davidthompson

Friday Ephemera

“The Freshette protects against unsanitary restrooms, uneven terrain, wind, rain and snow.” (h/t, Ace) // Fifty years of Bond titles. // Beet box. // Mixtape table. // Simon Beck’s snow art. // The contraptions of Dr Kellogg. // Sworn virgins. // Strange weather ahead. // Avengers effects. // At last, a robot dragonfly. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus) // Towels and stool left on the Moon. // Lactating milk jug and other kitchen accessories. (h/t, Simen) // Inks. // Catzilla. Hey, it could happen. // Cockerels and fish. // Clever mice. // Magnetic light mine. // “This is exactly what a record made of ice sounds like.” // And remember this? It’s been upgraded.

The Agonies of the Left: An Ocean of Tears

The freeloader’s manifesto. As rjmadden notes in the comments, replace ‘capitalism’ with ‘adulthood’ and all becomes clear.

From the thinkers who brought us this:   

Monbiot and the Morlocks

In which the Guardian’s George Monbiot encounters the underclass and shows how his worldview is quite different from yours: 

A group of us had occupied a piece of land on St George’s Hill in Surrey... Our aim had been to rekindle interest in land reform. It had been going well – we had placated the police, started to generate plenty of public interest – when two young lads with brindled Staffordshire bull terriers arrived in an old removals van. Everyone was welcome at the site and, as they were travellers, one of the groups marginalised by the concentration of control and ownership of land in Britain, we went out of our way to accommodate them. They must have thought they had died and gone to heaven. 

Almost as soon as they arrived they began twocking stuff. A radio journalist left his equipment in his hire car. They smashed the side window. Someone saw them bundling the kit, wrapped in a stolen sleeping bag, into their lorry. There was a confrontation – handwringing appeals to reason on one side, pugnacious defiance on the other – which eventually led to the equipment being handed back. They wound their dogs up, making them snap and snarl at the other occupiers. At night they roamed the camp, staffies straining at the leash, cans of Special Brew in their free hands, shouting “fucking hippies, we’re going to burn you in your tents!” 

We had no idea how to handle them without offending our agonised liberal consciences. They saw this and exploited it ruthlessly. Eventually the police solved the problem for us. Most of the cars parked at a nearby attraction had had their windows smashed and radios stolen, and someone had followed their lorry back to our site. As they were led away, my anarchist beliefs battled my bourgeois instincts, and lost.

Do read the whole thing. It brings a tear to the eye. And tune in next week when George tries to reason with the tattooed Neanderthal burgling his house.  

Update, via the comments:

What’s almost – almost – touching is the implied revelation, i.e., that members of Designated Victim Groups, with which Guardianistas feel obliged to side whatever the particulars, can in fact be obnoxious and predatory scumbags. Apparently this thought hadn’t previously occurred to George and, by golly, the news troubles him. All of which suggests a well-rehearsed imperviousness to reality. One Guardian reader praises Mr Monbiot for his “refreshing honesty,” which rather gives the game away. Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

For more of George’s ideological crises, see here and here. 

Update 2:

Oh dear. Mr Monbiot is now being assailed on Twitter for writing such a “racist” article. However, the people doing the chastising – including an indignant, self-described “agitator” - have yet to explain exactly why the article is racist, despite being asked. One of the chastisers is a “Marxist, knitter and student of critical theory.”

Our moral and intellectual betters, obviously.

Tidings (6)

Or, Six Years of Blogging and I Still Don’t Have One of These:

A birdsong machine, circa 1890. (h/t, Cmeej.) 

As usual, posting will be intermittent over the holidays and readers are advised to subscribe to the blog feed, which will alert you to anything new. Thanks for another five thousand or so comments this year, some of which have been much more interesting than the actual posts. And particular thanks to all those who’ve made PayPal donations to help keep this rickety barge afloat. Much appreciated. Newcomers are invited to rummage through the archives and greatest hits, where you’ll find, among other things, the thrill of public nudity, the warm glow of socialist compassion and humility, and coverage of the loftiest, most high-minded arts. 

To you and yours, a very good one. 

The Agonies of the Left, They Never End

Attention menfolk, you are faulty, inferior beings unless you agree with Laurie and Hugo.

Northerners of Yore

Photographed by John Bulmer, whose book The North was published in November. 

Friday Ephemera

“Tennis star buys world’s supply of donkey cheese.” // Ducks cross motorway. // Arthur Scargill menswear. // Bill Whittle on unserious people. // Self-dramatizing narcissism. // Offensively hot peanut butter. // The International Banana Museum. // Inside Amazon. // Festive decorations. // The full-body sweater you’ve always wanted. // “For a fee and a stool sample, the curious can find out what’s living in their intestine.” // Solar-powered plant thirst detector. // Page turning contraption using (among other things) a hairdryer and a hamster. (h/t, Ace) // At last, a Nüdifier app. // “We have a very good system to detect penis drawings.”

And Now Some Film News

Actor Sir Terence Stamp remembers the Seventies and playing a supervillain from the planet Krypton: 

For me, it was my comeback movie. I’d been out of work for eight years and living in India.... When I walked onto that set I’d been in an ashram for a year, learning to separate orgasm from ejaculation. I was rechanneling the life-force and I hadn’t been working, and when I walked on the set, it seemed like everyone was asleep, but I was so, so ready. The only guy who was really up for it was Brando - he totally understood where I was coming from. 

Via here, via Anna.

It’s Politically Radical Sex, Not Ordinary Mortal Sex

A librarian replies to a comment piece in the Daily Californian:

Please don’t fuck in the library. I work here. My staff works here. 

The piece in question is by UC Berkeley student Nadia Cho, who seems to believe she’s very edgy and progressive. In fact, it’s difficult to overstate just how edgy and progressive our columnist believes she is: 

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck. 

How incredibly, desperately transgressive. Ms Cho gleefully explains that she and her companions are “desecrating” buildings with their “perverse ways.” You see, the sex she’s having is much more radical than yours, and therefore more important. 

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it. 

Indeed. And what’s the point of exhibitionist psychodrama without an audience? We’ve been here before, I think.  

Thankfully, the author also obliges with some practical tips: 

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up. 

And,

It’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying. 

Of course it’s not just a matter of sexual abandon and incriminating evidence. It’s political too. Very political: 

Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognise the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few. 

Tuition fees well spent, then. 

The studiously uninhibited Ms Cho is keen to educate the rest of us in matters sexual and political. She tells us, for instance, that, “Sex-positive isn’t a term that most people are familiar with. Look it up, learn and be amazed.” Suitably amazed and quaking with excitement, Ms Cho shares her insights: “Sex-positive is a concept, a culture and a state of mind… It is a view based on acceptance, communication, zero judgement...” Judgement is recurring motif in Ms Cho’s sexual sermons and we are told, more than once, that, “It’s extremely insensitive to berate a person’s intimate experiences,” and that, “It feels good to internalise the belief that you deserve to be respected for your personal decisions and that you’re not doing anything wrong in doing what feels right for you.” And hence, presumably, the shagging in public libraries and issues of tissue. 

On learning that not everyone was awed by her libidinous odyssey, our Californian student offers the following explanation: 

The fact that I happen to be a woman of colour might have something to do with it.

Ms Cho’s previous contributions to human knowledge include, “The thought of being in a [monogamous] relationship scares the living shit out of me,” and a stern reminder that while having “fucking intense, mind-blowing sex,” her partners “need to acknowledge and understand their positions and privileges relative to mine.” Which sounds like a recipe for the hottest, edgiest, most radical sex ever. 

Found via Maggie’s Farm. 

Reheated (30)

For newcomers, four more items from the archives.

The Arts, They Ennoble. 

Leotard, heels and coloured puke. It’s a vision of loveliness. 

In this 34-minute milestone of cultural enrichment, Ms Brown “explores the relationship between music and performance art via self-induced vomiting.” The word explores is of course obligatory and, given the context, entirely devoid of meaning. Unless we’re to believe that the fruits of this alleged mental activity will redefine human knowledge and shake the world when finally, dramatically revealed to the public. 

Insufficiently Prole.  

The Observer’s Barbara Ellen oozes socialist benevolence. 

While any use of the term chav is denounced by Ms Ellen as bullying, “posh-bashing” is considered protest and an artform. This is the logic of identity politics, according to which, you must always treat people as social categories, as examples of some put-upon victim group, or conversely, some notional oppressor group. To which, various contradictory and patronising assumptions must be applied regardless of the particulars in any given instance. By this reckoning, when opportunist oiks at my old comprehensive school picked on a new arrival who was well-spoken, polite and somewhat studious, the people doing the bullying were righteous, entitled and “responding to oppression.” Their shoving and sneering was apparently “an instinctive protest against inequality.” But my calling them oiks for doing so is practically a hate-crime. You see how it works?

The Cost of Purity.  

“Shut up,” they explained. 

Actually, some of our budding intellectuals do declare their censorious urges out loud and in public, as if such urges confirmed their own unassailable righteousness: “We no longer need to listen,” say these mighty radical thinkers. Nor will they permit others to listen to ideas and arguments they, our betters, deem improper - on our behalf, of course. Let’s not forget the equally progressive efforts to shape young minds at Queen’s University, which decided that students’ private lunchtime discussions were in need of monitoring by hired eavesdroppers called “dialogue facilitators.” Eavesdroppers whose uninvited “interventions” would “encourage discussion of social justice issues” and “issues of social identity, power and privilege,” as defined by them and whether welcome or not. “Positive spaces and mindsets” would of course be created. 

Playing in the Dirt with Occupy. 

Bongos, bombs and ersatz farming. 

Here we have a movement whose “non-hierarchical” founder says Occupy is “about antagonising people and slapping them around a little bit.” A movement whose favoured “non-violent” tactics rely on mobs and coercion - and the moral anonymity that mobs make possible. A movement that’s explicitly premised on the seizure and violation of other people’s property, and which measures its impact by the disruption and distress it inflicts on others. And oh yes. A movement whose cheerleaders tell us that mobbing random retailers and intimidating their customers is “a perfectly justifiable form of protest.” And whose apologists and hagiographers have told us, repeatedly, that they “have no problem with principled, thought-through political violence,” that property damage is “not the same thing as violence,” and that setting fire to occupied buildings isn’t “real” violence. For members of this movement to then affect “shock” when that same thinking is taken one notch further requires colossal dishonesty. But hey, that’s who these people are.

There’s more to be had in the greatest hits. 

Elsewhere (80)

Mark Steyn on the cost of Big Government:

The problem facing the United States government is that it spends over a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have. If you want to make that number go away, you need either to reduce spending or to increase revenue… We already have a more severely redistributive taxation system than Europe in which the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay 70 percent of income tax while the poorest 20 percent shoulder just three-fifths of one percent… Yet Obama now wishes “the rich” to pay their “fair share” — presumably 80 or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in the New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year’s federal deficit. And after that you’re back to square one. It’s not that “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share,” it’s that America isn’t. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it’s not willing to pay for. 

A couple of years back, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that, if Washington were to increase every single tax by 30 percent, it would be enough to balance the books — in 25 years. If you were to raise taxes by 50 percent, it would be enough to fund our entitlement liabilities — just our current ones, not our future liabilities, which would require further increases. This is the scale of course correction needed. If you don’t want that, you need to cut spending — like Harry Reid’s been doing. “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars’ worth of cuts,” he bragged the other day. “So we need to get some credit for that.” Wow! A billion dollars’ worth of cuts! Washington borrows $188 million every hour. So, if Reid took over five hours to negotiate those “cuts,” it was a complete waste of time. So are most of the “plans.” Any “debt-reduction plan” that doesn’t address at least $1.3 trillion a year is, in fact, a debt-increase plan.

Related, the trajectory of socialism in cartoon form. Also, Thomas Sowell on taxes and fairness. And of course this.  

Victor Davis Hanson ponders the American left:  

Weighing over 250 pounds, not rickets, is a national plague. Riots target sneaker stores, not food bins. Sandra Fluke naturally became the epitome of frustrated liberal-mandated equality. We are to believe that an upscale white law student, who by choice enrols at a Catholic university, is deprived because her university will not pay for her condoms or abortion pills. Her cell phone no doubt costs more than a year’s supply of prophylactics. The result is psychodrama, not class struggle, as liberals strain to find ways in which America is Les Misérables rather than the Kardashians, plagued by this obsession to step in and make everyone (except themselves) the same. 

And Claire Berlinski, mentioned previously here, reviews Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution - The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind: 

In what must be reckoned a martyrdom operation, Bawer has spent countless hours not only reading the collective oeuvre of the leading luminaries in Black, Women’s, Gender, Queer, Fat, and Chicano Studies, but also travelling America to attend their conferences. At a gathering of the Cultural Studies Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, Bawer encounters the young Michele, who’s “like, a grad student at UC Davis?” She’s “sort of reviving a Gramscian-style Marxism,” involving the idea that global warming is “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” Bawer claims that his heart goes out to her. (His heart is bigger than mine.)

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

The Science is Throbbing

This chap, via Peter Risdon. I do hope someone’s told Caroline Lucas. 

Friday Ephemera

William Shatner wants a deep fried turkey. // “Christmas dinner in a can.” Only £5.99. // Dehydrated boulders and other Acme products. // Now how did that get there? (h/t, Dr Dawg) // Watches of the 1980s. // Perspective, baby. // Because you need a baguette bag. // Bond villains evaluated. // Bond effects. // Parrot loves bunny. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) // Play with your very own nuclear power plant. // Landscapes and mist. // At last, a totally unobtrusive decelerator helmet. // How to house your tree frogs. // Cheetahs in (slow) motion. // Bassett hounds running. (h/t, MeFi) // Eruptions of note. // Playing the Game of Thrones.  

Gaseous Anomalies

After that dizzying intellectual feast, it’s time for a palate cleanser. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous steers us to the delights of Silent But Deadly, a game of stealth in which “you have to navigate floors of the office building without being discovered by sniffing colleagues.” 

Oh, don’t turn up your noses. I know what you like.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

Or, Dissonance, Baby. Laurie Penny alerts us to a major cultural breakthrough: 

For those who missed it, Laurie’s own contribution to this “deeply, unapologetically intellectual” venture can be savoured here. 

On Fungal Matters

Speaking of identity politics and its befuddling effects, Julia steers us to another classic sentence from the Guardian:  

As a lover of white truffles, a stereotypically upper class food, the rapper [Jay-Z] is bolstering a new kind of black identity. 

That glorious caption is the work of a subeditor, but it’s perfectly attuned to the deep political musings of the article’s author, Ms Kieran Yates, who tells us: 

Jay-Z has shelled out an eye-watering €15,000 on three kilos of white truffles on a recent holiday to Italy.

Before asking the question pressing heavily on no-one’s mind. 

What does this extravagant detail say about the Jay-Z brand? 

And then answering it, excitedly and with tremendous gravitas: 

The term [bling] has always been political… This new kind of spending goes a long way to help his brand while bolstering a new kind of black identity. 

There we go.

This “new kind of spending” - buying overpriced fungus - is much more radical than buying Rolex watches, ostentatious cars or cases of Cristal champagne. It’s a thrilling development in “black identity.” 

Food has always been an issue in working class communities, and one of the first things you learn when you are finally allowed consumer power is that food that you once thought was off limits is in fact accessible. Jay-Z understands the cultural capital of food, and with his purchase he is showing the world that taste is not for the white elite to dictate. 

Note the words allowed and dictate. And indeed white elite. Ms Yates, an English Literature graduate, has evidently learned to regurgitate the kind of airy, tendentious guff her lecturers expected. 

What Jay-Z is in effect saying is that the world of decadent foodstuffs is not off limits – not to him, or to hip-hop culture. Assumptions are slowly being challenged.

See, radical and profound. One Guardian commenter helpfully distils the intellectual heft of this mighty opus: 

BLACK MAN EATS TRUFFLES. 

The fanciful pseudo-politics of “urban” music and rap paraphernalia are a Guardian staple, obviously, being as they are so daring and transgressive. Readers may recall Lanre Bakare, the recipient of a Scott Trust bursary, who tried to persuade us that “the soundtrack to the credit crunch is being written by hip-hop artists” whose “socially conscious” rapping should be acclaimed for its “focus on harsh economic issues.” Among the insightful thinkers offered as guides was the well-heeled Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy, aka Jay Wayne Jenkins, of whom, Mr Bakare said, 

Jeezy concentrates on his own money issues, with lines like “I’m staring at my stack like where the fuck’s the rest at” and “Looking at my watch like it’s a bad investment,” making it clear that even successful rappers suffer in an economic downturn.

In a later column, Mr Bakare urged us to believe that graffiti is deserving of taxpayer subsidy. Behaviour that our Guardianista would presumably find aggravating and costly to undo if done to him and his belongings should nonetheless be done to others because, well, it’s so edgy and countercultural. And let’s not forget Adam Harper’s apparent belief that “bobbing in time to the wacky syncopated beats and pitch-shifted vocals of Major Lazer’s Pon De Floor” is some kind of radical act, especially when done within fifty yards of a police officer. Wacky, syncopated beats having only been discovered in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Elsewhere (79)

Thomas Sowell on the appetites of unions: 

Many people think of labour unions as organisations to benefit workers, and think of employers who are opposed to unions as just people who don’t want to pay their employees more money. But some employers have made it a point to pay their employees more than the union wages, just to keep them from joining a union. Why would they do that, if it is just a question of not wanting to pay union wages? The Twinkies bankruptcy is a classic example of costs created by labour unions that are not confined to paycheques. The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa. All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions’ members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy, which can cost 18,500 jobs. The union is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Mathieu Deflem on “the politics of exclusion”: 

Universities today have lowered their standards of admission and accepted more students regardless of their level of preparation. For example, at the University of South Carolina, where I am presently employed, the number of undergraduates has gone up from about 18,000 in 2006 to 22,000 in 2011. As a result of the increased number of undergraduates, pressures are placed on teaching faculty to accommodate students regardless of intellectual skills… Students of lesser skill-levels are not only admitted, they are also given degrees, and that is the most worrisome trend. Obtaining a college degree has become a matter of justice. The notion that prevails today is not only that access to education is a right, but so is the successful exit thereof. Under these conditions, the very notion of an earned degree has become a mockery. 

And Victor Davis Hanson on the rise (and dishonesty) of identity politics: 

Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted — and Obama operatives have rejoiced in — a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorised, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound… Only in the hyper-racialist America can we take quite distinct Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese third-generation citizens and create from them the artificial rubric “Asian” in their shared antithesis to “white,” or take disparate Cubans and Mexicans and likewise reinvent them as identical Latinos, or take Jamaicans, Ethiopians, and American blacks and call them all “African-Americans” on the similar logic of not being something equally artificial like white — which I guess covers Americans who used to be Greeks, Irish, Armenians, Jews, Poles, and Danes… Are Asians “overrepresented” at UC Berkeley — or are the 20% of the student body who are white males the ruling establishment? Are blacks “overrepresented” at the U.S. Postal Service, but “underrepresented” at the DMV? Such are the absurd questions that arise in a tribal society where one’s primary allegiances are not to universal values or collective traditions and customs, but are first pledged to those who look most like oneself.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

More Proof That I Am Not a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl

Victor Luckerson, Time magazine:

Text messaging is on the decline, according to a new study by mobile industry analyst Chetan Sharma… During the third quarter of 2012, the average American sent 678 texts per month. That’s a big number, but it’s actually the first time America’s texting habit has declined, down from a peak of 696 texts per month over the summer. Experts say the decrease is likely a sign of a permanent shift away from SMS messaging carried over the same network we use to make phone calls. “With social networking and other platforms, they really take the messaging feature away from that usual channel,” says Wayne Lam, a wireless communication analyst at IHS Technology. “Consumers are messaging, but text messaging as a whole is competing with other forms of messaging.” 

And remember, phone years are like dog years. If you haven’t upgraded yours in the last 18 months, there’s a good chance you’ll be looked on as some kind of contrarian throwback to the Dark Ages. A couple of months ago I ventured into a popular high street phone shop to get a new SIM. A greasy young man in bad trousers looked at my old BlackBerry as if it had been unearthed in the ruins of Xunantunich. “Wow,” said he with just a hint of amused contempt. “Old school. I haven’t seen one of these in years.” Greasy Teen then struggled in vain to open the casing, as if eager to behold its clockwork innards. The device was indeed four years old, before human history began, so obviously the locking mechanism was inscrutable to him, involving as it did the pushing of one button. Then came the inevitable, shame-inducing question. “Have you thought about upgrading?” 

And since you ask, yes, I did.

Friday Ephemera

Sshhh. This hummingbird is sleeping. // Sonic booms and bending light. Wait for the ripples near the end. // I’m sure that isn’t really the title of the book. // The biodiversity of belly buttons. // The photography of Jay Mark Johnson. (h/t, Dr Dawg) // Collectors and their collections. // At last, a machine that will sort your Skittles by colour. // The rigours of academia. // Origami chair. // Idleness defined. // Edible gum party python. // Panoramic dentistry. // Panoramic washing machine. // Vibrative virtual keyboard. // Tiny violins for when you’re really, really sad. // “This is a visualization of over 100,000 nearby stars.” // The infinite jukebox. 

Dealing with Impurities

Or, Correcting Wrongthought. Bill Whittle on campus censorship and the narrowing of minds:  

65% of the 392 top colleges surveyed maintain speech codes and other restrictions on expression that violate First Amendment principles… No wonder a study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only 30.3% of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that, “It is safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus”… The students were downright optimistic compared to the 9,000 campus professionals surveyed. Only 18.8% strongly agreed that it was safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus... As the sociologist Diana C. Mutz discovered in her 2006 book Hearing the Other Side, those with the highest levels of education had the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view, while those who have not graduated from high school can claim the most diverse discussion mates. In other words, the most educated among us are also the most likely to live in the tightest echo chambers. 

Background on three of the incidents mentioned in the video can be found here, here, and here. See also this demonstration of “social justice education” and just how creepy it can get. And if you can, make time to watch this eye-opening lecture by David Horowitz.

Because I’m Glorious, Goddammit

Rummaging through my images files, I found this.

It’s one of the less baffling signs from Zombie’s report on Occupy LA, May 1st, 2012. Zombie’s caption reads, “Narcissistic personality disorder, coupled with delusions of grandeur.” Which seems fair enough. I suppose the placard might have been a little more honest if it had said, “I expect to be paid for a job that doesn’t actually exist and which no-one has asked me to do.” Or, “I’ve decided I’m an artist and therefore you owe me money.” Or, “I’m not prepared to do any of the things that you unenlightened people would be willing to pay me to do, but I’m still going to demand that you give me your earnings anyway because, yes, I’m that important.” Though admittedly the last one might be a little wordy for a slogan. Readers may wish to devise captions of their own.

Elsewhere (78)

Thomas Sowell on some popular misconceptions: 

The media misconception today is that what we need to speed up economic recovery is to end gridlock in Washington and have bipartisan intervention in the economy. However plausible that may sound, it is contradicted repeatedly by history. Unemployment was never in double digits in any of the 12 months following the stock market crash of 1929. Only after politicians started intervening did unemployment reach double digits - and stay in double digits throughout the 1930s. 

There is nothing mysterious about an economy recovering on its own. Employers usually have incentives to employ and workers have incentives to look for jobs. Lenders have incentives to lend and borrowers have incentives to borrow - if politicians do not create needless complications and uncertainties. The Obama administration is in its glory creating complications and uncertainties for business, ranging from runaway regulations to the unknowable future costs of ObamaCare and taxes. Record amounts of idle cash held by businesses and financial institutions are a monument to the counterproductive effects of Barack Obama’s anti-business policies and rhetoric. That idle money could create lots of jobs - net jobs - if politics did not make it risky to invest. 

Complication, regulation and uncertainty – yes, shocker, all of it costs. 

Via Protein Wisdom, Tyler Durden on Big Government economics: 

Obama has already laid the foundation for his next four years of Presidency – more green jobs, tackle global warming, raise taxes on the rich and create jobs for the poor. That will come at a hefty price of further government spending. In the first four years of his term Obama increased the Federal Debt by more than 45%; however, with more than $5 trillion spent in promoting everything from solar panels to housing, the economy only grew by 7.1% during the same time frame (or a total of $905 billion.) In other words it took more than $5.60 of debt to create $1 of economic growth... The amount of debt required today to create a single dollar’s worth of GDP today is clearly unsustainable. 

Or as Mark Steyn puts it: 

In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet - whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese - who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return. 

Meanwhile, tick, tock. 

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. 

Friday Ephemera

Golfing interrupted by live shark falling from sky. // Gas masks of yore. // Horse head sculpture. // This clock is still ticking. // Carbon fibre sled of note. // How many BB guns would it take to stop a train? // Rave hell, Antwerp, 1997. // At last, laser tweezers. // Arsenious acid. // Approaching Heathrow. // Over-designed air freshener of note. // Tiny gardens. // Tiny tools. // Fibonacci cabinet. // More Guild of Evil real estate. // Power your iPad by sitting and rocking. // Caterpillar caravan. // Ironic retro drum machine. // A visual history of turntables and loudspeakers. // When mattress jumping is a job. // What’s it to be, bath or walk?

Elsewhere (77)

Via Samizdata, Frank J Fleming ponders the role of President: 

What was the concept of the U.S. government when it was created? That it’s our servant — we’re in charge of it. The president serves at our pleasure. So the president trying to lead us is like your butler dictating your agenda for the day. What would you do if your butler tried that? That’s right: You’d lock him in a small room in the wine cellar for a couple of days to teach him his place. Yet somehow we not only put up with the president trying to lead us, but we’ve come to expect it. 

Related, Jeff Goldstein on two visions of government: 

Either you believe the government owns you, and therefore you owe it tribute which it will then, in its wisdom, distribute as it sees fit; or you believe you own the government, and that while you keep more of your money and the fruits of your labour and allow the bureaucracies to molest you less, the federal government can learn to make do with what we decide to give it in revenue. And if that means, for instance, Big Bird or Planned Parenthood or solar energy companies have to compete in the marketplace with Cartoon Network or Wal-Mart or frakking, oil drilling, coal mining, and natural gas pipelines, then so be it.

Somewhat related, Zombie is compiling a “complete list of Barack Obama’s scandals, misdeeds, crimes and blunders.” It’s an ongoing crowd-sourced project so submissions are welcome. 

