REAGAN’S JOKE ON US
Join the forum discussion on this postHALF-FULL REPORT 01/01/16
Welcome to 2016 – the last year of the worst presidency in American history. With all the doom and gloom being predicted that 2016 will be even more ghastly than 2015, it’s time to cheer up!
Recall the advice given to the fellow who was sad and depressed: “My friend said, ‘Cheer up! Things could be worse!’ So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse!”
First the bad news about 2016, then the good.
The bad news is that it is going to get worse. 2016 will be the Year of Zero Unleashed. His hatred of America will be fully vented in an explosion of vindictiveness wreaked upon us, an orgy of fascist rules, executive orders, and flat-out lawlessness designed to abolish our freedom, ruin our economy, decimate our culture, and surrender to our enemies.
So what could possibly be the good news? It’s that we can look upon the Year of Zero Unleashed not as a disaster, but as an opportunity. A historically unique one to fundamentally re-transform America to the free country it once was. Here’s how.
THE CRUZ SLINGSHOT
There is a famous scene in the insanely funny 2006 movie Talledega Nights, where racecar driver Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) performs his Shake N Bake move: Slingshot engaged!
As all NASCAR fans know, the “slingshot” is a real racing tactic. Here’s professional racecar driver Alex Lloyd describing the maneuver:
“We all know about the Ricky Bobby ‘Shake N' Bake’ slingshot. And making use of the draft to complete a pass is crucial. The longer you can stay in the wake of the car you are pursuing the better. With each second your momentum gains and you pick up speed. Then at the very last moment pop out and use the slingshot to assist in getting you alongside and passing your competitor.”
Now let’s apply that strategy to Ted Cruz in his race for the GOP presidential nomination.
THE MALTHUSIAN MISANTHROPY OF THE LEFT
For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale.
It centers on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.
According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety.” Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in history.
By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases,” he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s one-child policy – and remains a hero to the environmental movement to this day.
Al Gore, for example, could be a poster child for Malthusian misanthropy.
MUD HUTS AND CIVILIZATION
I just started a Twitter campaign called #Rhodesmustrise. It’s in response to the lunacy currently embroiling the most revered and distinguished university on our planet – Oxford University.
That would be the #rhodesmustfall campaign for the removal from Oxford’s Oriel College of a statue of one of its benefactors Cecil Rhodes. Below is the letter that Oriel College should have written in response.
Dear race-hustling grievance mongers of Rhodes Must Fall:
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and wellbeing of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilization, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short-lived Southern African civilization of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilization has been near to zilch.
You’ll probably say that’s “racist.” But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.”
DOES SAUDI ARABIA HAVE A FUTURE?
Saudi Arabia is burning through foreign reserves at an unsustainable rate and may be forced to give up its prized dollar exchange peg as the oil slump Dr.ags on, the country’s former reserve chief has warned.
“If anything happens to the riyal exchange peg, the consequences will be dramatic. There will be a serious loss of confidence,” said Khalid Alsweilem, the former head of asset management at the Saudi central bank (SAMA).
Dr. Alsweilem, now at Harvard University's Belfer Centre, said the Saudi authorities have taken a big gamble by flooding the world with oil to gain market share and drive out rivals. “The thinking that lower oil prices will bring down the US oil industry is just nonsense and will not work.”
The dollar peg has been the anchor of Saudi economic policy and credibility for over three decades. A forced devaluation would heighten fears that the crisis is spinning out of political control, further enflaming disputes within the royal family.
The crisis is getting so out of control that some international observers are speculating that Saudi Arabia might not have much of a future at all.
RATIONAL GLOOM FOR 2016
The economist and philosopher F.A. Hayek warned us about the limits to knowledge and forecasting. What we do know, however, based on past behavior is that some future events have a much higher probability of occurring than others. So, now for 2016:
*There will be a major disruption in the global oil market, leading to higher prices, and this is why…
*There will be another financial crisis, and global economic growth will be less than the most recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast, and this is why…
*Iran will let the world know that it has a nuclear bomb while publicly denying it, and this is why…
Happy New Year anyway.
HOW TO ENLIVEN YOUR DREAMS
Have you ever tried to start an exercise program on your own?
There are many private galleries of home exercise equipment displayed as modern art, masterpieces such as a treadmill transformed into "Clothes Tree," racks of dumbbells as "End Table," and rowing machine as "Hurdle."
The abundance of such a range of home art displays is not, sad to say, a phenomenon of mass creative genius. It is a function of the difficulty of focusing our will consistently in multiple directions.
It takes willpower to decide to establish a new habit, and without some kind of support for this new habit – in the form of a clearly defined commitment, some kind of accountability, and incorporation into a daily routine – our dynamic potential of a new, positive habit can become stuck in the regret of an unrealized vision.
There are also certainly many people who use their home gym consistently and effectively. There are people who do establish new habits of regular exercise that they stick to on their own. What is the difference?
PIAPS WISDOM
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/25/15
Paris, France. Merry Christmas and welcome to the Christmas Half-Full Report!
Today we celebrate the hopefulness and optimism inherent in Christianity. It’s “The Most Wonderful Day of the Year” as the Christmas song declares – and which you can hear in the sound system of restaurants, markets, and stores all over in Paris.
Yes, in English. In fact, everywhere you go in Paris, you hear the classic Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole Christmas songs that we all grew up with – like White Christmas, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Winter Wonderland, Silent Night. Not French. American. Even in France, the most wonderful day of the year connects Christian hope with the fundamental cheerfulness of the American character.
And not just in France. Last week, Rebel and I were in Warsaw and it was the same. The Poles are perhaps the most devoutly Christian people in Europe. Christmas is a true religious day for them. And you hear Crosby and Cole, American Christmas music everywhere as well.
The Poles have very good reason to be optimistic today, with a new government devoted to standing up for Poland against Putin’s threats and EU bureaucratic tyranny. Poland is the hope of Europe right now, the patriotic free market alternative to the Moslemized welfare states of so much of the EU.
There is even a patriotic free market television news station now – Republika TV – as a very popular alternative to Poland’s libtard media always apologizing for Putin as they are on the Kremlin payroll.
I gave an interview which Republika both broadcast in Poland with Polish subtitles and on their YouTube channel without. Here’s the latter all in English:
