The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Sunday, January 25, 2026
The inner town (Itchan Kala) of the ancient Silk Road oasis of Khiva has been unchanged for centuries. Surrounded by 40ft-high snake walls that writhe around the city, its labyrinth of narrow lanes adorned with blue and aquamarine tile mosaics is a living museum for you to explore.
On the Oxus or Amu Darya River in deepest Central Asia, Khiva was ancient when Alexander the Great seized it in 329 BC. It survived the depredations of Arabs in the 7th century, Mongols in the 12th, Tamerlane in the 13th. The Khanate of Khiva continued to flourish on the Silk Road until conquered by the Russians in the 19th. Today in Uzbekistan, it remains as the best-preserved of the ancient oases of the Silk Road, yet unknown to the outside world. We’ll be here once again this coming May. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #118 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[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 an interview they gave to us that is abundantly informative. Greg and Michelle Pryor of Life Priority]
DURK: Everything that happens in your brain … every memory … every thought … every emotion … every innovation … every “wow, that’s great!” … is a result of the release of neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters are not drugs; they are natural substances made by nerve cells in your brain that transmit messages from one nerve cell to another across the synapse that divides them. That’s why they are called neurotransmitters. They are made the nutrients in your diet, but there is a very good chance that even if you have a good diet, you’re not getting the optimum amount of the raw materials that your brain can use to make neurotransmitters. LIFT is our formula created to help support more get up and go and help eliminate mental fatigue.
The three most important neurotransmitters have been known for a long time: acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and dopamine.
Acetylcholine is involved in memory and organization—the way you order things in your mind, the way you retrieve them in an orderly manner. It’s also involved in focus and concentration. A good example of what happens if you don’t have enough cholinergic activity can be found in a person who has taken the psychoactive drug atropine or any other anticholinergic drug. In many respects, they resemble someone with Alzheimer’s disease.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has been dying a slow death since Donald Trump assumed the presidency once more. Suddenly, it’s in rigor mortis.
It’s a philosophy that was aimed at evening the playing field for people of all races, genders and sexual persuasions, but instead it merely divided people and encouraged institutionalized racism, division, and putting someone’s characteristics over their actual merit for jobs and promotions.
Now two financial giants, BlackRock and Bank of America, are moving away from DEI even after BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink made the ludicrous statement in 2021 that “we must embed DEI into everything we do.”
A very strange priority, since his firm is supposed to effectively manage capital for people, pension plans and companies, not wage social justice campaigns.
But BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company that manages over $11.5 trillion, has now cut some key wording out of its annual report:
A cliff-top fishing village on the Italian Riviera? Nope, Azenhas (ah-zhane-yas) do Mar – Watermills of the Sea – is on the Portuguese Riviera. This is a magic place of fairy tale castles, thousand year-old fortresses, luxury boutique hotels, fabulous food, great wine, gorgeous beaches, and postcard-perfect scenery everywhere.
The Portuguese people are among the kindest in Europe, while Portugal is one of the safest countries in the world. Of all the planet’s First World countries, it’s hard to find one more calm and serene than here.
If you’d like a personal experience of the best of Portugal, Wheeler Expeditions can arrange it for you. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #87 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Critics view the Department of Government Efficiency’s emails asking federal employees for evidence of productivity as chaotic, arbitrary and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.
But Elon Musk is simply bringing normal private-sector standards to a government that desperately needs them. Since the Pendleton Act of 1883 introduced merit-based selection and civil-service job protections for federal workers, the administrative state has proliferated without sufficient checks and balances from the president or Congress.
The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 450, many of which are “independent” of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along.
And that’s exactly what they’ve done. No president—not Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—has cracked this nut. Most reforms have made the administrative state larger, not smaller. Mr. Trump refuses this deal.
Republican lawmakers are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s pointed refusal to blame Russia for starting the war in Ukraine, and they are highly skeptical about negotiating any lasting peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom many describe as a war criminal.
The Republican criticism of President Trump’s strategy for ending the war in Ukraine comes after the United States voted with Russia and its allies, such as North Korea and Belarus, against a United Nations resolution condemning Russian aggression toward Ukraine and calling for the withdrawal of its troops from the country.
The vote was on Monday, three years to the day when Russian began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The measure, which received the backing of NATO allies, passed the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly despite the U.S. opposition.
While GOP senators were willing to grant Trump broad deference on his controversial Cabinet nominees, they are doubling down in blaming Russia for starting the war and warning the president to approach Putin warily in any negotiation.
They look real, don’t they? Ready to defend their Christian land with their lives. We are in the Palace Armory Museum of Malta, where you realize there is no nation on earth more proud of their Christian heritage. It was on Malta in 1565 that a few thousand Christian Knights led by 70 year-old Jean de Vallette defeated in utter humiliation a massive horde of Moslem Ottomans led by Suleiman the Magnificent.
In seeking to use Malta as his launchpad to conquer all of Christian Europe, Suleiman was bitter in defeat: “This cursed island is like a barrier interposed between us and our possessions,” believing that Allah ordained all Christian lands need be taken for Islam by the sword.
Vallette knew what he and his Knights faced: “It is the great battle of the Cross and the Koran which is now to be fought. A formidable army of infidels is at the point of invading our island.”
The incredibly heroic saga of the Knights’ victory is told in The Siege of Malta, on TTP since 2009. What’s critical to understand now is that, after 5½ centuries, the Maltese people are just as proud of their history and Christian heritage as ever.
Just think of almost infinitely how better off America would be if its people believed that of themselves today? (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #264 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[This is the video and full text delivered yesterday (2/24) to the UN General Assembly by Oxford graduate and current Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski before a vote by the full Assembly to affirm “the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” It passed overwhelmingly with the US disgracing itself by voting against it along with Russia and North Korea.]
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I had many ideas for today’s speech, but one by one I discarded them. Here’s why. We live in turbulent times. After a short break from history that some of us enjoyed, it has again caught up with us all.
In times like these, when the world seems out of joint, when the old seems to be dying but the new cannot yet be born, what we need is a return to basics. To questions about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s actually happened, and what’s just a figment of propaganda.
According to Kremlin’s propaganda, what started three years ago was a justified reaction to Western imperialism allegedly threatening Russia’s security.
In fact, we have seen a modern-day colonial war against Ukrainian people who want a better life and realize they can never achieve this goal by going back to their subjugation to Russia. Kremlin aggression is a manifestation of a failing empire’s desperate struggle to restore its sphere of influence.
Democrats are anxious to rebuild their party on the heels of President Trump’s victory in November. But they have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand: The money isn’t there.
Democrat donors — from bundlers to small dollar donors — say they are still angry about the election results and uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then.
“I’ll be blunt here: The Democrat Party is effing terrible. Plain and simple,” one major Democrat donor said. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”
A second donor was equally as pointed. “They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking. … The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”
The 5th highest mountain on earth at 8,463 meters/27,765ft, Makalu is Sanskrit for “Great Black” – a name for Shiva, the Hindu god of creative destruction, as here is one of his homes. You’re looking face on the Southeast Ridge (the right side in sun, the left side in shade), which is the primary climbing route.
You’re seeing the entire south side of Makalu in Nepal, while the north side is in Tibet with the border running along the horizon crestline. Makalu Base Camp lies below the bottom right corner of the photo. This was taken at over 20,000 feet on our approach from Everest and Lhotse – 12 miles away – during our Himalaya Helicopter Expedition, or “HHE.”
Everyone is understandably entranced with Everest – yet the other 8,000 meter Himalayan giants are breathtakingly magnificent in their own right, and you can see why with Makalu. On our HHE, we went to them all! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #37 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
[This is the seventh 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.]
The motto of a free society is: Live and Let Live. The motto of a communist society is that of Lenin: Kto-Kovo, Russian for "who-whom," who conquers whom.
As Stalin said, "The fact is, we live according to Lenin's formula of kto-kovo."[1] If the only way to achieve your goals is at someone else's expense and the only way they can achieve their goals is at your expense, then the only question left is who conquers whom.
Place this perspective in a tribal context in which the individual subordinates his will and identity to that of a tribe and you get class or racial warfare.
Just as Marxism is a primitive way of thinking, recasting envious black magic as exploitation, it is equally atavistic in defining a human being's identity as a member of a tribe, urban tribes such as the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, racial tribes such as non-white “people of color” versus “white.”
Class warfare, or the racial warfare of Marxist “identity politics,” is urban tribal warfare, with the Marxists as sorcerers telling the tribes they have to fight each other.
The intellectual justification for this tribal mentality is also a regression, namely, back to the worldview of pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (533-475 B.C.), which was shown to be nonsensical by Aristotle 2,300 years ago.[2]
The metaphysics of Marxism is so bizarre and off-the-wall that your first temptation will be to say, "Oh, come on — no one can actually believe that!"
Yet the following is what every school child in the Soviet Union had, and continues to have in Communist China, drummed into his or her brain as a catechism – and is the unspoken foundation of what “progressive” professors in elite US universities drill into their students that turns them into snowflakes today.
This has been a dizzying and disorienting week in international diplomacy. One with wild implications for Ukraine, the future of America’s standing in the world and President Trump’s legacy.
President Trump is absolutely right in wanting to end the bloodshed in Ukraine. The suffering has been appalling and the stalemate brutal. But in the furious mix of wild opinions this week from the White House down, there are at least 10 truths which every American voter must hang onto.
In Trump’s rush to end the bloodshed, these are also the truths against which any deal will be judged and will define him when the history books are written.
To ignore them or not treat them with the gravity they deserve will also have enormous consequences for decades to come:
TRUTH No. 1
Vladimir Putin started this war, despite what President Trump said days ago.
Back in 2007, I gave a talk to a small group of conservatives in Washington DC. It was recorded by C-Span. I hope you find it informative and entertaining. My talk lasted 26 minutes, the rest is Q&A, during which I was asked good questions. Enjoy!
What a breath of the fresh air of sanity on the cover of the New York Post this morning (2/21) after a week of heartbreaking lunacy.
The cover story is written by one of the world’s most prominent and best-selling conservative authors, Douglas Murray, and is such a critically important must-read for TTPers that it is a companion article in full to this HFR: Mr. President: Putin Is The Dictator -- 10 Ukraine-Russia War Truths We Ignore At Our Peril.
The small print intro on the cover:
“’It’s right for President Trump to want to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, but there are certain truths we all must remember – namely that Vladimir Putin is solely responsible for this war. He is the one who started it, and the one who committed unspeakable horrors. Any peace that appeases Russia will not be looked on kindly by history,’ writes Douglas Murray.”
Murray concludes:
“President Trump has a chance to bring an end to this war, to stop the killing. Maybe even win a Nobel Prize for Peace. But he will not be honored if the peace is an appeasement, one that bows down in the face of evil as it denies obvious truths.
The judgment of history will be even harsher — decades of peace and prosperity in Europe and America thrown away to a resurgent Russia harassing the east. Without a strong peace, it won’t be just Ukraine that suffers. It is all of us.
That is the ultimate truth.”
This week has been truly bizarre, almost schizophrenically so, fully half-empty, yet also fully half-full. How did it get that way? Here’s the explanation…
