This is from Deadspin. I don't like linking the vile Gawker empire so I won't.

At the University of Maryland, one of the "lower-tier" sororities -- one for "awkward" sorts of girls -- got matched with Sigma Nu, which I guess is some kind of socially-higher fraternity, for Greek Week.

I really don't have any idea what this means, by the way. I guess there's a random draw and frats and sororities are matched with each other for four days of forced socialization.

So I guess this is the sorority's Big Chance to improve its Greek Cred.

Like in a movie. You've seen movies, right? It's like that. Jennifer Lawrence pretends to be an awkward, unattractive girl (she wears glasses and she reads books) but she wants to be popular so she tells her sisters, "We can Rule this School if we get the Sigma Nus to think we're Cool!"

Well, this sorority, I guess, was not really mixing well with these Sigma Nu studs, who, in the movie, I guess would be played by the Werewolf from the Vampire Girl movies and... gun to my head I cannot think of another actor in his twenties. I'll say Channing Tatum but I know he's older.

I'm not even sure I know who that is but whatever. The only other person I can think of is Michael Cera, but he wouldn't be a Sigma Nu, he'd be the sweet nerd who Jennifer Lawrence finally realizes she's loved all along. Unless the audience reaction wasn't good, in which case they'd "Ducky" him and just have her land the Werewolf.

But I digress. So, the Werewolf and Channing Tatum, and it's totally important to get these Sig Nu guys to like us, OKAY?!!

Thus, this sorority girl let her sisters have it for being lame and only talking amongst themselves instead of mingling and whatever you're supposed to do at a mixer.

Eh. It's blog fodder. You might find it funny, or sad, or skippable.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (305)
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Updated: Pictures here. Half the world just clicked on that link so there might be some lag.

Another site: Legal Insurrection grabbed all the pictures.

I gotta say, I'm a bit disappointed. These pictures are not very clear. I don't know if these pictures are going to be enough to ID these guys.

...

Note the bag at his feet.

As this local Fox video report notes, if there's a "Suspect Number Two," obviously there's a "Suspect Number One" we haven't heard about.

While we're waiting for that, take a grain of salt, and note that an anonymous source in the Obama Administration tells the NYPost that there's a fifty/fifty chance the West, Texas plant explosion was arson.

A senior Obama administration official said a series of briefings overnight have produced concern the Texas blast could have been at least criminal in nature. Authorities are trying to contain their speculation for fear of causing a panic, but the official told The Post the cause of the blast is "suspicious."

Authorities suspect the blast was set off by a truck or rail car holding a large quantity of ammonia that somehow caught fire or blew up. Ammonia, under certain conditions, can become combustible or explosive.

"It's 50-50," the source said. "Some sort of explosion caused the ammonia truck/rail car to create a shockwave up to a half-mile away, destroying that little town."

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (812)
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I'ma gonna stomp my planets post that no one except a few geeks cares about.

"GERALDO RIVERA:" Totalitarianism and dictatorship can never stand in the argument against freedom. Freedom always wins, free people always want that, they always want to be free and to have rights. If anything, it unsettles the Cuban government, the repressive communist Cuban government. I detest what they stand for, a lot of what they stand for. I think that they are, you know, Stalinist and old school. Fidel Castro should be on the garbage heap of history, I totally get that. But the way to do it is, get 'em cell phones. Get 'em satellite TV. Let 'em see what America's all about.

I am firmly convinced, I mentioned this to you earlier this morning, that when my talk show went on the air in 1988 in the Soviet Union, before the fall of the Wall, that helped accelerate the process, it was first my talk show and then Joan Rivers joined me on the air in the Soviet Union. Can you imagine ...

WABC RADIO ANNOUNCER NOAM LADEN: How did you even get on there?

GERALDO: Same way I get on everywhere, people pity me and fear my pungent sweat, but mostly they put me on "for the lulz."

He didn't say that last thing. I made that up.

Andre Sakahrov just emailed me to say, "He's right, I was a huge fan."

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (202)
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Well they didn't say that but they did say they've found a five-planet system with two of the most earth-like planets ever discovered.

Caveat on that: They're not really all that earth-like. But usually they find super-Jupiter planets. Finding planets even close to earth is hard, because they're so small.

But these are all quite a bit bigger than earth. You might want to go to these places to train for a sporting event, but I don't know if you'd be comfortable living there.

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets.

Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making it the exoplanet closest to the size of our planet known in the habitable zone of another star. Kepler-62f is likely to have a rocky composition. Kepler-62e, orbits on the inner edge of the habitable zone and is roughly 60 percent larger than Earth.

The third planet, Kepler-69c, is 70 percent larger than the size of Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. Astronomers are uncertain about the composition of Kepler-69c, but its orbit of 242 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our neighboring planet Venus.

Yeah, pass.

Okay no one's going to want to live on these sucky planets, but we're getting closer to finding one that might suit our purposes.

Land grab, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (84)
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I never really suspected this guy. He looked like a runner. The right shape, the right clothes.

