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Elephant’s sixth ‘toe’ discovered BBC (hat tip reader John M)

Pope berates Christmas ‘glitter’ BBC. Um, the Vatican is awfully glitzy and this Pope is a bit of a clotheshorse.

More than spirits are being lifted Associated Press. As Buzz Potamkin notes: “Of course, none of the banksters are included, as the total listed is chump-change in their bonus pool.”

Nothing Predicted Happened as Men Conspired With Nature in 2011 Bloomberg

Russia building 10-petaflop supercomputer ComputerWorld

Fair Trade Proving Anything But in $6B Market Bloomberg

The FDA Is Totally Cool With Us Eating Seafood 10,000 Times Over The Contamination Limit Clusterstock (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)

Caseby’s squalid note to The Guardian editor shows News International’s true face Guardian (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)

ECB’s €489bn will ‘buy valuable time’ but is no debt bazooka Telegraph

Herr Draghi or Signor Draghi, and the ECB’s Santa Rally (technical) Telegraph

Vast Rally in Moscow Is a Challenge to Putin’s Power New York Times

Mikhail Gorbachev calls for Putin to resign Telegraph

The Christmas Drone Truce – CIA Stops Airstrikes in Pakistan Dave Dayen, Firedoglake

In Government We Don’t Trust Governing (hat tip reader May S)

ID errors put hundreds in L.A. jails Los Angeles Times

Consumer, business spending point to slower growth Reuters

How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much Forbes (hat tip reader May S). See the underlying report here.

The Haves’ Children Are Healthier Than the Have-Nots’ New York Times (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)

Occupy is Coming to Town YouTube (hat tip reader Paul Tioxon)

Occupy Christmas: Movement Expands Religious Appeal National Memo

Archbishop of York attacks bankers’ ‘massive bonuses’ Telegraph

Services offshoring increases wage inequality VoxEU

A Victorian Christmas Maureen Dowd, New York Times

Antidote du jour:

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30 comments

  2. Rex

    Nothing Predicted Happened as Men Conspired With Nature in 2011

    Is it just me? Does that title mean something I can’t detect? It seems it was just randomly tacked onto the list of 2011 events (some with inexplicable bias to their POV).

    Predicted? Conspired with nature? Huh?

    Hopefully the title can be recycled for use at the end of the coming year, because there have been a few predictions about 2012.

    1. Foppe

      I think what we’re supposed to take away is that both Tahrir and Steve Jobs’s death were like natural disasters. Not sure why that makes sense.

  4. nowhereman

    Merry Christmas to you all. Thank you Yves for the gift that keeps on giving, a little knowledge is a wonderful thing.

  5. bill

    US auto production exceeds German auto production. It’s like 7.7 million, not 2.7 million. I like the rest of the piece, but when such an easy to check fact is so far off, how can I have any confidence in the rest of it?

      1. ambrit

        Friend;
        Was Bernardo O’Higgins an Irishman or a Chilean? Same conception I assume. (Some Christmas humour.)

  6. josap

    Have a wonderfull Christmas.
    Thank you all for your posts and Yves for a great blog.
    I don’t post, but read everyday. And everyday I learn something.

  8. Grotius

    “Everything is connected to everything else”.
    ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

    Re: Pope berates Christmas ‘glitter’ BBC. Um, the Vatican is awfully glitzy and this Pope is a bit of a clotheshorse.

    Yes, and he always wears these lovely red suede shoes. But then again that’s what you get with effeminate men.

    Don’t forget how the Vatican was build. It was financed by indulgences. “Alleged abuses in selling and granting indulgences[3] were a major point of contention when Martin Luther initiated the Protestant Reformation (1517).” (Wikipedia)

    PROTESTant Reformation had not been possible without the invention of the printing press or Gutenberg’s press. Today’s protests on the financial frauds in our WORLD (!!!) would not have been possible without the invention of the internet. Yves, you and your fellow bloggers, writers and journalists in America are doing an amazing job! Thank you all. We here in Europe are divided by too many languages and cultures to really pack a punch.

    Anyway, it might seem wholly inappropriate for Christmas day but then again truth needs to be told. I have attended five public schools in my teenage years, one of which was a Roman Catholic boarding school. We lived on the campus with retired priests who used to be teachers at the school on the campus. And yes, some, a minority were sexual predators hunting for the souls and spirits of youngsters. (Spiritual warfare)

    Capo di tutti capi has come out this year that it is possible for some of his flock to wear a condom when having sexual intercourse. You can wear a condom… there are three prerequisites, when A) your gay and B) you have an STD and C) you are a prostitute.

    (Religious leaders call their followers FLOCK!!!!!)

    What wonders me is the fact that most people don’t see the incarnate evil behind the mask of feigned benevolence, knowledge and respectability.

    This brings me to another hypocrite of epic proportions. The Queen of Orange-Nassau. In today’s news she expresses her worry about the planet, especially about the environment. Well Beatrix you own a whole lot of shares in oil companieS and other corporations. According to your former nephew in law you own 9% of all the shares in Shell oil. It is well documented by Joris Luyendijk (Guardian) that the Shell oil corporation is blocking and has been suppressing any alternative energy sources although they pretend to be working in favor of alternative energies. Moreover, your oldest son has been on the evening news saying we have to start preparing for drill, baby drill on the Artic. Your second son, the rocket scientist who was a former partner at Goldman Sachs London and whose wife works for George Soros, has been saying that world has to look into developing additional nuclear power plants. That flies right into the face of what you have been telling TODAY! There is a whole lot more I can say but I would like to keep it light today… but yes, you did partially own the central bank in the Netherlands until 1948 (and you still do but the central banking families have hidden that fact).

