The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Member Menu

The Amazon's Pantanal

Serengeti Birthing Safari

Wheeler Expeditions

Member Discussions

Article Archives

Archives

L i k e U s ! ! !

TALK IS CHEAP

Many of you have read of VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol. That’s what this column is about. This week we’ll discuss the originator and largest company in the field.

If the people you talk to on a regular basis have computers, you can talk to them for free, through your computer’s microphone. If you want to be ‘fancy’ or ‘stylish’, you can use a telephone that hooks into your PC’s USB port.

The program that made this mode of phone chatting a must have for computer users is the free basic version of Skype.

Read more...

The Future of Iran

July 9 was the day the Iranian student movement designated for national demonstrations against the regime, and a general strike in favor of democracy. Shaken by weeks of recent protests, and worried about the mounting criticism from several Western countries, the regime took unprecedented steps to head off a potential showdown with its own people.

Read more...

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS SPYING-ON-EVERYONE FIASCO PART II


So, in Part I on January 8,  I left on the note about how many of you had thought the RSA had been bribed to handover backdoor information of their supposed unbreakable code.

Not as cute the government finally thinking "Hey, we forked over all this money for this equipment.  We actually own it or parts of it and now we demand access to our stuff."

Then they thought:   "Our partners under the 1994 CALEA law - the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act - requires communications companies to help us and provide a means and method to surveil so as not impede our investigations!  Let's have a talk with them.  Only this time we bring some of our other partners like DEA and DOJ into the conversation and let's get serious on this."

So the list of agencies who can surveil you just got bigger.  But how did they start surveiling?  Let's discuss begin with just one program called Carnivore.

Read more...

OBAMA’S FISCAL DEATH DANCE


It is estimated that up to a quarter of all American households still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Many of these people have been able to refinance their home loans with much lower interest rates, but that does not solve the problem because they have a balance sheet problem rather than a cash-flow problem.

Those who owe more on their homes than they can sell them for, and who have little other savings or assets, are "locked in" to their existing homes.

Even if they have a better job offer in a location too distant to commute, they may not be able to take the job because they cannot afford the mortgage payments on their existing homes, cannot sell for a price higher than their mortgage, or cannot afford rent or house payments in the new location.

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are largely responsible for the problem.  Ironically, they too are locked in to an inescapble conundrum of their own making.

Read more...

WILL ROMNEY BE OUR FDR?


If you want to trace back all America's woes caused by the pathologies of liberalism to their original source, you'd focus on the inception of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

True, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism places the blame earlier, on "America's first fascist presidency," that of Woodrow Wilson.  But much of Wilson's assault on our Constitutional freedoms didn't last, and was reversed by his successors, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge chose not to run in 1928, resulting in the debacle of Herbert Hoover, the Dems gaining the House in 1930 (first time since 1916), and the complete entrenchment of the Dems at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in 1932.  FDR became America's first president-for-life (he finally died in office in 1945), while the Dems held a monopoly of power in the House for the next 62 years (with two irrelevant interregnums, 1946-48 and 1952-54; the Pubs finally got the House back, 1994-2006).

Yet the FDR/Dem victory of 1932 was far, far more than an electoral victory of one political party over the other. It was transformational, so deeply altering the fundamental relationship of Americans to their government and to their Constitution that the alteration lasts to this day - and is now, in fact deeper than ever.

For conservatives, FDR's transformation was and remains disastrous for America's freedom, America's culture, and the integrity of America's Constitution.  Today, as we reach the final economic consequences of FDR's transformation, it has proved to be equally disastrous for America's prosperity.

What we need is a president who can not only reverse FDR, but who can generate a transformation of his own, altering the relationship of Americans to their government that restores their freedom, their culture, their prosperity, and their Constitution.  We need our own FDR.  The question is: will Mitt Romney be that president?

Read more...

FREEDOM’S BIRTHDAY


[This was originally in To The Point for July 4, 2004. It needed only a slight updating for 2006.  We at To The Point wish all of you an exceedingly happy Fourth of July.]

July 4th is Freedom's Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which are great - that you take the time to feel good about America.

Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what's wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn't exist.

One reason is that, for all your worries about America's culture and morality, you and all your fellow conservatives can feel good about your country. Liberals can't. One of the defining characteristics of leftie-liberals is an inability to feel truly proud of their country - proud to the bone.

You cannot be a liberal without feeling apologetic and embarrassed over being an American. You cannot be a conservative without lacking any such embarrassment or compulsion to apologize at all.

Being an American is simply the coolest thing on earth.

Read more...

THE GREATEST ONE WEEK ADVENTURE IN THE WORLD

 
k2.jpg

This is K2, the second highest mountain in the world at 28,741 feet (8762 meters), and harder to climb than Everest.  It isn't in the Himalayas, but an even remoter mountain range in Central Asia called the Karakorum.

In the center of the Karakorum range is a confluence of massive glaciers, a legendary uninhabited spot known to mountaineers as Concordia.  Legendary because it is by consensus of professional mountaineers and adventurers to be the single most spectacularly scenic place on planet Earth.

At Concordia there are 41 peaks over 21,000 feet within a radius of nine miles.  The highest mountains in the world are called "eight-thousanders," higher than 8,000 meters or 26,250 feet.  There are 14 such giants, all in either the Himalayas or the Karakorum.  At Concordia you can see four all at once.  It is unique on earth.

It takes ten days of trekking from the last outpost of civilization - called Skardu - to reach Concordia.  Then ten days back.  But this July, I am going to take a dozen adventurers to Concordia in a single day - by helicopter.

And that's not all.

Read more...

