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So when Anderson Cooper asked Hillary, “How would you not be a third term of President Obama?” the question couldn’t have been unanticipated. Many are saying that Hillary performed well last night–I spent the evening at a conservative event and didn’t watch the debate–but this response strikes me as awful. The main difference, Hillary says, is that she is a woman. Well, all right then!

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Poodle Roo the rooster is partially deaf and blind, and he was bullied by the other birds on his farm. But now, the kind creature has found a special role as the farm’s resident nurse and provides comfort to injured animals.

I am not making this up.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Many of the movies and TV shows that emerge from Hollywood are simply unwatchable because so many people in the industry place liberal activism ahead of every other consideration.

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The University of Manchester has banned feminist activist Julie Bindel from speaking at a panel on feminism’s free-speech problem.

The Manchester Students’ Union (SU) flagged Bindel’s appearance at the event—titled “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?”—as a potential breach of the school’s “safe space” policy. “After reviewing the request in more detail, the Students’ Union has decided to deny this request based on Bindel’s views and comments towards trans people, which we believe could incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students,” SU said in a statement.

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Victory of the Proletariat Zuckerberg has sort of a ring to it.

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When Frank Hudock, 35, a restaurant manager in the Chicago area, first told his wife, Jennifer Hudock, 30, an executive assistant, that his grandparents wanted them to name their son Frank, per generations of family tradition, her response was, “That’s never going to happen.”

They had just decided on a name they both agreed on — Max — after arguing about dozens of others, and that had been a big relief.

But then the grandparents threw in a sweetener: an offer of $10,000 in exchange for choosing Frank.

Ms. Hudock’s company didn’t have a maternity leave policy, and she wasn’t going to get paid for several months. She agreed to think it over.

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Early this past week, teacher Michael Frassetto led a walk-out-of-class protest at the Allentown (Pennsylvania) School District because of the district’s alleged disdain for minority students.

…

Frassetto, who “twice applied for jobs in Allentown,” currently teaches at the Medical Academy Charter School. He did not have his contract renewed for this year at the Roberto Clemente Charter School.

Gee, I wonder why?

He and his protesters called for “a summer employment program and a representative on the school board who is chosen by the students.” They also want Superintendent Russ Mayo’s resignation.

But a good portion of the student “activists” were more excited about missing class — and eventually heading home and/or getting some grub….

There’s a Doonesbury cartoon in there somewhere.

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Tolbert said the boys got into a staring match with a female student last school year.

“He was playing a game with her. He said she was laughing. They were engaged. When she finally giggled and said stop. He stopped,” Tolbert said.

The female student was cited in court papers as saying she also stared at the boys.

However, the Cincinnati Archdiocese said the 12-year-old boys were suspended for one day after the girl’s parents complained.

Even Catholic schools aren’t safe from the rot nowadays.

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About 140 geography professors have added their name to a “manifesto” calling on the Association of American Geographers to diversify its conference panels, decrying them as too white and male.

“Geography is still predominantly white and male, but there are far more women and people of color than in previous decades,” it states. “… Yet this shift in the racial and gender composition of the field is often not fully reflected at key sites and moments, including the composition of and attendance at conference panels, inclusion in syllabi and special issues, citations, and the hiring, evaluation, and promotion of faculty.”

Just when you think they’ve jumped the shark, they find a bigger one.

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I’m with the black guy on this one.

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Why? Because they’re “racist” of course.

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It is the drink of choice for the health-conscious, but doctors have warned of the hidden dangers of green tea after a teenage girl who drank three cups a day for three months contracted acute hepatitis.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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I guess he looked at their campaigns and said ‘How hard could it be?’.

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We missed noting the story reported in the Washington Post late last week about an aspiring poet named Michael Derrick Hudson of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was having trouble getting his poetry accepted in any poetry journals. So what did he do? Pretended to be Chinese….

…

I’ve been thinking for a while that if people can self-identify as anything (gender or race) that they want, then everyone should start declaring themselves to be a racial minority (except Asian—the only officially disfavored minority) on college applications, mortgage loan applications, Census forms, etc, until this whole corrupt edifice collapses.

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Sort of a self-correcting problem.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Sort of a self-correcting problem.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

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The German college student gave up her apartment in spring. “It all started with a dispute I had with my landlord,” Müller told The Washington Post via e-mail. “I instantly decided I didn’t want to live there anymore — and then I realized: Actually, I didn’t want to live anywhere anymore.”

Instead, she bought a subscription that allows her to board every train in the country for free. Now, Müller washes her hair in the train bathroom and writes her college papers while traveling at a speed of up to 190 mph. She says that she enjoys the liberty she has experienced since she gave up her apartment. “I really feel at home on trains, and can visit so many more friends and cities. It’s like being on vacation all the time,” Müller said.

