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This cupcake costs $750. Repeat: this cupcake costs $750. Maybe you shouldn't get one for everyone in the third-grade class. Meet the $750 Decadence D'Or cupcake at Sweet Surrender inside the Palazzo. It's encased in a hand-blown sugar fleur-de-lis and crafted using chocolates that get more special attention during production than Rip Torn when the movie's shot in a whiskey bar. It's arguably better than the Hostess version. Here's how it breaks down: • The Cake: Made from Palmira Single Estate chocolate, which was developed by Valrhona, a French chocolatier who planted a series of Criollo bean trees to create...

SACRAMENTO, CA, August 13, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Governor Jerry Brown has signed California's new 'transgender' law, making the state the fifth where it is legal for self-identifying “transgender” children to use bathrooms, showers, locker rooms, and changing rooms designated for children of the opposite biological sex. "Now, every transgender student in California will be able to get up in the morning knowing that when they go to school as their authentic self they will have the same fair chance at success as their classmates,” said Mason Davis, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center. But Peter Sprigg, Senior Fellow for...

Representatives from Operation Rescue, Kansas Coalition for Life, Kansans for Life, and a local church asked the Wichita City Council this morning to re-zone property where a the South Wind Women’s Center abortion clinic currently operates due to an increased safety hazard created by the clinic. “Some of the clinic workers are aggressive and harassing toward the pro-life people who are attempting to offer help to abortion-bound women. An escalation of their hostile behavior has every possibility of spilling out into the neighborhood, causing a safety concern to residents along Bleckley,” Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Policy Advisor for Operation Rescue told...

"Life can be a crapshoot. Even if you have a high level of situational awareness, and you go out of your way to avoid bad parts of town after dark, you still might find yourself unexpectedly confronted at some point in your life by a thug or a "gangsta" wielding a knife or a gun. Tonight, an expert in hand-to-hand combat shows us a couple of basic but highly effective self-defense techniques that will have your attacker saying "uh-oh!" H/T smalldeadanimals

Being more intelligent does not stop people being racist – it simply makes them better at covering it up. He said the study showed racism and prejudice were not simply a result of low mental ability. Instead, they result from the need of dominant groups to ‘legitimise and protect’ their privileged social position over other social groupings. More intelligent citizens ‘are just better’ at this, added Mr Wodtke at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. In modern America, ‘this means that intelligent whites say all the right things about racial equality in principle but they just don’t actually...

Tea, Earl Grey, hot. Those are the words spoken by Capt. Picard to the computer when he wants his favorite beverage replicated. While we're still a long ways away from that becoming reality, we're taking steps toward it. NASA will be taking that step when it takes a 3D printer up to the International Space Station in June 2014. MORE: How 3D Printing Will Save You

The possibility of an active NFL player coming out as gay remains a hot topic. Speaking on the subject, Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III believes there are gay players in the league right now and thinks there's a window of opportunity for them to make it known.

Click on link. Tried posting from ~ 4-6:30 this AM, but had site problems. Had to drive to PA & just got back home.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has ratified revision 3.2 of the SATA specification. The latest specification includes the SATA Express standard which enables the coexistence of SATA and PCIe storage devices, improves power management, caters for more new SATA form factors and contains optimisations for hybrid SSHD drives. The SATA Express specification was first introduced in January 2013 and the industry consortium that is SATA-IO ratified it as part of revision 3.2 of the SATA spec yesterday.Enabling SATA and PCIe storage solutions to coexist will bring significant benefits to users. The SATA-IO group spells out the benefits thus;...

I'm not sure.. when you put them side by side.. which is which?

Dance teacher Katie Dalby was going through agonies trying to choose which of her pupils to be bridesmaids at her wedding. So she picked them all. The 26-year-old ended up with 80 attendants at her marriage to fireman Norman Gooch, 37, in Harwich, Essex. The bridesmaids and page boys – 76 of whom are pictured here – included all pupils from Katie's Boogie Shoes Dance Academy, three sisters-in-law, a niece, a cousin and her best friend.'

Tompall Glaser, a country music singer, publisher and studio owner best known for his association with the outlaw movement against record labels, died Tuesday. He was 79. Louis Glaser, Tompall Glaser's nephew, said the singer died in Nashville, Tenn., after a long illness. Thomas Paul Glaser, a Spalding, Neb., native, began performing with his brothers, Jim and Chuck, as The Glaser Brothers in the 1950s and eventually moved to Nashville after meeting Marty Robbins, who tapped them to sing backup. Glaser and his brothers immediately chafed under the label system in place in the 1960s and '70s — just like...

