  Building on a recent joint paper with Sturmfels, here we argue that the
combinatorics of matroids is intimately related to the geometry and topology of
toric hyperkaehler varieties. We show that just like toric varieties occupy a
central role in Stanley's proof for the necessity of McMullen's conjecture (or
g-inequalities) about the classification of face vectors of simplicial
polytopes, the topology of toric hyperkaehler varieties leads to new
restrictions on face vectors of matroid complexes. Namely in this paper we give
two proofs that the injectivity part of the Hard Lefschetz theorem survives for
toric hyperkaehler varieties. We explain how this implies the g-inequalities
for rationally representable matroids. We show how the geometrical intuition in
the first proof, coupled with results of Chari, leads to a proof of the
g-inequalities for general matroid complexes, which is a recent result of
Swartz. The geometrical idea in the second proof will show that a pure
O-sequence should satisfy the g-inequalities, thus showing that our result is
in fact a consequence of a long-standing conjecture of Stanley.
