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.

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:

This may come as a shock to some of you–Facebook is a commercial business.

Facebook is not a nation state. It does not have a constitution or a supreme court that guarantees you a “right to privacy.”

In exchange for allowing us to dance around the Bonfire of the Banalities, Facebook uses data that we voluntarily give to Facebook to make money for Facebook.

That is known as a “business exchange.”

Netizens need to understand that nothing on the World-Wide Web is free. Everything on the Web entails a value exchange (though not necessarily a monetary exchange, thus Facebook apparently still does not earn a profit).

Netizens, it’s time to move from petulant cyber adolescence in digital adulthood.

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)

So last night at a reception, I learned from S. J. Wolfe about the robust trade in linen mummy wrappings to feed America’s hunger for fine rag-content paper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Apparently, Egyptian rag merchants were bringing out their dead, divesting them of their linen wrappings, and shipping the rags to the US, where fine paper (including that used in American currency) was made from them. (The mummies, in many instances, were converted into fertilizer, nourishing the roses of British monarchs.)

Wood pulp paper, developed in the 19th century, is acidic and not of fine quality (as anyone will remember from first grade when we wrote on paper, as Bill Cosby used to say, that still had big chunks of wood in it).

Wolfe, a cataloger at the American Antiquarian Society, is the author of Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptian as Artifacts (McFarland, 2009).

In this case, this college started out as a junior college extension of Oldest Southern College, declared its independence, got a makeover with a couple of master’s programs for “university” status (like putting a ribbon on a pig), and a subsequent reconstruction as a Public University with a Private Liberal Arts ethos (which is what I thought Oldest Southern College still is [it keeps "college" in its name, but is really a doctoral-granting university]).

So a mad building boom over the past ten years, and dorms, library (named after the president and his wife), and other buildings in Collegiate Colonial style (like Oldest Southern College). But the buildings have that bland inoffensiveness that one associates with banks, pretentious hotels, or evangelical churches: lots of pediments, oversize decorative columns, an absurdly tall cupola, creamy white walls. The library’s marbled foyer and grand staircase remind one of a hotel, but they may be because hotels are the only buildings that still try to be grand. Outside the new performing arts center, cigarette urns are Home Depot planters filled with sand. The windows appear to be vinyl-framed double-paned, ecological but like the brick facades flat and textureless.

When their children can’t get into Oldest Southern College, the exurban Republicans can feel comfortable about their children attending here. Inoffensive, textureless, lacking in detail or real history.

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.

The timing of this sermon was unusual in that for centuries the Catholic Good Friday liturgy blamed the “perfidious Jews” for the death of Christ.

Medical observers, however, expressed alarm, noting that the friar’s sermon and recent Vatican pronouncements indicate a serious, even life threatening pathophysiology requiring a surgical procedure.

The surgical procedure is a cranial-rectalectomy, the surgical removal of one’s head from one’s own or another’s rectum. Delay, according to medical authorities, only worsens the condition, which can become permanent, dimming the prognosis.

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.

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.