patrick.net

Okay, Bret, now tell us what you REALLY think.

https://t.me/FirstAmendmentPraetorian/50495

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/rogue-manholes-wednesday-january

The Associated Press published an angry article yesterday with a Republicans Pounce!-style headline: “Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”

It can only be a weapon against ‘colleges’ if they plagiarized somebody. Just saying. ...

Ms. Gay (if that’s her real name), survived an initial barrage calling for her resignation over her atrociously smug performance at her Congressional testimony last month. Controversy arose after the top educator smugly refused to agree that genocidally calling for jews to be wiped off the face of the Middle East violated Harvard’s so-called speech policy, a tautly-enforced policy that can get a student expelled for accidentally calling the University’s president Mister Gay, for just one example, and don’t even ask what happens if you whisper “what is a woman” anywhere on Harvard’s campus.

They drag you into the Skull & Bones club’s back room and nobody ever sees you again, that’s what.

Anyway, Claudine somehow survived the worst that the Anti-Defamation League could dish out, and the shady Harvard Corporation’s anonymous board issued a rock-solid plebiscite of support, or whatever they call it. But then two influencers got involved: Harvard alum, Pershing Capital CEO, billionaire, and major donor Bill Ackman, and even more triggering for the Left, “conservative activist” Christopher Rufo piled on.

Both men claimed to have whistleblower information proving Claudine was a chronic plagiarist, which apparently is just what you don’t want to be if you’re president of a major Ivy League University.

Well, after millions of people started looking over her writings, it turned out that Claudine might have possibly borrowed a phrase or two from other academics and could have forgotten to mention it, from time to time. It started with her PhD dissertation. And it apparently continued through pretty much everything the so-called academic ever wrote, which in her defense is not very much, certainly not when compared to previous non-black Harvard presidents.

For instance, Claudine is the only Harvard president in history who’s never written a book. So? Books are overrated. And books are racist. Who cares.

You probably think I’m planning a victory lap since, in C&C’s December 10th roundup, I correctly predicted this would happen. “Gay’s a goner,” I said. “Claudine Gay will be gone soon,” I said. Fortunately, no one took the bet, because what would I do with Bud Lite stock shares?



... And, as she pointed out in her letter, Claudine’s coerced cancellation proves that the entire system is organized against black women of color, especially extra-black women of color sporting short-cropped hair, an austere, sexually ambiguous appearance, and wearing fat-framed Malcolm X glasses. Which all proves their essential blackness.

So you can easily see: This wasn’t just racism. It was systematic racism, which is literally one billion trillion times worse than regular racism. ...

It’s all such a shame, but the worst effect of Claudine’s untimely resignation is how unfortunately it hurts the whole movement toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just consider the unhappy statistics so far:

The first black female president of Harvard has now resigned as a serial plagiarist after the shortest tenure in the school’s history.

The first black female Supreme Court Justice does not know what a woman is.

The first black female Vice-President can’t stop laughing like a hyena — I think it might be Tourette’s Syndrome — and she ‘enjoys’ the lowest approval rating of any Vice-President in American history, and that includes VP Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace in 1973 after being convicted of bribery and tax evasion.

I’m just saying it doesn’t look too good for DEI. Maybe things would look better if they were allowed to choose some conservative ladies of color. It’s almost like it’s not really about diversity at all, but is really just about marxism.

Never mind, I’m talking crazy again.

Patrick says

The Associated Press published an angry article yesterday with a Republicans Pounce!-style headline: “Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.”

This is a deflection by the AP. It was not Republicans that pounced, it was Jewish donors and other powerful Jews that did not like Gay's stance on Palestine. Falsely blaming Republicans is the AP's effort to stop Blacks from being angry at Jews.

Applies to Soros Fecal Impaction types in general.

Seriously, Gay is claiming that

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/claudine-gay-claims-white-supremacists-went-back-in-time-and-forced-her-to-plagiarize-at-gunpoint

Seriously, Gay is claiming that getting fired for her plagiarism is somehow racist.

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/claudine-gay-claims-white-supremacists-went-back-in-time-and-forced-her-to-plagiarize-at-gunpoint

She/it is returning to the predictable baseline level of type after being lofted above her highest level of incompetency. It only works on Netflix, with the backstops of highly paid script writers.

HeadSet says

This is a deflection by the AP. It was not Republicans that pounced, it was Jewish donors and other powerful Jews that did not like Gay's stance on Palestine. Falsely blaming Republicans is the AP's effort to stop Blacks from being angry at Jews.

I doubt the AP is protecting Jews.

AmericanKulak says

I doubt the AP is protecting Jews.

Then why the deflection? Jewish donors forced Gay out, so why did the AP say it was Republicans?

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/liberals-warn-harvard-president-ouster-could-lead-to-terrifying-world-where-people-are-held-responsible-for-their-own-actions

There is so much 'cheating' in academia anyway. Like they say, most progress in understanding history, geology, and the world and its relationships is going on OUTSIDE of academia, because academia is purposely an institutionalized distraction and deception from truth. Formal academia is largely formaldehyde for historical propaganda advertising, and contrary ideas are squashed.

Obama had no qualifications for Harvard Law, but was sheep dipped for his bullshit tenure there. Harvard was extremely bribed, but probably would have done it anyway without the bribe, to get the political advantage of Obama's arc. Why do you think Obummer is lobbying so hard for this Netflix phony.

Even science and physics progress have nominally ceased, with the 'real stuff' being mostly relegated to black ops and top secret projects run by the Nazis. Scientists who perform routine tasks will be tutored in classical, limited theories. They want boxed in technocrats with narrow focus, not imaginative seers.

Step out of line and invent a free energy engine, or devices relying on zero point energy, and you'll be eliminated with extreme prejudice and if you have a patent, it will be stolen.

Eric Weinstein talks about the 'internal' universities with shells inaccessible to the plebeian students. He says physics has not progressed since the 1930's, stalled it appears. It didn't stall, it just went underground, opaque to the public in secret projects that we see occasional manifestations of. They give us simple minded science movies based on predictive programming.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/outside-the-walls-of-the-crumbling

It’s not like she’s doing the honourable thing: renouncing academia, donating her estate to a fund for the education of inner city orphans, and secluding herself in a nunnery, ideally after taking a vow of eternal silence. She’s stepping down from the presidency of Harvard, yes. But she will continue to draw the $900,000 a year salary she earned as the president, which to be fair is not far off what most Harvard professors make, in exchange for which incredible annual deposit of lucre she will do original and impactful research uh teach okay probably not that either, well I guess ... wear ugly glasses and be a black woman, I suppose.

But tell me more about white privilege. ...

The goal here is not to fix Harvard by installing a good president. Harvard will not get a good president, and Harvard cannot be fixed. The goal was to make the academy look like a coven of blundering scoundrels, and boy was that achieved. Academics closed ranks around Gay, went way out on a limb for her, and then that limb fell off. The entire world saw them openly defending academic perfidy at the highest levels in the name of Dishonesty, Imbecility, and Exclusion. The prestige of the academy took a massive hit. ...

As something of an epilogue, Brunet did some digging on Fake and Gay’s thesis adviser Gary King who, it turns out, is equally fictitious...

The tl;dr is that this tenured giant of the social sciences has erected his entire career upon the shaky edifice of ideas that he either stole outright or pulled out of his butt. Everything he has published, in other words, is either de facto plagiarism (albeit conducted with somewhat more skill than that demonstrated by Gay), or fraudulent flim-flam. Gay is truly the rancid fruit of a poison tree, and in keeping with that metaphor she fell very close to it indeed: King, too, is a professor at Harvard.

As I keep saying: the rot is too deep. It is not a matter of a few bad apples; the entire bunch has been spoiled. ...

Over the past month, many suggested that part of the motivation for the professoriate’s spirited defense of Gay’s right not to perform the emotional labour of citation was their anxiety over the skeletons they all know full well are hiding in their own closets. Plagiarism-checking software didn’t really exist until a couple of decades ago, and so far as I’ve seen it hasn’t been systematically applied anywhere outside of the occasional undergraduate course. By unspoken gentlepronoun’s agreement, our eminent learned societies have quietly avoided subjecting their work to such scrutiny.

That raises the fascinating question of just how much plagiarism there really is. The guilty man fleeth. The ladyboy doth protest too much.

We already know all about the Replication Crisis, with something like half of the scientific literature failing this basic test of scientific validity. ...

At the end of the day, the problem with the universities is that they are not meeting, and indeed are actively undermining, the social functions that they serve: preserving the knowledge of the past, passing it on to the next generation, and pushing back the frontiers of human understanding. But without a superior alternative – and at this stage ‘superior’ really means ‘just barely at the edge of workable’ – the clanking old beater will continue puttering along down the highway.

The truth is, we have almost everything we need to build an agile, fluid, ersatz academy on the Internet. The tools necessary for autodidacts to learn everything they need to on their own, largely for free, have existed for years now. ...

The key missing element is credentialization. There’s no robust, open system by means of which students can prove that they know the things that they know, meaning that employers are still reliant on the academic diploma monopoly, thereby forcing students to go deep into debt paying inflated tuition fees so that they can waste years taking a large number of mostly useless courses while subjecting their minds to indoctrination with brain-frying illogicalities and paramoralisms (or the jaw-clenching frustration that comes from successfully enduring and resisting it). All just to get a job. Usually a shit job at that.

An expanded system of fine-grained standardized testing, enabling students to learn in whatever manner suits them and have their knowledge and mastery evaluated according to a universal and objective standard, would kick the final leg of support out from under the universities. ...

Distribution of funds by anonymous panels of expert peer reviewers recruited by impersonal bureaucracies introduces powerful biases into the directions of scientific research. Incremental, rather than disruptive, science is preferred: no one wants the gore of their favourite ox being used to augur the future of the field. At the same time granting agencies strongly prefer research proposals that can yield guaranteed results ... and if the results can be guessed ahead of time, it follows that the research probably isn’t particularly ground-breaking, and therefore not especially interesting. The natural consequence is that most researchers end up beavering away on increasingly granular minutiae, learning more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing at all. Such work is of no interest to anyone outside of their own little circle, and often barely all that interesting to them. “What the heck is the point of this,” is a question that elicits deep spiritual torment for many academics. It’s very difficult to feel passionate about dedicating one’s life to studying the inner workings of the ozopores under the antecephalic apodous collum of an endangered millipede found only under a single large rock in the Guatemalan rain forest.

Uninspiring research of the sort that the modern academy excels in producing is an inevitable consequence of the bureaucratization of funding. The agencies don’t care about the contents of the research, and they don’t care if the public cares; the taxes are appropriated whether the public wills it or no. All the bureaucrats care about is the maximization of quantifiable metrics: so many papers published, so many citations obtained, and so on. It’s all Big Line Go Up so the soft-spoken squishes in the bureaucracy can tell their immediate superiors they’re doing their due public diligence. It doesn’t matter to them if the work is relevant, or interesting, or even correct. Thus the publish or perish ethos of the modern university, in which academics are incentivized to churn out mountains of unreplicable, unfalsifiable, and unreadable bland nonsense as fast as they can. ...

Independent scholars surviving via the support of public audiences won’t be able to get away with pointless research and dull prose. It will have to be interesting enough to support, which means that it will have to be relevant. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has to care about it. Again, audiences of millions aren’t required: enthusiastic patronage clubs of hundreds are probably enough. If, in the entire world, with a population of 8 billion people, after a few years of working on and writing about a certain subject, you can’t find a few hundred people to nerd out with you enough to throw a few dollars your way every month, well, maybe that line of research just isn’t worth pursuing. Except perhaps as a hobby ... and maybe a lot of science would be improved if it was deprofessionalized, and returned to its roots as a prestige hobby for the idle rich. ...

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-the-incompetocracy

At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.

This shift in priorities compromises the educational system at a very basic level. Classroom instruction is now much less about teaching students how to think and how to do things, and far more concerned with ensuring they become appropriately enthusiastic about what they’re supposed to feel1. This is true at every level in the system, right on through post-graduate education.

Since those being advanced through the system are being evaluated not on their intellectual ability so much as their emotional docility, the overall level of competence declines. Dull minds have a harder time mastering difficult material; therefore, the rigour of the curriculum is reduced.

The result is the incompetocracy: a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them. ...

Therefore, we need to break the monopoly of the universities.

Since the universities don’t sell education, but credentials, we need a new system of credentialing. ...

There’s a market opportunity there. Listen up, Peter Thiel: whoever does this right won’t just make a lot of money, they’ll blow a hole below the waterline in the ruling class’ legitimacy.

One very obvious answer is standardized testing. We’ve already got that, of course: SATs at the end of high school, GREs for grad school, LSATs for law school, and so on. Standardized testing could be taken a lot further than it is, however. It could made a lot more granular and precise, to the point where classroom grades become entirely irrelevant.

Instead of having one big test at the end of school, tests could be provided on a subject-by-subject basis: Algebra I, Algebra II, Algebra and Geometry, Single-variable Calculus, Multi-variable Calculus, and so on. Students could take the test whenever they feel ready, after studying the material in whichever fashion they feel most comfortable, whether alone, or with the assistance of a tutor, or at a more traditional school.

Rather than having the tests be written at an appointed time and physical location, the tests could be taken at home, with screen-sharing and cameras ensuring no cheating was taking place. Randomization algorithms – changing the numerical answers to mathematical questions, switching the order of multiple-choice questions, and so on – could be used to ensure that each test was functionally equivalent but unique in its particulars, making cheating yet more difficult. Since the speed with which a student completes the test is easily recorded, and since it is generally the case that mastery correlates with speed on a test, whereas cheating usually slows things down, making speed a factor would also discourage cheating. “Oh, you scored a 95% on Calc II in 75% of the average time,” sounds a lot better than, “Huh, you got a 60% and took 1.3x as long as average.”

Such a system could easily be employed from elementary through post-graduate levels of education. It could furthermore be made granular not just at the level of individual subjects, but at the level of individual topics within a subject – replacing mid-terms, quizzes, and homework assignments.

There’s no reason that such a system should require an expensive, unwieldy government bureaucracy to support. In fact it’s best if it’s done outside of the state. The system would support itself with user fees. Rather than students paying to sit in class, they would pay the standardized testing corporation to take the test. If they want a better grade, they can take the test again; thus providing an incentive to do it right the first time. By building it in the private sector, it can be started more or less immediately, without waiting for anyone’s permission. Furthermore, as a private entity, it can easily be exported around the world, thereby providing an objective evaluation of student ability everywhere.

For employers, it would remove a great deal of ambiguity: rather than shrugging their shoulders and hoping that a diploma from Wherever U meant something, they could review a potential employee’s educational records in detail, gaining immediate knowledge of what they know, how well they know it, and how that compares to other applicants.

There are lots of other chocolate covered dindus in the Kommie fraud-o-sphere candy box.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/01/07/interim-harvard-president-makes-almost-1m-a-year-from-drug-companies-in-addition-to-his-946k-salary-n2168424

Interim Harvard President Makes Almost $1M a Year From Drug Companies in Addition to His $946K Salary

Patrick says

Interim Harvard President Makes Almost $1M a Year From Drug Companies in Addition to His $946K Salary

Guess the vax mandates on the plebeian layer aren't ending any time soon. Roll up your sleeves, sterilized sheep students. That NASCAR Harvard Logo on the resume is going to remain expensive in more ways than one.

https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/do-your-own-research

Once meaning has been unmoored from linguistic signifiers, over time, signified meanings become modular and can be swapped in and out at will by the Party. The short-term results are described above, but it must be stressed that the long-term result of this willful corruption and control of language is far more catastrophic. It is nothing short of the complete intellectual collapse of the Indoctrinated to the point where they are incapable of understanding or discussing even the most basic concepts independently, degenerating to a state of utter reliance on the Party to provide, literally, meaning to their lives.

We have come to the point where any independent though is completely forbidden at Harvard. All must look to the Party to know what "science" says. Which is the very opposite of real science.

From Palo Alto Daily News today:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/kitten-corner-diversifying-diversity

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/whirlwind-reapers-friday-february

But there’s no escaping the fact that, before the pandemic Gay and Magill would have gotten away Scott-free with their arrogant refusals to give straight answers to the questions from dull, non-PhD-having Congresspeople. Instead, they pranced prettily into the propeller blades because credentialed experts have no trust residual to draw on anymore. Nobody likes them. Nobody trusts them. They were wrong about everything.

In other words, everyone is fed up with academic experts who think they are better than everybody else just because the media fawned over their every word during the pandemic. They are now experiencing a rude awakening.

I can offer no more recent evidence of the tsunami of reckoning washing away the edifice of fake expertise than yesterday’s Harvard Crimson story headlined, “Top Harvard Medical School Neuroscientist Accused of Research Misconduct.” It’s bad. A Harvard darling, a so-called expert and top medical science research professor, now stands credibly accused of having falsified (Portlanders: that means made up) his data and having plagiarized other people’s images and illustrations, in over 20 of his papers during a twenty-year period. Over once a year on average. ...

The Crimson story suggests the doctor may have taken a few shortcuts, you know, to make sure his papers popped and so that he would get the “right” answer.

Who knows how much the alleged cheating contributed to Shah’s meteoric career? While other academics toiled away, following the rules, not obtaining the astounding pro-pharma results like the not-so-brilliant Dr. Shah did? Real science is a lot harder.

Shah’s deceit was discovered by data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik. Ms. Bik is every woke academician’s worst nightmare. She is a “real” expert with a talent and a passion for sniffing out academic fakesters. Nowadays Elisabeth uses A.I. and reverse image searching to help, but she’s written guides explaining how you too can help expose fraudulent Harvard doctors. According to Liz’s bio, her exposé work has resulted in 1,069 Retractions, 149 Expressions of Concern, and 1,008 Corrections (as of last November).

If you’re a science type, here’s a link to Elisabeth’s blog post on her investigation of Dr. Shah’s ‘work,’ if you can call it that.

For everybody else, according to the Crimson, Bik found 44 different examples of made-up data in Dr. Shah’s papers between 2001 and 2023. But the “most damning” problems were from Shah’s 2022 paper in Nature Communications (it had 32 other authors, but Shah was the lead author). Bik said Shah’s 2022 paper contained figures and images stolen from seven other papers (written by other scientists) plus some images copied straight off the websites of two scientific product vendors.

For instance, one of Shah’s pinched pictures came from an online catalog by R&D Systems, which makes scientific research antibodies. Shah did not give credit to R&D Systems for using its image in his 2022 article. Instead, Dr. Shah claimed the image was from his own work and — get this — he edited the picture’s labels to show a completely different antibody than the original.

Totally fake. Fake, fake, fake fake fake.

“This is a really unusual sort of thing that I cannot imagine how this happens by accident,” drily noted an independent professor who reviewed Bik’s findings for the Crimson.

Harvard again! What is obvious beyond denial is the bigger movement afoot: the anti-expert movement. Ms. Bik’s helpful labors are but one small special forces unit in the army of discontent that Peter Hotez can see coming through his smudgy, pie-shaped eyeglasses. Mark my words. Their downfall will be so complete that before this is over, they’ll be claiming they were set up.

Patrick says

The Harvard grads would claim they originated that statement.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvards-plagiarism-problem-multiplies

Patrick says

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvards-plagiarism-problem-multiplies

Affirmative action hire.

Patrick says

After the covid debacle, I'm convinced 80% of world would.

https://genesiustimes.com/harvard-hires-stormy-daniels-to-teach-class-on-virtue/

If Stormy Daniels actually looked like that, she wouldn't have to be trying to extort Trump

ElYorsh says

If Stormy Daniels actually looked like that, she wouldn't have to be trying to extort Trump

That woman has a Slavic jaw. Still pretty now, but that jaw will be more pronounced as she gets closer to 30.