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Emory students frightened by word “Trump” in chalk on sidewalk

This is a spoof, right? They’re not seriously saying this are they?

Emory University students say they are “in pain” and “afraid” after someone left pro-Donald Trump chalk messages on their Atlanta campus, according to the student newspaper. “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe” here,” The Emory Wheel quoted one unnamed student as saying. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well. … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.”

The chalkings appeared overnight, saying “Trump 2016,” according to the newspaper. About 40 students held a protest demanding action from the administration, chanting “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!”

At least the Vietnam era lot had chants that rhymed.

“I legitimately feared for my life,” Paula Camila Alarcon, a freshman at Emory who identifies as Latino, told The Daily Beast. “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus.”

“It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone,” freshman Jonathan Peraza added.

Is Emory a special school for the short bus kids?

Seriously, the name of a candidate you don’t like very much, OK, but still a legitimate candidate in a legitimate election and no one is allowed to write his name on your campus? H
ow about someone setting up a Students for Trump society? That allowed? Or not?

College president Jim Wagner met with the students, who expressed anxiety that the writings were threats to their safety rather than political speech, considering Georgia’s Republican primary was held earlier this month.

“The students shared with me their concern that these messages were meant to intimidate rather than merely to advocate for a particular candidate, having appeared outside of the context of a Georgia election or campus campaign activity,” Wagner wrote in a university-wide email Tuesday. “During our conversation, they voiced their genuine concern and pain in the face of this perceived intimidation.”

And you sir are a disgrace. Your job is to educate these children. Including telling them not to be so damn stupid.

Jeebus, fire the fucker on the Admiral Byng precedent.

Snigger

Mitt Romney Mocks Trump’s ‘Foreign’ Wives: ‘There Really Are Jobs Americans Won’t Do’

Nice line, even if not actually true. Number two, Marla Maples, was from the US version of Georgia, no?

Apples don’t fall far from trees, do they?

Saskia Sassen:

Here is one local version of this fighting back. It needs to be expanded and recognized as significant. It is the work of re-localising components of “the” economy. Re-localising in this case becomes a fight against the corporatising of everything: do we really have to depend on corporations to have a cup of coffee, to buy vegetables, to get bookshelves? Any neighbourhood is likely to have local talent that could handle this. We must re-localise whatever we can re-localise. This will inevitably be a partial project as many of our more complex needs can only be met via complex knowledge systems (e.g. a hospital). But we must maximise the replacement of franchises by work done in our or other neighbourhoods in our cities and towns. A franchise by definition takes out part of the consumption capacity of a neighbourhood out of that neighbourhood and onto central headquarters. We must maximise the recirculation of our spending in our localities, and that means a collective effort to meet as much of our needs locally. I see in this type of effort a first step that can lead to other efforts, notably a new kind of politics.

Wikipedia:

In most cases, fascists discouraged or banned foreign trade; fascists believed that too much international trade would make the national economy dependent on international capital, and therefore vulnerable to international economic sanctions. Economic self-sufficiency, known as autarky, was a major goal of most fascist governments.

About Saskia Sassen:

Sassen was born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1947. In 1948 Sassen’s parents, Willem Sassen and Miep van der Voort, escaped to Argentina and the family lived in Buenos Aires.[1] Her father was a Dutch collaborator with the Nazis, a Nazi journalist and a member of the Waffen-SS. In the 1950s Willem Sassen was close to Adolf Eichmann when both were living in Argentina and she recalls him visiting her childhood home.

The sins of the father do not descend to the daughter of course but her economic ideas don’t seem to have gone far from that tree, do they?

We should subsidise pornography

Abstract
According to radical feminist theory, pornography serves to further the subordination of women by training its users, males and females alike, to view women as little more than sex objects over whom men should have complete control. Composite variables from the General Social Survey were used to test the hypothesis that pornography users would hold attitudes that were more supportive of gender nonegalitarianism than nonusers of pornography. Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory. Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes—toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion—than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory.

Further, given that the spread of it reduces the rate of rape and sexual assault we really should be subsidising it.

Baggsie me to be on the grant approval board.

The varieties of English

Reading around the web, as we do these days, we’re rather more exposed to those other variations of English out there. Where words don’t quite mean what we might think they mean. Possibly.

Take this from India:

Bengaluru: Police book Uber driver misbehaving with techie

That the techie was female is interesting but not necessary to the story. In our English English a possible meaning of “misbehaving” would be getting a freebie and consensual legover instead of being paid a fare. Unlikely perhaps, but certainly a possible meaning of the wording.

Hmm:

Bengaluru: Uber has done it again. The cab aggregator is this time in the dock over a lewd driver, who allegedly masturbated at a traffic signal while ferrying a woman passenger from HSR Layout to SG Palya late Tuesday evening at around 8 pm.

Ah, no, they mean the other possible meaning, don’t they?

