Why Johnny and Janey Can't Think

We are all, of course, seriously discommoded over the presence of so many foreign born students in American universities.

Happily, these pages have not missed the story. Recall that Kenny Xu reported that in Silicon Valley some three-fifths of the tech workers are Chinese. As Xu adds, that does not mean Chinese-American. It means Chinese Chinese.

Whatever we think of the fact that students from outside of the country are taking up space in America’s best universities, we should see it as a challenge, not as an invasion. At the very least, it suggests that American students cannot compete.

If we want to make America great again, we cannot rely on students who were brought up in foreign countries. Surely, it is a good thing that foreign companies are investing so heavily in America. And yet, are we confident that we have the human capital to work in those factories?

John Mac Ghlionn explains it in the New York Post. 

The numbers tell a stark story. According to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group, foreign-born workers who arrived on student visas out-earn their American peers by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re twice as likely to work in research and development.

But this isn’t a zero-sum game where one group’s success diminishes another’s potential. Instead, it’s a mirror reflecting what America could achieve if it stopped settling for mediocrity and started demanding excellence from its own educational system.

True enough, he is not the first person to note it-- I even wrote about it myself-- but we ought to see the reality of our failed educational system:

Walk across any American university campus today, and the contrast becomes painfully clear. While international students pack engineering labs and computer science departments, too many American students have drifted toward paths of least resistance — degrees in Critical Race Studies, Queer Theory and Gender Analysis.

He continues that American students are deconstructing the past, and learning to complain while foreign students are building the future.

One group is building the future; the other is deconstructing the past. These fields offer little beyond debt and limited career prospects. Yet they proliferate while hard sciences struggle for enrollment.

The real revelation isn’t that international students are outperforming Americans. It’s that they’re succeeding within systems America built, but has allowed them to decay. They’re mastering curricula Americans designed, conducting research in labs Americans constructed, and launching careers from universities Americans funded. The infrastructure for greatness already exists. America has simply forgotten how to use it.

Where to start? Surely, we can begin by shutting down ethnic studies programs. We also begin hiring faculty for their merit, not for their ideological groupthink.

You will be thinking that this is easier said than done. The leftist faculty that has infested American universities has tenure. Getting rid of them will be no easy task.

Mac Ghlionn explains his idea, which is to encourage American school children and university students to learn to compete with their foreign-born counterparts:

The key is understanding that competition drives excellence. International students aren’t just filling seats. They’re setting benchmarks. Their success should inspire their American counterparts to rise up and meet them, not retreat into easier alternatives.

When classrooms contain students from around the world, all working at the highest level, everyone benefits from the elevated — and more, yes, diverse — standards.

Surely, we believe in competition. And yet, as he argues persuasively, foreign students are studying subjects that American students are avoiding. And American students have stuck themselves in idiot courses in which they will learn nothing resembling a useful skill.

Fundraising

It’s that time of the week, again!

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. And, a special thank-you to paid subscribers.

Today is Sunday, so we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. It allows you to show that you want me to continue. Dare I say, requesting donations is preferable to tithing.

Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post every day. Very few others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that, in my humble opinion, is worthy of compensation. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal link on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017. Please make the check out to my name, Stuart Schneiderman.

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Please accept this expression of my gratitude for those who will donate and for those who have done so already. Many thanks!

Saturday Miscellany

 First, I had a few words to say about Zohran Momdani’s anti-Semitism yesterday. But, why miss the opportunity to offer some added commentary. The first, from Matt Walsh:

New Yorkers stand poised to elect a socialist crackpot from the third world who's only been a citizen for 6 years and wants to nationalize grocery stores and appropriate money from taxpayers to spend on castration drugs for children. The voters have a death wish. They want their communities to be destroyed. And they will get what they ask for. So be it.

Second, Lawrence Summers points out that Mamdani is a gift for certain Southern states. Bloomberg reports:

Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says if Zohran Mamdani is the next mayor of New York City, it will be a great gift for the economies of Florida and Texas. He says the democratic socialist's policies would hurt the city and there would be "massive outmigration."

Third, Iran was being attacked by Israel. So, naturally it turned to its sometime ally, China. Apparently, the alliance was not as sturdy as they imagined. 

China Tells New Israeli Ambassador It Wants to Boost Cooperation.

If Iran had had the idea that it could punish the world by closing the Straits of Hormuz, it must have learned, fairly quickly, that China would never tolerate such an action.

