LIBERALS WILL CONTINUE TO LIE ABOUT RACE AND GENDER IN 2015
When People magazine asked Michelle Obama about her personal experience with racism, she cited a 2011 visit to a Target store in Virginia. "The only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf," the First Lady said. Why is it "racist" for a short white woman to ask a taller woman (Ms. Obama is 5'11") who happens to be black to get a box of detergent for her from a high shelf? The First Lady's anecdote illustrates how difficult it is to find evidence for the charge many liberals make that racism and sexism are as rampant in America today as half a century ago.
HALF-FULL REPORT 01/02/15
A brand new year. Is it time for predictions? OK, here's one you can count on. There will be a whiteness of Black Swans. Yes, a "whiteness" is the collective noun for swans, even when they are black (the subspecies Cygnus atratus in Australia). These days, a capitalized "Black Swan" refers not to a bird but an event - something that comes sailing into history right out of the blue and bites us right in the tuches. The worst, most negative Black Swan in modern American history continues in 2015 - the Zero Presidency. Interestingly, the Curse of Zero will test my next prediction: that whatever and how many Black Swans bite the world this year, America will sustain them - even triumph over them - better than anywhere else. Now why would that be?... It's also time to introduce a new feature in the HFR. Most every week, I'll try to include a useful tip on health & fitness. None of us are getting progressively younger, but we can all do any number of things to slow our progress down in the opposite direction. Here's the HFR's first entry... We're going to close with... Perspective Time. Just to make you feel good.
POLYGAMY AND VIOLENCE
[Note: this essay may be most fruitfully read in conjunction with Terrorism and Tiny Zibbs from September 2003-JW] When the Kurdish peshmerga forces broke the siege of Mount Sinjar last week, there was no trace of the 5,000 Yazidi women and children abducted from the area in August. It is thought that they have been mostly sold as concubines to jihadist fighters of Islamic State. When the London Times reporters posed as two British girls interested in joining Islamic State, they were told: "The only way to guarantee being together is marrying the same man." Meanwhile, the 219 girls still missing in Nigeria after being abducted in April have been "married off," according to the leader of Boko Haram. My point in connecting these incidents is that throughout history polygamy has fueled violence. Might it be worth suggesting to Moslem leaders, religious and secular, that they push for monogamous norms as one way to reduce violence and bring more peace to the Middle East and to north and west Africa?
2015: THE YEAR OF GLOBAL DOLLAR DANGER
America's domestic economy can handle a surging dollar and a fresh cycle of rising interest rates. Large parts of the world cannot. That in a nutshell is the story of 2015. Tightening by the US Federal Reserve will have turbo-charged effects on a global financial system addicted to zero rates and dollar liquidity. Yields on 2-year US Treasuries have more than doubled from 0.31% to 0.74% since October, and this is the driver of currency markets. Since the New Year ritual of predictions is a time to throw darts, here we go: the dollar will hit $1.08 against the euro before 2015 is out ($1.21 on 12/31), and 100 on the dollar index (already at 90 at year's end). Sterling (the British pound) will buckle to $1.30 ($1.57 on 12/31) as a hung Parliament prompts global funds to ask why they are lending so freely to a country with a current account deficit reaching 6% of GDP. There will be a mouth-watering chance to invest in the assets of the BRICS and mini-BRICS at bargain prices, but first they must do penance for $5.7 trillion in dollar debt, and then do surgery on obsolete growth models. What are the odds for either?
WHAT TO READ 2014
Happy New Year's Eve! And welcome to the third annual TTP What to Read list. We initiated this tradition with a list of the books I read and recommended in 2012, the first What to Read. That was followed a year later with What to Read 2013. So here we go with what I've read and suggest for your consideration in 2014. I'm sure that on New Year's Eve, you're planning to spend the evening curled up with a good book, right? You better not be... Tomorrow and beyond is another story. A good book can help clear your brain from the night before - in addition to a lot of the amino cysteine to detox your system (best sources: Durk & Sandy's Party Pills, N-Acetyl-Cysteine at your local GNC, or a multi-egg omelette with plenty of garlic, onions, and ricotta cheese). All of the books below you can get on Kindle/iPad (instantly and much cheaper). Let's start with the political and geopolitical, then move into science and history...
THE NEW & IMPROVED GOVERNMENT LIES OF PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION
Have you heard of "parallel construction"? If not, take a breath, this one is rather shocking. Here's what parallel construction is, as Wikipedia reports it: "A process of building a parallel - or separate - evidentiary basis for...creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance." If this sounds like a rights violation to you, you're correct. Warrantless surveillance is a blatant violation of the fourth amendment, and illegally-obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. Nonetheless, this is exactly what's happening these days. The NSA is grabbing nearly 100% of all American Internet traffic, emails, etc., sorting it all, then handing it off to be used in criminal prosecutions. And to prevent cases like this from getting thrown out of court, the they have developed special tricks, like parallel construction. Here's how it works, and how to protect yourself from it.
PREDICTIONS ON WEALTH OR WEATHER ARE JUST A ROLL OF THE DICE
How many hurricanes do you think will hit the East Coast of the United States in 2015? Will the Arctic ice sheet disappear next year? How fast will the U.S. economy grow? What will the level of the Dow Jones stock index be at the end of 2015? Which team will win the World Series? Go back and look at past predictions made by the experts, and then look at what really happened. Climate alarmists 15 or so years ago were forecasting catastrophic events by this time. Al Gore and his alarmist crowd told us that by now we would be having more and stronger tornadoes and hurricanes. And indeed, many tornado and hurricane records have been broken -- not because there were more, but because there have been fewer. Florida has now gone a record nine straight seasons without a significant hurricane. Government economists have no better track record at predicting what will happen to the US economy next year than climate alarmists. Maybe worse and here's why.
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/26/14
Welcome to the Last Half-Full Report... of 2014. Next week we begin a whole new year, so let's say goodbye to this old one. Should we also say good riddance? This being the HFR, the judgment should be, well, at least a bit more half-full than half-empty. Before we start, however, first a thank you. That would be for all the kind comments, both on the Forum and by personal email, regarding Revolutionary Constitutionalism and Declarations of Defiance (published on Christmas Eve, 12/24). One comment by email from a long-time TTPer and dear friend was truly humbling... Now, what's half-full around here? Looking around the world, 2014 was way more than just half-full for India. And the best news for us and much of the world is the worst for the jerks of the world (e.g., the governments of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela). There's other good news as well -- and news from an elite US college that's morally evil. Plus a video of the HFR Hero of the Week that will make you cheer and laugh your head off at the same time...
REVOLUTIONARY CONSTITUTIONALISM AND DECLARATIONS OF DEFIANCE
At the end of 2014, it is clear that our constitutional order is breaking down. Whether by Alinskyite design, the cowardice of the GOP Elite, or a sense of hopelessness by people in general, the barbarians are at the constitutional gates and are rabidly tearing them down. Barbarians celebrating the murder of two NYPD police are marching down 5th Avenue in New York today (12/24), while barbarians in the Zero White House have issued over one thousand two hundred unconstitutional "regulations" to further suffocate our freedom in just the last two weeks. Our Barbarian-in-Chief rules by executive decree without any concern for the Constitution he swore to uphold. There is no normal way to fix this. Our country's political and cultural situation has become so dire that only a radical, indeed revolutionary fix will do. This can be done, however, without the violence of a Second American Revolution, but constitutionally, fully within America's founding legal framework. That is, rather than another Revolution, what we need is a revolutionary interpretation of the Constitution, "revolutionary" only in the context of how far we have strayed from its original meaning. Here's how to go about it.
THE BLESSING OF HUMAN PROGRESS
On this Christmas Eve, you should count your blessings that you live in 2014. Would you prefer to live as the French King Louis XIV did (1643-1715), or as you do today? The average low-income American, who makes $25,000 per year, lives in a home that has air conditioning, a color TV and a dishwasher, owns an automobile, and eats more calories than he should from an immense variety of food. Louis XIV lived in constant fear of dying from smallpox and many other diseases that are now cured quickly by antibiotics. His palace at Versailles had 700 rooms but no toilets nor bathrooms (hence he rarely bathed), and no central heating or air conditioning. Louis and John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world 100 years ago, had many servants to gather and prepare food for them, but they could not get fresh food out of season and had a tiny choice of food compared with anyone who has access to a modern supermarket, where one is increasingly able to purchase prepared meals of far higher quality and variety than anything Louis or Rockefeller could obtain. My Cato colleague Marian Tupy has created a website, HumanProgress.org, which graphically details the enormous progress humans have made on nearly all fronts. People in the world live far better today than they did a mere half-century ago.