Roundup
(1) Hunter Biden’s “Big Guy.”
(2) Post-lockdown college students feel aimless and disconnected:
In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. As many as 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.
“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them”…
This entire generation is likely to be marked in some way – and not a good one – by their lockdown experience, and that experience was similar around the developed world.
(3) Mass shooting in a Brooklyn subway injures 28. The shooter is still at large:
A manhunt is underway in New York City for a suspect accused of donning a gas mask, setting off a smoke canister and opening fire inside a Brooklyn subway train and station during the morning commute Tuesday, injuring at least 28 people, five of whom are in critical condition.
The attack began around 8:24 a.m., as a Manhattan-bound N train approached the 36th St. station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The suspect, described as an approximately 5-foot-5 Black male with a heavy build, is still at large and is “dangerous,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters nearly four hours after the shooting.
The suspect’s shots struck multiple people on the subway car and on the platform, New York Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. He was wearing a green “construction type” vest and a hooded gray sweatshirt. The suspect has not been identified by authorities, Sewell said.
A gas mask and a hoodie would make him very difficult to identify, although not impossible. I wonder how widely documented his movements were; it would depend on how many surveillance cameras there are in New York and how widely dispersed. It’s amazing that no one was has died yet in such a large attack – although there’s still time for that with so many in critical condition.
(4) New York’s lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, is indicted on corruption charges in a campaign finance scheme. The charges are bribery, fraud, and falsification of records. Sounds positively ordinary these days, doesn’t it?
(5) Oklahoma outlaws all abortions except the medically necessary. It does not criminalize the woman; only the health care provider. Nor does it criminalize drugs like the morning-after pill. I predict a court challenge. If I’m not mistaken, this new law is the strictest anti-abortion legislation in the US at present.
Gas mask and a hoodie were probably not seen as weird in a COVID world.
I thought about that years ago when the COVID hysteria started and it went from if you wear a mask into a bank the police are called to the next day if you don’t wear a mask into a bank people freak out.
Pro crime policy!
New York’s unelected governor has turned out to be even worse than Cuomo, although there is a slight chance of her defeat in the fall (Zeldin, Astorino, and Giuliani Jr are all contending). On the topic of elections, France managed to run a free and fair contest (first round, with Le Pen and the bland and dreadful Macron facing off on the 24th) two days ago, with no early voting and no mail-in voting, along with paper ballots given only to those with proper photographic ID and then counted by hand. It is not simply concerning the topic of cuisine and wine that we have much to learn from the French.
Newsweek is reporting that the gunman was known by the FBI and DailyMail is reporting that NYPD found his rental van obtained in Philadelphia. Caveat; this stems from the FBI getting involved, so take it for what it is worth.
Shooting suspect was on an FBI terrorist list until 2019; cleared after multiple interviews. This, after earlier reports that there was “no indication of terrorism.” Setting off a smoke bomb and shooting people in a subway car is quite terrifying, I think.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10711479/NYPD-searching-man-gas-mask-rush-hour-explosion-shooting.html
1) no smoking gun
2) “The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.”
Sheep… do as they’re told.
3) “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Dostoevsky
4) who did he piss off?
5) The possible extenuating circumstances are obvious. Also, presumably God does not support rape and incest. In which case, ending a pregnancy that God never supported in the first place, would be a case of killing, rather than murder.
“Thou shalt not murder”.
The mistranslation; thou shalt not kill… has led to great confusion.
Doane is in Crete, Nebraska. I can assure you that the students at Creighton in Omaha are doing their work. That being said, I will NEVER forgive the media, Dems and China for the Wuhan virus. Our response was the biggest unforced error in American political history and we all will be paying a price for years.
The NYPD just made a statement on the shooting. A Glock-17 9mm with an extended magazine was used, with two spare extended mags. also found. At least 33 rounds were fired, the number shell casings found. I think they said that 10 people were shot, but a number of other injuries occurred from stampeding or other ancillary accidents.
Though the perp also had a hatchet, they did not mention any hatchet assaults. There is a BOLO out on a Mr. Frank James who rented the U-Haul used prior to the attack. They don’t know if Frank James is directly connected to the attack.
More than one of the relevant surveillance cameras were inoperative at the time.
I double checked. 10 shot, and 13 injured by smoke inhalation, falling down or panic attacks.
“I wonder how widely documented his movements were; it would depend on how many surveillance cameras there are in New York and how widely dispersed. ”
I noted an item in passing that reported a crucial camera or series of cameras in th e area were all out of service or broke. NEW YORK NEW YORK A WONDERFUL TOWN….
““They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.””
They’ve been made weak and made ready for the winnowing.
The Brian Benjamin indictment is not shocking, but it is puzzling to me.
Benjamin got a chunk of taxpayer money funneled to a developer (I assume there was a legal channel for that cash payment which is a little troubling under any circumstance) who then turned around and used straw donors to funnel a portion of that cash back into Benjamin’s campaign for comptroller.
There is no claim that Benjamin pocketed any of the cash. Should we presume that there was going to be pocketable cash available to him as comptroller? (Benjamin didn’t win the election.)
The fraud happened some time ago. While the wheels of justice were turning on that case the new governor of NY appointed Mr. Benjamin to the Lt. Gov’s office.
This is wild speculation on my part, but I’ve often wondered if one of the prerequisites for selection or appointment to these semi-high offices is that the candidate must disclose prior criminal activities (or something extremely salacious) to the boss so that the latter will have leverage and control over the former.
Gerard V.,
I prefer “New York, New York, It’s a hell of a town.” Or is it helluva?
Let’s not run down Neo’s hometown. After all, where else can you say, “You can take a subway to anywhere in the world.”? (Bulletproof vest recommended. My wife and I used subways exclusively way back in 2017.)
I’m not sure that is still true, but it once was. I was flabbergasted in 2017 when I had to hunt and hunt for a bagel in the Wall St. district.
When abortion was created as a constitutional right, not many states had it legal.
I have contended for decades that women, in aggregate, are spiting men due to long historical oppression and that is through abortion. At the same time, in general, women are playing God or a god in this in being the sole arbiter of what is human life or not. Again, to spite men.
Three things about Crete, Nebraska:
1. Doane College.
2. Crete Carrier trucking company.
3. The dog food factory.
That entire generation of students were never educated, but indoctrinated. The college age kids I come in contact with are astonishingly ill educated. I once mentioned to one of them that it was the anniversary of Midway, and was astonished to discover that we had fought a war with Japan.
@TommyJay – did you ever find Leo’s? Best bagels around Wall St.
My coworker was in the station where the shooting happened. She was on the train across the platform. Two of the injured ran onto her train bleeding from gunshots. There were announcements to get off right away, but she waited out of fear of being trampled. With good reason, it turns out!
You always hear about random stabbings, shootings, assaults, etc. in NYC but this is the scariest thing that’s happened in a while. A lot of people didn’t want to take the subway with the suspect at large. I heard Uber and Lyft have been accused of jacking up prices today. It looked like it when I compared prices on the Uber and the Curb (NYC taxi) apps.
Kate Marley is writing about college age students; what I think we have yet to see is what this has done to the younger K-12 age generation.
Two of my co-workers with kids that age have mentioned their kids have been impacted by the lock down and especially the mask wearing. They have told me their kids are more lethargic. Hopefully, they are still young enough to bounce back.
My one co-worker tried to get his kids out of the house every day while we were all working from home – bicycle riding with dad at the end of the day, walking around the neighborhood with mom and dad during lunch, etc. It helped that they live in a suburban area with open space.
My other co-worker has kids that couldn’t even get out of their apartment because they live in Manhattan and the local park (which they have considered to be like their backyard) was closed for fear it would attract too many people. Ha! This guy, who has always said that he didn’t want to live in the suburbs because of the commute has been house hunting with his wife on weekends in the suburbs!
A year or two being shut in was hard on adults; but the same time frame on kids when their are developing social skills, school learning, etc. is a big chunk of their lives they will not get back.
shadow,
I had not been in Manhattan for so long that the little familiarity that I once had was forgotten. I found a day old bagel at some Asian cafeteria place. Ugh.
For the most part, I was never concerned about safety there.
TexasDude:
No doubt some women were interested in spiting men, but you are WAY overgeneralizing.
First of all, I was around at the time of Roe, and plenty of men breathed a sigh of relief because instead of shotgun weddings they could just say, “Hey, have an abortion!” Plenty of men impregnated women they couldn’t have cared less about nor did they care about any child of that union, much less to support any child of that union. So, many women deciding to have abortions were deciding it all on their own.
When Roe was decided, this was the legal situation:
In a lot of states where abortion was legal if it endangered the woman’s health, that often included mental health and was liberally interpreted. But more importantly, there was a huge illegal abortion industry everywhere. I wrote some about that here.
Brian Benjamin, what a schmuck! He should have funneled that taxpayer money to a crony in Ukraine – he’d be home free now.
Cornhead on April 12, 2022 at 7:19 pm “Our response was the biggest unforced error in American political history and we all will be paying a price for years.”
On the bright side, this was a fairly benign and short term application of tyranny compared to what might have been employed under the fear of Covid. It can and has served as a wake up call for many about the fragility of our liberties and the need for a counter march through the institutions to regain what has been declining over the last 100+ years.
(3) Mass shooting in a Brooklyn subway injures 28.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/04/12/update-on-brooklyn-attack-though-some-media-outlets-omit-key-detail-regarding-shooter-n549478
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/04/12/breaking-person-of-interest-identified-in-brooklyn-subway-attack-n549522
Oklahoma outlaws all abortions except the medically necessary.
Progress… no. A conservation of principles that follow principals. There is no mystery in sex and conception, a woman, and man, have four choices, and a right to self-defense through reconciliation.
The normalization of elective abortion a.k.a. planned parent/hood was a wicked solution to a purportedly hard problem: “burden” relief h/t Obama, feminist and masculinist ambition, clinical cannibalism #CecileTheCannibal, shared responsibility, social progress, underage sex qua pedophilia absent political congruence (“=”), and to keep women appointed, available, and taxable.
RE #2: I have two daughters, a 16 year old HS sophomore and a 19 year old in college.
IMO, the lock down certainly hasn’t helped, but the real culprit for their listlessness are their phones. They are both literally addicted to them, and they are not exceptional by any means. Many young (and some not so young) adults are not far behind.
#2 “The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.”
This student may actually be the paragon of students that he claims to be.
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/04/12/woke-kid-goes-ballistic-the-moment-ben-shapiro-proves-him-wrong-n549449
}}} Three things about Crete, Nebraska:
1. Doane College.
2. Crete Carrier trucking company.
3. The dog food factory.
#4: Are the people who live there Cretins?
Inquiring minds want to know!! :-9
Re: Students and disengagement
My house was flooded in Ida. Since then, the dislocation, change to years of habits, stress and anxiety have had a strong and similar effect on me at work and my sons in school. It is a manifestation of PTSD. We broke, in a sense, if not in fact. It did take Covid + losing home (at least for a few more months). It is not hard to imagine that , over the larger population, some individuals and groups might be more susceptible to shocks like ‘everything has changed, nothing makes sense.’ It’s not like late teens have anything like that going on. :rolleyes:
I am mostly shocked that the narrative is allowed to share this now.
Apparently the “person of interest” in the shooting posted numerous racist, violence threatening rants on youtube. Not banned. But don’t you dare say anything about ivermectine or that the 2020 election was stolen.
Lots of ugly details here on “person of interest” Frank James’s social media presence. He hates white people, hates Trump, supports black nationalism.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/04/12/person-of-interest-in-brooklyn-subway-attack-has-social-media-accounts-full-of-extremism-n549568
But they tell us that black people cannot be racist; only oppressors (white people) are racist. Expect this story to drop from mainstream media soon.
WRT cell phones:
Weirdest thing. You’ll see people standing around, cell phone in hand–held up, not at their side–not using it. Saw one guy in a theater while we waited for the previous showing to end. Ten minutes. Wondered if there was an orthopedic practice which would fix your elbow so you could do that.
In Panera, guy standing there, phone held up. Five minutes awaiting his order. Order called. He spent TWO MORTAL MINUTES trying to finesse the order, it was pretty big, into an arrangement which he could carry with his other hand, the cell phone hand still aloft. I was wondering how far that was going to spread, a couple of the containers looking like soup. Eventually, his brain cell came to the conclusion that, if he put the phone in his pocket, he could carry the order.
So I’ve started watching how many times I’ve seen people with the phone in one hand…unused…having to do something awkwardly. Elbow the door, shove the chair with a hip, laboriously shift the phone to the other hand–last resort–and have come to a conclusion these people are idiots.
In the event of emergency, or just a quick-appearing something needing to be done, their response is going to be slow and ineffective because they don’t carry the phone in their pocket. They put extra effort into carrying the phone aloft, absorbing the awkwardness, all without need and without thinking. Why?
The identified perp is evidently a black guy, so the narrative will be gun control.
Perhaps one reason college kids appear disconnected is that there are too many of them that really should not be in college; they go to college because that’s what they are “supposed” to do.
The colleges get paid upfront; either directly from the student’s family or from a govt. loan so the colleges have nothing at risk, financially, in student outcomes.
Further the number of “majors” that are totally useless and/or simply
propaganda / indoctrination (e.g., black/women/LGBT/latino, etc. studies; what I call the “hate majors.”) seems to increase as fast as well-above-the-inflation-rate college tuition.
By useless majors I mean those majors that have graduates applying for jobs as waiters or as baristas or working in retail.
All jobs can be useful, albeit many serving as stepping stones to higher paying/better jobs, but a college degree is not needed to become a waiter.
Perhaps one reason college kids appear disconnected is that there are too many of them that really should not be in college; they go to college because that’s what they are “supposed” to do.
The thing is, as a higher and higher % of each cohort obtains some tertiary schooling, it can put the remainder at a competitive disadvantage (depending on which segment of the labor market they’re working). The college degree is now a labor market signal of trainability. The young may learn some actual skills therein, but often they will not be able to find work in their field and what they have is the market signal. On the way to obtaining those skills, oodles of time are wasted on obtaining distribution credits and futzing around because you need those 120 credits for your BA.
Further the number of “majors” that are totally useless and/or simply
propaganda / indoctrination (e.g., black/women/LGBT/latino, etc. studies; what I call the “hate majors.”)
The young know those programs are hooey and almost no one majors in them. Out of 1.9 million baccalaureate degrees awarded each year, fewer than 2,000 are in ‘women’s studies’, and women’s studies is the most popular of the victimology majors. These programs are a scandal, but the scandal is that institutional funds are being used for patronage for privileged political interests. Another problem is that the course lists of conventional academic departments can be distorted and disfigured by the imperative to produce cross-listed courses for victimology programs.
About 2/3 of those who obtain baccalaureate degrees major in occupational subjects. Business disciplines (business administration, accounting, finance, marketing, general business &c), schoolteaching (‘elementary education’ &c), nursing, IT, physical education, ‘criminal justice’ & c. are the order of the day most of the time. In this realm, there’s a scandal much more consequential than the victimology programs: the degradation of teacher training. It’s been infested with faddish and ill-considered hooey for a long time, but in recent decades it’s been scandalously politicized.
Those running the education scam have known for decades to discourage kids taking “gap” years. They couch it in losing school skills, but in reality, having a break from the scam and some of the marks wise up. And these students being lamented now, are the ones who came back. Many, many of the best and brightest broke from “school helplessness” and have taken charge of their education.
College is a declining proposition held up by old Boomers who are nostalgic for the college that they, themselves, refused to continue when they became professors. By the 1980s, when those in college in the ’60s and early ’70s were becoming full professors, the English and Liberal Arts were already in decline. No way I would have gotten the rigorous writing skills my brother got as a history major in the early 1970s when I entered college in 1980s. But then, at what turned out to be the ending of the 1970s economic, uhm, disaster, I, and many others, went for real skills in those horrible vocational majors. I started out in engineering, but got arrogant and got my degree in Physics. I wanted to know about this nuclear/atomic that Ronald Reagan was going to kill us all with (he didn’t).
And even since the 1980s, the world has changed, leaving colleges almost an anachronism they change so slowly. Economics professor Ed Leamer offered an excellent insight into the future of colleges.
===========
–Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor’s degree, you’re going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you’d get a great job.
He’s lying or you’re quoting him out of context. About 25% of the 1947 cohort cadged a baccalaureate degree. The share of professional, administrative, and supervisory jobs in the economy is about that. In 1969 as today, they’re occupied by people of various attainments and ages who have been promoted within the ranks, along with some new blood from the collegiate population. There are also skilled jobs which are not professional, administrative, or supervisory; the BA degree is a gateway for some and not for others (then as now).
I believe some of the fiction of Ann Beattie (a contemporary of our moderator) gives a sense of how many college-educated people felt about their work lives and their prospects in that era.
So, my view is we’ve got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century.
Actually, what he’s telling you is that you need to replace schooling with apprenticeships.
I’d be interested in the number of minors which are from victimology studies. Or, for that matter, how many victimology credits even if short of a minor, the average BA includes.
The idea of the “trades” includes several items. One is…working for the power company, for example, out in the field. That sort of thing. Another is working for the HVAC company in town. Different skills. But underneath it is the picture of the guy who IS the plumber, owns the HVAC company. This guy has to be a businessman and a people person. Skills are necessary but not sufficient.
Interestingly, I just had an argument last night with a friend of mine who is notably younger (32, IIRC — I’m 63). He’s highly intelligent, but when we discussed teaching stuff, he Just Could Not Get It.
