An article over at the Counterterrorism Blog warns of the supposed dangers of an Iranian EMP attack on the continental United States. EMP, if you’re not up on your acronyms-of-mass-destruction, stands for “Electro-Magnetic Pulse”, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how it works. There’s a little more to this than meets the eye, however.
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Today, a roundup of strangeness, short-attention-span style: Cooties, cats, dead presidents, and another nail in the coffin of the War on Drugs. But first, a word from my inner Jewish mother:
Did you vote yet? No? Well what are you waiting for, a direct order? Go, vote already. The history of the future of the free world depends on you!
We now return to your regularly scheduled oddness….
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When you see news stories in this country like the armed, naked patriot on a California freeway, it’s easy to assume that America is the only place that breeds such wierdness, strangeness, and oddity. Alas, that may have once been the case, perhaps, but is certainly no longer true. (Crazies: one of America’s more enduring cultural exports? Discuss amongst yourselves.)
Consider, if you will, as one of the officers involved puts it, an idiot with samurai sword versus police dog; “the Idiot came second.” (Yay, K9 officers the world over.) And it’s hard to trump either this camouflaged fellow and his naked, trussed-up accomplice or the Hampshire police’s judgment: probably a prank, or “misdirected leisure activity”. Oh, and if you happen to be the naked woman, tied up in the woods by a man in cammies, please ring the police and let them know you’re alright, would you? Presumably, they’re holding back certain details you’ll be expected to provide to prove that you were the one whose leisure activities are so very, very misdirected. After all, how many naked women can there be in any given woods in England in November?
The HSDL blog today posts about an interesting recent report on the emergency preparedness (or lack thereof) of nonprofit groups in and around the nation’s capital. This report raises two interesting questions, at least to me…
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A little over a month ago, I made a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to the U.S. Navy for a copy of a very obscure DVD produced by the Naval Education and Training Command about the Seabourn Spirit incident in 2005. Given the recent renewed public interest in Somali piracy, it seemed like the video was something worth trying to get. Alas, the Navy doesn’t want to part with the “USS Gonzales / USS Capt. St. George Somali Pirate Incident” case study.
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