davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

When your meticulously planned attempt at bank robbery is cut short. // Close enough. // Under London. // When men lactate. // LSD ‘microdosing’ is apparently a thing now. // Planet X is cloaked. // Plus one. // Pedal cars of yore. // Showbiz. // Hombre. // Birth of the camera phone. // Feel my babies. // Place your bets. // On Britain’s collective tea-making menace. // Animated bodies. // Paper puppets. // 1970s Spider-Man. // Cityscapes of note. // Tornado. // Storm. // Squirrel combing. // “A flight in China was delayed for five hours after an elderly passenger threw coins into the aircraft’s engine for good luck.” // And finally, rather pleasingly, “When a security developer was contacted by an IRS phone scammer, he decided to do more than simply ignore their call.”

Incoming

The deal we seem to have come to in Europe is that, on the minus side, we’ve got a bit more gang rape and beheading than we used to have, but on the plus side, there’s a much wider range of cuisine. So it’s all swings and roundabouts.

Mark Steyn talks with Douglas Murray about demographic transformation. 

Somewhat related, the Simon Schama Tendency. 

Forked Tongue

I’m actually, personally, very speech permissive. I would say I’m very pro-speech, almost absolutist on speech… um, but…

In the clip linked above, assistant professor of English Aaron Hanlon attempts to portray the physical suppression of speech on campus as a quality control issue and a cross-party phenomenon, as if these things weren’t overwhelmingly a default of the campus left. The assistant professor, whose activities include combing through rap lyrics for supposedly righteous and subversive anti-capitalist content, does this while simultaneously invoking the importance of intellectual standards, to which, by implication, said campus leftists, people such as himself, have some proprietary claim.

Update, via the comments: 

Elsewhere (237)

Joe Simonson on the latest innovation in anti-Trump “resistance”: 

Just Nips [are] the “official nipples of The Resistance movement,” according to founder Molly Borman. Started last January in time for the Women’s March, Just Nips provides synthetic nipples that you can wear over your bra or over your nipples. The product “cements the idea that women can and should do whatever they want,” Borman told me over the phone. In this case, “whatever they want” means making random people in public think you’re not wearing a bra — for empowerment or something. Just Nips’ release date is no coincidence. Borman sees her product as a direct challenge to President Trump’s administration. According to Borman, “a lot of women feel unsafe” under Trump, and her product helps provide comfort and “a safe space.”

Apparently, they’re “the WMDs of nipple erectors.” 

Sarah Hoyt on processed youth:

I don’t know who coined “Reeeee” for the sound progressives make when in the middle of a scream fest about some – mostly imaginary and unintended – offence. I know that for several months now my friends have been using it, usually when just having dealt with some idiot who keeps yammering on about moon ferrets. Or patriarchy. Or white supremacy… Thing is, if you’ve read about the Cultural Revolution… those too were a bunch of ignorant kids, taught only Maoism, and completely ignorant of what the peasants needed to do to survive and grow food. Their advice, their demands, their theories, were not only stupid but actually life-threatening. But people had to follow it because otherwise they’d be denounced and held up before revolutionary tribunals… The people who destroyed Chinese culture and productivity in the Cultural Revolution, and who filled the Yellow River with so many bodies that they washed up en masse on the shores of Macao (where my dad saw them), were nothing more and nothing less than weaponised Reeeee brigades.

Meaty Goodness

The German shepherd was calm and responded to police commands. On the way to an animal sanctuary, the dog vomited some of its owner’s tissue, including skin with still-recognisable beard hair.

Here’s a thing to ponder as you pet your fluffy companion: If you died, would your dog eat you? 

In 24 percent of the cases in the 2015 review, which all involved dogs, less than a day had passed before the partially eaten body was found. What’s more, some of the dogs had access to normal food they hadn’t eaten.

And before owners of other pets start feeling terribly smug:

Cats tend to go for the face, especially soft parts such as the nose and lips, says forensic anthropologist Carolyn Rando of University College London… Even hamsters and birds have been known to scavenge on occasion.

Sleep well.

Friday Ephemera

They do this better than you do. // Chap has skillz. (h/t, Tim) // “Chestfeeding” is a thing now. // Don’t look down. // Japanese robot fighting is brutal and brisk. // Bowling ball coffee table, $1,650. // Portable barbecue suitcase. (h/t, Coudal) // Bird sounds, visualised. // The high life. // His low-altitude flying is better than yours. // Humour is not permitted. // The mysteries of dry cleaning. // Unearthing Denmark’s oldest known toilet. // Artificial intelligence merges dinosaurs with flowers and nineteenth century fruit engravings. // The wonders of state schooling. (h/t, Darleen) // Pretty but impractical. // Always respect the media. // This. (h/t, Ace) // That. // With paint, soap and oil. // For your felt fake product needs. // And finally, all too aptly, a vintage voice-over of note.

Elsewhere (236)

Anthony Gockowski glimpses the unhappy mind of a professional educator: 

A professor at Connecticut’s Trinity College seemingly endorsed the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims “fucking die” because they are white. “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put [an] end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system. #LetThemFuckingDie,” Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams wrote in a June 18 Facebook post.

Pretentious victimhood is quite a drug.

