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Rational Conservatives
Thursday, February 19, 2026
This is Fifth Generation WarfareA train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, a small town at the headwaters of the Ohio River, occurred on February 3, 2023, and went largely unnoticed by the press. On average, a train derails every other day in the United States, and fifteen major chemical fires have occurred so far in 2023.
There was a dramatic black cloud, but it dissipated quickly. Some people were evacuated from their homes. Some fish were killed.
The chemical of concern was vinyl chloride, a common industrial material used to make PVC plastic. It is highly volatile and was historically used as a refrigerant in air conditioners and as the propellant in hairspray and rattle-can spray paint. You would know the scent if you were alive in the 1960s and 70s.
The material is toxic, but not so toxic as to stop women from shaping those mod hairstyles back in the day. The biggest complaint was the sticky coating that was deposited on bathroom mirrors.
Then something changed. Ten days after the train accident and fire, TikToc and the rest of social media exploded with incredible stories of a widespread disaster, coverups, and environmental pollution hundreds of times worse than Chernobyl.
Anonymous victims reported dead pets and farm animals, and the Amish had dropped dead in their barns. Armaggedon had arrived, and the U.S. Government was covering the disaster up.
But it was not a disaster: a major train wreck, a chemical spill, and a big fire, to be sure. But the end of the world? Nah.
We just watched the Chinese state propaganda machine in full motion. The volume, rhetoric, and visuals possible through TikTok were amped up louder than all the fake dead bodies during the Covid virus rollout.
Government officials were caught flat-footed, and now, candlelight vigils are being held for the "victims" worldwide. Hysteria is crazy level out of control.
The videos and commentary blasting from the internet were produced in China, and the quality is excellent. The propaganda ultimately bumped the Chinese spy balloons from the narrative and is fueling a movement to block the reshoring of industrial plants to the United States.
Intel is hiring 10,000 people in Ohio to staff their new chip plants. Or so they think. By the time the hysteria dies, many younger people will consider it their mission to stop those computer chip plants.
At the same time, ultra-globalist Nikki Haley has thrown in for the 2024 presidential election. Her history as an anti-industrialist is evident as she worked behind the scenesd to block a Boeing factory in South Carolina while giving speeches praising it simultaneously.
The first shots have been fired in the propaganda war, and the new arsenal of technologies is impressive. This is Fifth Generation Warfare.
Let's talk some more about it over at this week's HFR.
Joel Wade is on a break this week, so it’s my turn. Alexander the Great famously said that while he owed his life to his father, he owed his ability to think from his revered teacher, Aristotle (387-322 BC).
So let’s talk this week about how we can use Aristotle’s philosophy of “the Golden Mean” to increase your sanity – physically, inside your brain. Ready? Here we go!
The times are turning our way! For starters, Texas bans Citigroup from participating in a $3.4 billion state bond offering because of the bank's anti-gun ESG policies. Warning to Woke Banks: Don't mess with guns or oil if you want to do business with the Texas government!
Texas Drops Citi From Huge Muni Transaction Over Gun Policy
This issue of Skye’s Links has so much cool stuff for you to know that here might be a shortcut – scroll through the graphic or photo that starts each Link and stop at the ones you find most interesting. It could be Elon’s tweet about the most dangerous yet obscure deep state government agency – or Rep. Nancy Mace lacerating Twitter’s main censors –or funny ones like:
[I’ve known Mike Waller since the 1980s in the middle of the struggle to overcome the Boland Amendment preventing aid to the Contras. Now, Mike wants to use a Boland strategy against the Dems. It’s very clever and I’m encouraging him to expand on and “unpack” his strategy. The picture on the cover above is of Carlos Fitzeral, the Contra who saved my life in a firefight with the Sandinistas. --JW]
The House “weaponization of government” hearings kicked off an excellent start for public awareness. But without a legislative agenda, the short-staffed subcommittee will show little enduring accomplishment.
House reformers don’t believe they can force some of the necessary changes because the Senate and Joe Biden oppose them. So they haven’t prepared a strategic legislative agenda.
Yet, there is reason for hope and change.
An earlier generation of House Democrats blazed the trail for today’s House Republicans. Some lateral thinking and historical precedent can help today’s House leaders hack away at the weaponization of the federal government.
Most people watching Joe Biden believe that he’s a puppet who says and does what he’s told. He seems to be a “useful idiot,” as the 20th century’s communists would have said. The big question, then, is who’s really in charge in the White House? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Susan Rice?
Nope, a Bloomberg report intimates. It’s really Jill Biden, and she intends to see her decrepit husband run again.
According to a Nancy Cook article at Bloomberg, the person with whom Joe doublechecks every decision he makes is his unelected wife, Jill Biden, a school teacher who wrote a shoddy dissertation to justify a truly meaningless doctorate in education. Writes Cook:
Not long ago, Disney ripped off any pretense of being a family company and dove head-first into the social justice muck with an episode of “The Proud Family” that featured a slam poetry segment that echoed the fringe critical race theory claim that “slaves built this country.”
It soon surfaced that the writer of the show is a very loud and proud social justice radical named Latoya Raveneau, who has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and wants to introduce “queerness” to the shows your kids watch whenever she gets the chance. She also bragged that no one at Disney is trying to stop her.
