Here we go

Let the world love fest begin.

Oddly funny links

These have been going around the office and are pretty funny in a mesmerizing sort of way:

http://www.cryingwhileeating.com/

http://dailydancer.com/

another good book

A good companion piece to the Jeffrey Sachs book that I plugged a while back is Samantha Power's pullitzer prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America in the age of Genocide. It charts both the many cases of genocide in the twentieth century and the evolution of American foreign policy vis a vis genocide, which has essentially been to complain a lot.
The End of Poverty and A Problem from Hell combine to do a pretty good job of showing how incredibly fucked up human beings are. I am pretty much unequivocally in the Pax Americana camp at this point. For all those parents of soldiers who would flip out if we sent their kids to, god forbid, stop a genocide, I say Get OVER IT! That's the job they signed up for, and I'm sure the soldiers would rather risk their lives for a noble cause than to secure the pocketbooks of CEO's.
The Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsis AND the Hutus (they alternately slaughtered each other), the Cambodians, the Kurds, the Bosnians.....sorry bout ya, can't piss off Mr. and Mrs. Apple-pie. They might vote for the other guy next time.

Academic open-mindedness

CUNY’s school of education has actually codified the institutionalized ideological discrimination that now pervades academia:

The School of Education at the CUNY campus initiated last fall a new method of judging teacher candidates based on their "dispositions," a vogue in teacher training across the country that focuses on evaluating teachers' values, apart from their classroom performance.
Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions.
"All of these buzz words don't seem to mean anything until you look and see how they're being implemented," a prominent history professor at Brooklyn College, Robert David Johnson, said. "Dispositions is an empty vessel that could be filled with any agenda you want," he said.
Critics such as Mr. Johnson say the dangers of the assessment policy became immediately apparent in the fall semester when several students filed complaints against an instructor who they said discriminated against them because of their political beliefs and "denounced white people as the oppressors."