[Ed. Note: Please visit Big Journalism for the full "Cry Wolf" series.]

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

Drier-Email –

What are they afraid of? (more…)

“REAL ART ENDURES” blared a printed United Artists sales pitch to theaters in 1920. “Art is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of popular selection. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is a more powerful attraction today than when it was first shown last Spring, because people speak of it, they see it again and again, and those who have not yet had the opportunity are looking for it. They feel it is the one film they must not miss. That is why Broken Blossoms is a more compelling box-office feature for you now than ever before. It’s name above your theater entrance means big business and prestige for your house.”

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten. (more…)

So a new Gallup poll just came out, reporting that socialism was viewed positively by more than one-third of Americans. That’s a lot of people, if you could call them that.

But I’m not surprised.

Think about it for a second. Since when has socialism ever been accurately portrayed in American pop culture or academia? I’ve never seen it covered in “Facts of Life,” and I’ve watched every episode. And Rage Against the Machine, one of the most successful leftwing buckets of noise on the planet, never really explained how they spent their millions. Although I’m guessing it’s not just on Rogaine and trucker hats.

Fact is, because socialism is a lie, people have to keep pushing the lie. When someone says, “Hey, my brother is a socialist,” they never follow it with, “you know, that ideology based on envy that’s responsible for the deaths of millions.” No instead it’s, “He sells Che shirts out of hemp, when he isn’t recycling sex toys for the homeless. God he’s so caring.” (more…)

I’ve got to admit that I set out to create this video expecting the finished product to be nothing more than tomfoolery as per usual. When I sat down to review the final version however, I realized just how sad/scary this is. These people are our future. They’ll be building our airplanes, teaching in our schools and possibly… running our country. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t trust 90% of these kids with a pair of scissors.  All of this begs the question: how did they get into Berkeley?  More importantly, what the heck are they teaching over there?

(more…)

Today, President Obama delivers his speech to American students after several days of controversy due to its companion U.S. Department of Education (ED) Lesson Plan.

Count me among those who find a U.S. President delivering a speech to students–especially one encouraging them towards academic responsibility and excellence as a means to productive adult citizenship–among the more innocuous, and potentially beneficial activities of the Office.

Appreciating yesterday’s early release of President Obama’s speech and having now read it in context, I would heartily maintain that opinion, were it not for the ED’s controversial lesson plan.

FYI:

Part I, Sec. 1905 of the ED’s General Provisions: ELEMENTARY & SECONDARY EDUCATION states: (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

With Barack Obama, many Americans had hoped to get a post-racial president. With Mr. Obama’s pick of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace David H. Souter on the Supreme Court, it looks less and less like they got one.

President Obama – a man we still hardly know – clearly subscribes to the notion that we should judge each other not just on the content of our character, but also by the color of our skin.

We’ve had warning signs before. Remember the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.?

As for the outrage du jour, the call for Sotomayor to apologize for making a racist comment in a 2001 speech is silly. She said what she meant, and she meant what she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” (more…)