Matt Ridley
WHY DO THE GREEN TALIBAN WANT AFRICA TO STAY POOR?
In what is probably the silliest comment on climate since Harry Reid blamed global warming on the Koch brothers, a green journalist opined of the refugees currently dying in the Mediterranean: "This is what climate crisis looks like . . . We know there is evidence that the violence triggered by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 were in part fuelled by protests over soaring food prices." The soaring prices were actually exacerbated (as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN confirmed) by the diversion of much of the world's farmland into making motor fuel, in the form of ethanol and biodiesel, for the rich to salve their green consciences. Greenie climate policies were a far greater contributor to the Arab Spring than climate change itself. Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. As the International Energy Agency recently put it in a recent report, "increasing access to modern forms of energy is crucial to unlocking faster economic and social development in sub-Saharan Africa". Africa is awash with fossil fuels - but not the capital to build plants to turn them into electricity. Greenie activists and politicians in the West -- what I call the Green Taliban -- are determined to deny them that capital. Why?
AN OPEN LETTER TO POPE FRANCIS
Your Holiness: As world leaders contemplate a climate agreement, many look to you for guidance. We commend you for your care for the earth and God's children, especially the poor. With this letter we raise some matters of concern that we ask you to consider as you convey that guidance. Much of the debate over environmental stewardship is rooted in a clash of worldviews, with conflicting doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin, and salvation. Unfortunately, that clash often works its way into the very conclusions of environmental science. Rather than a careful reporting of the best evidence, we get highly speculative and theory-laden conclusions presented as the assured results of science. In the process, science itself is diminished, and many well-meaning moral and religious leaders risk offering solutions based on misleading science. The effect, tragically, is that the very people we seek to help could be harmed instead. Specifically, the scientific method demands that theories be tested by empirical observation. By that test, computer climate models of the warming effect of enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming, and therefore no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming by restricting the use of fossil fuels or any other means. Further, we ask you to consider that substituting low-density, intermittent energy sources like wind and solar for high-density, constant energy sources like fossil fuels would be catastrophic to the world's poor.
CHINA’S COMING LOST DECADE
China is drafting plans for bond purchases to boost liquidity and shore up the country's $2.6 trillion edifice of local government debt, becoming last of the world's big economic powers to resort to quantitative easing. The news propelled the Chinese stock market to a seven-year high yesterday (4/27), helped by fevered talk of a merger between Sinopec and PetroChina, the country's two oil giants.. The Shanghai Composite index of equities has risen by 40% this year and 125% since June, even as the economy grapples with a property slump. Corporate profits fell 2.6% in the first quarter and swathes of industry are mired in recession. "The operational situation of industrial enterprises remains grave," said the National Bureau of Statistics. Total debt has reached 250% of GDP, if all forms of trusts, shadow banking, and off-shore lending are included. "No country has ever survived that sort of rise without something bad happening," said Nariman Behravesh, global economist for IHS Global Insight.
HALF-FULL REPORT 04/24/15
It's a jump from Niue to Vegas. My brain hasn't the faintest idea of what time zone it's in, so my own "puzzle of paradise" is how I'm going to compose a coherent HFR right now, especially when the Rendezvous begins in a few hours. Jack Kelly has been manning the HFR ramparts superbly since early February - that's how long I've been gone - so let's hope I still remember how to do this. Let's start right off the bat with the HFR Hero of the Week - actually, she's the Heroine of the Week, a British lady named Katie Hopkins... Now, if you prefer an American Hero of the Week - well, that's obvious too: Peter Schweizer. His new book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, won't be out until early May - but just a handful of excerpts from it this week are destroying the PIAPS' White House hopes... Scweizer may have written her political obituary. We need other political obituaries too - like those of any pro-amnesty RINO White House aspirant like Jeb Bush. Or else it's America's obituary that will be written. Yes, folks, we're turning into Chavista Venezuela, which is seeing a population explosion (of voting age adults!) just in time for elections. Mark Fitzgibbons at AT explains that America is already a Soft Police State. But there's one instructive counter-example from South Carolina... Meanwhile, you've got to love a guy who drives libtards apoplectic, like he did on Wednesday - a sacred day for all lefty eco-fascists as "Earth Day" - to the moonbats at Mother Jones who ran this headline: Scott Walker Celebrates Earth Day by Proposing To Fire 57 Environmental Agency Employees. How cool is that?
