Read it.

Here’s your sign….

Read it.

But that’s not the funny part – the funny part is:

An education minister in one of India’s poorest states has demanded the sacking of its examinations board chief after his two children failed for the second successive year.

Does that not sound like something that a Democrat Congresscritter would do?

Read it.

Biden: The gift that keeps on giving.

What can you say about the judgment of a man who would pick this moron as his Vice-President? (And don’t get me started on the people of Maryland, who elected him to the Senate for 36 years….)

Read it.

Read it.

ZoomLee Sheldon of Bloomington’s Indiana University is using an experience point (XP) system rather than the traditional grading method in two of his game design classes. Borrowing from RPGs and MMORPGs, students begin the program with an avatar at level one. To gain experience, students must complete assignments camouflaged as RPG-based tasks such as quests, crafting, and more. In real life, they’re making presentations, taking quizzes, and doing all that other boring school-related work.

It’s hip, and trendy. I must confess that I would strive mightily to avoid taking a class taught by somebody named ZoomLee, but I suppose that’s just me.

Read it.

For the sports star who has everything there remains one tiresome problem – how do you get hold of your millions without having to leave the house?

Read it.

Nicola Rothon and Helen Bicknell tried to register joint maternity after their daughter, Satya Amani, was born in December, but were denied permission.

The women, both 34, then filed a claim alleging discrimination and demanding that state prosecutors protect their constitutional rights.

I’m curious as to what ‘constitutional rights’ a homosexual couple could have in Ecuador.

Their baby was conceived using a sperm donor, who was a mutual friend, and Miss Rothon carried the child to term.

So Rothon is the mother and the sperm donor is the father. That’s biological fact, and (more than likely) legal fact in Ecuador (and every other jurisdiction not run by space cadets).

Whatever happened to the ‘reality-based community’ that ‘progressives’ so loudly claim they inhabit? No trace of it here.

In 2008 Ecuador adopted a new constitution extolling “families of diverse types” and recognising civil unions, giving them the same rights as marriage apart from joint adoption of children.

Aha. But do-it-yourself-parentage wouldn’t appear to be included.

The women are now considering taking the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Where would the space cadets be without these trans-national busybody organizations? For which taxpayers like you inevitably wind up paying?

Read it.

Apparently the natives are restless. Ask not for whom the drums sound — they sound for thee.

OneSTDV has a talent for finding nuggets of degeneration where you would think that the depths have already been plumbed.

You MUST watch this video, which is a definite sign of the End Times.

Read it.

Dozens of memes, no waiting.

Smitty at The Other McCain points and laughs.

President Barack Obama, who has spent almost all of his career and adult life in academia, law firms, and government, begins his criticism of Mitt Romney by declaring, “those of us who have spent time in the real world . . .”

Read it.

Read it.

In the Texas GOP Senate primary between the moderate and establishment David Dewhurst and the anti-establishment conservative Ted Cruz (who is surging in a new poll), who has been endorsed by almost every prominent conservative, including Sarah Palin, whose support often serves as the gold standard for anti-establishment conservative fighters, a third candidate who is even more liberal than Dewhurst, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert, is strangely trying to rebrand himself as a conservative.

But upon closer examination of Leppert’s record, one wonders if he even belongs in the Republican primary. Leppert’s record and associations can only make conservatives and Republicans scratch their heads. Leppert sought ACORN’s support and supported sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. He sought the support of another liberal union, SEIU. One of his first acts as Mayor was to raise taxes. And, as a high-ranking official in the failed Washington Mutual bank, Leppert said the bank had “good things ahead” merely two weeks before the bank disastrously collapsed.

Read it.

Hey, compared to Gloria Allred, Janet Reno is too hot.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Stanley Fish has some fun with ‘literary studies’.

I was pleased to see that the program confirmed an observation I made years ago: while disciplines like physics or psychology or statistics discard projects and methodologies no longer regarded as cutting edge, if you like the way literary studies were done in 1950 or even 1930, there will be a department or a journal that allows you to proceed as if nothing had happened in the last 50 or 75 years.

Absent are the titles that in the past gave reporters an opportunity to poke fun at academics who apparently had too much time on their hands. This year the only candidate for that kind of attention is “The Material History of Spider-Man,” but given the serious study devoted to comic books in a number of disciplines, there’s not much there to ridicule. By the evidence of this program at least, literary scholars are no longer gifting critics and pundits with an open invitation to skewer them.

Once again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old. If you see a session on “Digital Humanities versus New Media” and you’re not quite sure what either term means you might think you have wandered into the wrong convention. When the notes explaining the purpose of a session on “Digital Material” include the question “Is there gravity in digital worlds?”, you might be excused for wondering whether you have become a character in a science fiction movie. And when a session’s title is “Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?”, you might find yourself muttering, “Not soon enough.”

Read it.

