Ace’s headline pretty much sums it up:

Selfless Crusader Against Income Inequality to Heroically Accept $225,000 for Nine Months of Sub-Part-Time Work from State-Funded Organisation to Occasionally Give a Few Quotes About the Scourge of Income Inequality.

Hiring Paul Krugman, a Guardian contributor and the left-leaning owner of this humble abode, is part of the City University of New York’s latest “inequality initiative.” Mr Krugman’s will be “a modest role” with no teaching or supervision commitments. In fact, neither party seems able to define what, exactly, that “modest role” will be. Hence the salary of $25,000 per month.

Update, via the comments:

Further to the Dartmouth “micro-aggression” saga, Victor Davis Hanson notes the comforts and privilege of our campus role-players:   

President Hanlon apparently felt the students’ pain of what they had called “micro-aggressions,” or the day-to-day psychodramatic angst that these young elites feel are their own versions of the world of the Wal-Mart checker, the roofer in Delano who nails in 105 degree August heat, or the tractor driver who has disked half-mile long rows day in and day out on the farm. If you have never done such things, and you have $60,000 a year to spend on Dartmouth, then I suppose you could conceivably dream up a micro-aggression of being tortured to read ‘women’ for womyn, or having to use either the boys’ or girls’ bathroom…

They and their faculties enjoy privileges undreamed of by 99.9% of the population. DeVry and Phoenix trade schools cannot afford to offer Dartmouth-like race, class, and gender courses to contextualise their accounting, computer programming and nursing programmes because none of their students have the cash for such psychodramatic indulgences. Our aggrieved .01% can play act that they are embattled, precisely because free market capitalism gave them those dramatic opportunities in a way unknown in Mexico or the Congo.

And as we’ve seen, the longer and more ostentatiously this role-play is indulged, the more bonkers it becomes. Seven years of it can really leave a person beyond the reach of reason. 

Larry Sand on children’s education versus teachers’ job security: 

In the last ten years, only 91 teachers out of about 300,000 (.003 percent) who have attained ‘permanence’ [tenure] lost their jobs in California. Of those, only 19 (.0007 percent) have been dismissed for poor performance. Is it possible that Golden State teachers are that good? Such an astronomical permanence rate doesn’t square with the performance of California’s fourth- and eighth-graders, whose scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests persistently rank near the bottom.

And Steven Malanga notes some more academic high-mindedness: 

Readers can perhaps get a sense of the current state of the anthropology field by considering the most absurd claim against [Napoleon] Chagnon: that he was a McCarthyite. The evidence for this was little more than [an] observation that Chagnon grew up in the 1950s in a rural area of Michigan, where “anti-Communist feeling ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support.” Critics also sniped at Chagnon for being… “a free-market advocate.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

The paintings of Alyssa Monks were featured here a few years ago. In the following link, Ms Monks crops up again, along with some other rather talented people. 

Via MeFi. 

At least we are according to the aesthetes behind Swansea’s taxpayer-funded art festival Art Across the City, which improves the locals with things like this, and specifically conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, whose work, above, is sited in a car park behind a shopping centre. The press release for this mighty piece tells us, “Deller’s plaintive request gets straight to the point. Everybody and everywhere could do with more poetry.” Likewise, presumably, “everybody” could “do with” more conceptual art too. 

Babies’ first encounters with lemon. // Montana elk herd crosses road. Will the lone straggler make it? // Paper robot field test. // A life-sized cardboard Iron Man and other cardboard creatures. // What a dog’s tongue does. // Special needs Doberman. // How many days did you spend watching that show? // If the Moon were a giant disco ball. // Build your own solar system with Super Planet Crash. // Alien audiobook. // Drag balls in Kansas, 1950s-60s. (h/t, MeFi) // Kingdom of the little people. // A-ki-ra. // Hedgehog masks. // City of darkness. // Can you do a British accent? // The coldest city. // A brief history of post-credits movie scenes. // Baby elephant gifs. // And finally, befriend your hummingbird. 

Brace yourselves, dear readers, it’s art news time. Today we marvel at the searing brilliance of the French performance artist Abraham Poincheval, who, as I type, resides in the belly of a bear. Or rather, in the hollowed-out carcass of a bear, one that’s currently situated in the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris. Mr Poincheval is, we’re told, re-enacting “a powerful sensitivity” and “profound symbolism,” one that “still grips the Western world’s imagination today.” It’s a “communion” that will “inevitably bring him to a state of profound meditation.” He’s “confounding the boundaries between man and animal.” How so, you ask? 

Just like the mammal during the winter months, Poincheval remains within a small enclosure, keeping with him all the basic things he might need to survive throughout the weeks spent inside; food, water, activities and even a place to relieve himself… By residing within the species, Poincheval aims to understand his own physical limits and experience animal nature, a symbolic image of the ‘inside out’ of a bear during hibernation. 

Mr Poincheval began his immense artistic feat on April 1 and hopes to make it through two weeks of, um, “residing within the species” and “experiencing animal nature,” albeit with pillows and electric lighting, amenities and distractions, and a kettle on hand. There is, of course, a live feed for the benefit of aesthetes unable to make it to Paris. 

I urge you to tune in. It’s gripping stuff. 

A tilt-shift film by Filippo Rivetti. 

At last, a tumblr devoted to gay male partners who look remarkably similar. 

“Because what’s sexier than dating yourself?” 

The Wall Street Journal reveals the unspeakable suffering of leftwing students at an Ivy League college:  

The demonstrators had a 72-point manifesto instructing the college to establish pre-set racial admission quotas and a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum for all students. Their other inspirations are for more “womyn or people of colour” faculty; covering sex change operations on the college health plan (“we demand body and gender self-determination”); censoring the library catalogue for offensive terms; and installing “gender-neutral bathrooms” in every campus facility, specifically including sports locker rooms. 

We rarely sympathise with college administrators but we’ll make an exception for Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon, an accomplished mathematician who for some reason took the job last year. The occupiers filmed their confrontation and uploaded the hostage video to the web, where Mr Hanlon can be seen agog as his charges berate him for his “micro-aggressions.” Those are bias infractions that can’t be identified without the right political training.

Mr. Hanlon left after an hour and told the little tyrants that he welcomed a “conversation” about their ultimatums. They responded in a statement that conversations – to be clear, talking – will lead to “further physical and emotional violence enacted against us by the racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic, xenophobic, and ableist structures at Dartmouth.” They added: “Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack.”

The mighty student ‘occupiers’ were also rendered tearful and distressed on discovering that their behaviour had been described as “threatening.” You see, the students’ threats of further “physical action” should be heeded and obeyed but not recognised as threats. That too would be a “micro-aggression.” Dartmouth’s annual tuition of $65,133 has evidently failed to deter fits of delinquent psychodrama by checkers of privilege whose own colossal sense of entitlement somehow escapes detection.

As noted previously, this kind of obnoxious and narcissistic behaviour is regarded as a credential by many students on the left, as somehow self-validating, something to be proud of. It’s what elevates them within their own immediate peer group. They’re achieving their in-group status, their imagined radical chic, by imposing on others – people about whom they simply don’t care or for whom they show outright contempt. It’s more than a little symbolic that the disruption and clearing up are always at someone else’s expense. Despite the guff about “social justice,” their behaviour is fundamentally parasitic.

And hey, think of how well they’re using that $65,133 a year. Think of the message they’re sending to potential employers. Who wouldn’t want to hire someone who wants to abolish capitalism, who hallucinates “white supremacy,” who dismisses dialogue as “racialized and white” and “gendered and masculine” and therefore invalid, and who threatens “physical action” if their absurd demands aren’t met?

Meanwhile, in other high-altitude cow transportation news:  

A plane was forced to make an emergency landing because the almost 400 cows it was transporting were giving off too much heat. The Boeing 747 was forced to touch down at Heathrow Airport in London. The plane was flying over the Irish Sea when a fire alarm sounded from where the 390 cows were being kept, reports the Sunday People. After the plane landed, technicians inspected the plane, but found no evidence of any smoke. Instead, they concluded that the alarm was set off by the cows.

If they learn how to make fire, we’re buggered. Mercifully, there are no reports of a catastrophic methane build-up.