In Trifkovic’s case, he’s also a monarchist, which in Serbian politics has a particular and special meaning. It doesn’t mean you actually want the Karageorge family back — hardly anyone in Serbia really does. What it means is that you’re simultaneously nationalist, anti-Communist, and Yugoslavist. Basically it’s misty-eyed yearning for the lost Royalist Yugoslavia of 1919-41 transmuted into a political philosophy.

Anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish sentiments are very much part of this. That’s because the Karageorge dynasty claimed much of its legitimacy from the victories of 1912-13, in which Serbia “liberated” Kosovo and most of Macedonia from Ottoman “tyranny”. It may seem strange to derive your political analysis from a hundred-year-old war fought by a dynasty that’s been out of power since 1946, but that’s far from the craziest confusion of ideas to come out of the former Yugoslavia.

Anyway — romantic conservativism + bone-deep Islamophobia = a natural affinity between Serbian monarchists and American conservatives, both paleo- and neo-. Trifkovic, for example, has been a fellow of the far-right Rockford Institute for years.

Doug M.

An example. To get into the undergraduate math course at the University of Cambridge, you have to pass a separate exam which is far harder than the Math A-Levels. Many of the people who do get in have other impressive things on their resumes, e.g. medals from math olympiads. There is a substantial gap between Cambridge and the next crop (Oxford / UCL / etc), the next one (Manchester / Birmingham), and so on until you get to the polytechs-that-were-recently-made-into-universities level where – I have it on good authority – many students have problems with fairly basic algebra.

Of course, with humanities the picture is a lot more complex, since they are nowhere near as easily quantifiable as the “hard sciences”.

I agree with much of your critique of Ivy League / Golden Triangle elitism and how a great deal of their international appeal is due to residual reputational advantages, but I wouldn’t overdo it. By and large, – except in a few cases where you have excellent connections or sporting achievements – you still need very good grades to get into them (hence student quality is high), and their high budgets means that they offer excellent opportunities.

My main problem with these international lists is not that they put Cambridge ahead of the University of Bristol, but that they put places like MSU, St.-Petersburg State, and probably a dozen Chinese and Indian institutions as equivalent to Bristol, whereas in fact they are far closer to Cambridge.

I think you firgot to mention re the Saakashvili invasion affair that it has been certifieably claimed that at least one person died of a heart attack and if I remeber correcly a pregnant woman miscarried.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/14/russia-georgia-fake-invasion-report

Ok it’s by Luke Harding, not the most popular journalist round here. And he also manages to make it light hearted. Saakashvili again a walking disaster, he even managed to kill a mother and child when he heinously blew up a soviet war memorial last December.

Also, did you here about the world’s most intelligent mathematician who is living a Dostoevskian life of poverty in nowhere other than St Petersburg?
Grigory Perelman. At least he has taste when he chooses his city. He refused a one million dollar reward and still lives with his mother

Alumni of Leningrad/St Pete’s state university. I doubt that will be in the top 100 universities.

The university rating system is very overrated. The anglo saxon friends get together, what a surprise. As the poster above me has put it, they are just rackets so that they can charge more and perpetuate their existence.

Particularly in Britian, where there is a strong drive to get everyone into studies, even if they absolutely stupid and of no value to the student or academic community. I watched a BBC documentary tonight about feminists in London. Half of them where PHD students, writing theses why lap dancing oppresses women or something. No shit Sherlock, I’ll just collect my proffesorship. Our universities are full of these Mickey Mouse degrees, like gender studies and identity studies. Funnily enough, I found myself in agreement with many of the feminists aims, I am totally opposed to the objectification of women and the crass vulgar culture with Playboy marketing to children. However I don’t need to write a Marixst postmodern critique on these, I know intrinsically what is right and wrong.

Meanwhile India and China will haul out engineers and scientists. Most science faulties and technology at British universites have a very large number of south Asian and east Asian students anyway, while our natives study media studies or poststructuralism etc. Just what we need….

Ombrageux
I can’t stand the Times either. It’s haughty tones drip privelige. The times is basically in cahoots with the power and influnece in Britian, upholding our obsecne property bubble and appealing to an empty utilitarian, supposedly meritocratic, but cultureless society.

Finally, Russian bombers flew ‘over’ my home town, (well near enough, they were still in international airspace, but some British media is reporting them as actually flying over the town, I presume to drum up Russophobia). For example, this BBC website says ‘near Stornoway’, but to be in international airspce they would be at least 30 miles to the west of the town flying over the Atlantic ocean.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8585432.stm

TU 160, good but they only have somethign like 16 in service, I checked wikipedia. I did not realise, they are larger and have a bigger payload than the B52, and of corse they are supersonic.

They are just retarded. Speaking for myself studying history and politics at both the University of Liverpool (a fine, if unremarkable British university) compared with the very prestigious London School of Economics, I found them to be not really different in teaching quality. The professors can be more prestigious, but that doesn’t mean they are particularly good teachers. In my case, Liverpool was a much more “human” institution and their program much better thought out. The most prestigious universities in the world – Ivy League, Oxbridge, Grandes Ecoles – waver between being educational rackets that use their prestige to get extortionate amounts of money (which is then reinvested into principally whatever projects might maintain that prestige (famous professors, lavish sports programs)) and being finishing schools for the world’s super-elite.

The Times rankings seek to mask these realities and spread a hatefully “bourgeois” ideology to the minds of youth and parents.