davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

Amuse small children with this giant inflatable spider puppet. // Lionel Richie’s Hello remixed by Matthijs Vlot. // Couples, vacuum-packed for freshness. // Shaolin kung fu monks. // Can you match the colours? // How to spoil your cat. // Small girl and lion. // A very loud snoring dormouse. // Painting in haste. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // 48 years of Doctor Who and it’s not getting any better. // If Beavis and Butt-Head were real. // Bill Whittle on presidential iconography. // Every home needs a pile of huge woollen pebbles. // And then there’s the giant camera of which the legends foretold. // “That’s the mistake that Karl Marx made.” 

Because Artists Are So Dangerous

Speaking of Bettina Camilla Vestergaard, whose radical freeloading thrilled us so, here’s a more recent project of her devising, from August 2010. Decenter II was a “park intervention,” the purpose of which was to  “reinterpret Decenter, an artist colony set up by Danish author Elsa Gress and painter Clifford Wright at Marienborg Manor in the 1970s” and which offered “an uninhibited space for creative thought and action.”

Here we see Elsa Gress (seated) and Clifford Wright (cloaked) with some of their protégés:

And here’s a lively artistic happening:  

Reheated (23)

Yes, I know. Posting has been sparse and I’ve been neglecting you terribly. But trust me, it’s all in a good cause and normal service should resume shortly. Meanwhile, here are few items from the archives. There is, as you’ll see, a common theme.

But it’s Clean if it’s Taken by Force.

The modesty of the art world’s subsidy-seeking caste.

Clearly, recidivist anti-capitalists showing us how to live deserve better than this. They deserve more public subsidy. It’s vital work. Art institutions must not take donations from companies of which some artists may disapprove. That would be wicked and insidious. Instead, those institutions should encourage the state to take money from the taxpayer, forcibly, and give it to artists and projects of which the taxpayer may disapprove. That would be virtuous and clean, apparently.

Is That Your Hand in My Pocket?

Playwright Jonathan Holmes thinks he’s heroic and so you owe him money.

Note how the prospect of reducing coercive public subsidy is framed rather grandly as “censorship” of artists - and by implication an attack on democracy itself. No other genuine motive could possibly exist. Those who would rather keep a little more of their own earnings and choose for themselves which art forms they indulge are clearly monsters. We’ve heard this pompous guff before of course, as when Hanif Kureishi and the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington conjured a world in which artistic “dissent” was being “suppressed” by suggestions that artists might actually consider earning a living. […] Mr Holmes would have us believe that he’s “speaking truth to power.” But one has to wonder who has more power in the current funding formulation. The taxpayer, who is forced to bankroll projects regardless of personal interest or objection, or those who take the taxpayer’s money and expect to go on doing so?

Here, Let Me Lick Those Tears.

Oh, don’t be so mean. Artists have special needs. 

Readers will no doubt recall the Danish artist Bettina Camilla Vestergaard, whose benefactors include the Danish Arts Council, the Arts Grants Committee Sweden, the Danish Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Council of Aarhus. Ms Vestergaard used her government stipend to spend six months in Los Angeles pondering “identity and gender” and working on an “intervention in public space”: “My first three months primarily consisted of passing time in residential Hollywood, sitting alone in my car, shopping and getting fuel.”

And do poke through the bushes of the greatest hits.

Elsewhere (55)

Chris Snowdon, author of The Spirit Level Delusion, spends an evening with the New Economics Foundation:

The NEF recently revived its idea of restricting working hours to 21 hours per week as a means of creating full employment and achieving the work-life balance that is so cherished by wealthy, middle-aged academics. This idea - which can be most charitably described as ‘eye-catching’ - revolves around ‘redistributing time’ to deal with ‘time poverty.’ The twist is that, unlike with income redistribution, it is the indolent poor who will be the ones handing over their spare time to the over-worked rich in this zero-sum, leisure-heavy Shangri-La. […]

A bit of banker-bashing yielded the one and only round of applause of the night after an elderly gentleman asked how a reduced economy is supposed to pay for geriatric services. [Professor Robert] Skidelsky side-stepped the question by diverting the discussion towards the evergreen issue of bankers’ bonuses... Never mind. It was all good sport and it took our minds off the fact that several hundred reasonably intelligent people were sitting in a room discussing the prospect of making people happier by halving their incomes.

