Good First Friday of a new year to you all.  Cold this morning with heavy frost on the roofs but clear skies.  The official temperatures are in the low double digits though our thermometer reads about 22F.  Next week may give us temps in the 40s.  We'll see.

I have seen articles similar to this at infrequent intervals over the last year or two as the Greek situation ebbed and surged--in the news at least.  An interesting thought struck me--will a time come when the Euro is so irrelevant to the lives of the Greek masses that remaining in the Eurozone confers no advantages at all?  And if that time comes will the majority of Greeks vote to remain in the Eurozone as they have recently?  And, in case you think that the story about far off Greece has no relevance over here, I have seen a few articles about local areas in the U.S. adopting their own local currency in parallel with and convertible to dollars.

Wouldn't it have been nice if our news media had put out stories like this one before the fiscal cliff legislation was passed?  It is amazing how often the interests of ordinary citizens gives cover for governmental gifts to industries and corporations.

During my long sojourn in academia two people provided much of the foundation for my studies.  Elwood Jensen pioneered the study of steroid hormone receptors.  He was my advisor's PhD advisor and I met him briefly at a conference just before I started the Master's program.  And the news this morning announced the death of Gerda Lerner the founding mother of women's history.  Almost everything I read in women's history was written either by her, by one of her students, or cited her work.  I never met her.  I don't often see news stories that have any direct relationship to my own life.  This has been an odd week.

Check this op-ed for an excellent and accurate assessment of our various political cliffs--fiscal, debt ceiling, and sequester.  Our political clowns 'solved' the first by kicking most of the can down the road postponing its effects for two months.  (I am trying to cut out some cliches here).  Though we have 'technically' bumped up against the debt ceiling Treasury can avoid default with accounting tricks for the next two months so that 'crisis' will go critical at the same time as the sequester.  I wonder how soon the show will begin--again.

I wondered why the oft repeated notion that the fiscal cliff is a 'good compromise' because nobody is happy with it set my teeth on edge.  Jon Walker (no relation) at Firedoglake explains the fallacy of that old notion.  A more accurate definition of a 'good compromise' is one with which no one is entirely happy but which gives each side something of substance to be happy about.  By that standard the fiscal cliff compromise was not a good deal but then I notice that most of the standards by which politicians judge their efforts have been set abysmally low.