Cargo Culture

/

awaiting the manna delivery god

Now California Wants to Force You to Ride the Magical Mystery Train

STEPHEN GREEN | 4:00 PM ON MAY 23, 2024

It takes a special kind of stupid to mandate electric vehicles that many people can't afford, charged on a power grid that can't support them. But beyond even that, it takes a special kind of magical thinking to mandate electric trains that haven't been invented.

Welcome to California, the land of magical thinking.

By law, "all new passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs sold in California will be zero-emission vehicles [ZEV] by 2035." ZEVs include EVs, hydrogen-powered vehicles, and plug-in hybrids (but not regular hybrids). If Sacramento gets its way, starting in 2030, freight trains will have to meet the same strict standards.

While it escaped my attention at the time, in November the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued new regulations "that would require all freight trains to be in a zero-emission configuration by 2035. By 2030, the rule mandates that diesel locomotives that are 23 years or older be retired, even though a locomotive can have a useful life of 39 years or longer."

Passenger trains will have to go full ZEV by 2030 and freight trains by 2035. The problem is that nobody makes a ZEV freight train. It also seems unlikely to be a good idea, but stick a pin in that thought because I'll come back to it momentarily.

The closest thing to CARB's new standard is a battery-electric locomotive made by a firm called Wabtec. But it's only a demonstration engine at this point; it only reduces fuel use by 11% because it has to be used in tandem with traditional diesel engines, and therefore still doesn't satisfy CARB.

>>>>

If there's one thing diesel does very well, it's generate absurd amounts of towing power. Want to pull a hundred cars of freight? Diesel. Need to deliver a semi's worth of unassembled IKEA furniture? Diesel. Towing your 26-foot camping trailer up the mountains? Diesel.

Batteries suck for towing. The additional mass drains them far more rapidly than regular driving does. I can't imagine how many locomotives worth of batteries it would take to pull the massive coal trains I see moving along the Front Range, but most of the ones I see already use four or five diesel engines.

So either California is going to require the most ridiculous number of (non-existent) electric locomotive engines, or they're going to have to electrify their entire network of train tracks. I don't even know if that's possible. But I am laughing at the thought of what would happen when the train hits the Nevada state line and the power runs out.

What can account for seemingly educated people enacting mandates that defy logic, physics, experience and common sense? Why do they demand the impossible, and grow so furious when they’re denied it?

I suggest that they see the amazing wealth and prosperity of the western world and covet it, but have no idea how that wealth was produced, and no knowledge of how to make their own, so they’ve invented an imaginary cornucopia that, upon proper appeal and appeasement of Mother Gia, will magically reward them with earthly and spiritual delights. Or perhaps it’s the opposite; certainly at least some of them see prosperity as wicked, and reject it for both themselves and the world, and seek to destroy it. Either way, a form of religion is involved, and with religion comes ritual.

The article below explains cargo cults as “ a crude attempt to make sense of the world”, and isn’t that what we’re seeing today? Having discarded everything that used to comprise western culture: religion; science; literature, they’ve been left adrift, and need a replacement for what humans have previously used to explain their world. They’ve settled, at least for now, for magic.

Sapiens.org What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature

When Indigenous communities throughout the area had their first encounters with colonial forces, they marveled at the material abundance the foreigners brought with them. During World War II, when many Melanesians worked for U.S. and Australian military forces, they observed soldiers who never seemed to engage in any productive activities, such as fishing, hunting, working the land, or crafting anything. All they did was march up and down, raise flags, chant anthems, and signal toward the sky.

And when they did that, metal birds appeared and dropped all kinds of goods for them. The Indigenous observers concluded that the strange rituals were causing the cargo to arrive.

With the end of the war, the military bases were abandoned and the goods ceased to arrive. To get the cargo to return, local chiefs began organizing ceremonies that mimicked the rituals of the troops. Soon, elaborate myths and theologies developed around those rituals. Surely, the cargo must have been a gift from the gods—their own ancestors. After all, who else could be capable of producing such wealth? The foreigners had merely discovered the rituals that unlocked these treasures.

These remarkable religious movements became known outside of Melanesia as “cargo cults.” The term first appeared in print in an Australian news magazine in 1945 and was soon adopted by many anthropologists. Others in the field raised objections over the term, pointing to its Western-centric origin and pejorative connotations.

Ethnographers stressed that these movements were about much more than just material goods. They saw them as revitalization movements, acts of resistance against colonial intervention and missionization. By the middle of the 20th century, Indigenous communities throughout the area had experienced more than a century of European and later Australian, Japanese, and U.S. colonial and military interventions. These intruders had taken control of their land and coaxed or forced them into slave labor. Missionaries had also established a kind of moral police that punished those who practiced traditional customs not in accordance with Christianity. Within that context, ethnographers argued, cargo cults had emerged as a way for local leaders to consolidate their power, relieve social stress, and/or unite communities under a proto-nationalist ideology or a demand for political autonomy.

But the emergence of cargo cults also reveals something else: the universal human need for ritual. Examined from this perspective, the practices of Melanesians may begin to look more familiar to those of us living in other parts of the world.

✽

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAW RITUAL as a crude attempt to make sense of the world. They often disparagingly described Indigenous beliefs and practices as “prelogical,” like those of young children. The assumption was that one day these groups of people would “grow up” and shed their backward ideas. Ironically, however, in reporting on what they saw as “primitive” or exotic, anthropologists often unwittingly described the behaviors of people in their own societies—revealing some truths about human nature in general.

Research shows that humans have intuitive expectations about ritual efficacy that operate unconsciously. From early childhood, we are drawn to ritualization. Young children are obsessed with routines and patterns, are keen on imitating others, and appear to believe that ritual actions have causal effects. For instance, studies have found that preschoolers think birthday parties cause other children to grow older.

Adults, too, have similar intuitions, even if they don’t realize it. In a study conducted in the U.S., my colleagues and I showed people videos of basketball players shooting free throws. In half of those videos, a player performed a pre-shot ritual like spinning or tapping the ball. In the other half, we switched the camera angle to show the same shots without the ritualized parts. After the ball left the player’s hands, each video stopped, and participants were asked to predict the outcome of the shot. As it turned out, they expected the same shots to be more successful when they were ritualized.

Why would we have such expectations if a ritual doesn’t actually cause cargo to fall from the sky or make our free throws more accurate? This question has bemused social scientists for a long time. But while ritual, by definition, does not have a direct causal outcome, this does not mean it has no function at all.

On the contrary, as I explore in my new book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, rituals play key roles across human societies, helping their members soothe their anxieties, connect, and maintain social order.

✽

MELANESIAN CARGO CULTS FLARED up during times of crisis. When colonists started arriving in the area in the 17th century, Melanesians saw their ways of life upended. The invaders imposed changes that devalued their customs and norms, and colonists’ military strength left them feeling powerless to react. Faced with the pressures of modernization and capitalism, their traditional exchange systems, based on barter and gifting, now seemed obsolete. And while previously self-sufficient, they suddenly felt relative deprivation compared to the foreigners’ opulent lifestyles. It was against this backdrop that cargo cults emerged. And indeed, such movements occurred more commonly in those areas that faced greater encroachment from the colonizers.

This reflects a broader pattern: People are more prone to turn to ritual in stressful contexts such as war, illness, or natural catastrophes.

Indeed, experiments show that ritual can be an effective coping mechanism. For example, in research conducted with Hindu women in Mauritius, my colleagues and I found that performing prayers at a temple helped the women reduce stress (both subjective and physiological) caused by contemplating natural disasters. Likewise, cargo cult rituals may have helped Melanesians cope with the uncertainty of their rapidly changing conditions. They also served crucial social functions. By bringing Indigenous people together to enact them, these rituals forged a sense of common identity and helped create a collective conscience.

Of course, nothing in these rituals will save us from starving, but westerners, especially Americans, are grievously obese anyway, so where’s the harm?

Instapundit linked to this article, but in case you missed it ...

/

diversity r us at ucla

Looking for a doctor? Choose an Asian, or a white, but otherwise, especially if the physician in question trained at UCLA, the odds of competence are dead set against you. Before you accuse me of racial discrimination, consider: isn’t that exactly what this school is doing?

Free Beacon:

A Failed Medical School': How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame.

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee's meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

"Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?" Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate's scores shouldn't matter, she continued,  because "we need people like this in the medical school."

>>>>

Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university's Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a "failed medical school," said one former member of the admissions staff. "We want racial diversity so badly, we're willing to cut corners to get it."

>>>>>

"I have students on their rotation who don't know anything," a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. "People get in and they struggle."

>>>>>

Within three years of Lucero's hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report's rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.

Those tests, known as shelf exams, which are typically taken at the end of each clinical rotation, measure basic medical knowledge and play a pivotal role in residency applications. Though only 5 percent of students fail each test nationally, the rates are much higher at UCLA, having increased tenfold in some subjects since 2020, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.That uptick coincided with aThat uptick coincided with a steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants and tracks the subjective impressions of faculty who say that students have never been more poorly prepared.

>>>>

One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don't know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.

"I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. "Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students."

And for those who've seen the competency crisis up close, double standards in admissions are a big part of the problem. "All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races," an admissions officer said. "For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded."

Led by Lucero, who also serves as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion of UCLA's anesthesiology department, the admissions committee routinely gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics, four people who served on it said, while whites and Asians need near perfect scores to even be considered.

The bar for underrepresented minorities is "as low as you could possibly imagine," one committee member told the Free Beacon. "It completely disregards grades and achievements."

Several officials said that they support holistic admissions and don't believe test scores should be judged in isolation. The problem, as they see it, is that the committee is not just weighing academic merit against community service or considering how much time a given student had to study for the MCAT. For certain applicants, they say, hardship and community service seem to be the only things that matter to the majority of the committee's 20-30 members, many of whom were handpicked by Lucero, according to people familiar with the selection process.

"We were always outnumbered," an admissions officer told the Free Beacon, referring to committee members who expressed concern about low grades. "Other people would get upset when we brought up GPA."

Lucero hasn't been kind to dissenters. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who've worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.

>>>>

After a Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, for example, Lucero chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister, according to three people familiar with the incident. No applications were reviewed that day, an official present for the lecture said.

In the anesthesiology department, where Lucero helps rank applicants to the department's residency program, she has rebuffed calls to blind the race of candidates, telling colleagues in a January 2023 email that, despite California's ban on racial preferences, "we are not required to blind any information."

>>>>

The focus on racial diversity has coincided with a dramatic shift in the racial and ethnic composition of the medical school, where the number of Asian matriculants fell by almost a third between 2019 and 2022, according to publicly available data. No other elite medical school in California saw a similar decline.

"It's a combination of a bad curriculum and bad selection," another professor said, referring to the admissions process. Some students are accepted with GPAs so low "they shouldn't even be applying."

>>>>>

Lucero uses proxies like zip codes and euphemisms like "disadvantaged" to shut down criticism of unqualified candidates, citing a finding from the Association of American Medical Colleges that, technically, most students with below-average MCATs make it to their second year of medical school. How well they do after that point goes undiscussed and undisclosed.

"We have asked for metrics on how these folks actually do," one committee member said. "None of that is ever divulged to us."

>>>>

“Within three years of Lucero’s hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research. And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.”

(FWIW): "I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. That’s easy: all hospitals have DEI departments now, just as medical schools do, and these graduates will be hired, in the place of competent ones. Alternatively, and if the proponents of DIE are correct and these minority students will end up in minority neighborhoods, maybe the usual pattern will triumph: the liberals will achieve their own goal, and the poor will pay the price.

Coming on the market for the first time since 1977

/

17 Alden Road, which will be priced at $5.750 million, showings to begin May 28th. I’ll be curious to see the markets’ reaction to this home. Built in 1930, its late owner bought it almost 50 years ago, and he doesn’t appear to have done much updating. Then again, he was 96 when he died in Florida last year, and I imagine that at that age he was perfectly comfortable with the way it was decorated, so why change it?

And good for him — that’s a perfectly reasonable decision, but younger buyers are going to want to make some significant, and probably expensive renovations here.

2.35 acres.

joe barbieri having refused to loan out the zebra, this stager has decided to attempt to one-up him. we’ll see how that works out.

definitely not joe’s chickens — he doesn’t have any to lend

Well finally

/

382 North Street is pending. Currently priced at $2.950 million, it started off in June 2022 at $4.1. It’s a perfectly decent house, nicely set off from North Street, but dated: built in 1956, it was last updated in 1991, and it shows. But the fact that it lingered this long in this market is attributable to the pricing decisions made over the past 24 months and not to the merits of the house itself.

Does this mean that Biden's bosses are getting ready to get rid of him?

/

the sound of approaching hoofbeats

You can’t dump Joe unless you also also shed Kampallawalla Ding Dong, and until now, what passes for wisdom in Washington has declared that impossible, given the identity politics that rule the Democrat party. But what’s this? Someone has given the Daily Show permission to mock the VP, and that’s unheard of. It will take someone trained in Kremlinology to figure out what this portends, but it suggests to me that Miss Word Salad shouldn’t start measuring for new curtains in the Oval Office quite yet.

And over in the eastern city's namesake, Portland Oregon voters appear to have had enough

/

antifa goons and the summer of love

The collegiate pacifists are apparently gearing up to do battle again this summer at both parties’ conventions; that will only reinforce the image of the new Democratic Party among voters, and this sign of ordinary citizens rebelling against woke should make Biden’s handlers nervous.


Well, of course it does — the Massachusetts diaspora has metastasized through Portland, and is now invading neighboring towns

/

Westbrook [Maine] Wants to Turn Private Homes and Churches Into Homeless Shelters for illegal aliens and hobos

The city of Westbrook is considering a new ordinance which would allow private homes, along with churches and community centers, to be used as homeless shelters, as the vast majority of people applying for housing assistance in the city are immigrants.

The proposal follows an earlier admission by the Westbrook official running the city’s welfare program that “90 to 95 percent” of welfare recipients are migrants — or “New Mainers.”

“What we can afford in this ordinance are shelters in single family homes which are deemed to be emergency shelter families,” said Jennie Franceschi, Westbrook Director of Planning and Code Enforcement “A church that has a room that they utilize for the purposes of baked bean suppers or educational or social needs could then take that room and make it into a shelter if the needs of the community necessitated it.”

The ordinance would not force private homeowners or churches to house homeless people, but would allow them to become official homeless shelters if they choose.

During a May 7 Planning Board meeting, multiple members of the public appeared to speak in favor of the new ordinance, arguing that it will help the city to deal better with the skyrocketing rate of homelessness in Cumberland County, of which Westbrook is a part.

One concerned Westbrook resident, Martin Malia, however, sent an email to be read during the public hearing, criticizing the new measure for the potential tax burden it could impose on property owners in the city.

“I do not believe the entire homeless shelter proposal is beneficial to the property taxpayers and residents of the city of Westbrook. Last year, the property taxpayers were burdened with an 8.8 [percent] tax increase,” Malia said, adding that the current proposal would hike property taxes by 11.4 percent.

Malia expressed concern that the new ordinance would attract more homeless immigrants to the city, who could then apply for taxpayer-funded General Assistance, which would add to the taxpayer funding going to the new shelters in private homes and churches.

… Despite failing to address the tax burden imposed by the new shelters, the Planning Board voted unanimously to send the new ordinance, as well as an ordinance creating a licensing process for homeless shelters, to the city council for consideration.

At an April 9 Westbrook City Council meeting, which began with a “land acknowledgment” apologizing for colonialism, Harison Deah, the director of general assistance, admitted that the vast majority of people applying for general assistance in the town are “new Mainers” meaning immigrants.

He went on to say that, in many cases, his office has to teach the immigrants living in apartments with the help of taxpayer-funded general assistance how to do basic things to avoid angering tenants and neighbors, such as how to use a thermostat. [And toilets, and keeping chickens out of the house —ED]

The general assistance program poses a significant tax burden on Westbrook residents, with statewide taxpayer money used to pay for 70 percent of the assistance, and local residents paying 30 percent directly through property tax.

With the extremely high percentage of immigrants applying for general assistance, it is likely that many families housed in the newly proposed homeless shelters inside homes and churches, would be in the country illegally.

“How is this all not an immigration resettlement program being funded by taxpayers under the guise of fighting homelessness,” said Malia, in comments provided to The Maine Wire.

