Look, let’s be clear.  The fact that Han shot first is absolutely essential to understanding the Solo character and his actions and motivations for the rest of the trilogy and you Lucas bootlicking naysayers probably liked Jar-Jar.

Oh, yeah, I’ll go there.

But today we’re talking about another Solo, much cooler and more black and white.

I must confess I had a mad English teacher that thought The Magnificent Seven was the best picture ever and devoted 6 weeks of independent study to it’s intricacies (which I could bore you with, but I got a 98 so whatever).  Among his favorite story arcs is Robert Vaughn’s Lee, the gunslinger that has lost his edge and lives in constant fear of both dying and being exposed as a coward.

“There was a time when I would have have caught all three.”

Vaughn’s career has sunk so low that his must memorable current stuff is standups for Mall Lawyers, but there was a time when he was the next Bill Shatner (I remember the 5th season of The A-Team).  You’d be surprised to know he was a recurring character on Coronation Street as Milton Fanshaw.

Number One of Section Two was a mini-Bond created by Ian Fleming for the show.  Looking at the episodes is instructive in an early ’60s Feminist sense of demonstrating many of the common tropes and memes of that time.  Remember, while tongue-in-cheek, the character is supposed to exude an inescapable charm of wit and elegance.  Vaughn brought a perfect edge of arrogance, ennui, and superficiality.

If you were a brainiac like me though the one you totally dug was Illya.

He holds a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and a PhD in Quantum Mechanics from the University of Cambridge, though he admits to not keeping up-to-date with the field. He appears to have been an undergraduate at the University of Georgia in Tbilisi, where he practiced gymnastics. Kuryakin is a polymath. He is well-read in English literature, he has an in-depth knowledge of music and plays the bass viol, the English horn and guitar. He also sings, and he speaks many languages, including French, German and Japanese.

His technical skills are also well honed. He is an explosives expert who stayed on at the U.N.C.L.E. Survival School a month after he graduated to teach a class on the subject.

David McCallum is now known as “Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard” from NCIS which is just as ridiculous a name as I can possibly imagine but he’s still a heart throb at 80, which is not so bad for the guy they used to call “the blond Beatle”.

Now neither the cinematic reboot’s box office or critical reception are as bad as you might think although it’s already generating negative buzz so it’s unlikely to be Warner’s summer blockbuster.  I’ll probably watch it as I did the Avengers (no not that one) on free TV when it comes around.

Zaki’s Review, not the worst one, from Huffington Post

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is less about any particular surprises the script (by Ritchie and Lionel Wigram) may offer — though, admittedly, there are a few. Instead, it’s similar to the Bond formula in that it’s all about the simple pleasure of knowing things have to come to a preordained conclusion, and watching it done well. Stylistically, U.N.C.L.E. is very much of a piece with Ritchie’s two Sherlock Holmes flicks (the first of which I enjoyed quite a bit, the second less so), so I suspect one’s appreciation for it will depend greatly on their tolerance for the Snatch helmer’s specific tics.

Of course, the real joy of the film is in watching the game cast (which includes Hugh Grant and Jared Harris) go through their paces. Cavill in particular is a lot of fun as Our Man Solo, adopting an exaggerated affect to his delivery that neatly mimics Vaughn’s staccato style and also feels like the character’s sly commentary on the genre itself, as if he’s standing to the side and winking at the audience. Hammer arguably has the tougher job: trying to make his character seem sympathetic and understandable all while speaking in a Russian accent that could very easily tip into Boris Badanov territory. Luckily, he manages to pulls it off admirably.

From Kingsman earlier this year and Mission: Impossible last month to the 007 epic Spectre in November, 2015 is proving quite the fertile year for big screen spying (and that’s not even mentioning Melissa McCarthy in Spy!). Though The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lacks the wit of Kingsman and the spectacle of Rogue Nation (any comparisons to the new Bond will have to wait, natch), it nonetheless sits comfortably alongside its spy movie siblings.