Tell the truth: Haven’t we all wanted to do that?

Read it.

Read it.

Does being an early childhood educator turn you into a meddlesome nitwit, or are meddlesome nitwits instinctively drawn to careers in early childhood education?

It’s a tough call. One recent example of the WE KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR YOUR CHILDREN brigade overexerting itself involves a report on UK schools that are attempting to enforce a ban on best friends. In UK newspaper The Sun, educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni noted an increasingly common policy used in several UK regions whereby “teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together.” Apparently schools in Surrey, Kingston, London, and other regions of the damp ’n’ dreary isle are attempting to make it official school policy that children only play in large groups and thereby avoid the distastefully intimate and counterrevolutionary scourge known as “exclusive friendship.”

Read it. And watch the video.

Because of a mounted dashboard camera, you can watch the footage of a Quincy, Ill. municipal transit bus on its seemingly uneventful ride until an oncoming car suddenly loses control and swerves directly into its path.

If you do watch the footage, released by the plaintiff’s lawyer, see whether you would have predicted that the legal outcome of the crash would turn out to be “city pays $4 million to passenger in car that lost control.”

One of the reason why modern America sucks — all the children have been below average for the last few decades.

Read it.

She sketched a mural that showed the growth of a boy into adulthood. The last image showed a man with a woman and child and wedding rings over their heads.

Sounds pretty normal.

Some people at the school felt the mural didn’t accurately represent many students at Pilgrim and school officials decided to paint over the right side.

I guess the new normal isn’t the same as the old normal. I guess we don’t want all of those teenage slackers having kids out of wedlock to feel, you know, uncomfortable.

On Friday, Bierenday spoke with John DePetro on WPRO-AM about the mural and said she was told that her original design may be offensive or a religious symbol.

Oh, yeah, that famous offensive religious symbol, the wedding ring. It’s all clear to me now.

Read it.

I’ll refrain from expressing an opinion regarding the metrosexuals who would subscribe to a monthly grooming kit. It would be like kicking a puppy.

Read it.

The government today confirmed that an electrically powered bicycle, may not be sold in this country because its top speed exceeds legal limits.

The Turbo e-cycle’s US-based creator, Specialized, was all set to peddle its first battery-equipped bike in coming months across the EU. But with a top assisted speed of 28mph, it will not be permitted in the UK, it has emerged.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … so long as you go slowly.

See if you can pick her out.

Ignore the Farah Fawcett wannabe.

Read it.

Oh, what treacherous webs we weave….

Read it.

Read it.

Futher adventures in the quest by the Southern Poverty Law Center to keep the money rolling in.

Forget Arabs flying planes into buildings, you stupid cops and spies. The SPLC—whose dispatches are “sent to every law enforcement agency in the country”—has named the real enemy: white men unzipping their flies.

Read it.

Class action lawyers are suing the government of Iowa on an theory that “subconscious” bias resulted in employment discrimination against black employees and job-seekers. “The plaintiffs — up to 6,000 African-Americans passed over for state jobs and promotions dating back to 2003 — do not say they faced overt racism or discriminatory hiring tests.” Instead, they are relying on the work of an expert witness who is the developer of something called an Implicit Associations Test meant to measure subconscious bias.

Look out, or you’ll be placed on Double Secret Probation.

Charlie Stross has an amusing tale of the sort we all go through on a more or less perennial basis.

Let’s look at the last paragraph particularly, shall we?

Final observation: today’s monopoly status can be as lost as easily as it was gained. Virgin Media have a monopoly on cable TV in the UK … but there are rivals; Sky for satellite TV (if you live in an area where satellite dishes are permitted), digital terrestrial TV, and BT have upgraded their phone network to the point where TV-over-ADSL services such as BT Vision become practical. The instant I can get the channels this household needs from some organization other than Virgin I will be out of that contract. And all because they stuck after-sales technical support in the wrong column of the balance sheet — as a liability, rather than an infrastructure investment.

So why is this significant? Because Charlie Stross is a socialist, and rather tiresome about it; particularly in his bad-mouthing of capitalism and all its works. And yet the competition and free markets that are the distinguishing characteristics of capitalism, and that invariably disappear in socialist systems, is what he loudly wants — and, presumably, would be the first to vote to get rid of if he got the chance. There’s enough irony here to sink an aircraft carrier (of which Britain no longer has any, poor dears, since their government spends like our government but they’ve run out of other people’s money first).

Read it.

I guess they thought they were prospective Hogwarts students or something.

One of the tourists said the GPS insisted the drive was possible, so they followed its advice.

Guess they didn’t hear the snickering.

Think of it as evolution in action. The machines are on our side.

Read it.

Vice President Joe Biden addressed 87 wealthy Democrats last night attending a fundraiser at the home of Sen. John Kerry in Georgetown. As they dined on grass-fed New York strip steaks and white truffle mashed potatos underneath a outdoor tent, Biden criticized Republicans for being out of touch.

“These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there,” Biden said according to the pool report, “They don’t know what it means to be middle class.”

87 guests paid a minimum of $10,000-per-couple to attend the dinner.

No comment necessary, I think.

Read it.

No word on whether the people doing the course have to answer to the name ‘Bruce’.

Read it.

Read it.

The James Baker family wants to stop the cancer-causing emissions floating into their home during their neighbors’ patio smoking breaks.

“We’re just saying, ‘please don’t poison us,’” James Baker said. “Can you smoke inside your home? The reason they don’t want to do that is because they don’t want their family breathing it in. But it’s okay for your neighbor?”

Well, yeah, if they’re a bunch of fascists like these swine.

Kelly and her two sons, ages 11 and 16, have asthma. After l0 years of being surrounded by smoking neighbors, Kelly said her children have become sicker.

So move to Arizona. I guarantee that the cost of living will be lower.

Read it.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.

Where were these chicks when I was in law school? Sheesh, talk about born too soon….

Read it.

In a twist on typical union activity, employees of the National Labor Relations Board are accusing their bosses of treating them unfairly. NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce and Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon are facing resistance as they attempt to limit the amount of on-the-job time unionized employees can spend on union business, and on attending seminars and other meetings.

The biter bit. God forbid that they should actually do the work they’re getting paid for rather than union business.

Scott Johnson points and laughs.

I’m pretty sure that the algae angle would have earned a Republican president hoots of derision and charges of detachment from the real America in the spirit of the mythical story of George Bush’s wonderment at supermarket scanners. The story of Bush’s wonderment, it cannot be stated too often, was fabricated by the New York Times. By contrast, Obama’s support for the transubstantiation of pond scum is in the text of his big energy speech. (The Times mentioned it in the third-to-the last paragraph of Mark Landler’s story.)

Read it.

An appointee to the United Nations Human Rights Council has issued a four-page memo warning Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson that local officials could be violating the human rights of the homeless people living within the city. In the January 23rd dated letter, Catarina De Albuquerque, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation for the United Nations human right council, says that the current policy of evicting the homeless from their “tent cities” and denying the homeless with safe access to clean water is, in effect, prohibited discrimination based on their economic and social status.

Read it.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, is hosting a conference about The Media World after Wikileaks and News of the World. Sounds like it could be an interesting event, but one organization not happy about it… is Wikileaks. Seeing as it was a conference that touched on Wikileaks’ interests directly, Wikileaks asked to take part, and was instead denied a chance to speak at the event. When asked about this, UNESCO actually claimed that choosing to not allow Wikileaks attendees was an exercise in “freedom of expression,” which seems like a poor choice of words.

Reminds me of the ‘Machine That Goes Ping!’ sketch in Monty Python’s LIFE OF BRIAN.

Pregnant woman: ‘What should I be doing?’
Doctor: ‘Nothing, my dear. You’re not qualified.’

Read it.

Sounds like a tabloid headline, doesn’t it? ‘Giant walking catfish attacks sleeping child.’ ‘Tiny space aliens attend rock concert.’ ‘Hitler has son with  French teen.’

Read it.

I wish for a new ice age, so that all of this foolishness will be forgotten.

Perhaps a human charity can sue the government on behalf of 100 million ‘slave’ taxpayers.

Read it.

There were no other witnesses to the punch, which came after the man had approached a patrol as a passenger on a motorcycle. His partner pulled a gun on a member of the Afghan National Army and was shot dead.

Ahmed Wali denied he was a member of the Taliban when he was questioned by Corporal C but prosecutors admitted his evidence was “unreliable”.

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

Read it.

Read it.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established with the hope to help the birth of the State of Israel. JNF plants trees for forest development in Israel, creates parks, battles forest fires, is responsible for soil conservation, pioneers innovative solutions to help Israel’s water supply, among other notable work.

The “Stop the JNF Campaign” alleges that the Jewish National Fund “was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1948 Nakba, and continues to play a central role in maintaining Israel’s regime of apartheid.” It calls for the revocation of JNF’s charity and to isolate the group by breaking all ties with it.

Despite its shrill and nonsensical premise, the “Stop the JNF Campaign” has garnered support from organizations across the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries around the world. It also has spread to American and Canadian college campuses.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

After all, Mao did much the same thing….

Read it.

A new online game in India called “Angry Brides” which seeks to highlight the problem of illegal dowry demands for women has attracted more than 270,000 fans.

Read it.

The guy is apparently famous for owning just 15 things.

In the old days, they called such people ‘bums’. But times change.

Read it.

A world-renowned American base-jumper known as “The Birdman” broke both legs when he crashed into the face of South Africa’s Table Mountain moments after leaping off its flat summit.

Stupid is as stupid does.