John Carpenter’s The Thing, as summarised in song by Frank Sinatra.

From the people who brought you this:  

Andrew Breitbart takes a stroll through the crowds at Occupy LA. 

Note that Breitbart is accused of “spreading violence” by a woman who then indignantly denies saying any such thing – despite having said it on camera – all while Breitbart is stalked by a union heavy, whose purpose, presumably, is to intimidate. Like some socialist antibody. The exchange at the end of the clip needs no further comment from me.

Band on wheels. // Oil and water. // Toroidal vortices. // Dark matter visualised. // View the Himalayas in comfort. (h/t, Coudal) // This is made of Lego. // The inverted skyscraper. // A partially edible toy piano. // Split decision pie pan. // A Menger sponge made from post-it notes. (h/t, Things) // Lovely, lovely slime molds. // Nature by Numbers. // World’s largest violin is just about playable. // Bear eats four pizzas, doesn’t pay. // More abandoned theatres. (h/t, MeFi) // VJ Day, Waikiki, 1945. // Why Elizabeth Warren is wrong. (Or, you do not belong to the state.) // So what is the state for? // Solar prominences. // Silencing U.

Heather Mac Donald on opportunist victimhood and the inability to process satire:

That script [of campus political correctness] requires that the massive campus-diversity bureaucracy treat the delusional claims of hyperventilating students with utter seriousness. Students in the ever-expanding roster of official campus victim groups flatter themselves that by attending what is in fact the most caring, protective, and opportunity-rich institution in the history of the world, they are braving unspeakable threats to their ego and even to their physical safety.

Heresy Corner on the rather selective hand-wringing of Madeleine Bunting:

Notice how, for Maddy, the fact that the treatment of women under the Taliban was used by the US and British governments as part – if only part – of the justification for war is of greater consequence than the condition of women itself.

Ms Bunting’s appetite for sorrow will be known to regular readers.

And Jeff Goldstein distills the, er, logic of “diversity”: 

You can’t end racial discrimination by ending racial discrimination. In fact, racial discrimination is the only way to prevent racial discrimination – the upshot of which is that, thanks to racial discrimination, racial discrimination is no longer a problem, provided you learn to view certain racial discrimination as non-discriminatory, and provided you learn to couch any questions about such racial discrimination as racist and discriminatory.

Because, as we’ve been told, the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

Update, via Anna & SDA:

Readers may have noted the NowhereIsland art project, in which assorted radical freeloaders – referred to as a “think tank” – were shipped to the Arctic at public expense to ponder the possibilities of progressive utopia and generally engorge their cultural glands. While moored at Nyskjaeret, an apparently unclaimed island the size of a football pitch, our merry band of thinkers gathered sand and rock and loaded it onto a barge, thereby creating a floating “visual sculpture” of tremendous, indeed profound, political significance. Said work will subsequently “tour” the south coast of Britain, leaving better, more enlightened people in its wake.

The project’s intellectual lynchpin, artist Alex Hartley, has explained why his subsidised trip was so imperative:

It will gather ideas around climate change, land grab, colonialism, migration… all of these issues that can be put onto the blank canvas of this new land… My plan is to take a part of the island into international waters and declare it as a micro-nation so people can register to become citizens… We have just declared our statehood. This moment marks seven years of work inspired by a simple question: What if an Arctic island went south in search of its people?

If this all sounds a little familiar, you may be thinking of this comedic excursion from 2009.

The project’s mission statement tells us,

NowhereIsland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation… NowhereIsland embodies the global potential of a new borderless nation, which offers citizenship to all; a space in which all are welcome and in which all have the right to be heard.

Others have taken a less sympathetic view. Among them, Geoffrey Cox, Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, who referred to the project as an “extraordinary folly”:

I think my constituents are going to find it quite astonishing that… we are spending half a million pounds digging up earth from somewhere in Norway and floating it down the South West coast.

Having survived this two-week taxpayer-funded odyssey in radical conjecture and dirt relocation, Laurie Penny – for ‘tis she – shares her thoughts:

I met a polar bear, a whale, some reindeer, several fat seals, an arctic fox, many drunk Russians, a statue of Lenin, and a very dear and well-meaning collection of British academics, activists and journalists… Crammed on a ship trying to teach everyone consensus decision-making whilst we held down our lunches as the Noorderlicht dived through the waves, trying to group-write a theoretical constitution for a speculative nation.

Good times. Though there were of course a few issues to contend with.

Every single one of us was white and middle-class.

Luckily, rote identity politics soon gave way to the romance of it all.

As we discussed our ideal society… it really did feel like the last colony ship off a burning planet – like we were the chosen, special ones strapped to a cosy life-shuttle, looking for a new world at the touching point of symbol and substance. This, surely, is how the privileged will experience the end times.

The chosen, special ones. And not, say, the ‘B’ Ark.