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wedged between the walls of a mountain crevice in norway is a rock called kjeragbolten. the rock is often stood on by tourists for a crafty photograph whilst attempting not to look down at the 3000ft drop.

More rocks at the link.

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A veto last week by President George W. Bush of a popular water projects bill was overridden by the House of Representatives on Tuesday, moving Congress closer to enacting legislation that would authorize $23 billion for nearly 900 projects across the United States.

The House voted 361-54 to override the president’s veto. The Senate is expected to take up the water bill as early as Wednesday.

If similar action occurs in the Senate, it would mark the first time Congress has mustered enough votes to override the president’s veto. Bush has vetoed five bills during his time in office.

So, the first time they discover they have a back-bone is when it’s the pork (and thus, their own jobs) that’s in danger:

Bush had long threatened to veto the $23 billion bill, saying it was too expensive because it had special projects supported by individual lawmakers.

“No one is surprised that this veto is over-ridden,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

“We understand that members of Congress are going to support the projects in their districts. Budgeting is about making choices and defining priorities — it doesn’t mean you can have everything,” he said. “This bill doesn’t make the difficult choices; it says we can fund every idea out there.”

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TPM:

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

Well, that’s sorted, then. But here’s what I want to know:

Who’s in the administration taking a cut of that untraceable $100 million as a kickback? And what are they doing with it?

Sure, it’s small potatoes compared to the $8.6 billion “lost” in Iraq, but “waste not, want not,” eh?

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Our recruiter emailed over the following with a note stating that, “If more jobseekers wrote from their soul with such truthfulness, it would be so much easier to find the right people.” This one came from a submission on our jobsite for a Systems Admininstrator. From the email…

“I’ve been bouncing boxes for Uncle Sam 2.5 years now in some of the most god-awful places on earth. I’ve racked servers during indirect fire, maintained contact with a bird while our vehicle was shot up, mastered the finer art of the many uses of duct tape and how it applies to IT in a warzone. I’ve put up racks in Namibian provinces while cheetahs and jackals watched me from 100 yards away, I’ve even chased an ostrich who tried to steal my CAT5 from the box. I’ve worked on military projects where the dotmil PM/leadership had a more difficult time making decisions than my wife. I’ve danced in the Red Zone with Iraqi locals after a support call to a Forward Operating Base. I’ve mastered the chemistry of the ‘essential caffeine stack’ and I debunked the myth that if you untie your belly button, your butt will fall off (it won’t!). I’ve been shot at, shot up, blown up, broken and put back together again; from Baghdad to Namibia and from Sudan to Djibouti. I strongly feel that I have the skillset, experience and thick skin to take on the world of IT in the greatest city on earth.”

The person was called right away; while he may not end up as an employee, for sure he’ll be remembered for a very long time.

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I had been playing trumpet for our troops and for embassy staff in Baghdad for about three of the seven days we had booked. It was a ten-piece R&B band, doing Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, James Brown, Stevie Wonder and the like. We did a gig in one of Saddam’s palaces for the troops, and afterward, we broke down a ton of gear, and moved it to the next venue, the embassy. It was getting late. Most of the band went to bed, but after the gig, a US military source and I were relaxing in the office.

“Let me show you something,” he said, and punched up a photo folder on his computer. “An officer and I had the detail of inspecting a morgue in downtown Baghdad. This is the travelogue.”

Go and read the whole thing.

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This may be interesting. Adobe could use the competition.

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This afternoon, President Bush held a joint press conference with French President Nicholas Sarkozy. A reporter asked Bush where he stood “on Iraq and your domestic debate on Iraq,” and whether he had a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. In response, Bush insisted that “freedom’s happening” and Iraq isn’t in a “quagmire”:

I don’t — you know quagmire is an interesting word. If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying: God, I love freedom, because that’s what’s happened.

And there are killers and radicals and murderers who kill the innocent to stop the advance of freedom. But freedom’s happening in Iraq. And we’re making progress.

Actually, if he were Iraqi, he’d probably be saying, “Allah, I wish I had electricity and clean water and a job.”

Because, if they were free, why are they trying to leave?

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G3 Systems Ltd must have been very proud when Tony Blair visited the logistics base it built in Afghanistan for the British Army a few months ago, and again when Defence Secretary Des Browne came calling. Their website boasts of offering a wide range of services to the armed forces, especially the supply of various vehicles, the construction of field hospitals, and various logistics services. They’ve been working in Afghanistan since 2002; back then their business was to set up the first British field hospital there.

