The Bulls*** Web

Here’s what Nick found on just one slow-loading CNN article:

• Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB

• Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB

• Twenty frames

• Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB

• Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes — though it’s hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are “beacons” that load after the page is technically finished downloading.

When ticks me off is going to a ‘news’ site and finding I’m running scripts for Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and others I’ve never heard of. Why? I’ve never even been on Twitter or Reddit (and have no wish to be). As does the author, I now use script and ad blockers. This breaks some websites. So be it, I won’t go to them anymore. I just want to read the articles, not have an “interactive” experience.

Source: The Bulls*** Web

Susan B. Anthony List President: ‘Safe, Legal and Rare – That Old

Susan B. Anthony List President Majorie Dannenfelser said Thursday:

“Every single Democrat in the Senate had the chance that day to take a stand against infanticide, against murder. All but three of them refused. The inhumanity of the modern Democratic Party’s position on abortion has not been exposed. We should be grateful for that. Safe, legal, and rare – that old Clinton way of looking at it is just a distant memory. Safe, legal and rare is not their mantra,” she added. It

Indeed Bill Clinton did say ‘safe, legal, and rare’ on his campaign. But one of his first acts as President was to break that promise. He lifted restrictions on abortion in military hospitals.

This is not making it ‘rare’ and Majorie Dannenfelser should have known this. It was just another Democrat lie. Democrats are Deathocrats.

Source: Susan B. Anthony List President: ‘Safe, Legal and Rare – That Old

Is There Any Intellectual Value in ‘Gender Studies’? | National Review

Gender studies is not about trying to understand the world, but is all about trying to change it in certain ways. It doesn’t seek to convey a body of knowledge, but just a set of grievances.

So the answer is ‘no.’ The U.S. needs to follow Hungary in banning such programs in colleges and unversities.

Source: Is There Any Intellectual Value in ‘Gender Studies’? | National Review

Freeing the Humanities from Academia

The greatest assault on Western Civilization came from the inside, and what was once the deepest reposit of that knowledge: Academia. This is nowhere seem more deeply than in the purging of the humanities of millennia of learned knowledge and the wisdom of generations to make room for its antithesis.…

Hence, we must all take it upon ourselves to learn, cherish, and teach the great humanities of Western Civilization so that some piece of us lives on rather than be relegated tot he ash heap of history.

So say we all. Amen.

A quick followup: since I posted this I discovered a website called Erenow, “one of the largest collections of online free books on history.”

Did I mention free?

Source: Freeing the Humanities from Academia

Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

As for actual learning, our intellectual patrimony will be further eroded. Culturally illiterate students who could not name a single artist or philosopher from Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment will announce that Western civilization is racist and patriarchal. Being forced to study the West’s monumental accomplishments of imagination and reason, whether by Plato, Aeschylus, Mozart or Hume, jeopardizes their very survival, they will whine.

I’ve read Plato, Aeschylus, and Hume and my survival was never threatened. Well maybe I was in danger of laughing myself to death after reading the idiocy that is Hume.

 

Source: Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

Is There a Cure for the Modern University?

The reasons for the precipitous decline in academic rigor, standards, and outcomes are many and have been thoroughly canvassed.  It may be worth bulleting some of them here to suggest the scope of the problem: …

  • the transformation of a reading culture into a visual and digital culture, rendering students progressively incapable of mastering the nuances, complexities, and semantic rules of written language as well as the habit of, like, coherent, like, conversation.  Like, I kid you not, dude!

Source: Is There a Cure for the Modern University?

Anti-Science

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them.

This is easily seen in the ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ hoax where actual results are replaced with easily manipulated computer games (or ‘models’ as they are called). The results of these computer games, which can’t even accurately reproduce yesterday’s known weather, purport to predict the climate 30, 50, 100 years out. These results are then said to show catastrophe in the making unless we raise taxes to prevent it.

And if you don’t ‘believe’ that a) man is causing climate change and/or b) that raising taxes will miraculously reverse the trend, you are a ‘climate-denier’ and don’t ‘believe’ in science, as if science were a religion instead of a method of understanding the physical world.

I blame leftists who’ve dumbed down the education system so badly that people can’t think critically anymore. If a ‘scientist’ says so, it must be true. Disregard the fact that all of predictions made by these ‘scientists’ have failed to come to pass. The ice caps are still there, the glaciers haven’t melted, and the seas haven’t risen.

Source: Anti-Science

The Overthrow of the Great Books

The professors act this way because they are suffused with ressentiment. Ressentiment is, of course, Nietzsche’s term for a certain state of mind, or rather, a condition of being. He liked the French word because it signified a deeper psychology than the German (and English) equivalent does. Ressentiment is the attitude of slave morality, Nietzsche wrote, the moral formation of one who feels rage and envy but hasn’t the strength or courage to act upon them. A man of ressentiment knows and resents his own weakness and mediocrity, and he hates the sight of greatness, which only reminds the lesser party of his own inferiority. And so he fashions a new moral system whereby victimhood becomes a high badge, suspicion signifies a sensitive eye for justice, and group denunciation of lone dissenters is the surest path to virtue.

I grew up with a set of the Great Books in my home. I was the only one who used them, and I still have them. With a set of these books I don’t need to deal with, or pay exhorbitant sums to, mediocre professors (but I repeat myself).

Source: The Overthrow of the Great Books