Category Archives: Academia

Voting to Destroy the Establishment, by Jim Quinn

Posted on March 14, 2016 | 3 comments

Jim Quinn, and Nassim Taleb, have reached essentially the same conclusion about the Donald Trump phenomenon as SLL. From Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Taleb is a prickly arrogant SOB who doesn’t give a crap what intellectuals, academics, and other establishment elitists think about him. He has an Ivy league MBA, but despises everything about the curriculum of Ivy League MBA programs. He has a PhD, but scorns academics and their worship of theories and models. He enjoys poking holes in the storylines of the propaganda spewing corporate media. He glories in ridiculing the predictions of captured “experts” mouthing the talking points of whichever corporate interest is paying them blood money.

I read his brilliant Black Swan book back in 2008. It was a difficult read, but there were so many gems of wisdom throughout the book, it was a powerful tome predicting the financial collapse in real time. He wrote it in 2006. He understands the world doesn’t operate the way Ivy League models say it is supposed to operate. The world is propelled by black swans, not a normal distribution of the world. He was right in 2006 and he’s right now. The paragraph below has been making the rounds in the alternate media this past week. The establishment media would never publicize it, as their job is to protect the crumbling social order.


He sees what the pseudo intellectuals, highly paid pundit monkeys, think tank pay for play sages, and other mouthpieces for the establishment have failed to see. They didn’t see the 2008 black swan coming and they fail to grasp the black swan flying into their midst today. Taleb understands unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Trump is an extreme outlier who will play a large role in sweeping away the existing establishment. The “experts” foisted upon the masses by the dying legacy media are clueless as to what is really happening.

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Trump’s blunt, angry, provocative, anti-establishment message has struck a chord among millions of disaffected Americans who have been ignored, abused, scorned, and shit on by the elitist establishment, banking cabal, corrupt politicians and government apparatchiks. The Deep State establishment has overstepped their bounds. Their ravenous pillaging of the national wealth through outsourcing millions of American jobs, largest mortgage control fraud in history, and outrageous gall in shifting their losing bets onto the backs of hard working Americans is about to bite them in the ass.

To continue reading: Voting to Destroy the Establishment

3 Comments

Posted in Academia, Government, Media, Politics

Tagged ,

Read What the Professor Who Helped Expose the Flint Water Scandal Said About Science and Academia in 2016, by Michael Krieger

Posted on February 2, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

It was the injustice of it all and that the very agencies that are paid to protect these residents from lead in water, knew or should’ve known after June at the very very latest of this year, that federal law was not being followed in Flint, and that these children and residents were not being protected, and the extent to which they went to cover this up exposes a new level of arrogance and uncaring that I have never encountered.

– Virginia Tech Professor, Marc Edwards

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several weeks, you’ll be aware of the extremely sad and infuriating water scandal that has been exposed in Flint, Michigan. Marc Edwards, a courageous and ethical professor of civil-engineering at Virginia Tech University, played a major role in exposing this public health danger as well as the inexcusable efforts of scientists and public officials to cover it up.

Mr. Edwards sat down for an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education and offered some very blunt words regarding the deplorable state of modern academia. Here are a few excerpts:

When Marc Edwards opens his mouth, dangerous things come out.

In 2003 the Virginia Tech civil-engineering professor said that there was lead in the Washington, D.C., water supply, and that the city had been poisoning its residents. He was right.

Last fall he said there was lead in the water in Flint, Mich., despite the reassurances of state and local authorities that the water was safe. He was right about that, too.

Working with residents of Flint, Mr. Edwards led a study that revealed that the elevated lead levels in people’s homes were not isolated incidents but a result of a systemic problem that had been ignored by state scientists.

The infrastructural problems go beyond the public utilities of certain American cities, he says. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Edwards said that the systems built to support scientists do not reward moral courage and that the university pipeline contains toxins of its own — which, if ignored, will corrode public faith in science.