Entertainment

• Straight Outta Compton: Black Lives Matter, By Deborah Nesbit, Crooks & Liars
• This New TV Show About The Robot Uprising Reminds Us How Complicated It Is To Get Out Of Housework, by Kay Steiger, Think Progress
• ‘Key & Peele’ Ends While Nation Could Still Use a Laugh, By DAVE ITZKOFF, The New York Times
• NBC Confirms Plans For ‘Xena’ Reboot, by Kevin Melrose, Comic Book Resource
• Exclusive: George R.R. Martin Says ‘Game of Thrones’ Ending Will Be ‘Bittersweet’, By Sean T Collins, The Observer
• Orlando Bloom Is Officially Back In ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ 5, by Bill Bradley, Huffington Post
• ‘Frozen 2′ Details: Director Teases a Different Side of Elsa, by Angie Han, Slash Film
• Hannibal Recap: season three, episode 11 – And the Beast From the Sea, by Eric Thurm, The Guardian
• Beetlejuice 2 is really happening, confirms Winona Ryder, by Nancy Groves, The Guardian
• Syfy’s new “Childhood’s End” could be the perfect show for our quasi-populist, government-hating times, by Scott Timberg, Salon

Sports

On Thursday Little League Baseball starts its World Series (which is really worthy of the name involving, as it does, other countries).

Thursday

• Caribbean (Los Bravos de Pontezuela, DR) vs. Europe-Africa (AVRS Secondary School, Uganda)
• Southwest (Pearland West, Pearland, TX) vs. Northwest (Wilshire/Riverside, Portland, OR)
• Latin America (Cardenales, Barquisimeto, Venezuela) vs. Australia (Cronulla, Sydney)
• Great Lakes (Bowling Green Eastern, Bowling Green, KY) vs. West (Sweetwater Valley, Bonita, CA)

Friday

• Canada (White Rock South Surrey, BC) vs. Mexico (Seguro Social, Mexicali)
• New England (Cranston Western, Cranston, RI) vs. Southeast (Northwood, Taylors, SC)
• Japan (Tokyo Kitasuna) vs. Asia-Pacific (Tung Yuan, Taipei)
• Midwest (Webb City, MO) vs. Mid-Atlantic (Red Land, Lewisberry, PA)

Saturday is the Semi-Finals (two teams will emerge) of the National and International Championships, I’ll probably tell you about the finals next wee.

• All Blacks Rout Australia to Retain Bledisloe Cup, By EMMA STONEY, The New York Times
• ‘We’ll Be Back,’ They Vowed, and They Are, By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY, The New York Times
• Top Spanish matador gored by bull, AFP
• Brazil prosecutors find Olympic village workers living in squalor, Reuters

Mets 4.5 games up after a miserable series.

Damn Yankees, still half a game in front.

Bonus Baseball- We’re in a golden age of hitters who can pitch – but some guys are better than others.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

–Aristotle

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

In still another sign of how the TPP is unraveling we have the story of Chile from Truthout.

Where the Trans-Pacific Partnership Could Lose

By Julia Paley, Truthout

Friday, 14 August 2015 00:00

In Chile, where the administration of President Michelle Bachelet has moved forward with the TPP negotiation process, opposition is strong in the legislature. Even Bachelet’s minister of foreign affairs has indicated that Chile won’t sign the agreement if the TPP doesn’t meet certain criteria.

The Chilean controversy over the TPP highlights some of the biggest problems with the agreement – for working people in Chile, the United States, and around the world – and it makes plain the false promises the Obama administration used to push Democrats to support fast track.

…

Under ordinary circumstances, signing on to a free trade agreement would be a no brainer for Chile. It has agreements with more countries than any other nation, and additional ones are on the way. In fact, Chile already has trade agreements with all the other countries involved in the TPP.

…

As critics in many countries agree, the TPP is expected to harm health by extending the duration of patents for medicines and medical procedures, making them unaffordable for millions of people and increasing the cost of implementing public health measures. The TPP is predicted to limit culture and education by increasing the time before movies, music, and books enter the public domain – thereby keeping the price too high for low-income people as well as schools and libraries. And the TPP could curtail Internet freedoms by impeding innovation and criminalizing popular forms of sharing. All of these, which could impact people in the United States as well, hit other countries especially hard.

What’s particularly thorny for Chile is that standards for these issues were already hammered out in bilateral agreements with the United States and other countries. The concern is that joining the TPP will be tantamount to renegotiating the terms of trade – and coming out with less favorable results than before.

…

The fact that Chile already has free trade agreements with all the other countries in the pact means it has no particularly strong incentive to sign on. Unlike countries such as Malaysia and Vietnam, whose access to investment and export markets are likely to increase substantially under the TPP, the agreement won’t bring major trade benefits to Chile. Meanwhile, the costs to the country – in terms of its own ability to create laws in the future and extensions of intellectual property protections – could be high.

