Clap your hands if you believe.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:07 AM | Comments (47)
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Or so says Jeff Randall at the Telegraph, anyway.

Pull quote:

What was once deemed unthinkable is now, I believe, inevitable: withdrawal from the eurozone of one or more of its member countries. At the bottom end, Greece and Portugal are favourites to be forced out through weakness. At the top end, proposals are already being floated in the Frankfurt press for a new "hard currency" zone, led by Germany, Austria and the Benelux countries. Either way, rich and poor are heading in opposite directions.

I always suspected that Germany's move to ban short-selling in their own country was simply the opening move in a larger effort to funamentally change the European Monetary Union (EMU). Either by shrinking it to a fiscally sustainable "core" of Northern European countries, or simply by leaving the Euro entirely and instituting their own currency once again.

Posted by: Monty at 04:35 AM | Comments (83)
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Or... He hopes he has the machines, anyway.

He started working on the machines -- or financing the work on them -- after the Exxon Valdez disaster. His brother, a scientist, did some of the design work.

Will they work? Who knows. Something about this to me says
this is so insane it probably will work.

Not the centrifuge technology -- that sounds on the level. The part about Kevin Costner's Ocean Therapy machines doing it.

“Kevin saw the Exxon Valdez spill, and as a fisherman and an environmentalist, it just stuck in his craw, the fact that we didn’t have separation technology,” said John Houghtaling, Mr. Costner’s lawyer and business partner as chief executive with Ocean Therapy Solutions, which developed the technology.

Mr. CostnerÂ’s brother, Dan, is a scientist who worked on the project and was also in New Orleans this week.

On Wednesday, BP’s chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said that the company had approved six of Ocean Therapy’s 32 machines for testing. All boast centrifuge processing technology — giant vacuum-like machines that suck oil from water, separate the oil, store it in a tanker and send the water, 99.9 percent purified, back into the gulf.

BTW, I always say this: Wyatt Earp was seriously underrated and worth checking out.

Everyone says Tombstone is better, but it's not. Tombstone's good, but Wyatt Earp is more of an epic, and despite the long running time, it's just a bigger, more ambitious movie.

Thanks to rdbrewer.

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 PM | Comments (163)
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Happy Thursday all.

The Best Underrated Fantasy Books Before 1937

I was never into fantasy books until just a few years ago - I always figured they were just rehashes of D&D adventures with vorpal swords, magic stones, humorous sidekicks and some kind of quest. But by chance I read a fantasy book by Jack Vance and it was different and far better than I ever expected. So after that pleasant surprise, the genre's become a staple on my reading list. And it was a post by Ace that got me started reading Robert E. Howard's Conan series - which I liked.

So over the past year or so I've started reading some of the early fantasy-type books that started off the entire genre. Of the ten books listed, I've already read four so far and own copies of nearly all the rest. So far my favorites have been William Morris' The Well at the World's End and Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:15 PM | Comments (824)
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Because doing "something" is always preferable to doing nothing.

The legislation calls for new ways to watch for risks in the financial system and makes it easier to liquidate large failing financial firms. It also writes new rules for complex securities blamed for helping precipitate the 2008 economic crisis, and it creates a new consumer protection agency.

"We'll soon have in place the strongest consumer protections in history" covering credit cards, student loans, mortgages and more, Obama declared.

Consumers can at least expect a buttload of mail in the coming weeks, from the financial institutions they do business with. I remember the last round of advisories and changes in terms, and it was craptastic.

Can't. Wait.

Unrelated, but since it's been mentioned a couple times today, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair takes the hit for the Christmas bomber fiasco, (you remember, back when the "system worked".) Well, ok for that, and also the CIA thought he was a bit "fussy". Here was my funny takeaway quote: "Another factor was Blair's blunt style, which was seen by some as an asset but irked others in a White House that prizes staying on message."

Yeah. They said that. "On message".

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:18 PM | Comments (142)
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Sorry, I did notice some complaints about this, and then Drew alerted me to a commenter asking about it. I put it off because I had intended -- but did not -- put up a post like this so I can get them all done in just a couple of emails to Pixy. (I like doing them in bunches so as not to trouble him with one request here, another there.)

As I always say, if you are banned, it is almost certainly a glitch; I haven't banned anyone in a while, and a long time before that, too.

The system just gets funky and decides that some word you used is used in spam, so you're banned.

Please send me the message stating you are banned -- which includes your IP address -- and I'll get it unbanned. Note that if you are not getting this message:

Your IP address (207.etc.etc.etc) has been banned. If you feel this is in error, please contact the blog owner by email.

... then you're not banned by the system, and if you can't post, it's some other problem.

Regarding the WordPress ban: Again, this happened before, and it's happening again. I don't know why -- I am guessing Spammers are using wordpress to spam the site, and the system is just banning anyone who includes a wordpress url. If that's happening to you, use tinyurl.com to get a proxy url that the system won't ban.

I'll get the WordPress ban lifted again, but I guarantee you it's going to be tripped again -- this is like the third time it's happened.

Sorry for the delinquency on the unbannings.

Posted by: Ace at 04:21 PM | Comments (170)
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At least, that's what I think he's saying here. Hard to tell, as his somewhat meandering statement also mentions coal miners, "American Idol" and the workings of the Rules Committee.

Personally, I thought 'YouCut' was a fun idea, if a bit gimmicky. Still, it's jarring to hear a member of Congress refer to those who participated as "so-called" Americans. It's too bad the Democrats weren't as concerned about potential foreign participation in our political process when Obama's...er...lax protocols on donations allowed his campaign to rake in an unknown amount of cash from overseas.

Also, as DrewM notes in an email, isn't it a bit ironic to have a congressman who is an impeached federal judge lecture the rest of us on morality?

H/t: The Corner.

Posted by: Slublog at 04:14 PM | Comments (44)
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If you haven't heard by now, today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, an event inspired by the recent death threats against "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Basically the idea is that if enough people display images of Mohammed, it becomes impossible to make it a social taboo backed by violence as Muslim activists have been trying to do. And if pictures of Mohammed are everywhere, there's no longer so much payoff in intimidating a single blogger or cartoonist.

Now I'm not particularly in favor of all the Mohammed caricatures being posted for similar reasons as S. Weasel's - mostly because I'm not into gratuitously insulting people's religious beliefs. But this is about a larger cultural principle - whether we allow actual free speech. Or just pretend free speech that's really subject to the veto of violence and intimidation. And whether Islam is to be a privileged religion over all others.

So here with Ace's approval is a drawing of Mohammed taken from Zombie's Mohammed Image Archive:

Well it turns out that the tradition of not picturing Mohammed is a relatively recent one - one that really only appeared in the 1600's. So for almost a thousand years after Mohammed's death, it was acceptable and even common in some Muslim regions to draw him in full form. During the Caliphate period there were even coins minted with his face on them. Even the burqa which has become a symbol of traditional Islam didn't appear until after Mohammed died and was until recently confined mostly to women in the harems of the aristocracy.

A lot of behavior that radical Islamists insist on today in western countries are actually traditions that got added to Islam long after it was founded. So to make a stretched analogy - it's as if the Amish somehow got control of Christianity and decided that the fashions and practices of the 1700's define how a true Christian must act today. And threaten to kill you if you dare disagree.

Update: Here's a site with pictures of the graduating classes of Cairo University in Egypt. Note that the head-covering-only hijab is far more common in the 2004 picture than it is in the 1959 picture. If it's such a long-standing Muslim tradition, why was it less common 50 years ago? And here's Mark Steyn's take on the pictures.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 03:25 PM | Comments (107)
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Readers previously told me Rush was on an incredible tear.

Via EdwardR's tip, here it is:

Earlier, House Democrats gave Calderone a standing ovation for attacking America.

Posted by: Ace at 02:49 PM | Comments (229)
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I'm still not clear, myself, but Allah credits him for giving the correct answer, presumably after Jim DeMint told him the correct answer and ordered him to give it.

I actually don't think it will actually destroy the party to have weird (and often toxic, in their implications) ideas floated about, even by Senators. Free speech and all. Marketplace of ideas.

But I still think these ideas are actually wrong: And should be rejected as wrong. And I do think we'll suffer if there's too much of that, if the party seems to be gravitating towards the institutional position that Jim Crow may have been wrong but nowhere in the Constitution is there any power to stop the practice of peonage.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (260)
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