THE NEW CONSERVATIVE COUNTER-CULTURE
I'd like to give all TTPers - both those who will be attending the Vegas Rendezvous this weekend and those unable to do so - an intro to what I'll be talking about. First, though, I need to get something off of my chest. I have become very, very tired of reading standard conservative media. Frankly, the gelded whining gets to me. Detailed arguments aplenty, explaining why the latest Leftist power-grab or exploitation is wrong. Or why their latest hate speech is unfair. So. What. Newsflash: the other side doesn't care. They've made it crystal clear that power is the only goal, that they enjoy using power to enrich themselves and hurt others, and that there are no limits of law or decency that restrain them. If you're looking to standard conservative media for hope or change, I recommend Prozac as a mandatory Plan B. Economics? Once, this was their spearhead. Now? They'd need a high-power telescope to see even Zero Hedge ahead of them; meanwhile, the global economic order makes ticking sounds. Popular culture? Never a strength - and now it's the main front of the Left. External enemies? This, they still get. But not the internal ones, who are statistically much more likely to murder you (yes, Virginia, liberals are more lethal than terrorists). Like so much of the conservative movement, they keep trying to approach the 21st century with the worldview and infrastructure of 1980. Not. Working. The cold hard truth is that liberty's future is arising without them - and may not need them. What's needed are the bright spots of the new conservative counter-culture. Here they are...
WHEN DID AMERICA FORGET IT’S AMERICA?
On a number of occasions during the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, the Israeli government has appealed to the United States and its allies to demand a change in Tehran's aggressive behavior. If Iran wishes to be treated as a normal state, Israel has said, then it should start acting like one. Unfortunately, these appeals have been summarily dismissed. The Obama administration apparently believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop its attempts at regional domination, improve its human rights record and, in general, behave like the civilized state it hopes the world will recognize it to be. As a former Soviet dissident, I cannot help but compare this approach to that of the United States during its decades-long negotiations with the Soviet Union, which at the time was a global superpower and a existential threat to the free world. The differences are striking and revealing. And the reason for those differences is tragic.
PUZZLES OF PARADISE
Niue Island, Polynesia. Have you ever seen the ocean turn day-glo pink? It does here naturally during a sunset.
THE LESSON OF CHATHAM
Waitangi Bay, Chatham Island. If you want an ultimate of remote and rugged isolation constantly swept by storms and gale-force winds of the Roaring Forties, here is where you come. And if you want to know how an unknown genocidal atrocity can teach us how to better deal with liberal guilt-mongering, well, here too is where you come. Believe it or not, it's in Polynesia.
THE FED SCARES THE IMF
The United States is poised to raise rates much more sharply than markets expect, risking a potential storm for global asset prices and a dollar shock for much of the developing world, the International Monetary Fund is warning in its just-issued IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO). The IMF fears a "cascade of disruptive adjustments" as the US Federal Reserve finally pulls the trigger for the first time in eight years, ending an era of cheap and abundant dollar liquidity for the international system. The Fed's long-feared inflexion point is doubly treacherous because investors seem ill-prepared for what lies ahead, and levels of dollar debt outside the US have reached an unprecedented extreme. The Fund says future contracts are pricing in a "much slower" pace of monetary tightening than the Fed itself is forecasting. The crunch comes as the world economy remains becalmed in 2015 with stodgy growth of 3.5%, held back by another set of brutal downgrades for Russia and string of countries in Latin America. Emerging markets face a fifth consecutive year of slippage as they exhaust the low-hanging fruit from catch-up growth and hit their structural limits. The world will remain stuck in a low-growth trap until 2020, and perhaps beyond.
THE DEMOCRATS’ 187-YEAR WAR AGAINST THE BLACKS
The Democrat Party has been waging war against Blacks since the election of the first Democrat President in 1828, Andrew Jackson. Democrats were the party of slavery whose voters included the cotton farmers. In their party platforms from 1840 to 1860, the Democrats supported slavery. After Lincoln's election, Democrats sparked the Civil War. After the war was over and slaves were emancipated, the Democrats became the party of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Renowned historian Eric Foner wrote, "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democrat Party, the planter class and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy." The last Democrat linked to the KKK was Senator Robert Byrd, who died as recently as 2010 while still in office. Like many Democrats, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, it's true that Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964. But there is more to the story. Let me tell it to you.
