It’s the ethanol, Sherlock. As in IBD’s editorial yesterday (1/05): A Profile In Courage In Iowa: Cruz Won't Bow To Ethanol Lobby.

Ted Cruz thinks he's going to win Iowa on Feb 1^st, and then compete for the nomination with whomever of the establishment candidates wins New Hampshire on Feb 9^th. But he's selling himself short. He should also win New Hampshire.

Winning both would give him the clear momentum to win South Carolina on Feb 20^th, Nevada Feb 23^rd, SC 20^th, NV 23^rd ST March 1^st

allowing him to wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday March 1^st with 45% of the delegates needed (565 out of 1236).  

Here’s the key: if Cruz wins Iowa, he will have defeated the ethanol lobby. And beating Big Corn on its home turf is what can propel him to a win in New Hampshire.

People in New Hampshire hate ethanol. Ethanol is corrosive, it destroys engines. Go to any tavern in New Hampshire and you'll hear an earful. And they despise craven politicians seeking the White House whoring in Iowa for the votes of a special interest that the rest of the country is forced to put up with – like Donald Trump, declaring “I love ethanol” at rallies in the state.

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale.

It centers on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety.” Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in  history.

By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases,” he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s one-child policy – and remains a hero to the environmental movement to this day.

Al Gore, for example, could be a poster child for Malthusian misanthropy.

I just started a Twitter campaign called #Rhodesmustrise. It’s in response to the lunacy currently embroiling the most revered and distinguished university on our planet – Oxford University.

That would be the #rhodesmustfall campaign for the removal from Oxford’s Oriel College of a statue of one of its benefactors Cecil Rhodes. Below is the letter that Oriel College should have written in response.

Saudi Arabia is burning through foreign reserves at an unsustainable rate and may be forced to give up its prized dollar exchange peg as the oil slump Dr.ags on, the country’s former reserve chief has warned.

“If anything happens to the riyal exchange peg, the consequences will be dramatic. There will be a serious loss of confidence,” said Khalid Alsweilem, the former head of asset management at the Saudi central bank (SAMA).

Dr. Alsweilem, now at Harvard University's Belfer Centre, said the Saudi authorities have taken a big gamble by flooding the world with oil to gain market share and drive out rivals. “The thinking that lower oil prices will bring down the US oil industry is just nonsense and will not work.”

The dollar peg has been the anchor of Saudi economic policy and credibility for over three decades. A forced devaluation would heighten fears that the crisis is spinning out of political control, further enflaming disputes within the royal family.

The crisis is getting so out of control that some international observers are speculating that Saudi Arabia might not have much of a future at all.