Heather Mac Donald on the myths of Black Lives Matter: 

Police officers —of all races— are disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police. Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that black people make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighbourhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by black people. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.

College Fix reports on the importance of getting in that leftist indoctrination while minds are soft and yielding: 

Stef Bernal-Martinez, a self-described “radical queer progressive educator” at Central Park School for Children in Durham, North Carolina, took her entire first grade class to a local Black Lives Matter rally this past Thursday. Yes, during the school day… “The project that my class took on in this quarter was a study of the Black Lives Matter movement,” she says. “And so, we’ve been investigating and asking questions about the issues and the causes that people are fighting for, and my kids… were very excited to, sort of, join the movement themselves.” 

Parents of the children in her class were informed,

The students will be wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts during the march on Thursday. 

No, don’t raise that eyebrow. When it comes to impressionable six-year-olds, progressive role models are important. Ms Bernal-Martinez is of course enthused by “social justice work” and tells us that she endures a life of oppression in a “White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” When not busy indoctrinating the small children left in her care, she spends her time “envisioning a world without physical or intangible borders.” 

Hi there. // Nose job. // Places in Norway named after Hell. // Leech swallows worm. // This. // That. // How to send email, 1984. // Maglev spherical tyres. // Very small drawings. // Diving suits and submarines. // Romanian salt mine tourist attraction. // Teeny tiny micro-robots drag big car. // A brief history of rhythm-making machines. // A brief history of synthesized speech. // A brief history of Star Trek prop recycling. // Hard-to-kill plant. // Portuguese spillway. // And a pink one for the lady. // Big hair metal band publicity shots. // “My name’s David Rees and I have an artisanal pencil sharpening business.” (h/t, Coudal) // Potential snag with quantum teleportation. // And finally, what you probably didn’t know about Teflon-coated super-suction aeroplane toilets.

Via Tim Blair, who has an eye for these things, some momentous news from the land down under: 

A Yarra councillor wants to see more ‘green and red lady’ pedestrian signals installed across the inner city to promote gender equality.

Well, obviously. It’s what your taxes are for.

Yarra Council announced yesterday the silhouette of a woman would be installed at a new pedestrian crossing in Richmond. Greens Councillor Misha Coleman said the initiative was a “unique and rare” way to display gender equity and she would like to see Yarra known for its ‘green lady’ signals. “I’m a mother of two young children and we always talk about waiting for the ‘green man’,” Councillor Coleman said. “From when kids are young enough to walk they are given an instruction by a man and it has never occurred to any of us that that is inherently so biased.”

The suitably empowering and bias-free signal can be beheld here. Apparently, it depicts Mary Rogers, the second woman in Australia elected to local government, circa 1920. And clearly it’s a vast improvement over the heinously oppressive stick figure previously in use, and which no doubt crushed the spirits of small girls across Australia and steered them towards lives of grinding gender conformity.

After attending several International Women’s Day functions, Councillor Coleman said women were “blown away” by the ‘green lady’ initiative. “I think the main reason was because ‘why didn’t we think of that before and why have we accepted [that] the man tells us whether to walk or not’,” she said.

Those of you picturing aggrieved feminists expressing their defiance of the luminously oppressive male silhouette by randomly blundering into the road – and into oncoming traffic – are very bad people.

Stephen Beard on women in STEM, absent males and the Great Diversity Hustle: 

Most large organisations — certainly universities — now have Diversity Officers, Diversity Consultants and Women’s Officers. Many of these Officers and Consultants and the like have academic backgrounds in gender or women’s studies… Perhaps this is why diversity bosses have chosen to focus on the four areas in STEM [out of eight] where men still make up the majority, rather than education, where men make up less than 25% of undergraduate and post-graduate students. This is a much more alarming statistic, given that only one-in-four British primary schools have a single male teacher, and there are over a million children in the UK growing up without a father. With the possible detrimental effects of not having positive male role-models, this is a much more pressing issue than the concerns of middle-class academic women seeking special privileges in their career.

The STEM fields in which women outnumber men are, oddly enough, not deemed biased or bothersome. 

Kyle Brooks on competitive outrage on campus: 

The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been enmeshed in controversy over the last few weeks in the wake of its chancellor mistaking a photo of two white students donning beauty facial masks as blackface and falsely accusing the students of being “racist.” […] Since the incident – which one student activist labelled “Bloody Sunday” – the campus has hosted diversity forums at which students have accused the campus of being steeped in racism and suggested administrators are not doing enough about it. One Black Student Union member even told peers she missed several days of school because she was too distraught by the blackface picture to attend class.

Related, their failure to know stuff is entirely due to your racism: 

Protesters interrupted the University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents meeting for a third time last week, demanding the end of “blatantly oppressive” standardised testing.

You see, the student protestors are ethereal beings of exquisite sensitivity, such that they are emotionally crushed by any hint of mockery – say, when laughed at for gathering in a “healing circle” – and are rendered tearful and distraught by any testing of their abilities. Such as they might be.* 

And Andrew Follett on the “feminist glaciology” hokum recently doing the rounds: 

The University of Oregon historian who wrote a study claiming glaciers are sexist said in an interview on Friday that the general public isn’t educated enough about feminism to understand his research. In the interview, Dr Mark Carey claims that when his studies are “described to non-specialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented.” […] The research was financially supported by taxpayer dollars. The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave Carey a five-year grant to write his “feminist glaciology” paper. He has received a total of $709,125 in grants from the NSF, according to his curriculum vitae. Carey did not address the huge sum of money he received in the interview.

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

New Order’s Blue Monday, performed in an old-school style. // Space race remnants. // Orbits is a game. // For those who had fun with Ultraflow, there’s now Ultraflow 2. But beware the hardcore mode. // A brief history of the umlaut. // Bike bell of note. // These bees make cannabis honey. // It happens, apparently. // Ocus is a puzzle. // It’s scenic, yes, but not everyone’s cup of tea. // A collection of coffee lids. (h/t, Things) // Acrylic and ink. // A series of bad decisions. // Rock salt firearms. // Music made with stones. // An archive of Oz magazine. // It’s a job with a high staff turnover. // “The victim pulled the knife out of his own neck, and stabbed his attacker.” // Thanks, Mythbusters. // It’s Marvel time. // And finally, ambitiously, all this little boy needs is a bit of a morale boost.