Thomas Sowell on affordable housing and its opponents: 

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of “affordable housing” as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters… One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up. This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge… When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the “complex” question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

Old Holborn steers ladies to the radical lover of their dreams. Seriously, brace those loins for impact. 

And Mick Hartley quotes David Brown on the Shoreditch “anti-gentrification” protesters and their class war credentials: 

Adam Barr, 23, the editor of Freedom News, a left-wing online newspaper, dismissed criticism of the protest as “reactionary bourgeois drivel” on a blog post on his website yesterday. “The Cereal Killer café is a legitimate target for protest as a symbol of the invading hordes that have taken over Shoreditch,” he added. Mr Barr, the son of a company director from East Yorkshire, could not be reached for comment.

In short, it seems the protesters are the usual clumping of middle-class academics and charmless misfits. The nearest thing to an actual member of the downtrodden proletariat seems to be the self-described “class warrior” and “rebel ethnographer” Dr Lisa McKenzie, currently blunting minds at the London School of Economics. Readers may recall Dr McKenzie from this video here, in which she explains that her academic role entails “not trying to find out something.” Instead, her purpose is to “challenge” the “negative stereotypes” of rough council housing neighbourhoods. Curiously, Dr McKenzie attempts this by proudly showing us graffiti – sorry, “muriels” – that actually confirm those stereotypes – of gangs, vandalism, car theft and, as she puts it, “young people who have died on the estate.” And Dr McKenzie does all this, quite earnestly, while a police helicopter rumbles overhead.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Behold the modern campus, home of deep thought and cool intellects: 

The incident happened Tuesday night, when students thought they found several nooses hanging from a tree. Word quickly spread as campus officials swiftly released a statement condemning the foul hate crime. But come morning, police said a short investigation had led them to conclude the “nooses” were really just the remnants of paper lanterns from an event held all the way back in June. 

In the video linked here police chief Patrick Ogden calmly explains what a paper lantern looks like, and the fact that a paper lantern isn’t actually a symbol of racial hatred. 

Yes, I know. It’s almost funny. But then,

Unperturbed by the truth, students launched an assembly following the incident to speak as though the hate crime really did happen. According to the News Journal, a local paper, the assembly was held “to find ways to change the campus climate” in the wake of the bad atmosphere apparently exposed by a fictional hate crime… One administrator said the climate of hate at Delaware was exposed by the mere fact he could even believe the alleged hate crime occurred.

And so,

The University of Delaware’s vice provost for diversity Carol Henderson… said the college is planning to launch a new “diversity action plan” as soon as it’s approved by school officials.

With so many witch finders now in business, witches will be found. 

Here’s a thing: 

Meat should be treated like tobacco with a public campaign to stop people eating it, Jeremy Corbyn’s new vegan shadow farming minister has suggested. Kerry McCarthy… admitted she was a “militant” when it came to clamping down on meat consumption. She said: “I really believe that meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco, with public campaigns to stop people eating it.”

Because using your own taxes to scold you from above and correct your preferences is what she thinks her job is.

Via Samizdata. 

Battleship probability calculator. // Cat eggs for breakfast. // Caffeinated shaving cream. // Cashless money box. // A brief history of modern art. // Nutcracker of note. // “How well do you know your toes?” // A global map of racial tolerance. // Enterprise-D VR headgear tour demo. Do the crew quarters have curtains? // Invisibility cloak. Hides particles, not people. // Raccoon earns her keep. // Donkey in a hammock. // Land’s End, from the makers of Monument Valley. // The lost tunnels of Liverpool. // Supersonic shock waves. // McDonald’s straws. // Speed chess. // Walther PPK rubber band gun. // Peek-a-boo fence. // Giant wooden megaphones “amplify the sounds of nature.” // And finally, cheerily, an interactive chart showing how many years you have left to live, probably.

In which I steer you to a fashion pictorial:

It was an era of football haute couture, representing a flamboyant and carefree culture, liberating itself from the dress of prior generations, and which reigned on university campuses across the country during the Jazz Age.

Full-length, pimp-style raccoon fur coats.

Via Ace. 

Building a scale model of the planets and their orbits is harder than you’d think. 

Via sH2. 

When badmouthing maleness goes horribly wrong. 

These guys are way more flexible than you. // Moroccan tree goats, obviously. // Top end kitchen knives made from molten meteorite. // A calendar of tiny dramas. // “It was designed to be an enjoyable ride.” // Only rub the underside. // Bias in social psychology. // Test your ear for pitch. // Candlestick. // “The global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate.” // Meanwhile, in exploding toilet news. //“No lumps, no waste, no mess.” // Lots of Lithuanian garage doors. // Designing hideous clothes is now even easier. // The Fallout Shelter Handbook, 1962. (h/t, Things) // The earliest known fuck. // And finally, as my dear old grey-haired gran used to say, “When walking past a monkey, don’t ever give it the finger.” 

It’s not racism when people of colour are prejudiced against white people.

And,

You can’t be sexist against men.

The deep intersectional wisdom of incompetent “comic artist” Alli Kirkham.

Via dicentra, Darleen Click finds a mother whose environmentalist pieties have produced a nightmare teenager: 

I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance travelled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry and fish I serve. He questions my every move — from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?) — an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.

The mother in question, Ronnie Cohen, is a “freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area” who writes about “social justice issues.”

And Andrew Stuttaford quotes Peggy Noonan on lofty border policies: 

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighbourhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality — normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular. The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder. 

I spotted a not dissimilar attitude, albeit in a different context, while watching this BBC documentary on the preservation and listing of despised Brutalist architecture – specifically, the notorious Park Hill estate in Sheffield, which embarrassingly dominates the city’s skyline. Note the romantic enthusiasm of the presenter, architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff, for this locally infamous eyesore, which is known chiefly for muggings, prostitution and the joys of dodging objects hurled from upper floors. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Dyckhoff does not live in, or near, Sheffield.) Note too, around 18:25, the views of Martin Cherry from English Heritage, who airily dismisses the preferences of Sheffield residents and insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.