Turns out, he is a runner:

I noticed that Newsweek editor Michael Moynihan was also tweeting skeptically about the two guys in the photo this morning and e-mailed him to ask why he thinks theyÂ’re innocent. Answer: He found their Facebook pages last night and says it seemed pretty clear from the volume of material about track and field, along with lots of other innocuous crap, that theyÂ’re unlikely to be the culprits.

And in fact both men-- black backpack and blue jacket -- have been cleared. (I was pretty suspicious of Black Backback, I admit.)

By the way, this is why I think Ricin Elvis might not be the terrorist the authorities say he is. Liberty Lady found all his social media appearances before his name was officially announced (she figured it out by the initials "KC" and his frequent mentions of key quotes, like "I'm KC and I approved this message).

Here's "KC" reacting to the Boston Massacre:

we the people are just not safe anymore! I mean bombs where folks are “racing”??? Elephants in Tupelo Circus getting SHOT??? What next! I guess there will come a time when Elvis fans can’t even go out to watch a bunch of Elvis Impersonators pay tribute to a man who gave his life for we the people! Geesh! It’s a sad sad world!

That doesn't seem to fit the psychology of a poison-pen-letter killer. While one could say "Oh, he's putting on appearances, maintaining a simulacrum of normal behavior," I've gotta say I don't buy that. People who do this sort of thing -- killers, psychopaths, maniacs, violent extremists, terrorists -- are so driven by their weird demons that they are pretty proud to announce them publicly.

If you think about escalation, it starts with angry denunciations, then goes to threats, then goes to stalker-type behavior, and then proceeds to actual violence. I'm not sure that a guy so crazy he sends ricin to the president is in control of his shit enough to maintain appearances on his Facebook posts.

And I'm not sure the truly crazy know what sane looks like enough to fake it when required. Jared Loughner and James Holmes, for example, were plainly insane in their social media postings. It might have provided them some help at trial to pretend to be sane, but they didn't bother, or they didn't know what a sane person might sound like.

Anyway... I still sort of think we're going to find out this guy has some castor bean plants growing by his house and the "ricin" detected was castor pollen or something.

The other day on Breibart I noted that I gave the media a pass for all its erroneous reporting on these matters, because, honestly, I'd rather have the unvetted rumor now than the nailed-down story later.

Andrew McCarthy, however, points out that a wash of erroneous information is detrimental to investigations-- and helpful to terrorists.

[M]ost journalists and many agents are not well-versed in the esoterica of the justice system — in which, for example, “arrest” is different from “custody”; a “suspect” is different from a “person of interest”; and “detention” is different from “apprehension” —

I keep pointing this out. The media is as ignorant about these distinctions as it is about the difference between a semi-automatic and automatic weapon.

-- and you have the roadmap to error-ridden reporting. The problem is not that reporters and sources are intentionally misleading the public. It is that their information is both less reliable than they think it is and easily given to miscommunication. A potential witnessÂ’s voluntary submission to a law-enforcement interview could be mistaken for a suspectÂ’s surrender to police custody. Solid leads on a potential bomber based on video and forensic evidence could be miscommunicated as a solid identification of a suspect. The issuance of an arrest warrant for a person not in custody could be miscommunicated as an actual arrest.

...

And even worse than its effect of confusing and angering the public is the help it gives the terrorists. The leak-generated misinformation puts pressure on investigative agencies to correct the record; these public corrections give the terrorists insights into the state of the investigation that they would not otherwise have. It makes them harder to catch.

Well, now that you put it like that.

By the Way: There's a puppet show in France, like Britain's Spitting Image, called Les Guignols d'Info. A day after the Boston attack, they announced the winners of the Marathon -- a severed leg, a severed arm, and a limbless torso. It's at 1:46 to 1:50 or so, here. It's in French but the "joke" (I use the term advisedly) is visual and obvious enough.

I don't know if it's really worth noting that there is a lot of bad taste in the world. Also, of course, a lot of bad comedy; this is the sort of joke an amateur seventh-grader thinks up. It's usually not thought of as being professional level work.

If you want revenge, you already have it: These assholes are puppeteers.

(If you want a brief translation of how Le Figaro introduced that clip: With the question, basically, "Did the Guignols go too far?" Wikipedia tells me the show is "leftist and populist" and often accused of presenting a dumbed-down version of the news to dumbed-down people. And it's accused of being anti-American as well. I think we can safely move that out of the "accused" category to "declared.")

Dang it my brain is still trying to come up with the plural of asshole.

-- tasker

France.

-- blindside

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (294)
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In a week of darkness, a dark observation is our only bitter humor.

The gun control groups central to ObamaÂ’s push never lost faith in the White House and praised its efforts even as it was clear the push would fail.

“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”

Second look at Obama's Great Depression?

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (361)
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Two weeks ago, it happened in Canada:

The Halifax Regional School Board and government officials in Nova Scotia are reviewing whether they should reopen the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, a Canada teen whose mother says she hanged herself after being bullied over an alleged rape by four teenage boys, Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry said Tuesday, according to CTV News.

...

