Cambridge soft subjects: raging, raging against the dying of the light?

Via Instapundit, here is an intriguing essay by a Cambridge emeritus professor named David Runciman. I am somewhat surprised that soft-commie rag The New Statesman would publish something this contrarian in 2026, but there you go. If you don’t want to give them traffic, here is an archived copy. https://archive.fo/g1Pvu

In a nutshell, Runciman argues that the “soft subjects” at Cambridge are “raging, raging against the dying of the relevance” [with apologies to Dylan Thomas] — all the money, new buildings, and impact are going to the STEM subject where Cambridge is of course playing in the Superleague. And they engage in “performative” politics, as he sees it, in a futile attempt to remain part of the conversation. As he puts it in the subtitle: “[Cambridge U]niversity’s place in the public imagination is as illusory as Jason Arday’s academic credentials”.

Go read the whole thing — I can’t do it justice by selective quoting. There are, of course, a few sops to the readership thrown in, but they read to me as syrup to make the bitter medicine go down.

[PS: I am on the road for work, with limited Internet access and even more limited “downtime”.]

Academentia amped up to 11: academic suspended for exposing academic fraud

The rector of Ghent University in Belgium, a former leader of the Green Party [p*ss be upon it], has now suspended philosopher Nathan Cofnas — previously at Cambridge University — in the wake of Jason Arday taking his own life after his being an all-around academic fraud became too blatant to ignore.

It would be giving Dr. Cofnas a bit too much credit to say he “unmasked” Arday, since even a casual inspection of the guy’s claims about himself makes it clear many of them couldn’t be true, and that those who made the decision to hire him were so blinded by the idea of appointing the youngest-ever multi-DEI case to the top professorial rank, that they completely took leave of their senses.

Rather, Cofnas was the little boy who dared yell: “the emperor is naked — and fapping too!” He had himself come to Cambridge on a hyper-competitive fellowship, which the university let lapse after grudgingly clearing him of wrong-doing. Subsequently he had taken up a position at Ghent University, which in Belgium is [or at least, used to be] regarded as the place to be for philosophy. (Interestingly, they hired him despite his highly controversial position on the “nature vs. nurture” debate.[*])

But oh, how the mighty have fallen. Ghent U. appears to be in the grip of full-on “Woke 2” academentia.

And you’d better do your homework — instead of outsourcing it to ChatGPT — especially if you have an inveterate gadfly like Cofnas in your backyard. [Article from January 2026.] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1909581/ugent-chancellor-petra-de-sutter-caught-using-ai-in-opening-speech

What’s striking is that De Sutter herself referred to the dangers of AI in her speech. She warned that we should “not blindly trust” the output of AI tools and that AI-generated texts “are not always easy to distinguish from original works.”

She also said that “it is the user of an AI tool who is responsible for the output, even when it generates incorrect or misleading information.”

This is also evident, for example, in the examination regulations of Ghent University: students who are caught using AI when it is not permitted risk severe sanctions. These can range from a 0 on the course component in question to a ban on participating in resits and even, in serious cases, expulsion from the university.

Cue up Testament’s “Practice What You Preach”.

Shabbat shalom!

ADDENDUM: https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/20/in-wake-of-arday-scandal-european-elite-institutions-free-speech/ Thank G-d both countries I live in take free speech much more seriously.

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[*] There is an interesting wrinkle to this story. Much of the criticism of Cofnas’s own work centers on him stating statistical evidence that performance distributions on certain intellectual performance metrics clearly differ between human population groups. People like Cofnas take a radical “nature” position, whereas the great Thomas Sowell — whom you’ve seen me refer to countless times on these pages — takes an almost full-on “nurture” position. Personally, I think it’s a mixture of both — somebody can be born with great athletic genes and waste them by being a couch potato. Moreover, IQ tests, SATs, and the like are not measurements but proxies — the way GDP per capita, human development index,… are measurable proxies for elusive “human well-being”. Not to mention that “the distribution isn’t the person”. (I drill “a proxy is not a measurement” into my students in a very different academic field.)

But at heart I think there is an unacknowledged reason why a position like Cofnas’s is so explosive in certain circles. Much of the secular-humanist intellectual class’s sense of self-worth is tied up in how “smart” and “well-educated” (read, increasingly: “well-credentialed”) they are. Those of us bound to religious traditions that teach every human is created in the image of G-d are less likely to make this kind of calculus. And, methinks, we are less likely to make the leap from “some population groups outperform other on metric X” to “some population groups are more valuable” than our secular-humanist peers…

Dave Freer’s acceptance speech for the Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction

The Prometheus Award is an award given to libertarian-themed (in the broadest sense) fantastic fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, and adjacent genres). This year they had a special award for Young Adult fiction, and the winner was — let’s hear it for my online friend — “Storm Dragon” by Dave Freer. Here is his acceptance speech in full:

Prometheus YA Special Award Acceptance Speech

My favorite bit:

Neil Postman – talking about BRAVE NEW WORLD — put it thus: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

We are already going there. If the younger generation doesn’t read, their children won’t.

I believe this with the passion of a crusader. Everyone who can read, should. And the only way to make sure it does happen is to make it a pleasurable experience, you can’t wait to try again – unlike my experience of [a particularly daunting Icelandic dish named] Hakarl. The problem – and the reason for my writing this book, and Raconteur starting this line – is that we have a real situation where young boys aren’t reading. Young girls – in opinion — aren’t reading enough… and they’re reading twice what boys read. Fiction in particular suffers.

But why is this even relevant? Everything is video, these days, right? And fiction? Bah.

I believe it is vital – to civilization, to liberty, to everything we wish for our species, especially for our young. Reading shapes the way we think. Not the content (that too, but it is near irrelevant). It shapes the way we CAN think, which opens our capacity to think. It requires translating and assembling symbols into words, words into concepts, images -things in themselves far bigger than the little word. It’s a process the brain uses to process and store information, but more importantly, to create from. Reading is training this, the younger a child starts, the easier it becomes and more building blocks they have. It is also compound interest for there on in.

It is a genie repressed in illiterate societies. It is a genie that, once freed, cannot ever be put back. Those who champion freedom, must champion reading, and particularly reading fiction, because that trains the mind in taking symbolic logic into creating what is not. Into building something far beyond the mere literal meaning of words, transforming them. That is what drives us, makes us human, gives us dreams. That will give us the stars.

Without that we’re little more than sheep.

With it, we have a key to being far more.

Putin wanted to gobble up Ukraine, will end up making Russia a Chinese vassal state?

I’ve been wondering about that one for a while, as I’ve voiced on this blog. At least economically, Xi the Turtle-“Lover” seems to have Puti[a]n thoroughly by the beitzim. Josh Faulks counts the ways:

Xi Dofek-Tzabbim knows China has a captive market in Russia, and that Russia needs him a lot more than it needs Russia. Yes, China has a thirst for oil and gas that is difficult to slake — but still manages to squeeze Russia to deliver to them at prices that eseentially leave no profit margin over exploitation and logistical costs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day China gives Putain a loan with Vladivostok (or a similar North Pacific port) as collateral, and once debt service becomes unbearable, China will end up either owning the port outright or getting a sweetheart 99-year lease on it…

Putain is quite an overachiever, but not in the way he wants. Without his grandiose invasion, Ukraine would not have been teaching the military world how to extract maximum pain from an opponent with massive fleets of low-cost drones…

Surprise, surprise! China is funding pro-HamaSS marches in the UK

See more here:

https://jakewallissimons.substack.com/p/the-evidence-is-coming-in-china-is?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

As well as in this exposé in the Telegraph (paywalled; cached copy here: https://archive.md/RhlUy).

And yes, the Marxist billionaire, buddy of Xi JinKing [of Underage Turtle Molestation], and husband of Code Stink leader is behind it.

No, I’m not silly enough to believe this is somehow a reflection of widespread Chinese judeophobia (that’s really not a thing in the CJK countries). This is a classic example of Ruth Wisse‘s “antisemitism as power play”.

Shabbat shalom!

A little musical blast from the past: the solo in “In That Quiet Earth” by Genesis: a study in exotic modal scales

A remark about Liszt loving modulations by minor thirds or major thirds (and Tony Banks of Genesis having picked this up through piano lessons from his mother): the proper music theory term for this type of modulation is a chromatic mediant.

Shabbat shalom!

The solo in “In That Quiet Earth” by Genesis: a study in exotic modal scales

Ruth Wisse on antisemitism as a power tactic

In this latest podcast, Haviv Rettig Gur interview Professor Emeritus Ruth Wisse[**] from Harvard, who at age 90 is still sharp as a tack.

The interview is great stuff — my favorite moment was when Ruth said she has the most beautiful bat mitzvah gift she could imagine, as the State of Israel was proclaimed right after her 12th birthday.[*]

But let me focus on one somewhat startling point: Wisse basically rejects the concept that antisemitism is an expression of religious or ethnic prejudice (aside from the superficial level). Instead, she considers it a power tactic to gather multiple grievance groups into a coalition — and in order to do so successfully, you need a small group — a medium-sized or big one would be too risky — but that has a societal profile well above its numbers. She compares it to the tactic of the magician, look at my finger while his other hand is doing something else. Focusing on “the Jews did this” or “Israel did that” makes it possible to deflect from socio-economic problems, from governmental incompetence, but also to avoid dealing with the internal contradictions of the coalition. (Think of LGBTQWERTY activists and radical Muslims in the same coalition.) The same applies, as Haviv points out, to Arab governments after the establishment of Israel. Hatred of that small country was the only thing they could organize around, and even that doesn’t work all too well.

Now, let me contrast this with Haviv’s own theory, which I’ve been repeating to all and sundry — namely that anti-Semitism is “the recurrent delusion that utopia is at hand —,be it a socio-economic one, a racial one, a religious one, or whatever — and that only that small pesky people stands in the way of the Garden of Eden.

I would, however, venture to say that both can be true at once. Harking back to George Orwell’s “1984”, Haviv Rettig Gur’s explanation fits the Outer Party. Ruth Wisse’s explanation fits the Inner Party. The Outer Party thinks it’s about Jews being the cause of everything bad, and of standing in the way of the dawn of universal “social” “justice”. The Inner Party encourages the Outer Party to believe this bollocks, but it has its own deeper agenda.

As Inner Party member O’Brien, while interrogating protagonist Winston Smith, tells him: “the object of power is power”.

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[*] Bar/bat mitzvah technically means: “subject to the Commandments” (i.e., [a rite of passage for] reaching religious majority). The age is 13 for boys and 12 for girls.

[**] I know she pronounces it “Weiss” (“white” in German) but I cannot help seeing German “Wissen” (knowing, knowledge)

“Masgramondou” on “The Racists Who Enabled Jason Arday”; Insty’s 25th blogiversary

Busy as heck at work: just two quick takes.

(a) “Masgramondou”, being an Old Cantabrigian (i.e. a Cambridge alumnus), shares his thoughts on an affair that would have defied the satirical talents of the late lamented Tom Sharpe. His header image speaks for itself:

https://open.substack.com/pub/ombreolivier/p/the-racists-who-enabled-jason-arday?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. […]

Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights – at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect[…] However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD.

However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?

Read the whole thing. As I never tire of repeating, the answer to electrocution is not reversing the polarity of the current, but to shut off the current.

(b) Insty is celebrating his 25th blogiversary, and looking back on his beginnings. “25 years of solitude blogitude” Heh 🙂

https://open.substack.com/pub/instapundit/p/25-years-of-blogitude?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

AAUP: a disgrace to the profession

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE minces no words: https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/what-happened-to-the-aaup-and-why

On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

Then came the less majestic denominator.

Inside Higher Ed reported that about 40 Michigan AAUP members attended the consultation call where the informal poll occurred, out of roughly 4,000 members statewide. Fewer still were on the call when the vote happened. One Michigan member said his “jaw dropped” when he saw Wolfson cite the percentages without the raw numbers.

That is not exactly a sweeping mandate, and yet here we are.

Given his surname Wolfson, Toad [sic] is likely a nominal coreligionist of mine.[*] But he also purports to represent the profession I have belonged to for half my life (in the USA and abroad). For that reason, I am even more outraged than Greg Lukianoff. And I thank G-d with all my heart that I was able to leave the US for academically freer pastures.

But more from Lukianoff:

Wolfson has been unusually explicit about what changed. At a debate in June, he said that for its first 50 years the AAUP was “a professional association representing the profession,” when neutrality made sense. Over the last 50 years, he said, it “has pivoted to being mostly a union.” Then came the key sentence: “Unions are political organizations,” and the AAUP has “shifted the organization to reflect that.”

So there it is. The AAUP’s president is saying openly that his organization has been remade into a political union. Not only that, but it has formed a political action committee and signaled that more endorsements are coming.

That may be coherent, but choices have costs.

I’ve written about the AAUP’s increasing partisanship and rejection of its founding principles before, and I didn’t do it to score points or make new enemies. I did it because this is a real loss. For most of its history, the AAUP occupied a uniquely important place in American higher education. Its 1940 Statement became part of the operating system of the modern university, and FIRE treated its best reports as models of principled analysis.

That authority depended on the belief that its standards applied across political lines. A professor did not have to vote correctly to deserve academic freedom. Once the AAUP becomes an electoral organization allied with one coalition, professors outside it have reason to wonder whether the association sees them as people to protect or opponents to defeat. And why wouldn’t they?

This past spring, I gave a presentation to FIRE’s staff about the importance of cultivating and maintaining viewpoint diversity across our ranks. Unfortunately, the AAUP has become an almost perfect case study in what happens to an organization that does not share — or worse, is outwardly hostile to — that value. What strikes me most is not simply that its leaders made a bad strategic choice. It is that they seem unable to understand why anyone could see the choice as a problem.

I understand Lukianoff is not a big fan of recent Trump administration initiatives imposing certain regulations on academia. For myself, I am ambivalent: even as I am no fan of government micromanaging academia, that industry has completely lost the plot and (as illustrated by the AAUP’s antics) has so thoroughly put all its political eggs in one basket that this sort of thing became inevitable. My mother tongue has the expression: where wood is being chopped, splinters will fly (waar gehakt wordt, vallen spaanders). And the rot sorely needs to be chopped lest it corrupt the whole tree.

But with every passing day, I am a little less convinced that academia can still be reformed — and a little more that it is beyond help. It genuinely breaks my heart.

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[*] His phenomenon is nothing new. Our Shmone Esre (“Eighteen [Benedictions]”) of the weekday Amidah (“Standing Prayers”) actually contain nineteen benedictions — after a new one was inserted at #12, beginning with the words: “And for informers let there be no hope.” (Ulamalshinim lo tihye tikva.)

Albrecht of Brandenburg: the cleric who unintentionally triggered the Reformation?

Shavua tov/have a good week!

There is a new channel on YouTube (with, alas, a lot of AI imagery) called “Markets of the Past”. Its latest video was devoted to the Reformation, or why Martin Luther succeeded where John Wycliffe in England, and Jan Hus in Bohemia [presently the central part of the Czech Republic] had failed.

In possibly the best phrase of the video, the difference with “neither courage nor conviction, but context”. Three major factors in the context were different:

(a) Gutenberg’s invention of movable type 80 years earlier made it possible for Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (and other material) to be quickly reproduced and disseminated across an entire country

(b) About one-third of all land in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation[*] was owned by the Church, and a number of local nobility and gentry were attracted to Luther’s ideas in part because they wanted to expropriate these holdings. (Cf. also Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.)

(c) Is the subject of today’s blog post.

Albert or Albrecht of Brandenburg, the younger brother of Margrave/Marquis (Markgraf) and Prince-Elector (Kurfürst) Joachim I of Brandenburg, had already become the Archbishop of Magdeburg at age 23 (!), besides acting as Apostolic Administrator for the vacant Bishopric of Halberstadt.

He had, however, set his eyes on the Archbishopric of Mainz — which would also make him a Kurfürst like his brother, one of a college of only seven Prince-Electors who decided on the succession of the Holy Roman Emperor. At the time there were three spiritual Kurfürsten (the Prince-Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier) and four temporal ones (the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine/Pfalzgraf by the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg.

But there were multiple obstacles. He did not have a university degree, A Papal dispensation was possible… But a modest “processing fee” was required (with or without dispensation?) amounting to some 20,000 German guilders (about $6-7 million in bullion value today, and about 1,000-2,000 times the annual income of a master craftsman — looking at it this way, more like $50-$100 million today). And then, after the Archbishop of Salzburg leveled objection against “pluralism” (in the sense of holding two such offices at once), the fee was raised further.

