The Other McCain

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

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. The blueprint for building these parallel digital ecosystems already exists among independent developers, who routinely bypass mainstream app store chokepoints to host everything from encrypted peer-to-peer communication networks to the best betting app for international sports markets. By adopting this decentralized server infrastructure, conservative media networks can completely insulate their content from Silicon Valley’s algorithmic interference and arbitrary platform bans.
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

Rule 5 Sunday: Force It

Posted on | June 28, 2015 | 13 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I was going to name this week’s post after the classic rock tune by UFO, Only You Can Rock Me, but I was pretty sure I’d done that already. Besides, why not throw more gasoline on the Fake Rape Epidemic fire with a deliberately ambiguous work by the same band?

No clearly didn’t mean no.
>:)

As usual, reader discretion is advised when clicking, because some or all of the following links may be NSFW.

Randy’s Roundtable kicks off this week with Julie Montouret, followed by imNsho with Country Girls Rule, Goodstuff with surfer babes (FOR SCIENCE!), and Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and the ever-popular Girls with Guns. Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Tax Plan Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, and First Street Journal has They Left Their Lipstick At Home.

EBL’s herd this week includes Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Mosby, Kathryn Grayson, and Morgan James.

Wine Women and Politics returns with the Babe of the Day Gallery, Friday Sweetie, Had Your Morning Orange Juice?, Thursday Hotties, Babe of the Day, Lounging In Latex, and Thursday Baby Dolls.

A View from the Beach presents Namibian Hotty – Behati Prinsloo and Friends, Did Bugs Bunny Do In the Neandertals? (has cave girl content), Not Your Average Water Slide, “I Know It’s Wrong (But That’s Alright)”, A Wet One for Wednesday, Who’s On the Money?, “Pocket Full of Sunshine”, Hold My Beer and Watch This!, and Hot Summer!

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your morning coffee creamer, Monday Motivation Invitation, Peekaboo Fur, Tuesday Titillation At Attention, Evening Awesome with Boots, Humpday Hawt Bearded Clam, Bearded Clam Second Helping, Fursday Formal “Only Her Hairdresser…”, Corset Friday Flabbergast, T-GIF Friday Hard Wood, Tit Tat Toe, and Bath Night: In Motion She Rises.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Jillian Hall; his Vintage Babe is Colleen Townsend, and Sex in Advertising this week is covered by Victoria’s Secret. Also, Game of Thrones Body Double for Nude Walk of Shame! At Dustbury, it’s the single-named singers Duffy and Alsou.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat for next week’s Independence Day Weekend Rule 5 Roundup is midnight on Saturday, July 4. Inspiring and patriotic Rule 5 submissions are particularly welcome!


Force It
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

Chris Squire: No

Posted on | June 28, 2015 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Chris Squire, bassist of Yes, has joined the Band Eternal. Here’s the signature cut of theirs, as far as I’m concerned:

Category: Video

Toward the Feminist Dystopia

Posted on | June 28, 2015 | 47 Comments

 

@JanetheActuary is an outside-the-box thinker you should follow on Twitter, and her musing today on Patheos deserves notice:

The increasing unmarriagableness of men is often identified as the reason why the rates of unwed motherhood have climbed so much . . . Women report thinking of the father of their child as “just a child himself” — whether because young women tend to be more mature than their same-aged counterparts or whether motherhood itself makes those women more mature. . . .

She then notes an apparent tendency toward bisexual/lesbian “experimentation” among young women and considers the possibility of women forming what might be called pseudo-lesbian families:

If women, to a significant degree, give up on men and form all-female households, no specific woman has harmed any specific man. But the harm to men, and society, in general, would be significant.

She asks if this is “too far-fetched,” but in fact this is already happening in various ways. Most women in their 20s nowadays are unmarried, and most of those women share apartments with other young women. Although the vast majority of these women do not think of themselves as bisexual (and certainly not lesbian), the shortage of marriageable males results in these young women experiencing conflicts and instability in their relationships with men, so that their female friends and roommates are a more enduring emotional influence in their lives than are their on-again/off-again boyfriends. We should not be the least bit surprised if some women in this predicament “give up on men,” and feminist theory would certainly encourage women to do this:

“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy. In order for men to have a justification for exploiting women and an ability to enforce that exploitation, heterosexuality has to become, not merely an act in relation to impregnation, but the dominant ideology.”

That was first published 40 years ago in a book co-edited by Charlotte Bunch, who subsequently became a distinguished academic at Rutgers University and in 1999 was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights by President Bill Clinton. (Click here to see C-SPAN video of Hillary Clinton’s speech at the December 1999 ceremony.)

You must never forget: Feminism Is Queer!

 

Feminism is Queer is an introduction to the intimately related disciplines of gender and queer theory. While guiding the reader through complex theory, the author develops the original position of “queer feminism,” which presents queer theory as continuous with feminist theory. While there have been significant conceptual tensions between second wave feminism and traditional lesbian and gay studies, queer theory offers a paradigm for understanding gender, sex, and sexuality that avoids the conflict in order to develop solidarity among those interested in feminist theory and those interested in lesbian and gay rights.

You see this 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. Accepting feminist gender theory, as I’ve explained, requires the de-normalization of everything:

To be a feminist means that you cease to believe that there is anything natural about the human condition and, furthermore, you must reject everything “normal” as inherently oppressive. . . . By constantly sharing everything, all their feelings and stories and selfies, feminists forge the bonds of Radical Sisterhood, as they struggle to overthrow the power of Male Supremacy.

My book, Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, explains this in depth. Based on the writings of dozens of feminist authors — Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller, Dee Graham, Judith Butler, Sheila Jeffreys, et al. — who are quoted at length, Sex Trouble exposes the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of what can only be described as a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It.

* * * * *

A quick note: The issue about Amazon reportedly prohibiting sale of the Confederate flag — see my article “A Dangerous Precedent” — has caused ironic harm to the conservative movement, and to me in particular. Online sales through Amazon Associates are an important source of revenue to my blog as for many other conservative bloggers who derive commissions from these sales. Amazon has been very good to me over the years, and so you can see why I am disturbed when I see people demanding a boycott of Amazon. Whose fault is it that Amazon was directly attacked by Democrats and the news media (but I repeat myself) with demands that they cease sales of Confederate merchandise? If executives at Amazon unwisely folded under this pressure, who is to blame? We can discuss these things reasonably, but how does it make sense to punish me by attempting to punish Amazon? Please do not deprive my family of income in the misguided belief that you will hurt Amazon more than you hurt me. God knows my family has already suffered a lot on account of my stubborn willingness to speak unpopular truths and defend unfashionable traditions, and I ask that readers not add to this suffering. — RSM





 

Category: Gays, Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: We’re Only In It For The Money

Posted on | June 27, 2015 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Pipe Dreams
Regular Right Guy
Animal Magnetism
Batshit Crazy News
In My NOT So Humble Opinion
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

Oppressive Biology
Living In Anglo-America
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Media Synchronicity and Confederate Thoughts on an Era of Elite Corruption
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Dustbury

Indecent Liberties: Police Say Teacher Showed Her Nude Selfies to Teen Girls
Living In Anglo-America
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: Saturday Morning Edition
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Avoiding EDC Edition
The Pirate’s Cove
BlurBrain
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 06.22.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive

A Dangerous Precedent
Batshit Crazy News
The Daley Gator
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach

In The Mailbox: 06.23.15
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame
Batshit Crazy News
Living In Anglo-America
Law Of Markets
Regular Right Guy

You Want To Whine About Being Offended?
Here, Let Me Give You Something To Whine About
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Elections Matter, But They Don’t Really “Matter” Matter, Do They?
The Lonely Conservative
The Camp of the Saints
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 06.25.15 (Late SCOTUScare Gnashing Of Teeth Edition)
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Feminist Tumblr: Spot the Error
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News
Jim-O-Rama

In The Mailbox: 06.26.15
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (16)
  2.  Regular Right Guy (9)
  3.  A View from the Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


Category: FMJRA Award

Greece Runs Out of Other People’s Money

Posted on | June 27, 2015 | 115 Comments

The Eurozone’s problem child throws a tantrum:

Two senior Greek retail bank executives said as many as 500 of the country’s more than 7,000 ATMs had run out of cash as of Saturday morning, and that some lenders may not be able to open on Monday unless there was an emergency liquidity injection from the Bank of Greece. An official with Greece’s Capital Markets Commission, the markets’ regulator, also warned that the Athens Stock Exchange may be unable to operate on Monday without a cash injection into the banking system. A Greek central bank spokesman said it was making efforts to supply money.
The European Central Bank’s governing council was expected to hold a conference call on Sunday to review the banks’ liquidity condition, said a Greek official, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The Frankfurt-based central bank said in a twitter post that it’s closely monitoring developments and would review the situation “in due course.” . . .
Euro-area finance ministers rejected Greece’s request for a one-month extension of its aid program, which expires Tuesday, shutting down any last chance for a financial stopgap until the referendum is held.
After withdrawing more than 30 billion euros as the anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, took power, depositors are now reacting to the latest twist in the five-month standoff with European leaders and creditors.

(Via Memeorandum. More at Legal Insurrection.)

In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.

Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland — the other fiscal weak sisters in the Eurozone — may manage to avoid default, and the richer EU nations may be able to stabilize the overall regional economy. If so, the Greek problem is just a Greek problem. On the other hand, who knows?

Greece’s European partners shut the door on extending a credit lifeline to Athens, leaving it facing a default that could push it out of the euro after the leftist government rejected tough lender demands and put their bailout deal to a referendum.
Finance ministers of the other 18 countries sharing the euro met for the first time without Greece and flatly rejected its pleas to extend an expiring bailout until after the referendum on July 5 and setting the stage for Athens to default on a crucial IMF payment on Tuesday.
The 18 pledged to do whatever it takes to stabilize the common currency area and said they were in much better shape to do so than at the height of the euro zone crisis a few years ago. In a formal statement, they also implicitly urged Greece to impose capital controls to stabilize its banking system.

We’ve spent seven years in a slow, weak recovery from the crash of 2008, and it might be that the Greek crisis will trigger a worldwide recession. Riots, famine, hyperinflation — anything is possible.

“Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice!
Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”

OK, probably not that bad. But you never know . . .





 

Category: Economics, Europe, Greece

A Prelude to Social Destruction

Posted on | June 27, 2015 | 129 Comments

“Politics is downstream from culture,” Andrew Breitbart often said. This was why I spent Thursday writing 4,000 words — “Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame” — in preparation for the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage which, as anyone who had been paying attention could have predicted, was a 5-4 decision with Justice Kennedy as the decisive vote. What we may discern from reading Justice Kennedy’s ruling is the same thing we discern from reading vulgar expressions of “gay pride” on Tumblr blogs. In both instances, we are confronted by irrational sentiment that not only refuses to recognize the potential for harmful social consequences, but which further insists that opponents are motivated by ignorance and prejudice. The Obergefell decision is not so much a legal argument as it is an accusation of bigotry against American society, an indictment of a nation that imposed a “demeaning” stigma on homosexuals. The decision declares that “marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order” (p. 4) before proceeding to declare that this social order must be destroyed because . . . well, why exactly?

There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle . . .

(What principle? Never mind. Justice Kennedy’s on a roll now.)

. . . yet same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage . . .

(You see that, in Justice Kennedy’s enlightened mind, the “benefits” of marriage are supplied by government, rather than being intrinsic to the nature of marriage.)

. . . and are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable. . . .

(How dare you “consign” them to “instability,” you haters!)

It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society . . .

(They’re locked out of the institution — by haters!)

. . . for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage.

(My wife has “transcendent purposes” for me to take out the garbage.)

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.

What can anyone say in reply to such a lecture, except to wonder how or why this alleged “inconsistency . . . is now manifest” in a way it was not manifest at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted and ratified by legislators who never so much as hinted any intention to alter the definition of marriage? Quite obviously, what is at the heart of this specious reasoning is a determination that gay people must be granted access, via marriage, to that “constellation of benefits” of which Justice Kennedy spoke. That is to say, insofar as the Welfare State doles out taxpayer dollars to straight people because of marriage, gay people must also be cut in for their share of the government-provided loot, and who cares what the larger consequences may be? We may expect, for example, that this will hasten the bankruptcy of Social Security as gay “widows” qualify for survivors benefits, but it is clear that Justice Kennedy would never pay heed to any such practical concern.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. . . . The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
— Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting

Equality with a capital E and Progress with a capital P are the inspirational touchstones of Obergefell. The past is a museum full of obsolete prejudices, where ideas that “may long have seemed natural and just” are dismissed as inferior to the ideas of our Enlightened Arbiters of Social Justice, these robed judicial eminences who are authorized to lecture us about the central meaning of fundamental rights. We can read the Constitution the same as they can, but only they are endowed with the extraordinary insight necessary to find “manifest” there a “principle” which had hitherto escaped our feeble perception.

The quasi-religious devotion to Equality and Progress that animates Obergefell moved Justice Kennedy to a mood of poetic rapture that reaches its ecstatic climax in his conclusion:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

One imagines the pages being stained and stuck together after Justice Kennedy finished writing that paragraph. Then he smoked a cigarette, got dressed in a hurry, put a $100 bill on the night stand and left quietly, while the Constitution cried herself to sleep.

About 20 years ago, when liberals began their push for gay marriage, it struck me as an absurd idea. I’m sure most other Americans felt the same way about it, and the social conservatives who took it seriously at the time seemed like hysterical alarmists. Certainly if anyone had told me, circa 1995, that we would reach this point so quickly, I would not have believed them, for I simply could not imagine that we would ever reach this point at all. Trusting in the basic common sense of the American people, I underestimated the persuasive power of the media and the entertainment industry, which have been playing the role of cheerleaders at the LGBT pep rally for so long. Also, I underestimated the extent to which the liberal gospel of Progress and Equality had taken root in the minds of people who, wishing to avoid serious thought about politics and social order, were content to go along with the crowd.

Conscientious people did not want to make themselves unpopular by resisting too loudly this lemming-herd stampede toward the cliff. If you do not wish gay people to be “condemned to live in loneliness” — note well Justice Kennedy’s accusatory implication that opponents are engaged in wanton cruelty — then you must Do Exactly What They Say and Give Them Exactly What They Demand. Thus we arrived at a 21st-century cultural Munich, where marriage was the Sudetenland.

Do you suspect that this will not be the totalitarians’ Final Demand? Well, you’re just a hateful homophobe, aren’t you?

What next? Ace of Spades ponders this briefly:

Now come the knock-on cases, where they ban federal funding of religious schools that don’t recognize gay marriage.

This is obvious enough, and there are many more equally obvious ramifications of Obergefell. The angry LGBT mob, full of destructive rage, will seize the whip they’ve been handed by the Supreme Court and employ it to inflict their sadistic revenge on America.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.





 

Category: Gays, Marriage, Supreme Court
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