From the archives, this:

And in the Financial Times:

Guardian Media Group hit with £173 million record loss. 

When the foremost printed organ of the British left publishes so many of these things, week after week, that they’re collected and circulated as works of minor surrealism, and are then mistaken for spiteful parodies by the paper’s own contributors, this may not be an ideal business model.

Via sk60. Readers are welcome to suggest variations of their own.

“This just looks impossible.” // Why sunny weather is bad for your secret identity. (h/t, Damian) // Why crashing into the Sun is harder than you think. // Westeros mapped. // Old shoe found in well. // Hello, Mr Williams. (h/t, Ace) // Game over. // A billion degrees of separation. // It’s a quaint Swiss villa and also a bunker. // Making tennis balls. // Split flap display combines abbreviations and cats. // Korean cinemas knock it up a notch. // The Darwinist dangers of Pokémon Go – an Islamic scholar speaks. // An enterprising young lady. (h/t, Julia) // Train set of note. // Springtime tornadoes. // How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? // And finally, make your own sperm fitness videos: “This can be done without getting semen on the phone.”

Or, Feel My Pain, Now Do As I Say. 

This is not a grand battle against institutionalised injustice. This is an addiction to indignation.

Below the fold, a short film by Rob Montz on the vanities, hysteria and clown-shoe politics of campus protest culture:

I need you to try to learn to love the lush overgrowth of your body. Let it grow wild and untamed as a garden you loved as a child. Love it for the way it sustains you, keeps you warm, goes to such lengths not to let you get hurt. Its only job is to care for you. I need you to try to love it if you intend to love me.

In the pages of Everyday Feminism, an anonymous woman of girth, a size 26, wants other people to stop trying to lose weight and to stop acknowledging their own fatness, except in flattering terms, as this makes her – our anonymous, rather demanding woman of girth – feel bad about herself: 

Every discussion about bodies  —  whether in the media or amongst friends   — is about how to avoid the horrible fate of looking like me… When you say that you shouldn’t have eaten that lunch or dessert, or when you announce your new year’s resolution to lose 5, 10, 25 pounds, you are saying that you don’t want your body to end up like mine.

Well, at risk of being indelicate, yes.

I know that all of us are impacted by body shaming, and that everyone has real, valid, deep, hard feelings about our bodies. I still need you to stop perpetuating it, especially when talking about yourself. No amount of caveats or prologues make it hurt me less. I need you to know that I’m taking it personally because it is personal.

So if any readers are planning to drop a few pounds by cycling, or jogging, or walking the dog, or just eating less, this makes you complicit in the sin of body shaming, and therefore an oppressor of those with surplus flesh.

Ben Shapiro on facts versus feelings: 

If the political goal is to alleviate feelings of discrimination, no end point can ever be reached so long as a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison. And a disproportionate number of black people end up in prison not because of discrimination in the criminal-justice system, but because a disproportionate number of black people commit crimes… Crediting the unjustified feeling that there is pervasive bias in the criminal-justice system means making evidence secondary to perceptions. In the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., a large majority of black Americans felt that Officer Darren Wilson was guilty of murder in August 2015. They were wrong. But according to our political leaders, such feelings ought to be granted the patina of legitimacy. This isn’t leadership. It’s moral cowardice.

It’s also, quite often, arrogance and vanity. 

Thomas Sowell on egregious media bias and the war on cops: 

To the race hustlers, black lives don’t really matter nearly as much as their chance to get publicity, power, money, votes or whatever else serves their own interests. The mainstream media play a large, and largely irresponsible, role in the creation and maintenance of a poisonous racial atmosphere that has claimed the lives of policemen around the country. That same poisoned atmosphere has claimed the lives of even more blacks, who have been victims of violence by thugs and criminals who have had fewer restrictions as the police have pulled back, or have been pulled back, under political pressure. The media provide the publicity on which career race hustlers thrive. It is a symbiotic relationship, in which turmoil in the streets gives the media something exciting to attract viewers. In return, the media give those behind this turmoil millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity to spread their poison.

Part 2 here. Heather Mac Donald’s book The War On Cops, which is recommended by Sowell, can be purchased here (Amazon UK) and here (Amazon US).

Speaking of media bias: 

This is apparently the current state of American journalism. The newspaper printed a fact, but that fact was unacceptable based on the demographics of the people who might potentially see it.

And Franklin Einspruch on why sport remains hugely popular while art is in decline: 

Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavour to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.

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