Category: Weird

Where There’s a Wool, There’s a Way*

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It appears that the people fo the Faroe Islands want to have Google cameras taking pictures of them when they are unaware so that the island is covered by Google Street View™.

I find this odd, but who am I to judge them?

What is odd is that they have a shortage of motor vehicles, so they mounted the Street View™ equipment on sheep:

Living across 18 tiny sub-polar islands in the north Atlantic, Faroe islanders are used to working in difficult conditions. So tired of waiting for Google Street View to come and map the roads, causeways and bridges of the archipelago, a team has set up its own mapping project – Sheep View 360.

With the help of a local shepherd and a specially built harness built by a fellow islander, Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands has fitted five of the island’s sheep with a 360-degree camera.

As the sheep walk and graze around the island, the pictures are sent back to Andreassen with GPS co-ordinates, which she then uploads to Google Street View.

“Here in the Faroe Islands we have to do things our way,” says Andreassen. “Knowing that we are so small and Google is so big, we felt this was the thing to do.”

My mind is officially blown.

Clearly

*H/t Emptywheel for the joke, which she described as a, “Baaad joke.”  Ouch.

Like a Dog That Has Finally Caught the Car

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As more political fallout from the Brexit vote accumulates we have another supporter of leaving the EU is calling it quit.

The head of UKIP, Nigel Farage is stepping down as head of the party:

He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave.

 Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party, saying, “I’ve done my bit.”

 Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back.”

 But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the self-made insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters.

 ………

 But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015.

I don’t think that any of them expected to win the referendum, and now they don’t know what to do.

This is rather ironic.

Your Daily Guck Foogle

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I’ve just discovered a web site that monkey wrenches your Google search history.

Seeing as Google Alphabet has gone full Monty privacy invading evil, I recommend this service, particularly since it is a bit of a screw you to the NSA as well:

Unless you’ve specifically told it not to, Google remembers everything you’ve ever searched for—a fact that’s been useful for artists, Google’s bottom line, law enforcement investigations, among many other things. We’ve all searched for stuff we probably shouldn’t have from time to time, but a web developer has decided to take the shared experience of regretting a specific search to its logical extreme.

“Ruin My Search History” promises to “ruin your Google search history with a single click,” and that’s exactly what it does. Click on the magnifying glass and it’ll take over your browser and immediately cycles through a series of search terms ranging from the mildly embarrassing (“why doesn’t my poo float,” “smelly penis cure urgent”) to the potentially relationship-ruining (“mail order paternity test,” “attracted to mother why”) to the type of thing that might get your name on a list somewhere (“isis application form,” “cheap syria flights,” “how to kill someone hypothetically”).

………

“I [Jon, the guy who authored the site] thought better of that and went down the route of things you’d hate for people to see in your search history,” he said. “I tried to make a semi-story out of the searches to add to the horror. And added in the person’s location to the queries (though people don’t seem to have noticed that).”

………

“Really not sure how I came up with the idea originally,” Jon wrote. “It was probably sparked by the never ending surveillance saga in the news: Snowden, NSA, phone taps, metadata, who searches for what.” I asked Jon if he thought there’s something to the idea that if we all search for words that are likely to be on a watchlist somewhere, we can confuse the NSA or make a comment about mass surveillance.

“I had the idea that the best way to make the government’s search surveillance useless is for us all to be on ‘the list,’” he said. “Maybe it does a bit, but if that’s enough to throw their surveillance off course, it’s probably not great surveillance.”

After it was posted, the website quickly went to the top of Reddit’s /r/internetisbeautiful, where people immediately began to freak the f%$# out over the inclusion of ISIS-related search terms. The reaction has been so visceral, in fact, that one of the moderators has had to step in and defend leaving the link to the site—which now has warnings all over it—on the page: “We’ve taken adequate steps to warn redditors that this link might be something you shouldn’t just blindly click,” internetisbeautiful moderator K_Lobstah wrote in an incredibly long post. “I promise the NSA is not going to black bag you in your sleep (unless you are a terrorist). I promise the police are not calling a judge off his poker game tonight to obtain an emergency search warrant for your apartment.”