Already having bled his personal treasury white to buy his way into the Magdeburg office[**], he had no choice but to turn to the richest banker in the world (and possibly history): a devout Catholic from Augsburg named Jakob Fugger. The video claims Fugger charged 20% percent interest, but that is likely an exaggeration — Fugger is on record as typically charging 5% on loans of this magnitude, with apparently additional fees for physically conveying such an amount of money to Rome on short notice. (Remember: this was centuries before wire transfers — there was a significant risk that any money transport this juicy would fall into the hands of highwaymen, which required either enough security to deter this or disguising the transfers very carefully, all of which cost money. Not to speak of compensation for the risk — it wasn’t [yet] like Fugger could take out insurance for the transfer risk and pass the premium on to his client.)

At the behest of his advisors, Albrecht proposed a special sale of general indulgences, with half the proceeds going to Rome for the building fund of the Sistine Chapel, and the other half towards servicing the Fugger loan. A Dominican monk named Johannes Tetzel became the face of the operation, and its fame (or infamy, depending on one’s point of view) spread wide.

Including to one Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk who was both a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg and a preacher at the main church there, the St. Mary’s / Marienkirche, where he also heard confession. There he encountered congregants who told him they need not come to confession as they had just bought plenary indulgences in nearby Jüterbog from Johannes Tetzel. Luther became increasingly outraged at what he regarded as what in today’s language we might call “spiritual malpractice”, and ultimately drafted a list of 95 objections.

The rest is history…

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[*] “not Holy, not Roman, and not an empire”, as Voltaire quipped.

[**] I don’t know whether through overt simony [the sale of church benefices or favors for profit] or through the thinly disguised kind of “making the appropriate customary donation”. I note with some amusement that simoniaque has survived as an insult in Québecois French, even if the word is quite unfamiliar to most people today.

Academentia, or: the Emperor is naked and abusing himself

(a) The Telegraph has a detailed blow-by-blow social media report of how the Ceuta would-be invasion evolved.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/08/07/europe-border-ceuta-morocco-social-media

The newspaper has lots of stories on the subject. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?q=Ceuta&p=1

In particular this one by a reporter from the Axel Springer Group (the Telegraph’s new owners): https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/04/dont-believe-spin-spain-hasnt-taken-back-control-ceuta/

The events in Ceuta have exposed an uncomfortable truth. Whether Ceuta, Melilla, the Canary Islands or the Spanish towns along the Strait of Gibraltar become the next centre of Europe’s migration crisis is determined less by Spain or Brussels than by Morocco.

Rabat not only failed to stop the latest influx. It is alleged to have facilitated it – perhaps even initiated it.

There is ample precedent. Morocco has repeatedly used migration as a political weapon.

Shortly before the mass crossing of May 2021, Spain had admitted Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, to hospital for medical treatment. Once that became public, thousands began streaming into Ceuta.

In 2018, tens of thousands crossed the Strait. The numbers fell only after Morocco dramatically tightened its controls, moved migrants away from its northern border regions and stepped up cooperation with Spain. The EU underwrote the policy with substantial financial support.

How long will the calm last this time? Nobody knows.

One thing, however, is certain. As long as Morocco seals its side of the Ceuta border – as it normally does – there will be no repeat of this. If Rabat chooses not to, Spain has shown that it cannot reliably defend the frontier on its own.

Madrid has a formidable list of failures to address.

The floating barrier is a start. A firm warning to Rabat – conspicuously absent so far – should follow. That warning might usefully include a reminder that European development aid is not unconditional.

There must also be an urgent investigation into why the Spanish government appeared wholly unprepared when tens of thousands gathered at the border, despite rumours of an imminent surge circulating for weeks.

Madrid slept through the warning signs. That failure demands consequences.

(b) The Jason Arday fracas is not merely “The Emperor is naked!” but “The Emperor is naked and fapping”. Even the late lamented Tom Sharpe’s satirical pen couldn’t have come up with something like this.

https://spectator.com/article/fact-check-the-many-claims-of-jason-arday

The PJMedia empire is all over this:

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2026/08/06/elite-academia-finally-flames-out-in-clueless-heights-of-hilarious-hubris-n3817702

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/08/07/the-problem-is-not-just-dei-or-academic-fraud-its-that-gibberish-is-considered-scholarship-n3817731

I really don’t care much about Arday himself. Why would I? I had never heard of him before, and like Jussie Smollett, I hope not to hear much about him again. Arday only matters because the Expert™ class made him important, and it is the Expert™ class that was corrupt in a much more important way than Arday. 

As I wrote earlier today, Arday is just a microcosm of the credentialed class as a whole, which is built on fabulism. It is certainly the case that there are excellent people with credentials — during COVID we saw the emergence of Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad, who both stood up for scientific standards and who paid a high price for doing so. 

But for the most part we had the Expert™ class all in lockstep, and banded together to destroy anybody who stood in the way of enforcing the Consensus™. You could almost hear the “97% of scientists agree” mantra when they spoke their lines of bull excrement. We all paid a high price because their ultimate loyalty was to the institutions that fed, clothed, and showered them with prestige; we were pawns on the board. 

Academia is now what General Pete Worden called the “self-licking ice cream cone,” meaning that it is a closed little world whose main or only goal is sustaining itself and growing in access to resources, power, and prestige. Its primary product is self-praise, and in its lust for money it keeps churning out crap. 

You have probably heard of the theory that our society has been overproducing “elites,” or more properly aspirants to elite status. It’s why the DSA is riddled with overeducated anti-society morons who are resentful that they are downwardly mobile. They are the people on X who lecture you with tweets that begin with phrases like “Historian, here, let me tell you why you are an idiot…”

See also yesterday’s post on Lumpenintellectuals.

Many people have noted that as shocking as the fact that Cambridge hired Arday despite his being a fraud, what is almost as shocking is that the “work” he produced was complete nonsense riddled with grammatical errors. Any person who read it would realize immediately that it was gibberish and not the product of the “best scholar in the world” in his field, as his department chair put it. 

And that’s saying something, since the field itself is nothing but gibberish. As is much of what passes for “scholarship” these days. Much of it is intellectual, and often enough descriptions of literal, physical onanism that a normal person might wonder how billions of dollars get poured into institutions that churn out scholars who write about their onanistic practices. 

From cogito, ergo sum we have sunk to masturbo, ergo sum.

Unfortunately, these institutions are fundamentally compromised, despite their being absolutely vital to our societal and economic model in the Western World. They have become enemies within, yet we cannot simply strangle them without first replacing them with something fit for purpose. 

I would argue that we should split the STEM fields from the Liberal Arts, but that would still require the STEM fields themselves to be purged of the large fraction of radicals who produce little but poison the well. 

If you have suggestions for how to do that, let me know. Because I despair about fixing a problem of such size, complexity, and importance without inflicting too much damage. 

As does this writer, alas not entirely unfamiliar with radicals even in hard STEM.

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/08/06/the-highly-credentialed-are-all-jason-arday-n3817729

[…] What I mean by that is that the credentialed class is, as a class, so compromised by political commitments to various causes that you can no longer trust anything they say. 

When somebody says “so-and-so is a Harvard professor” or a “law professor at Yale,” that used to mean something to most people. It signaled that they had a stamp of approval that lent special credibility. They were at the top of their field. Take notice and listen. Even if they are wrong, you are likely to learn a new perspective worth considering. 

No longer. These same people are of the class that went gaga over Jason Arday. They didn’t just love him. They didn’t just promote him. They called him “the best in the world” and defended him to the end, accusing his doubters of being vile racists. 

Despite Arday’s story completely collapsing along with the reputation of Cambridge University among people in the know, the media are still trying to cover for both by basically ignoring the facts of the case. Basically, it’s the same thing they have done with Fauci, focusing on Rand Paul as Inspector Javert rather than on the fact that Fauci ruined lives because he is a malignant little man with a God complex.

Speaking of which, yesterday the relevant Senate committee voted to declare Anthony Narcissus Faux-Xi in contempt of the Senate. Which led Fauci’s wife, who incredibly was supposed to be the bioethics watchdog over her husband’s agency, to give the little finger salute from the visitor’s gallery.

But read that whole latter article, which is much broader than Arday and Faux-Xi.

[A whistleblower on transbutadiene] was doing great work, as evidenced by the fact that the organization that demanded she resign was simultaneously giving her multiple awards for it, but she wouldn’t toe the line on defending fraud. 

Sound familiar? That’s exactly what Cambridge did until it could no longer sustain its defense of Jason Arday. It lashed out at every critic, not because they were wrong, or even plausibly so, but because they were speaking out loud about the uncomfortable but obvious facts. 

Shut up, they explained. Or else. 

The credentialed class is fatally compromised. Their loyalty is not to truth, rigor, or any vision of the good you and I can recognize. It is to their ideological commitments, which include a complete disdain for the hoi polloi and whatever we consider to be important values. 

These days, the tweed coat, the white coat, or any other symbol of high-status credentials should be viewed with special suspicion. 

Sad, sad, but true.

Shabbat shalom!

Neologism of the day: “Lumpen-intellectuals”

Steven Kotkin didn’t invent the term, apparently, but he used it to great effect in this clip from a long podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel:

Kotkin’s definition of lumpen-intellectuals is roughly: people who possess educational credentials or ideological ambition but lack the discipline, originality, or competence of true intellectuals — and yet are eager to wield state power (and act as enforcers). Think Antifa [=really competingFa], the “Free Palpatine” thugs, but also the cancel squads.

“Lompen”/”Lumpen” are false friends between Dutch and German. In Dutch (and originally in German), “lompen” are rags: “het arme meisje is in lompen gekleed en barrevoets” = “the poor girl was dresssed in rags and barefoot”. As an adjective “lomp” can also mean “dumb, slow-witted”, “clumsy”, or even “tactless” in Dutch — that in turn generated the noun “lomperd” for a boy or man like that. (I’ve never heard it applied to a female.) In German, on the other hand, “ein Lump” is a scoundrel, a good-for-nothing, a ruffian. (Possibly the meaning descends from the stereotype, in the very clothes-conscious Europe of old, that such individuals dressed in rags.)

Of course, the term puns off Lumpenproletariat, coined by Karl Marx (shr”y) in The Eighteenth of Brumaire [a reference to the coup that brought Napoleon into power]. There, it refers to people outside the regular working class, on the margins of society: beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, petty criminals,… Supposedly these lacked “class consciousness” and could thus be exploited by the other side.

The point of that video segment is to explain the attraction of Marxism and neo-Marxism to intellectuals. I personally know very intelligent academics who fall for elegant “theories of everything”, in and out of politics, with concerns about real-world applicability being treated as a nuisance. But, says Kotkin, more than that — and a false promise of redressing real and imaginary wrongs in the world — a (neo-)Marxist revolution proposes to put the intellectual and lumpen-intellectual class in charge.

Hiroshima Day post: Rush, “Manhattan Project” and Iron Maiden, “Brighter Than A Thousand Suns”

HRG: What does Qatar want; the Islamocommunist takeover of the “Democratic” party; Ceuta and Melilla; Cambridge academic fraudster resigns

(a) h/t Mrs. Arbel: Haviv Rettig Gur reviews how Qatar came on the scene, and how it’s become one of the greatest destabilizing forces on the planet (not just in the region) while at the same time laughably marketing itself as an ally.

