Archive for July, 2007
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Live Earth is promoting green to save the planet – what planet are they on?
…The Live Earth event is, in the words of one commentator: “a massive, hypocritical fraud”.
For while the organisers’ commitment to save the planet is genuine, the very process of putting on such a vast event, with more than 150 performers jetting around the world to appear in concerts from Tokyo to Hamburg, is surely an exercise in hypocrisy on a grand scale.
Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse, has dubbed it ‘private jets for climate change’.
A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.
The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts – nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.
The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists’ and spectators’ travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations.
Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year.
Posted in Idiot Activists, Unintended Consequences, Yuck! | No Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007
Alleged DC madam can distribute records
A woman accused of running a prostitution ring in the nation’s capital is free to distribute thousands of pages of phone records after a federal judge lifted a restraining order on Thursday.
U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler’s order granted the request of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 51, of Vallejo, Calif., to quash restrictions by government prosecutors that prohibited her from giving away the list.
“As a result, Jeane has determined to release those records under certain conditions to qualified individuals or organizations,” wrote her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, in an e-mail.
Posted in Politico Follies, Sex | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Price of machetes drops after elections
The price of machetes has halved in parts of Nigeria since the end of general elections in April because demand from thugs sponsored by politicians has subsided, the state-owned News Agency of Nigeria reported.
NAN surveyed prices in the northeastern state of Gombe and found that a good quality machete was now selling for 400 naira ($3) compared with 800 naira before the elections, which were marred by politically motivated violence in many states.
“A price survey on machetes, which served as a popular weapon among political thugs in the state, indicated … a drop in the price of the implement,” NAN reported over the weekend.
Posted in A Bit of The Old Ultraviolent, Concentrated Criminality, Crazed Dictatorships, Cultural Oddities | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
‘Slave’ labourers freed in Brazil
More than 1,000 labourers have been freed in Brazil by the government’s anti-slavery team.
They were said to be working in inhumane conditions on a sugar cane plantation in the Amazon.
An ethanol-producing company which owns the plantation has denied allegations of abusing the workers.
Human rights and labour organisations believe that between 25,000 to 40,000 people could be working in conditions akin to slavery in Brazil.
Posted in Concentrated Criminality, Slavery | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Mitterrand’s role revealed in Rwandan genocide warning
The former French president François Mitterrand supported the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide despite clear warnings that mass killings of the Tutsi population were being orchestrated, according to declassified French documents.
The publication of the documents in today’s Le Monde for the first time confirms long-held suspicions against France. The previously secret diplomatic telegrams and government memos also suggest the late French president was obsessed with the danger of “Anglo-Saxon” influence gripping Rwanda. In three months from April 1994, at least a million Rwandans – mainly Tutsis – were systematically slaughtered in killings engineered by the Hutu regime to exterminate its ethnic rivals and repel the Uganda-trained Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
The documents, obtained by lawyers for six Tutsi survivors who are bringing a case against France for “complicity with genocide” at the Paris Army Tribunal, suggest the late President Mitterrand’s support for the Hutus was informed by an obsession with maintaining a French foothold in the region. One of the lawyers, Antoine Compte, said France was aware of the potential danger of its support for the pre-genocide Rwandan government. “Massacres on an ethnic basis were going on and we have evidence that France knew this from at least January 1993. The French military executed the orders of French politicians. The motivation was an obsession with the idea of an Anglo-Saxon plot to oust France from the region.”
Posted in Concentrated Criminality, Corrupt Journos, Idiot Authorities | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Tojo’s granddaughter vows to take on WWII issues if elected
The granddaughter of wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo said Tuesday if she wins election later this month for a seat in the Diet she will push to strengthen the military, rewrite the history of the Rape of Nanking and move to censure the United States for dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
Yuko Tojo is seeking a seat in the Upper House of the Diet. She is running as an independent after being rejected by the ruling conservative party.
Tojo told a news conference one of her primary goals in office would be to settle issues from World War II that remain deeply controversial.
On Japan’s mobilization of tens to hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” to serve in front-line brothels, Tojo said the government was not directly involved, a commonly held belief among Japanese conservatives despite evidence to the contrary.