Tim Worstall on the same:

They also recommend that we do more of our own housework, make and mend more, darn socks and so on. Essentially, live as the poor of our grandparents’ time did… The NEF are quite deliberately insisting that we turn our backs on the division and specialisation of labour and go back to doing everything, ourselves, in our own households. This isn’t just perverse or stupid, it’s ignorant.

I particularly like Chris’ observation that some contributors were happy to ignore the data presented on their own charts, busying themselves instead with a collective denunciation of advertising, which apparently should either be taxed or, if possible, banned altogether. (No doubt George Monbiot would approve, given his stated belief that “advertising is a pox on the planet… driving us towards destruction.”) Newcomers should note that the NEF thrilled us with their socialist brainstorming not too long ago. Oh, how they brainstormed. Oh, how we laughed.

Via Ross, House of Dumb mulls the morality of Ken Loach:

Nothing sums up the demented nature of the modern left better than a soi-disant socialist party that supports taxing janitors in Leeds to give money to millionaire luvvies in London, so they can make films about how folk in Yorkshire are ignorant bigots.

For more, see this, this and this.

And Tim also tackles the great question of our time:

Why isn’t there a Grindr for lesbians?

By all means add your own.

Friday Ephemera

The animated Kubrick. // Bookshop reorganised. // The museum of bags. // GPS with “avoid ghetto” function. // Grandma’s robot companion. // Made of straws. // Unorthodox kiting. // Cave of note. // To tenderise meat. // Mere rope cannot hold Mr Houdini. // They’re gaining on us. // Following photons at a trillion frames-per-second. // Pingu versus The Thing. // “The mole’s most distinctive feature is a circle of 22 mobile, pink, fleshy tentacles at the end of the snout.” // Every home should have a glow-in-the-dark crowbar. // What happens to your luggage. // Try a glass of this. // Then watch a live South Pole webcam. Gripping stuff.

Elsewhere (54)

Tim Worstall on poverty redefined: 

One benefit, recall, just one benefit that this family receives, is to be cut from a little under median full time wages to a little under median full time wages after tax. From £23,000 a year to £18,000 a year. This one benefit is to be cut - and recall that this benefit is received free of all taxation - to median pre-tax individual income. They’re getting more in one benefit alone than the average person going out to work in the country sees in their paycheque. After this cut. There are all sorts of ways one could describe this situation but poverty ain’t one of them. That housing benefit alone, after the cut - yes, even with family size of four - puts them in the top 17% of the world’s income distribution.

See also Guido, who asks, “Where is the social justice in paying welfare benefits to people that are higher than the majority of the tax paying working people’s take home pay?” And remember, this modest cap on housing benefit is denounced by Laurie Penny as “a Final Solution [of] the urban poor.”

Armed and Dangerous on varieties of anti-intellectualism: 

Even where the intelligentsia has not attached itself to totalising political ideologies, the effects of its belief in its own superiority have been consistent. Technocratic, credentialist and statist – the intelligentsia perpetually urges us to cede control of our lives to the smart people, the educated ones, the experts, the selected elite – if not the intellectuals, then the bureaucratic machines guided by intellectuals. There’s a nearly extinct political tendency called “clericalism” which held that society should be guided by priests, considered as a disinterested non-hereditary elite with better education and morality than possessed by mere laypeople. The intelligentsia’s political instincts can be best described as a sort of neo-clericalism in which education substitutes for ordination.

Some common shortcomings of our tenured intelligentsia are illustrated in this: Iowa Professor Shocked To Discover He’s In Iowa. Note how the professor’s imagined sophistication is churlish, presumptuous and parochial. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. More than once.

And Bill Whittle presents a voters’ guide to Republicans (and the benevolence of the left):

According to Democrats, we Republicans are greedy because we’re in favour of low taxes and limited government. We think you should surrender as little of your freedom to the government as possible and you should be entitled to keep as much of your money as you possibly can. We think you’re entitled to the rewards of your own work. We also think you know how to spend your own money better than the government, which wants to take as much of it as possible. So, as you can clearly see, we Republicans - who don’t want your money - are greedy, and the people who do want to take all of your money, the Democrats, are benign and generous. Just ask them.

As always, feel free to add your own items of interest in the comments.

Tidings (5)

As the holidays near – and this rickety barge approaches the end of its fifth year afloat - posting will for a while be more intermittent than usual. Subscribing to the blog feed is therefore recommended. As always, thanks for taking the time to comment and for all the donations made towards the upkeep of the barge. Newcomers may wish to rummage through the archives and updated greatest hits, where things like this and this and this are not at all uncommon.

Before heading off to indulge in the traditional festive pastimes, I’ll leave you with some immensely practical wisdom.

Don’t torment the frog:

Friday Ephemera

“The Little Rooster will wake her up with increasing vibration intensities.” // Your kitchen needs robots. // Art with salt. // What exactly happens when you fall into lava? // Scribbled line people. // Do you pogo? // When octopuses mate, it’s quite confusing. // Ugly Renaissance babies. // Baby echidna. // Brains made of food. // Build your own gingerbread geodesic house. // Devastating explosions. // “Sapphire and Steel have been assigned…” (h/t, MeFi) // Seven-inch insect eats carrots. // Terrarium Christmas tree ornaments. // A mountain walkway that’s made of glass. // And (subtle hint) your host has been known to lift a glass of this.

It’s the Calibre of the People That Impresses Me the Most

Denver’s occupodpeople take umbrage with a Wal-Mart distribution centre and wrestle with some difficult philosophical questions. Among which, “What right do you have to do that?” and “What money have they stolen from you?” And of course the big one, “Why are you doing this?” Readers should also note the exchange around 3:40, in which a champion of the people grapples with the suggestion that he and his comrades are basically forcing their will on others. Then things go downhill.

Update, via the comments:

Elsewhere (53)

Antony Jay, co-creator of Yes, Minister, on the leanings of the BBC:

It would be astonishing if the BBC did not have its own orthodoxy. It has been around for 85 years, recruiting bright graduates, mostly with arts degrees, and deeply involved in current affairs issues and news reporting. And of course for all that time it has been supported by public money. One result of this has been an implicit belief in government funding and government regulation. Another is a remarkable lack of interest in industry and a deep hostility to business and commerce. […] This deep hostility to people and organisations who made and sold things was not of course exclusive to the BBC. It permeated a lot of upper middle class English society (and has not vanished yet). But it was wider and deeper in the BBC than anywhere else, and it is still very much a part of the BBC ethos. Very few of the BBC producers and executives have any real experience of the business world, and as so often happens, this ignorance, far from giving rise to doubt, increases their certainty.

See also Jay’s Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. 

Kevin D Williamson is a fan of Thomas Sowell:

One of the great things about Thomas Sowell is that he, like most nerds, appears to be simply immune to certain social conventions. This is a critical thing about him - because the social conventions of modern intellectual life demand that certain things go studiously unnoticed, that certain subjects not be breached, or breached only in narrow ways approved by the proper authorities. Sowell does not seem to me to be so much a man who intentionally violates intellectual social conventions as a man who does not notice them, because he cannot be bothered to notice them, because he is in hot pursuit of data about one of the many subjects that fascinate his remarkable brain.

Sowell’s failure to avert his eyes from unspeakable details is also in evidence here.

And Theodore Dalrymple looks back on the summer’s opportunist looting:

One rioter told a journalist that his compatriots were fed up with being broke all the time and that he knew people who had absolutely nothing. It is worth pondering what lies behind these words. It is obvious that the rioter considered being broke not merely unpleasant, as we all would, but unjust and anomalous, for it was these qualities that justified the rioting in his mind and led him to suggest that the riots were restitution. Leave aside the Micawberish point that one can be broke on any income whatever if one’s desires fail to align with one’s financial possibilities; it is again obvious that the rioter believed that he had a right not to be broke and that this right was being violated.

When he said that he knew people with “nothing,” he did not mean that he knew homeless, starving people left on the street without clothes to wear or shoes on their feet; none of the rioters was like this, and many looked only too fit for law-abiding citizens’ comfort. Nor did he mean people without hot and cold running water, electricity, a television, a cell phone, health care, and access to schooling. People had a right to such things, and yet they could have them all and still have “nothing,” in his meaning of the word. Somehow, people had a right to something beyond this irreducible “nothing” because this “nothing” was a justification for rioting. So people have a right to more than they have a right to; in other words, they have a right to everything.

However, the Guardian’s Nina Power would have us believe that the looters, muggers and arsonists, the majority of whom had numerous previous convictions, were, in ways never quite made clear, fighting against entitlement. Albeit by robbing children of their clothes, assaulting fire-fighters and burning women out of their homes. Yes, it was all about “social justice,” see? And whatever you do, don’t refer to the perpetrators as feral – even those who ganged up on pensioners and beat them to the ground - or you’ll upset Laurie Penny, for whom, “nicking trainers… is a political statement.”

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

Quote of Note

Or, We’re Much Too Fascinating to Register the Comedy:

I’m tempted to talk about the irony of kids taking out student loans to enrol in a class that will “study” why irate college grads who can’t get jobs are camped out in tents complaining about the amount they owe on student loans; but then I think, no, let’s let whole thing play itself out as a piece of cultural performance art and see if anybody involved in the enterprise is self-aware enough to remove him or herself as one of the brush strokes.

Jeff Goldstein, commenting on this thrilling development: 

New York University will offer a class next semester on Occupy Wall Street… The university’s “Department of Social and Cultural Analysis” will offer a class about the “history and politics of debt and take a deeper look at the economic crisis the movement is protesting.” The undergraduate course: “Cultures and Economies: Occupy Wall Street” will be available next semester and taught by Professor Lisa Duggan.

We learn,

Peter Bearman, professor of sociology at Columbia University, also expressed enthusiasm about the new course. “OWS as a topic of study offers prismatic opportunities to consider the changing shape of inequality in our society and the dynamic processes of repertoire change in social movements globally, from the picket line to the sit-in, to the consideration of life course trajectories, among other themes central to the sociological apprehension of the modern context,” he said.

And if you thought the story wasn’t sufficiently stuffed with inadvertent humour…

Ironically, you would need to be in OWS’s hated “1 percent” to pay the tuition bill at NYU, which was ranked 2nd on the 2011-2012 list of America’s most expensive colleges… The College Board lists per credit hour tuition at $1,159 at NYU.

I suppose it was inevitable. A laughable, profoundly dishonest, narcissistic “movement,” cheered on by leftist academics and their credulous protégés - David Graeber and Priya Gopal, take a bow - becomes a subject for “study” by leftist academics and their credulous protégés.

Update:

In the comments, rjmadden wonders whether Professor Duggan will be teaching students about the merits of not wasting money on worthless courses that leave them in debt with little hope of finding a job. He then links to Professor Duggan’s research interests, which include “lesbian and gay studies,” “queer historiographies” and “constructions of whiteness in the United States.” I suspect that sharing such practical advice wouldn’t exactly enhance Professor Duggan’s own career prospects, which depend on students making precisely that mistake.

Update 2:

Reheated (22)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Freeloading and Snobbery.

Leftwing arts establishment claims to be “suppressed,” sneers at the little people, demands free money.

Note the word “suppressed.” Like “dissent,” it’s a tad grandiose. I’m not convinced that the reduction of taxpayer subsidy for loss-making plays qualifies as “suppression.” And reluctant taxpayers please take note: Despite all the years of providing hand-outs, you’re now on the side of the oppressor. That’s gratitude for you.

Where Reason Never Sleeps.

Professor Thomas Thibeault points out error in sexual harassment policy and is fired two days later.

And so “exposing faculty members” to a book about public figures said to deserve the appellation “asshole” – including Bill Clinton and George Bush - can now be construed as “sexual harassment” and grounds for dismissal. Indeed, mere visibility of the book’s title may be taken as evidence of “divisiveness” and intent to oppress.

The Warm Glow of Socialism.

Student protestors somehow, perhaps carefully, miss the larger issue.

Some view “free” higher education as an entitlement warranting violence. But who’s going to pay for this “free” service when its value is increasingly called into question, not least by employers, many of whom point to dramatically lowered standards and ill-prepared graduates? One complaint we hear is that many students will be left with large debt (or theoretical debt) and limited prospects of a suitable job. But if so, doesn’t that call into question the value of what’s being demanded? In the UK there are currently around 20,000 students of fine art, 10,000 philosophy students and 27,000 enthusiasts of media studies. But is there a corresponding economic need? If the investment of time, effort and (other people’s) money doesn’t pay off with a lucrative and fascinating career in the private sector and a return via taxation, then how is the process justified in its present form?

And by all means wade through the greatest hits.

Friday Ephemera

Attention, starfish. Beware the brine icicle. // Owl petting. // Predator and prey. // Inflatable fifteen-foot-long six-legged robot Ant-Roach. // A Lego ball that’s very nearly spherical. // Electromagnetic leak (or what aliens are watching.) // Occupodpeople versus reality. // Desk lamps of note. // If you’re looking for a motorbike… // Bad photographs. // “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that’s as scary as this one.” // Obviously, the Guild of Evil has a full-size one of these. // And an artificial tornado may well prove useful too. // Don’t tread on me versus tread on everyone. // Saul Bass title design. // Woob: Return to the City.

