On Noisy Pendulums
On Noisy Pendulums
Trend or fluke, we are happy with any good news that come our way
There are pendulums and there are pendulums.
The razor-sharp pendulum in Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum is a Spanish Inquisition toy. The story’s protagonist is rescued from it by the rats who eat his ties. Another pendulum pokes fun of postmodernism—the precursor of the Social Justice inquisition—dissecting it with its postmodernism’s own deconstruction blade. The title is telling: Foucault's Pendulum; the book is authored by the last sane person who could rationally comprehend postmodern texts, Umberto Eco. With the second pendulum, no escape from the Social Justice morass is in sight: the Pied Piper of Hamelin forgot the rats, and he is now busy luring our kids to the Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi (Ha-He-Hou) cheer-land.
The woke↔sanity seesaw is of a noisy kind, like stock prices: one never knows what’s a trend and what’s volatility (I would be rich should I knew the difference). Deprived of any good news in the last four years, we take any of them as a trend. Who knows, maybe it is a trend. See for yourself:
DEI loyalty oath in faculty hiring is out:
Blue and Purple states:
UMass Boston (c. November 2023)
MIT (c. May 2024)
…
Red states:
Currently North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana Utah, Kansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida feature a comprehensive anti-DEI legislation. More are added “every day.”
SATs/ACTs are back:
MIT (March 28, 2022)
Georgetown University (c. Fall 2022)
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (along with the entire University of Tennessee System) (c. Fall 2022)
Purdue (November 29, 2022)
Dartmouth (February 5, 2024) (as the president of the first Ivy to restore normalcy, Sian Beilock is honored with a 2024 Cojones Award)
Yale (February 22, 2024)
Brown (March 5, 2024)
Harvard (April 11, 2024)
Caltech (April 11, 2024)
UT Austin (March 11, 2024)
Vanderbilt (c. 2024, comes in effect in Fall 2027)
University of Wisconsin-Madison (c. 2024, comes in effect in Spring 2027)
…
Never went to the dark side:
University of Florida, Florida State University (along with the entire State University System of Florida)
Georgia Tech, University of Georgia (along with the entire University System of Georgia)
Among the schools for gifted and talented, the standardized admission tests are restored:
Lowell High School (San Francisco) (c. July 2022)
…
Never went to the dark side:
The Bronx High School of Science (never abolished tests in the firts place)
The remaining 250+, including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia (SCOTUS case lost) and our own O'Bryant School of Math & Science (SCOTUS case pending), are yet to return from the dead.
Why are the ellipsis in the end of each of the three lists bolded? Ah, those are our fat rats of hope, the ones that will set us free. The “escape from Wokestan” plans have not been provided, and we have to improvise with what we have. Forget the pipe, we can probably just whistle. O, Giant Rat of Sumatra—so horrifying that Sherlock Holmes was certain that the “world is not yet prepared” to meet him—please come and show us the way away from the DIEing swamps of the intersecting poor minds without neither a soul or an identity (“Mister Anderson, welcome back. We missed you.”) but with a need for a higher salary!
Our ellipsis are also, secretly, italicized, to continue looking special in case hope hooks on Ozempic.
In any case, this page is a living document: we are updating this page in real time.
To reclaim a healthy society, we all need to criticise every component of government, commerce, science, academia, media, and services; whenver we spot irregularities, especially abrogations of responsibility and integrity. Bill Maher does this in spades.