THE AMERICAN Academy of Arts ad Sciences is one of the most hallowed intellectual institutions in American history. It was founded in 1780 to promote scholarship in the arts and sciences. John Adams was its first president. The Academy, which has come a long way from its beginnings as an aristocratic preserve of learning, is in the news because its second female president faces accusations that she lied on grants and misrepresented her academic credentials, saying she had a doctorate when she did not. Leslie Cohen Berlowitz makes $598,000 as the organization’s president. The board says its stands by her and doubts the charges. She blames the error on her staff.

Regardless of whether Berlowitz lied, one wonders how a woman who has never authored a book on her own, does not possess great academic distinction and whose highest previous position was as director of institutional development for New York University achieved such an exalted position and such high remuneration. The Academy has apparently gone the way of other liberal institutions: to the elevation of mediocrity.

Interestingly, Berlowitz is known for what the New York Times calls a “sharp-elbowed management style.” This is a nice way of saying she was hated by her underlings. How utterly surprising. As we all know women in management are always conciliatory and congenial. That’s why we need women at the top to change the world.

AT The American Thinker, Daren Jonescu writes about the rash of punitive measures against boys with imaginary guns in schools. The boys are guilty, as Jonescu points out, of thought crimes. Jonescu is not foolish enough to believe that these are manifestations of extremism in a fundamentally sound system. He has written a number of articles condemning public education altogether. I highly recommend them and entirely agree with his working premise. Jonescu writes in another piece:

There are several major obstacles to overcome if there is to be any hope of saving civilization from the grip of the authoritarian pre-education camps we call “public schools.”  The most stubborn obstacle of all, however, is perhaps the one embedded in our own hearts, namely the all too human instinct to comfort ourselves with the thought that the soul-deforming corruptions of public education began in earnest only after our own school days, and hence that we ourselves escaped the harm we so easily recognize in others.

Among those soul-deforming corruptions, as the blogger Sunshine Mary points out, is the effort to turn boys into girls and girls into boys. No amount of tinkering with girls and boys sports program will fundamentally alter the effort by public education to create an artificial unisex world. The goal of public education is to cultivate passivity. Masculinity and femininity are empowering.

FIFTH Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Edith Jones faces a formal complaint of judicial misconduct for stating in a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in February that nonwhites commit more violent crimes than whites. Steve Sailer writes about the case, which involves several comments made by Jones, at VDARE. And, here is a rebuttal to the charges at the legal blog Above the Law, where Tamara Tabo writes:

While there’s not enough space here to evaluate each of the charges the complaint makes, let’s have a closer look at a few of them, starting with her alleged comments on race.

According to the complaint, Judge Jones asserted that “certain racial groups commit more of these crimes than others.” She said that “[s]adly some groups seem to commit more heinous crimes than others.” When asked to explain her remarks, she stated that there was “no arguing” that “Blacks and Hispanics” outnumber “Anglos” on death row and “sadly” it was a “statistical fact” that people “from these racial groups get involved in more violent crime.” Read More »

IN A debate on homosexual “marriage,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois recounted the 2002 murder of his secretary, a mother of four, by a homosexual man, Lifesitenews reports.  Read More »

AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about the art of the musical fugue:

Musically and rhetorically, fugue exerts the effect of enthralling the listener to participate in the imaginative equivalent of flight, pursuit, and redemption – or flight, pursuit, and transfiguration. Read More »

A SAME-SEX marriage law is currently being debated in the British House of Lords. According to the New York Times:

[THE] 86-year-old Baron Jenkin of Roding, said he had been supportive of gay rights since he was a college student and his grandfather first explained gay people to him. Speaking on Monday in the two-day debate over a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, Lord Jenkin argued that the measure would not diminish the bonds of traditional marriage, as its opponents have maintained. Read More »

Ellen Sturtz scolded Michelle Obama on Tuesday night

A lesbian protester heckled the First Lady at a fundraiser at the home of a lesbian power couple in Washington Tuesday night and Michelle Obama threatened to leave. The Daily Mail reports that Ellen Sturtz, outraged that Obama has not issued an executive order on employment of homosexuals, called out that she was a ‘lesbian looking for federal equality before I die.’ Michelle left the podium where she was speaking and said to Sturtz, “Listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide.” Sturtz was simply escorted from the gathering, her outburst in striking contrast to the evident success of her hostesses and to the warm support of the Obamas for “equality.” Just another lesbian thug out for an evening of fun.

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Sister Simone Campbell in the Maoist garb of a post-Vatican II nun (AP)

DON VINCENZO writes:

Those devoted servants of God known as the “Nuns on the Bus” are back on the road once again led by Sister Simone Campbell, who was a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. This time our Sisters Religious seek, through “faith-based” support, passage of President Obama’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform, which really means “amnesty” for illegal aliens currently in the country, whose numbers reach tens of millions.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The criticisms of the Boy Scouts for caving into the “gay” lobby – and marching in “gay pride” parades and so forth – seem to me to be valid.  I nevertheless have a somewhat different view of these recent occurrences.

When I was in the third, fourth, and fifth grades at Toland Way school in Highland Park, an old suburb of Los Angeles in 1963, 64, and 65, my schoolmates and I undertook many of the activities that the Cub Scouts undertake on our own – exploring the local free country in the hills and arroyos, learning to shoot a twenty-two calibre game rifle, learning to swim at Hansen Dam and at various YMCA and public-parks swimming pools, learning what goes on in a railway shunting yard, walking a good length of the Los Angele sRiver right through Downtown, building model planes and cars, and other boyish activities.  Read More »

PAUL writes:

Here is an eleven-minute video of Megyn Kelly at Fox News defending her choice not to stay at home in a discussion of the recent Pew report.  Read More »

A RECENT report by the Pew Research Center, which has received an enormous amount of publicity, contends that women are the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of households with children under 18. However, the majority of these female “breadwinners” (63 percent) are single mothers. The use of the term “sole breadwinner” is highly deceptive given that many are receiving some form of government support.

According to the report, in which I could find no mention of the government role in “mothers as breadwinners:”

About three-quarters of adults (74%) say the increasing number of women working for pay has made it harder for parents to raise children, and half say that it has made marriages harder to succeed.

SEVERAL boy scouts and an adult scoutmaster marched in uniform at the head of the Utah Pride Festival Parade in Salt Lake City Sunday. According to NBC:

Peter Brownstein, a Scoutmaster in Salt Lake City who helped organize the Boy Scouts participation in the march, said a few adults and youth marched at the front of the parade in uniform, including a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout and his stepdad, an Eagle Scout, who borrowed a uniform to wear, and an Asst. Scoutmaster.

The regional head of Boy Scout of America said the action violates Scout policy which prohibits scouts from wearing uniforms at “political events.” (This is not an honest policy. Boy Scouts have historically participated in political events. Fourth of July parades are political events.) But he said he would not take any action to discipline those in the Salt Lake City parade. A national spokesperson said any action was up to the regional council.

According to a newly-enacted membership rule, openly homosexual individuals cannot be excluded from the Scouts. This means in effect, as we see here and as was argued in previous discussions (see here, here and here), that the Boy Scouts of America is a pro-homosexuality organization. The Boy Scouts of America now promotes homosexuality.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

If anyone thought that the travails of Paul Tudor Jones, the 1976 University of Virginia graduate and wealthy hedge-fund entrepreneur who recently proffered a rational and natural explanation why childbearing affects the “focus” and subsequent success of women in finance, were a thing of the past, he should think again, for as if on cue, the administration of the University of Virginia administration has further backtracked in pleading “mea culpa,” and now, in a movement demonstrating their commitment to feminist solidarity, has unleashed “the long knives” within the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. Read More »

THE entire West Point men’s rugby team has been temporarily disbanded because members made crude jokes about women in private emails, according to Army Times. The team was charged with creating “a culture of disrespect for women.” Team members are now undergoing an “intense respect rehabilitation program.” This involves “self-assessments, reflective journals and role-model interviews, supervised by a mentor.”

The team was investigated for more serious charges, but these were dropped.

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ALEX writes:

From The Wall Street Journal:

“New York City is launching a campaign to recruit gay and lesbian foster parents, part of a major push to expand the kinds of families who consider fostering and to find more welcoming homes for children who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.”

A few steps down the line: if the government determines that your child identifies as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer,” and deems your home not to be welcoming enough, it may take your child from you and give him to a pair of homosexuals, who don’t even need to be “married.” Or to a single homosexual. Or to any number of homosexuals living together.

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JOE A. writes:

The London papers are a twitter (see here and here) with news of yet another sex scandal from the prime minister’s office. No one will say who or what, but a few weeks ago it was revealed a Tory MP and deputy speaker of the Commons was arrested for homosexual rape and assault, with other allegations against him surfacing soon afterward.

Not to be outdone, a Liberal Democrat peer (House of Lords) is under investigation by Scotland Yard for sex assaults on women. Another Lib Dem MP faces charges of sexual assault this coming week. Read More »

BY subsidizing student loans, the federal government has helped the cost of higher education soar since the early 80s. Subsidized loans create higher demand for a limited product. When politicians say they want everyone to be able to afford college, they mean they want the government to underwrite the higher education industry’s growth and escalating prices.

At Zero Hedge, Tyler Durden writes:

The higher education industry in the U.S. operates as a central state-enabled and funded cartel, limiting supply while demand (based on the fantasy that a college degree has critical value) soars. This enables the cartel to keep raising prices even as the value of its product (a diploma) sinks to near-zero.

Durden provides links to other pieces on student debt.

Zero Hedge

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