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Zoriah has uploaded a gripping series of comparison shots dealing with the tsunami that hit Thialand in 2004.

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In a stunning turn of events, Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley and leaders of Catholic Charities of Boston announced yesterday that the agency will end its adoption work, deciding to abandon its founding mission, rather than comply with state law requiring that gays be allowed to adopt children.

The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, president of Catholic Charities of Boston, and Jeffrey Kaneb, chairman of the board, said that after much reflection and analysis, they could not reconcile church teaching that placement of children in gay homes is ”immoral” with Massachusetts law prohibiting discrimination against gays.

”This is a difficult and sad day for Catholic Charities,” Hehir said. ”We have been doing adoptions for more than 100 years.”

Hehir, it is absolutely obvious that you don’t give a fuck about the orphans, otherwise you wouldn’t put their welfare as blackmail exchange token against a policy you don’t like. You betray them in the classic catholic way.

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I take solace in the fact that these scumbags who like to call themselves Christians, no matter how hard they tried haven’t been able to find one single word against teh fags pronounced by Jesus in the Gospels*

Jesus actually based his message on including the outcast of society in one’s company, in one’s family so to speak, breaking bread with sinners, tax collectors (in an occupied land like Palestine they were the worst offenders evar, they were the collaborators of the enemy, the invader’s finks), adulterers.

denying an abandoned child a good family because of one’s anti-gay stance is… well, let’s hear it from the man these people pretend to worship:

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,
naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’
Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?
When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’
And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“One of these least brothers of mine”, Archbishop O’Malley. Listen to your King, for once.

* Jesus instead had very staunch pronouncements against divorce: the reason of course being that men would divorce (ie dump) their wives, leaving them with no financial support and no job skills in conditions of abject poverty. hence, Jesus was against divorce to protect the weaker party, ie the women. but no word against teh fags, alas. maybe God doesn’t really hate them, who knows

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Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration’s eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.

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“The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact,” said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.

Secret arrests, secret renditions, secret interrogations in secret jails, and now, secret rulings from US federal judges.

Remind me again that US is supposed to stand for.

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Luck struck two St. Jerome girls when they discovered a winning Tim Hortons coffee cup yesterday, but now their families are fighting over who gets the prize.

The dispute began after a 10-year-old girl named Marilou found the cup in the garbage bin of her primary school. Remembering the doughnut chain’s popular contest, she tried to roll up the rim. Her small fingers were unable to loosen the tough cardboard, so she enlisted the help of a 12-year-old schoolmate.

The other girl rolled up the rim and found it was a winner, entitlement to a Toyota RAV4 SUV – base price $28,700 – one of 30 automobiles being given away as prizes.

“They took the cup to the school’s daycare service, and a teacher called both parents,” said Nathalie Prevost, mother of the 12-year-old girl. Prevost would not reveal her daughter’s name.

“The first parent to arrive there was Marilou’s father, so he took the cup.”

Prevost thought her daughter’s helping hand deserved some recognition, however, so she phoned a local radio station to ask for legal advice.

“I wanted the name of a lawyer who could tell me if my daughter is entitled some of the prize,” Prevost said.

That’s when the story became a media sensation.

If you think you can imagine how ugly this stort is going to get, you’re probably wrong…

It turns out, in the PC game business, no copy protection doesn’t mean everyone pirates your game. This makes some people angry. From the article:

“For example, we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I’m not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it’s troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary.”

via digg

A special report by 2 journalists embedded with Alpha Company of the First Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Battle Group

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During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.

Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God’s will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way, when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.

You should probably buy a shredder today.

Google Mars

(I think search is broken – I searched for “hotels near elysium mons” and it says “no results found”)

Another site with a mars map is here

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“I’m for any Republican who can get elected,” said Craig Capehart of Dallas, Texas. “It would be nice if they also had policies that would be good for the country.”

But if they don’t, well, fuck the country.

via

via

Artists paint on the bodies of two models using a USB-stick and a Compact Flash card during the 2006 CeBIT information and telecommunication technology fair in Hanover.(AFP/DDP/Jochen Luebke)

Workers dye the Chicago River green as part of the city’s annual St. Patrick’s day celebrations in Chicago March 11, 2006. REUTERS/John Gress

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After years of haggling, Hollywood’s movie studios and theater owners agreed in 2005 to replace old film projectors with new digital systems, but some say the equipment is not ready for use.

The battle involves potentially billions of dollars, pits industry players against each other, and will be a major topic next week at ShoWest, a key industry event in Las Vegas where the studios, theater owners and equipment vendors gather.

New digital cinema projection systems are expected to bring clearer images and three-dimensional movies to audiences, as well as new revenue opportunities to theater owners who can use them to screen live sports, concerts and teleconferences.

Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance, which fell 9 percent in 2005 in the United States.

Digital cinema will revive attendance?

Well, despite sucky movies, forced advertising before the movie, lectures about piracy assuming the paying customer is the thief, the expensive tickets and overpriced food, crying babies, restless children, chatty couples, cell phones going off, I say to myself: “I could put up with all of this if only the film projector was digital.”

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It’s easy to track America’s covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.

She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.

Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.

The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have “horrified” CIA Director Porter Goss.

“Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age,” said the CIA’s chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. “There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work.”

Dyck declined to detail the remedies “since we don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re fixing.”
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An online search for the term “Camp Peary” produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary’s small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.

Although the Tribune’s initial search for “Central Intelligence Agency” employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.

Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied that “I don’t have a great explanation, quite frankly.”