The board of directors is an impressive catalogue of military-industrial bigwigs from companies such as Thales and BAE, and from the Army; it includes a brigadier and a major-general. It also still includes Roy Ashurst and Mike Ford, founders of the company back in 2001.

You don’t need to be an expert to remember the case of Lincoln Fraser and Julian Brook’s spectacular Imperial Consolidated Group, a financial company that went bust in 2002 with the loss of an estimated £200 million in its customers’ savings. Fraser and Brook were already facing disqualification as company directors before that over their disastrous purchase of the Midland Grand Hotel in Blackpool, which ended with guests being turned out in the street as bailiffs seized the linen.

During the administrators’ efforts to recover the cash, they discovered an incredibly complicated network of companies engaged in doing much the same thing in the UK, various Caribbean tax havens, Hong Kong, Canada, and South Africa. Imperial indeed. Some of the victims of the original fraud were bilked twice over, as Fraser and Brook reappeared with something called “Matrix Investigations” based on the same property as several other businesses of theirs, which promised to make inquiries in return for a fee. Specifically, it targeted Imperial’s original client list, which Fraser and Brook had taken with them. It also conducted an Internet propaganda campaign against the administrators, the Financial Services Authority, and various other parties.

You might be a little surprised, then, to discover that while Imperial Consolidated was collapsing, the same people were in charge of G3 Systems. In the administrators’ report to creditors, G3 Systems and a second firm, G3 Strategic, are described as part of the Fraser-Brook Partnership. As well as Ashurst, Fraser and Brook were directors, as was Hugh Allen, who claims to be an SAS officer and was also part of another Fraser-Brook venture, Alpha Toronto Series Inc, which itself was ordered to stop advertising investments by the Canadian government. You don’t need to take my word for it; you can read all this in the liquidators’ report to creditors (pdf). Much more documentation is available from the liquidators here. Fraser and Brook left the board in February, 2002, but the company was still owned by them in May when Ashurst and Pond appear as directors. The relevant facts are on pages 58-62 of the report.

Fraser and Brook’s financial activities were based on the old RAF fighter base at Binbrook in Lincolnshire, but they also owned the nearby Faldingworth facility, originally built as a high-security nuclear bomb store for the RAF but used since 1972 for a variety of semimilitary functions, for example explosive and weapons tests for HM Forces. More dubiously, it appears in the Scott Report as the site where Jonathan Aitken’s company, Alpha Defence Systems, was based. Inside the site, there is a complex of bunkers and a weapons testing range, surrounded by the owners’ security precautions. You can see the place, thanks to the guys from Subterranea Britannica; loads of photos are here.

Matrix Investigations and G3 Strategic both had their registered addresses at Faldingworth. G3 Systems is based elsewhere, in a business park in Royston and on the old Portland naval base, and is now under new management, being part of a US company. But its website’s “facilities” page still shows a photograph of what is clearly the entrance to Faldingworth. (Compare the left-hand photo with this SubBrit photo.)

When the Sloman Traveller arrived in Immingham with its 7,639 pallets of arms – pallets whose contents were not specified to either the Croatian or British authorities, and which were neither sealed before shipment nor opened on arrival – it was only a few miles from the Faldingworth site. Now, if you look up the ostensible recipients’ address, you’ll notice that it’s a basement unit in a shared building in the middle of a housing estate. Seven thousand pallets?

View Larger Map

What they wanted with the arms is an interesting question. The arms that went to Iraq were flown direct from Tuzla to Baghdad, or as Shazia Mirza might have said, at least that’s what it said on the flight plan. So why bring them to Lincolnshire? Perhaps the fact that a director of Matrix Investigations, was seen in Liberia about this time could explain it.

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OK, so by chance we have some real data to put into the sums in this post. The head of MI5 has just announced that we should all be very scared, because he reckons there may be 2,000 people in Britain who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism.

So let’s run the Terroriser. 59 million people; 2,000 terrorists. So there’s a 0.0034% chance of any given citizen being a terrorist. Remember that the Terroriser will catch 99 per cent of the real terrorists – so that’s all but 20 terrorists. Now, the Terrorist will also miss 98 per cent of the non-terrorists – but that means we’ll get some 1,180,000 false positives. 1,980 terrorists plus 1,180,000 false positives = 1,181,980 suspects. (1,980/1,181,980)x100=0.1675155. There is a 0.167 per cent chance that any one of the suspects is a terrorist.

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In 1735, an anonymous “lover of mathematicks” offered the following conundrum:

“‘Tis certainly Matter of Fact, that three certain Travellers went on a Journey, in which, tho’ their Heads travelled full twelve Yards more than their Feet, yet they all return’d alive, with their Heads on.”

Here is how this is possible…

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U.S. banks and brokers face as much as $100 billion of writedowns because of Level 3 accounting rules, in addition to the losses caused by the subprime credit slump, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

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“This credit crisis, when all is out, will see $250 billion to $500 billion of losses,” said Janjuah, who’s based in London. “The heat is on and it is inevitable that more players will have to revalue at least a decent portion” of assets they currently value using “mark-to-make believe.”

Wall Street’s biggest firms have written down at least $40 billion as prices of mortgage-related assets dwindle because of record foreclosures. Morgan Stanley has 251 percent of its equity in Level 3 assets, making it the most vulnerable to writedowns, followed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. at 185 percent, according to Janjuah. Goldman, the biggest U.S. securities firm, fell 4 percent in New York trading today.

$40 billion done out of at least $100 billion. The credit crisis is far, far from over.

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After nearly a week of delegating the U.S. response to martial law in Pakistan to Condoleezza Rice, yesterday George Bush took matters into his own hands:

I spoke to President Musharraf right before I came over here to visit with President Sarkozy. And my message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform. You can’t be the President and the head of the military at the same time. So I had a very frank discussion with him.

…and my message was very — very plain, very easy to understand, and that is, the United States wants you to have the elections as scheduled and take your uniform off.

And less than a day after that very easy to understand message, and with the assurance from the White House that,  ”President Musharraf listened carefully and heard what President Bush had to say,” it is being reported that:

Three politicians and a union activist were charged with treason for making anti-government speeches in the southern port city of Karachi, a court official said Thursday.  [...]

If convicted, the charge carries a maximum sentence of death.

Yes, it sounds like free and fair elections are just around the corner.  And for the record, the administration is still refusing to say that Pakistan is now a military dictatorship, preferring to describe it as having,  ”veered off the course of the democratic pathway.”  

This line?

You can’t be the President and the head of the military at the same time.

Perhaps Bush should read Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.  Of course it’s not surprising that Bush would be unfamiliar with that document.

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This is the fourth and last picture of a series of the Canopus thermonuclear test in French Polynesia.

This is a scan of a (digitally restored) hardcopy of a picture taken by the French army which could be purchased in Tahiti at that time.

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Estimated number of France’s operational nuclear warheads: 348. France ranks 3rd worldwide, after Russia with 5,670 and the United States with 5,163. China and the UK have less than 200 warheads each. Israel, Pakistan, and India: less than 100 each. North Korea: less than 10.

Iraq, 0, Iran, 0, Syria, 0.

I’ve always been terrible at higher math: remind me again where the worldwide threat might be coming from.

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* Egg and bacon
* Egg, sausage and bacon
* Egg and <span>
* Egg, bacon and <span>
* Egg, bacon, sausage and <span>
* <span>, bacon, sausage and <span>
* <span>, egg, <span>, <span>, bacon and <span>
* <span>, <span>, <span>, egg, and <span>
* <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, <span>, baked beans, <span>, <span>, <span> and <span>
* Lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and <span>
* <span>, sausage, <span>, <span>, <span>, bacon, <span>, tomato and <span>

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“Major League Baseball has just strengthened the case against DRM. If you downloaded videos of baseball games from MLB.com before 2006, apparently they no longer work and you are out of luck. MLB.com, sometime during 2006, changed their DRM system. Result: game videos purchased before that time will now no longer work, as the previous DRM system is no longer supported. When the video is played, apparently the MLB.com servers are contacted and a license obtained to verify the authenticity of the video; this is done by a web link. That link no longer exists, and so now the videos will no longer play, even though the MLB FAQ says that a license is only obtained once and will not need to be re-obtained. The blogger who is reporting this contacted MLB technical support, only to be told there are no refunds due to this problem.”

If the product is defective by design, and you buy it, and it turns out to be defective, the product is working as intended.

The best thing you can do is: don’t buy products with DRM. Ever.

Bears repeating:

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An 18-year-old authorities say shot eight people inside his high school in southern Finland, before turning the gun on himself, has died, police said.

The shooting appeared to have been planned out in graphic videos posted on Internet file-sharing site YouTube.

They would have caught him sooner if only he would have used copyrighted music in his video posts..