This line from the Economist in an article about how ‘green’ policies have become (at least in rhetorical terms) mainstream made me smile:

The shared level of commitment and wonkiness is, in its way, inspiring (though it must be a bit dispiriting for the Green party, which to stay distinctively unelectable has had to move towards a thoroughgoing social-justice agenda funded with tax increases no-one else would touch)

This is a really good graph showing how much the PIIGS economies owe to each other and to Britain, France and Germany. Really scary to see how much of the debt is owed even within Europe.

This Der Spiegel interview with Col. Gaddafi throws up some truly mad lines. Personal favourites include a strange burst of what appears to be sense (or at least a technically accurate statement):

I don’t think that Ahmadinejad means the violent destruction of Israel when he says this. I think he is thinking of a new democratic state structure to replace the current state of Israel — on the territory of what is geographically Palestine. No one is talking about throwing Jews into the sea.

but he quickly runs back to his regular self when talking about Angela Merkel

She is a strong personality. More like a man than a woman. But I have never had a conversation with her

and possibly the most revealing insight ever into somebody’s personality:

SPIEGEL: Where do you get your facts? Do you watch television? Do you read books?
Gadhafi: I get most of them from the Internet. I constantly sit at my computer

…. Gadaffi is basically an internet troll cast as world leader? The more you think about it the more sense it makes….

It’s completely barmy as you can imagine.

Some of the touches, like Kim Jong Il’s son having ‘mickey mouse’ ears are nice nods to real world events and definitely add to the strangeness of the episodes. Anyway, I’ve put up what I can find off youtube so enjoy:

Cheney: We bomb the World Trade Center.

Kristol: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!

Cheney: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.

Feith: Oh. How?

Cheney: Easy. First, we cultivate 19 suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I’d say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight schools. They should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free reign by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually that process is already underway now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.

Wolfowitz: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven’t even planned this yet?

Cheney: They just are. Okay?

Wolfowitz: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?

Cheney: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.

Wolfowitz: And how do we get them to do that?

Cheney: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahadeen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we’re still thick as thieves with them.

Feith: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.

Cheney: No, Doug, dammit, you’re not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won’t be sufficient to knock down the Towers. We know this because we’ve privately conducted studies which show that the Towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we’re going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds of the way up each of the towers early on a business day, we’re looking at trapping and killing a good three, four, maybe even five thousand people on the upper floors.

Feith: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It’s too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.

Cheney: It is too bad — especially since we’re going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.

Feith: We are?

Cheney: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and on to the street, where they will achieve relative safety — at which point we’ll finally detonate the massive network of explosive charges we’ve secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.

Feith: Wait, why did we do that again?

Cheney: Because the buildings wouldn’t have fallen down unless we did.

Wolfowitz: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?

Cheney: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.

Feith: So why don’t we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?

Cheney: That’s a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings immediately collapse, everyone will be suspicious and they’ll immediately be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will “soften” the building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterwards, we’ll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.

Feith: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn’t our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn’t have caused the buildings to collapse?

Cheney: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world’s civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.

Feith: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?

Cheney: Because that’s what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?

Wolfowitz: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months and weeks worth of career- and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.

Cheney: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we’ll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building, for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.

The rest of it is a bit long but has some other sarcastic gems.

Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.

You’d think it’d be a rather bizarre and, frankly, pointless exercise. And you’d be right. Take a sample here for example….

You can find the original video of Bill O Reilly freaking out here