Pagan Thinktank Releases Annual Sol Invictus-Friendly Shopping Guide

And now, a blue sunset on Mars:

… Pagan Rights Watch, the cultural thinktank and political activism unit of the North American Neo-Pagan Alliance, has published a list of retailers rated according to whether or not they recognize the holiday in promotional materials and advertising. Of particular interest is the traditional pagan greeting during the solstice, “Felicitous Sol Invictus!”

PRW has divided retailers into three categories: “Magickal” (identified as “friendly” to solstice observance), “Mundane” (identified as “negligent” toward the holiday) and “Baneful” (regarded as “offensive” to the observance). While retailers classified as “Magickal” have retained explicit references to the traditional pagan holiday that falls on December 25, including use of “Felicitous Sol Invictus,” “Mundane” companies have marginalized Sol Invictus references and “Baneful” retailers apparently ignore the holiday altogether.  …

Comment:  Sol Invictus technically *follows* the solstice, with the name of the celebration referring to the “victory of the sun,” the first day of the year with a measurable increase in sunlight.

via Pagan Thinktank Releases Annual Sol Invictus-Friendly Shopping Guide.

Sol Invictus (“the undefeated Sun”) or, more fully, Deus Sol Invictus (“the undefeated sun god”) was a religious title that allowed several solar deities to be worshipped collectively, including Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god; Sol, the god of Emperor Aurelian; and Mithras, a soldiers’ god of Persian origin.  Emperor Elagabalus (218–222) introduced the festival of the birth of the Unconquered Sun (or Dies Natalis Solis Invicti) to be celebrated on December 25, and it reached the height of its popularity under Aurelian, who promoted it as an empire-wide holiday. With the growing popularity of the Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth came to be given much of the recognition previously given to a sun god, thereby including Christ in the tradition. This was later condemned by the early Catholic Church for associating Christ with pagan practices- wiki

Celebrate the rebirth of the Sun this year. After the Winter Solstice, the time when winter is the harshest, the days are shortest, and the global warming deniers pat themselves on the backs with stories of cold, cold, coldness! Ha! Don’t worry, the Sun will be back. He is waking up now. The days are lengthening! Felicitous Sol Invictus!

California beaches ‘contaminated’ after rain storms

California health officials have warned residents to stay away from beaches contaminated by run-off after a week of torrential rain.

Miles of beaches remain closed after the deluge washed rubbish, pesticides and harmful bacteria into the sea.

And even as the rain has relented, residents are bracing for landslides, with hundreds of homes evacuated.

During the storm, Los Angeles received half its annual rainfall in just six days. At least one person was killed.

Heavy rain was also reported in neighbouring Arizona, Nevada and Utah, with the storm heading east. Forecasters predict the storm will hit the US East Coast at the weekend, after the busiest of the Christmas travel days.

In California, meanwhile, the weather has cleared but public health officials warned residents to avoid the beaches for several days.

via BBC News – California beaches ‘contaminated’ after rain storms.

Wikileaks.info Warning

I like Spamhaus. I have for years. Great site. Legit spam and crime fighting organization. I was a bit surprised to read, then, that they were at odds with Wikileaks, but this explains it:

In a statement released today on wikileaks.info entitled “Spamhaus’ False Allegations Against wikileaks.info”, the person running the wikileaks.info site (which is not connected with Julian Assange or the real Wikileaks organization) called Spamhaus’s information on his infamous cybercrime host “false” and “none of our business” and called on people to contact Spamhaus and “voice your opinion”.

Consequently Spamhaus has now received a number of emails some asking if we “want to be next”, some telling us to stop blacklisting Wikileaks (obviously they don’t understand that we never did) and others claiming we are “a pawn of US Government Agencies”. None of the people who contacted us realised that the “Wikileaks press release” published on wikileaks.info was not written by Wikileaks and not issued by Wikileaks – but by the person running the wikileaks.info site only – the very site we are warning about.

The site data, disks, connections and visitor traffic, are all under the control of the Heihachi cybercrime gang. There are more than 40 criminal-run sites operating on the same IP address as wikileaks.info, including carder-elite.biz,h4ck3rz.biz, elite-crew.net, and bank phishes paypal-securitycenter.com and postbank-kontodirekt.com. Because they are using a Wikileaks logo, many people thought that the “press release” was issued “by Wikileaks”.

In fact there has been no press release about this by Wikileaks and none of the official Wikileaks mirrors sites even recognise thewikileaks.info mirror. We wonder how long it will be before Wikileaks supporters wake up and start to question whywikileaks.info is not on the list of real Wikileaks mirrors at wikileaks.ch.

Currently wikileaks.info is serving highly sensitive leaked documents to the world, from a server fully controlled by Russian malware cybercriminals, to an audience that faithfully believes anything with a ‘Wikileaks’ logo on it. Spamhaus continues to warn Wikileaks readers to make sure they are viewing and downloading documents only from an official Wikileaks mirror site. We’re not saying “don’t go to Wikileaks” we’re saying “Use the wikileaks.ch server instead”.

—- Steve Linford The Spamhaus Project http://www.spamhaus.org

via Wikileaks.info Warning.

WikiLeaks: A secret government operation to take over the Internet?

I like to check out all the angles… It is interesting to consider that Wikileaks is a Psyop, a psychological operation by US military to achieve a desired outcome.  Here are a few points I found that other people were using to support the idea that Wikileaks a well funded scam:

1. Not much is revealed: People claim that the information release is just old non-news and propaganda.
2. Nothing of any importance regarding 9/11, not even evidence of incompetence.
3. Lawrence Lessig, “respected Law Professor from Stanford University and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told an audience at the 2008 Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet. Lessig revealed that he learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that an an “i-Patriot Act,”  is already in existence. The Justice Department is just waiting for a cyber terrorism event to implement it. – Roy Tov: On WikiLeaks, 9/11 and American Terror.
4. John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks,  in January 2007, claiming the operation was a front. Young also published some 150 email messages sent by Wikileaks activists on cryptome.
5. The Wayne Madson Report:  “confirmed Young’s contention that Wikileaks is an Intel Agency front operation. Wikileaks is intimately involved in a $20 million operation that U.S.-based Chinese dissidents that hack into computers in China.”
6. A CIA’s task force reviewed all Wikileaks documents. The group is called WTF, the Wikileaks Task Force. “The director asked the task force to examine whether the latest release of WikiLeaks documents might affect the agency’s foreign relationships or operations,” CIA spokesman George Little said. The panel is being led by the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center but has more than two dozen members from departments across the agency.” PD. Was the examination of the documents before or after they were leaked?
7. Although the CIA has featured in some WikiLeaks disclosures, relatively little of its own data has come out in the open …While most of the CIA’s correspondence is supposedly classified at the same “secret” level as the leaked cables, it is understood it uses systems different from those of other government agencies. …
8. The cablegate leak justifies the CIA rejecting, as recently as 2008, “a request to make more of its intelligence reports available on the SIPRNET, the classified network used by the Pentagon to pass information around the world.” – washpost

 

I’m undecided, some of this conspiracy theory sounds like possible propaganda from China, but the possibility makes the alternative Wikileaks-type sites like cryptome even more interesting to watch.

Unlike Wikileaks, Openleaks will not publish or verify material; leaving that role to newspapers, “NGOs, labour unions and other interested entities”. “We are trying to build a community of various organisations that need or have use for anonymously submitted information,” former Wikileaks member Herbert Snorrason told the BBC. Mr Domscheit-Berg, said the decision to be a “conduit” rather than publisher was made because of the team’s experience at Wikileaks. … bbc

 

 

Fake Al Qaeda Actors: Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab

 

YouTube – Fake Al Qaeda Actors EXPOSED! Adam Gadahn & Yousef al-Khattab.

Holiday Terror: Weaponized Candy Canes

…  The latest threat?

Candy Canes.

If reports are to be believed, administrators at Battlefield High School in Haymarket, VA punished ten members of the school’s Christmas Sweater Club for participating in the spreading of Christmas cheer, part of which included the tossing of small, individually wrapped candy canes to students.

According to accounts by several students, the school punished them with detention and cleanup work because the popular holiday treats pose a possible threat to others due to the ease of weaponizing the candy canes.

Skylar Torbett, a junior, says he was told, “candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them.” Zakk Rhine, another member of the club, was told that the candy canes could, “maliciously maim students with the intent to injure.”

School administrators deny the allegations, citing unruly behavior, littering and creating a disturbance. The official student “referrals” sent to parents made no mention of candy canes or the possibility that they could be used to maim or wound. …

via Holiday Terror: Weaponized Candy Canes.

Qur’an etched in Saddam Hussein’s blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders

It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur’an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight – locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant’s legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with. …

The vault in the vast mosque in Baghdad has remained locked for the past three years, keeping the 114 chapters of the Muslim holy book out of sight – and mind – while those who run Iraq have painstakingly processed the other cultural remnants of 30 years of Saddam and the Ba’ath party.

“What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of dollars,” said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, head of Iraq’s Sunni Endowment fund, standing near the towering minarets of the west Baghdad mosque that Saddam named “the Mother of All Battles”. Behind him is the infamous Blood Qur’an, written in Saddam’s own blood. …

“It was wrong to do what he did, to write it in blood,” says Sheikh Samarrai. “It is haraam [forbidden].”

Despite this, Sammarie says he acted as the document’s protector during the mayhem that followed the US-led invasion in 2003, hiding pages in his house and moving others among the homes of his relatives.

“I knew this would be much sought after and we made the decision to protect it. But to see this now is not easy. There are three keys and none of them are held in the one place. I have one, the police chief in the area has another and there is a third in another part of Baghdad. There has to be a decision of a committee to let you in.”

via Qur’an etched in Saddam Hussein’s blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders | World news | The Guardian.

Google’s own office blurred out on Street View

Sometimes, even those companies that are supposedly open turn out to operate under a cloud of deep, dark secrecy.

Google, it turns out, has become one of those–at least in Germany, and not of its own volition.

I am indebted to loyal reader Ingo Klein, who directed me to the news that Google’s office at Dienerstrasse 12 in Munich seems to have enjoyed the attentions of the “German Street View Shroud.”

Should you, yourself, have been operating in the clouds lately, you may be unaware of Germany’s slight discomfort with Street View.

Almost 3 percent of German property owners decided that they would prefer their buildings to be objects of mystery rather than desire. So they have requested that their buildings be blurred out on the mapping service.

And so it has passed that Google’s own Munich office, which happens to be in a building that contains other, perhaps more privacy-conscious tenants, is blurred out on Google’s own revolutionary visual recording of the world.

According to CenterNetworks.com, one of the tenants did, indeed, request that the building be blurred.

via Google’s own office blurred out on Street View | Technically Incorrect – CNET News.

Samuel Sevian, 9, Becomes Youngest US Chess Master

A 9-year-old California boy has become the youngest American to earn the title of “national master” in chess.

Samuel Sevian of Santa Clara earned the United States Chess Federation title at a match in San Francisco on Dec. 11, the federation’s website says. He earned a rating of 2,201, just over the threshold of 2,200 to become a “national master.”"It feels good,” Samuel, a fourth-grader at Don Callejon School, told the San Jose Mercury News.

He moved up from chess “expert,” a title he got at age 8, by besting the previous record holder, Nicholas Nip of San Francisco. Samuel beat Nicholas to the record by 11 days.

Samuel, who turns 10 Sunday, has been playing since he was 5. “I like the tactics and the combinations,” he said.

Samuel plays chess with his father, Armen Sevian, 37, also an avid chess player at the “expert” level. The family is from Armenia, where chess players are held in high esteem.

“In Armenia, chess is very big,” Armen Sevian told the Mercury News. “It’s certainly not a geek sport. Chess players are compared to rock stars.”

Each day, Samuel spends at least two hours studying chess moves in books, playing chess with his father and practicing, via Skype, with his coach in Los Angeles. …

via Samuel Sevian, 9, Becomes Youngest US Chess Master.

Ancient humans, dubbed ‘Denisovans’, interbred with us

DNA from a tooth (pictured) and a finger bone show the Denisovans were a distinct group

Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species.

The ancient humans have been dubbed Denisovans after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found.

There is also evidence that this group was widespread in Eurasia.

A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with our species – perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone. …

According to the researchers, this provides confirmation there were at least four distinct types of human in existence when anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) first left their African homeland. …

No one knows when or how these humans disappeared but, according to Professor Paabo, it is very likely something to do with modern people because all the “archaic” humans, like Denisovans and Neanderthals disappeared sometime after Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene. …

via BBC News – Ancient humans, dubbed ‘Denisovans’, interbred with us.

We probably ate them too… just like we ate those Neandersteaks.