HARVARD DOESN’T THINK MUCH of U.S. high schools, according to this report.

UPDATE: Reader Gautam Mukunda says it’s not quite like that:

I just saw your link on Harvard’s opinion of US high schools. I’m afraid it doesn’t quite mean what you (and the person you linked to) think it means. I graduated from Harvard in 2001 and the dirty little secret of the program was that, overwhelmingly, it was populated by recruited athletes. One of my roommates was a safety on the football team and many of my best friends were recruited players on the football team and soccer teams – I certainly didn’t have any problem with them being at the school. But Harvard does drop its academic standards significantly for people on its premier sports teams (primarily football and men’s hockey – although it happened somewhat on the women’s teams as well, it didn’t happen nearly as much). There was a rumor my year that at least one player on the hockey team had an SAT score below 1000. So, in this particular case, I don’t think it really means that Harvard feels that many of the most elite students in America still don’t have basic writing skills. There is a similar program in mathematics as well – and I mean really basic math, algebra and such, which, again, is heavily populated by recruited athletes.

Me, I was a four-letter man. Of course, the letters were B-E-E-R.

TECHCENTRALSTATION has a redesigned website. Check it out, and don’t miss Eugene Miller’s system for mapping the debate over technology.

MARK STEYN ON LABOR DAY:

This Labour Day weekend, I find myself thinking about the working class, the masses.

No, honestly, I do. Okay, I’m on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand have jobs they’ll be getting back to on Tuesday. They work. They would be classed as workers. But they’re not a homogeneous “working class,” they’re not conscripts in Karl Marx’s “masses.” The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.

Not everyone is happy about that, naturally. Read the whole thing.

BILL QUICK has recovered from his blog outage.

MORE UNSOPHISTICATED DIPLOMACY, from the French. One day, perhaps, they’ll acquire sufficient polish to be effective in the international arena.

TWENTY WORDS: Reader Franco Aleman emails:

The NYT is starting to see the light; the piece is a good one. But what I found astonishing is the first paragraph, coming from the same ranks that made such a big fuss over the 16 words by Bush on his SOTU address…

Yes. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The BBC, the world’s largest and best known public service broadcaster, sends out millions of words daily, but its long-nurtured reputation for accuracy, fairness and objectivity is being challenged for just 20 of them.

On May 29, the defense correspondent of its morning radio news show, Andrew Gilligan, said that the government had inserted into its dossier of intelligence on Iraqi arms the claim that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were deployable within 45 minutes.

Mr. Gilligan went on to say that “actually the government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in.” The phrase took only seconds to utter, at 6:07 a.m., but the effect has been long lasting.

And it’s not over:

While most attention has been focused on the decline in public trust of Mr. Blair’s government, the BBC’s ratings have slid as its practices and internal judgments have been exposed. In a poll in The Daily Telegraph late last week, 47 percent of those questioned said their opinion of Mr. Blair had gone down since the inquiry began, and 36 percent said their opinion of the BBC had also fallen.

Rightly so.

UPDATE: John Keegan observes:

It does seem extraordinary, whatever value we give to the issues of freedom of speech and independence of the media, that a body founded by royal charter and supported by what is effectively a tax on subscribers should treat with the government as if it were a sovereign body.

The rights and immunities conferred on the BBC at the outset of its existence were clearly both desirable and justifiable, if it were not to become an agency of government news management.

The enlargement of those rights engineered by the BBC, particularly in recent years, suggests that both its employees and trustees now conceive themselves to be outside and even above democratic and constitutional processes. . . .

The issues raised by the BBC’s conception of itself as a sovereign power are too large to be dealt with by Lord Hutton. They are crucial, nevertheless, in the context of the inquiry, because they have worked to direct its focus away from the purpose for which it was called into being.

Accountable to neither the voters nor the marketplace! That’s the ultimate New Class dream, of course, and explains in part why the BBC has such iconic status to the New Class, worldwide.

UPDATE: Biased BBC has more on this, of course.

“VOICES” is a new blog set up by Michele Catalano to remember 9/11. She fears that the Big Media won’t do a proper job. She’s not the only one:

They are doing token little gawpy, mewling pieces here and there about individuals whose lives were damaged or destroyed by what they demean as ‘incidents’, as though this brutal assault were just another mundane ‘accident’.

Those were not ‘incidents’ or ‘accidents’; they were the opening salvos of the war in which we are now engaged.

Let’s hope they do better than that.

THEY WERE SPOILING FOR WAR, SO THEY SILENCED INTERNAL DISSENT AND BURIED THEIR OWN DOUBTS:

BBC governors decided to turn the tussle with the government over the Iraq dossier story into a make-or-break trial of strength despite harbouring doubts over the original Today report.

Emails released by the Hutton inquiry show that a number of governors, including chairman Gavyn Davies, were determined not to buckle in the face of government pressure even though they thought the story might not stand up to scrutiny. . . .

This evidence will fuel the concerns of those in the BBC who believe it went into battle for the right reasons but over the wrong story.

I blame the NeoBeebs.

UPDATE: Bill Herbert likes the term “neobeebs” and points out some additional problems with the BBC’s position: “Gilligan couldn’t possibly have believed his own copy.”

Sadly, however, he appeared to believe his reviews.

BUSTAMANTE UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky has posts on MEChA here and here.

He also notes, via email, that the lefty regions of the blogosphere don’t seem as willing to condemn Bustamante’s racist connections as the righty regions were willing to condemn Trent Lott’s.

UPDATE: Make that racist and homophobic. I’m disappointed to see the Democrats choosing such a troglodyte as their standard-bearer.

And yet, as Matt Welch notes, somehow it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger who’s being called homophobic? Puhleez.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Michael Levy emails:

You should note that Aztlan.net is not officially linked to M.E.Ch.A.–they deny any link, and Hector Carreon of la Voz is part of U.M.A.S., a different chicano student organization. They do share the same views on most issues, but you can’t blame M.E.Ch.A./Bustamante for Carreon’s words unless you can find some proof M.E.Ch.A. supports la Voz.

Fair enough. The page linked above under “homophobic” goes to Aztlan.net, not MEChA. My mistake. I blame the cough syrup. (And, yes, there really is cough syrup — I’ve spent labor day weekend with a nasty cold, which seems deeply unfair. It’s like having to scrape ice off your windshield in August — bad enough in season, but a real gyp out of season.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Rustler has a post correcting my error on Aztlan.net, above. Meanwhile here’s a Daniel Weintraub post on Bustamante.

STILL MORE: Crooked Timber says it’s all just a right-wing smear job, and Bustamante has nothing to be ashamed of. (Well, actually they say that “Bustamente” has nothing to be ashamed of. Who’s he? Another one of those 134 candidates? But my snarkiness aside, it’s a long post that’s worth reading if you want to see the pro-Bustamante angle to this story. Trouble is, when A.N.S.W.E.R. is routinely portrayed by the media as a bunch of ordinary concerned citizens, it’s not much of a stretch to think that MEChA might be getting a free ride, is it?)

LATER: The post at Crooked Timber is by Ted Barlow — I didn’t credit him above because I had the impression — apparently wrong — that he was keeping a lower blog-profile these days. Sorry, Ted. And glad to have you back in the blogosphere! I don’t take back the “Bustamente” crack though — if you’re going to post that everyone else is sloppy, it behooves you to spell the name right.

YET MORE AGAIN: Juan non-Volokh has a post saying that the Crooked Timber item above is “sloppy” and notes:

Why do all these MEChA sites post “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan”? Perhaps because it was a statement of principles adopted at the 1969 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, out of which MEChA was born. It is part of “the essential philosophy of MEChA,” according to the University of Arizona chapter, and is one formulation of the group’s organizing principles. Whether or not the infamous phrase is the “official” slogan of MEChA or not, it is certainly reasonable to view it as part of the association’s creed.

I feel pretty sure that a right-wing group saying the same kinds of things about white people that MEChA says about hispanics wouldn’t be cut this sort of media slack.

STILL MORE ON THIS: It’s a bit behind the curve, but here’s a post by David Neiwert defending Bustamante, just in case you’re interested. Flatteringly, he seems to think that I’m more influential than Fox News, though that in itself may undercut his credibility.

YET MORE: Now Neiwert is mad at me for “knocking his credibility.” Sheesh. I just thought it was funny that he was putting me in the context of Big Media. I actually thought I was being rather generous and even-handed to add his post here. And I think I’ve gone out of my way to link to, and quote, people who say Bustamante and MEChA aren’t racist. I just don’t find them persuasive, and I think that Newert would call any white politician who talked about race the way they do a racist.

The rather frantic nature of the response to what seem to me perfectly legitimate questions — questions that, as Kaus points out, Bustamante could have cleared up easily with a few straightforward sentences when they were first raised — suggests to me that some people have a lot invested in the notion that their political allies couldn’t possibly be racist. Sorry, but reality intrudes. It’s not 1964 anymore.j

And Trent Lott wouldn’t have gotten a pass for this, either. Meanwhile Robert Tagorda thinks that Pejman Yousefzadeh has pretty much settled things.

STILL MORE: But if that doesn’t, here’s an exhaustive examination of MEChA in its own words.

KAMIL ZOGBY spots some hopeful news from Najaf:

Imagine: the Shia are the majority in Iraq, and they were murderd and persecuted by Saddam’s Bathist Sunni regime for decades; then, Bathist henchmen and al-Qaeda terrorists murder the one of the most revered Shia Ayatollahs in Iraqi Shia society, along with over 120 innocent other Shias; then, a large Shia crowd becomes aware that two al-Qaeda mass killers have sent an e-mail saying “mission accomplished: the dog is dead.” And, what do they do? They hustle the two characters off to the “nearest police station .” They didn’t kill them on the spot, ripping their limbs from their bodies, and disembowling them on the spot. They brought them to the police! This shows to me, if the story is true, that the majority of Shia want an Iraq that subscribes to rule of law and not the rule of men.

Perhaps the “Arab street” is less irresponsible than some fear.

MORE EURO-SCANDALS:

Pressure was growing on leaders of the Italian left yesterday over allegations that they took massive kickbacks when Telecom Italia bought a chunk of Telekom Serbia during Slobodan Milosevic’s rule.
A key financial adviser has accused European commissioner Romano Prodi; a former foreign minister, Lamberto Dini; the leader of the Democrats of the Left party, Piero Fassino; and Rome’s mayor, Walter Veltroni, of taking millions of pounds in backhanders when the deal was done in 1997. . . .

More used to firing similar accusations at Italy’s billionaire prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, he suggested, without giving details, that Mr Berlusconi was the real “puppetmaster” pulling the strings behind this scandal too.

Stay tuned.