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Activists and would-be revellers are angry that the right-wing party has been granted an official place in the London Pride Parade 2015 despite alleged incidents of homophobia.

“Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, clearly does not support the values of acceptance that Pride promotes, and UKIP is an inherently homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic political party,” the petitioners argued.

I swear, sometimes you can’t tell the crazies without a scorecard.

Richard Fernandez isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

Yahoo says a petition in change.org asking the International Olympic Committee to take back the gold medal Caitlyn Jenner won in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games has raised the issue of “how to differentiate men and women”.  The petition reads:

It has recently come to light that gold medalist Bruce Jenner is in fact transgender, and therefore, identifies as a woman. We congratulate Ms. Jenner on these new developments and wish her the best. However, this creates somewhat of a problem as Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore, was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men’s sports and vice versa. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that we must ask whether or not it is proper that Ms. Jenner should retain her olympic records in light of this, as we must now either claim that Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner are two entirely different people (which we know is not true), or that Bruce Jenner was, in fact, a woman participating in a men’s event.

But it’s worse than that.  The problem it raises is whether we can draw a correspondence between what a person is and the body he/she/it inhabits.  Now it used to be worrisome when one found oneself in earnest discussion with group pretending to consist of Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. To join in was itself a sign that you had lost a few marbles recently.  But assuming that both the Yahoo article and petition were written in sober seriousness, then society is now seriously talking on Jenner’s terms.  After all, Jenner’s on the the cover of Vanity Fair and on the headlines of all the major news outlets so it must be serious.

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The epitome of Identity Politics.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a … Black Person.

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My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar – but once he’d got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself “would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?” In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words. Perhaps one could conceive of a device like the Teleporter in Star Trek – no more fanciful than many things actually dscribed in the JKR corpus!

Greek isn’t a dead language … it’s just resting. Beautiful plumage….

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Wouldn’t it be nice if, for just one day, they were able to keep the peace somewhere?

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I’m starting to think Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is going to supply a great deal of high quality entertainment in this presidential cycle. His economic ignorance—too many choices of deodorant!—is right out of the 1950s (but then, as Glenn Reynolds noted his morning, the whole Democratic field has a Lawrence Welk feel to it). Leave it to Remy to offer Bernie some fundraising help:

…

As Tom Bethell asked years ago when Sanders first went to Congress, how can you tell the difference between Sanders and any other Democrat?

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“If you’re talking premium liquor, you expect premium glass and ice too,” says Andrew Bohrer, a longtime Seattle bartender and co-founder of the Washington State Bartender’s Guild.

I am not making this up.

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Campign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is demanding the St Albans based establishment in Hertfordshire rename itself ‘Ye Olde Clever Cocks’ to “celebrate chickens as the intelligent, sensitive and social animals they are”.

I guess these guys were scared by a Disney movie while in the womb and are working out their issues in real life.

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Consumer Reports never spent more on a car than on the all wheel drive version of the Tesla Model that it bought to review.
But its reviewers soon ran into a unique problem – they couldn’t get in the car.

The $127,000 Tesla Model S has door handles that retract flush into the door when not in use, and which are supposed to pop out when a owner approaches the car with the key fob.

That mad giggling sound you hear is Elon Musk scampering all the way to the bank.

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Oh, yeah, that’s SURE to work. Why didn’t Obama think of that?

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Today’s major news story is the crash of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia, killing at least seven people and injuring many more, some critically. The crash had barely been reported before liberals on Twitter erupted with denunciations of Republicans. Why? Because the current House budget proposes cuts in federal support for Amtrak. How could that possibly relate to last night’s crash? Don’t expect logic from a liberal. Twitchy documented the dementia here and elsewhere.

Then it came out that the train was traveling around 106 miles per hour, entering a curve in a 50 mile per hour zone. It seems unlikely that the crash had anything to do with “infrastructure,” the liberals’ magic word. So, are liberals cowed at being not just wrong, but ghoulishly wrong? Not a bit of it. It doesn’t matter what the question is, the liberal’s answer is always the same: money. Specifically, government money.

Read it. And watch the video.

Parkour is what Batman does to relax.

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I’m sure you’re losing sleep over that as much as I am. The Guardian is one of the more self-parodic Voices of the Crust (not as bad as MSNBC, but MSNBC are professionals), and I await the inevitable headline ‘Men Land On Mars, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.’

Luckily the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers, but no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery or oppression. It’s just what we do.

If by ‘we’ he means the Left, he’s certainly correct. But, to paraphrase Marcellus Wallace, ‘there is no we.’

Read it. And watch the video, of course.

The thought would never have ocurred to me, but, then, of course, I’m not an ‘international scientist’.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Perfect for your foodie friends who think that ‘sea salt’ somehow has magical properties that will, in some ineffable way, save the planet.

(Hey, they laughed at the Pet Rock, too, but that guy made a lot of money.)

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This is what we’ve descended to when it comes to cultural engagement: A charity group that raises millions of dollars annually to fight AIDS has canceled a fundraiser because the gay guys who own the club hosted a reception with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The Gaystapo never forgives, and it never forgets.

This looks like a case of cutting off your, uh, whatever, to spite, you know, whatever….

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Bike-share has a promising role to play in city transit networks, but its inability to reach low-income users has become an unsettling problem—and it’s a problem that appears to be growing. Take the latest member survey from Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C. (spotted by Mobility Lab). Half of the roughly 3,500 survey respondents reported having six-figure incomes:

CityLab is pretty much a Voice of the Crust devoted to SWPL problems, but my first thought is that if they put the bikes where ‘low-income users’ could get them, said low-income users would just steal the damned bikes and sell them to somebody for cash toward buying a car. Bikes tend to be a SWPL affectation in which people on limited incomes can’t afford to indulge.

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His rich NIMBY neighbors won’t allow him to build a movie studio so he’s going to put poor people there instead. Pass the popcorn.

(Of course, ‘poor’ for Marin County means ‘worth less than a billion dollars’ so it won’t be all that dramatic.)

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Rather like a tongue exploring a gap where a tooth once was.

Would that every RINO had the honesty to come out of the political closet. (Yeah, Lindsay Graham, I’m lookin’ at you.)

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Police arrested the man who fired shots outside a Queens casino after a chaotic brawl erupted due to long daiquiri lines, police sources said.

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The International Edible Book Festival is an annual event usually held on or around April 1, which is also known as Edible Book Day.The global event has been celebrated since 2000 in various parts of the world, where “edible books” are created, displayed, and small events are held. The creations are photographed and then consumed. Regular contributors to the site are groups from Australia, Brazil, India, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, The Netherlands, Russia, and Hong Kong. The event was initiated by Judith A. Hoffberg and Béatrice Coron in 2000.

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The punchlines write themselves on this one, and that’s exactly what’s happening. Hillary Clinton, soon to announce her candidacy for president, spoke last night before the American Camp Association in New Jersey. In an effort to try to connect with her audience, she said, “We really need to have camps for adults. … None of the serious stuff. None of the life challenge stuff. More fun. I think we have a huge ‘fun deficit’ in America.”

I guess laughing at the Clintons isn’t enough.

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Be the first on your block to suggest that you ought to be subtracted from the gene pool.

Third World Problem.

The issue of Gulf royals coming to Pakistan to hunt with falcons is becoming increasingly controversial.

Well. There it is.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

With Jeb Bush much in the news, it’s worth recalling how central to the Bush Dynasty has been the goal of integrating Mexico into the North American economy ever since 1953 when George H.W. Bush co-founded the Zapata Corporation. (It’s not surprising that George W. Bush named his little oil company Arbusto, or Bush in Spanish.)

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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Mark Oberholtzer wasn’t following the Syrian militant group Jabhat Ansar al-Din on Twitter. So when they tweeted a picture of a Ford pickup in December with an anti-aircraft gun blazing from the truck bed, he probably missed it.

Until someone mentioned to him that it was his truck. Or rather, it was a truck previously owned by his plumbing company. The jihadists hadn’t bothered to remove the decal from the door for Mark-1 Plumbing, complete with his phone number, before sending out the action shot on social media.

Texas sets the standard for bad-ass.

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Feel free to laugh uproariously.

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Totally coincidental, I’m sure. (But somewhere there’s an architect laughing his ass off….)

