Skillz. (h/t, Damian) || Look behind you, Dr Floyd. || Feminist academia. || Battleships solitaire. || Just Marvin. (h/t, Obo) || Commemorative coin of note. || “Agnes Richter densely embroidered her standard-issue straitjacket.” || I have to say, those really are impressive balls. || Intrigue. || Grain. || Tiny origami. || Shoreditching redux. || A small drama in three parts. || He does this better than you do. || How to cook a potato. || Poseable miniature birds. || Peeg. || Charcoal chicken. || I’d watch and so would you. || You want one and you know it. || They’re gaining on us. || An archive of antiquated sounds. (h/t, Coudal) || Four minutes of concentrated YouTube. || That’s an awful lot of faeces. || And finally, via Things, jars of handcrafted hump fat and other unappealing products.

Apparently, we live in post-satirical times:

According to [Rochester City Court Judge, Leticia] Astacio, the raise was deserved and the media are “biased” in their reporting on her because they are “racist.” “Why’s my name in the headlines?” she asked via Facebook. “You’re mad because I’m a young minority getting paid.”

While poking through the news coverage, readers may entertain other, perhaps more obvious reasons for interest in Ms Astacio’s career and taxpayer-funded compensation, as when the words “parole violations” and “alcohol ankle monitor” make an appearance. And do watch Ms Astacio’s Facebook video, in which she mentions, at some length, how “inspirational” she is to those less statusful than herself, while applying generous amounts of lip balm, before asking her critics, “What makes you feel so entitled?”

And she thinks for a living: 

Douglas Murray on crime, migration and modern dishonesties: 

In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.

Related: “Vibrant and diverse.” And of course these items here. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” versus merit: 

Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades… The result: wasted resources, the side-lining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t — because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

And Roger Kimball on being outraged by the obvious-but-unmentionable: 

Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered. What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” […] As William Henry argued back in the 1990s… “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal… It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.

And then Professor Wax mentioned other obvious things, much to the agitation of people who like to pretend.

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

They’re just for display purposes: 

He wants someone to help him wash his hands. || Jetpack Samurai. You heard me. || 14,000 Apollo photos turned into gifs. (h/t, Coudal) || In local news. (h/t, Julia) || Supply and demand. || More densely populated than Manhattan. || Made using Google Earth. || He does this better than you do. || And he does this better than your kids did. (h/t, Damian) || “Writer, teacher and broadcaster.” || Stealth SUV. || For fans of the mechanical. || Kitchen knife made of foil. || Frozen lake versus red-hot jackhammer. || Joinery of note. || Book thief curses of the Middle Ages. || How the Devil got his horns. || This depiction, seen as a child, has lingered in the memory. || This is one of these. || “Mine’s real.” || And finally, if you find this footage amusing, you’re a terrible, terrible person.

David Paxton on identitarian pay complaints: 

A pay gap between two men is the product of market forces, but a pay gap between a man and a woman is attributable to either the market or to patriarchal oppression, depending on whom it favours… Pointing at specific cases, highlighting a demographic difference, and then declaring discrimination to be the sole cause without further evidence, is a tactic favoured by those who consider themselves thoroughly modern… But this thought process is pre-medieval – an unreflective instinct of pattern-seeking mammals who habitually see conspiracies in misattributions of cause and effect. Just as infant deaths were once blamed on a neighbour’s malevolent witchcraft, and crop failure on insufficient animal sacrifice, today’s hashtags blame identity-group discrimination for pay differentials when perfectly logical alternative explanations are readily available.

David Solway, husband of Janice Fiamengo, on the corrosive shakedown named “social justice”: 

My wife, who for many years donated one fifth of her salary to charity, is anything but a heartless conservative, and I have gone out of my way to help people in distress. We do not reject the social safety net intended to assist the unfortunate who have, as they say, “fallen through the cracks.” But helping measures must be closely and fairly monitored so that the indolent and inept do not gradually displace or usurp the productive and the competent, to everyone’s ultimate disadvantage. A difficult task, to be sure, but worth undertaking. “Social justice” makes no attempt to distinguish the one from the other… The old saw that development grinds to a halt when there are as many or more people riding in the wagon as pulling it applies with a vengeance.

