evolution

news from the people’s republic of california: California Dems debated extending budget crisis. read the article, but be sure to read the prc assemblywoman’s feeble attempt at spin.

every time i read the atlantic monthly, i read something new that blows me away. if the following passage from an article about harold bloom, yale university professor of humanities. if you went to an american university, you should be able to identify with this experience. here are professor bloom’s words, in part:

…Throughout the English-speaking world, the wave of French theory was replaced by the terrible melange that I increasingly have come to call the School of Resentment-the so-called multiculturalists and feminists who tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author.

Feminism as a stance calling for equal rights, equal education, equal pay — no rational, halfway decent human being could possibly disagree with this. But what is called feminism in the academies seems to be a very different phenomenon indeed. I have sometimes characterized these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them.

Yale on the whole has held out against that better than Harvard and Princeton have. This university has so long and strong a tradition of real philological studies, a deep love of imaginative literature, that it has held up fairly well. But last spring a very charming young lady who was one of my research assistants came in here shaking her head. She said, “Harold, I’m rather stunned. I’ve just gone to my undergraduate seminar in American Studies.” I shivered, because of all the Yale departments that once would have been called humanistic, the one that has now given over completely to nonsense is, in fact, American Studies. She said, “We just had a lecture on Walt Whitman. The professor spent the entire two hours explaining to us that Walt Whitman was a racist.” In the face of that, my dear, I almost lose my capacity for outrage, shock, or indignation. Walt Whitman a racist? It is simply lunatic.

(full article)

we here at evolution: take the next step strive to provide you with the best entertainment “bang” for your buck. however, we will be on hiatus from thursday, july 31 until monday, august 18 so that we can move to indiana and get our internet account from purdue.

we love you all.

pat robertson, he of the “700 club” – the radical right-wing christian group – is holding a 21-day prayer vigil for the retirement and/or deaths of a number of current supreme court justices. robertson apparently thinks the court is “too liberal” (read: won’t reverse roe v. wade) and needs to change.

at the other end of the “idiots in the news” spectrum, i’m told that one can pay $10,000 for the privilege of staying for a week at a las vegas ranch, eating three meals a day, relaxing, and “hunting” naked women with a paintball gun. in all fairness, i have to say that the women are paid substantially to provide this service (with bonuses if they are not “shot”). furthermore – putting aside any moral and ethical objections you may have – it hurts to be shot with a paintball gun. i was shot in the face with one in high school, and paid for it with a stinging welt and a bruise. it hurts to be shot anywhere, and not being fleet of foot, i found out that it even hurts to be shot when one is wearing heavy fatigues.

you want excitement? arm the women. i’d rather have naked women hunting me.

the royals are 47-39 as of today. they had the day off, but will begin a three-game series in anaheim against the defending champs. the royals lead the a.l. central by three and a half games – after taking three of four from the woeful tigers and watching cleveland beat up on the twins.

and, as is par for the course, the lawrence city government has ruined it for all by banning all fireworks within its city limits. clean-up costs and a few complaints by people in the paper were cited as the reasons. i wonder how much it will cost the city to have officers on duty to enforce the ban?

lawrence, and kansas government on all levels, is managed by short-sighted fools who have ground this state to a halt economically and academically.