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Well, actually, they are. Like similar posturing on the left, with the Occupy Whatever crowd, this is receiving a lot more attention than it deserves. There is a greater chance of the Mayan end-of-the-world scenario actually happening than this one.

The White House has received petitions from all 50 states – signed by nearly 750,000 citizens asking permission to secede from the United States. A White House spokesman did not return calls seeking comment.

Going to show that there are silly people everywhere. But we knew that.

UPDATE: More silliness from Slate.

My home state is an odds-on favorite to stick it to the federal man in a secession battle in part because it’s been spoiling for such a fight since Reconstruction. But it’s not just the state’s vaunted independent streak that gives it a leg up: Thanks to a strange quirk of its original annexation agreement, Texas may actually be in a slightly better position than any of the other 49 states to back up its tough-guy talk.

This myth pops up every time ‘native Texans’ get together. The status of Texas within the United States is not governed by the original annexation agreements but by the Act that readmitted Texas to the Union in 1870, which puts it on the same footing as every other state. I suppose that it should surprise anyone that a ‘journalist’ would get this wrong; pretty much everyone else does.

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Last week, we warned of the impending “Million Puppet March,” a pro-public-broadcasting and anti-Mitt Romney demonstration whose goal “is to preserve the inalienable right of Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ira Glass, and other folks to receive federal subsidies that are simultaneously so small as to be meaningless and so vast as to be irreplaceable.”

The protest happened yesterday and drew “hundred” of folks, many clad in Sesame Street-themed garb. The semi-inspired chant, “El-Mo, We Won’t Go!” rang through the air. “We’re just making it clear that public media matters and it’s something that we want to see supported and we still want to see federal funding of,” said one of the organizers.

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You can find anything on the Internet. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes not so much.

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

I prefer the traditional term FNG.

Undoubtedly, the school will now call for the city name to be changed, since Chapel Hill sounds too Christian.

No doubt that’s the next step.

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 Maneesh Sethi placed an advert on the classified website Craigslist to recruit someone willing to monitor what he was looking at on his laptop.

The computer expert and writer, from San Francisco, now pays a female employee $8 (£5) an hour to strike him in the face if she spots him wasting time on social media.

Mr Seethi claims the unusual motivational system has helped him boost his productivity from just 35 per cent to around 98 per cent during the working day.

I suspect that he has larger issues than ‘productivity’.

Read it. And watch the video … if you dare.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

But ya gotta love Australians.

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Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions in the overall use of student suspensions; suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” See Agreement to Resolve Oakland Unified School District, OCR Case No. 09125001, page 14, Section VIII(c)(iii). These “targeted reductions” are racial quotas in all but name. (“Disparate impact” is when a process affects one racial group more than another, despite having no racist motive, such as when whites have higher average scores than minorities on a standardized test.)

Welcome to our modern, race-blind society, where the content of your character is directly correlated to the color of your skin, by government decree. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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 A set of “master keys” to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay last month, leaving many public commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis.

The thing I find amusing is that the blog post (echoing the newspaper article) published a convenient photograph showing the keys and a legend describing what they do.

Wouldn’t it be fun to make a set for yourself? The two Yale keys appear to be standard models. From the published specs and the photograph it wouldn’t be at all difficult to create a set with the proper measurements from metal stock using appropriate tools (utter the magic work ‘Dremel’….).

I wonder whether any of this occurred to the person who wrote the blog post? Or the newspaper article?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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1. The economy is in the toilet, and the Democrats are repeatedly pulling the flush lever.

2. Our civilization faces an existential threat (as it has for the last 1400 years) from an aggressively expansionist oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, and our government is treating it as if it were a skin rash.

3. Our political system is so arranged that the surest way to get elected is to be more narcissistic and corrupt than your opponent.

What is the chief focus of the Libertarian Presidential candidate? The ‘war on weed’ — as if there were people out there who will certainly die unless they are allowed to smoke cannabis.

Tom Clancy once said that the reason truth is stranger than fiction is because fiction has to be believable.

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 Parents have been banned from watching their children compete at sports unless they have been vetted by police.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in California.

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I am not making this up.

I have this image of a stuffed penguin with an eye-patch and a parrot perched on his head….

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Silver Lake takes the top spot on Forbes’ inaugural list of America’s Best Hipster Neighborhoods. Nestled between Echo Park and Los Feliz, the trendy community boasts some of the nation’s most lauded food trucks and farmers markets, a multicultural blend of residents with eclectic professions, and a booming arts scene. Even the buildings exude an avant garde aesthetic a hipster could love: Silver Lake is home to some of the most celebrated modernist architecture in the country, including Richard Neutra’s VDL Research House and John Lautner’s Silvertop.

Now go wash your hands.

Check it out.

Granted, not as cool as a billion dollars, but still pretty cool.

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There was an unusual event in Haifa the other day. Muhammad Sharif Odeh, the leader of the Israeli community of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, announced the 25th anniversary of an Ahmadiyya-sponsored translation into Yiddish of selections from the Quran. Called by Haifa’s Jewish mayor, Yona Yahav, the “Reform Jews of Islam,” the Ahmadiyyas, who claim tens of millions of followers around the world, are among the most moderate of Muslims. Their Yiddish Quran project, the only one of its kind, represents a reaching out to Jews — a touchingly naive one, it must be said, since just about the only native Yiddish speakers left are Haredim, who are about as likely to read the Quran as they are to replace their black hats with Arab keffiyehs. (And who could, in any case, read the Quran in the full Hebrew translations that already exist.)

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 Paul and Rachel Chandler have set sail to restart their interrupted tour around the world aboard the same boat on which they were kidnapped by Somali pirates.

Some people just can’t take a hint.

Steve Sailer sometimes likes to point and laugh.

 Matthew Yglesias points out that the top 12 executives are all white men at Apple (which, in less than a decade and a half, has gone from down-and-out to the world’s highest stock market valuation). He goes on to suggest how to begin fixing Apple’s problem.

Thank God I sold all my Apple stock in 1999 and used the money to buy Hewlett-Packard stock because HP had appointed Carly Fiorina CEO. As we all know, white men cannot begin to grasp the diverse needs of women and people of color, so how can they sell them computers?

And he’s not very shy about it, either.

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The only open question is whether they will be forced to join the SEIU first — one must, after all, follow tradition.

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Hunter Spanjer uses the standard S.E.E., Signing Exact English. He crosses his index and middle fingers and waves them slightly to signify his name. And, Grand Island Public Schools’ policy forbids any “instrument” that “looks like a weapon,” reported NCN (see video above).

Stupid rules enforced by stupid people = extremely stupid results.

Mommas, don’t send your babies to government schools.

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WASHINGTON — The District of Columbia water and sewer authority is asking Congress to serve tap water instead of bottled water at the presidential inauguration.

The authority’s general manager yesterday wrote to New York Sen. Charles Schumer, saying tap water costs a penny a gallon while bottled water costs 100 times more and is environmentally harmful.

Well, Democrats are down on things that are environmentally harmful, aren’t they? Seems like a slam-dunk.

Schumer (D-NY) announced this month that New York-based Saratoga Springs Water will supply H20 for the inauguration.

Oh, I forgot — principles be damned when there’s some pork to be barreled. Can’t buy campaign contributions with tap water.

Bottled-water foes say that option creates more waste and pollution from trucking the water bottles.

Well, yeah. Let’s see if Senator Schumer finds that argument convincing. (Prediction: Not)

DC Water General Manager George Hawkins says that if bottled water is served, the authority is willing to provide reusable water bottles to lawmakers wanting to show their support for public- water systems and the environment.

Ah, the magic compromise. We’ll be happy to harm the environment, but in an environmentally-friendly way. That’s the modern Democrat party for you.

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A British man who has lived as an Apache Indian for the past 20 years will be allowed to keep badger paws and eagle wings in his home after charges against him were dropped.

Father-of-six Mangas Colaradas, 60, was due to stand trial tomorrow for keeping protected wild animal parts in his semi-detached home filled with the trappings of his Native American lifestyle.

But brave Mangas vowed to fight the court case on the grounds that it is part of his Apache lifestyle – even though he lives in a three-bed semi in Swansea, South Wales.

Life imitates Monty Python.

JUDITH: Here! I– I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies.

FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

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University of Colorado Chancellor Phil DiStefano notified the Boulder campus faculty Tuesday afternoon that professors “do not have the right to shut down a class or refuse to teach” should they learn that one of their students is lawfully carrying a gun under a concealed-carry permit.

And, DiStefano added, any faculty members who do so will be in violation of their contracts and face disciplinary action.

DiStefano’s message comes a day after Professor Jerry Peterson, chairman of the Boulder Faculty Assembly, told the Daily Camera that, under his own “personal policy,” he plans to cancel class if he ever learns any of his students are carrying firearms. A Colorado Supreme Court ruling this spring overturned CU’s Boulder campus gun ban, and university officials say that students with conceal-carry permits are allowed to bring guns into classrooms and labs.

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Finding the right words, however, can often be a tricky proposition. “There are words that can’t be translated,” Mozilla’s Mexico representative Julio Gómez told CNNMéxico. “In Maya, file doesn’t exist. Tab doesn’t exist.” Gómez continues to explain that the group may keep foreign words as-is, or find other terms to represent the same ideas. In addition to software localization, it’s believed that the effort could allow Maya speakers to “recover their identity and their cultural heritage,” according to Wikimedia México president Iván Martínez.

I’m trying to think of something that would be a more complete waste of time and I’m not coming up with anything.

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Rome’s Fiumicino airport has defended its security procedures after a drunk Norwegian tourist fell asleep on a baggage belt and travelled 160 feet before being identified by an X-ray scanner.

Hey, it could happen to anybody….

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Australia’s hotel industry has been rocked by a court’s ruling that a prostitute was illegally discriminated against by a motel owner who refused to rent her a room to work from.

Gotta love Australians.

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Much like watching Barbra Streisand drive her SUV to her private plane to jet off to Europe for a Climate Change conference, these internecine struggles among the SWPL Crust offer some of the most amusing political ironies in history.

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Which one is the girl? Oh, right, the one with the Adam’s apple.

Despite many creative ideas, Brendan Greene-Walsh and Leila Rathert-Knowles have yet to hit on a good solution for their last name, should they get married.

My heart breaks for them. I’m surprised that they decided to have a common married last name. How sexist.

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You knew it had to happen.

We live in a litigious society. That’s not a secret. So it’s no surprise that, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado Batman shootings, lawsuits will be filed. But as always the question is: who do you sue? Well, if the linked TMZ article is accurate, Torrence Brown Jr., who was in the theater, but not directly injured (though a friend of his was killed), has lawyered up, hiring an attorney named Donald Karpel to sue Warner Bros. for making the movie too violent. He’s also apparently planning to sue the theater for not properly guarding the emergency exit, which is apparently where Holmes left and re-entered with the weapons. Oh yeah, and the doctors of shooter James Holmes for not properly monitoring him.

Actually, I’d be inclined to sue the theater for making it a ‘gun free zone’. But that’s me. And I suppose that the theater doesn’t have pockets deep enough to make a really fat target.

This certainly seems like a frivolous lawsuit. Going after Warner Bros.? For what? That’s likely to get laughed out of court. This seems like a clear case of a “Steve Dallas lawsuit,” named for the famous Bloom County comic strip in which lawyer Steve Dallas gets beat up by Sean Penn after trying to take a photograph of the star. He then explains why the proper target of a lawsuit is not Sean Penn, but the “Nikolta Camera” company, because “a major corporation with gobs of liquid cash … was criminally negligent in not putting stickers on their camera which read, ‘warning: physical injury may result from photographing psychopathic Hollywood hotheads.”

Since Mr Brown is a Person of Color and the shooter was a Person of Pallor, I’m astonished that he didn’t add a layer of alleged racism to his suit. (Hey, there’s still time to add it later. When the Crust keeps telling you you’re a victim, you tend to believe them and see oppressors everywhere.)

The good news is that Warner Brothers can afford some pretty fancypants lawyers, certainly better than anybody Mr Brown might engage. The bad news is that I’m sure Mr Brown’s lawyer is counting (probably accurately) on Warner Bros. being willing to pay them a substantial-but-to-a-megacorp-trivial sum to go away.

No doubt some future high school guidance counselor will include among his recommended career plans ‘attend a public function that is shot up by some deranged wacko and then sue everyone in the same ZIP code’. It’s certainly more likely than hitting the big time in professional sports, and life in the ge-hetto doesn’t offer a lot of options in the Obama Economy.

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Plans for a full-size replica of the Western Wall in Jerusalem are being drawn up in Wichita, Kan. But women who have had abortions — rather than Jews — are the target audience.

The proposed replica is part of a monumental “International Pro-Life Memorial and National Life Center” being planned by evangelical activists in Wichita’s anti-abortion community. The envisioned shrine is meant to promote and solidify Wichita’s reputation as the city in America that is most hostile to abortion, say the activists. The project planners have decided that the most vivid way to invoke the scale of the abortion tragedy, as they see it, is to reference Jewish suffering — embodied in their minds by the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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The vehicles come in two models currently, The Elf which can hold up to 150lbs, and the TruckIt, which can handle an 800lb payload. Both have solar charged batteries that can last for 30 miles before switching to pedaling mode, and they have turn signals, brake lights and front headlights. They even have side mirrors.

Great for a Soap Box Derby.

It’s one of those products that — given the right financing and marketing — could be completely disruptive in Urban areas.

Message: Hey, there’s government money available for ‘green’ products! Let’s go get us some!

‘Financing’ : Getting a sufficiently high government subsidy. ‘Marketing’ : Hiring the right lobbyists to get on the gravy train. ‘Completely disruptive’ : the effect on your family budget when taxes go through the roof to pay for this horseshit.

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Angers, in the Loire valley, was the capital of Anjou province and the geographical base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 until 1485, providing some of the most celebrated monarchs in British history, including Richard the Lionheart and Henry V.

But when Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, was executed for treason in the Tower of London in 1499, the house’s legitimate male line came to an end. “As redress for the execution of Edward, Angers today demands that the Crown Jewels of England be transferred to Angers,” reads a petition posted on the city’s official website.

Fine. They can give back the western half of modern France — including the city of Anger, and it’s surrounding district — that was at one time the possession of the English royal family.

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Ebonics comes to Canada.

Progressives delight in constantly and arbitrarily reengineering the English language. This rigged game of musical chairs ensures that we reactionary racist rubes always land on our rhetorical butts.

So when black Torontonians and their liberal enablers started clamoring for “Africentric” schools a few years back, the local paper was obliged to run a helpful sidebar explaining why the right word wasn’t “Afrocentric” anymore:

“[I]t’s African-centered education, and there is no “o” in the word Africa,” said Dr. Patrick Kakembo, director of the African Canadian Services in Nova Scotia. “Why should it be Afro? That’s a hair-do.”

Now you know.

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Our Olympic heroes will be headed off to London this month — looking as if they’re decked out for a Hamptons lawn party.

Ralph Lauren yesterday unveiled the preppy parade uniforms that Team USA members will wear at the July 27 opening ceremony, stirring an uproar over pricey duds fit for a regatta.

The outfits include blue blazers, cream-colored trousers, white skirts — and berets.

“2012 US Olympic team is wearing berets. Really? America?” tweeted John Lee Rudnicki, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. “How many people in the US have you ever seen wear a beret? Five?”

“What the France?” tweeted Greg “Hollea” Rachal, a political activist and former Jacksonville, Fla., City Council candidate.

The company said the outfits embody “the spirit of American athleticism and sportsmanship.”

Sure, I believe that. I think they rather embody the spirit of Ralph Lauren’s homosexuality.

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Of course: you have to present a “government-issued photo I.D. (such as a driver’s license).”

Hey, wouldn’t want any non-colored people getting into a meeting of our explicitly racist organization.

We noted the same thing when Holder traveled to Texas to speak at the LBJ Library on the evils of voter ID. Also when Michelle Obama did a book signing. Do you think you can get anywhere near Michelle Obama without a photo ID? Of course not. And, needless to say, you can’t set foot inside Eric Holder’s Justice Department without a photo ID.

Funny how that works.

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Movies that show actors smoking tobacco should automatically earn an R rating in order to minimize copycat smoking among impressionable tweens and teenagers, the authors of a new study suggest.

PG-13 films account for nearly two-thirds of the smoking scenes adolescents see on the big screen, according to the two-year study, which surveyed roughly 5,000 children ages 10 to 14 about the movies they’d seen and whether they’d ever tried a cigarette.

Smoking in PG-13 films — including background shots and other passing instances — was just as strongly linked with real-world experimentation as the smoking in R-rated films. For every 500 smoking scenes a child saw in PG-13 movies, his or her likelihood of trying cigarettes increased by 49%. The comparable figure for R-rated movies was 33%, a statistically negligible difference.

This, of course, presumes that anybody pays any attention to the ratings on movies. The number of films that are seen ‘on the big screen’ as opposed to Netflix or other online providers (not to mention just buying the damned thing from Amazon, who will cheerfully sell you an R-rated movie without asking your age) makes this exercise in optimism Just Another Crustian Inconvenience, producing a warm fuzzy feeling on the part of the ruling class without any effect in the real world.

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Police narrowly escaped an undressing after stumbling into a rowdy hens’ night in northern Australia where they were mistaken for strippers by the bride-to-be and her friends.

Gotta love Australians.

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Here’s an odd one. The School of Economics and Management in Essen, Germany is suing former student, Marcel Pohl, for graduating too quickly. You see, he finished all of the necessary exams for both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 20 months — representing three semesters. Normally, it takes students 11 semesters, and the school feels ripped off. The complaint is that, even though they charge per semester, what they’re really charging for is the degree, and Pohl didn’t pay enough for his. So they want another €3,000.

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 Parents of students at England’s Gartocham Primary School were excited to learn that Alan Bell, the chief starter of the London Olympics, would be firing his starter’s pistol for races at the school’s annual sports day. Local health and safety officials were not excited. They banned Bell from firing the pistol, saying it could frighten the children.

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You knew it was coming.

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Although Islam and black nationalism share a flame-belching, sword-swinging hatred for Western Civ, it’s an odd pairing when you consider history. American blacks who dump Christianity and shack up with Islam seem to think they’re flipping the bird at the creed that enslaved their ancestors, but they’re only swapping it for a religion that has enslaved their ancestors for far longer.

Like Jews joining the Nazi party because they think that America is being mean to them. There are times when ‘clueless’ is entirely inadequate to describe the situation.

Many historians harp about how the Arab slave trade was far more humane than the transatlantic slaving biz. If only for spite, I’ll focus on what was far worse about it.

For starters, it predated the transatlantic slave trade by at least 800 years and has outlived it for 150 years and counting. Whereas the bloodthirsty hallucinating pedophile sandworm Muhammad (c. 570-632) owned both male and female black slaves, European explorers didn’t even begin dipping their beaks into the African human-cattle trade in large numbers until the 1500s.

Roughly three centuries later, Europeans and their American descendants took it upon themselves to put the kibosh on slavery. In contrast with Christendom, there was never a concerted Arabic abolition movement, and slavery was only formally outlawed in the Islamic world due to intense outside pressure. But slavery still openly thrives in places such as Mauritania and, on the downlow, throughout much of Africa and the Middle East.

If you count human bodies equally, the Arab slave trade likely shackled at least as many Africans as the transatlantic trade and possibly twice as many. Although early documentation is scarce due in part to a deafening lack of written languages below the Sahara, historical estimates range from a low of eight million to a high of 25 million. In contrast, the general consensus is that around 11 million Africans were transported to the New World—yet only a mere 5% of those wound up in what is now the USA, although the USA gets 100% of the guilt-tripping.

History is such an inconvenient thing for the ‘progressive’ mind….

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A steal at $4.6 million. Be the first on your coast….

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Part of it was that I was simply burnt out. I had spent the better part of 10 years either studying computer science in college or working as a professional software engineer (or both), and I suddenly decided I wanted to experience life outside the cubicle. Living in the woods was a childhood dream of mine, and it seemed like a good time to realize that dream.

But, the other part was that I started to see some fundamental issues with the way the industry and our society are structured. At a personal level, I realized that striving for success and accomplishment didn’t bring me any closer to happiness. And at a societal level, it occurred to me that a system predicated on infinite growth simply was not sustainable. So, I decided to step back, slow down, and rethink my life and my priorities.

Perhaps he’ll be eaten by a bear. We can only hope.

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I guess some Communists are more equal than others.

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Now conservationists have urged police to crack down on an explosion in illegal poaching of Roman snails after discovering they were being gathered up en masse to meet a grisly, buttery end in local French restaurants.

Frankly, if I knew that people were hoovering up local snails to sell to French restaurants, I’d be loathe to stand in their way. But that’s me.

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A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth.

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‘Yasser Lopez’? I guess we know what politics his parents espouse.

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A Russian ship believed to be carrying helicopters and missiles for Syria has been effectively stopped in its tracks off the coast of Scotland after its insurance was cancelled at the behest of the British government.

There’s a First World solution to a Third World problem.

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You’ve read all the rest, now read the best….

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Think of it as evolution in action.