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So, RadFem 2013 was a conference in London, which resulted in a gigantic controversy because radical feminists insisted on excluding the “transgendered” from their female-only event, and one of the featured speakers, Australian lesbian feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys, was about to publish a new book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, that was deeply offensive to the “T” people represented in the LGBT acronym.

How crazy did that conflict become? At one point in April, the venue tried to cancel the event after discovering that “certain language was used and some statements were made about transgender people that would go against our equalities and diversity policy.” Another RadFem conference organizer, Cathy Brennan of Baltimore, was meanwhile all over Twitter announcing “transwomen are men” and comparing them to MRAs (men’s rights advocates).

Temperfect Mug

Kresto hand cleaner

Heated furniture cover

Cool Circuits puzzle

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Hint: Chuck Norris isn’t even on the list.

Read it. And watch the video. (You know there had to be a video.)

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

‘”A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” Orwell writes, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Similarly, a teen may take to weed because he feels himself a loser and then become all the more of a loser because he smokes weed.’ — Jonah Goldberg

If you don’t subscribe to the G-File, you really really ought to.

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Eight Democrats, two Republicans. You can probably fill in the list as well as JW; it’s not as if they make any effort to hide.

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Key question to ask: Which are more likely to vote Democrat?

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The student who was extorted for sex found himself in this situation after he sent nude pictures to the accused who was posing as a woman.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Taki joins in a game that anyone can play.

One of the great but perverse pleasures of my life when I’m in New York City is to read The New York Times. It’s perverse because no paper north of Saudi Arabia lies quite as blatantly as the Times does. Its lying is based on omission rather than invention and by the use of the kind of selectivity on news reporting that would earn a Soviet-era Pravda newshound the Stalin Prize. Excluding facts, indeed stories, which do not fall within the purview of its viewpoint is the paper’s norm rather than the exception. “All the News Our Bias Allows” should be its motto and on its masthead, but even there, the Times is spinning the facts: “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is the first big lie one encounters on page one.

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“There is no more neutrality in the world,” said Black Panther leader, civil rights activist and fun-loving rapist; Eldridge Cleaver. “You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem—there ain’t no more middle ground.”

We live in Eldridge Cleaver’s world now, a world with no more middle ground. Where not doing anything does not mean you will be left alone. This is no longer a nation founded on the curious premise that the government should leave people alone unless they are causing problems.

That peculiar idea was held by a nation of farmers and merchants who fled religious persecution, and whose great contribution to human history was the notion that governments shouldn’t be all-powerful and that everyone should mind their own business when it comes to other people’s affairs. Our present-day rulers revile them as racist slave owners who only cared about money, but they also happen to be racist slave owners who only care about money, and they have far more of both.

The average American still holds the fanciful belief that, if he isn’t annoying anyone, he should be left alone. To the people running his country, this is as bizarre and unworkable as Phrenology or the Geocentric theory or handing out universal health care without also compelling everyone to buy it.

Read it.

Oh, really.

The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers.

“No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,” said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. “Companies do it every day.”

Makes you wonder where these guys were in 2008, when the rest of us were saying that.

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 Doctors have long been in the high-stakes information management business. They must quickly sort through a patient’s symptoms, comments, test results, records and history to come up with a diagnosis. The physician brings to each diagnostic encounter a storehouse of knowledge and experience, all that he or she has read and learned over years.

The information overload for doctors is only growing worse. Medical information is estimated to be doubling every five years, and surveys show most doctors can find only a few hours a month to read medical journals. So it is not surprising that automated assistance for doctors has been pursued by researchers and companies for many years. Decision-making in medicine, after all, involves not just time and money, but also human lives.

A worthy goal, but a frustratingly difficult one. Yet in the last few years, real progress is being made in what is called “clinical decision support” technology. And the story in medicine is the same as in so many applications of modern computing: advances in sensors for measuring, calculating power and artificial-intelligence software are opening the door to a new generation of smarter tools.

And about fargin time, too.

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The general narrative of the situation in Hamas-controlled Gaza is of a people under siege, deprived of everyday goods, whose only means of receiving sufficient supplies is through the network of tunnels that bring a wide range of essential items from Egypt.

In fact, Israel delivers an average of 300 truckloads of goods each day through official crossing points to the Gaza Strip, basic supplies that provide steady, if unspectacular amounts of necessary items to the 1.6 million inhabitants of the Hamas-controlled enclave. The majority of everyday commodities as well as luxury items and, most significantly of all, drugs, explosives, and military hardware, come through the tunnels. They are run by a band including multi-millionaire Gazan businessmen often making vast amounts of money, and critically, paying taxes/bribes to Hamas to allow free passage of all goods.

It’s all about the MONEY.

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But all the odes to middle-class Americans working middle-class jobs, misses one big point: What exactly is “middle class” in America in 2013? That’s not an easy question to answer.

The place you live has a lot to do with how you experience and understand “class” in America. The “middle” is always defined by who is at the top and bottom and that varies greatly from state to state and county to county.

Changes in American communities – particularly growing wealth in urban and suburban places – mean the words “middle class” don’t carry the real weight they once did. The definition of the group has become so broad that crafting something that appeals to it as a whole is a difficult task.

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The Thirteenth Amendment is an attractive vehicle for advocates of nearly unlimited federal power because a broad interpretation of it would enable Congress to circumvent the limits the Supreme Court placed on Congress’ powers under the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment in cases such as United States v. Lopez, United States v. Morrison, and NFIB v. Sebelius. Unlike a law authorized by the Commerce Clause, a law authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment need not have any connection to interstate commerce or “economic activity.” Unlike most parts of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Thirteenth Amendment is also not limited to regulating action undertaken by state governments, since it bans even purely private slavery and involuntary servitude.

Steven Hayward certainly speaks for me.

2014 is just a few hours old, but we’ve already got the apparent winner for the Nanny of the Year, and it’s New York’s brand new mayor Bill de Blasio.  According to the NY Daily News, de Blasio wants to do Bloomberg one better in the authoritarianism department by shutting down all of the city’s remaining horse-drawn carriages.

…

Naturally there are “advocacy groups” behind this.  What would we do without advocacy groups.  It sounds like this is driven by the PETA types, rather than by environmentalists or health nuts worried about the tiny residue of horse manure around Central Park.  Either way, New York City is in for a miserable next four years from de Blasio. Maybe we can bring Rudy back in 2017?

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The books On the Road, Atlas Shrugged, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Bridge on the River Kwai, Funny Face, and The Prince and the Showgirl, the play Endgame (“Fin de Partie”), and more. . .

Steve Sailer is on the case.

As 2014 dawns, the world continues to keep me furnished with material. For example, the current political shakeup in Turkey turns out to be a mashup of various obsessions and hobbyhorses of mine, such as byzantine conspiracy theories, test prep, the naiveté of American education reform, immigration fraud, the deep state, and even the Chechen Bomb Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan.

I love the smell of conspiracy theory in the morning….

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Gov. Scott Walker has signed a bill that legalizes drinking on pedal pubs. Pedal pubs accommodate up to 16 riders that sit across from each other, using peddles underneath their seats to slowly power the quadracycles across city streets.

While a driver steers the multi-pedaled vehicle, riders sit in seats and can rest their tasty alcoholic beverage on the bar mounted in front of them. Although passengers continue to pedal the vehicle, they are still able to raise their glasses and toast each other or citizens that wave to them as they roll by.

I am not making this up.

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The new year will bring tough new health care decisions for many businesses, especially those that are too small to easily absorb new costs and too big to think about dropping coverage, experts say.

These midsize businesses, particularly those with 50 to 200 workers, are having the toughest time affording escalating health care costs, says Nancy Taylor, a health care lawyer with Greenberg Traurig.

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

Automation may be blamed for destroying middle-class jobs, but government ‘help’ is certainly as much a culprit.

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I’m lovin’ it.