Sense amongst Madness - Wit amongst Folly

European leaders agreed on a new ‘comprehensive’ solution to the Euro crisis, for the 5th or 6th time.  LOL.   This one isn’t even worth the paper it is written on.   Apparently a footnote to the treaty was inserted saying it must pass the Finnish parliament, knowing full well the treaty is unconstitutional under the Finnish law. (lots more commentary here)

The British were none too pleased either and good for them!

I think it might be something like Escape from New York (see below for video preview).  Sound Silly?    think again -

First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. … Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained.
…
Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria … to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.
…
And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak.

One of Hungary’s major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it’s anti-Roma (Gypsy), it’s anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party.
…
The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start … It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.   Paul Krugman

A discussion of unemployed Wall Streeters (yes there are lots of them) looking for financial firms that practice ‘integrity and honesty’ and hedge fund managers crying ‘boohoo’ that JP Morgan has seized their MF Global funds. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Danny Schechter about plunder, the crime of our time, inspiring an economic justice movement.

The U.S. ‘celebrated’ Black Friday today, the biggest shopping day of the year. And what fun it was! Especially at Wallmart. After the 2008 incident where an employee was trampled to death, when a crowd of aggressive bargain shoppers ‘surged’ – this year they were prepared.

“I would just tell you that the plans we have in place were developed with nationally recognized crowd experts and really were the first of their kind,” company spokesperson Greg Rossiter.

This year, Walmart decided there wasn’t any sense in actually waiting until, you know, Black Friday to begin, but why not start early? Like at 10 pm on Thursday, which is American thanksgiving, and so in-keeping with feelings of gratitude and sharing with family and friends.

[A witness] said that by the time he arrived at the video games, the display had been torn down. Employees attempted to hold back the scrum of shoppers and pick up merchandise even as customers trampled the video games and DVDs strewn on the floor. Hat Tip TalkingPointsMemo

“Overall, it’s been a very safe event,”  he adds.    Oh, except for the beligerent bargain shopper who resisted arrest and was tasered by the cops.   Oh, and the riotous crowds brawled over video games, waffle irons and towels.

One of the most outrageous incidents of the day was in the Los Angeles area, where up to 20 people were injured after a woman at a Walmart used pepper spray to get an edge on other shoppers in a rush for Xbox game consoles.

Apparently their web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic as well. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors causing items to go out of stock before they could buy them.

A tribute to Nobel Prize winning economist, New York Times columnist and all-round decent guy –

http://www.epi.org/publication/epi-25-paul-krugman-video/

NY Times today ran an article on Amazon and the frightening prospect of Amazon not only selling ebooks, but actually making deals direct with authors.  The nerve!  And not even talking to the publishing companies that control the entire industy!    What’s next?

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.  Full article Here

You don’t say?  Big companies are actually selling ebooks and talking to authors all by themselves!  Without publishing companies, bookstores, agents or any of that.   If you think it is just big companies like Amazon and Apple, think again.  And if you are just noticing now,  then you are pretty late to the party, and anything you do is probably going to be way too little and way too late.

The really surprising thing is that publishing companies, agents (et. all) have held on this long.    Things are much further along that one would suppose.  According to the Economist,  Amazon now sells more ebooks than paper books, and ebooks account for 20% of large traditional publisher’s sales.  Blockbuster novels sell equal ebooks and paper books.   And if you think about what Apple did to the music industry, ie. just took it while nobody was looking, and what NetFlix and others have done to the once formidable Blockbuster, not only is there a full length novel written on the wall, the wall has long since fallen over.

(more…)

Actually I would prefer oil, maybe in a pastoral setting, but if you are a prehistoric Kraken, its pretty good.

Paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College came to the conclusion that the shonisaur remains had been deposited in a “kraken” lair by its massive, tentacled squatter. From his abstract of research being presented today at The Geological Society of America’s annual meeting:

We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a “kraken,” with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid Mesonychoteuthis. In this scenario, shonisaurs were ambushed by a Triassic kraken, drowned, and dumped on a midden like that of a modern octopus. (maybe something like this) Where vertebrae in the assemblage are disarticulated, disks are arranged in curious linear patterns with almost geometric regularity. Close fitting due to spinal ligament contraction is disproved by the juxtaposition of different-sized vertebrae from different parts of the vertebral column. The proposed Triassic kraken, which could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever, arranged the vertebral discs in biserial patterns, with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle. The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each amphicoelous vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. Thus the tessellated vertebral disc pavement may represent the earliest known self?portrait.

Europe is still circling the drain, getting ready from the big dive, Steve Jobs died, and now we hear from Wasilla that Sara Palin isn’t running for president! What next?

Andrew Sullivan sums it up:

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one). Her explanation is, as usual, opaque. But the idea that this person is protecting her family – after putting them all on a reality show, after deploying an infant with Down Syndrome as a book-selling prop, after pushing her son into the military, after sending her elderly dad headfirst into a ravine for a reality TV shot, and after using another young daughter as a campaign press bouncer … well, it’s as ludicrous as almost everything she says. … And the sheer craziness of this clinically disturbed person would bring it all crashing down [anyway]. So she’s bowing out. Call it cowardice; call it a rare example of sanity; call it a bizarre end to an even weirder game of hide and seek for the past few months.

(more…)