Kafka's The Trial Meets Orwell's 1984

Kafka's The Trial Meets Orwell's 1984

From the April 11, 2010 Daily Mail:

A medical technician killed himself after being suspended from work after someone complained that he made a politically-incorrect joke about a black friend.

Roy Amor, 61, who was devastated at the prospect of losing his job making prosthetics, shot himself in the head outside his house.

He was facing a disciplinary investigation after suggesting to the black colleague that he ‘better hide’ when they noticed immigration officers outside their clinic.

It is understood that the man was a close friend of Mr Amor and was not offended. However, it was overheard by someone else who lodged a formal complaint.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265065/Man-kills-row-work-non-PC-joke.html#ixzz0l8GHBxXA

I remember reading several years ago that some police departments in Britain were beginning to send undercover officers into bars to listen for racially derogatory remarks.  No, not showing up to deal with racists committing violent acts, or conspiring to commit racially-motivated crimes--but simply idiots saying the sort of obnoxious stuff that reflects poorly on the speaker.  I hope the liberals involved in this feel nice and warm about driving this guy over the edge.

Yet Another Reason San Francisco Should Be Expelled From the Union

Yet Another Reason San Francisco Should Be Expelled From the Union

This is something so awful that if a novelist wrote it, you would put the book down in disgust, because it would be so unbelievable. From the June 22, 2009 Los Angeles Times:

San Francisco D.A.'s program trained illegal immigrants for jobs they couldn't legally hold

As she runs for state attorney general, prosecutor Kamala Harris faces questions over a program that trained illegal immigrant drug felons for jobs, kept them out of jail and expunged their records.

The assault on Amanda Kiefer at dusk in San Francisco's posh Pacific Heights was extraordinary enough for its cruelty.

A stranger, later identified as Alexander Izaguirre, snatched her purse and hopped into an SUV, police say. The driver sped forward to run Kiefer down. Terrified, she leaped onto the hood and saw Izaguirre and the driver laughing. The driver slammed on the brakes, propelling Kiefer to the pavement. Her skull fractured. Blood oozed from her ear.

Only after the July 2008 attack did Kiefer learn of the crime's political ramifications. Izaguirre, police told her, was an illegal immigrant who had pleaded guilty four months earlier to a drug felony for selling cocaine in the seedy Tenderloin area.

He had avoided prison when he was picked for a jobs program run by San Francisco Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris, now a candidate for California's top law enforcement post. In effect, Harris' office had been allowing Izaguirre and other illegal immigrants to stay out of prison by training them for jobs they cannot legally hold.

The program, Back on Track, is a centerpiece of Harris' campaign for state attorney general. Until questioned by The Times about the Izaguirre case, Harris, a Democrat, had never publicly acknowledged that the program included illegal immigrants. In interviews last week, she and her office offered inconsistent explanations.

The fact is that San Francisco's DA can do stuff like this without worry of the voters getting upset. They like this sort of thing. It makes them feel so progressive.

Confederacy: It Doesn't Just Refer To The Stars and Bars

Confederacy: It Doesn't Just Refer To The Stars and Bars

Adam's Blog points to one of those reminders that there's always someone prepared to play the victim card and take offense, even where none was intended:

Political correctness will rot a thinking mind. Case in point, the reaction to the following statement from Id. Rep. Dick Harwood (R-St. Maries):

Promoting his state sovereignty resolution on the floor of the Idaho House of Representatives on Monday, St. Maries Rep. Dick Harwood declared that the United States is really a “confederacy.”

“To be accurate, we’re a confederated republic,” the fifth-term Republican then told the House.

This brought a strong reaction from a local minority right’s activist:

“It’s a very offensive term for minority communities in our country, like African-Americans,” said Tony Stewart, a board member and co-founder of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, and a retired political scientist at North Idaho College. “That whole term refers to the period of slavery.”

So every use of the term confederacy applies to slavery? Not according to my dictionary. The primary meaning is, ” an alliance between persons, parties, states, etc., for some purpose.”
Steve Shaw, an active political science professor at Northwest Nazarene University, while disagreeing with Harwood and suggesting that Harwood needed remedial U.S. History classes, identified Switzerland as a confederacy. I guess this would indicate the Swiss have slaves, if we’re to believe Mr. Stewart.
Was the United States founded as a confederacy? I’m going to do something totally wild and suggest we find out what the Founding Fathers say.

Adam agrees that Harwood needs some remedial U.S. History classes, but that the term "confederate republic" is used in Federalist #9, and Tony Stewart's comments also show a certain lack of knowledge. I might excuse this ignorance a bit more except Stewart is a retired political science professor--and he doesn't know that "confederacy" refers to something more than the C.S.A.? I can see why I can't get a teaching job at a community college--not ignorant enough.

What really disturbs me is how often victimhood offense is based on ignorance. I mentioned several years ago how a member of the Rhode Island legislature was insisting that the formal name of the state ("Rhode Island and Providence Plantations") be changed because of the slavery connotation of "Plantation." Except that "plantation" did not have a slavery connotation with respect to Rhode Island's name, and there were similar "plantations" in Ireland.

And the District of Columbia official who was forced to resign for using the word "niggardly" which has nothing to do with the racial epithet.

And as I mentioned last year, when the term "black hole" was used to refer to the Dallas County traffic ticket collection system, a judge insisted that this was a racist term--with no apparent awareness that it refers to an object so dense that light can't escape it. (Or perhaps a judge so dense that no knowledge can cross his event horizon.)

Someone Please Tell Me That This Report Is Wrong

Someone Please Tell Me That This Report Is Wrong

The alternative is that multiculturalism in Britain has lost all touch with reality. From the July 7, 2008 Telegraph:

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.
This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.
The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.
...

The guide goes on to warn that children might also "react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying 'yuk'".
Staff are told: "No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action."
Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instill prejudice, the NCB adds that if children "reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes".

Obviously, these multiculuralists have never had toddlers.

Quickie Burger

Quickie Burger

Eric Scheie over at Classical Values is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and reports on a local burger joint called "Quickie Burger." Their symbol is a cowgirl riding a gigantic hamburger. Okay, there is some double entendre involved with the name, and it might not have been my first choice for that reason. The logo is perfectly wholesome--and there was a time when the logo and the name of the place would only have suggested (in all but the most dirty-minded) that this is a place for fast food.

There are people upset about the name, however, and the cowgirl riding the hamburger. Is it a bunch of narrow-minded fundamentalists? No! Eric links to this news account from the March 21, 2008 Michigan Daily of who is upset:

When the owners of Quickie Burger and Dogs chose their logo, they thought it would make patrons crave an order of chili cheese fries. But the logo, a busty woman in a tight shirt straddling a hamburger, has drawn criticism from campus groups.

...

The Stonewall Democrats, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender caucus of the University's College Democrats chapter, has taken offense with the restaurant's logo and recently began circulating a petition to sway the owners to change the logo.

LSA senior Kolby Roberts, a member of the Stonewall Democrats who has led the effort, said he finds the logo's message inappropriate and offensive.

"I have a problem that you take a women riding a hamburger and you put it next to the word 'quickie,' " he said. "It just seems like it's not putting a good message out there for the objectification of women."

Maria Arman, whose family owns the restaurant, said the logo was meant to invoke a cowboy theme.

"We were thinking beef, rodeo, so instead of putting a cowboy, we just picked a cowgirl," she said. "It's a rodeo-style cowgirl riding a bull, but instead, it's a burger. It was put together to be funny and different. No offense was meant to anyone."

Now, there are traditional morality groups that, if they complained about this, I would say, "Guys, I see your concern, but you are grasping at straws on this. This is writing parking tickets while ICBMs re-enter the atmosphere." But when a gay and lesbian group gets upset about insulting objectification of women, I can only say this: Why aren't you complaining about drag queens? My wife finds the entire insulting parody of women that drag queens do insulting, and I can see why, and agree.

One of the commenters over at Classical Values catches it very well (although you do need to have read George Orwell's 1984 to appreciate the wit of it):

"In a related story, gay campus activists today announced they were organizing a Junior Anti-Sex League to 'combat doubleplusungood expressions of sexism.' The activists also issued demands for U of M to include Newspeak in its core liberal arts curriculum, imposition of mandatory 'Two Minutes Hate' at noon each day, and the creation of a 'Vice-Provost of Love' to oversee student sexual activities, suppress vice and propagate virtue."

It's Like An Elaborate Joke

One that might be told if you wanted to insult liberals by comparing them to intentionally ignorant idiots. This article describes something that happened at IUPUI--which is an acronym for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis:

Keith John Sampson never thought he could get in trouble for reading a book, especially not on a college campus. But that’s what happened. Sampson is a man in his early 50s. He does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, where he’s been gradually accumulating credits for a degree in communications studies. He has 10 credit hours to go.

...

Sampson is an avid reader. It’s been his habit to bring books to work with him, so that he can read in the break room when he’s not on the clock. Last year, Sampson was working in IUPUI’s Medical Science building.

...

At the time, Sampson was reading a book he had checked out from the public library. Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan, published in 2004, features a photograph of the University of Notre Dame’s famous golden dome on the cover. Its author is Todd Tucker, the publisher is Loyola Press of Loyola University in Chicago.