Elsewhere (52)

KC Johnson encounters more protesting intellectuals: 

According to the New York Times, organisers “were protesting not only tuition increases [of $300 per year] but also the university’s push for a public-private partnership,” such as the $1.4 billion in private philanthropy that [City University of New York] has received this year. Of course, if the university received no private support, either tuition bills would have to increase dramatically or services, including the number of faculty, would need to be slashed dramatically. But logic doesn’t appear to be a strong suit of “OccupyCUNY.”

Note the hostility to private and commercial philanthropy, i.e. money given voluntarily, and the simultaneous belief that using money taken forcibly via punitive taxation is a much more righteous endeavour. Apparently, funding by coercion makes the protestors’ education virtuous, or at least more satisfying. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, of course. Note too the standard “occupy” traits – arrogance, unrealism and a passive-aggressive disregard for the safety and rights of others. Why, it’s almost as if socialism were a license for neoteny and spite.

Charles Kadlec ponders the unspoken meaning of “social justice”:

The OWS movement demonstrates that “social justice” is based on unjust policies similar to those they condemn. The protestors rightfully assail the bailouts of banks and Wall Street executives, but their solution is more of the same including bailouts for student loans and individuals who took out mortgages on houses they could not afford.

In truth, the OWS protestors are only skirmishing over the distribution of the spoils system they claim to abhor. Their demands for higher tax rates on the “1%” show their desire to join those who pillage through the power of government. They call it “social justice.” But its credo is the same as the crony capitalists who exploit the American people through government handouts: Both seek to use political power to satisfy their needs by taking the income of others rather than through voluntary exchanges. In each case, its true name is “greed.”

And Mark Steyn is unimpressed by U.S. budget “cuts”: 

In return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (and, by the way, that’s the wrong way of looking at it: more accurately, we’re lowering the debt abyss), John Boehner bragged that he’d got a deal for “a real, enforceable cut” of supposedly $7 billion from fiscal year 2012. After running the numbers themselves, the Congressional Budget Office said it only cut $1 billion from FY 2012. Which of these numbers is accurate?

The correct answer is: Who cares? The government of the United States currently spends $188 million it doesn’t have every hour of every day. So, if it’s $1 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes to roast a 20-pound stuffed turkey for your Thanksgiving dinner, the government’s already borrowed back all those painstakingly negotiated savings. If it’s $7 billion in “real, enforceable cuts,” in the time it takes you to defrost the bird, the cuts have all been borrowed back. Bonus question: How “real” and “enforceable” are all those real, enforceable cuts? By the time the relevant bill passed the Senate earlier this month, the 2012 austerity budget with its brutal, savage cuts to government services actually increased spending by $10 billion.

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

Incongruities

“Fox chained to automobile,” 1940. By John Vachon. Note the water dish.

Hush, Our Betters Are Speaking

It’s about antagonising people and slapping them around a little bit and waking them up to reality.

So says Kalle Lasn, editor of the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters and inspiration for Occupy Wall Street. He and his OccupodPeople are slapping us around for our own good. It’s altruism, see - because they care - and it’s the only way we’ll learn.

Mr Lasn also shares his views on Christmas, the build-up to which he hopes to disrupt with a mix of flashmobs, “rabble-rousing,” sit-ins and other yuletide obstruction:

[Christmas] has been an empty, soulless kind of ritual that very, very few people  enjoy.

He’s therefore giving us “a new way of thinking about the holidays.” He, or rather his minions, will “occupy the paradigm” and “occupy our minds.” Yes, they will save us from Christmas. With sit-ins and mobs in shops. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, here’s a video of an attempted flashmob “occupation” from earlier this year, in which protestors, some of whom were masked, invaded and eventually shut down a Boots store in Oxford Street. One protestor was arrested for suspected criminal damage, at which point other protestors tried to overpower the arresting female officer in an attempt to prevent the arrest. Despite repeated instructions to step back, a scuffle ensued, during which at least three protestors ended up with CS spray in their faces. The protestors inevitably accused the police of being “violent,” “heavy-handed” and “disproportionate.” The views of the store’s owner and customers were, sadly, unclear:  

Elsewhere (51)

Heather Mac Donald on the moochers of Zuccotti Park:

While the number of people who commandeered Zuccotti Park was pathetically small - several hundred a night - compared with the weight of media attention lavished upon them, their sense of entitlement to take other people’s property, whether public or private, is unfortunately widespread… The demand by student participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests that they be allowed to welsh on their student loans simply because they don’t want to pay them displays a similar sense of royal privilege over other people’s property - in this case, the assets of taxpayers who extended the loans.

As regular readers will know, seizing and demanding other people’s stuff is, among some, a very fashionable idea.

Silvia Morandotti shares a cautionary tale and some simple lessons. Among which, “Higher taxes mean bigger government, not lower deficits.” And, “Nations reach a point of no return when the number of people mooching off government exceeds the number of people producing.”

And John Sexton parses the vanity of Kalle Lasn, whose idea to “occupy” Wall Street has now become embarrassing: 

Why should [taxpayers] have to subsidise some kid’s desire to study 20th century protest movements? Answer: They shouldn’t. Lasn’s entire move is about getting someone else to pay for the society he envisions… You cannot take over private property, irritate the neighbourhood with drumming day and night, put local business out of business, allow crime and violence to flourish in a cop free zone that is unsafe for women, and then demand that the city endlessly spend millions to deal with your nonsense… People are already sick of it. And that’s why cities around the country are tossing these camps out of public spaces so they can once again be for the public, not for the tiny fraction of a percent of naïve dopes that read [his] magazine.

Whenever you read a statement by an OccupodPerson, look for the signature traits: Arrogance, vindictiveness and utter self-involvement. You may be surprised just how often they crop up.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Friday Ephemera

Measuring explosive duck erections. Make a donation and advance science! (h/t, Jim Cambias) // The museum of the modern snowglobe. // Baby teeth and adult teeth. // Wombat in a tea cup. // Pig-shaped pork. // On eating insects. // The hazards of running shoes. // HumanForm, a flexible phone. // Fenella Fielding’s voice. (h/t, Stephen)  // The Iron Lady. // Stuttgart City Library. // The submerged cars of Thailand’s Honda factory. // Cheese cube. // Approaching bridges in a different way. // Burglary in the webcam age (but with a happy ending). // A brief history of beer. // Vodka-soaked tampons are the new thing, apparently.

Where Earthlings Live

A time lapse compilation of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station, August to October, 2011. Edited by Michael König. 

The OccupodPeople Will Save Us

Via EBD, meet Daniel Johnson, Saskatchewan Green Party candidate and full-time OccupodPerson: “Occupy has no leaders. We run on a consensus based thing, though there are kind of… certain people whose ideas get followed more than others.”

Spare a moment too for this union liaison and Portland Occupodder who wants to “see human beings come together” and “interact with one another.” You see, he’s “tired of differentialities.” However, this touchy-feely soul “couldn’t care two fucks about what happens if, you know, we have another Great Depression.” So his requests for more intimate interaction may not appeal to everyone:

Friday Ephemera

The starlings of Rome. // Surfing, Matrix-style. // This is exactly why I’ve never had a moustache. // How to relocate a sedated rhino. (h/t, Ka-Ching!) // The perpetual dilemma of Michael Moore. // Mythical injustice. // Unfolding apartment. // The interactive periodic table of swearing. // Why “social science” is disreputable. // Nature wants to eat you. (h/t, R. Sherman) // “If there’s one speech about the climate debate worth reading in your lifetime, this is it.” // GroundBot. // Outgrowing Marxism. // The explosions of Michael Bay. // The 10 best villains in literature? // Truckstopping. // TasteSpotting. // Following the reindeer.

A Better World (2)

Another one for the pile marked passive-aggressive, from Occupy Portland. It’s a long clip but instructive, and as things progress, unpleasantly tense. I can’t help thinking it captures the, er, flavour of so much of what we’ve seen. There’s something for everyone. An ineffectual pacifist who arrives too late, fails to calm the situation then walks away; vacant stoners; and a belligerent onlooker who also wants to play the passive-aggressive game. Note how Masked Raving Guy says, “We are the 99% and we don’t want you in our society!” (That’s because he’s “trying to bring back democracy,” see?) Masked Raving Guy is ostensibly angry about how his fellow protestors have been depicted, i.e., as incoherent and aggressive. “We don’t want any violence,” screams he, while going out of his way to be provocative and physically intimidating.

