How I survived the end of the world in Aotearoa

In his chapter from the New Zealand edition of Fleeing Vesuvius, Laurence Boomert gives an account of a lifetime built on accepting and rejecting Vesuvius and the progressive actions taken to beat the odds. "The foreground will seem like the end of the world but I see, through the smoke and ruins of that which must fall, a wiser, more humble, more determined humanity with 10,000 years of social and technological success stories to draw on, setting a new course for the future."

Emigration solves unemployment in the Baltics. Is this plan for Ireland too?

Mna n hEireann should take note of Latvia's experience -"No People, No Problem": The Baltic Tigers' False Prophets of Austerity By Jeffrey Sommers, Arunas Juska and Michael Hudson*. Ignore our politicians' rhetoric about the value of 'seeing the world', exporting our young was ever the way to avoid dealing with entrenched interests (usually older) in Ireland.

Good news from Brussels?

The news overnight from Brussels is that the 17 euro countries, led in this particular respect by France, have refused to allow the UK to exclude itself from their emerging plans to regulate financial transactions.

Indefatigable Helen Brown in the Huff Post

Helen Brown links national money policy to her oft heard cry for State (in eurozone, read Member State) charter banks. We have forgotten our roots, when the American colonists thrived on a system of money created by the people themselves, debt-free and interest-free. The continued dominance of the Wall Street money machine depends on that collective amnesia. The fact that this memory is surfacing again may be the machine's greatest threat -- and our greatest hope as a nation. [...]

Irish Central Bank checking out money printing presses

Spiegel Online repeats Wall Street Journal reports "from insiders" that central banks around Europe are preparing for a break up of the eurozone - even looking into where they can get revived national currencies printed - in particular the Irish central bank are looking into where they can print new money in case in "in the short term they have to introduce a national currency"