That giant woollen cat head you’ve always wanted. // It takes brains to live in a technological world. (h/t, PootBlog) // Tiny computer. // Robot glockenspiel. // Kissy, kissy penguin. // Responsive sand. // Alaskan Dr Seuss house. // The Sun, its atmosphere and a passing Moon. // Simulacra. // Lenses. // Lab beaker wine glasses. // Tonic water lighting isn’t terribly efficient. // Marionette drummer. // Michael Douglas is shrinking people again. // A tiny English village with a tinier one inside it. // Today’s word is vertiginous. // Plastic bottle sculptures. // Passports. // Big rabbit. // Rapping while deaf. // Indian science fiction films. // The gluten-free museum. // Three-way hammock. // How to hold your smartphone. // And finally, behold the Guild of Evil’s luxury helicopter. 

And yet it isn’t at all difficult to imagine this happening for real. Given sufficient beer.  

Via PootBlog. 

The Guardian’s Deborah Orr tells the unenlightened that Hillary Clinton should be elected president of the United States because she has ovaries and fallopian tubes, and that’s what really matters:

She’ll be the first American president who has experienced childbirth, or even admitted to wearing a bra… She’ll be the first president to have prompted the need for an answer to the question: who is that guy then, if he isn’t the first lady?

An opening for a feminist gag is what voting is all about.

I’ve never been a big Hillary fan. I don’t expect her to be the best president ever. In my book, anything more than competence would be a bonus.

Yes, if elected Mrs Clinton may be barely competent, and possibly much worse, but she would nonetheless be,

the perfect US president.

Why? Because Hillary is a she-person:

The symbolic power of her appointment transcends all else. Anyone who doesn’t understand that, in this one respect, Clinton is an absolutely perfect presidential choice, is simply refusing to acknowledge reality.

You heard the lady. We must vote based on a person having the right kind of genitals. It “transcends all else.” Because the “perfect US president” is one whose merits, so defined, are an accident of birth.

Devorah Goldman on “diversity” in schools of social work: 

[The professor] explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking… until I realised he wasn’t.

Dave Huber on Duke’s vanishing “noose” story and faculty demands for “eliminating white supremacy” on campus: 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, chair of the Sociology department, added that “Duke is not a neutral racial space,” and that the school “oozes whiteness.”

If oozing whiteness sounds a bit much, you may want to revisit previous mentions of Professor Bonilla-Silva. When not denouncing “white logic,” the professor equates critics of affirmative action with 19th century supporters of slavery. One of the more bizarre indicators of Bonilla-Silva’s mental state is his written insistence – published in a course syllabus – that students must control their “body language” and avoid “irresponsible contestation” of his arguments. Black students who disagreed with the professor’s lurid racialist theories have been denounced by him as “Uncle Toms.” Professor Bonilla-Silva, a grown man, a tenured academic with a six-figure salary, refers to the United States, in class, as “AmeriKKKa.”

And Bryan Burrough on the “revolutionary” terrorism of the Weather Underground: 

Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorised. There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers: ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson of the New York cell. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would always insist there were never any plans to harm people. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what [the group] actually planned. In the middle ranks, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were going to be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls a Weatherman named Jon Lerner. “I remember talking about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.”

But hey, why endure the tedium and pretension of far-left politics if there isn’t a little pay-off, a little personal gratification…?

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Via the mighty Iowahawk. Somewhat related: Sing-a-long-a-Hillary. Sound essential. 

Robert Stacy McCain on self-flattery and groupthink: 

If your worldview is decisively formed within the insular climate of an elite university, the equation “liberal [i.e., leftist] = smart” is a formula you can never permit yourself to doubt, unless you are willing to admit that you have been hustled, scammed and bamboozled. A fellow with a diploma from Harvard or Stanford cannot confront the possibility that he has been swindled like an ignorant hick playing a carnival game at the country fair.

Mentioned in the comments yesterday, Professor Jere Surber unwittingly provides a textbook example. Note the parochial conceit that an educated worldview can only be a more or less leftist one. Note too the professor’s casual dismissal of those who challenge his self-flattering expectations. It’s rather like when George Monbiot waved aside those who disagree with him as mere dullards struggling with racial phobias. In George’s mind, a non-leftist outlook “thrives on low intelligence” and “appeals to stupidity.” It’s “the critical pathway from low intelligence to racism.” While self-imagined super-intellectual leftists – people like George, in fact – are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.”

Charles C W Cooke on the not-so-latent fascism of Mr George Galloway: 

Britain now has a range of unbelievably capricious “hate speech” and “public order” laws that effectively give anyone who feels offended the power to shut down his critics. Such measures are sold with mawkish appeals to the protection of the weak. But they are typically used by the strong and the rich and the well-connected.

Mr Galloway’s boldness is something to behold. 

And Katherine Timpf on things now deemed “unsafe” on campus: 

Last October, Arizona State University’s athletics department banned face paint — “whether the theme is black, maroon, gold or white” — because ASU is an “inclusive and forward-thinking university” and they must make sure that “everyone feels safe and accepted.” They did not explain whether or not any students had actually reported feeling threatened by the paint, and if so, how those students were handling their lives currently.

Also declared emotionally hazardous to young intellectuals: the words “freshmen” and “bullet,” and, obviously, petting-zoo camels.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. And tickling the tip jar makes me feel loved. 

Katherine Timpf detects more sorrow among the competitively sensitive: 

A student at Harvard University published an op-ed on Wednesday complaining that her school’s “safe spaces” are just not safe enough. According to Madison E. Johnson, her time spent in the “safe space” was really great at first — there were “massage circles,” “deep conversations,” and “times explicitly delineated for processing and journaling.”

Yes, journaling and massage circles. Readers who studied at less glamorous institutions will no doubt feel the ache of deprivation. Don’t you yearn to display undiluted your “more radical views,” free from laughter, contradiction and accusations of pretension? Which is to say, though not out loud, free from other people? All this in a “beautiful” space, one that’s “rife with consciousness.” Though preferably only yours. Is that too much to ask?  

But then it all changed.

Ah. It turns out that a fellow seeker of safety needed a space in which to air their “more radical views,” specifically, their radical poetry:

A white poet gets on stage and says the n-word a few times.

A student poet going rogue. And so,

I’m realising “safe space” might mean different things for different people.

It’s a learning curve, that whole reciprocity thing. What with the radicalism and all.

The poetry slam presents the real question. At this point in reality, can there even be a truly safe space? 

You see, if it’s even remotely possible that “any facets of your experience or identity… could be mobilised against you,” thereby causing you “harm, panic, anxiety, disadvantage” – or fits of pretentious hysteria – then the space you’re in “is not safe.” “And you shouldn’t call it safe, because that is dangerous.” Despite such complications – complications that no mortal brain could possibly have anticipated – Ms Johnson is clear about what a safe space means to her:  

For me, a safe space is one in which I feel that I can express all aspects of my identity without feeling that any one of those aspects will get me (including, but not limited to) judged, fired, marginalised, attacked, or killed.

Yes, killed, as in killed to bits. Possibly by radical poetry. In a safe space that is “dangerous.” On a campus where tuition and board costs $60,000 a year.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of Social Justice. 

Or, “If you expose our student indoctrination policy we will punish you.”

According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognise “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicised content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Crotch Funk as Art. 

In which I hammer culture into your tiny minds.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

The Sound of Wringing. 

To show how virtuous they are, and therefore superior, Guardian columnists stick pins into their eyes.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic 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.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

Please don’t try drilling into your head at home. // 75 hours of drawing in under 2 minutes. // 3D-printed car isn’t fast or pretty. // Floating flower garden. // Fractal forest. // Fluids in a fish tank. // Low frequency fire extinguisher. // Frost. // Free sausage roll. (h/t, Julia) // All the types of Spam. // Symmetrical breakfasts. // Bespoke chocolate faces. Price on request. // A boy and his bird. // I suspect these people may be nerds. // 900,000 photographs of historic New York City. // This. // Commute with a better class of riff-raff. But only in San Francisco. // San Francisco’s summer of ’71. (h/t, Coudal) // An uncompleted tomb. // Soviet pilot cemetery. // Super-typhoon seen from space. // And finally, what happens when you combine Pong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders? 

Daniel Hannan on poverty and its alternatives: 

“Like slavery and apartheid,” Nelson Mandela told 20,000 people in Trafalgar Square ten years ago, “poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” They were inspiring words, and the crowd duly went wild. But the old man was talking utter, unadulterated bilge. Poverty is not “man-made”: it is the primordial condition of all living organisms, including humans. It is wealth that is “man-made.”

John Leo on the latest campus fundamentalism: 

The National Association of Scholars released a 260-page report on how far the new [definition] of “sustainability” has spread, particularly on campuses. Credentials can be earned in 1,438 distinct college programmes and its message now extends to such unlikely subjects as English composition, mathematics, art history and psychology… Under the argument that true sustainability requires an end to social oppression, the report says, the movement embraces identity politics, calls for the overthrow of patriarchal systems and misogynist bias, the virtual elimination of extraction of energy from fossil fuels, an end to industrial development in the underdeveloped world and a return to subsistence or near subsistence standards of living. The need to overthrow capitalism, though not supported by all, is a common and much discussed theme in the movement.

And Bill Whittle on 16-year-olds and voting: 

Teen voters, the younger the better, are exactly what the left is looking for. They know no history; they base all of their decisions on emotion; they have no real world experience in terms of what works and what does not. They haven’t the slightest idea of discipline or delayed gratification. They live in a world of fantasy and wish fulfilment; they make demands that cannot be met but they’re willing to settle for an ice-cream cone. They are utterly dependent on others; they’re desperate to conform to the cultural norm, and in general they are the perfect, pliable, ignorant, utterly emotional, reason-free, easily-manipulated vote farm that the progressives need for their power grab.

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