Academics From The United States

"It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it."

"In everyone’s life there are crossroads, moments of decision, however insignificant. To spot the crucial moments in his life, and act, makes a great soldier. To spot the crucial moments on a larger scale, a grand scale—that’s the work of a general."

"Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!"

"Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse."

"I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman."

"“Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was. “That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.”"

"The noticeable genetic divergence of India from other regions is coupled with low levels of genetic divergence across the subgroups within India."

"[B]etween impulsive hearts and compulsive authority, you have consistently seasoned justice with mercy, and invigorated mercy with justice."

"It is as though we had to reconstruct for ourselves a mountain range from its distorted reflections in the bosom of a lake."

"The Sumerologist is one of the narrowest of specialists in the highly specialized academic halls of learning, a well-nigh perfect example of the man who "knows mostest about the leastest.""

"So whenever I give a lecture, somebody from the audience gets up and says, "Dr Kramer, ... how do you know how to pronounce these words?" And my answer then is as follows: If one of the dead Sumerians that Leonard Woolley dug up at Ur, if he was miraculously resurrected and came into the room and he heard me say, [speaks Sumerian], he would say: "That man Kramer, he’s doing very well; he’s pronouncing his words and I understand them. But my goodness does he have a Jewish accent.""

"Bharat has been an inspiration to me through her great gift to the modern world, Mahatma Gandhi, and the incredible tradition of spirituality from which he came. India doubtless needs some things today from the West -- not the ones she has chosen to adopt, namely the materialism and superficiality, rather the West’s efficiency and organization. But the West needs even more badly India’s humanity and spirituality, which is unrivalled by any culture I know of, past or present."

"Modern scholars, then, sought a method for containing Sanskrit’s potential to activate its cultural politics, by subjecting the study of Sanskrit to scholarly protocols which were antithetical to the language’s genius and charisma. They opted for a decidedly unromantic array of curatorial and antiquarian forms of scholarship: philologizing, cataloguing, typologizing, organizing into chronologies, and so on; eminently useful practices, no doubt, but none of them glamorous."

"‘Watson’s Utopia, the implied authority of experts was institutionalised in the form of a technocracy managed by behavioural scientists’. Watson wanted religion, the antithesis of science, to be ‘outlawed”. When conditioning failed to cure what Watson termed the ‘hopelessly insane, or incurably diseased’, the physician ‘would not hesitate to put them to death’. According to Buckley, ‘there would also be no mercy’. This has echoes of the Nazi Goebbels. Watson’s ideal community would not recognize words like, ‘right, wrong or punishment.'"

"In some respects, modern-day behavioural science can be construed as a derivative of the psychological school of behaviourism that gained prominence over a century ago with the work of American psychologist, John B. Watson. A rejection of the previously dominant introspectionist movement (whose focus was subjectivity and inner consciousness), Watson viewed the main goal of psychology to be the ‘prediction and control of behaviour.’ The paradigm of behaviourism concentrated exclusively on observables: the environmental stimuli that make a particular behaviour more or less likely, the overt behaviour itself, and the consequences of that behaviour (referred to as ‘reinforcement’ or ‘punishment’)."

"We can we can discuss what it is after we've proved that it exists. It's silly to do it beforehand."

"In comparison with Italy we Americans are not so "intelligent", we have the tendency to exaggerate in describing situations, we are inclined to cut off, to polarize."

"(quote at 35:35 of 1:36:06 in video)"

"The classification of s shows that every finite simple group either fits into one of about 20 infinite families, or is one of 26 exceptions, called . The is the largest of the sporadic finite simple groups, and was discovered by and ... Its order is 8080,17424,79451,28758,86459,90496,17107,57005,75436,80000,00000 = 246 ⋅ 320 ⋅ 59 ⋅ 76 ⋅ 112 ⋅ 133 ⋅ 17 ⋅ 19 ⋅ 23 ⋅29 ⋅ 31 ⋅ 41 ⋅ 47 ⋅ 59 ⋅ 71 (which is roughly the number of elementary particles in the earth). The smallest irreducible representations have dimensions 1, 196883, 21296876, ... The has the power series expansion j(τ) = q−1 + 744 + 196884q + 21493760q2 +... where q = e2π iτ, and is in some sense the simplest nonconstant function satisfying the functional equations j(τ) = j(τ + 1) = j(−1/τ). noticed some rather weird relations between coefficients of the elliptic modular function and the representations of the monster as follows: 1 = 1 196884 = 196883 + 1 21493760 = 21296876 + 196883 + 1 where the numbers on the left are coefficients of j(τ) and the numbers on the right are dimensions of irreducible representations of the monster. At the time he discovered these relations, several people thought it so unlikely that there could be a relation between the monster and the elliptic modular function that they politely told McKay that he was talking nonsense. The term “monstrous moonshine” (coined by ) refers to various extensions of McKay’s observation, and in particular to relations between sporadic simple groups and modular functions."

"... if you take the s, we have a classification of them ... And then we've got a very simple explanation of why this list turns up, that they more or less correspond to finite reflection groups. And we know who to classify finite reflection groups. ... we can give single uniform construction of all the compact Lie groups. But there's nothing like that for the sporadic groups."

"Scientists now routinely utilize the genetic information in biological macromolecules—proteins and DNA—to address numerous aspects of the behaviors, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of organisms. When used to best effect, molecular data are integrated with information from such fields as , , , , and paleontology. These time-honored biological disciplines remain highly active today, but each has been enriched if not rejuvenated by contact with the relatively young but burgeoning field of molecular evolution."

"An example of how this is the best of times for evolutionary biology is provided by the recent elucidation of a draft sequence of all 3-billion-plus nucleotide pairs in the human genome et al. 2001, et al. 2001). ... Some prognosticators believe that the application of recombinant DNA methods to gene therapy and gene replacement (the repair or replacement of defective genes in the body) soon may lead to a revolution in the history of medicine comparable to the introductions of sanitation, anesthesia, and antibiotics and vaccines. If the new recombinant gene technologies live up to their early billing, we or our children might see a day when gene therapy can alleviate sickle cell anemia, heart disease, cancer, or various other human genetic disorders. Just as we may marvel at our forebears' fortitude in the dark ages before the advent of our modern medicine, our grandchildren may look back with marvel at our fortitude in the era preceding the wide availability of gene therapies. Nonetheless, the technical hurdles remain daunting. … … Ecologists and natural historians are painfully aware that the subject matter of their devotion—biodiversity—is under assault worldwide as the continents fill with people. The collective weight of human activities is leading to the disappearance of wilderness. Atmosphere and oceans are being polluted, marine fisheries are collapsing worldwide, and wetlands and freshwater aquifers have shrunk dramatically. In short, Earth's renewable and nonrenewable resources are being tragically squandered. In the Amazon Basin, for example, which is famous for its rich biota, slash-and-burn fires are so numerous that their light is visible to astronauts in the space shuttle. Some of these astronauts have felt moved to speak in a deeply spiritual tenor about the beauty of the “blue planet” and to bemoan how we are despoiling this special, fragile place."

"The last three decades have vindicated 20 centuries of Catholic teaching about marriage and the family like never before. It's great to belong to a Church that’s right when the world is wrong!"

"Phylogeography is a field of study concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographic distribution of genealogical lineages, especially those within and among closely related species. As the word implies, phylogeography deals with historical, phylogenetic components of the spatial distributions of gene lineages. In other words, time and space are the jointly considered axes of phylogeography onto which (ideally) are mapped particular gene genealogies of interest ... The analysis and interpretation of lineage distributions usually require extensive input from molecular genetics, population genetics, ethology, demography, phylogenetic biology, paleontology, geology, and historical geography. Thus, phylogeography is an integrative endeavor that lies at an important crossroads of diverse microevolutionary and macroevolutionary disciplines ..."

"Recent genome-sequencing efforts have confirmed that traditional "good-citizen" genes (those that encode functional RNA and protein molecules of obvious benefit to the organism) constitute only a small fraction of the genomic populace in humans and other multicellular creatures. The rest of the DNA sequence includes an astonishing collection of noncoding regions, regulatory modules, deadbeat pseudogenes, legions of repetitive elements, and hosts of oft-shifty, self-interested nomads, renegades, and immigrants. To help visualize functional operations in such intracellular genomic societies and to better encapsulate the evolutionary origins of complex genomes, new and evocative metaphors may be both entertaining and research-stimulating."

"…American sociologist George Yancey in his 2015 book “Hostile Environment” focused on American media bias against Christianity and conservative religion in general and found its roots in the fact that mainline U.S. journalism is a self-perpetuating caste. If you are an Evangelical Christian or do not agree with the prevailing liberal and secular ideology, particularly on moral matters, you will be thrown out of the first interview when you will try to be hired by one of the mainline media."

"Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited os a useful concept in human biology…. There is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features."

"The term 'Early Harappan' as opposed to 'Pre-Harappan' has gained acceptance for a number of reasons. The principal reason is the evidence for cultural and historical continuity between the Early and Mature Harappan as well as the premise that the process of change was primarily autochthonous. It involved the peoples of the Greater Indus Valley itself, without significant or out-of-the-ordinary, external influence . . ."

