A seemingly random assortment of the moment’s news items in front of me, that if taken together appear to form a plot for a story about the new remaking of an allegedly “old” Europe. If these items could be imagined as audio, rather than read as words and images, they would give us a soundtrack full of sounds of bulkheads giving way, of cables stretching and snapping, of water rushing in through holes, of rivets popping, in other words, the cracking and crackling of a system.

These are some of the items published today that I alluded to:

Belgian government collapses over bank affair

Swedish city hit by youth riots

Greek police braced for more riots

“Sock and Awe” for the U.S.: Montreal casts its shoes at Bush this Saturday

Yet another TV station occupied; fresh demos in Athens and Thessaloniki; final build-up for international day of action against state murders

Regarding the last item, yesterday saw several more mass media outlets being occupied in Greece: “the municipal radio of Tripoli, Nea Tileorasi TV in Chania, Politeia FM in Sparta and Star FM and Imagine 897 FM in Thessaloniki were occupied” (source).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot, the economic crisis may turn out worse than the Great Depression: