Why make a big fuss about announcing what everyone knew well before the trial started? Because Leavenworth is an all-male prison. This makes it look less like a courageous stance by a transgender individual, and more like a cynical ploy to avoid spending the next 7-35 years in Leavenworth.

(cynical quotes around certain words in the previous paragraph have been omitted to avoid discussing the general issue of gender as a fluid concept disconnected from biology)

• George W. Bush was legitimately elected President. Twice.
• Vaccines save lives, and do not cause autism.
• There is no such thing as a "climate-change denier", just people who think that Global Warming is 99% social engineering and 1% climate science.
• George Zimmerman did not get away with murder, and the verdict, which did not depend on "standing his ground", would likely have been the same in 48 other states (and possibly even in Ohio).

…stay away from any unmoderated forums or comments for the next few days weeks.

I mean, damn.

[Update: also forums moderated by “diversity of everything except opinion” Leftists (redundant, I know); I’ve read several lengthy threads where not a single person participating has even a passing familiarity with what was presented in the courtroom. Their bigotry has left them filled with hatred over “facts” that the prosecution was unable to provide even a shred of evidence for.

Of course, these are the same folks still carrying a grudge over Bush “stealing two elections”, so law and reason were never their strengths…]

Via Althouse comes this Berkeley headline:

Firefighters use lid to put out kitchen pot fire in Berkeley

This boingboing article attempts an in-depth analysis of the recent flap about a Kickstarter campaign for pick-up artists that contained some controversial—and in some cases unsavory—advice for men who can’t manage to score any other way.

It jumps the shark the moment the author uses the word “cisgender”. You don’t need to read anything past that point to predict everything he says.

Google doesn’t just take anyone’s word for it that wheels should be round; they try every other possible shape first.

On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Along the way, though, they did discover a few things that many corporate HR folks still don’t accept:

One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless -- no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.'s and test scores, but we don't anymore, unless you're just a few years out of school. We found that they don't predict anything.

What's interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who've never gone to college.

Thursday I had my car at the dealer’s for a slightly-belated 60,000 mile major service, and while they were at it, they replaced the wheel bearings on the right rear tire, which had been making some noise. All under warranty, no big deal. I drove back to the office, parked on the side of the building, and all was well.

Saturday morning, while waiting for our instructor to show up at the dojo, another student noticed the head of a 3-inch nail sticking out of the right rear tire. He figured vandalism, because it went in nice and straight, as if pounded with a hammer.

This morning, when I went out to the car, I happened to check the new tires, and found this:

Same tire, same kind of nail, pounded in nice and straight. Guess where I parked yesterday? Guess which side of the office building has no lights, no windows, and isn’t covered by our security cameras?

Grrrr.

In a bold choice, this young historical cosplayer has chosen to dress up as a gangster’s moll and terrorize a room full of innocent people with an automatic weapon.

(moved below the fold because I’m tired of looking at her…)

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