This man is standing awfully close to a cascade of lava. // For ladies who fight crime. Or commit crime, stylishly. // Click then focus. (h/t, Brian Micklethwait) // A camera falls from space. // 30 metre whale kite. // Body modification, it’s not for everyone. // Curvature compensation and virtual anatomy. // Performing routine tasks with no arms. // Volcanic Iceland. // At last, off-the-shelf ready-peeled bananas. // It’s a belt buckle, it’s a beer holder. // Pig swing. (h/t, EBD) // How to remove a fish hook from your finger. // Morbid curiosities found in old newspapers. // Miniature New York deli, 21” long. // A monkey on a goat on a cup on a tightrope.

Thomas Sowell on tax and dogmatism:

There was a time when Democrats and Republicans alike could talk sense about tax rates, in terms of what is best for the economy, without demagoguery about “tax cuts for the rich.” Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy spoke plainly about the fact that higher tax rates on individuals and businesses did not automatically translate into higher tax revenues for the government. Beyond some point, high tax rates on those with high incomes simply led to those incomes being invested in tax-free bonds, with the revenue from those bonds being completely lost to the government – and the investments lost to the economy.

As President John F. Kennedy put it, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” This was because investors’ “efforts to avoid tax liabilities” make “certain types of less productive activity more profitable than more valuable undertakings,” and this in turn “inhibits our growth and efficiency.” Both Democratic president Woodrow Wilson and Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush said virtually the same thing. This disconnect between higher tax rates and higher tax revenues is not peculiar to the United States. Iceland and India both collected more tax revenue after tax rates were cut. In Iceland the corporate tax rate was cut from 45 percent to 18 percent between 1991 and 2001 – and the revenue from corporate taxes tripled at the lower rate.

Related, this:

You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth – and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated.

A point that seems to have escaped the New Statesman’s class warrior Peter Tatchell.

And Heather Mac Donald on the parallel universe of campus ‘diversity’ spending:

The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and “underrepresented minorities” can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin colour or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM PhDs enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else.

As Mac Donald noted previously, UC San Diego has to scrape by with only the most skeletal diversity apparatus, including,

The Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Centre, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Centre, and the Women’s Centre.

Clearly, that just won’t do. Catering to students’ colossal self-involvement is a full-time job. For at least 18 people. At one university.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Perry de Havilland spies a whisper of presumption at a certain newspaper:

David Leigh thinks that broadband needs to be taxed to keep him in his job at the Guardian.

No, he’s not joking. After all, nobody loses money quite like the Guardian. You see, the left’s national newspaper is so good, and so necessary to the turning of the world, you must be forced to pay for it whether you read it or not. It’s what righteous people do. £100 million a year should just about cover it, according to Mr Leigh. Other Guardianistas have of course suggested similar measures.

And yes, it’s because they matter – sorry, care – so very, very much.

How to levitate liquid with sound. // How to make a hot glass horse in no time at all. // Luminous dog leashes for walkies after dark. // How deep is your swimming pool? // Puffer fish carve geometric patterns in sand. All for lady puffer fish. // Prism glasses for tilted reading. // Buddhabrot. // Chocolate beer milkshake. // For readers who tire of humdrum carpeting. // Made of cardboard. // Fedor Yurchikhin’s snapshots from space. // An index of unused airfields. (h/t, Things) // Leftist teachers taking liberties, part 4,023. // The complete Indoctrinate U. (h/t, Mike) // Prisons and opera houses. // Liquid nitrogen meets 1,500 ping pong balls. 

Steven Pinker on collective delusion and dissent:

We look at these horrors retrospectively and we say, “How could everyone have been so… mad? On top of being evil, these ideas seem patently ludicrous. How can you have a collective delusion overtaking an entire society?” And it looks like one of the answers is, if dissenters are punished and can anticipate they’re going to be punished, then you might have a situation where no-one actually believes something but everyone believes that everyone else believes it, and therefore no-one is willing to be the little boy that says the emperor is naked. And this pluralistic ignorance, as it’s sometimes called, is easily implemented when you have the punishing or censoring of unpopular views.

Alan Charles Kors on speech codes, groupthink and the decline of the humanities:

I guarantee you that Reason [magazine] published on a campus would be defunded and that you’d be up on harassment charges every other week… I have always voted to hire people who think radically differently from myself, who are asking questions that I wouldn’t ask. The problem is that a lot of those people wish to clone themselves in their department and see voices that are dissident to their own orthodoxies as uncollegial… If you’re taking a course, the goal of which is to make you understand that you have false consciousness, that you don’t understand the way in which America has brainwashed and mystified your mind, and which has given us a faculty that thinks of its primary goal as the demystification of students who have been brainwashed and given false consciousness by consumer capitalist America, that is not of intellectual value. They are contributing to the very crisis of the humanities that they are bemoaning. 

And so, for instance, the Marxist pseudo-philosopher Nina Power rails against the “ideological devastation of the education system” and demands more public subsidy for Marxist pseudo-philosophers, while telling us that “everyone is equally intelligent” because, well, they just are. Of course one shouldn’t assume such people are interested in logic, reality or the testing of ideas, certainly not their own, despite all the blather about “critical thinking.” What they’re interested in – and determined to have more of – is power. Ideally expressed by making students credulous, conformist and pretentiously resentful. 

And Thomas Sowell on government interference, irrational taxes and how to create an economic crisis:  

To be a masterful politician you have to have a lot of brass. It takes an incredible amount of brass for Bill Clinton, who was the biggest factor in creating the housing boom that led to the bust that brought down the whole economy, [to blame Republicans for that crisis]. It was during the Clinton administration that the federal government forced lenders to change their lending standards, which had been in place for decades and had made real estate one of the safest investments around, to bring those standards down in order that they could get the numbers that they wanted for low income, minority mortgage applicants. Attorney General Janet Reno, under Clinton, threatened lenders with legal action from the Justice Department if their numbers – in terms of minority groups and income levels of people who were approved – didn’t fit her preconceptions. The Housing and Urban Development programme, under Clinton, made law suits against lenders, charging them with racial discrimination based solely upon statistics. The government was forcing people to lower the lending standards that had existed for years, and [afterwards] they said, “Well, the problem was greed.” You don’t satisfy greed by lending to people who can’t pay you back. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.