Eva von Dassow, a professor of classical and Near Eastern studies, spoke at a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

According to an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed, the video of her talk is inspiring many of her colleagues at Minnesota and elsewhere, many of them fed up with what they view as unrelenting budget cuts, particularly of humanities disciplines.

Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Death By Gadget,” describes how “[a]n ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Our digital devices use several rare metals that are becoming the equivalent of “blood diamonds,” funding the barbarism in Equatorial West Africa.

Next time you’re porn surfing the Web on your iPad or iPhone or other e-device in search of material for onanistic self-pleasuring, or just texting (and, really, we are not in love with you, so we really are not interested in what’s on your mind or where you are from one moment to the next), view this video first:

At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .

Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue blazer, blue shirt, UConn blue and white tie.

McDonnellitis. Although we meet on a campus whose president is a former Republican senator and whose students are the sons and daughters of Republican exurbanites, many disparaging references to the ahistorical Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, whose recent proclamation of Confederate History Month conveniently forgot African American slaves (and by extension their descendants)

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class . . . The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.

Well, so much for the bogus working-class, populist, grassroots movement. AstroTurf movement, is more like it.

Not surprisingly, they are against Big Government . . . except when they benefit from Big Government:

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

Big Government for me but not for thee.

Well, Sarah, that “hopey, changey thing” is looking pretty good to me. Looking much better than that “nopey, dopey thing” that you, the Tea Baggers, the Tea Baggers’ punditry, and the Tea Baggers’ paramours, the Republican Party, have going on.

In one week (after a year’s work, of course): Health care reform (not perfect but the best we’ve had during my more than half century on earth), student financial aid reform (access to higher education was responsible for the unprecedented post-World War II social and economic expansion and may continue to work its magic), and a new nuclear arms limitation treaty with Russia (which may help in containing nuclear arms proliferation, as in Iran).

So, Sarah, while there are some in America who are dazzled by your manic pageant performance, and a desperate John McCain and the Tea Bag Nation turns its lonely eyes to you, I’ll stick with No-Drama Hopey Changey.

Time for the Democratic majority in Congress to govern. Now. Time for the Democratic Party to mobilize support for what most Americans want and need. Now. Time for the Democrats to discover, whatever the political price later, that atrophied muscle: courage. Now.

The Republican Party has made it clear that they are working to defeat health reform simply to defeat Barack Obama and the Democratic majority. They tart up their opposition in their usual garb of self-righteousness. Claiming, for example, that the Democrats in seeking a reconcialiation procedure are manipulating the democratic process, something that they would never, never, ever do. Except, as conservative thinker Norm Ornstein and others recently pointed out, since 1981, the Republicans in Congress have used the reconciliation process MORE OFTEN than Dems.

Paul Krugman (no fan of the health reform bill, for other reasons) reminds us:

Reuters published an investigative report this week that powerfully illustrates the vileness of our current system. The report concerns the insurer Fortis, now part of Assurant Health, which turns out to have had a systematic policy of revoking its clients’ policies when they got sick. In particular, according to the Reuters report, it targeted every single policyholder who contracted H.I.V., looking for any excuse, no matter how flimsy, for cancellation. In the case that brought all this to light, Assurant Health used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002,” to claim that the infection was a pre-existing condition that the client had failed to declare, and revoked his policy.

. . . But this is much more than a law enforcement issue. For one thing, it’s an example those who castigate President Obama for “demonizing” insurance companies should consider. The truth, widely documented, is that behavior like Assurant Health’s is widespread for a simple reason: it pays. A House committee estimated that Assurant made $150 million in profits between 2003 and 2007 by canceling coverage of people who thought they had insurance, a sum that dwarfs the fine the court imposed in this particular case. It’s not demonizing insurers to describe what they actually do.

. . . And one more thing: employment-based health insurance, which is already regulated in a way that mostly prevents this kind of abuse, is unraveling. Less than half of workers at small businesses were covered last year, down from 58 percent a decade ago. This means that in the absence of reform, an ever-growing number of Americans will be at the mercy of the likes of Assurant Health.

So what’s the answer? Americans overwhelmingly favor guaranteeing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions — but you can’t do that without pursuing broad-based reform. To make insurance affordable, you have to keep currently healthy people in the risk pool, which means requiring that everyone or almost everyone buy coverage. You can’t do that without financial aid to lower-income Americans so that they can pay the premiums. So you end up with a tripartite policy: elimination of medical discrimination, mandated coverage, and premium subsidies.

Or to put it another way, you end up with something like the health care plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts in 2006, and the very similar plan the House either will or won’t pass in the next few days. Comprehensive reform is the only way forward.

In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:

Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should revoke such policies because they lack the legal authority to name gay state employees as a protected class, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, a Republican who took office in January, wrote in a letter to the colleges that only the state’s General Assembly can give legal protections to gay state employees. The legislature has repeatedly declined to take that step.

Connecticut, in contrast, recognizes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex parents, prevents discrimination because of sexual orientation, and provides benefits for same-sex spouses. Since Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 (the Supreme Court decision, ruling on a law restricting access to birth control, that established a right to privacy), the “Land of Steady Habits” has moved steadily into modernity.

The Virginia AG office has historically been the springboard for those with gubernatorial ambitions, like Bob McDonnell, the recently elected governor whose campaign was successful in part because he was a Right Wing transvestite performing in Centrist drag, and whose 1989 Public Polic master’s degree and Law JD thesis from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (entitled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family”) includes this gem: “. . . every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer”  (p. 65).

I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder hymn, Dayenu . . . “it would have been enough.”

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ collusion in shielding sexual abuser priests and preventing the victims from receiving their rightful pastoral care.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ intractable denial of a rightful place for women in ministry and in positions of leadership, more recently evidenced in the Vatican’s New Inquisition of orders of women religious.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the Church’s single-minded campaign against the social equality of gay and lesbian people.

Today’s news includes salt on that wound. After the Washington, DC, government decided to recognize same-sex unions as marriages (with all the rights, privileges and duties pertaining thereunto), which included the provision of health benefits for spouses, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, led by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl (”Oh, her!” I could tell you stories that I’d heard about that girlfriend years ago), has decided that henceforth they will not offer spousal benefits to any new heterosexual employees or to any new spouses of current heterosexual employees, in order not to give even the appearance of condoning same-sex marriages.

The former chief operating officer of the archiocesan Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, has called upon the archdiocese to change its position. According to a report in the Washington Post:

“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage,” said Sawina, a former priest. “Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”

The sound you hear is my shaking the dust off my sandals . . . again.

Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.

(To be prayed for nine days in a row)

Almighty and All Just God, who smites the proud and who protects the weak, hear us as we beseech Thee to deliver us from the pestilence of Pat Robertson. Raise Thy mighty arm and remove this affliction from our midst. May Thou bring him swiftly into Eternity where Thou shalt mete out justice and mercy. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, the soon-coming Just Judge of the quick and the dead. Amen.

(Disclosure: I conducted some research for my book AIDS and American Apocalypticism in the library of Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was once threatened with arrest on the campus during direct action civil disobedience there to protest Robertson’s anti-gay on-air slanders.)

Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked by supposed agents of the Chinese government in an effort to read the emails of Chinese human rights activists.

While I’d like to think that Google (whose corporate value is Don’t Be Evil, or some such vaccuous nonesense) has discovered a muscle called “courage,” I suspect that the motives are more strategic.

Google sees its future in its cloud computing operations and as the provider of email services for large clients (like major universities that provide email accounts to their students).

The Chinese hacker attacks threaten Google’s credibility as a reliable and secure provider of cloud services. It isn’t personal and it isn’t ethics, it’s just business.