Posted in Politically Incorrect, Politico Follies, War | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Skateboarders to go ‘wild’ in S.F. – Examiner.com
“Wild in the street” has city officials scrambling for details as more than 500 skateboarders are expected to descend onto the streets of San Francisco on the Fourth of July.
As of Monday, no route for the five-mile skateboard ride had been announced, the Police Department had few details and permits had not been secured with the Recreation and Park Department.
Organized by Emerica, a Southern California-based skateboarding shoe company, the free event is being promoted as inspired by Critical Mass, the London-born “Reclaim the Streets” movement and other grass-roots happenings.
The first “Wild in the Streets” event took place in New York City in 2002, drawing more than 1,000 participants. Subsequent events were held in Philadelphia in 2005 and Chicago in 2006.
Posted in Anarchy, Idiot Activists, Idiot Authorities | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
5 dead in Virginia farming accident
Deadly methane gas emanating from a dairy farm’s manure pit killed five people, including four members of a Mennonite family, authorities said.
Emergency workers speculate each of the victims climbed into the pit in a frantic attempt to rescue the others. “It was a domino effect with one person going in, the second person going after them,” Sheriff Don Farley said.
Farley identified the victims as Scott Showalter, 33; his wife, Phyillis, 34; their children, Shayla, 11, and Christina, 9; and Amous Stoltzfus, 24, who worked at the Showalter’s dairy farm in the Briery Branch community.
Posted in Doh!, Yuck! | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Nurse survives window blowout in air ambulance at 20,000 feet
A critical-care nurse aboard an air ambulance fought to keep from being sucked out of the cabin when a window blew out of the aircraft at 20,000 feet.
“I guess it wasn’t my day to die,” said Chris Fogg, who lives near Boise, Idaho, and was flying with a patient and the pilot last Wednesday from Twin Falls, Idaho, to Seattle. “For anyone else, I think he would have been sucked completely out, but for some reason I was spared, and I don’t know why.”
Fogg’s head and right arm were pulled outside the window, and he suffered cuts to his head. Some equipment, charts, his eye glasses and packages went flying out of the cabin.
The rapid decompression occurred when Fogg was unbuckled from his seat and reaching for a water bottle.
Posted in Technological Travesties, You lucky bastard | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
7-Elevens turn into ‘Simpsons’ Kwik-E-Marts
Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of “The Simpsons” fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.
A Dallas, Texas, 7-Eleven has temporarily become a Kwik-E-Mart as a tie-in to “The Simpsons Movie.”
Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.
It’s all part of a campaign to hype the July 27 opening of “The Simpsons Movie,” the big-screen debut for the long-running television cartoon, which loves to lampoon 7-Eleven as a store that sells all kinds of unhealthy snacks and is run by a man with a thick Indian accent.
Posted in Doh! | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Alleged bird beater had wild weekend
Police say they’ve collared the man they believe administered a fatal beating to a peacock because he thought it was a vampire.
Police sources told the Advance last night that cops arrested John N. Potts, 32 — who lists his stepfather’s house on Surfside Plaza in Tottenville as his address but may, in fact, be homeless — in connection with Thursday’s avian assault.
Potts was picked up just before 7 p.m. yesterday, after he sparked a domestic disturbance at the stepfather’s house, capping a wild weekend for a man described by one source as emotionally disturbed.
Posted in A Bit of The Old Ultraviolent, Concentrated Criminality | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
750,000 a year killed by Chinese pollution
Beijing engineered the removal of nearly a third of a World Bank report on pollution in China because of concerns that findings on premature deaths could provoke “social unrest”.
The report, produced in co-operation with Chinese government ministries over several years, found about 750,000 people die prematurely in China each year, mainly from air pollution in large cities.
China’s State Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and health ministry asked the World Bank to cut the calculations of premature deaths from the report when a draft was finished last year, according to Bank advisers and Chinese officials.
Posted in Idiot Authorities, Technological Travesties | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
iPhone hackers disclose vulns and hunt for clues
The game is on for hackers trying to spot security vulnerabilities in Apple’s iPhone and already they’re scoring points. Less than 72 hours after the iPhone’s introduction, researchers have reported at least one flaw that could allow an attacker some level of control over the device, while other hackers have uncovered passwords hiding in Apple software that could prove key in gaining root access, they said.
The most serious flaw, reported by Errata Security, resides in the iPhone’s Safari browser. By effecting a buffer overflow in the application, an attacker can take control of the browser and run code on the device, said Robert Graham, CEO of Errata.
“The scenario that seems most attractive is to have the phone dial 900 numbers,” Graham said, noting an age-old attack that allows criminals with ties to fee-based phone services to profit each time an infected computer dial the number.
…
Among the advances made to date, hackers have discovered the password the iPhone requires to give an application root access is, amazingly, “dottie” (minus the quotation marks). A second password for mobile access is “alpine.”
Posted in Hackers and Hacking, Technological Travesties | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Bran Castle, Also Known As ‘Dracula’s Castle’
An heir of Romania’s former royal family put “Dracula’s Castle” in Transylvania up for sale Monday, hoping to secure a buyer who will respect “the property and its history,” a U.S.-based investment company said.
The Bran Castle, perched on a cliff near Brasov in mountainous central Romania, is a top tourist attraction because of its ties to Prince Vlad the Impaler, the warlord whose cruelty inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”
Legend has it that Vlad, who earned his nickname because of the way he tortured his enemies, spent one night in the 1400s at the castle.
Posted in Cryptozoology, Historical Oddities | No Comments »
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
Dead Airman’s Affidavit: Roswell Aliens Were Real
…But last week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery.
Lt. Walter Haut was the public-relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Col. William Blanchard.
Haut died in December 2005, but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.
Last week, the text was released. It asserts that the weather-balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.
He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.
He wasn’t the first Roswell witness to talk about alien bodies.
Posted in Aliens, Cloak and Dagger, Conspiracies, Uncategorized | Comments Off
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
Bad Day For a Staten Island Peacock
A deranged Staten Island man spotted a peacock in the parking lot of a Tottenville Burger King Thursday morning, and mistook the majestic animal for a vampire. According to the Staten Island Advance, the man assaulted the bird in pretty much every possible way except driving a stake through its heart, as onlookers watched in horror.
Witnesses said a man in his late teens or early 20s grabbed the helpless bird by its neck, struck it repeatedly with a baseball bat and kicked it in a Burger King parking lot on Page Avenue.
He then jumped onto the hood of a car and threw the peacock to the ground before running off when he saw police.
Hat tip to Kara!
Posted in A Bit of The Old Ultraviolent, Concentrated Criminality, Cryptozoology, Kara's Classics | No Comments »
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
Tony Blair speaks his mind now that he is off the leash:
Blair launches stinging attack on ‘absurd’ British Islamists
…’The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don’t have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you’ve got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,’ Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
‘The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we’re not actually fighting it properly. We’re not actually standing up to these people and saying, “It’s not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn’t justified.”‘
Posted in Politically Incorrect, War | No Comments »
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
Zimbabwe’s top cleric urges Britain to invade
ZIMBABWE’S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.
Posted in Career Limiting Move, Crazed Dictatorships, War | No Comments »
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
We ain’t got dames
A NEW disease is abroad in eastern Germany: Frauenmangel, lack of women. In some towns there are only 75 young women for every 100 young men. In one or two there are as few as 40. The effects are worrying, not only because populations may shrink but also because of the existence of a growing underclass of young men who are partnerless, underqualified and jobless.
A study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development has looked at Herzberg and Ebersbach, two small towns in eastern Germany. “Even the mayor of Ebersbach hadn’t realised this is going on,” says Reiner Klingholz, the institute’s director. It is a vicious spiral. Girls are more studious than boys, so they get better qualified and migrate west to find both partners and jobs. The boys lack role models at home, where fathers are often unemployed, and at school, where teachers are mostly female. Young men now account for 65% of German high-school dropouts.
Consider this your German Neo-Nazi Storm Warning…
Posted in Doh!, Unintended Consequences | No Comments »
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
China finds secret tomb chamber
A mysterious underground chamber has been found inside the Chinese imperial tomb guarded by the famous Terracotta Army, Chinese archaeologists say.
Historical records describing the tomb of Qin Shihuang, China’s first emperor, do not mention the room which is 30 metres (98 feet) deep.
The unopened chamber was found at the site near the old imperial capital of Xian using remote sensing technology.
One expert says it may have been built for the soul of the emperor.
Posted in Historical Oddities, Most Mysterious | No Comments »
