ESPN.com reports that former Indiana running back BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who just transferred to Ole Miss, may now be heading back to Indiana. Bizarre.

One of Austin Bay’s commenters notes a historical “Rule of 72” and figures that we can expect the UN’s death around 2018 (72 years after its 1946 founding). I can’t say I’ll be disappointed since the UN stands in the way of creating a meaningful alternative, like a coalition of liberal democracies.

Marc Cooper has some fighting words for his bretheren on the left who are giving Ward Churchill’s remarks a free pass:

Free speech and the first amendment should cover all professors, no matter how repugnant. I think it legitimate to defend Churchill’s right to be a vocal asshole (heaven knows most universities are densely populated with such types on both the Right and Left).

What I’m worried about is the way that some liberal groups are hemming and hawing on what he actually said. I’ve seen that some Colorado peace groups are praising Churchill as some sort of font of wisdom and downgrading his remarks as merely “stupid.” Other similar groups are actually supporting him—like this statement from the Rocky Mountain Center for Peace and Justice who in lauding Churchill characterize his remarks as only “ill-chosen.”

No. Not ill-chosen. They were carefully selected, hateful, unforgivable and demented, frankly. And having kept half-an-eye on Churchill since he emitted his execrable screed, I noticed that he has continued to be invited as a guest or panelist at numerous lefty events instead of being ostracized and ignored.

Mind you, Cooper wouldn’t have Churchill fired; neither Stephen Bainbridge nor Eugene Volokh would fire him either. Glenn Reynolds also has some linkage on Churchill’s connections (or lack thereof) to the American Indian Movement and native American ancestry in general; apparently being a “fake Indian” is even more popular than I thought previously.

With regard to “Bulgegate” that had the left side of the blogosphere worked up last Fall, the NYT explains why they couldn’t run with the story: it was all speculation. TalkLeft has the details, yet seems somewhat disappointed in the outcome.

Daniel Drezner received a gratis copy of a sex manual in the mail and is plugging it as one of his books of the month. I have two comments for Dan:

1. Given Jacqueline Passey’s thoughts on the matter, I suspect that if some of Dan’s under-18 readers (is that a null set?) got hold of the book, I doubt many of their future mates would disapprove.
2. Speaking of null sets, anyone considering throwing a copy my way should be aware that me having a copy of this book might possibly be even more useless than tits on a bull.

Our book of the month, however, is less likely to get you laid but may nonetheless be of interest to readers.

Chris and I would differ on this, and both of us would differ with Spoons. I’m pretty sure he’s wed to a Windows box, though Chris would recommend a Linux machine and I would recommend a Mac.

I went for an end-of-night stroll around the internet looking for a quote that I used years ago as an email signature. Apparently Oklahoma has had issues with cockfighting for decades, even up to the present. Here’s the quote I was looking for:

In every country the Communists have taken over, the first thing they do is outlaw cockfighting.
– John Monks, Oklahoma state representative, arguing against a bill that would make cockfighting illegal in his state

I also found this via The Professor, about The Professor:

10)He dresses as Santa Claus and pretends to have a heart attack in front of small groups of children.

6)He has to kill hobos to get an erection.

From /var/log/syslog on the laptop:

Feb 3 20:51:56 localhost smartd[6711]: Device: /dev/hda, 190 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

Looks like it’s time to backup the laptop’s hard drive and drag it over to Best Buy for warranty service.

Henry Farrell and Orin Kerr both are somewhat optimistic about Inside Higher Ed, which is intended to be a web-based (and free) alternative to the venerable Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’m cautiously optimistic myself, but I wonder if its job service’s self-described mission of “transforming the tedious, time-consuming and expensive process of applying for academic jobs into something almost enjoyable” might be a tad inflated. (Indeed, transforming the job market in political science to something even vaguely resembling that mission statement would require replacing the APSA “meat market” with a proper hiring-only event that is scheduled to correspond with actual disciplinary hiring practices.)

Following up from yesterday, Steven Taylor links an E! Online piece on the demise of Star Trek: Enterprise.

I’m with John (not Juan) Cole, Kevin Drum, and Oliver Willis: the “opposition rebuttal” to the State of the Union address is a waste of time and energy that usually makes the people who deliver it look like complete idiots (in large part because the rebuttal is written before the content of the SotU is known).

Heidi Bond quotes from a rather petulant email received by Kevin Jon Haller taking issue with the latter’s use of “state time” to post to his weblog. Haller writes, in partial response:

… I think the author has a very narrow understanding of what my academic duties are. Blogging is an extension of my research and teaching, not a digression from them.

Stephen Karlson reports on another misconception of the role of the professor, while Mike Munger is highly annoyed with mid-level university functionaries telling professors what to do.

It seems to me that the job (nay, responsibility) of the professor is the dissemination and expansion of human knowledge, for the good of society at large; in other words, both teaching and research. Further, being a professor (as opposed to a teacher, instructor, or lecturer) necessarily transcends the status of “jobhood” into a (dare-I-say?) existential realm; the occupation defines one’s existence, in a way that being a secretary, janitor, lawyer, or medical doctor doesn’t.

As such, professors are never truly “off the clock,” nor are they ever truly “on the clock”—professors have professional responsibilities to teach, to counsel and advise students, and to participate in shared governance of the university or college, but the scheduling of classes and meetings are concessions to the temporal nature of the world at large rather than exercises in “clock punching.” Thus, contra the AAUP, I’m not sure there is a point at which the professor truly speaks as a “private citizen,” although there are certainly points at which the professor should make clear that he is speaking outside his field of expertise, and unless the professor is an administrator of the college or university his remarks should not be construed as to carry their endorsement.

To return to Haller’s point, the professor’s primary teaching responsibility is to his or her enrolled students, but—unlike the teacher’s responsibility—the job also entails the wider dissemination and expansion of human knowledge. Blogging—like earlier forms of professorial participation in public discourse—is thus not a “distraction,” or even an “extension,” of one’s teaching and research; it is, in fact, an essential part of it.

For our Memphis-area readers: Saturday will see another iteration of the always-popular Memphis Area Blogger’s Bash; see Dark Bilious Vapors for all the gory details.

Update: Mike has a writeup, and Abby has pictures.

I can’t say I have a huge amount of sympathy for the political views of Ward Churchill, the UC-Boulder professor who now won’t be speaking at Hamilton College. That said, he’s a tenured faculty member at Colorado—however ill-judged the decision to tenure him was—and even if he weren’t tenured, the facts that he’s an insensitive jackass with repellant views and a walking testimonial for the validity of Godwin’s Law wouldn’t rise to the level so as to justify his firing.

More at Protein Wisdom and Cold Spring Shops; another account of Churchill’s travails appears in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed daily update ($).

Steven Taylor notes a lengthy piece in today’s Los Angeles Times looking at efforts to amend the Constitution to permit naturalized citizens to serve as president and vice-president.

The article also looks at the historical circumstances that gave rise to the prohibition on foreign-born citizens serving as president, although mention of Britain’s 1689 Glorious Revolution, in which the Stuart monarchy was displaced by the Dutch House of Orange is curiously omitted, and past efforts to eliminate that prohibition.

I previously discussed my support for such an amendment here.

The writing on the wall was there for some time, but now it’s official; Star Trek: Enterprise will come to an end after four seasons on UPN. Although I have to say that (at least creatively) Enterprise was on the rebound, hopefully this will give the powers that be behind Trek a few years to sit down and rethink their approach to telling stories; maybe they’ll even learn something from Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, which is getting significantly better ratings in a less desirable timeslot and with a big chunk of the potential audience having already seen the episodes that have already aired in Britain. (þ: OTB)

You know, I don’t think referring to the state’s leading football prospects as the state’s “Ten Most Wanted” is really projecting the image wanted by Ole Miss, State, and Southern.

As a recovering Randroid—well, it was a phase of mine about fifteen years ago and it lasted less than a year—I thought I should comment on all of the recent attention that’s been given to Rand. Cass has a good post that explores it, and she even mentions my love of Rush!!

First on Rand. Cass has asked if the world we live in now—the values we claim to hold—is Rand or Rand-lite. Definitely Rand-lite, as I see it. Rand considered things as mundane, and necessary, as taxation to be slavery of one to another. If I recall correctly, she was trying to come up with a way for the government to operate without taxes, such as charging people for access to the courts and police protection. Similarly, she was quite dogmatic about, well, everything. She considered self-sacrifice repulsive, even though Cass gives the matter a more thoughtful reading. One passage I recall is her trying to figure out if one should risk his life to save another’s. I believe she used the lifeboat scenario and concluded that in an emergency, self-sacrifice might be appropriate.

Ultimately, what turned me off of Rand was the coldness of her philosophy. Her philosophy could be taken straight out of the Declaration of Independence, but she takes it to an extreme that is unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a very basic, even foundational, description of liberty and one which I whole-heartedly endorse. In fact, The Declaration is as close to a holy book as I have. However, I see it more as defining the role of government than telling me how to live my life.