Seventeen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons was taken off life-support by her mother, Leah Parsons, on April 7 after she hanged herself last week. According to Leah Parsons, her daughter never recovered from an alleged rape by four teenage boys that left her deeply depressed and bullied in her community.

Rehtaeh's mother said one boy took a photo of the alleged rape in 2011 and her daughter was subjected to bullying after it went viral.

After a year-long investigation, police concluded there were no grounds to charge the four boys because of insufficient evidence.

Horrifyingly, it turns out that this is not an isolated incident, but a trend. It also happened in California. The state just arrested the alleged rapists, but only after letting them remain in school for seven months. And only after the alleged victim hanged herself.

The California teens, arrested Thursday, are accused of sexually abusing Audrie Pott, 15, while she was passed out drunk at a classmateÂ’s house party.

To make matters worse, they allegedly took photos of the reported assault and used cell phones to spread them “like wildfire” through Saratoga High School in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"The whole school knowsÂ…. My life is ruined," Audrie wrote on her Facebook page.

Eight days later, on Sept. 10, 2012, she hanged herself.

There is some pushback on the idea of the photos spreading "like wildfire" -- the school newspaper says that they didn't go "viral." They specify that "only" around ten people saw the photos (though I'm not sure how they could ascertain that -- how do you know it's only those ten?).

But to Audrie Potts, whatever the number of people who had seen the pictures, it surely seemed like the whole school had seen them.

I hate posting this item in a week of truly horrible news but I think people should know.

I was very annoyed by Anderson Cooper's anti-bullying campaign when he mounted it. But a month ago I saw the documentary that set him off -- simply called Bully, streaming on Netflix, I think -- and I'd strongly recommend it. School officials seem evenhanded to a fault, if one can call it that, in these matters, not differentiating between the aggressor (the bully) and the victim (the bullied), but rather engaging in this weird "cycle of violence" sort of thinking in which both parties are, somehow, equally responsible for the fact that one kid goes home every night thinking about suicide (and sometimes carrying through on that thought).

There's also a very weird "Well what can we do to stop it?" mentality. I can only think of twenty things off the top of my head, from suspensions to parent conferences to a semester hitch at alternate school (for first-time offenders; those who just continue being sadists can and should stay in a more structured environment, as a bureaucrat might euphemize it).

That's the only thing I can add here: Check that movie out. It may well change your mind. It changed mine.

Headline Corrected: As people note, it's alleged that they were raped, and further, maybe "sexually assaulted" is a better term until we know the exact actions alleged.

So I added "Allegedly" and changed "Rape" to "Sexually Assaulted" and deleted a second reference to "rapists."

Posted by: Ace at 09:35 AM | Comments (507)
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This is pretty intense stuff. It is my understanding that the man who filmed this survived the explosion, but did not survive the beating his wife gave him when he got home.
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:10 AM | Comments (424)
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• Massive Explosion At Texas Fertilizer Plant
  
• Obama Acts Like Child After Gun Vote Fails
  
• Hispanics Beat Up Arab Looking Man In The Bronx After Boston Bombing
  
• Feminist's Son Suffers From Society Modern Feminism Helped Create
  
• MSNBC Claims The NRA Is Hindering..The Boston Bombing Investigation?
  
• How Obama Misread The Politics Of Gun Control
  
• White Writer's Privilege
  
• Elvis Impersonator Arrested In Ricin Letter Case
  
• China's Local Debt Out Of Control
  
• Are You Ready For Forced Retirement Accounts The Government Can Pilfer?
  
• US Charges 24 Current And Former IRS Workers With Theft Of Government Benefits
  
• After Gun Defeat, Where Does Obama Go From Here?
  
• IMF Piles On, Pensions Are In Danger
  
• Lawyer Up, Issa Warns CIA Staff
  
• Some People Take Their Chicken Wings A Little Too Seriously
  
• CNN Was On A Roll Yesterday When It Came To Making Stuff Up
  
• Man Describes Horrific Attack During Which His Estranged Wife Cut Off His Penis
  
• Famed WW2 Aviators Hold Final Reunion
  
• College Fired Professor Who Forced Students To Sign Pledge To Vote For Obama
  

Thanks to CDR-M for the retirement accounts link.

You can find pictures of Kate Upton motor boating Christina Hendricks here.

Update: I removed the Blaze article linking to the NYPost article. It looks like the NYPost identified the wrong people.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:23 AM | Comments (769)
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Happy Thursday.

What they really think:

“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”

Now you tell us. A "key architect" of Obamacare says there's a "huge train wreck coming down" because the law is too complicated and poorly understood.

Following the news that Mark Sanford was creeping around his ex-wife's property and has a court date to resolve a trespassing charge, the NRCC is pulling the plug on his campaign: "At this time, the NRCC will not be engaged in this special election." Oh, and you remember this sad photo (that's one of Sanford's sons at the election night party that Sanford's mistress/fiance crashed)? Jenny Sanford says that's the first time the son had met the woman.

Officials are reporting 5 to 15 dead in the Texas fertilizer plant explosion, but they expect to find more bodies.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (617)
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