He was complaining about 10th grade geometry class, where he failed a test on doing proofs, because he could not remember certain terms. He also indicated that no class he ever took in math, including some higher level classes, had EVER been open book.
I attempted to point out to him that the schools and teachers he had sucked big time. Because all they were teaching was rote memorization, and not the processes needed to do the job functionally**. He really, really resisted this idea.
I tried to make it clear to him that, after around Calculus, and even during calculus, all tests should be open book. The teacher should be looking for you to understand the processes and ideas and use them effectively, not merely to recite the book contents back to him.
My own personal experience, with over 63 semester hours of math at Calculus level and above — including 2 “5000” level math courses and 2 “6000” level math courses, all with As and Bs, was that, post-calculus, almost every teacher had take home tests. There were a couple exceptions, but that was how most handled it. The tests required you to USE the techniques to solve problems you had not seen before. Yes, it opened up the possibility of cheating, of having someone else do the actual work, but, first off, if you did that, you’d be getting more and more lost as the class progressed, and, when a teacher looked to you for an answer, it would be obvious. Equally important, if you did successfully cheat your way through one class, would that same “helper” be available — and useful — to you on the next class? And you’d be even more lost right from the start… and it would be quickly obvious — even if you had memorized terms — because you could not do the work
He just could not Get That. He kept saying that ever course he’d ever taken, including a few beyond calculus, involved at most maybe a little note card of information, never the whole book, much less the entire test being a take-home.
I grant this doesn’t work with some disciplines, but, in general, it usually does — because the process means that the teacher has to do a better job of creating tests… they have to write tests that invoke process, not memorization, which makes grading more difficult, because you can’t just look at the answer, and glance over the rest. You have to actually look at the work the student did.
As an example, having a class in a foreign language… after the most basic courses, you should be testing how well they translate idiom and localized usages, not one-for-one word replacement… so having a dictionary for the interchange of the languages is irrelevant: you are looking at the nuance, at how “L’esprit de l’escalier” does not mean the “feeling in the staircase”, but means that hindsight realization of what you SHOULD have said before you left the room. Of realizing that “Todos El Mundo” isn’t “All the World” but “Everyone” in English. And obviously much more complex understanding of whole sentences and such which have special meanings in and of themselves.
I’m put in mind of an old joke — supposedly, back in the 60s, one of the first efforts at machine translation, they developed a Russian-English and English-Russian translator.
So they put “out of sight, out of mind” into it, translated to Russian, then back to English.
What they got back was “Invisble Insanity”. 😀
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** And when I say “functionally”, I don’t just mean only “in a job situation”, but, for mathematics, as an example, how learning higher math teaches you to think rigorously, as well as to examine multiple sides of a viewpoint automatically. In the end, for the most part, much of math advancement involves taking something you have no idea how to solve, and manipulating it via a set of processes, until it appears as something you DO know how to solve. REALLY major advancements also involve inventing new processes for manipulation (and proving those processes “work” accurately). And then reversing the solution you know by an inverse set of processes to get back to the thing you previously did not know how to solve, and so forth.
To learn to do higher math, you have to learn to be very good at applying those processes consistently, cleanly, and reliably. THIS in itself provides a very useful life skill: You become fairly good at applying that behavior to your own mental analysis of the Real World. You’re more able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to make sure that your deductions and inductions remain valid. Yes, you’re still human, subject to error and bias, but a better thinking one, more able to avoid both of those…
For languages, since I used that example, I’d think in terms of how you read nuance in multiple languages…
obloody
Having learned or been exposed to Latin, French, Spanish and Vietnamese, I have a different take.
As a general rule, people speaking to a non-native speaker aren’t going to slosh me with nuance and slang unless they’re trying to be funny or something. Which wouldn’t be funny, in any event.
So for every brain erg I used learning about the wisdom of the staircase, I have not that available to learn an actual, technical word I might need to know in situations more grave than thinking about what I should have said.
In Vietnamese, “friend” and “shoot” are the same syllable but with different intonations. Rather spend my brain ergs learning that FOR SURE than a cheerfully suggestive way of greeting a cute young woman in an ao dai.
Once you can get around in standard whichever, you can learn to josh with the boys.
And that’s more than the basic courses.
My wife and daughter are Spanish teachers. When leaving a message for one or the other, they say, ‘llamame espalda”. It’s kind of a joke based on what the students get when they use on-line translators. Try that on someone who doesn’t know it’s a joke….