To continue reading: The Professor Who Helped Expose the Flint Water Scandal

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Education, Environment, Government, Morality, Politics

Tagged ,

The Self-Serving Apologists for Student Debt-Serfdom, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on January 26, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Mankiw’s claim that college costs are the inevitable result of Baumol’s Disease is pure self-serving rubbish.

Everyone who isn’t blinded by self-interest sees that the cost of higher education in America–and the way we pay for it, by turning students into debt-serfs– is unsustainable. Those benefiting richly from the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy see no alternative, of course; their self-serving handwringing would be laughable if it wasn’t so destructive to the nation and the economy.

Greg Mankiw, professor at Harvard, recently offered up a typical helping of self-serving handwringing: Three Reasons for Those Hefty College Tuition Bills. Mankiw squeezes out a few insincere (but necessary for PR purposes) alligator tears over the soaring costs of a college degree, and then trots out the usual justifications for maintaining the status quo, which just so happens to reward him so well.

Let’s dismantle his bogus justifications one by one.

1. Mankiw predictably trots out the Gold Standard of justifying the absurdly high cost of an often-ineffective and useless college degree: those with college degrees earn $1.5 million more over a lifetime of work than those without degrees.

On the face of it, this offers plenty of justification for $120,000 piles of debt for degrees in Critical Studies, etc.: that extra $1.5 million will easily fund the cost of a 4-year degree.

But this data is completely out of date. Yes, a college degree offered substantial lifetime wage increases back when four years of college cost about as much as a new car, not a new house, i.e. the current cost; but as recent graduates have discovered, a four-year college degree offers little advantage, and substantially underperforms journey-person wages for skilled trades workers such as pipefitters, plumbers, etc.

The exception is of course highly technical degrees in engineering, computer science, biotechnology, etc. But this reality has led to a systemic over-supply of graduates with STEM degrees (science, technology, engineering, math), as the economy does not create paid positions in these fields simply because more people have studied these subjects.

As I often note here (and in my book that proposes a much cheaper and more effective system of higher education, The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education), employers can only hire employees if the business will earn a profit from their labor–and opportunities to earn a profit in STEM fields are not as abundant as boosters of the status quo claim.

The economy has changed profoundly and structurally in the past 15 years, and the breezy cliche that a college degree automatically boosts lifetime earnings by $1.5 million is no longer supported by current realities. Just having a college diploma offers little advantage, especially when compared to those with real-world skills. Even those with STEM degrees find themselves in a Darwinian struggle to get a job in these fields, a struggle that forces many to get deeper in debt to secure a Masters or PhD.

But alas, tens of thousands of other under-employed college graduates had the same idea, and the job market is over-supplied with graduates holding Masters and PhDs.

Yes, if a student slaves away for 7 years to secure a PhD in computer security, he/she will likely enjoy multiple job offers. But the number of such positions is vanishingly small in an economy of 140+ million workers.

The reality is a college degree no longer offers the leverage it once did, due to simple supply and demand: millions of other people have degrees now, too, including advanced degrees, and the job market doesn’t create jobs just because people have degrees.

To continue reading: The Self-Serving Apologists for Student Debt-Serfdom

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Economics, Economy, Education, Horseshit

Tagged ,

The Story Line Dissolves, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 30, 2015 | Leave a comment

From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Sometimes societies just go crazy. Japan, 1931, Germany, 1933. China, 1966. Spain 1483, France, 1793, Russia, 1917, Cambodia, 1975, Iran, 1979, Rwanda, 1994, Congo, 1996, to name some. By “crazy” I mean a time when anything goes, especially mass killing. The wheels came off the USA in 1861, and though the organized slaughter developed an overlay of romantic historical mythos — especially after Ken Burns converted it into a TV show — the civilized world to that time had hardly ever seen such an epic orgy of death-dealing.