    I have a mind which is psychological predisposed to conspiracy theories so don’t take my experiences in private banking in the City and various Big time profit corporations in four European countries for anything worthy. Good night, sleep tight :-)

    This the internet and it is going to bring us light, love and liberation. We the people of the World.

    1. Grotius

      In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmR0V6s3NKk&ob=av1e

        1. Grotius

          If the people of America realy, really, really want change in this barking mad WORLD. I am not saying this lightly because it will cost many, many, many lives. Then you have to focus on WTC7 and demand a new investigation.

          If not, all the engineers and all engineering departments of all the Universities in the United States of America are complicit. Period.

          I AM JESSE VENTURA !!!

          1. EH

            I have some friends like this on Facebook, but unfortunately NC doesn’t have a “show only important posts” filter.

  10. Taylor

    Re physical fitness for kids,

    Stop playing the poverty card…

    Most of the children in the Mission District of San Francisco are American Indian via Mexican blood.

    American Indians have a starvation gene that allowed their ancestors to pack a tremendous amounts of fat onto their bodies to weather the cycles of famine in the
    Asian and North American steppes. Introduce junk factory food, canned food, lard, McGrease, high fructose corn syrup, or “corn booger” into their diets and you have a wave of obesity.

    Also, everyone of any race packs the pounds on when eating food grown in skeletal soils with fewer nutrients and minerals which is the case with most non-organic and processed factory food. Your body need a certain amount of minerals, enzymes and nutrients and you will feel hunger until it is satisfied whether you eat a dense nutrient packed organic meal or feed on three times as much junk food with the empty calories that accompany it.

    There are excellent farmer’s markets in the Mission District and hopefully soon word will get out to even the most uneducated and poor parents that fresh local organic produce is better for your children and you than junk processed factory food.

    More about organic food:

    http://www.organicconsumers.org/

    Merry Christmas everyone

  12. craazyman

    This is a weird news report. Not sure what to make of it . . .

    * * *

    Man Shoots Santa Claus in Home Foreclosure Fight

    Las Vegas Times, Dec. 25

    by D. T. Tremens, Reporter at Large

    The Las Vegas region’s foreclosure crisis took a tragic turn Christmas Eve when a Bullhead City man shot an intruder believed to be a bank agent foreclosing on his home.

    It was only after firing three rounds into the intruder’s chest did Randall Rembo, 53, realize, in a case of mistaken identity, that the intruder was in fact Santa Claus.

    “Randy is still in a state of shock,” said Wendy Rembo, the shooter’s wife. Mr. Rembo told police his home had been broken into three times by bank agents, who twice changed the locks on his doors and scheduled his home for auction, even though his mortgage is current and he has never missed a payment.

    Mr. Rembo told police he awoke at 2 a.m. to use the bathroom and noticed a large man in the living room shuffling boxes under the Christmas tree. Mr. Rembo, a licensed gun owner, had been distraught over his mounting legal fees and was certain the intruder was a bank agent.

    In a strange twist to the tragic encounter, police investigators were unable to locate the victim of the shooting. “He just dissapeared right where I shot him. I don’t know where he went,” Mr. Rembo reportedly told investigators, who recovered the bullets from Mr. Rembo’s wall but found no other evidence to corroborate his story.

    “I guess this is what’s it’s come down to,” said Detective Tom Pinchon of the Las Vegas Police Department. “Everybody’s just about on the edge and it doesn’t take much to push them over.”

    Mr. Rembo was released after questioning early Sunday and no charges were filed. There were no reports of missing gifts in Bullhead City or the greater Las Vegas area.

    “Whatever happened, Santa apparently survived,” said Detective Pinchon. “This case is strange, but it’s closed.”

  13. ambrit

    friends;
    Re. “Christmas Drone Truce,” could the CIA be afraid that the Iranians have given the Pakistanis the method for tricking American drones to land? It’s a lot like the old Mad Mag “Spy Vs. Spy” cartoon.

  14. Laughlinlvr

    Bullhead City is in Arizona. It has its own police force and spokesperson. Las Vegas is policed by Las Vegas Metro, which also polices Laughlin just across the Colorado river from Bullhead City.
    It seems extrememly unlikely that a spoksperson in Las Vegas would comment in an official capacity on another state’s police action.
    It seems more likely this is a fake story.

    1. craazyman

      I think you are correct. The reporter seems suspicious. He may be an imposter and I am not sure he can be believed.

      1. Valissa

        Nicely played ;)

        It’s a tragically common tale… http://www.wtv-zone.com/rosebuds/graphics/holiday/cartoon_santa-shot.gif

        What a tangled web we weave… http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/jsi/lowres/jsin609l.jpg

        Santa’s cookie preferences… http://www.the-cartoonist.com/TCDC/tcdc_2004/TCDC/Filius/santacarb.jpg

        btw, did you know “Reno is so close to hell you can see Sparks!” Eons ago when I lived in Reno I got a traffic ticket in Sparks (they were known for that!). Didn’t get around to paying it for a while and when I finally did I had to get arrested (yes, really), although the cops were all good humored about it. The Reno cops, on the other hand, were much nicer to folks who were in a bit of trouble (no further comment).

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