"It seems that during the Indus Age the Sarasvati was a large river and that water that now flows in the Yamuna and/or Sutlej Rivers made it so. Over time these waters were withdrawn and the Sarasvati became smaller, eventually dry. The agency for these changes was the tectonic reshaping of the doab [interfluve] separating the Yamuna from the rivers of the Punjab."

"Over the course of the third and second millennia, the Sarasvati dried up."

"At the end of the third millennium the strong flow from the Sarasvatī dried up... This [the drying up of the Sarasvatī towards the end of the third millennium] carries with it an interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rgveda were in the Sarasvatī region prior to the drying up of the river and this would be closer to 2000 BC than it is to 1000 BC, somewhat earlier than most of the conventional chronologies for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in the Punjab."

"Of relevance here is Possehl's observation (1977) of the "extraordinary 'empty spaces' between the Harappan settlement clusters," as well as "the isolated context for a number of individual sites" (546). He proposes that "pastoral nomads, or other highly mobile (itinerant) occupational specialists filled in the interstices," since such spaces are un- likely to have been unoccupied. He goes so far as to suggest that "pastoralists formed the bulk of the population during Harappan times since there do not seem to be any settled village farming communities there" (547). Pastoralists and farmers coexisted "not . . . as isolated from one another, but as complementary subsystems: two aspects of an integrated whole. One relied on the intensive exploitation of plants and arable land, the other on the extensive exploitation of animals and pastures" (547). Moreover, "the presence of pastoralists makes very good sense if we see them as the mobile population which bridged the gap between settlements as the carriers of information, as the transporters of goods, as the population through which the Harappan Civilization achieved its remark- able degree of integration" (548)."

"The history of medicine serves several useful functions today, when doctors and the American health care system confront many challenges. Physicians live and work in an era of escalating expectations, eroding autonomy, and decreasing discretionary time. There is so much—far too much—to know, to learn, and to do. Understandably, many doctors are concerned about the future of medicine as they watch so many powerful political, economic, and social forces transform medical practice, research, and education. In this context, the history of medicine provides useful perspective and teaches valuable lessons. Just as a helps us assess the significance of their symptoms and develop a diagnostic and therapeutic strategy, the history of medicine provides important perspective on present and future challenges and opportunities. ... History also teaches humility. I could cite many examples that apply to institutions, organizations, nations, and entire cultures, but I will focus on humility at the level of the individual. The aphorism “fame is fleeting” applies to medicine, as it does to any other area of human endeavor. Almost all of the most influential physicians and medical scientists of earlier generations are now forgotten. ..."

"is an impatient industry, especially when Wall Street is involved. Healthcare professionals must be sure that aggressive strategies to cut costs and enhance short-term profits do not harm patients. We face special challenges when new policies are implemented abruptly. For example, a managed care company in Wisconsin gave hospitals less than 2 months’ notice in 1994 that they would routinely authorize just 5 days of hospitalization for patients undergoing CABG despite the fact that fewer than 9% of patients in the state were achieving this target at the time."

"... Natural science is not occult but accessible to any normal mind, and it generates real, not imaginary power—which confronts us as an alien force, which may even destroy us all. Nuclear bombs are the appropriate symbol, not only in their literal capacity to destroy us all, but also in the universal irresponsibility that they embody. Scientific inventors created them as an unrestricted gift to military and political leaders, who keep insisting in advance that “the adversary” will be responsible if “we” are “obliged” to initiate some “nuclear exchange.”"

"Why is a book that weaves together histories of heart care, a celebrated medical center, and specialization important? And why should it interest general readers as well as health care professionals, historians, social scientists, and policymakers? First of all, most individuals living in industrial countries have or will develop cardiovascular disease during their lifetimes. And most of them have already seen coronary heart disease alter or end the lives of family members and friends. Despite astonishing developments in diagnosis and treatment in recent decades, cardiovascular disease still kills more Americans than any other cause. Its economic implications are staggering. In the United States alone, medical costs and productivity losses related to cardiovascular disease are approaching $500 billion annually. ... Second, the Mayo Clinic is the world's oldest and largest multispeciality group practice. There is value in understanding why this institution has been a national leader in health care since the early twentieth century. ... Specialization is the book's third major topic. I agree with historian 's assertion that "specialization is the fundamental theme for the organization of medicine in the twentieth century." ..."