I doubt that I’m I alone in worrying that America today is losing its collective mind. Our official relations with other countries seem perfectly designed to provoke chaos. The universities have melted into toxic sumps beyond even anti-intellectualism to a realm of hallucination. Demented gunmen mow down total strangers weekly in what looks like a growing competition to end their miserable lives with the highest victim score. The financial engineers have done everything possible to pervert and undermine the operations of markets. The political parties are committing suicide by cluelessness and corruption.

There is no narrative for our behavior toward Russia that makes sense anymore. Our campaign to destabilize Ukraine worked out nicely, didn’t it? And then we acted surprised when Russia reclaimed the traditionally Russian territory of Crimea, with its crucial warm-water naval ports. Who woulda thought? Then we attempted to antagonize them further with economic sanctions. The net effect is that Vladimir Putin ended up looking more rational and sane than any leader in the NATO coalition.

Lately, Russia has filled the vacuum of competence in Syria, cleaning up a mess that America left with its two-decade-long crusade to leave a train of broken governments everywhere in the region. A few weeks back, Mr. Putin made the point before the UN General Assembly that wrecking every national institution in sight among weak and unstable nations was probably not a recipe for world peace. President Obama never did formulate a coherent comeback to that. It’s a little terrifying to realize that the leader of our former arch-adversary is the only figure onstage who can come up with a credible story about what needs to happen there. And his restraint this week following what may have been a US-assisted shoot-down of a Russian bomber by idiots in Turkey is really estimable. It all looks like a feckless slide provoked by our side into World War III, and for what? To make the world safe for the Kardashians?

The uproars on campus before Thanksgiving are more a reflection on the astounding cowardice of college presidents than the foolishness of young minds — which, being not fully formed, are easily susceptible to idealist figments. The adults in charge ought to know better. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber actually entertained the “demand” to erase Woodrow Wilson’s presence on campus for being an arch-segregationist by a black “social justice league” that at the very same time demanded separate (i.e. segregated) social space for blacks only. How did he reconcile these pleadings in his own mind, I wonder.

To continue reading: The Story Line Dissolves

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, War

Tagged , ,

They Said That? 11/23/15

Posted on November 23, 2015 | 1 comment

Here is the correct response to safe spaces, speech codes, microaggressions and all the other horseshit plaguing college campuses these days. From the University of Chicago, a statement on free expression:

It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.

…the university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the university community, not for the university as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not be seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.

The Wall Street Journal, “Chicago School of Free Speech,” 11/23/15

To their credit, the faculties at Purdue and Princeton Universities have also voted to adopt the Chicago principles. It will probably be a cold day in hell before a public university does the same.

1 Comment

Posted in Academia, Civil Liberties, Horseshit

Tagged

Authoritarian Leftist “Activists” Demand The End Of Free Speech, Extensive Re-Education, by Alex Thomas

Posted on November 17, 2015 | 3 comments

The weekend at the college didn’t turn out like you planned,

The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand

Steely Dan, “Reelin’ In The Years”

If the manifesto that follows is representative of what passes for knowledge and thought among Amherst students, that’s a lot of $60,000 per years straight down the drain. From Alex Thomas at intellihub.com, via zerohedge.com:

Hard left authoritarians at Amherst College have issued a series of demands, under the threat of civil disobedience, that include the complete end of free speech on campus as well as extensive re-education for offenders.

The demands, issued in support of the so-called uprising at the University of Missouri, read like a literal fascist manifesto and are conclusive proof that the mainstream media supported protests at multiple colleges over the last few weeks are not about racial equality but rather are about totally and completely shutting down the speech of anyone who disagrees with the opinions of the protesters.

The fact that the group is attempting to get the President of a major university to sign off on re-education classes and punishment for anyone who speaks about free speech or says all lives matter is a startling reminder of the extreme authoritarianism that runs through the veins of the college hard left.

Here are the demands. Take note of the outright fascism.

We, Students of Amherst College, refuse to accept the negative social climate created towards our peers of color and other marginalized groups. We have begun this movement, Amherst Uprising, in an effort to change the status quo for a more just and inclusive environment within our campus. We demand that Amherst become a leader in the fight to promote a better social climate towards individuals who have been systematically oppressed. Student leaders acknowledge and support the demands previously stated and currently being presented. Furthermore, we demand the College acknowledge its ethical and moral responsibilities as an institution and community of our world. Amherst College should not be complicit in oppressive organizations and systems, no less.

We as a compassionate student body have gathered to address the legacy of oppression on campus. If these goals are not initiated within the next 24 to 48 hours, and completed by November 18th, we will organize and respond in a radical manner, through civil disobedience. If there is a continued failure to meet our demands, it will result in an escalation of our response.

1. President Martin must issue a statement of apology to students, alumni and former students, faculty, administration and staff who have been victims of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism. Also include that marginalized communities and their allies should feel safe at Amherst College.

2. We demand Cullen Murphy ‘74, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, to issue a statement of apology to students, alumni and former students, faculty, administration, and staff who have been victims of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism

3. Amherst College Police Department must issue a statement of protection and defense from any form of violence, threats, or retaliation of any kind resulting from this movement.

4. President Martin must issue a statement of apology to faculty, staff and administrators of color as well as their allies, neither of whom were provided a safe space for them to thrive while at Amherst College.

***

To continue reading: Authoritarian Leftist “Activists” Demand The End of Free Speech

 

3 Comments

Posted in Academia, Civil Liberties, Horseshit

Tagged ,

There Are No Safe Spaces, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

From James Howard Kunstler at kuntsler.com:

I’m not persuaded that world opinion will ever “make sense” of the Paris attacks. The non-linear rules the day. So-called Fourth Generation Warfare works because there are so many small arms loose in the world and any band of maniacs with a few machine guns and a pound of Semtex plastic explosive can create the equivalent of a war zone in a given locality.

As for the French military, the obvious first move was to bomb the ISIS “stronghold” of Raqqa. But haven’t the US and Russian air forces been doing exactly that for some time now? Either they’ve already bombed the place and everything in it to gravel, or air power is not what it’s cracked up to be — and we have plenty of reason to believe the latter after a decade of selectively pounding jihadists from Afgahnistan to Libya with nothing to show for it except a refugee crisis.

One thing seems assured: hard-line governments are coming soon. Politically, the West had boundary problems that go way beyond the question of national borders to the core psychology of modern liberalism. When is enough of anything enough? And then, what are you really willing to do about it? The answer lately among the Western societies is to do little and do it slowly.

The behavior of college administrators and faculties in the USA these days is emblematic of this cowardly dithering. Intellectual despotism reigns on campus and the university presidents roll over like possums. They don’t have the moral strength to defend free speech as the campus witch-hunts ramp up. The result will be first the intellectual death of their institutions (brain death), and then the actual death of college per se as a plausible route to personal socioeconomic development. The financial racketeering that has infected higher education — the engineering of the gargantuan college loan scam in tandem with the multiplication of “diversity” deanships and tuition inflation — pretty much guarantees an implosion of that system.

The cowardice in the college executive suites is mirrored in our national politics, where no persons of real standing will dare step forward to oppose the juggernaut of Hillary-the-Grifter, or take on the clowning Donald Trump on the grounds of his sheer mental unfittedness to lead a government. In case you haven’t noticed, the center not only isn’t holding, it gave way some time ago. The long emergency is showing signs of morphing into something like civil war. The Maoists on campus apparently want to turn it into race war, too.

So many forces are in motion now and they are all tending toward criticality. The European Union may not survive the reestablishment of boundaries, since it was largely based on the elimination of them. Spain and Portugal are back to breaking down politically again. The Paris bloodbath has discredited Angela Merkel’s plea for “tolerance” — of what is proving to be an intolerable alien invasion. The only political figure on the scene who doesn’t appear to be talking out of his ass is Vlad Putin, who correctly stated at the UN that undermining basic institutions around the world was not a good idea.

To continue reading: There Are No Safe Spaces

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Other Views, Politics, Uncategorized

Tagged ,

She Said That? 11/15/15

Posted on November 15, 2015 | 1 comment

From Ali Michael, Ph.D., Director of P-12 Consulting and Professional Development at the Center for the Study of Race Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article on huffingtonpost.com, “I Sometimes Don’t Want to Be White Either”:

Rachel Dolezal is a fascinating case study in White racial identity development.* [Rachel Dolezal was the head of Spokane’s NAACP branch who was revealed to be a white woman who “identified” as black and had assimilated into black culture.] She is stuck in the immersion/emersion stage, in which White people, having learned extensively about the realities of racism, and the ugly history of White supremacy in the U.S., “immerse” themselves in trying to figure out how to be White in our society, and “emerge” with a new relationship to Whiteness. Only in the case of Dolezal, her way of dealing with the pain of the reality of racism, was to deny her own Whiteness and to become Black.

She is an extreme example of a common phenomenon. The “immersion” stage is typified by White people taking more responsibility for racism and privilege and often experiencing high levels of anger and embarrassment for racism and privilege, which they sometimes direct towards other Whites. They sometimes try to immerse themselves in communities of color, as Dolezal did. She’s not alone.

I definitely experienced this. There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors… and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically.

***

**White racial identity development was first theorized and written about by Dr. Janet Helms.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-michael/i-sometimes-dont-want-to-be-white-either_b_7595852.html

Thank you, Ali Michael, for not propagating your privilege biologically. We only wish that all people who feel the way you do would make the same decision. As Yale University and the University of Missouri have recently demonstrated, this country already has way too many screwed up kids.

1 Comment

Posted in Academia

Tagged ,

The First Amendment Is Dying, by David Harsanyi

Posted on November 14, 2015 | 1 comment

From David Harsanyi at reason.com:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

Unless we’re talking about a white chocolate-paneled cake for a gay wedding or perpetual funding for “women’s health” clinics because it’s the “right thing to do.”

“or abridging the freedom of speech;”

Unless that speech is used by boorish climate change denialists to peddle dirty fossil fuels and run capitalist death machines that wreck the Earth, by anyone engaging in upsetting hate speech or other forms of “aggression,” by a wealthy person supporting candidates who undermine “progress,” by a pro-life protester who makes people feel uncomfortable about their life decisions, by a cisnormative white male who displays insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” that minorities experience in places of higher learning or by anyone who has a desire to undermine the state-protected union monopolies that help fund political parties.

“or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,”

Unless the press invades safe spaces designated by mobs or writes about incorrect topics at incorrect times.

“and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Unless someone is a member of a predesignated special interest group, he should report to the IRS before doing so.

That’s pretty much the state of the First Amendment today. Climate change, abortion, gay marriage, race, taxes, what have you, even in mainstream political debate, these interests outweigh your piddling concerns about the First Amendment. So the notion that a bunch of students and leftist professors would agitate to shut down free expression in a public space in Missouri because they feel their special issue trumps your antiquated list of rules is not particularly surprising.

Now, we shouldn’t overstate the problem. Most of us are able to freely engage in arguments and express ourselves without worrying about the state’s interfering. This will not end tomorrow. But it is difficult to ignore how creeping illiberalism has infected our discourse and how not many people seem to care.

The thousands of other University of Missouri students, for example, could have held a counter-protest against dimwitted fascists cloistered in safe spaces. Where are those student groups? Why was there no pushback from those kids—and really, there was none as far as I can tell, at either Missouri or Yale—against the bullies who want administrators fired for thought crimes? It can mean that students are too intimidated, too uninterested or not very idealistic about these freedoms. None of those things bodes well for the future.

To continue reading: The First Amendment Is Dying

1 Comment

Posted in Academia, Civil Liberties, Other Views

Tagged ,

He Said That? 11/13/15

Posted on November 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927):

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia

Tagged