The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 07.01.15

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Ted Cruz And The Supreme Court
Proof Positive: 800-Pound Reagan Statue
Doug Powers: MSM Awakenings – Hey, Maybe Problems Like Greece Have Something To Do With Spending Money They Don’t Have
Twitchy: Photographer Who Posted Recreation Of Iconic Iwo Jima Photo With A Pride Flag “Didn’t Expect The Backlash”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Next Culture War
American Thinker: SCOTUS Ignites New Level Of Resistance
Conservatives4Palin: So What If Greece Leaves The European Union?
Don Surber: Another Faked Hate Crime
Jammie Wearing Fools: Arab Allies Looking Anywhere But To America For Friendship
Joe For America: Hillary Caught Lying Again – Can We Arrest Her Yet?
JustOneMinute: United They Stand
Pamela Geller: Forty Imams Deported From France For Hate Speech
Protein Wisdom: A Follow-Up Re Intentionalism, Textualism, And Originalism
Shot In The Dark: Fighting Residual Anomalous Racism With Acute Personal Racism
STUMP: Digging Into The Near Past – Greece’s Pension Situation
The Gateway Pundit: ISIS Publishes Map Of July 4th FBI Command Centers
The Jawa Report: ISIS Snuff Film (No Really)
This Ain’t Hell: VA Tells Vet “We’re Not Taking New Patients”
Weasel Zippers: CNN Poll Shows Zero Support For Obama’s Gun Control Plans After Charleston
Megan McArdle: Tallying Right-Wing Terror Vs. Jihad
Mark Steyn: Violent Extremistan Versus The Dar Al Gay


The Complete Avengers 50th Anniversary Edition

Category: Linkagery

Reminder: Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 37 Comments

Tyrelle Shaw.

How many times do I have to explain this? You let enough kooks run around loose — as has been the policy in this country since we de-institutionalized the mentally ill in the 1970s — and people adjust their expectations. People become accustomed to encountering weirdos, freaks and lunatics, jabbering madness to themselves on street corners or posting deranged nonsense on Tumblr blogs. You’re not even supposed to notice there is anything strange about these wild-eyed nutjobs roaming around with facial piercings, tattoos and purple hair. I’ve been denounced as an “ableist” for pointing out that a Tumblr feminist is mentally ill, even though her “about” page listed a long litany of psychiatric diagnoses and her writing was self-evidently crazy.

Well, you can’t call them “crazy” anymore, because then you’re stigmatizing the mentally ill, and stigma is bad. Probably not as bad as getting bashed in the face with a hammer, however.

How a Life That Showed Promise Veered
Into Violence Against Asian Women
The last message to family and friends from Tyrelle D. Shaw, an artist and bow-tie designer who called himself “Mr. Talented,” arrived at 1:38 p.m. on June 16.
“Surprisingly, I saw my afterlife!” he wrote on Facebook. “If I’m correct- I should be reincarnated into a Rat. Guess what? Your life after death already exist. It’s just waiting for you to die. I know! I know! People call me weird, but I’m actually Brilliant.”
The distressing note, in which Mr. Shaw said he planned to take his own life, signified the beginning of the end of a vicious crime spree that had terrified an entire community in New York. It also represented the climax of what the Police Department’s chief of detectives would later describe as “one of the strangest stories” he had encountered in some time.
Over the previous six days, a man had attacked at least four women in Manhattan, smashing them in the face with a heavy object wrapped in a plastic bag. The common thread in the seemingly random attacks: All of the victims were of Asian descent.
The attacks and the resulting manhunt for Mr. Shaw, identified through a surveillance video, spread fear in Chinatown and other Asian enclaves across the city.
In one of the episodes, the police said, the man complained to his victim that Asian women would not talk to him. But could such a thing really explain the assaults?
What happened next would also shock: Mr. Shaw said on his blog that he planned to place his neck in a noose tied to an elevator at the bottom of a shaft. The next person who pushed a button to send the elevator up would, he wrote, “murder me without even knowing it.”
Days later, his body was found. It was a sad, violent end to a short, promising life. On his blog, he had admitted to the attacks and had blamed being rejected by Asian women for committing them. He had tried to talk to nearly 1,500 in less than 350 days, he wrote, and none had said hello: “I just couldn’t understand why Asian Women didn’t find me attractive.”
A friend recalled Mr. Shaw saying he had been found to have bipolar disorder, but could not afford the medicine to treat it. Mental health records obtained by The New York Times from 2013, when he was in jail on Rikers Island, did not show him reporting any manic symptoms, only a history of depression.

