For those in search of a lockdown project, how to make toilet-paper moonshine.

“I’m going to be turning toilet paper into drinkable alcohol.”

Via Elephants Gerald. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. 

According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism.

Christopher F Rufo on the pantomime politics of spoiled children: 

Keep in mind that [The United Nations International School] is the school of choice for the world’s elites, teaching the children of diplomats and leading figures in international banking, finance, technology, and business at a cost of up to $44,000 a year. The school’s political climate was already thoroughly liberal and progressive… The dynamics at this bastion of elite progressivism reveal something important about the American political environment. The children of the most privileged people on the planet have donned the mantle of oppression to satisfy their moral narcissism and to exercise power over their elders. The adults, crippled with anxiety about any threat to their status, immediately bow to anonymous teenagers leading an online mob.

Needless to say, the well-heeled youngsters have eagerly embraced the buzzwords of woke status, such that “intersectionality” trips off the tongue, and standards and expectations are to be “decolonised.” The school must, we’re informed, “revolutionise the curriculum.”

Judging by the various demands and hyperbolical Instagram posts, it seems we’re expected to believe that the wealthy and statusful are paying $44,000 a year to have their own children abused by “oppressors,” that any kind of “disparity” is proof of bigotry, and that having one’s phonetically unobvious name mispronounced, even once, is “thinly-veiled racism” and a form of “racial trauma.” A trauma inflicted by “the white man’s mouth.”

Faced with an upsurge of opportunist theatre – and asked whether he is, as claimed, a “racist” and an “oppressor” – the school’s director, Dan Brenner, has shown all of the probity and spine one might expect. And so, the supposedly downtrodden Mao-lings behave more like aristocracy, with expectations of deference and impunity, as if they were entirely unaccustomed to be being told no. 

Via Nikw211, who adds,

If this is how, as children and adolescents, they are capable of treating people whose names they know, whose faces they recognise, and who they interact with on a regular basis, just imagine the kind of crude, stunted stuff that will have to pass for something like empathy when they inevitably move into the ranks of elite influencers in business and politics.

And they will have learned so much from ‘progressive’ educators.

There’s a story here, I think. (h/t, Damian) || Knick-knack of note. || You know you want to. (h/t, Holborn) || Manly feats, a possible series. || Papercraft computers. Build your own and impress your friends. (h/t, Things) || Fun with cardboard. || Fun with cardboard 2. || Boom. || What’s behind the belly button? || It’s a Toshiba. || Temples in snow. || Super-metals, metallic glass. || 1960s Los Angeles. || Roland is the one of the right. || Always read the label. || In romance news. || Chords and scales visualised. || Cat storage solution. || If you like wine, look away now. || The teeth are a nice touch. || Attention, heterosexuals. || A historical dictionary of science fiction. || And finally, his voice is deeper than yours.

“There were so many students who came into the school with no preparation for the conversation about race or racism. They knew nothing about white privilege and white supremacy,” social policy professor Amy Hillier said.

It’s a dental school, by the way. For dentists.  

It occurs to me that if you’re brandishing the terms “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” and invoking “implicit bias” as if it weren’t laughable woo, such that the indoctrinated must “come to understand” foregone conclusions, it doesn’t sound much like a conversation. More a series of begged questions, whereby some people can be deemed guilty or complicit by virtue of their skin colour.

And yet, if you plan to be a dentist and attend the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, it seems you must first submit to condescension and insults, and accusations of being either a bigot or an enabler of bigotry, based solely on unchangeable aspects of your appearance. Because apparently you can’t do dentistry without the weird political woo of dogmatic parasites who’ve managed to insert themselves into yet another sphere of life.

For newcomers and the forgetful, two items from the archives:

The Blurting. 

A leftist compulsion is pondered.

A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree - that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common… The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

Trust Me, I’m A Witchdoctor. 

Guardian columnist denounces Western medicine as “outdated,” champions use of bush dung.