“TSA says they are going to crack down on the invasive pat-downs. In fact, one agent was transferred to another parish.”

—David Letterman

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"The true story of Thanksgiving is how socialism failed,"

– Rush Limbaugh

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The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is.

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There’s been a lot of very obnoxious misuse of software patents in recent years. This ranges from patent trolls wielding submarine patents to overly-generic patents being used to scare everyone else out of a business. But at least in most of the cases, the patents were an original idea of some sort, even if that idea was far too general to be patented.

The situation just got worse. We now have a company scraping open source commit logs and patenting them.

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Reporting from Los Angeles and New York —

The first arrest in an escalating probe of suspected Wall Street insider trading throws a spotlight on what authorities fear is a disturbing new trend by hedge funds and other big players — paying networks of well-connected corporate insiders for illegal access to privileged information.

The government appears to be building a case that the use of insiders is generating huge illicit profits for Wall Street heavyweights, at the expense of individual investors who don’t have access to the same information.

A disturbing new trend? Where has this newspaper been for the past decades?

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Germany and its few wealthy euro zone colleagues must wonder how much longer it can afford such rescue missions. German taxpayers must be shocked that the rescues were required in the first place. Eleven years ago, when the euro was born, they were told the shiny new currency would be as stable as the mighty Deutsche mark and any country that lived beyond its means would not be bailed out, so fear not. Both assurances were shams. The euro has been highly volatile during the European debt crisis and the bailout tab for tiny Greece and Ireland alone is expected to be a monstrous €200-billion.

[..]

If Germany realizes that it faces never-ending, and ever-rising, costs to keep the euro zone intact, and that the victim states will not ditch the euro of their own volition, it might be pushed into a radical move: Remove itself from the euro zone and put the mark back into action.