The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Welcome to the Good Friday HFR!
Yes, I admit to the self-promotion above. My friends at Escape Artist invited me to do an interview cover story for the April issue of their Insider magazine. Click on the link for the full issue, for they have kindly provided it free to all TTPers.
While you can scroll down to page 20 for my interview, you’ll also find a number of valuable articles, like Asset Protection and Bitcoin and How to Bulletproof Yourself from Cancel Culture. There’s a lot of cool info here – I hope you enjoy it.
There’s also a lot of value info in this Good Friday HFR. Get ready, ‘cause here we go!
Ghazni, Afghanistan, August 1984. With my beard, turban, and shalwar kameez tunic and trousers I looked like just another Afghan guy walking with my Mujahaddin friends into the city. We were scouting out how the attack, led by commander Adam Khan, would be made that night on the Soviet high command atop the Bala Hissar fortress in the city center.
It was risky for there were Soviet and Communist government lookouts and guardposts everywhere – and I was in serious trouble. I felt weak, confused, on the verge of falling down, and knew I would jeopardize my life and those with me if discovered. I realized what was wrong.
[Facebook banned Lara Trump’s interview of President Trump last night (3/30). Here is the full 18 minute interview, followed by the full transcript. It is more than worth your time to watch and read it entire. At the end, POTUS comes very close to saying he’s running to be 47 in ’24.]
[VDH has never written anything more insightful and more concise than this. Copy and send to everyone you know.]
There are 10 new Woke Rules we are now expected to live by that are changing America, maybe permanently.
1) Money is a construct.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
3) Racism is now morally required.
It gets worse…
Woke hall monitors must screech like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 version “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” whenever they see a constitutionally free and unmasked citizen daring to appear in public without a slave muzzle.
It’s a mad scramble for a Year Zero to rival those of the French and Bolshevik revolutions—the dawn of a new age of tyranny masquerading as compassion.
@Corporate communism began trending on Twitter yesterday afternoon (3/30) due to the video above of MTG (Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene) coining the term.
The freshman Republican is talking about the Xiden administration’s ambitions to buddy up with so-called private companies in creating a way to identify who has been vaccinated against the Chicom Virus.
You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness?
We're right there in the narrative of "The Road to Recovery": the highway that Democrat Wall Street and Media promises would be smooth and wide open is about to be detoured into a rutted track that peters out in a wilderness without any lights or signage.
You know the rest: the naive, trusting teens are picked off one by one in the most horrific fashion. Substitute naive punters in the stock market and you have the script for what lies ahead.
The Ruling 'Crat-designed invasion of cheap labor and more 'Crat voters has just begun, but the 'Crat base doesn't like it:
Gallup CEO Warns Joe Biden: 42 Million Migrants Want Entry to U.S.
More Blue vs. Blue - Two 'Crat Senators proudly announce that they will not vote for anyone with the wrong color of their skin and the MSM goes crickets: When Wokeness Damages Democrats
When guns are outlawed, outlaws will still have guns – who knew? Glock 19 Disguised As Nerf Gun Seized In North Carolina Drug Raid
April 1990. When our oldest son Brandon was six years old, I took him with me to the North Pole. It was my 14th expedition there, and as always, we stopped to visit friends at Canada’s northernmost community, the Inuit hunting village of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. Brandon thought it would be cool to sleep in an igloo, which the Inuit do only when they’re hunting seals or walrus far out on the ice.
So the villagers happily complied, showing him how they built one, carving out blocks of wind-blown snow, shaping and placing them in an inward-sloped spiral with one block on top, and packing snow as mortar between the blocks. When it was bedtime – still daylight with 24-hour sunshine by April – they lined the inside with caribou skins, which shed like crazy with hairs everywhere but sure are warm. Snuggled into our arctic down sleeping bags, we slept like stones.
It was an experience both of us will never forget. Never pass up an opportunity to have an adventure with your kids they’ll always remember. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #50 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
On display in the National Museum of Congo in Brazzaville: “Ancient Money.” I took the picture because this is the money that made us human 90,000 years ago. They are tiny Nassarius gibbosulus estuarine snail shells too small for food, perforated with small holes to string on a necklace, used as money “before the establishment of the CFA” as the sign says, the Central Africa Franc in 1945.
These are the same species of shell that was the first jewelry in history unearthed at seashore sites in Morocco and hundreds of miles inland in Algeria some 90kya (thousand years ago) – meaning they were traded. For the first time in history, a species began to exchange things between unrelated unmarried individuals to share, swap, barter and trade, and over great distances.
Other animals do not barter. This, maintains science author Matt Ridley, is what made us distinctly human, enabling us to cooperate with other groups or tribes, to innovate, to evolve ever more complex cultures. This little shell, used as money, is the founding of human culture. And after 90 millennia, it was still in use in Africa until 75 years ago! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #61 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
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)
The Kayan tribal people live in a remote roadless valley in the Shan Hills of Burma. Kayan women practice their tradition of beauty starting at age five. The young girls have a few brass coils placed around their necks, adding to them progressively as they grow until in older adulthood they are wearing as many as two dozen – becoming what the world knows them as Giraffe women. (The Shan people call them "Padaung" meaning "long-necked," but they call themselves Kayan.)
We are not here to gawk. We are here to make friends, treat them respectfully, and learn about their traditions. It is an intensely memorable experience to meet these ladies. We’ll be here again in early March next year. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #58 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
This really isn’t photoshopped – it’s what a sunset actually looks like on the Luangwa River in Zambia. Best way to enjoy it is with a gin-and-tonic Sundowner with good friends on a dream Africa safari. Zambia is an undiscovered gem, the best safari country in all Africa right now.
Fabulous luxury lodges, iconic animals of Africa in amazing profusion, and much less expensive than the well-known safari regions elsewhere. We’ll be here in July. If you’ve always dreamed of a real Africa safari once in your life, now is the time. Let me know if you’d like to be with us: jack@wheelerexpeditions.com. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #122 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
