KC Johnson has begun to wind down his outstanding Durham in Wonderland blog, which details the infamous Duke “rape” case, along with the PC prejudice and general bad faith of various “activist” faculty members. Those with an interest in tenured ideologues and hokum merchants will find plenty to entertain, and it’s worth casting an eye over this table, which prompts the following comment from a DIW reader:

“Looking at the departmental affiliations of the good guys it’s hard not to conclude that the widest gulf on campus is not the one separating black and white or the one separating men and women, but the one separating the quantitative, fact-based disciplines from what the humanities have deteriorated into. Whether universities survive as useful institutions will depend on whether the anti-rationalists can be exorcised.”

I’m not exactly sure how the culprits (and the cultural environment in which they flourish) might be “exorcised”, so I guess large swathes of academia will continue to decline, in terms of both substance and reputation. Or perhaps there will come a point at which drastic measures have to be taken in order to save the institution from the accumulation of parasites on its back. Maybe parents will no longer be willing to pay $40,000 a year for their children to be misled and stupefied at the hands of, say, Wahneema Lubiano, who labels herself a “post-structuralist teacher-critic leftist” and who sees no reason to distinguish between her role in the classroom and her bizarre political “activism”.

Related. And. (H/T. The Thin Man.)

Via Atom Films, here’s Jamin Winans’ short film, Spin.

More. And. Also.

Bloxorz. One block, one hole, 33 levels. // Via Infosthetics, the science of boomerangs. // The secret of invisibility. “Walk unseen among people or crowds.” $19.95 // 1” cube wooden speakers. 1.5 Watts. // Mirin Dajo, human pincushion. (1947) More. // Di-positronium and the gamma ray annihilation laser. More. // Make your own Moon surface. Some explosives required. (H/T, Coudal.) // Washing hair in zero gravity. // Guess who. (H/T, Artblog.) // Via Denis Dutton, astronomy and empire. A mutual history. (mp3) // Jeff Goldstein on “negotiating” with al-Qaeda. Live and let live meets live as we say. // Ehsan Jami and the Committee of Ex-Muslims. “We no longer tolerate the intolerance of Islam.” Jami says Muslims should be free to leave Islam without being killed. Death threats ensue. More. // Abrogation in Islam. Mecca versus Medina; how the monstrous is made legitimate. // The power of prayer. // The power of Hubble. (H/T, Stephen Hicks.) // TV’s best (and most improbable) science fiction makeover. Much better than this old tosh. // On pregnancy payouts. // 1939 New York World’s Fair. Adverts, postcards, visions of tomorrow. // The Castle House Tower. Eco-building chic. More. // Tokyo skyline time-lapse. 35 years in 20 seconds. (H/T, AntiCitizenOne.) // Case Study: LSD Woman talks to protesting hotdog. Things turn ugly. (1969) // Via The Thin Man, Doris takes a different kind of trip.

Here’s footage of British troops unwittingly testing LSD, circa 1953/54. The experiments were supposedly to determine the drug’s value as a “non-lethal incapacitating weapon.” Hilarity ensues. One soldier attempts to feed the birds by climbing a tree. “The efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired.”

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Related. And.

Via DSTPFW, here’s Christopher Hitchens on Tariq Ramadan and the mainstreaming of Islamic imperialism.

“French author Caroline Fourest has made an intensive study of Ramadan’s discrepant appearances in Europe and in the Muslim world, and has concluded that he speaks with a forked tongue and deliberately gives different impressions to different audiences. Having listened to him, I would say that the problem is not quite that. He possesses a command of postmodern and sociological jargon (of the sort that you may easily recognize by its repetitive use of the terms space and discourse to delineate the arena of thinkable debate), and he has a smooth way with euphemism.

Thus, he tells Egyptian television that the destruction of the Israeli state is for the moment ‘impossible’ and in Mantua described the idea of stoning adulterous women as ‘unimplementable’. This is something less than a full condemnation, but he is quick to say that simple condemnation of such things would reduce his own ‘credibility’ in the eyes of a Muslim audience that, or so he claims, he wants to modernize by stealth.”

More on Mr Ramadan’s “discrepant” pronouncements, and those who squint at him optimistically, here.