I finished up a few books that I've mentioned in previous threads, so I thought I'd give a quick overview of them.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I've heard people compare this book to Stephen King's The Stand, but I don't know that I'd say that. Yes, it's an apocalyptic novel where civilization is brought low by an ancient evil (glow-in-the-dark vampires, in this case); but Cronin is laboring mightily to make this book about something more than just the monsters. He doesn't succeed entirely: the first third of the book is great, but the rest of the book slows to a crawl. I think that would be my utlimate judgement on the novel: too slow. The vampires never really coalesce as a scary enemy, and the book just drags on too much. It would have been a stronger novel if it had been cut by about about a third, I think. (This is the first book of a trilogy, and I fear the bloat will only get worse.)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee. I first read this book in high school (lo these many years ago), and it has been a favorite ever since. It is neither history nor memoir, exactly, but something else. There aren't many books in my library that I return to as often as this one.

I don't often read poems any more, but there are certain poets whose work I revisit at long intervals. Edgar Lee Masters is one such, with his collection Spoon River Anthology. Like Whitman in Leaves of Grass, Masters captures the American plainsong better than almost any poet who came afterward.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I finished Adam Carolla's book In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks. There's not much new here if you've heard his stand-up act or listened to his podcast, but it's still pretty damned funny stuff (and sharp, too). Any book that can make me literally laugh out loud deserves a good mention.

Also: I managed to break my Kindle. I dropped it on a wooden floor, and...pfut! I didn't realize how much I used it until it was broken. It seems an incredible inconvenience to actually have to carry multiple books around with me now. The good news is that Amazon is replacing it free of charge under warranty, so I should have the replacement unit in the next day or two.

Posted by: Monty at 06:42 AM | Comments (109)
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...that aired last Monday night. It's Paul Ryan's appearance on Charlie Rose.

I like this guy.
Not in an Ace way.
You know what I mean.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:42 AM | Comments (9)
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Sunday NFL Thread [CDR M]

Good mornin' sleepy heads out there. This is your friendly public service announcement that reminds you to go get your Pick 'Em picks done. Get 'er done!

And yes, you can haz cheerleader!

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:42 AM | Comments (81)
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Would it not be easier in that case for the government to disolve the people and elect another?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:00 AM | Comments (107)
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Liberal economist Paul Krugman has outdone himself in his latest op ed for the New York Times – a piece entitled, ‘Axis of Depression.’ Krugman’s unyielding defense of Keynesian economics with his penchant for melding fact with fiction and a seething desire to be relevant, is sure to impress the uninformed and feeble minded. To the rest of us, Krugman is rightfully viewed as a progressive shill. A high functioning progressive shill but a shill nonetheless.

Krugman is always loaded for bear when it comes to those who donÂ’t tow his liberal line of politics and economics. And as you can well imagine, Krugman aims a lot at conservatives and occasionally at his fellow progressives if he perceives them not to be 1) yelling loudly enough for more government intervention or 2) loudly enough at conservatives. With Krugman, itÂ’s all in the yelling - in addition to the hyperbole and shoddy analysis.

In his NY Times’ Axis of Depression piece, Krugman bangs the drum for more intervention from the Federal Reserve and defends his old Princeton colleague Ben Bernanke by setting him up as our economic savior, if only we would all just listen to Bernanke and stop the whining about inflation, uncontrollable debt and insolvency; and on and on it goes. You see, when you are as smart as Bernanke, wrong seems right and right seems wrong . . . such is the foundation of Krugman’s thesis . . . a thesis that can be boiled down to hey, “we’re the government and we’re here to help.”

Krugman and his gang of overly educated brats of theory are long on theoretical analysis and short on practical application. The United States is in an economic maelstrom. We are in uncharted economic territory . . . and following conventional wisdom is not the reason we are in the economic mess we are in. Quite the opposite is true. Over the last 20 years, conventional wisdom was shunned for government intervention in the creation of easy credit by the Fed resulting in smoke and mirrored economic growth and the inevitable creation of asset bubbles.

Not quite a year ago, former Fed Chair, Alan Greenspan, the bubble master himself, testified before congress . . . and through all of his nice sounding words finally admitted that he made erroneous, “assumptions” about the “models” used when analyzing the risk of financial derivatives. Those with all of the so called “answers” (like Krugman, Greenspan and now Bernanke) are merely interventionists – each ready to intervene like some sort of rabid economic surgeon. That’s the point in all of this . . . economic interventionism . . . it’s the modern day leech that’s killing the patient, a patient called the United States of America.

If you are up for some amusement, read KrugmanÂ’s NY Times Axis of Depression. It really is quite a treat. We would love to be able to provide a link to it but given NY's bed bug thing and all, the last thing we want to be responsible for is giving you the scratch.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:15 PM | Comments (39)
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Even as I prepare for my first-ever trip to the European continent, the news keeps pouring in that Europe is, put simply, in deep kimchee. The problem with financial shell games is that you eventually run out of shells, and that's what's happening in the glorious EU:

The government backstopped the banks, and now the European Central Bank has to back up the Irish government?

Yes. And in the end, S&P is estimating out that the bank bailout could cost Ireland taxpayers $80 billion a year, which might be more than a third of GDP.

Who's next?

It's Portugal. Just look at the spreads. Greece is the highest. Then Ireland. Then Portugal. Then Spain. All of these spreads are wider now than in May before the announcement of the safety net. That's showing you that the markets see this as a solvency problem [ie they're fundamentally broke], even as the ECB is dealing with this as a liquidity problem [ie they'll be OK with some cash transfusions].

Oh, and Europe is struggling with shortages of critical materials:

The European Commission expects that economic growth in China, India and Brazil will lead to significantly increased demand for raw materials. The EU strategy paper notes that the manufacture of high-tech products will see demand for some metals rise 20-fold over the next 20 years. The European Commission has identified 14 "critical metals" whose demand could triple by 2030, and which are only extracted in a few countries. The following metals could face supply problems: antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorite, gallium, germanium, graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium, platinum group metals, rare earths, tantalum and tungsten.


In the meantime, several European countries, including Spain, Greece, Romania and Sweden, as well as other nations, including the US, Canada and Australia, have started new extraction activities. Their reaction is late, however: The raw materials crisis in Europe has worsened because many companies had scaled back their mining as a result of the economic crisis.

As the article notes, we're facing shortages as well, but we've got domestic sources that Europe doesn't.

So, even with the challenges we face here in the US, at least we have responsive state and federal governments that are already starting to change direction based on the elections a few weeks back. The Fed may be messing with the dollar, but I suspect it has better long-term prospects than the euro.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:39 PM | Comments (30)
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Poor guy.

He wears pants two sizes too large to accomodate the medical equipment he wears. With his belt off, his pants fell down. He tried to tell them about his medical condition and the urostomy bag. The TSA agents informed him they "didn't need to know about that." Only until they saw the bag did they want to know about his medical condition. When they began the pat-down, he tried to warn them about the seal on the bag. They ignored him. Then they broke the seal. Urine dribbled down his shirt and into his pants. No apologies. No offer of help. They acted like it never happened.

A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich.

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

(Emphasis mine.) He then walked through the airport soaked in urine. He couldn't clean up until he was on the airplane.

As soon as Mr. Sawyer said the words "medical condition," someone should have snapped out of auto-pilot and listened to him before continuing. Not everyone flying is in the same situation. It's not an assembly line. These are real people.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:42 PM | Comments (131)
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So it looks like AceCorp management is forcing us to go on yet another yearly corporate retreat. I suppose they arenÂ’t so bad, but the long flights to and from Thailand can really wear a person out. And no one really likes the syphilis treatments we invariably have to get on our return.

Usually the worst part though is when LauraW gets placed in charge of the team-building exercises. That wouldnÂ’t be so bad either except that she always makes us stop in the middle of the fire pit and sing the AceCorp corporate song before we can move on. ItÂ’s almost as if she takes pleasure in the smell of charred feet and the sound of us belting out the tune in a fast, high-pitched scream.

Zinc Oxide and You

Now w/ Spanish subtitles!

Just doing my part to make sure we maintain our reputation as a smart educational blog.

Parting shots below the foldÂ… more...

Posted by: Genghis at 06:15 PM | Comments (348)
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Okay.

As she prepares to relinquish power, Nancy Pelosi believes not enough attention has been paid to her role as the first woman to hold the post of Speaker of the House. "I was the first woman speaker," Pelosi tells the New York Times. "It didn't get that much play. And I'm not a publicity seeker, so it was OK with me."

"Boehner, before the election, they had him on the cover of Newsweek," Pelosi continues. "Now, he's on the cover of Time, and women are coming to me and saying, 'Is the job less important when women hold it?'"

Byron York runs some Lexis/Nexis searches to demonstrate that this isn't close to true, in case you were wondering.

Posted by: Ace at 02:32 PM | Comments (197)
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As you can probably tell from the dwindling quality and quantity of my work, I am badly burned out from the election stuff and moving. I need time away (it's been a while since an official vacation), and figure Thanksgiving Week is the best time for that.

Apologies, by the way, for the lame blogging.

I really want all the cobloggers to take a week off, because they keep this site going, and they ought to have a break too.

So if you're an Open Blogger, I'd appreciate your putting up a post here or there. Quickies are ideal -- just put up a headline, a link, and brief quotation, and whatever you think about it all (that last part optional), just to keep the "headline churn" going and have some content on the site.

If you're not yet an Open Blogger, but would like to give it a try, write to me at my gmail address (the name there is the name of the site, aceofspadeshq). I'll give you the log-in and stuff, and an email explaining basic HTML stuff. Error: I stupidly miswrote my email handle; it's aceofspadeshq (plural) not aceofspadehq (singular, as I wrote). What a dummy.

I need a couple of people to cover the morning headlines thread and ONT thread too. Preferably an east coaster who can post an open headlines thread at like 8 or 9 each morning, Eastern time, for the morning headlines thread, and preferably a west coaster who can post an overnight thread at like 10 or 11 Eastern. You don't have to bother with all the funny links Maet and Ghenjis do! Sure, post a silly animal video if you like, but I really just need the thread created.

If you're a blogger and want to do this to drive traffic to your site -- that's cool, and sort of ideal, as it's mutually beneficial. Cross-posting is great-- you can just tease your own post and then put a link up to your site to pull readers there.

I will be around to put some stuff up here and there, and to make sure the site's running properly, but by and large I'm going to try to keep away. It's been a really long time since I had time off. The last time I took off was July, but I wasn't really off, just working on something else (a script), and also blogging when I had the time.

Unbans: For a while now I've been promising to get people unbanned, but have kept blowing it off as it's a long-ish list. I'll do that tomorrow morning. You should be unbanned by Monday.

Oh: Jenjhis has tonight's ONT already in draft so no help needed at the moment on that front.

Posted by: Ace at 02:14 PM | Comments (99)
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