This plane is about to crash. // What to do with a naked male model and 28 cans of shaving cream? // Adorable toy butcher’s shop, circa 1900. // The Xiying rainbow bridge, Taiwan. // Yo-yos in microgravity. // Sea dragon babies. // Fun with strobes and video capture. // Calculating machines of yore. See them calculate. // What government waste? // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists. // Designer axe. // Sound design of The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. For more, see here. // Why Superman Returns is a terrible, terrible film. Will Man of Steel be better? // Chinese bootleg Avengers subtitles leave much to be desired. 

Via Simen, Daniel Greenfield talks us through the Victim Value Index:

Historical suffering transmuted into guilt is the gold standard of liberalism, but suffering is relative. In our wonderful multi-everything society, there are so many groups with so many claims to pain. Everyone agrees that the Heteronormative Caucasian Patriarchy of Doom is to blame for all of it, but that still leaves the question of dividing up the spoils of the system and all the privileges to be gained from denouncing privilege. A caste system doesn’t work without priority, and calculating the priority of privilege claims by the perpetually underprivileged is complicated. Without the Victim Value Index, understanding how these priorities work can be confusing, even for liberals. It’s particularly confusing for conservatives and libertarians who don’t understand the system and dismiss it as liberal insanity. It is insane, the way all cultural taboos are, but there is a method to the madness.

A. Barton Hinkle on Obama, pencils and who deserves what: 

A complex society is necessary for the creation of business, but it is not sufficient. Countless people made modern computing and the internet possible. But Elon Musk, not anybody else, made PayPal happen. And even if that were not so – even if Musk’s contribution to the creation of PayPal were no greater than the contribution from Phil, the goateed baristo at Starbucks with the Occupy Everything sticker on his car – Obama’s approach leaves a crucial question unanswered: Why should Phil, rather than Elon, enjoy the proceeds from PayPal’s success? Suppose you sell me a pencil. You didn’t make that. Still, I freely gave my dollar to you. How much right do you have to that dollar? That’s hard to say, but this is not: You have far more right to keep it than any third party has to take it away.

And Glenn Reynolds on two ways to pitch a campaign and Obama’s track record:   

The Obama administration sold its near trillion dollar “stimulus” plan by claiming that without it, unemployment would reach 9% while with it, unemployment would stay below 8%. Despite the bill, unemployment hit 10% and has, in fact, remained more than 8% for the past 42 months. The “stimulus” money, meanwhile, seems to have vanished into a welter of crony-capitalism deals of which the Solyndra debacle is only the most famous. And all that “hope and change” from the administration has turned to “attack and blame” as Obama and his surrogates launch one assault after another in an effort to turn the conversation to anything besides the economy. So much for the promised Bright New Day. With trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and the exploding national debt (which Obama called unconscionable when it was about half as big as it has become under his stewardship), it seems time for a Back To Basics approach. And that’s clearly the direction favoured by Romney, the turnaround artist who specialised in taking mismanaged entities and making them work. His choice of Ryan simply takes it to a new level. As Internet humourist IowaHawk tweeted on Saturday: “Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: Math.”

Yes, it’s often fun to watch bluster collide with maths. 

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

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Crotch Funk as Art.

Belgian performance artists nail some culture into us.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by Jan Fabre, in which five narcissists 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.

Just Thwarted Sperm. 

When being callous and vindictive is a badge of feminist virtue.

Male readers should note that – according to Amanda, her admirers and the ladies at Feministing – you have, and can have, no legitimate feelings on the subject of abortion, even if the images above were of something – or someone – you helped create. Except, that is, for the nasty, misogynist, controlling feelings that Amanda and her peers will assign to you, based solely on your gender. 

Techno, Annotated. 

Goa/psytrance is being repressed!

