In Passing.

Did you know that EUtopia is in big trouble? Well excuse my schadenfreude but it couldn’t happen to a more stupid bunch of people and just in time to show the US what is in store if they follow the Pied Piper of ‘Ham’-elin blindly down the river and don’t forget what happened to the children of Hamelin after the ethically challenged people didn’t pay the piper.

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Barbara Kay who writes in The National Post, the best of the Canadian newspapers, [there isn't much competition] wrote this week about ‘Peace Studies’. Worth reading the whole thing but here is an excerpt:

Peace, peace, peace. In vogue as never before. Yes, “Peace Studies” is very hot, even though, unlike “Renaissance Studies” or “Canadian Studies,” there is no actual subject to analyze. Peace is not a “thing” or a place or a related series of events. Just as dark is the absence of light, peace — warm or cold — is essentially the absence of war. The rest is opinion and commentary.
Yet Peace Studies has become a huge academic industry over the last 40 years. The name is benign — what could be more worthwhile in principle than studies that claim to further what all of us desire? — but its allegedly disinterested agenda is anything but.

Peace Studies programs — the “idealistic” school of conflict resolution as opposed to the realist schools of military studies, geopolitics and the like — began as a response to the threat of nuclear armageddon during the Cold War. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis accelerated their growth. Then the further upheaval of the Vietnam War prompted lavish donations from foundations like the Institute for World Order, which gave the movement academic security and political respectability.
But Peace Studies hasn’t produced practical prescriptions for managing or resolving global conflicts, because ideology always trumps objectivity and pragmatism.

Academics, idiots with brains.

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Funny Picture.

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An article about the research into the genome of Neanderthal Man is amazing. It reminds me of what I found so fascinating about the sciences when I was a schoolboy.

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