And from the vaults, Heather Mac Donald on fatherhood and poverty:  

The premise of the Young Men’s Initiative, like that of its predecessors, is that government has the capacity to produce upstanding, bourgeois citizens - if it just gets all its agencies to act in a coordinated fashion. […] Since Mayor Bloomberg claims to be a fan of managing by information, here are some more data for him to focus on: in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighbourhood in 2009, 84 percent of births were to unmarried women, according to city health statistics, followed by Brownsville, Brooklyn, at 81.2 percent; Hunts Points, the Bronx, at 80.4 percent; and Morrisania, the Bronx, at 79.1 percent. East Tremont (the Bronx), Bushwick (Brooklyn), and East New York (Brooklyn) all had out-of-wedlock birth rates well above 70 percent. Compare those with the rates in largely white neighbourhoods, such as Battery Park (6.8 percent), the Upper East Side (7.9 percent), and Murray Hill (8.6 percent). 

The breakdown of the family lies behind all other urban dysfunction. Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government programme can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children. […] The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples.

But hey, let’s do what Laurie Penny says instead. Yes, “fuck marriage,” “fuck monogamy” and fuck all of those other “small ugly ambitions.” Because, rather like Laurie herself, it’s all so incredibly radical and defiant. Just don’t look too closely at the practical results. 

Update:

Speaking of practical results, or the denial thereof, let’s not overlook the bewildered educator Grover Furr. A Professor of Medieval English and a devout Marxist, Furr has been mentioned here before and readers may recall his indignation at the fact that a few non-leftists still have the temerity to remain in the humanities, despite the professor’s wishes for ideological purity. Well, it seems our unhinged academic is still sharing his wisdom with students.

Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

Superior Beings

Victor Davis Hanson ponders a certain, quite common kind of leftist mindset. Among its attributes, this: 

For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furore at “the system” governs their political make-up. Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big money? Why does sophisticated pontificating at Starbucks earn less than mindlessly doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with Michelle Obama who, prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to get to Aspen or Costa del Sol, and thereby, despite the huge power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and career titles, felt that others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,” “downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed as expressions of yuppie angst. The more one gets, the more one believes he should get even more, and the angrier he gets that another - less charismatic, less well-read, less well-spoken - always seems to get more.

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms 1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor, the kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the foundation officer. What sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better compensated (and all for what - for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return? What a sick country - when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.

Speaking of professors, remember Jere Surber, whose nuanced and complex socialism - and resentments about status - are exceeded only by his self-flattery? Of course you do. But still, the last paragraph should bear some repetition. And while we’re on the subject of superior beings and their benign and selfless wisdom, here’s a cheering thought. Occupy announces that the ongoing flooding and destruction, and the hospitals without power, along with the frightened, the cold, the injured and the dead... all of this is good for us. With capitalism “in retreat,” we’ve been “unchained,” you see. 

Update: 

In the comments, rjmadden notes how socialist bloviating often implies the need for a corrective caste system, under which society will be reorganised, regulated and, oh yes, made fair. Indeed, it’s surprising just how often professed egalitarianism coincides with assumptions of superiority and hierarchical entitlement. There are dozens of examples in the archives. Among them, John Jordan, an “artist and activist” and co-editor of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism. Writing in the Guardian, Mr Jordan demanded taxpayer subsidy on the basis that he is “showing us how to live differently.” You see, talentless, recidivist anti-capitalists are our teachers - messiahs, in fact - and so we should be forced to hand over our earnings. It may be your money, the money you had to work for, but he, being so special, is more deserving.

An assumed caste system might also explain why George Monbiot flies around the world to promote his own books while insisting that other, less enlightened, less important people shouldn’t. Mr Monbiot is also annoyed by the fact that some people can afford to buy jet skis, and therefore go jet skiing, of which he disapproves. So much so that in 2007 he prayed for a recession to teach us all a lesson and put us in our place. Beneath him, presumably. And maybe that’s why Polly Toynbee grumbles about non-leftwing people earning almost as much as she does. Perhaps, like George, she imagines herself as part of the impending nomenklatura, and therefore entitled, unlike those boorish nobodies who just run businesses. Know your place, peasants. Our betters have big plans.