Noah Rothman on the late Otto Warmbier and the unsavoury pieties of “social justice”: 

“Privilege” is how social-justice advocates describe those who they think should be found guilty under a Rawlsian ideal of distributive justice. So what made Warmbier so deserving of his captivity and mistreatment at the hands of a famously brutal Stalinist regime? Huffington Post blogger La Sha was direct… his heritage. Specifically, his “white male privilege.” “That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialised first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country,” she wrote. In fact, it’s not rare for North Korea to take American citizens hostage, but they are often of Korean heritage. There are three Americans of Korean origin in Pyongyang’s clutches right now, in fact. The author of this deluded, bigoted rant makes no effort to understand the conditions in North Korea. Why should she? Her appeals to identity politics are enough for her baseless opinion to be taken seriously and published in a national political blog.

According to Ms Sha, being imprisoned in North Korea and sentenced to 15 years in a hard labour camp, for stealing a poster, then suffering extensive and mysterious brain injuries and being left in a persistent vegetative state, is not unlike being a middle-class black journalist who writes for the Huffington Post. Mr Warmbier, she wrote, was merely experiencing her own “daily reality.”

Somewhat related. 

Graduation Is Hard

Meanwhile, in Mexico City:

A Student Strike Becomes an Occupation, for 17 Years.

Savour that mental image.

It remains unclear exactly who occupies the building and how many members compose the occupying force. Insular and mercurial, they refused repeated requests for interviews. “We’re against the mass media,” explained one occupier, who declined to give his name, saying it was a policy of the occupation not to grant interviews without consent of “the general assembly.” He was standing in what was once the lobby of the auditorium, its walls now covered with insurrectionist stickers, graffiti, posters and murals. “I don’t want to be assimilated into the mass media,” he said.

Oh, there’s more:

Since the late 1960s, the building has been commonly known as the Che Guevara Auditorium. “This has been the most politically symbolic space that the university has had in its entire history,” said Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, head of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s office of institutional evaluation.

And,

For many years the occupation operated as a collective of various radical groups, though its composition mutated, sometimes violently… In 2013, for instance, self-proclaimed anarchists drove other groups out of the building, according to local news accounts. Three months later, however, a band of rivals stormed the auditorium and ejected the anarchists. Later the anarchists — armed with metal rods, fire extinguishers and sticks embedded with nails — violently retook control of the building. The university administration issued a denunciation of the violence and ordered “the immediate surrender” of the auditorium, to no avail.

After several such coups and counter-coups, no-one seems entirely clear what, exactly, the protestors are currently protesting against. However, the building has been unilaterally declared an “autonomous, self-managed workspace,” a leaderless “horizontal organisation,” and is a lively venue for T-shirt salesmen, pamphleteers, and marijuana vendors. And to highlight the occupiers’ immense political gravitas,

A sound system outside the auditorium blasts hard-core punk music.

Via Christina Hoff Sommers. 

A Kinder, More Caring World

A telling exchange, one of many: 

“It essentially sounded like you were being held hostage. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go with two escorts – is that true?”

“Erm, that’s what the students felt was true. I was going to go to the bathroom regardless and they wanted to escort me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did they want to escort you to the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, of course not.”

From Michael Moynihan’s short film on events at Evergreen State College, where ‘progressive’ utopia is under construction.

Update:

In the thread below, several commenters note that the dramas at Evergreen - this Theatre of the Bedlamites™ - is merely an extension and enactment of the values being inculcated by the staff. After years of wearing away the customary moral and behavioural restraints, and after years of rewarding pathological vanities and delusions of persecution, the leftist bureaucrats and educators were caught off-guard by the speed and vehemence with which their own protégés turned on them, using mob force and well-practised spite, and merrily wielding baseball bats. Which reveals just how blinded by ideology, and how ludicrous, and unfit, those educators are.

Friday Ephemera

“I’m a vegetarian. It was self-defence.” // Fun with projection mapping. // Pause. (h/t, Damian) // AI attempts portraiture, does pretty well. // Peacock in a liquor store. // “A scientific meta-analysis of whisky flavours and quality.” // Rejection. // Undulations. // Most hated online advertising. // A burglar’s mishap. (h/t, Obo.) // Meanwhile, in Mozambique. // Always respect the media. // Museum of Teletext. // Multi-pass. // Inner peace. // Irony. // These ladies go hardcore. (h/t, dicentra) // I hope they don’t screw this up with identity politics. // Initiative. // Bookshop of note. // How British teachers voted. // Today’s word is touché. // And finally, “Sadomasochist swingers club with a dungeon and torture chamber has been shut down over health and safety concerns.”

Your Knowledge Of Past Events Is Counter-Revolutionary

This, as they say: 

 

 

Captures the air of things, I think.

It’s A Feast For The Senses

Attention, lowly peasants - art is happening. Today I bring you an untitled “guerrilla performance” by “artist, healer and dancer” Shizu Homma, and an associate named aj, filmed in New York City, April 2010. Ms Homma tells us that she likes to “interrogate the human condition by searching for movement that exaggerates the behaviour of our species,” and that she’s “available for masterclasses, workshops, and choreography.” When not shaking the artistic landscape with her creative tremendousness, Ms Homma spends her time telling us, repeatedly, what kind of person she is.

Now feast ye. Gorge on that art. 

Another “guerrilla performance” featuring Ms Homma, equally staggering in its scope and profundity, can be savoured here.