As the negotiation process nears a close, congressional representatives in Chile have renewed their opposition.

…

Minister of Foreign Affairs Heraldo Muñoz made declarations about how far the Bachelet government was – and was not – willing to go. In response to deputies’ concerns, he declared that in the area of intellectual property, patents, and services, Chile would not accept any terms worse than those already negotiated in its existing free trade agreements. Specifically, in relation to patent protection for pharmaceuticals, he said that Chile would insist on the five years allowed for in existing treaties and not agree to the 12 years proposed for the TPP. “If there isn’t an agreement that’s acceptable, we won’t sign it,” he declared. Moreover, with regard to the US certification process, he affirmed, “we will not accept any interference in our sovereignty, and if that were the case, the agreement would not go into effect.”

The 3 Rules of Opera–

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

My life is hardship and misery thanks to this opera. Everything about it is wrong for me.  (It is) totally at odds with all that I dream about, demanding a type of music that is alien to me.

Now to be fair, Debussy was talking about another opera he attempted but never finished- Rodrigue et Chimène, a sort of El Cid knockoff.

He was probably unhappy with the upbeat Hollywood ending where, mortally wounded, El Cid dies wishing only for one more crack at the Muslims so they (the Spanish) impale him on a stick like a corn dog, strap him to his horse, point him (the horse, El Cid is dead) at the Moors and give him a kick in the ass (the horse again, they could hardly give El Cid a kick there, that’s where the stick was).

From beyond the grave, El Cid tastes victory again, saving us from those civilized not us.  God and the Holy Roman Catholic Church be praised!

The fact is that his father was a greedy bastard and wanted some of that hot Opera money.  Our Claude however was all artsy-fartsy and gave it up as a bad job, opting instead for Pelléas et Mélisande.

Prince finds mysterious forest girl (that would be Mélisande) and marries her.  He brings her home and she falls in love with his brother (that would be Pelléas).  After years (maybe it only seems like years, it is Opera) of restraint and denial they confess their love in range of the stalking paranoid Prince who kills his brother Pelléas in a fit of jealousy.  Mélisande dies shortly after, in childbirth, never saying if the girl is from the Prince or Pelléas.

And how would she know anyway even if she’d been dinking them both?

As you see it has all the essential elements and sex besides.  You might expect it to be an unmitigated success but it took several years (1895 – 1902) to even find a venue and while regularly performed the reviews were mixed and the box office not boffo.  After the Great War it faded from public conciousness almost entirely.

The other thing about it is that it’s a conscious rebuke to Wagnerian bombast-

“It is customary, and in the main correct, to regard Pelléas et Mélisande as a monument to French operatic reaction to Wagner.”

…

Debussy strove to avoid excessive Wagnerian influence on Pelléas from the start. The love scene was the first music he composed but he scrapped his early drafts for being too conventional and because “worst of all, the ghost of old Klingsor, alias R.Wagner, kept appearing.”

…

(T)he way Debussy writes for the orchestra is completely different from Tristan, for example. In Grout’s words, “In most places the music is no more than an iridescent veil covering the text.” The emphasis is on quietness, subtlety and allowing the words of the libretto to be heard; there are only four fortissimos in the entire score. Debussy’s use of declamation is un-Wagnerian as he felt Wagnerian melody was unsuited to the French language. Instead, he stays close to the rhythms of natural speech, making Pelléas part of a tradition which goes back to the French Baroque tragédies en musique of Rameau and Lully as well as the experiments of the very founders of opera, Peri and Caccini.

Which is a big plus in my book.  Without further adieu-

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Remember, CT stands for Completely True.  Or Connecticut, take your pick.  We publish only the most scurrilous rumors.

Tonightly Mike Yard investigates conspiracy theories with HUD Secretary Julian Castro.  Larry asks Bernie Sanders to Keep It 100.

Our panel is Ophira Eisenberg, Michael Rapaport, and Mike Yard.

Sanders, Bernard Sanders

Larry’s been mainlining politics since Jon’s departure.  I sort of like it.  I have no idea what’s happening next week.  Larry doesn’t believe in Comedy Central’s website.

Well, since we’re bombing Syria and have allowed Turkey a free Kurd hunting license.

One of the enduring questions of Physics is baryon asymmetry, or more popularly- ‘Where’s the Anti-Matter at?’

Technically a quark’s properties are-

1. Electric Charge (ElectroMagnetic Force)
2. Spin (Angular Momentum)
3. Mass (Gravity)
4. Position (Weak Force) and
5. Color (Strong Force)

An anti-Quark has exactly the opposite qualities for anything (except Spin and Mass) and I’m not talking not Green in the sense of Blue or Red, or not Top in the sense of Bottom, I mean the -1 times whatever it is.

Observed in the wild you say?  Oh my yes, constantly.  A Meson is specifically a Quark/anti-Quark package of Space-Time.  They last briefly as the by product of high energy collisions in nature and are regularly observed by particle colliders, sometimes reaching energy levels not seen since the Big Bang.  There is some evidence of Mesons made entirely of Quarks which may relate to the cause or effect of our central question but we’ll ignore it for now because basically it makes my main point which is that nobody has a clue.

It is a fact though that given a neutral environment (one in which no unaccounted for factor contributes to the result) there should be exactly as much anti-Matter as Matter in the Universe, and we’re just not seeing it.

I don’t know exactly how you would detect an anti-Photon and it would be hilarious if the amount of Dark Energy and Matter (essentially missing in that we can detect its gravitational influence on the expansion of Space-Time but not much else) equaled the amount of missing anti-Matter (remember Mass and Spin don’t change).

But that’s pretty tin foily and I don’t propose it except as a nerdy joke.

Mystery Deepens: Matter and Antimatter Are Mirror Images

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science

Matter and antimatter appear to be perfect mirror images of each other as far as anyone can see, scientists have discovered with unprecedented precision, foiling hope of solving the mystery as to why there is far more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Everyday matter is made up of protons, neutrons or electrons. These particles have counterparts known as antiparticles – antiprotons, antineutrons and positrons, respectively – that have the same mass but the opposite electric charge. (Although neutrons and antineutrons are both neutrally charged, they are each made of particles known as quarks that possess fractional electrical charges, and the charges of these quarks are equal and opposite to one another in neutrons and antineutrons.)

The known universe is composed of everyday matter. The profound mystery is, why the universe is not made up of equal parts antimatter, since the Big Bang that is thought to have created the universe 13.7 billion years ago produced equal amounts of both. And if matter and antimatter appear to be mirror images of each other in every respect save their electrical charge, there might not be much any of either type of matter left.

…

Theoretical physicists suspect that the extraordinary contrast between the amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe, technically known as baryon asymmetry, may be due to some difference between the properties of matter and antimatter, formally known as a charge-parity, or CP symmetry violation. However, all the known effects that lead to violations of CP symmetry fail to explain the vast preponderance of matter over antimatter.

Potential explanations behind this mystery could lie in differences in the properties of matter and antimatter – for instance, perhaps antiprotons decay faster than protons. If any such difference is found, however slight, “this will of course lead to dramatic consequences for our contemporary understanding of the fundamental laws of physics,” study lead author Stefan Ulmer, a particle physicist at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), told Live Science.

In the most stringent test yet of differences between protons and antiprotons, scientists investigated the ratio of electric charge to mass in about 6,500 pairs of these particles over a 35-day period.

…

The scientists found the charge-to-mass ratio of protons and antiprotons “is identical to within just 69 parts per trillion,” Ulmer said in a statement. This measurement is four times better than previous measurements of this ratio.

In addition, the researchers also discovered that the charge-to-mass ratios they measured do not vary by more than 720 parts per trillion per day, as Earth rotates on its axis and travels around the sun. This suggests that protons and antiprotons behave the same way over time as they zip through space at the same velocity, meaning they do not violate what is known as charge-parity-time, or CPT symmetry.

CPT symmetry is a key component of the Standard Model of particle physics, the best description to date of how the elementary particles making up the universe behave. No known violations of CPT symmetry exist. “Any detected CPT violation will have huge impact on our understanding of nature,” Ulmer said.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

I really encourage you to read the science links today.  There are some mighty fine stories.

• DNA Is Said to Solve a Mystery of Warren Harding’s Love Life, By PETER BAKER, The New York Times
• Tomb of Nefertiti, Egypt’s mysterious ancient queen, may have been found, The Guardian
• England to Test Roads That Charge Electric Vehicles, by Angela Moscaritolo, PC Magazine
• Cheers! Yeast’s Evolutionary Journey Gave Beer Its Flavor, by Elizabeth Goldbaum, Live Science
• During mass extinction, no species safe: study, By Marlowe Hood, AFP
• Medieval Sword Carries Mysterious Inscription, By Elizabeth Palermo, Live Science
• How We Could Detect an Alien Apocalypse From Earth, by George Dvorsky, io9
• The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found?, By THEO EMERY, The New York Times
• Cutting-edge science as you’ve never seen it before, by Kit Buchan, The Guardian
• Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile, by Alex Bellos, The Guardian

C’mon, we’re talking an obtuse polygon with 5 vertices.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below (also pretty good).

Interesting but maybe not coincidental that this discussion comes on the day Bernie pulls ahead of Hillary in at least one New Hampshire poll (the Franklin Pierce study is a little rare, a little spare, and seems designed to produce a desired Republican result of making Jeb seem stronger than he really is).

But no matter, I think anything that benefits Bernie is probably good news (unless you hold his NRA endorsement against him).

We’ll probably touch on ‘Black Lives Matter’ who’s more gentile and less militant Massachusetts branch just today got booted from a Hillary rally and accepted gratefully in return a “private meeting” where “concerns were heard”.

Bow down Bernie indeed.

Though mostly he has.  He gave them the mike and an audience.  There’s a new communications director, a fully developed policy, and 40 years of history at the forefront of Civil Rights (not for nothing folks).  O’Malley caved after Netroots Nation without the resume and had presided over Baltimore and Freddie Gray.  Now he gets a pass?

There are lots of questions (swiftboat) but I’ll put my tin foil aside.

Populist Propaganda

Ferguson

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

Our panel tonight is Andrea Savage, Alonzo Bodden, and Rory Albanese.

Please, please, please keep my neolib co-conspiritors in power.

Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge

by Tony Blair, The Guardian

Wednesday 12 August 2015 13.30 EDT

The Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence. I say this as someone who led the party for 13 years and has been a member for more than 40. The leadership election has turned into something far more significant than who is the next leader. It is now about whether Labour remains a party of government.

Governments can change a country. Protest movements simply agitate against those who govern. Labour in government changed this country. I don’t just mean the minimum wage, civil partnerships, massive investment in public services, lifting millions out of poverty, or peace in Northern Ireland. I mean we changed the nation’s zeitgeist. We forced change on the Tories. We gave a voice to those who previously had none. We led and shaped the public discourse. And, yes, governments do things people don’t like, and in time they lose power. That is the nature of democracy.

But in a thousand ways, small or large, which anyone in government can describe, being in power can make a difference to those we represent. The reality is that in the last three months the Labour party has been changed. Its membership has virtually doubled. Some will have joined in shock at the election result; many more are now joining specifically to support the Jeremy Corbyn campaign; some with heavy organisation behind them. These last two groups are not many in number, relative to the population. But, relative to the membership of a political party, they’re easily big enough to mount a partial takeover. The truth is they don’t really think it matters whether Labour wins an election or not. Some actually disdain government.

…

The unions in the 1980s were, by a majority, a force for stability and sense. There were constituencies so solidly Labour that nothing could shake them from their loyalty. The party that assembled after the 1983 defeat knew its direction. Maybe we didn’t know how far or how fast, but we knew, and the new leader Neil Kinnock knew, that we had to put aside the delusion that we had lost two elections because we weren’t leftwing enough and start to modernise. And our objective was to return to government.

What we’re witnessing now is a throwback to that time, but without the stabilisers in place. The big unions, with the exception of the most successful in recent times, USDAW, are in the grip of the hard left. And the people do not have that same old-time loyalty.

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation. If he wins the leadership, the public will at first be amused, bemused and even intrigued. But as the years roll on, as Tory policies bite and the need for an effective opposition mounts – and oppositions are only effective if they stand a hope of winning – the public mood will turn to anger. They will seek to punish us. They will see themselves as victims not only of the Tory government but of our self-indulgence.

…

I don’t doubt that his campaign has sparked interest. Why wouldn’t it? There is something fascinating about watching a party wrestle with its soul. It doesn’t mean it is a smart place to be. And, yes, some young people will be enthused. Many Young Labour members were enthused in 1997 and are enthused by modernising Labour policy today.

The tragedy is that immense damage has already been done by a policy debate that, with some honourable exceptions, is defined by its irrelevance to the challenges of the modern world. We should be discussing how technology should revolutionise public services; how young people are not just in well-paid, decent jobs but also have the chance to start businesses that benefit their communities; how Britain stays united and in Europe; what reform of welfare and social care can work in an era of radical demographic change.

Pretty please?

The tears of sell-out pragmatists delight me.

In econo-speak it refers to a condition in which a market has given up the illusion that it’s ‘assets’ have any particular value at all.

Greek Bailout Goes to Servicing the Debt

Real News Network

August 12, 2015

As Costas Lapavitsas pointed out in his speech at the Democracy Rising conference a couple of weeks ago in Athens, it’s extremely unrealistic to expect given the pathetic performance of the privatization program today that anything near 50 billion euros is going to be generated by the sale of Greek state assets, particularly with the economy in shambles, which drastically reduces the value of many of these assets. And with the instability, which is going to be a great concern to potential acquirers of these assets.

And what’s likely to happen is that the sale of these assets is not going to generate anywhere near that amount of money, so that there isn’t going to be any money available for investment. It’s basically all going to go towards recapitalizing the banks. Perhaps if you can get up above 25 billion euros, some portion of the debt will be paid down with the proceeds.

The point I think that we ought to really bear in mind, there are a number of them, in assessing the importance of this deal, is that first of all there’s no agreement to date on debt relief. And if Greece does not get, as the IMF staff now plainly acknowledges, a dramatic writedown of its debt or equivalent measures, then its debt will remain unsustainable. And it almost certainly is going to default eventually, and that would precipitate in all probability an exit from the eurozone. So the very purpose of this deal would be defeated.

The Guardian view on the Greek bailout: a deal that addresses nothing

The Guardian

Tuesday 11 August 2015 14.46 EDT

The Greek PM simply threw in the towel. Pre-referendum sticking points, fiscal perks for Greek islands and reduced VAT on fuel, suddenly paled beside new extreme austerian demands.

A ludicrous €50bn in asset sales were demanded, sweetened only by the concession that Athens could keep an eighth of the cash, while the majority went to foreign debtors and banks. Mr Tsipras spun this as a sovereign wealth fund, implying investment in a more prosperous future. The reality is more like being forced to sell your house, and then being allowed to hang on to a fraction of the proceeds. Controversial cuts to pensions are coming at speed. The traditional European way was to sneak the nastiest medicine down along with a mouthful of fudge, but no more.

…

Mr Tsipras is left pretending that somewhat revised targets on the fiscal surplus, in truth little more than a retrospective accommodation to the reality of GDP and tax revenues disappearing in the new slump brought about by Greece’s stringent capital controls, represent a major concession.

…

This week’s “deal” may allow the German and Greek leaders to duck a few local political bullets, but the bombs that threaten the euro more widely have still not been defused.

Extend and pretend is a Ponzi scheme at best.

It’s really hard to know what to say about Ferguson.  On the one hand I don’t seem to be finding a firm answer to my question- did the guy the cops shot really have a gun?  Do you remember the Molotov cocktail at the 3 am news conference last year, where they displayed a bottle of liquid with a rag in it and clamed this was an actual, factual gasoline bomb they had recovered that night and then proceeded to man handle it as if it had no forensic value at all?

You know, you’d think if they wanted to become cops they would have watched at least one cop show in the last 30 years.

Other than that teeny tiny sliver of good faith on my part (I don’t think most cops are liars, I know it) the news is that things are, if anything, worse.  The capper for me is that they’re letting armed vigilantes roam the streets in cammo and body armor because they are…

Wait for it.

White!  Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Missouri has always had very flexible rules about open carry and it’s always a great pleasure when I venture South to discover that everyone doesn’t wander in to the Waffle House (Waffle House!) packing a Peacemaker as a cosplay codpiece in their own personal Rio Bravo fantasy of frontier justice.

They have just relaxed their restrictions on concealed carry about which part of me asks- if I’m using a gun as a deterrent, why wouldn’t I want people to know I’m packing heat?  That’s right, I like that Buntline Special with the barrel that pokes into your boot tops.

There is another part of me that wonders- so what if I’m Black?  How exactly does that interaction go?

“Officer- you need to know I have a permit”?

My instinct is- not well.

You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.

Our panel tonight is Jordan Carlos, Regina Hall, and Carey Reilly.