Education Protests Add to School Problems

At the Chico Enterprise Record, "Keep Education Protests Rational":

We hope students and teachers remember that there and right and wrong ways to protest. Vandalism is the wrong way.

Students statewide have promised a week of protests in response to budget cuts at all levels of education.

It could be a teachable moment. Or it could be something much worse.

We hope students and teachers realize that staging walkouts at campuses statewide only adds to the problem, especially at the K-12 level. The last thing students need is less time in the classroom.

Various protests are planned at public universities, community college and even K-12 schools.

Vandalizing school property, which has already occurred at UC Berkeley, also makes little sense, particularly when money to repair schools is more scarce than ever.

Education protests this week could only serve to make the problem worse if they aren't carefully considered. When students gathered in Berkeley late Thursday to discuss this week's activities, some people at the gathering vandalized a campus building and a nearby business. Why?

On Monday, five students were arrested at the state Capitol when they wouldn't leave the office of north state Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber. Earlier, student leaders and administrators gathered and spoke with Nielsen and his staff. Later in the day, five more arrived and demanded Nielsen pledge to restore education funding. When told to leave, five UC students did not. They were arrested for disrupting state business. What did that accomplish?

And previously:

* "No Cuts to Education! Collectivize!"

* "Unions, Radicals to Protest Education Cuts Across U.S."

* "Shut it Down! March 4th Mobilization - Protest, Strike, Solidarity!."

* "California March 4th Protests: 'Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué'."

* "Teachers Unions, Anarcho-Communists Launch 'Day of Action' to 'Occupy California!"

No Cuts to Education! Collectivize!

At Against the Cuts, "Join The Fight For Education!"

It is time to say enough is enough! California is the wealthiest state in the country; its economy is ranked in the top ten of the entire world. It is home to some of the largest corporations in the world. There is more than enough wealth in California to fully fund education.

In order to stand up to these attacks and demand a quality education for all, we all must come together -- students, teachers, workers, parents, from all levels of education, K-12 through the universities. Everyone in the state has a stake in education. If we can come together and organize our power collectively, we have the forces and the numbers to launch a movement across the state to stop these attacks and win quality education for everyone.

And previously:

* "Unions, Radicals to Protest Education Cuts Across U.S."

* "Shut it Down! March 4th Mobilization - Protest, Strike, Solidarity!."

* "California March 4th Protests: 'Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué'."

* "Teachers Unions, Anarcho-Communists Launch 'Day of Action' to 'Occupy California!"

Unions, Radicals to Protest Education Cuts Across U.S.

At CNN, "Students Across U.S. Plan to Protest Education Funding Cuts":

Dissatisfaction, anger and an uncertain future have led professors and students in California and across the country to call for a day of action Thursday to defend education at state colleges and universities.

Budget cuts have resulted in canceled classes and class waiting lists doubling or tripling in California.

Whitney Thompson experienced this firsthand when all her courses at Fresno State University were dropped, setting her back an entire year. She is part of a rising phenomenon in which students take up to six years to graduate.

These "super-seniors," as they are referred to by the universities, have to take out more debt to carry the full-time load needed to maintain their financial aid and health insurance. She is now enrolled in classes that do not meet her graduation requirements.

"My plans were messed up, I now have more debt, and I'm taking classes that were my least choice," Thompson said.

More at the link.

And previously:

* "Shut it Down! March 4th Mobilization - Protest, Strike, Solidarity!."

* "California March 4th Protests: 'Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué'."

* "Teachers Unions, Anarcho-Communists Launch 'Day of Action' to 'Occupy California!"

Live Aid Funds Went to Rebel Insurgency in 1984-5

Via Theo Spark, "Millions of Ethiopian Famine Aid Used to Buy Weapons":

Millions of pounds of Western aid money intended to buy food for starving Ethiopians during the country's 1984 famine were instead used by rebels to buy weapons, an investigation has found.

At least some of that money was likely to have come from the £150 million raised by Live Aid and Band Aid. More than three million copies of Do They Know It's Christmas sold in just five weeks in late 1984 to raise funds for the estimated eight million Ethiopians facing starvation. Up to a million died.

According to a report published on Wednesday, rebel soldiers disguised themselves as grain traders and handed over sacks of sand hidden beneath genuine food aid, in return for cash from Western donations.

The rebel army involved, headed by Ethiopia's current prime minister, Meles Zenawi, went on to overthrow Ethiopia's Marxist government and has run the country since.

Mr Meles has been one of Britain's most favoured African leaders after promising democratic reforms.