I’m guessing his reflection doesn’t please him.

Update:

Thuggery and Squalor is New and Exciting

Further to this extended post on the Occupy phenomenon, here’s a brief update on the “movement” that, according to Laurie Penny, “is trying to do something so profoundly new and exciting with politics.”

Occupy Wall Street seems to be spiralling even deeper into farce – and is now a crime-ridden “sliver of madness, a leaderless bazaar,” according to Candice Giove of the New York Post, who stayed overnight and lived to regret it. The Great Utopian Project in Zuccotti Park now has its own “rape-free zones,” which suggests exactly the kind of problem you think it suggests, and, in suitably Orwellian style, some opinion-management issues have apparently arisen. Though at least they don’t yet have a serious hair and body lice problem, as is the case at Occupy Portland.

Occupy Denver has coughed up the usual parade of people with issues, with banners telling us that the “business world needs to be eradicated” and “killing billionaires” is the way forward. Among the more notable participants was Orange Neckerchief Guy – named Frankie Roper – who arrived at the protest wearing painted-on “injuries” and then set about harassing police officers, verbally and physically, in the hope of provoking “brutality” and thus achieving martyrdom. When this initial bid failed, Mr Roper resorted to pushing one passing officer from his motorbike. Roper promptly ran away, being as he is so radical and brave, but was soon wrestled to the ground and arrested by the officer he’d assaulted a few seconds earlier. Naturally, there followed much collective indignation and mutterings of brutality.

Meanwhile, Occupy Eureka brings us the joys of public defecation and dirty protest, and Occupy Boston is apparently “deteriorating” amid crack dealing, drunkenness and fights. Protestors in Boston also found time to “occupy” the Israeli consulate, chanting “Intifada! Intifada!” and further north, Occupy Vancouver can boast its first “confirmed fatality.” At Occupy DC, where violence erupted again, some protestors saw fit to bring small children to use as shields and doorstops, a move that takes radical leftwing parenting to a whole new level. At the same site, protestors harassed female reporters, held a wheelchair-bound woman captive and pushed elderly ladies down concrete steps, all of which obviously signal the last word in radical piety.

Readers may struggle to understand the mindset of people who find it acceptable to jostle and intimidate elderly ladies who are just trying to get home. Just as they may struggle to empathise with people who find it entertaining to trap and intimidate a woman in a wheelchair. I scarcely need to point out that none of the protestors stopped to help either of the elderly women who’d been knocked over. Instead, these titans of tomorrow kept on chanting and feeling righteous about themselves.

Update:

Re the videos of violence and physical intimidation linked in the post above, it’s worth noting the following comments by Ace:  

The media likes to claim these demonstrations are ‘mostly’ non-violent. But every mob persists because of the implied -- and often express -- threat that violence will ensue if police attempt to disperse them. Before the elderly woman is pushed to the ground for the crime of attending a conference the mob doesn’t support, the mob indulges in a joyous spree of menace and intimidation. They gleefully block a car, driven by a guy with a 2-year-old in the back seat, just trying to get home, because they want to make their physical capacity to harm other people known. They get in the face of a couple with what looks like a four year old and a pre-toddler, to let them know the mob has power over them. They get up into people’s faces with menacing gestures -- hands flashed quickly to people’s faces, a pantomime of violence -- to let them know the mob can hurt them, the moment it wishes to.

The point about “pacifist” protestors implying mob violence should anyone dare to challenge them is illustrated in the update to this.

Update 2:

Friday Ephemera

Attention fitness enthusiasts, the Tug Toner has arrived. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // Man mistakes moon for UFO. // Levitating lampshade. // Apartment block of note. // It’s a decommissioned nuclear bunker, it’s a luxury home. // Clouds, lots of clouds. // Criminal penguins. // Assorted ceramic dildos. (h/t, Phil Radmall) // Don’t stop ‘til you see smoke. // Smoke like this. // “Spiders, as it happens, can often be identified by their genitalia.” // Just bacon. // Vegas, ’62. (h/t, EBD) // The guardian of the hole. (h/t, Julia) // Great questions of our time, #621. // Here’s something else not everyone can do. // And beware the big bad wolf.

Because It Can Be Done (Just Barely)

A taste of Sébastien Montaz-Rosset’s documentary I Believe I Can Fly.

“I’m not sure I can hold on with my toes.”