Unwanted in the Business World

Apparently, reality does bite. The people who are in charge of hiring for corporations have discovered that today’s college graduates are basically useless in the business world. Whatever they were studying, they did not learn any useful skills. Worse yet, they lack the kind of executive skills needed to function on the job. They think that work is a four letter word. See this, from The College Fix.

So, reality has caught up to the American university system. Students are taught to be woke. They are told to ignore the wisdom of the past. They learn to be self-indulgent narcissists, drowning in their sorrow over how oppressed they are.

They might not all be out on the streets fighting against the Gestapo, that is, against government law enforcement agents. But many of them are. And those who are not certainly sympathize with those who do.

In the meantime, the word is out. Today’s young people are simply not worth the trouble. They expect to be coddled and swaddled. They have no work ethic. They complain and whine about whatever. They are quick to take offense. They feel entitled and do not respond to feedback. That is, they cannot tolerate being told that they can improve.

As the old saying goes, they are thin skinned. It counts as a form of depression. 

More importantly, this generation as a whole never learned to work. They were granted awards and prizes simply for showing up. They did not learn that hard work is required to excel at competition. They are so thoroughly involved with their own self-interest that they ignore the best interest of their companies. Many companies have decided that they are not worth the trouble.

It is a sad state of affairs. If you ask yourself why so many young people are drawn to the madness of Antifa and are more than happy to go out on the street to cause trouble, the answer is easy. It is all they know how to do.

They have been taught to live for the psychodrama, not for the hard work and achievement.

If they did not learn adult behavior in school and even at home, they will go out in the world to act like overgrown children. In some ways it must be worse in elite institutions, like the Ivy League. These schools have long since abandoned their mission to educate in favor of an effort to indoctrinate in woke ideology.

Worse yet, diversity quotas have helped fill classes with students who could not do the work. As noted some time ago, when affirmative action became the order of the day many students who could not do the work often resorted to plagiarism. When professors saw what was going on they were told by their deans that it was  best to give everyone an A, regardless of the plagiarism. Otherwise, they would be threatened with a charge of racism.

So, why would you work to get a good grade, or to hand your assignments in on time, when you know that certain members of your class were plagiarizing their work and getting excellent grades.

Thanks to DEI college became an exercise in what you could get away with. Merit was tossed aside, with the exception given for STEM subjects, most of whose students were from outside the country.

Since students are taught that hard work does not matter, they end up believing in socialism. That is, they believe that the government and businesses should take care of them. If someone is going to provide for your needs, regardless of the work you put into any activity, you are going to vote for socialists. You are going to disdain the free market and its competitive ethos. 

Wednesday Potpourri

First, well before the waters had crested Democratic political operatives were out shrieking that the Texas flood was Donald Trump’s fault. 

Some argued that it was the fault of the most recent Big, Beautiful Bill that Trump had just signed. Others blamed it on climate change.

For people who believe that everything is Trump’s fault, the flood was not just Biblical. It was a gift from Heaven, that is, God’s judgment.

One is not going to rehearse all of the arguments, but Chris Martz offers some cogent analysis:

Okay. Let’s talk some facts. The Camp Mystic flood disaster in Texas is very unfortunate, and I hope that all of the missing girls are found. The usual suspects are exploiting this tragedy to score political brownie points. 

Some left-wing activists are blaming this flood on “climate change,” others are blaming the deaths and missing persons on inadequate warning caused by low staffing at the National Weather Service (NWS) caused by Trump administration federal RIFs. 

First of all, staffing cuts played no part in this tragedy. The NWS issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the flood. They also issued a flash flood warning for Hunt and Ingraham THREE HOURS before the Guadalupe River began to climb. There was plenty of lead time with respect to the forecast and issuance of warnings. 

The flood was caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry becoming embedded into a broad mid-level trough over central Texas. These remnant lows are typically slow-moving and drop heavy rain over a large geographical area where the troposphere destabilizes. 

This particular one stayed quasi- (fairly) stationary, and caused massive flooding along the Guadalupe River, something that has happened many times before. In 1987, a flash flood on the same river killed 10 teenage campers from the Pot O Gold Christian Camp, with another 33 swept away who survived. 

Camp Mystic is built on a floodplain. It is on sediment that has been deposited by hundreds, if not thousands of floods over the last millennium. The event has nothing to do with climate change. 

And, the tragedy had nothing to do with DOGE cuts. If you are someone who has exploited this catastrophe because you just don’t like Trump, you need to take a serious look in the mirror. 

As for staffing, the National Weather Service had extra staff on duty at the time.

Second, as noted before, Zohran Mamdani, candidate for New York’s Mayor, is a gift that keeps on giving.

As does his father. 

Zohran Mamdani's father believes: 

The Allies and Nazis had the same goal 

Abraham Lincoln was Hitler's inspiration 

White people are the oppressors, America is the root of all evil 

BLM is the resistance Blah blah blah. Another wealthy leftist who hates America. Now we know who Zohran gets it from.

Not just a wealthy leftist. A Columbia University professor, too.

Third, on the Mamdani front, the candidate’s association with notable anti-Semites is certainly troubling:

Socialist New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani visited a controversial Brooklyn mosque to pray while on the campaign trail — just months after the imam had called for the destruction of Israel.

Mamdani posted a picture of himself speaking at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, alongside firebrand cleric Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr, on his social media in January.

Fourth, and then there is this, the image of Mamdani ridiculing the Jewish holiday of Chanukkah. Via Newsmax:

A Jewish advocacy group harshly criticized democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani over the weekend for posting a "sick" video mocking Hanukkah and "cosplaying Jews," the New York Post reported.

Mamdani shared a video on his X account last year from the Geeta Brothers Duet Group, which showed two men wearing wigs dancing behind a menorah, spinning dreidels, and celebrating with Punjabi-style music.

The pro-Jewish group Stop Antisemitism group wrote on X that "Zohran Mamdani posts Indian men cosplaying Jews, spinning dreidels and lighting the menorah." The post continued that "our holidays and traditions are sacred and not for your comedic pleasure @ZohranKMamdani — this is sick."

Fifth, the New York Post reports that some senior Palestinian officials are now interested in joining the Abraham Accords:

A group of five top Palestinian officials in the West Bank’s Hebron district said they are willing to leave the Palestinian Authority and join the Abraham Accords, recognizing the state of Israel.

The sheikhs penned a letter to Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat, expressing their desire to transform The West Bank’s largest district into an emirate that “recognize[s] the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari — one of the most influential leaders in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest region — urged Israel and President Trump, who oversaw the Abraham Accords in his first term, to back the plan for self-governance.

Sixth, meanwhile, back in Germany, migrant crime advances exponentially. Via Zero Hedge.

In the last 10 years, we’ve welcomed a lot of ill-behaved and criminal young men into our country for no discernible reason, and along the way we’ve had the dubious privilege of discovering whole new categories of crime. There is the hostile-immigrant-drives-his-car-into-a-crowd-of-unsuspecting-innocents crime, there is the hostile-immigrant-stabs-a-bunch-of-random-people crime, there is the immigrant-gang-collectively-rape-underage-girl-in-park crime, and there is the immigrants-at-swimming-pool-molest-or-assault-various-children crime.

The latter has been stealing the headlines since the latest (allegedly carbon dioxide-induced) ‘heatwave’ in Germany. Recent stories include this one about a 25 year-old man of undisclosed background (who is almost certainly a migrant, otherwise authorities would not be so secretive about his origins) exposing himself to a bunch of underage teenagers at a pool in Asperg (Baden-Württemberg). Or this one, about a 21 year-old Syrian at a pool in Schweinfurt (Bavaria) caught exposing himself to four boys. Or this one, about men of “dark complexion” who severely beat an 18 year-old and threw him down some stairs. Or this disturbing one, about two Syrians who groped and assaulted a 12 year-old girl at a pool in Hof (Bavaria), forcing her beneath the water repeatedly and leaving her with a bloody nose.

