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Prof Mary Beard admitted some of her colleagues were “a bit dubious” about the academic value of the history course, which ran for three years.

Oh, ya think?

This is what happens when universities go all hip-and-trendy.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Well, duh. That’s what dictators do. I’m surprised he even went along with having elections.

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Let the whining begin.

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But only for the Right Sort.

Suppose you are a government employee in California, authorized to conduct civil marriage ceremonies, and you object on moral or religious grounds to same-sex marriage. According to the plain logic of the California Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month, you are simply a bigot; the spring of your objection is irrational prejudice. There is no ground for tolerance for your views, precisely because your views impinge upon the fundamental rights of others. Recall that even someone (like Senator Obama) of the view that while marriage should remain an institution exclusive to a man and a woman, civil unions should be established for homosexuals, is also a narrow-minded bigot, again according to the force of the Court’s logic.

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Thousands of protesters have besieged India’s capital New Delhi demanding their caste status be reduced to secure government benefits.

Incentives work.

Or sponge, as the case may be.

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If you get an outfit, you can be a terrorist too. (Or at least pretend — without having to go to the trouble of, like, maybe blowing yourself up or breaking a nail or, you know, something gross like that.)

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Can you think of a bigger waste of taxpayer money in a city where the crime and the quality of the schools would suggest better ways to spend those resources?

Run by Democrats, of course, like most urban behavioral sinks.

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I favor a series of exams ending in a cage match. But that’s me.

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Funny how even governments that do everything they can to interfere with property rights among their subjects seem to be at the front of the line to claim such rights for themselves.

Freeman Dyson doesn’t approve.

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“Well, damn the French.” — John Cleese

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Ah! I knew that something was occupying their time other than investigating Arab terrorism.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term “peacekeeper”, doesn’t it?

Note that the nationality of the “peacekeepers” involved isn’t identified, which means that they weren’t Europeans. Had they been Europeans, of course, they’d have been identified immediately.

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Funny how the U.N. never seems to get around to investigating the myriad occasions on which “Palestinians” in Gaza kill Israelis.

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I guess they do think that California is a different country and not part of America at all.

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A very good question.

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If you are not familiar with the al Durah incident, you need to be.

Richard Landes has invented a new word, “Pallywood”, to describe the tactical practices they employ, the staging of news events, intimidation and manipulation of foreign journalists and the infiltration of the western mainstream media by local “stingers” (many of whom are nothing more than operatives of the palestinian propaganda ministries) This “weaponization” of our media can no longer be denied.

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Kick a pacifist for Memorial Day.

It’s not as if they would do anything about it.

Except maybe whine.

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Seems reasonable to me.

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French police have so far made no attempt to quell the protest, according to the trapped sailors.

And that’s the key to the whole situation. How would French police react if, say, the British people trapped started fighting back? Jail time galore, I suspect.

The first function of government is to keep the peace. When the peace is not kept, then there is no government, no matter how many fools parade around in uniforms.

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Since the 1960s, humanities and social science faculties have been the last redoubt of the Left, whether in its Marxist totalitarian or post-modernist, multicultural incarnations. Academics have been allowed to have their way in imposing a stifling political correctness.

Mary Lefkowitz is a retired classicist who until recently taught at Wellesley College, a women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Her troubles involved an Afro-Caribbean colleague called Anthony Martin from the Africana Studies department. By all accounts, he had done much to advance the careers of young black women under his tutelage.

One evening in October 1991, Martin was part of a group reading Twelfth Night in a college hall. He wanted to pee. On his re-ascent from the men’s room, Professor Martin was stopped by a student dorm officer, one Michelle Plantec, who had been trained to ask all non-resident visitors: ‘Excuse me, sir, who are you with?’ This seemingly straightforward challenge, evidently heavy with undertones that Martin was similarly attuned to spot, prompted the professor to respond by screaming at Plantec that she was ‘a f—ing bitch, a racist and a bigot’.

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I’ve never understood the attraction of cars with doors that swing up. Do they anticipate parking in extremely narrow spaces? Imagine the complexity — the NEEDLESS complexity — of the hinge.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Cringely is always worth reading.

Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job?

The answer is almost always “no.” By “almost always” I mean 97-99 percent of the time.

Think back on all the stories you’ve read about strikes at manufacturing firms where “essential functions are being performed by managers”. How many companies could do that if their IT staff walked out?

David Friedman does a job that American bureaucrats won’t do.

It is worth noting that the only justification offered by the CPS for seizing male children was that they were being brought up to be child abusers—which is to say, being brought up in their parents’ religion. It sounds from some news stories as though the implicit deal being offered to parents was that if they would accept suitable psychological counseling, they would eventually get their children back. Combine those two and it looks as though the idea was to force people to renounce their religion, holding their children hostage until they did.

Your tax dollars at work.

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I’m curious as to why the ACLU is involved in this issue. It would appear to be somewhat far afield from their core business of making sure that American life sucks.

