HALF-FULL REPORT 01/02/09

The HFR has recovered from its hangover bidding the annus horribilus of 2008 vale ad aeternam, goodbye forever, and welcomes you to what’s coming for this brand new year of 2009!

Or rather what might be coming – for as we learned near the start of last year in The 2008 Carpe Diem Filter,  history is stochastic, a series of uniquely unrepeatable events.  There is no such thing as the future, and you can’t make predictions about something that doesn’t exist.

You certainly can about nature (like what time the sun will rise tomorrow), but not about what people will do, because they haven’t decided yet – and in particular, the extent to which they decide to treat problems as opportunities (the carpe diem filter).

Nonetheless, there are some things that look exceedingly likely.  So here goes.

Don’t be surprised if 2009 is as weird a year as 2008.  A president who worships at a God Damn America church is worshipped as the savior of America – but for how long?  The media will focus on his every word and deed, and will shout hosannas of positive news regarding everything he touches.  But sooner or later it will dawn on folks that he is no more competent a president than he is a golfer – or bowler.

Or writer.  You did know that his fake autobiography, Dreams of My Father, was actually written by his terrorist buddy, Bill Ayers, right?

The recipe for reviving our economy has a few simple ingredients:  keep the Bush tax cuts, eliminate all capital gains and corporate income taxes, repeal Sarbox, allow full expensing of capital expenditures (eliminating all depreciation schedules), drill baby drill offshore and in ANWR, toss the entire trillion-dollar "stimulus" plan in the Potomac, and accept the fact that man-induced global warming/climate change is a hoax.

More simply put, focus on wealth creation instead of wealth redistribution – "redistribution" being liberal code for "theft."  (Richard Rahn offers more ingredients for the recover recipe, like abolishing the SEC, this week in What Needs To Be Done And Won’t.)

None of this will be done, of course.  What we’ll get is an increasingly vicious catfight between hordes of Democrat beggar constituencies:  unions, greenies, corporate cadgers, state capitols, city halls, and other "political entrepreneurs" will tear each other’s eyes out for a piece of the stolen-from-taxpayers spoils.

And speaking of catfights:  the most entertaining of the year will be the one between Hillary and Michelle (Mrs. Zero).  They hate each other’s guts on a personal level (actually every level), and – as any man knows who’s made the fatal mistake of inviting his mother to live with him and his wife – you can’t have two Queens in the same castle.  Read all about it as they engage in a war of catty leaks to the media.

Globally, 2009 may be the year of Give War A Chance.  The Israelis are first out of the box, trying to finish off the constant terrorism of Hamas rockets.  Let’s hope that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak really means it when he says this is "war to the bitter end."  

The war in Gaza will give Zero his first opportunity to show how ineffectual his foreign policy will be.  But it gets better.  After sixty years of an American pro-Israel policy, the Arab world is under the illusion that Zero will take its side.  He won’t come remotely close to their dreams – and their disillusionment will be a thing of awe to witness.

The Arabs, then, will be the first people to break the spell, the hypnotic trance of messiah-worship, and bail out of the Cult of Zero.  Others will follow.

The Chinese already have no such illusions – which is why the Chicom news agency Xinhua ran a major piece on Sunday (12/28) about "waning U.S. strength."  As you can see from the article, they expect Zero to let Russia get away with its traditional bully act.  The bully act has already started, in fact, with Ukraine.

Not satisfied with having paid off the richest and most corrupt leader of Ukraine – a hot blonde named Yulia Timoshenko whom you learned about three years ago, December 2005, in Washington on the Dneiper – plus practicing natural gas extortion, and stirring up trouble among the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, now Putin is funding a secessionist movement in a region of far western Ukraine bordering Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania (good place to cause trouble, eh?) called Carpathian Ruthenia.

Putin will keep up the bully act until he’s burned through his entire foreign reserve (as of 12/31: $438 billion, down close to 30% since August; it will likely be below $200b by April and gone by the end of summer), betting that oil prices will rocket back up by then, saving him thereby.  It won’t happen.

Will the Chicoms engage in a bully act, taking advantage of a "waning U.S."?  Maybe not. One reason is Denny Blair.

Zero has made a number of mediocre appointments (Richardson at Commerce, Solis at Labor, et al), but his choice for Director of National Intelligence – four star Admiral Dennis "Denny" Blair – is rock solid.

The best Denny Blair story I know (other than his water skiing being towed by the Destroyer he was Captain of) is his calling the Chicoms’ bluff over Taiwan.  In a meeting in Beijing with the highest ranking Chinese military brass, he dismissed their bluster over Taiwan with a wave of his hand:

"Let’s be serious, gentleman.  We all know that your capacity to invade Taiwan is problematical in the extreme.  But even if you somehow do, you cannot maintain it, you cannot protect it, you cannot keep it.  So let’s move on to more substantive matters, shall we?"

Anyone who can tell the blunt truth to the Chicoms like that is my kind of guy.

Couple that with a welter of rapprochement signs between Beijing and Taipei, from stock exchange deals;  loans to Taiwan companies;  resuming direct flights, shipping routes and postal deliveries across the Taiwan Strait this month (12/15) – all this and more point to the chance of war here rapidly diminishing in 2009.  Good news at last!

Because he will be ineffectual and irrelevant most everywhere else, one place Zero will focus his foreign policy on will be Africa.  We could call this drama Zero in Africa.

He is going to be spending a lot of our money and risking many of our soldiers’ lives in Africa.  After all, that’s where his alleged father is from.  It’s what the entire liberal elite expects of him.  And it won’t do any good.

Endless wars, bottomless corruption, disease, tyranny and dictatorship seem standard operating procedure for Africa.  Out of the over 50 nation-states on the continent, one can point to the mild success story here and there – but these are exceptions to Africa’s being the bottom of humanity’s barrel.  The coup last week in Guinea is a fine example.

The former French colony has the world’s largest bauxite reserves, lots of  iron ore, gold, and diamonds, lots of rich farmland.  Most of its 10 million people live on less than $1 a day, it was ruled by a thug for the last 25 years until he died, whereupon some completely unknown army captain staged a coup and took over the country.  Guineans are hailing him as "Obama Junior."

Africans will be looking to Zero to end their paleolithic poverty and violence, and he won’t be able to – because of a fundamental fact he cannot change.

The American Psychiatric Association classifies people with an IQ of 70 or below as mentally retarded.   The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67. 

Of course, there are plenty of very smart individual Africans.   But the majority population of the entire continent of Africa (excluding North African countries such as Morocco and Egypt, and the whites of South Africa) is suffering mental retardation – or, put another way, has the mental faculties of a pre-teenage child.  The average IQ in Guinea is 63. 

The world’s foremost researcher on IQ is Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in the UK.  His exhaustive research over 30 years has been compiled in monumental studies entitled IQ and the Wealth of Nations and Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis.  His latest study is The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide.

Sifting through 168 national IQ studies covering 81 countries and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, analyzing the entire body of scientific psychometric (psychological measurement) research for the last 100 years, Lynn has determined that:

*East Asians (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, but not China) have on average 5 IQ points higher than Europeans and European-Americans.

*East Asian mean IQ is 105,  China excluding Hong Kong is 100 (Hong Kong is 107, the world’s highest), European/European-American is 100, Inuit Eskimo is 91, American Indian is 87, Mexican is 87, American Black is 85, South Asian (e.g. India, Pakistan) is 84, Middle East/North Africa Arab is 83, Sub-Saharan African is 67, Australian Aborigine is 62.  The world average IQ is 90.

The key words are "on average."  For while the average East Asian is smarter than the average European or American, the latter have greater variability.  Which means, especially for Americans whose culture allows for more flourishing of intelligence, there will be a lot more really smart folks, super-smart individuals with IQs above 130 among them.

It is these geniuses of science and business that have enabled our culture, that of Western Civilization, to prosper far beyond any other. 

And it is just these folks, the brightest and most talented, that Zero will stifle and sacrifice on his altars of Equality, Fairness, and Redistribution.  So a lot of them will give up or leave the US – they will shrug, as we discussed last month in Atlas in America.

We’re in for a wild roller coaster ride in 2009.  Not a straight descent with everything getting worse, but steep ascents of optimism followed by plunges into abysses, one after the other, different ascents and plunges in varying markets and world regions concurrently.

You can expect the unexpected from Zero.  Don’t be shocked, for example, if he issues a presidential pardon soon after his inauguration for Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and José Compean.

Their conviction and imprisonment for shooting a drug smuggler in the butt outraged conservative Republican Congressmen, and Bush’s obstinate refusal to pardon them has done more to embitter these Congressmen towards him than anything else.  Zero’s pardoning Ramos & Compean would curry instant favor with dozens of the most conservative members of Congress.  It would be a very smart move for him to make.

One thing to always keep in focus is that Zero is more of a narcissist than an ideologue – just like Slick Willie.  He’s not nearly as smart as Clinton, politically or intellectually, his left-wing bias is far more pronounced (he really doesn’t understand how wealth is created), and he’s an inexperienced amateur. 

So he’ll screw things up far more than Slick.  Just sit back, and do your best to enjoy the 2009 show.

Perhaps the best way to do so is keep remembering that America is better able to withstand its many problems than any other major country in the world is able to withstand theirs.

Do this, and you can laugh at, rather than worry over, such front-page news stories as Russian Professor Predicts End of US in the Wall Street Journal (12/29).  Igor Panarin’s hallucinations about America breaking up into separate countries and Russia getting Alaska back say volumes about how desperate Russians are to deny their reality – but very little about America’s future.

America is resilient enough to withstand the Zero Presidency.  That’s the message to never forget for 2009.  America’s glass will be half-full this year, not half-empty.