(b) His onetime guest Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who knows the toxic brew of Islamism first-hand (and left his native Egypt for the US), minces no word on his Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/critiqueanddigest/p/it-will-only-get-worse?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary is the kind of headline that, were it not entirely predictable, would have required some explanation. A former local health official, endorsed by the DSA and who campaigns at college rallies alongside Hasan Piker — the vile streamer who openly believes America deserved 9/11 and that he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every single time,” and that China’s Mao was “one of the great leaders of this world,” not to mention electrocuting his dog on camera — has just won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in a battleground state that the party must carry in November if it hopes to flip the Senate.

He won by spending $7.5 million against $64.7 million, which means, among other things, that AIPAC just flushed $32 million down a toilet. The establishment’s preferred candidate, Haley Stevens, a four-term congresswoman backed by Schumer, funded by Emily’s List and every pro-Israel organization with a checkbook, lost to the guy who was sad about the killing of Khamenei. 

The response of the Dem establishment to this outcome has been characteristically invertebrate. Schumer praised El-Sayed for “an energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders.” Stevens congratulated him and offered her support. Senate Majority PAC called him “a real fighter who shows up for working families.” This is how a party behaves when it has already decided, at some cellular level beneath the reach of its own spokespersons, that resistance is no longer worth the cost. Simply, succumbing to progressive demands now has less than the cost of facing progressive anger.

The same evening, in the adjacent congressional district, a DSA-backed state legislator named Donavan McKinney unseated Shri Thanedar, a two-term Dem incumbent in Detroit’s 13th District, with keffiyeh-wearing supporters celebrating alongside Rashida Tlaib. This makes El-Sayed’s victory the latest data point in a national pattern that started with Mamdani’s conquest of New York, more DSA displacements of establishment incumbents in New York congressional races, Melat Kiros’s toppling of DeGette in Colorado after thirty years in office, and the DSA’s march into mayoralties in Washington and Los Angeles. Over thirty DSA-backed candidates have won primaries this cycle. The RNC’s comparison of El-Sayed to Mamdani was, for once, accurate, which is rare.

This latest victory of Queer-Palestine-anti-Americanism tells us about the changes in the structure of power inside the Democratic Party, and how completely the structural analysis I have been offering in these pages has been vindicated by events. The Democratic establishment’s decision to concede Israel to its radical wing was never going to remain confined to the Israel question, because anti-Zionism is a whole worldview, Palestine is a complete Idea, a way of organizing political reality that generates conclusions far beyond the particular case of Israel. The centrists are the authors of their own demise.

Bridge Michigan reported that El-Sayed voters, wealthier and whiter than the voters of Stevens, which already tells you much, said they found the avalanche of anti-El-Sayed ads irrelevant, or that the ads themselves had become an argument for his candidacy […] When El-Sayed tells a donor call that his victory would allow him to primary “people like John Fetterman” and that “ideally, you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message,” he is describing the logic of revolutionary purification — the logic which the kids wealthy Americans have learned to fall in love with and masturbate over in the universities — in which the purpose of electoral victory is the punishment of dissenters. […]

A once-respectable political party has been skinsuited by Bolsheviks who, like the historical original more than a century ago, were a minority in the party despite the name literally meaning “majoritarians” as they imposed their will on the actual majority. Whatever one’s misgivings about the GOP, November offers a very clear choice. The neo-Jacobins and Islamists race-communists must be stopped at all cost, lest they run the USA completely into the ground.

(c) And speaking of Islamic takeovers: what the heck is happening in Ceuta and Melilla, the two long-standing Spanish exclaves surrounded by Moroccan territory? The Spanish government claims it has returned the vast majority of the border-crossers, while at the same time, we read and see reports of groups on the street, camping out on the beach,…

Keep in mind that as of January 1, 2025, the permanent population of the exclaves stood at about 85,000 each — so even if only about 10,000 illegals (let alone 20,000) out of the original 50,000-60,000 were to remain, that would still be quite enough to be very disruptive.

(d) the Jason Ardey fracas is looking more and more like a Tom Sharpe novel, with self-important, dimwitted, oh-so-woke university administrators having fallen for such an obvious fantasist that they make Eva Wilt look smart in comparison.

UPDATE: And now The Telegraph claims his scalp: “Jason Arday resigns after Telegraph reveals his false book claims” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/05/jason-arday-falsely-claimed-to-have-published-book/

Well done. Now each and every one of the woke-simps who enabled him should follow suit.

(e) and among the overpaid and worse-than-useless college president, a bright light now retiring after 14 years at the helm of Brown University. https://freebeacon.com/campus/president-paxson-who-made-brown-an-ivy-bright-spot-says-she-will-leave/

Dispatches from the Tom Sharpe Universe, August 4, 2026: chicken experts, Faucism, and the Law of Asymmetry of BS

(a) we really are living in the Tom Sharpe universe

“BY th epower vested in me by the District of Columbia, I now pronounce you man and chicken.”

(b) Israel, rightly angered at the muerde-almohadas por las Islamistas “Dirty” Sanchez have a degree of Schadenfreude at Spain getting to deal with an immigrant invasion in Ceuta and Melilla (two Spanish exclaves on the Moroccan coast may actually be making a mistake, argues a Spanish MEP for the right-wing VOX party (and Israel supporter). https://www.jpost.com/international/article-904518

(c) Insty in the NYPost calls for “an end to Faucism.”no more Faucis”. https://nypost.com/2026/08/03/opinion/faucis-follies-time-to-toss-science-is-settled-groupthink/

By that I mean we should never again allow a single bureaucrat or a small group to exercise the sweeping and largely unchecked institutional power that Fauci wielded for decades.

