Published four years ago this week.

"Laissez-faire, c'est fini," said President Nicolas Sarkozy. "We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money."

Such language can now be heard daily across Europe. It can only intensify as the fall-out from the EU's €1.8bn trillion (£1.4 trillion) bank rescue becomes clearer, and as Europe's elites discover that their own banks are the most leveraged in the world and have played their own Wagnerian part in Gotterdammerung.

Professor Hobsbawm, who spent his youth watching Hitler's rise in Berlin, has a warning for those who think this will help the Left in any recognizable form. "In the 1930s, the net political effect of the Depression was to enormously strengthen the Right," he said.

More at the Telegraph.

More—including dead cats and his wife's wedding ring—over at Der Spiegel.

I feel that this story, originally published about this time last year, is more than appropriate for this week's "From Our Archives" given that a) it's officially November and a cold, wet, dark winter is upon us and b) a man jumped from the Aurora Bridge this morning. "The Long Winter" is all about winter. And depression and suicide. And cookies.

Two short excerpts:

Suicide was the eighth cause of death in Washington State in 2005 according to the Department of Health's website. That doesn't sound impressive until you realize that means over 800 people killed themselves in 2005, which amounts to roughly 2.2 people killing themselves in this state every day. The Aurora Bridge, a bridge I drive across almost every day to avoid the traffic on Denny, is the second most popular suicide bridge in the nation. I probably don't have to tell you how Kurt Cobain died. No one in the Pacific Northwest should ever be shocked that they're depressed; they should be thankful they're surviving it.

By the time I got home, I'd decided I was going to make every single cookie in that fucking magazine. I was going to wrap Chocolate Malt Sandwiches in cellophane bags and tie them off with candy-cane-striped string just like on page 15. Then I was going to ship carefully organized tins of crunchy Pecan Logs and Lime Meltaways to my friends in Oregon and California as shown on page 11. This was going to be the best holiday season ever. I wasn't going to spend one more minute thinking about how un-fucking-happy I was. I was gonna make cookies.

Click here to read the whole piece (and get one of Martha Stewart's recipes for some really delicious cookies, should you need a pick-me-up).

Over three and a half decades, Deep Throat has been damned by religious groups, decried by feminists, defended by First Amendment advocates, derided by critics and debated by social scientists. It dragged for years through local and federal courts around the country in a welter of obscenity trials in which it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned. All this had the effect, observers agreed, of sustaining acute public interest in the film.

...

In interviews over the years, Mr. Damiano credited his work as a hairdresser with having given him a keen understanding of women. This helped him greatly, he made clear, in his later career.

“I was just a nice guy, which is why I think I did pretty well,” he told The News-Press of Fort Myers in 2005. “I mean, I’d meet an actress and have to say, ‘Sit down, take your clothes off — I’m going to ask you to do some nasty things.’ You have to be pretty nice.”

NYT obit here.

...hundreds of these soldiers would lose their lives thrown into action by generals who knew that the Armistice had already been signed.

The recklessness of General Wright, of the 89th American Division, is a case in point.

Seeing his troops were exhausted and dirty, and hearing there were bathing facilities available in the nearby town of Stenay, he decided to take the town so his men could refresh themselves.

"That lunatic decision cost something like 300 casualties, many of them battle deaths, for an inconceivable reason," says [historian] Mr Persico.

At 10.45 another 40-year-old soldier, Frenchman Augustin Trebuchon, was taking a message to troops by the River Meuse saying that soup would be served at 11.30 after the peace, when he too was killed.

Augustin Trebuchon's grave - along with all those French soldiers killed on 11 November 1918 - is marked 10/11/18. It is said that after the war France was so ashamed that men would die on the final day that they had all the graves backdated.

^{Photos by Joel Sanders}

The bulldozer's advance, according to ISM activists who witnessed it, pushed up a mound of dirt that Rachel came to be standing atop, so that she was looking straight at the bulldozer driver in his high cab. The bulldozer kept advancing.

Here the stories get a bit confused. Some say Rachel kneeled atop the mound of dirt. Others say she tried to run down off the mound, away from the bulldozer, but lost her footing. Either way, all the activists who saw it agree that the bulldozer pushed the mound of dirt over Rachel, burying her alive and dragging the giant blade across her body, first forward as the bulldozer advanced, and then backward as the bulldozer driver backed up.

Click here to read the full, powerful story.

This is Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, which stands in Red Square at UW. Four versions of it exist, one in Houston. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones today provides a reminder of the obelisk's political life.

In Houston in 1969, city officials didn't want it to be a public memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of his assassination.

The proposal to treat it as a prominent King memorial was put forward by the famous art collecting family the Menils. (Their museum complex currently houses the sculpture.) In another version of the story told here, they initially responded this way:

After being told that city officials would reject a public memorial to King, the de Menils proposed that the sculpture be placed in front of City Hall and that the base bear the words Forgive Them, for They Know Not What They Do.

The story about the obelisk as a sign of race relations is something to keep in mind as you pass this thing by on the eve of the election that may give us our first black president. Are black voters going to be held back at the gates again (like in 2000)? Is the obelisk going to fall all the way this time? Or maybe the obelisk is a totally outdated symbol of race relations at this point; what would a new one look like?

Broken Obelisk represents more than one broken system: public art is another. Newman said he intended the obelisk as a beacon of hope—a sign that things, even broken things, could get better. But part of what's so great about the sculpture is that it has an equally dark heart. It represents something already fallen, but only halfway. This present state of grace feels like its bounce moment, the moment its tip hits a ground point before the whole thing crashes down to pieces.

Public art with a dark heart is rare these days. The obelisk reminds me of something Seattle artist Dan Webb recently wrote in an essay called "I Heart Public Art" in which he critiques both the gallery system and the public art system (published in La Especial Norte and available at galleries):

Conceptual art has become the new orthodoxy, rooted in something that was hard won, and enduring, and has since evolved into something that is too frequently facile and rote. Hard won principles become short cuts to lesser practitioners; many artists today seem content to be merely clever.

Public art is in quite a bubble as well. It is fixated on trying to be art, without the teeth. When Brian Eno was asked his opinion of New Age music, which he is generally credited with inspiring, he said he didn't like any of it because it lacked a sense of evil. True that. When public artists voluntarily dumb things down, erase the evil, they ultimately come across as condescending.

^{Photos by Rob Devor}

The absence of a law banning bestiality was never more apparent than it was on the day James Michael Tait—the man who, according to the Enumclaw Police Department, filmed the exact moment that the horse's monstrous penis fatally ruptured Pinyan's colon—stood before a judge last November. The prosecutor's office wanted to charge Tait with animal abuse, but the police found no evidence of abused animals on the many videotapes they collected from his home. As there was no law against humanely fucking a horse, the prosecutors could only charge Tait with trespassing. At the time of Pinyan's death, Tait lived in a trailer on a 39-acre lot next to a ranch that breeds Arabian stallions, and at night he and another man would, according to the "Charges in Enumclaw Horse Case" document filed by the office of the prosecuting attorney, "repeatedly visit the [farm's] barn and have sex with several of their [neighbors'] horses." Because the owners of the violated farm "were not aware that [Pinyan, Tait, and others who connected with them via the internet] were repeatedly coming into their barn and having sex with their horses," the prosecutors decided to file criminal trespass first degree charges against Tait. The other man was not charged because he wasn't on the videotape that captured Pinyan's last night on earth.

Read this story and others in The Stranger's "Best Of" archives.

The Shropshire MP said he would use his Ten Minute Rule Bill, which he will present in the Commons on Tuesday afternoon, to highlight why the practice of keeping the animals had no place in modern society.

"Are we a modern country or are we a country stuck in Victorian times that likes to keep primates in confined spaces in order to entertain us," he told BBC News.

For example, Googling "Sarah Palin" in 2001 brings up nothing on the current VP candidate until page 4, where the Frontiersman expresses it's gratitude that "Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin has approached city council members about using Wasilla’s bountiful sales-tax revenues to erect" something or other. (The link stubs out.)

Also in 2001, Googling "Chris Crocker" got you a New Zealand music writer and an Austin doctor, but no weeping Britney fans.

Experience the virtual time-traveling pleasures for yourself here.

The political crisis has paralyzed its government, enhungered its illegal immigrants, and compromised its masculinity.

Which is too bad, since the combined forces of the Flemish and the Walloons have produced some of the world's greatest inventions, including beer, colonialism, and awkward silences.

And, of course, Plastic Bertrand...

... who is, in fact, the new identity of Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, le grande fartiste.

Some of the highlights of his stage act involved playing a flute through a rubber tube in his anus, farting sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms as well as farting La Marseillaise. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Sigmund Freud.

Mr. Pujol faked his own death in 1945—to get away from child stalkers who followed him around with cigarette lighters—and reinvented himself as Plastic Bertrand.

When asked for comment on the delicate political situation in Belgium, he responded with a YouTube video (be sure to watch when your boss is standing right behind you):

Also: Belgium is an anagram for "I be glum."

I think we all finally understand why.

Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and the chief House Democrat negotiating the bailout package, called McCain's move "the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either footballs or Marys.

Google gave me this answer:

And from Wikipedia:

A Hail Mary pass or Hail Mary play in American football is a forward pass made in desperation, with only a small chance of success.

I can't exactly recommend you read it too, because it's deeply depressing—about an evil German Evangelical named Paul Schaefer who founded a lil' utopia (32,000 acres) in Chile where he could terrorize, torture, and rape its inhabitants into submission.

In exchange for being left alone, Schaefer did lots of Pinochet's dirty work—tortured and executed political dissidents, mostly, who were brought to Schaefer's small kingdom of terror, up in the Chilean mountains.

Here is probably the gentlest, kindest thing Schaefer ever did:

All challengers to Schaefer’s authority—real or imagined—were rooted out and destroyed. No one inspired greater love and admiration among the children of the Colonia than Santa Claus. It is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one year in the mid-1970s, Schaefer gathered the Colonia’s children, loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to a nearby river, where, he told them, Santa was coming to visit.

The boys and girls stood excitedly along the riverbank, while an older colono in a fake beard and a red and white suit floated towards them on a raft. Schaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming to wound Santa, who tumbled into the water, where he thrashed about before disappearing below the surface. It was a charade, but Schaefer turned to the children assembled before him and said that Santa was dead. From that day forward, Schaefer’s birthday was the only holiday celebrated inside Colonia Dignidad.

Schaefer was finally arrested in 2005. He lives in jail now.

The rest of the horrible story is here.