José Manuel Ballester has a new exhibition in which he has reworked paintings in the Prado, including Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, removing all the people. Slideshow at the link.

Right, his "enhanced" version of Vermeer's The Artist's Studio.

(h/t Fogonazos)

Passengers could be taking budget flights between the US and Europe on a Ryanair-backed airline in less than three years, the low-cost carrier's chief executive claimed yesterday.

Michael O'Leary said plans to launch a no-frills transatlantic service had been bolstered by an industry downturn that could slash the cost of long-haul aircraft as rivals go bust or orders are cancelled.

The carrier would operate from up to nine bases on each side of the Atlantic, with Stansted, Frankfurt-Hahn and Rome-Fiumicino among the candidates for European hubs. Islip airport on Long Island is mooted as a New York base.

O'Leary said the airline could be launched 18 months after acquiring a new fleet next year. "There may be an opportunity to pick up cheap long-haul aircraft next year, in which case we might launch a low-cost, long-haul programme in two-and-a-half years," O'Leary said.

Here's another one:

Sarkozy: if we're to panic, we must panic together!
(I love the way Berlusconi is drawn)

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Check out the detail.

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

Also note that according to the IMF projections in their World Economic Outlook, growth is supposed to pick up in no time while oil prices and food prices are supposed to keep dropping.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Volvo slashes 3,300 jobs

Volvo cars has announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 staff, including 2,000 factory workers and 700 office workers in Sweden.
The beleaguered Swedish car maker, a unit of US auto giant Ford, previously announced 2,900 cuts earlier this year.

Governing body the FIA is attempting to reduce the impact of motoring on the environment through a promotion called "Make Cars Green".

The campaign is backed by leading F1 teams such as McLaren and Ferrari.

"The campaigns help to show us we can all drive in a greener way," said championship leader Lewis Hamilton.


Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.

With European lawmakers still bickering over how to respond to a string of bank failures and a fading economy, expectations are rising that a clairvoyant French banker will come to the rescue.

Bickering, heh. Unfortunately the "clairvoyant French banker" isn't Jerome. Nope, it's...

Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, has been playing a key behind-the-scenes role in recent days as elected leaders and finance ministers from across the 27-nation European Union have held emergency meetings to deal with the credit crisis. Although politicians have struggled to present a united front, analysts said odds were high that Trichet will intervene soon with a cut in interest rates -- something that his bank hasn't done in more than five years.

Easy money!

Trichet had warned of big troubles looming in the banking sector and, unlike many European leaders, had predicted that local banks were vulnerable to the collapse in subprime loans plaguing the U.S. market. "We have to look very carefully at the business model of banks," he warned last January.

Trichet, however, has also consistently resisted political pressure to cut rates and has fiercely defended the independence of the European Central Bank, which was created nearly a decade ago to oversee the creation of the euro as the continent's common currency.

Unlike the Federal Reserve, which is also legally bound to fight unemployment by stimulating growth with low rates, the European Central Bank has a single mission: to maintain price stability by keeping inflation low.

Hey Tom, why don't we try to drown Putin and see if he floats?!
 

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

The Tories and Lib Dems are urging ministers to "clear up the uncertainty" about hundreds of millions of pounds councils invested in Iceland's banks.

Chancellor Alistair Darling has protected Britons' savings in banks which are now in default.

But at least 20 councils in England and Wales are known to have deposits in Landsbanki - some of tens of millions.

The BBC has learned that Kent County Council alone has £50m in Iceland- based banks.

For the Tories, Eric Pickles said local government finances were at risk as they were not covered by the guarantee.

The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents councils in England and Wales, says it has identified more than 20 councils which are believed to have deposits in Landbanksi or Heritable, which was run by Landbanksi.

Light bulbs.  Where are the factories making light bulbs?  Are they all in Communist China?  If China gets pissed off at US for ANY reason and they stop shipping us light bulbs, do we use up what store we have in warehouses and then the lights go out?  And that's just one example.

You can't throw up a factory in a day or a week.  How vulnerable are we, finances aside?

Now go back to discussing "the Evil Umpire".

Welcome to ET, Paul Krugman

Financial crises do not automatically produce recessions or depressions. Only bad policy cab turn a crisis into a catastrophe. The 1930 Great Depression could have been avoided if governments had not pursued pro-cyclical policies, and most important, if central banks had not allowed deflation.  We have learned from those mistakes, but are committing new and possibly bigger ones. Government is our one and only safety net. It could, if it wanted to, provide basic financial services, that could easily fulfil three economic functions that are attributed to finance: to provide liquidity, to share risk, and to allow agents in the economy to make inter-temporal choices. You don't need CDOs and CDSs for that. A network of central bank branch offices, in combinations with a relatively small number of national, or nationalised banks, could temporarily offer the vast bulk of all financial service of wider economic relevance. The way to go is to shrink the financial system and nationalise the systemically important financial institutions. I have heard there are about 45-50 in the euro area though this is not a precise guess, and subject to change over time. After the financial sector is stabilised, it is time to rebuilt the system, to allow the government later re-privatise its assets, ideally subject to different incentive structures than those that have led to this crisis. In theory, governments could even make money on it. I doubt it. But at the very least, governments can minimise losses.

I think I may know why.  McCain, we find today, is taking a supplement used for Alzheimer's and dementia patients.

Coupled, as others note, with the fact that he referred to his audience today as his "fellow prisoners" rather than "fellow citizens," along with numerous other examples, this is not exactly reassuring.

If it becomes a massive story, I think we're done.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?