The greatest narrative poem in the English language. On a par with Homer or Virgil. It's actually a very irreverent poem
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the 14th Century masterpiece which tell the stories of a host of characters on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, has been given a trigger warning by Nottingham University because they contained “expressions of Christian faith”. The Mail has more.
Nottingham University has now been accused of “demeaning education” for warning students about the religious elements of Chaucer’s stories – saying that anyone studying one of the most famous works in English literature would hardly have to have the Christian references pointed out.
The Mail on Sunday has obtained details of the notice issued to students studying a module called ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’ under Freedom of Information laws. It alerts them to incidences of violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith in the works of Chaucer and fellow medieval writers William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve.
The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400, is a collection of stories about characters on a pilgrimage from London to the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
They include the promiscuous Wife of Bath, the drunken miller and the thieving reeve, who delight and shock each other with stories containing explicit references to rape, lust and even anti-Semitism.
However, the university’s warning makes no reference to the anti-Semitism or sexually explicit themes.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, said: “Warning students of Chaucer about Christian expressions of faith is weird. Since all characters in the stories are immersed in a Christian experience there is bound to be a lot of expressions of faith. The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signalling, ignorant academics.”
Historian Jeremy Black added: “Presumably, this Nottingham nonsense is a product of the need to validate courses in accordance with tick-box criteria. It is simultaneously sad, funny and a demeaning of education.”
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Billionaires back a new ‘anti-woke’ university
Billionaires frustrated with elite colleges are banding behind a fledgling school in Texas that boasts 92 students.
Trader Jeff Yass, real-estate developer Harlan Crow and investor Len Blavatnik are among the high-profile people donating to the University of Austin, or UATX. The new school has raised roughly (AU$297 million) $200 million so far -- including (AU$52 million) $35 million from Yass -- a huge sum for a tiny school without any alumni to tap.
Crow, a major GOP donor, was an early backer. “Much of higher ed today seems to want to reject Western accomplishments and the accomplishments of Western civilizations in their entirety,” he said. “Many people think that’s a bad idea.” Crow said he expects UATX to encourage ideological diversity.
Crow and his wife, Kathy, have hosted several events for the school at their Dallas home and let the school use space in an office park he owns for its summer program, provocatively called Forbidden Courses. Crow has been a controversial benefactor to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has said he has never discussed pending cases with Thomas.
Frustration with the state of debate and levels of unrest at prestigious universities has spurred some of the richest Americans to flex their financial muscle.
Billionaires like Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman led campaigns to oust Ivy League presidents they viewed as being too soft on antisemitism on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza. Many wealthy donors believe elite colleges are overwhelmingly progressive -- and are attracted to the idea of an alternative school that says it encourages meritocratic achievement and myriad viewpoints.
Enter UATX, which welcomed its initial class of first-years last month in a former department store near the Texas Capitol. The school says it is nonpartisan and refers to its mission as the “fearless pursuit of truth.” Its foundational curriculum marries classical texts -- students were given a copy of Homer’s Odyssey upon enrollment -- with an emphasis on entrepreneurship.
A video posted to the school’s YouTube page contrasts scenes of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments at other schools with a civil UATX seminar. The video ends with the message, “They burn, we build.” Officials talk about UATX in lofty terms. Some cite the University of Chicago as an aspirational role model.
President Pano Kanelos called students and faculty “pioneers” and “heroes” in his convocation address. “What is truly historic is that which sends the trajectory of history, and lives lived within the stream of history, shooting in a direction other than that towards which they were tending,” Kanelos said.
The effort to launch the school was announced in fall 2021. Founders include venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a conservative who is donating to Donald Trump, and journalist Bari Weiss, who has described her news startup, the Free Press, as a check to mainstream media’s liberal orthodoxy.
Yass, who has long pushed for school choice and is UATX’s biggest donor, said in a statement, “Higher education needs competition. It is time for philanthropists to start new colleges in keeping with the way American learning institutions were founded.” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has long known Lonsdale and has separately been paying students to skip college, made a small gift. Former energy trader John Arnold and his wife, Laura, who are advocates of criminal-justice reform and open debate on campus, are major donors. Alex Magaro, co-president of investment firm Meritage Group, gave $10 million last month.
The campus turmoil over the war in Gaza accelerated fundraising, school administrators said, including from those who felt universities selectively applied free-speech principles. Blavatnik, who is Jewish, gave $1 million through his family foundation in the days after Hamas attacked Israel. He later paused his giving to Harvard University, his alma mater.
