Interesting post by Deborah Elmar at Return of Queens: A Dating-Site Profile: What If?

Hmm, I perceive that my enemy looks a bit gay:

LAGOS, Nigeria — Arrests have spread across Nigeria as dozens more people perceived to be gay have been rounded up and questioned…

Money quote:

“There is obviously a minority community that is affected…but anyone could be perceived to be gay.”

At the very least, you should cover your eyes:

Get Covered, a partnership among state healthcare exchanges and the Obamacare missionary Enroll America, expertly fails to cater to young people. Its (six-hour) circus began Thursday with a dance-off between Richard Simmons and the contortionist Nathan Barnatt…

Hollow doughnut-like rock "materialises" in Mars rover's path http://t.co/5UWkEMYVUp. Spot the difference pic.twitter.com/VvPtbPAsMd

— New Scientist (@newscientist) January 18, 2014

From a poem performed this past Tuesday at New York City Hall NY by Ramya Ramana, the official Youth Poet Laureate of New York City:

“This is the moment when you make of your fist the same clench in your teeth, make of your tongue all the textbooks your school was not funded enough to provide you with, make of your fingerprints the first draft of a revolt, when the follicles of capitalism’s hips falls on your school like angel dust, an army of unbranded jungle mouths will shout and yell and the trinity will linger there too like an arena of thunderclaps, and I will be there too and I will wonder how a genocide of shredded trees somehow makes some people think they can somehow play god, and then I will further wonder what made white people so insecure that they will do everything to put us in the lion’s den…”

Ramana read another one of her poems several weeks ago during New York mayor Bill di Blasio’s inauguration.
h/t

Aitzaz Hasan
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A brief excerpt from Angela MacLeod Irons’ C2C review of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”:

(Haidt and his researchers) asked 2,000 Americans to complete a questionnaire designed to evaluate the six moral foundations. One-third of the group was asked to fill it out as themselves, one-third was asked to fill it out as they thought a typical liberal would, and the final third as a typical conservative would. The researchers found that moderates and conservatives were the most accurate in their answers whether they were pretending to be liberal or conservative. Liberals were the least accurate, particularly if they self-identified as “very liberal.”

Golly, who’da thunk that the ignorant, gun-toting, bible-thumping racist warmongers would be better than their self-professed intellectual superiors at intelligently assessing the real-world mindset and views of their political opponents?
All sarcasm aside, it’s well worth your time to read MacLeod Irons’ edifying review of what sounds like a very interesting book.

Remind me not to hire any hyphenated-studies majors.
Matter of fact, remind me not to hire any liberal arts majors period.

Change? They’re still stuck on Hope:

Cover Oregon’s online enrollment system still doesn’t work more than three months after it was supposed to launch, and the state has hired or reassigned hundreds of workers to manually process applications. Officials say they hope the online system will be operational by March.

Just to be on the safe side, maybe they should pickle it.

Good grief:

A University of Saskatchewan student group abandoned plans for an Hawaiian-themed fundraiser after complaints that it insensitively appropriated indigenous Hawaiian culture.

What was intended as a benign escape from winter ignited a small controversy on campus when organizers central to the Idle No More movement complained about the “Hawaiian Night” poster this week..

Apparently the students who were hoping to blow off a little steam and have some fun didn’t have enough idle time to reflect:

“It’s basically an outsider selling an outsider culture to other outsiders without really reflecting on that process,” said Adam Gaudry, an assistant professor of native studies at the university.

h/t

From Malcolm Pollack’s response to a column by Vered Benhorin titled “I Never Thought My Son Would Play With Guns”:

The safety and security that make possible this young mother’s pacifism and loathing of weapons are luxuries she enjoys only because, to paraphrase Orwell, “rough men stand ready to do violence on her behalf”. She acknowledges this in passing, but clearly it is not the sort of thing she would want her own boy to have anything to do with; presumably her defenders are of another species altogether, and are no mother’s sons.

Read the whole thing here.

Terence Corcoron quotes ultra-pure GTA distillate Jian Ghomeshi’s opening to his CBC radio show:

“Hi there. It’s Monday, January 13, 2014. Imagine a place where decades worth of scientific research and information has been systematically destroyed. Imagine a place were sensitive environmental information and cultural data is simply ‘disappeared.’ Imagine a place where invaluable journals, monographs, reports and texts are junked because they are ‘an inconvenience.’

“Well, actually, there’s no need to imagine, Canada. Because you’re living in that place.”

Corcoran:

From this hyperbole, Mr. Ghomeshi soon moved on to interview rock star Neil Young..

The Neil Young interview, Corcoran notes, “will be rebroadcast Wednesday night on The National with Peter Mansbridge.”
How do you say “Defund the CBC” in Laurentian?
Read “Fahrenheit 45.2, or how the CBC helps promote scares and confusion” here.

aka “how to legally get your revenge on the left.”

In this episode of Bachelor Pad Theater we discuss how men, specifically black men, cannot compete against the financial resources of the government to win the affection of women.

Don’t know:

The National Security Agency said it is lawfully unable to search its database to determine if it has swept up phone records from members of Congress or other elected officials.

h/t