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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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http://archive.is/GqIgZ
https://via.hypothes.is/https://www...the-gym-because-of-trump-now-i-cant-open-jars

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It was November 2016 and the only person I knew who believed Trump would win the US election was the owner of my gym. This was clearly a ridiculous prediction so, seeing the chance for some easy money, I offered to bet him $100 that Hillary would win.
But the gym owner, clearly not wanting to do his dough, pointed at this horrible thing in the corner with the name “sled” and said: “If Trump wins you have to pull 70kg on it.”
It was double what I could usually pull. And, if I won the bet, the gym owner would pull double his personal best.
I didn’t want Trump to win – he’d grabbed women by the pussy and mocked a reporter’s disability. He’d promised to build a wall and called Mexicans “rapists”. The thought of his presidency was frightening but so was pulling the sled. What if I herniated a disc?
After Trump claimed victory, I went up to the gym in a foul mood. “Just fucking load up the fucking sled, all right, and let’s get it over with,” I said without much grace as I strapped a belt around my waist.
I pulled the sled like a human oxen while being filmed and the gym staff cheered. I did it. But the Trump victory soured my successful show of strength.
Yeah, I could pull a pretend sled. But how was that going to help me when the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons or climate change?
Hungry and sore, I repaired to a restaurant down the road that I had never visited and where I had never seen anyone come or go from. The silent restaurant – no background music, no other diners – seemed like the perfect place to welcome the end of the global liberal order.
What new political order had been born tonight?
An elderly waiter appeared and handed me a menu. Most things on it were not available. The one dish that was was unspeakably awful and the colour and texture of cement.
I never went back. But I also didn’t return to the gym. I associated it now with Donald Trump, the bad meal and pulling the sled.
It was 9 November 2016 and my thinking about fitness changed almost overnight. In tune with the times, it became more Trump, less Obama.
In the spirit of the Donald, I drank more bottles of Diet Coke and ate more McDonald’s. I dropped the gym – embracing Trump’s belief that we are given a certain amount of energy and if we use it then we are depleting a finite resource.
According to the book Trump Revealed: “Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, ‘You are going to die young because of this.’”
I didn’t want to die young, so I didn’t go to the gym.
Trump explained his exercise routine like this to Reuters: “I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that. I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”
I walked. I this. I that. Months passed. Then a year. Trump was going to be in power for another 1,000 years. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Could I really avoid the gym for the entirety of his presidency?
I missed being strong enough to open jars and carry groceries. So, last week, I returned to the gym, slinking back in as if no time had passed. I hoped that by wearing a puffy jacket and MC Hammer pants I could hide my lack of definition – that I could pretend I had maintained my fitness on my own. At home, running to the building next door. On the couch. While tweeting.
But you can’t hide fitness. You either have it or you don’t. You can either lift the dumbbell or you can wobble on your fifth rep and drop the load.
You are either strong or you are weak. And I was weak.
When I started my gym program again last week, I started at the beginning. I started on the simplest machines and with the lowest amount of weight. I did a split squat on a box and fell over from a lack of balance. I got vertigo doing calf lifts. My knees clicked.
The next day I woke up feeling like a human ironing board. Sitting down became impossible. I had to sort of fall on to chairs because there was no “bend” available in my legs. And typing this is agony – my arms hurt. There’s no strength in my wrists.
The cruellest thing about fitness is that it doesn’t last. It should be the rule that you only need to get fit once. And once you get there, you stay there.
I was fit in 2016, before Trump. But when you stop, it goes. And it goes quickly. A week or two and you have to start again with the 2kg dumbbells and the tremor in your forearms.
I returned again this week – to the boredom and pain of the gym – trying to build up back to the strength I had before Trump became president.
The struggle is Sisyphean.
• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist
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Koko did not have a human IQ, did not know sign language, and didn't understand english.

Can't we just let a cool monkey be a cool monkey? And no gorilla refugees please, not to mention I don't think they'd like it here.
 
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Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
Koko did not have a human IQ, did not know sign language, and didn't understand english.

Can't we just let a cool monkey be a cool monkey? And no gorilla refugees please, not to mention I don't think they'd like it here.
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Yeah it's been a long time but I vaguely recall from my days in high school learning American Sign Language that trained gorillas strung together a slurring word salad that didn't seem to indicate anything beyond mimicking gestures they saw.

They're still cool but them being communicative was just hype.
 
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Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
Koko did not have a human IQ, did not know sign language, and didn't understand english.

Can't we just let a cool monkey be a cool monkey? And no gorilla refugees please, not to mention I don't think they'd like it here.
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You have to be a (((human trafficker))) or have an IQ lower than a re†arded gorilla to want more Somalis in your country.

It's not even worth the cheap labor when they take more in welfare for their ten-plus kids bred like rabbits.
 
Denies Holocaust, on trial
The Canadian Press - Jul 9, 2018 / 2:07 pm | Story: 230928
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Photo: The Canadian Press
Monika Schaefer
A former federal Green candidate disavowed by the party after she published a self-made video denying the Holocaust is on trial in Germany for incitement of hatred.

Monika Schaefer ran unsuccessfully for the Greens in Alberta's Yellowhead riding in 2006, 2008 and 2011, but the party rejected her as a candidate in 2015 and condemned her views the next year after the video emerged.

Andrea Mayer, a spokeswoman for Munich's public prosecutor's office, says Schaefer has been charged with six counts of "incitement of the people" for publishing such videos.

She says Schaefer's trial, which began July 2, is set to continue until August 17 and the maximum penalty for each count is three years in prison.

Mayer adds that Schaefer was visiting relatives in Germany and attended a court hearing in a different case when she was arrested on Jan. 3, and she's been in custody ever since.

In Schaefer's 2016 video, which is still up on YouTube, she calls the Holocaust the most "pernicious and persistent lie in all of history," and describes concentration camps as "work camps" that didn't have gas chambers.
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The fact she was a green party hippie is surprising to me.
 
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-body-posed-video-games-doritos-funeral-vgtrn

The family of a New Orleans teen tragically killed in a shooting last month wanted their loved one's funeral to honor him just the way he lived—so they had his body embalmed and posed it in a recliner with a PS4 controller in hand, WGNO reports.

Eighteen-year-old Renard Matthews was fatally shot while walking his dog on June 25. His mother, Temeka Matthews, told WGNO that her son was "a bit of a homebody" who loved the Boston Celtics, so she and the family decided on a non-traditional way of remembering him at last Sunday's wake.

Instead of a standard casket, the family positioned Matthews at the head of the room at Charbonnet Labat Glapion Funeral Home, seated in a chair in front of a TV playing NBA2K. The Celtics fan was dressed in sunglasses and a Kyrie Irving jersey with matching socks. Next to his chair, on an end table, the family lined up some of their son's favorite snacks—a bag of Doritos and root beer.

According to Yahoo, the Treme funeral home has hosted a variety of unusual funerals, like these so-called "extreme embalmings." Back in 2014, the funeral home reportedly put together a wake for a 53-year-old woman whose family asked for her to be posed at a table with a cigarette and beer. The funeral home has also "stood a deceased drummer from a grassroots band at a drum set" for a wake, an employee told Yahoo.


Matthews's wake is a surprising but loving tribute to the high school student whose life was cut short by the shooting. He is set to be laid to rest Tuesday at Interment Providence Memorial Park.

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