Daniel Lubetzky, founder of snack-bar maker Kind Snacks and a son of a Holocaust survivor, donated early on and continued to give after the attacks. He became increasingly alarmed at the rise of ” us vs. them” thinking on campuses. Active discussions are ongoing with others, including Ackman, who was harshly critical of elite colleges’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and their handling of antisemitism on campus.
“It took what happened in the wake of Oct. 7 on the major campuses to convince Wall Street, to convince people in Silicon Valley, that there really was a problem” with higher education, said historian Niall Ferguson, another school founder.
A larger fundraising campaign is expected to start in January. Whether prospective students find UATX as attractive as donors remains to be seen. UATX currently lacks accreditation and can receive it only after its first class graduates. As a way to offset the risk students are taking, the first class of students is receiving full-tuition scholarships worth about $130,000. More than 40% of the students in the class hail from Texas and a third are female.
Executives from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Boring Company are helping to develop the school’s engineering curriculum. Lonsdale, the school’s board chair, is gifting a few acres of land outside Austin, adjacent to SpaceX and Boring, for a science and technology center. UATX is also searching for a main campus.
While UATX says it isn’t an explicitly political school, some of its most prominent backers are big donors to Republican candidates and causes, including Yass and Crow. Yass co-founded trading giant Susquehanna International Group, which has a big stake in TikTok.
Kanelos, the University of Austin’s president, said the school’s top 10 donors vary in political ideology but that, “Everyone who gives to us is a critic of higher education.”
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The British Left drifts Right
In the once vibrant landscape of British politics, the Labour Party stood as a defiant force of opposition – loud, principled, and occasionally even radical. Enter Keir Starmer, the man who promised to rescue Labour from the clutches of ‘Corbynceps’ (the ideological fungus that some believed had infected the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership). With impeccable suits and measured tones, Starmer vowed to restore order and respectability. A harmless reformer, right?
But like any good parasite, the danger lay in his quiet persistence.
First, Starmer neutralised the ideological immune system by purging the most vocal members of Labour’s left wing. It wasn’t long before the party started behaving differently. The infection took root when he announced that Labour was backing away from nationalising public utilities – policies once central to its DNA. Electricity, railways, water? Nah, too ‘1990s’. Like an infected insect abandoning its instincts, Labour now began parroting lines that wouldn’t be out of place at a Conservative Party conference: ‘We have to make tough decisions…’ (Because, apparently, billionaires are on the verge of poverty if we tax them fairly.)
Next came the retreat on welfare spending. Universal Credit? Reforms to benefit the poorest? Starmer’s Labour would ‘look at’ these things but won’t make any promises. The host, still clutching onto the hope that this is all for the greater good, began climbing higher and higher under the influence of its new master, ready to eject policies that are more palatable to the center-right media than the voters who once believed in radical change.
Starmer’s crowning infection is a U-turn on climate pledges. The party that once promised to spearhead a Green New Deal is now backing away from Net Zero targets and clean energy investment. Labour is scaling back plans for a greener economy, all while the planet burns. In true Cordyceps fashion, Starmer’s party is marching toward its doom, happily parroting platitudes about ‘balancing priorities’ while the environment takes a back seat. We wouldn’t want to upset the fossil fuel lobby, now would we?
And in perhaps the boldest betrayal, Starmer announced tougher immigration controls, further infecting the very soul of Labour with rhetoric once reserved for the likes of Nigel Farage. ‘Tough on crime, tough on immigration, and tougher on anyone who thought socialism was still in the room!’ Labour, by this point, is no longer recognisable, now fully under the control of the Starmer Fungus, nodding along as if austerity cuts and limited housing plans were exactly what the people had asked for.
Then there’s Brexit, or rather, the absence of any meaningful stance on it. You’d think the party that once championed Europe might say something about reversing the damage. But no, Starmer has convinced the host to forget its pro-European roots entirely. Like an insect zombified by Cordyceps, Labour now stumbles along, muttering, ‘We need to move on…’ while blindly avoiding any discussion of rejoining the EU or repairing our international standing.
Just when you thought Starmer’s parasitic takeover was complete, another curious incident emerged: the Chagos Islands controversy. In a move that even some of his own supporters might find bewildering, Starmer quietly backed the decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a questionable choice amid uncertain geopolitical times. The islands, once a strategic military base for the UK and the US, are being surrendered like a trinket in a pawn shop, with little regard for their significance in the Indian Ocean as a key point of influence between East and West. Starmer’s Labour, keen to avoid any friction, accepted this development with a shrug, sacrificing national security for the sake of international optics.
As if to distract from this grand misstep, Starmer dangled his ambitious vision for the nation: The Five Missions. Labour, now thoroughly hollowed out by its fungal overlord, eagerly embraced these as if they were bold new ideas. Starmer announced missions to grow the economy, fix the NHS, improve education, tackle crime, and address climate change. But in true parasitic style, these are empty promises – vague enough to sound inspiring but lacking any commitment to the radical reforms needed. ‘Grow the economy,’ Labour mumbles as it stumbles forward, protecting the wealthy instead of taxing them. ‘Fix the NHS,’ it chants, even as Starmer avoids discussing how it will be funded.
Public polling reflects this internal turmoil. Voters, once loyal to Labour’s cause, are increasingly disillusioned, with many expressing that they feel betrayed by Starmer’s shifts away from core party values. Some polls suggest that a growing number of traditional Labour supporters are contemplating alternatives, revealing just how far the party has drifted from its roots.
Tensions within Labour only add to the chaos. Discontent is brewing among the party’s left faction, who see Starmer as the embodiment of a hollowed-out, centrist machine. The voices of grassroots activists and former Corbyn supporters are growing louder, questioning whether the party can ever regain its revolutionary spirit or if it’s simply become a pale imitation of its former self.
And while the public stirs with frustration, the spectre of history looms large. Once, Labour was synonymous with the fight against injustice and colonialism, yet now, under Starmer’s rule, it seems more concerned with political survival than moral integrity. The ghosts of Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ and Margaret Thatcher’s reshaping of the Conservative Party haunt the current leadership, hinting at the perils of sacrificing principles for power.
But just when you thought the infection was complete, the final punchline arrives. In this madcap world of Labour under Starmer, one can only wonder: what’s next? Perhaps a radical pivot toward embracing the monarchy or a manifesto to build a luxury housing estate on the remnants of the NHS?
Labour, once the champion of public ownership, social justice, and geopolitical awareness, has now climbed to a platform indistinguishable from that of its once sworn enemies. The spores of center-right policy drift out into the world, infecting the broader political discourse, with Starmer as the grim puppet master smiling quietly in the background, promising a new dawn.
But when the dust settles, one must ask – what happens to the host when it has served its purpose? Does Starmer move on to infect the broader electorate next, convincing them that voting for Labour is a vote for change when, in fact, they’re simply climbing higher to a precipice of political sameness? The answer, like any parasitic infection, remains to be seen.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/keir-starmer-labours-cordyceps-fungus/
****************************************Try a Little Honesty About Israel
Victor Davis Hanson
Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.
A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] should remember that.”
Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: This current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.
Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”
Election interference?
Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into swing-state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance to a left-wing magazine.
Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.
Her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.
Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a b—-, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f–king guy!”
What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?
It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his would-be successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.
Yet they feel they must also pander to anti-Israel, Muslim-American voters who may determine the Electoral College votes of critical swing-state Michigan.
Democratic politicos square that circle by claiming they support Israel—despite damning the conservative Netanyahu. That way they seek to blame Netanyahu for alienating Arab and Muslim-American voters, while they do not alienate left-wing Jewish and pro-Israeli Democrats.
For all the invective, a demonized Netanyahu is now regaining public support in Israel. The Israeli public approves of his near-destruction of Hamas, the ongoing brilliant Israeli emasculation of Hezbollah, and Israel’s revelations that the once widely feared terrorist regime in Iran may in fact well prove to be a paper tiger.
Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan admitted just eight days before the Oct. 7 massacres that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
His boast was an admission that Biden and Harris had inherited from the prior Trump administration a stable Middle East.
So, what blew up Sullivan’s quietude?
Certainly not Netanyahu or Israel in general.
It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise-attacked and killed 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and a Jewish holiday.
Their slaughtering, torturing, raping, and hostage-taking revealed a level of precivilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.
Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number more than 20,000.
It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until Oct. 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.
During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both U.S. Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.
For over three years, the Biden administration had signaled Israel’s enemies that it no longer acted like a close ally of the past.
After it all, Biden-Harris lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls. It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal. It abandoned the Abraham Accords. It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis. It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders. It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.
Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: Attack the Jewish state, and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.
And so they did, in unison.
Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.
The final irony?
Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic and endanger its very survival—and so, will not agree to its own suicide.
Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek. And one of whose beneficiaries from Israeli blood and treasure will be the U.S. itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/11/try-little-honesty-about-israel-2/
**************************************************My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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