Notice the sob-sister feature treatment about the “sad” death of this young man with such a “promising life.” If only he had posed with a Confederate flag . . . Well, that would be a different story. Meanwhile, in the real world, where the New York Times is mournfully reporting the death of this violent maniac, we learn why Tyrelle Shaw was jailed at Rikers Island. You see, he “did stupid things, like stealing a leather jacket valued at almost $1,500 from Bloomingdale’s, or stealing four pairs of sunglasses from the BCBG Max Azria store on Madison Avenue.” To liberal journalists, these are just “stupid things,” not actual crime:

He also lied. Two years ago, Mr. Shaw told a friend he was moving back home to Toronto. But he spent much of the period from June 2013 to June 2014 on Rikers Island after being convicted of stealing the sunglasses, as well as an iPad from a hair salon and an iPhone from the front seat of an ambulance.
He was arrested again in December, this time for trespassing, after he was found in a storage room in a building at 696 Madison Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He spent only a day in jail.
Those who knew him said he had changed. Nia Langley, who met Mr. Shaw through social media, said he was “very giving, very open, very artistic,” that is, at least until the beginning of this year. She said he started posting “weird stuff” online — about being rejected by women, about how he felt as a black man, about how he thought Asians were racist.

The parallels to Dylann Roof seem obvious enough here, and the feminist blog Jezebel sees another relevant comparison:

Mental illness doesn’t explain the violence of the attacks Shaw is suspected of committing. Neither does a feeling of entitlement to women’s bodies, and a frustration when they didn’t respond the way he wanted. But like Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 others during a shooting rampage he blamed on women rejecting him sexually, there’s a toxic mess here of untreated mental illness, growing rage and misogyny. In Shaw’s case, that was seemingly compounded by a life of poverty and a grandiose self-image that he seemingly came to realize was disconnected to the way the world actually viewed him.

Slinging this kind of gender-theory jargon about male “entitlement” and “misogyny” is how feminists prove they’re smarter than the rest of us. This particular writer, Anna Merlan, got her B.A. from UC-Santa Cruz and a master’s from Columbia University, which qualifies her to . . . write for a feminist blog. Elite credentials for such menial drudgery, and Ms. Merlan fails to notice a striking aspect that connects Rodger and Shaw — ethnic fetishism. Rodger was half-English, half-Malaysian with a fixation on blondes, whereas Shaw was black and had a fixation on Asians. Can we deduce anything from this? Is there a “moral to the story,” some kind of sociological pattern here? I don’t know, and it might be unwise to generalize from these two examples because Elliot Rodger and Tyrelle Shaw had something else in common: THEY WERE CRAZY!

Wacko, bonkers, zany, cracked, demented, disturbed, off their rockers, nuttier than squirrel farts and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

And what do I keep telling you about crazy people?

There are more than 300 million people in the United States. What percent of them are dangerously crazy? If it’s just 1%, that means there are 3 million potential mass murderers out there. And we can’t lock them all up, because the mentally ill have rights, including the right to vote.

How do you think Obama got elected, anyway?

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 06.30.15

Posted on | June 30, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Go Home, Hillary, You’re Drunk
Doug Powers: Good Luck – Obama Advising Greece On How To Stave Off Financial Ruin
Twitchy: Media Accused Of Ignoring Black Church Fires After Obsessing Over Single CVS Arson; NAACP Speaks Up
Jack Kingston: The Sad Truth About King v. Burwell


OVER THE TRANSOM
American Power: Jeb Bush Calls Confederate Flag A “Racist” Symbol
American Thinker: Obergefell v. Hodges And Tax Exemption For Churches
BLACKFIVE: July 4th
Conservatives4Palin: Gov. Palin – Building America’s Future
Don Surber: Gay Marriage No Longer Helps Proponents
Jammie Wearing Fools: Gay Marriage Supporters Handle SCOTUS Decision With Class And Dignity
Joe For America: Medical Marijuana Isn’t Medicinal
JustOneMinute: Say It Ain’t So
Pamela Geller: Jihad In New Jersey – Muslim Arrested For ISIS Plot, Brothers Named Co-Conspirators
Protein Wisdom: No, Intentionalism Didn’t Kill The Rule Of Law
Shot In The Dark: I Love A Happy Ending
STUMP: Things Fall Apart – Greece And Puerto Rico
The Gateway Pundit: FAKE HATE – Black Activist Admits Hanging Confederate Flag From Black Soldier Memorial
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Hillary Is Oppressed
This Ain’t Hell: Pilot Says F-35 Can’t Dogfight
Weasel Zippers: Amazon – No Confederate Flags, But Hezbollah Onesies, Hamas Flags, And Even Taliban Action Figures Are Acceptable
Megan McArdle: The Moral Of The Greek Story
Mark Steyn: That Flagging Feeling


