The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Friday, February 20, 2026
For me, this is an exceedingly cool way to celebrate the Fourth of July – handing a banana to a wild orang utan along a river in Borneo.
I’ve been on a houseboat on Borneo rivers for the past few days. This photo was taken earlier today.
I am here doing what I’ve loved to do my whole life – explore and have adventures in remote places in the world. I’ve been able to do this because I’m an American.
Sure, people from other countries are able to have the life they want, including one devoted to adventure – but it’s more difficult to do so.
It’s easier to do so in America than any other place on earth – because of the founding principles of our country that we celebrate today. Thus today for me is a celebration of the moral essence of our existence as Americans.
[Skye’s comments on the Forum re the HFR last week (07/01) are so insightful many TTPers requested they be a full article. We are happy to comply]
A TTPer asks, “Skye, your doubts on Trump (e.g. on tariffs and trade) are justified but a little more substance would help for an observer who retains an open mind on the subject. What is evil? This visceral distrust (of Trump) may be justified but what is the alternative Biden, Clinton and 2 to 3 Supreme Court justices?”
I don’t think that Trump is evil (unlike Hillary). I do believe that he is mistaken about many things, and most importantly about what it would take to get him elected. He is a prisoner of his own egotism. His belief that his name can replace campaign funding with a billion dollars is what will give us those ‘Crats and their Supreme Court nominees. I am obviously very unhappy with that prospect.
4 to 8 years of Clinton II are likely to create a lot more desperation. I do not want to see voting from the rooftops with .338 Lapua ballots. That almost always ends very badly.
I would love to read of as many other possibilities as smart TTPers can imagine. We need to consider as many alternatives as possible from as many minds as possible. A productive first step would be to stop wasting effort arguing about the relative qualities of Trump and Hillary. Of course, the latter is truly horrific, but unless the former undergoes an unexpected sea change with respect to campaign funding actions, we will be stuck with the latter.
FBI Director James Comey has decided not to recommend that Hillary Clinton be indicted for violating security laws concerning the handling of classified information, among other offenses.
By doing so he has compromised a fundamental principle of consensual government: that the laws apply equally to everybody, including those entrusted with the people’s power. Now it is up to voters come November to reaffirm that we are a nation of laws, not men.
Comey’s decision is just the latest in a long-developing trend. In recent years government officials from the president on down have demonstrated the progressives’ penchant for disregarding laws that don’t serve their private or political interests.
I am reminded by Comey’s decision of Aristotle’s definition of tyranny. Here it is…
French leaders are openly plotting to peel off large chunks of the City’s financial industry as soon as Britain leaves the EU. This might prove much tougher than they imagine.
France is rolling out the red carpet for putative refugees from Canary Wharf, hoping to capture the lion’s share of the estimated €600bn to €1 trillion market for clearing in euro-denominated transactions. Some German officials are also eyeing the City, but more discreetly.
"There is a power play going on. It is very clear France and Germany will do everything they can to damage the City and get the business for themselves," says Professor Athanasios Orphanides, a former member of the European Central Bank's governing council.
"Whatever they try to do, they'll end up shooting themselves in the foot and driving the businesses out Europe. The EU regulations are so costly that I think the City could actually see long-term benefits from leaving," he says.
The City is ranked number one in the Global Financial Centres Index, ahead of New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Zurich. None of the EU's other hubs come close. Luxembourg is 14, Frankfurt is 18, and Paris lags far behind at 32, behind Calgary or Dalian in China.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s war in Syria and Iraq isn’t going well, and he has accordingly purged those in charge.
The excuse given for sacking chief of staff General Firouzabadi is that he’s obese, but he’s been fat for quite a while, and his successor—his deputy Mohammed Baqeri—doesn’t have much battlefield experience.
The redoubtable Amir Taheri tweets that the new chief of staff is an intelligence professional, not a warrior. (He’s very slim, by the way). And he’s got lots of experience in business, where the Revolutionary Guards have done a lot better than in Syrian fights against ISIS and anti-Assad forces.
Aside from Firouzabadi, the biggest loser in this shakeup is the celebrated General Suleimani, easily the most recognizable face among the Revolutionary Guards.
Suleimani was a selfie star for years, and was even considered a possible successor to the supreme leader by some of the Tehranologists. That surge of popular stardom has ended.
Meanwhile, hatred of the Islamic Republic is rampant across the Iraqi border. A couple of weeks ago, a quarter million Iraqi Shi’ites demonstrated in Baghdad chanting “Down with Iran, down with Suleimani!”
Have you ever wondered why it is that even the most successful companies invariably stall out in terms of growth and profits?
The reason is that any organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit, or a government, reaches a point where it can no longer be managed in an effective and efficient manner as it was when it was smaller.
When I took my first course in antitrust as a graduate student, the big concern at the time was that IBM would monopolize the computer industry, that U.S. Steel would monopolize the steel industry, and that General Motors (GM) would monopolize the automobile industry.
Such concerns seem absurd today, where there is more concern about the long-run viability of these companies than fear they will engage in monopoly power and abuse.
Economists have long understood the dangers of monopolies. Monopolies tend to become slothful and less well-managed, are easily corrupted, increase costs, reduce innovation, and thus slow progress.
But what is too often ignored is that government monopolies of any activity also eventually exhibit all of the characteristics of private sector monopolies, but are even worse because there is often no effective check on them — even in democracies.
Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia.
There couldn’t be a more appropriate and exotic place to discuss death cults than here. In the distant highlands of central Sulawesi undiscovered by any Westerner until little over a century ago, are a people called the Toraja who take propitiation of their deceased ancestors to a limit unmatched anywhere else.
Yet most interestingly, the Toraja have combined their ancestor worship with a devout Christianity. Tana Toraja (the Land of the Toraja) is a Christian haven within the world’s largest Islamic population. Churches here are as plentiful as mosques elsewhere in Indonesia, while a giant statue of Christ towers above Tana Toraja high on a mountaintop.
The Toraja are a people with deep pride and confidence in the worth of their culture. If there were anyone among them who lacked that pride and confidence, who felt ashamed and apologetic of their culture, they would be despised. If that someone felt so ashamed and apologetic that they wished and worked for their culture’s destruction, they would be regarded as demented.
There are such people among us, among our fellow Americans. There is a name for these people: Democrats. And it is critically important to understand something fundamental about them.
Brexit was an historic reassertion of Britain's ancient liberties. It was also a monumental repudiation of the left and its ever-growing nightmare of government by remote, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies and the subversion of all democratic process.
Thomas Sowell has described this elitist trainwreck as "The Vision of the Annointed." It is everywhere and always the same, give or take a gulag or two.
Brexit was Lady Thatcher's dying hope, having come to understand that the EU was "fundamentally unreformable." Her dream has finally been fulfilled.
An independent Britain, free to set its own course and determine its own future -- as it has done for a thousand years before the Brussels behemoth was even a thought -- will preserve and extend its heritage of liberty and innovation. The Continent will fall deeper into its increasingly despotic quagmire, unless it breaks up well before that.
Immediate market disruption aside, some are concerned about the long term economic impact of Brexit. They shouldn't be.
Long-developing cracks in the Western political establishment’s century-old paradigm suddenly widened this year.
In the US Donald Trump, a reality television star and real estate developer, improbably became the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Bernie Sanders, a socialist and long-time Senate crank, challenged the Democrats’ pre-anointed nominee Hillary Clinton, who prevailed only by dint of money and un-democratic “super-delegates.” Meanwhile in Europe, the UK voted to leave the European Union, perhaps opening the flood-gates to more defections.
These three events share a common theme: populist and patriotic passions roused by arrogant elites have fueled a rejection of Western establishments and their un-democratic, autocratic, corrupt paradigm.
A mob of starving people advanced on the presidential palace chanting, “We want food”. They were met by soldiers and police dispatched by the tyrant from his lavish palace decorated opulently with a golden sun, giant rock crystal mirrors, sparkling chandeliers and towering oil portraits.
The scene wasn’t 19th century France, but 21st century Venezuela.
And if you are wondering why you haven’t seen it on the news, it’s because Venezuela is a Socialist disaster area that was once being used as a model by the left. Now it’s a place where the vast majority of people can’t afford basic food staples and a third are down to two or fewer meals a day.
Obama laughed and joked with deceased monster Hugo Chavez, who handed him a copy of the anti-American tract, “Open Veins of Latin America” that had even been disavowed by its own author. Obama called the book a “nice gesture,” but Eduardo Galeano, its author, had told an audience that the left “commits grave errors” when in power.
Venezuela, once a wealthy oil state, where the doctors offering “universal health care” have no medicine and starving people loot government stores looking for food, is yet another example. 50 people are dead in the latest food riots. Their graves are yet another “grave error” of the left.
Italy is preparing a €40bn rescue of its financial system as bank shares collapse on the Milan bourse and the powerful after-shocks of Brexit shake European markets.
An Italian government task force is watching events hour by hour, pledging all steps necessary to ensure the stability of the banks. “Italy will do everything necessary to reassure people,” said premier Matteo Renzi.
“This is the moment of truth we have all been waiting for a long time. We just didn’t know it would be Brexit that set the elephant loose,” said a top Italian banker.
The share price of banks crashed for a second trading day, with Intesa Sanpaolo off 12.5%, and falls of 12% for Banka MPS, 10.4% for Mediobana, and 8% for Unicredit. These lenders have lost a third of their value since Britain’s referendum five days ago.
“When Britain sneezes, Italy catches a cold. It is the weakest link in the European chain,” said Lorenzo Codogno, former director-general of the Italian treasury and now at LC Macro Advisors.
The Brexit vote is just the beginning of the revolt against unaccountable institutions and persons. The global political-economic class reacted with horror when a majority of British citizens said “enough is enough,” by voting to leave the EU.
Rather than government by citizens for the citizens, the world has increasingly become government by unaccountable bureaucrats for bureaucrats.
As a result, there is emerging a middle class revolt against the mandarins of the EU, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and other supranational organizations designed to supersede national laws and sovereign rights. It’s about time.