THE FARCE OF CLIMATE FASCISM AND ASTHMA
President Obama has made a not-so-subtle attempt to personalize his administration's war on "climate change" by linking it with his daughter Malia's asthma. Nice try, Mr. President. But the evidence just doesn't stack up. It's one more farce for the Climate Fascists. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the EPA's Gina McCarthy and the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have lent their ‘expert' support to the ‘global warming means more asthma' thesis -- all a classic case of doing their masters' bidding. Problem is, despite this impressive show of concerted ‘expert' strength, the connection between climate change and asthma is flimsy on stilts. This becomes evident when you examine the claims made by the CDC website. It certainly sounds authoritative. (How could America's leading national public health institute possibly get it wrong where health issues are concerned?) But none of them bears close scrutiny. Let's examine them one by one.
HOW CHINA TURNED OBAMA INTO ITS USEFUL GREEN IDIOT
China's approach to international energy and environmental policy can be summed up very simply: tell the idiot yang guizi whatever they want to hear - then carry on doing what China wants, regardless. Fortunately for the prospects of the US economy, it would appear that not every US politician has fallen for the risible line, heavily promoted by the Obama administration and its amen corner in the environmental movement, that China cares every bit as much as the West does about the allegedly urgent need to curb global CO2 emissions. Two who very much haven't are Republican senators Roy Blunt of Missouri and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma who have just launched a challenge to the bilateral climate change "agreement" reached by Mr. Obama with China last year, whereby both countries have supposedly made a commitment to reducing their "greenhouse gas" emissions. In addition, there is, as this ACCF policy research special report notes, a good deal of further legal trouble ahead for Obama and his eco-fascists at the EPA. Mr. Obama may yet be prevented from being China's Useful Green Idiot - however much he wants to be.
THE LAND OF ADVENTURE
Hobart, Tasmania. Before we delve into Tassie, as Tasmaniacs affectionately call their island, I need to make an announcement. With the Platinum Vegas Rendezvous a little more than two weeks away, I better explain why it may the Last Rendezvous. As you may know, TTP is a labor of love for me, and not the way I make a living - I do that primarily by running expeditions. They often come together in that I prefer the company of TTPers on an expedition. By contrast, I try never to take any liberals and lefties, as having to put up with one in a remote place in the world is a serious annoyance. I've been running Jack Wheeler Expeditions for 37 years, starting with the first commercial expedition in history to the geographic North Pole, on the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean at 90 North. That was in April, 1978. I started To The Point 12 years ago, at the end of March, 2003. Over those last 12 years, many of you have had extraordinary adventures with me - safaris in the Serengeti and Namibia, Gorillas and Pygmies in Central Africa, Concordia by helicopter to K2 base camp in northern Pakistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, The Land of the Dragon Blood Tree in Socotra, North Korea, the North Pole, remote islands in French Polynesia, Hidden Burma, Hidden China, Hidden Persia... it's a long list. Next September, some of you will be with me to The Lost Kingdom of Lo. I've been able to operate all of these and still keep TTP running without interruption - thanks in large part to Miko, and to Jack Kelly's superb HFR's when I'm gone. A TTP Rendezvous, however, is different. My travel schedule has been so intense recently that the Vegas Rendezvous is the first we've been able to schedule since 2012. And now I have no idea when I'll be able to schedule another. The reason is that I am passing my expedition baton to my son, Brandon.
THE LESSON OF RABAUL
Rabaul, New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. The Brits called him George, a Melanesian native of Rabaul born here in 1934. He was 8 years old when the Japanese invaded and seized this island from the Brits - who took it and all of German New Guinea after World War I. George showed me where the Japanese kept the Australian and British prisoners they captured, all overgrown now. Hidden in the bush, he watched as they were hung or beheaded, and then... eaten. "The officers thought human liver was a delicacy," he said. "The soldiers would cut off pieces of thighs and arms to fry in strips." I recount George's eyewitness not to guilt-monger, as I'm aware of how difficult it was for TTPers of Japanese ancestry to read The Lesson of Iwo Jima last week. The evidence for Japanese cannibalism during WWII is extensive, along with numerous other hideous atrocities. Entire cultures and societies have the capacity to go criminally insane, as do individuals. One of the most recurrent themes in history is barbaric savagery - from the constant blood feuds of primitive tribes to the Mongols of Genghiz Khan to the Reformation's Thirty Years War to Stalin's genocidal murder of millions of Ukrainians and Hitler's of Jews. There is a famous scene in the movie classic The African Queen, when Bogart tells Hepburn such savagery is "natural" - and Hepburn responds that "Nature is what we were put here on earth to rise above." Christianity offers a way to do this for individuals - but how can an entire culture, an entire people rise above their past?
OBAMA PERSONIFIES GEOSTRATEGIC INCOMPETENCE
The United States has handled its economic diplomacy with shocking myopia. The US Treasury's attempt to cripple the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) before it gets off the ground is clearly intended to head off China's ascendancy as a rival financial superpower, whatever the faux-pieties from Washington about standards of "governance". Such a policy is misguided at every level, evidence of what can go wrong when a lame-duck president defers to posturing amateurs in Congress on delicate matters of global geostrategy. Washington has enraged Britain by trying to browbeat Downing Street into boycotting the project. It has forced allies and friendly countries across the Far East to make a fatal choice between the US and China that none wished to make, and has ended up losing almost everybody. Germany, France, and Italy are joining. Australia and South Korea may follow soon. The AIIB is exactly what the world needs. Here's why...
THE LESSON OF IWO JIMA
RULES ARE NOT LAWS: WHAT 2016 SHOULD BE ABOUT
The power to make laws rests wholly in Congress - at least that is what the Constitution says. Yet who makes the "laws" in our federal system today? Vast amounts of legislative power have been "delegated" to independent federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission or to the president or his cabinet secretaries. The sheer volume of these rules is mind-numbing. Consider that in 2014, the year that just ended, 75,000 pages of new regulations were adopted by the Executive Branch, either by the Obama administration directly or through independent regulatory agencies. This is in addition to the myriad executive orders the president gives to his various departments regarding how to administrate federal laws. The imagined need for these rules is that congressional legislation cannot anticipate every situation or change that requires new regulations. That is true, of course, only if we accept the underlying premise that the federal government ought to be directly involved in almost everything we do. Abolishing the completely illegal and unconsitutional scam of legislative delegation to unelected bureaucracies should be a major GOP campaign theme in 2016.
HOW TO GET REGIME CHANGE IN IRAN
There's a profound disgruntlement in the Force over the impending Iran deal, ranging from the Israelis to the Saudis, and from the French to the Gulfies. It isn't just words, apparently - there are rumors suggesting that some of the disgruntled Arabs are arranging to get their own nukes, just as Netanyahu foresaw (or perhaps even knew), and as Kissinger warned (and perhaps knew). The powers-that-be have bought into the false option of either making a deal or going to a war footing. It was once known as the Sarkozy Option: Iran with the bomb, or bomb Iran. It need not be, and everybody knows it. Deep in the subtexts, and every now and then in public, we hear about the White House's not-so-secret dream that the Iranian regime will either moderate or fall. It's worth recalling that Gorbachev managed both. First he reformed, via glasnost and perestroika, and then he fell. There was never a fatal choice between a deal and war. Indeed, regime change is a constant leitmotif of the world today, having reshaped Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, threatened Syria and Venezuela, aimed at Jordan, and raged across Africa. It can be done in Iran and here's why.
CRUISING THE INSIDER PASSAGE
THE CHINESE MARATHON
Sanya, Hainan Island, South China Sea. This is China's Florida, where Chinese Snowbirds escape from freezing their tuches off suffering Beijing's winter. I am at Howard Johnson's Sanya Resort eating a cheeseburger and listening to a local rock band playing Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman, singing the lyrics in English. The place is gigantic with 1,000 rooms, and packed with Chinese - I am the only Westerner here. The band now launches into an enthusiastic Beatles' Obla-dee-obla-dah, which brings back a flood of memories when I first heard it, dancing with my Hawaiian girlfriend Vonnie at a Honolulu night club in 1969. The Red Guards were rampaging through China back then, egged on by Mao, while millions of Chinese were starving to death. The scene before me now would have been considered a madman's hallucination in 1969. Then Mao finally died in 1976, and his successor, Deng Xiao Ping created a "birdcage economy" as the way for China to grow into an economic superpower yet retain a Communist Party monopoly of power. The Chinese people were allowed to be songbang, unleashed and free to fly around in the cage to make money - but never allowed to escape from the Party's cage itself. They accepted the bargain offered them - prosperity in exchange for loyalty - and the result was the most massive increase in national wealth in the shortest time in human history. Today, the bargain between the Chicoms and the Chinese people - greater economic freedom for little or no political freedom - is breaking down. The Party needs a new rationale for its monopoly of political power - and has found it in that most lethal of tyrant excuses, jingoistic nationalism and demonization of a foreign devil. Guess who that is.
