With the news of Germany standing fast against “Eurobonds,” and the Eurozone crisis worsening as a result of the impasse, I posted this silly tweet last night:

Fear! Fire! Eurobonds! Awake! #PANIC

Political Math said he found this very funny, to which I replied with a faux-quote from Angela Merkel: “Let the little people blow.” This caused a brainstorm, as I suddenly realized there’s waaaay more material there. Lord of the Rings quotes are perfect for this situation! (And every situation, really. But particularly this one.) I immediately couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. Anyway, the flood gates opened:

“Understand, François, I would use these eurobonds out of a desire to do good. But through me, they would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine.”

“One Bond to rule them all; One Bond to find them; One Bond to bring them all; and in the darkness bind them.”

“Give Greece the weapon of the bankers. Let us use it against them!”
“Greece cannot wield the Eurobond! None of us can.”

Merkel to Hollande: “I will not lead the Eurobond within a hundred leagues of your city.”

“I am the Servant of the Anti-Inflationary Fire, Wielder of the Flame of Weimar. Dark Eurobonds will not avail you, Flame of Udûn!”

European Council: “If you ask it of me, I will give you the right to issue the One Bond.”
Merkel: “You offer it to me freely? I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this. In the place of a Council you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! … I have passed the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Merkel.”

“Greece is demanding Eurobonds from the south, Spain from the west. And France, you say, has betrayed us. Our list of allies grows thin.”

I eventually broadened the joke to quotes more generally about the Euro situation, not necessarily Eurobond-related:

“I know what you saw, for it is also in my mind. It is what will come to pass if you should fail. The Eurozone is breaking. It has already begun.”

“We Germans cannot hold back this storm. We must weather such things as we have always done.”
“But you’re part of this world! Aren’t you?! You must help! Please!”

“The Euro cannot be destroyed by any craft that we here possess. It was made in the fires of Frankfurt. Only there can it be unmade. It must be taken deep into the heart of the European Central Bank, and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came!”

And lastly, my personal favorite:

[Greece throws a few hundred billion euro down a hole.]
Germany: “Fool of a Greek! Throw yourself in next time and rid us of your stupidity!”

UPDATE: Brandon Minich chimes in with more good ones:

(Conversation in the 1990s)
“The European currencies are strong, my Lord. Their roots go deep.”
“Rip them all down!”

Hollande: “What is this new devilry?”
Merkel: “A Bank Run. A demon of the ancient world. This foe is beyond any of you. Run!”

Merkel: “My currency is spent. My chancellorship has ended. Greece has deserted us. ABANDON YOUR DEPOSITS! FLEE, FLEE FOR YOUR CURRENCIES!”

“The Euro is burning…already burning.”
“It’s not dead! It’s not dead!”
“Farewell, Hollande. Go now and die in what way seems best to you.”

Heh! #nerds

UPDATE: More:

“A great bank run, you say?”
“All Barcelona is emptied.”
“How many?”
“Ten thousand strong at least.”
“Ten thousand?!”
“It is a bank run bred for a single purpose: to destroy the Eurozone. The banks will be insolvent by nightfall.”

“I will not risk open #PANIC.”
“Open #PANIC is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.”

“A red sun rises. Red ink has been spilled this night.”

Panagiotis Pikrammenos: “Go back to the abyss! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your fellow lefties!”
Alexis Tsipras: “Do you not know death when you see it? This is my hour!”

“Arise, Voters of Syriza! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword day… a red day… ere the sun rises! DEATH!! DEATH!!!”

France to Netherlands re: opposition to eurobonds: “How long has it been since Germany bought you? What was the promised price?”

“Angela… they cannot win this fight. They are all going to die!”
“Then I shall die as one of them!”

“Is there any hope, Angela, for Spain and Italy?”
“There never was much hope. Just a fool’s hope.”

“I’m… naked in the dark, with nothing, no veil… between me… and the € of fire! I can see it… with my waking eyes!”

“Sons of Germany, of France, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the Euro fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of currency. But it is not this day! An hour of woes and shattered banks, when the unity of Europe comes crashing down! BUT IT IS NOT THIS DAY! This day we bail out Greece! Again!”

Merkel: “Forgive me. I mistook you for Sarkozy.”
Hollande: “I am Sarkozy. Or rather, Sarkozy as he should have been.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Thanks for the link, Glenn! ‘Tis my first Instalanche in a while.

To encourage discussion, I’ve temporarily disabled mandatory comment registration. Chat away!

(Regular readers, if you’re presently logged out, you can still log in here.)

UPDATE: More…

“You did not seriously think that a small Mediterranean economy could contend with the will of the Bond Markets? There are none who can.”

“Smoke rises from the Acropolis of Doom. The hour grows late, and Hollande the Red rides to Berlin, seeking my counsel. For that is why you have come, is it not? My old friend.”

