The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
It’s good to be back in the HFR saddle again. I’m so appreciative of the wonderful job my buddy Rod Martin did in my absence. Thanks, Rod!
I have to admit I’m writing this with a huge smile of gloat. For a year now – since the HFR of May 22, 2015 – I’ve been predicting the Dem nominee will not be The PIAPS but SloJoe Biden. What makes this prescient are two bombshells that dropped this week.
On Tuesday (5/24), Zero gave a speech in Hanoi, Vietnam (full text in the link). You only wish he’d praise capitalism, entrepreneurship, and economic opportunity for Americans as he did the Vietnamese. All in all though, it was a very good and important speech. Here’s why.
There are new reports on Russia. TTPers on the Forum are asking what this might mean militarily. It means, frankly, that Putin is all hat and no cattle. Let’s take a look at Ukraine to see why.
The real threat to America is not external, but internal. Every day now our country becomes more insane. Not metaphorically but literally, actually, clinically for real insane. This week we couldn’t have two clearer examples. Is there any sanity to be found amidst this? Yes.
We close with our Hero of the Week. Forgive me, but it’s personal.
Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska. Welcome to a country you never heard of. It’s a Christian country in Europe – and proudly so, unlike those Euroweenie countries like Germany busily Moslemizing themselves.
The churches and cathedrals here are magnificent –
It’s a peaceful, prosperous place – and great for having a beer inside a medieval fortress overlooking a beautiful river…
Problem is, it’s at the center of Tectonic Europe, where two geopolitical plates have been grinding against each other for centuries and still do today. It could get terribly worse. Here’s why.
Nobody rings a bell at the top of the credit supercycle, to misuse an old adage. Except that this time somebody very powerful in China has done exactly that.
China watchers are still struggling to identify the author of an electrifying article in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, People's Daily, that declares war on debt and the "fantasy" of perpetual stimulus.
Written in a imperial tone, it commands China to break its addiction to credit and take its punishment before matters spiral out of control. If that means bankruptcies must run their course, so be it.
China's debt is approaching $30 trillion, 440% of China’s GDP of $6.8 trillion. Popping a debt bubble that gigantic could be catastrophic for the entire world’s global - and over-globalized - financial system.
This summer brings the 50th anniversary of the full deciphering of the genetic code — the four-billion-year-old cipher by which DNA’s information is translated and expressed. The genetic code was the greatest of all the 20th-century’s scientific discoveries.
Fifty years on, the discovery of the genetic code has produced a cornucopia of good and very little harm. It has convicted the guilty and exonerated the innocent in court on a huge scale through DNA fingerprinting. It has enabled people to avoid passing on terrible diseases.
It has led to the development of new drugs, new therapies and new diagnoses. It has given partial sight back to a blind man through gene therapy. It has increased the yield of crops while reducing the use of chemical pesticides.
Yet still we are bombarded with scares about Frankenstein foods, biological warfare, designer babies, genetic discrimination and the return of eugenics. We have a virtual ban on GM crops and put huge obstacles in the way of GM vaccines.
The exhaustive and cautious new report from the American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine leaves no room for doubt that genetically engineered crops are as safe or safer, and are certainly better for the environment, than conventionally bred crops.
When Moses came down from the mount, he brought with him 10 rules covering most things that people really needed to know and could remember. There are now literally millions of federal rules that we are all supposed to have knowledge of and comply with — clearly an impossible task for any mere mortal.
The result is we have lost our individual liberty because, if the feds decide to target you, they can always find some rules you have broken. The IRS is Exhibit A, with more than 70,000 pages of rules that no one can possibly know.
Several studies from highly reputable institutions have been released in the last number of days, all with similar alarming conclusions — namely, millions of new jobs have not been created, and wages for existing jobs have stagnated because of the ever-increasing costs of new regulations. What can we do about it?
Well, what do you do when you see a mosquito on your arm biting you?
Wednesday, The Donald released his short list for the Supreme Court. It’s a blockbuster: to quote John Yoo at National Review, “these names are a Federalist Society all-star list of conservative jurisprudence.”
What we should think about this is already a matter of considerable debate.
A month ago, the conventional wisdom was that Hillary would slaughter Trump. As I predicted, that “wisdom” was ludicrously wrong. Rasmussen now has Trump +5, 42-37. And that's just for starters. Indeed, the Trump-loathing Wall Street Journal actually asked this week "Can Hillary Win? It's Hard to See How".
All this, plus the Democrat War on Women, Bill Clinton's rape problem, drafting women, and a hilarious new poll of Native Americans on the Washington Redskins. And of course, much much more.
Knossos, Crete. Welcome to Atlantis. This is what it looked like. And this:
More nonsense has been invented about Plato’s myth of Atlantis – mentioned briefly in his Timaeus and Critias and nowhere else by anyone else in antiquity – than any other legend you care to name.
Yet like many myths, it was constructed out of something that really existed. Here’s the story and the lesson to be learned.
[This essay by conservative scholar Bob Kagan states precisely why To The Point has so fervently opposed Trump’s candidacy and will continue to do so—JW]
The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.
But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him.
His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.
And the source of allegiance?
It’s not hard to see why the discussion of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ exchanges with the New York Times – The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru – has received so much attention from the chattering class. A lot of it is all about them, after all, and we all love to talk about ourselves.
By now, we’ve all heard the insults to the D.C. press corps (they’re 27 years old and don’t know anything about anything) and the self-satisfied account about how Rhodes and his colleagues, including Obama himself, deceived America about the Iran deal.
The deception hasn’t stopped, however, nor does it go away because Obama and Rhodes have given us a new account of the Iran deal.
For now we discover that negotiations with Iran started even before Obama was inaugurated, and had nothing to do with events over there. It was Obama’s initiative, and it’s the key to his foreign policy.
Global fund managers have almost no faith in the latest stock market rallies around the world and have begun to fear the worst from Brexit, putting aside near record sums of money in cash as they brace for a ‘summer of shocks.’
Investors have already lost confidence in China’s economic rebound this year and are shunning British equities like the plague, fearing a financial crunch if Britain votes to leave the EU.
Bank of America’s monthly survey of funds shows that 27% now think Brexit is the biggest ‘tail-risk’ for the global economy, overtaking neuralgic concerns about a devaluation by China or a wave of defaults by Chinese companies.
Longstanding fears that central banks are running out of policy ammunition or risk ‘quantitative failure’ have slipped to third place. The new worry is ‘stagflation’ in the US, a toxic mix of slowing growth and rising inflation at the same time.
What is puzzling is that this mood of deep alarm conflicts with clear evidence of accelerating monetary growth worldwide, usually a harbinger of better times ahead.
The end is near — depending on how you define “near” and where you live.
A couple of weeks ago, hedge fund legend Stanley Druckenmiller gave an important talk arguing that the crisis is about to hit and investors should liquidate their equity holdings. He and others who have similar views have been the subject of much debate among economists — more of it about the timing of the next global and U.S. downturn and not so much about whether it will come.
The crisis has already hit many — depending on where you live and what assets you hold — and will eventually spread to billions of others, including a very large segment of the U.S. population.
The fundamental problem is most countries are experiencing little or no growth as a result of excessive government spending (particularly on transfer payments), and destructive regulations and tax policies.
The unwillingness of the politicians (and their voters) to cut back on spending and regulation has led to an explosion of government debt, which is not sustainable at current levels of economic growth. This, in turn, is fueling a demand for more government spending (more free stuff) and thus more debt.
How long do you think this can go on?
Earlier this week, Jack published “The To The Point Rebel Alliance.” You should certainly read it if you haven’t. It starts with a clip of the Galactic Senate giving Palpatine thunderous applause as he declares himself emperor.
Across the Atlantic, two branches of a very real empire collided a couple of weeks ago. Barack Obama threatened Britain with draconian consequences should it vote to leave the European Union (or as it’s more fondly known, the EUSR). Boris Johnson’s rejoinder was an instant classic, demonstrating that he, not David Cameron, is Margaret Thatcher’s true heir.
Continuing to confound expectations of his certain doom, this week Donald Trump pulled ahead of or even with Hillary Clinton in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Quinnipiac has Trump 4 points ahead (43-39) in life-and-death Ohio, and just 1 point down (43-42) in the other two.
Hillary's mistakes just keep piling up, as virtually everything she does seems to reinforce the Trump brand. Indeed the campaign is so tone-deaf that everyone’s earlier worries about Trump being a ringer for Hillary increasingly look backward: if anything, it’s Hillary who’s working to elect Trump.
All this, plus Admiral Akbar, America’s own Emperor Palpatine, and the most encouraging Jimmy Kimmel segment you’ve ever seen, all in this week’s Half Full Report.