Dr St John’s more recent and even more ambitious project is Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. For the heathens among you who don’t already subscribe, and for whom the terms noisecore and bloghouse are just strange and scary words, the Dancecult journal is “a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) worldwide.” Its concerns are of course numerous and deep. Current gems include Media Studies lecturer Dr Hillegonda Rietveld’s Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory, an article rendered lofty by obligatory references to Deleuze, Guattari and de Sade, and which “addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution,” one that is “keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix.” Some of you will, I’m sure, feel a strong urge to contribute, thereby helping to expand the boundaries of human knowledge on matters of great and pressing import.

Now pour yourself a stiff one and explore the greatest hits.

Then we get the hubris: 

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.” This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.” […] Generally speaking, the more liberal the respondent, the more willingness to discriminate and, paradoxically, the higher the assumption that conservatives do not face a hostile climate in the academy.

The incongruity of the term liberal needs no further comment. They’re doing it for the children, obviously.

And speaking of hubris, KC Johnson finds another leftwing academic taking liberties: 

In the winter 2012 semester, [Professor Shorter] taught a course called “Tribal Worldviews”; the course homepage contained a link called “Boycotting Israel.” The course resources page, meanwhile, featured links to the Goldstone Report, to a site on “US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,” and (with two different links) to an “Open Letter to Bono Re: Palestinian Rights.” While the Goldstone Report, as vile as it was, at least is an official document, it’s hard to see the course-related relevance of links to an open letter to Bono. And the links to boycott-Israel sites would seem to constitute a clear violation of California regents’ policies that prohibit professors from misusing their courses to engage in “political advocacy.” […] To reiterate: these links appeared on a course webpage for “Tribal Worldviews,” taught by a professor whose academic specialty is a Native American tribe from Arizona.

However, when two dozen current and retired University of California professors enquired as to the propriety of Professor Shorter’s classroom Israel-bashing, they discovered that political activism on the public dime is, for some, perfectly okay. Provided of course it’s activism of a certain political stripe: 

In magisterial terms, the [UCLA Committee on Academic Freedom] proclaimed that “faculty members should be free of such scrutiny and should not have to answer to interest groups outside the university.” UCLA is a public university, supported in part by tax dollars paid by people “outside the university.”

What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yes. Fiefdom. As noted previously, more than once, some academics and administrators don’t seem inclined to follow their own stated rules of classroom probity.

In case you’re interested, Professor Shorter received a PhD in the “history of consciousness,” is the author of We Will Dance Our Truth, and is employed by the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. His faculty page tells us, 

My undergraduate teaching fields include Native American film and video, myths, rituals, symbols, tribal worldviews, ethnographic fieldwork and perhaps my favourite, Aliens, Psychics, and Ghosts.

Why wildebeest don’t rule the Earth. // I hear you still don’t have your very own battle robot. // Bond is coming. // Lullaby versions of alternative pop. // Little people, giant food. // “What factors could increase the survival rate of red-shirted crewmen?” // For people who just have to look at porn in a public library. (h/t, Kate) // Amuse the kids with preserves. // Brown bear cam (with occasional salmon). // What would it cost to be Batman? // “The body in charge of America’s temperature record has systematically exaggerated global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.” // Bill Whittle on Jon Stewart and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. // 

Daniel Hannan on patriotic feeling:  

The first few days of the Olympics have been accompanied by a clutch of articles about how British patriotism has been rehabilitated, the Union flag reclaimed and so forth. Really? Reclaimed from whom? Other than in the imagination of a tiny metropolitan elite, when was it ever ceded? […] Watching the women’s race at Hampton Court, we were caught in torrential rain. Among the spectators were dozens of orange-shirted Dutchmen, accompanied by a brass band, which played on impressively through the downpour. When the water eventually slackened, the Hollanders struck up Rule Britannia, delighting the natives: true patriots, of course, approve of the national pride of other peoples. The idea that loving your country means scorning someone else’s is downright silly.

Perhaps someone should tell Billy Bragg, who informed Guardian readers that “our imperial instincts” prevent us “relating to our neighbours as equals.” “The English,” wrote Bragg, “are in danger of becoming an insular people, jealously guarding the right to make our own laws.” Mr Bragg – who once told listeners of Radio 4 that he had “learned all of his politics from pop music” – went on to claim that English sports fans dislike their national teams losing because of a “hangover from an imperial past.” More prosaic explanations were not entertained. 

Greg Lukianoff on campus speech codes and uncritical thinking:

I’m trying to make the point that, after 11 years of looking at college censorship, this is starting to have a negative effect on the way our country talks with itself. I think it harms our ability and inclination to debate if the one institution that’s supposed to be making us deeper, more honest, harder thinkers is actually saying “And if you disagree, kind of shut up.” 

When it comes to discipline, apparently schools need racial quotas. I kid you not: 

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional levels of school penalties, regardless of the behaviour by members of each group… “What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for.” 

See also Heather Mac Donald, who shares some striking statistics:

The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialisation that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.

And Nick Gillespie on Dallas and the downfall of Romanian communism: 

Dallas was the last Western show allowed during the nightmarish 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu thought it showcased all that was wrong with capitalism. In fact, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap communist-produced cars… After the dictator and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve 1989, the pilot episode of Dallas – with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in – was one of the first foreign shows broadcast on liberated Romanian TV.

The Guild of Evil recently started watching some reruns of Dallas, ironically at first. Now the mix of schemes, shoulder pads and ginormous hair is a regular treat. And I’ll thank you not to judge me. 

As always, feel free to add your own. 

The Observer’s Elizabeth Day asks a question of thunderous, nay, cosmic, importance:

Should artists have to work or should they be supported by the state?

Apparently public funding via the Arts Council, which currently spends around four hundred million pounds a year, simply isn’t enough.

Individuals applying for grants to the Arts Council already have only around a 32% success rate nationwide.

Cease that weeping immediately.

We also learn, shockingly, that being an artist is not the most promising vocational pursuit:

The statistics make for uncomfortable reading. Almost a third of visual and applied artists earn less than £5,000 a year from their creative work, according to a survey conducted last year by Artists’ Interaction and Representation (AIR); 57% of the 1,457 respondents said that less than a quarter of their total income was generated by their art practices and only 16% of them paid into a private pension fund, raising questions about how professional artists will support themselves once they reach retirement age.

With the above in mind, would it be too outrageous to suggest that perhaps we have a surplus of would-be artists? If there are too many artists chasing too little demand, and if very few can hope to make even the most basic living as artists, then why use even more public money to entice more people into such an unpromising line of work? Or rather, non-work.

In other countries, there are different approaches. In Denmark, selected artists are awarded life-long annual stipends.

Indeed. Those deemed sufficiently steeped in artistic wherewithal can receive up to £17,000 a year, every year, for the rest of their lives. Stipends allowed Bettina Camilla Vestergaard to travel to Los Angeles and spend six months sitting in her car at taxpayers’ expense while “exploring collective identity” in ways never quite made clear. Oh, and doing a spot of shopping. For art, of course.

After sufficient time had been spent idling and, as she puts it, “slowly but surely reducing my mental activity to a purposeless series of meaningless events,” Ms Vestergaard struck upon a deep and fearsome idea. Specifically, to let strangers deface her car with inane marker pen graffiti. This radical feat allegedly “explored” how “identity and gender is constituted in public space.” Though, again, the details are somewhat sketchy.

The freewheeling disposal of other people’s earnings also allowed Ms Vestergaard to film herself and her friends looking bored, tearing up grass and pondering the evils of capitalism. And, in an all too brief moment of awareness, wondering if what they do is actually any good and worth anyone’s attention. The resulting videos, all bankrolled by the Danish taxpayer and showing highlights of four days’ artistic inactivity, have been available online for over a year and have to date attracted zero comments and no discernible traffic except via this blog.

