US higher education is no meritocracy, and that doesn’t seem to be changing

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s the premise of this article:

For most of its history, America’s higher-education system, for all its flaws, operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. Talent mattered. The ability to retain information and apply it correctly mattered. Academic excellence was the surest path to opportunity. You didn’t need family connections (although they certainly helped). You didn’t need a billion-dollar last name (again, that didn’t hurt either). You needed results.

Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier.

Today, that operating system is being systematically dismantled. Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. In the modern Ivy League, identity is currency. Grievance is gold. Merit, once the only metric that really mattered, is treated like a relic of an oppressive past.

That’s been true for quite some time, and the article indicates that despite Trump’s efforts, nothing has really changed. Well, it’s early yet. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t change, because colleges are now dedicated not to learning but to destructive leftist goals.

The article doesn’t say too much else although it does give some details. But it brought to mind once again the fact that one of the main goals of today’s education in most Western countries is learning to hate your own country. It’s taught in lower levels and in higher ones, and it’s certainly not unique to the United States. In fact, it’s not only the US that is labeled hateful; it’s western civilization as a whole, and all its traditional values – one of which is meritocracy.

Which in turn reminds me of an old post of mine based on some work by Allan Bloom. I reproduce the relevant portion here (it constitutes the remainder of the present post), but you might want to read the whole thing.

[Here’s Allan Bloom] again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past: …

Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book [The Closing of the American Mind], pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.

Melatonin: not so great?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article saying that melatonin has not been shown to help with chronic insomnia:

In a culture that believes there’s a pill for every problem, melatonin seems just what the doctor ordered. It’s a natural hormone whose production the body increases in response to darkness and decreases whenever there’s light. It works to regulate the body’s 24-hour internal clock, also known as circadian rhythms. Decades ago, travelers embraced it as a proven way to recover from jet lag. It’s easy to see how such a pill transformed from a treatment for the ravages of long plane rides into a nightly sleep aid. A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that its use quintupled between 1999 and 2018.

“Melatonin is a sleep regulator, not a sleep originator,” Breus said.

If melatonin is not an effective sleep aid, why has its use exploded? Experts point to a variety of factors. Foremost is the strong placebo effect when it comes to insomnia treatment. Believing that melatonin will improve sleep can help people feel more relaxed when they get into bed, and they feel as if they can stop trying so hard to fall asleep. Couple that with the misery that insomniacs suffer in their frantic search for a solution, and they become vulnerable marks.

Insomnia is both a common and an awful experience, and many people will do almost anything to try to eliminate it. I had bad bouts of it as a result of chronic pain from a series of injuries many years ago, and among other things I tried melatonin. For me, it not only didn’t work; it seemed to have a paradoxical effort. In other words, it made me nervous in addition to everything else I was going through, and so I never took it again. But I know people who rely on it on a nightly basis.

I imagine a great many of you have opinions on the subject, so fire away.

Art for non-art’s sake: the Times Square monument to our age

The New Neo Posted on by

A recent development in the world of art is the installation of a statue in Times Square. While the virtue-signaling have been busy pulling down heroic statues of white men, they are erecting this sort of thing in their stead:

New York City’s Times Square installed a statue of a 12-foot-tall Black woman in casual clothing that its creator hopes will encourage people to reflect on “greater cultural diversity.”

New York-based Times Square Arts recently put up the new statue display, titled “Grounded in the Stars,” by artist Thomas J Price, along with his “Man Series” animated billboards, both of which are temporary, but causing a stir online.

The Times Square website states, “Price’s multi-channel presentation on the screens and sculptural installation on the plaza below forms a two-part takeover in Times Square that foregrounds the intrinsic value of the individual and amplifies traditionally marginalized bodies on a monumental scale.”

Note the style of the writing. It’s a very typical Newspeak that originated in academic circles and functions as a sort of “I’m highly educated and oh-so-virtuous” tell.

The statue is neither attractive nor heroic, which is the point. It happens to be of a black woman or “woman of color” – another point. But if the race of the person depicted had been white, it certainly would not have been any more attractive. Is this the current urban Everywoman? I suppose. Her gaze is either blank or slightly defiant, but she looks like anyone you could see walking on the street. The statue’s only raison d’etre seems to be its anti-heroic and woke nature – that, and to conjure up controversy.

It reminds me somewhat of a trend I’ve noticed in advertisements and even some store mannequins that feature models who are not the least bit remarkable and only of very ordinary and average (or less than average) attractiveness. The only thing different about this woman is that she’s not in a store advertising anything; she’s supposed to be purely art plus politics.

By “traditionally marginalized bodies,” the author of that deathless descriptive prose I quoted can’t possibly mean “women who are a bit heavy.” There’s a lengthy art tradition for that, and even a more recent one. As a native New Yorker, I immediately thought of the Nadelman-inspired sculptures in the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. I’ve always liked them, although I wasn’t sure why. Here’s one:

These women are also of the overweight variety. They’re white because the stone is white, but to me at least they seem beyond race and time. They’re supposed to be circus performers, but they certainly don’t look like any circus performers I’ve ever seen. There’s something monumental about them, something that isn’t political.

Speaking of old traditions, the image of the overweight ( that is, fat) woman has enormous antiquity. In fact, such sculptures are among the oldest art we have. I bring you as an example, the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be about 30K years old. The sculpture is only about four inches tall:

Then of course the overweight woman has a prominent place in painting of yesteryear from the Renaissance to Renoir and beyond, almost a cliched place. But none of these images have anything like the aura of the Times Square sculpture, which is anti-art or perhaps art as pure politics. As such, it’s emblematic of our times.

India avenges Daniel Pearl

The New Neo Posted on by

The murder of Daniel Pearl seems like ancient history now; it happened early in 2002. However, a few weeks after the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel I took a look back at Pearl’s murder and wrote this:

Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.

Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.

Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew [born in Baghdad] who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence …

During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”

Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first.

I go on to add that the who killed Pearl want killing Jews to be a worldwide effort.

Now we learn, however, that as a result of India’s retaliation against Pakistani terrorists who murdered civilian tourists in Kashmir, the killer of Daniel Pearl has been, as they say, neutralized. Here’s the story:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s governing party, said that the Indian army killed Pakistani terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar in “Operation Sindhoor.”

A group of Islamist terrorists, including Azhar, kidnapped and murdered Pearl in 2002. The terrorist was affiliated with al-Qaeda and Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamist terror group that aims to separate Kashmir from India and fully incorporate it into Pakistan. …

In the BJP announcement, the party said that Azhar was involved in a number of terror activities, including the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight, the 2016 Pathankot Air Force base attack, and a 2001 terror attack on the Indian parliament.

Azhar’s involvement in the 1999 hijacking freed Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born al-Qaeda member who formerly served in Pakistan’s intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Azhar wasn’t targeted because he killed Pearl. He was targeted because of his terrorism against India. But as you can see, it’s all connected. And I wonder whether India got some help from Israeli intelligence.

I would add the old saying “The wheels of justice grind slow,” but it doesn’t seem like “justice” when this person and his colleagues have been walking the earth for over 20 years since the beheading, and have recently managed to kill 26 innocent people more.

NOTE: See also this article in the India Times.

Papal surprise

The New Neo Posted on by

The surprise? The newly-elected pope is an American from Chicago. I don’t think that was on the radar screen of any predictions I ever read or heard.

His name is Robert Prevost, to be known as Pope Leo XIV. It doesn’t sound to me as though he’s a conservative; sounds somewhat in the mold of his predecessor, and he even has a South American angle because he was a missionary in Peru for many years and later became a citizen of that country, and only recently a cardinal.

More here:

President Trump sent his well wishes to the new American Pope, Robert Prevost — even though the new pontiff has been critical of the president, his administration and his treatment of migrants.

Prevost, who has taken the name Pope Leo XIV, has shared several highly critical posts about Trump and his immigration policies on X.

One scathing post Prevost retweeted read: “There is nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from their parents and warehouses them in cages. This is being carried out in our name and the shame is on us all.”

The MSM seems to be his main source on that issue. And is he the first pope with a history of tweeting prior to his election to the post? I think maybe.

Here’s his Vance reference:

The new pope also previously shared an op-ed from the National Catholic Reporter titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” following comments the vice president made on Fox News in February.

During the interview, Vance said, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”

I’m going to assume the Pope-to-be knows a great deal more about Christian concepts than I do, but strangely enough I’ve written something related to that very topic, which you can find here.

AI taking over education?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a problem – a big problem:

Some teachers have responded by having many in-class essays, with electronics banned. I wish them well.

I see the AI phenomenon as the next step – albeit a huge one – in the dumbing-down of education that’s been going on for many many decades. My ex-husband was a university professor in the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, and it was evident even then that many many university students couldn’t write. That trend accelerated, but now with AI they mostly don’t even have to try. Calculators have made it so that most don’t seem to know basic math or even arithmetic. General knowledge – especially of history – has fallen by the wayside. If you don’t have a background of knowledge, what on earth could you write knowledgeably about?

The conflict between India and Pakistan

The New Neo Posted on by

A helpful tip for people of the future: don’t partition an “I” state and a “P” state, especially if the “P” state is Muslim. Israel and Palestine; India and Pakistan.

I’m being a bit facetious about a topic that’s very serious, but it’s an odd pattern, isn’t it? Of course, there are huge differences between the conflicts, and although the animosity between India and Pakistan has religious roots I think the border dispute (Kashmir in particular) is more central than it is in the Middle East, where it’s somewhat of a screen for the annihilationist goals of the Palestinians. As far as I know, Pakistan has no plans to annihilate the Indians, which would be an odd goal considering India’s enormous population. Israel, on the other hand, is very small.

What will happen now between Pakistan and India? Well, there are threats:

India hit Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir with missiles on Wednesday and Pakistan vowed to retaliate saying it shot down five Indian aircraft, in the worst clash in more than two decades between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

India told more than a dozen foreign envoys in New Delhi that “if Pakistan responds, India will respond,” fuelling fears of a larger military conflict in one of the world’s most dangerous – and most populated – nuclear flashpoint regions. …

India said it struck nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites, some of them linked to an attack by Islamist militants that killed 25 Hindu tourists and one local in Indian Kashmir last month.

