A WHITE HOUSE VALENTINE MESSAGE
Happy Valentine's Day ♥️ pic.twitter.com/6d7qmo7gtz
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2025
[Note: this is real, here’s the link]
HALF-FULL REPORT 02/14/25
Welcome to the 2025 Valentine’s Day HFR!
This is the day that gives us the opportunity to express our appreciation and gratitude to those people in our lives whom we love and value, and by whom we are so fortunate to be loved and value in return.
If we are lucky enough to be blessed with someone who has chosen to share their one life with us, today we devote in particular a special thankfulness to them.
Yet this year’s Valentine’s Day has another blessing, for it enables us love and be grateful for our country once more, in a way we only dared dream of for the last four years of unfathomable degradation.
A beautiful expression of this blessing was provided by Maureen Callahan on TTP yesterday: Resistance to Trumps Is Dead in Less Than Three Weeks. So moving it made me cry, and after reading and watching those three Super Bowl ads, you may do the same.
This is another terrific HFR – it will make you happy! Let’s go…
PANTELLERIA’S MIRROR OF VENUS
Between Sicily and Tunisia in the Mediterranean lies a secret hideaway of Europe’s rich and famous – the small Italian island of Pantelleria. Peaceful and quiet, the opposite of glitzy places like Ibiza, wealthy elite retreat here in luxurious yet very understated villas to get away from it all. It helps that the shoreline is all volcanic rock cliffs, which dissuades hordes of African “migrants” attempted to claim “asylum” in the EU welfare state by landing here.
The most beautiful spot on Pantelleria is this volcano crater lake known as “The Mirror of Venus” – of such magic color that, the legend goes, the goddess Venus would admire herself in its reflection. Come here for a tranquil escape of your own. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #164 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
RESISTANCE TO TRUMP IS DEAD IN LESS THAN THREE WEEKS
We are, as Trump promised in his inaugural address, entering the 'golden age' of common sense. And there's no going back, not anytime soon.
Just look at three of the biggest ads during the Super Bowl 59 — an event at which Trump, as the first sitting US president to attend the game, was cheered, while Taylor Swift, who wholeheartedly endorsed Kamala Harris, was booed.
The culture has gone full MAGA. Brad Pitt, as you saw above, starred in a nearly five-minute long Super Bowl ad for FOX Sports and the NFL, extolling national unity and pride. There was no irony, no winks to a liberal agenda or racism or the 'threats' to so-called marginalized communities.
Nope, just a full-on ad for American exceptionalism — a phrase and a concept that hasn't been part of the lexicon since the 1980s.
MYTHOLOGIES ABOUT MUSK
Here are some of the untruths told about Elon Musk and DOGE.
“Musk has no right to cut USAID.”
Elon Musk and his team are not cutting any federal programs. They are auditors. They were given legal authority under a presidential executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Ultimately, Musk can propose program cuts, but Trump holds the authority to approve or reject them. He may or may not act on all, some, or none of the DOGE recommendations.
“No one elected Musk.”
THE LESSON OF RABAUL
The small black mountain in front of you is a volcano called Tavurvur on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. In 1994, Tavurvur erupted, covering New Britain’s beautiful capital Rabaul in ash. The entire area is volcanic, including the hot springs where I’m standing to take this picture. Tavurvur is very much alive and smoking today – starkly beautiful and dangerous.
History can be like this – beautiful and peaceful, then without warning it explodes in violent destruction. The lesson then is how to overcome, rebuild, and avert its repetition.
It’s an obvious lesson to learn right now, with the destruction of our economy by the Chinese Communists unleashing their virus, and the current attempted theft of the presidency and our entire electoral system by the Democrats. We must overcome these twin evils, and we must make extremely sure that we never allow such travesties to threaten our country ever again.
You can climb to the rocky rim of Tavurvur to stare down into its smoking caldera. There’s fabulous scuba-diving along the coral reefs offshore of Rabaul, and upon sunken Japanese battleships from World War II. It’s a worthwhile experience to come here as you learn the Lesson of Rabaul. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #97 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
NO, TRUMP DOES NOT HAVE TO ABIDE BY A MYTHICAL ‘JUDICIAL SUPREMACY’
They may develop a sense of entitlement and even become narcissistic. And proving that judges are no exception to this reality are a number of recent court “opinions” designed to scuttle President Trump’s agenda.
There is a real solution to what we have now, a kritocracy, a dictatorship of judges. It’s that federal and state officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. They do not take an oath to uphold judges’ opinions. What are the consequences of this?
TAKE THEIR DEUCE TO COURT
Let the January 6th Lawsuits Begin!
In my career I have done a lot of law enforcement jobs, some of which involved jail time – not for me, of course, at least not in the way that is usually understood.
I started working at “intake,” where a newly-arrested person came in, and later I helped to run a jail in Texas. That experience gave me an overview not only of what goes on in a jail, but also the liabilities for the ones running it.
In Texas, every jail must comply with the standards of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which has a detailed list of the rights of prisoners and the responsibilities of those guarding them based on Federal and state law.
Inspectors show up and do compliance inspections—some announced, and some not, depending, and they have the authority to decertify and close jails that are out of standard.
In addition, staff members can face civil and criminal liability for things done, or not done, concerning these inmates.
Other jails in other states and jurisdictions have their own, similar regulatory systems and agencies.
THE BLUE CITY OF CHEFCHAOUEN
My wife Rebel and I love this uniquely picturesque ancient Berber village in Morocco where everything is painted in shades of blue. Suffused in soothing blue, there’s no more relaxed place than just about anywhere. Everyone is welcome from the wealthy staying in sumptuous boutique hotels to backpackers in hostels. There are no “tourist spots,” for every café and bar is where the locals go themselves. (It’s pronounced shef-shah-win, by the way.)
Berbers – “Amazigh” (Unconquered) in their language, are the original people of Morocco having lived there for over 12,000 years. They are directly related to the reindeer-herding Lapps of Lapland in northern Scandinavia (they share the same mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U5b1b). Both are descended from the same stock of Cro-Magnon Ice Age hunters in Western Europe that split in two 15,000 years ago – one moving far north, the other south crossing the Gibraltar Strait to Africa.
One more reason why Morocco is so magical. Would you like to experience the Magic of Morocco with us next year? (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #21 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HOW TO COMMIT DEMOCRAT PARTY SUICIDE
The Democrat Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Democrat self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democrat Party do? Evidently, that question has not even been asked, much less any attempt to answer it.