Reverend Jesse Jackson will push the message that equality and rights matter in General Election 2011, says the Equality & Rights Alliance (ERA).

Election 2011 got under starter's orders this morning with the launch of a campaign urging people to "Make Your Mark for Equality and Human Rights" on their ballot papers.

I'm not one for really long quotes on this blog, but O'Rourke's post today deserves to be clipped and remembered. The comments are not worth reading. O'Rourke quietly, but angrily, gets it just right: capital walks away scot free.

"[T]he real cleavage in Europe is between European taxpayers and bank creditors (with the ECB being a third interested party, as another body which could help to fill the holes which have emerged in the European banking system). But since the powers that be are ruling out bondholder haircuts and quantitative easing, the only cleavage we are left with in practice is the one between core and periphery taxpayers.

Attending a packed pop-economics lecture in Ennis, questions from the crowd threw up an interesting point. What will happen the cash in your pocket if Ireland leaves the euro? Will the people who have been quietly withdrawing their savings end up with a pile of worthless notes under the bed?

We arrived at such a question through a circuitous route. David McWilliams - it was he who drew the packed crowd from their homes on a freezing Wednesday night - had been expounding his theory for saving Ireland. It involves defaulting on the Anglo Irish debt, as the markets know that to keep pumping money into that particular 'cesspit' is madness, and the markets don't like to think that the people in charge are mad. It also means engaging in a debt-equity swap for the rest of the banks that are dragging us down. This manouvere involves us taking plenty of time and offering the bank creditors equity in the banks, because 'we have no money', just like the Finance Minister of Iceland told McWilliams in a funny accent. Eventually, the creditors would get their money back.

In editing the recent review of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, so much was taken out. For those interested in the novel, here is another exposition of a key scene. By Shane Creevy.

Perhaps the best example of the significance accorded subjectivity in The Crossing is the gypsy's story of the airplane. The gypsies arrive when Billy's horse is teetering on the brink of death. As he weaves the tapestry of his story, the gypsy restores the horse to health. Despite the abundance of death in the rest of the trilogy, therefore, one may interpret the act of storytelling as sanctifying life. Whether one believes it or not, the gypsy's tale is invested with sacred value.