@stevebruskCNN : White House says Pres. Obama will honor the '72 Miami Dolphins on August 20th. Only undefeated team in NFL history never got an invitation. I guess there's nothing to do or going on...might as well do this.....sigh.

Pete Rose says he should have picked Alcohol , drugs or beating his wife.

By now you've probably heard: Short haircuts are happening. Everywhere. From the September Vogue Paris cover, to Coco Rocha's Instagram in real time, to Rihanna, who went short a few weeks ago. And if there are other life forms out there in the universe, I’m sure even they have heard about Beyoncé’s pixie cut, polled their colonies for their citizens’ opinions, and put forth multiple theories about why she did it. But as a short-haired woman for the past two years, I’ve been watching the pixie hysteria unfold with some level of bemusement. I was never that comfortable with long...

Last week, George W. Bush had heart surgery. During a comprehensive annual physical, doctors noticed something troubling on the 67-year-old former U.S. president’s EKG reading. They ordered him a CT angiogram, a remarkable imaging technology that provides a detailed view of the heart. That, in turn, revealed an arterial blockage. So, last Tuesday, Bush’s doctors inserted a stent, a metal-mesh sleeve that pushes open the blocked artery to allow greater blood flow.

This is that time of year where we, and other news outlets, remind you of the fatal consequences that occur when you leave your kids or pets in hot cars. But two Ohio parents now face charges after their baby died during a hot drive through Oklahoma.The Columbus Dispatch reports that husband and wife Angela Randolph, 26, and Christopher Randolph, 28, now face charges of child neglect after their 23-day-old daughter died in the back of a car running without air conditioning on a hot day. The newspaper says the parents were driving in a car packed with their...

<p>The next version of Windows is expected sometime this fall, but ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley is narrowing the timeline down even further, reporting that the system will move to manufacturers this month and hit store shelves in October.</p> <p>That follows more or less the same timing as the 8.1’s predecessor, Windows 8, which went to manufacturers ahead of general distribution on Aug. 1 of last year. Windows 8 was available to general consumers on Oct. 26, of last year.</p>

Sandforce adds a working Shield and DVS to controllersLSI is talking about two new technologies in their Sandforce controllers that deal with space and error correction. One is really simple to explain while the other is a whole lot more complex in implementation and description.The complex technology is an error correction scheme that LSI calls Shield. This is a five layer software LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) scheme among other related error correction, detection, and mitigation technologies that they claim can both prevent many errors and extend the life of low write lifetime flash quite a bit. Shield fits between...

There are various things out there. But I could not find something to set this up. VoIP (Voice over IP) has been around for a long time. I would not mind just using headphones and a microphone to make the phone call. There is a website IPKall.com that will give you a Washington state telephone number. But I am not sure how you set up the VoIP part. I tried to see if there were any other threads on this. I guess using SKYPE is one way to do this, but not to call someone else who has a real...

Before Trayvon, there was Tawana Brawley. Read the Grand Jury report. Earlier this month it was reported: Tawana Brawley, who faked rape, begins defamation payments 25 years later. Well, that didn't last long: Just months after Pagones began to collect garnished wages from [Tawana Brawley]. . .his lawyers will need to begin the process again. Pagones’ lawyer, Garry Bolnick, Sunday confirmed a prior report in the New York Post that Brawley, now 41, had been separated from her job at a nursing home in Virginia. “We were told (by a circuit court in Surry County, Va.) she was terminated at...

The MSM-e, hollywood, activist atheists, activists within the Roman Catholic Church (RCC),etc, have been, and are pushing really hard for the Roman Catholic Church to change its stance on not allowing females to serve as priests. I don't see these same usual suspects pushing for greater "inclusiveness," i.e., pushing for Sunni, Shiite, or Sufi Islam to allow female Imams or pushing for female Rabbis within Orthodox Judaism, or even other branches of the same.

Airline travel suppression. Why not have the same-day ability to buy an airline ticket and hop on board a plane minutes afterward - even with a college-issued id? What about one-stop purchasing of airline tickets? How about even no id required to purchase an airline ticket? To stop terrorists from hopping on board a plane? Hmmm. Didn't one of the Tsaernaev brothers go to an area near Russia, engage in activities that alarmed the Russians, they alert the U.S., and yet he flies back here nonetheless? Scrap all of the security measures because its just one guy? Stupid (even though...

‘I have an opportunity to explain firsthand what racism means and what injustice means,’ said the Miami artist, who plans to respond to each piece of hate mail on her website. Huong reveals George Zimmerman lookalike in painting is really her assistant. She unveiled the mural at Florida state capitol and plans to take it on the road. The Miami artist behind the controversial “We Are All Trayvon Martin” mural says she won’t back down despite threats and volumes of hate mail. “This is not new to me,” Huong told the Daily News. Huong’s mural shows a George Zimmerman look-alike...

The recent same-sex marriage ruling has cleared the way for many, including gay Muslims, to marry. But over the years, homosexuals who identify as Muslims found it difficult to have an Imam perform the ceremony. Now, they have a place to get married, complete with an Imam who will marry them. Imam Daayiee Abdullah of Washington, D.C., is available to perform gay Muslim marriages. Abdullah converted to Islam at the age of 29, while studying in China, reports the Religion News Service. He was born to a Baptist family with seven siblings, he told Metro Weekly in an in a...

Who saw the first episode of the last season of Breaking Bad last night? Is this the most awesome show ever on TV or what? The acting is first rate all around. When Hank punches Walt it looks like he is going to go all out right then and there, but as Walt circles back around him and stares Hank down at the end, it shows he is clearly in charge of the situation

On September 4, South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung Electronics should make official the next device in its popular Galaxy Note series (namely the Galaxy Note III), and some more info on what the handset will pack in terms of hardware specs has emerged. At least two flavors of the device will arrive on the market, featuring model numbers SM-N900 and SM-N9005, with different processors inside, and each targeted at various markets out there. According to a recent article on SamMobile, both Galaxy Note III iterations will arrive on the market with a 5.68-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels)...

Looks like men have grown tired of footing the bill for every dinner out: Sixty-four percent of guys said they'd prefer if their partner chipped in, while close to half said they'd break up with a woman who never offered to pay.Two out of three men think women should help pay for a date, although most feel guilty about accepting their money, a study out Saturday suggests. Of the 64% wanting to split the bill, 44% said they'd even ditch a love interest who never doled out any dollars. That said, 76% of men felt bad about pocketing payments from...

The new patient is 12-year-old Zachary Reyna, his family told CNN affiliate WBBH. A spokesperson for the Hendry-Glades Health Department in LaBelle, Florida, said that the department wouldn't release the age or name of the infected person for privacy reasons. Reyna's family told WBBH that Reyna was kneeboarding with friends in a water filled ditch by his house on August 3. He slept the entire next day. His family told WBBH that Reyna was an active and healthy seventh grader, so sleeping that much was unusual. His mother took him to the hospital immediately. He underwent brain surgery and doctors...

In response to the Newtown, Conn. massacre and a host of school shootings in recent years, the Obama administration released a 67-page report on emergency planning this summer that includes several pages advising educators on how to manage “an active shooter situation.” The U.S. Department of Education’s “live-shooter” section doesn’t recommend that schools arm teachers or employ armed guards. It doesn’t even advise schools to add door locks for classrooms. Instead, the section counsels teachers and students to “run,” “hide” and then “fight”—but only “if neither running nor hiding is a safe option.” Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education and...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the incredible spectacle of the European arm of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) attacking Mozilla on the grounds that the latter had "lost its values" because it insisted on defending the users' rights to control how cookies were used on their systems. Now, given the barrage of mockery from all sides that this monumentally daft tactic has provoked, you might have expected wiser counsels to prevail, and for the IAB to have crawled into some quiet little corner in the hope that people would stop making fun of it, and just forget...

After a steep – 33% – decline in unit shipments in the second calendar quarter of the year, Acer Group now wants to shrink its Microsoft Windows-based offerings and expand product lines that utilize operating systems from Google, such as Android or Chrome. The company seems to be serious about the plan as it wants to grow its “non-Windows” business as quick as possible. "We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible. Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. I also see a new market there for Chromebooks," said Jim Wang, the president...

He claims to have been riding like this for 30+ years (he is in his 50s now) with no serious crash. At the 0:40 mark he complains to the van driver that he didn't indicate before changing lanes. The bike is a Yamaha XJ6 with a custom exhaust.

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show geoscientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming...

BEIJING — A medicine mogul spent six years building his own private mountain peak and luxury villa atop a high-rise apartment block in China’s capital, earning the unofficial title of “most outrageous illegal structure.” Now, authorities are giving him 15 days to tear it down. The craggy complex of rooms, rocks, trees and bushes looming over the 26-story building looks like something built into a seaside cliff, and has become the latest symbol of disregard for the law among the rich as well as the rampant practice of building illegal additions. Angry neighbors say they’ve complained for years that the...

As Twitchy reported, evidently a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask must now be entered in the Handbook of Racial Code Words. Don an Obama mask to mock him? Not allowed. The always awesome Dana Loesch laid down the smack in epic style. The rodeo clown crisis was then averted when the Mo. State Fair permanently banned the Obama-mask-wearing clown. No, for reals. They did that. Enter #MockObamaDay:

THIS "Hooters Girl Hula Hooper - Unbelievable" is why I LUVS my internets!

"In 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi, John stepped between angry protesters and armed police to prevent a potential massacre after the murder of Medgar Evans,"

Thanks to a little error on the part of the city of New York and a lot of blind luck, a Manhattan man pays the bargain basement rate of $1 per month in rent for his apartment. David Lieberman moved into the pad on Morningside Boulevard, an in demand section of up-and-coming Harlem, in 2006 and paid $2,100, market rate at the time for the two bedroom apartment. But since learning that the city lowered the rent to a buck for previous tenants while they waited for damages from a fire to be repaired, Lieberman has laid claim to the...

The government’s antitrust authorities have thrown a large road block in the way of the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, suing to block the deal. The suit, filed by the Department of Justice after months in which the air carriers said they were confident that the deal would sail through anti-trust review, sent shares of US Airways tumbling Tuesday. The stock is down nearly 9% to $17.15 in recent trading.

The 1972 film “The Day the Clown Cried” was apparently such a disaster that it never saw the light of day, except for among a few people. Even decades later, actor and comedian Jerry Lewis, who directed and starred in it, said at the Cannes film festival this year “no-one will ever see it” because he is “embarrassed” by it. But then over the weekend, rare scenes from the making of the film seem to have cropped up on YouTube.

An Elko County sheriff’s deputy is recovering from an injury he suffered while accidentally shooting himself in the wrist while cleaning his department-issued weapon.

Using the Abused narrated by NRA News Commentator talks about groups that are against guns uses statistics of abused as the main cause. As we all know guns don't make one an abuser, but the individual. So non-gun activist have hidden agenda in their motives that say they're there to help the abuse. But at the same time trying to un-arm the rest of us (pro guns) Read & watch the vid here westernshootingjournal.com/women-and-guns/using-the-abused/

Ok, NOW are you ready for a Third Party, a party with some fight... come out from among them and be holy, says the Creator to His people... DC is a hell hole filled with power hungry, slathering dogs, who's purpose is to sow discord "among the brethren" (read pre-Obama Americans) so as to ingratiate themselves and impoverish us. DC is a corrupting influence and no man is immune... even some conservatives who've been lifted by the wings of the tea party are caving. If you're calling yourself a Republican but are disgusted by their lack of will to fight...

How far has the Democratic Party moved left? Compared to the party under Bill Clinton, Hard left. Compared to the party under John F Kennedy, Extreme left.

Earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey, Queen of talk, declared Martin’s murder “the same” as Emmett Till. Eye roll! In 1955, Till was savagely murdered by two racist white men in Mississippi because he was a 14 year old black boy and a white woman thought he whistled at her. Martin, a 17 year old black teen tragically contributed to his own death by starting a fight with Zimmerman. Not the same, not even respectfully close. Oprah should stick with pushing Hollywood stereotypes of blacks by promoting her new film “The Butler” and leave history to experts who know it.

Last Thursday, Texas based email provider Lavabit suddenly shut down their encrypted email service, leaving behind a message for its customers on the company's website. The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levinson, intimated that the company had received a secret search order from the government and shut his business down to avoid being "complicit in crimes against the American people."

"I'm in a store and the person doesn't obviously know that I carry the black card..."

Maria Espinosa, 51, hit speeds up to 80 mph with her 34 y/o husband, Matthew Soria, clinging to the hood — Espinosa then went on a wild, 11-block high-speed ride before crashing. “He was screaming, ‘Stop the car!’ ” — but that only made Espinosa go faster. L/E said Soria had biked up to Espinosa as she got into her blue Ford Explorer. Soria wanted the keys and money....Soria tried to keep Espinosa from getting into the vehicle, but she pushed him away, prompting the angry husband to jump on the car’s hood. Espinosa then backed up, hitting a parked...

Dear Dave, Should I take advantage of a 403(b) withdrawal in order to buy a house? Bryan Dear Bryan, I wouldn’t do that because it really doesn’t accomplish anything. The only money you can take out is what you’ve put in, and any growth you’ve experienced has to stay in there. Basically, it’s a retirement plan, and I wouldn’t monkey around with retirement money to buy a home. My advice is to make sure you’re debt-free and you have three to six months of expenses set aside in an emergency fund. Once you’ve taken care of those issues, you can pile up...