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The latest examples of the “pacifascists” among us would be those that raised the howl last week demanding that the US Armed Forces supply Burma’s suffering millions with aid even if they had to go in at the point of a gun with massive air cover.

It has texture, and scope.

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It is always soul-satisfying to have some external object that rationalizes what we would otherwise have to admit are merely character flaws. Hence the Guardian, noted socialist rag, is an appropriate venue for this article — after all, that’s what socialists do best.

The truth is that programming improves the quality of reflective thought, because it requires attention to detail — you can’t just say “whatever” and have code work. The same goes for ideas, although the feedback is less immediate: If a professor or a pundit were confronted with a Blue Screen of Death every time he said something stupid, the world would be a better place.

As Francis Crawford of Lymond famously said, “You must carry polish and precision into everything you do.”

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Eugene Robinson is a Negro, so he ought to know, right?

(So far as I can tell, that’s his only qualification for writing in the Washington Post, so it has to be worth something, right?)

Some commentators have speculated that she wants to have the votes counted simply so that she can semi-plausibly claim to have had more popular support than Obama, a distinction that would serve her well if she ran again in four or eight years. I say dream on; the Clintons don’t do moral victories.

Hmm. He may have something there….

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

A lot of ethnic struggles aren’t driven so much by mass hatred as by thugs, most of them young, who get into scrapes with the other side. In the meritocratic uplands, it all seems irrelevant. But down in the lowlands, where social ties are less determined by having unusually high IQs or particular talent, but by blood and neighborliness, the young thugs are nephews and cousins and neighbors’ nephews and cousins. While they may be sons of bitches, they’re our sons of bitches.

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The whole concept of “intellectual property” needs to be re-thought.

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Well, stay out of that row.

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Bet on Phalanx.

Megan McArdle looks at inflation.

George Will points out the silliness of listing as “endangered” a species that is increasing its numbers.

Because of restrictions on hunting, polar bears might be more numerous today than ever and might be twice as numerous as they were three decades ago — when the media were fanning frenzy about global cooling. (Science magazine, March 1975, reported “the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age.”)

But it’s not about the polar bears — it’s about cancelling the Industrial Revolution.

Want to build a power plant in Arizona? A building in Florida? Do you want to drive an SUV? Or leave your cellphone charger plugged in overnight? Some judge might construe federal policy as proscribing these activities. Kempthorne says such uses of the act, unintended by those who wrote it in 1973, would be “wholly inappropriate.” But in 1973, climate Cassandras were saying that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). And no authors of the Constitution or the 14th Amendment intended to create a “fundamental” right to abortion, but there it is.

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Old Seinfeld reruns will do the same thing and cost less. But we’ll give them credit for a good effort.

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Earlier today I linked to the Wikipedia page about the band The Decemberists, to point out that in addition to warming up for Barack Obama in Oregon, the band is known for using the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction to their concerts.

That section of the Wikipedia page has now gone down the memory hole.

Gee, in the old Soviet Union, they used to shoot revisionists. Perhaps the fears about Obama being assassinated are well-placed.

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Or ought they to be barred from the Olympics entirely? After all, they’re as bad as the apartheid South Africans, and that precedent ought to be good enough for the Politically Correct.

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Why a lot of the people in college ought not to be there.

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The problem isn’t just with Muslims.

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Mugabe, like so many post-colonial sub-Saharan African leaders, was a successful rebel leader. He was also a professed Marxist. In 1979 Mugabe’s Shona tribe-based rebel organization and allied rebel groups (the coalition referred to itself as the Patriotic Front) overthrew the white-run Republic of Rhodesia (formerly Southern Rhodesia). However, in 1980, with the aid of North Korean military advisers, Mugabe (a member of the Shona tribe) turned on his former allies in the Matabele tribe. From seven to ten thousand Matabele died in that brief war. No one has stepped forward to finance another armed resistance. Guns cost money, and no one sees Zimbabwe worth getting involved in. So Mugabe and his well armed Shona allies have kept control, without armed opposition.

With what result?

Once a major regional food producer, today a substantial number of Zimbabweans go hungry or leave. Since 2000 an estimated three million Zimbabweans (nearly a quarter of the population) have fled the neighboring nations, with South Africa a preferred destination. Zimbabwe’s economy is wretched beyond description. In late 2007 the Zimbabwean government’s own inflation data put the inflation rate at 7,600 percent a year. Economic analysts outside of Zimbabwe rated it as high as 15,000 percent. An IMF “forecast” said the real rate could reach 100,000 percent or more. The statistical differences were meaningless. Staples like meat, bread and cooking oil are not available in retail grocery stores.

Gee, overthrowing the colonialist white regime really worked out well, didn’t it?

\Any apologies from those who promoted this scheme? Of course not.

Megan McArdle dishes the dirt.

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Government by Picard: “Make it so.” (Gee, it always works on television….)

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And what would Ellsworth Toohey’s favorite magazine be able to do about it?

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Perhaps they’re sick and tired of living in Yobistan.

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Well, you know, they don’t make doomsday cults the way they used to….