ICARUS WAS A LIBERAL
Join the forum discussion on this postHALF-FULL REPORT 04/01/16
Welcome to the April Fools’ HFR! Let’s get started with Being Clean Inside and Out with Royal Orchard Fruity Soap.
We also have April Fools’ suggestions for you.
The internet is awash with speculation on Trump’s campaign and Trump himself falling apart this week. I discussed it in The Trump Titanic yesterday. This morning, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal had a very insightful and compassionate observation about Trump supporters.
This hard fact, however, has now emerged: Trump will not get the GOP nomination. You can take that to the bank.
Going geopolitical, you may want to secure an adult beverage because this is going to get engrossing. An intriguing connection between Vladimir Putin and Indiana Jones arose this week.
After the HFR Hero of the Week, we close with the funniest – and most revealing – April Fools’ story of the day
WILL AMERICA FOLLOW EUROPE INTO THE ABYSS?
Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path of national suicide.
No European country can take the security measures necessary for its own national needs, without either violating or ignoring EU mandates. That the latest terrorist murders struck near the very heart of the EU in Brussels is emblematic of the Union’s dilemma.
As far as America is concerned, a fossilized EU should remind us of our original and vanishing system of federalism, in which states were once given some constitutional room to craft laws and protocols to reflect regional needs — and to ensure regional and democratic input with checks and balances on statism through their representatives in Congress.
Yet the ever-growing federal government — with its increasingly anti-democratic, politically correct, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracies — threatens to do to Americans exactly what the EU has done to Europeans.
STOPPING THE LYING SWINE LIBERAL MEDIA
Would you invite someone into your home who you knew to be a thief and a rapist?
Of course not. So why are Republicans permitting the Lying Swine liberal media to pick their nominee for president?
If Donald Trump prevails in Cleveland, it’ll be all she wrote for the GOP, and for the constitutional republic our Founding Fathers gave us. But if we’re spared this awful fate – and I think we will – we need to examine why we came so close to catastrophe, and to figure out what we must do to keep this from happening again.
The Lying Swine have given Trump about $2 billion worth of free publicity, roughly six times as much as they’ve given all the other Republican presidential candidates combined. As the propaganda arm of the Democrat National Committee, the “mainstream” media do this mostly because they want the GOP to nominate the weakest possible candidate for the general election.
There isn’t much Republicans can do about media bias. But it is imperative for GOP leaders to stop pretending it doesn’t exist. The Lying Swine are the enemy – our foremost enemy. They must be treated as such.
WHY OBAMA IS LIKE MERKEL
Angela Merkel took a shellacking in German regional elections earlier this month (3/13), but she’s not about to get tougher on immigration, which is what provoked her bad results. She’s sticking with her open-door policy, even though it isn’t working very well.
It is a typical feel-good policy that ignores reality: Merkel, and lots of other German leaders, want to prove that they are fine humanitarians, not the descendants of the Fuhrer. And so they “welcome” hundreds of thousands of refugees and are trying to turn them into good Europeans.
It’s a self-hating vision with an explicitly destructive purpose – a vision and purpose she shares with Barrack Obama. Here’s the reason why they share it.
BRITAIN DOESN’T NEED DONALD TRUMP’S MERCANTILISM
The late Sir George Martin, “the man who made The Beatles,” created substantial British exports.
Had the import of his music to America been banned to save the jobs of US musicians, Britain would have missed out on some revenue but the American consumer would have been the biggest loser, missing out on the music. Trade benefits the importing country: that’s why it happens.
Frankly, we might as well be living in the 17th century, so antiquated are our current debates over trade, both here over Brexit and in America over the presidential nominations. Many current assumptions about trade, such as Mr. Trump’s, were debunked more than two hundred years ago and then tested to destruction in the mid-19th century.
In the 17th and 18th centuries European governments were in thrall to “mercantilism”. They sought to restrain imports with tariffs and bans, while encouraging exports with monopolies and gunboats.
Along came Adam Smith and made a different argument, that mercantilism punished consumers and the poor, while rewarding protected producers and the rich; that imports were a good thing because they raised people’s standard of living by giving them what they wanted at lower prices. It’s a shame Donald Trump never read Adam Smith.
YELLOW YELLEN?
In her speech to the Economic Club of New York yesterday (3/29), Fed Chair Janet Yellen vowed to move with extreme care before tightening monetary policy in the face of lingering global deflation and trouble in China.
She swatted aside vociferous hawks on the Fed’s voting committee (FOMC), more or less pledging to flood the economy with excess stimulus in order to guarantee a safety margin against any further deflationary shocks. Her dovish comments set off wild moves on the currency markets and a powerful relief rally on Wall Street.
Mrs. Yellen is taking a major gamble.
A chorus of critics have warned that the Fed is falling behind the curve as the labor market tightens and commodity prices start to firm again, fearing a repeat of the 1970s when the institution repeatedly found excuses to delay taking action on the grounds that there was still plenty of hidden slack in the economy.
“The longer the Fed dithers, the higher rates are eventually going, ” said Paul Ashworth from Capital Economics.
WHY IS HONG KONG RICH, CUBA IMPOVERISHED, AND PUERTO RICO BROKE?
Back in 1955, the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba and Hong Kong had roughly the same real per capita income. They each took very different economic paths.
Now, some 60 years later, Hong Kong is even richer than the United States on a per capita income basis. Cuba is an economic disaster, having gone from the richest Caribbean nation to the poorest, next to Haiti. And Puerto Rico finds itself flirting with bankruptcy, with a per capita income much higher than Cuba’s but only roughly half that of Hong Kong.
The contrasting lessons of Hong Kong and Cuba provide a clear path that Puerto Rico must take to have an economic future.
NO DIFFERENCE, MR OBAMA?
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/25/16
What do you see here? A group of Moslem “refugees” walking in a snowstorm headed for the German Welfare State?
Well, yes – but look more closely. There are seven men and one woman – and the woman, unlike the men, is barefoot. What’s more, she is carrying two children – and not one of these seven men is lifting a finger to help her.
This encapsulates the incapacity of a culture that looks upon and treats women as sub-human to adapt to the moral norms of Western Christian Civilization.
That Europe would allow people in the millions from such a culture to flood their shores is suicidal. The horror of Brussels on Tuesday (3/22) should not come as any surprise in the slightest. This is what being suicidal begets – you become prey for the predators.
This is a teachable moment. It is prime time to learn – or relearn as TTP has been teaching this for years – the root cause of the West’s and America’s suicidal inability to defend itself from foreign threats, be they Moslem terrorism, tsunamis of illegal immigration, or an America-hating president.