[Quote]:

But the bishops aren’t entirely off the mark. They are the right on the money when they declare that this issue is fast becoming “the ‘Roe v. Wade’ of marriage.” Oh, you mean that thing where the United States Supreme Court asserted that the Constitution wasn’t written to uphold the worldview of one religion? That Americans should have the freedom to make their own choices about major life issues that affect them directly, without the interference of the church? That how and when we create our families is a deeply personal decision, one that should be respected and upheld? That, despite your best attempts, this isn’t a theocracy? Thanks for the message, gentlemen. I sincerely hope you’re proven entirely correct.

[Quote]:

Yesterday we decided not to run with a story published by Bloomberg that Pegatron’s forecasted 25 percent to 30 percent drop for second-quarter revenue was due to “falling iPad mini demand.” It seemed a little far fetched that an Apple supplier would be giving up specific information on product demand, something we know suppliers in Apple’s circle typically remain tight-lipped on. Today CEO of Pegatron Jason Cheng has confirmed our suspicions in an email to Fortune claiming that Bloomberg reporter Tim Culpan made the iPad mini angle up.

[..]

“We held our Institutional Investors Conference yesterday, and gave out a guidance of our 2Q13 business outlook… The category of Consumer Electronic Product includes game consoles, LCD-TV, e-paper readers, tablet products, and some others. We put all tablet products in this category, but have never broken down to detail numbers for specific products nor customers.

“After the meeting, one reporter from Bloomberg approached me, trying to dig out detail numbers about some specific product. I clearly refused to comment on specific products, nor customers, even though he continued with other questions. I did say those words that he quotes me in the article “more on demand, while price has been stable”…, “almost every item is moving in a negative direction”…; “Not just tablets, also e-books and games consoles”. But I did not say anything associated with any specific products.

“‘No indication, nor hint for specific products or customers‘ has been our principle and guideline for any public events such as investors conference. There are always speculations after these meetings.

[Quote]:

$(document).fartscroll();

// Fart every 800 pixels scrolled in the document
$(document).fartscroll(800);

// Fart every 100 pixels scrolled in the body (probably a bit much)
$("body").fartscroll(100);

// Now I'm just adding more examples to make the page longer
$("body").fartscroll(50);

// SO MANY FARTS
$("body").fartscroll(5);

// I should register fart.io for this
$("div").fartscroll(500);

// I should register fart.io for this
$("body").fartscroll(400);

// Dammit, fart.io is taken
$(window).fartscroll(600);

// Alright, that's probably enough examples
$("body").fartscroll(400);blockquote>

[Quote]:

Strange, isn’t it, that hunches and vague tips about potential marijuana growing (in a state that recently legalized the drug!) is motivation enough to send a SWAT team busting down a door? Compare that to recent reports that police in Cleveland, Ohio ignored years of tips and calls about strange things going on in the home of the three Cleveland men suspected of holding captive, brutally raping and beating three women for nearly a decade.

[..]

“The statistical demands of the drug war and the grants that come from the federal government — all they do is incentivize our local police to chase drugs and chase seizures so they can supplement their budgets,” Downing said. “We call that ‘policing for profit.’”

[..]

Perhaps the strongest example of how drug war policing can distract resources from more pressing problems is the use of department laboratories. In Ohio, police agencies across the state have sent more than 2,300 untested rape kits to a state crime lab for testing. Some of them are decades old, and could contain vital clues regarding suspects in rapes. But they’ve been backed up in police departments across the country.

“What they don’t talk about is why do they have that backlog in the first place?” said Downing. “The answer is that drugs take a priority because they often involve people in custody, and they’re going to be in court, so when they show up in court, they’re going to have those tests. Thousands and thousands of tests run through our police labs for drugs when most of the time it’s a personal use decision. Most of the time it’s a recreational use of drugs rather than an abuse of drugs. But our criminal justice system is completely involved in dealing with drug crime rather than dealing with crime that truly affects public safety, like property and crimes against persons.”

