[Quote]:

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

*popcorn*

[Quote]:

Tiny fragments said to be from the manger that held the infant Jesus, the veil of his mother, Mary, and a thread from the cloak of St. Joseph will be displayed by a Roman Catholic church in Chicago when it celebrates its 155th anniversary on Sunday.

The fragments, released by the Vatican in 1972, were a gift to the Holy Family Church from the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, also in Chicago. Displaying them now has particular significance because of their association with Christmas, which marks the birth of Jesus.

The Rev. Jeremiah J. Boland, administrator of the church, said on Friday that he is “not that interested” in carbon testing the items to see if they are from the beginning of the Christian Era.

“The Vatican has its own process to determine the authenticity of things,” Boland said.

Probably the exact same process they use to determine if a priest molested little boys.

on a similar note, if you count the amount of foreskin available, Jesus must have been circumcised at least eight times.

[Quote]:

When Illinois legislators approved civil unions last year, gay-marriage opponents turned to Scripture and church teachings to explain their resistance. But with state lawmakers poised to consider approval of same-sex marriage, Roman Catholic bishops and other advocates of traditional marriage have changed their tack.

They say church teaching has nothing to do with it; gay marriage simply violates natural law.

Dear Catholic Hierarchy In America:

When something is “against natural law”, that means it is not permitted in reality. The universe will stop you from doing it. As one example, energy (including the energy currently in the form of matter) cannot be created or destroyed. As another example, angular momentum must be conserved. Creating the universe ex nihilo is “against natural law”. Buttsex is not. That’s “against your bigoted and undeserved authority”, not “against natural law”.

Gay couples everywhere will be proving you wrong about consummating their marriages tonight. Some of them live on pay-per-view.

I continued to rub her pussy with my two fingers when she suddenly sprayed me with her musky perfume. Her woman’s scent was overpowering. I grinned at her two sisters who eagerly awaited their turn. “I bet you’re squirters too”, I said. They nodded mischievously…

[Quote]:

Outcry Leads Facebook to Back Away from Overt Censorship

Prominent political critics confirmed to us that their accounts had been suspended or inactivated yesterday in a coordinated purge.

But after we – and others – slammed the censorship, the activists’ accounts have been reinstated.

Peter Dale Scott told us:

The issue seems indeed to have been activism, but of many varieties, including gun advocacy. Above all it seems to have affected many more accounts in England than here. See the Guardian story on my webpage, now restored, also this:
http://www.secretsofthefed.com/facebook-now-suspending-accounts-which-question-mainstream-media-reportingaccount-of-events/

It is possible we [9/11 activists] were marginal victims of a procedure designed to prevent flash mobs (which alas we will never be).

Ejournalism seems to have taken care of the problem. Let’s take heart from this.

Michel Rivero writes:

Last night while I was sleeping the Magic Elves turned my Facebook account back on. I understand that most if not all of the other accounts were also switched back on. Frankly, I am honored to have been included in the list of leading political critics thus attacked. I feel like I made the varsity team!

Not a word of explanation has been forthcoming from Facebook. This, I think, rules out an external hacker attack.

The lesson to be learned here is that the alternative media has more power to affect change than we ourselves fully comprehend, and it is time to use that power.

Mike Adams of Natural News reports:

Facebook … suspended our account and gave us a “final warning” that one more violation of their so-called “community guidelines” would result in our account being permanently deactivated.

They then demanded we send them a color copy of a “government issued identification” in order to reactivate our account. Our account was removed from suspension just minutes before InfoWars posted its article on this Facebook censorship, and the Facebook page is now functioning at:
www.Facebook.com/NaturalNews

Perhaps Facebook wrongly assumed that we aren’t smart enough to notice?

[Quote]:

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.

The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations’ knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).

As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledgesOccupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”:

“FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conductingsurveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.”

Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:

“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its “domestic terrorism” unit. The Anchorage, Alaska “terrorism task force” was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan “joint terrorism task force” was issuing a “counterterrorism preparedness alert” about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the “Bank Security Group” – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to “National Bad Bank Sit-in Day” (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state’s Occupy members’ details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its “joint terrorism task force” aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.

 

Quote

Politicians in Greece are calling for the country’s former finance minister to be investigated for allegedly removing the names of three of his relatives from a list of suspected tax evaders.

George Papaconstantinou, the minister who helped design the country’s first austerity measures, was quickly kicked out of his socialist Pasok party after his family members were found missing from a list of Greeks with Swiss bank accounts that authorities were using to investigate possible tax evasion.

In a statement announcing his ejection on Saturday, Pasok said there were “clear indications” that names of family members had been deleted from the list.

Greek tragedies used to be big, sweeping dramas of Fate, Life and Death, not stories of small-minded, grasping thieves selling their fellow citizens into poverty.

[Quote]:

Let’s make America for the world what Cape Canaveral was to America: the world’s greatest launching pad. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about transportation. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of green energy that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, “them’s the breaks.”

Quote

Royal Bank of Canada and National Bank of Canada led the 7.5 per cent surge in bonus awards among the country’s lenders this year, bucking a global trend of pay cuts on Wall Street and in London.

Royal Bank, Canada’s biggest by assets, and National, the sixth-largest lender, boosted variable compensation 11 per cent in the year ended Oct. 31. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was the only one among the group to pare its bonus pool, trimming 2 per cent from last year’s allocation.

“The Canadian bonuses are not remarkable, but relative to what their peers are getting in London and the U.S., it’s great,” Bill Vlaad, president of Toronto-based recruitment firm Vlaad & Co., said.

“We never saw the true upside of the glory years in the bull market, but we’ve reaped the rewards now by not having the abysmal downside in the tough years.”

Great news chaps! The Canadian government stopped us from wrecking the Canadian economy and we still get bonuses! Paar-tee!!

.

[Quote]:

Video captured the moment a plane careened off the runway in Russia and smashed into a highway, killing five crew members and spilling debris across the roadway.

The deadly accident happened Saturday in Moscow, and investigators are examining flight recorders and other evidence to try to determine the cause of the airliner crash.

The Tu-204 belonging to Russian airline Red Wings was carrying eight people, all of them crew members, when it ran off the runway while landing at Vnukovo Airport. It went partly into an adjacent highway, broke into pieces and caught fire.

[Quote]:

In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.

[Quote]:

Top-secret janitor. Pollster to the spies. Classified comic book artist. Any organization sufficiently large is bound to have the odd job opening within it. But few organizations are as freakin’ colossal as the U.S. military intelligence industrial complex, with an estimated 4.9 million Americans holding security clearances today. Which means there are thousands of unconventional positions to fill at any given moment.

Here are some of the wilder military and intelligence “help wanted” ads we found online. Some classifieds are for truly wacky jobs. Others are for slightly more standard positions — but presented in an odd way. If you find more, let us know in the comments, on Twitter or on Facebook. We’ll post some of the best suggestions.

Military-Industrial Artist

Twitter Stalker

Russian Counter-Espionage Expert

Yiddish Linguist

Mexican Drug War Instructor

Bio-Weapons Hunter

Gallup Pollster

Top Secret Janitor

 

[Quote]:

So, here’s a very confusing thing that Americans For Tax Reform founder Grover Norquist tweeted this morning, apparently in reference to the fiscal cliff talks:

We had an election Boehner was elected speaker. Now lame duck obama should get over it. (Also 30 GOP governors)

That’s … kind of impressive, actually.  Norquist somehow managed to stuff, like, nine errors into fewer than 140 characters: 

How on Earth can the Onion compete with that?

[Quote]:

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Viviane Reding, the vice-president of the European Commission, attacked the Prime Minister over the Government’s proposal to opt out of European Union law enforcement and policing measures.

The justice commissioner expressed particular concern that the Government was “minded” to opt out from 135 EU crime and policing laws, including the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), which, she claimed, had “horrified” Britain’s own police force.

“Do you want criminals and paedophiles running around freely on the streets? Is that really in the United Kingdom’s interest? It is crazy,” she said.

Stop scaremongering, stupid bitch – crime fighting worked fine before your hallowed Europe even existed.

[Quote]:

Two of Iceland’s most senior former bankers have been jailed for making reckless business loans, following investigations stemming from the collapse of the country’s banks in 2008.

Larus Welding, the former chief executive officer of failed Icelandic bank Glitnir, and Gudmundur Hjaltason, a former director at the bank, have each been sentenced to nine months in jail for fraud, a court ruled.

They were sentenced by the Reykjavik District Court after the two men were indicted a year ago on charges that they had “misused their position and grossly endangered the bank’s funds” by lending €102m to a company called Milestone ehf without guarantees or collateral, the prosecutor said. At the time Milestone was a shareholder in the bank.

[Quote]:

Father Piero Corsi of Liguria sparked outrage after members of his congregation posted his Christmas bulletin onto Facebook. The flyer, entitled “Women and femicide – healthy self-criticism. How often do they provoke?” said victims of domestic and sexual violence should question if they were themselves to blame for the incident.

The flyer said women “provoke the worst instincts” and “should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on ourselves?”

“The fact is that women are increasingly provocative, they become arrogant, they believe themselves to be self-sufficient and end up exacerbating the situation,” Corsi added. “Children are abandoned to their own devices, homes are dirty, meals are cold or fast food, clothes are filthy.”

He later added fuel to the fire by suggesting an Italian reporter must be gay if he wasn’t enticed by a picture of a nude woman.

Following the uproar in Italy, Corsi said he plans “to take a period of rest.”

[Quote]:

Samsung, the south Korean electronics giant, could face fines running to billions of pounds from the European commission over its attempts to use its “standard-essential” patents on 3G to ban sales of Apple’s iPhone and iPad in Europe.

The Google-owned smartphone company Motorola Mobility may face similar penalties over its attempts to ban sales of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 through its use of SEPs relating to Wi-Fi and the H.264 video standard.

Both companies could yet receive fines in the US as well, where the federal trade commission weighed in earlier in December in a court case between Motorola and Apple, arguing that Motorola’s use of SEPs amounted to a “hold-up”. Samsung is also being investigated by the US justice department over its use of SEPs in cases against Apple.

The European commission’s competition arm, run by Joaquin Almunia, issued a formal statement of objections last Friday.

The potential fines can run to 10% of a company’s worldwide turnover, which in tSamsung’s case would amount to nearly $15bn (£9.3bn), based on its 2011 revenues of $148.9bn. The commission opened its investigation into Samsung in January.

[Quote]:

Want to know the White House’s key propaganda lines for refusing to allow proper oversight into how the NSA is spying on us all? Well, sit back and read on, because the White House’s “talking points” on why the Senate should reject four key amendments to try to roll back some of the excesses of the broad and massive secret program to collect tons of data on Americans, has been leaked.

If only there were a progressive Democrat constitutional law scholar President, then this kind of shenanigans would be unthinkable.

[Quote]:

Carla walked into my office with despair in her eyes. I was surprised. Carla has been doing well in her four months out of prison; she got off drugs, regained custody of her kids, and even enrolled in a local community college.

Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f—ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

If she’d committed rape or murder, Carla could have gotten assistance to feed herself and her children, but because the crime she committed was a drug felony, Carla joined the hundreds of thousands of drug felons who are not eligible.

[Quote]:

Suddenly Steve Martin is asking them to open his nine-night stand at the Universal Amphitheater, in Los Angeles. The opportunity presents a vexing problem. The band has no band.

They turn to Paul Shaffer, S.N.L.’s bandleader. Shaffer draws up a list of candidates. All are crack musicians, highly paid and hard to get.

Belushi rallies, cold-calling the candidates at inappropriately late hours. “This is John Belushi,” he tells Steve Cropper, a noted guitarist. “We’re putting a band together. I need you here tomorrow.”

“There’s no way,” Cropper replies. “I’m mixing an album.”

“I gotta have you.”

“No way. Can’t do it.”

“I gotta have you.”

This continues for an hour.

[Quote]:

An attorney for Hobby Lobby Stores said Thursday that the arts and crafts chain plans to defy a federal mandate requiring it to offer employees health coverage that includes access to the morning-after pill, despite risking potential fines of up to $1.3 million per day.

Hobby Lobby and religious book-seller Mardel Inc., which are owned by the same conservative Christian family, are suing to block part of the federal health care law that requires employee health-care plans to provide insurance coverage for the morning-after pill and similar emergency contraception pills.

The companies claim the mandate violates the religious beliefs of their owners. They say the morning-after pill is tantamount to abortion because it can prevent a fertilized egg from becoming implanted in a woman’s womb.

[Quote]:

Basically, this argument comes down to, “it’s our money, and we want to use it to deprive our employees of their religious freedom, as an exercise of OUR religious freedom.”

They should extend the coverage to every employee, and then do what everyone else has to do in this society, try to convince their employees not to use it. Otherwise, they are using their position of power to violate their employees’ right to be whatever religion, and choose whatever set of morals, they wish.

Obviously, that’s the point. This isn’t about religious freedom, it’s about religious control. Their right to control is more important then their employees’ right to be free.

[Quote]:

We have found that the current practical Newtonian formula for the gravity tide of the Earth implies a hypothesis that gravity travels at the speed of light; furthermore, we have derived and solved the propagation equation of gravity using the observation data of Earth tides from Shiquanhe and Wushi, after correction of phase lag due to the anelasticity of the Earth, and found that the speeds of gravity are from 0.93 to 1.05 times the speed of light with a relative error of about 5%. This provides first set of strong evidences to show that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light.

[Quote]:

Het federaal parket vervolgt de scientologykerk van België als criminele organisatie. Dat berichten de kranten De Tijd en L’Echo. Het parket vervolgt de Belgische poot van de bekende beweging en twee topmedewerkers ook voor oplichting, illegale geneeskunde, verschillende inbreuken op de privacywet en afpersing.

Translation, Belgium is prosecuting the church of Scientology and two leaders on the grounds of being a criminal organisation, illegal practice of medicine, blackmail and invasion of privacy.

[Quote]:

What’s that saying again? If you can’t beat ‘em…

2 Player Productions officially debuted its big gaming documentary this weekend on Microsoft’s Xbox Live platform, but before you get upset that you, a PlayStation or Nintendo Wii owner (or console hater in general), have no way to viewMinecraft: The Story of Mojang, a little something strange happened.

By that, we mean that 2 Player Productions decided to go ahead and upload its movie directly to The Pirate Bay – even though the filmmakersintend to sell the film as an $8, DRM-free stream or a $20 physical disc starting Dec. 23. Why, then, would they ever want to release it for free on a file-sharing site?

“We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue,” the company said. “Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.”

“We’ve been there. We’ve all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don’t have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you’re pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell’s words, ‘a service problem,’ please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please,” reads the torrent’s description.

The 2.52GB movie is up to just under a thousand seeders and more than a thousand current downloaders as of this article’s writing. As a testament to 2 Player Productions’s plan, however, reactions to the movie being released as a downloadable torrent actually seem to be meeting the filmmakers’ intent.

“Wow. You guys are awesome. I had a lot of respect for you before, but uploading your own production for torrent is just a new level. Just because of this, I will buy it. Well done on all your hard work; you deserve every penny no matter how good or bad this movie is,”commented one member of The Pirate Bay.

“Was going to use some of my visa gift card for the steam sale, but you guys just won eight of my dollars. Thank you,” said another.

[Quote]:

So why is compromise so hard in the House? Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress.

But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.