The third guy ducks.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

"Recovery is just around the corner." - Olli Rehn (Loose translation)

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Oops, looks like we have two Wednesday Open Threads. :-)

There are interesting rumours that UKIP are beginning to enjoy a late surge at the by-election in Eastleigh which will be held tomorrow.

Probably not enough to win, but possibly enough to beat the Tories into 3rd place.

If that happens, civil war will erupt within the Tory party which might split it apart. Such fun !!!

keep to the Fen Causeway

I'm currently reading, well skimming, a book about the early days of the Beatles and it is staggering the extent to which Brian Epstein made terribly bad deals which costs the band tens of millions of pounds.

He was just unbelievably incompetent. I'd not realised that before

keep to the Fen Causeway

**Doom!™**

If you want to know what they're selling, it's here.

Damn those wicked pensioners and their greedy, grasping, stability-destroying ways.

Have the last few versions of firefox got very slow over the past weeks or is it just me?

-----
sapere aude

France accused of cover-up over Tunisian dictator's gold | The Times

France was accused of a cover-up yesterday over claims that Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's former dictator, and Leila Trabelsi, his spendthrift wife, had flown 1,800 gold ingots out of the impoverished African country to pay for their life of luxury in exile.

The gold, worth €72 million (£62.2 million), was transported through French airports, according to customs officers, despite a European Union pledge to freeze the fallen despot's assets.

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

New Economics Foundation: How can we link monetary systems to the natural world? (27 February 2013)

Money may not grow on trees, but it does grow at a much faster rate - particularly when created by banks as interest-bearing debt. In modern economies, nearly all money is created in this way. To maintain a stable money supply, debtors must repay both the initial loan and the interest on the loan.  This means we need either economic growth at a rate in line with the interest on the debt and/or inflation, both of which we've had a great deal of in the past century.

But back in the real, natural world, there are limits to growth. The ultimate limit is energy, something all production requires. Humans require food to survive and re-produce. To create this food we need energy, energy that comes, ultimately, from the sun.

...

We need to create a better feedback mechanism between money - our universal unit of account, store of value and means of exchange - and energy, the universal source of life. We've released a new report today on energy currencies - the first attempt to review existing proposals and projects that link money to energy, or vice versa. We present a typology to help understand the different functions that these energy currencies can fulfil, in terms of both anchoring money in the natural world and encouraging more sustainable economic activity.  We include case studies of a variety of different approaches to the problem:

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

The Daily Show was rather scathing yesterday/today, depending on where you are.  John Stewart started off with a brief summary on the new "merger mania" that's sweeping Wall Street, asking why now, and why ever, given that it's failed so badly before.  Then a new contributing comic, one I'd not seen before, came on with a cutting "evil capitalist" routine, complete with a dictionary he'd personally bought and created to bring his own newspeak words into the dictionary, like Greeb, which is the desire to own everything even after one already owns everything.

More horsemeat

Shockwaves rocked the world of haute cuisine today after Napa Valley health authorities discovered the iconic 3-star Michelin restaurant The Horse & Pony featured horse meat in all 18 courses of its signature chef's tasting menu.