So much for prestigious academic names

One of the most internationally renowned American universities is MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One expects services provided by MIT to be of good quality.

MIT runs an online Classical Greek library called The Tech Classics Archive. I have not used it after a while, because I noticed that all the longer files (=texts) were cut off at a given point. Another web site just told me why: "this site crashed some time in 2000 and not all texts have been fully restored ever since. Due to the way they restored the site, using archive from Google, dialogues whose size led to a file greater than about 100K, the maximum size of Google archive for a page, are now incomplete." Talk about cheapjack! This is the kind of online library that the great MIT feels able to offer? And in FIVE YEARS they have done nothing to improve the situation? Clearly to put in the necessary resources would have cut into the senior table's dinner budget.

That, and my own alma mater, Oxford, has just given a visiting fellowship to the worst intellectual pirate and jihad promoter in the world, Tariq Ramadan. (He is, I believe, a grandson of Hassan Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a distant cousin of Arafat. In the Arab world, these connections count.) Of course, it is only a one-year fellowship, and of course it is from one of Oxford's less ancient and prestigious colleges, St.Anthony's; but no matter, in the eyes of the rest of the world it is a teaching post at Oxford, and it validates a man who has been refused an entry visa into the US as a manifest supporter of terrorism.

Bush at his worst

If only Dean, Kennedy and the other idiots would shut up, G.W.Bush might well ruin himself. Has there ever been a more atrocious example of not knowing when to shut up, than his public congratulations to the Iraqi public for a constitution that, a) seems to be rejected by the one group that the Americans wanted in, the Sunnis, b) enshrines the illiberal Sharia law in the fundamental law of the State, c) clearly shows that Shias and Kurds want to keep oil revenues to themselves instead of letting the whole nation benefit? At the very least, this constitution is a gamble, and optimistic rewritings of history just do not cut it. Bush's immense good luck might still see him through, but he has, in the Italian expression, wasted an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut. Presidential silence might also have signalled to the Shias and Kurds that the Americans were displeased with their inflexibility - which by all accounts they were, having pushed hard to placate the Sunnis. Instead, the Shias and Kurds will feel secure, even vindicated. And unless they manage to win the coming referendum, uncertainty and politics by bombing will stretch out into the future.