sick

The Claremont Review of books - conservo-fascist answer to the NYRB maybe - comes out with one of the more honest defenses of having a Fuehrer on top the American system. Because the law doesn't know how to enforce itself, and we need a Machiavellian Great Leader with "energy" to defend the rule of law. By breaking laws. Or something. Sick sick sick.

Of course, this is the organization that thinks Rumsfeld is Churchill, and has a Jonah Goldberg review of Dinesh D'Sousza's antidemocratic screed. Funny that in the review he denies that the Muslims embrace democracy - because they would rather have the very same executive power that the idiot in the previous story was touting.

[A]s he concedes, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have only called for more democracy because they know "their group can win." Embracing elections so you can gain power and keep it permanently is not quite the same thing as embracing democracy. Every party, including the Nazis, gushes about democracy when it wins an election, but constitutional government means abiding by the rules when you lose an election. One man, one vote, one time, is not democracy; it's will-to-power masquerading as ritualized lever-pulling.

Imagine that, a valid historical comparison to the Nazis! Too bad Goldberg and D'Sousza don't look in the mirror and see the will-to-power in their own party.

Hong Kong universities developing history curriculum

Just saw on the faculty listserv an annoucement that Fulbright and Hong Kong universities are offering fellowships to go and help overhaul their gen ed courses in preparation for changing to a 4-year school. From their outline it sounds like they're looking for more experience and I wouldn't have a shot. But the description from HKGEI interested me in that it prompts some good thoughts about the goals of a gen ed world civ course.

I especially liked their

The Value of Liberal Arts/General Education
HKGEI is based on the belief that the purpose of a liberal arts/general education curriculum is to:

• Provide students with knowledge and understanding of the challenges that threaten global stability, such as climate change and global warming, public health, unequal resource utilization and distribution of wealth, and religious and ethnic conflict.

• Help students to achieve target learning outcomes and competencies, skills such as communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, problem solving, entrepreneurship, information technology, and collaboration and cooperation.

• Enable students to question values that are contrary to those that promote self-responsibility, tolerance, and moral behavior; and to reinforce values and attitudes that motivate people to actively engage in activities aimed at solving personal, inter-personal, community, and global problems.

These would all be good to add in the intro lecture.

presidential literature

Really interesting blog post on bookblog the Millions - genre review of Nixon literature, others on presidential fiction. Postulates that this current administration will offer no literary possibilities -- they have to know in some small corner that what they are doing is wrong. And they don't seem to.
Closes with a great observation is that this administration has been most effective and most dangerous because they have been able to destroy sources of resistance to its desires. More than any specific goal, what they have done is permanently, or at least significantly, weaken social sources of power that can be used to check any executive. Can see this institutionally within the government, media, scientific community, etc.

As the Millions put it better:

A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself.

new nazis stealing leftist symbols

Spiegel story Verkleidete Rechte: Tarnkappen-Nazis buhlen um junge Linke. CRAZY! But makes total sense. Looks like the Nazis are now taking Che as their own brand of icon -- a nationalist freedom fighter!

Possible uses: youth culture and fashion as political tool, totalitarianism (that the symbols can be shared by the two extremes), women in fascist movements (see included photo essay and story on "Skingirls, Renees, und braune Schwestern"

Americans used 'comfort women'

CNN/AP story about how American soldiers allowed the comfort women system to continue, and took advantage of it despite having some evidence that the women were coerced into prostitution.

"Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation
troops," recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police
Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. "The strategy was,
through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect
regular women and girls."

MacArthur stopped the practice in spring 1946. Story here.

front page gallery

Looks like the Newseum has a front-page gallery that shows papers from around the country. Unfortunately there seems to be no archive or search feature. It's just for the current day.

prison diary

American writer has a freak-out on a BA flight to London... he's arrested and spends two months in a British jail. His story discusses the climate of fear in international travel, Muslim prisoner underclass in Britain, immigration, the prison system, etc. Pretty good, especially his interactions with Muslim prisoners.