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The Basement Collection presents: An 8mm film bought at an estate sale back in the 90′s. This reel is part of a series of a family vacation movies to Europe in 1938. On this reel the family visits France and then Germany. The footage of Hitler is from a celebration in the Berlin Stadium on what I think is a May Day celebration (May 2, 1938) then another celebration at Berlin’s Lustgarten. (on May 1st). (I think the reel was edited together out of order)

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As BP finishes pumping cement into the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead Thursday, some scientists are taking issue with a new U.S. government report that says the "vast majority" of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been taken care of by nature and "robust" cleanup efforts.

In addition, experts warn, much of the toxic oil from the worst spill in U.S. history may be trapped under Gulf beaches—where it could linger for years—or still migrating into the ocean depths, where it’s a "3-D catastrophe," one scientist said.

The U.S. government estimated Monday that the Deepwater Horizon spill had yielded about 4.9 million barrels’ worth of crude.

On Wednesday a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report said that about 33 percent of the spilled oil in the water has been burned, skimmed, dispersed, or directly recovered by cleanup operations. (See "Gulf Oil Cleanup Crews Trample Nesting Birds.")

Another 25 percent has evaporated into the atmosphere or dissolved in the ocean, and 16 percent has been dispersed via natural breakup of the oil into microscopic droplets, the study says. (Read more about how nature is fighting the oil spill.)

The remaining 26 percent, the report says, is still either on or just below the surface, has washed ashore or been collected from shores, or is buried along the coasts.

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In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News has the oldest audience among fully distributed cable networks. The network’s average viewer last season was 65 years old, according to Nielsen. Heck, it’s viewers are even older than viewers of Hallmark Channel, Military Channel and Golf Channel.

Perhaps the reason viewers tend to leave Fox News on all day racking up hours of big Nielsen numbers is they can’t actually change the channel?

You have 100 pounds of Martian potatoes, which are 99 percent water by weight. You let them dehydrate until they’re 98 percent water. How much do they weigh now?

(not really a paradox, but most people find the answer counter-intuitive)

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Newt Gingrich, the man who told his wife he was leaving her as she lay in a hospital bed sick with cancer, has declared that “overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife” on his website. Unfortunately for him, he left comments open, and is on the receiving end of a lot of contempt for his hypocrisy.

My favorite so far is “Which one of your multiple marriages was the most sacred to you?”.

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A Guantanamo jury recommended a 14-year sentence Wednesday for an al-Qaida cook, though its decision may be overruled by a plea bargain that will limit the time he spends in prison.

6000 dead soldiers, 4 trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, the longest war in US history.

And the result: a cook in jail.

Feel safer yet?

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The genus Homo is no longer the sole primate lineage known to have used stone tools to consume the meat of large mammals. New research pushes that skill back nearly a million years.

Large fossilized animal bones with ends shattered for sucking out marrow and cut marks deliberately made with sharp stone tools have been found just a few hundred feet from a previously uncovered Australopithecus aferensis skeleton. The bones are roughly 3.4 million years old, and connect the earliest evidence for using stone tools and eating large game to our Lucy-like ancestors.

Previously, the earliest evidence for using tools to cut the meat off large animals was attributed to early Homo in the Gona region of Ethiopia around 2.5 million years ago. This find from a different region in Ethiopia, Dikika, shows the behavior was around at least a million years earlier.

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Perhaps the most alarmingly repugnant stories are those coming in from our recent war veterans regarding the widespread practice of "battlefield Christian proselytizing." When, on active duty, our service members sought urgently needed mental health counseling while on the battlefield and with the gun smoke practically still in their faces, they were instead sent to evangelizing chaplains, who are apparently being used with increasing frequency to provide mental health care due to the acute shortage of mental health professionals. Chaplains are not certified, professional mental health experts.

According to the reports of these veterans, the chaplains they were sent to for evaluation and treatment had the unmitigated temerity to urge, as a medicinal cure, a conversion to evangelical Christianity, and sometimes even went as far as disgustingly lacing their "counseling" with the soldiers’ need to stay on the battlefield to" kill Muslims for Christ." Even in the best cases, while the chaplains’ words of proselytizing may have provided a temporary placebo, allowing these soldiers to return temporarily to combat for the remainder of their deployment, within months of returning home from war, their "temporary religious faith" wore off as their profound mental health symptoms, quite predictably, returned in all their fury. And, again, the shortage of available mental healthcare professionals and lack of treatment exacerbated the service members’ psychological trauma.

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In a move that has stunned critics Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the resignations of two Dublin auxiliary bishops.

Bishop Raymond Field and Bishop Eamonn Walsh had both tendered their resignations in 2009 in the wake of the Murphy report into clerical child abuse.

Both men had come under intense pressure because they had served as bishops during the period investigated by the Murphy Commission into clerical child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

The Murphy Commission in Ireland found that sexual abuse was ‘endemic’ in boys’ institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy.

‘Following the presentation of their resignations to Pope Benedict, it has been decided that Bishop Eamonn Walsh and Bishop Raymond Field will remain as auxiliary bishops,’ Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said in a letter to priests of the Archdiocese reported in The Irish Catholic.

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Ah, pre-crime. THREsq has a worrisome story of a couple of recent lawsuits by concert producers pre-suing potential bootleggers claiming trademark infringement. Yes, they’re claiming trademark infringement for something that hasn’t happened yet, and simply listing out hundreds of John Doe and Jane Does who can later be filled in. As a part of this, they’re getting law enforcement involved by using the lawsuit to ask the court to order US Marshalls, local and state police and even off-duty officers to go ahead and seize and impound the bootlegged material.

It’s really quite something to read the lawsuit which refers to possible events happening in the future.

The article notes that it seems unlikely that any defendants will show up in court to defend themselves or to protest the lawsuit, since they haven’t done anything yet. So, basically, the lawsuit is allowed because there’s no one to contest it, because who’s going to contest such a lawsuit?