Nearly a week ago the president of Wilfred Laurier University issued a statement.

It’s a gratifying thing to read.

When the issue first broke, I erred on the side of caution. As a person, and as the president of Laurier, I am sensitive to the viewpoints and concerns of our students, staff and faculty. As an employer, I am cognisant that the four people who were in that meeting room are employees and one is also a student. All four are entitled to due process. I did not want to rush to judgement; rather, I wanted to ensure we were able to objectively assess the facts and make sound decisions flowing from that assessment.

We hired an external fact-finder

A not very festive item I was unaware of: a friend mentioned the deregulation of neurotoxins “resulting in an entire generation of cognitively impaired humans” and I asked what he meant and he replied with Children of Color Hit Hardest as Environmental Enforcement Tumbles Under Trump. Ah yes. I knew that – I knew that poison and pollution in general is much more likely to be perpetrated on poor people than on rich people and more on people of color than white people – but I didn’t know about this particular example. It’s not cheerful.

Public health researchers have found elevated levels of manganese, a heavy metal that can cause neurological disorders and other health problems, in the toenails

In the Telegraph:

Academics say they have been forced to leave the country to pursue their research interests as British universities are accused of blocking studies over fears of backlash on social media.

The Twitter armies are marching, marching.

The academics have decided to speak out as James Caspian, one of the country’s leading gender specialists, revealed that he is planning to take Bath Spa University to judicial review over its decision to turn down his research into transgenderism.

Well but you see there’s no need to research transgenderism, because we already know all there is to know: that gender is how people “identify” and that sex is wholly beside the point.

Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, a fellow

Egypt plans to make not believing in god a crime.

The Egyptian parliament’s committee on religion has announced plans to make disbelief in God a crime. Under the current law against “contempt of religions” atheists can be prosecuted for expressing their disbelief in public but the committee’s proposal would go further and criminalise disbelief itself.

I wonder how they plan to detect that crime, or collect evidence for it, or present the evidence in court.

They don’t really, I suppose, it’s just a fist under the nose. But there’s nothing quite like people trying to tell you what to believe to bring out the defiance in most of us.… Read the rest

Ah the British sense of humor.

Oh Elf, we know it’s nippy outside but not that kind of nippy! #ElfBehavingBad pic.twitter.com/kYMNruqLda

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 11, 2017

Rub-a-dub-dub, three in a tub. A night of 'selfies and chill.' #ElfBehavingBad pic.twitter.com/C5FrrUMdJF

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 12, 2017

That’s one way to scratch that itch. That’s not Santa’s toothbrush is it?! pic.twitter.com/bzgX3LFEDA

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 13, 2017

Don't tell Rudolph I've found a new piece of ass pic.twitter.com/UA4Ye2jh3R

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 16, 2017

First come, first served pic.twitter.com/JstSqtWOTh

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 19, 2017

Spot the difference… pic.twitter.com/hWV83m4EYE

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 21, 2017

Noel Coward eat your heart out.… Read the rest

Porn script or sexual assault?

That’s the question two filmmakers recently asked a group of men for a new video project titled “Be Frank.” Created by Dutch natives Damayanti Dipayana and Camilla Borel-Rinkes, “Be Frank” is a seven-minute film featuring men discussing the recent #MeToo movement and the role men can play in combating sexual violence.

…

In the above “Be Frank” clip, Dipayana and Borel-Rinkes asked men to read different storylines and then guess whether the situation was from a pornography script or a #MeToo story. The #MeToo campaign, originally created by activist Tarana Burke, has recently sparked a cultural reckoning with how we deal with sexual violence around the world.

Although it’s revealed at the

Also in the Guardian, and not particularly significant but kind of amusing…why Carter Page had such a hard time defending his PhD thesis.

In emails seen by the Guardian, Page compares his decade-long struggle to get a postgraduate qualification to the ordeal suffered by Mikhail Khodorkovsy – the Russian oligarch sent to a Siberian prison by Vladimir Putin.

In one unhappy note to his examiners, he writes: “Your actions to date have been far more destructive than anything I have personally experienced in my 39 years on this planet.” The fate of Khodorkovsky, he adds, represents “the closest analogy in recent history to my trials”.

Well at least we can see he had a scholarly sense of proportion … Read the rest

Yet more shame and degradation on the world stage, this time involving the shiny new US ambassador to the Netherlands.

Trump’s new choice for ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, who was only sworn in by the vice president, Mike Pence, on 11 December, was being interviewed for current affairs programme Nieuwsuur by reporter Wouter Zwart.

Zwart says: “You mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands, and that cars and politicians are being set on fire in the Netherlands.”

Hoekstra replies: “I didn’t say that. This is actually an incorrect statement. We would call it fake news.”

Hoekstra is then shown clips of him saying: “The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have

These are the people who are ruling over us.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc0wnvLDR3u/

“Some good friends decided that while my birthday is not for 2 weeks that they would get me an early 40th birthday cake,” Trump Jr. explained on Instagram, beside a photo of himself gripping the cookie with both hands and what appears to be a grimace of pain.

Cruz stands next to him.

Newsweek wrote the senator “appeared unmoved by the cookie,” though Bill Kristol saw a “sickly smile” on his face — as though he had some foreboding of the storm to come.

The sickly smile on Ted Cruz's face suggests he knows that even many of his hard core supporters are going to think this a bit

There’s a pattern.

On a summer afternoon in Southern California nine years ago, a commuter train blew through a stop signal and ran head-on into an oncoming freight train, killing 25 people.

After investigators determined that the crash could have been prevented by automatic-braking technology, Congress ordered all passenger railroads to install new systems by 2016. Since then, Congress has extended that deadline and trains have kept speeding into preventable disasters, including the Amtrak derailment that killed three people in Western Washington on Monday.

In Amtrak’s case, this is a recurring nightmare. The crash this week was eerily reminiscent of one just two years ago in Philadelphia, where an Amtrak train barreled into a sweeping curve at 106