Category Archives: Human Accomplishment

The Dumb Generation’s Hand-Held Devotional

Education, Family, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Pseudo-intellectualism, Science, Technology

In “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” it was observed that, while “Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages that the older generation has nothing on the youth, especially when it comes to technology smarts—this is manifestly false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain-wave activity are made, for the most, by ‘older people’ with advanced engineering degrees.”

In my opinion, the reason highly creative individuals in hi-tech are able to create for The Kids is that they have enjoyed the benefits of a less laissez faire, more traditional education, involving a core curriculum—and if lucky a literary canon—the hardest of sciences, discipline, all coupled with parental moral instruction and guidance.

Now it appears that these hi-tech elites are designing gadgets that stunt an already stunted generation.

WARNING. This NYT article about the effects of time spent interacting with electronics on socialization and intellectual development is itself a product of a disorganized mind. The writer seems incapable of deciding—and developing a systematic argument—as to whether a child’s focus on these passive, quick-fix electronic stimuli detracts from overall healthy socialization or stunts the ability to be alone.

Missing is a line or two as to the two states-of-being—solitude vs. togetherness—being facets of a healthy psyche.

I live with an individual who is intimately involved in the design of some wonderful gadgets. Yet he himself hardly uses them in the little spare time he steals for himself. They frustrate him; they don’t seem to satisfy his creativity or sate his intellect. His greatest pleasure is found in composing and playing complex thematic pieces of music in his home studio. To do so he follows eternal, timeless rules of composition. Low-tech, if you like.

Myself, I have no interest in hand-held devices. I use my well-appointed PC for work. Away from the PC—during a jog, for instance—I think. Ideas flood my mind during physical exertion and solitude. On the rare occasions that we both go away on vacation, we do not take our work along.

More @:

“Your Brain on Computers.”

UPDATED: Pimping The Culture (No Nirvana)

Art, Barack Obama, Celebrity, Human Accomplishment, Music, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Below is an excerpt from the current weekly column, Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

“The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture—it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products. …

… By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page—most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

‘Grammy and Academy Award winner’ Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of ‘vocal wobble’ a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, ‘Why be a musician, when you can be a success?’ Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves. …

… More sounds that curdled the air were those of Alicia Keys pounding on the piano keys. …

… I’d rather listen to the dodecaphony of twelve-tone music than sit through the guttural battle cries emitted by today’s entertainers. …”

The complete column is Pimping The Culture, now on WND.

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UPDATE (Jan. 24): No fan of mine (or my column), the writer below, says the in-house studio musician, is “Obviously a nirvana fan…”

From: Daniel G
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 9:59 AM
To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: anywho

“Typical prog fan, putting other people down because their favorite musicians don’t use 20 sided dice to choose their time signatures.”

HERE’S the good (non-nirvana) stuff:

‘Les Misérables’: Lessons Lost, Great Literature Defiled

Art, Celebrity, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Intellectual Property Rights, Literature, Pop-Culture, The State

The musical is a loathsome form of entertainment. To debase a great literary work like “Les Misérables” by putting Victor Hugo’s words to catchy, schmaltzy jingles, belted out by Hollywood starlets—this reflects on the miserable state of the culture.

Not that I follow the Golden Globes Hollywood awards itself, but I believe the production called “Les Misérables” was nominated in the “best musical or comedy” category.

It’s quite probable that the self-reverential (and self-referential) crowd involved in the “Les Misérables” production had not read or understood the book.

One Fox News anchor mentioned that this song-and-dance was based on a book written in the 1600s. “Les Misérables” was published in 1862. I doubt Victor Hugo was 200 plus at the time of publication.

As a child, I read “Les Misérables”; Harry Potter type literature was not around (or rather, not in-vogue) to contaminate the mind and the imagination with poorly written phantasmagorical folderol. There is nothing like an historical novel penned by a master, to both teach and excite the imagination.

I do not recognize the book I read way back, in the gush and tosh being disgorged in pixels and on paper about “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo. I’m sticking to the version I remember.

The “Les Misérables” I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations.

A similar power (Uncle Sam) and its enforcers recently hounded Aaron Swartz to death. (As a lefty, Swartz would not have defended my rights to be left alone by government, but then we libertarains are not like them. And more of us (libertarians) than them (leftists) understand that “Patents And Copyrights Undermine Private Property.”)

Ivy League Education: Only Idiots And Elites Need Apply

Affirmative Action, Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews

A graduate of an Ivy League school himself, Barely A Blog contributor Myron Pauli (bio below) decries the idiots and the elites—categories which are by no means mutually exclusive—who rig top tertiary education these days.

Ivy League Education: Only Idiots and Elites Need Apply
By Myron Pauli

Imagine a “thought experiment” where a student has two choices:

CHOICE ONE: Attend Harvard University where famous obnoxious faculty big shots (Nobel Prizewinners and public celebrities) roam the campus and where you will be likely to dorm with children of CEO’s, cabinet officers, and third world dictators, dining out in the Cambridge milieu – and then you receive a diploma after 4 years that says “University of North Dakota,”

OR:

CHOICE TWO: Attend the University of North Dakota with friendly but completely ordinary professors and the 4-H club and ROTC students hanging out in the great cultural milieu of Grand Forks ND – and then you receive a diploma after 4 years that says “Harvard.”
In other words, which is better, the “Harvard education” or the “Harvard credential”? My mother who always said, “It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know” would definitely pick the latter. So would most people. In fact, the Harvard education is probably worth 1% of the value of the Harvard certificate. Such is the nature of the elite “meritocracy” of the United States where Ivy League graduates such as the Obamas are automatically heralded as “geniuses.” Conferring an Ivy League diploma on the local bowling alley attendant elevates that person into a sage of our modern era.

Naturally, affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics distorts the admissions process. While I was at MIT, a white from Brooklyn with one B and A in everything else, including advanced graduate work, was denied admissions to Stanford graduate school, while a black from East Orange NJ with C’s and D’s in lower level MIT courses was accepted. They both stayed at MIT with the former now a distinguished professor in his field, and the latter dropping out of graduate school – having had his time “wasted” by people bending over backwards on his behalf.

There are many other distortions and biases – some of the statistics and anecdotes can be found in the recent article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” in The American Conservative (TAC) which serve to point out the rather arbitrariness of the elite admissions (except for the completely test-related Caltech) of the elite colleges.

Not surprisingly, Asians, as a group, are discriminated against by the Ivy Leagues. They score 140 points above their white competitors and 450 points above their black competitors on the SAT’s (perhaps the Asians are not as good in football!). A more surprising find is that non-Jewish whites, formerly the backbone of the Ivy Leagues, appear to be at a disadvantage under the current admissions process. While they make up 88% of University of North Dakota, these “whities” are only good for 18% at Harvard. Even nerdy Caltech with 39% Asian has 33% non-Jewish whites. But they are currently not politically protected. The article referenced did not go into how many non-Jewish whites, who are neither alumni legacies nor ones with elite “connections,” get into Harvard, but it is likely a very low number.

Ironically, the TAC data indicates that Jews, who used to be discriminated against by the Ivies 90 years ago or so, currently seem to be overrepresented above and beyond their performance. Additionally, there are arguments that Jews have slipped educationally in the last few generations for a variety of reasons: disinterest in academics (why study physics when you can make money doing hedge funds?), and the demographic rise of the non-academic Orthodox Jewish component. Jews who dominated in science competitions 40 years ago seem to have been replaced by Asians. [Could it be that Jews are now fully acculturated to the American progressive educational ethos, where the goal is to ‘follow your dream and have fun’; a goal that almost always precludes hard work? Asian mothers are slower to respond to this fatuity, but it’s happening. I met one the other day.—IM]

Academic performance has been replaced with expert “gaming the system”. Why bother with nerdy grind-work when a well-connected guidance counselor and the correct extras can get you into the palace of Princeton?

If America of 1912 was dominated by a self-anointed “old-boy network” of White Protestant men – the America of 2012 is dominated by a self-anointed “PC network” which may look more diverse but is just as much of a self-chosen network.

The “best and brightest” is not merely a snobby social club, but also includes those who make decisions to get us into wars, deficits, and to take our freedoms away.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.