Pakistan said at least 31 of its civilians had been killed and 46 wounded, a military spokesperson said, and that India “had ignited an inferno in the region”. This included deaths from the strikes and border shelling.

Is Pakistan telling the truth about civilian casualties? I don’t know.

But I’ll go out on a limb and say I don’t think this will end up in some sort of nuclear conflagration. There is a lengthy history of this sort of skirmish there and they are ordinarily contained.

NOTE: That Reuters article I linked has a typical weasel headline: “Pakistan vows retaliation after Indian strike over tourist deaths.” Terrorists killed the tourists; they didn’t just die.

Birthrates large and small

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Snow on Pine” recently started a discussion about people claiming China’s population is less than officially reported. That rang a small bell for me; I believe such rumors/reports are mostly based on the work of this guy:

China has long been over-reporting its population, over 100 million people fewer than officially claimed, a Chinese scientist told Newsweek, a claim met with strong resistance from demography circles.

Yi Fuxian, an obstetrician at University of Wisconsin-Madison who conducts demography research, said the censuses China carries out every 10 years are “seriously overestimated” in an effort to match official estimates. The annual data should be corrected with the census data, he said. …

… [A] closer look at demographics showed a glaring disparity, Yi said. Around 164.24 million babies were born between 1991 and 2000. After accounting for these births and subtracting deaths and net migration, there were about 40 million fewer Chinese than reported.

However, Yi is apparently pretty much alone among scientists in thinking that.

What is not disputed is China’s very low birthrate, shared by other Asian nations such as South Korea and Japan. Here’s a handy chart in which countries around the world are listed by birthrates in descending order. It’s readily apparent that different areas of the world have very different birthrates, with Africa the highest (for example Niger, number one, has a rate of 6.7), then countries in the Arab world and Latin America, as well as places like Tajikistan. Then come the nations of the West, with the US fairly high in that category (1.7). Bringing up the rear is some of Asia, minus Laos (2.36), Cambodia (2.51), and Vietnam (1.88). Here are the large countries in Asia with the very low birthrates: China at 1.02, Japan at 1.23, and South Korea at .75.

One of the outliers is Israel, a highly developed country with a birthrate of 2.9. This is not due, as most people might assume, to very high birthrates among the very religious. Although the latter phenomenon does exist, there are not enough ultra-Orthodox people in Israel to account for the highrate, which exists in all groups to varying degrees. Nor is it due to the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab. See this:

… [I]n recent years, Muslim women in Israel have almost the same number of children, on average, as Jewish women in Israel do. In contrast, fertility remains very high among the Haredi Jewish population, who are at the same 6.5 rate of pre-Revolution Iran. Even Jewish Israelis outside the Haredi community have higher fertility than their counterparts in other countries. …

… [E]ven though Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] fertility is high, it is far below maximal levels observed in other populations (10 children per woman on average), and it is consciously limited and controlled by married couples, implying that family planning and family limitation in this population is widespread.

Beyond the wide disparities in fertility among various Jewish subpopulations, Israel is also unique in the value placed on having children among self-described secular Jews, who most commonly have three children by the time they complete their families, a markedly higher rate than their Diaspora counterparts. Why?

It’s that phenomenon – the secular Jewish birthrate in Israel – that is unusual. Here’s the explanation the article gives (in addition to a generally “pro-natalist” policy by the government):

The collectivist and communitarian core of Israel’s social philosophy places a family-shaped framework around its mores at all levels of society. Individuals rely to a great extent on their families within and across generations, strengthening family bonds and engendering a broad and expanded conception of the family: in size, relational lines, and responsibility. Put another way, cultural codes for family behavior and commitment are rather extensive because familial feeling extends beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. Taking this into account, we can understand Israel’s high fertility in part as springing from the institution that serves as the foundation of family life: marriage.

The author points out that over time there’s been a slow and slight reduction in the Israeli birthrate among secular Jews, and that may or may not continue. But what I don’t see emphasized in the article, and what I think are also large factors, are two other things. The first is that about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from Arab and/or North African countries, and they may be following their own cultural heritage that somewhat resembles that of those countries. The second is that much of the other half of Israel’s Jewish population descended from Holocaust survivors, for whom every Jewish child born represents a triumph over the forces – then and now – which would destroy the Jews. Therefore I don’t think the Israeli experience can speak to that of other Western or Asian countries; it’s significantly different.

I’ve put up other posts – including videos focusing on China – about the falling birthrates in Asia and around the developed world, so I won’t go into a huge analysis of that now. This post just scratches the surface. But it’s a very important topic that I’ll probably revisit, one that doesn’t seem to be going away.

Open thread 5/7/2025

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of Cohen’s less well-known songs, but I think it’s very beautiful. He (uncharacteristically) forgets some of the words to the third chorus – the one about his children – which go like this:

And they lead me away to the great surprise
It’s “Papa, don’t peek, Papa, cover your eyes”
And they hide, they hide in the world.