Insane Swedish superwomen

A totally bizarre television news report from the BBC. Twin Swedish women traversing the high-speed M6 motorway on foot, hit by trucks, get up fighting... I can't embed it, but you can watch it at this link.

Update: for the few who will be interested, there is information re subsequent events, including murder here, here, and here.

Bathtime in Dubai

At the Atlantis hotel.

Link found at Tell Me Something I Don't Know.

Life could have travelled from Mars to Earth...

...via meteorites. This has been suggested before, but now there is more suggestive evidence, thanks to an "artificial meteorite."

The STONE-6 experiment tested whether sedimentary rock samples could withstand the extreme conditions during a descent though the Earth’s atmosphere where temperatures reached at least 1700 degrees Celsius... sedimentary martian meteorites could reach Earth. The fact that we haven’t found any to date could mean that we need to change the way we hunt for meteorites. Most meteorites have been found in Antarctica, where their black fusion crust shows up clearly against the white snow. In this experiment we found that the sedimentary rocks developed a white crust or none at all. That means that we need to expand our search to white or light-coloured rocks.

The rocks also transported living organisms, a type of bacteria called Chroococcidiopsis, on the back of the rocks, away from the exposed edge. Unfortunately the heat of reentry was so high, even with a protective two centimetre-thick rock coating, that the organisms were carbonised. They died but their cells still remain as “pompeified” forms.

Palin becoming a parody of herself

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Always be skeptical of financial advice...

Breathtaking bird photographs

One hundred of them collected at the photo site Widelec, unfortunately without credit to original photographers. But an awesome assembly, certainly. (Click to enlarge above photos)

Iconic image - from what movie?

No need to put guesses in the Comments section, because you can see the answer by mousing over the image. But this will serve as an introduction to 1000 Frames of Hitchcock, which reduces each Hitchcock film to just 1000 frames. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to scroll quickly through the sequences, but it is a nice place to harvest (with attribution) classic images.

How we got into this mess

Here is President Bush in 2002 speaking approvingly of the extension of credit via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to persons with poor credit histories:

"...help deserving families with bad credit histories to qualify for home ownership loans...If you put your mind to it... the low income homebuyer can have just as nice a home as anybody else."

Make no mistake about it - the evolution of the credit crisis was a bipartisan effort, endorsed and encouraged by the Democratic Congress. But in this brief one-minute video, President Bush elucidates the fatal concepts quite succinctly.

(It's subtitled in Dutch because I found the link on a foreign website).

$25,000,000,000 will be loaned to automakers

The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a $25bn package of low-cost loans to help hard-pressed carmakers and their suppliers finance plant modernisation at a time of restricted access to public capital ­markets.

The automotive loans are separate from the proposed $700bn bail-out for the banking sector, which is still being debated in Congress. The House approved the measure 370-58, setting the stage for Senate approval within days.

Executives of General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler and their suppliers have lobbied heavily for the loans. Both presidential ­candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have expressed support.

I wonder why this happened...

The industry’s case has been helped by the fact that Michigan and Ohio, the two states most dependent on the car industry, are key swing states in the November 4 presidential election.

Oh, I see. Never mind.

The Sorted Books Project

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom.

(Found at Growabrain)

"May you live in interesting times"

The title is reportedly the English translation of an ancient Chinese curse, although its provenance is disputed. The other two curses in the trilogy are

• May you come to the attention of those in authority, and
  
• May you find what you are looking for

Mastercard spoof, incisively done

The "sea-smurf" is coming...

An active duty army brigade (the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team) is being redeployed from Iraq to the U.S. mainland. As reported by ArmyTimes:

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks... After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one...

Some people feel that this is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the uniformed services from intervening on non-federal (state, private) property. The Insurrection Act was modified for this purpose in 2007, but the amendments to it were supposedly repealed in 2008.

Here's what is envisioned as the role of this military unit:

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack...The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” ... referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them...

The CBRNE (chem, biol, rad, nucl, explos) acronym explains the larger "sea-smurf" acronym:

The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).

I don't think any civilians argue with the appropriateness of deploying the manpower of the armed forces in times of crisis. This has been done before, and would be fully appropriate if, for example, the New Madrid fault line were to rupture. What is most interesting is that this is being done next week; the timing - right before the presidential election - has many people upset.

One of the ?paranoid scenarios envisioned by the radical left as an explanation for this deployment is that civil unrest might follow a McCain victory (whether normally achieved or engineered via electronic ballot box manipulation).

A second (and more frankly paranoid) explanation is that someone in the administration foresees with some certainty that a terrorist attack is imminent and cannot (or will not) prevent it, and thus this is being done to cope with the aftermath.

The third (and most paranoid) suggestion is that in order to enhance the chance of a McCain victory, a "terrorist attack" will occur and will be interrupted or ameliorated by the effective action of this task force, frightening the population, who will then elect the candidate with the greatest war experience and most belligerant foreign policy attitude.

Thus the almost humorous comment that the rallying cry on Reddit has now changed:

January 2008: "Bring our troops home now!"
September 2008: "Send Troops back!"

The simplest and most reassuring explanation is that offered by ArmyTimes:

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”

Choose for yourself. TYWKIWDBI has an opinion, but we'll leave it unexpressed for the moment, while waiting to see what happens. For now we'll just write this to let everyone know that the deployment is scheduled to happen next week...

King Richard II's recipe book - going online!

A 14th-century recipe book compiled by King Richard II's master cooks is to be put online for the first time to give modern-day chefs an insight into the delicacies of the Middle Ages.

Forme of Cury, which was written in 1390 in Middle English, details more than 200 recipes that were cooked in the royal household, including blank mang (a sweet dish of meat, milk, sugar and almonds) and mortrews (ground and spiced pork).

The book is one of 40 rare manuscripts that are being digitally photographed and put on the internet by the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library.

Cannabis smoker fined... for smoking tobacco!

A man was fined by the Dutch police for smoking a cannabis joint but only because it was mixed with tobacco.

While the Netherlands has kept its liberal policy on the smoking of cannabis in the country's legendary "coffee shops", zero tolerance is now shown to tobacco smokers in Dutch cafes and restaurants after a smoking came ban came into force last July...

"The man was not fined for smoking a cannabis joint but for smoking. You can smoke cannabis but not tobacco in coffee shops."

The man was caught lighting a hand rolled cannabis joint during a routine police check and fined because officers found tobacco mixed with the soft drug.

(found at Nothing to do with Arbroath)