The timing is nothing if not ironic. On the day the EU has been awarded the Nobel peace prize, we watch as Europe sits idly by and lets fascism brew once again - this time in Greece. If a sharp turn towards religious fundamentalism and fascism is to be avoided, Europe needs to act now.

On Thursday night the Athens premiere of Terrence McNally's play, Corpus Christi, was cancelled following protests by members of the far-right party Golden Dawn (including some MPs) and religious groups.

The protest had a clearly homophobic agenda. Manolis V, a journalist, was attacked by protesters while the police apparently did nothing: "The police is next to us. I shout 'They're beating me, aren't you going to do something?'," he wrote on Twitter. "I move away so I can look on from distance. A well-known Golden Dawn MP follows me. He punches me twice in the face and knocks me to the ground. While on the ground, I lose my glasses. The Golden Dawn MP kicks me. The police are just two steps away but turn their back."

BRUSSELS - The eurozone should consider introducing treasury bills, a special budget and a finance ministry in order to stabilise the future of the single currency, says an ideas paper published by EU council president Herman Van Rompuy on Friday (12 October).

The seven-page document, meant to spur discussions among EU leaders at next week's summit, outlines the "specific challenges by virtue of sharing a currency."

It notes that while the EU has made progress to strengthen budget oversight and discipline among member states, this needs to be complemented by a "fiscal capacity" - shorthand for a separate eurozone budget.

The centre-right European Peoples' Party (EPP) will start sketching the 'profile' of the next European Commission President at its upcoming congress in Bucharest next week, its President Wilfried Martens told the press yesterday (11 October).

Martens, who is a former Belgian Prime minister and founding member of the EPP, met  the press ahead of the political family's "statutory" congress to be held in Bucharest on 17-18 October, just ahead of the 18-19 EU summit. The statutory meeting, held once every three years, elects a new leadership and updates the party platform (see background).

...Asked what the main features of the profile will be, as for example if it would be a requirement that the candidate should be a prime minister with experience of EU summits, Martens declined to elaborate if the experience of prime minister would be a must, but said that the next Commission President should speak "several languages".

At first sight, his statement eliminates at least one of the EPP heavyweights, namely the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose name was rumored as a possible successor to José Manuel Barroso. Tusk speaks English, but hardly enough to deal with complex issues at the highest level.

The recently freed member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot has denied rumours of a split within the trio who stood trial and vowed to continue her opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, was set free in a surprise ruling on Wednesday, after she pleaded during her appeal that she had not fully taken part in the "punk prayer" that led to her and her two co-defendants being jailed for two years in August.

...After the judge ruled that Ms Samutsevich was released on Wednesday, she shared emotional hugs with the other two women, who appeared pleased to see her let free.

The Russian blogosphere, however, erupted in criticism for Ms Samutsevich and the Pussy Riot lawyers, with some suggesting that the ruling had been a cunning attempt by the authorities to create tension between the band members. "Which new game exactly have our authorities begun?" asked the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets on its front page. "Are we once again talking about an attempt to apply the time-honoured formula 'divide and rule'?"

This morning I wrote about Troikans being paranoid with a disease developing at full speed. Just hours later, my prediction came true. It's all over the Greek press, that the Troika suggested that Greeks residing on islands with less than 150 inhabitants should be relocated somewhere else! This insane demand was allegedly revealed by Minister of Maritime Affairs Kostas Mousouroulis while he was attending a meeting with representatives of the maritime sector.

Selling one uninhabited island to Russia looks better by the day.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

Italy's Catholic Church will be forced to pay taxes starting in 2013 after the EU pressured the country's government to pass a controversial law stripping the Church of its historic property tax exemption.

­The Catholic Church in Italy is excluded from paying taxes on its land if at least a part of a Church property is used non-commercially - for instance, a chapel in a bed-and-breakfast.

"The regulatory framework will be definite by January 1, 2013 - the start of the fiscal year - and will fully respect the [European] Community law," Italian premier Mario Monti's government said in a statement on Tuesday.

The move could net Italy revenues of 500 million to 2 billion euros annually across the country, municipal government associations said. The extra income from previously exempt properties in Rome alone - including hotels, restaurants and sports centers - could reach 25.5 million euros a year, La Repubblica daily newspaper reported.

finally!

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

Mail on sunday - 'We're ready to walk out on Europe': Prime Minister's closest ally Michael Gove sparks EU furore with dramatic admission

The chances of Britain leaving the EU rose dramatically last night after it emerged that one of David Cameron's closest Cabinet allies believes it is time to tell Brussels bluntly: `We are ready to quit.'

Education Secretary Michael Gove has told friends that, if there was a referendum today on whether the UK should cut its ties with Brussels, he would vote to leave.

He wants Britain to give other EU nations an ultimatum: `Give us back our sovereignty or we will walk out.'

Mr Gove insists the UK could thrive as a free trading nation on its own, like other non-EU nations in Europe such as Norway and Switzerland. He has changed his view partly as a result of his fury at Brussels meddling which has held up his school reforms.

Industry ministers from France, Germany and five other EU countries sent a letter to Brussels on Thursday (11 October) urging more protection from unfair competition for Europe's struggling manufacturing industries.

Ministers from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg and Romania signed the letter.

"We are experiencing de-industrialisation, Europe must switch gear," Montebourg said in a video address following a meeting of EU industry ministers in Luxembourg.

"When Americans, Chinese, Indians, Koreans and many others choose to subsidise their industry, they don't have Brussels on their backs," the minister said, referring to the EU's strict state aid rules.

More than one year ago, French carmaker Renault found itself embroiled in a high-profile industrial espionage scandal. Three executives were fired, but the case turned out to be bogus, and in a desperate attempt to put the whole sordid affair behind them, the company issued a public apology to its former employees.

It appears, however, that the story is far from over. New documents have emerged showing that Renault had prepared statements in the event that the scandal drove the three employees concerned to kill themselves.

Executives Michel Balthazard, Bertrand Rochette and Mathieu Tenenbaum were dismissed from Renault in January of last year on suspicions that they had leaked information on the company's electric cars to rivals. Although wrongly accused, the three found themselves at the heart of a very public scandal, with little recourse to defend themselves.

 

Japan said Saturday it would consider buying bonds issued by Europe's new permanent bailout fund in a bid to help soothe the eurozone's crippling debt crisis.

"We will consider buying them after carefully reviewing what Europe itself will be doing" on reforms, Finance Minister Koriki Jojima told a press briefing on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's annual meetings in Tokyo.

Jojima said he told his French counterpart Pierre Moscovici that Tokyo may scoop up paper issued by the new 500 billion euro ($650 billion) European Stability Mechanism (ESM) "to help stabilise Europe's financial system".

???

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

Today's helping hand was a comment from French economist Olivier Blanchard. He qualifies as a serial offender on the comic statements front, since when wearing the hat of founding editor of the American Economic Review: Macroeconomics, he uttered the now immortal line that "the state of macro [economic theory] is good" - one year and six days after the financial crisis began.

He was the chief economist for the IMF prior to that gig, and he subsequently returned to the IMF, where he now has the curious title of "economic counsellor" (now there's another potential gag, but I digress).
While delivering the baleful news in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook that the global economy is slowing, Olivier noted that:

"In most countries, fiscal consolidation is proceeding according to plan."

"According to plan?" Well, yes, if the plan is to inspire the rise of fascist dictatorships in southern Europe, I suppose you could say that. Golden Dawn is, it seems, within striking distance of being the third largest party in the Greek parliament were an election to be held now. The disastrous impact of the austerity programs on Greece's people is the overwhelming reason why this once laughing stock of a party is now within reach of power.

Turkey scrambled two fighter planes to the border with Syria on Friday after a Syrian military helicopter bombed the Syrian border town of Azmarin, a Reuters witness said.

There has been intense fighting between rebels and Syrian government forces this week in Azmarin and neighbouring towns, an area strongly opposed to President Bashar al-Assad's rule.

...Held in Danville, Kentucky, and moderated by journalist Martha Raddatz, the debate saw a feisty Biden hitting his Republican counterpart on a variety of issues including taxes, abortion, and US policies regarding Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Biden's aggressive approach was a far cry from Obama's passivity last week. It was also a dramatic departure from his own more restrained debate performance against Sarah Palin four years ago.

Ryan, a 42-year-old Congressman from Wisconsin known for his winning smile and staunch fiscal conservatism, was on the defensive for much of the time.

A CBS poll of uncommitted voters carried out right after the debate found 50 percent of respondents naming Biden as the winner, 31 percent choosing Ryan, and 19 percent calling it a tie.

Why did the administration get it wrong? It wasn't exaggerated faith in the power of its stimulus plan; the report predicted a fairly rapid recovery even without stimulus. Instead, President Obama's people failed to appreciate something that is now common wisdom among economic analysts: severe financial crises inflict sustained economic damage, and it takes a long time to recover.

...

And Republicans are dead wrong.

The latest devastating demonstration of that wrongness comes from the International Monetary Fund, which has just released its World Economic Outlook, a report combining short-term prediction with insightful economic analysis. This report is a grim and disturbing document, telling us that the world economy is doing significantly worse than expected, with rising risks of global recession. But the report isn't just downbeat; it contains a careful analysis of the reasons things are going so badly. And what this analysis concludes is that a disproportionate share of the bad news is coming from countries pursuing the kind of austerity policies Republicans want to impose on America.

...

And here's the thing: if Mitt Romney wins the election, the G.O.P. will surely consider its economic ideas vindicated. In other words, politically good things may be about to happen to very bad ideas. And if that's how it plays out, the American people will pay the price.

Reading through to the comments section, 'Kontract Killa' sums it up nicely:

The Car Crash Paul Ryan Should Have Avoided at the VP Debate-Daily Beast

Kontract Killa -- The problem with Paul Ryan is that he is an un mitigated hypocrite. He admits that his mom helped raise him with the aid of US Federal Government programs. And despite being only in his 40s he has spent his entire adult life working (circa 25 yrs!) for the US government, which ENTITLES him to life time health care for himself and coverage for his family! Yet he says the American people are too dependent on the government.

Mitt Romney is essentially a corporate debt and out sourcing specialist who wants to be POTUS. Totally ignoring the fact that the 2 things that kill jobs are.... corporate debt and outworking! Hypocrites of the first order!

Obama must go for the victory. The victory of ideas and truth over lies and subterfuge, with unapologetic, unreserved attacks and "call-outs" on the hypocrisy and lies of the selfish, entitled right.

EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger has written to Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, reassuring him that proposed EU regulations to cut vehicle CO2 emissions will not harm the German automobile giant because of relaxed rules for "supercredits". EurActiv reveals the content of the leaked letter.

In the missive, obtained by EurActiv, Oettinger spelled out that proposed new limits on car CO2 emissions had been loosened before the Commission's proposal was presented in July.

The Commission proposals, he continued, "reflected not insignificant changes compared with the initial plan", in what will be seen as an attempt to assuage industry fears that the regulations would hit jobs and competitiveness in Europe.

The draft new rules set a limit of 95 grams of CO2 per km (g/km) for all new European cars from 2020. A standard of 130g/km has already been set for 2015. 

But under the Commission proposal, carmakers will be allowed to continue producing gas-guzzling cars by making use of "super-credits" earned from manufacturing electric vehicles.

Faced with fervent and growing opposition to onshore wind farms in the UK, Tory MPs are backing a plan to site those facilities in Ireland - and then export the renewable energy generated back to Britain using cables running under the Irish Sea, to Wales.

A company has already sourced land to build more than 700 turbines in countryside to the west of Dublin. They would have the capacity to supply power for more than three million homes by the end of the decade - the equivalent of 10 per cent of the UK's renewable energy targets.

On Sunday Lithuania will be voting to elect new members of the Seimas, its unicameral parliament, as well as on a referendum on whether to build a new nuclear power plant near the city of Visaginas - something that was a major issue in the election campaign.

Most parties are in favor of a new plant. However, this past summer, most Social Democrats spoke out against the plans. According to opinion polls, the Social Democrats and the Labor Party will win the vote. The governing Christian Democrats would then have to go into the opposition.

... According to a poll conducted this June by the Vilmorus market research center, around 62 percent of Lithuanians are against construction of the plant near Visaginas. Only 22 percent said they were for it, and 16 percent were undecided.

... The change in opinion is not based on any fear of nuclear power, according to the Lithuanian sociologist Vladas Gaidys, who heads Vilmorus. Rather, the main reason is economic - citizens fear that the state would be forced to take out loans that would ultimately fall to the taxpayer. "Lithuanians see debt as something horrible," Gaidys told DW.

The article also says that the referendum is non-binding and my be over-ruled by the new government even if the Social Democrats win.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Patrick Robbins, a 26-year-old native of Brooklyn who works on sustainable development at Cooper Union, is the spokesperson for the group, Occupy the Pipeline. He explained the purpose of the protest-art show hybrid:

"[We're] protesting the pipeline's construction on New York City's West Side Highway and Gansevoort, which is soon to be completed. The pipeline ... is slated to bring hydrofracked gas from the marcellus shale - a bed that lies under Pennsylvania and New York State - into New York City's gas infrastructure."

While the health hazards at the point of fracking are well-known, I was not aware of hazards on the consuming end of using fracked gas. According to Occupy the Pipeline, the fracked gas threatens New Yorkers because gas produced from Marcellus shale has 70 times the average radioactivity of natural gas and very high radon content. The trouble with the noble gas (meaning that it is an inert gas) is that it was not one of the issues looked into by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when it analyzed the pipeline project. The commission asserted that radon risk assessment was "outside their purview", said Robbins. But the element has been linked to increases in the risk of lung cancer among non-smokers, claims Occupy the Pipeline, and poses a special risk to New Yorkers with immuno-compromised systems the moment the gas is burned - dispersing the radon.

A new weather pattern that sends blasts of warm southern air into the Arctic each June has fueled the recent, dramatic decline of the region's sea ice, according to a new government-funded study.

But that is not all it has done, the analysis suggests, linking the shifting summer winds to record thaws of the Greenland ice sheet, unusually wet European summers and Rocky Mountain wildfires.

Researchers say the switch from light, variable east-west winds to stronger, warmer blasts of southern air appears to have strengthened a climate feedback loop they call "Arctic amplification."

As the amount of ice that melts each summer increases, it opens larger and larger patches of dark Arctic Ocean waters that absorb more heat than the reflective ice they replace, a process that accelerates Arctic warming.

When scientists selected a rock to test the laser of the Mars rover Curiosity, they expected it to contain the same minerals as rocks found elsewhere on the red planet, but were shocked to discover it was in fact more similar to a rock found on Earth.

The rock was chemically more alike to an unusual type of rock found on oceanic islands such as Hawaii and St Helena, as well as in continental rift zones such as the Rio Grande, which extends from Colorado to Chihuahua, Mexico.

"It was a bit of a surprise, what we found with this rock," the Curiosity scientist Ralf Gellert of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, said. "It's igneous ... but it seems to be a new kind of rock type that we encountered on Mars."

Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone will stoke the embers of old glories when they play a pair of ageing bulls in the boxing saga Grudge Match. The Warner Bros production casts 69-year-old De Niro as a retired pugilist who is coaxed back into the ring to battle old rival Stallone - a comparative spring chicken at the age of 66.

...While script details remain sketchy, Segal's film implicitly promises a fantasy bout between Raging Bull's Jake LaMotta and Rocky Balboa, the mumbling mainstay of the Rocky franchise. De Niro won the best actor Oscar for his anguished turn as LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's 1980 classic, while the original 1976 film Rocky - scripted by and starring Stallone - scooped three Academy Awards and earned $225m at the international box office.

Full employment doesn't have to mean everybody has a job. There are lots of really crappy jobs out there, and the left shouldn't be interested in creating more drudgery. (Paradoxically, full employment could actually eliminate some degrading, non-essential jobs. If workers had more bargaining power, the worker cleaning rich people's houses could demand better pay and working conditions, or just quit. I imagine some menial jobs would just disappear as a result.) Full employment simply means that everyone who wants a job can find one.

Consequently, it could be achieved by coupling a permanent WPA-style jobs program with a guaranteed minimum income, so people could opt out of the labor force. To my mind, this approach both would be superior to relying on general government stimulus or loose monetary policy, which would just fuel the engine of consumer capitalism. JK Galbraith's felicitous phrase about public squalor alongside private affluence still applies; public employment programs should be designed to deliver social benefits, rectifying the ignominious imbalance.

That's the other thing about full employment: It's a potentially radical incremental reform, but it makes people's lives better today. The only time in the last few decades that low-income workers saw meaningful wage growth was in the late 1990s, when unemployment was kept at bay. From what I gather this was largely accidental, but it still brought down poverty rates and increased wages at the bottom. And bringing down poverty rates, of course, has spillover effects: Our public education system, for instance, would be immeasurably better if were poverty eradicated.

AFP - Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said Friday he was against re-attributing disgraced US rider Lance Armstrong's seven victories in the world's most prestigious cycling race.

The US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) this week said Armstrong was at the centre of the biggest doping programme in sporting history, as it produced more than 1,000 pages of testimony to support its decision to ban him for life in August.

"We cannot be indifferent to what USADA has unmasked this week, it's a damning picture that's been drawn," Prudhomme said.

"What we want is that there is no winner," Prudhomme said of the seven years between 1999 and 2005 when Armstrong was victorious in the gruelling annual race.

With good reason. The full report is on-line here; I read parts of it, some important points:

• Some of the most important evidence came in very recently, like several sworn affidavits (includinga key one,  George Hincapie's) at the end of September.
• The evidence is not just about Armstrong. The witnesses spoke extensively about their own doping history and the team managers and doctors.
• But it's not just about US Postal either: the confessing cyclists spoke about what went on in their other teams and how doping knowledge was diffused as cyclists and managers and doctors changed teams, and how the team Motorola/US Postal doping system was built up in reaction to the original spread of EPO use in other teams.
• The media focuses on the omertà of teammates, but reading the report IMO the key to evading detection was knowing when controllers come. There are ways to mask doping use, and in earlier years it was possible to evade a control or two my pretending to be asleep or not in the room, but the cyclist needs to be warned beforehand.
• Some teams employed spies to track the movement of doping controllers as recently as 2010.
• Corrupt UCI officials might also have been a source for tips on doping controls. Until now, the weightiest anti-UCI accusations were based on claims of untrusted Floyd Landis, but now there is more and his own story got added context (he had a feud with the UCI head over his wage into which Armstrong intervened).
• Based on the testimonies, the modern doping era in cycling seems to have started with the wide use of EPO in 1995 (it was low-risk being undetectable and it gave such a strong advantage that no multi-day racer could be competitive without it), but quickly escalated to the use of other drugs and the involvement of medical experts.
• There is (to me) new scientific evidence, for example, a new method to detect blood doping, used on post-comeback Armstrong samples.

Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too "intense," too "hyper-real," too "beautiful," too "interactive," and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. Nor does he know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for merely a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether his cortex was rebooting or not).

Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex "shut down," freeing his soul to travel to another dimension. As one of his correspondents has already informed him, similar experiences can be had with ketamine, which is a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that psychedelic compounds like DMT and ketamine "do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding" he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about. 

Again, there is nothing to be said against Alexander's experience. It sounds perfectly sublime. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel.

interesting psychogical no-man's land...

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

Holy shit. I've not seen a Hollywood contract or a gaming industry contract that's that bad-and those industries are bad. Like, they'll claim the sexual rights to your housepets as collateral for your eternal soul bad. Wow.

It also reminds me of green M&Ms. In the mid 80s, Van Halen got a lot of bad press for demanding a bowl of only green M&Ms in their contracts-prima donna shenanigans, the press called it. Well, they're a local band and I got to work as a video tech on a couple gigs with some of their members, and got to hear the real story:

They got so sick of venues and promoters not living up to the contract that they inserted the green M&M clause (and other similar clauses) so they'd have quick and easy confirmation that the responsible parties had read and understood every line of the contract. If they didn't, they had the right to cancel the gig-and they exercised the option more than once.

It impressed on me (for the first time) how important it is to read and understand every single clause of every single contract I sign. Someone might stick green M&Ms into it, or something worse. And, from time to time, I've stuck clauses like that in contracts with business partners I didn't trust, and it's occasionally saved my butt.