BBC Radio 4 veers into Alan Partridge territory: 

Can you ever trust a gorilla with a child?

Answers on a postcard, please.

Magic words. // Assorted dicey moments, illustrated. // Japanese log relocation. It’s a vigorous business. // Vitruvian man action figure. // Voltige, a cautionary tale. // At last, Star Trek: The Next Generation swimsuits. // We’ll be seeing more of this, I think. // Not thinking things through, I fear. // Animations of note. // American shopping malls circa 1989. // This. // That. // The other. // Post-It notes and beer. // Mechanical Pong. // “The stench started masking the smell of their popular hickory-smoked ham.” (h/t, Ace) // Yes, apparently, it does happen. // Made of sand. // Done with suction. Crime-fighting applications under consideration. // Something is licking his tent. // This is one of these. // And finally, via Damian, some cat comradeship.

Or, You’ll Get What You’re Given And Like It, Bitches™.

For readers with an interest in really bad art and its coercive public funding, this post and subsequent discussion over at Artblog, which some of you may have missed, offers quite a lot to chew on. Because I’m vain and shallow, I’ll quote myself:

The political uniformity and extraordinary conceits of our own publicly-funded arts establishment have entertained us many, many times. As when the writer Hanif Kureishi told Guardian readers that culture, as represented by him, is “a form of dissent,” while the paper’s theatre critic Michael Billington claimed that a reduction of taxpayer subsidy for loss-making plays is nothing less than “suppression” of that “dissent.” Likewise, when the playwright Jonathan Holmes claimed that he and his peers are “speaking truth to power” – I kid you not – and insisted, based on nothing, that “the sole genuine reason for cuts is censorship of some form” and “the only governments to systematically attack the arts have been the ones that also attacked democracy.”

You see, the suggestion that artists might consider earning a living, rather than leeching at the taxpayer’s teat, is apparently indistinguishable from fascist brutality and the end of civilisation. Though when the status quo in London’s dramatic circles is overwhelmingly leftwing, and when publicly subsidised art and theatre tend to favour parties that favour further public subsidy for art and theatre, what “dissent” actually means is somewhat unclear. And reluctant taxpayers please take note: Despite all the years of providing hand-outs, you’re now the oppressor.

The whole thing, as they say.

Thomas Sowell on dubious graduation messages: 

Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organisations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how much nobler it is to be in “public service” than working in business or other “selfish” activities. In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organisations consuming output produced by others than to be in organisations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally one-up is where it’s at. The second theme of many Commencement speakers, besides flattering themselves that they are in morally superior careers, is to flatter the graduates that they are now equipped to go out into the world as “leaders” who can prescribe how other people should live. In other words, young people, who in most cases have never had the sobering responsibility and experience of being self-supporting adults, are to tell other people — who have had that responsibility and that experience for years — how they should live their lives.

Michael Strickland learns that interracial smiling can be a sign of “white fragility” and therefore proof of racism, at least when people of pallor do it: 

They continue to ponder if they are racist for crossing the street the wrong way, or when they smile at people of colour. “Am I doing the ‘white guy smile’?” asks one of the students.

Robert Tracinski on the vanity and incompetence of Mrs Bernie Sanders: 

While her husband has been out promising everyone free college, [Mrs Sanders] used to run a $25,000-per-year private college — which just announced it will be closing down due to the crushing weight of debt it incurred under her leadership. The debt was backed by fraudulent claims about millions of dollars in pledged donations. The case of Burlington College is a nice little microcosm of what we can expect from her husband’s economic agenda: grandiose schemes for expansion and improvement and lavish benefits offered to everyone — based on lies and financed by reckless, unsustainable borrowing, resulting in eventual collapse. It’s a microcosm of socialism in one other respect, too, which is that Jane Sanders and her friends and family did pretty well skimming the gravy off the top of the system while she ran it into the ground.

And Katherine Timpf on what that student debt is getting you: 

A professor at Santa Monica College took a group of students on an “EcoSexual Sextravaganza” trip earlier this month, during which they “married the ocean”… The students were specifically instructed to think of this marriage as one involving sex, and encouraged to “consummate” the marriage and “make love to the water” by sticking parts of their bodies into it.

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

The complete, scrollable Star Wars. By all means spend your lunch hour checking for errors and omissions. // Mitsubishi bees. // At last, a 3” turntable for all those 3” records you’ve kept. // Cat watches Psycho. // Why snow and confetti ruin YouTube video quality. // Can you tell what it is yet? // A pumpkin’s life. // Supaidāman, 1978. // Twerk it, sister. // Where to test your satellite antenna. // Low pass, Budapest. // Chart of note. // Air raid sirens of the Los Angeles area. (h/t, Coudal) // Cooking with dog. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // Can you spell “grade inflation”? // Cosplay triumph. // Boys and girls. // British diet data. We’re drinking less tea, apparently. // Travel snaps of note. // Fire from the sky. // And finally, this chap plays the piano better than you do and he has no fingers.

There’s a nasty institutionalised habit of letting leftwing activists get away with the worst of offences. After all, despite forking out nearly a grand in security costs, they wouldn’t even stop the activists from storming the stage.

While visiting DePaul University, Chicago, Milo Yiannopoulos has been having a spot of bother with some of the natives.

The gentleman muttering threats of violence is Edward Ward, a political science alumnus, and apparently the protest’s ringleader. The agitated young lady, the one screeching hysterically and jabbing her fists in Milo’s face, claims to have been silenced “for 200 years.”

Full video of the event can be viewed here.

Laurie Penny tells us that her politics,

lean towards anarchism/anarcho-communism.

And so, intrigued, we turn to Wikipedia:

The abolition of wage labour is central to anarchist communism. With distribution of wealth being based on self-determined needs, people would be free to engage in whatever activities they found most fulfilling and would no longer have to engage in work for which they have neither the temperament nor the aptitude.

How terribly precious. Imagine all of our delicate hand-wash-only radicals, all those little Lauries, self-determining how much wealth should be distributed their way, and how much, or little, they could be arsed to do in return. Temperament permitting. 

See also, parasite. 

Robert Tracinski on socialist Venezuela and the imaginings of John Lennon: 

Before you judge Venezuela’s looters, consider what you would do if your children were starving. So much for “no hunger.” What about the “brotherhood of man”? Not only is looting soaring in Venezuela, but so are all forms of crime. It has gotten so far out of control that mobs of vigilantes are burning people alive in the streets over petty thefts. It turns out then when people are starving, there’s not a lot of brotherhood. Instead, they fight like dogs over a bone.

Mick Hartley quotes Nick Cohen on Venezuela’s leftist cheerleaders: 

Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination.” What more could a breathless Western punter ask for? Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. […] The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.

Theodore Dalrymple on charity and welfare: 

Charity given as of right, for that is what the welfare state does, favours the undeserving more than the deserving, in so far as the undeserving have a capacity and even talent for generating more neediness than the deserving. (They also tend to be more vocal in their demands.) The welfare state in fact dissolves the very notion of desert, because there is no requirement that a beneficiary prove he deserves what he is legally entitled to. And where what is given is given as of right, not only will a recipient feel no gratitude for it, but it must be given without compassion — that is, without regard to any individual’s actual situation. In the welfare state, the notion of a specially deserving case is prohibited, for it implies a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.

And Katherine Timpf on sartorial innovation in the name of “social justice”:

The New Hanover County School System in North Carolina has proposed a ban on wearing tight pants in its schools because apparently “bigger girls” are getting bullied for the way that they look when they wear them.

Snug jeans and leggings would only be permissible if a looser secondary garment, say, a long shirt or dress, “covers the posterior in its entirety.” Freddie Mercury and Sir Mix-A-Lot could not be reached for comment.

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

Hubris meets nemesis. (h/t, Damian) // There’s a GoBoat with your name on it. // 12 hours of air conditioner hum. Use it wisely. // Darth by Darthwest. // Bath time. // Behold. // Do not swallow your phone. // For all your subtitled Soviet movie needs. (h/t, Tom) // “History’s most dangerous piece of intellectual malware.” // Suspiciously quiet on Mars. // Miniature nineteenth century photo studio. // Man’s besties. // The making of you. // Hardcore ivy. // Stiff breeze. // Headline of note. // Because Korean hip-hop exists. I denounce the cultural appropriation. // Corgi orgy. // And happily it’s washable. (h/t, Paul) // For the wee ones, a cuddlesome cephalopod. // Sculptural fish tanks. // And finally, thrillingly, the Great Crepitation Contest of 1946. It’s all in the knees, apparently.

Rachelle Peterson on the ugly racial dogma of Black Lives Matter: 

A major claim shared by most of the participants at Black Lives Matter 101 is that the black “lived experience” is impenetrable to non-blacks. The “narrative” is closed off and inaccessible to any who has not lived it, which means, by definition, all “whites.” According to these pronouncements, [non-black people] are inadvertent racists if they attempt to affirm black culture because they will inevitably present it as one-dimensional. And they are racists pure and simple if they do not affirm black culture in exactly the ways the Black Lives Matter activists prescribe. It is racism either way, and racism all the way down. […]

The spokesmen at Black Lives Matter 101 gave voice to what would quickly be recognised in any other context as claims of racial exclusivity. They were not shy about this or worried that it would undermine their larger claims. But, in fact, this view does undermine their larger claims. Their eagerness to take racial categorizations as fundamental, unalterable, and essentially “true,” contradicts their sense that racism is unjust and wrong. Replacing one form of racism with another takes us no closer to a fair and just society… What is the use of protesting racism by affirming an intrinsic all-powerful racial identity? 

And yes, there’s video of the gathering in question. Though to get through it, you may need a handy canister of nitrous oxide. 

Heather Mac Donald on the Great Mao-ling Psychodrama: 

My personal favourite in this tsunami of self-pity comes from Princeton’s put-upon minority students, who proclaimed that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” a phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who had picked cotton as a child on a Mississippi plantation and who was beaten for trying to vote. Can we have a reality check here? Every American college student today, no matter his race or gender, is among the most privileged individuals in human history. Millions of Chinese students are at this very moment studying their butts off in the hope of gaining access to the intellectual resources that American students take for granted. And being a Princeton or Yale student bears no resemblance – need I really say this? – to being a sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. 

Meanwhile, at Dartmouth College, merely suggesting that the lives of police officers matter too can result in indignation, vandalism and organised efforts to intimidate. Note which party college administrators are frightened of upsetting and willing to indulge with double standards, and note the somewhat creepy tactics of those who feel entitled to dictate the range of opinions and facts that may be expressed. Apparently, remembering police officers killed in the line of duty is nothing more than “white supremacist bullshit” and an act of “violence.”

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