WINTER TO BE MILD PREDICTS MET OFFICE,

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/208012/Winter-to-be-mild-predicts-Met-Office/#

Oh dear, I’m having a tabloid attack.

Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust

‘Don’t bob for apples, the stalk might poke you in the eye – take them out with your hands!’

I didn’t make it up, honest…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1324527/Halloween-health-safety-Wear-goggles-apple-bobbing.html

Trust the Wail to pick this up amongst all the boobs and bums.

I forget who posted the last item from this source, but they do run some thoughtful pieces.

“U.S. Midterm Elections, Obama and Iran is republished with permission of STRATFOR.”

U.S. Midterm Elections, Obama and Iran

By George Friedman

We are a week away from the 2010 U.S. midterm elections. The outcome is already locked in. Whether the Republicans take the House or the Senate is close to immaterial. It is almost certain that the dynamics of American domestic politics will change. The Democrats will lose their ability to impose cloture in the Senate and thereby shut off debate. Whether they lose the House or not, the Democrats will lose the ability to pass legislation at the will of the House Democratic leadership. The large majority held by the Democrats will be gone, and party discipline will not be strong enough (it never is) to prevent some defections.

Should the Republicans win an overwhelming victory in both houses next week, they will still not have the votes to override presidential vetoes. Therefore they will not be able to legislate unilaterally, and if any legislation is to be passed it will have to be the result of negotiations between the president and the Republican Congressional leadership. Thus, whether the Democrats do better than expected or the Republicans win a massive victory, the practical result will be the same. Continue reading “War?”

There was an event in Washington in August called ‘Restoring Honour.’ No idea what it was all about, but the organisers had planned a fly-past to start the event. The fly-past was banned on the grounds that the sky over Washington is a restricted airspace. And then this happened:

🙂

And I apologise, a bit, for being lazy, but I thought it made some interesting points.

Meat is how we convert indigestible vegetable protein into something we can eat. If you eat a cow, you are eating grass or grain in concentrate form.

If veganism is so good for the body, why was there not a single naturally evolved vegan culture? It is because veganism is not sustainable in a hardscrabble subsistence culture. In the bush you eat what you can find when you can find it. There are no freezers, refrigerators, ships from Chile loaded with fresh grapes or planes loaded with berries showing up. It takes a huge infrastructure to support a vegan. The amount of energy consumed just transporting their food and keeping it from spoiling is tremendous. Continue reading “This is a C&P”

We are to build two aircraft carriers – and no aircraft for them to carry.

We are to spend one billion pounds on capturing carbon from the atmosphere and burying it. This is to add to the megatons of carbon already buried there – which, btw, we could use to produce real, usable energy instead of spending further untold billions on useless windmills which our ancestors gave up a couple of hundred years ago as soon as something better came along.

We are to be taxed to the point of agony – but still continue sending money to line the pockets of corrupt third world thieves politicians, fat-cat Brussels thieves bureacrats and inefficient French thieves farmers while building a two-hundred and fifty million pound palce for an obscure Belgian bureacrat.

We are to cut spending on schools and other educational facilities, but still continue to import thosands of immigants whose children will add to the burden on our already overstretched edycational establishments.

We are to reduce the size of the fighting forces while continuing to featherbed the drones in the Ministry of Hot Air Defence.

We are… I give up. Time, for once, to take a leaf out of the French livre and take to the streets.

…you might like to take a look at some of the tech used to support and rescue Los 33 🙂

http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2211/1/

… a high-powered corporate security consultant, consorting over the past week with Directors of National Customs and Excise authorities and like that. And what does my cat think I am? A toilet cleaner, that’s what!

First of all, a confession, apart from the first shot of the beach, all of the better pictures are stock images. It was hissing it down with rain the whole time I was in Albania, and I was wrapped up in meetings most of the time in any case. The shots of the run-down housing, which give a better impression of what it is actually like, are mine, taken on a walk between the hotel and a nearby restaurant – which was, actually, excellent – on the first evening.

Those pillboxes are everywhere in Albania, a legacy of Hoxha’s paranoia. Crossing the land border into Albania is like travelling through a WW1 landscape, lines of fortifications – that would, of course, have delayed a modern Army for about, oh, I don’t know, a cigarette?

The last shot shows that, if you get out of the crappy, run-down, crowded cities, life can be quite pleasant for some – the rest of course, are on the dole in Dover or begging on the tube. See the slideshow

Without googling, when was the first automatic sprinkler system installed in a commercial building in the UK?

Learned this today when I was sourcing equipment over the net 🙂

Sipu was closest with a neat bit of reasoning.

It was 1723. Ambrose Godfrey’s patented exploding flasks were installed in warehouses along the South Bank – large jars filled with a mix of alcohol and water. If a fire occurred, the alcohol boiled, shattering the glass and dumping water on the blazing bales below. Interestingly, the alcohol/water mix is still used in some stand-alone sprinklers.