HALF-FULL REPORT 11/25/11

Perhaps the best characterization of this Thanksgiving week’s events would be droll, which means curiously amusing.

We’ll resist the temptation to name Tatyana Limanova, a well-known news anchor on Russian television, the HFR Hero of the Week for flipping the bird to Zero.  Who among us has not done the same when confronted with his repulsive presence on our TV screens?  Tatyana, however, did so with 120 million Russians watching.  You know a lot of them applauded, and so do we.

Zero also got the bird, albeit not so overtly, from two prominent Democrat pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, who requested on the Wall Street Journal editorial page (11/21) that he "abandon" his running for reelection, and "step aside" for Hillary Clinton.

No surprise to TTPers, as the HFR has been predicting Zero would be LBJ Redux since June 2009.

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You’re not going to get a better example of Joel Wade’s Democrats Are In A Cult, Republicans Are In A Trance than the Supercommittee fiasco which so predictably ended in failure on Monday (11/21).

From start to finish, this was a charade engineered by Dems to sucker hapless Pubs into keeping their perpetual spending machine running as usual.  The "cuts" the supercommittee was supposed to agree on were always nonexistent, a $120 billion a year meaningless slowdown over 10 years in an always escalating budget.  With the group’s "failure," these ersatz cuts are now ersatz "automatic."  They cut nothing.  They don’t take effect until 2013, when there’s a new Congress not bound by them.

The only thing the Boehner Congress has been able to do is block Zero’s plans for more massive deficit spending.  It has been utterly unable to do what it was elected for a year ago:  not just block more spending, not just slow down budget increases and call them cuts, but to make serious reductions in actual spending – to spend less in real numbers, to reduce the deficit for real.

It hasn’t happened and it’s not going to.  There is no indication whatever that Boehner & Co will make even a feeble attempt at any real deficit spending reduction in the FY2012 budget allegedly to be up for a series of votes in December. 

The deficits, the regulatory fascism, the joblessness and economic destruction all will continue with no end in sight – until and unless Zero is replaced by a 10^th Amendment president determined to "uproot, tear down, and rebuild Washington DC."  But who would promise to do such a thing?

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Perhaps the best news of the week is the double-whammy Warmism took.  There is a warmist boondoggle called the Western Climate Initiative, an alliance of 7 western US states and 4 Canadian provinces for the purpose of imposing cap and trade fascism on its citizens and businesses.  Until this week, that is.

Now the list of WCI Partners shows its only US partner to be California (of course).  New Mexico, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah have quit.

Then there is Climategate II.  In November 2009, over a thousand emails of warmist scientists were hacked and publicly released, revealing the scientists to be frauds wanting to e.g., "hide the decline" (scroll to the middle of the 12/18/09 HFR for an explanation of the term).

On Tuesday (11/22), a group of hackers called FOIA 2011 released an enormous zip file of over 5,000 additional emails by these same scientists further cementing their reputation as fraudsters.  This is now being called Climategate II.  It will fun watching Warmists In Denial denouncing this exposure of the truth.  For a continuing discussion of how Climategate II is unfolding, see Watts Up With That.

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Now for the Word of the Week:  Eurogeddon.  That’s what Jeremy Warner of the London Telegraph is terming the impending death of the euro:

"What we are witnessing is awesome stuff – the death throes of a currency. And not just any old currency either, but what when it was launched was confidently expected to take its place alongside the dollar as one of the world’s major reserve currencies. That promise today looks to be in ruins… (Prepare for) the biggest mass default in history. There’s no orderly way of doing this. European finance and trade is too far integrated to allow for an easy unwinding of contracts. It’s going to be anarchy."

Meanwhile, the Eurocrats in Brussels have more important things to do, such as making a claim that water prevents dehydration a jailable offense.

After the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA, the EU’s FDA) refused to approve the statement, "regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration," EU officials have now forbidden producers of bottled water to make the claim, and if they do, they are subject to heavy fines and their directors subject to a two-year jail sentence.

The thrilling news is that at last someone has had the courage to disobey.  The largest producer of bottled water in the UK is Highland Spring in Perthshire, Scotland.  CEO Lee Montgomery told the London Daily Express that the ruling was "ridiculous," that it "is right to mock this EU directive which is based on a legal technicality and just another typical example of Brussels bureaucracy," and that it is "business as usual" at his company.

Sure enough, the Highland Spring website continues to make clear statements on the necessity of water in preventing dehydration, e.g., "If you don’t top up the water level in your body, you’ll quickly start to become dehydrated."

This is the level of craziness to which fascist bureaucracies in Europe have sunk, forcing businessmen to risk jail by remaining sane.  I leave it to Skye to provide any number of examples of similar craziness by the FDA in the US.

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Yet if you want a truly inspiring example of political craziness, we must go Seoul, South Korea, where on Tuesday (11/22) a member of the National Assembly, Rep. Kim Seon-dong, set off a tear gas canister in front of the Speaker’s chair to prevent a vote on the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement.

Parliamentarians covered their faces with handkerchiefs or face masks, voting continued, and the agreement was passed.

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As you know, I was in Africa for the past while.  Last weekend, Pope Benedict XVI was in Africa as well, in a country called Benin, which borders Nigeria.  As it turned out, I was in Benin at the same time, and even chanced to be on a street in Cotonou where I saw him drive by in the Popemobile.  Celebratory posters are everywhere.

He gave a moving sermon at this cathedral in the coastal town of Ouidah.

Across from the cathedral is the Voodoo Temple of Pythons. 

And on the beach at Ouidah is this monument called The Point of No Return.

It was at this beach that Western slavers, mostly Portuguese, took delivery of captured slaves to be shipped off to Brazil and the Caribbean, never to return. Between 2 to 3 million of them.

The guilt-mongering of liberals is ceaseless regarding this.  What they never mention is that the slaves were sold, captured and sold by their fellow blacks.  Western slavers rarely conducted slave raids themselves as did Moslem Arab slavers in East Africa.  In West Africa, they bought them. 

The coast of West Africa was named by traders for what different sections of it offered.  There was the Pepper Coast (now Liberia), the Ivory Coast (same name today), the Gold Coast (now Ghana) – and there was the Slave Coast of what is now Togo, Benin, and southwest Nigeria.

It was called the slave coast because it was ruled by an incredibly vicious totalitarian kingdom called Dahomey, whose kings maintained power by continuous human sacrifice (by beheading), and expanding that power by conquering their neighbors in a constant quest for more sacrificial victims.

The king was protected by a praetorian guard of several thousand fanatically fierce women warriors.  When Western explorers made contact with Dahomey, they dubbed it the "Black Sparta," with the women guard known as The Amazons of Black Sparta.

When the Portuguese slavers showed up in the early 1700s, followed by French and Spanish, it dawned on the Dahomey kings they could make money and get guns by selling captured folks instead of beheading them.  They used the money and guns to capture more and more folks to sell, with enough for all their sacrifices too.

The British forcibly put an end to the slave trade elsewhere in West Africa, but couldn’t in what is now Togo and Benin because the French were too entrenched.  Finally the French ended it and conquered Dahomey in the late 1800s.  There still is a king, but it’s all for show, tradition, and ceremony. 

I happened to be in the Dahomey capital of Abomey when the new king was being coronated.  There were no beheadings, that’s long long gone, but women devotees were kissing his feet.

We of the West need feel no special guilt over some of our cultural predecessors engaging in slavery, for it is one of man’s oldest and most widespread practices.  On the contrary, it is we of the West who rose above it and ended it.  It is thanks to the Christian West that slavery is no more in West Africa, that tribes are no longer free to enslave and behead each other.

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A final note.  We still have space for one, maybe two, more couples to join Rebel and me for an International Plan B Seminar in Portugal December 9-12.  It’s only $900 per person for room, meals, wine, seeing the gorgeous Portuguese Riviera, and getting to talk to me about anything you want to in the world.  Our primary focus will be discussing options, foreign and domestic, for our futures – in the context of having a really great time.

Let Miko know, at 703-003-4529 or [email protected], if you can join us.

Hope you all are having a really Happy Thanksgiving weekend!