The investigation by the BBC, will raise further questions over Western support for Mr Meles and his ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.

That party grew out of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, the rebel army given Western cash to buy food aid during the 1984-5 famine.

At the time, the Ethiopian Marxist government of Haile Mengistu Mariam refused to pass food to famine-hit civilians living in the north of the country, where a civil war was already years old and where a drought was biting hardest.

Instead, Europe and the US shipped food through Sudan and into the northern provinces of Tigray and Eritrea.

Some areas had surplus harvests, and food was bought from those farmers via a local aid group, the Relief Society of Tigray and trucked to famine-hit regions.

Max Peberdy, an aid worker in 1984 with Christian Aid, told the BBC that he carried more than $500,000 across the border into Ethiopia to buy food.

He insisted that there was "a complete separation" between cooperation from the rebel army and the "logistics" of buying food from local farmers.

But one of the traders who sold grain to Mr Peberdy directly, Gebremedhin Araya, said that he was in fact a senior rebel commander.

The article links to CIA documents supporting Wednesday's report.

Shut it Down! March 4th Mobilization - Protest, Strike, Solidarity!

At Indy Bay, "March 4th - Strike - Shut it Down! Take the Streets!," and "Students and Education Workers Gear Up for March 4th":

At Reoccupied, "Reoccupied Solidarity Statement":

Social War must be made! Students to the barricades!
Taking the streets is not enough! Occupy! Fuck shit up!
The university is dead! Kill the Student in your head!
Human strike is now in sight! It’s 2010! It’s time to fight!
Forever’s! Gonna! Start to-night!
Debtors of the world revolt!
FORM! CONTENT! FORM! CONTENT!
COAT! LINEN! SELF-ABOLITION!
Open up the Vortex! Let us all in!

And Atlas Shrugs on the mobilization:

"DEFEND EDUCATION".

This is a rally on March 4 to stop any cuts to our failed public school system, the laboratories and factories of leftist inculcation and corruption of America's young minds.

An image for UC Riverside:

And from the Daily Californian:

My union yesterday called for a "new revenue model" that taxes corporations. And in my inbox today, from OC Weekly, "A Clockwork Orange: Local Protests Against Education Cuts Draw State Teacher Union's Biggest Guns."

And at Socialist Worker:

* "Why We're Protesting, Part One."

* "Why We're Protesting, Part Two."

* "Why We're Protesting, Part Three."

Revolution in the streets. Coming soon.

Check back for updates ...

Dylan Ratigan's Not Just a Disgrace, But an Exemplar of Leftist Ideology as Well...

This video's getting a lot of play today, for example, at Atlas Shrugs and Right Wing News. And from Greg Gutfield at Big Hollywood, "Daily Gut: The Phony Rage of Ratigan":

Now, there’s always a scene in zombie movies, when one non-zombie character will turn to another, and say, “If I ever turn into that, I want you to kill me.” Then they make love, and reload.

Well, I want you, dear viewer, to make the same promise to me. Except instead of killing me if I become a zombie, I want you to kill me if I ever turn into Dylan Ratigan.

I am not joking. If you see symptoms of me frothing, twitching, or ranting until my eyeballs pop out and roll across the floor – I want you to hack me to pieces with a hatchet. Try to make it quick.

See, there is a reason why no one should ever be Ratigan. He has a hard time being himself. Check him out interviewing a Tea Party leader, Mark Williams, as if Williams himself ran a concentration camp in the 1940’s.
Does Williams get a chance to respond? Not really. Because when he tries, Ratty accuses him of trying to hijack the interview!

Again, dear readers, behold Dylan Ratigan, a perfect representative of today's Democratic-left.

The Middle Finger and the Law

From Threat Level, "Flipping Off Cops Is Legal, Not Advised":

Flipping the bird, or sticking out the middle finger, is perhaps the oldest insulting gesture on earth. The move dates back to ancient Greece and was adopted by the Romans as digitus impudicus — the impudent finger.

A zillion middle fingers later, an Oregon man is suing suburban Portland cops ... over his use of the gesture, claiming civil rights violations. Twice he flipped them off for no apparent reason while driving and was pulled over each time — resulting in what he said was a “bogus” traffic citation that was later dismissed, and a tongue lashing he still remembers.

“The guy flew into a road rage,” Robert Ekas, a retired Silicon Valley systems analyst, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Lawrence Wolf, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, said there was no law against flipping off cops. And in most instances when it leads to an arrest or conviction, the charges are dismissed. But the gesture invites police confrontation, he said.

