In an eye-widening article that I recommend reading in full, Paul Sperry takes a look at ‘progressive’ education policy and its consequences: 

Thanks to talking circles and peer juries, “young people are now taking control of the environment,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan gushed in a 2014 speech to black students at Howard University. “It’s sort of a counter-intuitive thing for many of us as adults, but the more we give up power, the more we empower others, often the better things are,” Duncan added. “And empowering teenagers to be part of the solution, having them control the [classroom] environment, control the culture, be the leaders, listening to them, respecting them — when we do that, wonderful things happen for kids in communities that didn’t happen historically.”

Just weeks after “empowering teenagers,” San Diego public schools witnessed a surge in violent assaults.

A development repeated elsewhere, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oakland, Santa Ana and Syracuse, and all of which is no doubt bewildering to such educators as Eric Butler, a “restorative justice co-ordinator,” whose prideful mantra is “I don’t blame, I don’t punish.” 

How very generous of him.  

After a black high-school boy repeatedly punched his teacher in the face, sending her to the emergency room, the teacher, who is white, was advised by the assistant principal not to press charges. The administrator lectured her about how hard it is for young black men to overcome a criminal record. Worse, she was told she should examine what role she, “as a white woman” holding unconscious racial biases, played in the attack…

A white sixth-grade teacher at a mostly black Washington, DC, school told the US Commission on Civil Rights she had similar “conversations” in which she was told that the bad behaviour of black boys is mainly the teacher’s fault. “I have been encouraged to examine and question how my own racial dispositions affect my teaching and my students,” Andrea Smith testified. During cultural sensitivity training required of school districts under restorative justice programmes, teachers are told they are largely to blame for bad behaviour of black students because they “misinterpret” African-American culture.

Via Darleen Click, who asks, 

I’m sorry, but exactly how does one misinterpret a punch to the face?

Answers on a postcard, please. 

Daniel Hannan on stats and cover stories: 

“The rich are richer and the poor are poorer,” says the left-of-centre British newspaper, The Independent, on its front page. That phrase is so common, so facile, so glib, that it is almost a truism. Except that it’s not true… On almost every measure of absolute wealth, the poor are getting richer. Because this fact seems counterintuitive, some people scrabble around for data that seem to contradict it. The Independent’s rather tendentious use of savings as its main measure of wealth is typical… The same partiality explains why leftists clutch so determinedly at their bizarre definition of poverty as having a household income less than 60 per cent of the mean – a measure which gives Britain a greater rate of poverty than Bangladesh.

And Natalie Solent on minimum wage laws and the subsequent, inevitable, dancing around the obvious: 

I came across this article asking “Why are so many Seattle restaurants closing lately?” The writer, Sara Jones, goes through the possible answers to this question at some length. Ownership changes. “Concept switches,” whatever they might be. Premises too big. Ingredients too pricey. Menus too esoteric. Too loud. Too quiet. Managers who do too much. Managers who do too little. Many and various are the potentialities diligently listed by Ms Jones. It is a little hard to see why a plague of Managers Doing Too Much should suddenly descend on so many of Seattle’s eateries all at once, though. Could there be something else behind it, some really strange and frightening phenomenon whose name no one in Seattle dare speak? […] In fairness to the author, she does discuss the effect of the minimum wage hike eventually, after having exhausted all other options. She’s doing better than many.

As Anthony Anton of the Washington Restaurant Association puts it, “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem.” And I was rather taken by this comment here, spotted by Sam Duncan and offered in reply to a typically pious and self-flattering leftist:  

No you don’t get to get away with that. You don’t get to advocate policies [i.e., higher minimum wage laws] which allow you to use force to deprive people of their jobs and their opportunities, and then claim that those who would have provided the jobs are the heartless ones. You don’t get to trot out the insipid, mindless, tendentious talking points about how you are morally or intellectually superior when every “solution” you proffer is destructive and is based upon forcing others to do your bidding. You don’t get to decide whose job is worth preserving and whose isn’t and still claim the moral high ground.

As yet the leftist in question has not seen fit to respond. Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments below. 

How to ruin a full English breakfast: 

One of these. Via Christopher Snowdon. 

Competitive hair freezing is a thing now, apparently. // Fun with uranium and a cloud chamber. // Tiny floating worlds. // If the Star Trek films were devoid of people. // Oh nO, a game of deduction. // Ultra-tiny sculptures are measured in microns. // An ambitious weekend smoking project. // At last, your very own life-size Hulkbuster. // Lovely mould. // A ball of eyes. // Urban tree housing. // The Revox man. (h/t, Coudal) // Why rats don’t vomit. // Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise, redone. // Age of Ultron, redubbed. // An electronic nose. // Acid. // And finally, curse those evil corporations. What have they ever done for us? 

An adolescent with an IQ of 100 was [up to] 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females.

Here. Via Pootblog. 

Kevin D Williamson on fellating dictators: 

Celebrities came to sit at [Hugo Chávez’s] feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, and Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic programme “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.

The ludicrous Mr Myerson has been mentioned here before. 

From the comments following this: 

In another world she would be a feminist icon. Instead we have Lena Dunham.

Franklin Einspruch implores his fellow artists to try a little maths: 

This article is my call for artists, art writers, and the like, to the extent that they feel inclined to comment upon capitalism and related economic phenomena, to either learn how these things work or do the rest of us a mercy and zip it… If you can’t explain how prices are determined then you have no business complaining about neoliberalism.

And Jim Goad on “social justice education” and the shaping of young minds: 

I’ve looked over the [dictionary] definition [of racism] many times and still haven’t seen an addendum that says, “….but only when white people are doing it.” So for the time being, the official definition of racism does not contain any such “whites only” clause. But according to Luke Visconti, a white man who is the CEO of something called Diversity Inc, such dictionary definitions of racism are indeed “too white.” From a cursory glance of his website, I suspect that everything may be “too white” for Visconti — possibly even himself. If he were offered the magical ability to moult his skin like a snake and emerge as a coal-black Haitian, I tend to believe he’d accept the offer, provided there was no salary cut.

Regarding Mr Visconti’s conceit that only white people can be racist (and always, always are), don’t forget the moral boneyard to which such posturing leads. 

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

Everest, Ama Dablam and Lhotse, filmed in ultra HD at 20,000 feet using a gyro-stabilised camera. 

Students at the University of California, Irvine have denounced exposure to the American flag as potentially inflicting “hate speech” on passers-by. Indeed, the mere sight of it could make young intellectuals burst into tears and feel terribly unsafe. The potential emotional terrors of the national flag are articulated at length, and with great expenditure of gas, in a bill calling for the removal and banning of said items in the name of inclusivity:  

Flags not only serve as symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism, but also construct cultural mythologies and narratives that in turn charge nationalistic sentiments… Flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenised standards for others to obtain which in this country typically are idolised as freedom, equality, and democracy… Freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible[,] can be interpreted as hate speech… No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.

Despite their no doubt acute acute political consciousness, and references to constructed paradigms and “deep knowledge,” it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading. Or basic grammar. 

Quokka selfies. Cuter than you. // Cat island. // Big dog. // Cheese and biscuits. (h/t, Pootblog) // Hidden bars. // Watch your fingers. // When messaging was pneumatic. // In need of auto-tune. // Nantucket slurpee waves. // At last, a pancake printer. // Magnetic spider lamp. // When 11-year-old boys watch Aliens for the first time. // Dancing origami. // She wasn’t always green. // I suspect the gent in the last shot will prove rather important. // Public bathroom riposte. // More fast food. (h/t, Simen) // When bins fight back. // For big, big fans of Miles Davis. // And finally, bewilderingly, Mr Piggy Dies in 25 Dimensions.

Heather Mac Donald on pretentious students and their enablers: 

This proliferation of in-your-face sexual identities [among students] is all posturing, just part of the dance between students desperate to find one last means of being transgressive and college bureaucrats eager to show their sensitivity and to justify their six-figure salaries. Students who should be studying European history and the roots of the novel — would that such subjects were still taught — are instead combing the farthest reaches of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual for ways to distinguish themselves. By posing what they hope will be rejected demands on their administrations, they seek only to prove that they are living a life of oppression.

And on the remarkable elasticity of “queer theory”: 

Today’s identity-based theorising represents a worldview and righteous self-definition that precede facts and analysis.

Not entirely unrelated, Kevin D Williamson on the misplaced moral glamour of defaulting on student loans: 

The students… took out loans and used their credit to purchase a defective product, no different from putting a bucket of magic beans on a MasterCard. They made poor decisions with other people’s money, which is not entirely surprising: Access to other people’s money is an invitation to making poor decisions… But just as MasterCard is not responsible if you put a lemon on your credit card (you’d be shocked how many people purchase cars with credit cards), Bank of McNasty and Uncle Stupid are not responsible for legal adults who borrow money to buy sub-par educational services.

Somewhat related. 

And don’t forget the self-described “bacon-eating vegan” who was left shocked and tearful upon discovering that her degrees in “social justice studies” and “gender studies” have zero value in the job market. “My degrees mean NOTHING,” tweeted she. “I don’t even know how to process the reality that is my life now.”