You(Tube) Have Got To Be Kidding

The European Union has launched its very own dedicated section on YouTube which - and I really wish I was making this up - takes a whole bunch of simulated orgasm scenes from EU-financed films to promote itself. (Brief pause while people jump to the link - hint, it isn't that good.) They - honestly - wrap the video up with the catch-phrase "Let's come together." No, really.

The EU's executive arm on Friday launched a special page on the US Internet video sharing site YouTube dubbed EU Tube to use "new and innovative ways of informing people on the activities of the European Union," according to a statement.

By Tuesday, the page had already won a wide if not always flattering following of viewers after receiving mentions in blogs and British tabloids, although mostly due to a sole video.

The clip in question features 44-seconds of sex scenes snipped from various different European films supported by EU money such as 'Amelie from Montmartre' and 'Breaking the Waves'.

Although the clip — which had been viewed more than 280,000 times by Tuesday — has drawn attention to EU Tube, it has also won its fair share of sarcasm.

"So at last the Commission has found a way to appeal to the general public: vulgar (at best), pornographic (at worst) film clips," one visitor to the page said.

In the face of such criticism, Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said: "We think that we can be proud in the European Union about strong European cinema."

However, another visitor to the site concluded: "What a waste of money, putting up these … what I can say, propaganda videos."

If this is what makes Europe proud, then it is time to take a real hard look at the frequent criticism (one would not be exaggerating to say incessant criticism) from Europe about the output from Hollywood. And one would also not be out of line to call the effort of "EUTube" EeeyeeewTube, either. It isn't a prudish thing here, either. It is about pointing out blatant propaganda and raging hypocrisy. The EU is desperate to get its constitution-disguised-as-a-treaty past the righteous indignation of the nations it is stealing sovereignty from. This is part of the propaganda, nothing more.

Catching A Bite

A fisherman in North Carolina went out to catch a bite to eat. And did. In fact, he's lucky he didn't end up on the menu himself.

The piranha was hungry.

MOUNT HOLLY, N.C. - A fisherman looking to catch a catfish for dinner instead reeled in a fish that flashed its teeth and bit his knife. Jerry Melton, 46, was fishing in the Catawba River last week when he caught what state wildlife officials later identified as a piranha, a South American carnivorous fish that lives in freshwater.

"When I got it on the bank I didn't really know what it was; I hadn't seen anything like it before," Melton said.

When Melton opened the fish's mouth with a pocketknife, he said the fish bit down and left an impression on the blade.

Wildlife officials told Melton on Saturday that he caught a 1 pound, 4 ounce piranha that was probably dumped in the river. Melton was fishing in Mount Holly, a town northwest of Charlotte.

The catch highlights the growing problem of people keeping exotic animals and fish as pets and later dumping them into local waters, said Paul Barrington, an ichthyologist with the Fort Fisher Aquarium. Earlier this year, another fisherman caught a snakehead fish — also a nonnative fish — in Lake Wylie near Charlotte.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have our doubts about the bit about the impression left on the knife blade by the piranha, however. Unless the Animal Uprising™ is fitting the fish out with tool steel teeth. Although that is a possibility. We also have to point out that North Carolina, the North of England and North Dakota have all had reports of piranha swimming in their waters. We see a common thread there. Obviously piranha take their orders literally.

Novak Tells All

Robert Novak is publishing the details of his involvement in the entire Plame incident. Richard Armitage was Novak's only source for Plame's name. And it appears to have been just an aside by Armitage. Not only was no crime committed, but Joe Wilson comes out looking even worse than he already looks. 

It's not often that a political book hyped as a "tell-all" actually delivers the dirt, but that's certainly not the story in Robert Novak's fast-paced bio The Prince of Darkness, 50 Years Reporting in Washington . Let's get right to the point: Did the administration leak former CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to him to punish her hubby, Joe Wilson, who had blasted the president's claim that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Niger? Nope. He says that it was just an afterthought from his source, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. In fact, it wasn't even a leak. Armitage was just asking a question about Wilson, whom Novak met two days before, July 6, 2003, in the Meet the Press green room. According to an advance copy of Prince provided to Whispers, Novak entered the normally quiet green room only to see Joe Wilson (whom he didn't know) boasting about his fact-finding mission to Niger, where he found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was hunting for uranium like the president claimed about in his State of the Union address.

"He kept saying, 'We did this' and 'We did that.' The 'we,' I soon surmised, consisted of the National Security Council staff in the departed Clinton administration. He was making clear that 'we' handled affairs better than 'they'–the Bush NSC–did now. In view of what followed, I hope I can be excused for the vulgarism that crossed my mind: 'What an asshole!' "

(I'm letting that particular violation of my own policy here in because it is key to the entire passage.) And the whole incident started because Joe Wilson was more than willing to lie in an effort to get the Bush administration. Fitzgerald knew - almost from the very start of his investigation that Armitage was Novak's source, yet he continued - even though he knew that no crime had been committed.

We Can Erase It For You Retail

Tired of remembering your ex-spouse? Have a trauma in your past that you'd rather not recall? Well, researchers are actually working on erasing bad memories. And that should scare the bejabbers out of anyone who has read Phillip K. Dick's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

An amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories is under development by researchers at Harvard and McGill University (in Montreal). The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled. You don't even need to know the Vulcan mind-meld to do it.

In a new study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the drug propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, while others were given a placebo.

A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.

Similar research led by Professor Joseph LeDoux has been carried out at New York University on rats; scientists were able to remove a specific memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of the animals' memories intact. An amnesia drug called U0126 was administered.

The rats were trained to associate two musical tones with a mild electrical shock so that when they heard either of the tones they would brace themselves for a shock.

The researchers then gave half the rats the drug when playing one of the musical tones.

After the treatment, the rats that had been given the drug no longer associated that particular tone with an imminent shock but still braced themselves upon hearing the second tone, demonstrating only one memory had been deleted.

The linked article at Technovelgy has a bunch of references to science fiction movies, television shows and stories that predicted memory erasure. Including the story mentioned above.

And Now For Something Completely Different

In contrast to Anne Applebaum's take on why the attempted bombings in Britain failed - that it was a superior Western culture that is winning - Richard Littlejohn from the Daily Mail says it was superior excessive bureaucracy that foiled the attempts. But also enabled them in the first place. He starts out in a humorous way, but soon becomes very angry.

Difficult to know whether to laugh or scream after the weekend of madness we've just been through. And it's not over yet, with the security level raised to 'critical' and another terrorist attack imminent.

So let's get the laughter out of the way first, something which wouldn't have been possible had the bombers succeeded and hundreds of innocent people been killed or maimed.

Mistake One as far as the jihadists were concerned was trying to set off car bombs in the West End of London. The chances of either vehicle staying put for long enough to detonate were always going to be negligible.

In Westminster, you can get ticketed at traffic lights. One of them was towed away because it was parked on a double yellow. The second was spotted by two alert paramedics attending to a paralytic drunk, a routine casualty of another quiet night under Labour's rock-around-the-clock drinking regime.

We've only seen pictures of one side of the green Mercedes in the Haymarket. From a different angle, it too may well have been clamped, awaiting the removal truck.

Then there was the folly of relying on mobile phones to spark the explosion. Apparently they made at least two failed calls. What did they expect? Have you ever tried to get a signal in Piccadilly at chucking out time?

"The car bomb you are calling may be switched off. Please try later."

At least they didn't try loading their deadly cargo into a couple of SUVs. They'd have been beaten up by the provisional wing of Friends Of The Earth before they'd had time to set the fuse.

A little black humor, only possible because the plot failed, as he points out. But then, as I mentioned, he gets angry:

Don't blame the police or the intelligence service, this is a mess made by politicians. I felt like retching when Gordon Brown sauntered on camera to announce that the safety of the British people was paramount.

Here is a man who for the past ten years has been one of the two most prominent members of a government which has turned Britain into a playground for jihadists.