UPDATE: Uh-oh. We have crossover:

“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of bondholders suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

UPDATE: Back to LOTR, with still more jokes, some from comments…

“One does not simply walk out of the Eurozone. Its iron gates are guarded by more than central bankers. There are technocrats there who do not sleep. And the great € is ever watchful. Not with ten thousand drachma could you do this. It is folly.”

“The Greeks delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of the Bundesbank.”

“The Euro stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while Germany is true.”

“I think you should leave the Euro behind, Greece. Is that so hard?”
“Well, no. … And yes. Now it comes to it, I don’t feel like parting with it. It’s mine, I found it. It came to me!”
“There’s no need to get angry.”
“Well, if I’m angry, it’s your fault! It’s mine… my own… my precious…”
“Precious? It’s been called that before, but not by you.”
“What business is it of yours what I do with my own currency?”
“I think you’ve had the Euro quite long enough.”

“We swears we will enact austerity measures! We swears to serve the master of the Euro. We will swear on… on… the Euro!”

Or, if we make the drachma, instead of the Euro, the “precious”…

“We wants the drachma back. We needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little Eurocrats. Wicked, tricksy, false!”

UPDATE: More!

“Strangers from distant lands, friends of old, you have been summoned to answer the threat of debt. Europe stands upon the brink of destruction. You will unite or you will fall. Each nation is bound to this fate, this one doom. Bring forth the Euro.”

“I owe nothing.”
“Indeed. I can avoid paying my debts for a while if I wish, but to make them disappear entirely, that is a rare gift.”

“They were nations once. Great nations. Then Germany the deceiver gave them Euros of power. Blinded by their greed, they took them without question — one by one, falling into darkness. They are the Euro-gûl. Nation-wraiths, neither living nor dead.”

“I’ve put this off far too long … I regret to announce that this is the end! I am going now. Goodbye!” [slips drachma on finger, vanishes]

I don’t follow Scottish politics, so perhaps Alasdair or my dad or somebody can tell me: is this a fair summary of yesterday’s election results?

FREEDOM!!!!! :)

P.S. Meanwhile, it’s FPTP FTW, and I believe Nick Clegg is saying to his enemies that they may take his Alternative Vote, but they’ll never take his adorable cats!!!

Thomas Friedman nails it, or so it seems to me, in his analysis of what Andrew Sullivan calls the Middle East’s 1848 — starting with the line “This is really hard stuff, and it’s just the beginning.”

When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history — and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them — well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.

How could it not be? In Libya, we have to figure out whether to help rebels we do not know topple a terrible dictator we do not like, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to a monarch whom we do like in Bahrain, who has violently suppressed people we also like — Bahraini democrats — because these people we like have in their ranks people we don’t like: pro-Iranian Shiite hard-liners. All the while in Saudi Arabia, leaders we like are telling us we never should have let go of the leader who was so disliked by his own people — Hosni Mubarak — and, while we would like to tell the Saudi leaders to take a hike on this subject, we can’t because they have so much oil and money that we like. And this is a lot like our dilemma in Syria where a regime we don’t like — and which probably killed the prime minister of Lebanon whom it disliked — could be toppled by people who say what we like, but we’re not sure they all really believe what we like because among them could be Sunni fundamentalists, who, if they seize power, could suppress all those minorities in Syria whom they don’t like.

Foreign policy is so, so complicated. I’ve increasingly come to believe that those, both Left and Right, who believe it can be fit into a straightforward ideological box are, basically without exception, fools. Or rather, I should say, they’re being foolish in that particular regard. They may not be fools on other topics. There are lots of smart, very smart, neo-cons and paleo-cons and isolationists and noninterventionists and various other -ives and -ists. But the pragmatists, the situationalists, are fundamentally correct, maddening though that is to folks who are naturally predisposed to be idealists like, yes, myself (grand theories of #PANIC!!! and doom notwithstanding). Of course, the pragmatists and situationalists can and do get their pragmatic, situational, case-by-case judgments wrong in certain particular cases — it’s always much easier to know that in hindsight, but sometimes it might also be true with foresight — but their basic approach (that nuance and details matter) is correct, and the ideologues’ basic approach (that they don’t) is wrong.

This stuff is hard. The fact that Obama seems to be struggling with the complexity of it, rather than taking a pre-determined ideological approach and “not blinking” or wavering or otherwise risking America’s “prestige” (hi Newt) in the pursuit of sound policy, is a feature, not a bug.

Obama hasn’t handled this perfectly, but that’s impossible. Meanwhile, I believe there is a directly inverse relationship between “seeming confident” and “having a f***ing idea what you’re doing” in this sort of situation — those who seem confident don’t know what they don’t know; those who don’t seem confident may actually have a clue — and I prefer someone in the latter camp than the former, thank you very much.

