There were, and still are two main reasons for Greece's predicament: The country borrowed way too much; and it failed to grow its economy on a sustained basis. This lethal combination was amplified by weak public administration.

Yet the rescue of Greece involved making new loans to the country and was asking for a very ambitious fiscal adjustment effort. Neither the size of the debt nor growth reinvigoration were properly addressed.

I suspect this choice was not driven by a strong conviction that the approach would work. Rather, decision makers feared the complexity of the alternative which involved opting for a pre-emptive, and hopefully orderly debt restructuring, and placing much greater emphasis on structural reforms.

A year later, Greece is still in the financial intensive care unit, and needs renewed urgent attention by the "troika" of doctors -- from the European Commission, ECB and the IMF.

Regrettably, the country's condition is even more serious now, with every single one of its vitals worse than projected by these same doctors a year ago.

The economy has contracted by more than programmed: unemployment is higher, debt and deficit dynamics are worse and, with market risks measures of spreads at even more alarming levels, the country is further away from restoring access to normal capital market financing.

Walid al-Muallem, Syria's foreign minister, has said the European Union's reaction to President Bashar al-Assad's speech on Monday showed it wanted to "plant strife and chaos" in the country.

Addressing journalists in Damascus on Wednesday, Muallem said his country - which has seen three months of protests against Assad's rule - would not accept demands from "outside Syria".

"None outside the Syrian family have the right to dictate or to ask. The Syrian affair is an internal affair and any intervention from outside is rejected," Muallem said.

A judge in Amsterdam is set to announce a verdict that might put new boundaries on freedom of speech in the Netherlands, in what has been exorbitantly dubbed by Dutch media as the "Trial of the Century".

The Dutch extreme-right leader Geert Wilders faces judgement in a court in Amsterdam on Thursday where he is on trial for labelling Islam as a "fascist religion" and for calling for the banning of the Quran. In total, Wilders is facing five counts of inciting hatred and discrimination.

The plaintiffs are a collection of minority groups that view Wilders' anti-Islam comments as having overstepped the boundaries of free speech, compounding ethnic tensions in the country.

Dutch law is clear on what constitutes incitement to violence, but when it comes to incitement to hatred or discrimination, the limits are not as obvious. Since he launched the Freedom Party in 2005, Wilders has been artfully pushing the legal boundaries of freedom of speech, while technically never crossing them - or has he?    

LAMPEDUSA, Italy, Jun 22, 2011 (IPS) - It's only a few hundred metres from the rocky hillside overlooking Lampedusa's commercial port to the other side of the protected bay. For more than a decade this narrow strip of ocean has been a migratory gateway into Europe for tens of thousands of mostly African migrants. The numbers have risen and fallen in response to shifting government policies and geopolitical developments.

In terms of Lampedusa's wider political impact on Europe however, no previous influx has had the same potentially momentous consequences as the 26,000 Tunisians who converged on the island earlier this year.

The spectacularly inept response of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government to these arrivals transformed Lampedusa into the symbol of a nightmare scenario that has obsessed Europe for more than two decades - of an uncontrollable surge of impoverished Third World migrants pouring across the continent.

Italian politicians and the media did much to fan these anxieties with melodramatic descriptions of an `invasion' and `assault' on the island by undocumented migrants, and these siege narratives were echoed in the European media. Even the more reserved BBC entitled a recent documentary `The Invasion of Lampedusa'.

The UK government has sharply criticised Poland for blocking an EU effort to set a higher target for cuts in CO2 emissions.

"I'm deeply disappointed that the only country in the EU that could not accept a good compromise on how we can move Europe to a low carbon economy was Poland," said UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

The EU is committed to a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020, from 1990 levels.

But there are now calls for a 30% cut.

EU environment ministers discussed a European Commission roadmap to 2050 on climate and energy, which sets out how the EU can move to a competitive low-carbon economy and cut CO2 emissions.

But there was no agreement to set more ambitious CO2 targets at the talks in Luxembourg on Tuesday.

Poland is poised to gain more influence over EU negotiations when it takes over the rotating six-month EU presidency on 1 July.

Sufficient savings have been found in Europe's Galileo sat-nav project for at least six additional spacecraft to be bought for the system before 2014.

The BBC understands 500m euros (£440m) will become available to make the extra purchase, taking Europe's version of GPS from 18 operational satellites in the next few years to 24.

This should make a big difference to Galileo's performance.

The announcement will be made at the Paris Air Show on Wednesday.

It will come from European Commission Vice President Antonio Tajani, who has overall responsibility in Brussels for the flagship EU space project.

REUTERS - A press photographer was shot in the leg and two other people were injured when riots broke out between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast for a second successive night on Tuesday.

Police said around 700 people threw fireworks, petrol bombs and other missiles in the Newtonards area of the city, a night after two people suffered gunshot wounds in what politicians described as the worst violence of its kind in the area for a decade.

The male photographer was shot in the leg by a gunman on the sidelines of the clashes, witnesses told Reuters and in an unusual move, the police urged all journalists and camera crews to stay out of the area "for their own safety".

The two men who were injured were suffering from burns, police said.

A res publica beyond our borders

Hiding away is no policy, nor is the pretence of being a sovereign state that decides alone. Nor is ignoring the existence of a European public to whom we are just as responsible as we are to the nation. There is now a res publica beyond our borders, which has its rules, and whose leaders are not creatures of governments, but people who answer to larger institutions.

Take, for example, the appointment of Mario Draghi as President of the European Central Bank (ECB). An irreproachable choice, but one that was made in the most muddled, ramshackle, old-fashioned way? In return for his appointment, Nicolas Sarkozy demanded that a seat on the executive of the ECB be freed up for Paris, and in return Berlusconi offered him the head of Lorenzo Bini Smaghi [a member of the ECB's board], as if the latter were his to control, not a leader of the Union. The mandate of Bini Smaghi, who was elected in 2005 for a term of eight years, will end on May 31, 2013. It cannot be revoked, neither by the member states nor by agreements among these states. This is not a slap at Bini Smaghi personally, but to the European institutions to which he is loyal.

What's more, the case creates a worrying precedent: each government may now decide to wriggle out from under the mandates and rules of the European Union's jurisdiction. The violation of the Maastricht Treaty, justified by a so-called "unwritten rule among the states", is manifest.

Speaking in front of the Bundestag, the German chancellor admitted that Germany did not have sufficient support for its position of a hard investor bail-in; she said one consideration was that a forced bail-in would push otherwise solvent countries into the EFSF; she said she did not want to be blamed for a eurozone-wide banking crisis; eurozone finance ministers spoke to bank and insurance chiefs to press home the need for their participation; the Greek cabinet approved the austerity plan, one Pasok MP said he would not support the plan, but one opposition MP said he would [vote] in favour if needed; the EBA now insists that banks must  include a sovereign default in their stress test scenarios; Germany's Länder are rebelling against Merkel's tax cut plans; Jean Quatremer calls Merkel the sick man of Europe, and claims that in the end she always follows Nicolas Sarkozy's lead; the French budget minister wants to create an FBI to fight social [fraud]; Barclays Capital did some scary analysis on Italy's debt sustainability; Jacques Delpla, meanwhile, and helpful as ever, says Germany owes Greece €575bn from World War II.

(Reuters) - Bank of England policymakers warned of a possible need for a second round of quantitative easing at their rate-setting meeting earlier this month, after they judged that Britain's economic outlook had darkened.

Two members of the nine-man Monetary Policy Committee -- chief economist Spencer Dale and external member Martin Weale -- still backed an interest rate rise to tackle high inflation, but the overall balance shifted in a dovish direction.

Bank officials observed a run of weak activity indicators at home and abroad in the run-up to their June 8-9 meeting, while British consumer demand is stagnant in the face of hefty public spending cuts to slash the country's huge budget deficit.

(Reuters) - The government will try to encourage equity investors to take a longer term view of their shareholdings and break away from a "quick buck mentality," Business Secretary Vince Cable said on Wednesday.

He said equity investment needed to be "recalibrated" to support the long-term interest of companies and underlying beneficiaries such as pension fund members, according to extracts of a speech to the Association of British Insurers in London released in advance.

Economic commentator John Kay would lead a review into investment in Britain's stock markets and examine the role of pension funds, pension advisers and fund managers, Cable said.

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- The German government called a meeting today with the country's biggest financial companies, including Deutsche Bank AG and Allianz SE, to discuss ways private investors can participate in a Greek rescue, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The meeting between Finance Ministry officials and company representatives was set for this afternoon in Frankfurt, said the people, who declined to be identified because the event is private. The talks, reported earlier today by Reuters, are exploratory and no concrete results are expected, they said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on June 17 that she'll work with the European Central Bank to seek a voluntary contribution from bondholders in a second Greek rescue. Germany's state-owned and private banks said earlier this week that they want incentives to encourage investors to participate in the European effort to reduce Greece's debt.

Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank AG, DZ Bank, HVB Group, WestLB AG, Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, WGZ Bank, DekaBank Deutsche Girozentrale, HSH Nordbank AG, Allianz and Munich Re are among the companies invited to the talks, according to the people. Spokespeople for the banks and insurers either declined to comment or couldn't immediately be reached by phone.

The Netherlands has also initiated talks with the country's financial industry on a voluntary rollover of outstanding Greek debt, a person familiar with the situation said today.

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- Global millionaires rose by 8.3 percent last year as the ranks of the wealthy in the Asia- Pacific region overtook Europe for the first time, according to a report by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch & Co.

The number of individuals with at least $1 million of investable assets increased to 10.9 million after markets rebounded following the financial crisis, according to the 15th annual World Wealth Report published today. Global wealth held by millionaires rose to $42.7 trillion, exceeding the $40.7 trillion reported at the end of 2007.

Millionaires in Asia-Pacific jumped 9.7 percent to 3.3 million with the numbers in Hong Kong and Vietnam both climbing by about a third, the report showed. That compared with growth of 6.3 percent to 3.1 million in Europe and 8.6 percent to 3.4 million in North America.

"Asia-Pacific continues to contribute the greatest year- on-year additions to global high-net-worth individual ranks," the report said. "Those segments reflected robust macroeconomic indicators such as gross national income, and strength in other key wealth drivers such as equity-market performance."

The US Federal Reserve gave a downbeat assessment of the world's largest economy on Wednesday as it pointed to slower than expected growth and higher inflation.

In the most significant change to its policy statement, it stripped out all reference to "subdued" measures of underlying inflation and said that the economy is growing "somewhat more slowly than the Committee had expected".

The toxic combination of disappointing growth but higher inflation combined to leave no hint that the central bank will consider further asset purchases to stimulate the economy.

"Certainly there was no hint of ease," said Jim O'Sullivan, chief economist at MF Global in New York. "One very notable change was dropping the language about inflation being too low."

The Fed cut the centre of its forecast range for 2011 growth from 3.2 to 2.8 per cent. It also trimmed its 2012 forecast from 3.85 to 3.5 per cent, suggesting that it expects fiscal tightening next year to bear down on growth.

On the one hand, as already noted, economics is replete with eulogies to freedom (particularly of the market). However, on the other hand, the type of freedom that economic textboks talk about is compatible with the science fiction image of rows and rows of persons attached to a pleasure machine which bombards them with utility (or, to be more respectful to ordinal utility, which keeps them at the very top of theur preferences ordering)

A giveaway of government-owned shares in RBS and Lloyds, worth hundreds of pounds to British taxpayers, is being proposed by the deputy prime minister.

Nick Clegg has set out his plan in a letter to the chancellor, George Osborne, in which he says such a move would create 46 million shareholders and allow a form of collective ownership of the banks.

Do the deserving citizens get a share of the banks' liabilities with that?

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama was set to unveil on Wednesday his plan to start bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan, a first step toward ending a decade-long war that is increasingly unpopular in the United States.

Obama is expected to announce in a televised address at 8 p.m. EDT a plan that may include the withdrawal by year's end of up to a third of the 30,000 'surge' troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2010, possibly followed by the removal of the rest of those extra forces by the end of 2012.

(Reuters) - There is no cyber warfare taking place between China and the United States, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday.

The two countries might suffer from cyber attacks, but they were in no way directed by either government, said Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai.

Mexican police have captured the suspected leader of a cult-like drug cartel in the latest blow to a gang that was until recently one of the most notorious in the country.

Federal officers detained alleged La Familia (The Family), boss Jose de Jesus Mendez, known by his nickname "El Chango," or "The Monkey", at a highway checkpoint in central Mexico.

No shots were fired during Tuesday's arrest, the government and prosecutors said.

In a rare bloodless capture in Mexico's escalating war on drug cartels, President Felipe Calderon's national security spokesman said Mendez's arrest was a major victory and the end of La Familia, which was infamous for beheading its enemies.

"With this capture, this criminal group is destroyed," Alejandro Poire told reporters, adding that Mendez was being flown to Mexico City for questioning.

Mendez's detention follows the death last December of La Familia's top boss, Nazario Moreno, known as "The Craziest One," in a dramatic series of army raids that briefly turned the western state of Michoacan, La Familia's heartland, into a war zone littered with burning cars.

