Prague, Czech Republic. Year by year, the current nine countries of Eastern and Central Europe that were controlled by the Soviets -- Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia -- become relatively more prosperous in comparison to the richer nations of Western Europe. As a result of the European debt crisis, this trend is likely to accelerate.

It has been more than two decades since these countries acquired their freedom. All have become multiparty, largely free-market democracies. What seems normal now was far from a foregone conclusion at the time of the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. In fact, most bets would have wagered that not all these nations would have made it.

Today, all nine are doing better, often far better, than the rest of the EU.  Here's why.

Alaska’s Frank Murkowski has my nomination for the most courageous governor in the US. Sick and tired of spineless Washington Republicans unable to overcome the religious worship of the Alaska tundra by Democrats and Eco-Fascists, Murkowski has announced oil and gas lease sales for offshore drilling in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of ANWR (the sacred and holy Alaska National Wildlife Refuge).

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in Monterey, California, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbor before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice.

I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world's great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets.

Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers' fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning.

Here's the awful story, and why the leaders of Greenpeace should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity like war criminals.

Did you know that President Obama is responsible for the loss of more U.S. jobs than any other person?

Did you know that Sen. John F. Kerry and his wife are three to four times as rich as Mitt and Ann Romney, according to the New York Times, yet paid a lower tax rate than the Romneys in 2003, the year before Mr. Kerry ran for president?

Do you know how to lower your tax rate? Do you know how abysmally ignorant and hyprocritical Democrats are on tax regulations?  Read on.

John Kerry’s 1971 screed against America, The New Soldier, written when he was the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testifying in Congress that his “band of brothers” (as he calls them now) were war criminals, is available in its entirety online at http://johnkerrythenewsoldier.blogspot.com/.

You can download and read the whole book for free. Also free are three chapters of John O’Niells bestseller, Unfit for Command. If you know anyone wavering on Kerry, send them the link.

New evidence coming to light in the British National Archives and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University may soon change our entire view of the Anglo-American slave trade, and the roots of institutional plantation slavery in the Americas.

With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of "classical liberal" government and the free market in the 17th and 18th centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery.

For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke (1632-1704) and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half.

From that it is but a step to dismiss the moral claims of classical liberalism as so much humbug, to write off all the talk of justice, natural rights, inviolable contracts and government by consent as the self-interested catechism of oppressors. As Samuel Johnson said acidly: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Except that this established version of events is not true. It is a near complete inversion of what happened, and this matters in all kinds of ways since the debate over slavery refuses to subside.

Should we start with Headline of the Year?  "Hillary ‘I dodged sniper fire' Clinton Near Death after Supersecret Crash Landing in Iran," brought to you by the überwackos at Lyndon Larouche's EU Times nutball website.

It's astonishing that Drudge would carry this drivel as if it were a real news story.  The EU Times is an Internet hoax site that dreams up the most goofball conspiracy theories out of thin air for the fun of it or to gain attention to their pathetically fragile egos.  They are maxed-out looney tunes.

So welcome to 2013.  The craziness this year has in store for us has only just begun.  Yet the real craziness - lethally dangerous craziness - comes not from Internet weirdos but from Washington DC.  So lethal that the HFR is now a staunch advocate of gun-control.

Do you have any idea how many federal departments and agencies have agents that carry guns?  Even the Post Office has these armed fascist thugs called OIG (Office of the Inspector General) Special Agents breaking and entering people's homes tracking down "mail fraud" - which could be any email you've ever sent.

Gun control for federal agents is what's needed, not gun control for law-abiding citizens.  The literally crazy problem is, there's no such thing as a law-abiding citizen anymore. The purpose of 98% of the Federal Register is for there to be some law or rule the Federalies can criminalize you with if they want.  We're all criminals now, which is by Washington's design.

Two centuries ago, it was common practice for the doctors to bleed a patient in the belief that it would get rid of the "vapors" that were thought to be causing the illness. As a result, most patients got worse and many died. Much of the world is now suffering from equally incompetent politicos playing economic doctors.

Most of the major democratic countries are headed for a fiscal cliff because they have been increasing government spending at a rate far higher than economic growth for the past several years.

Politicians tend to like bigger government because it gives them more power -- so they have a natural inclination to try to increase taxes rather than cut spending.

As poster children for bad economic policy and for bad tax proposals, I have selected three rich jurisdictions. Despite the vast difference in size of these political entities, the three are exhibiting the same disease -- undisciplined spending. Each of their leaders is prescribing the very same lethal medicine -- tax increases on the most productive and on their capital.