Stories like this often come in groups, and what set off the present cascade was a particularly grim incident from June 22nd in Gelnhausen (Hessen), in which a group of Syrian migrants aged 18 to 28 molested eight or nine underage girls at the local pool. When the girls first complained about what was happening, pool personnel sent them back into the water. After this incident became a nationwide story, the Mayor of Gelnhausen, Christian Litzinger (CDU) gave an interview in which he appeared to ascribe the crime to “high temperatures”, which can cause “tempers to flare up”.

Seventh, what would we do without experts? Consider the case of Argentina and the administration of their new libertarian president, Javier Milei:

Javier Milei has lowered Argentina’s monthly inflation rate from 26% to just 1.5% The economy grew 7.6% in Q2 YoY Never forget… the media and professional class labeled him a dangerous “far-right” lunatic because he wanted to cut spending.

Eighth, on the therapy front, there’s  relatively recent therapy that seems to be producing good results. 

Consider the case of one Miley Cyrus. She claims that EMDR cured her stage fright:

Miley Cyrus has performed for some of the world’s biggest audiences — but for years, she quietly battled stage fright behind the scenes.

In a recent interview, the pop icon revealed that a therapy called EMDR was instrumental in curbing her anxiety.

“Love it. Saved my life,” she told The New York Times in May. “I’ve never had stage fright again. Ever.”

In another recent interview with Vogue, Cyrus said that EMDR felt like watching a movie in her mind — vivid and emotional, but grounding.

What is EMDR?

EMDR — or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — is an alternative therapy designed to help people process unresolved trauma and emotional pain….

“EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, often through eye movements, tapping or sound, to help the brain reprocess those upsetting memories,” added Campbell, who leads a team of EMDR professionals.

She elaborated, “On a neurological level, EMDR helps shift the memory from being stored in the emotional part of the brain (the amygdala) to the more logical, rational part (the prefrontal cortex).”

I have no personal experience with EMDR, but I have it on good authority that you can produce a similar effect by fly fishing. I think that the same would apply to golf. 

How Does It Feel?

Princeton Professor Robert George recommends that we see ourselves living today in an Age of Feeling and Feelings. In other terms, terms that ought to be familiar to my readers, we are living in a therapy culture where the value of ideas depends on how much therapy we have had, and where those who disagree with us are said to be suffering from unresolved emotional distress. 

We no longer exchange ideas. We no longer debate propositions or policies. We fixate on our ideas, the ones we feel most deeply, and reject everyone else for having failed to have done enough therapy. They have not dealt with their issues and thus they are not just wrong, but not worth debating or even respecting.

The issue is complex. If therapists want you to get in touch with your feelings they are assuming that your feelings will show you something relevant about your reality. This involves introspection but it does not involve analyzing real world situations. It does not tell you what to do to solve problems. It limits itself to your subjective state.

As Professor George puts it:

That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth.

It gets more complicated. In Freudian psychoanalysis the issue is not how you feel but what you want. They ought not to be confused. Freud’s theory begins with wish fulfillment, not with emotional lability. 

Worse yet, the situation becomes more complicated when analysts decide that they want to figure out what other people want from you. It becomes less about what you really really want and more about how you are reacting to what other people want from you.

And that does not really answer the question of what truth is. After all, does your truth lie in your desire or your feelings? Or is there a truth that is impersonal, that is true regardless of whether or not you feel it. 

What about scientific truth or even philosophical truths? 

By definition, scientific truths are objective. They are not subjective. Evidently, those who make a fetish of feeling have little use for objective truths. The case of transmania makes that clear.

But then, what about tradition? What about policies that have been shown to have worked in the past? Ought we to respect tradition? Or ought we to reject tradition because it is not subjective?

Take the case of language. However much you are in love with your feelings, you are still obliged to use a language that other people understand. That means, a language that has evolved over centuries. You might want to impart your style to your sentences, but you cannot speak your own private language. As Wittgenstein famously said, there is no such thing as a private language.

In principle, the search for your true feelings is promoted as a way to improve your relationships with other people. And yet, if two people are not speaking a common language, and using words as they ought to be used, they are unlikely to connect. 

The Equality Hustle

Perhaps you want to know what our great minds are contemplating these days. Political philosophers Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, from Paris and Harvard, are about to publish a book about equality.

At a time when New York City has an idiot candidate for mayor who drones on about equality it does not feel like a bad idea to ask what equality is, whether it is desirable, and whether it is achievable.

In the most obvious and everyday sense of the term, equality is an ideal that never becomes realized. (except perhaps in mathematics) Perhaps that is why serious thinkers are contorting their minds in order to pretend that we can achieve it.

We will agree, without any disagreement, that we are not equal. We are not equal in height, weight, intelligence, ability, character, wealth, strength and even maturity. The notion that we are equal collapses once we ask the most obvious questions.

You might think that when Thomas Jefferson was intoning that all men are created equal he was not talking about these types of equality. He was suggesting that all human beings have the same and equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is a universalist theory, one that presumably will lead to the advent of a universal state, a Heavenly City, in which everyone will be equal to everyone else.

Otherwise, you will easily note that all citizens of our republic have rights that are not granted to non-citizens, like the right to vote. Nationhood and the identity that comes with it exist in relation to other nations. You might belong to one but you do not belong to all of them. 

And yet, cultures are not all created equal. Some are better; some worse. Some produce wealth and prosperity for their members while others avoid production in favor of more decadent pursuits. Richer or poorer, smarter or dumber, more or less peaceful… different cultures excel in different ways.

Besides, if no one was better than anyone else at badminton, what motivation would you have to improve your game?

Without inequality there would be no competition. There would be no pride in being successful at competition. And, let us not forget the words of New York Mayor Eric Adams-- there is no dignity in receiving a handout.

The principle of competition says that you can earn what you have. As for the notion that we should provide basic goods for everyone, thus redistributing income, it has been tried and it has failed. When you remove the motivation to work harder, people tend to work less.

A London Review of Books blog post about the book makes the point:

It is hard to shake the feeling that the centrality of these particular kinds of stigma in the book’s conversation stems more from their consequentiality for what is viewed as the left’s central political project of redistribution rather than a more general engagement with inequalities of recognition and respect. What about stigmatised groups who do not decide the outcome of elections, and their claims to equality?

Of course, this is traditional Western idealism. The Enlightenment philosophers thought that they had dispensed with religion, but, as Carl Becker famously argued, they were mining the tradition of the Heavenly City. They were doing secular eschatology, straight out of the book of Revelation.

For those who care about intellectual history, this idealism also comes from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. The notion of a state that provides equally for everyone suggests a basic matriarchy, named a Mutterrecht by Swiss sociologist J. J. Bachofen in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Thinking that human society is best organized as a matriarchy suggests that it is like a mother who cares for her children equally. Obviously, this infantilizes people and makes them all dependent on the state. It has never ended well.

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.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, neighbors, associates and colleagues.

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

Sturday Miscellany

First, in the matter of Zohran Mamdani, it keeps getting better.

When he was a high school senior applying to college Mamdani lied on his application to Columbia. He claimed to be Black, the better to game the DEI world. After all, if Elizabeth Warren could get away with it, why not try.

Also, Mamdani’s father was a professor of Columbia.

Put them together and the young man could not get into Columbia. He must have been astonishingly stupid.

Second, you remember the Boulder, Colorado fire bomber, by name of Mohamed Sabry Soliman. And you know that one of the victims of his terrorism has now died.

You might not be familiar with the fact that our federal government has chosen to deport Soliman’s family. That is, to deport his wife and children, apparently to Egypt.

Now, in the latest news, the family has lost its appeal and a judge has allowed the deportation to proceed.

Third, it turns out that the Democratic Party has fully embraced anti-Semitism. But, you knew that already.

The news comes from Harry Enten, crack pollster at CNN:

“What are we talking about here? All right, who do Democrats sympathize more with: Israelis or Palestinians? In 2017, the Democratic Party was a pro-Israeli party,” Enten explained. “Look at this. They sympathized with the Israelis by 13 points—more with the Israelis than the Palestinians. But look at this sea change. Now, Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians by 43 points.”

