Here’s a thing.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused the United States of causing the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, which killed possibly 200,000 people. Chavez believes the U.S. was testing a tectonic weapon to produce eco-type devastations.

Blimey. One wonders how this revelation will go down among the Great Man’s admirers here in the UK.

But I’m confused. I thought only “The Jews” had such diabolical technology. As revealed in December 2007 when Hamas MP Ahmad Abu Halabiya informed Al-Aqsa TV that,

It is not impossible for the Jews to generate an artificial earthquake… in order to accomplish their goal of destroying the foundations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Needless to say, The Guild of Evil™ has been conducting research of its own with this mobile apparatus.

Update: Not what it seems, it seems.

Heather Mac Donald on juvenile violence and absent fathers. (Mac Donald discusses the issue further here. The statistics are extraordinary.)

The official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there. A fleeting reference to “parental” responsibility for children is allowed, before the speaker quickly moves on to society’s more important role. […] Press coverage of teen shootings may mention a participant’s mother, but the shooter and victim may as well be the product of a virgin birth, for all the media’s curiosity about where their fathers are. I asked John Paul Jones of Obama’s old Alinskyite outfit, the Developing Communities Project, if anyone ever tries to track down the father of a teen accused of a shooting. The question threw him. “Does anyone ever ask: ‘Where are the fathers?’” he paraphrased me. A brief silence. “That’s a good point.”

Victor Davis Hanson on affirmative action.

The concept was noble, but now antiquated and mostly absurd. It requires the logic of the Old Confederacy to determine racial purity among the intermarried citizenry. Jet-black Punjabis get no preferences. Light-skinned Mexican-Americans of the fourth-generation claim privilege. Poor whites from Tulare don’t rank. The children of black dentists do. I see very little logic here.

And Darleen Click on why the humanities stay so leftist.

Anyone weighing their career options doesn’t just look at their own interests and strengths, they also assess their chances in that particular career based on the people who are already there. If a non-leftist and/or religious student is observing, daily, the clannish, hyper-political intolerance of the people in charge of “educating” him/her, s/he might be hesitant to pursue a career in academia where their success is dependent on people already hostile to them.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Time for another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. Or rather the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer, where Kevin McKenna attempts to convince readers that a one-size-fits-all comprehensive education is all that any young person could possibly want. Indeed, should Mr McKenna get his way, it’s all they’d be permitted to have:

Savour that for a moment. Ponder the big, generous heart behind those sentiments. It offends Mr McKenna that private education should be allowed to exist. How dare some parents want the best for their children when the best is something not everyone can have, or indeed benefit from? Notice that smell? It’s the funk of socialist arrogance and nasty urges to control.

By Mr McKenna’s reckoning, it would be less iniquitous to deny parents the right to use their own money to benefit their own offspring in a private and legal transaction of their own choosing. According to this moral calculus, parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked. And so they should be stopped.

Sadly, the details of how private education would no longer be permitted remain mysterious. Would parents daring to venture outside the state sector be imprisoned or merely fined? Would private education become a black market phenomenon? Nor is it clear whether these totalitarian urges would extend to after-hours tuition, home coaching or the punctual doing of homework.

However, McKenna does convey to us the full horror of the private schooling he “narrowly escaped”:

Truly the stuff of nightmares, I think you’ll agree.

But let me share with you a flavour of my own, more recent comprehensive education at a school where aspiration was less common than graffiti and no Sebastians dare set foot. The school blazers weren’t green or particularly lovely, but they were a routine target of vandalism and theft, along with any other belongings of small but discernible value. My other half, whose state education was similar to my own, has shared a number of stories in which students who were not called Sebastian or Julia would attack each other’s uniforms with razor blades. It was quite the thing, apparently.

While Sebastians were in short supply at my local comprehensive, there were plenty of teachers whose egalitarian leanings were at least as pronounced as those of Kevin McKenna, resulting in a conviction that the teaching of grammar was insufficiently progressive and therefore superfluous. (This ideological omission made the learning of German and French rather challenging, especially when confronted with alien things called subordinate clauses.) I’ve previously mentioned the unusual skills I developed during my secondary education, including some proficiency in throwing chairs in order to deter random lunchtime assaults. And I recently learned that one of the school’s two main buildings had been burned to the ground, possibly by a disaffected student.

Heather Mac Donald on theories of crime.

If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?

KC Johnson on academic groupthink. 

Essay after essay in the NEA’s annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.

Candace de Russy on Sociology 101.

It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most “educated” are systematically being taught to loathe it.

Greg Lukianoff on campus censorship and learned intolerance.

Until 2007 Western Michigan University’s harassment policy banned “sexism,” which it defined as “the perception and treatment of any person, not as an individual, but as a member of a category based on sex.” I am unfamiliar with any other attempt by a public institution to ban a perception, let alone perceiving that a person is a man or woman. Even public restrooms violate this rule. […] These codes not only chill free expression by warning students of serious consequences for controversial speech — or even normal, everyday speech — but they also systematically miseducate kids to believe that free speech goes only as far as the most sensitive person in the room can handle.

And it’s worth bearing in mind that “sensitive” may actually mean passive-aggressive or dishonest, or the person with the weakest argument. 

College students are placed in an unenviable position. They are constantly urged to argue, debate, discuss, question, and analyse the most important issues of the day, but they also often know stories of other students who were punished for taking the “wrong side” of an argument. […] When students come to believe that censoring rival points of view is not only permissible but laudable, the potential damage goes far beyond campus. Our colleges and universities produce our scientists, our business leaders, our lawyers, and our legislators. The habits formed in college inevitably seep into the other major social institutions.

As usual, feel free to add your own.

Darleen Click has compiled reactions to Avatar by self-appointed representatives of Designated Victim Groups. Needless to say, the levels of unrealism and doctrinal turgidity are quite hazardous.

There’s a bit of this:

This synopsis contains profoundly ableist language in the way it describes the protagonist Jake as “confined to a wheelchair.” I don’t use a wheelchair; nevertheless, I was very offended when I read that. We’ve been trying to eradicate terms like “confined to a wheelchair” for a while now, and to see this demonstration of ignorance on such a large scale, since it is mainstream, is distressing. […] It’s a long-held stereotype (and still exists today) that disability is unnatural in people and so must be fixed or cured. 

And this, from a breezy sermon titled Gender Normativity and Imperial Domination in Avatar:

I’d like to explain that I do not believe that binary gender is natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans, or even as animals. […] I have too many female friends with penises to put all my faith in biological determinism, no matter what planet I’m on.

Update, via the comments:

Self-preoccupation is essential to the kind of tribalism seen above, along with an urge to pathologise the prosaic. If the prosaic can be made to sound oppressive or inauthentic, it makes those who announce themselves as nonconformist sound much braver and more interesting than they actually are (if only to themselves and those similarly disposed). For instance, the clownish Amanda Marcotte rails against any number of “normativities,” all of which she seeks to pathologise. It isn’t enough that she doesn’t feel an urge to become a parent. She has to claim that those who do wish to become parents don’t know their own minds and are dupes of some hegemonic power. In much the same way, the preference for an intact and functional body is depicted as both a parochial social construct and a moral failing. And likewise, the belief that “binary gender” is not “natural or fundamental to our biological existence as humans” is based on an occasional malfunction of the very biological processes that are imagined not to exist.

But this is what gorging on identity politics does – it fosters unrealism and makes dishonesty routine. Often there’s a creep of small dishonesties. For instance, the disabled feminists article grumbles about the Avatar synopsis, which refers to the film’s protagonist as “confined to a wheelchair.” The author complains, “Non-disabled people may think… referring to someone who uses a wheelchair as ‘confined to a wheelchair’ is okay – but of course, it’s really not — ‘wheelchair user,’ for instance, is more acceptable.” However, this means avoiding a perfectly legitimate and accurate term – Jake is confined to a wheelchair; that’s sort of the point, dramatically. But fluffier, more sensitive terms are apparently now required. “Wheelchair user” could of course mean that Jake only uses a wheelchair occasionally – say, when walking leaves him fatigued. Which is deliberately imprecise and hardly the stuff of interplanetary drama.

Sentiments of this kind may be dishonest – indeed bizarre – but they are surprisingly common. Not long ago on Radio 4, a legless and rather prickly “activist” insisted that it was “oppressive” to view the loss of a person’s legs as in any way regrettable. Regarding this loss as something negative was apparently “ableist,” “ignorant” and offensive. This claim was repeated several times, emphatically. At one point the activist declared that given a chance to walk again he would refuse, such was his “pride” in having lost a third of his body. Anger had been displaced from the obvious grievance – the traumatic loss of one’s legs – to the supposed “injustice” of regarding limb loss as a dismaying or terrifying state of affairs. As a coping mechanism, it wasn’t entirely honest. Or, it seems, successful.

(h/t, Dicentra.)

Stuart Taylor takes another look at Duke University, where its infamous far left faculty has dug in even deeper.

Duke’s rules define sexual misconduct so broadly and vaguely as to include any sexual activity without explicit “verbal or nonverbal” consent, which must be so “clear” as to dispel “real or perceived power differentials between individuals [that] may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion.” The disciplinary rules deny the accused any right to have an attorney at the hearing panel or to confront his accuser. The rules also give her – but not him – the right to be treated with “sensitivity”; to make opening and closing statements; and to receive copies of investigative documents.

Jeff Goldstein notes why Duke’s infestation will persist. 

The fact is, the people who make up these activist identity groups need their “isms.” And because fighting a particular “ism” is what gives them their identity to begin with, they cannot allow the “ism” ever to be stamped out without, in effect, obviating their own identities.

As Jeff, myself and others have pointed out, the relevance and power of identity politics advocates requires a cultivation of grievance among those ostensibly being championed. The grievance narrative must never be allowed to go away, whatever the actual situation, since grievance (or professed grievance) is the principal source of leverage, influence and funding. Even if this entails exaggerating minor slights or distorting statistics, or framing the issue so tendentiously that almost any kind of dissent can be deemed oppressive and malign. See, for instance, the ludicrous campus rape claims of Barbara Barnett, formerly of Duke, or the reactions of many feminists to factual correction by Christina Hoff Sommers, or the outrageous treatment of Keith John Sampson and Thomas Thibeault.

And Ophelia Benson notes some routine moral flummery at the BBC.

It had to report on this al-Shabab guy trying to kill Kurt Westergaard so therefore it had to make sure you didn’t get the wrong idea and think it, the BBC, didn’t think Kurt Westergaard deserved it, at least a little bit.

Indeed. Yesterday morning, the BBC’s Today programme performed much the same manoeuvre, suggesting the attempt to murder the 75-year-old cartoonist with an axe showed the strength of “feeling” on the issue and the “anger that still exists over what he did.” A more realistic response might stress instead a psychotic sense of vanity and barbarous presumption – one that validates the point of Westergaard’s cartoon.

Feel free to share your own items of interest.

Bearing in mind the recent seasonal gorging, here’s another Classic Sentence from the Guardian. This time courtesy of Neel Mukherjee and his deep ruminations on vegetarianism.

It slowly dawned on me that there were no rational, intellectual or moral arguments to be made for carnivorousness.

Heavens, he’s bold. There simply isn’t a good reason to partake of the flesh. None whatsoever. I do hope there’s a devastating argument to support such a claim.

The meat-eaters had always already lost. This is not the place to rehearse all those arguments.

Ah. Not the place. Isn’t it wonderful when arguments can be won entirely in your own head, with none of that messy business with evidence, logic and stuff you hadn’t thought of? Mr Mukherjee does, however, indulge us with one attempt at reasoning:

Far more convincing for me than all kinds of shocking exposés of the meat industry and the way a piece of steak makes it way on to our plates… was the unimpeachable moral argument against speciesism: because we are the most powerful animals in the animal kingdom, because all animals are at our mercy and we can choose to do whatever we want with them, it is our moral duty not to decimate, factory farm and eat them. It is an argument of such majesty and generosity that its force is almost emotional.

Note the invention of an entirely new prejudice for those so inclined to feel guilty about – speciesism. Note too the sly conflation of meat eating with factory farming and decimation. This “unimpeachable moral argument” could of course be expressed a little less tendentiously,

Because we can eat animals it’s our duty not to.

But then – amazingly – it loses much of its persuasive force. To say nothing of its majesty.

Marcus Winters on teachers’ unions versus educational standards. 

The premise underlying the policies favoured by the teachers’ unions, which govern so much of the relationship between public schools and teachers, is that all teachers are uniformly effective. Once we can objectively distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, the system of uncritically granted tenure, a single salary schedule based on experience and credentials, and school placements based on seniority become untenable. The unions don’t want information about their members’ effectiveness to be available, let alone put to practical use.

TM Lutas on scientific scandals past and present.

So without any conspiracy we seem to be betting trillions on science that does not adequately coordinate to prevent control data from entering real data sets, has practices in the discipline that are inadequate to guard against undue weight, and is taking large chunks of its data from weather stations whose error bars far exceed the global warming signal we’re all supposed to be worried about. At this point a finding of “no conspiracy” would not reassure me. It should not reassure us at all.

Simon Scowl on James Cameron and his Avatar.

James “King of the World” Cameron is lecturing you about your unearned sense of entitlement. Isn’t that cute? […] Why is it okay for James Cameron to devote whole rooms full of energy-sucking computers – and the Red Bull-sucking nerds in front of them – to creating photorealistic cat people, but I get a lecture when I leave my cell phone charger plugged in? […] It’s not enough to be rich and famous if you’re not somehow “relevant.” Whether it’s Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: “Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants.”

Feel free to share your own items of interest.

Cuban television sets photographed by Simone Lueck.  

Readers will most likely be aware that the Guardian has quite a lot to say about the evils of high pay and rewarding failure. Demands for a “maximum wage” are aired at regular intervals, usually in articles denouncing executive “pigs” and “private sector kleptocracy.” For instance, Polly “two villas” Toynbee can be counted on to gasp in well-rehearsed horror at “fat cats” and the “danger of stratospheric pay.” Scarcely a week passes without our favourite bejewelled socialist railing against “the unjust rewards of the rich,” by which she means, “the 1.5% who earn over £100,000.” These are the “extravagant earners” who “feel profoundly entitled to take what they like in salaries” and “monster bonuses,” all while being “unashamed” and “untouched by public disgust or a sense of propriety in the face of so many losing their livelihoods.”

Despite the protestations of umbrage and disgust, this well-heeled descendant of the Earl of Carlisle somehow finds the strength to cope with being quite rich herself. Toynbee’s Guardian salary, for years a subject of speculation, was eventually revealed as £106,000 – excluding royalties, advances, media fees, etc. Presumably Polly feels her own financial rewards are not at all “extravagant” or “unjust,” or a likely cause of public outrage. It seems, then, that Ms Toynbee only dislikes the wrong kind of rich people, which is to say rich people whose politics and backgrounds may differ from her own.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that 180 journalists and advertising staff will soon be made redundant at the Guardian: 

The newspapers have been in financial turmoil since the Guardian’s editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger, decided to move the papers from broadsheet to the current medium-sized Berliner format in 2005. The move involved spending £80m on new presses, but in the four years since then, the Guardian has lost almost a fifth of its readers, with sales slumping from 380,000 to 311,000. In August GMG reported that it had lost £89.8m… The company’s financial position has become so precarious that it went to the very brink of closing down the 200-year-old Observer earlier this year.

Despite the losses, Mr Rusbridger received an 11% pay rise last year to £445,000.

That would be the same Mr Rusbridger whose egalitarian credentials are affirmed by owning only two houses and just the one £30,000 grand piano. And the same Mr Rusbridger who, when asked if he was embarrassed by his 2007 salary of £350,000 and the previous year’s bonus of £170,000, said, 

I didn’t ask for the money.

Which of course makes all the difference.