Pamper yourself with Next Two

The theme so far today has been insanity from on high but it need not be the on-highs – it can be a bog standard auto company too:

Renault wants to make your commute as chill as possible. Assuming your route is “protected” (free of pedestrians, cyclists or lane changes), the French automaker has a few tricks up its sleeve to make gridlocked traffic less of a hassle. Once you engage automated driving mode, the Next Two prototype releases scents to calm you down, adjusts cabin lighting, kicks the seat back and activates massage motors to melt away the day’s stresses.

The company purposely designed these features to activate at below 19MPH (30KPH) — about half of Audi’s cap — to take the frustration out of bumper-to-bumper traffic. With the push of a button though, the reins are back in your hands and everyone’s safety is up to you.

[H/T haiku]

Snipers take out US grid network – stuff of good fiction?

Just when we thought it was safe to go back into our shells, muttering, “There ain’t no conspiracy, it’s flights of fancy,” comes this:

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, last April, in the middle of the night, snipers opened fire for almost 20 minutes on a substation next to a freeway south of San Jose, California, and knocked out seventeen transformers that direct power around Silicon Valley. They also cut the nearby telephone cables. It took a month to fix all the damage — the attackers are still unknown.

The former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Jon Wellinghoff — who now works for the law firm Stoel Rives — has been trying to bring attention to the incident because he thinks it could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger coordinated attack on the U.S. power grid. Shortly after the event occurred, Wellinghoff — who was still FERC Chairman at the time — took a group from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia (which trains Navy SEALs) to investigate the scene and they determined it was a professional job.

Wellinghoff thinks that a larger coordinated attack could be so detrimental that it could lead to widespread blackouts across the U.S. Not everyone agrees with him, though, and othersquoted in the Wall Street Journal article think the grid is more resilient.

Perhaps that’s what they were trying to determine in an exercise – whether it was or not, just for information, you understand. I place this alongside that PC over here who smashed that pensioner’s car window to determine whether any wrongdoing had been done.

Understandable behaviour really.

In which insanity is dropping down like faeces from above.

[H/T haiku]

Lord Smith and the Environmental Agency

The Environment Agency has been getting a lot of stick recently, especially over the flooding in the Somerset Levels.

Now nobody can stand in the way of nature when conditions are way above anything that can be anticipated and nobody ever will, but this authority has undoubtedly failed in its duty of maintenance time and again regards rivers and watercourses.

A little bit of history spells out that not all is right with the Agency in more than one area.

Bletchley – when those who come after have none of the wartime spirit

This via Chuckles. The headline had it:

Elderly Bletchley Park volunteer sacked for showing Colossus exhibit to visitors

And:

Now the ongoing war between Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing has claimed its first casualties. Tony Carroll, an elderly volunteer at Bletchley Park, was fired after daring to …

There are people out there who understand this far more than I and they might even have been to the exhibition. Comments, usually throws more light on things but in this case, confuses them more in my mind:

La Manif pour tous

Massive demo in Paris:

Firstly, who are they?

The French must stand up…”Mariage pour tous” (“Marriage for all”) is same-sex “marriage” imposed on all!

The “Mariage pour tous” bill wreaks havoc on the Civil Code, replacing the words “husband” and “wife”, “father” and “mother” by unisex, undifferentiated terminology (notable “parents”). This bill intends to erase sexual differentiation and complementarity from the law and jeopardize the foundation of human identity: sexual difference and the resulting structure of parentage. It paves the way for a new, “social” parentage unrelated to human reality. It creates a framework for a new anthropological order founded not on sex but on gender, that is, sexual preference.

“Mariage pour tous” is the end of genealogy for all !

With plenary adoption for two men or two women, children will be considered, by law, born of two parents of the same sex, thus willingly deprived of a father or a mother. They will be deprived of half their origins. This is profoundly discriminatory and unjust for children.

They organized a demonstration in Paris against gay “marriage”, to which the socialists [PS] said:

In a statement, the first secretary of the PS denounces “the manipulations and lies on which a reactionary fringe trying to cement opposition to government policy, with the support of several irresponsible parliamentary UMP”.

Reactionary “fringe”, eh?

Some Reactionary “fringe”. There was a poll on the socialist attempt to force this bill through, as Cameron did. It asked if you agree with the socialists that it should go through and protests were out of order. In other words, was being anti gay “marriage” wrong:

Think that’s fairly clear – the French people want no part of this. It’s something pushed by the socialists and gay mafia only.

Now, if it is such a large protest in Paris, then it will be in all the papers over here for days, will it not?

Just checking now. N-n-n-n-o-o-o-o-o. Nothing. Not a sausage. Well, whodathunk it? Now if it had been for gay “marriage”? Every headline in the world.

Will the socialists and gay mafia ever take the hint?

Meanwhile, over here, a criminal social worker or whoever approves these things has approved two lesbians being given an orphaned Muslim child to do as they wish with.

That person and whoever wrote that code need to be behind bars.

Do you think this is an in-joke?

Hot on the heels of the last post, is another puzzler.

OK, you’re all out in the brilliant sunshine, joie de vivre is the order of the day, so why am I here writing this bit of what looks suspiciously like spite? One reason is I’m waiting for my visitor to arrive, rhubarb pie at the ready, the other is that I just saw it and tend to write on what gouges the eyes out.

I’m going to ask readers a question. Do you think this article in the Wail is a wind-up? Do you think there is some secret in-joke they’re having on us, not unlike Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden or the Martin Scribblerus of old?

That would be understandable.

Is it just a filler piece? Does the lady work at the Wail and they all wanted to do such an article and Sam was a good enough sport to go along with it? Do you think that’s it?

Or do you suspect she might actually be serious? Poor lady. Because let’s face it, she might not be as ugly as sin but she’s certainly no looker and if she is serious, then she’s also a fruitcake. And no one wishes to see beauty o’erthrown or even a once noble mind.

Most of us are no lookers either and so we rely more on our abilities in other areas. Even a woman who does have looks generally doesn’t go on about it – she just struts her stuff or lets it all hang out today or in yesteryear, she was self-effacing but still enjoyed the accolades: