Comme disait Frédéric sur Ludovic Monnerat, voilà un groupe qui « risque pas de passer sur MTV ou M6″….

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As college costs soar through the roof—averaging above $31,000 a year for tuition, room & board—today’s college students study adultery, the male genital, and Native American feminism. The Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation’s colleges and universities.

The growth of these courses gobbles up tons of money and resources and ignores scholarship from conservatives. For instance, books and speeches from the late Milton Friedman and Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick are rarely studied in the classroom, yet leftist works are prevalent in college classrooms nationwide. Scores of courses were researched from hundreds of the nation’s leading schools. The Dirty Dozen is the worst of the worst. This year, we have also included a dishonorable mentions category—courses that could’ve easily made the list.

When one examines these classes, keep in mind that a recent study found that only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, but more than half can name at least two family members of “The Simpsons.” The Washington Post reports that only 31 percent of college grads could read and comprehend complex books, while The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 40 percent of college students need remedial work in math and English. Are we really putting our educational resources to the best use?

Young America’s Foundation Spokesman Jason Mattera remarks, “The Dirty Dozen demonstrates that professors still have an obsession with dividing people on the basis of their skin color, sexuality, and gender. They also can’t seem to shake off a strong admiration for Karl Marx and his murderous ideology—apparently the 100-plus million totalitarian regimes have murdered over the years is not enough?!”

1. Occidental College’s The Phallus covers a broad study on the relation “between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism.”

2. Queer Musicology at the University of California-Los Angeles explores how “sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation” during the 1990s. Music under consideration includes works by Schubert and Holly Near, Britten and Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.

3. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be given another chance?” Students in this class are asked to question if Marxism still has “credibility,” while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by “returning to [Marx’s] texts.” Coming to Marx’s rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.

4. Students enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Adultery Novel read a series of 19^th and 20^th century works about “adultery” and watch “several adultery films.”  Students apply “various critical approaches in order to place adultery into its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of family as a social and economic institution” and “feminist work on the construction of gender.”

5. Occidental College—making the list twice for the second year in a row—offers Blackness, which elaborates on a “new blackness,” “critical blackness,” “post-blackness,” and an “unforgivable blackness,” which all combine to create a “feminist New Black Man.”

6. Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration is University of Washington’s way of exploring the immigration debate. The class allegedly unearths what is “highlighted and concealed in contemporary public debates about U.S. immigration” policy.

7. Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism is Mount Holyoke College’s attempt to analyze race. The class seeks to spark thought on: “What is whiteness?” “How is it related to racism?” “What are the legal frameworks of whiteness?” “How is whiteness enacted in everyday practice?” And how does whiteness impact the “lives of whites and people of color?

8. Native American Feminisms at the University of Michigan looks at the development of “Native feminist thought” and its “relationship both to Native land-based struggles and non-Native feminist movements.”

9. Johns Hopkins University offers Mail Order Brides: Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context, which is a supposedly deep look into Filipino kinship and gender.

10. Cornell University’s Cyberfeminism investigates “the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of feminism/post feminism and the accelerated technological developments of the last thirty years of the twentieth century.”

11. Duke University’s American Dreams/American Realities course seeks to unearth “such myths as ‘rags to riches,’ ‘beacon to the world,’ and the ‘frontier,’ in defining the American character.”

12. Swarthmore College’s Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism “deconstruct[s] terrorism” and “build[s] on promising nonviolent procedures to combat today’s terrorism.” The “non-violent” struggle Blacks pursued in the 1960s is outlined as a mode for tackling today’s terrorism.

Dishonorable Mentions

• UC-Berkeley’s Sex Change City: Theorizing History in Genderqueer San Francisco explores “implications of U.S. imperialism and colonization for the construction of gender in 19th-century San Francisco’s multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic” community. The course also covers “contemporary transgender, queer, genderqueer, and post-queer cultural production and politics” and “the regulation of gender-variant practices in public space by San Francisco’s Anglo-European elites.”

• Cornell University’s Sex, Rugs, Salt, & Coal asks students to ponder the questions: Why are “oriental” rugs collector’s items? How did we come to keep salt shakers on our dinner tables? When did coal start replacing wood as a fuel source?

• Hollins University’s Drag: Theories of Transgenderism and Performance analyzes historical, theoretical, and autobiographical perspectives on drag, including transgenderism and performance in non-Western cultures.

• University of Colorado-Boulder’s Introduction to Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Literature introduces some of the forms, concerns, and genres of contemporary lesbian, bisexual, and gay writing in English.

• Swarthmore College’s Peace Study in Action partners students with a local “peace” organization “to study its mode of action and develop a document or brief that brings useful peace research to the service of the organization.”

• Swarthmore College’s Renaissance Sexualities explores the homoerotic, chastity and friendship, marriage, adultery, and incest.

• Oberlin College’s first-year seminar, She Works Hard for the Money: Women, Work and the Persistence of Inequality,  “tackles” price differences, occupational segregation, comparable worth, and other factors that supposedly uncover institutional discrimination against women.

• Hollins University’s Lesbian Pulp Fiction examines “a literary genre that critics once deemed ‘trash’ and moralists commonly found ‘scandalous,’ but that formed a crucial part in the burgeoning canon of queer literature.”

Apart from feelings of guilt over van Gogh’s death, her voice is forceful and unbowed—like Irshad Manji, she delivers a powerful feminist critique of Islam informed by a genuine understanding of the religion

ABC News has learned that al Qaeda operatives in the greater London area are being encouraged to « strike during the Christian holidays, » according to intelligence and law enforcement sources.

« The first is that you aren’t the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen — the Muslim Ummah’s vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq — are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost, » Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News.

Zawahri calls on the Democrats to negotiate with him and Osama bin Laden, not others in the Islamic world who Zawahri says cannot help.

Bon , tout ca est evident mais ca ne coute rien de rappeler ce genre de pratiques , quasiment innees de nos « pas si fistes mais presque  » On peut juste se souvenir qu’ils ont un sens tres aigu de ce qui peut nuire a leur petite sante ( et ca peut etre un debut d’explication ) Des naifs a l’epoque avaient voulu « raconter » le regime irakien : ils ont rebrousse chemin dans l’urgence devant les « conseils paternels  » des Mukhabarrat . Quand aux « boucliers humains » inconsiderement aventures apres la chute de Saddam , ca a ete une fuite eperdue devant le desir de vengeance des populations , les identifiant avec justesse comme des soutiens objectifs de Saddam  . Pour le reste , le « silence des agneaux  » est eloquent ……..

Moralites a deux vitesses ……

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Écoutez la chanson!

Dans un pays qui s’est construit sur l’exceptionnalisme et qui, dépassé par l’autre exceptionnalisme, se réfugie de plus en plus dans l’obstructionnisme le plus puéril contre “l’hyperpuissance” et les “anglosaxons” …

Dans un pays où, comme le rappelle Chris Patten, le “stupéfiant analphabétisme économique” fait dire à l’actuel squatter de l’Elysée que le libéralisme serait pire que le communisme …
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Sites officiels, blogs proprement dits, agrégateurs de contenu, observatoires vidéo, pour suivre la campagne électorale, les journaux présentent leurs guides des blogs politiques français:
LIBERATION:

Guide pratique de la Netcampagne

Tous les outils pour avoir une vue d’ensemble des programmes, rumeurs et analyses de la campagne présidentielle sur le web.

Si la présidentielle 2007 se gagne à la marge, c’est peut-être sur le Net qu se trouvera le réservoir de voix qui fait la différence. Avec 27 millions d’internautes en France, le web est en passe de devenir un mass média mais reste obscur pour nombre d’utilisateurs

Même si 58% des Français estiment que le développement des débats en ligne et des blogs représente un enjeu majeur pour la présidentielle, seuls 7% (1) affirment s’être déjà rendus sur le carnet de bord d’une personnalité politique. Parce que l’Internet suscite encore la méfiance des non-initiés, et pour ne pas passer à côté de la campagne en ligne, Libération propose un guide pratique de la Netpolitique.

Toutes nos excuses!

Contrairement à ce que nous avions dernièrement laissé entendre (merci l’Institut Hayek et Bellaciao), ce n’est pas la Corée du nord mais la prison à ciel ouvert de Cuba qui respecte actuellement le mieux le protocole de Kyoto.

Du moins si l’on en croit le WWF, qui rappelle les précieuses vertus de la pauvreté et le “bon niveau de développement humain” du goulag tropical (moins de problèmes de chauffage ?) mais nous rassure néanmoins en précisant que “cela ne veut pas dire que Cuba soit un pays parfait”.

Il nous reste donc plus qu’à prier pour la durabilité du cher leader de ce pays-phare du développement du même nom …

La machine E-Quran devrait dériver du Classmate PC d’Intel

En association avec deux éditeurs de logiciels saoudiens, Intel développe une version électronique du livre sacré de l’Islam qui sera intégrée à un ordinateur de type UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) destiné aux écoles d’Arabie Saoudite. Baptisé « E-Quran » (soit e-Coran, ou Coran électronique), cet ordinateur équipé d’un processeur ULV (Ultra Low Voltage), d’un écran 7 pouces et d’une connectivité sans fil permettra aux professeurs comme aux élèves des écoles coraniques de consulter les textes sacrés, des documents historiques numérisés ou d’accéder aux sites de la communauté musulmane locale, en accord avec le gouvernement saoudien.

Selon l’agence AP, Intel a déclaré ne pas avoir l’intention de commercialiser cet appareil, qui sera donc proposé de façon exclusive au travers de l’accord passé avec les autorités saoudiennes et ne portera pas sa marque. Pour le numéro un mondial des semi-conducteurs, cette initiative ferait partie d’un plus large mouvement destiné à équiper les populations des pays émergents en machines peu coûteuses. Intel envisage également de fournir les équipements nécessaires à la mise en place d’accès à Internet, et vient d’ailleurs d’annoncer la couverture d’une ville égyptienne de 200 000 habitants, Oseem, à l’aide d’une infrastructure basée sur la technologie Wimax.

Jerusalem Post : Just in time for Hanukka, Israelis have something to cheer about: Ben-Gurion Airport has been judged the best in Europe. Among 40 of Europe’s most popular destinations – including Brussels, Zurich and Amsterdam, to name just a few – Israel’s gateway won top marks in a passenger satisfaction survey conducted by Airports Council International.

France’s Total probed over Iran kickbacksAFP

December 19, 2006

PARIS — The French oil giant Total is being probed on suspicion of paying illegal kickbacks for the rights to exploit an Iranian gas field between 1996 and 2003, a source close to the inquiry said Tuesday. French authorities opened an investigation Monday into the alleged misuse of company funds and the corruption of foreign civil servants, after a tip-off from authorities in Switzerland where the suspect funds were discovered.Around 100 million Swiss francs (€60 million, $80 million), believed by investigators to have been used to secure the Iranian contract, were found on two Swiss bank accounts, according to the source.

Swiss authorities have opened a separate investigation for money-laundering and the funds have been frozen. (Lire la suite…)

Un article de Roger Baker sur la proliferation , ses contraintes et ses surprises ….

Les petits malins pourront bientot s’equipper en combinaisons NBC ! C’est un peu encombrant , on y transpire beaucoup mais bof , faut ce qu’il faut !

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British Prime Minister Tony Blair will call on Wednesday for Middle East states to rein in what he calls the threat from Iran and to help advance peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians.

Le Figaro veut débattre de l’Irak. Fort bien et pourquoi pas?

Mais pourquoi tronquer des citations? Il cède à des réflexes conditionnés.

A man who was being hunted for the murder of a policewoman is understood to have escaped from Britain by disguising himself as a veiled Muslim woman.

Mustaf Jama, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, assumed his sister’s identity — wearing the niqab and using her passport — to evade supposedly stringent checks at Heathrow, according to police sources.The use of the niqab, which leaves only a narrow slit for the eyes, highlights flaws in British airport security. At the time, Jama was Britain’s most wanted man, while Heathrow was on a heightened state of alert after the 7/7 terrorist atrocities in London five months previously.