President Obama’s Ticking Greek Time Bomb

President Obama’s Ticking Greek Time Bomb

By Desmond Lachman 

Developments in Athens suggest matters are spiraling out of control.

The last thing that President Obama needs before the November election is a Greek exit from the euro. Such an event would surely cause contagion to the rest of southern Europe, which would in turn roil global financial markets. Yet the evidence coming out of Athens suggests that such a Greek event could very well occur over the next few months, with all of its adverse consequences for the U.S. and global economies.
Among the least favorable signs coming out of Athens is the pause in International Monetary Fund-European Union (IMF-EU) negotiations with Greece over the next loan disbursement. These negotiations have now been suspended until early September in order to give the Greek coalition government more time to iron out its differences on the budget measures to be taken. In the meantime, the Greek government is literally running out of money. Without any further disbursements from the IMF-EU program, Greece will almost certainly default on its official loan obligations by October.

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Churchill and the Power of Words

By John Steele Gordon 

Had Winston Churchill never set foot in the House of Commons, he would still be remembered today as one of the major writers of his time.

Winston Churchill is one of the titanic figures in the history of the 20th century. If not for him, that century would have turned out very differently indeed. It is hard to see how Britain could have long survived the fall of France without Churchill’s adamant refusal to consider negotiations, his shrewd diplomacy to nudge a reluctant United States into aiding Britain’s cause, and his immortal oratory to strengthen British resolve in the face of the German onslaught.
Had Britain been knocked out of the war in the summer of 1940, could anything have stopped Hitler’s conquest of the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and then the Soviet Union? Could even the United States have then prevented, in Churchill’s words, “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”?

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Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee, PC?

By Michael M. Rosen 

Free speech rights ‘for computers’—in all their glory and with all their limitations—are fundamentally derived from human activity, warts and all.

“I’m sorry Dave,” Hal, the legendary talking computer, asserted in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
That breakthrough film raised the startling specter of sentient machines capable of speaking intelligently and outwitting their masters—at least until their plugs are pulled.
Even in 2012, we’re still quite distant from the world of 2001, but computer speech has emerged as a fascinating new issue at the intersection of law, technology, and politics. As more and more commercial functions and decisions become automated, a discussion has been taking place among legal and policy whizzes about whether and how to regulate and respect machine “speech.”
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu provocatively asked: “Do machines speak? If so, do they have a constitutional right to free speech?”
Wu’s questions seemingly answer themselves. Constitutional rights, as everyone knows, apply only to humans, not to animals, cyborgs, or computers—don’t they?
But Wu is getting at something a bit more subtle:

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Raining Nonsense during a Drought

By Blake Hurst 

The only conclusion to draw from a year like this one is that Mother Nature is not always kind.

Never waste a good crisis, at least when it comes to the op-ed section. On the subject of this year’s historic drought, the chattering classes have certainly obliged.
William Moseley contributed a sermon for the New York Times, pinning the scarlet A on corn and damning it for all that is wrong with agriculture.
The author informs us that because corn is particularly vulnerable to a hot, dry period during the crucial week of pollination, no sensible farmer should grow it. Gosh, without the agronomic advice of professors of geography, I wouldn’t know what to plant on my farm here in Missouri!

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