"In August 1945 British military intelligence unwittingly performed a splendid experiment in the social psychology of natural scientists. They delivered the news of Hiroshima to interned German atomic scientists, and secretly recorded the conversation that resulted. Only fragments of the record have got past restrictions on “classified” material, but they are enough to reveal the German scientists’ mentality—their soul, if I may use an outmoded term. They were conscience-stricken; they had failed “German science.” Casting about for reasons, they took note of the obvious disparity in size: the American A-bomb project had been enormously larger than their own. But that contrast only deepened the anguish of self-accusation. “We would not have had the moral courage,” Werner Heisenberg, the originator of the Uncertainty Principle, exclaimed, “to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 people.” ... Implicit in that soul-searching was one measure of the scientist’s social and moral worth: his capacity to beat the competition, to win, whether fame for himself or wars for his country, or both together. When Heisenberg emerged from internment and discovered that the winners were uneasy, he turned to a different measure of the scientist’s worth. He and his colleagues had shown moral courage, he decided, of a higher order. They had dragged their feet, to withhold the A-bomb from their Nazi masters. ..."

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots, and bodies of the invaders and defenders."

"[T]he Constitution was built for deliberation, not for speed. The Founding Fathers sought to create a system of checks and balances that prevents any branch of government from becoming tyrannical. The rise of czars threatens that goal. Hopefully, the political problems the czars caused President Obama mean that the American czar system will share the fate of the Russian one."

"OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] also states that a "school should also ensure that hearings are conducted in a manner that does not inflict additional trauma on the complainant", which implies that the school should not start the proceedings with a presumption of innocence, or even a stance of neutrality. Rather, university officials should assume that any complaint is valid and the accused is guilty as charged."

"In early 2014, the Department of Justice and Education issued guidelines pressuring public school districts to adopt racial quotas when disciplining children. The basis for this guidance was studies showing that black children were over three times more likely to face serious punishment--suspension or expulsion--for misbehaving at school. The government concluded that school districts were engaging in massive illegal discrimination against black students. In fact, however, the government had no basis for its conclusion. The Supreme Court has explicitly stated that racial disparities in punishment do not by themselves prove discrimination, as they may just be consistent with the underlying rates of misbehavior by each group. There are no valid statistics (and the government hasn't cited any) from which one can infer that black students and white students would be expected to engage in serious misbehavior in school at the same rate. Unless there is some reason to expect kids to behave completely differently at school than outside of it, the school discipline figures are in line with what one would expect. African-American minors are arrested outside of school for violent crime at a rate approximately 3.5 times their share of the population. Moreover, as former Department of Education attorney Hans Bader notes, the government's own statistics show that white boys were over two times as likely to be suspended as their peers of Asian descent. By the government's logic, this means, absurdly, that school districts must be discriminating against white students and in favor of Asians. As of this writing, Minneapolis education authorities have announced their intention to end the black/white gap in suspensions and expulsions, a plan that struck many observers as announcing the imposition of quotas on school discipline."

"Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers, and okapis on the basis that they are all stripey."

"In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G. R. Dales, director of archeological fieldwork in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans ... have not yet been identified archaologically.""

"Researchers discovered that for a given cohort of law school graduates, there was a massive disparity between those who listed themselves as Native American lawyers on the census (228) and the number of self-identified Native Americans who graduated law school over that same time period (2,610). In other words, over ten times as many people claimed to be Native American when they applied to law school than identified themselves as Native American lawyers once they graduated."

"…we cannot even establish a definite correlation between the end of the Indus civilization and the Aryan invasion. But even if we could, what is the material evidence to substantiate the supposed invasion and massacre? Where are the burned fortresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of Aryan invasion. It is interesting that Sir John Marshall himself, the Director of the Mohenjo-daro excavations that first revealed the "massacre" remains separated the end of the Indus civilization from the time of the Aryan invasion by two centuries. He attributed the slayings to bandits from the hills of west of the Indus, who carried out sporadic raids on an already tired, decaying, and defenseless civilization. The contemporaneity of the skeletal remains is anything but certain. Whereas a couple of them definitely seem to represent a slaughter, in situ, the bulk of the bones were found in contexts suggesting burials of sloppiest and most irreverent nature. There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by weapons of war. The citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence. …..Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated."

"Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armour, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders?... Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion."

"No one has any exact knowledge of the date when the Aryans first entered the Indus Valley area; they have not yet been identified archaeologically."

"Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race". The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims."

"But it was shabby archaeology: U.S. archaeologist George P. Dales proved in 1964 that the owners of The said skeletons had lived in different periods; moreover, neither weapons nor any signs of war were found at the supposed sites of the “mythical massacre,” as he called it: “Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion.”"

"There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armor and surrounded by the weapons of war … Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion. (Dales, 1964: 43, 38)"