Enjoy!
And wave goodbye to The PIAPS!
Last Friday (11/25) at age 90, Fidel Castro finally croaked. Cuban-Americans danced in the streets of Miami. Liberals mourned. A mystery I’ve found puzzling for almost 60 years rose again to confront me.
When I was 14 years old in 1958, my father was able to take my family to Moscow on a filming assignment. We went to Lenin’s Tomb, where a huge line of Russians waited their turn to enter and see the corpses of Lenin and Stalin encased in glass displays.
We went to the front of the line, as "foreign guests." Everyone from the guards to the people in line were so reverential, as if this were a holy, sacred place. There was complete silence as we entered the tomb with a number of Russians and proceeded between the two bodies under glass, nobody making the slightest sound. It was impossibly creepy.
It was also hard for me not to laugh. All over Moscow we had seen huge statues of Lenin and Stalin, making them look like giants towering above the rest of us mere pygmies. Yet I had learned in the research I'd done back home that they were not much taller than midgets – Lenin was five-foot-one, while Stalin was under five-four.
What really got to me was all the pretending that these two monsters were moral giants. What would the world think of Germans flocking to the tomb of Hitler, with Hitler's body on display under glass and worshipped?
I was only 14, yet I knew that these men had murdered millions, that they were among the most evil men who had ever lived, that they were moral equivalents of Hitler. The reverential silence, the worship of evil, displayed by these Russians all around me as we slowly shuffled past their corpses was terrifying and mysterious. Suddenly, I didn't want to laugh.
When we came out again onto Red Square, I felt overwhelmed by a question: Why would people worship evil?
This picture was taken in Afghanistan in 1988, at the height of the Afghan Mujahaddin’s struggle to liberate their country from the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union.
Yet only two of those pictured are Afghan – the white-bearded gentleman in the middle, famous commander Moli Shakur, and his aide standing behind him.
The man on the left of the picture is yours truly. The man on the right is the man who should be the next Secretary of State.
Here’s why.
President-elect Trump is wisely considering a number of qualified candidates for SOS. What I am about to say is in no way to criticize them. The however is that with one exception, they will run Foggy Bottom according to their world-view.
The exception is the man you see gently cradling an AK-47 in his left hand – for his world-view almost uncannily coincides with that of Donald Trump. He’s US Congressman from California Dana Rohrabacher.
With Dana, President Trump will get a Trump State Department – not that of anyone else.
Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine.
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms.
Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.
Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion.
This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.
Here is a short primer for the young protesters.
If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics.
The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.
The home page of Hillary Clinton’s campaign website (still up: https://www.hillaryclinton.com) has links to “African Americans for Hillary, Latinos for Hillary, Asian Americans and Pacific islanders for Hillary, Women for Hillary, Millennials for Hillary,” but none to “Men for Hillary,” let alone “White Americans for Hillary.”
Given the history of such stereotyping, it is baffling that politicians on the left cannot see where this leads. The prime exponents of identity politics in the past were the advocates of apartheid, of anti-semitism, and of treating women as the legal chattels of men. “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation,” Trevor Phillips says.
Identity politics is thus very old-fashioned. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism, says equality feminism — fair treatment, respect and dignity — is being eclipsed in universities by a Victorian “fainting couch feminism,” which views women as “fragile flowers who require safe spaces, trigger warnings and special protection from micro-invalidations.”
Sure enough, when she said this at Oberlin College, Ohio, 35 students and a “therapy dog” sought refuge in a safe room.
Global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year – the biggest and steepest fall on record.
But the news has been greeted with an eerie silence by the world’s alarmist community. When temperatures shoot up it’s catastrophic climate change which requires dramatic headlines across the mainstream media and demands for urgent action.
But that when they fall even more precipitously it’s just a case of “nothing to see here”.
The cause of the fall is a La Niña event following in the wake of an unusual strong El Niño.
As David Rose reports:
Big El Niños always have an immense impact on world weather, triggering higher than normal temperatures over huge swathes of the world. The 2015-16 El Niño was probably the strongest since accurate measurements began, with the water up to 3C warmer than usual.
It has now been replaced by a La Niña event – when the water in the same Pacific region turns colder than normal.
This also has worldwide impacts, driving temperatures down rather than up.
One of the cardinal beliefs of the American Left is that too much money is spent on political races and that he or she who has the most money will win — which is unfair.
Hillary Clinton bought into the myth; so, while Donald Trump was holding rallies, Hillary was holding fundraisers. The Clinton campaign raised and spent twice the money as the Trump campaign — approximately $1 billion versus $500 million (including PAC money).
As a result, Mr. Trump won the electoral vote with approximately a 14 percent margin, while Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote with about a 1.5 percent margin. Clearly, Mr. Trump spent his money much more wisely than Hillary.
The Democrats failed in electing their people at all levels of government, not because of a lack of campaign funds, but because it was all too clear that their support of special interests were in conflict with the majority whose interests were in lower taxes and less regulation, not more.
The establishment media, while largely ignoring their own failures in covering the campaign, are back in full attack mode against Mr. Trump, arguing that with his extensive business holdings there are bound to be conflicts of interest, unless he sells everything.
Two basic things are ignored in these arguments.
A Tale of Trump in Two Charts.
The first is Low Priced Stocks vs. the S&P 500 over the last 22 years. The first shaded section is the early 2000s dotcom crash, the second is the Lehman 2008 collapse. But the key data point here is the fork-in-the-road divergence starting in early 2013, with the S&P rocketing up and the low caps racing for the basement.
What happened? The SEC launched its enforcement of Dodd-Frank, particularly its making stock brokers and investment advisors criminally liable for recommending high-risk shares to clients. The obvious consequence is that brokers abandoned any high-risk/low-priced company.
The second chart is that of the Russell 2000 (the bottom 2000 stocks in the Russell 3000) since Trump’s election. It closed last night (11/23) at 1342.09, a record high with a win streak of 14 consecutive sessions, the longest in over 20 years.
What’s the connection? Trump has pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank.
There’s so much more – this Thanksgiving HFR is going to be one of the most enjoyable you’ve ever read. I guarantee it….
On Thanksgiving Day, Americans gather with their family and friends to celebrate the blessings that Providence has bestowed on their beloved country.
A deep appreciation of these blessings involves understanding that they were earned. It is to understand the awesome truth of how “God helps those who help themselves” applies to the Mayflower Pilgrims and their First Thanksgiving at America’s birth.
This is an appreciation and understanding of which those on the Left are incapable – for it would mean celebrating the capitalist freedom that made that original Thanksgiving possible. That made America possible.
This no liberal, no Democrat, no leftie can do. Thus they must distort history instead.
The distortion starts in Kindergarten, with the childish make-believe of your kid's school play portraying the noble Squanto teaching the helpless Pilgrims how to feed themselves. So let’s drop the curtain on the distortion and watch the real thing.
The real history of the Mayflower Pilgrims was recounted by their leader, William Bradford (1590-1657) in his book Of Plymouth Plantation, completed in 1647. It is as effective a refutation of socialism and affirmation of capitalism as there has ever been. Here it is entire.
Little more than three weeks ago, our freedom and abundance was threatened as never before by a Fascist Left determined to destroy it.
With Donald Trump, Americans chose the embodiment of capitalist abundance over being impoverished wards of The State.
Churchill defined Marxism, be it Socialism or Fascism, as “the gospel of envy.” It is the gospel that Obama, Hillary, the Enemedia, and all Democrats preach. It takes extreme moral courage to reject it.
Yet that moral courage is exactly what a majority of American voters demonstrated on November 8th. Only American voters could be so envy-free to elect so opulent a capitalist businessman who proudly flaunts his earned wealth rather than apologizing for it.
Now more than ever is the time to focus anew on all that we love about our country, to know that Providence has always smiled upon it - for we, like the Pilgrims have chosen capitalist freedom over socialist slavery.
We are very blessed to call this nation our home. And that is what America is: it is our home. It’s where we raise our families, care for our loved ones, look out for our neighbors, and live out our dreams.
It is my prayer, that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country, strengthened by a shared purpose and very, very common resolve.
In declaring this national holiday, President Lincoln called upon Americans to speak with “one voice and one heart.” That’s just what we have to do.
The Democrat Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.
Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.
They have two basic options.
They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.
The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course.
For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.
It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.
Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine.
Virtual reality isn't something that's coming. It's here. It's been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality.
There's a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia.
What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses after it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world.
The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in their social media bubble, except a few crazy uncles agreed with them. All the celebrities were on board. And then the holodeck got switched off.
It wasn't a unique experience. Most Nazis didn't understand what was happening when the tanks broke through to Berlin. The average Russian wasn't prepared for the fall of the USSR.
If you are in business and the government will not allow you to open a bank account, what do you do?
Thirty years ago, almost anyone could walk into a bank and open a bank account with no questions asked. But now it is increasingly difficult for honest people and businesses to open bank accounts because of all the new regulations on banks, which are intended to make life more difficult for terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers, money launderers and other assorted criminal types.
Many of those who are involved in the legal Colorado marijuana business — growers, processors and retailers — have found it impossible to get bank accounts, so they have been forced to deal in cash. As a result, armored cars go around to the various pot businesses, pick up the cash and put it in a hopefully secure warehouse.
The business is growing rapidly, so literally billions of dollars of cash are being transported and hidden in Colorado alone. Once the marijuana businesses get up and running in all the states that have made it legal, there may well be more than $100 billion in physical cash sloshing around — for this one type of business alone — making it ripe for theft, armed robbery and, of course, tax evasion.
The need to do everything in cash creates new industries, both legal and illegal.
