What's going on regarding Greece?  Here's one bottom line:  The people who run the EU and the Eurozone have suffered a reputational catastrophe.  The EU/Eurozone has shown itself unable to manage its basic moral responsibilities Oxi Day (pronounced oh-hee, the Day of No) has totemic significance in Greece. It commemorates the defiant Greek "No!" to Mussolini's ultimatum in October 1940, and the heroic acceptance of war against a vastly bigger military machine.  Churchill's praise was:  "Greeks don't fight like heroes - heroes fight like Greeks." It is the same word - Oxi, No! - that will top the ballot sheet when Greeks vote in a snap referendum this Sunday (7/05) on creditor demands, and prime minister Alexis Tsipras is not shy in evoking the same spirit of wartime resistance. Ambulances in parts of northern Greece have run out of fuel. The Greek Chamber of Commerce warns of "serious shortages" of basic goods and pharmaceutical supplies within days. The radical-Left Syriza government is skating on very thin ice. If Europe's creditor powers have succeeded in bringing Greece to its knees, they have paid a fearful price themselves. As Pyrrhus of Epirus said after the battle of Asculum in 279 BC: "Another such victory, and we will be utterly ruined."

Why are people so afraid of technological progress? Pope Francis complains in his new encyclical about "a blind confidence in technical solutions", of "irrational confidence in progress" and the drawbacks of the "technocratic paradigm." He is reflecting a popular view, held across the political spectrum, from the Unabomber to Russell Brand, that technology, consumerism and progress have been bad for people, by making them more selfish and unhappy. But however thoroughly you search the papal encyclical, you will find no data to support the claim that as people have got richer they have got nastier and more miserable. That is because the data points the other way. The past five decades have seen people becoming on average wealthier, healthier, happier, better fed, cleverer, kinder, more peaceful and more equal. Global inequality has been plummeting for years as people in poor countries get rich faster than people in rich countries. The vast preponderance of these improvements has come about as a result of innovation in technology and society. So what precisely is the problem with technology that the Pope is complaining about? What is he afraid of?

All Your (Data)Base Are Belong to Us: OPM, Failure & Legitimacy You can think of this as part 3 of the Half-Full Report. Part 1: Wild Cards and Part 2: The McRaven Mindset were already too stacked for the amount of coverage this issue requires. Frankly, this is also just too damn important. I wasn't kidding when I said:

"It will take American intelligence decades to recover, and the level of idiocracy/ incompetence involved here is beyond anything you've ever seen from the Obama administration. I repeat: anything."

Recently, several liberal - or "progressive" as they want to be called now - professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the PC orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern "feminist" professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously as "Edward Schlosser," reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species):  I'm A Liberal Professor and My Liberal Students Terrify Me. It's shocking that these progressives should now be shocked at such intolerance and persecution after decades of speech codes, disruptions of conservative speakers, campus inquisitions which ignore Constitutional rights, cancellations of commencement speakers, and ideological litmus tests imposed on new hires and curricula. Their shock bespeaks not principle, but rather indignation that now they are on the receiving end of the bullying and harassment they have long inflicted on conservatives and people of faith. Call it Karma: the campus intolerance that progressives are now whining about is the child of the progressive ideology many of the complainers still embrace.  Let's revel in the details.

History is not static and it does not progress linearly.  There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century BC Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry. That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression - especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas. Welcome to Dark Age America - a Pre-Enlightenment Age when groupthink acceptance of a lie replaces truth on grounds of social utility.  When current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. When, in our current Dark Age, logic is ignored in lieu of ideology.

I have good news for you, Mr. Obama!  You don't have to worry about "climate change" being the "greatest national security threat our country faces" anymore!  In your Coast Guard Academy speech on May 20, you said that "severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram."  You can retract that now - because the latest evidence, published yesterday (6/02), is that northern Nigeria and the entire area of the southern Sahara Desert is getting greener because of more CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes!  Rising greenhouse gases -- all that CO2 which we've been pumping into the atmosphere that's been frightening you so much - has caused rains to return to the "Sahel" or southern Sahara from Senegal to Sudan, Aren't you overjoyed?  Absolutely thrilled for those Africans who've been starving, scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert?  What's that?  You're not?  You think this is terrible news - because it threatens your narrative of climate change as a national security threat bogey-man?

Despite a generation in which radical anti-crime policies such as enforcing the law and locking up criminals slashed murder rates, there's still plenty of debate over whether anti-crime policies work. But no one can argue over whether pro-crime policies work. 108 people were shot in New York, Baltimore and Chicago over this past weekend. Many of the casualties were thus saved from that terrible "school-to-prison pipeline" that bedevils promising young crack dealers and instead went straight to the morgue. Baltimore has just racked up its deadliest month since 1999. The fascist pigs no longer go down to the ghetto to hassle misunderstood youth who are just protesting police brutality by shooting each other. When they do, they're confronted by angry mobs brandishing ObamaPhones set to record outrageous police misconduct such as arresting career criminals and drug dealers like Freddie Gray. The Baltimore cops got Obama's message loud and clear. So did the gangs.

History is full of instances where a rising power, aggrieved and dissatisfied, acts aggressively to obtain new borders or other international concessions. In Russia today we see a much more unusual case: This increasingly menacing and ambitious geopolitical actor is a state in decline. Notwithstanding Russia's nuclear arsenal and its vast territories, the distinguishing feature of the country today is its striking economic underdevelopment and weakness. For all Russia's oil and gas, the country's international sales of goods and services last year only barely edged out Belgium's - and were positively dwarfed by the Netherlands'. While Russia's childbearing patterns today look entirely European, its mortality patterns look Third World - and in some ways worse. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, a 15-year-old youth has worse survival chances today in Russia than in 33 of the 48 places the United Nations designates as "least developed countries," including such impoverished locales as Mali, Yemen and even Afghanistan. Russia's "high education, low human capital" paradox also shows up in Russia's extreme "knowledge production" deficit. Long-term economic progress depends on improving productivity through new knowledge - but this is something Russia appears mysteriously unable to do. In the modern era, the ultimate source of national wealth and power is not natural resources: It is human resources. And unfortunately for Russia, its human-resource situation is almost unrelievedly dismal - with worse likely in the years to come.

If you are reading this before breakfast, please consider having an egg, yolk included. Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of "nutrients of concern" altogether.  A sixty-year torrent of bad dietary advice is coming to an end. The evidence has been building for years that eating cholesterol does not cause high blood cholesterol.  It's not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and estrogen. Your liver manufactures most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine blood cholesterol levels. Lowering blood cholesterol by changing diet is all but impossible. From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease were not just flawed, but fraudulent.

Last week (5/19), Mary Anastasia O'Grady commented in the Wall Street Journal on The Pope's Embrace of Castro. She noted that "The Holy Father is a native of 20th-century Argentina, ideologically defined by nationalism, socialism, corporatism and anti-Americanism. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that this influences his views toward the U.S. and the island 90 miles from its shores." Yet there are many Argentines who are not so influenced and who can think for themselves.  As a life-long devout Catholic, it pains me to observe this is not the case with Francis.  As a result, he is a papal fraud.  In matters of the cloth, good Catholics always seek a vision of Saint Peter's earthly successor as a man of goodness and spirituality -- as God's anointed emissary on earth goodwill will be done. Sadly, this is not always true. There are many realities past where the Pope simply was neither devout in his vows nor divinely blessed to do God's will on earth for all mankind. Today we have such a man who is radical to the traditions of the church, and instinctively biased against the teaching and strength of character of his two predecessors, Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

Obama can't defeat ISIS with soft power, though ISIS could beat him with soft power assuming its Caliph ever decided to agree to sit down at a table with John Kerry without beheading him. Iran has picked up billions in sanctions relief and the right to take over Yemen and raid ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf just for agreeing to listen to Kerry talk for an hour. And that might be a fair exchange. As bad as having your capital or ship seized by Iran is, listening to John Kerry talk is even worse. So far ISIS has preferred the classical approach of killing everything in its path. The approach, deemed insufficiently nuanced by masters of subtlety like Obama and Kerry, has worked surprisingly well. For it's hard to destroy something if you don't know what it is. And it's hard to know what a thing is if you won't even call it by its name or name its ideology. The left loves root causes, but the root cause of ISIS isn't poverty, unemployment or a lack of democracy.  It's...

A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown. Many facts buttress Kalantari's apocalyptic prediction: *Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle East's largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. *What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan - except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. *Over two-thirds of Iran's cities and towns are "on the verge of a water crisis" that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Nor are Iranians alone in peril; many others in the arid Middle East may also be forced into unwanted, penurious, desperate exile. With one unique, magnificent exception, much of the Middle East is running out of water due to such maladies as population growth, short-sighted dictators, distorted economic incentives, and infrastructure-destroying warfare. Some specifics:

Chanceries, political elites and business federations across Europe, regardless of whether they are on the Left or the Right, are hoping the Conservative Party loses today's (5/07) general election. All the better if a motley Labor government is strapped to a bloc of triumphant Scottish Nationalists, guaranteeing a double-lock against any further flirtations with Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union). Or so goes the argument. They should be careful what they wish for. A Labor-SNP arrangement would be inherently weak and unstable, like the string of Gladstone governments dependent on the swing vote of the Irish Home Rule movement in the late 19th century. A Tory defeat would flush out the last EU dreamers and leave a post-Cameron party with even less tolerance for the posturing of Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, who this week accused the Anglo-Saxon world of trying to destroy the euro and vowed to stop Britain imposing its "exclusive agenda on all the other member states of Europe." In other words, Brexit and the doom of the EU is either on the horizon or just beyond it.

[This is the text of Robert Spencer's address at the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland Texas on Sunday, May 3rd, just hours before two Moslem terrorists were gunned down trying to murder the attendees.] A very good friend of mine told me right before I left for this event that - you're just poking them in the eye, you're trying to provoke them.  You know, why are you doing that?  You're the one that's being offensive.  And this was a friend, you know, and I was kind of taken aback.  And I had to stop and think - well, what exactly is wrong with that? And what's wrong with that is that this is only offensive because Moslems have made it offensive.  Okay, so we have to not draw Mohammed, because that'll poke them in the eye and offend them.  And then we have to not be Jewish, because that will poke them in the eye and offend them.  And then what?  Okay, I guess pork and alcohol are out.  Okay, and then what? The Islamic State - the Islamic State is beheading people and taking sex slaves, and subjugating the Christians under the hegemony of the Islamic law.  And they're doing it all on the basis of Koranic directives.  And so that's all Islamic.  So I guess we can't say a word about that.  Because that would poke them in the eye and offend Moslems. You see, step by step by step, we're ending up going in the direction of accepting Islamic law.  Let's put it this way: Every Western media outlet that refuses to publish the Mohammed cartoons is accepting Islamic blasphemy law. I say it's time for a little cultural self-assertiveness.

Amazing scenes from Baltimore: rioters throwing bricks at police, looting and burning down a CVS pharmacy and other stores, stomping on police cars and setting them on fire. The rioting followed the funeral of Freddie Gray on Monday (4/27), a black man who died in police custody in uncertain circumstances. The next day (4/28), National Guard in camouflage patrolled the streets, and a curfew was imposed. The rioters also burned down a housing project for seniors and a community centre, a $16million investment by the Southern Baptist Church that was due to open in six months. It was meant to be a sign of hope in a blighted area. And yet, despite the evident self-destructiveness, some were claiming that the rioters were "uprisers" that represented a "rebellion". Morehouse College professor Mark Hill Lamont told CNN that the turmoil in Baltimore was "resistance to oppression" rather than rioting.  Salon commentator Benji Hart called the rioting a "legitimate political strategy" But there was nothing "political" in the rioting and looting. In fact, in political terms, destroying one's neighborhood is a big setback for those who want to have legitimate concerns about policing addressed and effect other changes.  Liberals seem to not care less.