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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
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I just noticed this on the yahoo news page
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Nice proofreading there journo. Forgetting to put in 'million' and that pic of trudeau makes the article initially seem like its going to be some attack against trudeau and him being an idiot or cheap as fuck and doing something crazy
 
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thepostmillennial.com

'Women are now third-class citizens': Trans swimmer's UPenn teammate speaks out

A University of Pennsylvania swimmer, teammate to Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as transgender and dominates in women's college swimming, said that "women are now third-class citizens."
thepostmillennial.com thepostmillennial.com

University of Pennsylvania swimmer, teammate to swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as transgender and competes—and dominates—in women's college swimming, said that "women are now third-class citizens."

Speaking on condition of anonymity to the Washington Examiner, the swimmer said that the qualities Thomas retained as a biological male gives Thomas a distinct advantage over women competitors. Thomas is 6'3" and only transitioned after swimming for the UPenn men's team for three years.

"Women are now third-class citizens," she said. Male athletics come first, then trans athletes, and women come in third, overshadowed by men, then by trans-identified biological males.

"Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 (freestyle events)," the teammate said, "But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn't good at as a man."

Thomas won two more races on Saturday in a meet against Harvard in the the women's 100 and 200 meter freestyle races, easily beating the female competition in both cases.

The swimmer went on to tell the Washington Examiner that administrators who condone these activities, of having a biological male compete on the women's team, don't care about women athletes.

"The top people at the NCAA, who are on the board of directors... they are not protecting women's rights. Imagine if there was this kind of inequality in men's sports. Or someone found out about doping in a men's sport. It would be fixed in a blink of an eye. Everyone would be all over it. But because it's women, they don't care," the teammate said.

The swimmer also said that she's received lots of support for her views–outside of swimming. "People have come up to me and said this is so wrong. I am typically liberal," she clarified, "but this is past that. This is do wrong. This doesn't make any sense."

"I'm trying to do everything I can without harming my future from stopping this from happening," the swimmer said. "I can't just sit back and let something like this happen. I'm not just going to sit back and say, 'My rights are being taken away, too bad.' It's embarrassing that people aren't speaking out more."

Thomas recently lost to Yale's Iszac Henig, a biological female who identifies as transgender and has decided to continue swimming on the women's team rather than taking testosterone and competing on the men's team. A teammate of Thomas' believes that Henig and Thomas, who are friends, colluded to let Henig win.

"Looking at [Lia's] time, I don't think she was trying," a UPenn swimmer, also speaking on condition of anonymity, alleged. "I know they're friends and I know they were talking before the meet. I think she let her win to prove the point that, 'Oh see, a female-to-male beat me.'"

In the 100 freestyle race, Henig finished first with a time of 49.57, while Thomas finished in sixth with a time of 52.84. During a November tri-meet with Princeton and Cornell, Thomas swam that same race in 49.42, which would have bested Henig.

When asked if she thought there was collusion, the anon swimmer said "I do. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be shocked if I found out that was 100 percent true."

Others on the UPenn team have said "Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach [Mike Schnur] just really likes winning. He's like most coaches. I think secretly everyone just knows it's the wrong thing to do."

"When the whole team is together, we have to be like, 'Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.' It’s very fake," the anon swimmer went on to say.

Thomas is slated to compete in the women's 200 meter, 500 meter and 1650 meter freestyle events at the NCAA swimming championships this year.
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Bee farming: Police stung as beekeepers protest in Chile​

(Article)

Four beekeepers have been detained in Chile following a protest calling for government support for their industry.

The beekeepers held a demonstration outside the presidential palace in the capital, Santiago.

Seven police officers were stung as they tried to remove beehives placed by the protesters to block a main thoroughfare.
A prolonged drought has been ravaging beekeeping in Chile, affecting bees' food sources such as flowers and crops.
To highlight their cause, the beekeepers set up some 60 hives containing around 10,000 bees in front of the palace and prevented the police from dispersing the demonstration.

One of the protesters told journalists the death of bee colonies was devastating not just for them, but for the whole world.

Protesters want government reform to improve honey prices or provide subsidies to honey producers, Reuters news agency reports.

Ministry of agriculture officials say they share the protesters' concern about the effect of the drought, adding they have been providing aid for months to 20 communities experiencing severe water shortages.
But the protest resulted in some bees flying around in the air, causing concerns to passers-by.
"It is dangerous for people who are allergic, because it can cause death," one told reporters.
 
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www.spiked-online.com

The hypocrisy of the knee-takers

Marcus Rashford has been photographed alongside a notorious racist – where’s the outrage?
www.spiked-online.com www.spiked-online.com

The hypocrisy of the knee-takers​

Marcus Rashford has been photographed alongside a notorious racist – where’s the outrage?

