Fake Steve Jobs is getting more and more interesting…

IRAQ FELIX

On curacao, the local TV on the resort had the US version of CNN on it.

With the commercials.

US readers probably know how often commercials are repeated, and I’ve seen enough of the internet response to head-on to not be surprised by the commercial any more, but damn, that thing is stupid.

Your forehead and your brain are separated by a thing called your skull, and they’re even on different branches of the carotid artery. Headaches do not occur on your forehead, even if that’s where you feel the pain referred. So why rubbing it with a stick of inert wax (probably with some menthol in it?) would help relieve pain is beyond me. Until it hit me just now, when I ran into a youtube version: at no time at all do they claim it relieves any pain whatsoever. They just tell you how to fritter away the money that you just wasted.

They’re probably laughing all the way to the bank….

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During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

(many more pictures at the link)

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Photo credit: David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton

Cynthia Vanderlip, manager of the State of Hawaii’s Kure Atoll Wildlife Sanctuary, cut open the dead body of a fledgling Laysan albatross (nicknamed “Shed Bird”) to find more than half a pound of plastic in its stomach.

Concentrated on the right are all the items retrieved from inside the bird: Plastic lighters, bottle caps, and other plastics that are carelessly tossed often wind up floating on the ocean surface, where they are occasionally consumed by foraging seabirds and other marine creatures.

Larger images, if you can, y’know, stomach them, can be found below. ::Oceans Alive (PDF) and ::Sierra

This (click for full size):

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A hostpital refused to help an emergency patient parked TEN yards from its A&E entrance — and told his pal to call 999 for an ambulance.

A fall at work left garden waste collector Darren Sams unable to move with crippling muscle spasms.

Work pal Mike Russell parked in the bus stop outside St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, and dashed into A&E to get help moving him.

But staff told Mike, 37, to call for an ambulance. Mike, of Carshalton, said: “Darren was in severe pain. I couldn’t move him in case I did more damage.

“But a member of staff said no one could move him for insurance reasons. They didn’t even ring an ambulance for me.”

Mike rang 999 and when the ambulance arrived, paramedics had to give Darren, 31, morphine to ease his pain.

Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust said staff’s first responsibility was to patients inside A&E — and the receptionist followed policy.

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In the next few days Pope Benedict plans to issue his second encyclical – the most authoritative statement a pope can issue – which apparently will focus on social and economic inequity in a globalized economy. In the statement, he is expected to denounce the use of tax havens as socially-unjust and immoral in cheating the greater well-being of society.

And the Pope should know! The Vatican is a big tax haven, and the church owns big pile of gold, and money in swiss banks.

The Pope will have to spend a few centuries eating humble pie before I’ll take his advice on any of this…

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WASHINGTON: The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the “state secrets” privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show.

The lawsuit against the banking consortium, which is known as Swift, threatens to disrupt the operations of a vital national security program and to reveal “highly classified information” if it is allowed to continue, the Justice Department said in several recent court filings asserting its strong interest in seeing the lawsuit dismissed. A hearing on the future of the lawsuit was scheduled for Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The “state secrets” privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower’s claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect.

Workaround: sue in all other countries where Swift operates. Which is, basically, every single country in existence.

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US submarines are designed for speed and stealth. The Navy takes great pains to keep this technology a secret. The most critical part of that secret is the design of the propellers that drive the subs and keep them quiet.

Whenever the submarine is brought into the graving dock for service, one of the first things that they do is cover the propeller with a tarp so that it can not be photographed. Evidently, if you know what they look like, you can figure out how to copy them and make your subs quiet too.

This photo shows the USS Georgia coming out of the water to be serviced. Note the shroud over the propeller to keep it from being photographed.

Now, click on this link to be taken to the Sub Base at Bangor, Washington. You may have to be in Internet Explorer to see this…
Exposed Propeller!!

The photo is of the graving dock on the “Delta Pier” and the propeller of an Ohio Class Ballistic Missile Submarine. Oops!! It really is an interesting design though. Seven blades with a “hook” in them. They actually look pretty fragile.

You can also use the zoom in and out keys and move around the Bangor Sub Base taking a close up look at the bunkers and magazines where they keep the nuclear weapons. You would think the US government would keep better tabs on this stuff.