Global warming has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this.

Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don't know what I am talking about, and so forth.

At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realized that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of global warming. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows an entire article on the net benefits of global warming.

Last Friday (11/09), President Obama said, "We can't just cut our way to prosperity. If we are serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes."

Mr. President, with all due respect, you continue to be wrong on both assertions.

The president and many of his Keynesian supporters believe that the reason we are having slow growth and very little job creation is because of a lack of sufficient demand. This is why they passed their $833 billion stimulus bill and have promoted other big-spending projects.

These endeavors have not worked -- and will not work -- because they have misdiagnosed the problem. The real problem is malinvestment.

An excellent explanation of specifically how financial regulations misallocate resources, reduce the level of investment, undermine good management practices and increase the risk to the entire financial system can be found in a new book by John A. Allison, former chairman and CEO of BB&T (the ninth-largest financial company in the United States), entitled "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope".

While the focus of the world is on Ukraine, Putin’s Russia, Iraq, nukes in Iran, et al, it has become obvious to a small number of folks in Washington that the world’s most dangerous man is not in any of these places and is off most everyone’s radar scope: Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Imagine Fidel Castro in the prime of his life with billions of dollars of oil money. Given his pathological hatred of America, what do you think he would spend his money on? Suppose he thought the President of the United States was trying to knock him off - how do you think he would respond?

The International Monetary Fund has thrown in the towel on emerging markets. After years of talking up the BRICS club of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, it now admits that these countries have either exhausted their catch-up growth models, or run into the time-honored problems of supply bottlenecks and bad government. Yes, China too.

The Fund has cut its forecast for the developing economies by 0.5% to 4.5% this year in its latest World Economic Outlook, and by 0.4% to 5.1% next year.

The 2013 estimates have been slashed by 1.8% for India, for Mexico by 1.7%, and 1% in Russia, compared to forecasts made in April. Similar damage is expected for Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine, and others with big trade deficits as details are fleshed out.

In what amounts to a mea culpa, the IMF hinted that it had for long been blind to festering problems in the BRICS and mini-BRICs.

It said the economies of Brazil, China, and India will be 8% to 14% smaller in 2016 than had been assumed just two years ago, a revision that calls into question some of the giddiest claims that the newcomers will soon surge past the decaying West. But the West, especially Europe's eurozone, is rapidly decaying just the same.