The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Pantelleria, Strait of Sicily, Italian Mediterranean. Welcome to Europe’s hidden ultimate hideaway for the rich and famous. No matter who you are, nobody cares. It’s totally laid back. No big fancy resorts, no tourists, no paparazzi, no autograph hounds, you’re left alone in peace, solitude, and private luxury.
There’s just one little problem, right on the horizon you see in the distance. It provides a useful perspective on the main story of the week in America – Trump vs. Clinton on illegal immigration.
This has been a news week of mind-numbing global intensity. There are events you should know about in 15 countries on five continents. Let’s see how many I can get to – starting obviously with Mexico.
The most surprised guy on the planet late last week was Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. He issued a pro forma invitation to both Trump and Hillary for a meeting/discussion as a diplomatic nicety. He got the reply he expected from her office, thanking him, will do our best to rearrange the busy schedule, our people will be in touch with your people, blah blah.
He fell out of his chair with Trump’s reply: Muchas gracias, I’m on my way, I’ll see you tomorrow! You can imagine the freakout in the presidential chambers: “QUE??? Hay-soos Crees-toh!!!” And however you say WTF!! in Mexican.
It was the very last thing he expected. But when the shock subsided, here’s what Nieto told his aides:
What does she stand for? What are the genuine accomplishments in her life? What new innovative ideas does she have to change the current direction of the country that two-thirds of voters think is wrong?
Then there are questions of ethics and morality. Ereyesterday (8/28), Roger Simon laid out the stakes:
“The truth about the Clinton Foundation is already clear: a medium to leverage Hillary Clinton's position as Secretary of State for personal enrichment and global control by the Clintons and their allies. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done in the history of the United States government.
This means quite simply, that the United States of America has abandoned the rule of law. The election of Hillary Clinton—our own Evita—will make the situation yet more grave. Consider something so basic as how you raise your children in a country where the president is most probably an indictable criminal and most certainly a serial liar of almost inexhaustible proportions. What does this say about our basic morality and how does that affect all aspects of our culture?”
It’s been a long hot political summer, with the Lying Swine Media in a 24/7 feeding frenzy to demonize Trump and coronate Hillary as having already won before the campaign really begins. As always, summer froth abates over Labor Day weekend, with campaigns beginning in earnest the day after – one week from today, Tuesday September 6th.
So with the LSM predicting the race for the White House is over before it begins, I figure I might as well join in. My prediction is: Hillary is going to lose. She is going to lose, as Dick Cheney would say, “big time.”
Of course I’m going to caveat that big time – I’ve been wrong too many times before not to do that. But let’s set the caveats aside for now. Let’s first count the abundance of ways she’s going down for the electoral count.
“Scoundrel’s View” of Mount Everest – Tibet North Face on left, Nepal Southwest Face on right
Can you imagine what it is like to actually be at Mount Everest? Or any other Himalayan giant – like Kanchenjunga, Annapurna, or Dhaulagiri – the greatest mountains on earth? To be in the presence of any one of them is a life-memorable experience.
To reach any one, you must trek for many days, over extremely rough mountainous terrain at very high altitude. You must be in exceptional physical condition to do so.
Which is why almost no one, even the most ambitious trekker, has ever been to all of them. Last May, I created an alternative: to the base camps of all eight 8,000 meter peaks in the Himalayas by helicopter, piloted by the most experienced mountain rescue pilots in the world.
Here’s our high altitude AS350 B3 coming in to land at the Khumbu Ice Fall on Mount Everest at 17,500 ft.
What we did in May was so astoundingly spectacular I can’t resist doing it again this November. Would you like to come with me?
Where does media bias come from? Anyone who really wanted to know had that question answered when much of the media took a break from attacking Trump to attack the Associated Press.
What does the AP have in common with Trump? Both were hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances to score payoffs from dictators, arms dealers and tycoons with terrorist ties for the next four to eight years.
The Associated Press got in trouble with the rest of the media for digging up dirt on the Clinton Foundation. Instead of just repeating the usual Clinton denials, it actually ran the numbers and noted that more than half the “ordinary folks” who got meetings with her had donated to her Foundation.
Instead of reporting on the AP story, the media went to war on its own. It wasn’t just the usual suspects like Vox and Slate who have a reputation for attacking any actual reporters who stray off the reservation and actually do their jobs. This time all the big boys were on the job.
The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is approaching its annual nadir. By early September each year about two thirds of the ice cap has melted, then the sea begins to freeze again.
This year looks unlikely to set a record for melting, with more than four million square kilometers of ice remaining, less than the average in the 1980s and 1990s, but more than in the record low years of 2007 and 2012. (The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing in recent years, contrary to predictions.)
Meanwhile, the habit of some scientists of predicting when the ice will disappear completely keeps getting them into trouble. But would it matter if it did all melt one year? Here’s the point everybody seems to be missing: the Arctic Ocean’s ice has indeed disappeared during summer in the past, routinely.
And when it did, during a period known as the “Early Holocene Insolation Maximum” (EHIM), it was the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Here’s why.
Would you be in favor of a tax that loses money for the government, and penalizes entrepreneurship, job creation and economic growth?
Only muddy-brained or mean-spirited people would favor such a tax -- yet many such people are found in the Internal Revenue Service and Congress. The tax that I am referring to is the capital gains tax, and even more specifically, the capital gains tax as it is applied to the sale of commodities.
A capital gains tax liability occurs when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it. The asset could be stocks, bonds, real estate, art, or gold and other commodities.
Most commodity prices have fallen, after reaching a cyclical high at the beginning of the Great Recession, which means, even in nominal terms (not-inflation-adjusted), the capital gains tax on commodities is a net revenue loser for the government.
The issue is of renewed importance because of the rise of new, private digital-like monies (e.g., bitcoin).
Good grief. What a disastrous, horrible, no-good lousy week this has been… for The PIAPS.
I’m sure you need cheering up after this depressing news, and if listening to a masterful British orator won’t do it, nothing will:
Nigel Farage, however, was the least of Shrillary’s worries this week. On Wednesday (8/24), the New York Post’s cover story was A Nation for Sale under Hillary Clinton. But this isn’t a Post scoop – this is an exposé of the Clinton Foundation’s naked criminality by the media’s gold-standard flagship, the Associated Press itself. Every newspaper in the country uses an AP newsfeed. As such, it cannot be ignored by the Libtard Media and it is utterly devastating.
Trump was fully justified to declare that, “It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history.”
Jack Kelly had a marvelous column this week on Journalists as Presstitutes. They are intentionally biased for the left, willful propagandists and shills for the Democrats.
There is another way they presstitute themselves that you should know about, for it will give you a deep insight into how journalism really works. We use a current story about Turkey in the New York Times as a prime example.
How’s this for a headline in this morning’s (8/26) London Daily Express: Favorite to be Next Dutch Prime Minister Vows to Ban the Koran and Close All Mosques. Yep, that’s Geert Wilders. He and his Dutch Freedom Party lead every poll there is by double digits, and the election is soon.
We have the HFR’s favorite judge, favorite Olympian, and Hero of the Week. Here we go.
Tiraspol, Transnistria. Lenin lives. At least he still does here in the strangest country in Europe, as it insists on pretending it is a part of the Soviet Union.
We are in a landlocked and isolated sliver of Moldova that wanted no part of the breakup of the USSR in the wake of Berlin Wall falling in November 1989.
This is where the Soviet Union still exists – and where the people consider themselves Soviet citizens. They idolize Putin – and thus idolize Trump for being Putin’s friend.
Let’s state it clearly: Washington’s policy regarding state sponsors of terrorism is schizophrenic. As a result, our government is failing in its duty to protect Americans from terrorism.
It is not as if we need evidence of what nations are sponsoring terror attacks against us. Whether the attacks of 9-11, the Khobar Towers bombing, and the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Iran was the prime culprit, in addition to the thousands of American soldiers maimed and killed by IED’s strewn all over Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian agents.
If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, Obama’s Iran nuclear deal)) was truly able to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, looking the other way while Iran builds ballistic missiles and supports terrorism might be considered unpalatable, but nonetheless necessary if that were the only choices before us.
