The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Florence, Italy. Below the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s town hall built in the 1300s on the Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s main public square, you find this granite/bronze plaque embedded in the pavement stones. It is ignored by the hordes of tourists anxious to take photos and selfies of all the statues adorning the Piazza, such as the copy of Michelangelo’s David.
Yet this is where the real history took place, for at this spot on May 23, 1498, the people of Florence put an end to the destructive insanity destroying their city. The plaque commemorates where the leader of the Taliban of the Renaissance, a mad monk named Savonarola and two accomplices, were hung on a gallows cross and burned to ashes.
As Savonarola was Florence’s #1 Domestic Terrorist of his day, so Joe Biden is America’s #1 Domestic Terrorist today.
Edith Wilson Edith Wilson Wannabe
Many Biden watchers have long observed Jill Biden’s grasping obsession with becoming the First Lady. Throughout the campaign as Joe Biden’s failing mental abilities became more and more obvious, did she love him enough to end it? Oh no, not Jill. She continued on with her elder abuse.
One explanation may be her long fascination with Edith Wilson – exemplified by dedicating her 2019 autobiography Where the Light Enters to: “The inspiring, groundbreaking First Lady Edith Wilson.”
She admired and apparently coveted the role that Mrs. Wilson filled after President Woodrow had a stroke in October 1919. Edith Wilson hid the seriousness of her husband’s condition and took over the job of running the country until the end of his term in March 1921. Now it’s Jill’s turn.
His Fraudulency Joe Biden’s attorney general has just announced that the FBI will be engaged to terrorize parents who oppose left-wing school board policies.
All around the country, parents have been speaking out and protesting against several absurd and destructive school board policies that have been put in place to damage, sexualize, and indoctrinate innocent children.
Tragically, too many of the government-run schools in this country have become breeding grounds for mentally ill educators desperate to force their warped political agendas and neuroses on our children.
And now that parents have had enough, Fascist Joe is now unleashing his FBI Brownshirts on parents who have the audacity to want a say in how their child is educated.
Even as President Biden shrugged his shoulders over progressives’ harassment and intimidation of a sitting United States senator of his own party — a crime under Arizona law — Biden’s Justice Department was running roughshod over the First Amendment, threatening to investigate and prosecute parents for protesting against school boards and teachers who insist on indoctrinating children with the cultural Marxism beloved by Democrats.
On Monday (10/04), Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum in which he wailed about the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
Garland knows this is dangerous nonsense. I personally know that he knows it.
Are you starting to wonder what, if anything, will be left standing of the life we once called “modern” when Christmas 2021 rolls around? Shopping? Motoring? Working? Mingling? Eating? Sleeping? Waking…? Suddenly, everything is coming apart.
The supply lines are wobbling and many will go down. No stuff, no parts, before long no food. Energy supplies are shaky everywhere. China’s electric grid is going dark from insufficient coal. Russia lacks the surplus NatGas to keep Western Europe warm. Global shortages drive up US oil and gas prices while people lose jobs and incomes over vaccine mandates — meaning families will freeze as the daylight dwindles.
“Joe Biden’s” dark winter is coming on fast.
On Tuesday (10/05), I gave a lecture for students at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in a course I believe is unique in the nation. It wasn’t so much an art history lecture as an American history lecture, using art—or rather a lecture about what Americans believed about themselves, for better and for worse, as manifest in works of art.
I’d like to discuss two of them here—two of them that are now inconceivable, not just because the practical necessities they show are no longer in play, but because the culture they describe, culture as a spiritual reality, embodying the high aspirations of the human soul, is gone. What has taken its place is another matter.
The two paintings are not sentimental, as almost all of our politics is now. By that I mean that our politics is less about thought or pragmatic planning than about feeling, and less about genuine universal human feeling than about its self-swindling substitute, sentimentality, a ginned-up mimic of feeling; and the louder you cry the sentiment up, the less genuine and the more shallow or delusive it is likely to be.
After my workout this morning, I stopped at the cliffs above Capitola, overlooking the Monterey Bay. It had just rained lightly, so the air was crystal clear, and the brownish gold of the kelp beds at low tide made a vivid contrast with the blue gray ocean. The little bit of sun that peeked through the clouds lit a meandering path across the water and through the center of the wharf.
I stop on these cliffs almost every morning, because it gives me something I need - something we all need, a fundamental requirement for our happiness and well-being actually… and something that is all too easy to be oblivious to in these days of iphones, kindles, and reliably traumatic 24 hour news cycles.
A sense of awe.
FBI admits that it doesn't track ANTIFA violence (just January 6 insurrectionists):
FBI Counterterrorism Official Admits Agency Doesn't Track Antifa Violence
Majority of likely voters in latest Rasmussen poll say that Xiden should resign:
Majority Believe Biden's Lying About Afghanistan, Want Him to Resign
Rand Paul. M.D., roasts HHS Secretary (a lawyer who apparently thinks that he knows more about medicine than a physician) on the subject of naturally acquired immunity. Please read as you’re gonna love this. Dr. Paul is a true hero of the Senate!
Seventeen years ago today, October 9, 2003, I had the privilege to meet and have an unforgettable conversation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It was at a luncheon hosted by India’s Ambassador to the US at his residence in Washington. His Holiness loved my telling him how I had passed out over a thousand pictures of him during my three overland expeditions crisscrossing Tibet. “Illegally, yes?” he asked, as the Chinese make this a crime. “Oh, very illegally!” I answered as we both chuckled.
The Ambassador asked where he was born. His answer, “very remote village in far northern Tibet.” He was startled when I interjected, “Yes, I know, I’ve been there – I even bought a doonchen (telescoping 15 foot-long Tibetan prayer horn) in your village.” “A doonchen?” he exclaimed. “You mean…?” and put his hands to his lips to make this really loud WHOOOH like the horn makes. I nodded and did the same, WHOOOH. We belly laughed, while all the diplomats and Congressmen did not know what was going on.
Then he wrapped his hands around mine and I felt an electric energy run through my body. It was his blessing. I will treasure it all my life. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #60 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Famboun, Cameroon. This is a Ndiki Drum. It is used by the Sultan of Bamoun to call his subjects to their end-of the-year Nguon festival over which he presides. It can be heard for miles.
The carved wooden forearms and hands propped up at the drum’s end are not the original drumsticks. They are symbolic for what the real drumsticks used to be. Until the British and French put an end to the custom in the 1920s, the Ndiki drumsticks were human arms, amputated at the elbow off captured slaves. Four drummers were needed to properly pound the drum, each requiring two drumsticks: eight amputated human arms in total.
The horror of slavery in Africa was ended by Western colonialists. In its place they introduced roads, railroads, electricity, an impartial rule of law instead of law favoring one tribe over another, and other benefits of civilization. They did a lot of stupid damage to African cultures, true.
But that is vastly outweighed by getting rid of slavery – exemplified by how this drum was pounded until less than 100 years ago. If you have a child or grandchild in school with woke teachers, you might have them bring this picture to class, and explain how the benefits of Western Civilization so greatly outweighs its liabilities. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #124 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
This is the North Face of Mount Kailas (6,638 m/21,778 ft) in a remote region of far western Tibet inhabited only by Changpa nomads. For 22% of all people on Earth – 1.2 billion Hindus, 510 million Buddhists and many millions of others – it is the spiritual Center of the Universe, the Navel of All Creation.
Kailas and surrounding glaciers are considered the source of four of Asia’s great rivers radiating out from it: the Indus, Tsangpo-Bhramaputra, Sutlej, and Karnali-Ganges. As a sacred mountain it has never been climbed.
For thousands of years, people from all Asia have made the arduous pilgrimage to Kailas to perform the sacred act of circumambulating around the mountain – most clockwise, counterclockwise for others such as the Changpa adhering to the ancient Bön Tibetan religion.
It is not easy. Huffing over the high point of the pilgrimage route with TTPer Big John Perrot, our altimeter said we were as high as Kilimanjaro, over 19,000 feet. The highlight, however, is being among so many pilgrims from so many diverse cultures. This is one of our world’s thrilling adventures, and such a privilege to participate in. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #38 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Originally nomads from the Tibetan Plateau, the Nashi people settled in the fertile Himalayan foothills of Yunnan over 2,000 years ago. From the ancient Tibetan religion of Bön, they developed a unique religion of nature-worship called Dongba. The progenitors of humanity and nature were two half-brothers, two mothers with the same father. Nature is controlled by a human-snake chimera called Shv – a statue of whom you see here.
The Nashi are a peaceful gentle people whose ideal is living in accordance with nature. They dress very colorfully, women have equal respect with men, they write with the world’s only still-functioning pictographic script, and are proud of preserving their culture for millennia. It is an enchanting experience to be among them. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #163 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Reading Joel’s beautiful Keeping Your Sanity with a Sense of Awe today (10/04), with its mention of the sun reflecting off the kelp beds of Monterey Bay, I couldn’t help thinking of a similar experience I had.
I learned how to scuba dive off the California coast, particularly in the waters off Catalina Island. Kelp plants grow to spread their leaves on the ocean surface, but it’s underwater you experience their true beauty. They rise from the bottom rocks of the shallow ocean floor near the coast as a forest, and when the sun’s rays shine through them, it is a magical sight to see them turn the color of gold.
The first time I saw this on a dive off Catalina I was transfixed in a true moment of absolute awe, in a transport of appreciation of the Creation in which we are privileged to exist.
The photo you see is not mine as I did not have an underwater camera, I could only take a picture with my mind’s eye which I have never forgotten. So the photo is an approximation of what I saw, yet it brings back that memorable moment of awe I had almost sixty years ago. Thanks, Joel. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #162)