There’s so many stereotypes in this story

A celebrity barrister has admitted supplying party drugs that killed his teenage boyfriend during a gay sex and drugs orgy.
Henry Hendron, 35, bought £1,000 of designer drugs from BBC producer Alexander Parkin, 41, to sell on to revellers for a ‘chemsex’ party at his flat at his legal chambers.
The drugs killed Hendron’s waiter boyfriend Miguel Jimenez, 18.

Two day poppers and drugs sex party, gay couple, successful bloke with twink (who, for completeness, was a waiter).

If you put that in a film script these days you’d be accused of homophobia.

We need scientists to tell us this?

If you’ve ever found yourself excluded from a clique, it may be you’re just not good looking enough – according to science.
A study has found that people rated as attractive tend to seek out equally attractive people in social situations.
And attractive women were most likely of all to be found at the centre of a group, the researchers said.

Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand, Oxford University and others carried out a giant experiment using hidden cameras on the roof of a sports stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand.

We can probably close down large chunks of our universities if this is what they are reduced to studying. Because absolutely anyone even vaguely observant, doesn’t have to be blokes out on the pull, would tell you this in an instant. Just look at the birds in a pub or nightclub. There will be some slight variance of hotness and shaggability among groups of of them, said variability being very much less than that variance between groups.

Everyone knows this already: why are we paying tax money to get people to “study” it?

At least we’ve a definition now

Some days Daniela Esquivel Asturias, 21, wakes up feeling feminine and puts on a dress or lipstick. But on others Asturias feels much more masculine and the thought of wearing a skirt induces an overwhelming sense of dysmorphia.

Gender dysmorphia apparently means that some days she prefers to wear a skirt and make up, other days trousers and not. Isn’t this something that can just be left to chacun a son gout?

No, no, of course the slippery slope argument is not valid logic

The average fruit juices and smoothies contains at least twice as much sugar as drinks which will be subject to new Government taxes, a BMJ study reveals.
The research on 158 drinks led by the University of Liverpool found that the average juice drink contains 5.6 g of sugar per 100ml – meaning it would just cross the threshold to be affected by new planned taxes.
But pure fruit juices – which will be exempt from George Osborne’s tax – contained twice this amount, while smoothies, also not covered, had even more sugar in them, the major study found.
Researchers called on manufacturers to cut their sugar content, or covered by the new taxes.
They said fruit juices and smoothies should no longer be included as part of “five a day” consumption.

Sigh.

Towards a centralised Eurolanguage

A European human rights commissioner has told British ministers to stop referring to “illegal immigrants”, claiming they should use the term “irregular migrants” for foreigners who enter this country without permission.

Actually matey it’s our language to define and use as we please. A language which we will use and define as we wish without any permission, allowance or direction from the likes of you.

The latest from James Hansen is just fascinating

Southern Ocean
surface cooling, while lower latitudes are warming, increases
precipitation on the Southern Ocean, increasing ocean stratification,
slowing deepwater formation, and increasing ice
sheet mass loss.

Increased precipitation on the Southern Ocean is also known as the snow/ice pack on Antarctica getting deeper/higher.

And no, the paper does not consider this.

The dumb blonde jokes never were about natural blondes

They’re not ‘dumb blondes’ after all: Women with the natural hair colour are MORE intelligent than brunettes and redheads
The study showed that blonde-haired women had an average IQ of 103.2
This was compared to 102.7 for brunettes and 101.2 for those with red hair

That does pose a puzzle since the average IQ of any population is, by definition, 100, thus who are the dumb birds?

But the point about dumb blondes was never about natural hair colours. It was always about those who dyed their hair that colour to play (or be) the bimbo.

Quite so, the glory of our isle

Except it probably won’t actually get called Boaty McBoatface. Nor will the other imaginative suggestions such as Big Shipinnit or Big Metal Floaty Thingy-Thing likely make the final cut. But, just days after the NERC launched a poll, encouraging the public to suggest a suitable moniker, the Great British public did what it does best – and has been doing for centuries. We took the piss.

And I can’t say I’m surprised. This is, after all, the country that created Punch, Viz, Private Eye. The people who call the Queen “Brenda” and the Prince of Wales “Brian”. The nation that dubbed Liverpool Cathedral “Paddy’s Wigwam” and voted to send the Spice Girls on tour to Baghdad. We’ve met with triumph and disaster, and we’ve always made a bum gag just the same. Love it or loathe it, schoolboy humour runs in our blood like Bovril and weak bitter.

Quite amazing really, an article in The Guardian that actually understands the local population.

I thought we were supposed to be against this sort of thing now?

I’ve seen more of Ann Hirsch than I have of possibly anybody else on the planet. To be specific, I watched her one-minute film of her vagina “singing” I Feel Pretty, which is brilliant and hilarious and joyful, and makes you feel sad and angry about all the other vaginas on the internet which are shaved, penetrated and exploited.

Art despite it being paid for, is not exploitation, is that it?

So when was it ever different?