But the JCPOA only delays Iran from reaching its goal of becoming a nuclear-armed state sponsor of terrorism—which all evidence suggests is happening rapidly. The effect on Middle East security is already devastating.
By our inaction, we are helping Iran create a Shia crescent from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon and to the Mediterranean Sea, an arc dominated by Iran and its terror proxies that jeopardizes the entire Middle East and especially the US allied oil producing states.
China is at mounting risk of a Japanese-style "liquidity trap" as monetary policy loses traction and the economy approaches credit exhaustion, forcing a shift towards Keynesian fiscal stimulus.
Officials at the Chinese People’s Bank (PBOC) have begun to call for a fundamental change in strategy, warning that interest rate cuts have become an increasingly blunt tool. They cannot easily stop companies hoarding cash or halt the slide in private investment.
Sheng Songcheng, the PBOC’s head of analysis, set off a storm last month by warning that the economy had “started to show some signs of being caught in a liquidity trap.”
Caixin magazine said last week (8/16) Chinese companies are hoarding record sums of “dead money” rather than spending it. The growth rate of private investment has dropped to 2.1% over the last seven months, the lowest since global financial crisis.
The International Monetary Fund warned in June that China’s corporate debt has reached 145% of GDP. “Vulnerabilities are still rising on a dangerous trajectory. They must be addressed immediately,” it said. China’s entire financial system is clearly out of kilter.
Climate change projects spend enormous sums with no effect. They have not only been a waste of money, they have done real harm.
Some trillions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars have been spent to combat global warming over the last three decades. Has the expenditure of all of this money reduced global temperatures from where they would have otherwise been? No, at least not to a measurable degree.
The major governments of the world have undertaken a public policy which to date has cost far more than any benefits. The rebuttal by the advocates of all of this government spending is to say it is nothing more than a down payment on what needs to be done and the benefits will accrue to future generations.
British scientist Valentina Zharkova and her team at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom have produced a new model enabling unprecedentedly accurate predictions of the sun’s solar cycle. She recently presented her findings in an address to the Royal Astronomical Society, Heartbeat of the Sun from Principal Component Analysis and prediction of solar activity on a millenium timescale.
The model predicts that a coming periodic reduction in the sun’s magnetic radiation will soon lead to major global cooling.
These are rules to live a full and savored old age. The last is the most important. But you won’t fully appreciate it until you’ve read all the others first.
He did it again! Just last night!
Yesterday (8/18) in Not Never Trump, I described three game-changing events this week providing positive reasons to be for a Trump Presidency rather than merely being against the nightmarish evil of a PIAPS Presidency.
Now there’s a fourth. In Charlotte, North Carolina last night, Trump delivered what is being called his New American Future speech. (The link is to both the full text and full video.)
It is no accident, comrades, that we are witnessing the transformation of Daffy Donald into Presidential Donald before our very eyes this week. Who else but Kellyanne Conway could have effected this?
Meanwhile, our current Pathetic POTUS was playing golf with some comedian yesterday. He interrupted his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to do a fundraiser for Hildebeast, but wouldn’t for the devastated people of Louisiana.
So where will both Trump and Pence be today? In Louisiana while Zero laughs through another 18 holes. Even the Associated Press (see the link) couldn’t ignore the brilliant (for Trump) and ghastly (for Zero) optics.
And where is Hillary? Not in Louisiana nor anywhere else public. She’s, ah… resting. Poor old gal runs out of gas easily these days.
Evidently it’s much worse than “exhaustion” from the brutal pace of campaigning. Her coughing fits, seizures, and bizarre behavior are now at a point where it’s legitimate to question her physical and mental fitness for office.
On Wednesday (8/17) at Trump campaign headquarters in the Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, campaign policy director Steve Miller convened a round table of 16 folks to discuss how to defeat political and terrorist Islam. I wasn’t there as I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria this week with my family.
Kellyanne was there, and let’s suppose – just suppose, for this is only a thought experiment – that she asks me to attend the next such meeting. What would I say?
