Fave Obama nicks

1. "Ear Leader"

2. "President Toonces"

3. "President Shortpants"

Not sure where I first read any of them.

Update: 4. "Messiah in Chief" (h/t jwp). At least our side attempts a little humor, unlike the "Bu$hitler" types.

5. "The Won" (h/t Sherm). Should, of course, be "Teh Won."

'Tenure means nothing' if Wart loses his appeal

That according to David Lane in a post by Westword's Wart-shill, Michael Roberts:

"Tenure means nothing anymore if the regents are never going to be held accountable for constitutional violations."

As for those repercussions, Lane believes they're already being felt.

The decision "has already had the effect of causing people to think long and hard before they every open their mouths about any controversial issues," he argues.

As jwp notes, isn't it generally a good idea to "think long and hard" before you open your yap in the first place? (Not that I've always followed that precept.)

But I'd like to see Lane name one tenured prof at CU who's become afraid to say anything that pops into his or her stupid head.

Great porn name, by the way: Wad Churchill (see first comment on the Roberts piece).

Yeah, friends

Spring draws nigh, which means it's almost time for Earth Hour!

FIVE to Change the World!

Dear John,

In just 37 days, you will be uniting with hundreds of millions of people all over the world in the fight against climate change. Last year one billion of us stood together during Earth Hour 2009. We became a powerful voice for action on climate change. Earth Hour is a grassroots movement fueled by passionate people like you.

That's what she said.

Today we need that passion to raise the volume of our message during Earth Hour 2010.

We've come together to change the world. To do that we must get everyone involved.

Can you get FIVE more of your friends to join today? Use our recruiting tool and social networking page to send messages to your friends and we'll track how many you have brought to the movement. So far Jason from Chesterfield, MO is our Earth Hour champion. He has already recruited 57 friends!

What'd he win? And fifty-seven friends? Hell, hard as I've tried, I don't even have 57 enemies.

But okay. I nominate, um, Sherm, Fred, Willibeaux (where's he been, anyway?), Laurie and JWP (dust that quicklime off and get out here!). Your names have been forwarded. (Hey, I think my enemies list is lengthening as we speak.)

I'll look around the Earth Hour site again (that is, for this year) when I get the chance. Sure to be more "hilarity."

Encore! Wart to appear at SF anarchist book fair

From Infoshop:

15th Annual SF Book Fair is Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14, 2010. Complete info at website http//sfbookfair.wordpress.com

Book publishers, vendors and other tablers (so-called T-shirt fair, and you may find a few of those too). Valet bike parking by SF Bicycle Coalition. In fair cafe by local collectives. Kid and family space.

Valet bike parking? Wonder what kind of tip you're expected to (not) give.

Speakers this year include Randall Amster, Robert J. Benedetti, Yantra Bertelli, Terry Bisson, Ward Churchill, John Curl, John Duda, Matt Hern, Luis A. Fernandez, Peter Gelderloos, Andrej Grubacic, Owen Hill, Lierre Keith, Magpie Killjoy, Ernesto Longa, Caslos Martinez, Jason Mcquinn, Keith McHenry, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Jessica Mills, Tomas Moniz, Vikki Law, Patrick Reinsborough, Kim Stanley Robinson, Penelope Rosemont, DericShannon, Jennifer Silverman, Jeremy Adam Smith, Sarah Talbot, Laura Whitehorn, Kristian Williams and Ward Churchill.

So nice, he's appearing twice! Not one other name rings a bell, though I do rather like "Magpie Killjoy" and "Tommi Avicolli Mecca." Let me know if any names are familiar.

Oldtimers may remember that Zombie was at Wart's last (I think) appearance at the fair in 2005, which featured the historic first appearance (again, I think) of Inflated Scrotum Guy. Somehow I doubt there'll be such a buzz this time around.

Mumia agrees (he's still alive?)

Pirate Ballerina notes an amicus brief from the usual idiots arguing that the "quasi-judicial" immunity from suit invoked by CU after the Wart trial, and with which the judge agreed (if you remember, Wartists accused Judge Naves of plagiarizing CU's position), is invalid. Only skimmed the thing, but already spotted some howlers, among them:

Responding to public controversy over a 9/11 op-ed piece critical of the federal government’s foreign policy . . .

Um, it wasn't that that pissed people off, was it? I believe the term "Little Eichmanns," used to describe (non-governmental) people just making a living, was involved.

. . .the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado approved an ad hoc investigation into all of Professor Churchill’s writings and public statements to see if he had “crossed the line” of speech protected by the First Amendment.

"All of Professor Churchill's writings and public statements. . ." As I've said from the beginning: I wish. Can't wait to see what law professors and etc. sign on in the (thus far empty) space provided. The increasingly alluring PB has more.

Update (2/18/10): And another brief on Wart's behalf, this one from the ACLU, the AAUP and the NCAC (National Coalition against Censorship).

Unhinged again

When last heard from (at least by me) ex-NYT reporter Chris Hedges was waxing apocalyptic about those goddamn Christianists:

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

Somehow though, in a new screed at the estimable journal Countercurrents, Hedges doesn't even mention the fascist God-botherers. This time it's capitalism and globalization and environmental degradation and corporations and--glavin! Like so:

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

He goes on and on, of course. Self-fisk, if you don't have anything better to do on a snowy (at least here) Sunday.

AAUP lives down to expectations

KC Johnson on the latest crapola from the American Association of University Professors' Journal of Academic Freedom:

The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today's college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn't contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic freedom coming from the ideological and pedagogical majority on most college campuses.

No, really? But much as I love Johnson (aw, shaddap) for his comprehensive takedown of the groupthink surrounding the Duke lacrosse case, it's always bothered me that he's taken care to maintain his liberal cred. In case you didn't know, he voted for Obama!