“It’s certainly not the smartest thing one can do,” Wolf said.

Interesting, and there's a link to a legal manuscript, "Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger and the Law." The piece is extremely well-documented, but a pleasant read if you just skim the footnotes.

And the issue, altogether, is a reminder that common sense is, er, your best rule of thumb.

Hat Tip: Ann Althouse.

Islamist Scumbag Salman An-Noor Hossain Investigated for Hate Writings

Memeorandum has the link to the National Post, "Toronto Man Investigated Again for Hate Writings."

But the inside scoop is at Blazing Cat Fur, "Web Site's Almost as Good as the Onion! Ringing Endorsement of Multiculturalism!":

Unrepentant Haterermongerer Islamist Scumbag Salman An-Noor Hossain is clearly one of the smarter wannabe Jihadi's -he goes to York after all. Our poster child for immigration reform finds himself in hot water again for preaching Islam on the interwebs. This time he's been busy on filthyjewishterrorists.com, a site which reads like an excellent parody on par with the very best of The Onion.

Read all about it here, it's a humdinger.

That said I really find it hard to believe that resources from "13 police forces" have been assigned to investigate this little dolt. Times are tough, I suppose even the Cops need make work projects, let's at least hope the "Team" included several graduates of the "Jennifer Lynch Finishing School for Neo Nazi Cyber Hookers". Frankly I never would have heard of him or the web site had they not been made "World famous in Canada".

For those who don't wish to visit the site I have published a sample of Scumbag Salman's work here - The Attempted False Flagging in Toronto, Canada on 9-11-2006 ...

Check the post ... it's updated with Hossain's response!

John Edwards: 'The Ultimate Fall From Grace'

At National Enquirer, "GRAND JURY TO INDICT EDWARDS." (Via Memeorandum.)

Typical Democratic sleazebag.

The Political Wire comments:

The National Enquirer, which seems to be the newspaper of record on the John Edwards scandal, reports the former senator and presidential candidate is about to be indicted by a grand jury.

And at the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Pulitzer for the National Enquirer?"

Jim Bunning's Stand

Digby provides one of the best recent examples of the moral gap between collectivists and conservatives. Citing a Mother Jones piece identifying Senator Jim Bunning as "the darling" of the tea parties, Digby writes:

I am getting the same sick feeling in my stomach about this that I got when I watched the torture "debate" unfold. This is yet another unraveling of certain pieces of the already threadbare social contract --- the reflexive moral consensus on cruelty and selfishness that we all teach our children and at least pay lip service to if not always live up to. Things like whether or not it's ok to torture --- or to let people flounder with no income at all during a serious economic crisis. You can tell that this is one of those things by the punch drunk response of so many, even some on the GOP side, who are having a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that this could happen.

It's way outside the normal consensus about what is expected of our government during an economic downturn and it could be the beginning of something really ugly. Up until now there was no question that it would be political suicide, much less morally wrong, to make massive numbers of unemployed, working and middle class workers, pay in order to make an ideological point. But with these incoherent tea partiers and nihilistic libertarians pulling the same kind of out sized influence the neocons did during the Great GWOT scare, this is what happens. We lose our moral consensus.

And bandwagoning on Digby is the Liberty Street blog:

This crisis, caused single handedly by the Republicans so their handlers can get obscenely rich is beyond the understanding of the Tea-Bag crowd. The Tea-Baggers are not bright enough to realize that they are being manipulated by people like Dick Armey and his ilk to allow the rich to get even richer.

The part the Tea-Baggers miss is the concept of social contract. That if we live as if we are all in this together, we can all do better.

And then, one more, Open Left has a post up titled, "The Principle Of Favoring Wealth Over Work."

It's kind of amazing that one GOP senator, exercising his power of parliamentary procedure to resist an unprincipled expansion of the Obama welfare state, is excoriated as Public Enemy #1 by the left.

And note that it's not just radical bloggers who've jumped on this "wealth versus work" meme. Top Democrats in Congress have sought to portray Jim Bunning as the Republican Beelzebub.

Yet, Senator Bunning's perhaps the most principled member of Congress right now. He deserves our thanks for pushing the legislature to live by its own rules. See the Wall Street Journal's editorial, "Jim Bunning's Finest Hour":

Throughout his Hall of Fame baseball career, Jim Bunning was famous for the brush back pitch: a fastball inside to a batter crowding the plate. Now Mr. Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky who is retiring after this year, is throwing a political brush back in the Senate on behalf of fiscal responsibility.

And all hell has broken loose. Mr. Bunning has dared to put a hold on a $10 billion spending bill to extend jobless insurance and fund transportation projects. Mr. Bunning says he won't yield until the Senate finds a way to pay for the new spending with cuts somewhere else in the $3.5 trillion budget. For this perfectly reasonable stance, Mr. Bunning has become the Beltway and media villain of the hour. We'd call it his finest hour.

Every time Washington wants to spend money, the Senate Majority Leader asks for "unanimous consent" to authorize the funding, and in the collegial Senate everyone falls in line. But when Harry Reid wanted consent last week for that $10 billion, Mr. Bunning broke the old-boy rules by shouting: "I object."

The faux indignation has been something to behold. "It is simply unfair for one Senator to attempt to hold the Senate hostage," said Senator Richard Durbin. "Unfair," cried Jay Rockefeller. The Obama Administration has attacked Mr. Bunning for playing "political games" and forcing a furlough of 2,000 government workers. (The horror!)

By the way, Democrats could end Mr. Bunning's stand by invoking cloture and getting the 60 votes they need to proceed. Mr. Reid won't do that because he thinks he's scoring points using Mr. Bunning to define Republicans as "obstructionists." So who's playing politics here?

Mr. Bunning is merely asking the Senate to live by the rules that President Obama said it should when he signed an executive order requiring "pay-as-you-go" budgeting. "Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else," he said, only three weeks ago. But instead of backing Mr. Bunning's stand that new spending must be "paid for," the White House is attacking him.

The real story here is that Mr. Bunning is exposing pay-go as a fraud. When Mr. Obama and Democrats want to spend money on their priorities, they waive the rule by declaring an emergency. They only enforce pay-go to block tax cuts. The Senate will soon follow with another $85 billion spending bill, and rest assured that too will violate pay-go rules.

There is ideology and there is truth. And in this debate, it's not difficult to see which side stands with the latter.

Front Page Exclusive Interview with Chuck DeVore

At FrontPage Magazine, "The Battle for California":

FPM: I’d like to start off with a local California issue. After the Muslim Student Union at the University of California at Irvine last month disrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, you sent a letter to school’s chancellor, Michael Drake, urging him to ban the MSU from campus. Why did you decide to get involved in the controversy over the MSU and why did you call for a ban on the group at the UCI campus?

DeVore: The MSU has been complaining that this is a controversy created by outsiders who are calling for their punishment. But I am not an outsider. I represent a district that’s home to UCI and I’ve been following this issue closely for quite some time.
For years, the MSU has been bringing in speakers – people like [Hamas and Hezbollah supporter] Malik Ali – who call for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews. Unfortunately, the school has long had a walking-on-eggshells policy when it comes to the MSU. For instance, it allows them to ban recording of their events, which of course prevents people from finding out about the kinds of things that are said at those events. In the past, if you tried to record something at an MSU event, their members would surround you, and they would get the campus officials to drag you away. UC Irvine is the only UC campus that allows the MSU to get away with this.

It’s different for conservative students. When the College Republicans and conservative students tried to show the Dutch cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2006, the MSU complained and the school initially tried to shut down the event because of threats of violence. At the time, I told Chancellor Drake, “If you shut down this event, in a few years time you’ll have the equivalent of Sharia law on campus.” Eventually, the administration issued a wishy-washy statement of support for free speech, saying that if the students went ahead with it the school wouldn’t shut them down.

The MSU, on the other hand, has repeatedly violated school policy – and gotten away with it. In 2007, the MSU packed a room with protestors when Daniel Pipes was giving a speech. I showed up for that event, not only because I’m interested in Pipes’s work, but because I knew there would be trouble. And there was. The MSU’s members had duct tape over their mouths and they said that they would not be silenced and tried to shut down the event. That was a violation of university policy.

Then, last May, the MSU hosted a fundraising event with George Galloway where they were videotaped passing around a hat for donations to Hamas. First, this is a violation of UCI policy about fundraising on campus. Second, this is a violation of federal law prohibiting raising money for groups on the State Department’s designated list of terrorist groups. It’s not a hard list to figure out and Hamas, as I recall, is on it.

My understanding of radical Islamic thought is that if you keep giving them ground they will keep on taking it. That’s what happened last month when the MSU tried to shut down a speech by [Israeli ambassador to the United States] Michael Oren. Before he could even get his speech launched, 11 of them, all members of the MSU, including its president, stand up and start yelling. Finally they were taken away and arrested. This comes at the end of a very long string of abuses.

So this is something we need to deal with. The MSU at UCI is the most virulent and the most militant of the Islamist groups on American campuses today.

FPM: Why do you think UCI has not dealt with it? More generally, surveying the modern university scene, you could make a compelling case that universities have been too-tolerant of the MSU and kindred groups. What does that say about the current state of academia?

DeVore: It’s not just an issue of tolerance. It’s politically correct behavior that you find in some – not all – academic departments, especially in the social sciences. It’s a vision of the world in which America and Israel are cast as imperialist powers, where Zionism is racism, and where the MSU is a member of a noble, persecuted minority that deserves support, and even encouragement, for standing up to these evils. What the MSU has in common with these academics is that they both see the world through the same lens.

The rest is here.

California March 4th Protests: 'Berkeley Pre-Game Communiqué'

At the Marxist In These Times, "Calif. Unions Step Up Opposition to Public Education Gutting."

Students and workers in California’s public schools—K-12 and higher education—will protest against deep budget cuts on Thursday, March 4.

“We have never before witnessed this much participation and outrage about the dismal state of education on our state campuses and in our public schools,” says Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association (CFA), a labor union which represents a total of 23,000 tenured and tenure-track instructional faculty, lecturers, librarians, coaches and counselors in the 23-campus California State University. “The call for March 4 protests has hit a nerve. It’s an historic moment.”

In California and across the U.S., tax revenues have slowed sharply after the housing market crash. K-12 spending cuts of $18 billion in the past two years have closed California schools and forced local districts to fire employees. With a $20 billion state budget deficit now, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing education cuts of $2.5 billion, while vowing to protect California’s public school students.

“Our message is simple: legislators must protect and expand the budget for public education with adequate funding,” said Kevin Wehr, a sociology professor at Sacramento State University and CFA campus president.

RTWT. My union, CTA, is cited.

Plus, at the Sacramento Bee, "Five UC Students Protesting Budget Cuts Are Arrested at Capitol."

And get this: The revolution goes mainstream at Huffington Post, "California Student Strike: Send Us Your Videos & Photos."

RELATED: Occupy California, "UCB Occupied!"

'American Stories' at LACMA

I don't care for the cultural context of Christopher Knight's review (I don't make his connections), although the show is a smash. See, "Art review: 'American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915' at LACMA":

What is an American? Today, as the 20th century -- the so-called "American Century" -- recedes in memory, the question can seem immodest or even grandiose. If we don't know now, after decades wielding almost unimaginable superpower status around the globe, will we ever?

Still, there's another way to look at it. The question arises anew because of the conflicted place in which the United States finds itself today.

With the national nervous breakdown unleashed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- trauma Americans have collectively been unable to resolve -- our identity remains a shambles. The uncertainty had been building for at least 30 years. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib and AIG, once-settled matters of morality now appear unrecognizable.

A new exhibition of American paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seems prompted by this deep unease. The show turns to history -- to the era when the question of what an American might be was still brand new and very much up for grabs.

"American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915" centers on 19th century art. Lots of first-rate paintings keep company with dreadful Victorian morality plays. George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale (father and son) and others stand out.

Mostly it regards the evolution of genre paintings, which show men and women at work and leisure, engaged in public and private life. A few portraits also make an appearance. They include Copley's classic 1768 depiction of Paul Revere, silversmith and Revolutionary War hero, in shirtsleeves. His chin is contemplatively held in his right hand, a handsomely crafted silver teapot cradled in his left.

The teapot of course nods toward the critical role of tea in the New World's economy. A year before, Britain's Parliament fiddled with the tea tax; results were devastating for colonists. (Witness Revere's grim, shadowed face.) The subsequent Boston Tea Party was an insurrection against a corporate stranglehold on trade, held by the British East India Company working with George III. Copley's brilliant image fuses head and hand as tools for thought, labor and moral action. The portrait describes a person, but it places him in the context of an epic story.

The painting -- as sleek and elegantly crafted as Revere's light-reflective silver -- puts artists in that developing story too. Copley is as much an agent of thought, labor and action as Revere is, and his work speaks to the present as much as to history.

The painting occupies pride of place as the first picture encountered in the show. Across from it is Copley's monumental -- and morally ambiguous -- "Watson and the Shark," showing a notorious British businessman who, in his youth, fell overboard from a merchant marine ship and was nearly eaten by an enormous shark. With the theatrical flourish of Grand Manner style, Copley painted this thrashing melodrama of heroic rescue in London.

I recently posted "Watson and the Shark." See, "American Stories."

The show runs through May, so look forward to my own mini-review here sometime in the next few weeks. See, LACMA, "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915.

IMAGE CREDIT: "Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, c.1768–70," via Wikimedia Commons.

Mainstreaming Pedophilia?

Nope, sorry. Just can't go with this line of thinking, at Ordinary Gentlemen, "Desire and Deviance":

The brief legal justification McArdle offers is why there isn’t a slippery-slope argument to be made here. We are fairly sure as a society, or so at least we tell ourselves, that consent is the operative moral variable in sexual relations, and since the consent of children is understood to be deficient, child pornography is always something akin to rape. So, I don’t think another half-century will bring about the normalization of child pornography, though there have been changes in sexual mores equally strange and sudden in the past. I’m more interested in the way the evolution of views about sexuality can repeat itself. McArdle’s posts, along with the Dan Savage letter she links to, represent the second step in the process of recognizing people who have certain desires as constituting a group. With the caveat that I haven’t undertaken a Foucault-like cultural history of homosexuality, from a survey of medical texts and pre-war analogues to gay rights movements it seems to me that this process occurred in the United States sometime around the middle of the last century with regard to homsexuality.

Of course homosexuality in the sense of same-sex sexual acts has been around at least since Homer and probably much longer, but the notion that there is a class of people who experience permanent desire for members of the opposite sex in a manner analogous to the ordinary kind of love and desire between men and women is relatively recent, even if such people may have always existed (not that the forms of heterosexual attraction are stable throughout time and place; C.S. Lewis once wrote that the idea of romantic love was invented by a group of poets living in 12th-century France, and pace Ovid, I almost believe him). Specifically, while the idea of homosexuality has its origins in the Mollies of the 18th century and the Dandies of the 19th, it required the post-war mania for cataloging and extirpating deviancy by rational-technical means to sunder those terms from broader ideas about decadence, aestheticism, Continentalism and Catholicism, which were occasionally unified and apotheosized in infamous figures like Huysmans. Part of this cataloging and extirpation process was the identification of homosexuals as a sub-set of the population who were like other people except with respect to this single pathology. This made its way into general opinion in odd, quasi-medical ways, but the general sentiment directed towards this newly invented population, I gather, was not unlike the way we feel about pedophiles today: a covert, unspeakable menace threatening our children in the midst of us.

Read the whole thing for context and links.

Call me a "wingnut," or something, but for the life of me, I simply can't make the leap from the increasing social acceptance of homosexuals to the increased social acceptance of pedophiles, practicing criminals or not. (Gee, never did molest a kid, so I guess it's okay if he lusts after 'em all the time -- don't want to judge folks, you know?)

Nope. Just. Can't. Do. It.

And not only that, the analysis ain't so hot either. Name-dropping verbosity, mostly, with some sickening postmodernism thrown in.

E.D Kain's not quite that far gone yet, but he's working on it!

Ta-Nehisi Coates Under the Bus!

The Atlantic online has a new web design. And not surprisingly, the publishers decided to make Andrew Sullivan's blog a showcase attraction, and segregated relegated the less influential/popular blogs to the sidelines, literally. The stable of bloggers have their posts in a format some are called "archiving," so that they're posting updates to a blog that doesn't look at all like a blog. Ta-Nehisi Coates took it pretty hard. He didn't really want to fully express his frustration over the discrimination change, so he posted a forthright "comment" from a reader:

The Atlantic clearly recognized that Andrews' Daily Dish has a branded identity of its own that was well worth preserving. Click on his name, and you wind up on his page. It's constructed with the same design language, but bears his own clear imprint. And his posts display the same way they always have, requiring jumps only when they extend beyond a few paragraphs.

TNC's blog, on the other hand, has essentially been spiked. Or, more accurately, rolled into the amorphous category of 'culture.' I'm not even sure what 'culture' means, other than that it's an incredibly poor way to pigeonhole TNC's creative output. This blog has covered politics, policy, culture, art, and entertainment with verve and passion, and a huge element of what keeps me coming back to it is that eclecticism. It's the musings of a creative and fascinating individual, not the aggregated output of a group of staffers assigned to similar beats.

I like what TNC does enough that I'll probably give this a shot. But I'm disgusted with The Atlantic for taking away his blog, and leaving him with nothing more than what you get when - for example - you click the name of a journalist on a newspaper's website. It's just a list of his recent offerings, with single-sentence links. That's not a blog. It's an archive search function. It's online journalism with tagging.