THE WRATH OF ALLAH



This is Rakaposhi, a 25,000-foot Karakorum giant that towers above the hidden kingdom of Hunza in far northern Pakistan. It is one of the world’s great sights to wake up in the morning and watch the sunrise light up Rakaposhi from the balcony of your room in Karimabad, Hunza’s capital.

Far northern Pakistan is far and away one of the most spectacularly scenic regions of our planet. Today unfortunately, it has become one of the most tragic. Tens of thousands of people lie dead and millions are homeless with their villages and lives turned to rubble by an enormous earthquake.

Having spent quite a bit of time exploring the region over the years, it is heart-breaking for me to think of what has befallen all of the friendly folks I met there. The region, however, had become infested with numbers of decidedly unfriendly folks as well. There are many hidden valleys that were used as Al Qaeda refuges and training camps for Jihadi guerrillas launching attacks into Indian Kashmir.

Read more...

RSS

I’m sure you’ve all been reading about RSS, Really Simple Syndication. Some of you are probably using it. Others know it has something to do with getting ‘feeds’ on a subject you’re interested in, but have no idea beyond that.

Let’s quickly discuss RSS and then given an example of an application that I use.

RSS provides a convenient way to syndicate information from a variety of sources, including news stories, updates to a web site or even source code check-ins for a development project.

Regardless of the purpose for which the RSS file is being used, by watching this XML file, you can quickly and easily see whenever an update has occurred. Of course, viewing the RSS feed in Internet Explorer and hitting F5 every few minutes is not the most efficient use of your time, so most people take advantage of some form of client software to read and monitor RSS feeds.

There are many different RSS clients available, but here are a selected few that we tested our feeds with and that you may find useful:

Read more...

The Seventh Level

Sorry to say, I haven't reread Dante's "Inferno" for some years, but I still remember his description of a very low and extremely unpleasant level of hell that houses traitors. Surely abject appeasers of evil qualify for the same treatment, and we must note grimly that three prime candidates have recently come forward to swell the ranks of that overheated realm: Senator Joe Biden of Delaware (D.), Senator Arlen Specter (R.), of Pennsylvania, and Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio (R.)

Read more...

SHARON’S FINAL ROAD


During his long career, Ariel Sharon built a lot of roads. As housing minister in the early 1990s and as national infrastructures minister in the late 1990s, Sharon played a key role in building everything from the Trans-Israel Highway to access roads to isolated communities.

Since he passed away on Saturday (1/11), his role in building Israel's national infrastructures has been widely noted. But no mention has been made of the final and most important road that he paved.

That is the road to Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.  Here's how it got built.

Read more...

HALF-FULL REPORT 07/12/13


While waiting for my flight in the airport lounge in Sofia, Bulgaria yesterday (7/11), it was hard to ignore the big TV monitor tuned to ABC News.  There was Diane Sawyer announcing the "latest development" of the Zimmerman trial, and up flashed the ABC intro graphic to start the story.

On one side of the screen was a picture of Zimmerman in the gray suit and tie he wears to the trial.  On the other side was a picture of Trayvon Martin - not as a six-foot tall 17 year old but as an angelic smiling 12 year-old.  It's the same picture ABC uses to identify him on its website:

Somebody switched the channel to CNN - funny how many American news channels there are in Bulgaria - which was devoted to some lawyers discussing mindless minutiae of the trial.  Not a word about the real "latest development" - the disclosure on Wednesday (7/10) that Eric Holder's Justice Department organized with taxpayer money racial protests and racial unrest against George Zimmerman.  

The best op-ed of the week on this racist farce is in Tuesday's (7/09) IBD.  It's IBD's conclusion that everyone needs to understand  -- that any blood from planned race rioting will be on Obama's hands.

Let's get out of the stuffy air in here and into the world a bit.  There's no resisting, for example this headline of the week:

Read more...

OBAMA DENIES ROLE IN GOVERNMENT


WASHINGTON -President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has "played no role whatsoever" in the U.S. government over the past four years.

"Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am," he said. "Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization."

The President's outrage only increased, he said, when he "recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice."

"The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them," he said. "They sound like bad news."

Read more...

TAKING MONEY FROM BUSINESS BENEFITS ONLY BIG GOVERNMENT


Can you name the worst tax? In recent weeks, there have been a slew of articles in major publications about how many multinational corporations have found legal ways to reduce their tax burdens by running some of their operations through low-tax jurisdictions. In response, those who love high taxes and big government demand that corporations pay more.

Economists dislike the corporate income tax because it reduces productive labor and capital and is an additional tax on income that has already been (or will be) taxed. Politicians love the tax because it is largely invisible to most voters. Because of tax competition among countries, corporate tax rates have been dropping globally, resulting in the United States having the world's highest rate.

Now the high-taxers are fighting back.  They need to be stopped.

Read more...

OBAMA’S TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA


"It's unbelievable," said an unemployed waitress. "How can Obama be leading in the polls and likely to win enough electoral votes for a second term despite the worst economic performance by any President in the past 100 years?"

"It's downright frightening," said A small business owner. "What is the real plan that Obama and the Democrats have for their ‘transformation of America' and, more importantly, how are they going to achieve that plan and how will it affect my business and my family?"

The answers to these critical questions is clear. There is enough evidence, both direct and circumstantial, to provide reasonable answers. Yet, the reasons for Obama's showing in the polls and his transforming plan are kept masked by a media and a public who is seduced by the silver-tongued politician.

Obama's ability to mask his intentions produces an almost opium-like effect. That mask, however, will be removed once re-elected and America will, more clearly than ever, see and feel the impacts of the ‘plan'.  Here is that unbelievable, frightening plan to transform America.

Read more...