And Toni Airaksinen on the feminist appropriation of “toxic masculinity”: 

The term may have first been popularised by early forms of the men’s advocacy movements. (Not feminist movements, as one might expect.) For example, one book that seeks to raise awareness of issues that men face, titled Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (1994), highlighted one of the earliest examples of toxic masculinity in the literature. “Without a “father in residence,” [men] may go through life striving towards an ideal of exaggerated, even toxic, masculinity,” the author of the book, Frank Pittman, said on the topic of young men without fathers. But the term has recently been co-opted by the feminist establishment as a way to scapegoat, blame, and denigrate men as a whole. In the college classroom, toxic masculinity is presented to students as a reality that affects all men, and is harmful to all women.

And so we arrive at the contradiction of feminists who denounce “toxic masculinity” as both all-pervasive and a fundamental evil, at least among white people, while simultaneously endorsing fatherlessness and family instability, i.e., the most obvious causes of the behaviour they claim to dislike. 

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

Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct them. State curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.”

“Their role as social engineers.” And so, 

Two schools rolled out what was called a compensatory gender strategy. Boys and girls at the preschools were separated for part of the day and coached in traits associated with the other gender. Boys massaged each other’s feet. Girls were led in barefoot walks in the snow, and told to throw open the window and scream.

Yes, it’s faintly absurd and veering towards comedy. But if you read the whole thing, you may well be struck by the eye-widening arrogance and vanity of the educators, who, as self-appointed “social engineers,” feel entitled to “counteract” normative gender differences, along with the preferences of parents, some of whom have complained about their children’s subsequent behaviour.

Via Ben Sixsmith. 

Now hush and approach with caution: 

My magical practice is based in African Diasporic voodoo, herbology, and root-work. I came to these rituals by studying Black slave rebellions, and unearthing the ways in which enslaved folx used hexes and curses to thwart their masters.

Not entirely successfully, it seems, given the word masters.

I turned to these traditions most open-heartedly in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests circa 2014, when I started to feel hopeless and emotionally drained after regular violent confrontations with the police at demonstrations. By wielding these protective amulets, reciting these incantations, calling upon the Orishas, and working intimately with the plants, stones, roots, and bones of my environment, I began to feel more empowered.

Because when your behaviour is so appalling that you’re repeatedly getting into scuffles with the police, what you need, obviously, isn’t a rethink of your life choices, but a magical amulet.

Quickly, my focus in the Craft moved away from damning hexes against white supremacy to community care work and deep psycho-social-spiritual healing for Black and Brown people in the struggle. As a queer Black woman scientist activist, Queer Magic For The Resistance is what I’m always giving.

The lady sharing her deep, uncanny wisdom is named Iman, a sorceress of sorts, and an affiliate of Queer Magic For The Resistance, a “collective and political affinity group based in Oakland, California.” Because of course it is. Iman, whose “whole world is magical,” describes herself as a “scientist” and “emotional care provider,” a purveyor of roots, herbs and “emotional emergency response.” As when equipping the LARPing sociopaths of Antifa with herbal teas and “healing shields.” For her, she says, “magic is resistance.”

To reality, I’m guessing.

Budget cuts. || Black Panther. || Bathroom essentials. || Will hospitals give back an amputated limb if you ask for it? || Embroidered bacteria. || It’s bigger than most. || 25 days in the life of a bean. || Boneshaker race, 1928. || Swinging London, 1967. || In need of friction. || San Francisco scenes. || Something on the floor. (h/t, Obo) || This is one of these. || And this is one of those. || Because you’ve always wanted a warp speed calculator. || While you pee. || Paranormal property. (h/t, Damian) || Popping balloons. || Thoughts on ladies’ fashion, New York, 1930. || Tweet of note. (h/t, dicentra) || Teatime view of note. || Macau, China. || Mussolini’s Rome. || Scrotum adventure. || An old machine from the Seventies, now far from home, stirs. || And finally, a horrifying shark attack.