Be prepared. (h/t, Damian) || Electrodeposition and other chemical reactions. || That time in 1972 when a quarter of a million hippies attended a festival sited on swamp land, with lots of bad acid, and only six toilets. || Marie Curie and her x-ray vehicles. || Marvel goes Afro-futurist. || Impress your houseguests with a towel elephant. || Why penguins’ feet don’t freeze. || Jordan Peterson on the temptations of activism. || Short trip. || This is one of these. || Drawing logos from memory is harder than you might think. (h/t, Coudal) || Giant robot duel. || This. || Today’s word is socialist. || Today’s other word is woke. || The punchline cometh. || It came out of their toilet. || And finally, via Obnoxio, let’s play a guessing game: Is this the work of toddlers, or college students racking up debt?

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a conservative student at a small, low-key meeting of College Republicans in a space you’ve booked in advance, in the campus library, when suddenly a crowd of indignant leftists force their way in and start shouting and behaving hysterically, and randomly calling you names, and who then blame you for the disruption that they themselves are causing.

Because, and I quote, “Your existence is a disturbance.”  

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” voodoo’s encroachment on science and technology: 

Columbia’s vice provost for faculty diversity and inclusion regurgitates another classic of diversity boilerplate to justify this enormous waste of funds. “The reality is that you can’t really achieve excellence without diversity. It requires diverse thought to solve complex problems,” says vice provost Dennis Mitchell. Mitchell’s statement is ludicrous on multiple fronts. Aside from the fact that the one thing never sought in the academic diversity hustle is “diverse thought,” do Mitchell and his compatriots in the diversity industry believe that females and underrepresented minorities solve analytical problems differently from males, whites, and Asians? 

Somewhat related, this. It’s remarkable just how readily all of this “diversity” and wokeness boils down to a mental image of a teacher turning to one of his students and saying, “You, the brown boy. What’s the negro perspective on this engineering problem?”

See also this, added via the comments. 

Arthur Sakamoto on what happens when you challenge the racial assumptions entrenched in sociology departments: 

People are afraid to critique this paradigm [of “white privilege” and systemic racism] because it’s so ideologically popular. Privately, some people have told me that [by challenging it,] I’m, quote, “suicidal.” […] I’ll be frank with you — I’ve been submitting to the American Sociological Review on Asian Americans for the past 25 years and apparently there’s no data good enough to convince the reviewers that Asian Americans have reached parity with respect to white people. Every single one gets rejected. What happens is, when the paper doesn’t conform to the conventional wisdom [of “white privilege”], the methodological standards are raised. But if you argue that there is discrimination, then the methodological standards are relaxed. 

This is exactly how I do it. (h/t, Holborn) || A problem you’ll want to have: To span or to stack? (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Universal Paperclips is a game. Think of it as a test of endurance. (Remember this?) || Tiny paper plants. || Peepers. || Plucking. || The baby panda is a creature of great elegance. || Personality test. Use code 92556379. || An interview with Adam Perkins, author of The Welfare Trait. || Camp on water. || Catch. || Abandoned orphanage. || Ambling starfish. (h/t, Matthew) || Fan mail of note. (h/t, Tim) || A little Mercury. || Streets of Amsterdam, circa 1890. || Stampede of tumbleweed. || Danish treetop walk. || Tolstoy’s cooking tips. || He sells Slinkies. || Glass ruler, $30. || The great phone-box graveyard. (h/t, Simen) || And finally, he does this better than you do.

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” pseudoscience: 

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” Embraced by a president, a would-be president, and the nation’s top law-enforcement official, the implicit-bias conceit has launched a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law and spawned a multi-million-dollar consulting industry. The statistical basis on which it rests is now crumbling, but don’t expect its influence to wane anytime soon… The need to plumb the unconscious to explain ongoing racial gaps arises for one reason: it is taboo in universities and mainstream society to acknowledge inter-group differences in interests, abilities, cultural values, or family structure that might produce socioeconomic disparities.

Needless to say, the Implicit Association Test, while very much in fashion, is wildly inconsistent in its results and utterly fails to predict actual behaviour, the latter a detail belatedly and reluctantly admitted by the originators of the conceit, whose methodology – one might say cheating – is quite laughable.  

If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behaviour, as [test creators Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji] asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behaviour” in IAT research — trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums.

When the peddlers of a test, an alleged curative for unconscious racism, count practically any kind of behaviour, including the random positioning of a chair, as proof of “discrimination” and unjust inclinations, alarm bells should ring, quite loudly. This is the realm of “diversity” Scientology, and the kinds of leverage in play may well attract people whose own motives are not entirely benign.

And then of course there’s this:

Greenwald and his co-authors had counted opposite behaviours as validating the IAT. If test subjects scored high on implicit bias via the IAT but demonstrated better behaviour toward out-group members (such as blacks) than toward in-group members, that was a validation of the IAT on the theory that the subjects were overcompensating for their implicit bias. But studies that found a correlation between a high implicit-bias score and discriminatory behaviour toward out-group members also validated the IAT. In other words: heads, I win; tails, I win.

Do read the whole thing. It’s quite long, but there’s lots to chew on.

Very much related, Jordan Peterson here. From this longer video. 

Via Herb Deutsch.

Patrons are reminded that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers. If you’d like to help it remain buoyant for a while longer, there’s an orange button below with which to monetise any love. Debit and credit cards are accepted. For those wishing to express their love regularly, there’s a monthly subscription option top left. And if one-click haste is called for, my new PalPay.Me page can be found here. Additionally, any Amazon shopping done via this link or the search widget top right, or for Amazon US via this link, results in a small fee for your host at no extra cost to you.

For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade or so, and in over 2,000 posts and 70,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start. There you’ll find odysseys in consciousness-raising by fearless taxpayer-funded artists; several displays of the true warmth and compassion of Guardian readers; the bewildering mental contortions of leftwing academics; and quite a few things like this. 

If you can, do take a moment to poke through the discussion threads too. The posts are intended as starting points, not full stops, and the comments are where much of the good stuff is waiting to be found. And do please join in.

Again, thanks for the support, the comments, and the company. 

Katherine Kersten on leftist dogma versus educational standards: 

For years, the Edina Public Schools have been one of the brightest stars of Minnesota public education… But today, test scores are sinking. One in five Edina High School students can’t read at grade level and one in three can’t do grade-level math. These test results dropped EHS’s ranking among Minnesota high schools from 5th to 29th in reading proficiency, and from 10th to 40th in math proficiency between 2014 and 2017… There’s been a profound shift in district leaders’ educational philosophy. In place of academic excellence for all, the district’s primary mission is now to ensure that students think correctly on social and political issues — most importantly, on race and “white privilege.” […] The school is pervaded by an obsession with race. Katie Mahoney, Highlands Elementary School’s “racially conscious” principal, was hired in 2016. This fall, she announced that the school’s “challenges” for 2017-18 are to teach children “how to embrace ancestry, genetic code and melanin,” and to how “to be change-makers.”

If that doesn’t sound sufficiently dogmatic and perverse, and just a little sinister, then do read the whole thing. There’s more.

Larry Sand on truant teachers: 

A Fordham Institute study released in September demonstrates the full extent of the absentee problem… 28.3 percent of teachers in traditional public schools are chronically absent — defined as missing more than 10 days of school per year because of illness or personal reasons. In charter schools — most of which are not unionised — the corresponding rate is just 10.3 percent.

And Toni Airaksinen on underhanded educators: 

Two Canadian professors have developed an approach they call “Trojan horse pedagogy” to peddle social justice to otherwise unassuming students. Sal Renshaw and Renee Valiquette, both of whom teach at Nipissing University in Ontario, detailed their extensive “ruse” in a recently published book, boasting that their “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Analysis” class is actually a “social justice” course in disguise… “Our goal in this class is to move both hearts and minds, in part by ‘forcing’ an encounter with at least some knowledges that students have already decided they are not interested in,” Renshaw and Valiquette explain, adding that the classes are “rooted in… post-structural feminist theory.”

According to Renshaw and Valiquette, being dishonest about course content, and about the subsequent likelihood of getting a job, is “a pathway to social justice education” and therefore, they insist, “the ruse is justified.” The lecturers in question admit that for many students “social justice” claptrap has a poor reputation and is actively avoided, which prompts the professors to sidestep that reputational challenge by simply lying to students about what it is they’re paying for. The two words you’re looking for are fire and immediately.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.  

As I was pushed for time this week, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. However, I’ll set the ball rolling with a demonstration of stealth, how to deal with lawn pimples, a life lesson, some marble and acrylic furniture of note, and the ball that didn’t fall. 

Oh, and if this isn’t serendipity, I don’t know what is. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

But Why Aren’t People Rushing To Buy My Art? 

In which we brave the bleeding edge of conceptual performance.

For those who may be confounded by the profundity of the piece, a handy walk-through guide points out that the performance will encourage among onlookers “a deeper level of critical thought.” The guide notes, rather earnestly, that the first attempt, by Mr Carvalho, to envelop his head in bread, string and assorted meat products, prompted more amusement from the tiny audience than the subsequent repetition of it by Ms Cochrane. This is presented as an invitation to “a fundamental shift in paradigm” and some allegedly profound insight into gender politics. Or, how “different actions are read on different bodies.” Our artistic deep thinkers are seemingly unaware of the concepts of novelty and diminishing returns.

An Eighteen-Year Project. 

Proud feminist Polly Dunning shares her experience of motherhood.

Thank goodness that Ms Dunning, who “felt sick” at even the thought of “something male” growing inside her, is totally opposed to all that “casual and ingrained sexism.” 

Insufficiently Swiped. 

Immense, frustrated love machine Caleb Luna wonders why his Grindr profile attracts so little interest.

The option of weight loss isn’t explored, at all. Instead, it seems, we should all “interrogate” and “expand” our desires via immersion in intersectional dogma: “You can start by diversifying the range of bodies you allow into your pool of sexual possibilities,” says he. Thus empowered, we will overcome our “phobias,” which is to say our preferences, and consequently start lusting after “alternative bodies.” Specifically, bodies like Mr Luna’s. 

Further to this video of the hat-stealing, drunk-driving, threat-making racist and Angry Studies devotee Edith Macias, Jennifer Kabbany has more: 

Peers of the young Latina woman who swiped the hat, Edith Macias, have rallied to her defence, demanding the university protect her from any charges and even pay her rent in a “solidarity” document released Oct. 1.

The “statement of solidarity” is the usual dumpster fire of hyperbole, dishonesty and pretension, and makes no mention whatsoever of Ms Macias publicising her own behaviour and urging others to copy it, complete with hashtag. We do, however, learn that Tucker Carlson is a “far-right white supremacist.” With almost charming obliviousness, the statement also demands that Ms Macias be provided with free mental health counselling, due to the “emotionally and physically taxing nature” of being outed, not least by herself, as a thief who indulges in racial diatribes and threats of violence, both verbally and in writing.  

As noted in Friday’s thread, and in light of these demands for further cossetting and exemption, the odds of Ms Macias reflecting on her own behaviour and assumptions, and how they result in the dramas of her life, seem vanishingly slim.