First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. The idea that white people were sitting in rocking chairs sipping tea while black people did all the work from 1619 to 1863 is, frankly, stupid. It purposely shoves aside the industriousness of an entire country looking to build a new world and make something for itself.
Meaning the idea that reparations are owed to the black population of the United States by the taxpayers of this country is equally stupid.
Welcome to TTP’s celebration of Valentine’s Day, 2023!
Today is for celebrating the love and friendship that bless our lives. A day for feeling an infinite gratitude for having love in our hearts and being fortunate enough to have it returned.
It was Pope Gelasius I who, in 496 proclaimed that February 14 would be the feast day of Saint Valentinus of Rome, as he was martyred on that day in 269 on order of Emperor Claudius II for refusing to renounce Christianity.
Almost nine centuries later, England’s greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400), created the tradition of Valentine’s Day celebrating romantic love
What’s fascinating is how in recent times, Valentine’s Day is celebrated worldwide, and not only in Christian countries like throughout South America. The day is a big deal now in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. In Thailand, couples on Valentine’s Day get their marriage licenses on the back of an elephant –
When you get to be as old as I am, you’ve had a number of cars. I’ve had many over the years – but only one I really loved was this 1952 K2 Allard.
Sydney Allard (1910-1966) was a famous English race car driver in 1930s, and founded the Allard Motor Car company in London in 1945. His most famous race car was the J2 which finished third in Le Mans in 1950. The K2 was the roadster version of the J2 with those amazing swooping fenders.
Allards were always powered by an American V-8 – mine had a big block Chevy. I had drag races in it right out of American Graffitti or the Beach Boys’ Shut Down, and once hit 160 on a long empty stretch of highway out in the California desert racing a supercharged Porsche.
I asked Rebel to marry me in my K2 driving along the Pacific Coast Highway – best decision I ever made. So many memories in this car. But that was long ago. A car like that won’t last in East Coast winters, so I sold it when we moved to Washington long ago. Have I ever thought of getting another K2? Sure – but I know at my age driving a car like that (and knowing how I’d drive it!) is not wise. Better stick with the memories. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #258 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
You know the adage about the “800-pound gorilla” going wherever he wants to – such as five feet from you in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. It is one of the world’s great thrills to be this close to these giants and feel at ease doing so. They are “habituated” to small groups of people whom they ignore. You of course are very quiet and do nothing to alarm them, just observing the little ones playing, mothers nursing, young ones climbing trees, huge male silverbacks watching over their families.
Gorillas are vegetarians, males eating up to 75 pounds of vegetation a day – thus they spend most of their waking hours chewing! The biggest silverbacks never get anywhere near 800 pounds by the way – 450 to 500 pounds at most (like the fellow in the photo). Big enough, believe me.
Rwanda is one of the best-run countries in all Africa. President Paul Kagame deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for healing his nation after the genocidal horrors of the 1990s. That’s far in the past now in this beautiful, peaceful land. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #93 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
In the remotest center of the Sahara Desert lies an unknown, unexcavated mysterious lost city known as Djado. No one knows who built it or when. Lying on the ancient Roman trade route from the Saharan salt mines of Fachi and Bilma to the Mediterranean, the Djado oasis flourished for a thousand years (the 1st Millennium AD), but has been forgotten and abandoned for many centuries.
The only people who live near Djado in the vast desert wasteland where Algeria, Libya, Chad, and Niger come together, are the wandering Toubu nomads with no permanent settlements. It is an indescribable experience to explore such a wondrous lost city right out of an Indiana Jones movie that you have all to yourself. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #17, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Live on a private houseboat exploring the jungles of Borneo by river and families of Orang Utans will be your neighbors.
To get here, you fly from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to a small town in southern Borneo, Pangkalan Bun, on the Sekonyer River. You hire your own houseboat called a klotok (shower, nice bed, good warm food and cold beer) and English-speaking guide to take you up river through the jungles of the Tanjung Putting Orang Utan reserve. You’ll see proboscis monkeys, hornbills – and more wild orang utans than any other place on earth.
Spend time among them and you’ll understand how smart and human-like these gentle giants are. It’s an endearing experience never to be forgotten. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #72 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
In a hidden remote mountain valley there is a Christian monastery built over a thousand years ago by the students of a hermit who became the patron saint of Bulgaria, St. John of Rila. The colonnade you see leaves you awe-struck. Earthquakes, fire, pillaging by Ottoman raiders, all through the centuries the Rila monks would build it back ever-better and care for it immaculately.
It is little wonder that the Rila Monastery is a World Heritage Site. The picture you see is only one small section of the magnificent frescoes of the exterior archways – and the interior is equally extraordinary. There are nine more World Heritage sites in this Virginia-size country, like the 3,000 year-old (and still flourishing) city of Nessebar on the Black Sea. Bulgaria is one of Europe’s true undiscovered gems. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #74 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Here we see the Three Twitter Perps being sworn in at Wednesday’s (2/08) House Oversight Committee hearing regarding their colluding with the FBI to block anything that could help Trump and hurt Biden before the 2020 election.
E.g., Twitter Files Reveal ‘Laptop from Hell’ Censorship Was Orchestrated by Security State (12/19/22).
Of course, all they did was give a Three Monkeys Saw Nothing-Heard Nothing-Said Nothing performance. As the NY Post put it:
Ex-Twitter Executives Now Say They Forget Key Details Of Censoring Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop Scoop
Jump right on in for another great HFR!