Labour tore up border controls, allowing a mass influx of Islamist psychopaths from all over the globe. Radical preachers and terrorist recruiting sergeants were encouraged to settle here. They were fed and watered, handed benefits, council houses and free cars.

Two years after 9/11, Captain Hook was still given a police guard to peddle his message of hatred and murder on the streets of Finsbury Park. Omar Bakri was safely tucked up in free accommodation in Edmonton and driving a brand new people carrier paid for by the mug British taxpayer.

These were but two among tens of thousands of Muslims living among us who make no secret that they hate Western society and intend to establish an Islamic state in Britain. Yet Gordon Brown's government wasn't interested.

Those of us who had the audacity to question the folly of allowing Islamic radicalism to foment in this country in the name of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' were smeared as 'racists'.

The excesses of the British nanny state may have partially compensated for the complete failure of politicians to address the real problems, in other words. But how long can that luck hold? Littlejohn does not believe it will forever. The nanny state would have to get lucky every single time. The terrorists only have to succeed once.

Terminal at London’s Heathrow Evacuated

Terminal 4 at Heathrow airport in London has been evacuated following the discovery of a suspicious bag. And authorities now believe that al Qaeda sent at least a dozen people to infiltrate the British National Health Service.

Thousands of passengers were evacuated from Heathrow's busy Terminal 4 today in new terror alert after a 'suspect bag' was discovered inside.

It brought more chaos to the terminal which is British Airways' main hub as officials warned of more delays.

Airport operator BAA said they were in 'lock down mode.'

Passengers just moments from boarding were turned back from their flights after the alarm was raised at around 1pm

Planes with passengers already on board were directed away from the terminal.

All passengers inside the building were ordered to evacuate the terminal immediately as police and security services dealt with the 'suspect bag.'

A spokesman for BAA said: "In response to a suspect bag in Terminal 4, secondary searches are now being carried out on departing passengers. This will cause some delays to flights.

"Contingency plans have now been activated to ensure that we are able to effectively manage the increase in resource that this secondary search requires. We are working with the police to bring a swift resolution to the incident."

British Airways said it was monitoring the situation.

Meanwhile, up to 12 members of Al Qaeda were sent to work in the NHS, security sources said today.

Eight people have so far been arrested in the hunt for the car bombers who tried to cause carnage in London and Glasgow. Six of them are NHS doctors.

The scale of the infiltration by the terror network has led police to believe several members of the gang are still at large and the threat of an atrocity remains high.

Things are going to be jittery in Britain for a while until they catch most or all of the plotters from this particular group.

Resilient In Britain

Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post today that London is reacting stoically to the recent attempts at terror bombing. She attributes that to the superiority of Western culture to the tolls the terrorists use.

First, the London bombers failed because they were amateurish. The British branch of al-Qaeda, or of al-Qaeda imitators, does not have weapons of mass destruction, whether biological, chemical or nuclear. Nor does it have even Semtex, the plastic explosive favored by the IRA. If the group in Britain has supporters in the governments or secret services of foreign countries, they aren't very resourceful supporters: The car bombs were made of tanks of propane gas and rusty nails. These turned out to be covered with fingerprints and other forensic evidence, enabling British police to carry out raids and make arrests across the country over the weekend.

It's likely that the perpetrators will have been observed by one of central London's multiple video cameras as well: Though we sometimes think otherwise, Western technology is still far superior to the tools available to would-be terrorists.

More important, though, the London bomb plot failed because open Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. One of the Piccadilly car bombs was discovered because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from a car trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's super-vigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police.

I'd only point out one thing: the people trying to pull this off may have been clumsy or even stupid - but the devices they were trying to set off are deadly if built and detonated properly. For example, CNN has a cheerful little "how-to" video (which they deny is a how-to) which shows just how deadly one of these improvised car bombs can be. It is not at all amusing, nor would the results be amateurish. Note the size and intensity of the fireball.

UPDATE: Bob Owens is not at all impressed with CNN's car bomb, incidentally. He's got video of a properly detonated fuel-air explosive to show how devastating one can be. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be anywhere either one of the bombs, thank you.