Greece’s Syriza-led government has basically folded, for now, in its debt negotiations with the rest of Europe.

A “complete political surrender to the world of reality” was how [one European bank analyst] put it. [Other analysts] labeled it a “u-turn” by Tsipras, who won election Jan. 25 promising an end to budget cutting.
[...]
At last week’s meeting, Greece signed up to all the conditions of its current package and to continued international oversight, ditching plans to win back control of its purse strings so it could raise wages and pensions.

You can find GayPatriot’s backgrounder here. And some details on the new agreement, here.

Needless to say, many Syriza supporters are outraged. For example, one Syriza veteran of WW2 said, “…[Syriza's] promises have not turned into practice…On my part, I APOLOGIZE to the Greek people because I have contributed to this illusion.”

My feelings are mixed. Pleasure at seeing a gang of socialists having to learn math, combined with dismay/sympathy for the Greek people – who probably shouldn’t cave in; they probably would be better off, in the long run, if they defaulted on their debt and left the Eurozone.

I don’t think this drama is over. I think it ends with either Greece or Germany leaving the Euro currency (later this year or perhaps in 2016), as the Eurozone simply isn’t big enough for both of them. But, as the saying goes, “we’ll see.”

This will take some explaining.

• Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been Argentina’s President since the end of 2007. She is Peronist (Argentina’s version of national-socialist). Needless to say, her controversial policies have harmed Argentina’s economy.
• Alberto Nisman was an Argentine federal prosecutor. He was long investigating an infamous 1994 car bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
• In 2006, Nisman accused Hezbollah operatives of the 1994 bombing, and Iranian officials of having directed it (possibly over a nuclear deal that Argentina had suspended).
• On 1/19/2015, Nisman was found dead in his home, just hours before he was to explain his allegations to Argentina’s Congress.
• Government officials suggested it was suicide. Needless to say, Nisman hadn’t been suicidal, and had been living under constant death threats.
• The journalist Damian Prachter helped to blow apart the suicide story. Within a few more hours, Prachter found himself tracked by Argentine security services and felt compelled to flee Argentina.
• Wiki: “On Tuesday, 3 February 2015, Viviana Fein, the lead investigator into his death, announced that Nisman had drafted warrants for the arrest of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister, before his death. The 26 page document was found in the garbage in Nisman’s apartment.”
• The New York Times says that Nisman’s draft complaint against Mrs. Kirchner was about her efforts to protect Iran (or Iranian officials) from prosecution for the 1994 bombing. One analyst said that, had Nisman done his presentation to Congress, “It would have provoked a crisis without precedent in Argentina.”
• It seems that Mrs. Kirchner and some key supporters will be investigated anyway, now.

All I can say is: WTF? Why does Argentina’s President care so much about protecting Iranian officials? Were they funding her career? Or going to bail out her country?

BONUS: In Venezuela, condoms are now $755 a pack. Unrelated, except to show what happens when socialists run wild.

As AP reports, Greece has just gone (further) to the left by voting in their “Syriza” party. With 60% of the vote counted, Syriza leads with 36%, a blowout by Greece’s fragmented / multi-party standard.

Flounder of Delta House was reached for comment and said, “Oh boy, is this great!” Why would he? Because Syriza is a delightful mixture of the sane and the insane.

First, their key campaign plank has been to provoke a new crisis over Greece’s debt to the rest of Europe, including no small chance that Greece would default and/or leave the Euro currency. And that’s the sane part.

It’s sane, because Greece had entered the Euro under false pretenses and then borrowed far more than Greece can ever repay. Syriza is right that Greece’s debt problem is serious, and right that Greece’s solution may well be to default honestly and return to its former currency (the drachma), so that (after devaluation) Greece can be competitive in world markets. (Correction: Officially, Syriza wants to remain in the Euro. It’s just that no one else believes they can, if they’re serious about getting a haircut on Greece’s debt.)

The insane part is that Syriza calls their plans “an end to austerity”, “leaving austerity behind”, and so forth. The implication would be that, these last few years, Greece has buckled down and made painful, deep cuts to its public-sector spending. Yeah, except they haven’t.

When I last checked in 2013, Greece had still not made significant cuts to government spending after years of crisis and supposed austerity. (Update: tradingeconomics.com figures say that Greece did cut spending in 2010-2012 and has already started to reverse the cuts. In 2014, Greece’s spending was near its all-time high from 2009.)

As I’ve explained before, “austerity” is just the Left’s code word to mean “We aren’t being allowed to spend wildly enough!” If government stays as big as ever – if government has merely a small pause or slowing of its growth – the Left screams about the horrible austerity.

Likewise, “ending austerity” is the Left’s code to mean they get to grow government again and basically have it consume the rest of the economy (whatever it doesn’t own already). That is what the Greeks just voted in. A party that (wisely) wants to provoke a crisis over Greece’s debt; so that it can (stupidly) have even moar of the high-spending, Big Government policies that bankrupted Greece in the first place.

Something tells me the Greeks are about to find out what austerity really is.

Some News Items for your consideration

• Emperor Obama has fulfilled the Democrat-Left’s fifty-year dream of normalizing relations the brutal Communist Government of Cuba. The same people who were upset that three terrorists got waterboarded under GWB are now thrilled that the USA is embracing a Government that has systematically tortured and slaughtered thousands of political dissidents and their families and sent gays to concentration camps.
• A Christmas Miracle: Republican wins election recount. Martha McSally wins Gabby Giffords’ Congressional seat. I guess whatever Democrat was in charge of “finding” votes in the trunks of cars was too busy blocking traffic at an #(Only)BlackLivesMatter protest.
• Because slaughtering 130 children just wasn’t enough, Mohammedans went on to slaughter 150 women and girls for refusing to submit to forced marriage. Hillary thinks we should “empathize” with these… creatures.
• ICYMI, Kim Jong-Un is now the biggest player in Hollywood.
• Why Democrats want Amnesty: Illegal immigrant single mother demands $15-an-hour for making french fries and messing up your Drive-Thru order.

Readers of GP’s Economy category know that I like to write about how money-printing, now called “Quantitative Easing” (QE), actually drags on the economy (rather than stimulating it). In the long run, QE is just a ripoff to inflate asset bubbles for the Point-One Percent – and stick the rest of the economy with the fallout.

The topic is obscure, but it explains much of what has gone wrong in the U.S. economy as well as Europe, Japan, etc. (Overgrowth of the State explains the rest.) But today, I’ll spare you my verbiage and refer you to Pater Tenebrarum’s. Key passage:

When central banks or commercial banks add new money to the money supply, not one iota of real wealth is created…

However, monetary pumping does disturb the finely tuned dynamic processes [of the economy], as it distorts interest rates and prices. Economic calculation is then falsified and malinvestment invariably ensues. Have the housing bubbles in e.g. Spain and the US not shown this quite clearly?…The emergence of such illusory profits leads to the consumption of capital..

Eventually it turns out that companies actually lack the funds to maintain their real capital. This is what we mean when we refer to the pool of real funding being under pressure: the capital structure has been damaged. Actors in the economy need to…”repair” [the economy's real capital]…Then the economy is in “recession”, but this is really a healing process. It takes time to heal.

Additional money printing actively sabotages this healing process. It achieves nothing but even more impoverishment in the end, especially if it succeeds in igniting another boom by redistributing existing wealth and spurring more capital-consuming activities…

Inflationism is apparently more popular than ever. It doesn’t seem to matter how often and how consistently it fails to produce the desired results, there are always more people in the world who have an epiphany about saving the economy by printing money…[until] the economy has become so structurally damaged…that if banks indeed were to lend out more money [as the money-printers desire], they would be almost guaranteed to lose most of it.

If you have the patience, Read The Whole Thing.

Addendum: By the way, the Swiss don’t get it, after all. Last Sunday, 78% of Swiss voters were against having a sound currency. (Updates my earlier post, Do The Swiss Get It?)

UPDATE: The Japanese people suffer from their latest version of QE, even as their Nikkei stock index sits at seven-year highs. In the end, the U.S. will fare no better (and probably worse).

A few days old but, lest we forget: Ezra Levant was fined $80,000 by a Canadian court:

Levant’s posts centred on Awan’s testimony at a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal case…Awan was a law student when the article was published and was among a group of students who alleged the article was Islamophobic…Some of blog posts are titled “Awan the liar,” “Awan the liar part two” and so forth…Levant’s lawyer had said his defence was primarily one of fair comment. He had said the blog posts were based upon what Levant observed over two days of Awan’s testimony at the human rights tribunal and were comments on a matter of public interest.

Via HotAir, where Jazz Shaw explains that Levant was fined for expression of *opinion*:

When you get to subjects such as social evolution, religion and prognostication about the future (which was the subject of the original article) it’s fairly obvious that you are talking about matters of opinion. Even here in the United States, you can’t go around writing, for example, that Bob is a drug dealer unless you can come up with some proof to support the allegation. That veers off from the arena of opinion and into the land of slander and libel. But Ezra Levant was disagreeing with Awan – albeit somewhat strenuously – on more subjective matters. For this exchange of ideas a Canadian judge has fined him $80K.

I’m sure this is just what the Left would love to see in America. Levant plans to appeal; feel free to help him pay for it.

UPDATE: Not that I’m sure the U.S. is that much better. Of his order on deportations, President Obama has now boasted, “I just took an action to change the law” – thus ignoring the U.S. constitution, which assigns that power to Congress.

We’ll find out on Nov 30th, when the Swiss are set to vote on a citizens’ initiative that will require their central bank to hold 20% of its reserve assets in gold.

As recently as the year 2000, the Swiss National Bank was required by law to hold 40% of its assets in gold. That made the Swiss franc a relatively hard/safe currency. But Swiss voters removed that requirement in a 1999 referendum. Oops.

The SNB soon undertook an orgy of gold-selling, as well as money-printing (keeping the franc pegged to 0.83 Euro). Today, the SNB holds maybe 7-8% of its reserve assets in gold. The new referendum would require the SNB to take it back up to 20% over the next five years. (more…)

Zimbabwe tells the Obama administration to ‘go hang’:

THE United States has reportedly warned Zimbabwe about its growing economic dealings with Russia…

According to Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru, who is thought to be President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba, the Obama administration threatened further sanctions against Zimbabwe over its ties with Russia…

The US imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe in 2003, accusing Mugabe of human rights abuses and electoral fraud…

Manheru said it was ridiculous for the US to refuse to lift sanctions against Harare and then demand support for its measures against Moscow…He wrote…“This is where I am tempted to tell the American government to go and hang, hang on a banana tree, bums up.”

In 2008, left-liberals told me – explicitly and with a straight face – that electing a brown-skinned President would make us more trusted and popular, in the Third World.

First off, in the UK, a left-wing politician gets surprisingly candid about immigration’s importance:

Stella Creasy, the Labour & Co-operative MP for Walthamstow, said that Britain either needs immigration or a massive baby boom in order to support the growing number of pensioners, or else “our ability to sustain our economy” will collapse. She added that this would leave the NHS in crisis.

In an interview with Progress magazine, Ms Creasy said: “There are now more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 16 in Britain, so unless women like me have a lot of children very quickly, our ability to sustain our economy, to sustain our public services [will come under threat].”

Perhaps her horror at the thought of women “like her” needing to have children feeds into the horror that UK establishment parties feel about the rise of the UK Independence Party?

She said that this made UKIP leader Nigel Farage “deeply unpatriotic” as his party has campaigned for an end to mass immigration. UKIP are “basically talking about managing the decline of Britain” she said.

And it is true that UKIP voters believe that Britain needs tighter border controls. But does that make them “deeply unpatriotic”? Perhaps over-the-top name-calling is a tactic of the Left in the UK, as well as in America.

In reality, the UKIP stands in a libertarian-Thatcherite tradition; hardly unpatriotic, and not even very anti-immigrant. Its leader, Nigel Farage, has explicitly said “We’re not going to join in with extremist-nationalist groups” in the European Parliament. To the extent that Farage is required to ally with parties from other countries, he prefers Beppe Grillo, the comedian who leads Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star movement.

“I met Beppe Grillo last week … I am hoping we can do a deal with him and our group will sit bang in the middle politically of that parliament with a strong Europsceptic agenda,” Farage told the BBC in an interview…

Farage repeated previous comments that he would not work with France’s National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who this week struck a deal with four other Eurosceptic parties. “They come from a different political family,” he said. “We want nothing to do with that party at all.”

Which brings us to the point. To its great shame, the UK’s Conservative Party *is* now going to work with parties that it calls “unacceptable”, against Farage and the UKIP. Because the Conservative establishment is that frightened of Farage’s upstart movement, or of any effective challenge to Big Government.

I am reminded of nothing so much as how the Republican establishment treats the Tea Party (i.e., stab them in the back whenever possible, and even if it means betraying principles). It’s a sad moment for the once-great party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Consider these recent items:

• The UK Independence Party made big gains in UK local elections. They’re not against the ideal of a voluntary pan-European alliance, but are much against the coercive EU-rocrats who sit in Brussels.
• Anti-EU parties won 1/3 of the seats in the European Parliament elections last week, a political earthquake.

Some of these anti-EU folks are extreme nationalists, but more of them (like the UKIP) simply love liberty, democracy and traditional national sovereignty. The EU establishment hates those things, so look for EU media to try to tar them all as extremists, regardless of truth or facts.

From Canada’s National Post. Your porn is not Canadian enough, CRTC warns erotica channels

For failing to broadcast sufficient levels of Canadian-made pornography — and failing to close-caption said pornography properly — a trio of Toronto-based erotica channels has earned a reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television & Telecommunications Commission.

How does one make pr0n more Canadian? Does it involve maple syrup, bacon, and three month delays for health care?

30+ dead and 130+ injured…done with knives:

How much do you want to bet this tragedy took place in a “gun-free zone”? (That entire left-wing dictatorship of a country being such a zone, of course. Communist China does not permit its citizens’ gun rights.)

And how much hand-wringing do you think the Chinese people will do over what *they* supposedly did to cause the tragedy? (As opposed to punishing the actual perpetrators.)

Hat tip Zero Hedge.

President Obama will not attend the Sochi Olympics, but to appease his wealthy gay liberal donors show the Russians how miffed he is with recent anti-gay statements and legislation, he is sending lesbian tennis player Billie Jean King (because tennis is such a huge Winter Olympic sport), lesbian hockey player Caitlin Cahow, and Janet Napolitano as part of the US Olympic delegation.

[Edit: Deleted a line about Obama hiding behind Bille Jean King's pantsuit because it would have offended the easily offended.]

I love hockey, and amateur sports in general. But I lost interest in the Olympics a long time ago; one reason is because they have become so hyper-politicized; and the coverage doesn’t focus on the competition, it’s just one profile after another of an athlete overcoming something-or-other to compete at the games. Turning the U.S. Winter Olympic Team into an extension of the Obama Permanent Campaign and Minority Victims Perpetual Grievance Coalition just further politicizes sport; which is something we associate with totalitarian regimes, not a Constitutional Republic.

UPDATE: And a few days earlier, there was state-sanctioned looting:

Nov 9 – Thousands of Venezuelans lined up outside the country’s equivalent of Best Buy…President Nicolás Maduro ordered a military “occupation” of the company’s five stores…”I want a Sony plasma television for the house,” said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator, who had waited seven hours already outside one Caracas store. “It’s going to be so cheap!”

I’m shaking my head at the short-sightedness. If stores are going to be occupied and looted, then no, Amanda: TVs won’t be cheap.

I’m late getting to this, but from Reuters (via ZH):

Nov 15 – Venezuela’s socialist government has arrested more than 100 “bourgeois” businessmen in a crackdown on alleged price-gouging at hundreds of shops and companies since the weekend, President Nicolas Maduro said on Thursday.

“They are barbaric, these capitalist parasites!” Maduro thundered in the latest of his lengthy daily speeches. “We have more than 100 of the bourgeoisie behind bars at the moment.”

Inflation is the problem:

Officials say unscrupulous companies have been hiking prices of electronics and other goods more than 1,000 percent…

To spell it out for any lefties reading this: Companies only do what’s needed to stay afloat – and what the market will bear. It’s the Venezuelan currency that has been printed into oblivion. So yes, inflation.

Naturally, the government claims that its interventions help the poor: (more…)

The article, Saudi spy chief says Riyadh to ‘shift away from U.S.’ over Syria, Iran

To be sure, the Saudis have their own problems, but if our diplomats were a bit more, shall we say, deft in the dealings with our allies, we might have been able to avoid this.

UPDATE (from Jeff): Lots of irony here. First, the article sort-of-implies that Saudi Arabia was behind Kerry and Obama’s sudden, urgent push in August for a Syria war. (Once again, the Left *is* what it accuses the Right of.) Second, if the Saudis are shifting ‘away from’ U.S. protection, the article ought to state whose protection they are shifting ‘to’. I’ll say it: either Russia or China. Which is not good. Apart from the implied failure of the U.S. to contain Iran, it brings us a step closer to the world’s eventual rejection of the U.S. dollar as the basis of international trade. Whether through policies of insane spending/deficit/debt at home, or flailing incompetence abroad (no grand scheme), Obama is getting the U.S.’ world position to unravel. “Thanks, Obama!”

Congratulations to Tony Abbott and Australia’s Liberal Party, for their victory in Australia’s elections on September 7!

Note that “Liberal” is considered conservative, in Australia. I suspect it’s something like “classical liberal” (my own preferred political designation), the concept that it is liberal to believe in liberty, that is, in individual rights under a small(-ish or small-er) government.

HotAir has it covered, including links to Tony Abbott’s victory speech, and a Townhall link about how “War on Women” distraction tactics did not work for Australia’s Left.

As a bonus: Center-right bloc takes power in Norway, headed by Ms. “Iron Erna” Solberg, who also deserves our congratulations. Not that she’s perfect – for example, I do not like what I’ve heard of her past stances in favor of Islamic Sharia councils in Norway – but Norway has turned a new leaf, and let’s hope she leads it wisely.

…or else it’s just a pretense, a lie.

Reporter James Kirchik, known from TNR and The Advocate, was cut off last week on Russia’s RT network for denouncing Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay law. I’m with Kirchik in opposing the law, which puts speech restrictions on Russian gays.

Don’t get me wrong: As RT were ‘paying for his mic’, they had every right to cut off Kirchik. They have no obligation to provide him with a platform. Still, Kirchik deserves our cheers and thanks for publicly thumbing his nose at a State-funded propaganda network and for defending free speech.

Actions to support free speech, yay! But free speech isn’t free speech, unless disagreeable/bad views may also be expressed. The principle is that anyone advocating bad politics is to be answered by more speech; never to be silenced by law.

And that brings us to the case of the Rev. Scott Lively. In a blog thread last week, rusty brought up Lively, who is being sued in Massachusetts at the behest of a Uganda gay group, for his advocacy of the criminalizing of homosexuality in Uganda.

Criminalizing homosexuality is anti-gay (a term that the Gay Left otherwise uses too much) and a violation of individuals’ natural rights. As such, it’s wrong. But natural rights include free speech and conscience. For someone to merely advocate that homosexuality be criminalized is not a violation of human rights; it is an exercise of them.

See the problem? The pro-gay side is out there using the law to restrict opponents’ political speech, in the name of human rights (which ought to include free speech). So wrong!

Sure, Rev. Lively advocates something dumb and bad. But he has the moral right to do it, which means he ought to have the legal right.

That a U.S.-based court presumes to deal with a Ugandan matter seems odd; but that it does so in order to punish anyone’s political advocacy is a disgrace, a sign of how dangerously low our once-great country has fallen.

SMUG (the Ugandan gay group) is wrong to try to silence Lively with a court case. Given that they are, the MA court should have refused to play along, on the grounds that the MA and U.S. Constitutions guarantee Lively his right to free speech in all political issues, even gay issues, even when international law fails to guarantee it and even, or especially, if Lively’s views are objectionable.

It’s the objectionable views – the ones that the government’s Court itself dislikes – that courts are most obligated to protect. By now, we are used to the Gay Left forgetting such basic principles of freedom and justice, but – “et tu, Massachusetts?”

UPDATE: It just occurred to me that the MA court, and others who blame the Rev. Lively for what Ugandan legislators do, might be infected with a racist premise: the premise that the Ugandans are mere children (intellectually and morally), influenced too easily by the white man (Lively), who is thus accountable for their actions. If true, it would support my earlier post on the racism of the Left in 2013.

NB: I had originally said that Lively was being “prosecuted” in MA, when of course I should have said “sued”. Mistake fixed.

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that North Koreans are massively addicted to crystal meth:

North Korea is experiencing a “drug epidemic,” according to a study published in the Spring 2013 edition of the journal North Korea Review.

“A New Face of North Korean Drug Use: Upsurge in Methamphetamine Abuse Across the Northern Areas of North Korea” explains how during the past several years meth production has gone from government-owned factories to privately run underground laboratories and “home kitchens.”

According to the report, it’s not the first time that a drug originally intended for export into China and beyond ended up flooding North Korea’s domestic market.

Throughout the 1990s and into the next decade, opium was the narcotic of choice for both the cash-strapped Kim Jong Il regime and the populace. But by the mid 2000s, the poppy fields began to disappear and meth became pervasive…

To borrow a few lines that Bruce re-tweeted, “I’m so old, I remember the press having a healthy skepticism for military involvement in the Middle East…I’m also glad we amended the constitution to exclude that congressional authorization for war…”

I’m so old, I remember that President Bush actually troubled himself to get approval from Congress for the Iraq War, including a majority of Senate Democrats. But President Obama, with Syria? I doubt he’ll try.

According to Reuters this weekend:

About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act. More Americans would back intervention if it is established that chemical weapons have been used, but even that support has dipped in recent days…

…just 27 percent said they supported his decision to send arms to some Syrian rebels; 47 percent were opposed…

About 11 percent said Obama should do more to intervene in Syria than sending arms to the rebels, while 89 percent said he should not help the rebels…

Obama is considering a range of options. The most popular option among Americans: not intervening in Syria at all. That option is backed by 37 percent of Americans…

If “Obama” (was Reuters disrespectful for calling him that?) intervenes in Syria, he will be doing it without the support of the American people.

There may be no good options in Syria. Just to review: An Iranian-backed dictatorship is fighting rebels who are, basically, al Qaeda. We have claims that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons; and counter-claims that it was the rebels, running a vicious false flag operation.

UPDATE: Kerry says it was the Syrian government. I must be frank: Hearing it from Kerry makes me a little more skeptical than I was before. The man has been a gigantic, shameless liar on public issues ever since he slandered a generation of veterans in testimony before Congress, in 1971.

I realize that Kerry is backed up, in this instance, by hundreds of functionaries in the Obama administration, and that makes deception less likely (or harder to pull off). But not impossible; and because of Benghazi among other scandals, we know that the Obama administration can be untruthful on foreign policy. They may be telling a true story this time; but skepticism is not wholly unwarranted, and should not be faulted automatically.

If President Obama wanted trust to come forth in a more automatic fashion, then he should have (1) not let his administration mislead the American people on Benghazi, and (2) not chosen a figure known for his decades of lying, as Secretary of State. Having said that, could the administration’s version of events be true? I’m keeping an open mind. Kerry has promised more evidence in days to come; we’ll see.

In case you haven’t seen this already on The Gateway Pundit: