Central banks are being pressured by their political masters to solve a problem they cannot solve.

On Wednesday (9/12), a German court ruled that the European Central Bank can buy a seemingly unlimited amount of debt from the national banks of the countries in the eurozone without violating German law. By week's end, the U.S. Federal Reserve likely will decide if it is going to engage in another round of massive debt buying.

These are political decisions, irrational and destructive on any sound financial or economic basis.  Yet the bankers have been given no choice.

The military leader of the Contra anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua back in the 1980s was Enrique Bermudez. “003” as he was code-named, arranged for me to cross into Nicaragua from Honduras a number of times with Contra groups. I came to have tremendous admiration for his extraordinarily courageous struggle against the Soviet and Cuban take-over of his country, and the Communist tyranny established by the Sandinistas. I also came to have a great affection for him personally, as a man of unpretentious warmth and straightforward integrity.

Enrique was assassinated in 1991 on orders from the head of the Sandinista Gestapo, Tomas Borge, but the US left-wing Sandinista-sympathizing media assassinated his character way before then. The smears were unending as the left spared no effort to demonize him and the Contras. Now the left is busy doing the same to Enrique’s daughter.

Claudia Bermudez was born in Nicaragua, grew up in San Francisco, and while her father was fighting for freedom in Nicaraguan jungles, she was in college in Hawaii. She clearly has her father’s moxie - because she’s running for Congress on a boldly conservative platform as the Republican challenger of the most left-wing House Member there is, Barbara Lee, in the most left-wing Congressional District in the country, California’s 9th centered on Berkeley and Oakland.

What do we want the future Egypt to look like? A flawed, hybrid democracy, or a Sunni Muslim version of Iran? Based on his bluster yesterday (8/14) about events on the Nile, Secretary of State John Kerry prefers the latter.

And Kerry's remarks must have had White House approval.

In full outrage mode, America's most famous windsurfer castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to "peaceful protests." Apparently, "peaceful" means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches.

The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government's response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance - using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists).

Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?

Prague, Czech Republic. Year by year, the current nine countries of Eastern and Central Europe that were controlled by the Soviets -- Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia -- become relatively more prosperous in comparison to the richer nations of Western Europe. As a result of the European debt crisis, this trend is likely to accelerate.

It has been more than two decades since these countries acquired their freedom. All have become multiparty, largely free-market democracies. What seems normal now was far from a foregone conclusion at the time of the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. In fact, most bets would have wagered that not all these nations would have made it.

Today, all nine are doing better, often far better, than the rest of the EU.  Here's why.

Alaska’s Frank Murkowski has my nomination for the most courageous governor in the US. Sick and tired of spineless Washington Republicans unable to overcome the religious worship of the Alaska tundra by Democrats and Eco-Fascists, Murkowski has announced oil and gas lease sales for offshore drilling in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of ANWR (the sacred and holy Alaska National Wildlife Refuge).

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in Monterey, California, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbor before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice.

I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world's great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets.

Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers' fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning.

Here's the awful story, and why the leaders of Greenpeace should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity like war criminals.