Are being studied by minds superior to ours.

NB: No technical skill, including HTML encoding, is assumed or necessary.

Via Captain Capitalism. 

Slow Loris. One of Andrew Zuckerman’s creatures. There is of course a book. 

Mark Steyn on the decline of the family (and what that costs):

Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics… and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital”… The most reliable constituency for Big Government is single women, for whom the state is a girl’s best friend, the sugar daddy whose cheques never bounce. A society in which a majority of births are out of wedlock cannot be other than a Big Government welfare society. Ruining a nation’s finances is one thing; debauching its human capital is far harder to fix.

See also Heather Mac Donald here, here and here. Or if you’re feeling terribly radical and edgy, you could do as Laurie Penny says and “fuck marriage,” “fuck monogamy” and fuck all of those other “small ugly ambitions.” What could possibly go wrong?

Patrick Hennessy spies some slack in the system:

Ministers will hit back in the row over welfare this week by publishing a raft of figures which they say show that tough measures – or the threat of them – are already “changing behaviour” by seeing people drop their claims. These include the figures on incapacity benefit. As well as the 878,300 who chose to drop their claims [rather than face a medical], another 837,000 who did take the a medical test were found to be fit to work immediately, while a further 367,300 were judged able to some level of work. Only 232,000 (one in eight of those tested) were classified by doctors to be too ill to do any sort of job. Some 30 people claimed they were unfit to work because of blisters, while 60 cited acne and 2,110 said “sprains and strains” rendered them unfit for employment.

Tim Worstall has more.

Thomas Sowell ponders guns and what’s rarely said about them:

If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull. Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defence within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year. Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

And Chris Snowdon is momentarily optimistic about the culling of quangos:

One of the coalition’s stated priorities after the general election was to have a “bonfire of the quangos” which would save the taxpayer £2.6 billion and rid us of numerous pointless bureaucrats. Three cheers for that, of course, and some progress seems to have been made, with more than 100 of these parasitic organisations biting the dust. It is, however, notoriously difficult to slim down the size of the state thanks to the vested interests who depend upon it. Governments are also incredibly inefficient even when it comes to closing things down. Almost unbelievably, the cost of the bonfire will be £830 million — nearly twice the original estimate — and the government could not resist setting up some new quangos in the process.

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

Beach Boys minus auto-tune. // Musical mice. // “Clown on Stratford Broadway.” // The long, slow death of whom. // Further to this, the snack time hazards of a British secondary school. (h/t, Deborah Hare) // Signs of the End Times. // Socialist diet book. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // Orderly waiting. // Ode to the mainframe. // Recovered from the deep: rocket engines. // Toe ploughs. // Circuits. // Live bomb found in squid. // A Danish aquarium. // On Kilimanjaro. // This is not Photoshop. This is dangerous. // The film before the film. // Identical twins play Doctor Who theme on electric harps. // Test your combat skills with super duck punch. 

Franklin Einspruch climbs Mount Vanity and argues with art dealer Ed Winkleman, who tells us:

“Is that art?” is not a valid question for the observer, despite how well educated, to apply to a declared artwork. “Art” is whatever an artist says it is. The role of the observer is limited to deciding whether that declared artwork is any good or not. It’s not at all up to them to declare whether the work is “art” or not. The artist said it was. Full stop.

Yes, you – the lowly punter – have a “limited role,” even if you’re “educated.” And even if you’re a taxpayer being stiffed with the bill. Thank goodness our artistic Brahmins are so much better than us.

Mark Bauerlein on the left’s hold on academia (and why writing about it may make things worse):

In interviews of professors conducted by [sociologist, Neil] Gross and his colleagues, the most common explanation for the dearth of conservatives on the faculty was that conservatives lack the “open-mindedness” necessary for academic work (41 percent of interviewees stated this), while the second most popular reason was that conservatives care too much about making money to become academics (30 percent noted this). Prejudice or greed, take your pick – but don’t overlook the self-congratulation in each judgment (“we are here because we’re broad-minded and we care more about people than about dollars”).

If
that sounds vaguely familiar you may be thinking of this peacocking professor. He’s
one of many. And
it’s worth bearing in mind the objectionable nature of quite a few
teacher-training programmes.

Daniel Greenfield on wealth: 

As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposes of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars. In a single year, he disposes of three times his own net worth. A sum that would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America. That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.

Christopher Taylor ponders the workplace, pregnancy and feminist outrage: 

What’s amazing to me is that anyone, anywhere, would be so shocked and outraged with such an obvious business principle that they would not simply disagree or debate this topic, but would instantly and totally reverse their perspective on me and go from amiable esteem to contemptuous hatred. It is shocking to me that someone’s worldview could be so totally damaged and their comprehension of economics and business so twisted by a leftist concept of life that they would react so violently and irrationally to such a plain fact of life.

Oh, and here’s some laughter at the expense of poor not-so-poor Matt Yglesias, the leftwing booster of Occupy, leftwing denouncer of property rights, and now leftwing owner of a $1.2 million townhouse. 

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

Via Ka-Ching!

This is not food. // At last, a 3D cooking simulator. // Alluring elements. // Bombsites of the London Blitz. // Electronic dice barbarian gauntlet. You heard me. // Accelerated shipbuilding. // Aircraft underbellies. // Big teeth. // Spider-Man beard. // Passers-by, New York. // The economics of spam. (h/t, rjmadden) // Paper chandeliers. // “An all-weather, self-illuminated, human powered vehicle.” // The music for movie trailers. // Star Trek Into Darkness. // The slide you’ve always wanted. // “Explosions are most definitely a bad thing.” (h/t, Kate & EBD) // Reading chair. // A revolution in toast. // Via TDK, the truth about the Death Star.

Via reddit’s SRSsucks forum, comes this stern correction regarding countercultural coiffure:

This is the post about white people with dreadlocks. This is the post about white people who just don’t get the possibility that they could be doing something colonialist.

The author of the piece, a self-described “white, queer, rural-identified, able-bodied+mentally ill Episcopal priest lady,” is unhappy with the sight of,

white dude colonisers with dreads.

Why?

Because we’re seeing white boys… maintaining and justifying racist hair.

Yes, racist hair.

And being white herself, our Racially Enlightened Hair Corrector has much to say on the subject of the melanin deficient:

White people have this terrible, awful, no-good habit of trying to take everyone else’s “authenticity” because they feel so like lost and indie and culturally dislocated and their poor little selves are so tired, because they have all this power and it’s so exhausting.

Which I’m sure describes every single pale person you happen to know, yes? Thankfully, the author is determined to make the world a kinder, fairer, fluffier place, a feat that’s to be achieved by everyone else doing exactly as she says. And so, should you encounter a pale person with politically incorrect hair, the author’s suggested response – the “only appropriate thing” – is to deliver a long, un-paragraphed diatribe with fits of random shouting:

In other campus news:

A lesbian bondage expert and a campus-wide condom scavenger hunt are among the activities planned for The University of Tennessee’s first-ever “Sex Week.” The six-day event is expected to cost nearly $20,000 – covered in part by university grants, student fees and contributions from academic departments… There are 30 events planned including “Getting Laid,” “Sex Positivity; Queer as a Verb,” “Bow Chicka Bow Woah,” “How to Talk to Your Parents About Sex,” “Loud and Queer,” and “How Many Licks Does It Take…” – a workshop about oral sex.

In addition to a campus-wide scavenger hunt for a golden condom, the university is hosting noted lesbian bondage expert and erotica author Sinclair Sexsmith. Sexsmith, who serves on the board of the New York Lesbian Sex Mafia, will deliver a lecture titled, “Messing Around with Gender.” She also runs the online website “Sugarbutch Chronicles: The Sex, Gender and Relationship Adventures of a Kinky Queer Butch Top.” In addition to hosting college workshops and lectures about queer theory, she is an expert in sexuality and leather.

Ah, the life of the mind.

Update:

Readers will be thrilled to learn that Sinclair – sorry, Mr Sexsmith – has “always been into self-study,” “holds degrees in both creative writing and gender studies” and “has studied at Bent Queer Writing Institute in Seattle.” She – sorry, he – sorry, they – is also available for “spoken word performances on the subjects of queer sex, gender, and relationships,” “classes in healing,” “sexuality, leather, and BDSM educational classes and demonstrations,” “hands-on bodywork,” “sacred intimatacy” [sic], “stone sexualities” and, obviously, “tantra-based experiments.” Presumably, the faculty organisers of Sex Week had to look over Mr Sexsmith’s website to check her – sorry, his – sorry, their – credentials. Which makes me wonder at what point they decided that such fetishistic intrigues would bolster their claims for the event’s “academic soundness.”

I fear we’re in the realm of Dr Gillian’s vortex.