I can't decide which of these is sadder:

Lost baby whale thinks yacht is mom (and video here)

Or

Aussie mayor urges unattractive women to move into town

Have you seen this picture of the Spanish basketball team? Apparently it's bad. I don't think it's a big deal.

There's this dumb article quoting Jason Kidd complaining that the Spanish players won't be punished like American players would have been. Instead of saying that no one should be punished for this, he insists that the Spanish should be punished because the Americans would be too.

Interestingly, this CNN article shows that American Asians are a lot more offended than the actual Chinese, who should be the first to be offended should there be a real reason for it.

Hat tip to Dan for sending me this. The Lowell Spinners baseball team, an affiliate of the Red Sox in the New York Penn-League, is holding a Politically Correct game Night, followed by a Politically Incorrect Night the next day.
On Politically Correct Night:

[The] Spinners will take measures to make sure nobody—including the players—leaves the ballpark offended. Players committing an error will not be identified for fear of hurting their feelings, and gender-neutral terms will be used to refer to the players, for example first baseperson instead of first baseman... [and] referring to the shortstop as the “vertically-challenged stop.”

In addition, bases will not be identified as first, second, or third, and will be treated equally without numerical ranking, the foul lines will be identified as fair lines and instead of having one fan of the game, every fan will be recognized as Fan of the Game...

Lastly, the Spinners will be paying added attention to “Going Green” on Political Correctness night, encouraging fans to recycle and promoting carpooling and public transportation to the game, as well as a salute to Hybrids.

For the July 23 game the first 250 fans, male or female, in attendance will receive Lowell Spinners potholders.

And on Politically Incorrect Night:

[The] Spinners will for one night create “Men Only” entrances to the ballpark and allowing only men to participate in the between-innings promotions.

Furthermore, the first 250 women in attendance will receive pink Lowell Spinners potholders to use in kitchen while preparing dinner for their husbands. As a result, only females will take orders at the two main concession stands.

The Spinners are also happy to provide napping areas for any senior citizens who feel the need to “rest their eyes” during the game. Cot stations will be set up on the concourse, available to any fans over the age of 60.

The Spinners will continue their salute to the incorrect, offering complimentary gas cards to fans to encourage them to use as much gas as possible, including encouraging families to drive to the game separately. A tribute to gas guzzlers will include needlessly driving vehicles during each between-inning break.

I wish the big boys did that too.

I had completely forgotten about this blog until someone recently reminded of its existence. Stuff White People Like is an absolutely hilarious blog detailing, well, stuff that white people like. The top post right now is "unpaid internships," which is so true. One of my favorite posts is #98, The Ivy League.

Of course, there is also a plethora of variants now online, including Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Desis/Brown People Like, and Stuff Yellow People Like.

All are equally hilarious and politically incorrect. Gotta love it.

You may have read the Inside Higher Ed article I linked to a few days ago, about how the American Bar Association's pressure on George Mason Law to accept more black students resulted in unbelievably high failures rates among those accepted at lower standards.

Inside Higher Ed has another excellent piece out, discussing how universities obsessed with an image of physical diversity are putting out viewbooks with pictures that are much more diverse than the schools' actual demographics. In some cases, they are even doctoring photos of white students to add minorities in them.

I wrote a column on this issue more than a year ago. Excerpt:

I decided to track the website of Cornell University, my alma mater... On one of my visits to the site, the pictures showed a total of eight students, all minorities, with seven of them being women. For reference purposes, Cornell is split down the middle gender-wise, with blacks making up five percent of the student population.

This quote from the Inside Higher Ed article says it all: “Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture."

With the Berkeley tree-sitting fiasco coming back to light in recent weeks, and considering its parallels with similar events in recent years at Cornell, my alma mater, I wrote a column on the subject. Enjoy!

Almost overnight, London managed to switch from having one of my least favorite politicians as its mayor to one of my favorites. Reading this piece by Boris Johnson, London's new Conservative mayor, has made him one of my top politicians today.

In it, Johnson mocks the uproar he faced when he rode a bicycle helmet-less (the accusation being that he was setting a bad example). This kind of reminds me of Fred Thompson's (another favorite) silly hat rule. Neither of these men is going to B.S. the world by doing something ludicrous with themselves just so that the media can get a high off of it.

But perhaps the most exciting part of this piece is Johnson's understanding of economics:

I have also brooded on the results of some study in Australia, which showed that making bike helmets compulsory deterred so many people from cycling that there was a rise in obesity - and more people ended up dying of heart attacks than were saved by the head-gear.

This, of course, is reminiscent of the seatbelt laws that increase pedestrian deaths, the laws forcing children to have their own seats on airplanes thereby increasing children's highway deaths, and a million other laws designed by "wise"  and "knowledgeable" politicians who know what is best for us yet fail to look at the unintended consequences of their intrusive government policies.

And, of course, Johnson provides the icing on the cake:

I was negotiating Knightsbridge with extreme caution when a French tourist walked across the road without looking (you could tell he was French by the noise he made on impact) and, though I sprained my wrist, I felt the real lesson was about teaching tourists to look the right way. If I'd had a foghorn, it might have come in handy, or possibly a cow-catcher fitted to the front of my bike. But a helmet?

I'd like to see an American politician write something like this some time. 

Jaclyn Schiff has written a column about how the Internet is becoming a new form of colonialism. Not unexpectedly, I disagree, though she brings up some good arguments. She has posted my thoughts on the column at The Schiff Report, where she blogs. Since my response was an email to her, it's not in its finest form, but its hits some of the main points of my view of the Internet in the world.

Jonah Goldberg recognizes that if Obama hadn't called for a conversation about race, no one would have done it. Absolutely no one. zip.

Excerpt:

Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter's pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I'd been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses -- often entire majors -- dedicated to race in America. I'd even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes and issues into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. And scratching faintly in the back of my mind, I felt some vague memory that these same universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind's eye seemed to reveal African American studies centers, banners for Black History Month and copies of books like "Race Matters" and "The Future of the Race" lined up on shelves at college bookstores.