HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Marriage promotes ‘white supremacy’: George Mason professor. “Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”
Archive for 2024
March 17, 2024
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: High schoolers are losing confidence in the benefits of a college degree: study.
The study, ”Continuing to Explore the Exodus from Higher Education,”compares the results of focus groups and a national survey conducted in 2023 to findings from a 2022 Gates Foundation report titled, “Where are the students?.” Researchers found that high schoolers and non-enrolled adults ages 18-30 still associate some benefits with attending college, but those perceived benefits were in decline compared to findings from 2022.
The percentage of non-enrolled adults surveyed who consider reasons to go to college, such as to gain more money or get a better job, as important or very important has also dropped from the year before.
At the same time, however, non-enrolled adults continue to perceive an increasing benefit to other options such as licenses, certificates, and trade schools.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
BY REQUEST, a Sunday Morning open thread.
FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: The gyms and fitness chains closed during the coronavirus pandemic — and what some are offering instead.
There’s nothing like a good workout to combat coronavirus-related anxieties — but are trips to the gym safe amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic?
While there’s no need to throw down the dumbbell for good, some gyms are closing as a precautionary measure during the ongoing outbreak. Read on for a list of national chains and fitness studios that have shut their doors (for the time being) to fight the spread of the virus.
Most of the gyms announced “two week” closures, which in reality, often went on for months. 24-Hour Fitness, since reopened, declared bankruptcy on June 15th, 2020.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Sorting for Stupidity? Thoughts on the state of the federal government.
If you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription.
NOTHING TO HIDE, JUST STUFF THEY’RE HIDING: Thousands of Haitians dumped in US, but DHS won’t say where.
I will give it to Bill O’Reilly. I saw a clip with him this morning saying, don’t interview your boss. That is the lesson that came out of this hot mess of exchange between Don and Elon… Don Lemon behaved like an a**hole who was not grateful to Elon Musk for resurrecting his career. And O’Reilly’s, right. It’s very hard for Don Lemon to both be a good journalist and be a good employee. The man’s paying your salary so you do owe him a level of respect and discretion. And at the same time you want to show us in your first interview back how hard hitting you are and those two goals are not aligned. So I don’t blame Elon for being mad at the way he was treated…Even though of course, Don Lemon through spokesperson who is the same woman Jeff Zucker was having an affair with, Allison Gollust, is threatening to sue. All our old favorites are involved in this one, fellas!
Show some gratitude! Ask him about how amazing X is doing and how it’s thriving notwithstanding all the doomsday predictions, and whatever happened to loser Threads over on Facebook. Elon was having a moment but not in Don’s life and in his world, even though he just got this great opportunity. Oh my god…”You’re dangerous, you foment racism, you’re a druggie who’s running all these big companies, and I want to see your prescription.” And he doesn’t understand why Elon is like, “It’s over!”
Lemon couldn’t resist the urge. It’s his character.
Related: Don Lemon demanded Tesla Cybertruck, $5M advance, equity in X before Elon Musk canned him: sources.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Silonn Ice Maker Countertop. #CommissionEarned
IRREDUCIBLE MIND (Part 2): “What Consciousness and Colors Like Yellow Have in Common” is live on HillFaith for those who may be interested.
HOW IT STARTED: Apple CEO Tim Cook: Learn to code, it’s more important than English as a second language.
—CNBC, October 12th, 2017.
How it’s going: Laid-off techies face ‘sense of impending doom’ with job cuts at highest since dot-com crash.
—CNBC, Friday.
Related: Silicon Valley Opens Its Wallet for Joe Biden. A Wired analysis finds roughly 95 percent of contributions by employees of six big tech firms have gone to Trump’s Democratic challenger.
—Wired.com, October 6th, 2020.
OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum.
The Fitzwilliam Museum has suggested that paintings of the British countryside evoke dark “nationalist feelings”.
The museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, has undertaken an overhaul of its displays, in a move that its director insisted was not “woke”.
Luke Syson said last week: “I would love to think that there’s a way of telling these larger, more inclusive histories that doesn’t feel as if it requires a push-back from those who try to suggest that any interest at all in [this work is] what would now be called ‘woke’.”
The new signage states that pictures of “rolling English hills” can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland”.
“Or, Landscape Paintings Now Deemed Problematic, Racist,” David Thompson adds:
Above, John Constable’s Hampstead Heath, circa 1820. Beware its morally corrupting influence.
The problem, we’re told, is that paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “leaving very little room for representations of people of colour.” And obviously, even the past must be made “inclusive and representative.” Which seems to mean that we must all pretend that our islands’ population and cultural assumptions have always looked like those of, say, twenty-first century London, a city whose demographics bear little relationship to those of the country as a whole, even in the twenty-first century.
