[it’s Frivolous Friday, and Carnacki comes to the rescue. So, what’s thrilling and chilling you?- BooMan]
Good evening and welcome to another edition of Carnacki’s Chiller Theater.
Tonight I bring you a special Mummy’s Day edition.
Thrills to hairy primates. No, I do not mean Supreme Court Justice Scalia. I have not followed the latest bigfoot footage closely enough to render an opinion. That is something else that separates me from Scalia. My mummy taught me to only issue opinions based on evidence and knowledge of the case instead of preconceived notions.
Thrills to cave timeshares. Neandrathals, modern humans and hyenas may have shared the same cave 40,700 years ago. Don’t tell Senator Santorum. (I bet his mother is in the hyena family.)
Thrills to the European Space Agency for taking the most detailed satellite image yet of Mother Earth. Say “Cheese!”
Chills to damage to Old Mom. The magazine Foreign Policy (not exactly the Weekly World News) has a story titled “Apocalypse Soon.”
Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic, offensive nuclear warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces of Britain, France, and China are considerably smaller, with 200-400 nuclear weapons in each state’s arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and India have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have developed nuclear weapons, and U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2-8 bombs.
How destructive are these weapons? The average U.S. warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.
At least they’re in the hands of responsible people. /snark
Diplomats and intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden has made several attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or fissile materials. It has been widely reported that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of Pakistan’s nuclear reactor complex, met with bin Laden several times. Were al Qaeda to acquire fissile materials, especially enriched uranium, its ability to produce nuclear weapons would be great. The knowledge of how to construct a simple gun-type nuclear device, like the one we dropped on Hiroshima, is now widespread. Experts have little doubt that terrorists could construct such a primitive device if they acquired the requisite enriched uranium material. Indeed, just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, “I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now…. There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.” I share his fears.
Good thing we focused all of our national resources and military in the hunt for Osama bin Laden to stop him… (hold on, I’ve been interrupted by my favorite gargoyle looking over my shoulder. We did what? We diverted the majority of our military to a country that inspectors already concluded we had stopped their WMD program on phony evidence they had WMDs? That’s insane!)
My apologies for the interruption.
Chills to overstraining our dear Mom’s resources.
But limitless economic expansion in a finite world and the unleashing of boundless human desire upon a dwindling resource base do not necessarily lead to the social and economic enfranchisement of humanity. It may lead to intensifying competitive violence and wars over resources – land, water, oil.
Sorry, Mother. We’ll send a nice bouquet on Sunday to make up for being bad children.
Let’s end on a good note.
Thrills to the find of a beautiful mummy (photo at the top of this diary).
MSNB has the story:
A superbly maintained 2,300-year-old mummy bearing a golden mask and covered in brightly colored images of gods and goddesses was unveiled Tuesday at Egypt’s Saqqara Pyramids complex south of Cairo.
The unidentified mummy, from the 30th pharaonic dynasty, had been closed in a wooden sarcophagus and buried in sand at the bottom of a 20-foot shaft before being discovered recently by an Egyptian-led archaeological team.
“We have revealed what may be the most beautiful mummy ever found in Egypt,” Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said as he helped excavators remove the sarcophagus’ lid to show off the find.
I apologizes for making mummy jokes probably older than the pyramids. My Mummy raised me better than that. Oops. Did it again.
So what are your Chills and Thrills?