Fauci served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until the end of 2022. 

In this role, he was the senior federal official overseeing the bulk of US government-funded research on infectious diseases, immunology, allergy and related areas.

Thirty-eight years is too long for anyone to head a bureaucracy. 

And while Fauci didn’t control all of America’s biomedical research — NIH as a whole, other federal agencies, private foundations and industry fund more — his long tenure at NIAID made him particularly influential.

Cumulative funding under his direction ran into the tens of billions of dollars.

After 9/11, NIAID became the lead civilian agency for biodefense research against Category A agents like anthrax and smallpox, vaccines, diagnostics and medical countermeasures.

This included expanded work on “dual-use research of concern” — that is, research on pathogens that could be used either to treat illness or to maliciously spread it. 

Fauci’s continuous four-decade tenure, unprecedented for an NIH institute director, gave him deep institutional knowledge, relationships across government, and high public visibility. 

After so long in office, he had connections everywhere — and he used them with relish. 

People who crossed him were unlikely to get funded; people who pleased him had a much better shot. 

No wonder he saw himself as the embodiment of science itself.

But science isn’t something that people are; it’s something people do. 

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It’s a system in which hypotheses are tested, supported or falsified, and developed further. 

And allowing one person, with all his human biases and weaknesses, to hold so much power over science for so long can only do that system harm.

It’s not just Fauci. 

(d) The “Law of Asymmetry of Bulls**t” in action: https://x.com/prestonstew_/status/2084254897482985971

It’s a nasty type of poison in our media space these days.

I recently had someone that I’d known for years ask me to explain a Ukraine war conspiracy they heard on a comedian’s podcast. It was a relationship I valued so I spent hours, probably 8-10 total over a few months, sitting down in person and over the phone explaining why it was nonsense.

End of day, they felt the comedian wouldn’t lie which meant that I was.

I left our last conversation with them believing that I had become a Nazi-supporter who steals money from an audience while being secretly paid by the DNC and Ukraine.

Mind you, this was a friend, we’d known each other for a long time. Initially I laughed it off but eventually could tell they were serious. A ‘you do you, I just don’t agree’ type response.

That’s where I couldn’t break through. No matter what I said, they were convinced I was, for the first time in our relationship, now lying to their face about some pretty nasty personal allegations. Now why I would make this abrupt personal change or keep it all from them of course, wasn’t clear.

Maybe this is me giving up, but I haven’t spoken to that person since.

When a comedian or commentator’s opinion has the power to make people believe their friends and neighbors aren’t who you know them to be, that’s dark.

Looking around: Is Cuba going capitalist?! And much more

Say what? CUBA is going capitalist? Josh Faulks at VisualEconomics has more

It’s not the first time they’ve announced “reforms” that amounted to either window-dressing or simply acknowledging the reality on the ground. But this time, they might go all Deng Xiao-Ping — economic liberalization while keeping the political screws tight. Things have gotten so bad and unsustainable that, rationally speaking, they have no other choice. And US Secretary of State [=Foreign Minister, for the rest of the planet] Marco Rubio, being of Cuban heritage himself, would like nothing better than to help guide the land of his parents out of the commie sinkhole it’s mired in.

(b) A detail I’d somehow missed about Anthony Narcissus Faux-Xi:

Yup, look it up.

(c) Here in Israel, there is a major row as Defense Minister Israel Katz — a politruk with no real qualifications in this field — is trying to dismiss Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, the head of Central Command. You see, Bluth — while a pretty hardcore religious Zionist himself — takes the same dim view as I do of the “crabgrass” of the movement, and had pushed to extend the administrative detention order of a seemingly deranged individual.

And Katz knows that without the support of the Kachsuckers, his party is toast at the elections. The IDF, for its part, is backing Bluth and telling Katz to go pound sand.

(d) Read the whole sordid tale about how Cambridge U. fell over itself to hire every Race Marxist’s wet dream as “the youngest ever black full professor” — and this is now exploding in their faces, as the said individual is revealed to be not only a serial plagiarist but also a full-on mythomaniac.

AND THEN HE SHOUTED, CAMBRIDGE IS MAGA COUNTRY! Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Ja

(e) Nothing to see here, move along, Insty snarks: the number of fraudulent and “suspicious” votes cast in the NYC election exceeds the margin of “victory” of Khara bin-Khara Zohran Mamdani https://thepostmillennial.com/election-auditor-says-over-200000-votes-cast-in-nyc-mayoral-election-are-suspicious?utm_campaign=64483

(f) And Naftali Bennett, former Israeli Prime Minister and now again contender for the job, says something unthinkable to some, and blatantly obvious to others: that Qatar is a bigger threat to Israel than Iran.

Be it as it may, I told Mrs. Arbel after the October 7 pogrom that my first response would not have been an invasion of Gaza, but a commando strike on Qatar to eliminate all the HamaSS head honchos holed up there — and for the raid to include an “unfortunate targeting error” that saw the Emir Bin Sittim Alaf Sharmuteh and his entourage join them in Jehenna. Next target: the Iranian regime. And only then, with HamaSS’s two main backers either gone or too preoccupied with their own woes, deal with Gaza. When you’re fighting a snake, you cut off the head first.

(g) Well, the mass “immigrant” crossings into the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla, have seemingly been reversed, as of the mnore than 50,000 “immigrants”, 48,000 have (been) returned to Morocco within 48 hours and more are following.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/morocco-blames-misinformation-for-ceuta-migrant-rush-israel-conspiracy-theories-spread

And guess who conspiracy theorist are blaming… (Sigh of cosmic weariness.)

Putin’s game of chicken turning to rotisserie; in the depths of a mind insane

(a) A Russian missile strikes inside Poland — WTF? If the idea was to intimidate Poland, this appears to have backfired spectacularly. “Temu Napoleon” Putin really has the Mierdas Touch (or is that the “Gavno Touch”?): everything he touches turns to sh*t.

(b) Two more good reads on Anthony Narcissus Faux-Xi

Roger Kimball: https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-anthony-fauci/

Matt Ridley: https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/07/31/fauci-and-the-great-covid-cover-up/

(c) Seriously, this is whom the Dhimmicrats want us to vote for?

All satirists might just as well retire — reality is more absurd than anything they can invent.

(d) Blood pressure meds:

Meanwhile in Ceuta…

So now we have a massive breach of the Spanish border fences at Ceuta by, what else, Islamic men of military age?

The wages of Pedro “Dirty” Sanchez’s treason?

Or, bear with me… is this orchestrated by the Moroccan goverment to push Spain out of one of its last two footholds on the African continent? Yes, no joke. Most people think of Morocco as a former French colony, but 1912–1956 there was also a Spanish protectorate zone on its Northern coast, with Tetuán as its capital. The port city of Tangiers (Tánger on the map) and the surrounding small area were an international zone [1923-1956, final international privileges ending 1960].

There were, however, two port cities, Ceuta and Melilla, that had been Spanish going back for centuries. Melilla was captured for Castile in 1497 and subsequently incorporated into the Spanish Crown. Ceuta had originally been captured by the Portuguese in 1415; after the last king of the Portuguese House of Aviz died childless in 1580, the senior living relative, Philip II of Spain, became Philip I of Portugal in personal union, and so did his successors. In a December 1640 revolt, Portugal became independent again under John IV of the House of Braganza. Ceuta, however, remained loyal to the Spanish crown, and this Spanish possession was formalized in the 1688 Treaty of Lisbon.

Since legally these two cities were never part of the Spanish Protectorate, its dissolution in 1956 didn’t affect their status.

It remains to be seen what this is — a migrant invasion across a land border, an irredentist “re-reconquista” by Morocco, or a combination of the two.

Shabbat shalom!

All hail the scienceTM, Anthony Narcissus Faux-Xi!

As Ben Shapiro quipped about this image: “what was your first clue that this guy is a total douchebag?”

A painting of YOURSELF in your office… plus another photograph, plus a bobblehead… He may not drown and turn into a flower looking at it, but that doesn’t make it less narcissistic.

So during a Senate hearing, “The Science”(TM) plead the fifth no fewer than 111 times (!), including for control questions like “what color is your tie”?
https://nypost.com/2026/07/29/us-news/the-5-most-shocking-moments-from-anthony-faucis-senate-testimony/

[Instapundit, with his law professor hat on, pointed out that Fifth Amendment privilege does not apply to anything for which the person can no longer be convicted, e.g., because of a pardon or of double jeopardy.]

As a practicing scientist, who even won an award or 2, 3,… without lobbying for them (let alone, G-d forbid, pay government employees to lobby on my behalf for them while on the clock!!!), the stuff we learned from Anthony Narcissus Fauci’s unredacted diary fills me with vicarious shame.

But even this self-promotion and douchebaggery pale by comparison with the —- possibly irreparable —- damage this individual wrought to the public reputation of science as an enterprise, through (we learn from his diary that he himself didn’t believe half the bollocks he was spouting) deceiving the public, manipulating their fears, and attempting to destroy the careers of some colleagues who tried to inject some rationality into the debate.

My adopted home country can thank G-d (or, if secular, G-d know what) that it never had a real equivalent of Faux-Xi — our “corona project managers” were hospital directors and the like, who took 6-month leaves of absence from their regular jobs and then rotated back to them.

And don’t get me started on outsourcing viral gain-of-function research to China after the NIH director shut the local project down as too dangerous. At best, Faux-Xi should have lost his job over this. Instead, he was able to run interference for Real Xi, King of the Turtle-F***ers until his retirement. (Maybe Faux-Xi should have bought a turtle costume and shacked up with Real-Xi? “You’re my favorite turtle-boy after B1den, Faux-Xi!”)

It was regrettable, though understandable, that serious mistakes were made during the early phase of the pandemic. (BTW, I am 99% certain that the initial working assumption of the Israeli security echelon was that we were dealing with an escaped bioweapon.) But that does not excuse doubling down on teh burning stoopid.

Is it possible that Faux-Xi actually believed the CCP bore the guilt, and that the West couldn’t handle the truth? That if they knew the truth, it would have led to World War III (at worst) or a total economic decoupling from China (if only!!!) I am grasping at straws here to come up with any form of excuse..

No, seriously,

Elite overproduction, South Korea edition

Peter Turchin’s “Elite overproduction hypothesis” in action, Korea (and China) edition:

Pre-pre cram schools for toddlers to get into pre-cram schools for elementary school ages to get into actual cram schools for middle and high school, etc. … What the actual heck?

And how does a higher “education” that nearly 70% of the population graduates from still make any sense? (OK, the top 3 “SKY” universities [Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei] are still very tough to get into, and hence the high pressure cram-schooling.

Even the UK Labour flavor of the day has finally figured out that Tony Blair’s dream of 50% of college-age kids attending university serves no useful purpose other than academic puppy-milling, creating a glut of undereducated, overcredentialed graduates while manual jobs go unfilled for lack of applicants.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/07/27/burnham-brings-an-end-to-blairs-university-vision

(b) Did two wars just become one? That is, with Ukraine carrying out drone strikes on ships in the Caspian Sea bringing oil from Iran to Russia…