The French and German foreign ministers, Bernard Kouchner and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, are to record a duet together for release on YouTube. Fortunately professional musicians will be on hand to help out the two crooning politicians.

When it comes to singing, Bernard Kouchner seems to be more of a crooner ... The European Union has an image problem. All too many ordinary Europeans find it, well, boring, with young people in particular being on the whole underwhelmed by Brussels.

So what better way to appeal to young Europeans than through the language they understand best: music? Throw in some banging tunes and some fat beats and they'll be crossing the "yes" box at the next referendum before you can say "European constitution."

That, at least, seems to be the approach which the foreign ministers of France and Germany -- the two countries which make up the famous "motor" of the EU -- are taking in a bid to promote international harmony: Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 51, and France's Bernard Kouchner, 68, are to collaborate Monday on a duet.

For me, it turns clockwise, although with a little effort I can see her spinning counter-clockwise; the test outcome is as expected.

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) - A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

Of course this news wasn't reported in the english-speaking press:

"UN Racism Expert Doudou Diène addressed the General Assembly's Third Committee on social, humanitarian and cultural affairs, noting a "resurgence" in racist and xenophobic violence, as well as growing "defamation of religions." He cited racial as well as religious hatred, anti-Semitism, Christianophobia and, particularly, Islamophobia. Diène took the unusual step of criticizing French President Nicolas Sarkozy for a July 2007 speech in Dakar that allegedly stated that "Africans had not become part of history." According to Diène, this was "an example of the legitimization of racism...it recalled the essentialism of racist constructions of the 18th and 19th centuries."
UN Watch

No big surprise to anyone who followed the french elections yet it is good to see he is getting the publicity he deserves on the international stage.

"We know everything about you. From the Americans."

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

AEIO Uuuuuuuuuuu....

Followed by...the best song ever in a flim?

(Don't forget to turn the volume down again before clicking play.)

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

The combination is producing an unintended result: West Coast utilities and independent power producers are locked in a land rush to secure the best wind sites and the power they produce. Coupled with a worldwide shortage of turbines and a falling dollar, the resulting scarcity is driving up the cost of wind power -- a burden that electricity ratepayers ultimately will shoulder...

Meanwhile, experts are already questioning whether the West Coast states' progressively higher mandates will outstrip the region's potential supply of green power or its ability to move that power around the electrical grid...

Renewables advocates reject any notion of a shortage. They claim there are adequate projects in the pipeline to meet early targets and plenty more to tap if big players get moving. If wave, tidal, geothermal and solar technologies mature, they could be big contributors as well.

From this we note that the implied interest rate on gold is the lowest, over the long term, of any currency on earth. That's because gold is the highest-quality currency on earth.

The United States' Founding Fathers understood this well. In the constitution of 1789, they mandated that gold would serve as the basis of money in the United States. The United States stuck to this principle for 182 years, until 1971. During those 182 years, the US never suffered permanent, large-scale inflation. Immediately after decoupling the dollar from gold in 1971, inflation ignited in the US and around the world. The dollar lost about 90% of its value vs gold that decade, and prices adjusted accordingly. It took 20 years to recover from the disaster.

<...>

Between 1823 and 1914, 91 years on the gold standard, the yield on the British government's Consol bonds was never above 4.0%. These bonds were of infinite maturity. This one statistic tells you all you need to know about monetary and macroeconomic stability under the gold standard. If two currencies are pegged to gold, then their exchange rates must also be stable. Despite all the thousands of PhDs issued and papers written over the past decades, no government or mainstream economist has ever been able to touch this track record. They don't even try.

Floating currencies have been around for millennia. The attractions of currency manipulation are so great that it seems there's always someone who wants to give it another try. The philosopher Plato apparently helped the ruler of Syracuse issue a floating fiat currency in the year 388 BC. The results of that project, and all of the hundreds that followed over the centuries, were exactly the same. They eventually failed, and the successful governments returned to gold as the basis of their monetary affairs.

Godl: A barbarous relic

The thing that I could never get is this:

The principle of a gold standard is elementary: gold is stable in value...

Why?  What makes gold so special?  What gives it its almost divine status?  Surely water is far, far more instrinsically valuable to humans than a shiny, ductile, malleable and sectile metal?

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.