>Got to Pirate Bay

>Click “Legal Threats” in the bunch of links under the search bar

>Read the reponses to threats from big corporations.

>Laugh all the laughs.

I’m serious this is fucking hilarious.

For example, response to DreamWorks:

“As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.

Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium, will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for sending frivolous legal threats.

It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ……. morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Please also note that your e-mail and letter will be published in full on http://www.thepiratebay.org.

Go fuck yourself.

Polite as usual,
anakata”

Thanks to the anon who recommended I read this.

December 15, 2011 | Not all news stories are treated equally.

As 2011 comes to a close, we will see lists of the year’s most memorable events and most important people, as is the pattern every year. But not all stories are created equal. When the corporate media bury significant developments in the back pages of the paper or the second to last paragraph of an article, it’s easy for stories to go unnoticed.

As usual, this year was packed with critical, newsworthy and insufficiently covered stories that should have, but didn’t, make the front page. Below are eight explosive must-read stories of 2011 that you may have missed.

1) Our Planet Saw the Largest Increase in Carbon Emissions Since the Industrial Revolution

Global emissions of carbon dioxide increased 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest increase on record, according to Global Carbon Project, an international group of scientists tracking the numbers. This increase, reports the New York Times, is “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.”

Another study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, traces an estimated three-quarters of the planet’s warming since 1950 to human activities. On top of that, the World Meteorological Organization warned that 10 of the hottest years ever recorded have occurred in the last 15 years, with temperatures this year registering as the 10th highest on record.

It’s obvious that the world is getting warmer at an accelerating rate and it’s our fault. What are world leaders going to do about it? Wait another eight years to cut emissions.

These statistics were released before last week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, which ended with an agreement to kick the can down the road – they will negotiate a new climate treaty by 2015, which would postpone emission cuts until 2020.

To avoid the most devastating effects of climate change, we must limit the earth’s warming to 2°C. For that to happen, emission volumes cannot exceed 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. Since emissions have already reached 390 ppm, higher than any other time in recorded history, the International Energy Agency warns that action cannot be delayed past 2017. Based on the Durbin agreement, emissions won’t be cut until 2020.

Unless something drastic pushes our leaders to change the destructive path we’re on, 2011 may go down in the history books as the year that humans irreversibly screwed themselves and the planet.

2) Widespread Trafficking Of Iraqi Women And Girls Thanks To The Iraq War

Since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed and another 4.4 million displaced, leaving many women and girls widowed or orphaned.

As a result of the conflict more than 50,000 Iraqi women find themselves trapped in sexual servitude in Syria and Jordan, giving rise to a lucrative and growing sex industry that feeds off the chaos from the Iraq war.

Women and girls inside Iraq fare no better, often working in brothels run by female pimps. In an interview with the Inter Press Service, Rania, a former trafficker who now works as an undercover researcher for a women’s support group in Iraq, detailed a visit to “a house in Baghdad’s Al-Jihad district, where girls as young as 16 were held to cater exclusively to the U.S. military. The brothel’s owner told Rania that an Iraqi interpreter employed by the Americans served as the go-between, transporting girls to and from the U.S. airport base.”

Although human trafficking is illegal in Iraq, the country lacks a robust criminal justice system to enforce the law. Sadly, the victims of trafficking and prostitution are often the ones who are punished.

3) More Iraq Veterans Committed Suicide Last Year Than Active-Duty Troops Died In Combat

In 2010, 468 active duty and reserve troops committed suicide while 462 died in combat, marking the second year in a row that more US soldiers killed themselves than died at war, according to Congressional Quarterly’s John Donnelly.

Over the past decade, over 2,000 soldiers have taken their own lives, yet they receive little attention in our corporate media. In August the New York Times ran a story with the celebratory headline, “Iraq War Marks First Month With No U.S. Military Deaths.” That same month, the Department of Defense reported 19 possible suicides among active-duty soldiers. In July, that number reached a record high of 32. America’s decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan leave troops with deep emotional scars that can be just as dangerous as a combat wound. Perhaps it’s time we gave them the attention they deserve.

4) Drone Strikes Kill Innocent Civilians, Not Just ‘Militants’

After Jon Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, claimed in June that no civilians had been killed in US drone attacks in nearly a year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 US attacks during that period.

Overall, drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 780 civilians, including 175 children. The bureau documents 309 CIA drone strikes carried out since 2004 that have killed as many as 2,997 people. Over 85 percent were launched by the Obama administration, an average of one strike every four days. Yet the casualties of the US drone war rarely receive mention in the corporate media, except when described as “Islamic militants” or “suspected terrorists.” [note: suspected terrorists = anyone] This is challenged not only by the bureau’s data, but also by gruesome photographs of drone victims taken by local journalists.

The Guardian described the images captured by Noor Behram, a journalist from the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, whose work appeared in an exhibition at London’s Beaconsfield gallery in August:

The photographs make for difficult viewing and leave no doubt about the destructive power of the Hellfire missiles unleashed: a boy with the top of his head missing, a severed hand, flattened houses, the parents of children killed in a strike. The chassis is all that remains of a car in one photo, another shows the funeral of a seven-year-old child. There are pictures, too, of the cheap rubber flip-flops worn by children and adults, which often survive: signs that life once existed there. A 10-year-old boy’s body, prepared for burial, shows lipstick on him and flowers in his hair – a mother’s last loving touch.

Spencer Ackerman recently featured a number of Behram’s disturbing photographs at Wired, which can be seen here.

5) Record Number Of US Kids Face Hunger and Homelessness

A report released by National Center on Family Homelessness finds that one in 45 US children (1.6 million) are homeless, the majority under the age of seven. The Christian Science Monitor reports, “The number of homeless children in 2010 exceeded even the total in 2006, when thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita produced a historic spike in homelessness.”

It doesn’t stop there. According to recent figures released by the USDA, 17.2 million American households (14.5 percent) are “food insecure,” one of the highest recorded rates since surveys were first conducted in 1995. As a result, 16.2 million American children – one in five— face the threat of hunger. According to emergency room doctors in cities around the country, this is leading to a dramatic spike in malnourishment in babies.

Over the summer, the Boston Globe reported on shocking levels of infant malnourishment in Massachusetts. Doctors at the Boston Medical Center (BMC) reported seeing “more hungry and dangerously thin young children in the emergency room than at any time in more than a decade of surveying families.” Pediatricians in other large cities, including Baltimore, Little Rock, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, have also seen a rise in infant and child malnourishment since 2008.

BMC doctors also warn that “rising chronic hunger threatens to leave scores of infants and toddlers with lasting learning and developmental problems.”

The Globe likened child malnourishment and hunger among Boston’s poor to levels seen in the “developing world.” 

6) Prisoners Are People Too

This summer, more than 6,000 California prison inmates went on a month-long hunger strike in solidarity with those held in solitary confinement at the Secure Housing Unit in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. Pelican Bay is notorious for holding nearly half of its 1,111 prisoners in solitary confinement for longer than 10 years. The strike was suspended in July when inmates entered negotiations with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). They expected change, but prisoners who organized and participated in the strike were instead retaliated against by prison guards.

By September 26, the strike was back on, with 12,000 inmates throughout California and out-of-state facilities participating. But those numbers quickly dwindled as the CDCR disciplined those involved by limiting access to visiting family members and isolating participants from other prisoners. A string of prisoner suicides committed by inmates who participated in the hunger strikes followed. Colorlines’ Julianne Hing reported:

In recent months Alex Machado and Johnny Owens Vick, who were both housed in Pelican Bay’s notorious solitary confinement Security Housing Unit, and Hozel Alanzo Blanchard, who was incarcerated at Calipatria State Prison’s Administrative Segregation Unit, all committed suicide. Prisoner advocates say all three participated in a statewide hunger strike this summer to protest, among other things, prison discipline policies intended to identify prison gang members which punish innocent, unaffiliated inmates with decades of confinement to segregated units.

7) US Deports 46,000 Parents, Kids Left Behind In Foster Care

Under the Obama administration, deportations of immigrants have skyrocketed, with a record 397,000 people removed in 2011 alone and families torn apart as a result. According to an investigation carried out by Colorlines, the United States deported over 46,000 parents whose children were U.S. citizens between January and June of this year. With their parents detained or deported, at least 5,100 children have been placed in foster care, and many may never see their parents again. Our draconian immigration system is creating orphans. Investigative reporter Seth Freed Wessler writes:

These children, many of whom should never have been separated from their parents in the first place, face often insurmountable obstacles to reunifying with their mothers and fathers. Though child welfare departments are required by federal law to reunify children with any parents who are able to provide for the basic safety of their children, detention makes this all but impossible. Then, once parents are deported, families are often separated for long periods. Ultimately, child welfare departments and juvenile courts too often move to terminate the parental rights of deportees and put children up for adoption, rather than attempt to unify the family as they would in other circumstances.

8) FBI Teaches Agents That Muslims Are Violent Radicals

In September, Spencer Ackerman reported some disturbing findings about the FBI’s counterterrorism training materials. He revealed, among other things, that the FBI’s Training Division depicts all Muslims as potential terrorists. Ackerman writes:

The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “mainstream” American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a “cult leader”; and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.

At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”

Ackerman also came upon an alarming description of Sunni Muslims, which is included in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces mandatory online orientation material:

Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.

The FBI immediately apologized for the derogatory training materials, promising to comprehensively review all training materials. But it turns out that the FBI’s counterterrorism culture is soaked in Islamophobia, as demonstrated by the inclusion of books by Islamophobic authors Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes in the FBI Quantico library.

This comes on top of a troubling pattern in counterterrorism law enforcement training — the use of Islamophobic ”terrorism consultants” to school agents on the Islamic faith. According to the Washington Monthly, this “growing profession” of consultants rakes in taxpayer cash to educate our cops about evils of Islam. One example is Walid Shoebat, who reportedly told an audience at a counterterrorism conference last year that the way to solve the threat of Islamic extremism is to “kill them…including the children.” Shoebat’s extreme denunciations of Islam helped fuel the paranoia of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik, who massacred some 90 people in Norway earlier this year. According to the American Prospect, Shoebat is cited in Breivik’s manifesto 15 times.

I’m not even fucking joking.

Forget the 700 billion- multiply it by 11, that was a mind-boggling number in ‘08 but now is anyone evem surprised at the fuckery anymore?

1. The Federal Reserve made 7.77 trillion dollars out of thin-air and “lent” it to banks for an interest rate of as low as 0.01% -in other words: fucking free.
2. Then the banks took this same money that the Fed gave them for 0.01% and “invested” it (in the U.S. treasury) at interest rates of around 3% (market price) making billions of dollars of profits off the money they got for free.
   

7.7 trillion dollars is half of the U.S.’s total GDP. The 700 billion dollar bailout was apparently just a “diversion”. Congress didn’t even know the Fed was doing this. Long live the U.S. of A.

Source: Bloomberg and here are some main points.

LOL it’s so ridiculous, you couldn’t make this shit up if you wanted to.

Basically Enron was forced to declare bankruptcy because it turned out the company had gone to extreme measures to hide insane debt and bad deals using accounting loopholes and SPE’s. The stock price went from $90.00 to less than a dollar.

Some gems from Wiki:

• In 1999, Fastow [OF ENRON] formulated two limited partnerships: LJM Cayman. L.P. (LJM1) and LJM2 Co-Investment L.P. (LJM2), for the purpose of buying Enron’s poorly performing stocks and stakes to improve its financial statements.
• Before its fall, Enron was lauded for its sophisticated financial risk management tools.
• Enron’s bankruptcy downfall was attributed to its reckless use of derivatives and special purpose entities. By hedging its risks with special purpose entities which it owned, Enron retained the risks associated with the transactions. This setup had Enron implementing hedges with itself.
• Enron’s auditor firm, Arthur Andersen, was accused of applying reckless standards in its audits because of a conflict of interest over the significant consulting fees generated by Enron. In 2000, Arthur Andersen earned $25 million in audit fees and $27 million in consulting fees.
• Enron hired numerous Certified Public Accountants (CPA) as well as accountants who had worked on developing accounting rules with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The accountants looked for new ways to save the company money, including capitalizing on loopholes found in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the accounting industry’s standards. One Enron accountant revealed “We tried to aggressively use the literature [GAAP] to our advantage. All the rules create all these opportunities. We got to where we did because we exploited that weakness.”
• Enron made a habit of booking costs of cancelled projects as assets, with the rationale that no official letter had stated that the project was cancelled.
• In 1998, when analysts were given a tour of the Enron Energy Services office, they were impressed with how the employees were working so vigorously. In reality, Skilling had moved other employees to the office from other departments (instructing them to pretend to work hard) to create the appearance that the division was bigger than it was.
• Enron defending itself: “The broader goal of [Krugman’s] latest attack on Enron appears to be to discredit the free-market system, a system that entrusts people to make choices and enjoy the fruits of their labor, skill, intellect and heart. He would apparently rely on a system of monopolies controlled or sponsored by government to make choices for people.”

I’m seriously still laughing my ass off at all of this. Seriously, what. The. Mother. Fuck.

uniteordie:

Now what are all of those people doing camped out on Wall Street? Are they socialists? Commies? Anarchists? Left, right? For some reason the television news people don’t like them, which makes me sympathize. What’s going on?

I’ll explain.

Let’s say you are a young couple, newly married, anxious to get your piece of the American dream. And let’s say you decide to open your own hamburger stand.

Your first obstacle will be a maze of federal regulations. They are all well intended, helping out the disabled, protecting the environment, providing for workers’ health. The problem is that there are too many of them and they cost too much.

When I worked in the Bush Senior White House I saw the major companies come in and lobby for these REGS. They wanted them to be required for small businesses too, even businesses with five employees. Why? Because it would knock out the Mom and Pop operations who couldn’t afford them. By driving up costs they could assure that they would have a monopoly on hamburgers. But let’s say your parents mortgage their house and get you the start up money to pass that test.

Second, you will find that your competition controls the meat industry in this country. It is not just that they have volume but rather that their political donations assure that their friends get appointed to government meat inspection agencies. Sometimes, the very people who worked for the company will cross over and become a regulator. You must be prepared for some hair-raising conflicts of interest.

Third, your tax dollars will go to subsidize your competitor, the big hamburger company. Are you aware of this? This could be hundreds of millions of dollars.

There’s just no nice way to say this. Washington is corrupt. The big hamburger company establishes a lobby in Washington, D.C., which you can’t afford to do. They start with a firm of lawyers and former Justice Department prosecutors and meat inspectors. They lobby congress for money for their big hamburger corporation. And they get it.

For example, when I worked in the White House a major hamburger corporation lobbied for money saying that the French government was subsidizing their hamburger industry. Apparently the French felt that American hamburgers represented a cultural invasion. We had to either get a free trade agreement that worked or subsidize our own hamburger company.

Bottom line? Your competition is much larger and more powerful than you and not only controls the price and quality of the meat but takes dollars out of your pocket as an additional subsidy.

Now, here comes the piece de resistance.

Congressman Ron Paul has been railing about the unfairness of the Federal Reserve and the fact that it creates additional money, in secret, unaudited by anyone.

So thanks to Ron Paul, this past year, we were finally given a partial audit of the Federal Reserve. This applied to their activity in 2008. Here is what we learned. We learned that the Federal Reserved loaned out $16 trillion. That’s in one year. Keep in mind, that the entire accumulated national debt is just over $14 trillion. Remember Glenn Beck’s towering charts in his television studio?

And to whom did this money go? Well, banks, including banks that were owned by the members of the Federal Reserve board. Hmmmm. Nice huh? I guess they were secret for a reason. There were also a number of no bid contracts for companies to handle all of this. Here is a sweet tidbit, $3 trillion went to banks in foreign countries. We Americans are generous people. And oh, I almost forget, numerous corporations received this money too. For example, that big hamburger company, the one who needs federal subsidies? I think they got another $500 million interest free loan from the Federal Reserve.

Okay, who paid for that? Well, nobody. It was money “created” by the Federal Reserve. But you should really say that “everybody” paid for it because by increasing the money supply you are diluting its value for the rest of us. You are driving up the cost of wheat. You are causing famine in Africa.

Well, you say, why doesn’t somebody say something about this? They are trying. They are camping out on Wall Street. But then, keep in mind, the only way we can really know what is happening is through the news media. And that big hamburger company advertises in the news media. And one of the companies that got millions of dollars from the Federal Reserve owns one of the television networks.

So if you are that couple, just graduating from college, wanting to get your piece of the American dream? Forget it. You have two choices. Go to Wall Street and camp out. Or get a job at McDonalds. I think they pay $7.25 an hour. (But you can steal food.)

Doug Wead is a New York Times bestselling author and former adviser to two American presidents. He is a senior adviser to Ron Paul.

1st October, 2011

Recently the NYPD received “the largest donation in the history of the foundation” from JP Morgan as stated in a press release (mirror), a sum of $4.6 million.

Today during the “Solidarity March” protesters were kettled by the NYPD, and they’ve been (and still are) arresting people one by one, seemingly at random (Including children/teenagers), looking at the live feed I can see no reason for the arrests, people are just standing there getting picked off one by one. Now the real reasons are unknown so I can not comment on whether these are lawful or not.

I also can’t help but think that this is a strange coincidence; the arrests of (mostly) harmless protesters (protesting against the banks) and the biggest donation to the NYPD in their history (by one of those banks).

The livestream (well it was live, their battery went dead as I’m writing this, currently previously recorded footage is played) currently has 20,000+ viewers and is still increasing rapidly, the people are watching.

If the NYPD ignored the whole thing and acted rationally rather than randomly arresting and macing people this would’ve gotten nowhere near the attention it is now getting, so I guess we have to thank them for that.

The Elitist

No peace is easy. War is hard.

In war people have to go die, they have to live in treacherous conditions, they have to lose people they love. War is hard to maintain (did Afghanistan and Iraq not teach you anything?), war is hard to “sell” to people, and war is impossible to justify. War leads to harder consequences when the people you fucked over decide they’ve had enough.

War is hard. Peace is easy. Peace is almost literally doing nothing. Just don’t do shit to other people and you’re in “peace”.

The only reason we go for war is because war is profitable and war is a good way to keep hold of power. War is profitable to the people shoving shit loads of money into the pockets of politicians. War makes money, money goes to big ass corporations, big ass corporations pay politicians thus the politicians decide to go to war. War keeps people in fear, it convinces them that there is an enemy to be fought and so they need the state and the people in power to fight this enemy. War makes people let the atrocities of the state slip because the enemy that they’re at war with is more dangerous and thus the state is vital to the people.