The Tungurahua volcano, Ecuador, January 11, 2010. Photographed by Cecilia Puebla.

Heather Mac Donald on juvenile violence and absent fathers. (Mac Donald discusses the issue further here. The statistics are extraordinary.)

The official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there. A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. […] Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participant’s mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the media’s curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obama’s old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. “Does anyone ever ask: ‘Where are the fathers?’” he paraphrased me. A brief silence. “That’s a good point.”

Victor Davis Hanson on affirmative action.

The concept was noble, but now antiquated and mostly absurd. It requires the logic of the Old Confederacy to determine racial purity among the intermarried citizenry. Jet-black Punjabis get no preferences. Light-skinned Mexican-Americans of the fourth-generation claim privilege. Poor whites from Tulare don’t rank. The children of black dentists do. I see very little logic here.

And Darleen Click on why the humanities stay so leftist.

Anyone weighing their career options doesn’t just look at their own interests and strengths, they also assess their chances in that particular career based on the people who are already there. If a non-leftist and/or religious student is observing, daily, the clannish, hyper-political intolerance of the people in charge of “educating” him/her, s/he might be hesitant to pursue a career in academia where their success is dependent on people already hostile to them.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Time for another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. Or rather the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer, where Kevin McKenna attempts to convince readers that a one-size-fits-all comprehensive education is all that any young person could possibly want. Indeed, should Mr McKenna get his way, it’s all they’d be permitted to have:

Savour that for a moment. Ponder the big, generous heart behind those sentiments. It offends Mr McKenna that private education should be allowed to exist. How dare some parents want the best for their children when the best is something not everyone can have, or indeed benefit from? Notice that smell? It’s the funk of socialist arrogance and nasty urges to control.

By Mr McKenna’s reckoning, it would be less iniquitous to deny parents the right to use their own money to benefit their own offspring in a private and legal transaction of their own choosing. According to this moral calculus, parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked. And so they should be stopped.

Sadly, the details of how private education would no longer be permitted remain mysterious. Would parents daring to venture outside the state sector be imprisoned or merely fined? Would private education become a black market phenomenon? Nor is it clear whether these totalitarian urges would extend to after-hours tuition, home coaching or the punctual doing of homework.

However, McKenna does convey to us the full horror of the private schooling he “narrowly escaped”:

Truly the stuff of nightmares, I think you’ll agree.

But let me share with you a flavour of my own, more recent comprehensive education at a school where aspiration was less common than graffiti and no Sebastians dare set foot. The school blazers weren’t green or particularly lovely, but they were a routine target of vandalism and theft, along with any other belongings of small but discernible value. My other half, whose state education was similar to my own, has shared a number of stories in which students who were not called Sebastian or Julia would attack each other’s uniforms with razor blades. It was quite the thing, apparently.

While Sebastians were in short supply at my local comprehensive, there were plenty of teachers whose egalitarian leanings were at least as pronounced as those of Kevin McKenna, resulting in a conviction that the teaching of grammar was insufficiently progressive and therefore superfluous. (This ideological omission made the learning of German and French rather challenging, especially when confronted with alien things called subordinate clauses.) I’ve previously mentioned the unusual skills I developed during my secondary education, including some proficiency in throwing chairs in order to deter random lunchtime assaults. And I recently learned that one of the school’s two main buildings had been burned to the ground, possibly by a disaffected student.

First-person Tetris. // Pong reinvented. // Print your own 3-D objects. // Turn any flat surface into a touch screen. // News Update! One of these. (h/t, Coudal) // The Museum of Useful Things. // Permanent glasses. // Tape installations. // The possessions of William Burroughs. // A spot of Armstrong & Miller. // Alligator bread. // The Grand Canyon. // A database of dreams. // The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (h/t, MeFi) // Enhance grid 17. // Sushi etiquette. // Will it waffle? // The modern way to stun your lobster. // And, sadly, this never got built.

For some reason this tickled me. I think it’s chiefly due to John Hurt (far right). Sort of Alien meets Man at C&A.

More. Via Nerd Boyfriend.

Heather Mac Donald on theories of crime.

If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?

KC Johnson on academic groupthink. 

Essay after essay in the NEA’s annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.

Candace de Russy on Sociology 101.

It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most “educated” are systematically being taught to loathe it.

Greg Lukianoff on campus censorship and learned intolerance.

Until 2007 Western Michigan University’s harassment policy banned “sexism,” which it defined as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” I am unfamiliar with any other attempt by a public institution to ban a perception, let alone perceiving that a person is a man or woman. Even public restrooms violate this rule. […] These codes not only chill free expression by warning students of serious consequences for controversial speech — or even normal, everyday speech — but they also systematically miseducate kids to believe that free speech goes only as far as the most sensitive person in the room can handle.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that “sensitive” may actually mean passive-aggressive or dishonest, or the person with the weakest argument. 

College students are placed in an unenviable position. They are constantly urged to argue, debate, discuss, question, and analyse the most important issues of the day, but they also often know stories of other students who were punished for taking the “wrong side” of an argument. […] When students come to believe that censoring rival points of view is not only permissible but laudable, the potential damage goes far beyond campus. Our colleges and universities produce our scientists, our business leaders, our lawyers, and our legislators. The habits formed in college inevitably seep into the other major social institutions.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

It took 800 exposures, three nights and a rented room.

Emily said yes.

Darleen Click has compiled reactions to Avatar by self-appointed representatives of Designated Victim Groups. Needless to say, the levels of unrealism and doctrinal turgidity are quite hazardous.

There’s a bit of this:

This synopsis contains profoundly ableist language in the way it describes the protagonist Jake as “confined to a wheelchair.” I don’t use a wheelchair; nevertheless, I was very offended when I read that. We’ve been trying to eradicate terms like “confined to a wheelchair” for a while now, and to see this demonstration of ignorance on such a large scale, since it is mainstream, is distressing. […] It’s a long-held stereotype (and still exists today) that disability is unnatural in people and so must be fixed or cured. 

And this, from a breezy sermon titled Gender Normativity and Imperial Domination in Avatar:

I’d like to explain that I do not believe that binary gender is natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans, or even as animals. […] I have too many female friends with penises to put all my faith in biological determinism, no matter what planet I’m on.

Update, via the comments:

Self-preoccupation is essential to the kind of tribalism seen above, along with an urge to pathologise the prosaic. If the prosaic can be made to sound oppressive or inauthentic, it makes those who announce themselves as nonconformist sound much braver and more interesting than they actually are (if only to themselves and those similarly disposed). For instance, the clownish Amanda Marcotte rails against any number of “normativities,” all of which she seeks to pathologise. It isn’t enough that she doesn’t feel an urge to become a parent. She has to claim that those who do wish to become parents don’t know their own minds and are dupes of some hegemonic power. In much the same way, the preference for an intact and functional body is depicted as both a parochial social construct and a moral failing. And likewise, the belief that “binary gender” is not “natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans” is based on an occasional malfunction of the very biological processes that are imagined not to exist.

But this is what gorging on identity politics does – it fosters unrealism and makes dishonesty routine. Often there’s a creep of small dishonesties. For instance, the disabled feminists article grumbles about the Avatar synopsis, which refers to the film’s protagonist as “confined to a wheelchair.” The author complains, “Non-disabled people may think… referring to someone who uses a wheelchair as ‘confined to a wheelchair’ is okay – but of course, it’s really not — ‘wheelchair user,’ for instance, is more acceptable.” However, this means avoiding a perfectly legitimate and accurate term – Jake is confined to a wheelchair; that’s sort of the point, dramatically. But fluffier, more sensitive terms are apparently now required. “Wheelchair user” could of course mean that Jake only uses a wheelchair occasionally – say, when walking leaves him fatigued. Which is deliberately imprecise and hardly the stuff of interplanetary drama.

Sentiments of this kind may be dishonest – indeed bizarre – but they are surprisingly common. Not long ago on Radio 4, a legless and rather prickly “activist” insisted that it was “oppressive” to view the loss of a person’s legs as in any way regrettable. Regarding this loss as something negative was apparently “ableist,” “ignorant” and offensive. This claim was repeated several times, emphatically. At one point the activist declared that given a chance to walk again he would refuse, such was his “pride” in having lost a third of his body. Anger had been displaced from the obvious grievance – the traumatic loss of one’s legs – to the supposed “injustice” of regarding limb loss as a dismaying or terrifying state of affairs. As a coping mechanism, it wasn’t entirely honest. Or, it seems, successful.

(h/t, Dicentra.)

Smileycam. // Electricity. // You are teeming with bacteria. // Trillions and computing. // The evolution of life in 60 seconds. // A year in 40 seconds. // B-movies! // Dominoes. // Roots. // Nick Veasey talks x-rays. // Yes, but is it real? // “You have to be committed to tattoo your eyes.” // The parkour flip book.  (h/t, Coudal) // Ancient Egyptian art. (h/t, Derek) // Play Tetris with your feet. // Before you can fight crime you must first make a costume. // Godzilla gets some. // “Men know when they’re aroused, women may not.” // The Flatiron Building, 1902. // And finally, evil rabbits.