Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

 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.

Read it.

You knew it was coming.

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

I guess some Communists are more equal than others.

Read it.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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.