Free Republic

We were pretty much speechless when we read this - it sure puts guarantees by Noyer, Trichet and all the other bureaumonkeys that the ECB does not accept just any collateral in perspective. From Presseurop.eu: "The most expensive footballer in history may now be used to guarantee the solvency of a Spanish bank. “Ronaldo in the bailout fund,” headlines Süddeutsche Zeitung. The daily reports that the Bankia group of savings banks,...

Evenin', FReepers, and please accept my apologies for this vanity post. Haven't had a chance (and the media coverage is, shall we say?, spotty) to try to wrap up tonight's results and take a broad perspective about them. Inviting any and all FReepers to provide more info about election results. Best wishes, and G-d bless you all !

Openeurope.org.uk has put together a paper of the most blatant half-truths, propaganda, and outright lies, abused by Europe not only over the past month, but also over the past 10 years, for the entire duration of the now rapidly collapsing eurozone experiment. As the paper notes: "More than ten years since the euro was launched, and with the single currency facing its greatest ever crisis, the parameters have radically changed. Amid all the uncertainty, one thing has become painfully clear: the EU elite simply got it wrong on the euro." The authors demand for "a call for greater honesty about...

Gotta love it.

Did you ever wonder who might be the world’s biggest energy speculator? Now let me see, might it be T. Boone Pickens? Or perhaps it might be Prince Alaweed of Saudi Arabia. Maybe it is one of those big fund traders, you know, the ones that can allegedly control the price of oil on a whim. Well if that is what you think, you are wrong. ... (remainder of article at the link)

On December 11th, Microsoft converted from the nice, easy-to-use file sharing programme called FolderShare, to the (evidently) brand-new programme Windows Live Sync. We had used FolderShare for years, great programme. Now, we're unable to share the very same files that have been successfully shared for over 3 years. Clearly, there's some problem in the setup, but we can't seem to get a handle on it. Microsoft's ''help'' consists of directing people to a website, support.live.com, which provides nothing in the way of troubleshooting. Any and all advice from FReepers concerning how to make Live Sync functional would be much appreciated...except...

Bursting the Speculative Bubble - May 30, 2008 The Bubble may be ready to burst. The CFTC pushed by Congress may be sharpening the point on the pin that bursts the price balloon. Futures, Institutional Investors and Oil Prices. The volume of email commenting on the Michael Masters testimony before the Senate was surprising to say the least. While we disagree with some of his comments comparing the number of futures contracts to physical barrels, we do agree with the basic analysis and believe it helps explain some of the oil price increase over the last few ears. Since all...

Having a debate with a friend, a fairly Leftist friend, who is of course quite anti-Christian but, curiously, pro-Islamic. Would anyone be kind enough to provide specifics on the infilration of Islam into the city of Hamtramck? Many thanks in advance, and I do apologise for the vanity post.

Dozens of FReepers undoubtedly know this, but, sadly, yr hmbl srvnt does not. Seems to me that I recall an online site, perhaps ESPN or ABC, where one can ''watch'' a graphical play-by-play of virtually any football game. The game one is ''watching'' features a display of a field, where the ball is spotted and where it moves on each play, with a description of the play just run. Many thanks in advance for any and all help, and FReegards!

Attendance Deficit Disorder -- a condition suffered by Live Earth and other Leftist extravaganzas. Symptomised by few people showing up, unless they've been paid to attend. Not thought to be treatable by Ritalin. Antipsychosis drugs may be indicated.

Hi, folks! Getting some contradictory information, and I know you guys can straighten me out. KS particularly and OK somewhat also, have been very wet all year. That's fine until it's time to harvest wheat. I'm hearing tales that the crop is so wet that it's starting to sprout from the head. Questions -- Is this true? Is the ground really that wet? It has looked for a couple of days after Friday that KS and OK are no precip with a nice breeze, but...who trusts weatherguessers, eh? If anyone would care to offer a local weather report, esp. regarding...

Here we go, folks! Good luck to everyone! The game will end at 43 minutes after the hour, and the winner will be named just as fast as I can sort out the answers. Remember, the answer to EVERY clue is a single letter of the alphabet. Please answer with (clue number) - (letter). Thanks! And the clues are: The Clues. The answers are, in all cases, a single letter of the alphabet. Please answer with (clue number) - (letter) for any questions you care to answer. Some are easy; some are very difficult. Good luck! 1) Zuider? 2) Kaboo?...

There's a problem playing any sort of trivia on-line, these days. You can easily hop onto Google, or Ask, or wherever, and look things up. Here is an attempt at a trivia game that is, more or less, Google-proof. The game is entirely fair, and accurate. Some questions are dead lock cinches, others are much harder. A few are ''within context'', meaning that there might be several correct answers BUT the incorrect answers will be ''weeded out'' by answers to the other questions. Rules? Simple. Associate the various clues with ONE, just one, letter of the alphabet. Please answer in...

Running Outlook Express e-mail under Win 98, I accidentally clicked on folder A and folder B, right below A in the list, at the same time. Another click on A actually seems to have deleted the entire folder. Any suggestions as to how to recover folder A and its contents will be very much appreciated, and TIA to all ! (...and yes, I am logged in.);^)

Been looking around for a couple of days, trying to find or approximate the date that Ms. Plame ceased being any sort of covert operative for CIA. Having absolutely no luck finding any even marginally definitive answers (well, not counting ''definitive'' tinfoil-hatters). Would very much welcome becoming educated on these particulars by our enormously well-informed college of FReepers. Opinions are welcome; hard dates and sources are much more valuable, of course. And, may I apologise to all for this vanity -- I have to plead necessity of time, sorry.

A Serbian bridegroom spent the night in jail after he injured 15 guests while trying to shoot an apple with a shotgun. Shooting the apple is a traditional part of a Serbian wedding and is supposed to bring good luck to the newly-weds, reports Glas Javnosti newspaper. But the groom, 47, who's also a police marksmen, used a shotgun instead of a pistol and 15 people were hit by ricocheting pellets. None of the guests were seriously injured but police were called to the incident and arrested their colleague and confiscated his gun.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Got a gun but no game? Try Sweden's new moose bourse, launched by the Scandinavian country's state-owned forestry firm Sveaskog on Thursday. Sveaskog rents its grounds to 3,200 hunting teams with allotted kill quotas and teams will now be able to offer moose they do not expect to shoot to would-be hunters. Interested hunters can also post requests to use part of a team's quota on Sveaskog's Web site, www.sveaskog.se/jfn, the company said in a statement. Moose hunting is something of a national pastime in vast and sparsely populated Sweden, with 250,000 hunters felling some 100,000 moose...

OK, OK, I'm not a big telly watcher, certainly not of ''reality'' programmes, and I've only seen ''The Apprentice'' a couple of times, but is this master chef a thoroughgoing asshole AND a poor businessman to boot? Given a brand new staff, some of whom are known to be amateurs in the kitchen, just 90 minutes to become harmonised with the restaurant procedures and the menu? I'm just a jackleg cook, no intent of becoming a professional line chef, and I would have told this master chef genius to bugger off in 90 seconds' time, perhaps less. Views, opinions, thoughts...

Topic A. Have just finished development of a software package that provides certain very useful information to those who trade in the futures markets. Now, how to sell it? Oh, I've my own ideas, of course -- but they may be very poor ideas because, even after 30-odd years of designing software, this is the first retail-oriented product I've attempted. Options: 1. Set up a website, sell it there, or2. Hire a marketing firm, or3. Enter working arrangements with brokerage houses to give/sell the software to their clients, under some set of terms to be agreed, or 4. Some combination...

Airlines have resorted to charging travelers for meals, paper tickets and extra luggage to bolster their sagging bottom lines. Now, Delta Air Lines is pondering a new twist: charging a fee to send your call to a reservations agent in the United States instead of a call center in India. Delta first floated the idea in an online survey of select frequent fliers this month. The airline hasn't tabulated the survey results, let alone decided on imposing the new fee, said spokeswoman Meaghan Glynn. "We look into a lot of initiatives and ask a lot of questions," she said. "If...