I’ve got a cold and my dog had major dental surgery yesterday, so pardon me if I seem out of it.
Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’
LinkSwarm for February 6, 2015
Friday, February 6th, 2015Greece’s Insoluble Problem
Thursday, February 5th, 2015Greece’s left-wing Syriza party was swept into power by promising voters they could have their cake and eat it too. The problem is that not only is there no cake to eat, but Greek already owes more money than it can repay on all the cake they’ve already eaten.
The European Central Bank announced that it will no longer accept junk-rated Greek bonds as collateral. That may be why Greece’s new finance minister is already backtracking on election promises:
His party, Syriza, told voters it would demand a debt reduction; now Mr. [Yanis] Varoufakis says it will settle for a debt restructuring. Syriza said it would end austerity; Mr. Varoufakis now says he will run a primary budget surplus even if that means dropping other commitments in the party’s campaign manifesto.
Will Syriza keep promises made to the EU and the ECB any more than they kept their promises to Greek voters? Of course not. Greece is addicted to excessive government spending the way a junkie is addicted to heroin. In this sense, Syriza’s willingness to shamelessly lie to both voters and Eurocrats is what makes them the embodiment of modern Greece.
Running an actual budget surplus, as Varoufakis is almost pledging, would go a long way toward solving Greece’s problems. (My understanding is that he means Greece will have a budget surplus before debt payments are taken into account, which means they’ve really slowed down the rate at which they’re digging their own grave…) But neither Greece’s voters nor its ruling class want the nation to live within its means. As I have noted time and time again, Greece has never practiced real austerity, which is cutting government outlays to match receipts. Greece’s budget deficit was 12.2% of GDP in 2014. (If it seems like I repeat a lot of this information in many of my updates on Greece’s debt crisis, it’s because I do, mainly because MSM reports seem to omit mention of these centrally crucial facts…)
Greece’s participation in the Euro has harmed it by distorting its economy and making its export uncompetitive. That’s a problem, but that’s not Greece’s central problem, which is a dogged unwillingness to live within its means. It’s that addiction to deficit spending that has Syriza talking of defaulting on its debts. And it’s addicted to deficit spending because the modern European cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable.
But here’s the kicker: Neither leaving the Euro nor defaulting solves Greece’s central problem, or even provides temporary relief.
Leaving the Euro doesn’t solve the problem, because Greece’s debts will still be denominated in Euros. Creditors who hold Greek debt won’t be content to be paid in devalued drachmas, so Greece will still be on the hook for what they’ve already spent.
Defaulting will only make their predicament worse, because then no one will be willing to lend Greece money to continue their ruinous deficit spending.
Doing both and printing drachmas to continue spending will only result in hyperinflation. The Greeks can ask Venezuela how that’s working out for them.
If any Greek political party pledged to undertake real reform, reign in the Greek welfare state and end deficit spending, it’s escaped my attention. I suspect Greeks will have to experience a lot more economic pain, and no small measure of ruin, before undertaking the only obvious path to fiscal stability.
LinkSwarm for January 30, 2015
Friday, January 30th, 2015Already the end of January? How did that happen?
Some links:
Andrew Sullivan retiring to spend more time with the Sarah Palin homunculus that lives inside his head http://t.co/Cu9yYZOPu6
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 28, 2015
More than 2500 here in Austin rallying for #SchoolChoice #txlege #scw pic.twitter.com/m2RtVl3iHO
— Brendan Steinhauser (@bstein80) January 30, 2015
Did Megyn ask her for her lucky charms? RT @daveweigel: pic.twitter.com/0CFzMRY0bo
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) January 28, 2015
Gunman Forces Dutch News Off the Air
Thursday, January 29th, 2015Dutch news agencies reported on Thursday that a man with a gun had entered the offices of the national broadcaster NOS and was demanding to go on air.
The RTL press agency reported that a building belonging to NOS was being cleared. An 8 p.m. (2.00 p.m. EST) NOS broadcast displayed a message reading “In connection with circumstances, no broadcast is available at this time”.
Could be a lone nut. Or it could be a member of a certain religion that’s not Christianity, Buddhism or Judaism…
Update: Seeing reports he’s been arrested.
Update 2: Sky News confirms gunman’s arrest.
Pat Condell: “Jews are being driven out of Europe by Muslim anti-Semitism”
Wednesday, January 28th, 2015Once again, Pat Condell cuts right to the heart of the matter progressive multiculturalists desperately seek to obfuscate.
Samples:
“Not all Muslims hate Jews, but crucially the religion of Islam does hate them.”
“Every anti-Israel rally that’s full of Muslims quickly turns into an anti-Jewish hate fest. Pointing this out does not make me or anyone else a racist. However, denying it in the face of the evidence does make you a coward and a liar, especially if you call yourself a journalist.”
“Yet we in Europe are busy importing this mentality wholesale as part of our multicultural rainbow coalition of suicidal stupidity and moral cowardice.”
“The number of Jews leaving France for Israel is doubling every year.”
“In fact Jews are the new Jews. Muslims are the new Nazis.”
Watch the whole thing.
(Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
John Kerry Deploys James Taylor To Fight Jihad
Friday, January 16th, 2015So how did John Kerry apologize for the Obama Administration not sending a representative to the most important anti-Jihad rally in history?
He had James Taylor sing “You’ve Got A Friend.”
No. Really. That’s an actual thing that actually happened:
I’m trying to think of the last music performance that generated such cringe-worthy embarrassment for all involved. It may have been this:
I’m trying to imagine a musical choice that would have been more pathetic and I’m failing. Sir-Mix-A-Lot singing “Baby Got Back” would be more head-scratching, but at least wouldn’t have called for a double facepalm.
Well, I guess Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” would have been slightly more insulting.
A few Twitter reactions:
An emotional John Kerry holds James Taylor over his head outside France's window.
— Razor (@hale_razor) January 16, 2015
Last time John Kerry told someone in Paris "you've got a friend" it was the North Vietnamese. So this is actually an improvement.
— Drew McCoy (@DrewMTips) January 16, 2015
"How sweet it is to be mocked by you"
MT @politico: James Taylor to Paris: 'You've got a friend' pic.twitter.com/X81wtrg97Z
— Cameron Gray (@Cameron_Gray) January 16, 2015
Thank God Kerry was never elected President…
More Charlie Hebdo Fallout
Saturday, January 10th, 2015So the Charlie Hebdo killers are dead, but the manhunt for a female accomplice implicated in the deaths of four people during the siege of a Kosher food store in Paris continues. Here are various reactions and pieces on the Charlie Hebdo attack:
A journalist explains that a crowdfunding campaign, spontaneously created on the Internet by strangers, has already collected 98,000 euros in less than 24 hours. Charlie’s survivors are inundated with subscription requests that they can’t handle at the moment. Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, speaks. “There’s money arriving from everywhere. Assistance, space, personnel to deal with requests …” “We have received support from lots of media sources,” echoes Christophe Thévenet, another lawyer for the newspaper. “There are donations, already 250,000 euros from the Press and Pluralism Association, the million euros pledged by Fleur Pellerin [the French Minister of Culture and Communication]. … You are going to have finances like never before at Charlie!”
So no, we’re all not Charlie—few of us are that good, and none of us are that brave. If more of us were brave, and refused to yield to the bomber’s veto, and maybe reacted to these eternally recurring moments not by, say, deleting all your previously published Muhammad images, as the Associated Press is reportedly doing today, but rather by routinely posting newsworthy images in service both to readers and the commitment to a diverse and diffuse marketplace of speech, then just maybe Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t have stuck out so much like a sore thumb. It’s harder, and ultimately less rewarding to the fanatical mind, to hit a thousand small targets than one large one.
The French establishment is co-opting these brave men’s deaths for their own purposes, and for the most part the world’s media are helping them get away with it. I spent much of Thursday on TV and radio, and my irritation with the dismal #JeSuisCharlie campaign increased as the day wore on. The self-flattering evasiveness of all those cartoonists around the world offering lame variations of “the pen is mightier than the sword” was especially feeble.
Steyn also offers this sad, telling point:
I can’t claim to have known Georges Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist among the dead on Wednesday, but I met him briefly, a few years ago. Via Laura Rosen Cohen, I learn of the strange, circular journey of his life and death. His father was a Polish Jew who fled to Tunisia to lead a life free of pogroms. Georges was born there in 1934. Two years later, his dad was murdered, and the family moved again, this time to France.
And on Wednesday, like his father, the son was killed.
Wolinski père fled Jew-hate in Europe to be murdered in the Muslim world.
Wolinski fils fled Jew-hate in the Muslim world to be murdered in Europe, by Muslims.
however. When it comes to appeasing militant Islam, my own trade is equally culpable.
So is the entire apparatus of the State. We pussy-foot around anything which may cause offence to Muslims, partly out of good manners but primarily because we are worried about the potential backlash.
The reason most of the media in the Western world steered clear of republishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed wasn’t because they were not newsworthy but because of fears that men in balaclavas with machine-guns might march into the front office and start firing at random.
Snip.
Islam is just one of the New Establishment’s favoured client groups. Exciting ‘hate crime’ laws have been invented to grant them special privileges and punish their critics.
So mad mullahs in Midlands madrassas can call for homosexuals to be stoned to death. But a Christian preacher who objects to gay marriage can expect to be arrested and given a criminal record.
We have also created a ‘victim’ culture, which allows minority groups to justify any kind of bad behaviour on the grounds that they are being oppressed.
You didn’t have to look far yesterday to find allegedly ‘respected’ voices prepared to blame the staff of Charlie Hebdo for bringing the wrath of the Islamists down on themselves. They shouldn’t have been so ‘provocative’.
(Hat tip: The Jawa Report.)
Three cheers for cartoonist Robert Crumb. #CharlieHebdo #tcot #DrawMohammadDay pic.twitter.com/aSzf5nwGLS
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) January 10, 2015
The anti-Muslim backlash in France that many people were expecting this week seems to have somehow resulted in the murder of Jews.
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) January 9, 2015