If something drops out of the news, it usually means it is going well.  Mad cow disease killed nobody last year. Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious lick. There were only two localized famines last year - in South Sudan and the Central African Republic - both caused by conflict, rather than drought or population pressure. That's because the feeding of the world is going so well it's not news. New figures from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization show that the world's cereal harvest, which provides more than half of the calories that humans eat, broke a new record last year at 2.54 billion tons - an astonishing 20 per cent higher than ten years ago. Thanks to better techniques and seeds, the world's farmers (of which I declare I am one, in a mostly hands-off way) have provided a growing population with more food per head, year after year, largely without cultivating extra land or using extra water or chemicals. Corn, rice and wheat - the big three cereals - each broke records in 2014. So why do we hear frequent cries that the world soon will be or is already struggling to feed itself?

The latest Warmist campaign is that scientists and journalists who mislead the public about ‘global warming' should be banned from television. So says the producer of a highly tendentious and misleading new eco-propaganda movie about global warming, apparently blissfully unaware of the irony of his position. Robert Kenner is the producer of Merchants of Doubt, a documentary which seeks to claim that climate skepticism is nothing but a fossil-fuel-funded conspiracy coordinated by the same kind of cackling evil-doers who tried to persuade you that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Like the Obama administration, the movie takes for granted the notion that catastrophic man-made climate change is real, that all the scientists promoting the theory are reliable, honest and principled, and that the only possible reason anyone might have for claiming otherwise is that they are "merchants of doubt" - i.e., corrupt disinformers who deliberately and cynically seek to hide the truth about global warming from the public because they have been paid to do so by sinister corporate interests. Now Kenner has written a public letter to one of his fellow celebrity alarmists, scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, to help promote his crappy film raise awareness in the media of the very serious issue of Big Oil funded denialism. The letter says:

South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.  Last Friday 3/06), US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, "Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it's not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy." The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang's refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program. Sherman negotiated the US's nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal. Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs. Sherman is now the US's chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. She;s having hissy fits because Bibi Netanyahu has ruined her plans.

In a valedictory speech last weekend of characteristically Latin American duration - a mind-numbing three hours - the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, claimed that her country was the only one in the world to have reduced its national debt over recent years. Only Kirchner could think this a matter of national pride - for reduction in the national debt via the mechanism of default is anything to boast of.   Nonetheless, where Argentina treads, others will surely soon be following. The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default. This most certainly includes China, by the way.  China's total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282% of GDP, China's debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, than the US.

I don't know about you, but I have been especially glad of my gas-fired central heating and hot water in the past few frigid weeks. Gas really is rather special: it provides us here in Britain with 84 per cent of our domestic heat, 27 per cent of our electricity, much of the feedstock for our synthetic consumer products, and pretty well all of the nitrogen fertilizer that has fed the world and largely banished famine. Although we import half of it, beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the Bowland shale, lies one of the richest gas resources ever discovered, just 10 per cent of which would be enough to provide nearly 50 years of British needs. The technology to get it out involves using water and sand to make cracks that are a millimeter wide in rocks that are a mile and a half down. A month's work leads to 25 years of gas flow from a quiet box of tricks that can be hidden behind a hedge. No need to festoon the hills with permanent concrete bases for 400ft towers of steel trying to suck a sparse trickle of energy out of the wind on a cold, calm day. Shale gas extraction is a process that has proved very safe and clean in the United States. It has had virtually no impact on groundwater, earthquakes or surface pollution anywhere. These are exaggerated myths constantly repeated by the wealthy multinational pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, by wealthy fashion designers and their nimby friends in gin-and-jag country, and by Vladimir Putin and other Russians with an interest in expensive gas.

Ten or fifteen years ago, when you looked at the cars on the road, how many Hyundais did you see? How many Hyundais do you see now, driven by buyers who wanted a "good enough" car for a reasonable price?  Back in my April 4/14 Half-Full Report, I referred to a nascent "Hyundaization" (hun-dye-zay-shun) trend in the global defense market.  Even now, few people have noticed this. Hyundaization has been masked by spending from high-end customers who only want top-end gear, and by global fire sales of used Western equipment. As an example of those fire sales, many of the Jordanian F-16s bombing ISIS right now recently belonged to the Dutch and Belgian air forces. After a decade of those sales, however, there isn't much second-hand equipment left to sell. That's opening the door to new buys from new sources. A combination of technology trends, industrial policies, and a multi-polar global shift will give this trend staying power. This is a sea change on multiple levels.  "Hyundaization" is going to have profound diplomatic, military, and industrial consequences.  Let's talk about them.

The celebrity actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said he is "a complete fool," an "idiot," "thoughtless" and that he is "devastated" for having inadvertently used the term "colored" to describe black people on a US talk show. It's depressing enough that he felt the obligation to apologize. But what's worse is that he felt the need to do with such groveling self-abasement. Yes, we all know why he did it. It's Oscar nomination season coming up, Cumberbatch is a possible contender for his portrayal of fashionably autistic, gay code-breaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, and Hollywood is notoriously PC and squeamish about issues to do with race. But if anyone who owes anyone an apology, here, it's not poor put-upon Cumberbatch but the noisome professional offense-takers who by seeking to make political mileage out of such achingly trivial issues are creating a climate of linguistic fear in which good people suffer. This, though, unfortunately, is how the liberal-left rolls.  For as my friend Alex Wickham tells me, "Liberals are the new Puritans who want to control your life."  We need an End to the New Puritanism movement.

Pundits agonize over President Obama's resistance to calling Islamist terror "Islamist terror." How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence? How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they-secularized Christians and non-observant Jews-know Islam's character better than Moslems themselves? It's easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations.  Just as Obama's ideological predecessors could never criticize Stalin, so their successors today can never cricize Mohammed.

The European Parliament voted last week (1/13) to let countries decide their own policies on growing genetically modified crops. The vote allows countries such as Britain to press ahead because of hard evidence that such crops are good for the environment, good for consumers and good for farmers; and let countries such as Austria continue to ban the things despite such evidence. It's a strange-bedfellow  alliance of the rational with the superstitious against the bureaucratic. Indeed, the untold story is that it was a triumph of subtle diplomacy by Owen Paterson - the Euroskeptic former UK environment minister who knows how to work the Brussels system. Last year he denounced what he called The Green Blob - "the network of environmental pressure groups, renewable energy companies and public officials who keep each other well supplied with lavish funds, scare stories and green tape." It was the Green Blob that suffered defeat in Brussels last week.

If we could prevent or cure all cancer, what would we die of? The new year has begun with a war of words over whether cancer is mostly bad luck, as suggested by a new study from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and over whether it's a good way to die, compared with the alternatives, as suggested by Dr Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Cancer is now the leading cause of death in Britain even though it is ever more survivable, with roughly half of people who contract it living long enough to die of something else. But what else? Often another cancer.  Cancer's growing dominance of the mortality tables is not because it's getting worse but because we are avoiding other causes of death and living longer. It is worth remembering that some scientists and anti-pesticide enviros in the 1960s were convinced that by now lifespans would be much shorter because of cancer caused by pesticides and other chemicals in the environment. In the 1950s Wilhelm Hueper - a director of the US National Cancer Institute and mentor to Rachel Carson, the environmentalist author of Silent Spring - was so concerned that pesticides were causing cancer that he thought the theory that lung cancer was caused by smoking was a plot by the chemical industry to divert attention from its own culpability: "Cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer," he insisted. In fact it turns out that pollution causes very little cancer and cigarettes cause a lot. But aside from smoking, most cancers are indeed bad luck.