The leader of the strangers stood underneath the big ceiba tree he had slashed with his sword. He addressed the sub-chiefs assembled in front of him through the stranger who spoke Maya.

“I come to you from the greatest king in the world, His Majesty Don Carlos of Spain. The mighty country of Spain lies on the other side of the Great Ocean, and we have crossed it to trade peacefully with you and to instruct you in the religion of the One True God.

“His Majesty Dos Carlos commands us to come in peace, yet you attacked us and tried to kill us for no reason. We do not understand why you attacked us, but you must understand that if you try to attack us again we will kill you. You saw yesterday the power of our lightning-bearers. The lightning-bearers are still angry with you, and it is hard for us to control the death-fire they carry in their bellies…”

Without warning, one of the huge metal tubes lined up on the edge of the square went off with an enormous explosion and belch of fire. No one was hurt, but just the same, Malinali fell to the ground terrified like all the sub-chiefs, who proceeded to call out to the strangers’ leader asking his forgiveness for their aggression and disobedience.

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?

Welcome to the Last Half-Full Report... of 2014.  Next week we begin a whole new year, so let's say goodbye to this old one.  Should we also say good riddance?

This being the HFR, the judgment should be, well, at least a bit more half-full than half-empty.  Before we start, however, first a thank you.  That would be for all the kind comments, both on the Forum and by personal email, regarding Revolutionary Constitutionalism and Declarations of Defiance (published on Christmas Eve, 12/24).

One comment by email from a long-time TTPer and dear friend was truly humbling...

Now, what's half-full around here?  Looking around the world, 2014 was way more than just half-full for India.  And the best news for us and much of the world is the worst for the jerks of the world (e.g., the governments of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela).  There's other good news as well -- and news from an elite US college that's morally evil.

Plus a video of the HFR Hero of the Week that will make you cheer and laugh your head off at the same time...

The only surprising thing about Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's revelations that the legislation was based on a series of lies and voter stupidity was that Mr. Gruber was so stupid to think no one would see the videos of him saying so.

The good news is that, perhaps, many more Americans will wake up to the fact that Obamacare is not the only hoax they have been subjected to, and will be much more skeptical about policy experts' snake oil. Most of these schemes increase the power and money flowing to the political class and their "experts," while robbing the pocketbooks and liberties of the people.

The great economist F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) argued there was a limit to what any one person or even groups of people could know, which was one reason socialist planning always failed. His 1974 Nobel Prize lecture ended with the following sentence:

There is a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University that is getting a lot of news this week, in which she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased  over the last 30 years.

Some reports get a bit more frenzied than I prefer ("We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists!" just gets us scared, I prefer to be effective); but Twenge has been studying this trend for several years, has accumulated some impressive research, and has written several books.

Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the phony self-esteem movement, and how it feeds the fixed trait mindset - and thus the need to see oneself as just fantastic. This also shows what can be done to remedy the situation, by contrasting phony self-esteem with the genuine article -- earned self-esteem.

And so Malinali trudged through the forest and swamps to Pontochan, where Forearms sold her to the King and she moved into the palace - living in a palace again, but now as a slave and not a princess.

Malinali became very appreciative of Ciuacuatl’s lessons, for with her skills at sewing, cooking, and medicine, she was assigned to the household staff and not put out into the maize or cacao fields for manual drudgery.

Five winters passed. She became fluent in Maya, and learned how to do her work well and quietly, so as to be noticed as little as possible. She listened attentively, however, and began hearing talk of mysterious strangers who lived in gigantic war canoes. No one knew where they came from. Their skin was light and they had hair on their faces. Some wore metal on their bodies. Their canoes had carried them across the salt water from the south. They stopped at the mouth of the Pontochan River and talked to a group of Mayas but no one could understand what they were saying. They continued across the water to the north and were never seen again.

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: