The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Sunday, December 7, 2025
On Tuesday, President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, an event that was met with outstanding reactions from the public and boos and hisses from the mean-girl Democrats. The full video of the address is available below.
During the session, many Democratic lawmakers displayed signs and mini whiteboards expressing their dissent. Frankly, they looked juvenile. Representative Al Green from Texas’s 9th Congressional District was removed from the session by the Sergeant at Arms due to his behavior, as instructed by Speaker Johnson. Discussions are occurring among House members about potentially removing (more…)
Watching President Trump speak to both Houses of Congress, two colorful Yiddish words kept floating into my mind.
I believe that each captures an aspect of the reality of that unprecedented gathering that the English language fails to convey with the same level of nuance.
As President Trump spoke, I kept thinking that he’s a real shtarker, which is often translated as “tough guy,” but which carries considerable historical context.
At Quora, Wolf Krakowski explains:
“In Europe, studious, myopic Jews who spent their days warming a yeshivah bench were easy pickins for their loutish, violent anti-Semitic neighbors (more…)
Ngorongoro Crater, Serengeti, Tanzania. Ngorongoro is one of the world’s great natural wonders, created over two million years ago when the cone of a gigantic volcano collapsed in on itself. The crater floor is over 100 square miles, teeming with African wildlife that includes the densest population of lions in the world. You’re only allowed to drive on certain dirt roads to see them, but lions sometime have different ideas.
Here’s a lioness we found sunning herself on the hood of a Caterpillar road-grader, completely unconcerned by our presence. We spend a few days exploring Ngorongoro to cap off (more…)
[As you know, Durk and Sandy have passed on. Durk as “Skye” was beloved on TTP. We are preserving his and Sandy’s legacy through these “Live Long and Prosper” TTP columns. The following is Part Two of an interview they gave to us that is abundantly informative. Greg and Michelle Pryor of Life Priority]
GREG: Moving over to the other two neurotransmitters …
DURK: Noradrenaline is nature’s natural speed. It is your “get up and go” juice. But unlike speed, it doesn’t cause free radical damage that burns out the neurons in your brain. Noradrenaline … if you have enough of it you’re full of energy, you’re excited, you’re self-confident. If you don’t have enough of it …
SANDY: You can be depressed, but you’re certainly going to be having less energy, less drive. You may just lose interest in doing most things.
DURK: If you have a hard time getting out (more…)
On the remote north side of the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, there lives a cannibal tribe called the Big Nambas. The men wear a penis gourd wrapped in pandamus fibers, and eat “man long pig,” cooked human enemies. You have to trek over mountains of thick jungle to reach them. When I was able to years ago, there were a few men who continued the practice. This gentleman is one of them. I was in no danger as they were very kind and gracious to me.
That wasn’t the case a century ago when the first explorers, Martin & (more…)
One of the – sometimes – unspoken expectations when we buy something is that it will, to some degree, make us happy.
We buy a new appliance, or a nice piece of furniture for our home, and it satisfies an idea we had that led us to buy it in the first place. Part of that idea is that the new oven, or couch, will make us happy.
We shop for a new piece of clothing, and we expect that we’ll enjoy wearing it.
Even a trip to the grocery store is often accompanied with an expectation that the food (more…)
In case you have not heard, according to every mainstream media outlet, Donald Trump did NOT give a State of the Union speech Tuesday evening.
Once a year, some Leftmedia scribe does a Google search on “state of the union” and then copies and pastes Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 from our Constitution, which defines the information the president is to give Congress. Then, all the other outlets reprint that post.
But according to the American Presidency Project, the fact that it was technically not a State of the Union address makes little difference because the “impact (more…)
10,000 years ago, the Sahara was green, with lakes, rivers, and such an abundance of animals it was a hunting paradise for people who lived here. You’ll find their petroglyphs carved on to rock outcroppings like this that my son Jackson and I found on a Trans-Sahara Expedition in 2003.
The Milankovitch astronomical cycles that drive Earth’s climate produced a West African monsoon that greened the Sahara back then. When the cycles shifted ending the monsoon, the Sahara turned dry desert as it remains today. Political cycles that permitted a peaceful crossing of the world’s greatest desert have also shifted, (more…)
President Trump has stated many times his intention for brokering an end to Russia’s war upon Ukraine is “peace.”
When these statements are translated into Russian by Russian media, our English word “peace” is translated into the Russian word “mir.” The two words do not mean the same thing. In fact, they are diametrically opposed.
It is the same – as President Reagan famously pointed out – with our word “freedom” and the Russian word mistakenly translated as freedom, “Svoboda.”
Svoboda means license, not freedom in our sense. There is an (more…)
Is the era of rounding up government or academic “experts” to declare their support or opposition to ongoing controversies over? Public declarations by Anthony Fauci and his associates to follow their “expertise” or “science” did not work out well and persuaded few.
Recall the 1,200 partisan healthcare “professionals” of June 2020 who flipped to assure us that it was mysteriously now medically OK to break quarantines—but only if to publicly protest during the post-George Floyd unrest.
Do we remember the “70 arms control and nuclear experts?” In 2015, they were collected by Obama subordinates to convince America to embrace the (more…)
This is the interior of “Gur Emir,” the tomb of Tamerlane (1336-1405) in Samarkand, the great Silk Road city now in Uzbekistan. Tamerlane was the last of the nomadic conquerors of Eurasia, a Turkic-Mongol whose conquests extended from New Delhi to eastern Turkey.
Gur Emir is only one of a multitude of extraordinary sights in legendary Samarkand that make being here a life-memorable experience. We’ll be here during our exploration of Central Asia soon again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #59 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[This is the eighth chapter of Part I: Envy of my forthcoming book NO FEAR OF THE EVIL EYE: Key to Freedom, Peace, and Prosperity. Previous sections and chapters can be accessed here. I will really appreciate any feedback you have.]
Ever play the Ultimate Dinner Party parlor game – where you get to imagine inviting people from history to converse over dinner and explain why them? At such a party, one conversation I’d most like to hear would be between Aristotle and Einstein. (And no, Mussolini would not be invited – we discuss him after dinnertime.)
Einstein would first have to bring Aristotle up to speed with what science had learned since the 4th century BC. In particular, he would blow Aristotle’s mind about inertia.
Once Aristotle grasped Newton’s First Law explaining motion – that something will stay (more…)
Looking down 1,000 feet above world-famous Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River at sunset is one of most iconic views our planet offers us. It is to be found near Page, Arizona near the border with Utah. Yet in truth, the number of different mind-blowing iconic views is uncountable in this part of the American West.
Close by are the Vermillion Cliffs, and the simply psychedelic Antelope Canyon. Just a bit further is the Grand Escalante Staircase, a little bit further Zion and Bryce Canyons and Monument Valley. And of course, right next door is something called The Grand Canyon. (more…)
U.S. — The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the most recent government agency affected by the rule of DOGE, with layoff numbers reported in excess of 6,000 persons. Now, bands of former IRS agents are roaming the country, forced to go door to door to rob people directly.
“It’s just so sad,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said. “Elon Musk is quashing the dreams of real people who devoted their lives to stealing for the federal government. But some heroes remain, choosing to spend their own private time going door to door to rob people without government compensation. And I applaud them (more…)
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