HALF-FULL REPORT 12/14/12
We'll get to the grim stuff later. Let's start out with great hat trick the sports world scored this week. First, the happiest TTPer this week has got to be Ella -- because Texas A&M's Johnny Football won the Heisman (12/08). Here's why they call Jonathan Paul Manziel "Johnny Football." The best is saved for last, when - against #1 Alabama - he runs straight into one of his linemen knocking the ball loose, spins backwards to catch his fumble in mid-air, scampers evading tacklers, and rifles the ball across his body to a receiver in the end zone for a touchdown. Gig ‘em, Aggies! {youtube}QozDlif_2Gk{/youtube} Second, what Michael Jordan is to basketball and Joe DiMaggio to baseball, Leo Messi is to soccer. Many of the sport's devotees consider Messi to be the best there's ever been - and he proved it this week (12/09), when he scored his 86th goal of the year, breaking a record held for 40 years. Messi is only five-foot-seven, but there's never been a ball magician on the field like him. Third, the best boxer on the planet, Manny Pacquiao - world champion in six divisions from flyweight (112 lbs) to light middleweight (154 lbs) - got cold-cocked with one of the most devastating knockout punches in the history of pugilism.
WHY THERE CAN’T BE PEACE WITH THIS PRESIDENT
"The fact is, we live according to Lenin's formula: Kto-Kovo?" explained Joseph Stalin in a speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in April 1929. And indeed, President Zero lives by it as well. Which is why there can't be peace with him - not for Republicans in Congress nor for any non-mooching American. For Lenin, the only question that mattered in human affairs was Kto-Kovo? - Who-Whom?, who defeats whom, who wins and who loses. (For some perverse reason, you often see the phrase transliterated from the Russian Cyrillic as "Kto-Kogo." I insist on transliterating it as pronounced in Russian.) It is the only question that matters for Zero. It is not just a stance, an intellectual assumption of faculty lounge Marxism. It defines his basic outlook on the world and makes him who he is - profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, and anti-American. It makes him, as was Lenin and as the Left has always been, metaphysically fascist. Only by understanding this can Republicans on Capitol Hill prevent their being hopelessly steamrollered by him. Kto-Kovo? is far more than a political strategy for power. It is a statement about how the world works, about the nature of reality.
EUROPE HAS A COVENANT WITH DEATH
The collapse has begun. Nihilism thrives in Europe. A new book written by Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, El Suicidio Demográfico de España" (The Demographic Suicide of Spain - although in Spanish, here is a Power Point summary in English) delivers a death sentence for Europe. The German giant is also ditching. The weekly Der Spiegel has a long article titled "A Land without Children." The European Union, which offers its citizens every comfort, with first-rate health care, long holidays and sit-down lunches, protected jobs and generous welfare, has the world's lowest fertility rate (1.47 children per woman) and the highest percentage of a population that is over 65 years old (16.4 per cent of the population in the EU). Meanwhile, nearly one in three pregnancies in Europe is terminated by abortion, according to the Gutmacher Institute in the US, and all over Europe gay marriage is advancing (France and UK will soon approve it). The model is Spain, where you have no more "father" and "mother", but Parent (progenitor) A, and Parent (progenitor) B. In the Netherlands, you can order a mobile euthanasia van to your house. It's the first experiment in the world of door-to-door euthanasia and the insurance covers the cost of the operation.
THE BURSTING OF THE COLLEGE BUBBLE IS A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY
The average cost of a year at a public university last year was $17,131, according to the College Board. For a year at a private college, the average cost was $38,589. Most of the middle class would already be priced out, were it not for the federal student loan program, which is of far greater benefit to faculty and staff. Student debt has increased 74 percent since the 2008 recession began, according to a Citibank study, but only about half of recent graduates have found jobs. There are as many student loan debtors as adults with bachelor's degrees. The 90 day delinquency rate on student loan repayment has "gone parabolic." If the economy falls back into recession next year, soaring defaults will skyrocket. The college bubble is about to burst. When it does, the carnage will be awesome - and so will be the opportunities to reform higher education and liberal dominance of it.
REGULATORY GROWTH MEANS BUSINESS DEATH
Last week, Christine Jacobs, the CEO of Theragenics Corp., a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that makes medical devices and is involved in cutting-edge cancer cures, wrote a letter to President Obama explaining why it was necessary to "begin moving our U.S. manufacturing to Costa Rica." The power players in Washington still do not get that many businesses are being forced to flee America or just plain shut down because it is no longer profitable or too risky to continue to do business in the historical home of entrepreneurial capitalism. Businesses operating in the United States, and even businesses outside of the country that have a small nexus with the U.S., are going to be hit with a slew of expensive job- and growth-destroying taxes and regulations beginning the first of the new year, even if the "fiscal cliff" is avoided. The more government regulation grows, the more business in America dies.
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/07/12
Is John Galt Chinese? 
Star Alliance is the world's largest airline confederation. This full page ad appears in every current in-flight magazine of all its 26 member carriers worldwide. It is an explicit up yours/bird flip/thumb nose to Zero and his infamous "You didn't build/earn that" Marxism. The ad's endorser, Wang Shi, is a very interesting man. In his palm is an image of one of the many giant skyscrapers he's built as chairman of China Vanke, China's largest property developer. He's climbed Mount Everest, and all the other "Seven Summits" (the highest peak in all seven continents). "Life is one adventure after another," he says. My sentiments exactly. He's not only an entrepreneurial capitalist, he's proud of it and has nothing but contempt for anyone who thinks he should apologize for his success. That most certainly includes the fraudulently elected President of the United States. You know we live in an upside-down universe when John Galt is Chinese who exults in insulting the American president for being a virtual Communist.
THE ONE NUMBER THAT CAN KEEP AMERICA INTACT
There is a famous scene (at least famous for every Trekkie) in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (the 1989 movie, not a TV series episode) that Ben Franklin would have loved. Every American today needs to watch it. Spock, Bones, and Captain Kirk have beamed down to a planet at the center of the universe, led by a Vulcan named Sybok who convinces them that here they will meet God Himself. They are overwhelmed with God's presence, Who, upon being told the Starship Enterprise was able to get through the Impenetrable Barrier to reach the planet, asks that it be brought to Him. Everyone eagerly agrees - except for Kirk (William Shatner), who impertinently interrupts God to ask, "Excuse me... but what does God need with a Starship?" Bones explodes at him: "Jim, what are you doing!?" Kirk looks at Bones quizzically and answers simply, "I'm asking a question." Kirk's question and God's attacking him instead of answering it exposes "God" as an evil alien pretending to be God - the alien is not God at all. Today, America is ruled by an evil Alien with a God-complex. He is worshipped as such by a Witch Doctor Media, and millions of Americans lacking the courage to question their ruler's authority for fear that this may halt the various bribes he dispenses to them. Millions of other Americans, however, do possess this courage and despise both The Alien for pretending he is a god, and those who worship him. Thus we have Two Americas - and they are going to go their separate ways unless we find some rational way to keep them together. There's one number that can do it.
THE RISE OF THE THIRD COAST
In the wilds of Louisiana's St. James Parish, amid the alligators and sugar plantations, Lester Hart is building the $750 million steel plant of his dreams. Over the past decade, Hart has constructed plants for steel producer Nucor everywhere from Trinidad to North Carolina. Today, he says, Nucor sees its big opportunities here, along the banks of the Mississippi River, roughly an hour west of New Orleans by car. "The political climate here is conducive to growth," Hart explains as he steers his truck up to the edge of a steep levee. "We are here because so much is going on in this state and this region. With the growth of the petrochemical and industrial sectors, this is the place to be." Nucor isn't alone in coming to Louisiana, or to the vast, emerging region along the Gulf Coast. The American economy, long dominated by the East and West Coasts, is undergoing a dramatic geographic shift toward this area. The country's next great megacity, Houston, is here; so is a resurgent New Orleans, as well as other growing port cities that serve as gateways to Latin America and beyond. While the other two coasts struggle with economic stagnation and dysfunctional politics, the Third Coast - the urbanized, broadly coastal region spanning the Gulf from Brownsville, Texas, to greater Tampa - is emerging as a center of industry, innovation, and economic growth.
THERE’S MORE THAN ONE FISCAL CLIFF
What will happen if we go over the fiscal cliff? That depends on which "fiscal cliff." The term has been applied to two very different economic events: Journalists now are calling what will happen in January if Democrats and Republicans in Washington don't make a budget deal this month the "fiscal cliff:" The combination of its tax hikes and spending cuts will send unemployment back above 9 percent, and the economy into recession, the Congressional Budget Office forecast. That's bad. But if the economy falls over this "fiscal cliff," it's likely only to sprain an ankle, or maybe crack a rib. If the economy goes over the much higher cliff to which the term originally referred, it'll be in a coma.
INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION
Have you noticed this? Are there situations where years ago you would never have thought, "I wonder whether this is allowed?" but now you do? This can lead to what I call "internalized oppression" - and it requires our conscious awareness to avoid it. "The cost of liberty is eternal vigilance," goes the saying. But this vigilance is not only external. It's one thing when the rules on the outside become oppressive - which they have - but you also play a personal role in this: your internal acceptance of an oppressive mindset is necessary for allowing an oppressive government to continue to intrude further into our lives. It is this internal acceptance and adaptation that allows people to continue to obey an authority that is out of control. Our Founding Fathers knew this clearly. As the oldest and wisest among them put it: