because it's Friday, and the countdown to the DFB Pokal nears completion, afew has graced us with an early thread.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

/snark

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

An overwhelming majority of University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras campus students ratified in a general assembly Thursday the indefinite strike vote that has kept the state-run academic institution shut for 23 consecutive days.

The assembly, which had been endorsed by UPR President José R. De la Torre, Río Piedras campus Chancellor Ana R. Guadalupe and Board of Trustees president Ygrí Rivera, was initially questioned by the striking students who considered it a "desperate attempt" by university administrators to coerce the students into lifting the strike without considering their demands.

"They tried to ambush us. Today we went to their assembly, at a place of their choosing, in their own terms, and we won. This clearly demonstrates our strength," Student Negotiating Committee member Giovanni Roberto said.

"They should negotiate. They should stop being so intransigent," added the student leader.

Including a redesign of a site that hasn't even been launched yet. Which we discovered we had to do when the client emailed us a new logo they'd had designed ...

Very impressive pictures.

Wind power

A gameplan for getting to 100% renewables

Switching to renweable power, as we frequently hear, is difficult. It's unreliable, expensive, requires complicated changes to infrastructure, regularly falls foul of nimby-ism, and somewhat ironically, environmental problems.

At the same time, fossil fuels are not looking like being an easy option forever. Even if one overlooks climate change, other problems of pricing, supply, and geopolitics are increasingly apparent.

And now PriceWaterhouseCoopers has come up with a sketch [PDF] of how Europe and North Africa could get 100 per cent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2050.

FRANKFURT, May 14 (Reuters) - The European Central Bank camouflaged the evidence of its government bond buying activities on Friday, masking its actions and intentions from markets in a bid to maximise their potency. In its daily breakdown of market operations, the ECB scrambled the extent of its recent bond purchases by folding the total into its estimate of autonomous (special) factors that impact the euro zone banking system's liquidity needs.

It put the combined figure at 339.63 billion euros. That compares to the 348.8 billion estimation of autonomous factors on Thursday, and comes out roughly 12 billion euros below the 352 billion euros the figure has averaged out at since the start of the year.

"They have just made it impossible to actually say how much they have bought," said RBS economist Nick Matthews. "Some won't like the lack of transparency but it's actually a smart move. They are keeping an element of mystery to get the biggest bang for their buck, or rather euro."

From the ECB's monetary policy rules and procedures (pdf):

ANNOUNCEMENT OF BILATERAL OPERATIONS

Bilateral operations are normally not announced publicly in advance. In addition, the ECB may decide not to announce the results of bilateral operations publicly.

Dutch minister resigns after affair scandal | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Caretaker Deputy Defence Minister Jack de Vries has resigned. He is leaving politics and will not contest the 9 June election.

He was number 15 on the Christian Democrat list of candidates for the poll. However, his position has been compromised by recent news of an extra-marital affair with a female worker in his department.

He says "continuing media interest" has put unreasonable pressure on those around him, explaining that the scandal has led to his no longer being able to do his job properly.

This morning I was hoping he'd stay a bit longer. For kicks and an extra dose of ridicule. Shame CDA, shame.

Why can't we just acknowledge that the markets have the attention span of a ferret on crack and just ignore them for the purpose of public policy?

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan

The debt crisis in Europe will not necessarily have a direct impact in Finland's public economy. According to some experts, the crisis may actually be of indirect benefit to the country. A weaker euro and low interest rates are expected to boost economic recovery.

Reuters: Exclusive: Waddell is mystery trader in market plunge

A big mystery seller of futures contracts during the market meltdown last week was not a hedge fund or a high frequency trader as many have suspected, but money manager Waddell & Reed Financial Inc, according to a document obtained by Reuters.

Waddell sold on May 6 a large order of e-mini contracts during a 20-minute span in which U.S. equities markets plunged, briefly wiping out nearly $1 trillion in market capital, the internal document from Chicago Mercantile Exchange parent CME Group Inc said.

The e-minis are one of the most liquid futures contracts in the world, providing holders exposure to the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index. The contracts can act as a directional indicator for the underlying stock index.

Regulators and exchange officials quickly focused on Waddell's sale of 75,000 e-mini contracts, which the document said "superficially appeared to be anomalous activity."

Gary Gensler, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in congressional testimony on Tuesday that it had found one sale was responsible for about 9 percent of the volume in e-minis during the sell-off in the U.S. markets.

Gensler said there was no suggestion that the trader, whom he did not identify, did anything wrong in only entering orders to sell. Gensler said data show that the trades appeared to be part of a bona fide hedging strategy.

"a growing revulsion towards paper assets that would mark a sea-change in the world economy, and the beginning of the end for the dollar reserve currency."

I found interesting his recalling Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" 1966 essay. Here's Greenspan:

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

Jesse concludes:

Given his Randian audience and the mood at the time, it is interesting that Greenspan defines the culprits in the scheme of fiat monetization as 'welfare statists.' How ironic, that over a period of time there is indeed a group of welfare statists behind the latest debasement of the currency, the US dollar, but the recipients of this welfare are the Banks and the financial elite, who through transfer payments, financial fraud, and federally sanctioned subsidies are systematically stripping the middle class of their wealth. Perhaps they decided that if you cannot beat them, beat them to the trough and take the best for themselves until the system collapses through their abuse.

It would seem the Randians, such as Greenspan, destroyed the dollar (and gunning for the euro) on purpose to 'prove' their point. Anointing Alan "fiat currency is a crock" Greenspan to the U.S. Fed, is like putting the Republican "government cannot work" Party in charge of the U.S. government -- self fulfilling prophecies.