Now to Rush. My love for them pre-dates the Randroid period by seven or eight years. My first exposure to them was through the album Moving Pictures and if you listen to the lyrics to Tom Sawyer, it’s pretty clear that they were influenced by Rand. One blurb: “his mind is not for rent; to any God or government”. Sounds like her to me.

The other songs that I can think of, off the top of my head, that were influenced by her include Free Will and all of the album 2112. The title song is several things, one of which is a rant against totalitarianism and is also about human aspirations. IIRC, the first words are “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”, though the meaning isn’t the same as the Bible. In fact, it means the opposite. The meek will be trapped on Earth while the brave and adventurous will capture the solar system, though they will have to continue their battle against totalitarianism.

Lately, though, my favorite Rush song has been Red Sector A. It’s a story about the horrors of gulags, or concentration camps, and is quite moving. I can still remember the arguments about Rush starting to use synthesizers in their music (it happened a few years before Grace Under Pressure, which has Red Sector A, but I was a bit young to appreciate Rush when they made the switch; I was still hung up on Blondie and Rapper’s Delight).

Rush is still my favorite group, though Rand has been replaced by Hayek and Friedman.

See also these posts (here and here) at Marginal Revolution.

OTB Traffic Jam

Steven Taylor notes that the Austin American-Statesman has started a weblog just covering the Texas state legislature. It seems to me that the Clarion-Ledger could easily do the same thing for the Mississippi Legislature and provide a much more useful service to its readers than its typical output of 2–3 articles a day during the session.

Just got back from seeing The Motorcycle Diaries with my friends Kamilla and Chad; overall, it’s quite an enjoyable film, although I think that knowing where Ernesto Guevera’s journey ends—or at least what that journey was eventually perverted into, depending on your perspective on communism—made it slightly hard for me to feel a great deal of sympathy for the lead. Still, it’s a good rental, and enjoyable for the “buddy film” aspect of the piece if nothing else.

Glenn Reynolds in the course of rightly criticizing the neo-Confederate movement makes this rather incongrous statement:

As a political force, neo-Confederate sentiment is pretty trivial at the moment, even compared to the decaying remnants of Marxism.

Apparently Glenn didn’t get the memo about these schmucks who apparently have a substantial chunk of the Mississippi legislature doing their bidding. At least the Marxists around here are in relatively harmless professions (or serving on the Jackson City Council, which amounts to basically the same thing).

Somehow, the departure of William Safire from the New York Times has led to the gratuitous misuse of language:

Participation varied by region, and the impressive national percentages should not obscure the fact that the country’s large Sunni Arab minority remained broadly disenfranchised – due to alienation or terror or both.

The word “disenfranchised” literally means deprived of voting rights. Southern blacks were disenfranchised under Jim Crow. Women were disenfranchised prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

By contrast, Sunni Arabs in Iraq were not disenfranchised; nobody stopped them from voting. Instead, they chose not to drag their sorry asses to the polls, for whatever reason.

Today’s CL reports that BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who left Indiana University a couple of weeks ago, will be joining the Rebel football team in 2006, with two years of eligibility after sitting out the 2005 season due to NCAA transfer rules. Green-Ellis’ arrival will hopefully help shore up an Ole Miss rushing attack that has been anemic at best ever since the departure of Deuce McAllister. (þ: SEC FanBlog)

In other Ole Miss news (reported in the same article), the Rebels and the University of Memphis are considering rescheduling the 2005 opener at Memphis’ Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium for Labor Day (Monday, September 5th) from Saturday, September 3rd, presumably in the hopes of attracting regional or national television coverage for the matchup.

I don’t normally do the link round-up thing, but today seems like a good day to make an exception:

• Steven Taylor rounds up posts on the Iraqi election, as well as providing a bit of perspective of his own:

  The bottom line is: not every event in the world is part of a game between Reps and Dems where one side scores and the other side falls behind. Too many people treat the world like one football game where their team can do no wrong, and the other team must lose.

• Leopold Stotch writes:

  Obviously the new Iraqi government has a Herculean task ahead of it, but this is a major turning point in modern history. The Iraqi people are the true winners, but the secondary winner is the American voter, who once again put US foreign policy on the right side of history. The losers: the jihadists, old Europe, and most of the Democrat party.

• Joe Gandelman looks at Auschwitz and the Iraqi elections in light of the current conflict with Wahabiism.

I have to say that the scenario as things have played out has been at the “optimistic” end of my general thinking about this process, but there’s a rather long road ahead. I tend to think this election is an important—and necessary—first step, both for the Iraqis and for the Arab world at large. Now the hard work of building a democratic and inclusive constitution begins.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger helpfully explains why seven intersections in Jackson have been torn up for the past month while a contractor futzes around with installing new traffic signals.