It’s mostly harmless, but one warning:  one search term is “Donald Trump”.

Trump Wimps Out

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Now he’s not going to debate Bernie Sanders:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had a bemused response on Friday to Donald Trump’s decision to back out of a suggested debate between the two.

“Well, Mr. Trump, what are you afraid of?” the Democratic candidate said.

Sanders said reporters were the first to inform him that Trump pulled out of the prospective debate, shortly after a tech firm offered to put up the $10 million donation the presumptive Republican presidential nominee had named as a condition.

“Mr. Trump comes across as a big tough guy,” Sanders said. “If you’re so tough, let’s sit down and have that debate.”

He’s a punk and a wimp, and Sanders called him out as such.

Good.

The Donald Calls Hillary a War Monger

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It looks like Donald Trump is going to be the anti-war candidate this election:

Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.

Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.

“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”

And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.

Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”

I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.

At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state. 

At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq,  and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.

The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.

The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.

Here is a suggestion for Hillary:  If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.

Straight from Bag Full of Cats* to Stuffing Rabid Ferrets down One’s Trousers

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The speaker of Brazil’s lower house has reversed himself and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff for excessively rosy budget predictions is back on:

The drive to oust President Dilma Rousseff is back on track after the head of the lower house reversed a decision that had earlier threatened to throw the entire impeachment process into chaos.

Lawmaker Waldir Maranhao released a statement in the dead of night revoking his own call to annul impeachment sessions in the lower house. That puts the Senate back in the spotlight, with a vote on whether to put the unpopular president on trial still slated for Wednesday. If successful, it would temporarily remove her from office. Rousseff is charged with illegally using state banks to plug a hole in the budget.

This is seriously f%$#ed up.

*Yes, I know, I’m overusing this metaphor.

Another Bag Full of Cats on the World Stage

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This time, it’s Brazil:

The Brazilian Senate has vowed to vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff despite a ruling that a vote in the lower house was flawed.

Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros rejected the attempt by Waldir Maranhao, the lower house’s acting speaker, to halt the process.

Mr Maranhao had called for a new vote in the lower house.

But to boos and cheers in the Senate, Speaker Renan Calheiros called that decision illegal.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on Wednesday on whether to start an impeachment trial.

The president of the Senate impeachment commission also said the vote would take place as scheduled.

If Ms Rousseff loses, she will be suspended from office, pending a trial that could last six months. She faces allegations that her government violated fiscal rules.

In his decision, Mr Maranhao said there had been irregularities during the lower house session in which its members overwhelmingly voted in favour of the impeachment process going ahead.

He said members of the lower house should not have publicly announced what their position was prior to the vote, and that it had been wrong of party leaders to instruct their members how to vote.

Mr Maranhao called for a new vote in the lower house.

………


Mr Maranhao, who opposed the impeachment process in the 17 April vote, only took over as the speaker of the lower house last week, after the previous speaker, Eduardo Cunha, was suspended.

Mr Cunha, an outspoken critic of President Rousseff, led the impeachment drive against her.

The level of dysfunction here makes makes the Lewinski affair look like a Schoolhouse Rock episode.

I’m Calling Bullsh%$

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Al-Masdar news is reporting that the Panama Papers reveal that King Salman of the House of Saud laundered money which was donated to the Netanyahu campaign:

Isaac Herzog, member of the Knesset and Chairman of the Israeli Labor party, revealed that Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz financed the election campaign of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

There are no other sources for this.

The only other reports on the internet all link back to this source, and I have no information at all about tits reliability.

I am not citing this to suggest that it is true. I am citing this because my initial reaction was credulous, for about 45 seconds.

This post is not about the report, but about my initial reaction.

I wondered why my initial response was to believe.

I believe that this is because what the Middle East is, a bag full of cats that you can smell crazy on, to paraphrase a popular movie from a few years back.