End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun)
Exceptional Americans: 50 People You Need To Know

Category: Linkagery

The Feminist Martyrdom Complex: Climbing Up on the Digital Cross

Posted on | June 30, 2015 | 35 Comments

 

Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) is a bisexual Marxist with a history of severe mental illness, but other than that, I can’t imagine why her writing would be controversial or attract angry criticism. On the other hand, being a Marxist weirdo also gained the young British blogger a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University (the Ivy League having become a place where heterosexual capitalists are unwelcome). Finding that her 2014 book Unspeakable Things approvingly quotes love advice from Soviet commissar Alexandra Kollontai, I remarked:

Anyone who cares to read Unspeakable Things . . . will discover that Laurie Penny is as wholehearted an evangelist for sexual perversion as she is a wholehearted enemy of democratic capitalism.

This is not to say that Ms. Penny lacks talent. Indeed, she is a clever, articulate and persuasive advocate of pure evil. In this, she is much like Jean-Paul Marat or Leon Trotsky — remarkably intelligent, possessed of impressive talent as writers and capable of penetrating insight and yet, unfortunately, fanatical devoteés of dangerous and antisocial ideas. Trotsky was no doubt hard at work thinking up some new plan to advance the worldwide proletarian revolution right up to the instant Ramón Mercader‘s ice-ax slammed into his skull.

One of the wonders of democratic capitalism is how it gives its worst enemies weapons with which to attack democratic capitalism. The wealth that provided Ms. Penny’s education (her parents are successful lawyers who sent her to posh schools) was created by the economic system she desires to destroy, and her weapon is the high-tech system of computer-assisted communication whose development was funded by the white, male capitalists she so ostentatiously despises. This petulant and selfish brat was raised in affluence and grows richer every day as she is paid handsomely to spew her degenerate sentiments onto the Internet, collecting royalties from (and generating profit for) her publisher.

Having made a success of this ironically lucrative racket, and admired by the kind of fools who typically admire such monsters, Ms. Penny nevertheless has a persistent problem: People who don’t like her also have access to the Internet, and employ this technology to tell her what a deplorably bad person she is. Well . . . how dare they?

You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you’re political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter.
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse. . . .
In my experience . . . the charges of stupidity, hypocrisy, Stalinism and poor personal hygiene which are a sure sign that any left-wing columnist is at least upsetting the right people, come spiced with a large and debilitating helping of violent misogyny. . . .
If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it’s not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions. Free speech means being free to use technology and participate in public life without fear of abuse — and if the only people who can do so are white, straight men, the internet is not as free as we’d like to believe.

Ms. Penny’s 2011 column at The Independent is a typical feminist gesture: “They hate me because I’m a woman! Misogyny! Harassment!”

How much did The Independent pay her for that column?

Think about this. Ms. Penny was only 25 years old at the time and yet, because of her privileged background and elite education (Wadham College, Oxford) had managed to get herself hired as a political opinion columnist at an influential publication. Is anyone surprised that her impudent know-it-all tantrums provoke outrage? And is it surprising that, when readers become (quite understandably) irritated by lectures from this arrogant whelp, they respond by targeting her with what we might call ad feminem slurs and threats?

Like so many other feminists, Ms. Penny would have her readers believe that only feminist writers are subjected to online abuse, and that only “white, straight men” perpetrate it. Let anyone inquire with Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, Katie Pavlich, Dana Loesch or Ann Coulter if they wish to learn what sort of hateful misogyny the Left directs against conservative women. Nor, for that matter, are women the only ones who must endure such abuse. Go ask Rick Santorum, Herman Cain or Marco Rubio what kind of harassment, threats and smears they have been forced to endure. Indeed, you could ask Jeff Goldstein what it was like to be harassed by the dangerously deranged Deb Frisch.

The Left celebrates cruel, selfish cowards like Laurie Penny, who gain fame and wealth by denouncing the success of honest, decent people. She is a typical totalitarian, dishonest and sadistic, her politics inspired by a malign appetite for the power to make other people shut up.

All because she is so “lonely . . . ugly and unloveable,” you see.

Having secured herself a platform from which she can promote bad ideas — and get paid for doing it — Ms. Penny then got paid for writing a column in which she demanded action to silence those who criticize or disagree with her. And she wonders why people consider her a Stalinist.

Leon Trotsky could not be reached for comment.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Curb Your (Sexual) Enthusiasm

Posted on | June 29, 2015 | 84 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed, feminists are (a) trying to increase the number of rape accusations by (b) changing the concept of “consent” in such a way that (c) any unhappiness with a sexual encounter justifies a woman claiming that it was coerced or otherwise less than fully consensual, as part of (d) an obvious effort to make heterosexual activity less common, if not altogether illegal.

People think I’m joking or exaggerating when I refer to “Feminists Against Heterosexuality,” but it is becoming difficult to ignore how the anti-male ideology of feminist gender theory is reflected in “rape culture” discourse. Consider what one web site calls “101 stuff about consent”:

  • Sexual consent is an active ongoing process that involves free, non-coerced choice and shared responsibility about when, whether, and what to do sex-wise.
  • Consent has to be clear, explicit, communicated well and checked in on a lot.
  • Enthusiastic consent is mandatory before engaging in anything of even a mildly sexual nature.

Have these lunatics consulted any sane adults about how normal sex actually happens in the real world? Or do you see how, because “feminist gender theory . . . requires the de-normalization of everything,” this insistence on “active” and “explicit” consent is part of an agenda that seeks to inspire impressionable young people with a paranoid hostility toward normal sexual behavior? Note well that enthusiastic consent must be obtained before even “mildly sexual” activity and it is “mandatory” that there be an “explicit” negotiation process toward a sort of verbal contract as part of this “active ongoing process.” Yet any normal person who has ever had normal sex knows quite well that if two people are genuinely “enthusiastic,” no such negotiation is necessary. It is an insult to the intelligence of any sexually experienced adult to pretend that this is how sex normally happens, and it is disturbing to think that young people are being lectured in this manner.

Do young people no longer have desires, instincts, urges? Have words like “passion” and “seduction” and “romance” lost all meaning? Does anyone expect hormone-addled teenagers parking in the moonlight on Lovers Lane to conduct their adolescent trysts like diplomats negotiating a trade agreement? Is there no longer any expectation or hope for spontaneous magic in human sexual behavior? What kind of dingbats are giving kids this wretched advice about sex?

QueerTips
The best queer sex ed class you were never offered.
Run by the kickbutt people of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes’ Out For Health initiative.

This is a Planned Parenthood initiative in upstate New York, with offices in Tompkins County, Chemung County, Schuyler County and Steuben County — an area in and around Ithaca, site of Cornell University. Is anyone surprised to find this perverse “Queer Tips” nonsense being promoted in the vicinity of an Ivy League campus?

In the 21st century, where elite universities are hives of LGBT activism, we would be shocked to learn that any student at Cornell was interested in normal sex. Cornell students are highly intelligent, and only an extremely stupid student would attempt to engage in normal sex on an elite campus in the current climate of “rape culture” hysteria. A heterosexual male can expect to be expelled from Cornell if a partner claims rape two months after their drunken hookup, on the basis of an administrative tribunal in which he is deliberately deprived of the due-process rights that the Constitution guarantees any common criminal.

Ah, but he is not a common criminal! He is a heterosexual male on a university campus, where heterosexuality is seen as inherently oppressive to women, and males are denounced as oppressors. And where, of course, Feminism Is Queer as I explained:

[T]his is not “fringe” feminism or “extreme” feminism. This is simply what feminism means for university students in the 21st century. Feminism is Queer is a 2010 textbook whose author, Mimi Marinucci, is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University.

If anyone wishes to argue that I’ve dredged up an example of feminism that is not “mainstream,” let them make their arguments to the legislators and other officials who sanction the propagation of this ideology in America’s universities. Let the defenders of “mainstream” feminism examine the syllabi, textbooks and faculties of Women’s Studies programs and see what students are actually being taught and by whom.

If anyone is skeptical about this agenda, let them turn their attention to “Introduction to Feminist Theory” as taught at the University of Buffalo, where a student was overheard to exclaim: “Every time I walk out of this class I just become more sexually confused!”

You cannot blame teenage college students for this kind of confusion, when they are being bombarded with with radical ideology. Sexual confusion is everywhere, so that Planned Parenthood — a taxpayer-funded organization most people think of as a provider of contraceptives — now offers “QueerTips” on how to negotiate “enthusiastic” consent before doing “anything of even a mildly sexual nature.” Evidently people in upstate New York are so stupid they don’t even know how to fornicate without advice from these self-appointed “experts.”

What is being lost is the voice of common sense. Feminist ideologues, gay activists, legal authorities, education bureaucrats, academic theories — these are the people controlling the discourse about sexual behavior, and all of them in one way or another have their own personal and political axes to grind. The voices of normal people happily leading normal lives, and who hope their children can also grow up to find this kind of normal happiness, are silenced and marginalized because common sense is dismissed or derogated by the cultural intelligentsia. Remarking on the effect to enact the “yes means yes” or “affirmative consent” standard as legislation, Judith Shulevitz of the New York Times observes that “criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores”:

It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. . . . It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication. . . .
“If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

What neither Shulevitz nor Gertner nor any of the other intellectual critics of “affirmative consent” are willing to acknowledge that it seems specifically targeted at punishing heterosexual males. The feminist purpose, we can perceive, is to make the risk of a rape accusation so high that men will become afraid of sexual involvement with women under any circumstances. Already on most campuses, any male who expresses sexual interest in a woman is subject to the accusation of “harassment.” Should he actually attempt to initiate romantic activity — a kiss or a hug — this can be construed as “sexual assault” if the woman finds his advances “unwelcome” or “unwanted.” Yet even if she welcomes his interest and appears to be a willing participant in sexual activity, the man is still at risk that she will afterwards decide she was raped. Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit against Columbia University argues quite plausibly that Emma Sulkowicz was in love with Nungesser and that she falsely accused him of rape as an act of spiteful revenge because he was not interested in a romantic relationship with her.

Many young women are now full of such insane rage against males — really, you need to read my Feminist Tumblr series — that it is difficult to imagine why any boy smart enough to get into college would dare so much as speak to any of his female classmates, much less try to have sex with one of them. This climate of sexual fear and hostility has been deliberately incited by campus feminists to enhance their own power and influence, as well as to create a political issue that can be exploited by Democrats. One would have to be absurdly naïve to think it a coincidence that “rape culture” emerged as a topic of controversy at the same time Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign began gearing up for 2016.

Love is dead. Feminists killed it.

Having made it impossible that men and women could ever love each other — for how can the helpless victim of male supremacy be expected to love her oppressor? — feminists are now determined that sex should also be eradicated. Nevertheless, even while the feminist crusade to abolish collegiate heterosexuality reaches a fever pitch, students are being told it is “mandatory” to negotiate “enthusiastic consent.”

Somewhere at a university this fall, a boy and a girl will step outside a crowded frat house party and embrace beneath the autumn moonlight. She will nod her assent to his suggestion that they should pursue the matter further. Then the young man will look into her eyes and say, “Well, we could go back to my place. However, before we do, the university’s affirmative consent policy requires me to tell you exactly what I’m going to do to that hot little body of yours . . .”

That should make for an interesting conversation. Who knows? They might fall in love. It’s not illegal yet. Not even at Cornell.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.29.15

Posted on | June 29, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Da Tech Guy: Scalia – Who Knew Everyone Before Us Were Bigots And Dopes?
EBL: Frank Sinatra – Cycles
Michelle Malkin: The Media’s Vile Attacks On Conservative Assimilationists
Twitchy: Is Oliver Willis Downplaying The Holocaust?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Israel Intercepts Gaza Flotilla
American Thinker: What Life Is Like When Children Of Gay Parents Don’t Matter
Conervatives4Palin: Ayatollah Roberts And His Sharia Council
Don Surber: Editor Claims Not Publishing Letters Is “Fostering A Civil Discussion”
Joe For America: In Celebration Of Ramadan, Obama Signs Executive Order Banning Confederate Flag
Pamela Geller: Finally, Hundreds Of Cabbies Ticketed For Shutting Down NYC Streets During Ramadan
Protein Wisdom: How You Get There Matters. Still.
Shot In The Dark: One Vote
STUMP: Graph Week – The Mortality Gender Gap Among Workers
The Gateway Pundit: That Was Quick – Polygamists, Pedophiles Push For Their Civil Rights, Too
The Jawa Report: Ministry Of Irony – Three Islamic Terrorist Attacks In One Day?
The Lonely Conservative: So If This Is How It’s Going To Be
This Ain’t Hell: Little Rock Jihad Victims To Be Awarded Purple Hearts
Weasel Zippers: Liberal Group Advocating $15/Hour Minimum Wage Posts Facebook Job Listing That Pays Just $12/Hour
Megan McArdle: Subsidies And All, Obamacare Stays
Mark Steyn: Brollies And Dollies


The Avengers – The Complete Emma Peel Megaset

Category: Linkagery

Greece Closes Banks in Crisis

Posted on | June 29, 2015 | 70 Comments

It was first announced that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras debt-ridden left-wing government would close banks Monday, but now they’ve decided the banks will remain closed all week:

Greek banks are to remain closed and capital controls will be imposed, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says.
Speaking after the European Central Bank (ECB) said it was not increasing emergency funding to Greek banks, Mr Tsipras said Greek deposits were safe.
Greece is due to make a €1.6bn (£1.1bn) payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday – the same day that its current bailout expires.
Greece risks default and moving closer to a possible exit from the eurozone.
Greeks have been queuing to withdraw money from cash machines over the weekend, and the Bank of Greece said it was making “huge efforts” to keep the machines stocked.
Greek banks are expected to stay shut until 7 July, two days after Greece’s planned referendum on the terms it had been offered by international creditors for receiving fresh bailout money. . . .
Eurozone finance ministers blamed Greece for breaking off the talks, and the European Commission took the unusual step on Sunday of publishing proposals by European creditors that it said were on the table at the time.
But Greece described creditors’ terms as “not viable”, and asked for an extension of its current deal until after the vote was completed.
“[Rejection] of the Greek government’s request for a short extension of the programme was an unprecedented act by European standards, questioning the right of a sovereign people to decide,” Mr Tsipras on Sunday said in a televised address.
“This decision led the ECB today to limit the liquidity available to Greek banks and forced the Greek central bank to suggest a bank holiday and restrictions on bank withdrawals.” . . .
The temporary closure of banks in Greece, and the introduction of capital controls, is very bad news for Greece. Greek people will have less money to spend and business less to invest; so an already weak economy will probably return to deep recession.

(More at Memeorandum.) Notice how Tsipras suggests that the creditors are being undemocratic, rather than admitting that Greece has been irresponsible? Tsipras obviously believes Greeks have a right to other people’s money, and that it is wrong for European creditors to expect them to pay back what they borrowed.  Meanwhile the financial experts are getting worried:

The world will be unable to fight the next global financial crash as central banks have used up their ammunition trying to tackle the last crises, the Bank of International Settlements has warned.
The so-called central bank of central banks launched a scatching critique of global monetary policy in its annual report. The BIS claimed that central banks have backed themselves into a corner after repeatedly cutting interest rates to shore up their economies.
These low interest rates have in turn fuelled economic booms, encouraging excessive risk taking. Booms have then turned to busts, which policymakers have responded to with even lower rates.
Claudio Borio, head of the organisation’s monetary and economic department, said: “Persistent exceptionally low rates reflect the central banks’ and market participants’ response to the unusually weak post-crisis recovery as they fumble in the dark in search of new certainties.”

Oh, by the way: Puerto Rico can’t pay its debts, either.

 

Category: Economics, Greece

Sounds Like A Business Opportunity

Posted on | June 29, 2015 | 21 Comments

by Smitty

I agree that isolation of conservatives is an obvious goal for the Left, but Erickson’s worry doesn’t seem such a threat:

And now, Apple and Facebook are set to develop news platforms that will have a human curator, instead of a computer algorithm. Twitter, likewise, is engaging humans on trending news topics, etc. It is only a matter of time because Google works its algorithm magic to drive down links to those who oppose the new cultural agenda.
So we will see orthodox Christian voices disappear from most news channels. The left are master propagandists. One of the chief tricks of the propagandist is to convince you that you are all alone. Everyone else thinks otherwise. So an Apple that celebrates gay rights and bans what it thinks is hate is only one step from prohibiting a Russell Moore piece through its news service.

As long as there are blogs like Red State and Hot Air, I guess I don’t see the worry.
Outfits like Salem Media Group might grow to include more services, including conservative social media indexes and Twitter/FaceBook replacements.
Capitalism has taken some hits in recent decades, but there is still a market for media with a shred of moral clarity. I hope.

Category: Red State
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