DOHA, Jun 21, 2011 (IPS/Al-Jazeera) - The Libyan government says 19 civilians have been killed in a NATO air strike on the home of one of Muammar Gaddafi's top officials, a day after the Western military alliance admitted killing civilians in a separate attack.

Libyan officials took reporters to Surman, 70km west of Tripoli, to the site of what they said was a NATO air strike on the home of Khouildi Hamidi.

The officials said the attack on the home of Hamidi, a member of Libya's 12-strong Revolutionary Command Council, led by Gaddafi, took place on Monday morning.

Rescue teams were looking for survivors while reporters visited the site.

Reporters were then taken to a hospital in nearby Sabrata where they were shown nine bodies, including those of two children, plus some body parts, which the officials said were all of people killed in the attack.

Detained Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has been freed, state media report.

He was released on bail after pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

An outspoken critic of China's human rights record, Mr Ai was arrested in April in Beijing as he boarded a flight for Hong Kong.

Beijing alleges he had evaded taxes and destroyed evidence; its critics say the charges are motivated by his activism.

Xinhua reported that Mr Ai - who it said was suffering from "chronic illness" - had offered to repay the taxes and would be released because of "his good attitude in confessing his crimes".

Agriculture ministers from the G20 nations are meeting in Paris, in an attempt to tackle volatile food prices.

The meeting comes a day after the World Bank unveiled a new measure to provide protection from volatile food prices in developing countries.

Rising food prices have become a threat to the global economic recovery.

Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank called volatile food prices "the single gravest threat" the developing nations were facing.

"People are hungry for food and for action on a global level," he added. 'Sensible financial engineering'

The World Bank said that since June last year, rising and volatile food prices have led to an estimated 44 million more people living in poverty, under $1.25 (£0.77) a day.

It estimated that there are close to one billion hungry people worldwide.

Last week I put up a piece on "what the U.S. power industry thinks about the future of the U.S. power industry," reposting results from a survey of U.S. power utility managers and executives. Just in case you're not inclined to read through hundreds of words of survey results and charts (what's wrong with you?!), I thought I'd pull out a few take-home lessons.

The main lesson -- the meta-lesson, if you will -- is that the U.S. power sector remains, on average, extremely conservative. I don't mean ideologically conservative, but small-c conservative: biased in favor of the familiar. It's not a sector well-suited to producing thought leaders or risk takers. That's unfortunate, because no area more desperately needs risk-taking and innovation than clean electricity.

One thing to keep in mind is that taking an average across a sample this size can obscure some important differences. There are forward-thinking utilities, most in deregulated (or semi-deregulated) markets, moving purposefully toward a world of renewable power, energy storage, and smart grids. Think Austin Energy, Seattle City Light, or California's PG&E. But a larger number remain hidebound and congenitally cautious, especially regulated monopolies, like, say, Southern Company. That's why the results average out on the conservative side.

Fluctuations in climate can drastically affect the habitability of marine ecosystems, according to a new study by UCLA scientists that examined the expansion and contraction of low-oxygen zones in the ocean.

The UCLA research team, led by assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences Curtis Deutsch, used a specialized computer simulation to demonstrate for the first time that the size of low-oxygen zones created by respiring bacteria is extremely sensitive to changes in depth caused by oscillations in climate. These oxygen-depleted regions, which expand or contract depending on their depth, pose a distinct threat to marine life.

"The growth of low-oxygen regions is cause for concern because of the detrimental effects on marine populations - entire ecosystems can die off when marine life cannot escape the low-oxygen water," said Deutsch. "There are widespread areas of the ocean where marine life has had to flee or develop very peculiar adaptations to survive in low-oxygen conditions."

The study, which was published June 9 in the online edition the journal Science and will be available in an upcoming print edition, also showed that in addition to consuming oxygen, marine bacteria are causing the depletion of nitrogen, an essential nutrient necessary for the survival of most types of algae.

An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.

The research was conducted by members of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in Penn's School of Arts and Science: Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Andrew Kemp, now at Yale University's Climate and Energy Institute.

Their work will be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Sea-level rise is a potentially disastrous outcome of climate change, as rising temperatures melt land-based ice and warm ocean waters," Horton said.

The New York State Public Service Commission (Commission) has voted to approve a modification to the plans of the Marble River Wind Farm in the Towns of Clinton and Ellenburg, Clinton County. The decision will allow the wind farm owners to install the largest wind turbines in New York State.

"The changes we are approving to the Marble River wind farm will help maximize project efficiencies to reduce construction and operational costs while continuing to minimize environmental impacts to the maximum extent practicable," said Commission Chairman Garry Brown.