MORE FOOD FROM LESS LAND
If something drops out of the news, it usually means it is going well. Mad cow disease killed nobody last year. Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious lick. There were only two localized famines last year - in South Sudan and the Central African Republic - both caused by conflict, rather than drought or population pressure. That's because the feeding of the world is going so well it's not news. New figures from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization show that the world's cereal harvest, which provides more than half of the calories that humans eat, broke a new record last year at 2.54 billion tons - an astonishing 20 per cent higher than ten years ago. Thanks to better techniques and seeds, the world's farmers (of which I declare I am one, in a mostly hands-off way) have provided a growing population with more food per head, year after year, largely without cultivating extra land or using extra water or chemicals. Corn, rice and wheat - the big three cereals - each broke records in 2014. So why do we hear frequent cries that the world soon will be or is already struggling to feed itself?
OBAMA’S PLAN FOR A FASCIST AMERICA
Ha Long Bay, Northern Vietnam. This place is so spectacularly beautiful there's no wonder why it's a World Heritage Site. Americans are welcome now in Vietnam, where so many people speak English because it's required to learn it in school as a second language. Vietnamese have embraced capitalism with a vengeance, even while they are ruled by the same Commie Party we fought in the 60s, the Hammer & Sickle flies everywhere and Ho Chi Minh is pictured on their currency. The days of America being Hanoi's enemy are long gone. China is the enemy today as it has been for over two thousand years of Vietnamese history, against which Hanoi needs America as an ally. The tides of history ebb and flow. America's greatest enemy today is not external but within. A far more mortal danger to our country than Putin Russia, Chicom China, or Reconquista Mexico is a Hate America White House with the clear goal of creating a Fascist America. Government control of all of our major institutions and industries is taking place right before our eyes in broad daylight. If we have any chance of reversing it, we must begin by identifying exactly what is going on. The first step is to call what is going on by its accurate name: fascism. The Left loves to use the term as a pejorative sneer for anything lefties don't like. But as an economic theory it has a specific meaning. Socialism is government ownership of businesses and industries, with everyone in the economy - workers, managers, executives - being an employee of the State. In Castro's Cuba until recently, even shoeshine boys had to belong to a state cooperative. Fascism, by contrast and far more dishonestly, is government control of ostensibly private business and industry, the owners and executives of which can do nothing without bureaucratic regulatory approval. This is the economy Zero is determined to achieve. He is doing so with astonishing rapidity - and with Chicago gangsterism and corrupt thuggishness, hallmarks of any fascist regime. So rapid and thuggishly thorough it leaves the Marxist agenda of the Frankfurt School's "march through the institutions" - both economic and cultural - of the 20th century in the dust. It is a 21st century blitzkrieg of fascism. Let's itemize it.
CALL IT CLIMATE FASCISM
The latest Warmist campaign is that scientists and journalists who mislead the public about ‘global warming' should be banned from television. So says the producer of a highly tendentious and misleading new eco-propaganda movie about global warming, apparently blissfully unaware of the irony of his position. Robert Kenner is the producer of Merchants of Doubt, a documentary which seeks to claim that climate skepticism is nothing but a fossil-fuel-funded conspiracy coordinated by the same kind of cackling evil-doers who tried to persuade you that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Like the Obama administration, the movie takes for granted the notion that catastrophic man-made climate change is real, that all the scientists promoting the theory are reliable, honest and principled, and that the only possible reason anyone might have for claiming otherwise is that they are "merchants of doubt" - i.e., corrupt disinformers who deliberately and cynically seek to hide the truth about global warming from the public because they have been paid to do so by sinister corporate interests. Now Kenner has written a public letter to one of his fellow celebrity alarmists, scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson, to help promote his crappy film raise awareness in the media of the very serious issue of Big Oil funded denialism. The letter says:
THE POLITICAL ASSAULT ON GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS
Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from "global warming" to "climate change" indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom. Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn. World leaders are embarking on costly policies that have no capacity to replace fossil fuels but enrich crony capitalists at public expense, increasing costs for all, and restricting access to energy to the world's poorest populations that still lack access to electricity's immense benefits. Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy. So it is unsurprising that great efforts have been made to ramp up hysteria, even as the case for climate alarm is disintegrating. Which is why skeptics on climate alarmism are being politically targeted, myself among them.
BIBI PAVES THE WAY TO END OBAMA’S BOOTLICKING IRAN
South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country. Last Friday 3/06), US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, "Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it's not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy." The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang's refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program. Sherman negotiated the US's nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal. Once Pyongyang was ready to come out as a nuclear power, it threw out the nuclear inspectors, opened the sealed nuclear sites, vacated its signature on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began testing nuclear bombs. Sherman is now the US's chief negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. She;s having hissy fits because Bibi Netanyahu has ruined her plans.
WILL CHINA JUMP OFF A FISCAL CLIFF?
Nobody can fault China's leaders for lack of bravery. The Politburo has kept its nerve as the world's most giddy experiment in credit-driven growth faces assault on three major fronts at once. Real interest rates have rocketed. The trade-weighted rise in the yuan over the past two years has been spectacular. Fiscal policy is about to tighten drastically as the authorities clamp down on big-spending local governments. Put together, China is pursuing the most contractionary mix of economic policies in the G20, relative to the status quo ante. Collateral damage is already visible in the sliding global prices of iron ore, copper, nickel, lead and zinc over recent months, as well as thermal coal, oil, corn and even sugar. Zhiwei Zhang, from Deutsche Bank, says China faces a "fiscal cliff" this year as Beijing attempts to rein in spending. "This year, China will likely face the worst fiscal challenge since 1981. This is not well recognized in the market," he said. Another indicator: China is no longer buying US Treasuries and global bonds. It has become a net seller, stepping in to offset accelerating outflows of capital. The capital deficit reached a record $91bn in the fourth quarter.
MASS DEFAULT ONLY SOLUTION TO WORLD DEBT ADDICTION
In a valedictory speech last weekend of characteristically Latin American duration - a mind-numbing three hours - the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, claimed that her country was the only one in the world to have reduced its national debt over recent years. Only Kirchner could think this a matter of national pride - for reduction in the national debt via the mechanism of default is anything to boast of. Nonetheless, where Argentina treads, others will surely soon be following. The world is sinking under a sea of debt, private as well as public, and it is increasingly hard to see how this might end, except in some form of mass default. This most certainly includes China, by the way. China's total indebtedness has quadrupled since 2007 to $28 trillion, according to estimates by McKinsey. At 282% of GDP, China's debt burden is now bigger, relative to output, than the US.
OBAMA AGREES WITH IRAN: “DEATH TO AMERICA!”
Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan, China. I am thousands of miles away from my country feeling like Obi-wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movie. He suddenly feels faint and has to sit down, as he senses a "massive disruption in the Force" with millions of lives snuffed out somewhere in the galaxy. Darth Vader's Death Star has just obliterated an entire planet with everyone on it. I am feeling like Obi-wan right now as I just learned the Boehner House passed full funding for DHS yesterday (3/03) 257-167. Every single Dem voted yes, along with 75 Rinos. In completely and totally caving to Zero's Executive Amnesty, it was a Death Star vote, a vote to kill America. Phyllis Schlafly, my friend of decades, is precisely correct when she says, Democrats Plan to Win Elections with Illegal Votes. This is Zero's game plan to establish rule Democrat Fascist rule and kill freedom in America. It is ironic in the extreme that hours after Boehner's Death Star vote yesterday, Bibi Netanyahu gave a brilliantly heroic speech to Congress. The link is the complete text of his speech, an absolute Must-Read. The horrible irony, the hideous truth, is that Zero wants desperately to make a deal with Iran because his and Iran's goal is the same: Death to America!
THE LIBERAL CIRCUS
Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce. Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter. The problem with Hillary's scandals are not just that they reveal a lack of character, but that they are illiberal to the core on hallmark progressive issues of concern for equality, transparency and feminism. Attorney General Eric Holder came into office alleging racism and calling the American people cowards, and six years later is exiting, still blaming racism for his own self-inflicted failures. He leaves office as a caricature of incompetence and racial divisiveness. Conspiracists once warned us that the government was buying up ammo to prevent private gun owners from purchasing it; now we learn that Obama by executive order may ban the most popular type of sporting ammunition. So - why this descent into travesty?
THE WAGES OF WHITE GUILT
Mandalay, Burma. This is a country struggling to enter the 21st century after being stuck in the 19th for the last half of the 20th. One of the results is an Internet that barely functions. I have heard little of what is going on in the US and the world save for headlines, which are so irretrievably awful that I'm glad I'm isolated here or else my head would explode. I'll keep this short. Everything you are seeing right now with America coming apart at the seams at the hands of this Affirmative Action President has one and only one cause: they are the wages of white guilt. The one and only reason this evil, contemptible America-hating fascist has not been impeached for treason, the only reason anyone paid any attention to him whatever such that he was accepted to Harvard, made Editor of the Harvard Law Review, allowed to teach a course at Columbia, ran for Illinois State Senator, ran for Illinois US Senator, ran for the Dem presidential nomination, excused for attending a racist church for 20 years that prayed for God to damn America, got elected president, and re-elected president is the color of his skin. Absolutely none of this whatever would have happened if his skin were white.
BURMA NOTES
Inle Lake, Burma. This is the first of a "Notes" series, a running commentary on where I am as I make my way across the world to the Vegas Rendezvous in late April. We start in Burma, where I have been for the past week. These are my impressions so far. *Burma - 25 years ago the socialist military dictatorship insisted the name be changed to "Myanmar," but I along with most everyone else still call it Burma - is just emerging from a hermit socialism isolated from the world, and at a breakneck pace. The contrast can be jarring. You see oxcarts with the farmer holding the reins to the oxen in one hand, and making a cell phone call with the other. But overall, the "energy" of Burma is one of gentle serenity. Even in Rangoon where the traffic is horrendous, there's no road rage of any kind, no honking horns. Outside of Rangoon, almost no one drives fast, frantic to get where they are going. People proceed at a measured pace, they don't race; everyone makes room for everyone, whether an oxcart, a pedicab, a motorbike, car, bus or truck. Every smile is returned, and every wave. It's easy to see why the British fell in love with Burma - it's the people, their gentleness, their serenity of soul.
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS AN ANTI-SEMITE
Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America. Last week (2/09), apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made. Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month's massacres in Paris as "a bunch of violent vicious zealots," who "randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris." In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the Moslem terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just "a bunch of folks in a deli," presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches. Obama's statement about the massacre of Jews in Paris is notable first and foremost for what it reveals about his comfort level with anti-Semitism. The bottom line is that he is embracing anti-Semitism and Islamic fascism more nakedly by the day. Let us count the ways.
HAIL SHALE GAS!
I don't know about you, but I have been especially glad of my gas-fired central heating and hot water in the past few frigid weeks. Gas really is rather special: it provides us here in Britain with 84 per cent of our domestic heat, 27 per cent of our electricity, much of the feedstock for our synthetic consumer products, and pretty well all of the nitrogen fertilizer that has fed the world and largely banished famine. Although we import half of it, beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the Bowland shale, lies one of the richest gas resources ever discovered, just 10 per cent of which would be enough to provide nearly 50 years of British needs. The technology to get it out involves using water and sand to make cracks that are a millimeter wide in rocks that are a mile and a half down. A month's work leads to 25 years of gas flow from a quiet box of tricks that can be hidden behind a hedge. No need to festoon the hills with permanent concrete bases for 400ft towers of steel trying to suck a sparse trickle of energy out of the wind on a cold, calm day. Shale gas extraction is a process that has proved very safe and clean in the United States. It has had virtually no impact on groundwater, earthquakes or surface pollution anywhere. These are exaggerated myths constantly repeated by the wealthy multinational pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, by wealthy fashion designers and their nimby friends in gin-and-jag country, and by Vladimir Putin and other Russians with an interest in expensive gas.
NO SURPRISE THAT OBAMA BELONGS TO THE MULTI-CULTI CULT
There was nothing particularly new about President Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast the other day. Not that it's unimportant. It's extremely important. But the unfortunate notion that all religions, and indeed all cultures, are morally equivalent has been with us a long time, and it's very fashionable. It's now the conventional liberal wisdom, as a matter of fact. Even Pope Francis is a member of the liberals' Multi-Culti Cult. I'm not going to dwell on the silly anachronisms and false parallels in the speech - Governor Jindal did it best, I think, when he told the president to relax about medieval Catholicism and focus his concerns on contemporary Islamism - but rather on what we're supposed to do when we encounter religious views that offend us, or seem threatening to us. Obama basically said we should just shut up. His remarks weren't made in a theoretical debate. They come shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, and other barbaric acts in the name of radical Islam. They are part of the doctrine of multiculturalism or "multi-culti," which started as "culturalism," early in the last century.
THE PLATINUM VEGAS RENDEZVOUS XIV
THE “HYUNDAIZATION” OF THE GLOBAL DEFENSE MARKET
Ten or fifteen years ago, when you looked at the cars on the road, how many Hyundais did you see? How many Hyundais do you see now, driven by buyers who wanted a "good enough" car for a reasonable price? Back in my April 4/14 Half-Full Report, I referred to a nascent "Hyundaization" (hun-dye-zay-shun) trend in the global defense market. Even now, few people have noticed this. Hyundaization has been masked by spending from high-end customers who only want top-end gear, and by global fire sales of used Western equipment. As an example of those fire sales, many of the Jordanian F-16s bombing ISIS right now recently belonged to the Dutch and Belgian air forces. After a decade of those sales, however, there isn't much second-hand equipment left to sell. That's opening the door to new buys from new sources. A combination of technology trends, industrial policies, and a multi-polar global shift will give this trend staying power. This is a sea change on multiple levels. "Hyundaization" is going to have profound diplomatic, military, and industrial consequences. Let's talk about them.
THE REAL CRUSADERS
[This was written in 2005. We are republishing it in light of Zero's idiotic Prayer Breakfast speech last week, comparing Medieval Christians to Moslem terrorists of today who want the whole world to live in their world of Dark Ages barbarism. This is the real history of the Crusades in summary form. It is not taught in schools or universities today, and certainly never learned by Zero. He claims to have been educated at Harvard and Columbia, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and his words and deeds have never provided any evidence he is educated in any way.] It’s amazing how much the Arabs complain about the Crusades when they had so little to do with them. The Crusades were their great trauma, they constantly moan, the bottomless source of their resentment of the West and Christianity. Mysteriously, they never condemn the Real Crusaders who wiped out their entire civilization. There were eight separate Crusades over two hundred years, from 1095 through 1294. The Arabs played no significant role in any. The first was caused by the Seljuk Turks, who had swarmed out of Central Asia to conquer the Middle East, and seized Jerusalem in 1070. The Holy City had been part of the Fatimid Empire of Ismaili Shia Berbers from North Africa, who provided Christian pilgrims unhindered access to their holy places and freedom to worship in their churches. The Seljuks conducted pogroms on the Christians and desecrated their churches. They also terrified Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, who had lost much of his empire to them, so much that he pleaded with his rival in Rome, Pope Urban II, to call for all Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Islamic infidels.
HALF-FULL REPORT 02/06/15
We begin with an act of political genius, the greatest campaign ad of modern times:
THE LOST KINGDOM OF LO
If you're like me, we have to take a break from the current torrent of treason pouring out of this pestilential presidency or we're going to lose our minds. So let's take that break and visit a magical unknown corner of the world behind the Himalayas so hidden away its people neither know nor care who infests the White House. Our journey will be with photos. If you want to go there with me for real - well, that can be arranged.
THE IDIOCY OF ABASEMENT TO THE UMBRAGE POLICE
The celebrity actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said he is "a complete fool," an "idiot," "thoughtless" and that he is "devastated" for having inadvertently used the term "colored" to describe black people on a US talk show. It's depressing enough that he felt the obligation to apologize. But what's worse is that he felt the need to do with such groveling self-abasement. Yes, we all know why he did it. It's Oscar nomination season coming up, Cumberbatch is a possible contender for his portrayal of fashionably autistic, gay code-breaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, and Hollywood is notoriously PC and squeamish about issues to do with race. But if anyone who owes anyone an apology, here, it's not poor put-upon Cumberbatch but the noisome professional offense-takers who by seeking to make political mileage out of such achingly trivial issues are creating a climate of linguistic fear in which good people suffer. This, though, unfortunately, is how the liberal-left rolls. For as my friend Alex Wickham tells me, "Liberals are the new Puritans who want to control your life." We need an End to the New Puritanism movement.