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.

Further to yesterday’s post (and any number of others), Arthur C Brooks on the consequences of competitive victimhood: 

Victimhood culture makes for worse citizens — people who are less helpful, more entitled, and more selfish. In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups. Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task.

The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled. In a separate experiment, the researchers found that members of the unfairness group were 11 percent more likely to express selfish attitudes. In a comical and telling aside, the researchers noted that the [self-defined] victims were more likely than the non-victims to leave trash behind on the desks and to steal the experimenters’ pens.

Imagine my surprise. Via Ace. 

I was excommunicated… from a religion that I didn’t know existed. 

Gad Saad chats with Christina Hoff Sommers. 

Victor Davis Hanson on the vulgarity, hypocrisy – and appeal – of Donald Trump: 

The children of Republican elites do not sit in classes where a quarter of the students do not speak English… Their children are not on buses where an altercation between squabbling eight-year-olds leads to a tattooed parent arriving at your home to challenge you to a fight over “disrespecting” his family name. The establishment Republicans… are rarely stopped in a Walmart parking lot by a gang-banger in the next parking stall who out of the blue says, “Hey essay, what the fuck are you looking at me for already? And what are you going to do about it, punk?” 

Much like our own Guardianistas, gripped as they are by the Simon Schama Tendency. 

John Daniel Davidson on mass immigration and cultural decline: 

In the long term, Europe can either prefer its own civilisation and culture, and defend it, or capitulate to another. But it cannot absorb masses of unassimilated members of another culture and expect to survive. It will be changed forever, and the change will be in the direction of the immigrants’ way of life, and away from that of the native-born. This is a difficult truth to accept in our egalitarian age.

And Mary Grabar on Melissa Click and her equally arrogant faculty supporters: 

When news of her firing came, supporters doubled down: at the faculty council meeting, no one supported her firing. In fact, faculty expressed concern about how the decision would impact “the ability of academics to participate in activism.” […] What we have is a group of employees assuming the right to use company time in any way they want. Their outrage at outside scrutiny shows a level of privilege that no other profession enjoys. Attorneys, doctors, engineers, or manufacturers, all can be sued, but a professor who cheats students preparing for communications careers by teaching Lady Gaga cannot.

As Grabar notes, many of Click’s supporters, chiefly from the worlds of sociology and gender studies, were featured in David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s 2009 book One-Party Classroom, an eye-widening catalogue of absurdly dogmatic and politicised courses often taught by educators of questionable competence.

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

In which the students of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a winner of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s Foster Prize, stagger beneath the knee-buckling weight of their own immense talents. From Ms Phoebe Warner, an aspiring educator of children, and her exercise in gratuitous, somewhat masochistic thigh abuse, to the cryptically-named Fatty Spice, a Twitter poet and graduate of the Montserrat College of Art, who “makes shrines to her failed relationships” and dazzles us today with a pink ensemble and a gripping exercise in drooling, doomed horticulture and radical fatness. All captured for posterity at the Zeitgeist Gallery and Studios, Beverly, Massachusetts, May 2014: 

Readers will of course recall Ms Schaefer’s own, even more staggering contributions to the culture. A body of work perhaps best summarised by this video of the artist gnawing at a lettuce while slouching in her underpants.