evolution

Here it is, up to the Final Four, which will occur this coming weekend. I butchered the second and hence the third round pretty badly, but I ended up with the right Final Four.

Ezra Klein in the Los Angeles Times:

‘From the studio that brought you ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ ” intones the preview for the light comedy “Let’s Go To Prison,” “comes a penetrating look at the American penal system.” In case that was too subtle for you, the DVD box features a dropped bar of soap, just waiting for some poor inmate to bend over to pick it up — and suffer a hilarious sexual assault in the process.

Or maybe you’re not feeling up for a movie. It’s more of a board-game afternoon. How about picking up “Don’t Drop the Soap,” a board game created by the son of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas. The game “is simply intended for entertainment,” said Nicole Corcoran, the governor’s spokeswoman. What, after all, could be more entertaining then trying to “avoid being cornered by the Aryans in the shower room” (one of the goals of the game, according to its promotional material)?

Here in Washington, however, the weather has been beautiful lately, so if you were bored last week, you might have wanted to do something out of the house. One option would have been going down to the Department of Justice, where, on the third floor, officials were holding hearings on prison rape, interrogating administrators from some of the worst prisons in the nation about the abuses that go on within their walls.

These hearings are held annually. This year’s transcripts aren’t online yet, but in 2006 you could have heard a man named Clinton explain, “I had no choice but to enter into a relationship with another inmate in my dorm in order to keep the rest of them off of me. In exchange for his protection from other inmates, I had to be with him sexually any time he demanded it. It was so humiliating, and I often cried silently at night in my bed … but dealing with one is better than having 10 or more men demanding sex from you at any given time.”

Couple of months too late, but hey — there were political positions to defend!

Ed Morrissey:

We need to start making some tough decisions. Either we need to build a lot more prison space and hire a lot more prison guards to keep our current incarceration rates, or we need to start rethinking our criminal statutes with an eye towards eliminating violations that result in no violence to anyone else. We cannot keep laughing off prison rapes as some sort of sick joke without working to end them.

How about the latter… starting with the casualties of the “war on drugs”.

My Christmas list is already long enough, thank you very much.

I listen to a lot of comedy, both in my early-morning entertainment (the Bob and Tom show) and on the satellite. Here are ten that I am listening to a lot right now:

• Gabriel Iglesias
• Ron White
• Kathleen Madigan
• James Johanns (a Paola, KS native)
• Daniel Tosh
• D.L. Hughley
• Drew Hastings
• Reno Collier
• Henry Cho
• “Comedian Bob” Marley

While I was out, I espied a rally in honor of the Jayhawk game going on as we speak. I whipped out the evolution cameras and snapped some pictures. I’ll post them throughout the game as I, uh, “process” them.

Another:

One more before dinner:

Might do one more, with the probability increasing to nearly 1 if Stephon Curry does something in the last sixteen seconds here.

UPDATE: He didn’t, at least not this time. Kansas wins, 59-57.

The issue of gifts to American universities from foreign citizens, governments, and institutions became an issue recently when it came up that the same Saudi prince which tried to donate $10 million to the city of New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and whose gift was declined by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani) recently donated hefty chunks of his largesse to several American universities, including Harvard and Rice.¹

Stanley Kurtz of National Review filed a FOIA request to obtain the names of the donors (in some cases), the amounts of the gifts, and the donor’s country of origin. These are here. Here’s Kurtz:

To treat all or even most foreign gifts to American colleges or universities as somehow nefarious would be a serious mistake. America’s institutions of higher education — with their superb programs in science, medicine, and engineering — rightly benefit from the largesse of America’s foreign friends and allies, many of whom have benefited directly from the technical expertise developed in these institutions.

On the other hand, there are reasonable grounds to fear that some foreign donations may purchase undue influence over the way in which highly controversial subjects are treated in American lecture halls. For example, Virginia congressman Frank R. Wolf recently sent a letter of concern to Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia regarding a $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (the second largest gift in Georgetown’s history). A second $20 million gift from Prince Alwaleed to Harvard University has raised additional concerns…

Congress is soon likely to re-authorize the Higher Education Act. The House and Senate have passed very different versions of HEA, particularly Title VI of that Act, which governs the system of federal subsidies to university programs of Middle East studies and other area studies. The Senate bill is a carefully worked out compromise between both parties, led by Senators Kennedy and Enzi. That bill incorporates a number of urgently needed reforms that restore oversight to a program whose unsupervised character has rendered it liable to abuse by foreign donors (as I argued in “Saudi in the Classroom”).

In contrast, the House version of Title VI, a product of the Democratic majority, almost totally guts the Senate’s Title VI reform proposals. The House offers a single provision purporting to deal with the problem of undue foreign influence: a requirement that foreign gifts in the amount of $1 million or above be publicly disclosed, if specifically directed toward a Title VI center.

I picked through it looking for the Kansas universities, and found nothing worthy of concern. Fort Hays State received a fairly large sum of money from two universities in China; one of which is jointly funded by the U.S. and China, and the other appears to be a vehicle for business students in China (both Chinese and American) to earn American college credit toward business degrees. KU has two contracts with the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining in Switzerland. Here is the KU-operated Web site that describes the relationship. K-State had only one contract with St. George University in Grenada, and Ottawa University has a contract what what appears to be an American institute in Hong Kong.

I’m with Kurtz on this. It is counter-productive for both the aims of education and the aims of counter-terrorism to discourage foreign donations to American universities with hysterics and paranoia. There are, however, good reasons for asking these sorts of questions in some cases.

1. There’s no evidence that this is relevant to this issue, but Harvard recently instituted “women only” hours at its gym expressly to accommodate Muslim women who cannot, under Islamic law, appear in public in the company of men not their husbands or relatives. [↩]

My official site picture is pissing me off.

Any suggestions for a replacement?

I’ve been tweaking the blog tonight, which is why I haven’t had much to say. I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5’s latest release candidate, to see if it would jack up as much stuff as the last major version upgrade did, but it seemed to go okay.

The new version allows one to add one’s Gravatar to the site, so that if you regularly use that service, your Gravatar will appear here in the comments as well.

Feel free to request features that you’d like to have or think would be good for pushing this site along. Also, feel free to note features that suck and that should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Internet dweebs at places like 4chan and YTMND, and the users of Playlist for shoring up my traffic recently. It appears there has been an Internet phenomenon called “rickrolling” that started at the sites I just mentioned. This phenomenon was similar to the goatse.cx (FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK OR LOOK THIS UP AT WORK) phenomenon of about thirteen years ago, except instead of… that… the gag link goes to a YouTube posting of the MTV video for Rick Astley’s 80s hit Never Gonna Give You Up. I used it earlier in a bit of tasteless commentary.¹

So, thanks, Internet.

1. Is there any other kind here? [↩]

Having just recovered from my own “toilet ordeal”, I feel as though I should post about another Kansan’s similar travail:

Pat Bollinger, the woman’s aunt, said she calls daily to the hospital to ask how Babcock is doing and asks every day to talk to her. Babcock has agreed to talk to her only once for about 10 minutes, she said.

During that one call, Babcock spoke little and mostly listened as Bollinger recounted happy family memories — time spent swimming, camping and boating — from the year Babcock lived with them in Arizona when she was in fifth grade.

Babcock has not spoken about her bathroom ordeal, said Bollinger, the family spokeswoman.

“I didn’t bring up anything,” Bollinger said. “I just let her know how much I loved her and cared for her.”

Babcock’s relatives said that no family members have been allowed to see her at the hospital, that they know little of her medical condition and that she spends much of her time sleeping at the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Something’s a-weird going on here.