08:48 – Merkozy have scheduled another failed summit for today, calling Papandreou on the carpet to explain how he dared give the Greek people the right to vote on what Merkozy had decided Greece must do. Obviously, the EU elitists can’t afford to allow little things like freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty obstruct their grand plans for EU über alles. In all fairness to Merkozy, though, they’re not just picking on the Greeks. They don’t want German and French citizens to have any say, either. Nor any other EU citizens. If only everyone–especially those troublesome ratings agencies and the market itself–would stop asking questions and just do what Merkozy order them to do, the trains would run on time.
Meanwhile, making it obvious that Greece is just a distraction from the real problem, benchmark Italian 10-year bond yields have now reached a disastrous 6.2% and continue to climb. It’s long past time to stop rearranging deck chairs and start heading for the lifeboats, i.e., converting as quickly as possible back to local currencies.
12:11 – It starts again. One would think big publishers might have noticed the catastrophic results when music companies and movie studios decided to start suing listeners and viewers, but apparently they’re too stupid to learn from others’ mistakes. So Wiley has decided to track down and sue people who share Wiley books on torrent sites.
I suspect that Wiley isn’t even aware that it’s not illegal, in the US at least, for people to download a torrent of a copyrighted work. To the extent that the music and movie industries have had any success against torrents, it’s been to persecute those upload the material, not those who download it. In fact, those industries strove mightily to establish the very questionable legal concept of “making available”, just so they wouldn’t actually have to prove that their targets had actually uploaded any data. For now, merely “making available” that data to others is the crime. Someone who takes advantage of that availability commits no crime. Of course, the music and movie industry would like to see that change to include downloaders, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon.