CONGRESS MUST NOT BE AS NAÃVE AND UNWISE AS THE PRESIDENT
Leaders who cannot see beyond Stage One often cause great harm. Unfortunately for the United States and the world, President Obama continues to exhibit a strange naïveté and a lack of wisdom about domestic and foreign problems -- Syria just being the latest example. The famous Russian "reset" was one of the first policies that later turned into an embarrassment. The president shows compassion when he talks about those who were gassed in Syria, and he shows compassion when he speaks about minorities, the young and those who have the fewest opportunities. Yet by placing additional burdens on job creation, many of his tax and regulatory policies have led to the biggest increases in unemployment among those he says he cares most about. A compassionate speech is no substitute for sound action. A wiser president would realize his policies are not working and reverse course. Wise people learn from their mistakes, while the unwise double down.
FROM 9/11 TO 3.0
On this 12th anniversary of the Moslem Atrocity of 9/11, our problems seem worse than ever. The federal government has metastasized into a cancer that many consider terminal for our country's existence. Tens of millions of us have given up hope of ever finding a job again - while millions more just starting out in their twenties have never had a job at all. The problems seem so numerous and insuperable that many of us have given up on America's future. Most horrifying is that this is what Zero wants, the destruction of America's future is his goal. The more we suffer, the more he gloats, laughing in our faces as he plays another round of golf and Mrs. Zero is treated as royalty, going off on another multi-million dollar vacation. And all the while, his corrupt corporatist cronies, like those at Solyandra, make hundreds of millions. So it is only appropriate that we commemorate this day by committing ourselves to creating a new America that will conquer the Curse of Zero, and reclaim our future of optimism. The good news is that this creation is already well underway. There's a blueprint for it and the foundation is being laid. Here it is.
ARE CHEMICAL WEAPONS REALLY UNIQUELY BAD?
Syria is thought to have at least 1,000 tons of chemical munitions. They loom large in the debate over whether to launch air strikes against the regime of dictator Bashar Assad. Larger than they ought to. Chemical munitions -- along with nuclear bombs and biological agents -- are classified as "weapons of mass destruction." This is deceptive. To lump poison gas with nukes and bugs is like comparing a high school football team to the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Green Bay Packers. They don't really belong in the same league. The Germans, in the second battle of Ypres in 1915, were the first to use lethal chemical weapons. They were used extensively by both sides for the remainder of World War I, but hardly ever since. This has less to do with humanitarian restraint on the part of the combatants -- or fear of retaliation in kind -- than it does with the fact that chemical weapons aren't very effective. Here's why:
IT’S THE BELIEF THAT STRESS IS BAD FOR YOU THAT’S BAD FOR YOU
In a great TED talk, Kelly McGonigal of Stanford University revealed a new finding about stress. We used to think that too much stress could be very bad for you. In fact, people with high levels of stress have a 43% higher probability of dying than those with lower levels of stress. That sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? But it turns out that it's not the stress itself that'll kill you. Those with high levels of stress who believed that stress is bad for you indeed have a 43% higher probability of dying than those with lower levels of stress, but those with just as high levels of stress who believed that stress was a normal and healthy response of their body to the challenges of life were actually healthier than those with lower levels of stress. In other words, it's not stress, but the belief that stress is bad for you that will kill you.
HALF-FULL REPORT 09/06/13
Might as well start with the belly-laugh of the week. Who is this? 
It's the President of France, Francois Hollande. The pic was taken Tuesday (9/03) during his visit to a school in Denain, a city in northern France, and put online by AFP (Agence-France Presse, the government owned & operated news agency). It instantly went viral and has all France in hysterics. AFP pulled it within hours, issuing a "mandatory kill" order to its outlets not to publish it, as it damaged the "dignity" of the president. Too late. President Imbécile is now Hollande's nickname for millions of Frenchfolk. Don't you wish all of America could laugh at Zero that way? This week we may be on the verge of your wish being granted. And not just America, but most all of the entire world.
THE SYRIA BOTCH
We must intervene in the civil war in Syria because "if a thug and a murderer like Bashar al-Assad can gas thousands of his own people with impunity," it would set a bad example for others, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday (8/03). Secretary Kerry's moral outrage would have been more moving if Sen. Kerry -- who met with the Syrian dictator six times, and urged "engagement" with his regime -- hadn't said so many kind things about Mr. Assad in the recent past. Secretary Kerry's change of direction at Tuesday's hearing doesn't inspire confidence either. A resolution authorizing military action should not forbid the use of ground troops, he said, but flip-flopped after receiving criticism. He was right the first time. No war has ever gone the way the side that fired the first shot assumed it would. For recent examples, see Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq.
MY FAVORITE MUSEUM
My wife and I spent much of the summer in our favorite museum. It's called Europe. Not a museum in Europe, but Europe itself. Since America is an island, Americans tend to be insular and consider their problems to be the world's best. But it is not so. For Americans, the rest of the world is thousands of miles away across the Pacific or Atlantic, while Canada is that cold place far to the north where they say "eh" all the time, while Mexico is that sweltering place all the illegals come from - hence Americans see their country as a giant isolated island. A separate universe. When things are going good, we think there's no place better - a perspective for which there is justification. When things are going bad, we think no place on earth is going to hell in a handbasket faster. We consider Zero to be such a horrendous disaster because we've never been deranged enough to engage in electoral masochism before. This is a first for us - but for much of the rest of the world, it's the norm. Masochism, in the form of people accepting subjugation from thugs who declared themselves chiefs, kings, and emperors, has been the political way of life for most of human history. We view America as "the exceptional nation" because it is the exception to this history. Our cultural progenitor enabling this exception was Europe. Now that Europe is regressing, our fear is that we are too. But fear is a waste of time. Unless we use fear to assess the extent of actual danger, we'll just wallow in it and not rationally act to get rid of what we're scared of. So a glance at Europe could be helpful to see where it's fallen into the masochistic mire so we can avoid doing so.
THE QUACKERY OF CLIMATE ALARMISM
If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. One candidate for prison would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth. No one has ever doubted that climate changes. Pretty much everyone - probably more than 97 per cent, even - agrees that there is a degree of anthropogenic input, even it's just the barely measurable contribution of beef cattle farts or the heat produced by cities. But the dangerous bit? No one has come even close to demonstrating it, there is no reliable evidence for it, and very few scientists - certainly far, far fewer than 97 per cent of them - would ever stake their reputations on such a tendentious claim. So how do the eco-swine go on getting away with it? Jamie Whyte provides a fascinating, erudite and original answer in his new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs: Quack Policy - Abusing Science in the Name of Paternalism.
THERE IS NO BEE CRISIS
Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no "bee-pocalypse." There is lots of alarmist talk about "colony collapse disorder," people are blaming pesticides and talking about hundreds of billions of dollars at risk. But a closer look tells a very different story. Yes, honeybees are dying in above-average numbers, but the most likely cause is the varroa destructor mite and associated viruses. Moreover, if you look at the actual numbers, they undermine much of the catastrophic rhetoric. In the United States, where we have good data, beekeepers have adapted to CCD. Colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999. The beekeepers are not passive victims. Yet, scare stories abound. We are being warned that "bee deaths may have reached a crisis point for crops," and some commentators go as far as invoking an impending "bee-pocalypse" or a "bee-mageddon." They fondly employ a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live." The implication seems to be that if the smartest guy on the planet was alarmed, we should be too. However, the quote seems to have been made up, first appearing in 1994 in a pamphlet distributed by French beekeepers, protesting the high cost of sugar for feeding bees and opposing a proposed reduction of tariffs on imported honey.
THE EMERGING MARKET ROUT
Emerging markets are now big enough to drag down the global economy. As Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, Venezuela, South Africa, Russia, Thailand and Kazakhstan try to shore up their currencies, the effect is ricocheting back into the advanced world in higher borrowing costs. Even China felt compelled to sell $20 billion of US Treasuries in July. "They are running down reserves by selling US and European bonds, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback loop," said Simon Derrick from BNY Mellon. We are told that emerging markets are more resilient than in past crises because they have $9 trillion of reserves. But any use of that treasure to defend the exchange rate entails monetary tightening, and therefore inflicts a contractionary shock on countries already in trouble. We are also told that they borrow in their own currencies these days, immune to the sort of dollar squeeze that caused such havoc in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. This is true, but double-edged. India, Brazil and others will surely be tempted to stop fighting markets, let their currencies slide and inflict the pain on foreigners - that is to say, on your pension fund.