Picture this scenario. A white English cricketer is photographed alongside a man who once referred to black people as monkeys. This hypothetical cricketer is smiling in the presence of this notorious racist who also thinks slavery was an understandable practice – after all, how else should we treat blacks, those ‘snakes’ and ‘cowards’ who screw up everything for the rest of us? Now imagine what the response to such a photograph would be. It would be ferocious. The cricketer’s career would be over, kaput, utterly unsalvageable. It would be frontpage news for days. Cricket’s soul would be well and truly searched. There would be national self-reflection, social-media fury. It might even elbow aside Partygate on the news agenda.

So here’s a question – why has none of this happened following the publication of a photograph of football heroes Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard alongside grime artist Wiley? Wiley is a racist. He’s the David Irving of grime. His loathing for Jews has seen him banned from every social-media platform. Jews are ‘snakes’ and ‘cowards’, he says. They’re ‘Satanic’. He thinks Hitler may have had a point. ‘Why did Hitler hate [Jews]? For nothing?’, he asked in one of his deranged video tirades. And yet there are those two role models Rashford and Lingard with their arms around him in a photo reportedly taken in Dubai on Sunday, and not much has happened. Some headlines, sure, but that’s it. The woke set isn’t raging. Social media is not alight with anger. Football is not about to collapse. Rashford and Lingard will be fine.

How do we explain this stark double standard? Why is it a dead cert that if a top sportsman had associated with any other kind of racist – an anti-black racist or an anti-Muslim bigot – then his career would be history by now? We don’t even need the imaginary scenario outlined above to know how different such a situation would have been. Consider the cancellation of cricket legend Michael Vaughan after it was alleged that he said ‘There are too many of you lot’ in relation to Pakistanis some 13 years ago – an allegation he vigorously denies. So in Britain in the 2020s you can be dragged to the stocks for allegedly saying ‘you lot’ more than a decade ago, but you’ll be fine if you fling your arms around a man who thinks Hitler must have had a good reason to exterminate all those snakes.

There are two explanations for why the Wiley pic isn’t hitting as hard as a photo of a white cricket or tennis star grinning with a KKK nutter would have. For why the cancel-culture mob has stood down, for once, and said: ‘We’ll let this one pass.’ It’s either because the photo features Marcus Rashford who, with good cause, has become a national treasure. Rashford is a very admirable young man. His footballing flair, commitment to tackling poverty and moral integrity have endeared him to virtually the entire nation. Perhaps people are giving him the benefit of the doubt. Or it’s because the kind of racism spouted by Wiley – hatred for the Jewish people – just isn’t taken as seriously by the identitarian elites as other forms of racial bigotry are.

I think it’s a combination of these two things. I actually think it is right to give Rashford and Lingard the benefit of the doubt. Of course they should not be cancelled. We need far less of that career-crushing finger of judgement that our cancel-happy society is forever wagging at ‘wrongthinkers’. Rashford and Lingard have both now condemned anti-Semitism. However, it has to be noted how soft their statements are. That photo could ‘easily be misconstrued’, both said. Erm, yes – it could be ‘misconstrued’ as two young men who are worshipped by young people across the land posing for a photo with someone who thinks Jews are snakes. Rashford says he ‘wasn’t aware’ of Wiley’s anti-Semitic comments, which rather calls into question the extent to which Rashford is across the problem of racism in 21st-century Britain. A rounded anti-racist would surely be aware that one of Britain’s best-known grime artists had recently referred to Jews as reptiles?

No matter – Rashford and Lingard have made clear their distaste for anti-Jewish racism and that should be an end to it. And yet that question still lingers, like a bad smell in the world of woke politics – why are Jews always treated differently? Famous sportsmen are photographed next to an anti-Semite and woke’s normally noisy warriors against racism say nothing. A man from Blackburn treks 4,000 miles to terrorise Jews in Texas and tumbleweed rolls across the computer screens of Britain’s anti-racist set. Jews are murdered by Islamist extremists in Europe and there’s silence from the kind of people who will write a 50-tweet thread on why you shouldn’t ask a black woman about her hair. As for the problem of black anti-Semitism, which is a fairly serious problem in the US, or Muslim anti-Semitism, which is a pox in parts of the UK, don’t even go there. You’ll be branded racist and Islamophobic for broaching such problems. In the eyes of the woke mob, it is basically ‘Islamophobic’ to talk about anti-Semitism.

There is a fairly straightforward explanation for all of this: it’s because identity politics is not anti-racism. Today’s elites are not concerned with tackling and defeating racial thinking but rather with rehabilitating it in a new form. The woke set suffers from racial myopia. It views everything through the prism of race. Worst of all, identitarians have built new racial hierarchies of the ‘privileged’ and the ‘oppressed’ which determine the moral worth of racial groups. Whites are privileged, and thus bad. Muslims are oppressed and thus deserving of social sympathy. Black people, too. And Jews? They’re the worst.

They are hyper-white, hyper-privileged. Their role in the identitarian psychodrama is to atone for their advantages, not to complain about the historical persecution they suffered or the racism they still experience today. Pipe down, Jew.

This is the rotten truth of identity politics – it ‘Others’ certain racial groups every bit as enthusiastically as the racists of old did. It others Jews in particular. Its dogmas of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’ have given rise to a whole new era of good races and bad races, to the sanctification of some identity groups and the demonisation of others. Because genuine anti-racists are concerned with tackling all forms of racial hatred and discrimination, we are as horrified by anti-Semitism as we are by anti-black racism or bigotry against Asians. Because identitarians are concerned with organising humanity into ‘good’ racial groups and ‘bad’ racial groups, as a way of maintaining their own elite power as managers of race relations and enforcers of correct thought, they signal-boost acts of racism that bolster their ideological cause while diminishing acts of racism that call their belief system into question. Identity politics, being a new species of racism, is expressly complicit in the diminution of the problem of anti-Semitism.

Footballers like Rashford and Lingard take the knee against racism and then hang out with a man who views Jews as snakes. We need to reflect on this. It suggests, as powerfully as anything else I can remember, that the identitarianism that now infects every aspect of public life, from football to politics to culture, is not confronting racism in the way we need to.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
 
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Just more "Seventeen masks and 45 boosters to flatten that curve" dribble. 😒

https://6abc.com/philadelphia-covid...ids-5-and-under-philly-restrictions/11532464/

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The Philadelphia health commissioner is optimistic as the city continues to battle coronavirus and the latest wave of the omicron variant, but says the pandemic restrictions will remain in place for now.

Dr. Chery Bettigole spoke to reporters Wednesday morning during the city's weekly COVID-19 response briefing. She said the Department of Public Health is not looking to drop the city's mask mandate despite a drop in cases.

"If you think about where we are with this particular wave and case rates right now, we're probably several months away from a place where we will have the kind of safety to drop all the current restrictions," Bettigole said.

She said eventually they will lift the mask mandate, but "not at this time."

The health commissioner said the city is seeing an average of 554 new COVID-19 cases per day compared to just about 1,000 cases per day last week.

"The last week six weeks have been extremely difficult, but now we've seen our case rates fall about 50% each of the last two weeks," Bettigole said.

The percentage of tests coming back positive stands at 7.3% which is the lowest since Dec. 21, 2021.

Bettigole said 686 people who have tested positive are in Philadelphia hospitals, which is less than half the number seen during the peak of the wave two weeks ago.

RELATED: Pfizer asks FDA to allow COVID-19 vaccine for kids under 5

In regards to the FDA beginning to review data on a COVID-19 vaccine for children between six months and 5-years-old, Bettigole said the rollout would look different than previous ones.

"It could actually end up looking how our children get their routine vaccinations against measles, varicella and polio now," Bettigole said. "We're already working on how that will work so we'll be ready for when the FDA says it's ready to go."

Bettigole says the city is looking to sign up primary care practitioners to administer the vaccine. They are also looking at additional clinics for young children.

More than 95% of adults, 89% of those 12 and up, and 46.7% of children 5-11 have had one dose of the vaccine. Data shows 78.9% of adults, 73.1% of those 12 and up are fully vaccinated and nearly 30% of adults in the city have received a booster dose.

"If things continue the way they are, we could start to see things getting back to some semblance of normal," Bettigole said.

However, she added that "things are still bad out there." She reminded residents that the city is still classified in the CDC's high level of community transmission category.

She said everyone should continue to do what works: double mask or wear an N95 or KN95 mask when indoors around others, stay home if you're sick or have been exposed to someone with COVID, try to avoid crowded indoor areas and get vaccinated.

"There's lots of good news on the horizon," Bettigole said. She said with the help of vaccines and boosters, the city will find its way back to normalcy.

So we've seen a drop but we still need to wear two masks indoors? It's been fridgid lately. Every store has the heat turned up and my glasses fog like crazy and I can't breathe. The maskne popped up again too because of going in to hot buildings while masked. By the time I'm ready to exit a building my mask is damp and my glasses need to be cleaned. Fuck you if you think I'm doing that with two masks. That damp mask can't be good for my health.
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This is never ending. And the vaccine card mandate is already having a negative effect on businesses. My aunt works at an indoor amusement center that does birthday parties. If you don't have proof of vaccination you can't eat in. You can have food placed in containers by staff and you take it home. Even if it's your own cake. So parties aren't getting booked as much and several have been cancelled. My aunt's only working like two parties a week now. They still have other patrons. But I'm wondering if that will fizzle out too because you can't eat food indoors.
 
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The Drudge Report did this big headline with Facebook titled "The Crash of Facebook".

Shares of Facebook parent Meta were down more than 23% Thursday after the company forecasted weaker-than-expected revenue growth in the next quarter. It also said it’s taking a big hit from Apple’s privacy changes, and showed the first quarterly decline in daily active users on record.

The stock is on pace for its biggest one-day drop ever, ahead of the 19% plummet it saw in July 2018. Thursday’s drop is set to shave about $210 billion from its market cap, bringing it to about $689 billion.

The company, which released earnings under its new name for the first time with a new reporting structure, missed earnings estimates for the fourth quarter at $3.67 vs. $3.84 analysts were expecting, according to Refinitiv. But it beat on revenue for the quarter, at $33.67 billion vs. $33.4 billion estimated.
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