Dave Barry’s year-end roundup is out and, as usual, it’s well worth reading.
Selections:
Greece Inches Closer to the Endgame
December 29th, 2014Just because the European Debt Crisis hasn’t been in the headlines much as of late doesn’t mean it’s gone away.
Greece’s government has fallen again and they’ll be holding general elections next month. “Opinion polls point to a victory by the radical leftist Syriza party, which wants to wipe out a big part of Greece’s debt, and cancel the terms of a bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund that Greece still needs to pay its bills.”
The problem is that Greece wants to continue spending other people’s money to prop up a bankrupt welfare state, and the rest of Europe has decided they would really prefer to stop pouring money down that particular rathole. Syriza is against “austerity,” which is to say they oppose the Greek government even pretending to practice fiscal restraint. Because pretending is all they’ve done.
Remember, real austerity is reducing outlays until they match receipts. All those “austerity” street protests were over lowering Greece’s budget deficit from 9% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP. The rest of Europe didn’t ask them to stop digging their own grave, they just asked them to dig more slower. And this year, Greece’s budget deficit stood at 12.2% of GDP. Evidently even fake austerity is too much to ask of them; even the illusion of fiscal restraint is intolerable. This is why all news that Greece has “balanced” next year’s budget should be taken with several grains of salt.
So we’ll see another election, and if Syriza wins we’ll see another round of demands for more bailouts and debt writedowns, with Greece threatening yet again to exit the Euro. We’ve seen this movie before. The most likely outcome is that another cabal of EU-phillic insiders in the Greek government will engineer a last-minute cave-in to demands from Brussels and Frankfurt, ram another toothless austerity measure through parliament in exchange for still more credit (and perhaps even a small symbolic measure of debt forgiveness), dissolve the government again following the inevitable public outrage, then have the Greek bureaucracy ignore even those woefully inadequate reforms, setting the stage for the farce to repeat itself in another 12-18 months, or until mean old Aunt Angela finally cuts up the credit card.
Europe has had several years to acclimate itself to the fact the Greece might exit the Euro, and the possibility of a “grexit” has been priced into the markets for some time now. I do not pretend to understand the intricacies of the European banking system, but my impression is that much of the “stress testing” of European banks this year was to prepare for one or more of the PIIGS leaving the Euro. I suspect that the European elite have minimized their own exposure to a Greek default (which is really all they care about), and that the EU and the European Central Bank has found new, sneaky ways to put taxpayers on the hook for any possible sovereign defaults, strengthening the banking system without addressing Europe’s long-term economic problems (unsustainable levels of debt to support cradle-to-grave welfare states for shrinking populations).
It would be great if Greece actually undertook real structural reforms of their bloated, dysfunctional government, but I see precious little evidence that they’ve actual done so. Expect more pain ahead, and at least one more bailout…
Having An Intermittant Database Connection Problem
December 29th, 2014I seem to be having an intermittent database connection problem for old posts. Not seeing it right now, but if you see it crop up again, let me know.
Merry Christmas!
December 25th, 2014Enjoy a break from politics and spending time with your family. Here’s George Winston’s version of “The Holly and the Ivy” off his landmark album December:
Merry Christmas!
Gentry Liberals vs. The Police That Protect Them
December 23rd, 2014The classic saying is that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Judging from how many liberals have been saying how much they hate cops, I would guess that very few have been mugged in recent years. Chalk that up to falling crime rates, which in turn was helped along by aggressive “broken windows” policing like that which helped bring crime under control in Guliani-era New York City.
Given how many on the identity politics left were chanting “Dead Cops” in recent weeks, it looks like they’ve forgotten (or simply don’t care) what it took to bring those crime rates down. Which brings us to the recent police shootings.
Former NY Police Commissioner Howard Safir noted: “Michael Brown and Eric Garner died resisting arrest. Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu died doing their job. It is a very important distinction.” Further:
The national dialogue on proper and effective policing has been totally distorted. Activists purporting to represent the majority of the black community have been bolstered by a 24 hour news cycle that gives them unwarranted credibility. I do not believe for one minute that Al Sharpton represents the feelings of most hardworking, law abiding black American families. I know through dozens of community meetings during my time as NYC Police Commissioner that what the black community wants most is what we all want—a safe environment in which to live their lives.
Snip.
Does that mean that there are not serious incidents of police abuse or misjudgment? Of course there are. When they take place we should investigate them thoroughly and prosecute and punish those who committed the wrong doing. We should not burn down buildings and murder police officers.
When Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley brutally executed Officers Ramos and Liu he did so in an atmosphere of permissiveness and anti-police rhetoric unlike any that I have seen in 45 years in law enforcement. The rhetoric this time is not from the usual suspects, but from the Mayor of New York City, the Attorney General of the United States, and even the President. It emboldens criminals and sends a message that every encounter a black person has with a police officer is one to be feared. Nothing could be further from the truth. We will never know what was in the mind of Brinsley when he shot officers Ramos and Liu. However we do know that he has seen nothing but police bashing from some of the highest officials in the land.
You could chalk some of that bashing up to the usual Democratic hostility to working class men, but this goes much deeper. The radicals who now make up the ideological core of of the Democratic Party never got over their hatred of the police, still viewing them as agents of oppression and “The Man”–even though, with Obama and Holder in office, they are in fact “The Man” themselves these days. But who could have possibly imagined that the same activists who chanted “Free Mumia!” would one day chant that they wanted “dead cops,” or that the members of Occupy would delight in publicly defecating on cop cars? Also remember that Obama’s pals in the Weather Underground were always far more adept at killing policemen like Brian McDonnell and Waverly Brown than they ever were at effecting political change.
The likes of Obama, Holder and Sharpton have continually inflamed racial tensions by hyping otherwise nationally insignificant stories like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in order to continue milking minority grievances and keep them voting Democratic. When it comes to standing with grievance-mongering Social Justice Warriors, or standing with cops, the Democratic Party elite has chosen to stand with the Al Sharptons of the world.
If Democrats want a rerun of the sixties and early seventies, they shouldn’t be surprised when voters in 2016 treat them the same way they treated George McGovern in 1972.
Texas Economy Continues to Kick Ass
December 22nd, 2014Two bits of news dropped right after I put up the most recent Texas vs. California update.
First, Texas added 34,800 nonfarm jobs in November, and 441,200 more jobs year-over-year, more than any other state. And this happened despite the drop in oil prices.
One reason Texas does so well is that it has the highest level of economic freedom of any state (tied with South Dakota).
Needless to say, those two facts are strongly correlated. In the long run, free states produce jobs and economic activity while less free states produce dependency and stagnation.
(Hat tip: TPPF.)
LinkSwarm for December 19, 2014
December 19th, 2014I trust everyone reading this has already heard about Sony Picture’s spinelessness in cancelling their release of The Interview, and Paramount’s even more-spineless refusal to allow theaters to show Team America: World Police in its place. This would be good reason to avoid paying for any Sony or Paramount products any time in the near future. And Cuba is a topic for another time. So here’s a quick look at the rest of what’s been happening the week before Christmas:
I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka’s The Trial I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting “boomeranged” onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare “Ignore all rules!” when faced with the same rules used against them.
Boko Haram Murders 32, Kidnaps 185 Women and Children
December 18th, 2014After pointing out that mass jihadist violence was common two days ago, Nigeria’s Boko Haram decides to underscore my point:
Boko Haram insurgents kidnapped at least 185 women and children, and killed 32 people in a raid in northeastern Nigeria this week, local officials and residents said.
Gunmen in pickup trucks attacked the village of Gumsuri, just north of Chibok, on Sunday, shooting down men before herding women and children together.
“They gathered the women and children and took them away in trucks after burning most of the village with petrol bombs,”
This actually happened a few days before the Peshawar school attack, but the village was remote enough that word is only trickling out now.
And speaking of the Peshawar massacre, a Taliban spokesman said killing women and children is just fine and dandy with Islam:
“The Mujahideen were instructed to only kill the older children. The Peshawar attack is in complete accordance with the Prophet’s teachings because when the Prophet killed the Jewish Tribe of Banu Qurayza, he put the same guideline, that only the children who have hair below their belly button (pubic hair) are allowed to be killed. Killing of women and children is also in accordance with the teachings of the Prophet.”
Got that? “Killing of women and children is also in accordance with the teachings of the Prophet.” Any questions?
(Hat tip: Jim Treacher’s Twitter Feed.)