"The installation of these state-of-the-art turbines will maximize energy production, while significantly reducing the number of turbines needed due to the more efficient use of the region's wind resource."

The 3 megawatt (MW) turbines to be installed at Marble River are 492 feet tall, significantly larger than previous models proposed for the site, and are designed to achieve greater efficiencies of production by utilizing new gearbox and control designs, and by increased height and blade swept area to maximize generation potential at low and medium wind speed sites.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday that part of a newly installed radioactive water treatment system at its crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is operating only at one tenth of its expected decontamination capacity.

The utility said that although the system as a whole is performing above the minimum targeted decontamination level, it is investigating the cause of the insufficiency of a cesium-absorbing device developed by Kurion Inc. of the United States.

NEW YORK, Jun 21, 2011 (IPS) - Labour and women's rights groups are strongly criticising the Supreme Court's rejection of a class action suit brought by current and former female employees of Walmart who sought to represent 1.5 million female employees who claim that the company discriminated against women.

The largest retailer in the world, Walmart raked in over 405 billion dollars in sales last year and employs 2.1 million associates around the world.

Employees who want to sue Walmart for sexual discrimination will now have to proceed individually, or in smaller class action suits.

In `Dukes vs. Walmart Stores Inc.', the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the plaintiffs lacked the common ground by which to proceed as a class in further legal action - overturning previous decisions made by lower courts.

In 2004, the San Francisco District Court authorised six individual plaintiffs to represent 1.5 million female employees of Walmart in a national sexual discrimination lawsuit. After Walmart appealed, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the federal district court's decision.

Nevertheless, in August 2010, Walmart filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting it to review the Ninth Circuit's upholding of the federal court's ruling.

The Supreme Court decision did not determine that Walmart does or did not discriminate against women, although Justice Antonin Scalia did write as part of the justification for the Court's decision that the evidence presented lacked "significant proof" that Walmart "operated under a general policy of discrimination".

WASHINGTON, Jun 21, 2011 (IPS) - Exactly 40 years after former United States President Richard Nixon labelled his administration's drug policy a "war" in 1971, a huge coalition of civil rights leaders, advocates and educators converged in Washington D.C. to expose an on-going conflict that they believe is less `a war on drugs' and more an assault on the rights of African Americans in the 21st century.

"The War on Drugs has not failed to achieve its purpose," Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, told a crowded room at the National Press Club here Friday. "It has certainly failed to stop the trade and abuse of drugs, but it has succeeded in its original design: to ensure profit for some, political disenfranchisement of minorities, and the structural exclusion of a people based on their race."

A 2010 report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the U.S. Department of Justice claims that a drug arrest is made every 19 seconds, making the U.S. home to 25 percent of the world's inmates - most of them detained on non-violent charges of drug possession.

With one out of every hundred American adults behind bars, the U.S.'s bulging jails easily exceed even the prison population in China. These jails, experts say, have become the most racially biased institutions in the country.

In its 2011 annual report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented that, though African Americans comprise a mere 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for a stunningly disproportionate 35 percent of incarcerated drug offenders in the country.

For migratory birds and sea turtles, the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field is crucial to navigating the long-distance voyages these animals undertake during migration. Humans, however, are widely assumed not to have an innate magnetic sense.

Research published in Nature Communications this week by faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School shows that a protein expressed in the human retina can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila, reopening an area of sensory biology in humans for further exploration.

In many migratory animals, the light-sensitive chemical reactions involving the flavoprotein cryptochrome (CRY) are thought to play an important role in the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field.

In the case of Drosophila, previous studies from the Reppert laboratory have shown that the cryptochrome protein found in these flies can function as a light-dependent magnetic sensor.

To test whether the human cryptochrome 2 protein (hCRY2) has a similar magnetic sensory ability, Steven Reppert, MD, the Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience and chair and professor of neurobiology, graduate student Lauren Foley, and Robert Gegear, PhD, a post doctoral fellow in the Reppert lab now an assistant professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, created a transgenic Drosophila model lacking its native cryptochrome protein but expressing hCRY2 instead.

A rogue member of hacker group LulzSec is suspected to have been responsible for a hack last weekend which resulted in the theft of $9m worth of online currency.

The hack focussed around a "currency exchange" called MtGox, which provides a method for swapping Bitcoins - an untraceable, cryptographically-created online-only currency favoured by online activists and hackers - for real US dollars.

The attack - which could cost members of Anonymous and LulzSec thousands of dollars each - suggests other, more profit-focused hacking groups may be stepping up activity in response to the more high-profile politicised groups.

I'm flipping out at how organised they are, how clear ideas they have, how they debate... In Iceland I walked here and there asking people. I took three or fur weeks to get the message to sink in. Here you have 46 million people and it will take you time.

For some ten years I was (and maybe still am) the national speaker for the Green Party of England and Wales on Science and Technology. So I was asked this question many times: What is the alternative? Here is the answer. We do not need all that energy. Walk down the high street what do you see? Shop windows full of things. We have drifted into a state where all we do (the human race I mean) is make things (using energy and natural resources) and then spend energy (and natural resources) selling these things to each other.

This is a deadly bootstrap culture where we go round and round making things advertising things and buying the same things getting more and more tired and frustrated and sick. Sick: more things. Pollution: more things. Health foods, sleeping tablets, special designer metal sticks to walk up mountains (and get fit, Hah!). Cancer treatment things. Hospital things. Loony bin things (starting with Prozac). Viagra things. Blood pressure things. It is insane. We spend so much time doing this ( increasing competitiveness, increasing the GDP) that we are all unhappy, working all the time, with no time to be with each other and with our children, no time for love, for walking about in the countryside (without metal sticks) in the sun discussing the finer points of philosophy. Wearing white togas. Folk dancing. Science should have taken away the drudgery and struggle. Instead it has made it worse. Do we really need a toilet roll holder in the shape of a donkey? Twenty different types of washing powder, vaginal deodorant, hair dye, wrinkle cream with nanoparticles. All those things. All that energy. Going to work, coming back. Running about, exhausted, no time for love.

So what is it that has hypnotised the human race into believing that this breathless vortex of work, of continuous manufacture of every conceivable thing, of consumption and waste, and its associated requirement for vast amounts of energy is the "good life?

arabs have beat us back to the white togas, headgear optional though...

i like to live as independently from (hard) technology as i can, which leaves the tech that does creep in to be Quality, (in the Pirsigian sense) such as my old 70's tractor which fires up every time, my studio imac, musical instruments and my blogbook pro.

as few 'things' as possible, and only really good ones, that you can keep coming back to, over and over again and get the job done efficiently with, as tools to express the different parts of the whole that is the output of existence here in spacetime.

i too am staggered by the sheer spuriousness of consumerism, and the fact that we can be so shamelessly, mediatically proud of it, so 'consumer confidence' becomes a substitute for any other more interesting forms of confidence. real confidence imo comes from how little you can consume and still contentedly produce quality work with.

once i went away for a couple of months and left a young cat to be house-sat. when i came back i couldn't recognise him he had become so obese, his eyes tiny surrounded by his new jowls, and worse, his new totally entitled, arch-imperious arrogance, whereas before he was a moderately mellow animal, very in tune with his surroundings.

our civilisation's attitude to energy reminds me of his to food... i want it, now, more, and whenever i think i might need it, lots of it, burn it off, light 'er up, fire away, pedal to the medal, damn the torpedoes.

we've been thoroughly spoiled rotten, and by wanting so damn much so often we are possibly denying the best outcome of all, which would be to make enough clean energy that we could be (immaturely!) profligate as we seemingly crave to be.
:)

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Around 100 French and foreign journalists, as well as hordes of fashionistas and celebrity news hounds, gathered outside a Paris court on Wednesday, when British designer John Galliano will stand before a judge to answer to charges of launching an anti-semitic tirade in a trendy Parisian bar. Many will be searching the face of haute couture's bad boy for signs of remorse and improved health after three months of detox, while others will be waiting to hear if he makes a public apology.

According to those close to the notoriously shy designer, Galliano is anxious about his day in court. But according to FRANCE 24's fashion correspondent Jessica Michault, "He doesn't really realise the gravity of the situation. He's sort of in his little bubble."

A schoolboy murdered a former girlfriend by battering her with a rock after he was promised a free breakfast if he carried out the killing, a jury heard.

The alleged killer, aged 16, lured Rebecca Aylward, 15, to woods near Bridgend in south Wales where he attacked her, Swansea crown court heard. To divert suspicion, he told her to tell friends she was meeting someone else. But she did not follow his directions and revealed his identity to her mother, the jury heard on Tuesday.

The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, denies murdering Rebecca in October last year and blames his best friend.

Ga.'s farm-labor crisis going exactly as planned

After enactment of House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest industry.

I gloat.  

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere