Michael J Totten relays the splendour of a notable megalomaniac:  

Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedov just erected a 69-foot statue of himself in the centre of Ashgabat, the capital [of Turkmenistan]. He’s up there on a golden horse atop an enormous slab of marble that looks like an iceberg. He’s compensating. Two years ago he fell off a horse at an official race. The only reason we even know this is because a brave person in the audience captured it on amateur video and uploaded it to the internet. All the other riders rode past him as he lay flat on his back in the dirt, but he was declared the winner regardless and awarded an 11 million dollar prize for his “performance.” This clown follows President Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006 of heart failure. He renamed months of the year after himself and his family. He built a 60-foot statue of himself that slowly rotated so that his face was always in sunlight.

The first in a possible series.  

But really, Berdimuhamedov’s statue. You should see the thing.

Heather Mac Donald on post-Ferguson policing: 

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr Dotson reported. Arrests in St Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

See also Thomas Sowell on the same. And the last item here now seems somewhat prophetic. 

And Theodore Dalrymple on social work and deservedness: 

I called a social worker and made a disastrous mistake in my first sentence. “I have a particularly deserving case,” I said, thinking to arouse her interest and forgetting for a moment that desert in any traditional sense was a concept that had long been banned from the lexicon of social work. Far from arousing her interest, let alone compassion, it aroused her hostility. If I thought a case was particularly deserving, it followed that I must have thought that some cases were relatively or even absolutely undeserving. In short, I was judgmental, that is to say censorious, cruel and Victorian.

The abandonment of distinctions between the unfortunate and the merely verminous is a phenomenon we’ve seen before. As when the Guardian’s Zoe Williams wanted us to believe that the problem with ‘problem families’ is simply that they’re poor, and nothing whatsoever to do with how they choose to abuse their equally poor neighbours. And so attempts to deal with people who repeatedly play loud music at 3am or throw pets from top floor windows are framed as a “demonization of the poor” and “trying to shunt people out of society for not being rich enough.” According to Zoe, we should be “unstigmatising,” which is to say, non-judgmental. A result of which is that empathy, or feigned empathy, is shifted from the working class victim of crime and antisocial behaviour to the working class perpetrator of crime and antisocial behaviour, on grounds that the thug or criminal is in some way being oppressed and, unlike their neighbours, being made to misbehave.

Presumably Ms Williams’ own neighbours have little in common with, say, the delightful Stuart Murgatroyd, a father of twelve who has never worked and boasts an extensive criminal record, not least for robbing the elderly in graveyards, and whose attempt to challenge an antisocial behaviour order was cut short at the very last minute due to him being arrested for assaulting the mother of his children, herself a convicted getaway driver, on the steps of the courthouse. And I suspect our infinitely compassionate Guardianista has yet to experience an all-night eleven-hour rave being hosted next door, which would doubtless give her an opportunity to practise that non-judgmental piety.

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

Tiny origami robot folds itself, performs tasks, dissolves into nothing. // The road to success. // Days of future past. (h/t, Pootblog) // Eco-pod. You want one and you know it. // Plants and mirrors. // Cloudreporter. // Here’s some weather in a box. // Balloon creatures. // Hot dog style guide. // I think we need more logos. // A map of horror movie locations. // Odorous alarm clock. If you’re going to wake up to a smell, why not make it one of these? // Octopus lugs coconut shells. // It’s probably best not to try this at home. // Avengers interface porn. // At last, a 10-storey urban playground. // Smart device gesture sensing. // Done with magnets, marbles and sand. // Oh dear, something is sucking the eggs. (h/t, Julia) // And finally, I’m having second thoughts about this cunning plan.  

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here. 

Via Joan. 

Update via Franklin. Brace yourselves: 

Attention, amorous menfolk. The rules of dating feminists, especially brown ones, have been updated: 

Yeah, I said it: I absolutely refuse to even touch my wallet while on a date with a man. 

The fierce young lady saying it, yeah is one Tiffanie Drayton, whose deep feminist wisdom will shake your tiny world:

I am a thinking, hardworking, autonomous human being. I am also a woman, and a Black woman at that, who is constantly fighting for the right to claim an independence that has been hindered and even made secondary to that of my male peers. 

Damn those bastards. And therefore Ms Drayton has decided that politicised freeloading is the way forward:

Why should I believe I must overcome this inequality without the assistance of a man who wants to pursue me romantically? Why is my effort to reach for the cheque anything more than pretence? Society has never treated me as “equal” to the man sitting across from me, yet all of a sudden the playing field is levelled? 

Yes, relying on a man to pay the bill, every time, is proof of Ms Drayton’s emancipation and empowerment as a thinking, hardworking, autonomous black woman. It’s how she fights for the right to claim her independence. It’s also reparation for collective male sin. Oh, sweet serendipity.

In other words, a man who pays for a date is merely compensating for society’s imbalance and inequality. He is restoring equality. This is especially true in dating White or Asian men who – statistically speaking – has [sic] a weekly median income of nearly 2-3 times that of women of colour.

You see, by paying for everything she wants, whenever she wants it, your money is simply being “returned to the women from which [sic] it was displaced in the very first place.” And so the proudly feminist author “completely rejects the premise” that “I have to pay my own way.”

Ms Drayton is a “freelance writer and activist,” one who struggles daily with The All-Powerful Patriarchy™, and also grammar. Regarding her tweets on racism and sexism – sorry, her “lectures” on racism and sexism – she says, 

Google gets paid. I should too. 

She adds,

If discussions on racism make you uncomfortable, avoid everything I write. 

Given the dating conditions above, potential suitors may wish to expand that idea to contact in general. 

Kevin D Williamson corrects the comedy economics of U.S. senator Bernie Sanders: 

Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear… Free markets are a reflection of what people actually value at a particular time relative to the other things that they might also value. Real people simply want things that are different from what the planners want them to want, a predicament that can be solved only through violence and the threat of violence…

Markets adapt to political changes, and the hierarchy of values that distinguishes between an hour’s worth of warehouse management, an hour’s worth of composing poetry, an hour’s worth of brain surgery, and an hour’s worth of singing pop songs is not going to change because a politician says so, or because a group of politicians says so, or because 50 percent + 1 of the voters say so, or for any other reason. To think otherwise is the equivalent of flat-earth cosmology. In the long term, people’s needs and desires are what they are; in the short term, you can cause a great deal of chaos in the economy and you can give employers additional reasons to automate rote work. But you cannot make a fry-guy’s labour as valuable as a patent lawyer’s by simply passing a law.

Williams quotes the socialist Mr Sanders objecting to consumers having a wide choice of sports shoes and underarm deodorant, as if such things were a sign of wickedness, which reminded me of another socialist’s encounter with well-stocked shelves, in 1989, quoted here by Tim Blair:  

[Russian president, Boris] Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s supermarket nodding his head in amazement.” He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.

And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, filmed by Rick Suddeth. As you can see, the egalitarian retail experience is leaving shoppers happier and more morally elevated:  

“Because love is forever!” // Smart collar for dogs. // Brain-controlled bionic leg. // There are duck lanes in London. // Star Trek-inspired office building of note. // That holiday in Iceland you’ve been planning. // How to prolong battery life. // Belly paint. // Rihanna farts in a bath. // Giant strawberry. // Tasty hedge. // Stayin’ Alive. // How to make gummi Lego. // Wet-fold origami animals. // An interactive global map of meteorite falls. // Interactive pixelated fur pompoms. // Cruise ships from above. // “Masturbating men will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife.” Don’t question Islamic science. // Smartphone screen-to-body ratios. // Retro-ironic gaming cabinet of note. // Hurdler. // Dad interventions. // And finally, fiercely, drag queen Storm versus drag queen Dark Phoenix. 