Time for a Massive Campaign of Civil Disobedience

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The elitists at the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council have decided to ignore the will of the people and name their new research vessel after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, though they did throw a bone to the general public:

The UK’s new £200 million polar research ship will not be called Boaty McBoatface. The decision was announced early on Friday morning by the UK science minister, Jo Johnson. Instead, the new ship will be called the RRS (Royal Research Ship) Sir David Attenborough—a name that also picked up a few votes in the same poll that saw Boaty McBoatface come out way on top.

Showing at least a little bit of political savvy, Jo Johnson didn’t completely discard the people’s choice: RRS Sir David Attenborough will be outfitted with a number of remotely operated underwater vehicles (see gallery above), and one of those will be called Boaty McBoatface. Hopefully they’ll paint a dorky face on the front of its torpedo-like frame.

………

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) had originally planned to name the new ship via an online poll. Shortly after the poll began in March, James Hand, a former BBC radio presenter, proposed the name Boaty McBoatface. The name went viral and quickly picked up tens of thousands more votes than any other. The final tally was 124,109 votes for Boaty McBoatface, 34,371 for Poppy-Mai, and then a handful of others at around 10,000 (Sir David Attenborough picked up 10,284 votes).

………

Yesterday, following the naming debacle surrounding the ship, the UK’s parliamentary science and technology committee began an investigation into “science communication” and NERC’s approach to naming the ship.

You have to hand it to the science minister: if you’re going to take a huge political hit by ignoring the public’s choice, naming the ship after one of the few universally loved Britons is really quite smart. No one’s going to complain about a ship being named after Sir David—and it’s his 90th birthday this weekend. Damn you, Jo Johnson, damn you!

This is an outrage, and clearly it must not be allowed to stand.

Cue the Queen Song, and I Don’t Mean Bohemian Rhapsody

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Yesterday, Cruz dropped out, and today, Kasich threw in the towel:

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a moderate voice who tried to portray himself as the adult in the Republican primary field but failed to win any state but his own, ended his long-shot quest for the presidency on Wednesday, cementing Donald J. Trump’s grip on the presidential nomination.

 Mr. Kasich’s departure, a day after Mr. Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, leaves Mr. Trump as the only candidate remaining in the Republican race. His closest challenger, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, dropped out Tuesday night.

The Republicans have a nominee, and I am tremendously amused.

Then I remember who is leading in the Democratic primary, and I haz a sad.

Are You Sh%$ting Me?

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It appears that some people in Europe are so sick and tired of the consequences of Angela Merkel’s, and Germany’s, incompetent hegemony that they are hoping that Italian governance can fix Europe.

When Italy is your solution to your governance woes, you are in up a certain creek without a paddle:


As the European Union begins to disintegrate, who can provide the leadership to save it? German Chancellor Angela Merkel is widely credited with finally answering Henry Kissinger’s famous question about the Western alliance: “What is the phone number for Europe?” But if Europe’s phone number has a German dialing code, it goes through to an automated answer: “Nein zu Allem.”

This phrase – “No to everything” – is how Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank president, recently described the standard German response to all economic initiatives aimed at strengthening Europe. A classic case was Merkel’s veto of a proposal by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to fund refugee programs in Europe, North Africa, and Turkey through an issue of EU bonds, an efficient and low-cost idea also advanced by leading financiers such as George Soros.

Merkel’s high-handed refusal even to consider broader European interests if these threaten her domestic popularity has become a recurring nightmare for other EU leaders. This refusal underpins not only her economic and immigration policies, but also her bullying of Greece, her support for coal subsidies, her backing of German carmakers over diesel emissions, her kowtowing to Turkey on press freedom, and her mismanagement of the Minsk agreement in Ukraine. In short, Merkel has done more to damage the EU than any living politician, while constantly proclaiming her passion for “the European project.”

But where can a Europe disillusioned with German leadership now turn? The obvious candidates will not or cannot take on the role: Britain has excluded itself; France is paralyzed until next year’s presidential election and possibly beyond; and Spain cannot even form a government.

That leaves Italy, a country that, having dominated Europe’s politics and culture for most of its history, is now treated as “peripheral.” But Italy is resuming its historic role as a source of Europe’s best ideas and leadership in politics, and also, most surprisingly, in economics.

Italy?  Italy is the solution to the EU’s governance problems?
If you are holding up Italy as a better alternative on governance of anything, you have dug yourself into a very very deep hole.

They Should Name this Cat Incitatus

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In Rhode Island, there is a Cat running for President:

………

 Take Denise Rachiele, who was surprised to see a presidential campaign office — Mr. Trump’s — pop up a few doors down from her pet store, All About Pets. Now, her windows are decorated with fake campaign posters for her cat, Stump.

 “He felt he was more qualified, or at least as qualified, as Mr. Trump,” joked Ms. Rachiele, who said she had not decided whom she would support on Tuesday.

What? You don’t know who Incitatus was?

Read a f%$#ing book!

Yeah, but None of the Good Munchies Can Be Eaten

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Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the leading Askenazi (Easter European) Halachic authorities has ruled that Marijuana is kosher for Passover.

Of course, even if you smoke pot, you still cannot have ice cream sandwiches or Fig Newtons®, how the f%$# do you deal with the munchies:

Getting baked on Passover is no longer just for matzah, a leading Orthodox rabbi ruled, after sniffing (but not smoking) some cannabis leaves recently.

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, widely considered the leading living ultra-Orthodox halachic authority, ruled that marijuana is kosher for Passover and can be either eaten or smoked over the eight-day Jewish festival, during which strict dietary laws apply, according the pro-Cannabis online magazine cannabis.org.il.

Kanievsky gave the ruling in response to a question from the pro-marijuana group Siach, meaning both plant and conversation.

Kanievky stipulated that in normal circumstances the plant is considered a member of the kitniyot group of legumes and pulses that are banned on Passover among Jews of Ashkenazi origin. But, he said, if used for medical purposes, cannabis is permitted for Jews from all backgrounds.

Kitniyot include rice, corn and beans. They have always been permissible to Sephardi Jews on Passover, but have been banned by Eastern and Central European rabbis since the 1200s when they were sometimes mixed with wheat. Refraining from the consumption of wheat products is among the central facets of the Passover holiday

It’s leavened grain products, whether wheat, rye, spelt, oats, and barley (the 5 traditional grains) that are forbidden, not wheat products, which is why most Matzoh is made from wheat.

The someone screwed on that bit.

Of course, as any agronomist knows, Marijuana is not, and has never been a legume, and it not typically grown next to the 5 grains, so how it would ever be considered Kitniot is beyond me, though, of course, cooking it into brownies or cookies would be chomaytz.

I’m Not Sure that Hillary Wants this Endorsement………

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Charles Koch just said that Hillary Clinton might make a better President than the potential Republican nominees:

Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, a key source of financing for conservative Republican causes along with his brother, said Democrat Hillary Clinton might make a better president than the candidates in the Republican field.

Koch, in an interview to air on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” program, said that in some respects Bill Clinton had been a better president than George W. Bush, who Koch said had increased government spending. Then when asked if Hillary Clinton would be a better president than the Republicans currently running, he said, “It’s possible, it’s possible.”

Not a big surprise.

After all, Hillary is arguably the best Republican in the race.

Boaty McBoatface Wins!

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And the crowd goes wild:

The internet has spoken — and “RRS Boaty McBoatface” is the people’s choice to name a $300 million state-of-the-art polar research ship.

Over 7,000 names were submitted to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) poll which closed April 16, but “Boaty McBoatface” won easily with 124,109 votes. 

It all began when the NERC invited the public to christen the 129-meter long icebreaker, the largest and most advanced British research vessel to date.

They asked for names that were inspirational, such as a historical figure or a landmark.

However, after former BBC presenter James Hand cheekily suggested the Boaty moniker it quickly became the crowd favorite over more traditional names like “RRS Henry Worsley” after the British explorer who died in January while attempting a solo, unaided mission across the Antarctic.

………

It spawned countless silly riffs.

A UK train service from Portsmouth to Waterloo was briefly renamed “Trainy McTrainface” much to the amusement of its passengers.

………

There’s no guarantee that they will follow through on the public’s choice but whatever its name, the vessel will be setting sail for Antarctica in 2019.

I think that an MP should bring this up during question time, because it would be epic.