As quite a few readers on the eastern coast of the US will be in bunker mode due to a very large storm named Sandy, this seems apposite. A moving, zoomable map of wind.

Stay safe, people.

From the vaults, Theodore Dalrymple on why prison works:

[Former Justice Secretary, Ken] Clarke was quite right to say that short prison sentences are not effective but, with the practised lack of logic of a man who has spent far too long in politics for the good of his own mind, he has drawn precisely the wrong conclusions from it. His error will cause much unnecessary suffering. There are indeed many arguments against short sentences. The recidivism rate after such sentences are completed is very high. They pose large administrative costs on the prison system. They do not reassure victims that the suffering or loss inflicted upon them by criminals has been taken seriously by the state. They discourage and demoralise the police, who labour mightily, if mainly bureaucratically, to procure a conviction for very little result. They promote intimidation of witnesses…

But it is quite wrong to suppose that if something is not very effective it has no effect at all. Short prison sentences are ineffective by comparison with long ones, but that is not to say that they are ineffective by comparison with no prison sentences at all. It is a fact that a large proportion of crimes are committed by a relatively small number of people. It is not unusual for career criminals to commit a hundred or more offences a year. Therefore, keeping them in prison for six weeks, say, prevents the commission of 12 crimes. Of course, if they were kept in prison for four years, 400 crimes would be prevented. But it is better to prevent 12 crimes than no crimes at all.

See also this. 

Christina Hoff Sommers on the alleged gender pay gap:

The 2007 report does give readers the impression that millennial women are facing serious workplace discrimination. But buried on page 18, we find this qualification: “After controlling for all the factors known to affect earnings, college-educated women earn about 5 percent less than college-educated men earn. Thus, while discrimination cannot be measured directly, it is reasonable to assume that this pay gap is the product of discrimination.” As Steve Chapman noted in Reason, “Another way to put it is that three-quarters of the gap clearly has innocent causes – and that we actually don’t know whether discrimination accounts for the rest.”

And Jeff Goldstein ponders Obama’s hipster mythology:  

To me, Obama was never cool, was never substantive, was never a man of gravitas, was never capable of being the post-political, post-racial healer he was sold as. Instead, he was a man of constructs and mannered rhetorical tics; a man of tone, not of ideas. He was a fraud, and to those who don’t find comfort in belonging to a hipster ethos — which is no different than belonging to, say, a chess club or band camp, only on a grander scale — he was a fraud who was trying to turn statism and tyranny into the new cool, the new black, if you will… None of these attacks on individual sovereignty were ever cool or hip. Rather, they were an attempt to turn collectivism into a hipster pose, and reduce individualism to a superficial denial of certain truths: namely, that you didn’t build that, you aren’t ever going to be self-reliant, and that rugged individualism is a punch line, as trite and G-rated as an episode of Little House on the Prairie. What happened that turned conformist statists chanting Obama’s name into the epitome of cultural hipness? What made submission to the state an act of supposed defiance of The Man?

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Urine flavour wheels. (h/t, MeFi) // Beluga whale mimics human voices. // The Blitz in colour. // Bipedal robot masters tightrope. // Orphaned baby echidna likes milk, warm blanket. // Yusuke Oono’s 360° book. // Yes, but can you name them all? // Alan Rickman makes tea. // “Turin had the highest concentrations of atmospheric cocaine.” // Hand-blown glass straws. // Glass anatomy. // Real life escape pods. // High-performance hand-mounted slingshot. // Iron Man 3. // Attack of the big blue snails. // Clearing land mines. // When William Shatner sold Commodore computers. // Hallowe’en is coming. // And so costumes for everyone. 

Or, “Mommy, What’s a Cock Ring?”

Further to this comedic excursion from September last year, Zombie visits San Francisco’s latest radical nude-in, where a coalition of “nudists and leather folk” unveil their big ambitions:

From the Castro District they seek to expand the nudity zone outward to all of San Francisco; if the movement gains momentum, could it expand to all of California, and then eventually nationwide?

Viewer discretion advised.

Update:

In the comments, David Gillies captures the protest’s essential neediness: “Look how transgressive I am!” We can, I think, assume that the ‘activists’ aren’t trying to share a glorious aesthetic experience. Even many of the locals, who I’d guess are fairly accustomed to juvenile displays, are finding the ‘activism’ a little intrusive and annoying. Zombie cites an article in the Bay Area Reporter, in which the protestors’ need for attention and provocation is pretty obvious, if not actually pretty:

They have become more aggressive in the Castro. Some don cock rings – euphemistically referred to as ‘genital jewellery’ – to simulate an erection. Others, according to witnesses, shake their dicks at oncoming traffic, obviously seeking a reaction.

Unsurprisingly, local businesses and other residents, especially those with children, aren’t terribly impressed. As Zombie says,

Although the Castro may be a gay mecca, it is not exclusively populated by single gay men, nor are the surrounding neighbourhoods gay. Many families with children live in and around the Castro, which means that children are out in public, occasionally encountering the nudists. In fact during the protest itself families with children needed to get from Point A to Point B along Market Street, and had no choice but to navigate their way through the crowd of naked penises.

Which may strike some as funny, at least initially and from a distance. But imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. And the standard blather about “civil rights” and “body image” isn’t very convincing. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate.

And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

A supporter of the exhibitionists pops up, as it were, in the comments at Zombie’s place and insists,

It’s only your selfish control freak streak that wants to dictate what other people wear; your disrespect for the opinions and lifestyles of anyone whose opinion and lifestyle doesn’t match what you consider ‘proper’… Your statement reminds me of how selfish, childish and disdainful of anyone else’s rights so-called ‘conservatives’ are.

It seems to me this is more than a little dishonest. Setting aside the issues of exposing oneself to children, the impact on local businesses, etc., I think what’s objectionable is that random people are being made participants in the exhibitionists’ psychodrama, whether they wish to be or not.

For many, if not most, of the ‘activists’, this isn’t even about an enjoyment of being naked per se. It’s about confronting other people with unsolicited nakedness. That’s the enjoyment – it’s a juvenile kink. Being nude in private or among consenting nudists in dedicated bars, clubs, spas, on nature trails, at specialist beaches, etc., of which San Francisco has plenty, doesn’t give the ‘activists’ enough of a thrill. Because the people there are willing.

Hence the demand to display their genitals in front of random passers-by, including children. An audience is required in order to feel transgressive and it’s pretty obvious that’s what matters. They want to be naked near you. They want you to witness their daring. It’s essentially a kind of challenge – an imposition on others, and the act of imposition is, for some, the whole point. And so the source of the “selfishness,” “childishness” and “disrespect” is also pretty clear.

Tom Paine has been spending time with our leftist betters at the Barbican’s alleged Battle of Ideas, “a weekend festival – shaping the future through debate.” 

His report begins, 

It got off to a bad start for me with a session on equality that was more like the deep graveyard peace of a single idea than a battle. Four leftists set out possible views of equality, all favourable, and concluded that “everyone” agreed it was good and we needed more of it for the sake of our mental health because envy apparently drives them mad. Who knew? A token non-leftist offered a slightly different view and the chairman declared (with no hint of irony) that every possible idea had been expressed.

Mr Paine concludes, 

The Battle of Ideas may continue, fitfully, but in England the War seems lost. I sat open-mouthed, for example, as a speaker from the audience said to liberal-minded panel member Alex Deane: “We don’t want freedom any more, Alex. We want regulation. We want control.” I waited for the laughter as I first assumed he was joking. Then I realised he was serious and waited for the jeers. Reaction was there none. This sentiment, in modern London, was completely uncontroversial. 

Do follow the links for much more in between.