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The French satirical investigative journalism weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“ reveals that our holier-than-thou presidency is in fact a pirate’s lair. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the presidential audiovisual services produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52 minutes documentary “A visage découvert : Nicolas Sarkozy“.

The editor, Galaxie Press had only shipped 50 copies, but the propaganda plan required more so the Elysee went to work, going as far as modifying the cover and replacing the Galaxie Presse name and logos with “Service audiovisuel de la présidence de la République”.

That’s the second time he’s caught. One more time, and his own law will force him off the internet.

Wow. I didn’t know it was this bad…

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With hundreds of thousands of computers in its data centers, Google can collect an abundance of real-world data about how those machines actually work. That’s exactly what the company did for a research paper that found error rates are surprisingly high.

“We found the incidence of memory errors and the range of error rates across different DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) to be much higher than previously reported,” according the paper jointly written by Bianca Schroeder, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Google’s Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber. “Memory errors are not rare events.”

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First, the background, via Think Progress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Pretty heinous. If any company deserves to get the ACORN treatment, it’s Halliburton/KBR. So Sen. Al Franken introduced an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations to cut funding from contractors who use this sort of “cover your ass at all costs” in employee contracts, saying, “The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law… And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court… The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.”

[..]

In the end, the amendment passed 68-30, with these fine Americans casting the pro-contractor-rape vote:

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

100% Republican. Kneejerk obstructionism has never been so shameless.

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I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

– Lord Vetinari

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A central Wisconsin couple who prayed rather than seek medical care for their 11-year-old dying daughter were sentenced Tuesday to six months in jail and 10 years probation in the girl’s death.

[..]

“I do not regret trusting truly in the Lord for my daughter’s health,” she said. “Did we know she had a fatal illness? No. Did we act to the best of our knowledge? Yes.”

Dale Neumann, 47, read from the Bible and told the judge that he loved his daughter.

“I am guilty of trusting my Lord’s wisdom completely. … Guilty of asking for heavenly intervention. Guilty of following Jesus Christ when the whole world does not understand. Guilty of obeying my God,” he said.

It is impossible for me to imagine how fucked-up your mind needs to be to deliberately let your own child die, and then not feel that you’ve done the wrong thing. These people need to be locked up in an mental institution for the rest of their lives, not just six months in jail.

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A preliminary report released by the Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) has found that 74,021 names on Zimbabwe’s voters’ roll are for people aged 100 and over.

voters_agesThe report, titled ‘2013 Vision – Seeing Double and the Dead‘ also found that there are 82,456 people registered who are aged between 90 and 100. These figures are quite amazing when you consider that average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 34 for women and 37 for men, and in light of the fact that the World Health Organisation predicts that only 14.7% of people live beyond 60 in Zimbabwe.