Readers of this blog will, over the years, have marvelled at the outpourings of one Polly Toynbee, the Guardian’s foremost social commentator and hand-wringer in chief, a woman voted “the most influential commentator in the UK” and whose views regularly grace the programming of the BBC, for which she was formerly a newsroom social affairs editor. “Polly Toynbee’s influence is perceived to be huge in British public life,” wrote Julia Hobsbawm of the media analysts Editorial Intelligence. “Her columns resonate in Whitehall and beyond.”

From high atop those resonating columns, Ms Toynbee delivers her various pronouncements, including a conviction that “left-wing people are more intelligent and just generally better people,” i.e., better than thee and me, and a demand that taxes must be raised “to pay the state to become the best possible nanny to all babies.” There’s also her belief that “disruptive 16-year-old boys” should be taken out of class to spend a term being taught the finer points of dance, thereby resulting in a “transformation in the whole year group.” When not curing inner-city classroom delinquency with the thrill of modern tap, Polly tells her readers that obesity isn’t chiefly a matter of inactivity and overeating but instead has a more pernicious cause, i.e., a lack of socialism: 

It is inequality and disrespect that makes people fat.

To bolster this radical insight Ms Toynbee made a number of further claims regarding economic inequality and expanded waistlines, each of which proved to be either misleading or untrue. And chunkier readers should note that waiting for a socialist revolution probably isn’t the best way to lose those extra pounds.

Our imperious champion of the poor has a famously intermittent relationship with facts, logic and mathematics, such that an entire website, Factchecking Pollyanna, was devoted to providing detailed corrections of each week’s errors and distortions. Sadly, this effort to bring factual accuracy to the finest Guardian journalism became dormant some years ago, its anonymous author possibly having collapsed under the weight of the endeavour.

Happily, however, Tim Worstall has now published the best of that legendary blog in book form, so that another generation may bathe in Ms Toynbee’s blunders and fumbling with numbers. Amid various examples of Polly inverting statistics and misreporting figures by several orders of magnitude, as when she inflated council tax benefit changes by a mere 5,100%, the volume includes such moments of high journalism as Ms Toynbee telling the world that 142% of people were dissatisfied with Tony Blair, and a 21-word sentence containing no fewer than five factual errors.

If you buy the book via this Amazon link, or via this one here for readers in the U.S., your host will receive a small fee at no extra cost to you.  

Robert Stacy McCain on bedlamite feminism: 

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, [Shulamith Firestone] declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture.” She flatly declared “pregnancy is barbaric,” described women as “the slave class,” and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics.

David Clemens on academia’s Clown Quarter and its self-inflicted decline: 

The Modern Language Association is the world’s largest organisation for scholars of literature and languages with about 24,000 members in over 100 countries. Like the rest of academia, the MLA leans solidly to the left, yet it still includes a “Radical Caucus” and a leftist “Politics and the Profession” subgroup. One older gent from the Radical Caucus sports a hammer-and-sickle lapel pin; another member works to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin’s reputation… Is there anything more absurd than a handful of academics retailing their revolutionary fantasies in the Grand Ballroom of a luxury hotel?

Professor Clemens was a voice of reason in the excellent documentary Indoctrinate U. 

And David Hookstead spots more campus leftists signalling their brilliance to an unworthy world: 

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda… One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.” The event includes sessions investigating what it means to be a thief, how to construct political narratives, and how to destabilise hegemonic spatial representations.

Given the costs of being a student whose time is spent engaged in pretentious Marxoid seething, and given how unlikely it is that such seething will attract employers or a salary, it may not surprise readers that the organisers are also very much opposed to “debt and hierarchies of knowledge.” Being expected to pay your bills as agreed – say, those misspent student loans – is, we learn, a “means of oppression.” Because destabilising hegemonic spatial representations is something that someone else should be forced to pay for.

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

When your mom blows your cover on Facebook. 

Via sk60.