It only occurred to me recently, at the still tender age of 20, that these boys had no idea what they were talking about. Yes, they could name dazzlingly complex sex positions such as the “backward upside down cowgirl” that I thought only a contortionist could achieve. But, really, they were just pontificating on the basis of a few illegally downloaded porn films, traded around on memory sticks at break time.

Only a year before, they had been trading Pokémon cards.

My first lessons about sex didn’t come from sex education lessons, but were filtered through pre-pubescent boys, who received their information from porn. A 2008 report into youth exposure to pornography, carried out in the US, found that from a pool of 5,000 undergraduate students, 93% of boys and 62% of girls had been exposed to internet porn before the age of 18. The report also found that “boys were significantly more likely to view online pornography more often and to view more types of images”.

OK, so the access to porn may be different but I challenge anyone to give us a period or era of human history when the underlying reality was any different. Maybe when we were all back on the farm and everyone knew what taking the sow to the boar involved but that’s still not a great help with intimacy nor consent is it?

(Cue old joke: Young lad to young girl at the covering: wish I could do that. “Well, she might let you”.)

Telegraph seems to have changed

Changed the way they load cookies that is. Clearing out the Tele cookies in Chrome no longer gains access to the paper. It seems to load 31 cookies all at once. Thus it states that, even having cleared them, that you’ve had your lot for the month.

Bit of a pity for I quite like reading it, but not enough to actually pay for it.

Aren’t we lucky? Two stumps in one day!

It’s the Americans, the bastards!

For all these reasons to pretend that there is any legal reason that prevents the publication of country-by-country data should candidly be bluntly dismissed as straightforwardly untrue. Instead what my sources tell me is that the suggestion has been made in this form to appease the USA.

In the USA the inclusion of country-by-country reporting data in tax returns is seen as a European imposition on US companies even though it is actually an OECD issue. It is massively resented by the Republicans and is only being implemented because it has been argued that it is a mere administrative reform to tax returns not requiring legislation for approval, which would be blocked if it was proposed, like most things of any value are in the US these days. But, in a compromise the IRS thinks it has to make to get the data I understand that they have told the EU that they believe that the OECD stipulation that the data be unpublished is binding and that if any country or countries publish data for jurisdictions other than their own then they will not share data the US receives on CBCR with them. Apparently they accept the EU as one administration for this purpose.

So, the threat of legal action is from the U.S. here and the issue arises because the OECD rules do not require that a group of companies submit its country-by-country report to all the countries in which it trades but only to the tax authority of its parent company, which is then legally bound to share it, which is what it looks like the US is refusing to do. The consequence is that the US can hold the EU to ransom as a result.

It’s not the Americans, the bastards, it’s the companies, the bastards!

The EU has said of country-by-country reporting that to demand publication of data for all the jurisdictions in which a multinational company trades could lead it into a legal minefield.

Now, of course one has to be cautious about an excuse offered by an unnamed official to a journalist on a document that may, or may not, have been officially leaked. The claim may not be true, if course, and may just look usefully convenient when the political will to act does not exist.

But suppose for a moment that the claim is true. Suppose that the EU – the largest supra-national legislator in the world – thinks it cannot legislate because of a legal minefield. Who created that minefield? What is the risk? And why can’t it be cleared?

I have already dealt with the likelihood that the USA is the real risk and it’s not threatening legal action: blackmail is more its line. So the risk cannot be from there, and it cannot be from EU member states, so it must come from companies.

The clear implication of this is unpalatable. As many of us have feared to be the inevitable direction of trade deals and agreements, the EU may now be signalling that it can only regulate companies to the extent that they concur with its wishes, and if they do not then the EU is recognising that the threat of legal action may be real.

In other words the rule of law is now conditional on the consent of those supposedly subject to it.

Corporate law may, then, be prevailing.

This is the route to the corporate state, and that is fascism.

The fight over country-by-country reporting is, then, no minor issue: this is about the right to decide who really rules and the stakes are very high indeed.

And, err, yes, we do normally think that the rule of law is conditional on the consent of those subject to it. Any number of leftie campaigns are about “No, we do not consent to this law, change it!”. As is most of Ritchie’s campaigning of course. No, I do not consent to people paying less tax than I think they ought to, change the law!

Further, err, yes, we would rather like the government to obey the law. Like, you know, the UK government over Cadbury, Vodafone and the CFC rules? Or only locking up child rapists when there is evidence that child rape has occurred and it was ‘im what dunnit?

You know, law?

Just one drop is alive and well in the US

Somehow I thought we’d moved on from this:

Social workers SEIZE sobbing girl, 6, from her home of five years in adoption race row: Devastated white foster family forced to give up their daughter by court because she is 1.5% Native American

Lexi, a six-year-old with one-and-a-half per cent Choctaw blood has been removed from her foster parents of five years

One assumes, given the normal Amerind coiffure, that if the pencil falls out of the hair then she can be seized?

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