It occurs to me that notions of racial “representation” will likely be distorted by the embrace of rather parochial progressive conceits, and by proximity to the nation’s capital, which in my lifetime has gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%, and which is wildly out of step with the rest of the nation. Things that are denounced as “horribly white,” or whatever the current term of disapproval is, may not seem so to people who live in, say, Chesterfield or Plymouth.
It’s England, so how long before the spray paint and scimitar crowd has its way with the now double-plus ungood crimethink imagery?
Breaking: A member of the British radical group Palestine Action has destroyed a historic painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College in @Cambridge_Uni. pic.twitter.com/BUco8VU7va
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) March 8, 2024
Britain, 1066-2024. You had a nice long run. https://t.co/AnAraohrlN
— Steven F. Hayward (@stevenfhayward) March 15, 2024
JOHN LUCAS: Bits and Pieces – Are Socialists Nuts? Well, sometimes they’re evil, too. And by sometimes I mean often.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Monsters We Have Known. “One of the controversies surrounding the coverage of the chaos in Haiti has been the reluctance of mainstream outlets to mention such matters as voodoo and cannibalism in connection with gang violence, as if the influence of the occult and barbaric were somehow anti-black or racist. But it is universal.”
March 16, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s alright for threading.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Sorting for Stupidity? Thoughts on the state of the federal government.
NOW OUT FROM BOB ZUBRIN: The New World on Mars: What We Can Create On The Red Planet.
FASTER, PLEASE: Breakthrough Therapy Obliterates Deadly Brain Tumor in Days.
A PACK NOT A HERD: Be Afraid, But More Importantly Be Armed: Citizens Will Be Best First-Line Defense Against Terrorists Coming Across Border.
Shades of Kurt Schlicter’s The Attack.
HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ON ACCOUNT OF RACE: Davidson College forces athletes to watch ‘only whites are racist’ video. “The students with whom we have spoken about this film found it offensive, divisive, and personally insulting.”
THEY DIDN’T LISTEN: TOO MUCH GRIFT AND OPPORTUNITY FOR OPPRESSION. The Prophets: D.A. Henderson. Years before Covid, the scientist credited with eradicating smallpox warned against shutting down the world to combat an epidemic.
In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.
As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.
This month marks the four-year anniversary of lockdowns on a global scale. And though the pandemic has passed, its consequences live on. The lockdowns embraced by the U.S. public-health establishment meant that millions of young people had their education and social development disrupted, or left school for good. Mental health problems rose substantially. So did incidents of domestic violence and overdose deaths.
It didn’t have to be that way.
“D.A. kept saying, ‘You have to be practical, and you have to be humble, about what public health can actually do, especially over sustained periods. Society is complicated, and you don’t get to control it.’ ” But they wanted to.
JIM TREACHER FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY: Watch: Chinese Government Encourages Italians to Fight Coronavirus Racism by Hugging Strangers.
Titled “Italian residents hug Chinese people to encourage them in coronavirus fight,” the brief video shows a handsome, casually dressed young Chinese man standing in a busy pedestrian area in Florence. He’s blindfolded and wearing a surgical mask, next to a handwritten sign reading the following in Italian and Chinese: “I am not a virus. I am a human being. Free me from prejudice.” Then, as stirring electronic music swells, passersby hug him and touch his face to remove his blindfold and mask.
So much for “social distancing.”
This was released on February 4, 2020. Six weeks later, Italy now has more active coronavirus cases than anywhere else in the world, and the entire country has completely shut down.
Again, this video was released by the Chinese government. Someone who’s far more paranoid and conspiratorially minded than I am might wonder why the ChiComs stifled information about a viral outbreak within their own borders, silencing doctors and others who tried to warn the outside world, while at the same time releasing treacly, upbeat propaganda videos encouraging Europeans to come into direct physical contact with random Chinese people or else they’re racists.
REMEMBER, PENN IS TRYING ITS HARDEST TO FIRE AMY WAX FOR CRITICIZING ITS ADMISSION POLICY: Anti-Semitic Cartoonist Will Teach Fall Course at Penn, Ivy League School Announces. “One cartoon depicts Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses, a version of the ancient blood libel employed in anti-Semitic propaganda. Another shows Jews in a Nazi concentration camp holding signs that read ‘Stop the Holocaust In Gaza’ and ‘Gaza, The World’s Biggest Concentration Camp.’ A third depicts a Nazi flag with a Star of David drawn in place of a swastika.”
But at least he didn’t say anything hurtful about the results of affirmative action.
IT”S ABOUT TIME: Second Thoughts in New York. Facing community pressure, some progressive black leaders are reevaluating their soft-on-crime positions.