Friedman again:

Welcome to the Middle East of 2011! You want the truth about it? You can’t handle the truth. The truth is that it’s a dangerous, violent, hope-filled and potentially hugely positive or explosive mess — fraught with moral and political ambiguities. We have to build democracy in the Middle East we’ve got, not the one we want — and this is the one we’ve got.

That’s why I am proud of my president, really worried about him, and just praying that he’s lucky.

Me too.

We can remove the question mark now. The people have spoken, the dictator has (finally) heard them, and Hosni Mubarak has stepped down after three decades as Egypt’s ruler. What happens next? A true move toward some form of democracy, or Military Dictatorship II: Egyptian Boogaloo? Who the hell knows? For now, the protesters are jubilant. I heard a correspondent tell NPR that the joy in Cairo’s streets is “ten times greater than if Egypt had won the World Cup.” Heh. He also said it’ll be an “all-night party.” Well, good for them. Now let’s hope Egypt’s future is as joyous as is present, and that Iowahawk’s cynical take isn’t the final answer: “Vegas Line on next Egyptian Goverment: Kleptocrat Thugs 3-1, Genocidal Theocrats 2-5, Gentle Pro-Democracy Student Flower Children 87 million-1.”

At the end of a fantastic column about Egypt, Ross Douthat says something I was trying to say recently, and says it better:

The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

Read the whole thing.

I’m not paying nearly enough attention to events in Egypt, but from the tweets I’m seeing here & there, it’s clear that things are pretty damn serious. What I can’t figure out is whether I should be #PANIC!!!-ing (instability!), rejoicing (democracy!), or both. Anyway, here’s a live feed of Al Jazeera English (though it may be shut down soon, apparently).

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing the cover story of next month’s Atlantic, newly online today, gives us something new — well, not new, but something newly revived — to #PANIC!!!! about: Israel attacking Iran in the near future. Outlining the scenario that he envisions potentially unfolding, Goldberg writes:

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

Again I say, #PANIC!!!!! Although, Goldberg then adds:

If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks (though the public condemnation) of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House.

Read the whole thing.

Happy Monday Tuesday! In need of something new to worry about? Start off the new week, and month, right — with a new source of PANIC!!!!!!!!!:

[A new plant-blighting virus, called] brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.

Although it has been seen on coastal farms for 70 years, a mutant version emerged in Africa’s interior in 2004, “and there has been explosive, pandemic-style spread since then,” said Claude M. Fauquet, director of cassava research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “The speed is just unprecedented, and the farmers are really desperate.” …

The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories. Under many names, including manioc, tapioca and yuca, it is eaten by 800 million people in Africa, South America and Asia.

The danger has been likened to that of Phytophthora infestans, the blight that struck European potatoes in the 1840s, setting off a famine that killed perhaps a million people in Ireland and forced even more to emigrate.

That event changed the history of all English-speaking countries.

Indeed. My children starved / By mountain, valley and sea / And their wailing cries / They shook the very heavens / My Four Green Fields / Ran red with their blood, said she…

Anyway, what was it John Derbyshire said back in 2002? Oh yes:

Continue reading »

Dear Lord, I love British people:

We live in serious times. … [And] this seriousness is being compounded by an intensifying national determination to behave terribly seriously about it. … This aversion to levity certainly infused the [U.K.] election campaign. But there was a funny bit and most of us missed it. When Gordon Brown got in his car and called that woman a bigot, it was hilarious. It was a properly comical human moment, made funnier by the uncomfortable truths it hit upon, in terms of both the former PM’s flawed personality and the jealous xenophobia that lurks behind many discussions of immigration.

But we forgot to laugh, because some of us have come to prefer the sensation of judging: judging Brown for the gaffe, judging the media for its reporting of it, poring po-facedly over the subsequent pantomime of apology. It was the equivalent of his accidentally showing his arse and yet all we could do was carp: “Has he been concealing from the public quite how fat his arse really is?” or: “Why, at this moment of crisis, are our media focusing on arses rather than policies?” No one said: “Ha ha! I can see his arse!”

Teehee.

Tweets from myself, and various other tweeters I follow who are covering the U.K. election, will appear automatically below. Alas, because neither Cover It Live nor ScribbleLive are importing tweets properly right now, I’ll have to use the non-interactive, non-archive-able Twitter Widget verison. *sigh*

Two in the middle and I can’t catch Cameron.
Two in the middle and I can’t get around.
Two in the middle and I can’t catch Cameron.
Goodbye, Gordon Brown.