Fourth,  Brandon Smith takes up one of my favorite topics: the mess that feminism has made of relations between the sexes. He refers to a New York Times article that argues the following: women have been trashing men and have been rejecting traditional female roles… and then, the feminists among them are whining and complaining that men do not want them. Duh.

Listen men, your lack of participation is starting to stress out the ladies. Just admit you can’t handle intimacy. Just admit you can’t handle these “powerful” women and their vast intellects and emotional genius. You need to be taught how to behave, that’s all. Just crawl back to them and they’re ready to tolerate you again. 

Isn’t that nice? They’re giving you a second chance…

At no point does the author ask WHY men are exhausted? At no point does she ask any actual men what they think or feel before writing her nonsensical screed. Obscured by insufferable and flowery prose, she still blames men while asking them to come back. And that should tell you everything you need to know about feminism in general.

I would ask feminists the million dollar question that they have avoided for so long:  Have you considered the possibility that men ghost you and will not commit to you because YOU are the problem?  The answer is no, obviously.

To be fair, in these pages I have often remarked that feminists are the problem. So I do not believe that I missed this one.

 I’ll tell you the biggest open secret that modern women still don’t understand – They claim that men are afraid of approaching them. They say that men today are “weak” and that they can’t handle the new era of the “boss babe”. They argue that men need to abandon their traditional masculine roles and act more feminine; this will make it easier for everyone to get along.

These are common jabs at the male ego designed to make men feel ashamed for distancing themselves from feminists. In reality, men value one thing above all else: Peace. If you can’t offer peace, then no man with any sense of self worth has a use for you. Feminists offer the opposite of peace, and so they have no value.

I suspect that men want more than peace, but peace is a good place to start.

Fifth, meanwhile over at the New York Times, David Brooks does a bit of a mea culpa regarding his inane hostility toward Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He has not been as bad as his colleague, Tommy Friedman, who took the occasion of Israel’s involvement in a war to talk trash about the nation’s leader, but at least Brooks admits that he was wrong.

Here goes:

And yet those of us in the Bibi critics’ club do have to confront an uncomfortable fact: Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

Sixth, the French have found out how much it costs to welcome illegal migrants into their midst. And this is an addition to the simple fact that French women no longer feel safe walking the streets of their nation… thanks to migrants.

Zero Hedge blog tallies up the cost:

Rather than boosting growth, the think tank claims immigration is costing France the equivalent of 3.4 per cent of its GDP due to a significant mismatch between the taxes immigrants contribute and the services they consume.

Le Figaro reports that, according to OID, taxes collected from immigrants cover only 86 per cent of their fiscal cost, creating what it calls a “budget deficit.” This imbalance is largely due to low employment rates among immigrants: only 62.4 per cent of working-age immigrants in France are employed—one of the lowest rates in the European Union, just ahead of Belgium. The French native population, by comparison, has a 69.5 per cent employment rate.

The OID argues that if immigrants were employed at the same rate as native-born citizens, French GDP would be 3.4 per cent higher, and taxable income would rise by 1.5 percentage points.

The next time some talking head waxes poetic about how much migrants are contributing to the economy, recall this study from France.

Jewish Anti-Semitism

 Let’s face facts. If Republicans had nominated, for a major position, a raving anti-Semite, Democrat operatives would have been jumping out of their skin. They would insist that the GOP had become infested with anti-Semitism and that Trump is Hitler. You know the song. Repeat after me.

So, at a time when President Trump has joined with Israel, in all senses of the word, in their war against Iran, Democrats in New York City have nominated Zohran Mamdani for New York City’s mayor. 

Keep in mind, Mamdani wants to globalize the intifada, which means killing Jews. And he promises to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu if ever he steps foot in New York City.

As you know, the reliably leftist New York Times recommended that its readers reject Mamdani. And lifelong Democrat Lawrence Summers expressed his own alarm:

I am profoundly alarmed about the future of the @DNC and the country by yesterday’s NYC anointment of a candidate who failed to disavow a "globalize the intifada" slogan and advocated Trotskyite economic policies. I fear it is evidence that our party is following the most problematic aspects of Britain's Labor Party. It didn’t work there, and it won’t work here. @Harvard and other universities' moral weakness after Oct 7 in condoning hateful, anti-Israeli, and even antisemitic, rhetoric and activity opened the Overton window in ways that contributed to yesterday’s outcome. 

I hope candidate @ZohranKMamdani , who showed great ability to learn and adapt during his campaign, will continue to evolve in ways that provide much needed reassurance to people committed to a free from prejudice, market economy as an American ideal. An important task for Mamdani now is to provide reassurance that his moral energy and formidable political skills can be productively directed for the City of New York at this difficult moment.

The silliness about evolving simply means that if he makes a few noises against anti-Semitism Democrats are willing to overlook his bigoted history.

Another point is worth underscoring. The campus demonstrations in favor of Hamas and the intifada were instrumental in giving rise to a candidate like Mamdani. In fairness, Summers opposed campus anti-Semitism strongly. 

And yet, let us not forget that these demonstrations broke out in full force under the Biden presidency. If anti-Semitism has become acceptable, to the point where Jew-hatred is protected free speech, at a time when pro-Hamas students are defended by the political left, it should surprise no one that an anti-Semitic piece of scum should be leading the pack in New York City’s mayoral race.

The New York Times offers this analysis:

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world offered the starkest evidence yet that outspoken opposition to Israel and its government — and even questioning its existence as a Jewish state — is increasingly acceptable to broader swaths of the party, even in areas where pro-Israel Jews have long been a bedrock part of the Democratic coalition.

Some surveys showed Mr. Mamdani winning as many as one in five Jewish Democrats, with supporters including Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who also ran for mayor and encouraged his supporters to back Mr. Mamdani through a cross-endorsement. 

And on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mr. Mamdani, saying they would work together “to fight against all bigotry and hate.”

But for other Jews around the country who were already struggling with their place in the progressive movement, Mr. Mamdani’s stunning victory confirmed their worst fears about the direction of the American left, fueling a sense that urgent concerns about the community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city that Jews helped build.

Naturally, the candidate has been eating his words about Israel and Palestine. And yet, when he attended Bowdoin College, he belonged to the virulently anti-Semitic student group, Students for Justice in Palestine.

Jewish Insider has this to say:

In the closing days of the campaign, Mamdani, who began his activism journey as a Students for Justice in Palestine leader at Bowdoin College, defended the term “globalize the intifada” as an expression of Palestinian rights. Mamdani’s defense of the phrase was strongly criticized by Jewish groups across the ideological spectrum, who view the phrase as a call to violence. While Mamdani has pledged to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe, he has not acknowledged their concerns about his invocation of a phrase tied to a violent, yearslong Palestinian uprising. 

The Times of Israel reports similarly:

 Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary has set off shock waves among a Jewish communal establishment that has usually been able to count on the mayor to be in their corner on Israel and related issues.

At the same time, two of the city’s most veteran Jewish pro-Israel Democratic politicians — including the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress — issued endorsements of Mamdani, a supporter of the boycott Israel movement.

Because Mamdani has broken the pro-Israel mold of past mayors — with his staunch condemnations of Israel and his embrace of much of the rhetoric of the pro-Palestinian left — his victory over a strongly pro-Israel rival like former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has tied the Jewish political and communal establishment in knots.

And let’s not ignore parentage.  Mamdani’s mother, famed film director  Mira Nair is similarly anti-Semitic.

Roy Abrams notes:

I’m still digesting the fact that Zohran Mamdani’s mother, the successful film director, Mira Nair, tried to get Gal Gadot banned from attending the Oscars because she’s Israeli. It is so grotesque, so hate-filled and un-American.

It does not really need mention but the American left is fighting the good fight against Trump-Hitler. So it is willing to ignore the anti-Semitism in its own ranks.

As I have said, it has become the stupid party.

Is Chivalry Dead?

An old Chinese adage tells us to be careful what we wish for; we may get it.

Such is the case of contemporary feminists. Having declared war on polite and genteel behavior-- of men toward women-- they are distressed to see that men no longer give up their seats to women on the bus. Men have become rude and disrespectful toward women. 

Since women considered courtesy to be insulting and demeaning, they should now be thrilled to have won this small victory.

A New York Post article suggests that it all means one thing: that chivalry is over. 

If we wanted to be pedantic, we would point out that chivalry is a martial ethos, invented during the Middle Ages. It seems to have morphed into something else of late, but it did not begin as a form of courtesy. 

Similarly, chivalry is not the same as courtly love, the origin of what we call courtship. Courtly love was invented during the same Middle Ages, as a seduction ritual whereby the ladies of the manor, women whose husbands had gone to crusade in the Holy Land, worked to seduce the boys who remained at home. Those boys would obviously have been too young to fight wars as fully fledged knights.

