Definition of the Day: No. 79

Higher Education:

[A] political racket whereby Democrats fork endless cash to tuition extortionists, and lousy scholars impart insane ideas to debt-strapped students who are made dysfunctional citizens in the process.

Source

A Post That Disappeared: The Rot At the Head of the University

Reading the latest from the Marquette Warrior, aka Marquette University Professor John McAdams, on the efforts of Marquette's President, Michael Lovell, to impose on Marquette University, a supposedly Catholic institution, the rule of PC, I was prompted to review my own post of almost a year ago entitled: The Rot at the Head of the University, which however, I was unable to find either by way of this blog's search function or using Google to search the Web. That seemed odd since the post comes up at the head of the list in a Bing.com search, and it is in fact, still online as originally posted.

So, in the perhaps naive hope that Google won't exclude it from any future search of the Web, here's that post again.

In The Intellectual Costs of Diversity, Robert Weissberg explains the devastating harm to academic excellence done by the promotion of diversity  in the American University — a cost that guarantees America's demise as the world's leading intellectual, scientific and technological power.

In discussing this transformation of academia, the author considers the motivation of the Interim Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaigne-Urbana, Barbara Wilson, who has announced diversity, i.e., rigged hiring to insure blacks and women are favored over better qualified white or Asian males, to be central to the university’s mission. His conclusion is this:

... abandoning intellectual excellence is best explained by physical intimidation and what is most remarkable is the inconsequentiality of this threat. What interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson and others face is at most some fleeting verbal abuse …

This, sadly, is complete rubbish, for if it were not, it would be a simple matter to find university leaders with the balls to insist that the university is about scholarship, not the replacement of Christian morality with that of Political Correctness.

The State of US:Russia Relations

Source: CBC

Related:

RT: Russia demands Washington explain after reports say US military hacked into Russian networks

Zero Hedge: "Something Stinks" - Like Iraq WMD Fiasco, Russia Story Doesn't Add Up

Craig Murray: Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit

Anybody who believes the latest report issued by Obama as “proof” [of Russian hacking] provides anything of the sort is very easily impressed by some entirely meaningless diagrams. William Binney, who was Technical Director at the NSA and actually designed their surveillance capabilities, has advised me by email. It is plain from the report itself that the Russian groups discussed have been under targeted NSA surveillance for a period longer than the timeframe for the DNC and Podesta leaks. It is therefore inconceivable that the NSA would not have detected and traced those particular data flows and they would be saved. In other words, the NSA would have the actual hack on record, would be able to recognise the emails themselves and tell you exactly the second the transmission or transmissions took place and how they were routed. They would be able to give you date, time and IP addresses. In fact, not only do they produce no evidence of this kind, they do not even claim to have this kind of definite evidence ...

Independent: US government hackers ‘penetrate’ Russian electric grid and communication lines to be ‘ready’ in case of election day interference

SCF: A Loser’s Malice: What’s Behind Obama’s Attacks on Putin

Crap Canadian Journal Inadvertently Publishes Exposé of Its Own Corrupt Operation

A website accused of publishing fake science has posted an editorial saying that it, and others like it, are “predators” that treat legitimate scientists as suckers.

It’s an editorial that was written and submitted by the [Ottawa] Citizen, as part of our own little experiment.

Scientists should “park any ethics at the door” before publishing in the Journal of Applied Molecular Cell Biology, the journal’s own editorial adds.

We suspect the journal may have published the piece online without actually reading it — which would explain why it allowed its own editorial to accuse it of cheating, of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing that preys on scientists, of self-aggrandizement and of smelling bad.

The publisher is Consortium Publication of Saskatoon, which publishes using the logo and links of the Indian company OMICS International. OMICS publishes about 700 low-quality online journals and has recently been acquiring Canadian journals that were formerly independent.

Read more

FREEMAN DYSON: HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

1. The Need for Heretics

In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.

Read more:

Canadian University Teachers Put U. Lethbridge's PC Commissar, aka, President, Under the Gun For Illegal Discriminatory Action Against a Faculty Member

American Herald Tribune, Dec. 12, 2016: The witch-hunt against University of Lethbridge professor Anthony Hall may have just ended not with a bang but with a whimper. And it is the Israel lobby group B’nai Brith Canada, and its flunkies at the University of Lethbridge, who are whimpering.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) just issued a stinging reprimand for University of Lethbridge president Mike Mahon, a glorified gym teacher who unilaterally suspended Professor Hall without pay because he disagrees with Hall’s political views.

Read more

Note to President Mahon: Engaging in an unwarranted attack on the freedom of speech of a member of your own faculty who happens to be the Editor in Chief of a newspaper is the kind of thing that will get you a well-deserved come-uppance, much to the enjoyment of all and sundry.

Thomas Sowell: MY FAREWELL COLUMN

Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.

It was very fulfilling to be able to share my thoughts on the events unfolding around us, and to receive feedback from readers across the country – even if it was impossible to answer them all.

Read more

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Sahara Snowfall, 1979

Anthem for the Alt- New World Order:

Misrepresenting the Danger of Mass Migration

The other day, the Daily Mail ran a story under the following headline:

How many MORE atrocities before our leaders stop lying to us and admit that, thanks to their immigration policies, being mowed down while doing your Christmas shopping is simply the new normal?

A couple of crooks who suspect they've
 been found out.

The risk of being mown down while doing your Christmas shopping is, actually, not high. In fact, it is infinitesimally small.

The real danger to the European people of the immigration policies pursued by the Western elites is that unless those policies are ended now, the European peoples will cease to exist as a distinct racial and cultural group within a generation. Current Western immigration policies are, in other words, a program for the genocide of the European people.

Democracy, Shamocracy and the Death of the West

Is there a ceiling to the nationalist vote, asks John Derbyshire in another handwringing piece about the ongoing destruction of the European peoples. To which the correct answer is: who cares?

Democracy and the death of the West are synonymous. The European people never wanted mass immigration of Africans, Asians, Muslim middle-easterners, or anyone else. But they've nevertheless had it good and hard, whoever they voted for.

Brilliant Billionaires, No. 79: Mark Zuckerberg Cracks the Hard Philosophical Problem — What Is Truth?

We all know that young Mark Zuckerberg is a very smart man: a man of vision as well as a business tycoon. But who would have imagined that young Mark would answer what has been recognized throughout the ages as the greatest of all philosophical questions, namely: what is truth?

Yet young Mark has slashed the Gordian knot. He has discovered the test. He has found the touchstone of ultimate Truth, and it is to be put to immediate use, purifying the thoughts of mankind and advancing humanity in one giant leap to a state of perfect enlightenment. Henceforth, young Mark's fakebook will transmit nothing but the purest truth.

Will President Obama be charged with treason over a fabricated birth certificate?

Today, Intellihub published a report alleging that Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery.

The report states: 

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and lead investigator Mike Zullo along with forensic experts on two continents have concluded that President Obama’s birth certificate is not authentic and are seeking to take the matter up with the federal government.

Dubya Bush On Trial For War Crimes

As Sputnik International reports, the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument, December 12, in Saleh v. Bush, a class action lawsuit filed against key members of the George W. Bush administration for war crimes.

This report includes a 20 minute video of the court proceedings which suggests that the prime concern of the court is not whether war crimes were committed by the Bush II Administration but whether, if war crimes were committed, Bush and members of his cabinet are subject to prosecution under US law.

Why US Oligarchs and the Democratic Party Are Attempting a Coup d'Etat Against Trump

The following was written in December 2016, immediately after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, when it seemed possible to believe that Trump ("wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with the Russians")represented an alternative to the globalist scheme for world empire. Events have proved that on the contrary, Trump is simply a more militaristic replacement for the former frontmen for world empire, the Rapist-in-Chief, the Bush, the Shrubs and the wannabe Hillary. or as H.L. Mencken said of FDR, Trump, is simply "a fraud from snout to tail." That, however, does not invalidate the thrust of the following commentary, which deals with the plan for the take-down and dismemberment of Russia as a preliminary to a shoot-out with China.

In 1971, when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power, the fear in the West was of Soviet tanks rolling Westward to the Atlantic, leaving the United States with the choice of resolving the issue either by means of an all out nuclear war, or accepting Russian global hegemony.

To counter the threat, the US gave diplomatic recognition to Red China, the implication being: if Russia moved West, China, with US support, would move West also, to regain vast swaths of territory and the underlying energy and mineral resources lost to Russia under the, so-called, unequal treaties of the 19th Century.

Today Russia is weak, but China is strong and rapidly growing stronger. To the plutocratic class, both in America and China, Russia's weakness creates a golden opportunity: an opportunity to strip Putin's circle of crony capitalists of the vast resource wealth of Russia. Or as Canadian wannabe oligarch, Conrad Black wrote in the National Post:

UK Ambassador Trashes Claim Russia Hacked US Election

Hillary Clinton, in October, was the first to accuse Russia of meddling in the US Presidential election in order to prevent her winning, and to impose Donald Trump on the American people.

Now US "intelligence officials" are informing trusty mainstream media (i.e., globalist propaganda) outlets such as mostly-billionaire-Thomson-owned Reuters that:

U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that as the 2016 presidential campaign progressed, Russian government officials devoted increasing attention to assisting Trump's effort to win the election.

Specifically, Reuters claims, based on statements from unnamed "U.S. officials briefed on the matter," and as reported in the Washington [Com]Post, on Friday that:

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part II

Some time ago I wrote a two-part critique of Frans de Waal's book, The Atheist and the Bonobo, arguing that de Waal not only fails to understand the evolutionary significance of religion in the success of human groups, but advocates a return to the moral world of the apes, a proposition that seems guaranteed to insure continuation of the social disintegration now to be witnessed in the Western world. Part 1 of that critique delivers, I believe, points worth making. Part 2, however, enters I now see, a realm of incoherence, notwithstanding the validity of the objective that I was driving at. Normally, coming across a flawed post from the past, I either shrug or hit the delete button. The critique of de Waal, however, seems worth getting right, especially as, according to my blog stats, people are still reading it. Here, then, is the revision. which I have temporarily pinned to the top of the page.

First Posted December 8, 2016. revised November 23, 2019: Frans de Waal, whose accounts of animal behavior have won him numerous awards and honors, believes that empathy, which is innate to both mankind and many other species, is the only effective basis for socially constructive behavior and that religion as a guide to human conduct is, therefore, both unnecessary and undesirable.

However, as I discussed in an earlier post, de Waal fails to acknowledge the limits to the power of empathy, which is most clearly expressed among family members, friends and neighbors, but which is less evident or entirely absent in interactions among strangers, especially among strangers differing in tribe, culture, race or nation.

The Trouble With Climate Science

The trouble with what is called "climate science" is that it is all about predicting the future, and as someone said, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

Sometimes, it's true, science predicts the future reliably enough. For example, if you'd said on any day during the last four and a half billion years that "tomorrow the sun will rise in the East," you'd have been proved correct. Moreover, much else about astronomy is highly predictable. But that's because everything in the vast emptiness of space happens, well, in space. In other words, astronomical events are highly predictable because the objects about which predictions are made, planets, satellites, stars, and galaxies, are affected by their environment in very few and very predictable ways. These bodies exist in gravitational and electromagnetic fields the properties of which are well understood and which, on astronomical scales, change in strength and conformation incredibly slowly.

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

About Shit

In the late sixties, when I worked briefly at Vancouver's mountain-top Simon Fraser University, I encountered a Communist agitator who made much of the fact that "even the Queen shits." I never discussed this proposition with him, but I suppose the idea was to associate with Canada's monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, one's deeply ingrained aversion to the sight, smell, or thought of shit. In particular, it must have been supposed that once identified as a shitter, Her Majesty would, together with the entire Canadian political establishment, lose all credibility and thus be thrust aside by a disgusted proletariat to make way for the revolution. The same approach was adopted with a view to discrediting the Pope and thus the Catholic faith.

Happily, despite exposure to such treasonous and heretical propaganda, I remain a loyal subject of Her Majesty the Queen and no enemy to the Catholic church. Still, the line of attack did make some sense, and reveals why shit remains one of the world's outstanding problems, for shit is something people just don't like to think about. But with seven billion, going on ten billion, humans on the face of the planet, we do need to confront the reality of around ten million tons of shit a day. That's about 350 kilograms per hectare per year, worldwide. So mind where you step: especially in poorer parts of the World, where people mostly just shit behind a bush and leave disposal to natural processes, or people walking away with it adhering to the soles of their shoes — if they have shoes.

#TrudeauEulogies

There are times when being Prime Minister of Canada merely because your father was Prime Minister of Canada proves unrewarding. For Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the occasion of the death of his father's friend, the Cuban Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, has proved to be one such time. Remaining loyal to his father's friend, and indeed his own friend, Justin Trudeau said, among other things:

It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest-serving president... [a] larger than life [personality]... a legendary revolutionary and orator... I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother, President Raúl Castro, during my recent visit to Cuba. On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader....