The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Saturday, January 24, 2026
The price of gold, government shutdowns, and global conflicts are signals of a deeper struggle between order and disorder.
From yesterday’s collapse of the USSR to this morning’s Gaza ceasefire, from Trump’s battle against bureaucratic chaos to Japan’s “Iron Lady” restoring confidence, the world is at a turning point.
Truth is reclaiming the field while both citizens and leaders are driving out the agents of disorder. Systems are being repaired, virtue is being rewarded, and civilization is standing firm.
Chaos is losing, truth is winning, and the world is reclaiming its order and vibrancy.
November 1990. The “Tiger’s Nest” or Taktsang monastery is built in front of caves on a vertical cliff-face high above the Paro Valley in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Originally a meditation site of the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambhava in the 700s, the monastery temples were first constructed in the 1600s.
Bhutan is arguably the most fabulously exotic country on earth, still adhering to the ancient traditions of Ningma (Red Hat) Tibetan culture. It is quite a steep hike to the Tiger’s Nest but certainly worth it. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #133 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
When you think of what you do in your life, how do you think of yourself?
If you think thoughts such as, “I’m intelligent,” or “I’m talented,” or “I’m a failure,” you’re thinking of yourself in terms of traits. Traits are fixed qualities that do not change much, if at all.
There is a big problem with thinking of yourself – or other people – in terms of traits; it makes it very difficult to learn, grow, and change.
In research done by Carol Dweck and others, they found that kids who thought of themselves in terms of traits would give up easily, and had a hard time bouncing back from adversity or defeat.
If you’re told how smart you are, how talented you are, how gifted you are, and such traits are the main focus of praise for you, then what happens when you fail a test?
You shouldn’t fail a test; in fact you should never do anything but great on a test. After all, you’re brilliant and talented; a real natural at these things!
When a child is evaluated in terms of such positive traits, there isn’t much room for improvement.
You either do well and live up to your evaluation, or if you fail, that failure undermines the positive evaluation of your traits.
How can you be brilliant and do poorly? There must’ve been a mistake in the positive evaluation.
When there is failure, there isn’t much room for improvement, either.
Failing is not a verb to a trait-oriented person. Failure is something that you are.
A child with a trait-oriented mindset who has a setback or failure does not experience it as a failure of action, he experiences it as a failure of character – an overwhelming defeat at a fundamental level.
A trait-oriented mindset is a helpless mindset. But there is an alternative…
As America’s political and media elite partied in Washington, DC, following Donald Trump’s inauguration at the start of the year, one event in particular drew the great and the good.
The Free Press, an online news publication founded by outspoken US journalist Bari Weiss, teamed up with Uber and Elon Musk’s X for a party that played host to famous faces, including the Republican senator Ted Cruz, controversial Irish UFC star Conor McGregor and former prime minister Liz Truss.
The star-studded bash was a coup for Weiss, the former New York Times journalist who in recent years has become one of the hottest names in US media.
Now, though, her star – and her fortune – have risen further after Hollywood giant Paramount inked a deal to buy The Free Press for a reported $150m price tag.
The takeover embeds a news startup at the heart of one of America’s largest media empires.
More controversially, however, the deal will also see Weiss take up the role of editor-in-chief of CBS News in a move that could herald the biggest overhaul in the Paramount-owned network’s near-100-year history.
Glimpse (#98) was the back panel of the Painted Monastery of Voronet. Here you see a side panel fresco of Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Startlingly, however, the couple is not eating an apple at the serpent’s behest but a hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria mushroom – recognizable as the classic Disney cartoon mushroom with the red cap and white spots. Sounds hard to believe but there it is, 532 years old. It’s the center panel of a triptych, the left panel has Adam and Eve each grasping an Amanita stalk, the right panel knowing they are naked covering themselves with fig leaves.
In all three panels, the Garden of Eden is an Amanita garden. This is devotional art by deeply devout Christians over 500 years ago. What’s going on? Amanita muscaria is commonly found in the Carpathian forests to this day. Did the Voronet painters engage in Amanita ceremonies giving them visions they used to paint their churches? Did those visions make them decide it was Amanita and not an apple that Eve ate?
From time immemorial, people have used hallucinogenic plants to commune with the spirit world. Researchers have shown that Soma, the god instantiated on earth in the earliest Hindu texts, is Amanita muscaria. And they’ve made another connection. Google Amanita muscaria + Santa Claus to find out. Better be sitting down. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #99 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
In blue cities across America — Portland, Oregon, especially — often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.
Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Joe Biden years — illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.
Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.
Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.
ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90% of all current apprehensions.
No matter.
Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.
President Donald Trump loves a Sharpie pen, and now he has all the more reason to love the company that makes them.
The president signed the flurry of executive orders he issued the day he returned to office with a Sharpie.
He's used them for years, finding them more reliable than fancier pens.
Now we know they have another merit, too: They're almost entirely made in America.
Only the felt tip of a Sharpie comes from abroad -- it's made in Japan, according to the Wall Street Journal's Natasha Khan, who published an eye-opening article on the penmaker last week.
What makes Newell Brands, the corporation behind the Sharpie, so newsworthy is its success saving money -- and holding down consumer prices -- by making the pens in America.
Newell was once as dazzled as other manufacturers by the prospect of making its products more cheaply in Asia.
But in 2018, CFO Chris Peterson looked into producing the latest Sharpie, a gel version, at the company's factory in Maryville, Tennessee.
The new pen required updating the plant and training workers to operate and maintain the new machines.
Yet that's what made the project a triumph: investment, in an American factory and the Americans working there.
On September 12, 1683, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV as the Caliph of all Islam was on the verge of realizing the great Moslem dream of conquering all of Christian Europe for the glory of Allah. The great obstacle in his way – the city of Vienna – was about to be overwhelmed by the Sultan’s gigantic army of 140,000 Islamic Taliban of their day.
On the Kahlenberg hilltop above Vienna, the commander of the Christian forces, King Jan III Sobieski of Poland, gave the order to attack. Twenty thousand armed horsemen galloped down the slopes of Kahlenberg, the largest cavalry charge in history, with the Polish King and his Winged Hussars in the lead. The cavalry trampled the Ottomans and made straight for their camps.
Ottoman commander Kara Mustafa fled out of his tent and barely escaped with his life (it didn’t last long – the Sultan ordered him strangled). With the Christian victory at The Battle of Vienna, the Moslem threat to Europe was over. Sobieski wrote a letter to Pope Innocent XI, paraphrasing Julius Caesar:
“Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vincit” – “We came, We saw, God conquered.”
In turn, the Pope hailed Sobieski as “The Savior of Western Christendom.” Indeed he was, and still is so revered by the Polish people to this day – with no apology.
For the people of Poland stand out among those of all Europe for their pride in being part of Western Civilization – symbolized for them by this statue of their Hero King trampling the Ottomans in the beautiful Royal Baths Park in Warsaw. They will make sure visitors to the statue note that underneath the right forearm of the fallen Turkish soldier is a book – the Koran.
You owe it to yourself to visit Poland and meet the Polish champions of Christian liberty, having freed themselves from the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Soviets. We need more like them today. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #159 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
At the beginning of September, I told you how French President Emmanuel Macron was on the hunt for Prime Minister Number Four after yet another French government went le poof like a deflated soufflé.
It's always entertaining to watch the turgid burps of the excitable Gallic political process as they go about trying to form and reform governments, with cranky citizens (and others) taking to the streets in rowdy, car-b-quing mobs expressing either their delight or disgust.
Public unions often join the fray in generally making things even more difficult by striking various aspects of the national service industries.
Macron settled on a fellow named Lecornu as his Prime Minister, and things seemed to settle down, which made those watching more than merely the political upheaval breathe a small sigh of relief.
Stability in France has many in Brussels and beyond very concerned right now, as the French are in quite possibly one of the worst financial pickles they have been in decades - some say since the founding of this latest iteration of government in the early 1950s. Without a settled government, they are paralyzed as far as taking any action to correct it.
Hopes of breaking the impasse and moving on to restoring some fiscal sanity were dashed when No.4, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, resigned twenty-seven days after accepting the office and about fourteen hours after Macron finally named his new cabinet.
YOU ALL ARE CRAZY AND I'M OUT OF HERE
It was the 1980s. Reagan was in charge of the country now, and the US was engaged in an urgent rebuilding of our military.
Vietnam was still a fresh wound and the country was emerging from a crisis of confidence in itself and in its institutions.
On the other side of the world, the menace known as the Soviet Union was churning out weapons and had just invaded Afghanistan.
Europe, so the thinking went, or the Middle East at large, might be next.
Or perhaps both at once. Or perhaps they would just pound the US with a surprise nuclear first strike.
Nikita Khruschev had sworn to bury us.
The Soviets weren’t building all of their stuff for show, and were openly preparing for The Big One with us. The Soviet menace blared from every side—TV, books, and movies—and had transfixed me. My America and this entity were on a collision course.
My idiotic pacifist classmates told me I was paranoid. I knew better. I knew the things I was reading were fiction, but behind it was a very real, deadly, and evil menace that was killing and enslaving many people on the other side of the world.
On this particular day I’d left the video arcade by way of the bookstore and sat down in the mall reading a Popular Mechanics issue that had a rather gripping cover. It was a very well-drawn Soviet T-72 tank—charging towards the viewer in exquisite detail with a gun bore about three feet wide.
The issue talked about America’s new M-1 Abrams tank, its close cousin the German Leopard 2, the British Chieftain, and some other vehicles I’d never heard of before.
How did these US and NATO tanks stack up against the Soviet tanks? Our brand-new M-1 was “probably the best all around tank,” it said, “but expensive compared to the opposition.” And somewhere out there would be a new Soviet “T-80.” I read on….
It seemed America had a tank problem—and a big one.
Mount Athos, Greece. The Monastic Community of Mount Athos has been independent from the rest of the world for over a thousand years. In all that time, no woman has been allowed to enter. 20 Eastern Orthodox Christian monasteries, home to some 2,000 monks, are scattered along the Athos peninsula at the apex of the Aegean Sea. The most dramatic of them is Simonopetra built in the 1200s on a huge granite rock hanging on a cliff 1,000 feet above the sea.
Little wonder it is nicknamed The Potala of the Aegean, after the famed Potala in Lhasa, Tibet.
You have to get special permission to enter Mount Athos and stay in one of the monasteries. There are no tourists and no hotels. My son Jackson and I were privileged to be here. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #306 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on December 15, 2003. Today, the psychosis of Nazi Antisemitism has arisen once again as a moral stain on Western Civilization. “Pro-Palestinian” protestors rampaging in our cities and those in Western Europe need to be recognized as Neo-Nazis whose waving of Palestine flags is an excuse for hatred of Jews. Here is the story of their ideological founder, an Englishman over 100 years ago.]
The founder of the Palestinian terrorist movement was Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974).
As Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, he organized Arab rampages killing Jewish settlers in Palestine throughout the 1920s, and formed an alliance with the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s.
He met with Adolph Hitler in Berlin in November 1941 to encourage him to slaughter Jews in Europe so they couldn’t escape to settle in Palestine, and ordered Arab families to flee Israel upon independence so Arab armies could invade in 1948.
As one of the founders of Palestine Liberation Organization, he mentored his nephew Rahman Abdul Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, and turned the leadership of the PLO over to him.
His nephew assumed the alias of Yasser Arafat.
But just how did Amin al-Husseini become Grand Mufti?
April, 1979 – on the sea ice at 90 North latitude, the North Pole. I was one of the more unusual Profiles for Dewar’s Scotch. It was the 3rd of my 21 expeditions to the very top of our planet. One thing that stood out for me was the photographer brought false ice cubes of carved polished crystal for the photo you see of a glass of scotch perched on a small pressure ridge. That’s the way the pros do it. One genuine item he brought was a case of Dewar’s. We had one heck of a party on top of the world! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #75 photo of Jack Wheeler)
U.S. — The National Football League is apparently working double time to win back its conservative fanbase by planning a Super Bowl halftime show with a Spanish-speaking man in a dress.
Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny has officially signed with the NFL to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show in what experts are calling a desperate bid to attract conservative viewership.
"Conservatives are going to love this," NFL Chairman Roger Goodell said. "They're always talking about the brave Latinx people and gender roles."
Bad Bunny, who champions a new masculinity with his floral dresses, short shorts, and pink skirts, topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018. This makes him influential enough to reach conservative minds, said experts.
Conservatives gradually dropped out of football during COVID when the league embraced social justice causes such as defunding the police, Black Lives Matter, and kneeling for the National Anthem. The NFL is hoping to change all that with Bad Bunny.
At publishing time, conservative viewership continued to drop off for unknown reasons.
~ Babylon Bee reporting