The book is about how for two days in May 1924, a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight with members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was meeting in South Bend for the express purpose of sticking a collective thumb in the eye of the country’s most famous Catholic university. Notre Dame vs. the Klan was a Notre Dame Magazine “Pick of the Week” and garnered an average customer review of 4.5 stars on Amazon.com. In its review, The Indiana Magazine of History noted that Tucker “succeeds in placing the event in a broad framework that includes the origins and development of both the Klan and Notre Dame.”

Sampson recalls that his AFSCME shop steward told him that reading a book about the Klan was like bringing pornography to work. The shop steward wasn’t interested in hearing what the book was actually about. Another time, a coworker who was sitting across the table from Sampson in the break room commented that she found the Klan offensive. Sampson says he tried to tell her about the book, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it.

A few weeks passed. Then Sampson got a message ordering him to report to Marguerite Watkins at the IUPUI Affirmative Action Office. He was told a coworker had filed a racial harassment complaint against him for reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan in the break room. Sampson says he tried to explain to Watkins what the book was about. He says he tried to show her the book, but that Watkins showed no interest in seeing it.

Then Sampson received a letter, dated Nov. 25, 2007, from Lillian Charleston, also of IUPUI’s Affirmative Action Office. The letter begins by saying that the AAO has completed its investigation of a coworker’s allegation that Sampson “racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees.” It goes on to say, “You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence … you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers.” Charleston went on to say that according to “the legal ‘reasonable person standard,’ a majority of adults are aware of and understand how repugnant the KKK is to African-Americans …”

Sampson was ordered to stop reading the book in the immediate presence of his coworkers and, when reading the book, to sit apart from them.

I really want to believe that this article is misrepresenting what happened. But one thing I have learned over the years--when Political Correctness is hybridized with an academic institution and a bureaucracy, there's almost nothing that is impossible.

Political Correctness and Hip-Hop Mug Santa

Someone please tell me that isn't serious. Because if it is, this is very serious. From one of the South Africa news services:

Sydney - Santas in Australia's largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas's traditional "ho ho ho" greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported on Thursday.

Sydney's Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say "ha ha ha" instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", an American slang term for a prostitute.

The Horror! The Horror! Free Market Capitalism!

From the September 20, 2007 Inside Higher Education:

Supporters describe it as a fund created by alumni to support interests they have at the university, in this case the study of Western civilization and free market economics.

But many professors see it as much more — as a move by conservative alumni with influential national support to bypass normal faculty governance, create new courses and impose ideological tests on who gets certain pots of money. The alumni who have given the money for the effort, currently housed at the university’s foundation, are explicit that they want a formal role in who gets money from the fund, the views those people should have, and the eventual goal of creating a new version of the Hoover Institution at a top public university, with the ambition of inspiring others to follow their model.

As a result of those statements and other concerns, professors at the university are debating whether the new academy is appropriate for the university. Some like the program, others think it could work with certain oversight provisions, and others find the entire idea questionable. With the program about to kick off formal activities and the Senate at the university preparing to vote on oversight proposals for the academy, the debate is heating up. And the debate comes at a time that critics of academe are increasingly embracing a model of creating free-standing centers to sponsor fellowships, courses, lectures and other activities around such themes as American history, Western civilization, and free markets.

...

Vermette, a businessman and investor who is a former president of the university’s alumni association, said that the program came out of the conviction that key ideas are lost on too many students, and that money coming into higher education doesn’t change that. “I just have been concerned that the young people in particular are not being exposed to the value of free market capitalism and also limited government at our great universities,” he said. “There is almost a disdain for the free market.”

Almost? No, I'm afraid that it is way beyond "almost a disdain."

The new program will sponsor educational programs (the development of new courses or new curriculum for courses), lectures, conferences, research and more. The programs will all be based on “free market capitalism,” Vermette said, citing the ideas of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and the Austrian economics school of such libertarian thinkers at Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Vermette said that the founders of the center “very much want to work with faculty” at Illinois to support these programs. “We’ll work within the system,” he said.

Vermette stressed that the founders weren’t trying to exclude professors, but he also said that the donors anticipated having a real role in determining who gets support through the fund. Faculty members, he said, “will help us decide what programs are acceptable.” If professors at the university don’t want to get involved, he said, “we’ll bring in adjunct faculty when we need to,” he added.

The left is upset because the values that they are trying to promote might not survive a serious academic challenge--and there's little or no chance of that in most public universities today.

Portland Political Correctness

Odd thing I saw in the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Portland: "Degrading ethnic, racial, or sexist remarks are not allowed in this establishment." I'm not sure what this says. Does it mean that Portlanders have such bad manners that they don't know any better? Or does it mean that the owners are trying to show how progressive they are by saying that their clientele needs to be told this?