There is, however, this from the Observer comments:

It’s like complaining because you didn’t get paid for a job nobody asked you to do.

Guardian reader SanityRestored:

I’m prepared to judge you. Sorry if you don’t like it. But for the damage you are inflicting firstly on your own kids, and secondly on society in general, don’t I have the right to judge you?

Guardian reader NorthernLass81:

A decision that cannot really be justified.

Guardian reader ivanpope:

Every single comment you make is a Tory comment… I’m not sure that you really fit in at the Guardian… It’s commonplace for those of a leftist bent to move to the right as they get older (i.e. as they acquire income, assets and status). You are just following the norm, but I can still dislike you for that.

Guardian reader smallactsofdefiance:

Parents will perform the most extraordinary mental contortions in order to justify why their child is so special they must ditch their principles.

Guardian reader sammace:

An utterly immoral act.

Guardian reader Jonathan Staples:

What’s the article next week? Are you going to justify joining BUPA?

Heavens. And the Great Moral Horror that has these righteous souls so indignant and a-twitch? The Guardian’s education journalist Janet Murray has – oh my – sent her daughter to a fee-paying school:

I’ve been asked how I can reconcile writing about education for the Guardian with having a child at a private school… Deep down, I don’t think I ever really had a problem with private education. It just didn’t seem socially acceptable to say so.

Of course the sound of a thousand hands being wrung and knuckles being cracked has had some effect:

When I walk Katy to school in her straw boater and blazer, I sometimes sense people – particularly other parents – judging me.

And so,

I plan to send Katy to a state secondary if I can,

Whew. Her soul may yet be saved.

but if I find myself dissatisfied with what is on offer, I will go private again.

Unrepentant! Fetch the stones.

John Travolta, Johnny Depp, Nicole Kidman and Britney Spears are among the celebrities who’ve been Photoshopped to look like mere commoners. 

A vision of tomorrow, and at least one classic sentence, courtesy of the Guardian’s Jackie Ashley: 

Prospect magazine carries a thoughtful, slightly wistful piece by the former Labour MP Chris Mullin in which he calls for the abolition of the private car.

Yes, Mr Mullin would have us inhabit a world denuded of the automobile – a mode of transport he regards as “a disastrous invention” – and with it some rather obvious but unmentioned freedoms. Instead, he thinks we should want to live in a more bipedal and egalitarian world. A world not unlike, 

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, before the coming of market forces.

And naturally, Ms Ashley is very much intrigued: 

That might be going too far for today’s politicians, but the effect of hard times and the oil price on budgets, and the sheer misery of modern car commuting, suggests that a more radical agenda could be popular. That means much bolder support for cycling, with cars banned from many more roads and parks. It’s one of the few radical shifts in lifestyle that is easily deliverable and for which there is no real drawback.

Banning cars from roads is easily delivered and has no drawback, see? At least, not for Ms Ashley, who cares so very much and thinks so very deeply.

As do other cerebral and compassionate Guardianistas:

Cars should be banned – they are unhealthy, dangerous, a lazy and destructive option. The only people who should be allowed them are: (a) people who work far from their home where public transport is not sufficient (they would have to provide evidence upon trying to buy a car); (b) people with 3 children or more (for transporting kids + big weekly shops); (c) disabled people who would find it difficult to use public transport. All would have to provide proof when buying their car. Everybody else will have to use trains, buses, trams, their feet, bikes.

And, 

It is also vastly selfish to drive around with empty seats.

Though not, perhaps, as selfish as wishing to impose on others a “radical shift in lifestyle” and limited mobility. Unless shrinking a person’s world and robbing them of autonomy is now considered a virtue. Curiously, the Guardian comments are largely fixated with the respective hazards posed by cyclists and motorists, and which party smells more. Ms Ashley and Mr Mullin’s wild fits of authoritarianism, and those of their admirers, don’t cause much fuss.