, forests, rivers, vineyards, sprinkled with old castles and charming villages. The people of Srpska are proud of what they have achieved and now simply want to live in peace with their neighbors. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #300, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
IF ILLEGALS ARE ILLEGAL WHY ARE THEIR BABIES CITIZENS?
On his first day in office of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order ending anchor babies, the practice of treating kids born to illegals on U.S. soil as full-fledged citizens.
Three federal district court judges promptly issued (you’ll never guess) nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s order. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on those injunctions any day now.
That is clearly the assumption of smug liberals sneering that Trump’s executive order is “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one injunction-happy judge put it. Their sublime confidence in the permanence of a made-up constitutional right is awe-inspiring.
In fact, the whole “birthright citizenship” scam is based on a wildly expansive interpretation of post-Civil War amendments that were designed to help blacks and former slaves.
Birthright citizenship, let alone the anchor baby con, has nothing to do with the original Constitution. And as Trump keeps saying, the post-Civil War amendments, such as the 14th, are all about slavery.