In news from Kentucky –

State lawmakers will debate legislation in committees next year beneath “In God We Trust” signs.

Ok what the hell, man. How is this even legal? Why can’t we just have a secular government? Why do they have to keep pushing the Allahu Akbar-In God we trust shit in our faces?

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports state officials hung the new signs in 11 committee rooms in the Capitol and Capitol Annex, where legislators have offices and meeting rooms. Legislators approved the signs in March.

That’s not right. It’s not neutral, and the state is supposed to be neutral.

The ACLU of Kentucky and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State are not happy about

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Oh yay, Amanda Marcotte has a poke in the eye for the people who think Shakespeare was just the front guy for the Earl of Oxford or some other more aristocratic type because how could a nobody from the provinces possibly be Shakespeare?

Newsweek has a surprisingly sympathetic piece about Shakespeare truthers, republished here at Raw Story, and I just have to take some time to point out that, like with other conspiracy theories and denialist obsessions, there’s more going on here than some kind of legitimate dispute over the facts. For those who are unaware, Shakespeare truthers are people who believe that William Shakespeare was just a half-literate actor who was the cover story for some no doubt 

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And another such chain of girls-showing-tits drinking and dining establishments, courtesy of Orac commenting on the last one. This one is called, winsomely, Tilted Kilt. I thought it must be the flipped version, with male servers in kilts and nothing else. How silly can you be? Of course it’s not.

While the Tilted Kilt concept has its roots deep in the rousing tradition of Scottish, Irish and English Pubs, it actually first came to life in America’s own sin city, Las Vegas. The brainchild of successful restaurateur Mark DiMartino, Tilted Kilt was conceived to be a contemporary, Celtic-themed sports Pub staffed with beautiful servers in sexy plaid kilts and matching plaid bras.

Well actual – “Celtic” – kilts … Read the rest

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So this is something I didn’t know about – a chain of “sports bars” called Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill. “Bikinis” isn’t the name of the owner but what the servers – all women, of course – wear.

How “America’s Only Breastaurant®” got started…

It all started back in the winter of 2001. Weary of the technology world, and discouraged by the “dot-com” implosion that was happening all around him, Doug Guller packed his bags and headed to Australia for a much needed vacation.

While sitting at a bar on the Australian coast, watching some rugby on a small TV nearby, an attractive server approached and asked, “Wanna beer, mate?”

At that moment, all Doug could do was smile.

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Gawker has an entry in the Brand Names News category.

On Friday, The New York Times profiled some of the Chinese companies that have taken nonsensical branding to its postmodern conclusion, selling products under Western-inspired names like “Biemlfdlkk” and “Marisfrolg.”

Other brands mentioned in the article:

• Frognie Zila
• Helen Keller (a sunglasses maker)
• Chrisdien Deny
• Adidos
• Orgee
• Cnoverse
• Fuma
• Johnnie Worker Red Labial Whiskey

With ginger ale!

Of course, giving your company a meaningless, foreign-sounding name can present unique challenges when dealing with journalists.

A Biemlfdlkk saleswoman in the southern city of Guangzhou explained, “It’s a German name.” An employee at another Biemlfdlkk shop had a different explanation: “It’s the name of a French designer.”

Ah yes, Jean-Pierre Biemlfdlkk.

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A Fox “News” personality wondered on live tv if it might be the metric system that caused the AirAsia flight to go missing.

Fox News host Anna Kooiman speculated on Sunday that an AirAsia flight could have gone missing because international pilots were trained using the metric system.

During breaking coverage of missing Flight QZ8501, Kooiman asked former FAA spokesperson Scott Brenner if the “real reason” the plane had disappeared was because of the “different way other countries train their pilots.”

“Even when we think about temperature, it’s Fahrenheit or Celsius,” she pointed out. “It’s kilometers or miles. You know, everything about their training could be similar, but different.”

Also? They’re upside down. That must make it hard to fly … Read the rest

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One more good point, this one from Mychal Denzel Smith.

The rhetoric Lynch, Giuliani and others employ only reinforces the message protesters have been trying to get across. Lynch and Giuliani can see the tragedy of Liu and Ramos’s deaths, but do not extend that same sympathy to the families of those killed by police officers. The lives of officers Liu and Ramos are held up as more valuable than the lives of Garner, Brown and so on. That’s the reason the protests must continue, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s call for them to be suspended.

But also, you’d have a hard time convincing me that the reason Lynch and Giuliani mourn Liu and Ramos is because of their

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Patricia Williams, of The Nation’s Diary of a Mad Law Professor column, also makes a useful point.

…given clear evidence that Ismaaiyl Brinsley was mentally unsound, it is remarkable that the media could assign direct cause-and-effect to the atmospherics of news. If Brinsley had tweeted that William Shakespeare made him do it, would Fox & Friends be blaming teachers’ unions for troubling the waters?

It is its own kind of madness to blame these murders on those who do no more than debate the proper use of force by police, as Fox and others have done.

(As in: guns don’t kill people, public discourse and protestors without guns do.) This response chills freedom of expression, not least by using

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The editors of The Nation are also disgusted at the police grandstanding and defiance of civilian rule.

Police-union leaders and their allies, however, chose this moment to talk not of peace but war. “The mayors hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words actions and policies and we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly,” declared a now-infamous memo attributed to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

The PBA disavowed the memo, but its president, Patrick Lynch, clearly relished its imagery, speaking of “blood on the hands” repeatedly to reporters. Joining this twisted chorus were, among others, former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and former governor George

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The police fascism in New York is still ongoing. Yesterday at the funeral of Rafael Ramos it was on display again.

While mourners inside the church applauded politely as Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke, hundreds of officers outside turned their backs on him to protest what they see as his support for demonstrators angry over killings by police.

They’re “protesting” against civilian and democratic authority over the police, and that’s fascism. When the police get to call the shots, that’s a police state.

Sgt. Myron Joseph of the New Rochelle Police Department said he and fellow officers turned their backs spontaneously to “support our brothers in the NYPD.”

They need to stop doing that.

A block from the church,

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Remember Junaid Jamshed? The former pop star turned reactionary preacher who had to flee Pakistan for London when he was accused of blasphemy by another reactionary preacher?

First, more about him from the BBC three weeks ago.

…the BBC’s Shaima Khalil in Islamabad says what makes Junaid Jamshed’s case so unusual is the fact that he is a high-profile, wealthy Muslim preacher.

As opposed to a Christian peasant woman like Asia Bibi.

In his video broadcast, which has since been widely shared, he appeared to make negative remarks about the Prophet’s youngest wife Ayesha.

He described how Ayesha demanded attention from the Prophet and how one day she faked an illness.

The video led to another Muslim group, Sunni Tehrik,

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And now that we’ve revisited Vulliamy’s and ITN’s visit to Omarska, let’s revisit their libel suit against Living Marxism for saying it was all a fabrication. Ed Vulliamy again:

Some will say that Living Marxism won the “public relations battle”, whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN’s victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

But history – the history of genocide in particular – is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it

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Bosnia Institute News tells us that Omarska is being wiped from memory.

On 9 May, a group of survivors came to Omarska, near Prijedor in Bosnia, to lay a wreath for those who perished there in 1992. It was Victory Day – a Bosnian holiday to mark the defeat of fascism in the World War II – and also, for them, an opportunity to commemorate the victims of numerous detention camps from the more recent conflict. They did so last year and in the years before at this place, now an iron ore mine but once notorious as a place of torture and death for several thousand Bosnians at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces.

But guards hired by ArcelorMittal,

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I’ve been re-reading Samantha Power‘s A Problem From Hell, and I feel a need to revisit what happened in Bosnia in 1992 and after.

Power cites the work of Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian. We could start with his Shame of camp Omarska.

The internees are horribly thin, raw-boned; some are almost cadaverous, with skin like parchment folded around their arms; their faces are lantern-jawed, and their eyes are haunted by the empty stare of the prisoner who does not know what will happen to him next.

The prisoners, or internees, emerge from a huge rust-coloured shed, 30 at a time, into the sun and heat.

They are lined up by a prison guard, a civilian policeman,

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Another horror out of Pakistan.

Gunmen in a Punjab village shot dead a member of the Ahmadi religious minority on Saturday, five days after a Muslim leader denounced Ahmadis on a popular television show.

Luqman Ahad Shehzad was shot in the back of the head near Bhiri Shah Rehman village, a small community of Ahmadis in the Gujranwala district, said Saleemud Din, a spokesman of the community.

He is the eleventh person killed for being Ahmadi in Pakistan this year.

Should we be grateful the number is “only” eleven when it could be in the thousands? Or furious that it’s more than zero?

In 1984, a Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims and made it possible to jail Ahmadis for

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There was a heated discussion on a post of Tom Flynn’s at the CFI blogs about whether or not to celebrate Christmas because it is or isn’t a Christian festival. I don’t really have a position on that, but it prompted me to try to figure out if I ever really saw it (or felt it) as a religious observance. I may be misremembering, but for the life of me I can’t dredge up any real religious associations with it. By “real” I mean ones that I personally experienced as religious, as opposed to elements that I was aware were religious.

It’s odd, really, because there were a good few of the latter, but to me it’s as if they … Read the rest

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You have got to be kidding.

Ex-NYC-cop and blogger John Cardillo has a message for us:

Late last night I was contacted by a coalition of NYPD cops, Detectives, and supervisors hundreds strong and asked to disseminate the following statement on their behalf. They requested I wait until after the plane towing a banner which reads “DE BLASIO, OUR BACKS HAVE TURNED TO YOU” was airborne.

At 08:50 I received word that the plane was in the air and asked to release the statement and photo below.

The plane was in the air, towing a message to all of us:

As a large and unified group of current and retired NYC Police Officers, Detectives, & Supervisors, we are outraged

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

News from Ireland: the high court has ruled that that unfortunate woman who was being kept “alive” after brain death because she was pregnant can – and in fact should – be allowed to die the rest of the way.

The woman’s family had asked the court to allow treatment to be withdrawn so she could be put to rest.

Doctors would not grant their wishes as they were unsure of the legal status of the unborn child under the Constitution.

The woman in this case was declared dead on 3 December.

The court heard evidence that her body was deteriorating and the outlook for her unborn child was very poor.

Her family wanted the life support machine to be

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Meanwhile Erdogan is changing the subject by telling Europe to do something about “Islamophobia” before criticizing Turkey’s approach to freedom of the press.

Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan slammed European countries on Friday for criticizing deteriorating press freedom in Turkey and said they should instead try to find a solution for what he said was increasing Islamophobia in the continent.

Turkish police earlier this month raided media outlets close to US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan accuses of forming a ‘parallel state’ to undermine his rule and orchestrating a graft scandal targeting his inner circle.

The European Union, which Turkey has been seeking to join for decades, said the media raids ran counter to European values, a criticism already

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The teenager who “insulted” Erdogan is out of jail pending trial. Oooh really? How can they be sure he won’t insult again? It’s terrifying and reckless to let such a violent insulter walk around freely when at any moment he might say something hostile about the president of Turkey omigod.

Turkey’s penal code makes it a crime to insult the president.

As he left the courthouse in Konya, the boy said: “There is no question of taking a step back from our path, we will continue along this road.”

There has been growing concern amid rights groups in Turkey at what they see as a clampdown on freedom of speech.

Ya think?

The boy was arrested at school on

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