The Daily Mail records the latest Woke insanity, a particularly impressive example.

The University of Oxford is considering scrapping sheet music for being ‘too colonial’ after staff raised concerns about the ‘complicity in white supremacy’ in music curriculums.

Professors are set to reform their music courses to move away from the classic repertoire, which includes the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on ‘white European music from the slave period. …

Documents seen by the [Telegraph] indicate proposed reforms to target undergraduate courses.

It claimed that teaching musical notation had ‘not shaken off its connection to its colonial past’ and would be ‘a slap in the face’ to some students.

And it added that musical skills should no longer be compulsory because the current repertoire’s focus on ‘white European music’ causes ‘students of colour great distress’.

RTWT

They pay Peter Salovey $1,662,386 per year to destroy Yale. Amazingly, a fair number of inferior schools pay their presidents even more. The top earner, the President of California’s University of Spoiled Children gets $7,061,188.

Chronicle of Higher Education

Atlas Obscura discusses the effort to decipher the Rongorongo script.

On the outskirts of Hanga Roa, Easter Island’s only town, the Museo Rapa Nui has a small but striking collection. It includes a rare female version of the monolithic statues known as moai, and sets of piercing moai eyes made from white coral and red volcanic rock. Finely worked obsidian tools sit alongside displays on the Birdman contest, which involved swimming through shark-infested waters and searching an offshore islet for a seabird egg in order to claim the spiritual leadership of Easter Island. With so much to see, it’s easy to overlook the carved wooden fish in a glass cabinet. Raised on a stand, as if held aloft by a proud angler, it is the color of dark chocolate and roughly the size and shape of an oar blade. The design may be relatively simple, but this object represents a great—and unsolved—linguistic puzzle.

The fish is covered with rows of stylized glyphs. Some resemble human forms and animals and plants, while others are more abstract—circles, crosses, chevrons, lozenges. This is rongorongo, the only indigenous writing system to develop in Oceania before the 20th century and, according to James Grant-Peterkin, author of A Companion to Easter Island, one of “the last remaining mysteries on Easter Island.”

Known locally by its Polynesian name Rapa Nui, Easter Island is the remotest inhabited island on Earth, 1,298 miles from its nearest populated neighbor. According to oral traditions, rongorongo tablets were brought here by the first settlers, who arrived between the years 800 and 1200, probably from the Marquesas or Gambier islands, which are now part of French Polynesia. Academics disagree about when the writing system emerged. Some believe it long predated European contact—which began when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen reached the island on Easter Sunday 1722—while others argue that it emerged as late as the 1770s, after the Rapanui people saw European writing for the first time during a Spanish expedition to the island.

It appears that rongorongo was primarily used for religious purposes and only understood by the local elites. “Rongorongo was never a script of the common people,” says Cristián Moreno Pakarati, head of research at the Rapanui Pioneers Society. “Only a handful of wise literate people, according to tradition only men, could interpret the texts.” Knowledge of the script began to disappear in the 19th century, he adds. “The Rapanui population faced the disintegrating forces of the West in the form of disease epidemics, piracy, ‘blackbirding’ slave raids [in which up to 1,500 islanders were kidnapped and forced to work in Peru] and religious indoctrination.” As the Rapanui population declined by approximately 95 percent—a census in 1877 recorded just 111 Rapanui islanders—only a fragmentary understanding of rongorongo survived.

But the knowledge was never completely lost, says Steven Roger Fischer, former director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand, and author of Island at the End of the World, A History of Writing, and A History of Reading. “Several Rapanui still remembered the traditions, some chants and customs, and relayed a few of these things to foreign visitors well into the first two decades of the 20th century.”

Some of these visitors took notes on what they heard about rongorongo, and over the years, there have been various attempts to decipher the script, but it has proved a difficult task. One problem is the lack of data. Only 26 rongorongo objects have survived—the Museo Rapa Nui’s is a replica, and the originals are all overseas, predominantly in Europe, the United States, and mainland Chile. Some have only a few lines of text. “Some rock carvings on the island [have individual symbols that] are very similar to rongorongo, but there isn’t a line of text anywhere,” says Grant-Peterkin.

RTWT

They both look so happy!

It was windy. Trees came down, and we’ve been sitting with no power for a couple of days. You don’t realize how dependent on electrical power you are until you don’t have any.

Down in Virginia, we had a back-up generator. Our PA farm was always just a vacation place and, besides, power is usually very reliable and service restoration quick here in PA. Not so much this time.

Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu 吴修铭

Matt Taibbi has bad news for Americans who still care about Free Speech and the open exchange of opinions.

When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. …

Listening to Wu… is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

— More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”

That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.

RTWT

The kind of media environment favored by Wu (and other radical leftists) “that prevailed in the 1950s” is a regulated monopoly of three network sources all in complete agreement on the Overton Window, the range of acceptable political discourse, i.e. No Rush Limbaugh, no Fox News, no right-wing blogs.

The Yale Football Team of 1891. Read this.

Back in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton ’17, in This Side of Paradise described “The Yale Thing” this way:

——————————–

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

Monsignor chuckled.

“I’m one, you know.”

“Oh, you’re different.” I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic,” you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors”

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

“That’s it.”

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

——————————–

The Yale man in fiction was typically portrayed as an All-American, square-shooting man-of-action, along the lines of Frank Merriwell, Dink Stover, Flash Gordon, and even Bruce Wayne.

The modern ascendancy of leftism can **** up anything, even the Yale identity.

On Facebook, some self-appointed younger alumni (nearly all female) and some Albertus grad who merely works at Yale set up and run the “Yale Alumni Group.”

Typically, that group has a rules regime created by sanctimonious left-wing goo-goos.

1. Agree to Abide by the Rules of this Group by Joining it

By joining this group, you agree to abide by its policies below and understand that group Admins and moderators will enforce those policies at their discretion.
This page is heavily monitored. Posts that do not contribute to alumni community-building or are determined to be antagonistic, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise rude or insulting, will be deleted and the user may be muted, blocked and/or banned from the group immediately without notice.

In other words: Surrender your free speech rights at the door.

2. No Hate Speech, Bullying, Insulting or Rude Language

This page is heavily monitored. Posts that do not contribute to alumni community-building or are determined to be antagonistic, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise rude or insulting, will be deleted and the user may be muted, blocked and/or banned from the group immediately without notice. …

6. Be Kind and Courteous. Like at Yale.

We’re all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let’s treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required. …”

“Be Kind and Courteous. Like at Yale.”? What Yale is that? Not the Yale I was at. The Yale I knew was full of intensely competitive, sharp-tongued young men with a talent for cutting remarks who were not inclined to suffer fools and simps gladly.

Obviously, the more recent Yale has been sensitized and feminized, neutered and house broken, and politically corrected and pansified to a fare-thee-well.

Yalies today clearly do not wear big blue sweaters and smoke pipes, they get tattoos and piercings and emote a lot. They are not a bit reminiscent of November. They are like a sticky, humid day in August in the rainy season in a Third World swamp.

Over the last 48 hours, that Facebook Yale Alumni group featured a thread started by a typical female specimen who wanted advice about how to cope with “bullying and intimidation” when “speaking truth to power” at an upcoming meeting of some unnamed non-profit board.

It seemed obvious to me that anybody who started off telling you they enjoyed some sort of privileged possession of the truth, and who regarded debate and disagreement as “bullying and intimidation” was a deluded and outrageously self-entitled nuisance with a penchant for posing as a victim. I thought all this cowardice about facing oppositional speech and eagerness to play the victim card was decidedly unbecoming in a graduate of Dear Old Yale and consequently a card-carrying member of the national elite, and said as much. I carefully phrased all my observations as blandly and politely as possible (knowing perfectly well that censorship was a hair-trigger away).

A number of other females rushed immediately to her defense, accusing me of “mansplaining,” not entirely inaccurately describing me as “arrogant and insufferable,” and demanding that I check my white male privilege.

I responded with this poster meme:

Within a few minutes, when I went to read the responses, I found that all of my comments had been purged.

Having taken great care to avoid any actual pejoratives or colorful expression, I was much annoyed. I had drink taken as well, and I lost my temper. I sat down and wrote a posting specifically insulting the group’s management characterizing their sexual proclivities and existential status and urging them to commit obscene acts, some actually impossible. I’m afraid my boyhood roots in a mining town in the Hard Coal Region came out under provocation.

Not surprisingly, a minute later, I was no longer a member of the Facebook Yale Alumni Group.

But I’m not done with those wee slinkit cowerin’ beasties. My next step will be to create a Free Speech Yale Alumni Group on Facebook.