“Oh my God! That is a change in the margin of 56 points over the course of just eight years. So all of a sudden, it’s the pro-Palestinian position that actually reigns supreme in Democratic politics, not the Israeli position,” he continued. “And that is part of the reason why Mamdani was able to do so well in this primary, because those attacks over Israel, simply put, did not ring true for Democrats. They’re now on the side of the Palestinians, not the Israelis.”

Put that in your hookah and puff on it. Mamdani’s anti-Semitism resonates with today’s Democratic Party. He is a lot less of an outlier than Democrats would have you believe.

If you had not been alarmed before, it’s time to do so.

Fourth, it’s an astonishing divide. In America, 92% of Republicans and  24% of Democrats are proud to be Americans.

Just in case you were wondering why liberals have such poor mental health. If you feel no pride, in your nation or your community, you are more likely to be depressed.

Some people imagine, not without reason, that the cure for despair is hope. The truth is, the cure is pride, especially pride in achievement.

Didn’t a Navy admiral once recommend to a group of college graduates that they begin their day by making their beds. That is, by accomplishing something.

Try it; it works.

Fifth, once upon a time feminists declared “wife” to be a four-letter word. Women across America adopted the aberration and broke the American family. Large numbers of children are now being brought up without fathers. Many women who would want to be married find their prospects diminishing.

At the least, it made feminists feel empowered, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

As for putting the toothpaste back in the tube or putting the genie back in the bottle, recent cultural phenomena show women bucking the feminist current. Nowadays it is becoming more acceptable for women to want to be what are called trad wives, traditional wives who are homemakers and who do not spend half their time harassing their husbands over who is going to do the dishes.

And now we have the advent of the princess treatment, of who are not just tradwives but who want to be treated with a decent amount of courtesy when out on the town.

According to the New York Post, a TikTok post on the subject has garnered millions of hits.

The author is named Courtney Palmer. The Post reports:

“If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food,” she said. She also addressed minutiae, like what to do at the coat check, at the valet, and at the host stand when your husband is checking on the reservation.

Amazingly, at a time when Democrats are whining about why men no longer support their candidates, the post suggests that the princess treatment works because it allows a man to be more manly. Who would have thought it?

“You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine,” she declared.

“He made the reservation, he’s taking you out — let him do the logistics. You’re just being a princess, you’re not being hoity-toity; you’re just letting him take care of it,” she explained.

Happy Independence Day

 

Wht Is the Intifada?

By now everyone knows that Democratic New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refused, on three occasions, to reject the phrase-- globalize the intifada. 

When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker to denounce the phrase, Mamdani hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about free speech, and ended up refusing to eat his own words.

But then, how many of us really know what the intifada was? How many of us understand that it was a campaign of systematic terrorism against Israeli civilians, beginning in 2002. And, of course, it was globalized in terroristic attacks against Israelis and Jews in other parts of the Western world.

Yesterday morning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recalled what it was like living and working in Israel during the intifada.

The notion that a politician in New York City cannot denounce this is beyond belief.

I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing. 

… Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit….

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. 

This is straight-up terrorism, directed at civilians, to redress a grievance that was not really a grievance.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

And then, in 2004:

The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

As for what it means to globalize the intifada, Stephens offers some examples:

But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

Stephens finds the Mamdani attitude unacceptable. I find him to be a bit wishy-washy here:

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

The obsession with the Palestinian cause involves making the weak feel strong, making the impotent feel powerless, and making the cowardly feel courageous. Worse yet, it makes a free people feel oppressed. Keep in mind, there have been no Israelis in Gaza for nearly two decades now.

And yet, the Palestinians, rather than build a nation, never stop whining and complaining… and blaming someone else.

The Palestinian cause is the ultimate in lost causes. Its adherents will never forgive Israel for succeeding where the Palestinians have failed. And, given their moral degeneracy, promoters of the Palestinian cause are always blaming someone else for their failings and their failures.

As a coda, I will add a point that Times columnist Tommy Friedman made recently. The Palestinian Gazas are monumentally stupid people. So, their cause is to make idiots feel smart:

Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders: “What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”