LOOKS KIND OF SHADY: Judge Unseals RightHaven Contract.

THE TENNESSEE LEGISLATURE WILL CONSIDER GUNS ON CAMPUS, and I got a lengthy email from the Faculty Senate encouraging me to write my legislators in opposition. If you’re a Tennessean and want to share your opinion, you can find the contact information here.

ROGER SIMON ON U.C. IRVINE’S CONTINUING SCANDALS: “Only Orwell himself could describe the continuing saga of the UC Irvine, which has become the ‘Animal Farm’ of the University of California system (with other campuses not far behind).”

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: UNEARTHING MATRIARCHY and academic credulity.

Ten years ago, Cynthia Eller offered a useful and long-overdue demolition of a mistaken idea that gained widespread currency in women’s studies and in some sectors of popular culture. In The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future (Beacon Press 2001), Eller, who is an associate professor of women’s studies and religious studies at Montclair State University, reviewed the archaeological evidence in favor of the idea that human society had, in a remote epoch, gone through a period when women ruled and showed that this proposition was a tissue of wishful thinking, wild surmise, and aggressive misreading of the available facts.

The fantasy, of course, remains in circulation, often in association with the idea that once upon a time people were generally united in worship of “the Goddess,” in her various guises. The Goddess, according to this story, was eventually suppressed by patriarchal society. Suppressed but not forgotten, she lives on—notably in the syllabi of numerous women’s studies courses and feminist-inflected courses in other parts of the curriculum.

Read the whole thing.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD on U.S. / Brazil Relations. “President Lula killed the Bolivarean revolution with kindness; he choked it with butter. Lula’s Brazil stuck up for Venezuela at international gatherings and danced with it at parties. But all the while, Lula’s Brazil was destroying the political logic of the Bolivareans by demonstrating that a pluralistic democracy integrated into the global market can do more for the poor than incompetent populist blowhards. Chavez talked; Lula delivered, giving Brazilians (and especially the poor) rising living standards while enhancing rather than reducing their civil liberties. Thanks to Lula, Chavez looks more like a survival from a bygone era than like the cutting edge of Latin America’s future.”

STONE OF SISYPHUS: Responding to ThinkProgress’s misrepresentations. “Unfortunately, young Mr. Fang has neither the business experience nor the intelligence to understand the issues about which he writes. The result is that nearly every sentence is a howler. Among other things, while a contango market is the main subject of Fang’s post, he doesn’t know what the phrase means.” Plus this: “If Think Progress wants to attack petroleum speculators, Goldman Sachs should be in the dock–except that Goldman Sachs is a top contributor to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, Americans would be sold contaminated, germy meat. And they were right!

MARKDOWNS ON Household Supplies.

POLIWOOD: Teach a Muslim to Write? Islam’s Growing Influence on Hollywood & Speech.

SOME TAX THOUGHTS from Larry Correia: “Government can’t balance a checkbook. They’re idiots. I know finance math. I do it for a living. And when I look at the numbers involved here, (and the interest!) it makes my head swim. . . . It doesn’t work. No matter how hard you wish, no matter how hard you hope, no matter how much compassion you can fit in your stupid compassionate heart, no matter how much you happen to like some program that helps somebody do something wonderful… math never lies and interest never sleeps. Caring don’t pay the bills.”

He’s the author of Monster Hunter International, among other works.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: A ROUNDUP ON ACADEMIC BLOGGERS. I like the picture of me on the beach, which is actually from a photo shoot several years ago.

SHOCKING NEWS ABOUT MILLIONAIRES:

Most people know that wealth in the U.S. is in the hands of a small percentage of the total population. And, today, most of those folks with a net worth of $1 million or more have earned it themselves.

They’re mostly entrepreneurs who create everything from high-speed networks to garbage haulers. They dig ditches and build houses and grow corn and make jewelry. They deal stamps or coins or artwork and control pests and cut lawns. They also cure people and give them new teeth. Others will defend their neighbors or even feed them.

And they’re not big spenders. In fact, most of those with big bucks live well under their means — think about Warren Buffett still living in that modest Omaha home — and they put their money instead toward investments that help them stockpile more wealth.

Funny, that’s not the kind of thing I’m hearing from the White House. The advice to live below your means and avoid using credit is good, though it seems to me I’ve heard all this before.

JAMES TARANTO: Big Labor’s moment of triumph fails to materialize. “Perhaps their political power is fading because increasingly their adversaries are not Big Business but taxpayers. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a majority of labor union members work for the government.”

SO I GOT AN EMAIL FROM YALE PRESIDENT RICHARD LEVIN LAST NIGHT about the “sexual harassment” claims involving Yale. Here’s the key bit:

As you may know, Yale was recently informed by the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education that it will be investigating a complaint made by a group of current students and graduates alleging that the University is in violation of Title IX of the Higher Education Act. Title IX mandates that no one be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any federally supported education program on the basis of sex. We have not yet received a copy of the complaint, and the notification from the Office of Civil Rights does not provide details. We believe that the investigation will focus on Yale’s policies and practices concerning sexual harassment and misconduct.

It is imperative that the climate at Yale be free of sexual harassment and misconduct of any kind. The well being of our students and the entire community requires this. Should transgressions occur, they must be addressed expeditiously and appropriately.
We will cooperate fully with the Office of Civil Rights in their investigation, but the Officers, the Dean of Yale College, and I believe that we should not await the investigation before asking ourselves how we might improve the policies, practices, and procedures intended to protect members of our community. I write to describe some of the measures we are taking immediately.

I have appointed an external Advisory Committee on Campus Climate, chaired by Margaret H. Marshall ‘76JD, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and a former Fellow of the Yale Corporation. The other members of the Committee are Seth P. Waxman ‘77JD, former Solicitor General of the United States and a partner at WilmerHale LLP; Kimberly Goff-Crews ‘83BA, ‘86JD, Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students at the University of Chicago; and Elizabeth (Libby) Smiley ’02BA, former president of the Yale College Council and a director at Barbary Coast Consulting in San Francisco.
I have asked the Committee for advice about how sexual harassment, violence or misconduct may be more effectively combated at Yale, and what additional steps the University might take to create a culture and community in which all of our students are safe and feel well supported. The Committee will spend time listening to members of our community about the situation as they live it and will make its own assessments. We have policies in place, and a number of recommendations developed during the last year are being implemented. Nevertheless, I am confident that there is more that we can do, and I am grateful to the members of the panel for contributing their time and wise counsel.

It’s worth noting that — as Wendy Kaminer pointed out in The Atlantic last week — this is a claim based almost entirely on free expression that some don’t like:

What accounts for such feminine timidity, this instinctive unwillingness or inability to talk or taunt back, without seeking the protection of university or government bureaucrats? Talking is apparently beside the point. “I just want to be able to walk back to my dorm at night without hearing all this crazy stuff from these guys,” one student complains. I sympathize (I was a young woman once, too), but “hearing crazy stuff” from people in public is part of life in a free society, a society in which you enjoy equal rights to say crazy stuff.

Putatively progressive feminists might agree, if only they regarded women as equal to the task of talking back, if only they distinguished between men who “say stuff” about women and men who “do stuff” to women. In the feminist view reflected in the Yale draft complaint, the misogynist rants of some undergraduate men (perhaps a relatively small percentage of them) is not speech. It’s a series of “dangerous,” “sex-discriminatory threats” that “intimidate” and “terrorize” women, constituting a hostile environment (or “rape culture”) that causes sexual violence.

See, you used to be able to punish the sort of behavior complained of here on the ground that it violated general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior. But after a half-century or so of attacking even the notion of general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior — especially where sex is concerned! — that doesn’t work.

Universities have long told the larger culture that it must simply put up with whatever is said, however offensive, in the interest of free expression. Now we see more evidence that that was always a lie, a self-serving cover story that was really meant simply to protect speech that the larger culture didn’t want to hear, with no intention to protect speech that people at universities don’t want to hear. Universities, meanwhile, have become some of the most hostile environments for free speech anywhere in America.

That repression, of course, merely empowers such antics — or, if one wishes to play the usual leftist game, it could be argued that their very crudity is evidence of authenticity in response to repression. At any rate, at a time where the nation is rethinking the value of higher education generally in the face of straitened financial circumstances, this hypocrisy will not go unnoticed.

Meanwhile, I note that the investigating committee is stacked 3-1 women against men. Though this is probably meant as a signal to the complainants — and to the Obama Administration educrats — that the complaint is taken seriously, it also sends a signal that satisfying the complainants is more important than fairness. Bad move, Yale.

But Peter Berkowitz says that Yale is all about the Benjamins here.

UPDATE: Mischievous sorts may wind up piling on, arguing to the Department of Education educrats that Yale’s decision to host an unrepentant Taliban is further evidence of hostility to women on campus.

SETH GODIN On the Higher Education Bubble. “Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources? If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag.” Credentialed, not educated.

Meanwhile, Bill Quick observes:

Here’s the problem: Currently, you can acquire very expensive credentials without much of an education, or you can acquire a relatively inexpensive education without credentials.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, that dichotomy is going to be resolved. And I know which side of that bet I’m putting my money on.

Sooner or later, the gods of the copybook headings win out.

CHANGE: Radley Balko: Obama: — Worse Than Bush on Bullshit Gambling Moralizing, Too. Yeah, the near-shutdown they’ve imposed on online gambling is pretty heavyhanded, but seems consistent with their generally heavyhanded approach toward regulation of the Internet, and everything else. Apologies from once-fervent “Obamatarians” will continue to be accepted for a short time.

A. BARTON HINKLE: The Roots Of Racism: Will we ever get beyond the notion of racial identity?

Your garden-variety bigot is apt to argue that the differences between the races are not superficial but quite profound. He is apt to tell you each race possesses its own essential nature, its own culture and mores, and that for this reason it is best if each sticks to its own kind.

Some would call that backward. Others would call it progressive. Put a happy-face on the same sentiments and you have something like Somerville Place, a blacks-only residential floor at the University of Southern California. Says USC, “The goals of Somerville Place aim to foster an understanding of and respect for Black culture.” Ahh, that. The bigot and USC might differ on whether black culture should be respected, but they agree it exists. Interesting.

Somerville is not unique. Voluntary racial balkanization has greatly advanced in recent years, and rare is the major institution without a diversity office premised on the idea that people of different races bring with them different traits. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor famously put it, “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Some might say this is far different from the racialism of the Jim Crow South—that Sotomayor spoke of experiences people live as a result of their ethnicity, not traits they are born with. And there is something to this. But it also would imply that, at some point in a happier future, the need for racial head-counting would disappear as people cease to experience disparate treatment. To the contrary: Diversity programs will always be needed, one gathers, even when discrimination no longer exists. Also interesting.

As always, racial divisions that serve the purposes of those at the top are encouraged. Read the whole thing.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO USED “SIGNING STATEMENTS” TO AVOID LAWS HE DISLIKES: And they were right!

READER MARTIN MURCEK ON THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S INTERNET ID POLICY: “So, I need to give my ‘real’ identity to use the Internet, but not to vote? That makes sense…”

Heh.

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Greene snarks: “I’d be more than happy to present the government a copy of my original long-form birth certificate in order to use the internet. And I’ll do that the day Barack Obama shows me his.”

JON STEWART on President Obama’s ‘Spending Reductions in the Tax Code.’ “Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’re going to have to send to George Orwell? That’s the weirdest way of… just say ‘tax hike’! That’s like saying, ‘I’m not going on a diet, I’m going to add calories to my excluded food intake!'”

HEH: “Two words: John Edwards.”

THE FORGOTTEN TAX REBELS of the Great Depression. “Many historians depict the Great Depression as a turning point when bitter economic realities finally led the middle class to break from laissez-faire tradition and demand bigger government. This is not entirely untrue, but it’s only part of what happened. In its initial phase, the Depression also spawned a powerful movement for smaller government that included tax revolts. These revolts were not only more widespread but often more extreme than any sponsored by the tea party.”

WHY DRUDGE IS DRUDGE: The Genius Of Headline Arrangement.

JON MEACHAM: People Say Obama’s Not A Natural-Born Citizen? Then Let’s Amend That Clause Out Of The Constitution! “The beginning here sounds like a parody of bien-pensant liberalism — almost physical revulsion at what’s not only a minor thoughtcrime, but one rejected by all major Republican candidates except Trump (who isn’t really a major Republican candidate). Good lord, man. Get a hold of yourself.”

BLOG REPORT: Marco Rubio at the Tampa Tax Day Tea Party.