Not Newsworthy

Oh yeah. This is one of those stories that reminds you that liberalism has lost its way (if it ever had it). From the August 22, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The release by the FBI on Monday of photographs of two men who had been spotted in "suspicious" behavior on state ferries comes at a time when authorities are getting increased reports of unusual activity on the nation's largest ferry system.
"Over the last six to eight weeks, there has been an increase in some unusual activity reporting," said Assistant Special Agent in Charge Dave Gomez in Seattle. "What we are seeing are individuals engaging in behavior that citizens deem suspicious."
Asked to specify the behavior, Gomez said: These two men "showed an inordinate interest in the operation of the shipboard systems as opposed to the beautiful scenery passing by." Gomez said he would not be more specific because to do so would alert potential terrorists on how to better mask their intentions.
The Seattle FBI -- which houses both bureau and interagency analytic centers -- has been tracking suspicious activity on ferries for several years. Last year, a Justice Department report named the Washington State Ferry system as the No. 1 target for maritime terrorism, sharing that status with Gulf Coast petroleum tankers.
Behind that dubious distinction was the work of the FBI's field intelligence group and the Washington Joint Analytic Center. Supervisory intelligence analyst Ted Turner of the Seattle FBI office told the Seattle P-I last year that "there was an extremely high likelihood, in a handful of incidents, that there was pre-operation planning" for a terrorist attack on the ferry system.

Some of the Seattle newspapers and media used the photos. But not the Post-Intelligencer!

The P-I elected not to publish the photos, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns, which editors felt outweighed the newsworthiness of the images. "We have no confirmation that these men's behavior was anything but innocuous, and to forever taint them by associating them with terrorism under these circumstances is not consistent with our policy," said David McCumber, P-I managing editor.

The comments from readers are pretty amazing. The leftists (who seem to dominate the Seattle area) are convinced that this is all racism and paranoia and neo-conservatives out to market fear. Amazing. I am beginning to wonder if I just imagined what happened on 9/11.

Is There More To This Story?

The August 17, 2007 Inside Higher Education had this story that disturbed me, and makes me wonder if there's a bit more to what happened:

When Colorado Christian University notified Andrew Paquin, an assistant professor of global studies, that his contract would not be renewed, he knew that not being sufficiently guided by Christ wasn’t the problem. But it might have been that he wasn’t sufficiently capitalist.

“Throughout the process it became evident that the issue of capitalism, the use of a couple of different books were at the core” of President William L. Armstrong’s “discomfort” with him, Paquin said. Those included works by animal-rights ethicist Peter Singer and Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and The Left Doesn’t Get It. Once Paquin was notified that he couldn’t continue on as a professor, students, faculty and alumni started petitions and contacted The Rocky Mountain News, which broke the story this week and sparked a torrent of anger on the blogosphere.

I read the August 13, 2007 Rocky Mountain News story as well, looking for some indication that there's more to the story, but what I found sounds disturbingly like Colorado Christian University is a mirror image of many of the top tier secular universities:

Armstrong fired Paquin from a position teaching global studies at the end of the spring semester amid concerns that his lessons were too radical and undermined the school's commitment to the free enterprise system.
Paquin assigned works by Jim Wallis, who writes from the Christian left, and Peter Singer, an atheist and animal rights activist.
Armstrong won't discuss Paquin's case specifically, but he says free enterprise is fundamental to the school's philosophy.
"I don't think there is another system that is more consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ," Armstrong said.
That doesn't mean socialists can't be good Christians, and a belief in free enterprise is not linked to salvation, Armstrong added.
But free enterprise is the message of Colorado Christian, he said. "What the university stands for, among other things, is free markets."

Now, I agree that a school can have a particular focus or purpose. There certainly comes a moment when a university can decide, "Our charter is to promote X; you are actively denigrating X; find somewhere else to work." But at least the way that this is described in these two accounts, it sounds like Paquin was simply trying to make sure that students understood all sides. Indeed, that's what Paquin said in the Rocky Mountain News article:

Paquin said he assigned books from various viewpoints to challenge students with ideas they had not encountered before.
"I wanted my left-leaning, my right-leaning, my centrist, radical — whatever — students to at least give ear and respect to perspectives other than their own," he said.

I'm very skeptical that there are many students who make it to college who haven't been incessantly exposed to the leftist critique of capitalism. (Maybe the homes without televisions.) If Paquin was presenting only one side, that might be a valid basis for his dismissal. (Or for tenure at a public university.)

I would love to hear more about the basis for Paquin's dismissal. Right now, it doesn't sound good for CCU.

The Health Advantages of Islam

I mean, other than much of your male population doesn't live long enough to suffer from the diseases of old age. No, this article from Time Out London is a serious piece by leftists explaining how much better London will be when Islam takes over:

Is London's future Islamic?

It’s the capital’s fastest growing religion, based on noble traditions and compassionate principles, yet Islam can still be tainted by mistrust and misunderstanding. Here Time Out argues that an Islamic London would be a better place.

...

Public health

On the surface, Islamic health doesn’t look good: the 2001 census showed that 24 per cent of Muslim women and 21 per cent of Muslim men suffered long-term illness and disability. But these are factors of social conditions rather than religion. In fact, Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in London’s hospitals.

Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the city’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.

And it gets worse from there.

Bloggers all over are making fun of this piece of leftist nonsense, like Iowahawk, and David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy, and of course, Little Green Footballs. The leftists commenting over at Volokh Conspiracy, unsurprisingly, are attacking that Little Green Footballs mentioned it, rather than confronting the insanity of it.

A Rather Careless Piece of Research by the Weekly Standard

Consider two professors at the same school, both seeking tenure (at a school where 91% of those considered for tenure get it--so it isn't hard). One of the professors unfavorably compares a major document of Western civilization with Mein Kampf. The other?

According to a Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database, Gonzalez's scientific articles from 2001 to 2007 rank the highest among astronomers in his department according to a standard measure of how frequently they have been cited by other scientists. He has published 68 peer-reviewed articles, which beat the ISU department's standard for tenure by 350 percent. He has also co-authored a standard astronomy textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, which his faculty colleagues use in their own classes.

I quickly looked over the results of this search for Gonzalez's email address in scholar.google.com, and it does indeed seem to be the case that his many scholarly papers are often cited. (I searched by email address because there is another astronomy professor at the University of Washington with the same name, who also has a lot of published papers.)

So which one got tenure?

DESPITE A STELLAR RESEARCH RECORD, Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is being forced out of his job for the expression--outside the classroom--of an inconvenient personal belief.

In 2004, Gonzalez co-wrote a book called The Privileged Planet. He argued that life on earth and our ability to make scientific discoveries about the cosmos depend on a host of incredibly improbable planetary conditions--the preponderance of which suggested intelligent design rather than cosmic accident as the explanation for the universe.

Gonzalez never taught this material to students. But if he and co-author Jay Richards (a former colleague of mine) are right, then the late astronomer Carl Sagan was wrong when he mocked our human "delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe." Privileged Planet was praised on its dust jacket by senior scholars at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and England's Cambridge University.

Gonzalez was up for tenure at ISU this spring. He didn't make the cut. Which, in academia, is the equivalent of being fired (with a year's grace time to look for other work).

Normally, it is not especially difficult to attain tenure at ISU. In 2007, 91 percent of tenure applications were approved, including that of Hector Avalos, a religious-studies teacher. Avalos, was elevated to a full professorship despite wildly anti-religious statements in a 2005 book (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence) which compared the Bible unfavorably with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Avalos wrote, "Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible. . . . Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies."

At first glance, this tells us something of what positions are acceptable to take outside of the classroom at Iowa State University, and which are not. This article about the subject from the Ames Tribune would also suggest that political motivations drove the decision to deny tenure:

In the summer of 2005, three faculty members at ISU drafted a statement against the use of intelligent design in science. One of those authors, Hector Avalos, told The Tribune at the time he was concerned the growing prominence of Gonzalez's work was beginning to market ISU as an "intelligent design school."

The statement collected signatures of support from more than 120 ISU faculty members before similar statements surfaced at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.

According to ISU's policy on promotion and tenure, evaluation is based "primarily on evidence of scholarship in the faculty member's teaching, research/creative activities, and/or extension/professional practice."

In addition to that criteria, Gonzalez's department of astronomy and physics sets a benchmark for tenure candidates to author at least 15 peer-reviewed journal articles of quality. Gonzalez said he submitted 68, of which 25 have been written since he arrived at ISU in 2001.

"I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," he said.

However, this article from the Des Moines Register suggests that money is the issue:

Ames, Ia. - An Iowa State University professor who advocates say was denied academic tenure because he pushed the theory of intelligent design raised significantly less research grant money than his peers who achieved tenure.

Iowa State University has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Guillermo Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez's peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure, which is basically a lifetime appointment at the university.

"Essentially, he had no research funding," said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of the physics and astronomy department where Gonzalez is employed. "That's one of the issues."

Outside grant money pays for research, which includes everything from supporting graduate students to lab equipment to travel.

It's becoming more of a factor in tenure decisions across the university, Rosenberg said.

"At all levels of the university it has gotten more intense to look at that," he said. "In order to survive doing research, (you) have to support graduate students and travel. You have to generate that money yourself."

It is not uncommon for universities to use outside grant money as a criterion in tenure decisions, particularly in the sciences, said Jonathan Knight, who directs the program in academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors.

"The competition has become stiffer and fewer projects are being funded, and so the individuals are now being turned down to tenure because they are not able to get the funding," he said.

Advocates for Gonzalez have noted he authored more peer-reviewed papers than what his department had said was needed for someone of his rank to achieve tenure.

"The overarching and the most important thing is really my publication record," said Gonzalez, who said he's published 68 peer-reviewed papers during his career.

He pointed to ISU's physics and astronomy tenure policy, which said promotion to an associate professor requires potential to achieve a national or international reputation, a standard demonstrated by the publication of 15 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

The article from the Weekly Standard says that Avalos received tenure, but over here is the claim that Avalos did not receive tenure, but was only promoted to full professor.

I really don't know what to think. It might well be that Gonzalez's support for ID played a part in the denial of tenure, but there are other possible explanations as well, and I'm not too impressed with the level of research that this Weekly Standard article shows.

UPDATE: A reader with connections to the professional astronomers tells me that the Gonzalez at University of Washington and Iowa State University are the same guy, and as you might well expect, this guy is a superstar among professional astronomers--which makes anti-Christian bias an even more likely explanation for the refusal to give him tenure.

Complain to Dogpile.com--And They Listen

Or so it seems. A reader sent me the following:

The search engine www.dogpile.com has recently begun filtering out requests when the word "gun" is mentioned. Even "NRA Gun Safety" is blocked.

I sent the following request for them to consider the absurdity of their actions. Their contact info is at the bottom of their page.

-James Grant

Dear DogPile,

You take a very strange position on what adult content is. I was looking for information on "gun safety" and then received a block from your censors. So, I wanted to see how far DogPile is carrying this absurd restriction of access.

I decided to type in things that actually are disconcerting. I entered "robbery techniques" "burglary tools" "stealing cars" "make heroin" "grow marijuana" "Adultery", "Murder" "Mayhem" "Rape" "Incest".

All were given a green light from your filters. . Tips and how to's about anything criminal.

No filters, roadblocks, or verifications were required.

So what exactly is it about my safety that your are trying to protect me from? Please re-enable your search engine to pass lawful information freely and without hindrance.

-James Grant

I guess dogpile.com listens. By the time I returned from vacation, the blocks seem to have been removed.

University Thought Police

I mentioned a couple of days ago this girl who is held without bail on a felony charge for distributing flyers that were negative to homosexuality. Here's one of those reminders why I don't think I could ever be employed by a university, even if I managed to get a Ph.D. It's the story of a professor of economics who expressed doubleplusungood crimethink at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

Las Vegas prides itself for its tolerance and so does UNLV, its university. At the university, however, tolerance is selective. You may assert that white heterosexual males are responsible for all of mankind's misery, that Castro's Cuba is a great success story, that capitalism means exploitation, or that most university professors are liberals because conservatives are too stupid to teach. If anyone should complain about this, such complaint will be dismissed outright.

And rightly so. After all, the university is committed to academic freedom. Its faculty has the "freedom and an obligation … (to) discuss and pursue the faculty member's subject with candor and integrity, even when the subject requires consideration of topics which may be politically, socially or scientifically controversial. … (a) faculty member…shall not be subjected to censorship or discipline by the University ... on grounds that the faculty member has expressed opinions or views which are controversial, unpopular or contrary to the attitudes of the University…or the community."

None of this applies to professors who dissent from socialist, statist, or culturally left-wing view, however, as I would find out.

In March of 2004, during a 75-minute lecture in my Money and Banking class on time preference, interest, and capital, I presented numerous examples designed to illustrate the concept of time preference (or in the terminology of the sociologist Edward Banfield of "present- and future-orientation"). As one brief example, I referred to homosexuals as a group which, because they typically do not have children, tend to have a higher degree of time preference and are more present-oriented. I also noted – as have many other scholars – that J.M Keynes, whose economic theories were the subject of some upcoming lectures, had been a homosexual and that this might be useful to know when considering his short-run economic policy recommendation and his famous dictum "in the long run we are all dead."

During my lecture no question was raised. (You can hear the same lecture, given some time later, on the Mises Media server.) However, two days later an informal complaint was filed by a student with the university's affirmative action "commissar." The student claimed that he as a homosexual had been made to "feel bad" by my lecture. Based on this "evidence" the commissar, who, as I would find out only weeks later, was a former clergyman turned "certified" gay activist, called me at home to inform me that he would shut down my class if I continued making such remarks.

Eventually, after a series of hearings and actions, and shockingly enough, with the ACLU of Nevada's assistance, he managed to get his status of unperson reversed. But it is a disturbing reminder of the enormous power that homosexuals wield in universities to suppress dissenting points of view.

Barbarism...Let's Have a Party

I mentioned yesterday Michelle Malkin's report about this act of barbarism--the rape, torture, murder, and mutilation of a couple of young people that wandered into the wrong neighborhood in Knoxville. It gets worse. This report concerns two of the accused:

(Knoxville) - St. Nicolas Thief, president and founder of Black Poverty Speaks, along with many local Knoxville blacks who live in the Washington Pike area has organized a social action protest celebration championing Lemaricus Davidson and Letalvis Cobbins.

Davidson and Cobbins are the brothers and two of the five suspects charged in the carjacking, kidnapping, rape and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

"We're coordinating the celebration to to jive with the march angry whites are planning in memory of the victims and because of the 'media black-out' they note the case is receiving from national news networks," Thief, who is currently stationed in Knoxville, said.

"We're celebrating underprivileged Knoxville blacks who victimize privileged Knoxville whites," he added.

"If you come down here, you're either visiting someone or you're buying drugs," said, Misty Boshears, 31, who lives near Washington Pike. "I'm shocked, but I'm not shocked," of Christian and Newsom's murders, Boshears said. "I don't allow my girl to play outside because of the danger."

Another neighbor, Carl Hunley, who lives next door to the house where Christian's body was found, said three weeks prior to Christian's body being discovered, there was a drive-by shooting at the house.

"These are the kinds of communities we live in all throughout this country," St. Nicolas Thief said. "These communities are the legacies of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade.

"That whites' ancestors and the government hasn't and doesn't educate whites on how the legacy of slavery has created the impoverished conditions that do continue to influence and trap our people doesn't mean we have to excuse their ignorance.

"There's going to be a party in Knoxville and America everytime black poverty speaks and privileged whites suffer."

Fortunately, not everyone in Knoxville is looking to make excuses. Some are learning the lesson:

Interest in self-defense has boosted inquiries about handgun carry permits in Knoxville, firearms instructors say, although Virginia Tech wasn't the main impetus.

"The carjacking really kicked it off," said Sgt. Mike Lett of the Knox County Sheriff's Office, referring to the January torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Lett teaches the required course for handgun carry applicants at the sheriff's training facility.

UPDATE: There are some who suspect that this "St. Nicolas Thief" may not exist, and this be an agent provocateur of traditional white racists. Classical Values discusses this at the bottom, here.

Imagine if the Victims Were Blacks and the Killers Were White

Then this news story would be everywhere. It would be on the nightly news every day for a while, and then every week--rather like the Duke athletes rape case. But this one is getting no national attention:

(CNSNews.com) - The national news media demonstrates a double standard in covering "hate crimes," as evidenced by the lack of attention given to the murder of a white couple in Tennessee last January, a conservative columnist charged on Monday.

However, a media analyst responded that a crime is not necessarily a hate crime simply because the victims are white and those accused of perpetrating it are black.

Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, were out on a dinner date in Knoxville, Tenn. on Jan. 6, when they were carjacked, kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered.

According to published news reports, the two were tortured at length in each other's presence, strangled and shot. Newsom's mutilated and burned remains were found along a railroad track the following day. Two days later, Christian's battered and burned body was found in a trash bin.

Five men and a woman, all African-American, have been arrested and face up to 46 charges, including carjacking, kidnapping, rape, premeditated murder, theft and robbery.

And that account really does convey the barbarism of what was done to the Christian and Newsom. Michelle Malkin has a video presentation here that tells you more than you probably want to know.

It isn't like there's no local coverage of this horrifying crime for the national news media to use. Like here. If they really wanted to play up the white racism angle, there's this news story here, about white racists trying to stir up trouble with this. (It really says a lot about how far Tennessee has come. A crime this horrifying in 1950 would have probably led to a race riot and mass lynching.) And it seems to have woken the locals that they need to be ready to fight back:

Interest in self-defense has boosted inquiries about handgun carry permits in Knoxville, firearms instructors say, although Virginia Tech wasn't the main impetus.

"The carjacking really kicked it off," said Sgt. Mike Lett of the Knox County Sheriff's Office, referring to the January torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Lett teaches the required course for handgun carry applicants at the sheriff's training facility.

At news.google.com, "Christian Newsom" brings up 13 news stories--not a single one of them from the mainstream media.

Liberalism is a morally bankrupt and utterly depraved system of thought.

Low Academic Standards

One of the reasons that I get a bit irritated with identity politics "academic" programs in universities is that they are so often stronger in polemics than in research. I scratched my head about this supposed "Mercury 13" program. The claim is that these women entered astronaut training in the early 1960s, only to be scrubbed because of sexism. It was certainly possible, but I had never heard anything about it before, and unless it was intended as a response to the Soviet Union's female cosmonaut program, it seemed most unlikely.

James Oberg, who has spent entire entire life involved with the space program, has a devastating account of the dishonesty of the University of Wisconsin, and the credulity of journalists, who overwhelming bought the press releases, without any serious attempt at finding out what the real story was:

Truth #1: However impressive may have been the flight experience of the women undergoing the medical testing in 1960–1961, no white male with similar qualifications would ever have gotten a second glance by the NASA astronaut screening process. UW-Oshkosh and the press reports conceal this by equating all “flight experience” as of equivalent value for future astronaut candidates—small aircraft, commercial transport, jet transport, and even supersonic single-seat jet fighter—all are counted as of equal value.

Truth #2: There was no NASA program to even investigate whether women could pass the preliminary screening processes for astronaut selection. The activity was a private one sponsored by a doctor who was an independent consultant to NASA on astronaut selection.

Truth #3: There never was any training: all the activities involved medical screening.

Truth #4: The project ended after the investigator, Dr. Lovelace, had scheduled some screening time at the US Navy’s Pensacola flight training center and the Navy asked him for a charge number from the government sponsor of the project. He stalled all he could—there was no such sponsor—and the frustrated but still willing naval doctors finally called NASA to find out what was going on. When they found out that neither NASA nor any other government customer was sponsoring the tests, they told Lovelace that he had to pay or cancel. He cancelled his reservation. But there was no “program” that got “cancelled”, because there never had been any program to begin with.

Truth #5: There was no significant secrecy attached to any of activities, and no secrecy at all within a few months. The women’s activities were described in depth in contemporary press accounts and then in Congressional testimony.

All of these historical facts are easy to document and verify, but not a single journalist or academic shows any signs of ever doing so. Instead, they just accepted all of the assertions and cultural and social accusations of the university’s website and one particular book.

Although press reports quote a communications professor as claiming she assigned the book to her freshman class, it turns out that the university’s website states that a university panel had assigned the book to the entire freshman class. On a program called “The Common Intellectual Experience”, the university directed all incoming students to read the book, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Holyoke University Department of Women’s Studies professor Martha Ackmann.

UPDATE: A reader actually took flying lessons from one of the "Mercury 13" in 1972; she mentioned it, and that "it was a mad enthusiasm of one or a small number of people, and it never went anywhere; she certainly never had any direct dealings with NASA." The reader suggests that the real reason it went nowhere wasn't even sexism, but that military test pilots (who were almost all the early astronauts) were regarded as having signed up for hazardous duty, and there would little political fallout if they were killed in flight.

Collapsing The Traditional Distinction Between History and Theory

There was a time that this article from Front Page magazine about a professor who is arguing that that there is no evidence that Jews ever occupied Palestine would have shocked me. No longer.

In her introduction, El-Haj explains that she works by “rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method,” writing, instead, within a scholarly tradition of “post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and … in response to specific postcolonial political movements.” And the particular theory that El-Haj puts forward is that the “ancient Israelite origins” of the Jews is a “pure political fabrication” – a machination she proceeds to blame on “Israeli archaeologists” who were called upon to “produce … evidence of ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land of Israel, thereby supplying the very foundation, embodied in empirical form, of the modern nation’s origin myth.”

Deplorably, in the rarified air of Morningside Heights, some Columbia faculty appear to celebrate this sort of “liberation” of scholarship from any necessity to encounter verifiable facts. For example, Keith Moxey, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor Professor of Art History at Barnard College and one of five members of the committee that will vote on El-Haj’s tenure bid, lauds “The abandonment of an epistemological foundation for … history and the acknowledgment that historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes collapses the traditional distinction between history and theory.” (See Moxey’s The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History.) In other words, evidence, verifiability, probability and explanatory power become irrelevant, for what counts is that an argument “coincide with our political convictions.”

There's just too much historical and archaeological evidence that Jews occupied what is now Palestine for more than a thousand years until the Roman destruction of the second Temple. Is it possible that there is no longer a purpose to institutions of higher learning, when garbage like this starts to become acceptable? As Classical Values observes:

This all leaves me wondering.... If crackpots who spout Israelite denial can get tenure, what's next? Will Barnard and Columbia start offering courses in Holocaust Denial Studies? (A department, perhaps?)

Political Correctness at Sonoma State University

A friend is attending there, and reports:

There's an online "climate" (apparently in the sense of incidence of situations which someone, especially protected categories, might take offense to, rather than long-term weather trends) survey that they want people to fill out. It has checkboxes for various categories. Look at the nomenclature and ordering for this one:

Q7 My sexual orientation is:

• Bisexual
• Gay male
• Lesbian
• Heterosexual
• Unsure
• Queer

Despite this piece of weirdly ordered elaboration, they have no category for mixed ethnic background, only "Other".