It’s not difficult to feel sorry for the long-term residents of towns like Westbrook, because they are very much not voting for this stuff; unfortunately, they are quickly being subsumed under a wave of “New Mainers” — not the illegals NYC’s Mayor Adams calls wetbacks, but progressive liberals who’ve been priced out of adjoining Portland and have moved to Westbrook to duplicate what they created five miles away. This is happening everywhere in Maine south of the Tofu Line — coastal Maine from Bar Harbor south to Kittery — and elections are beginning to skew heavily Democratic. The oldsters and natives are forced out without so much as a land acknowledgement, and liberals replace them, bringing with them their social sensibilities and pocketbooks to pay for them, for a while. I don’t know what the final outcome of all this will be (though I can guess) but I can guarantee one thing: the leftists who are bringing in the world’s unwashed to share in their beneficence will not enjoy living next to church bingo hall’s homeless shelter with its residents’ third world habits, culture and lifestyle.

Tee hee.

There may be more to this story than the social outrage suggests, but then again, I've seen some incredibly boneheaded moves by lawyers in my time

/

The little vixon led him on, damnit!

Estes Carter Thompson is accused of recording multiple girls by taping his phone to plane toilet seats. In a new court filing, American Airlines says the young girl should have known that there was a recording device on the toilet.

"Defendant would show that any injuries or illnesses alleged to have been sustained by Plaintiff, Mary Doe, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s own fault and negligence," AA said.

"She knew or should have known contained a visible and illuminated recording device."

Thompson is accused of having videos of girls aged 7, 9, 11 and 14.Absolutely insane.

The plaintiff is a nine-year-old girl. (!!!)

This is the kind of defense pleading you might expect from a first year associate who remembers the principle of contributory negligence but has no grip on reality. If American Airlines insists on retaining lawyers with sub-60 IQs, it deserves what it’s about to get, but … gee.

In defense of first-year associates, however, I’ve seen counterclaims and special defenses asserted by veteran lawyers, counter-claims that are so dumb, so guaranteed to turn a jury against their client, that you’re left wondering who had what at lunch that day, and how much.

UPDATE: American now says that the filing was made by the outside law firm hired by its insurance company, and “has directed that pleading be withdrawn”. That bird has flown, dummies.

The decline of civilization proceeds apace

/

I noticed this twenty years ago when one of our children, then a junior at GHS, admitted that she’d never heard of, let alone read Thomas Wolfe. She happened to have the same English teacher I’d had, Dwight Wall, so I wrote to him, expressing my dismay and pointing out that, because he’d assigned “Look Homeward, Angel” to our class, I’d gone on to discover “The Web and The Rock”, and “You Can’t Go Home Again”, and thereby enriched my life. He wrote back a nice note, lamenting that “these days, I can’t get students to read a 20-page essay, let alone an entire book”. Mr. Wall was a tremendous teacher, staying for 53 years at the high school and inspiring thousands of students, so if, by 2004 he couldn’t persuade modern-day scholars from Greenwich Friggin’ Connecticut to immerse themselves in the glory of literature, it was they who had changed, not he.

So with that experience in mind, I was drawn to this essay in HotAir today:

David Strom: Why Johnny Doesn't Read...

Here's a shock for you (not). 

College students aren't reading the assigned texts for their college classes. 

Strom:

“This time--I promise you I will get back to my regularly scheduled bashing of the young whippersnappers--I am not going to waste any time talking about how much better it was in my day and how Gen Z are a bunch of lazy communists. I'm not even going to whinge about how stupid they are because I actually don't believe that's true. My gut sense is that they are as a group pretty smart, although there is a worrying trend in IQ measures indicating that intelligence measures are for the first time trending down. 

….

“But for this essay I will look mainly at what professors are saying, and it isn't good. Students are coming in with poor reading skills and short attention spans, and over time the penalties for not doing the work have evaporated. 

If you can get away without reading, why do the work?

Many college students don't read very well, their professors say. And they don't think they should have to work very hard. "Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary,"  writes Beth McMurtrie in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Others aren't willing to struggle. 

Furthermore, "a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts," say professors at colleges ranging from Wellesley to Cal State LA. Students don’t seem to "have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view."

In 15 years of teaching, Theresa MacPhail has adapted to the declining number of students willing and able to complete reading assignments. "She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still," reasoning that less is more, she told McMurtrie. "She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them."

MacPhail is an associate professor in science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, a selective university. But more and more of her students "still weren’t doing the reading, and when they were, more and more struggled to understand it." They complained about having to write a research paper. It was too hard.

Strom:

“Why aren't I going to go off on a rant about the stupid kids? 

“We, or at least our educational system and Big Tech, did this to them. I also think this is why IQs have been dropping in recent years. 

“I spend most of my time on the Internet--it is a matter of habit. I have a voracious appetite for knowledge, and it is now a job requirement for me to be constantly updated on what is going on. 

“And, as I have spent more time online I have noticed a severe drop in attention span. I read more than ever, but consume information in ever smaller chunks. Bottom line it for me up front, man! 

“Of course, my attention span was unusually long compared to my peers in school, at least when I was interested. I read Kant, for God's sake, although it was a slog. Hegel was a real slog, and I drifted off often enough. 

“So my shortened attention span is still probably above average compared to many, but technology has changed me and not always for the better. 

“Imagine kids raised on smartphones, watching TikToks, finding YouTube videos too long and only watching shorts. A book is too much for them, and an academic paper is too boring. 

“Now think about this: our public education system is beyond worthless for many students. It makes them dumber, not smarter. 

“Not all schools and not for all students, but for way too many. Even "college ready" students have trouble with reading and writing, and they know next to nothing. When a professor says they don't have "context," what they mean is that they know nothing.” 

“I have a lot of students who think they’ve already mastered the art [of writing], and other students who’ve never been required to really try,” says Gutierrez. He blames minimal writing requirements in high school and "good grades for mediocre work" for the decline in literacy.  His students think writing 750 words is too much.

The pandemic spread grading reforms, such as "equitable grading practices," that let students turn in work late, retake tests and receive points for assignments they didn't do. "Critics argue that such an approach can backfire, because, if done poorly, it conveys to students that deadlines, homework, and effort don’t matter," writes McMurtrie. A Fordham critique argued that the practices “lower academic standards and are likely to do long-term damage to the educational equity their advocates purport to advance.”

…..

“Whether or not you want to blame the students is beside the point; what matters is that we are churning out students who know nothing and don't have the tools to find out. Slap a headline and a lede out there that creates a narrative and you have them buying what you are selling. 

“Not every student, of course, but more than enough to erode our society's foundations.”

FWIW: Just the loss of Shakespeare is enough for me to mourn for our civilization, let alone Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if I were a kinder soul, I’d feel pity for the poor, dumb creatures who will never have the incredible pleasure of losing themselves in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D, or any one of Mozart’s piano concertos. As it is, I just feel sorry for the world.

Shame, shame on these brainless twits

/

“Ooooh, aren’t we just such adorably cute radicals? “

If only the young ladies shown posing in their newly acquired keffiyeh fashion statements could see the heartbreaking video I’m linking to below, they might not so proudly support their terrorist heros; on the other hand, they’d probably just squeal, turn away and run to their professors for reassurance that it’s just not true.

Ed Morrisey, HotAir:

Hamas Hostage Video: 'Here Are the Girls Who Can Get Pregnant'

Bodycam footage from the terrorists shows the moment the bloodied young women, operating at the Nahal Oz base outside the Gaza Strip, were handcuffed and pressed against a wall by Hamas while surrounded by the corpses of their colleagues.

In the sickening video, the terrorists could be heard gloating and announcing their plans to sexually assault the soldiers. 

“Here are the girls who can get pregnant,” one of the gunmen said. "So beautiful."

Here's the video, but I warn readers that this is violent and disturbing:

I’ll second Morrissey’s warning. It is so very, very sad, that I’ve gone back and forth wondering whether to post it or not. But I decided it really should be disseminated as widely as possible, even on little blogs like this one. By all means, don’t watch it if you don’t want these monsters to ruin your evening.

A video depicting female IDF observers being kidnapped from their IDF’s Nahal Oz base into the Gaza Strip on October 7 was released on Wednesday evening, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced.

The video, taken from Hamas terrorists’ body cameras, is a little over three minutes long and has been censored.