[/obscure Chad Mitchell Trio reference that only my parents will get]

Uh, so there’s an election today across the pond, over in the U.K., or as Wonkette and other snarky folks on the Internets call it, Knifecrime Island … or, as Irish nationalists call it, &$%&@%!!! Anyway, on this glorious day of sorta kinda democracy, in which even a first-place finish might land the Liberal Democrats only a small sliver of Parliament, let me be the first say, God Bless England:

If there was any doubt about why I love reading news that involves British people (and, uh, Welsh people, I guess*), check out the top item right now on the BBC’s breaking election news page:

Ieuan Wyn Jones, leader of Plaid Cymru, cast his vote this lunchtime for the general election in the town of Llangefni in the constituency of Ynys Mon, north Wales.

Teehee.

Polls close at 10:00 PM local time, which is 3:00 PM Mountain Time. But according to Wonkette, “Due to the quaint customs of Merry Olde England, Stabby Olde Scotland, Weird Olde Wales and Troubled Olde Northern Ireland, vote counts will not be revealed until Friday — a full night after polling ends!” Not sure how accurate that is; it should be noted that “Friday” begins two hours after the polls close, at 5pm in Denver. Hmm.

[UPDATE: In comments, Charles Fenwick suggests that perhaps Wonkette is joking, and in any event, "results will be rolling in on Friday, throughout the early hours. The BBC says “The first declarations are expected at 2300 BST [Thursday]. (4 PM Mountain Time).” So, there it is, then. Jolly good.]

*Let the record show that my ancestry is one-eighth Welsh. I also have some indeterminate, but not insubstantial, amount of English blood, from my “Western European mutt” grandfathers. As much as I make of my 25% Irishness — which comes from my only grandparent who was 100% anything, my dad’s mom, Helen McNamara Loy — I actually probably have more British than Irish blood.

From the Norwegian Meteorological Office, via The Map Room, here’s an animation of the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, that’s disrupting air travel and sowing PANIC!!!!! all across Europe. “Yellow indicates ash that has fallen by itself, red ash that has fallen as a result of precipitation, and black where the ash cloud is at that moment in time.”

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Looks like the ash cloud has made “landfall” in Newfoundland [UPDATE: Yup.] and possibly Nova Scotia. Is it headed toward New England??

P.S. Meanwhile, blogger Alan Sullivan, who has previously accused the Europeans of overreaction to what he says is an ash cloud incapable of bringing down an airplane — he doesn’t deny, of course, that ash clouds can do this, but says the intensity and elevation of this particular cloud are such that the concern is vastly overblown — writes that he is “pretty sure” the latest seismic data “means the eruption has entered a sub-Plinian phase. Yesterday’s thickening plume hinted at this, and I mentioned it in a post. This means continuous and copious ash ejection to a height of four miles of more. Upper winds will continue to move the ash toward Europe, and it might thicken enough to become a genuine problem, not just a psychological one.” Dunno if Sullivan’s right; hope he’s not.

UPDATE: It sounds like Sullivan is backing off the “sub-Plinian phase” talk:

[There is] dark, ash-rich emission being sheared away by the wind and racing SE away from the camera location, which is W of the volcano. The emission is much less than I expected, given the high tremor. … One expert speculation is that the eruption has entered an effusive phase. Lava is pouring from the vent(s) freely. No quakes because the conduit is flowing unimpeded. High tremor because a lot of lava is moving. Less plume because a lot of ice is gone now, and because the lava has largely degassed. Makes sense to me.

I just hope the ash cloud doesn’t reach New England, or that if it does, it doesn’t linger. I’m supposed to flying to Boston in three weeks for a visit with my folks.

There is some serious unrest happening in Iran right now. Andrew Sullivan is in flood-the-zone mode.

Via Olympic.org. Again, here’s the timetable. Voting starts at 9:10 AM Mountain Time (11:10 Eastern, 15:10 GMT), and the announcement is scheduled for 10:30 AM MDT (12:30 PM EDT, 16:30 GMT).

Live coverage from the Chicago Breaking News Center. More from ESPN Chicago.

UPDATE: Whoa. That was unexpected.

Let the schadenfreude begin!

UPDATE 2: That’s more like it, Matt:

I guess this means the fix wasn’t in.

Continue reading »

Sounds like President Obama gave somebody a tongue-lashing:

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Wednesday said he had misspoken in calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Iran’s elected leader and that Washington will let the Iranian people decide whether Iran’s election was fair.

“Let me correct a little bit of what I said yesterday. I denoted that Mr. Ahmadinejad was the elected leader of Iran. I would say that’s not for me to pass judgment on,” Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One.

“He’s been inaugurated. That’s a fact. Whether any election was fair, obviously the Iranian people still have questions about that, and we’ll let them decide about that.”

Well, good. That’s what the administration’s position should be. Whether the damage from Gibbs’s misstatement yesterday is already done, I’m not sure, but I’m certainly glad he corrected it.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, there’s this:

Heh.

P.S. As an aside, the reason Gibbs was speaking from Air Force One is because Obama was in Northern Indiana today — proving once again that the Greater South Bend Area became the center of the political universe just as soon as I left. Argh.