Well... an additional datapoint for you: I switched to using Xerces instead of Crimson, and the stack trace is now:

Exception in thread "main" java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: <?xml version="1.0"?>

[rest of the HTML]
     at java.net.URL.<init>(Unknown Source)
     at java.net.URL.<init>(Unknown Source)
     at java.net.URL.<init>(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLEntityManager.setupCurrentEntity(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLVersionDetector.determineDocVersion(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XMLParser.parse(Unknown Source)
     at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source)
     at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:453)
     at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:891)
     at Page.get(Page.java:38)
     at Launch.main(Launch.java:14)

But I still don't understand why it feels the need to request anything from the web! I set up the proxies just in case, but no luck.

Is it because you is fik?