In this piece, for another example, he says this about the Wart case:

The highlight of the journal, however, comes from AAUP stalwart Ellen Schrecker. In the world according to Schrecker, far-left ideologues are not wildly overrepresented in the academy but instead are besieged, scarcely able to hold off the widespread conservative demands for their universities to fire them.

Schrecker spent 40 pages articulating this thesis, beginning with the case of Ward Churchill. People of good faith can disagree on whether Colorado handled the Churchill affair properly (I consistently opposed the attempt to dismiss Churchill, largely because it seemed to me that the University knew or should have known it was hiring an unqualified charlatan when it brought Churchill on staff---so it couldn't credibly release him only when it became politically inconvenient for the university to keep him as a professor). Schrecker's essay, on the other hand, reads more like a defense brief, portraying Churchill as an extraordinary scholar and wonderful teacher, driven out of the academy on trumped-up charges.

So Johnson thinks Churchill shouldn't have been fired for being a liar and a plagiarist. CU should be stuck with him because they were stupid enough to hire him in the first place. Good thinking.

(via the pirate whose parrot thinks he (the pirate) looks exactly like one of those Jonas Brothers (the cute one, or are they all cute?))

Windschuttle publishes third volume of 'The Fabrication of Aboriginal History'

In which he debunks mainstream historians' claim that there was a "Stolen Generation" of Aboriginal kiddies whose stealing amounted to "genocide" (via Bolt):

The new volume in Keith Windschuttle’s series The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is based on an exhaustive examination of the archival records of child removals and of government policies and laws. It also scrutinizes the work of the historians on whom the Human Rights Commission relied when it declared genocide had been committed against the Aboriginal people. The book finds Aboriginal children were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, for any improper government policy or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the twentieth century were mostly based on traditional grounds of child welfare. Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned, destitute, neglected, malnourished or subject to various forms of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. The camps from which they were removed were the then equivalent of today’s notorious remote communities in outback Australia. Other children were sent by their Aboriginal parents to hostels to go to school or into the workforce as apprentices. The notion that this amounted to genocide came from creative interpretations of selected evidence taken out of context by politically motivated historians. There were no Stolen Generations.

Wart would disagree.

Update: QuadrantOnline, which Windschuttle edits, is definitely worth a look.

F'n retarded

Now that Rahmbo has made the phrase fashionable, I'm going to apply it to various tenants in or near the D-blog manse.

First, a tenant e-mailed me yesterday, threatening to abrogate the lease because the light in the refrigerator didn't work.

He or she told me he or she had replaced the bulb, but, no luck. I went over and screwed the bulb in correctly. I'm handy like that.

The second tenant actually pounded on the door to inform me that his mailbox was askew. The boxes hang on screws drilled into the brick. This guy is a scientist, with a masters from Colorado School of Mines. Just like Wart's non-bomb-making pal Derrick Jensen.

So much education, so little sense. And by the way, landlords should be lined up and shot. Please.

Update:

Q: How many landlords does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: One.

Update II: In fairness, I should note that the CSM grad apparently has a case of OCD which works in my favor. Twice now I've gone out to shovel snow (today was the second time), and it's already been done. The first time I thought it was the young, hale and hearty Denver firefighter who was doing me a one-off favor. But when I asked him he said it was the (oldish) Eccentric Scientist who'd done the shoveling. When I asked the ES why he'd done it, he said, "I can't help it."

Heheheheh. The D-blog is about to embark on a systematic exploration of what other useful work he "can't help" doing.

Daily -Gate

We've all read about it by now:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

As many have pointed out over at WUWT (via whom, of course), this is an oldish story. What's remarkable is that it's in the Grauniad, that bastion of warmism.

Even more remarkable are the comments. Over 800 of them so far, and probably three or more to one anti-AGW (tho I've read less than half of them). At the Guardian! What's more, the "recommend" thingie on their comments has got to be running ten to one against alarmists.

At the Guardian! The dam has truly burst.

Wart down under

Keith Windschuttle once again takes down Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, and his twisting of the facts to prove the existence of a "stolen generation" of Aborigines and the Australian government's supposed policy of "breeding out the colour" of said abos.

For a professor of politics at an Australian university to write about a policy of the Commonwealth Government and to omit its most telling decisions is a serious dereliction of his public duty. At the very least, and despite whatever interpretation he wanted to place on these events, Manne should have reported the decision of the Cabinet [to not adopt a policy of breeding out the color], the advice from the Department’s Secretary that Cabinet requested, and the statement the Minister made to the House.

In failing to mention these three critical responses, while pretending the government gave “full endorsement” to the very opposite approach, Manne falsified Australian political history on an issue that he, more than almost any other academic commentator in the country, had the opportunity, the interest and the ability to investigate thoroughly and report honestly. If Manne can get away with behaviour of this kind, it would mean Australian universities no longer demand any standard of truthfulness from their academic staff.

In recent years, universities in other countries have not tolerated such breaches of their expectations of proper academic conduct. When credible public accusations have been made, they have appointed independent investigations into the charges. At the University of East Anglia, the head of the Climate Research Unit, Professor Phil Jones, has recently stood down from his post while a review is conducted into allegations that his unit’s climate scientists have engaged in misconduct.

In 2005, the president of the University of Colorado stood down Ward Churchill, a Professor of American Indian Studies, and appointed a panel of academics from both within and outside his own institution to investigate public charges of academic misconduct against him. In May 2006, the committee found Churchill guilty of falsification and fabrication of history and of plagiarism. The president then dismissed him.

Not bad, roping Chutch, the CRU, and Manne together. Windschuttle, incidentally, calls for Manne to step down from his position.

(via slackbastard and Andrew Bolt)