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Really. Just … read it.

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They’ll need Chris Hemsworth for the opening, of course.

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Feel free to barf at the thought. I did.

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A vacationing woman accepted her boyfriend’s romantic marriage proposal in a picture-perfect cliffside setting in Ibiza — only to fall off the edge to her death as she jumped up and down for joy.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The Bay Area has never been perceived as religious: a 2012 Gallup poll found that fewer than a quarter of residents identify as “very religious” (defined as going to church weekly), as opposed to 40% of the nation as a whole. High salaries have drawn droves of well-educated millennials to the booming tech sector, which correlates with lower religious sentiment. So far afield from the Bible belt, the region is in fact seen as hospitable to all forms of old testament abominations: fornication, paganism – even sodomy.

If you look around, however, you’ll notice a bumper crop of newer Christian ministries that, upon superficial glance, could pass for any other Bay Area start-up: glossy web design, well-curated social accounts and yes, free coffee promotions. County-level statistics substantiate this: numbers from the Association of Religion Data Archives show that several large Protestant denominations have grown in San Francisco County in recent years.

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The finding was made when a landlord claimed his tenant had ruined a marble floor by sprinkling it with urine.

The disgruntled landlord tried to retain a €3,000 (£2,300) deposit for the damage allegedly caused by his guest’s acidic spillage.

But Judge Stefan Hank today ruled that men who stand up to relieve themselves cannot be held to account for any collateral damage.

And there was much rejoicing.

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The administration has acknowledged that it erred by not participating in a meaningful way in the giant pro-free speech demonstration in Paris, so it has tried to make amends by sending John Kerry to France. Apparently thinking that he needed reinforcements to convey a full sense of the administration’s symbolic support, Kerry brought along…James Taylor.

…

God only knows what the French made of this. Maybe James Taylor is still popular there, like Jerry Lewis.

As Tom Lehrer said when describing the ‘Folksong Army’: ‘They may have won all the battles — but we had all the good songs!’

(Now just think about what kind of President Kerry would have been…. America really dodged a bullet there.)

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Well, you know, the winter nights are long, and there really isn’t a lot to do….

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An online auction to join a man on his honeymoon after he split with his fiancée has reached £1,800.

Instead of cancelling his holiday for two to the Dominican Republic, John Whitbread decided to offer the chance to join him to the highest eBay bidder.

After an “overwhelming” response from 65 bidders, he has said he will donate some of the money to charity.

The Other McCain does a fisking.

Lisa Bonos (@lisabonos) has published a column headlined “How to find a feminist boyfriend” that reads like an Onion parody….

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George P. Bush was sworn in Friday as Texas land commissioner. The 38-year-old political newcomer sat next to his father in the Texas Senate while formally taking the reins of the state agency that oversees vast oil and mineral rights.

The next generation of Bush volunteers to serve as the butt of ‘progressive’ straw-men for the rest of his life.

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I can find no record of any baby being taken from a hospital because its birth was announced right after midnight on New Year’s Eve. But that doesn’t stop the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—funded, in part, by government dollars—from turning a joyous event into one requiring new oversight and worry.

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An Illinois woman is seeking to trademark the dying last words of the New York City man who gasped “I can’t breathe” while being arrested by NYPD cops for selling loose cigarettes.

In a December 13 application, Catherine Crump petitioned the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the phrase for use on hoodies and t-shirts for men, women, boys, girls, and infants.

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Three similar entrepreneurs have filed to trademark the phrase “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” for use on clothing items. Each of those USPTO applications was filed within three weeks of the August 9 death of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot to death by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Everybody knows that the best part about CSPAN is the unpredictable nature of the show’s call-in segments, where regular hosts and guests do an admirable job of fielding unusual questions with no advance warning. But brothers Brad and Dallas Woodhouse are now the champions of awkward CSPAN calls, after the politically divided brothers ended up taking a call from their mom.

“Oh God, it’s mom,” Dallas Woodhouse said as soon as “Joy” from North Carolina started to speak.

Know how they feel.

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As Scott Shackford noted last week, Google News is pulling out of Spain after the newspaper industry there, represented by the Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles (AEDE) successfully lobbied to force newspapers to charge Google for the inclusion of their content in news search results. Yes, really. Since Google News makes no money, Google found this a bit rich and decided to close shop rather than hemorrhage cash for the privilege of including Spanish newspaper results. Now, the AEDE wants Spanish and European Union government officials to force Google to keep the local edition of Google News operating. And, presumably, paying newspapers.

Franco may be dead, but the Fascist spirit apparently lives on.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported “27,483 unintentional fall deaths” in 2011 alone. That is 27,460.5 more deaths each year via unintentional falls than “school shootings,” yet Everytown is pulling out all stops to make America safer by pushing more gun control.

Well, then, let’s just ban heights. Nothing easier. IT’S FOR THE CHILDREN!

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Two guys behind the YouTube channel lifehunterstv sliced McDonald’s McNuggets and burgers into bite-size pieces and served them with toothpicks on a white platter. They told the conference attendees that the food was a sampling from their “high-end” restaurant’s menu.

…

One attendee called the food “nice and firm” and said it had “a good bite.”

Another said it “rolls around the tongue nicely,” and “if it were wine, I’d say it’s fine.”

There are times when ‘Heh’ seems inadequate.

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This sort of thing (and this sort of people) is why I don’t practice law.

It is also, I think, why politics is full of lawyers — the only career field where you can make a lot of money by being absurd.

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Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho has talked of her discomfort that the internet is made by humans who have a penis.

The former Martha Lane Fox, CBE, told the Radio Academy’s Radio Festival in Salford that she felt uneasy “that something that is now fundamental, like the water, for everybody’s daily life has been entirely produced by men.”

Alas, she’s right. Unlike Cuban cigars, which according to legend are rolled on the thighs of (female) virgins, internet packets arrive through a brutal, phallus-dominated patriarchy. It’s enough to make anyone queasy.

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Only Hillary Clinton can take a $225,000 speaking fee from a public university and then, in the speech, lament how high the cost of higher education is.

Your tax dollars at work.

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Unfortunately, for many of our remote ancestors, the absence of effective transportation, such as railroads and container ships, meant that they had no choice but to survive on a local diet and, in the process, put all their agricultural eggs into one geographical basket. This was always a recipe for disaster. The Roman poet Virgil in his Georgics described how, in bad years, weeds invaded the land, voles and mice spoiled the threshing floor, cranes and geese attacked the crops, goats ate the young vines, and moles, toads and ants each feasted on or undermined the farmer’s work. (Virgil could also have discussed fungus, insect pests and other problems.) Of course, whatever survived these pests could be damaged or wiped out by summer droughts and winter windstorms, as well as snow, hail or heavy rain. Even in good years, Virgil observed, a field might be accidentally set on fire.

No matter the location or agricultural system, local food for local people not only meant that most people struggled with famine and malnutrition – it also meant many were well aware of the undomesticated local plants they could use as either supplementary or emergency food sources. In the words of economic historian Peter Garnsey: ‘Peasants have always been systematic foragers on uncultivated land [including fallow fields], in woods, marshes and rivers.’ (1) Indeed, for the average European peasant, with the exception of poisonous or very bitter plants, ‘anything that grew went into the pot, even primrose and strawberry leaves’ (2). According to a recent survey, despite their absence from official statistics and the ‘routine underestimation’ of their importance, many ‘wild foods’ are still ‘actively managed’ by nearly one billion people whose annual income would probably not pay for one evening’s dining at NOMA or Coi.

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The fact that food snobs now need to revert back to the famine foods of old should not be viewed as an indictment of our modern food production system, but rather as astounding proof that, today, that system feeds middle-class consumers better than most kings in history. Far from wearing sustainable adornments, all the emperors of SOLE food really offer us in the end is an unaffordable witch brew that caters to the palates of people with too much time and money on their hands.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Cathy Brennan’s Twitter account @GIDWatch got suspended Tuesday because Brennan, a radical lesbian feminist, began “naming names” of those who had signed a petition to end the women-only policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival. Transgender activists have been attempting to take over feminist events and organizations, claiming that the fact that they were born with penises and XY chromosomes should not prevent them from being accepted as “lesbian feminists” even if they have not undergone surgery.