If The Atlantic is too dumb to realize what an immensely valuable asset they have in TNC, then that's their problem. But it seems singularly self-defeating to me to take a distinctive individual voice who has built in remarkably short time a passionately devoted following, and subsume his work within a broader category. If they want to cross-post his entries within the 'culture' section of the webpage, great. But they should also cross-post selected entries within 'politics' or 'food' or other appropriate categories. And it should preserve a single page, in classic blog-like format, for the thousands and thousands of readers for whom TNC is the attractive brand that confers legitimacy upon The Atlantic, and not the other way 'round.

Good thing the dude's going with "TNC" 'cuz Ta-Nehisi gets riled if you misspell his ethno-separatist identity marker name.

And frankly, Ta-Nehisi should just bail if he's got complaints, or Atlantic should throw him under the bus.

And on that note, Jeffery Goldberg's not complaining, but of course, he's not an identity-grievance monger. (Andrew Sullivan is, but you'll have to go through National Review, "Andrew Sullivan vs. His Website's Redesign"; and see Goldberg's reply, "Responding to Andrew's Atlantic Anger-Blogging.")

Chile, Three Days Later

At the Big Picture, "Chile, Three Days Later":

Chilean firemen recover a body found in debris washed up by waves generated by a major earthquake at the epicenter in Curanipe February 28, 2010. (REUTERS/Victor Ruiz Caballero)

And at Los Angeles Times, "Chile Sends Army Into Post-Quake Chaos."

Who Are the al Qaeda Seven?

From Liz Cheney's outfit, "Keep America Safe: Who Are The Al Qaeda Seven?":

The administration's not happy, natch. From Politico, "Liz Cheney Group Accused of McCarthyism."

Lots more good stuff at the homepage.

Women and Children First?

At the Los Angeles Times, "Women and Children First? Maybe":

Whether it is "Women and children first" or "Every man for himself" in a shipwreck may depend on how long it takes the ship to sink, researchers said Monday.

When the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, it sank in 18 minutes and the bulk of survivors were young men and women who responded immediately to their powerful survival instincts.

But when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912, it took three hours to go down, allowing time for more civilized instincts to take control. -- and the bulk of the survivors were women, children and people with young children.

Economist Benno Torgler of the Queensland University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues studied the two sinkings in order to explore the economic theory that people generally behave in a rational and selfish manner. The two tragedies provided a "natural experiment" for testing the idea, because the passengers on the two ships were quite similar in terms of gender and wealth.

The primary difference was how long it took the ships to sink.

Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers found that, on the Titanic, children had a 14.8% higher probability of surviving than a man, a person accompanying a child had a 19.6% higher probability and women had more than a 50% higher probability.

On the Lusitania, in contrast, fit young men and women were the most likely to make it into the lifeboats.

Social class was also important. On the Titanic, first-class passengers were about 44% more likely to survive, while on the Lusitania, passengers from steerage were more likely to emerge safely.

The authors considered other possible complicating factors, but concluded that the most likely reason for the differences was the amount of time passengers had to effect escape.

They suggested that when people have little time to react, gut instincts may rule. When more time is available, social influences play a bigger role.

More at the link.

This is extremely interesting.

In my World Politics course every fall, for the module on the global environment, I use a mini-case study focusing on "lifeboat ethics." It's a version of the "tragedy of the commons," which in turn is a metaphor for "global pool resources." How much can each individual actor (shepherd) consume (graze) without overloading the commons. Each actor (shepherd) has a rational incentive to consume (graze) as much as he wants. But if each actor (shepherd) pursues his narrow self-interest, the common pastureland with be depleted and all actors (shepherds) will face ruin.

In the case of lifeboats, from Dan Caldwell's, World Politics and You, the discussion begins with tourists taking a grand voyage on an ocean cruise liner:

As luck -- of the bad variety -- would have it, your ship runs into an iceberg (like the Titanic) and begins to sink." Not to worry; you proceed to your preassigned evacuation area. As the ship begins to take on water and begins to sink, the captain orders everyone to abandon ship. A panic ensues; a number of frantic passengers jump into the water, and several lifeboats cannot be released from their cleats and cannot be lowered into the water.

You are fortunate to be on one of the functional lifeboats. Your boat is lowered into the water, and it is immediately surrounded by a number of the passengers who have jumped into the water. The officer on your boat announces that the lifeboat can accommodate an absolute maximum of 60 passengers; anymore will cause the boat to capsize. You and the other passengers are confronted with several excruciating questions:

* There are ten available places left in your boat. How should you decide which passengers are allowed into your boat: the first ten to board it? Children, old people, the sick?

* What about the people in the water? Would you allow them to climb over the sides of the boat? Would you prevent, by force if necessary, more than ten coming on board?

* Would your thinking about these questions be different if you were one of those in the water rather than in the lifeboat?

* To what extent is this metaphor applicable to contemporary world politics?

The answer, of course, is that the metaphor is perfectly applicable to contemporary world politics, because we can conceive of the earth as a vessel with a finite carrying capacity (as a theoretical assumption, not a fact). Those in the "lifeboat" are the developed nations of the advanced industrialized north. What incentive do they have to help the less developed nations of the south? According to the logic of the Queensland University study cited at the Times, there's little incentive in the short term for states to abandon their rational self-interest (cut economic production, reduce consumption) to help the nations of the south through more globally sustainable policies. (Think Copenhagen.) But perhaps over the long term, if states had more time to "escape" the tragedy of the global commons, and cost-efficient technologies, new resources, etc., became available, advanced nations would agree to binding limitations on emissions, and hence production and potential living standards.

I'd have to see the Queensland study, as well as the full economic literature on the global commons, but my sense is that rational self-interest is not likely to give way to "women and children first" very soon. States, like people, act on the basis of self-interested, rational cost-benefit calculations. If the global commons is indeed finite, it's more likely we'd have a Hobbesian war of all against all than a massive kumbaya moment across the globe.

Leftists don't get this ... or they do, but push their totalitarian agenda anyway, for the sake of pure power.

FOOTNOTE: As you'll recognize at the video, that's Joseph Bruce Ismay in the 1997 film Titanic. Ismay's character is historically accurate -- he really did hop on a lifeboat before women and children. Ismay was subject to international condemnation upon his return to society after the Titanic catastrophe. In the film, he's simply a coward. But he acted rationally, and saved his own life. Only God knows the real circumstances of the moment, and God forbid any of us would have been in the same, er, boat.

Tenured Faculty Layoffs?

Obviously a touchy subject for the fat unions and their anarcho-communist allies. At Inside Higher Ed, "Layoffs Without 'Financial Exigency'":

One of the ultimate protections of being a tenured faculty member, historically, has been being immune from layoff in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Under policies issued by the American Association of University Professors and largely accepted by higher education leaders, only institutions that declare "financial exigency" -- a state so dire that it "threatens the survival of the institution as a whole" -- can eliminate the jobs of tenured faculty members.

Given the strict criteria on when an institution can declare exigency, and the obviously unwelcome scrutiny such a declaration would bring about, institutions have hesitated to invoke that status. As a result, while institutions eliminate adjunct positions all the time, the tenured faculty member has been protected.

But maybe not so much anymore. In a series of recent actions, colleges appear to be ignoring the exigency requirement either when eliminating tenured jobs or considering the possibility of doing so. Administrators defend their moves as necessary to manage institutions in tight financial times, but faculty leaders see an erosion of a key right.

Consider these developments ...

There's a list of institutions moving in that direction, at the link.

Only public sector employees enjoy this much economic and workplace protection -- all on the taxpayers' dime. And I know, I'm a professor. But cost-rationalization has to start someplace, and I don't see unions as realistic in burden-sharing in hard times.

I'll have more on these issues, especially given California's big protests scheduled for this week.

'Bud House'

At the Los Angeles Times, "Budweiser Casting 'Bud House,' Web Reality Show for World Cup Fans":

In celebration of the 2010 World Cup, Budweiser is casting "Bud House," a Web-based reality show that will feature a house full of "passionate" soccer fans -- one from each of the 32 qualifying countries -- and, very likely, beer.

Not since the "Jerry Springer Show" has there been a better recipe for a fistfight.

The project is looking for both male and female soccer fans to live together under the watchful eye of the Internet audience. Budweiser has promised "luxurious accommodations, thrilling excursions," and a once-in-a-lifetime chance for soccer fans. Thousands have apparently submitted applications, and whoever makes the cut will get flown to the actual Bud House in Capetown, South Africa, home of the 2010 World Cup.

Budweiser has enlisted the help of the Feed Company, the online buzz firm that has helped light the fuse on viral spots such as "Guy Backflips into Jeans."

Mostly, I just liked the video: