August 4, 2026

KYLE SMITH: Old University, New Problem.

A lot of funny guys are associated with the University of Cambridge, such as alumni John Cleese, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams and Sacha Baron Cohen. Today, though, one of the ancient university’s faculty is inspiring as much laughter as any of them at their best. Meet Jason Arday, the most hilarious storyteller alive.

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It has become a reflex in academe to question the motives of those who discover evidence that endangers the reputation of favored scholars, the ones the university really wants to succeed. Naturally, Mr. Arday’s response to one professor who in 2023 brought up passages from Mr. Arday’s work that strongly resembled previously published writing was to claim that he was being wronged by the questions. “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes,” he replied, adding, “anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Sorry, but questioning the character of an accuser isn’t how truth is found. “You’re racist” may be one of today’s most favored epithets but it still isn’t an argument. Picture a toddler putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “La la la” when being told it’s bedtime, and you’ll have some sense of how our supposed guardians of truth react to unwelcome information. As one long-ago Cambridge figure, Bertrand Russell, wrote in 1942, “People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people, is a secondary consideration.”

Exit question: “Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE KNOW IT ENDS BADLY:

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

TROLL LEVEL: POTUS DJT.

Do the writers and editors really think this AMC clip is “beloved?” When I saw The Odyssey last week, Kidman’s ad was just more padding in a half-hour block of terrible trailers, product commercials(!) and more self-promotional slop from AMC to make the wait before the movie began even more excruciating.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BATTLESWARM: Pipers At The Exit Gates Of The Democrat Party. “Now, I realize that in the year of our Lord 2026, saying, ‘Oh, the Democrats are crazy. The Democrats are mental,’ is not actually terribly incisive political commentary. However, it’s always different when you’re on the outside compared to when you’re on the inside. And getting the inside story is actually more revealing, because of course from the outside there are a bunch of things about the situation we just weren’t aware of that it’s nice to be aware of.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

LOOK FOR THIS FAMILY IN FIVE YEARS…:

…and they’ll almost certainly be doing great.

Posted at 1:29 pm by Stephen Green

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will mortarboards roll after the Jason Arday allegations?

I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.

Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.

The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?

Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.

As Gareth Roberts writes at the London Spectator on “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday,” “Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HE’S A PLAGIARIST AND A FABULIST, AND NEEDS TO BE FIRED. END OF DISCUSSION:

Either academia is for academics, or it’s a DEI jobs program for the otherwise untrustworthy and unemployable. But it can’t be both.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

TRUMP’S WORST ENEMY – HIMSELF: This by Patriot Post’s Nate Jackson captures the why using two very recent illustrations.

Posted at 12:13 pm by Mark Tapscott

SPACE: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, carries a mirror the size of Hubble’s but sees a patch of sky about a hundred times wider.

Two big questions drive the mission. The first is dark energy, the name given to whatever is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Roman will survey something on the order of a billion galaxies, measuring how they are distributed and subtly distorted, to trace how that expansion has changed across the history of the universe. It is not designed to explain dark energy so much as to measure its effects far more precisely than we can now.

The second is planets. Roman will stare at the crowded star fields toward the centre of our galaxy and watch for gravitational microlensing, the brief brightening that happens when one star, and any planets around it, passes in front of another and bends its light. Monitoring something like 200 million stars, it is expected to find well over a thousand planets this way, including cold, distant worlds far from their stars that other techniques tend to miss.

But have patience: “After the 30 August launch, Roman faces the same outbound trip as Webb did, out to the second Lagrange point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, followed by months of commissioning before any science begins in earnest.”

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH OR SOMETHING:

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green