We’ve known that since early in our own Freshman year, of course. But Dean of Undergraduate Affairs Betty Trachtenburg (PC-enforcer for the University) really outdid herself in the liberal stupidity department with this response to the Virginia Tech Shootings.

Oldest College Daily:

In the wake of Monday’s massacre at Virginia Tech in which a student killed 32 people, Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg has limited the use of stage weapons in theatrical productions.

Students involved in this weekend’s production of “Red Noses” said they first learned of the new rules on Thursday morning, the same day the show was slated to open. They were subsequently forced to alter many of the scenes by swapping more realistic-looking stage swords for wooden ones, a change that many students said was neither a necessary nor a useful response to the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

According to students involved in the production, Trachtenberg has banned the use of some stage weapons in all of the University’s theatrical productions. While shows will be permitted to use obviously fake plastic weapons, students said, those that hoped to stage more realistic scenes of stage violence have had to make changes to their props.

Trachtenberg could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

John McCain has been making serious movements in a rightward direction recently, speaking out against gun control, urging America to stay the course in Iraq. (You might almost think he was running for president, or something.)

This little vignette at the Murrells Inlet, South Carolina VFW Hall was downright endearing. The moonbats were wetting their beds over at Daily Kos over it: Splash1, Splash2, Splash3.

0:42 video

That Kos-linked video is being flooded with attention, and isn’t loading in a timely fashion. Here’s the same thing at an alternative link.

Here’s the complete version (on a leftwing site, but I enjoyed it anyway).

Christopher Booke reports that Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt has issued a strong condemnation of Iran’s propaganda photographs of captured British hostages.

It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.

Hat tip to Chuck.

The Washington Post yesterday reported the latest on the high school history pageant posturings of the moonbat trustafarian invaders of the Green Mountain State.

The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms.

Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire.

Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.

A decade before the War of Independence, Vermont became New England’s first frontier, settled by pioneers escaping colonial bondage who hewed settlements across a lush region whose spine is the Green Mountains.

All this 18th century folderol is pretty rich coming from a gang of tree-hugging, goat-milking hippies, who are about as popular with the real Vermonters as the Spring black flies.

But personally I hope they succeed with all this pretentious silliness. When they leave they’ll have to take Bernie Sanders and Jim Jeffords with them. Who knows? Maybe they can start a trend, and California will follow.

Comedian Evan Sayet, last March 5th, delivered this analysis of Modern Liberalism at Heritage Foundation in Washington.

47:56 video

David Kahane, at National Review, observes signs of a double-standard flourishing in the ultra-affluent communities of the Hollywood elite.

I was driving through Beverly Hills yesterday, on my way out to Malibu, and the signs in the yards caught my eye.

Not the “For Sale” signs. …

No, the other signs. You know, the ones that say “ARMED RESPONSE.” (They’re usually just to the left of the “Kerry/Edwards” signs.) Not only in Beverly Hills, of course, but in Santa Monica, Hancock Park, Brentwood, Bel Air, and all the best neighborhoods in town. The signs that advertise our private-security services.

You see, although we in Hollywood are personally opposed to firearms, and passionately support gun control, we have to be realistic about Bush’s America and protect our families and, more important, our possessions from burglars, stalkers, muggers, street people, the homeless, immigrants, the Christian Right, and tourists from Kansas City.

That’s why we were all so taken aback by the recent D.C. circuit-court ruling, which found that the residents of Washington are constitutionally entitled, as individuals, to possess firearms. It’s bad enough that every criminal in L.A. County has unlimited access to guns — now they want to give them to ordinary people, too?

Everyone knows perfectly well that the Bill of Rights was meant to protect the federal government against the depredations of the citizens — if you don‘t believe me, just ask senators McCain and Feingold …

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone discusses the negative impact of higher education today. The better-educated, wealthier, and more privileged the American, the more likely he is to have a fundamentally negative view of his own country.

“They always blame America first.” That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America — or the parts of America they don’t like — first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls “tenured radicals,” people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.

On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.

Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals’ description of the world is wildly at odds with reality. But this battering away at ideas of truth and goodness does have some effect. Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives…

“There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are.

Melanie Phillips points out a Guardian book review by “Mike Hulme, professor in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory,” which inadvertently spills the beans about which comes first from the eco-leftie point of view, the facts or ideology.

Too often with climate change, genuine and necessary debates about these wider social values – do we have confidence in technology; do we believe in collective action over private enterprise; do we believe we carry obligations to people invisible to us in geography and time? – masquerade as disputes about scientific truth and error…

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…

If only climate change were such a phenomenon and if only science held such an ascendancy over our personal, social and political life and decisions. In fact, in order to make progress about how we manage climate change we have to take science off centre stage…

This is not a comfortable thing to say – either to those scientists who still hold an uncritical view of their privileged enterprise and who relish the status society affords them, or to politicians whose instinct is so often to hide behind the experts when confronted by difficult and genuine policy alternatives.

Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists – and politicians – must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.

It is always hilarious when the mask starts to slip.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Rethinking Schools reports breathlessly:

As they watched their elementary-age students playing with Legos, Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin saw some disturbing trends.

In the current issue they describe how some kids hoarded the “best” pieces, denied their classmates any access at all to the pretend town they were building, and displayed other undesirable behavior surrounding ownership and the social power it conveys.

So the teachers banned Legos, and worked with the kids to surface the issues raised by the ways they had been using the popular building blocks.

I notice they want $5 from me, or a $39.95 annual subscription, to read the article though. Is that social justice, I ask you?

TCS Daily is less enthusiastic:

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of “Rethinking Schools” magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:

“A house is good because it is a community house.”

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University, has a son who wanted a WWII-themed birthday party last Fall, and some of their suburban neighbors were not amused.

His wife, Brigid Schulte, described the responses in the Washington Post last December 11th:

How do you explain to your neighbors in Alexandria that you’re hosting a war party? More, why are you hosting a war party? I wasn’t sure myself. I only knew that Liam had his heart set on it.

One mother said no right away. “We’re trying to get him away from guns.”

Others were wary. I assured them that the Germans would be an imaginary enemy. We’d have boot camp, a map-finding activity — granted, for a sniper’s nest, ammo dump and secret war plans — and have them jump off picnic tables for the parachute drop.

I promised it would be an, uh, “educational experience.” I had Liam write a short “Road to D-Day” history that he would read to his troops in the ratline. We wrote up the military alphabet, cleaned up the words to the airborne infantry song, downloaded Glenn Miller tunes to play in the mess hall and even printed out a program for the party.

One mother worried that her daughter would be left out. No, no, I assured her, she was going to be a medic, and a friend was building a cool field hospital and ripping up sheets for bandages.

“In that case,” she said, “I’ll bring the blood.”

Turley reflects on the reactions in USAToday this week.

As soon as the invitations went out, a couple of parents politely declined to let their children come to a war-themed party. Afterward, Brigid — a Washington Post reporter — wrote a short piece about the party, and the response from outraged readers was fast and furious. Describing the whole affair as deeply disturbing, one reader chastised Brigid for giving into the base, violent inclinations of her son: “Here’s a novel idea: Say no. Tell him that war is sad and horrible and should never be a cause for celebration.”

There is a palpable sense among such playground objectors that boys harbor some deep dormant monster that, once awakened, inevitably ends with the invasion of Poland or a massacre at My Lai. Of course, millions of men played war games as kids without becoming war criminals. To the contrary, playing war was for most men an early type of morality play, defining values of sacrifice and selflessness. George Orwell once observed that a war-weary parent “who sees his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

To teach that all war is immoral is to deny the absolute values that frame a truly moral life. Arguably, the view of all war as immoral is itself amoral. Whether it is World War II or the first Gulf War, there are wars worth fighting and causes worth dying — and yes, killing — for. The failure of the world to fight in Rwanda and Darfur are, in my view, amoral acts of omission.

Read the whole thing.

The Telegraph finally reaches the conclusion which has been obvious to many Americans all along: Gun control laws impact only law-abiding citizens. The criminal, who has already decided to commit robbery or murder, will hardly shrink from the footling addition of an additional charge of illegal gun possession.

For James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, Michael Dosunmu, 15, and Billy Cox, 15, the hand-wringing by police and politicians over the escalation of gun crime comes a little late: all three have been shot dead in south London over the past 10 days…

We have… the toughest gun control laws in the world. They have actually proved strikingly ineffectual.

Gun crime has doubled since they were introduced. Young hoodlums are able to acquire handguns – either replica weapons that have been converted, or imports from eastern Europe – with ease. With no dedicated frontier police, our borders remain hopelessly porous. The only people currently incommoded by the firearms laws are legitimate holders of shotgun licences, who are subjected to the most onerous police checks.

… what a price we are paying.

At American Thinker, Noel Shepherd explains the fundamental necessity of Global Warming for the socialist left.

In the end, that indeed is what this is all about: Global warming represents the Democrats’ weapons of mass destruction. With it, they hope to scare enough Americans into sacrificing their own financial well-being all for the noble goal of saving the planet…

.. by cleverly claiming that seas are going to rise and begin killing innocent people in ten years if nothing is done to stop it, the liberals have created an urgency about global warming that the Bush administration failed to with Social Security. As a result, the population is now ripe for listening to solutions for a problem that is significantly more a figment of the imagination than the mathematical certainty that America’s largest entitlement program will go bankrupt if changes aren’t enacted.

Put another way, two years ago, the left and the media were able to convince the American people that there was no consensus about when Social Security would run out of money, and though they agreed it will certainly happen at some point, Americans were more than happy to defer concern for this seemingly distant problem. Yet, two years later, these same politicians and press representatives have created an hysteria over an unproven theory, professing a consensus that they advertise as incontrovertible even though none exists, all over a calamity that might never actually occur.

Isn’t that extraordinary?

Read the whole thing.