BIDEN’S MORAL ISSUE
Gun control is a moral issue, Vice President Joe Biden said at a news conference Wednesday. This was more nonsense from the premier dunce in American politics. The evidence is massive gun control measures do not restrict gun violence. They may contribute to it. (All but one mass shooting in the last half century has taken place in "gun free" zones.) But liberals don't care much whether their nostrums work or not. They judge programs on their declared intent, not results. That's all it takes to massage their egos, and it spares them the trouble of having to learn a lot of pesky facts. The emotionally healthy can feel good about themselves without putting others down. Liberal preening apparently requires feeling superior to those who disagree with them. If you don't agree with us about gun control, you can't be as horrified as liberals are by mass shootings, the vice president implied. We're good. You're bad. Making themselves feel good is more important to most liberals than solving problems, and they tend to be intellectually lazy. So this attitude pervades most of the positions they take. Note the following:
HALF-FULL REPORT 01/11/13
On Wednesday (1/09), we saw the greatest headline ever posted on Drudge: 
It was linked to a Weekly Standard story on Zero's considering an Executive Order to effect gun control without legislation from Congress. It gave CommieMedia libtards the vapors, as chronicled by the Washington Examiner. They can't stand it whenever someone reveals they worship an Evil Messiah. Yet, in truth, there is in fact an enormous difference between Zero and Hitler-Stalin. Hitler and Stalin were both rabidly crazed nationalists, determined at whatever cost to conquer other peoples and subject them to Germany or Russia. Zero, on the other hand, is a rabidly crazed anti-nationalist, determined at whatever cost to destroy his own country. He is filled with hatred and contempt for America, as neither Hitler nor Stalin were towards their own countries. Zero is at the extreme end of American liberalism, which has always been characterized, at a minimum, by embarrassment. Liberals are embarrassed to be Americans, embarrassed over the very existence of America and in a state of constant apology for it - look what we did to the Indians, our Founders owned slaves, we're racist imperialist capitalist war-mongers, blah-blah-blah. This is why Zero - who feels free to take his phony-nice mask off in a second term and expose who he really is - has nominated three revolting embarrassed-to-be-American libtards to be in charge of our defense, foreign policy, and intelligence security.
THE LAW THAT CAN SAVE AMERICA AND PUT OBAMA IN JAIL
[Note: this is a Free Access article to enable it to go viral. Every Republican on Capitol Hill, every talk show host like Limbaugh and Levin, every conservative organization needs to be aware of it. There is a federal law that can remove the President from office and put him in prison without impeachment. Here it is.] Neither the Senate, nor the President, nor the Supreme Court, nor any federal agency secretary or bureaucrat, has the constitutional authority to spend one single dime by themselves, without a majority of the House giving it to them. This is the "power of the purse." There is, however, a problem - a legal problem, not just a psychological one, such as Congressistas being spendaholics or too cowardly to refuse the begging of various constituencies for handouts. This problem is epitomized by the Senate Republicans' inability to force Harry Reid to pass an annual budget, even though there is a law requiring the Senate to do so. Thanks to Reid's blocking all attempts, the Senate hasn't passed a budget since April, 2009, which clearly violates federal law - the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. So how come Reid can't be prosecuted? Why can't the Senate Pubs take legal action against him? As Byron York explains, "the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 doesn't have an enforcement mechanism. Lawmakers are required by law to pass a budget each year by April 15, but there's no provision to punish them, or even slightly inconvenience them, if they don't." So we arrive at what may well be the single most important question to ask in America today. Given that the current President of the United States seems determined to bypass the House's appropriation authority and spend gigantic sums on whatever programs he wants or enforcing whatever Executive Orders he issues, is there an enforcement mechanism for his violating the power of the purse clauses in the Constitution? The answer is yes.
PHONY SELF-ESTEEM HURTS CHILDREN, EARNED SELF-ESTEEM HELPS THEM
There is a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University that is getting a lot of news this week, in which she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased over the last 30 years. Some reports get a bit more frenzied than I prefer ("We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists!" just gets us scared, I prefer to be effective); but Twenge has been studying this trend for several years, has accumulated some impressive research, and has written several books. Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the phony self-esteem movement, and how it feeds the fixed trait mindset - and thus the need to see oneself as just fantastic. This also shows what can be done to remedy the situation, by contrasting phony self-esteem with the genuine article -- earned self-esteem.
THE DÉJÀ VU CATASTROPHE
The men whom President Barack Hussein Obama has chosen to head his national security team send more shivers down the spines of our allies than those of our enemies. So if Charles Emmerson is right in thinking the world in 2013 "eerily looks like the world of 1913, on the cusp of the Great War," that's not good. The United States, like Britain 100 years ago, is in relative economic and military decline, Mr. Emmerson, a researcher for Chatham House, a British think tank, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine Jan. 4. Hostile powers are rising and "jostling for position in the four corners of the world." The president wants someone whom many consider an outright traitor to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State; a straight out Anti-Semite to take over for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and a sympathizer of Jihad Islam as CIA Director. You couldn't ask for a greater recipe for catastrophe than that.
CHINA AND THE RACE FOR THORIUM POWER
Princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China's National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m. He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015. The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima. "China is the country to watch," said Baroness Bryony Worthington, head of the All-Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, who visited the Shanghai operations recently with a team from Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory. "They are really going for it, and have talented researchers. This could lead to a massive break-through." The thorium story is by now well-known. It could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale.
UNCLE SAM IS ADDICTED TO OVERSPENDING
Tax revenue in 2013 will be lower (despite the just passed tax increase), and government spending will be higher than forecast. It's an easy prediction -- and this is why. The capital gains tax rate and the tax on dividends is being raised from 15 percent to 23.5 percent for higher-income people. There are many studies, including those made by the U.S. Treasury, showing that the revenue-maximizing rate on capital gains is less than 15 percent. Taking a capital gain is often a discretionary event, and it is well documented that capital gains realizations fall as the rate is increased. Thus, this rate increase will be a net revenue loser for the government. Expenditures will also be far higher than forecast. The simple fact is the Obama administration and Congress, particularly the Democrats, are unable to resist the urge to spend more.
WILL EUROPE GO THE WAY OF THE MING EMPIRE?
A "rational optimist" like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a record rate, not because I have a temperamental or ideological bent to good cheer but because of the data. Poverty, hunger, population growth rates, inequality, and mortality from violence, disease and weather -- all continue to plummet on a global scale. But a global optimist can still be a regional pessimist. When asked what I am pessimistic about, I usually reply: bureaucracy and superstition. Using those two tools, we Europeans seem intent on making our future as bad as we can. Like mandarins at the court of the Ming emperors or viziers at the court of Abbasid caliphs, our masters seem determined to turn relative into absolute decline. It is entirely possible that ten years from now the world as a whole will be 50 per cent richer, but Europeans will be 50 per cent poorer. As the Ming empire found out, the more government you buy, the less economic activity you get. A Fujian travelling salesman in 1400 was enmeshed in such a tangled bureaucracy that he could neither travel nor sell without bribes and permits, and he had to submit a monthly inventory of his stocks to the emperor. Sound familiar?
THE SECURITY DIAMOND OF JAPAN, INDIA, AUSTRALIA, AND AMERICA
Peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Pacific Ocean are inseparable from peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. Developments affecting each are more closely connected than ever. Japan, as one of the oldest sea-faring democracies in Asia, should play a greater role in preserving the common good in both regions. Yet, increasingly, the South China Sea seems set to become a "Beijing Lake," which analysts say will be to China what the Sea of Okhotsk was to Soviet Russia: a sea deep enough for the People's Liberation Army's navy to base their nuclear-powered attack submarines, capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads. Soon, the PLA Navy's newly built aircraft carrier will be a common sight - more than sufficient to scare China's neighbors. That is why Japan must not yield to the Chinese government's daily exercises in coercion around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. The ongoing disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea mean that Japan's top foreign-policy priority must be to expand the country's strategic horizons. Japan is a mature maritime democracy, and its choice of close partners should reflect that fact. I envisage a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific. I am prepared to invest, to the greatest possible extent, Japan's capabilities in this security diamond.
HALF-FULL REPORT 01/04/13
Should we start with Headline of the Year? "Hillary ‘I dodged sniper fire' Clinton Near Death after Supersecret Crash Landing in Iran," brought to you by the überwackos at Lyndon Larouche's EU Times nutball website. It's astonishing that Drudge would carry this drivel as if it were a real news story. The EU Times is an Internet hoax site that dreams up the most goofball conspiracy theories out of thin air for the fun of it or to gain attention to their pathetically fragile egos. They are maxed-out looney tunes. So welcome to 2013. The craziness this year has in store for us has only just begun. Yet the real craziness - lethally dangerous craziness - comes not from Internet weirdos but from Washington DC. So lethal that the HFR is now a staunch advocate of gun-control. Do you have any idea how many federal departments and agencies have agents that carry guns? Even the Post Office has these armed fascist thugs called OIG (Office of the Inspector General) Special Agents breaking and entering people's homes tracking down "mail fraud" - which could be any email you've ever sent. Gun control for federal agents is what's needed, not gun control for law-abiding citizens. The literally crazy problem is, there's no such thing as a law-abiding citizen anymore. The purpose of 98% of the Federal Register is for there to be some law or rule the Federalies can criminalize you with if they want. We're all criminals now, which is by Washington's design.