The New York Times reports on a breakthrough in cutting-edge eco-friendly parenting:

When Jada Shapiro decided to raise her daughter from birth without diapers, for the most part, not everyone was amused. Ms Shapiro scattered little bowls around the house to catch her daughter’s offerings, and her sister insisted that she use a big, dark marker to mark the bowls so that they could never find their way back to the kitchen… “Elimination communication,” as the diaper-free method of child-rearing is called, is finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City. Ms Shapiro, who is a doula, a birth and child-rearing coach, says it is practically now a job qualification to at least be able to offer diaper-free training as an option to clients. Caribou Baby, an “eco-friendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store,” has been drawing capacity crowds to its diaper-free “meetups,” where parents exchange tips like how to get a baby to urinate on the street between parked cars. Parents are drawn to the method as a way of preserving the environment from the ravages of disposable diapers. Many of them like the thought that they are rediscovering an
ancient practice used in other cultures.  

How daringly ethnic. Why, it’s practically like having your very own brown baby. I can’t help wondering if this, um, innovation will affect how often such parents find willing babysitters and dinner guests. To say nothing of how often they get invited round for lunch by friends who may wish to preserve their own environment.

Readers who followed this recent thread on Margaret Thatcher and her critics may enjoy Martin Durkin’s documentary, available on 4oD here, Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary. Durkin’s film not only offers a useful history lesson, it’s also a nimble shredding of quite a few leftist myths.

Its highlights include contributions from Madsen Pirie, who really ought to be on TV more often, and some comically disingenuous squirming by Mary Warnock and Neil Kinnock. During the Kinnock interviews, pay close attention to Durkin’s right eyebrow. A lot can be said with an eyebrow.

This is an extraordinarily, absolutely, uniquely cohesive political entity and society… I’ve been there. I’ve seen it up close and personal… They do have a satellite circling the Earth. They do have a cohesive, pristine, innocent culture. A culture that has not been penetrated by globalisation and by Western mores… I’m much more afraid of the United States of America and so are most people in the world.

Noted bedlamite George Galloway praises that “courageous” stronghold of purity, North Korea. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Spanking One’s Own Arse. 

The woes of being leftwing and insufficiently black.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic Guardian piece Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, sympathetic readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame. It’s important to understand these are not just lapses in logic or random fits of insincerity; these outpourings are displays – of class and moral elevation. Which is why they persist, despite getting knottier and ever more absurd. Crudely summarised, it goes something like this: “I am better than you because I pretend to feel worse.”

On Fungal Matters.

A black man buys truffles. The Guardian is thrilled.

This “new kind of spending” – buying overpriced fungus – is much more radical than buying Rolex watches, ostentatious cars or cases of Cristal champagne. It’s a thrilling development in “black identity.”

Dealing with Impurities.

Academic Wrongthought™ and the narrowing of minds.

A study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only 30.3% of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that, “It is safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus”… The students were downright optimistic compared to the 9,000 campus professionals surveyed. Only 18.8% strongly agreed that it was safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus… As the sociologist Diana C. Mutz discovered in her 2006 book Hearing the Other Side, those with the highest levels of education had the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view, while those who have not graduated from high school can claim the most diverse discussion mates. In other words, the most educated among us are also the most likely to live in the tightest echo chambers.

It’s Politically Radical Sex, Not Ordinary Mortal Sex.

Meet Ms Nadio Cho: student, titan, radical shagger.

“It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up.”

Just Don’t Call It a Hustle.  

Know your place, peasants.

My local publicly-funded galleries of contemporary work, one of which is a glorified coffee shop for two dozen middle-class lefties, can be relied on to disappoint – and to go on disappointing – precisely because there’s no obvious mechanism for correction. No box office takings to fret about, no bums on seats, no ghastly commercial metrics need be considered. And so the featured artists, or pseudo-artists, can expect taxpayers to serve as patrons, whether they wish to or not, while being immune to the patron’s customary discrimination between promising art and opportunist flim-flam. The expectation that one must be exempt from base commerce, and by extension the preferences of one’s supposed audience and customers, is an arrangement that rewards and encourages the peddling of drek. Yet Liz Forgan and her Arts Council associates would have us believe that an interest in visual culture, music, etc., should coincide with an urge to make others pay for whatever it is that tickles you, or for whatever is deemed to improve the species by Liz Forgan and her colleagues, i.e., People Loftier Than Us.

Update: In light of today’s news, this seems relevant:

Wounds Sustained, Oblivion Avoided. 

Claire Berlinski on Margaret Thatcher and her loftier enemies. 

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

There’s more, so much more, in the greatest hits. And patrons are reminded that this rickety barge is kept afloat by the kindness of strangers.

Mark Steyn on the decline of the family (and what that costs):

Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics… and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital”… The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose cheques never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix.

See also Heather Mac Donald here, here and here. Or if you’re feeling terribly radical and edgy, you could do as Laurie Penny says and “fuck marriage,” “fuck monogamy” and fuck all of those other “small ugly ambitions.” What could possibly go wrong?

Patrick Hennessy spies some slack in the system:

Ministers will hit back in the row over welfare this week by publishing a raft of figures which they say show that tough measures – or the threat of them – are already “changing behaviour” by seeing people drop their claims. These include the figures on incapacity benefit. As well as the 878,300 who chose to drop their claims [rather than face a medical], another 837,000 who did take the a medical test were found to be fit to work immediately, while a further 367,300 were judged able to some level of work. Only 232,000 (one in eight of those tested) were classified by doctors to be too ill to do any sort of job. Some 30 people claimed they were unfit to work because of blisters, while 60 cited acne and 2,110 said “sprains and strains” rendered them unfit for employment.

Tim Worstall has more.

Thomas Sowell ponders guns and what’s rarely said about them:

If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull. Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defence within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year. Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

And Chris Snowdon is momentarily optimistic about the culling of quangos:

One of the coalition’s stated priorities after the general election was to have a “bonfire of the quangos” which would save the taxpayer £2.6 billion and rid us of numerous pointless bureaucrats. Three cheers for that, of course, and some progress seems to have been made, with more than 100 of these parasitic organisations biting the dust. It is, however, notoriously difficult to slim down the size of the state thanks to the vested interests who depend upon it. Governments are also incredibly inefficient even when it comes to closing things down. Almost unbelievably, the cost of the bonfire will be £830 million — nearly twice the original estimate — and the government could not resist setting up some new quangos in the process.

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.