Kids, these are trained professionals — do not try this at home.

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Will Brooker is studying David Bowie by trying to live like him for a year.

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

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A group is advancing a plan to breed red heifers in Israel, according to a piece in the Times of Israel. That’s much more important than it may sound: Both Christian and Jewish holy books appear to predict the construction of a new Jewish Temple before the world ends. One of the obstacles has been that the ashes of a red heifer “without blemish or spot” are needed for certain ceremonies connected with it. It appears now that some embryos with the right genes are ready to go—if suitably kosher farms can be found for them in Israel.

I am not making this up.

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Betcha he votes Democrat.

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Is this a satire? Or straight? We report, you decide.

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Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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I thought we had pretty much covered the entire waterfront on the Rachel Dolezal fraud last month, but who knew that she’d show up for an encore, granting an interview to a clearly skeptical (but in this case how appropriately named) Vanity Fair magazine.

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All together now:

FIRST

WORLD

PROBLEM

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University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point officials have advised faculty that the term “America is a melting pot” is a racial microaggression.

The common phrase was among a list of examples of so-called racial microaggressions used “as a discussion item for some new faculty and staff training over the past few years,” a campus official told The College Fix in an email.

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I fully support her decision not to reproduce.

In fact, I’ll contribute financially toward her hysterectomy just to make absolutely sure.

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It what may be the silliest expression of triumph at the Supreme Court ruling yesterday legalizing gay marriage across the United States, Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University, ponders “Can gay marriage [lacuna] the Islamic State?”

It doesn’t take much to be a law professor these days, apparently. Certainly ideology substitutes for intelligence at a high ratio.

In addition to her post at Georgetown, Brooks is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and previously served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy and as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Good luck with that.

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The ginger cat was picked up by Cat Protection helpers in County Armagh last week. When animal welfare officers took him to the vet for a health check, it was discovered that he had been micro-chipped in Australia.

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She said: “I haven’t had a DNA test. There’s been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.”

Describing herself as “transracial” she added: “I definitely am not white. Nothing about being white describes who I am. I’m more black than I am white.”

Denial is not just a river in Egypt any more….

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“Ford Shifts Grant Making To Focus Entirely on Inequality” is the headline on the Chronicle of Philanthropy news article about the Ford Foundation, which has more than $12 billion in assets.

…

The Ford Foundation’s most recent tax return reports that Mr. Walker’s predecessor, Luis Ubinas, was paid $1,891,441 in compensation and $109,294 in benefits for his final year, a sum that “INCLUDES SALARY OF $898,571 FOR THE PERIOD FROM 01/01/13 TO 09/05/13, POST-EMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION OF $954,622 PAID IN 2013 AND PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION OF $38,248 PAID IN 2013. EXCLUDES $249,045 OF PREVIOUSLY TAXED DEFFERED COMPENSATION THAT WAS REPORTED ON A PRIOR YEAR(S) 990-PF AND PAID IN 2013.”

The foundation’s staff also included a $1.3 million a year director of investment administration, a $927,148 a year director of private equity, an $889,992 a year director of asset allocation, and a $723,728 a year director of hedge funds, according to the tax return.

Maybe if the Ford Foundation is so concerned about inequality, they might think about giving away the $12 billion — not just the income it generates, but the principal — to everyone equally, and shut down themselves, their highly paid staff and their fancy New York headquarters.

Kathy Shaidle jerks back the curtain.

That Watt-Cloutier was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore isn’t something I’d personally brag about, but it gets us to the message of her book, which is basically “global warming is melting stuff up here and wrecking our way of life.” Said way of life in Nunavut amounting to paying ten times the price for groceries flown up from the part of the country where we actually grow and make stuff, then sitting in the dark half the year getting drunk.

Carrie Saxifrage, who wrote the second book in question — The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift — also changed her name in adulthood, but for pretentious, First World white lady reasons:

She and her husband named themselves after a white flower that grows on mountaintops, and, as she recounts, “Our families didn’t know what to make of our earnest explanations of how we were claiming relationship to those pure, high places[.]”

I pray that being “high” had something to do with this couple’s rejected-Portlandia-script name-change. The notion of anyone undertaking such an endeavor stone cold sober chills the blood.

…

The very notion of “climate change memoirs” provides minutes of fun. One eagerly awaits the release of Confessions of a (Locally Sourced, Organic) Opium Eater and Go Ask Alice (About Bee Colony Collapse.)

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Maybe Obama golfing is why the economy is so bad.

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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….