Academic Disintegration From Homer To Homo

By Myron Robert Pauli

President Obama has proposed making college education free for everybody. It used to be considered that college education was for people with IQ in excess of 110 – e.g. 20% of the population; however, the solution to that problem is, of course, to dumb down college. Apparently, college reading levels are now at the 7th grade level [1]. It is interesting to see what was required for completion of 8th grade in “lowly” Kentucky with the modern curriculum [2]. I would hardly be surprised if Masters Students were reading “Run Spot Run” in 2015.

There are still a few isolated spots of higher education left. I have admiration for serious students of “fine arts” who wish to be next Vladimir Horowitz or Enrico Caruso. Aside from the Church of Global Warming, political correctness has often left the hard sciences and engineering alone. Here is a sample of the 61 graduate students studying Materials Science at Columbia University [3]: 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. Those damn Xu’s are running things! Affirmative action means that for every 2 students from Shanghai, one is chosen from Beijing!

Arguably, many of our enlightenment-era leaders such as Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton received a thorough “liberal arts” education which included history, philosophy, the sciences, geography, logic, and literature classics such as Homer and Shakespeare. But a few blocks away from the Chens and Wangs working on understanding nature and producing products, Columbia is also teaching English [4]. Check out the link to find that in our “top 10 University”, the kids/parents/taxpayers shelling out over $200,000 are paying for courses in LGBT Lit (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), “Clarissa”, “Frankenstein”, “Postmodern Poetries”, and “Medieval Women Adventurers” (and G-d knows what junk is even in the normal-sounding offerings?).

Remember that the English Department is a “classical” department. How about Ivy League University of Pennsylvania’s course offerings in the “Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies [5]? I guess you can first earn a Bachelors in Bitchery and rise higher with a Masters in Male-Hating and a Doctorate of Dyking.

Here is what passes for advanced Social Sciences “Research” at elite Cornell University: “Network Evolution and the Beauty Advantage”, “Innovation Through Imitation”, and “Failing to See or Failing to Seize Opportunities to Build Social Capital? The Role of Neuroticism” [6]. I’m NOT making phony Ivy League websites!!!! No sense picking on the “second rate” schools who merely follow in the footsteps of the elite.

Recently, there was an academic “scandal” involving the football and basketball players at the (30th ranked nationally) University of North Carolina [7]. The “scandal” is that talented players like Julius Peppers did not actually “attend the classes” of moronic phony parasitical blowhards like faux-Injun Ward Churchill [8]. In other words, guys like Michael Jordan did not sit and watch Lone Ranger and Tonto re-runs. Can anyone seriously tell me that ATTENDING seminars in “White People Really Really Suck” is a productive use of anyone’s time? Failing to attend is a “scandal”?!!

Sure, send EVERYONE to college [9]! Why not??! Here is a one minute advanced look at an elite American university education in the 22nd Century. When I was 11, I read “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boule mistaking it for fiction instead of prophesy. And I am talking about white Americans also – they are merely following in the politically correct footsteps as their minority brothers and sisters.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19867-education-expert-says-college-freshmen-read-at-7th-grade-level
[2] http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
[3] http://matsci.columbia.edu/materials-science-engineering-graduate-students_6653
[4] http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/Spring%202015%20Course%20Distribution%20Vrs%202.4.pdf
[5] http://www.sas.upenn.edu/gsws/pc/term/2015A/GSWS
[6] http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/acc/2012/12/20/north-carolina-basketball-football-julius-peppers/1782113/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Goes_to_College

******
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.

UPDATE II: The ‘Selma’ Or ‘Sniper’ No-Brainer

Affirmative Action, Film, History, Hollywood, Just War, Military, Race

“Sniper” Or “Selma”? Which flick would you rather see? I will pass on both. However, if forced to choose between a 2-hour long, historically inaccurate guilt trip, laid on thick by the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever), and an action movie about an all-American “son, husband, father, and, most of all, decorated military man”; I can see why “American Sniper” is a box office sensation, while “Selma” circles the drain. “Sniper” grossed $105.3 Million on the week-end of its release; “Selma” $11.5 million.

Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the subject of the “Clint Eastwood’s biopic,” in my opinion, squandered his talents as an assassin for Uncle Sam. Kyle’s claim to fame, by the news media’s telling, is that he “held the record for number of kills by an American sniper. The Pentagon has confirmed more than 150 of his kills. The previous record was 109.”

As I wrote at the time the SEAL passed away, “live by the sword, die by the sword. Or in hippie speak: Kyle had bad karma.”

I’m quite comfortable stating that poor Kyle was not in the business of defending American liberties, as the mouths on neoconservative media insist. That the war over in Iraq saved lives stateside is a dubious proposition at best. To the contrary, there is more proof of the opposite; that picking off women and children and other invaded species, “when he [thought it] necessary,” increased the danger to Americans stateside from the victims’ community. (Unfriend and unfollow me all you like; that doesn’t change this immutable truth.)

Still, if “American Sniper” is an apolitical rendition, a human story about a controversial, conflicted assassin for the state—much like “The Hurt Locker” was—I can see the appeal.

UPDATE I: A day after I wrote “Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword” (02.03.13), Ron Paul tweeted out the same (02.4.13). He was denounced, of course.

UPDATE II: Writes pat Buchanan, in “Selma, 50 years on”: … “The era of marching for civil rights was over, and the era of Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and The Black Panthers eclipsing King, had begun.”

