HALF-FULL REPORT 01/08/16

It was last night over a glass of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder Double IPA that I decided to open this week’s HFR about beer and freedom.

I came of age in days of yore, when “American beer” – Schlitz-Pabst-Miller-Bud – was a watery tasteless oxymoron compared to real beer like in Germany or Belgium. Today is completely different.

From Denmark’s Faroe Islands north of Scotland to Gibraltar, I have had guys in pubs tell me they had to admit the best beer in the world now is American. It’s not even close.

RateBeer is an online community of tens of thousands of beer lovers from all over the world who rate their favorite beers. Each year, the ratings are compiled in all sorts of categories, but the metacategory is RateBeer’s Top 100 Beers in the World.

Of the best 100 beers in the world out of many thousands rated, 12 are Belgian, 3 Danish, 3 Canadian, 2 Dutch, 1 English – and 79 American. The American craft beer industry has left the rest of the planet in the dust.

That’s because there is a connection between beer and freedom. Economist Deirdre McCloskey’s term for economic freedom is not “capitalism” (since mere capital accumulation cannot account for the explosion of Western prosperity since the 1800s) but rather ínnovationism.

 “Enrichment of the poor,” she says, “does not come from charity, planning, protection, regulation, or trade unions all of which merely redistribute money – but from innovation caused by the decentralization of markets and customer-driven testing of new ideas.”

That is, as Matt Ridley explains in discussing McCloskey in his stunning new book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge:

“Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most entrepreneurs are innovators looking to outwit their rivals by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably bring improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most of the so-called ‘robber barons’ got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

Innovation is the key consequence of free enterprise, dwarfing gains from trade, efficiencies of specialization, and improvements by practice.”

America is the richest and most productive country in human history because its people are the most creative and innovative in human history. And because up until recently, they have had the freedom to create, innovate, and prosper thereby.

Zero and the DemFascists have waged an unrelenting war upon this freedom, garroting and asphyxiating it with uncountable (and unconstitutional) fed agency regulations.

The explosion of innovation, creativity, and immense improvement in quality at affordable prices in the American craft beer industry is a very instructive example of what American entrepreneurs are capable of – if left alone by the federalies and given sufficient freedom.

Now – just extrapolate that through the entire American economy if the next president can unleash its gigantic innovative capacities by removing the federalie garrote around its neck.

Most any Pub candidate would at least halt the advancement of Zero’s Regulatory State – but Ted Cruz has been the most explicit in promising to dismantle the regulatory state. If he wins and once he does, get ready to ride a rocket ship of prosperity in America. Sure will be about time.

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Being the leader in Iowa, TC is being targeted by all the usual suspects. Trump started the birther smear, but was rapidly picked up by the impossibly hypocritical libtard media, the biggest jerk in the Senate, Johnny McCain, and the most execrable scumbag in the House, Alan Grayson.

Perhaps, though, Trump has done Cruz a favor by enabling him to get rid of the “He’s not a natural born citizen!” nonsense now, ruining the Dems’ October Surprise they were going to spring on him if nominated.

It’s hilarious to see Obamunists who went berserk over birther claims on their hero now attack Cruz. The bottom line for both Zero and Cruz – and birthers of all stripes – is that “natural born” means one of your parents is a US citizen at your birth no matter where you’re born.

There is no federal law or high court decision stating that natural-born means both of your parents had to be US citizens. Period. That’s the end of it. Here’s well-known legal scholar and former US district attorney Andy McCarthy on Ted Cruz: Natural Born Citizen.

And here is the definitive analysis by Paul Clement, George Bush’s Solicitor General, and Neal Katyal, Obama’s Solicitor General, in the Harvard Law Review (March 2015): On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”

As Mark Levin (1/07) says:

“It is a settled constitutional and statutory matter… Cruz’s mother is an American citizen, was an American citizen when she gave birth to Cruz, and is, in fact, Cruz’s mother. Seems fairly simple. Not only that, American citizens give birth to American citizens, whether here or abroad. That’s not only common sense, it is the law.”

Ted’s response to Trump’s attack was to laugh and Twitter the clip of Fonz “jumping the shark” – the episode that sunk “Happy Days” in the ratings.

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There’s something that TC did this week that I dare not make explicit. I can only allude to it, and if you get it, you’ll quickly grasp that he’s not just smart, he’s scary OMG smart.

He’s being ravaged by 24/7 attack ads on Iowa television by the “Renewable Fuels Association” ethanol whores for being against Big Corn’s ethanol subsidies.

Cruz struck back with an op-ed in the Des Moines Register on Wednesday (1/06), I’m Fighting for Farmers Against Washington.

It was so brilliant it suckered the smarty-pants at HotAir: Cruz Just Caved on Ethanol. I won’t say anything more. Read Cruz’s op-ed, and when you see what he’s done you’ll laugh your head off.

Meanwhile…. This is genius:

and TRUST TED merging into TRUSTED is pretty clever too.

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Let’s go global and see what’s been afoot in the world this week.

Germany is getting exactly what it deserves for idiotically letting in Moslem welfare beggars by the million. More than 100 women were assaulted by a mob of Moslem men in Cologne on New Year’s Eve: They “threw bottles and fireworks into crowds and at the police, as well as molested, raped, attacked, robbed, knifed, spat, defecated, urinated, vomited, ranted, and raved as they turned an area of a beautiful city into a site of utter barbarism.”

Although the German press tried to cover it up, it turns out that there were sex assaults by Moslem men in every major city in Germany – Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, on and on.

And today (1/08) we learn that Moslem rape attacks are spreading all over Europe – in Finland, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere.

Hard to feel sympathy for people who brought this willfully and welcomingly upon themselves. There’s an easy cure. Note where there are no attacks – Denmark, Poland, Portugal for example. All places where welfare handouts for non-citizens are paltry to non-existent. No welfare, no Moslem “refugees” – it’s the humanitarian version of Stalin’s net cheloveka net problemy, no person no problem.

(The same, incidentally for a substantial majority of illegals in the US.)

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On Wednesday (1/06), the Norks announced they had detonated a hydrogen bomb. The crazy fat kid who runs NorkLand also announced that he, as the DPRK’s first astronaut, had flown to Mars over New Year’s where all the Martians hailed him as their Dear Leader.

Both claims have equal validity. The Norks haven’t got any weapons-grade plutonium. They “cooked” their uranium fuel rods too long, not taking them out in time to be converted into the P239 isotope, and got 240/242 instead. You need plutonium that is 90% of the 239 isotope to get the reaction to assemble fast enough for a nuclear explosion. More than 10% of the 240 or 242 isotopes and the reaction “fizzles.”

The Nork explosion on Wednesday was a total fizzle. The “critical mass” of plutonium required for fission to take place is between 6 to 7 kilos of more than 90% P-239 or “weapons-grade” plutonium.  Any less plutonium and you can’t get the fission process started.

The explosive power of nukes is measured in kilo tons (kt) of TNT-equivalent.  The minimum explosive yield of a properly designed and built bomb with 6½ kilos of 90+% P-239 is 20kt.  For the yield to be smaller, you have to do it on purpose, be willing to waste a lot of plutonium, and be far more sophisticated than the primitives in Pyongyang.

“Fat Man,” the one dropped on Nagasaki was 20kt. The South Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety reports the Nork yield was 6kt with no detectable radioactive gas leaks. There’s just no way to have a real bomb do that, fission or fusion, unless you’ve got one of the best labs in the world making a tiny tactical nuke to be used on a battlefield, with a very small yield like the M-388 Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle.

The M-388 round used in the Davy Crockett weighs only 76 lbs and has a yield of just .020kt (20 tons of TNT-equivalent).  The same amount of plutonium has to be used (6 kilos or so) as a bomb yielding 1000 times more, but it’s packed with far less high-density explosives to implode the plutonium and start the nuclear reaction.

In other words, you’ve got to be willing to waste a lot of plutonium in order to make a small portable nuke.

Since Baby Kim has no intention of demonstrating to the world that he is making tiny little tactical nukes instead of big warheads to put on ICBMs with which to threaten America, his “H Bomb of Justice” is a fizzled joke. Every nuke scientist on the globe is laughing at him.

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Back in the US, last October TTP described what was The Most Important Issue in the World Today – the growing capacity and determination of the Democrats to win the presidency this November through massive voter fraud.

This week, we got the first clear overt attempts. Maryland, run by Dems, announced (1/06) it would use Obamacare as a voter registration drive. Any illegal alien can get on Obamacare, and now gets to vote.

California, run by Dems, announced (1/07) that it issued just last year 605,000 driver’s licenses to illegals – who now can use the ID to vote.

Here it comes, folks, like a runaway freight train. Unless Pub Governors, Pub candidates, conservatives, and any American who cares about preserving democracy and voter freedom starts making all-out efforts to stop this, it won’t matter who the GOP nominee is – they’ll lose.

The Dems did this, of course, in 2012 – not massively, but just enough to get Zero over the fraudulent top. In 2016, they are taking no chances. Their vote fraud will be massive enough to overcome any honest Pub victory. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

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We close with the HFR Hero of the Week. Who else but the Leonidas of Texas, Governor Gregg Abbott, who told Zero molon labe regarding his fascist gun grab. Molon labe was the famous retort of Spartan leader Leonidas to the Persians demanding they surrender their weapons at Thermopylae in 480 BC: Come and take it.

America needs more heroic governors like Greg Abbott. We salute his courage in standing up for freedom and the Constitutional right of Americans to defend themselves against fascist tyranny.