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 Click on pic for series of engineering photo winners |
I might not have posted this series of contest winners except for Uncle Dave’s excellent U-2 post. We’re getting a convoy going here.
Despite first flying over 50 years ago, the U-2 continues to serve in the USAF, having outlasted its Mach 3 replacement, the SR-71 (also from Lockheed).
The only people to have gone gone higher on any sort of regular basis were SR-71 pilots.
Astronautics have, of course, gone higher still, but certainly not on a regular basis.
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Paris Hilton likes tiny little toy size dogs. But those toy size dogs live in Paris Hilton’s dog house – that is nothing like a toy.
Paris Hilton’s dog house has two floors and is thoroughly pink. Downstairs is the lounging and relaxing area from the stress of being Paris Hilton’s dogs. Upstairs is the sleeping area and a closet for her pups many different outfits.
Tinkerbell, Marilyn Monroe, Prince Baby Bear, Harajuku, Dolce and Prada, have to love the dog mansion. It was finished by famed interior decorator Faye Resnick. The dog house has Philippe Starck furniture, heat, a/c and a crystal chandelier…
Paris Hilton’s dog house is estimated to have cost around $325,000.
The median price for a family home in the United States is about $182,000.
Thanks, Jägermeister
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John and Adam discuss the news of the day from an international perspective
Queue / cue / Q the closing credits — We hope you enjoy the show!
No Agenda Archive
Running time: approx. 90 mins.
San Francisco – The Snitch – Let Freedom Ring: Federal Judge Rules That, Yes, You Are Entitled To Mail Out Pictures of Your Enemies Altered to Look Like Hitler — It’s about time this was addressed! What about Hitler pics of your friends?
In the past few years, it seems the powers that be have found so many devious new ways to restrict our freedoms. They’re reading our e-mails, listening to our phone calls, and calling up incessantly to try to get us to donate to their “Police Athletic Leagues” (hey, we’re on to you!).
So it was heartwarming to learn that, last month, a local federal judge ruled that we’re still entitled to one of our most basic freedoms: Firing off unsolicited mailings containing photos of your enemies doctored to look like the Führer.
Judge Saundra Brown dismissed a case filed against onetime General Electric worker Robert Delsman by Sedgwick Claims Management Services — after Delsman sent out postcards emblazoned with photos of two top Sedgwick executives altered to look like Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.
Obese Texas inmate hides gun in his flabs of fat
An obese inmate in Texas has been charged after officials learned he had a gun hidden under flabs of his own flesh.Twenty-five-year-old George Vera was charged with possession of a firearm in a correctional facility after he told a guard at the Harris County Jail about the unloaded 9mm pistol. The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday that Vera was originally arrested on charges of selling illegal copies of compact discs. The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin
So, an ancient Egyptian woman was reincarnated as Michael? That might explain a lot.
The Pharaoh of Pop doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as King of Pop, but visitors to Chicago’s Field Museum could swear that’s Jacko’s face on a 3,000-year-old Egyptian bust.
The spitting image limestone sculpture has been on display at the museum since 1988, but recently started drawing attention because of its likeness to Jacko — complete with disfigured nose.
Unfortunately the bust, which was carved sometime between 1550 B.C. and 1050 B.C., is of a woman and MJ likely never had the chance to see the statuette.
I’ve been looking at this article for a day wondering what to make of it. Part of the reticence flows from not knowing much about David Kilcullen.
I’ve found and read a few articles about him since I snipped this from DAWN. This one by George Packer for the NEW YORKER is probably the best background all-rounder.
Read on –
David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert who will assume a role as a senior adviser to Gen Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war’s management to date. He outlined a ‘best-case scenario’ for a decade of further US and NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan during an appearance at the US Institute of Peace on Thursday.
Under that timeline, the allied forces would turn the corner in those two years, followed by about three years of transition to a newly capable Afghan force and about five years of ‘overwatch’.
‘We’ll fight for two years and then a successful transition, or we’ll fight for two years and we’ll lose and go home,’ Mr Kilcullen said…
Mr Kilcullen was speaking for himself, and it is not clear that Gen McChrystal shares his dark assessment. Gen McChrystal is assembling what aides describe as a blunt summing up of a war his predecessor called a stalemate. That review is due within weeks and may lead to a request for additional US forces beyond those President Barack Obama has already sent to Afghanistan this year.
This article starts out with a nightmare story of a woman who’s on Georgia’s registry for life for having oral sex with a classmate years ago, a ‘crime’ that’s no longer even a crime (and never should have been) in Georgia. Like many drug usage laws, many sex laws and registries make no sense and make it harder to protect us from the really bad people.
Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.
Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.
[…]
So laws get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. “It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make him a threat to anybody,” says Mr Norris. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.”
 
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When his girlfriend took to his door with an axe, William Floyd started shooting, deputies say.
No one was hurt in the 2 a.m. domestic dispute at 2811 S County Line Road, said Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Debbie Carter. Floyd, 44, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Carter said it seems Floyd’s live-in girlfriend couldn’t get into his front door and tried to chop it down. So Floyd fired a round at the door with a .38-caliber handgun. The girlfriend drove away and refused to answer an investigator’s questions, Carter said.
Doesn’t say if she was carrying a concealed axe. Of course, axes don’t kill people, guns do.
And lest you think that’s all the goofy goings on in the L shaped state, other than the kitty pr0n case:
– Fight at gas pumps leads to name calling, gasoline shower.
– Man pretends to be disabled to get woman to diaper and bottle feed him.
– UFO video. Need I say more?
And you thought health care, the economy, swine flu shots, and why oh why won’t Paula Abdul be on American Idol were the only things to worry about.
The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.
[…]
If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.
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“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.
This was Heath Ledger’s last film. Because he died before it was finished, Gilliam came up with a clever, story-consistent way of using three other actors in the role of Tony for the rest of the film.
A 56-foot, 60-ton sperm whale died on a beach in Taiwan in January, 2004. Researchers wanted the carcass to perform an autopsy and for research, so they loaded the whale onto a tractor-trailer and set out through the city of Tainan, heading for the Shi-Tsau Natural Preserve. It took 13 hours, three cranes and 50 workers to get the whale loaded on the truck. Unfortunately, on the way through the city, gasses built up to a critical level in the whale and it exploded, spewing whale guts in the street, on the cars and over pedestrians. According to witnesses, the smell was pretty bad. Residents and shop owners put on masks and tried to clean up the mess.
Found by Dylan Newstead.
Looks like the cover pic of a 1940’s Popular Science Magazine.
The Copenhagen Consensus Centre—a respected European think tank which used to be skeptic on climate change—is now advising that we should spend $9 billion in building 1900 cloud-generating ships like the one above. Why? To cool down Earth:
When you spray saltwater into the air, you create nuclei that cloud condenses around, creating bigger and whiter clouds, thus bouncing more sunlight back into space.
That’s what David Young, a member of the panel that created the report, says. The fully automated vessels will cross the oceans absorbing water and spraying it into the skies. They say this will help the formation of big, whiter clouds, which will make the sun light bounce, lowering temperatures.
Found by Dylan Newstead.
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