Call it chivalry if you like, but it is really gentility. It involves codes of good conduct that exist for men and women. They are not universal and they are not therapeutically correct.

Mary Madigan explains her experience in the New York Post:

Is Chivalry dead? After a grown man practically trampled me to get on the bus recently, I’d be inclined to say yes.

He was in a suit and fun socks (boring finance bros tend to think quirky socks make them look fun), and he was on the verge of elbowing me to get a seat.

I was unnerved by his rugby scrum approach to public transport, it was a bit much for 8 a.m. and buses come every 10 minutes – but I wasn’t shocked

It wasn’t very chivalrous, but is that even a thing anymore? Is men letting women go first on public transport a dead concept?

Evidently, feminists rejected such behaviors. They argued that a man who was deferential toward a woman was demeaning her, and was saying that she was weak.

Strong women could open doors for themselves. They pay their own way in restaurants and they did not mind standing on buses or subways. According to feminism, a man who defers to a woman is simply treating her like a weak and ineffectual being.

Anyway, the important point, from my perspective, is that gentility-- to call it by its right name-- is a code of social conduct. It comprises roles and rules, from gentleman and lady to deferential and respectful gestures. 

And yet, in a culture that is defined by therapy people are not encouraged to follow old rules. They are not even inclined to follow new rules. They are told to follow their bliss, to express their feelings. We are induced into thinking that we are unique and autonomous individuals. As such we should do what pleases us, regardless of the consequences. If the woman is standing in your way, push her aside.

Evidently, the rules of gentility are not designed to make you function like a self-involved human monad. They have been established to promote social harmony and to allow people to get along. 

When you follow rules of decorum and gentility you are showing yourself to be a member of the group, to belong. If you fail to perform the most elementary gestures of courtesy you are showing yourself to be an outlier, an outsider, someone who is not contributing to group harmony.

Recently, I pointed out that the basis for social cohesion is trust. It’s a bit vague and limited as a concept, but it was the best we had. Now we can add that social cohesion develops when people follow one set of rules, follow them automatically and show respect and courtesy to other people.

If you fail to do so, you are showing yourself to be a boor, not to belong, and unworthy of trust.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, we have often noted that the Democratic Party has cornered the market in stupidity. If your leaders range from Kamala Harris to AOC to Jasmine Crockett… the point is self evident.

And yet, sane and rational Democrats do exist. Among them, as we have occasionally noted, is Van Jones. Consider this effort to shed light in the darkness of the leftist mind:

CNN's Van Jones calls on "progressives" to "GET ON BOARD" with Trump's stance that Iran *can't* have nuclear weapon.

 "I think progressives underestimate how dangerous Iran is. Iran is not a normal country. Normal countries don‘t blind women because they showed some hair. They don't empower little gangs and proxies to surround a country and fire rockets and r*pe people." 

"They cannot have a bomb ... Because they say death to America, death to Israel and death to all the Jews. One of those should offend you if you're progressives — at least one should offend you." "We cannot have a nuclear-armed Iran." 

Second, among the sane voices on the political left we find Abraham Foxman, formerly director of the Anti-Defamation League, via Newsmax:

The former director of the Anti-Defamation League is calling out "tone-deaf" Democrats for opposing Israel and President Donald Trump's "decisive action" to strike three Iranian nuclear sites in order to bring peace to the Middle East.

"Why are the Democrats so tone deaf?" ADL Director Emeritus Abraham Foxman wrote in an X post Sunday night. "Iran is a sworn enemy not only of Israel but of America and many of America's allies."

Supporting American and Israeli efforts against Iran having a nuclear weapon should be a "no brainer," according to Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who served as the ADL national director from 1987-2015.

Third, from the right side of the political spectrum, Clay Travis offers this:

If you are truly afraid of what Iran might do now — spoiler they can’t and won’t do anything — but if you are truly afraid, why weren’t you terrified of them getting nuclear weapons? Your logic doesn’t even add up.

Fourth, as for the danger posed by AI, the following study tells us something that we already suspected, namely that students who use Chat GPT to write their papers end up being more stupid. 

 · 

An MIT study found that heavy AI use, like ChatGPT, reduces memory, critical thinking, and brain activity, based on EEG scans of 54 students over four months.

Frequent AI users produced less original work, struggled to recall their writing, and exhibited "mental passivity," even when switching to unaided tasks.

The study suggests AI can create echo chambers and is best used as a support, not a substitute, for human thinking.

Let’s have a return to reading and writing.

Fifth, you may not find it to be good news, but reports have it that France is no longer France. For my part I will miss the good old France, the one that has been destroyed by migrants.

Consider the recent Festival of Music, where hundreds of women were stabbed with hypodermic needles. 

France24 reports:

Before the party, posts on Snapchat and other social media had called for targeting women during the festivities.

The interior ministry said 145 victims reported being stabbed with needles across the country, with Paris police reporting 13 cases in the capital.

Officials did not specify if they were cases of so-called needle spiking with date-rape drugs such as Rohypnol or GHB, used by attackers to render victims confused or unconscious and vulnerable to sexual assault.

"Some victims were taken to hospital for toxicological tests," the ministry said.

In Paris, investigations were opened after three people including a 15-year-old girl and an 18-year-old male, reported being stabbed in three different locations in Paris, prosecutors said.

Time to step up efforts to expel illegal migrants from America.

Sixth, pity Rachel Zegler, the actress who starred in the most recent colossal Disney flop-- Snow White.

Happily for her, Zegler had a psychiatrist at the ready to help her to get through the torment.

Even Snow White needs a shrink.

Rachel Zegler has revealed that therapy and anxiety medication helped her overcome the monumental backlash she received while starring in Disney’s live-action “Snow White” remake.

The 24-year-old actress opened up about the controversy and how she moved past it in an interview with i-D magazine published on Monday, June 23.

“My f–king psychiatrist has seen me through all of it,” Zegler explained, noting that her medical doctor constantly reminded her that “what you’re going through isn’t normal.”

Seventh, a side note on the Iran nuclear program, from Clifford May:

Is it not curious to note how many people who a week ago insisted Iran’s rulers didn’t have a nuclear weapons program are now insisting that the nuclear weapons program of Iran’s rulers has hardly been damaged- if at all?

Eighth, just in case you doubted that the Democratic Party had become the stupid party, here we have Rep. Jasmine Crockett, perhaps not the most ignorant buffoon of them all, but at least she hides her intelligence well:

Congress must authorize military force before any president—including Trump—launches a strike.

And to understand enough about the Constitution to the extent that I’m the one that’s supposed to make the f---ing decision, or at least get a vote.

Rep. Crockett is God’s gift to the Republican Party.

Cease Fire Now

Everyone has something to say about the American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mostly, the reviews are positive, even though the Sheriff of Los Angeles County managed to post a defense of Iran-- before taking it down.

If you believed that Los Angeles did not need the assistance of the federal government, now you know that you were duped.

Special mention to Tucker Carlson, who predicted that if America attacked Iran, the latter country would unleash horrors on the world. His was a portrait in cowardice.

The fact is, the result of the Trump attack on Iran has been something of a cease fire between the two belligerents. Not what Tucker had expected, but you were expecting nothing less.

Among the more sane and sensible commentaries we find the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. Fair enough, he is not a man of the left, but he is also not a knee-jerk Trump supporter.

Stephens points out that Trump dared do what other American presidents recoiled from:

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

Here is the bottom line. Bill Clinton said that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. So did Barack Obama. So did Joe Biden.

The difference is that they were all talk and no action. Trump overcame their pusillanimity and ordered a strike. 

Dare we say that it was a profile in courage:

Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.

Naturally, the anti-Trump left and certain members of the anti-Trump right were horrified. Those who insisted that the administration seek Congressional approval had ignored history:

Critics fault the administration for its refusal to seek congressional authorization for attacking Iran. But there’s a long, bipartisan history of American presidents taking swift military action to stop a perceived threat without asking Congress’s permission, including George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998.

But, was the danger as imminent as certain American and Israeli intelligence officers believed? Stephens points out that even if the final decision had not been made, Iran was still on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

Critics of the strike also point to an American intelligence estimate from this year that claimed Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb. But that was a judgment about intent, which can be fickle. Trump’s responsibility was to deny Iran’s leaders the capabilities that would have allowed them to change their minds at will, to devastating effect. Amid uncertainty, the president acted before it was too late. It is the essence of statesmanship.

Of course, the American president seeks a negotiated settlement. Stephens offers his outline of potential deal:

… my guess is that the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, will stand down and seek a negotiated settlement. In my column last week, I suggested the outlines of a potential deal, in which the United States could promise Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its complete nuclear disarmament and an end to its support for foreign proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

More recently, President Trump floated the idea of regime change in Tehran. Fair enough. I had suspected as much, including the restoration of the Shah of Iran.

Time will tell.