Category Archives: Intellectualism

Mindless In Academia

Education, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness

In which MYRON PAULI, PH.D, Barely a Blog’s resident nuclear physicist, sometime poet and opinionator, muses about the whiny, two-legged primates (white and black) running wild on campuses:

Fifty years ago, Tom Lehrer composed “The Wernher von Braun song”. The song ends with the prophetic lines “‘In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down Und I’m learning Chinese now!’ says Wernher von Braun”.

100 years ago, the German-speaking nations constituted the leading centers of academia from music to psychology to physics. Americans like Albert Michelson and Robert Oppenheimer went to study in Germany. They dominated the Nobel Prize winners. In 1930, “Zeitschrift fur Physik” was THE journal for all to have and took up about 4 feet of shelf space. In 1937, Zeitshrift was down to 1 foot of shelf space. In 2015, the Center for World University Rankings lists Heidelberg University as the top University in Germany and #76 in the world (other rankings have German Universities as high as # 37!).

The source of this debacle, of course, was political perversion in the form of Nazism. I”recommend a wonderful movie for all to watch, “The Mortal Storm.” The movie’s actions start with the birthday of a respected biology professor on January 30, 1933 (the day Hilter took power) applauded by his students and faculty. As the movie progresses, the professor is boycotted by his students, witnesses a book burning, and is shunned and eventually fired by his academic colleagues and administrators. The movie, by the way, was based on a 1938 book long before the death camps (which, arguably, can be seen as the ideological culmination of political intolerance).

Nowadays, it is American academia which is heading down the intellectual toilet. This should not be that surprising after nearly 50 years of neo-Marxist professors, “affirmative action” which takes mostly inferior students and admits them where they do not fit in, segregated dorms and segregated narcissistic sexual-racial-ethnic-religious “studies”, and the massive enlargement of colleges to the point that over 50% of young people attend college regardless of any talent or discipline. Federal largess has caused tuition to skyrocket to over $60,000 a year for these babysitting palaces. Nor are there many jobs for people who take such useful studies as “Network Evolution and the Beauty Advantage” and other courses I mentioned in my Barely A Blog essay, “Academic Disintegration From Homer to Homo”. Naturally, the “college graduates” COULD compete with illegal aliens for landscaping, restaurant, and painting jobs but I expect that to happen when pigs fly.

Another factor affecting American students is how intense competition from Asia has basically pushed native Americans out of the highly competitive science/health/engineering disciplines (not to mention the “all-nighters”, brains, and studying required to get through). I doubt that there are many “all-nighters” and lab work required to get a degree the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

Hence, what else is there for these modern American “students” to do but whine, march, protest, and be insulted by the “hostile work environment” of microagressions, Zionism, sexism, racism, and even Halloween costumes. Cao, Chang, Chen, Chen, Chen, Chuang, Duan, Gao, …, Li, Li, Li, Liang, Liao, Lin, Lin, 3 Lius! , Lu, Lu, Luan, … ,7 Wangs!, Wong, Xu, Xu, Yang, Yang, Ye, Yue, Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Zhen, Zhen, Zheng, Zhong, Zhou are busy studying Material Science and Engineering at Columbia University while the rest of American academia burns. The sobbing, whiny two-legged primates (white and black) may take selfies at the protest rallies but haven’t the slightest idea how a cell phone or a biological cell or a transistor function. Nor do 99% of them care.

Worst of all are the American academic “administrators” who care only about the bottom line of football team revenues, scientific grant money, and happy students. Unlike Franklin (America’s leading, first scientist) or Jefferson or Adams, modern American politicians of both parties are generally ignorant of science, technology, history, classical literature, or anything other than getting votes. Taxpayer money flows to the Greek-columned Romper Rooms and intellectual capital slowly flows to Asia.

One hundred years from now, American Universities will probably be highly rated in the fields of basketball and football but little else. Decades of University indulgence has passed the point of no return.

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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.

Thomas Friedman: Still Consistently Foolish About Everything After All These Years

Intellectualism, Iraq, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Rolling Stone is hardly a place for profound ideas, but even they don’t take Thomas Friedman seriously.

I hoped I had heard the last of this fatuous, smug, celebrity journo when, superimposed upon the program of another “gem” of veracity and virtue, Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer, Friedman could be heard venturing, recently, that ISIS appeals to young men because these are “young men who’ve never held power, a job or a girl’s hand and joined ISIS to get all three.”

For once I agree with John Maynard Keynes, who, in preparation for Bretton Woods, was known to have muttered something to the effect that (and I paraphrase), the Americans have all the money; we British have all the brains.

Friedman still persists in rejecting reality. The failed invasions he once cheered have brought this dolt no closer to the realization that, “Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be; that it can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away, legislated away,” or invaded away.

So many body bags later (ours; theirs), and Friedman is no closer to the intuitive understanding that young men need the anchor of a strong, muscular belief system for which they might consider dying. Why do America’s best and brightest sell their souls (and sacrifice lives and limbs) to Uncle Sam? Heroism (perceived or real) is in a man’s nature. You can’t tweak it out of him like an unsightly nose hair. And you can’t replace it, Mr. Friedman, with an iPad or a subscription to Match.com for Muslim singles. The spiritual nullity that is the West is no inspiration to Muslim men (and increasingly not to our own), many of whom want- and need to be engaged in epic battles.

The truly gifted Myron Robert Pauli quips, “Ah yes, I am going to BLOW MYSELF UP and take other people with me because, (1) my job is non-existent and/or sucks (roughly 95 percent of humanity), and (2) I am horny (roughly 95 percent of men). What brilliant insight into Muslim terrorists—as if atheists and Christians and Jews never have sucky jobs and get horny! Such deep thinking conjures movies like ‘Mars Needs Women,’ with the late Yvonne ‘Batman’ Craig.”

Here is our Friedman File spanning over a decade:

In “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (May 29, 2004), Thomas joined “Christopher Hitchens (who, unlike TF, was undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – as they grab the Bush administration’s Iraq bluff and run with it showing their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities; insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.

In “HIS RHETORIC, OUR REALITY,” Thomas is shown to have bastardized an important, modest principle of Judaism to better comport with his political ends (January 26, 2005). Top be fair, Friedman doesn’t know better.

In “Foul Tom Friedman,” Tom sticks to familiar territory: fouling up the meaning of capitalism.

And, in “Obama’s And Abdullah’s Plans for Israel,” Thomas Friedman joins that intellectual giant Wolf Blitzer in uproarious applause for Abdullah bin Abdulaziz’s suggestion that Israel beat a retreat to the pre-1967 borders.

“Mr. Friedman,” notes a reader (hat tip Allen Cogbill), in response to this post, “has such deep ideas that a couple of fellows actually wrote an op-ed generator that generates columns for him. They did a nice job”:

Cold Turkey For Creepy Kids And Their Even Creepier Parents

Etiquette, Fascism, Intellectualism, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West, The Zeitgeist

Here is a follow up on our pro-civilization, Adult Lives Matter, reclaim-the-childhood crusade. To our dossier on a child-deifying nation, we add the insanity that is the non-dilemma below.

A DRUDGE headline blares today: “Parent: My 8-Year-Old Son’s iPad Addiction Is As Real As Alcoholism, Drug Abuse…”

You don’t need to read this drivel in which a dumb parent “shares” his dumber, self-inflicted malady so publicly—public writing has turned into anti-intellectual public advocacy, hasn’t it? Conjure and share your cultivated malady, and abracadabra, you are a hero.

Whinging aside, you already knew the following:

* It’s your fault the little snot is addicted not to books or to outdoor ball games, but to gadgets.

* Who gave the gadget to said snot? You did! Take the iPad away.

* Stop paying for your kids’ cell phones and assorted hand-held devices. (It costs a fortune!)

You and I survived without them. If Creepy kid needs to contact crazy in love parent urgently, he or she can go to the principal’s office. It’ll give Creepy an opportunity to practice a few civilizing habits you refrained from teaching him:

Knock on her door (it’s never a guy these days). Enter when she says so. Address her as Ma’am or Mrs. Ask if you may call mom or dad, PLEASE.

Alternatively, tell him to wait on the corner until you collect him, just like you, his parent, used to do (we walked home, 4-5km each day).

Oh, and if a stranger sidles up to Creepy … you know the rest.

READING:

“Adult Lives Matter: On Kids And Communism.”

“Reclaiming Childhood: They Don’t Make Kids Like They Use To.”

Jonathan Meades Is Ever So Convincing; Much More Than Brutalism

Aesthetics, Art, Britain, Intellectualism, Socialism, The State

The little I know about Brutalist architecture is enough to make me skeptical of Jonathan Meades’ brilliantly spoken claims for it. This school of architecture seems to have been wedded to The State and, as such, to have taken on its foreboding austerity (expensive and ugly). “Governmentally sanctioned Brutalims” is indeed “the architecture of “cultural welfarism.” But a government-spawned “novelty”? Please!

However, Meades, a Briton of course, is a magnificent advocate for anything, really. His polemics are astounding in both beauty and internal logic. “… a prose style so pugnaciously cultivated, so unpredictably informative, and, enviably often, so extremely funny . …” Meades is indeed a strange experience: You might not agree with his assessment, but you love every moment of it and follow in delight.

On the 1960s cultural output: “A kaleidoscope of polychromatic vacuity.” “Enjoyably witless hedonism.” “A gluppy soap of mysticism …” “New universities busily inventing new disciplines.” Vatican Two decreeing that new churches should be churches in the round, like theaters in the round.”