[Quote]:

“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives, said last week during House debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”

[Quote]:

Doesn’t it bother you that your name is being used to peddle one of the worst anti-virus products on the market? Often it comes pre-installed on computers as a 30 day trial (crapware), with dire warnings flashed up in the event that the user fails to pay (scareware). The performance hit it brings is huge. Would you advise anyone else to name their product/company after themselves in this way?

McAfee: I haven’t been involved with McAfee Ant-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87% of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It’s barely a blip in the ocean of associations – madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few.Thank god I’m 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.

[Quote]:

Footage of a shootout between police and an alleged drug trafficker in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has emerged.

In the short video, police can be seen firing from a helicopter at a car, as it speeds through the city.

The car eventually stops and is surrounded by people from the local area but the suspect flees the scene. The accused drug trafficker was found dead a day later in a parked car.

The chase happened last year and authorities have now launched an investigation into whether the officers involved used excessive force.

Quote  (not recommended as the site is full of  ads for sh*t ‘n’ paradise)

Many of our readers have urged Catholic Online to interview Dr. Roy Spencer as a leading, qualified skeptic on the issue of anthropogenic global warming.

blah…blah…blah (although the interviewer asks fairly sane questions)

COL: Let’s say tomorrow, evidence is found that proves to everyone that global warming as a result of human released emissions of CO2 and methane, is real. What would you suggest we do?

SPENCER: I would say we need to grow the economy as fast as possible, in order to afford the extra R&D necessary to develop new energy technologies. Current solar and wind technologies are too expensive, unreliable, and can only replace a small fraction of our energy needs. Since the economy runs on inexpensive energy, in order to grow the economy we will need to use fossil fuels to create that extra wealth. In other words, we will need to burn even more fossil fuels in order to find replacements for fossil fuels.

There, right there, is the problem. Telling everyone we can do whatever we like and everything will be A-OK. “Party on! Guilt-free futures for everyone! Everything will work out for the best!”

Questions:

1. What has this got to do with Catholics?  Why is anyone pressing to have this person interviewed?

2. I’m a qualified skeptic. He’s not. This person is, in my opinion, either mad, bad or sad.

[Quote]:

*Trigger warning*

Sometimes I feel like the NRA is actively just trying to lose all the credibility it has left in this world.

Just when you thought the NRA’s annual convention in Houston this weekend couldn’t draw any more negative attention, it goes out and casually promotes a company selling a product that can help you practice shooting your ex-girlfriend. You know, in case you need that to defend yourself one day from your ex-girlfriend. We all know them ex-honeys can be crazzzzy.

The target, which is delightfully called “the ex,” is sold by a vendor who was present at the annual convention. Although it’s unclear if they displayed the mannequin or not, it was included in the pamphlet they displayed at their booth.  The company goes by the name of Zombie Industries and markets itself as the maker of “life-sized tactical mannequin targets.” After you shoot directly at it, the target will bleed and eventually look like this.

[Quote]:

A newly declassified CIA document suggests members of the US agency did help to shape the narrative of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow‘s recent film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

 In January the US Senate intelligence committee launched an investigation into whether Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were granted “inappropriate access” to classified CIA material following concern from high-profile members over the film’s depiction of torture in the search for the al-Qaida chief. The probe was dropped in February after Zero Dark Thirty, which had initially been tipped as an Oscars frontrunner, left the world’s most famous film ceremony with just a single award for sound editing.However according to Gawker it has now emerged that the CIA did successfully pressure Boal to remove certain scenes from the Zero Dark Thirty script, some of which might have cast the agency in a negative light. Details emerged in a memo released under a US Freedom of Information Act request. It summarises five conference calls held in late 2011 for staff in the agency’s Office of Public Affairs “to help promote an appropriate portrayal of the agency and the Bin Laden operation”.

Several elements of the draft screenplay for Zero Dark Thirty were changed for the final film upon agency request, according to the memo. Jessica Chastain’s Maya, the film’s main protagonist, was originally seen participating in an early water-boarding torture scene, but in the final film she is only an observer. A scene in which a dog is used to interrogate a suspect was also excised from the shooting script. Finally a segue in which agents party on a rooftop in Islamabad, drinking and shooting off an AK47 in celebration, was also removed upon CIA insistence. This was agreed to despite the documented use of aggressive dogs in US interrogations of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay in the early days of George W Bush’s war on terror, and despite some of the photographs from the later Abu Ghraib scandal featuring dogs menacing naked prisoners.

The memo appears to confirm suspicions of a cosy relationship between the CIA and Boal, with the agency confident it would be portrayed positively due to the level of help it had provided to the film-makers. “As an agency, we’ve been pretty forward-leaning with Boal,” a CIA staff member wrote to colleagues in documents released last year. “He’s agreed to share scripts and details about the movie with us so we’re absolutely comfortable with what he will be showing.”

In an emailed response to Gawker’s piece, Boal denied allowing the CIA to influence creative film-making decisions on Zero Dark Thirty. “We honoured certain requests to keep operational details and the identity of the participants confidential,” he wrote. “But as with any publication or work of art, the final decisions as to the content were made by the film-makers.”

[Quote]:

A fully fledged federal Europe may seem like “political science fiction” today but will soon become reality for all European Union countries whether inside or outside the euro, Jose Manuel Barroso has said.

The president of the European Commission has fanned the flames of British debate over EU membership by insisting that fiscal union in the eurozone will lead to “intensified political union” for all 27 member states.

“This is about the economic and monetary union but for the EU as a whole,” he said.

“The commission will, therefore, set out its views and explicit ideas for treaty change in order for them to be debated before the European elections.”

“We want to put all the elements on the table, in a clear and consistent way, even if some of them may sound like political science fiction today. They will be reality in a few years’ time.”

Mr Barroso’s announcement that he will set out plans for a European federation next spring, before elections to the European Parliament in May 2014, will further deepen Conservative divisions over the EU.

[Quote]:

Megaupload’s legal team are not restricting their fight with the U.S. Government only to the courts. Today they published a detailed white paper accusing the White House of selling out to corporate interests, particularly Hollywood. “The message is clear. The White House is for sale. More and more of our rights are eroding away to protect the interests of large corporations and their billionaire shareholders,” Dotcom summarizes.

[Quote]:

Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost.

The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade.

The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.

The process makes cheap silicon “actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment”, the head of the university’s photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said.
Advertisement

Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. “By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost,” he said.

“We’ve been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesn’t.”

At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. UNSW’s technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent.

[Quote]:

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – "is being captured as we speak".

[Quote]:

Pueblo Soberano-leider Helmin Wiels is zojuist geliquideerd bij de Pier in Marie Pompoen. Dr. Mozes heeft de dood van de politicus bevestigd en lijkschouwers zijn begonnen met een onderzoek. Volgens geruchten zijn de schoten gelost vanuit een goudkleurige auto.

Buurtbewoners hoorden wel een aantal vreemde geluiden, maar dachten niet gelijk aan schoten. Een van de buurtbewoners vertelt dat hij mensen zag rennen en is toen zelf gaan kijken. “Toen zag ik ineens politie en ambulances en wat er was gebeurd.”

De omgeving bij Marei Pompoen is afgezet door de politie. Omstanders kijken geschrokken naar wat er is gebeurd. Volgens geruchten is er een dader gepakt en zou deze van Colombiaanse afkomst zijn. De politie heeft deze geruchten echter nog niet bevestigt. De technische dienst is ook ter plaatse voor onderzoek. Wiels is de eerste politicus op Curaçao die is geliquideerd.

Short version: Helmin Wiels, big politician here on Curacao, was liquidated 2 hours ago. The first English news report doesn’t say much more than that.

[Quote]:

In my experience, kids were homeschooled for one of two reasons: for my brother and me, it was a means of avoiding an awful public school system without going to private school, which our family couldn’t really afford anyway. For some other kids, though, it was a means of escaping the evil, secularist curriculum of public school. The Earth is 6,000 years old, global warming is a myth, Satan buried dinosaur bones in the ground to trick us, and these children must not be taught otherwise, lest the fiery lakes of hell burn the flesh from their little limbs.

These two sets of kids were rounded up once or twice a week for a day of “cooperative learning,” and it was always easy to tell which group each child was coming from. There were kids like me—kids whose parents played the Beatles in the house, who watched Nickelodeon, who had friends who weren’t homeschooled, who had seen Jurassic Park.

[Quote]:

Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us –  the bottom 93% (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.

Do the math and you’ll discover that the top 7% gained a whopping $5.6 trillion in net worth (assets minus liabilities) while the rest of lost $669 billion. Their wealth went up by 28% while ours went down by 4 percent.

It’s as if the entire economic recovery is going into the pockets of the rich. And that’s no accident.

[Quote]:

What a great catch, to photograph a cardinal mid-flight, from this angle.

[Quote]:

THE UK GOVERNMENT has shown it’s at the forefront of modern technology and online services with its latest form for claiming benefits online.

Those who want to claim either Attendance Allowance, Disability Living Allowance or Overseas State Pension can simply visit the Gov.UK website, where they are then pointed to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website to fill out a form online.

So far, so impressive, in that the government is allowing citizens to apply for benefits over the web, rather than having to fill out forms and send them in via the post or visit offices in person.

However, it seems that many of those claimants could fall at the first hurdle due to some rather outdated stipluations about the computer systems supported by the DWP.

“This service doesn’t work with some modern browsers and operating systems,” the DWP notes. “We are considering how best to provide this service in future. You may want to claim in another way.”

[..]

“The service was designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available:

• Microsoft Windows 98: Internet Explorer versions 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2
• Microsoft Windows ME: Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2
• Microsoft Windows 2000: Internet Explorer version 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, Mozilla 1.7.7
• Microsoft Windows XP: Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, Mozilla 1.7.7.”

For the few of you out there wanting to claim benefits online who manage to dig out some old Windows machine from a basement or loft running an old enough version of IE or Firefox, there are further obstacles to getting any money out of the government.

“This service is not available on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings from 1.00am to 1.30am because of essential maintenance work. We apologise for any inconvenience,” warns the DWP.

Perhaps that’s when their hamsters change shifts – you know, the ones that run inside wheels keeping government IT systems up and running.

[Quote]:

Police are appealing for witnesses after thieves were spotted taking lead off the roof of Hawick town hall in the early hours of Friday morning.

So lead theft leads police to ask for leads?

[Quote]:

Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion’s practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.

The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.

The controversial thesis, laid out in “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,” has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.

[Quote]:

Pastor Jim Garlow of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego lost his wife of 42 years, Carol, to cancer earlier this month. I grieve for anyone who has lost a loved one, especially a beloved spouse.

But it’s too bad Garlow would not be able to extend the same compassion to me if I should lose my beloved spouse of 12 years. You see, Garlow has used the death of his wife as an opportunity to do what he does best: bash gays and lesbians.

In an email he sent to supporters this past Sunday, Garlow wrote:

On occasion I would read phrases in newspapers or blogs to describe me as being “anti-gay” or “anti gay-marriage.” First, I am not against homosexual “marriage” because there is no such thing. I cannot be against something that does not exist according to God’s definition.
 
But I am adamantly pro authentic, historic marriage. And God’s Word on the subject, along with an indescribably spectacular 42 years with Carol, caused me to be so intensely pro (natural) marriage.
 
I was once asked by a secular news reporter, “Has your love for Carol and her cancer battle impacted your fight for marriage.” “Yes,” I responded. Why? Because I saw the wonder of covenantal one man-one woman marriage. I saw the sheer delight of authentic, biblical, natural, historic, God-defined marriage. The complimentary halves of humanity coming together is simply breathtaking.

Two things struck me as I read this odious message. First, what kind of blind hatred of other people would compel you to use the occasion of your wife’s death to make political hay? Rev. Garlow’s wife dies and the first thing he wants to do is write a letter to his supporters about how awful and sinful other people’s relationships are compared to his “real” relationship?

Quote

Sun News Network made its final pitch to the federal telecommunications regulator on Thursday, saying anything short of a guaranteed spot on the dial would spell the end of the channel.

The Quebecor-owned network is seeking what is known as mandatory carriage from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

The CRTC is holding eight days of hearings in Gatineau, Que., to examine 22 applications for mandatory carriage from new and existing channels, as well as channels that want to renew their mandatory distribution status.

[Quote]:

A fisherman in Rawa Pening, central Java, Indonesia