Careful, children. It smells like human. // Tweet of note. (h/t, Damian) // Nosulus Rift. // HDR rocket test. // He wants all the oranges. // Puny Godzilla. // Keep very still. Their vision is based on movement. // A Firing Line compilation. // Kings Road punks, 1978. // Kings Road punks and New Romantics, 1981. // Classical mash-up. // At last, a rotating house. // Jihad interrupted. // The effects of Aliens. // Arrival. // His charcoal drawings are better than yours. // Hardcore victimology: “The idea of health is ableist.” (h/t, Julia) // Face for the paranoid. // And finally, uncannily, a stroboscopic picture frame of note.

Heather Mac Donald on race hustlers and riots: 

For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence. Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it… Obama’s indictment ignored, as usual, the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, Obama hasn’t uttered a word in condemnation of the lawless behaviour in Milwaukee, two days into the events. […]

And as important as the political stoking of that hatred is the academic race industry that keeps black victimology at a fever pitch. The 2015–2016 school year saw an outbreak of delusional self-pity among black college students across the country. They claimed to be discriminated against by faculty, administrators, fellow students, and academic standards. Never mind that many allegedly disparaged students were attending the colleges in question only because of racial preferences, despite having test scores that would automatically disqualify white or Asian applicants. Never mind that nearly every waking hour of a college administrator is devoted to the cultivation of a separatist racial consciousness among black students and to dreaming up new racial sinecures for faculty and other administrators.

For an example of that victimology, and the behaviour being excused by faculty and staff, see this surreal episode. Note the impunity and inversion of reality. And note the description, by the university’s vice provost for student affairs, of blatant racial thuggery as “a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

Ah, you didn’t see that coming. As I’ll be away for a long weekend, I’m afraid you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with a puzzle book of note, a brief history of EMI, a game about planets and potatoes, and, obviously, a 3D-printed clitoris.

Phone signal permitting, I may check in later. Play nicely. No biting.

A group of students at the Claremont Colleges in search of a roommate insist that the roommate not be white.

But of course. I mean, it is the twenty-first century.

Student Karé Ureña posted on Facebook that non-white students in need of housing arrangements should reach out to either her or two other students with whom she plans to live in an off-campus house. The post states that “POC [people of colour] only” will be considered for this living opportunity. “I don’t want to live with any white folks,” Ureña added.

[Student] Dalia Zada expressed concerns about the anti-white discrimination. “‘POC only?’ Maybe I’m missing something or misunderstanding your post, but how is that not a racist thing to say?” “This is directed to protect POC, not white people. Don’t see how this is racist at all…” responded AJ León, a member of the Pitzer Latino Student Union.

“People of colour are allowed to create safe POC only spaces. It is not reverse racism or discriminatory, it is self-preservation,” Sara Roschdi, another Pitzer Latino Student Union member, stated. “Reverse racism isn’t a thing.” “We don’t want to have to tiptoe around fragile white feelings in a space where we just want to relax and be comfortable,” commented Nina Lee, a Women’s Studies major. “I could live with white people, but I would be far more comfortable living with other POC.”

“White people always mad when they don’t feel included but at the end of the day y’all are damaging asf [sic] and if a POC feels they need to protect themselves from that toxic environment THEY CAN! Quick to try to jump on a POC but you won’t call your friends out when they’re being racist asf [sic],” noted Terriyonna Smith, an Africana Studies major and Resident Assistant for the 2016-2017 year. “I’m not responding to NO comments and NOPE I don’t wanna have a dialogue.”

Parents and alumni, please take note. This is what identity politics does to a child.

Victor Davis Hanson on borders and the lack thereof: 

Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age — and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The descriptive term “illegal alien” has given way to the nebulous “unlawful immigrant.” This, in turn, has given way to “undocumented immigrant,” “immigrant,” or the entirely neutral “migrant” — a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving. […]

What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalisation designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatise and oppress the “other”… “Where borders are drawn, power is exercised,” as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised — as if a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western notions of victimisation and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished migrants.

Inevitably, the issue of naked, often comical hypocrisy becomes hard to avoid:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers another case study. The multibillionaire advocates for a fluid southern border and lax immigration enforcement, but he has also stealthily spent $30 million to buy up four homes surrounding his Palo Alto estate. They form a sort of no-man’s-land defence outside his own Maginot Line fence, presumably designed against hoi polloi who might not share Zuckerberg’s taste or sense of privacy. Zuckerberg’s other estate in San Francisco is prompting neighbours’ complaints because his security team takes up all the best parking spaces. Walls and border security seem dear to the heart of the open-borders multibillionaire — when it’s his wall, his border security.

See also, Simon Schama Syndrome.