It’s not about Arday. It’s about the rot in colleges that’s been going on for a long long time.

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know how far the rot extends to other countries, but it’s certainly pervasive in the US and Britain. I suspect it’s even worse at elite institutions than at institutions that once were thought of as being of lesser quality.

The scandal of the Arday story isn’t really about Arday, it’s more about his fawning enablers. But even that isn’t broad enough, because it’s about an entire system that let this happen. For it’s not just a story about plagiarism getting past a committee. Nor is it just a DEI story about race and neurodiversity, although it’s about that as well. It’s not even just about a fabulist whose lies were so obvious no one should have believed them. Primarily it’s a story about universities that have utterly lost their way. The reason I say that is that the people who have actually read Arday’s academic work or listened to speeches he’s given have concluded that the content itself is garbage – and that includes both the plagiarized parts and the parts he seems to have composed. Unintelligible, ungrammatical, meaningless sloganeering.

Arday should not have been hired as a professor anywhere, much less at Cambridge. And yet he was not only hired, but praised to the skies in an almost ecstatic frenzy.

Everyone involved with this needs to go, and universities need to rethink their entire curriculum in race studies and gender studies and in particular the education departments. It’s of absolutely zero surprise that the Arday affair involved the education department of Cambridge. Education departments have always had less rigorous scholarship than most other departments, but in recent years they have become deeply political and deeply woke.

Will this happen? To put it bluntly: no.

[NOTE: These trends were already starting in the 1960s. I’ve written many times about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as well as the 1969 Cornell uprising. Here are some previous posts and an article on the subjects: this list as well as this post and this account by Thomas Sowell.]

AOC giggles her way to an excuse

The New Neo Posted on by

Even a writer at CNN is not impressed:

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” the New York congresswoman said on ABC’s “This Week,” before laughing.

Ocasio-Cortez, who once supported defunding the police, went on to suggest Covid had expanded the range of acceptable political discourse. But she said that it’s “not rhetoric that we would use today.”

This might be a politically deft explanation for Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk. But it’s a bad one for the body politic. It continues a troubling trend of major politicians asking Americans not to take the things they say — or more specifically, that they once said — at face value.

The article goes on to describe other politicians laughing it off as a weird or crazy time. Well, it was indeed that, but they said what they said and are responsible. And it’s only gotten weirder and crazier.

More on those years, from Wisconsin’s gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong:

“I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter, but when you’re a business owner running a restaurant during Covid, trying to pay bills as a student, you’re putting feelings out there into the world,”?Hong told Politico. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned.”

Yes, she’s learned to dissemble in order to fool voters. She wasn’t trying to appeal to voters back then.

But I’ll leave it to Ami Kozak to give you an idea of what AOC would be saying if she were to be honest. I love this guy:

Miscarriages, Fauci, and the COVID shot

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Fauci was a plague on this country. He made things up regarding masks and distances, he promoted shutdowns that harmed people, and he was a self-aggrandizing narcissist.

And yet I will be defending him at least somewhat on the current topic, that of miscarriages and the COVID shot. The story:

Dr. Anthony Fauci privately raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could “theoretically” be linked to miscarriages in expectant mothers, despite having publicly insisted there were “no red flags” for pregnant women.

“I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” wrote Fauci in a Jan. 25, 2021, text exchange with then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

“Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester,” added the then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.

So, there was a theoretical risk, but no data. Recall that there was the same or worse theoretical risk from getting COVID itself.

More:

Days later, on Feb. 3, Fauci said during a question-and-answer livestream with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that the FDA “found thus far, and we have to be careful, but thus far no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”

So, what’s a “red flag”? Is it a theoretical risk, or does there need to be actual data saying there’s a higher-than-normal risk after the shot? And to what should the risk be compared – healthy women or women who contract COVID itself? The shot doesn’t prevent COVID, but it did initially ameliorate the most severe symptoms of early strains, and early 2021 involved relatively early strains.

In the end, what we’re really debating here is how to inform the public of a theoretical risk without doing more harm than good. What if Fauci had said this to the public: “We have no data on the shot in pregnant woman, but there’s a theoretical risk that a second dose might precipitate a higher-than-normal number of miscarriages. However, so can getting COVID. So you need to make your decision based on that information or lack thereof”?

That would have been truthful. But since there was no evidence at all one way or another about the shot and miscarriages, would it have been best to say that? Or would it have discouraged pregnant women from getting a shot that, on the whole, might have done more good than harm for them at the time? I don’t have an answer, although I think the truth should have been told anyway.

And in no way do I think the shots should have been mandatory.

As for the actual evidence that later emerged on the topic of the COVID shot and miscarriages, there is no evidence that it increases the rates of miscarriage. Now, if you have come to distrust all science reports on this topic – and I could understand why you might have concluded that – you’ll just shrug that off and believe whatever you want. But that’s not science; that’s belief in anecdotal evidence on the order of “my friend got a COVID shot and a week later she had a miscarriage, therefore the shot caused the miscarriage.” That proves nothing, because miscarriage rates are very high and have been high even without COVID or the shot.

I was open to the idea that COVID shots might exacerbate miscarriages, and I looked and looked for evidence of that, but the overwhelming result of research is that the shots do not raise the miscarriage rates (see this for example, but there are plenty more studies of that type). The evidence on COVID itself is the following:

Pregnant women were initially excluded from the initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials, as they are from most trials. However, experts have recommended the vaccines for pregnant women since they were first released to the public because of the disproportionate risks this group faces compared to the general population. Pregnant women are at higher risk to experience severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to nonpregnant women, and are at greater risk of needing to be hospitalized, admitted to the intensive care unit, and intubated. COVID-19 is also associated with pregnancy complications such as preterm birth or stillbirth.

Health authorities are supposed to give recommendations that balance the risks. Is full disclosure necessary? I’m in favor of it, but I realize that sometimes the risk/benefit ratio is difficult to process and understand. In the case of COVID, many lies were told and many errors made, increasing the suffering of many people and hurting society as a whole in a myriad of ways. But the miscarriage message turns out to have not been harmful, and compared to all the rest it’s very very minor.

[NOTE: If you’re interested, here’s an article on miscarriage rates in general, which occur in approximately 30% of pregnancies. The rates have been rising year after year at a rate of about 1% per year, but that trend started before COVID or COVID shots.]

Confessions of a former DSA organizer

The New Neo Posted on by

If you watch only one video on the DSA, I strongly suggest this one. It’s an interview with a former member from back when the organization was advocating more of a European-style welfare state. He watched it morph almost overnight into the extreme left-wing group it is now, and dates the change to around 2014-2015. He is very angry, and has dedicated himself to fighting DSA, even to the point of supporting its opponents on the right such as Michigan’s Mike Rogers.

It’s definitely worth a listen, IMHO:

Trump seems to have decided to take the economic pressure route on Iran for now

The New Neo Posted on by

At least, that’s what he’s saying at the moment:

“We are low-keying it,” Trump said during a brief phone call.

“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”

He stressed that Iran “is in very bad shape” economically and has no money to pay its troops. The U.S. naval blockade has exacerbated the Iranian regime’s economic crisis, Trump said.

At the same time, Trump said that with oil down to slightly over $75 a barrel, U.S. consumers are feeling less pain from the war.

“It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game,” Trump said of the back-and-forth with Iran.

I had long thought that it was the Iranians (Persians) who invented chess, but that’s not exactly true:

The history of chess can be traced back nearly 1,500 years to its earliest known predecessor, called chaturanga, in India; its prehistory is the subject of speculation. From India it spread to Persia, where it was modified in terms of shapes and rules and developed into shatranj. Following the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Europe via Spain (Al Andalus) and Italy (Emirate of Sicily). The game evolved roughly into its current form by about 1500 CE.

How is Iran actually doing economically and politically?

U.S. officials also say there are growing disagreements inside the Iranian regime. One camp, led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, is extremely worried about an economic collapse and believes Iran needs to reach a deal with the U.S. Another led by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, rejects any concessions.

“Good cop, bad cop”? I very much doubt that either is actually a good cop.

I don’t especially trust any predictions on Iran, so I’ll skip them.

There’s also this:

After months of conflict, Iranian officials decided the United States should compensate them for damages tied to the war. …

[Trump replied]:

“It is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts,” Trump countered.

He went on to mention the USS Cole bombing from nearly 26 years ago and suggested compensation to America should include consideration of “thousands of others killed in combat.”

“Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months,” he added.

Trump said he has instructed his representatives to include the compensation demand into “any, and all, future negotiations.”

I don’t think negotiations have much of a future. But then, I never did think so.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) From what I can tell, the Irish civil war threat over “migrants” from an entity called the “New IRA” comes from a single source. I’m not convinced it has much if any meaning:

The New IRA is planning a violent campaign aimed at driving migrants out of Ireland, intelligence officials have warned.

Security bosses fear the republican group, which succeeded the Real IRA, has been exploiting “tensions” on both sides of the Irish border. …

A video appeared last week on social media in which an unidentified man issued threats against migrants on behalf of the IRA.

“They will take control, and they will give an ultimatum, not to politicians but to the illegal migrants who are in the country,” he says.

The man claimed the British Army had “respected” the IRA during the Troubles for their effectiveness and “professionalism”.

(2) Netanyahu says no to the 15-point Gaza plan:

“I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document. I have heard people saying, ‘You didn’t say that.’ So here I am saying it again,” he told a Cabinet meeting, referring to the peace plan set out by Trump last year. “The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed,” he added. …

The peace plan called for a phased withdrawal of Israel’s troops from Gaza alongside the disarmament of Hamas, but Netanyahu said Israeli forces are not going anywhere until Hamas completely disarms first.

“When I say Hamas must be disarmed, I mean heavy weapons, lighter weapons, all weapons. We are talking about genuine disarmament, not a fictitious one,” Netanyahu said Sunday.

Hamas had last month said that it would disarm, but only after Israel withdraws completely and stops all hostilities.

It sounds as though Gaza had rejected it first. And of course Israel wasn’t going to withdraw before any disarmament: been there; done that, and 10/7 was the result. Israel may have been asleep at the wheel that day, but Netanyahu is not planning a repeat, if he can help it.

(3) The WNBA is a travesty. The racial tensions are vast:

But that’s not the only problem. Another one is that they’re trying to figure out what the “W” in WNBA stands for, now that a few men have figured out they can declare themselves women, do nothing to change anything about themselves other than that, and qualify to play in the league. It’s a clever way to point out the insanity of the point we’ve reached on trans sports issues:

Former NBA player Royce White plans to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft — the second former pro to test the league’s policy on trans athletes.

White, 35, a Republican candidate for US Senate who only played three games in his short NBA career, made the announcement on Friday on the heels of former first round draft pick and Knicks center Enes Kanter Freedom’s declaration earlier in the day.

“I’m transgender. I’m a woman… I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purposes of… professional basketball,” White told Fox News.

Oopsies, says the WNBA. Time to define “woman”? More:

White said the move challenges the league to define parameters clearly and indicated he would pursue the declaration regardless, stating he does not want to be discriminated against.

“I think the WNBA could come out and make a definitive statement about guys with a pair of balls playing in the Women’s Association,” White told Fox. …

The Women’s National Basketball Players Association issued a statement on Friday addressing the broader debate:

“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”

You’ve already inserted yourself into politics and chosen sides.

(4) More brilliance from DSA:

Here’s more about the exchange. Also, more on Dr. Gill, who is “a resident physician in psychiatry at Los Angeles General Medical Center.” Wow, just wow:

According to watchdog reports from Canary Mission, Gill has been active with the DSA since at least 2019, boasting on social media back in June 2020 that her medical school class group chat was “blowing up with people talking about why they support defunding the police!” Today, she is licensed to practice psychiatry and neurology in California while sitting on the DSA’s 2025–2027 National Political Committee.

Idiocracy is here.

(5) On the much brighter side – remember that 16-year old lifeguard whose successful rescue of a 10-year-old boy was caught on video that went viral? Here’s a fascinating breakdown of what the lifeguard was doing during the rescue:

Cohan and Cagney

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of you have probably seen the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy” starring James Cagney as George M. Cohan. I watched it on TV many times as a child, and loved it.

A while back I read that Cagney’s stiff-legged dancing in that film was an imitation of Cohan’s idiosyncratic dance style, and I started to wonder whether there was any film of Cohan dancing or singing. He died in 1942, so there should be something of the sort.

Not much, as it turns out. But a bit.

First, here’s Cohan singing “Over There” in 1936, when he was 58 years old:

And here’s Cagney singing the same song in the movie. He only sings a small part of the song, but gives it the same high energy. The movie was released in June, 1942 (Cohan died in November of that year, but apparently saw the movie). That was well -into WWII, although “Over There” was a song from WWI. But you can see why it meant so much at the time.

The following is the only footage I could find of Cohan dancing (it’s Cagney singing in the background, though). It’s about a minute long:

This is Cagney doing much the same number in the film “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They’re both playing FDR, by the way, wearing a top hat:

I think you can see how well Cagney captured Cohan’s style. There were quite a few similarities between them: both had backgrounds in vaudeville, both were of Irish ethnicity (Cagney mostly, anyway), and both were relatively short (5’6″ for Cohan and 5’4″ for Cagney).

You can feel the playfulness and energy practically blast off the screen in both versions. Those were different times, weren’t they?

A wedding at Notre Dame

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a feel-good story:

A carpenter who helped restore Notre-Dame after the devastating 2019 fire was granted permission to marry inside the cathedral, becoming part of its first wedding ceremony in 30 years.

A remarkable exception was made when 29-year-old master carpenter Martin Lorentz was allowed to marry his fiancée, Jade, inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Lorentz had spent three years hand-carving the massive oak beams used to rebuild “the Forest”—the cathedral’s intricate medieval roof structure, which was destroyed in the devastating 2019 fire. Because Notre-Dame is classified as a national monument rather than a parish church, private weddings have been prohibited for decades, making theirs the first ceremony held there since 1995.

In recognition of Lorentz’s dedication to the cathedral’s restoration, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich personally granted the rare permission. Around 500 guests attended the ceremony, including family, friends, and many of the craftsmen who helped bring Notre-Dame back to life. As the newlyweds left the cathedral, Lorentz’s fellow carpenters formed a traditional guard of honor, raising their axes overhead in a moving tribute to the man who helped rebuild one of France’s most treasured landmarks.

Hand-carving oak beams for three years.

Card-carrying DSA members: more Michigan news

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously written about the quandary faced by far-leftist DSA members/supporters in the general election. After winning the primary as radicals, how do they convincingly tack at least a bit towards the middle?

Here’s how one candidate for the US House of Representatives from Michigan’s 7th District, William Lawrence, dealt with it (the clip is about two and a half minutes long):

William Lawrence’s life story resembles so many other DSA member profiles, although it doesn’t include immigrant parents or having been born in another country. Lawrence was born in Madison, Wisconsin, a deep blue university community, but was raised in East Lansing, Michigan (another university community), son of two law professors at Michigan State University. He graduated from Swarthmore (sociology and anthropolgy degree) – a deeply leftist college – and was a climate activist there and ever since, as well as having been trained in community organizing. And of course, he says Israel has committed genocide.

In that clip of Lawrence explaining his DSA membership lapse, he looks a bit like a deer in the headlights. And yet he managed, in a fairly purple district, to defeat two formidable (and fairly moderate) rival Democrats: Ambassador Bridget Brink and former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam. Brink was an ambassador to Ukraine appointed by Biden, and in her mid-50s as opposed to Lawrence’s 36.

If you look at the primary results, you can see a familiar pattern. Lawrence got less than half: 43.7%, to be exact. But his two opponents split the difference fairly evenly: 28.8% for Brink and 27.6% for Maasdam. What would have happened had one of them dropped out? I can’t say, but there’s certainly a good chance the remaining candidate might have gotten nearly all the other’s votes and beaten Lawrence.

That didn’t happen. Lawrence will go up against Tom Barrett, the GOP incumbent, but it’s considered a swing district.

More Arday fallout: some students want their money back

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t blame them; his professorship was a scam for which the university is responsible. It showed a mindboggling absence of due diligence.

Apparently Arday was a tough grader, too:

A number of Mr Arday’s former students have complained that they received lower grades than expected after “inadequate” supervision by the professor. In one case, a student who asked to change supervisor was accused of being racist.

Separately, Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, is facing demands to refund the tuition fees of students who were taught by Mr Arday after they were “deceived about the nature of their education”.

A mass refund or large-scale retrospective grade changes would be unprecedented in the university’s 800-year history.

I would be nice if they had to give refunds out of their own salaries, but that will never happen. I actually don’t think any refunds will happen, although every student Arday taught should get a pro-rated one. If not, his former students should sue the university for some cause of action involving fraud.

It would be a fitting logical consequence if Cambridge was made to pay, but although that probably will not happen in the monetary sense, I think it’s already happened in terms of the school’s reputation. Also, not only Arday should be losing a job over this. It could start with these two ladies:

Prof Prentice is also facing criticism for failing to grip the crisis engulfing the university, which has damaged its reputation on the international stage. The academics have accused the £507,000-a-year leader of the university of “inaction”, having made no public comments since The Telegraph first reported on the plagiarism row around Mr Arday a fortnight ago. He has now resigned.

It has also emerged that when Cambridge was sent fresh evidence of Mr Arday’s alleged plagiarism last year – having first been alerted to it in 2023 – the “responsible person” allocated to the case was Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of Mr Arday’s faculty who had told him he was “the best in the world” when he was hired.

Were they DEI hires as well? Both are white women; Prentice seems to have a conventional background in social psychology, whereas Cremin seems profoundly granola-esque.

Ann Coulter has pointed out the prevalence of women among Arday’s champions, boosters, and helpers:

All the people promoting Arday seem to be women – agents, editors, co-authors, professors:

Arday’s book editors—Dawn Davis and Kris Doyle

Eve Claxton – co-wrote the book with Arday

Jennifer Gates – Arday’s book agent

Prof. Hilary Cremlin – called Arday’s research, “the best in the world”

So his memoir was “co-written.” Interesting. The book supposedly got an advance of 1.4 million dollars (I wrote “supposedly” because, as far as I can tell, that’s based on Arday’s own report; and we know how reliable that is). Guess what? It’s going to be released anyway; my guess is that it may sell even better because of the notoriety:

Despite allegations against Arday, Simon & Schuster said earlier this week it was planning to go ahead with the publication of his memoir on 11 August in the US and 27 August in the UK. Simon & Schuster US told the Guardian on Thursday night it was “proceeding with the publication of Great and Unfortunate Things by Jason Arday as planned”.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum. …

One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable.

It seems that “madness” is happening more and more as time goes on.

The book’s title is Great and Unfortunate Things, which I think is nearly perfect as a description of the entire debacle – not that the book goes into that; I’m going to assume it does not. There’s also this great promotional material:

In comments reported by the Bookseller in April, Kris Doyle, the nonfiction publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, said: “I can promise you’ve never read a story like this – even the viral news headlines don’t do it justice.”

Arday’s lies were entirely egregious, and it doesn’t seem as though the simplest checks were brought to bear. There was totally and complete trust, a willingness to believe that was fervently intense, and a self-congratulatory glow for having done so.

Some of the Cambridge faculty seem to be angry and want an independent investigation:

The signatories want an independent investigation into the circumstances of Arday’s appointment, and any risk assessment made by the university’s management “when crafting a media narrative focusing on his youth, his race, and his transformative potential”.

It also wants details of the university’s handling of allegations of academic misconduct against Arday, including whether the university was involved in efforts to deter journalists from reporting on the allegations.

The university has denied supporting Arday’s efforts to stop publication of critical coverage in the Times Higher magazine last year, or funding his use of lawyers.

The signatories also call for an evaluation of the “enormous damage this episode has done to people of colour within and beyond the Cambridge academic community, and what can be done immediately to reassure them – and the wider public – that anti-racism and academic integrity at Cambridge are both essential and mutually reinforcing.”

It seems to me they want to have their cake and eat it too. Are “anti-racism and academic integrity both essential and mutually reinforcing”? Yes – if and only if the anti-racism is based on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome.

Lastly, the more I think about the Arday case – and I’ve though about it a great deal – the more I think he wasn’t a DEI hire because of race alone. That was an element, of course. But I think the even-greater element in his story was his supposed profound autism and recovery to ascend the heights of intellectual thought. The two had a synergistic (shall we say intersectional?) effect, making him the perfect candidate for a university position based on sympathy, virtue-signaling, and wishful thinking.

[ADDENDUM: Some details on the complaints of some of Arday’s students:

Former Cambridge students who contacted The Telegraph complained that Mr Arday gave them minimal supervision, telling some they did not need supervision because they were so outstanding, only for them to get lower grades than predicted.

Interesting.]