UPDATED: Cameron On Criminal Culpability (Vs. Obama)

Britain, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised: This is how progressives have been depicting the Muslim murderers in their midst. Progressives, after all, come from the school of “thought” whereby crime is caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

According to this pervasive, widely accepted, therapeutic worldview—rapidly colonizing conservative thought, too—the poor barbarians of France’s burbs were driven to do their diabolic deeds.

Feelings are what count in the progressive perspective, for progressivism does not follow logic or a systematic thought process, as Jim Ostrowski points out in his book on the topic.

Likewise do libertarians, for their part, reduce immoral conduct to the fault of the state. Thus the state is said to have driven the barbarians of the burbs into a death cult that counsels killing.

Under the heading “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION, the column “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” exposes this libertarian logical contradiction—for if one holds that human beings have free will, thinking of human beings as determined entirely by forces beyond their control doesn’t fit.

From “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION:

For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state. In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s “the-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual- and aggregate group dysfunction.

In other words, Muslims have the capacity and freedom of conscience and will to decide how to respond to events that enrage and are indeed unjust: US foreign policy.

That’s my own political philosophy.

It’s therefore encouraging to see that British Prime Minister David Cameron does not give credit to the-state-made-me-do-it argumentation about the Islam-inspired killing of innocent Europeans. Flanking progressive Barack Obama—who does saddle society with blame for the erupting burbs of France, and contra Ray McGovern—Camerson said:

You can have, tragically, people who have had all the advantages of integration, who’ve had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer, who still get seduced by this poisonous, radical, death cult of a narrative.”

UPDATE: “Obama: Europe needs to better integrate Muslim communities…”

Obama the progressive feels (for he does not think) that Islam-inspired crime is the fault of the French. They did not dish out sufficient freebies and fraternité.

“Our biggest advantage … is that our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans and there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition,” he said.

“There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case… it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.”

MORE moron.

Heresies About The Hebdo Headache

Europe, Free Speech, Islam

“Heresies About The Hebdo Headache” is the current column, now on WND:

WINNING IN THE WEST. A French “documentary maker”—a title everyone with a camera assumes these days—told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the West was winning. The docu-dude felt that the people of Europe were displaying a winning resistance to the imposition of Islamic blasphemy laws.

How was the West vanquishing the enemies of free speech? In response to the craven, yet characteristic, massacre of staff at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, hundreds of thousands of Europeans—in Barcelona, Brussels, London, Paris, Nice, Lyon—came out en masse to plonk teddy bears on sidewalks and point pens and pencils to the heavens.

“Winning,” as Charlie Sheen would say.

The winners also flaunted their feelings with placards that read: “Je Suis Charlie” and “Not Afraid.” The CNN signatories to the dhimma “pact of surrender” celebrated the triumphant “outpouring of art in response” to the executions in Paris. Meek, wishy-washy drawings popped up everywhere. An example: Patrick Chappatte’s New York Times cartoon, in which a sunken-chested white male sheds a tear, holds a flower. The caption: “Without humor we are all dead.” Fierce.

The terrorists in the midst of the winners were in for more blows. A plural option was added to the rallying cry “Je Suis Charlie”: We are Charlie Hebdo—Nous Sommes Charlie. “Say no to terrorism” was another winning slogan.

Then there was the showy and meaningless parade of parasites in Paris, from which Onan No. 1 was absent:

The world’s leaders united against murder, an insight that was already well within the ken of leaders of the ancient world (Ten Commandments?). The charade of charlatans featured the very people responsible for legislation that authorized the round up, around them, of “54 people … for hate speech or other acts insulting religious faiths, or for cheering the men who carried out the attacks.”

THE SWORD IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PEN. No wonder author Martin Amis spoke of clichés of the mind and the heart. The orgy of sentimentality and helplessness came with its share of clichés. Particularly enveloping in its preposterousness was “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

Remember the iconic scene in the film “Raiders of the Lost Ark”? Challenged to a duel by a scimitar-wielding, keffiyeh-clad Arab, Indiana Jones draws a pistol and dispatches the swordsman without further ado.

In my (allegorical) more accurate adaption, the roles are reversed. The Prophet Mohammad’s avenger faces his somersaulting Western offender, who comes at him with a pen, convoluting about freedom of expression, inquiry and conscience. How does Mohammad’s mercenary respond to the penman’s lofty ululations? As Indiana Jones did: He aims his automatic weapon and drops the prophet’s offender.

Before Charlie Hebdo came the 12 Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons. In 2005, JP drew cartoons that joined Muhammad to the violence that disfigures the Muslim world. While clucking about the sanctity of free speech, countless commentators climbed into the Danes. The illustrators were called juvenile, obnoxious, Islamophobic, even immoral. They were accosted for doing nothing to advance enlightened argument; of acting in “terrifically bad taste”; and indulging in “gratuitous provocation, not worthy of publication,” to quote some of the pieties disgorged by politicians and pundits.

Having been where Charlie Hebdo finds itself today—a catalyst for eruptions across the Islamic Ummah (now innervating the West)—Flemming Rose, JP’s cultural editor and publisher, knows of what he speaks. He informed BBC’s HARDTalk that the sword is mightier than the pen. “Violence works.” The great Danes of JP will not reprint “Charlie Hedbo’s post-attack front cover.”

Winning. …

The complete column is “Heresies About The Hebdo Headache”, now on WND.