Jerome a Paris comment on 31 January 2007:

The problem is that there are now too many euroskepitcal countries (and the leaders of France and Germany themselves are less euro-enthusiastic) to get the second leg working. Or it's just that the euro was such a great economic reform that it has brought no crisis that would really bring about the need for political integration. Compared to the monetary crises and devaluation traumas of the 80s, the current spats on budget deficits are very mild.

So this is an obituary of sorts, but more of a tribute to a singular type of character. I have just watched the film of "On the Road" and realised how some aspects of Dean Moriarty/Jack Cassady reminded me of this person.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, ...and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. I think of. Dean. Moriarty."

I thought of that line when I heard J. had died,  OD'd over the weekend of heroin in Thailand, he thought it was cocaine which you'd do if you were stoned in Thailand and somebody offered you some white powder cos cocaine is what white powder always is, isn't it? Except, in Thailand it's heroin. That's not a mistake anybody gets to make twice and so poor old J. is dead, at 27.

There was something of Dean in J. That charm, the easy languid smile, the restless seeking of the next sensual thrill. He was a user too, of people as well as chemicals, although more an abuser of both. Oh yes, he even studied how to be a bastard at Pick-Up School-for-Scoundrels. He'd steal from anyone, which was how he got fired from when I knew him but there was more to it than just a dark mischief, he stole for fun, to prove he was a better survivor, more predatory, sharpened his instincts. I'm sure he was fun to be around, but he wasn't a nice person even if he did me no harm.

It's tempting to say he deserved what he got. Although any of us who've woken up after rattling our bones at the ol' reaper know that it's never about deserving. No, in those circumstances when you wake up in unfamiliar rooms with the sweats upon you and you count your limbs and lucky stars you know it's all about dumb luck and the roll of the dice. Well he chased snake eyes all the way of the dragon and somewhere along the line his luck ran out.

Dean was the life and soul of a party, wherever he was there was a party. He was a hedonist, relentless in his mischief and, disguising his damage with energy, he attracted the very best of people to him and the intellect and spirit to keep 'em. The positives outweighed Dean's dark side and made his awfulness forgivable.

J lacked such enthusiasms, he was just damaged and lost. And now he's dead. In Thailand, where the cocaine is heroin and the heroin is cheap and nobody cares about another dead tourist who OD's cos there are always plenty more.

The saddest thing is, unlike Dean, few will think of him. At work everybody went "meh", there had always been that "oh me oh my, feel like I'm fixin to die" inevitability. Live fast,  die young, leave a beautiful corpse. If it wasn't going to be from sleeping with the girl with the deranged ex-boyfriend (in SX that is always a possibility) then drugs was always the probability.

I think of Dean Moriarty, cos something in you reminds me of him. I'd never met a self-styled "pick up artist" before and the desperate sleaziness fascinated me. But I will not think of you anymore. A lost soul who lost out.

4. No one goes swimming anymore

OK, that's an exaggeration. But it's true that summer beach vacations just aren't the tradition they once were. Parents and kids alike are burdened with more commitments and less free time, and Griswold-style family trips are becoming a relative rarity. A shark terrorizing a seaside resort wouldn't resonate the same way it did in 1975 - most of us would shrug and say, "Who has time to go to the beach?"

Pete Brown - How Big Lager Lost The Plot And Developed Narcissistic Personality Disorder

As anyone who has read Man Walks into a Pub will know, my entry into the world of beer was via Big Lager. I loved lager ads when I was growing up as a teenager.

Later, once I was helping make those ads, I was fascinated by the tribal loyalty people had to their favourite beer brands.

If you were a group of mates in your twenties, Carling or Heineken or Carlsberg was like another one of your gang, always there when all the best times happened. In research groups you sometimes do an exercise where you ask people to imagine what brands would be like if they were people at a party. Beer brands were always characterised as confident, friendly guys, witty and popular without being an arse, enjoying a drink but never getting too drunk. This guy was never the pack leader, not necessarily the most popular or pushy guy in the room, but everyone liked him.

Things started go go wrong around 1997. Advertising regulations grew ever tighter and the funny campaigns of the eighties were no longer possible. And beer started to take itself seriously. It wanted to provide a bit of substance behind the good-natured banter. Fair enough. But the picture started to blur.

Dr. Ehrlich's opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over." He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair "England will not exist in the year 2000." Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that "sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come." By "the end," he meant "an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the '70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet's population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when "The Population Bomb" became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson's on "The Tonight Show." How the apocalyptic predictions fell as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth is the focus of this installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining significant news stories of the past and their aftermath.

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After the passage of 47 years, Dr. Ehrlich offers little in the way of a mea culpa. Quite the contrary. Timetables for disaster like those he once offered have no significance, he told Retro Report, because to someone in his field they mean something "very, very different" from what they do to the average person. The end is still nigh, he asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse "various forms of coercion" like eliminating "tax benefits for having additional children." Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone "throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor's backyard as they want."

If renewable energy is ever to become truly subsidy independent and earn its keep in electricity markets, that means there is a natural stopping point at which a marginal increment of wind or solar will become unprofitable. The market revenues earned by these VREs will eventually fall far enough that it's no longer worth deploying more.

This is also why the idea of reaching "grid parity," or a levelized cost equal to the prevailing market price, is pretty meaningless. As soon as wind or solar penetration grows, the goal posts move further away due to this merit-order or market price effect. Wind and solar costs will have to keep falling to secure greater penetration levels and remain profitable at the ever lower and lower market prices caused by increasing VRE penetration.

Alternatively, if wind and solar are to remain subsidized, the amount of public subsidy per unit of energy supplied will have to keep growing in order to push VRE shares higher and higher. The total subsidy cost could rise sharply, as the price per MWh required increases alongside the quantity of electricity generated from these sources. 

(...)

Indeed, according to a major new study of the challenges of integrating wind and solar in the Western Interconnection of North America, the maximum production of variable renewables at any instant can't exceed about 55-60 percent of total demand without risking system stability.

In Ireland, which, as we saw in part 1 is the world leader in variable renewable penetration, system operators currently limit variable renewable production to 50 percent of demand at any given time, although operators are working to increase this limit.

In short, the capacity factor threshold may actually be generous: if the instantaneous penetration of wind and solar can't exceed half or two-thirds of power system demand in any given moment, system security concerns will begin to bind before the penetration of variable renewables reaches their capacity factor.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to "offensive" texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students' ire and sealed his fate.  That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik -- and I wasn't the only one who made adjustments, either.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme -- be it communism or racism or whatever -- but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

It seems clear that he will announce rejection of Merkel/Hollande's latest ultimatumconstructive proposal

Shit, meet fan.

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

According to data from the European Broadcasting Union, nearly every television viewer in Iceland watched this year's Eurovision, topping every country in the world.

Abstract

Structural and functional features of central nervous system lymphatic vessels

One of the characteristics of the central nervous system is the lack of a classical lymphatic drainage system. Although it is now accepted that the central nervous system undergoes constant immune surveillance that takes place within the meningeal compartment1, 2, 3, the mechanisms governing the entrance and exit of immune cells from the central nervous system remain poorly understood4, 5, 6. In searching for T-cell gateways into and out of the meninges, we discovered functional lymphatic vessels lining the dural sinuses. These structures express all of the molecular hallmarks of lymphatic endothelial cells, are able to carry both fluid and immune cells from the cerebrospinal fluid, and are connected to the deep cervical lymph nodes. The unique location of these vessels may have impeded their discovery to date, thereby contributing to the long-held concept of the absence of lymphatic vasculature in the central nervous system. The discovery of the central nervous system lymphatic system may call for a reassessment of basic assumptions in neuroimmunology and sheds new light on the aetiology of neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases associated with immune system dysfunction.

Anyone with positive experiences using Cranio-sacral therapy will smile at this...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty