As America becomes more multicultural and less intelligent, it becomes more debased. The lowest common denominator takes over. When American culture was run by WASPs, it was more elevated.
New York Post: The revival of the wholesome 1970s game show “Family Feud,” hosted by Steve Harvey, has recently been criticized for sexually explicit Q&As.
In two clips posted last September, Harvey asked a contestant to recall “the last thing you stuck your finger in.”
“My wife.”
“My favorite answer of all time,” Harvey said.
“Name the first part of a woman you touch to get her in the mood,” Harvey asked another panel.
“Um, that would be the lower part of the vagina,” said one contestant, whom Harvey high-fived.
Posted inBlacks, Hollywood|Comments Off on The Black Revival Of Family Feud
New York Post: The Obama administration is doing its best to give the nation another mortgage meltdown.
As Paul Sperry recently noted in The Post, Team Obama has pushed mortgage lenders to offer home loans to folks with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market collapse.
Wasn’t the last one bad enough?
Credit scores of approved borrowers, for example, have been trending down, even as their debt levels have grown.
The Federal Housing Administration and government-sponsored “independent” lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been demanding lower credit standards — just as the feds did starting under President Bill Clinton, in pursuit of the same “affordable housing” goal.
Some borrowers need only put 3 percent down to get a Fannie Mae loan — even if the downpayment is a gift. Fannie also has started up a new subprime-lending program.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently warned that mortgage underwriting standards have slipped and now reflect “broad trends similar to those experienced from 2005 through 2007, before the most recent financial crisis.”
When the economy and housing prices turn south again, a lot of these loans will go bad, just as they did last time.
Good news: That probably won’t cause another global financial crisis, because the banks largely learned their lesson on that front back in 2008.
Bad news: The taxpayers will likely wind up on the hook. Directly or indirectly, Uncle Sam has been responsible for insuring at least 80 percent of new mortgages since 2008.
We learned nothing from the last financial crisis. The housing market is set to collapse, again, and a key culprit, again, is artificial demand created by government policies.
For starters, mortgage-software firm Ellie Mae reports that the average FICO credit score of an approved home loan plunged to 719 in January (the latest month for which data is available) from 731 a year earlier, and well below 2011’s peak of 750.
It’s a dangerous sign lenders are loosening underwriting standards. Lower FICO scores correlate with higher risk of loan default.
The Federal Housing Administration is a big reason for falling credit scores. So are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government housing agencies have slashed credit requirements under pressure from the Obama administration — like the Clinton administration before it — to qualify more immigrants and minorities with low incomes and “less-than-perfect credit.”
Meanwhile, home lenders are approving more debt-strapped borrowers. According to Ellie Mae, applicants approved for mortgages in January had an average household debt-to-income ratio of 39%, up from 2012’s annual average of 34%. Borrower debt loads have been creeping higher each year since 2012, when Ellie Mae first started tracking such data.
A recent report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a federal agency that regulates the nation’s banks, warns that declines in mortgage underwriting standards are mirroring pre-crisis trends.
“Underwriting standards eased at a significant number of banks for the three-year period from 2013 through 2015,” the report said. “This trend reflects broad trends similar to those experienced from 2005 through 2007, before the most recent financial crisis.”
Not since 2006, it noted, have lenders taken on so much credit risk, and it says the hazard will continue to grow this year: “Examiners expect the level of credit risk to increase over the next 12 months.”
A large chunk of the risk is coming from first-time home buyers with shaky credit and so-called “rebound” buyers who previously defaulted on home loans.
Posted inMortgages|Comments Off on Team Obama is setting us up for another housing-market collapse
The Israeli start-up ecosystem is a well-oiled investment machine that has been turning out companies for the better part of two decades.
The country has its own homegrown angels like Gigi Levy-Weiss and Eilon Tirosh, venture capital firms like Carmel, JVP, Pitango and Canaan, equity crowdfunding firms like OurCrowd and iAngels, and Silicon Valley firms with offices on the ground like Battery Ventures and Sequoia (that’s not to mention the new wave of Asian investors betting on Israeli start-ups).
But, for all the “Start-up Nation” fanfare, Google’s acquisition of Waze – Israel’s highest profile start-up exit to date – was valued at just $1.1B. And, while Israel officially has two Unicorn companies on the CrunchBase list (more if you count companies like Taboola and WeWork), only a handful of Israeli companies have actually exited in the billion dollar range. This is, at least in part, by design.
COMMENTS:
* I know you will laugh, but the key missing element is middle management. Israelis want to either be left alone to code or design, or want to be the vice president/CxO of something. We are not being taught at school, the army or university to be the backbone of scaled companies.
What we see in recent years is new forms of management like squads for engineering & product that embrace a more casual or lesser hierarchy style. This is probably better suited to the local culture.
* I would imagine that the Arab-Israeli conflict and an economy in which salaries cannot keep up with living expenses are bigger roadblocks than the lack of middle management.
Second, it seems like an easy problem to solve. There are many people who (like me) moved to Israel from the United States or Europe, places with no shortage of middle managers. Can’t they simply step in and fill those middle management rolls?
* I find that the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn’t negatively impact the building of big companies. If anything, in a similar fashion to how evolution is driven by external stimuli, the big challenge (with its many downsides) that the geo political situation presents actually stimulates innovation. This is driven by both the doubling down on engineering efforts in the intelligence corps (8-200) that are tasked with sustaining security through this complex situation as well as “getting shit done” culture resulting from it. The article you cite about cost of living is true, but it also specifically notes that the “high tech economy” has the income levels to sustain a (very) high standard of living. This is not dissimilar to the issues you see San Francisconians have with Google / Facebook / Twitter and other high tech employees that increase the rent for others. If you are willing to live in parts other than Tel Aviv, cost of living is significantly lower. My biggest complaint is the lack of sufficient development of public transport.
Going back to the issue of building big companies, the issue is one of a transforming industry, and the Israeli culture of dismissing authority.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on Can Israel build big, sustainable companies?
The following story is a rare example of Dennis yelling at a caller.
Dore phoned Dennis Prager’s radio show Dec. 24, 2010: “Dennis, you love the holiday [of Christmas] so much, do you have a Christmas tree in your house?”
Dennis laughs.
Dore: “You are so enamored with it. Why? Do you get enamored with Easter?”
Dennis: “No. I am enamored with Christmas.”
Dore: “Why don’t you become a Christian? You don’t like Chanukkah, right?”
In the past, Dennis described Chanukkah music as “pathetic” in comparison to Christmas music.
Dennis: “Why does liking Christmas as a Jew mean I don’t like Chanukkah?”
Dore: “Why is it so important? If you take away the shmaltz, the music, the tree and everything else, you’ve got a religious holiday?”
Dennis: “Yes. I love the religion of my neighbors. For me, it is not a religious holiday. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ. Is it a national holiday?”
Dore: “Yes. Unfortunately, it is.”
Dennis: “The vast majority of Americans do [observe Christmas]… It is a meaningful day [for most Americans] and I like that and that’s why I live here. I love this country and I love its holidays including Christmas. My colleague Michael Medved is an Orthodox Jew and he plays this Christmas music [on his radio show]. My brother is Orthodox and he sang Christmas carols with a yarmulke with the Columbia’s Glee club. You are insular, we are not… You live in a tiny little ghettoized mind. I don’t.”
Dore: “Do you know the only day that Jews weren’t killed in the concentration camps? Christmas day.”
Dennis: “You’re an ingrate. How many Jews are living in the freest country on earth thanks to American Christians… You are an ingrate, sir.”
Dore: “No, I’m not.”
Dennis: “You are living in the best country Jews have lived in and you are crapping on the Christians who made this country. Why do you continue to live here if you have such a contempt for the Christians who surround you?”
Dore: “I have no contempt for non-Jews. I have contempt for Christmas day.”
Dennis: “Your entire call has been how crappily Christians have treated Jews. Why do you continue to live among Christians when you could live in Tel Aviv among Jews?”
Dore: “If I had the money, I would make aliyah to Israel.”
Six times during the call, Dennis called Dore “an ingrate.”
In a May 1, 2012 speech, Dennis said: “I text my rabbi (Orthodox), ‘Merry Christmas.’ And he texts back, ‘Gut yontif.'”
He replied: Wow, that conversation with “Dore” is fascinating… Prager does seem like a weird sort of Jew–so patriotic. I’ve been trying to formulate an identity map of sorts, like those X/Y-axis politics grids that you see now and then on Facebook. It seems like there’s 1) national identity 2) racial identity 3) religious identity, and 4) personality.
Seems like this could be helpful in sorting. I think Asian-Americans tend to be low in 1, 3, and 4… whites tend to be low in 2 and, increasingly, 4. Blacks low in 1… but among Jews, there is some diversity. And Prager seems to stand alone. [i’m still reading]
–in the ancient world, tribal Jews prayed to their YHWH, and I suppose they assumed everyone else prayed to their own gods… the Athenians prayed to Artemis, or whatever, and the Romans to Jupiter, and so on… the strange thing is that 2000 years later, in the West, there is really only one god to pray to — the YHWH of the Jews — and yet it seems very evident that most Jews would say that the Christians and other gentiles are wasting their time “worshiping” in their characteristic non-Jewish ways. It does frustrate me pretty deeply, to be honest, that I not only do not know–but can not know–the gods and rituals of my deep ancestors. I wonder how Jews feel about Paul, who basically tried to make a one-size-fits-all Judaism… and I wonder whether Paul’s Greekness–overlayed onto his Jewishness–was part of the cause of his… meddling? Like a modern American Jew, his culture surrounded him with gentile objects & customs… and so maybe as a response, he started to hate all things gentile, and preach, with his weird eschatological Jesus, that one needn’t be circumcized to be among G-d’s people.
sorry, digressing… but I guess most Jews would say they don’t think of St. Paul at all, or they kinda despise him? Yet it seems to me that they ought to love him, for basically single-handedly designing a system that would destroy all the native paganisms of the ancient world, and clear the way for…. “Judeo-Christianity.”
I like the parts where Prager says davening & praying bore him… because I feel so the opposite. I think of all institutional religion as like training wheels, and I think of people who still attend as I would think of adults who ride bikes with training wheels. But that aspect of his personality attracts me, because it’s baffling… almost no inner life, apparently. Just: work, be nice, try hard, stay positive.
“I get my values from the Bible” is what all my Southern Baptist students say… Does Prager’s dad remind you of your dad?
Wow! — that stuff about benefiting from a non-Jew’s business error is craaaaazy! Fuck these people. Put that story about returning the electric shaver in the first paragraph. It’s when I read stuff like that and kinda viscerally react that I see how much of a universalist I was raised to be. And it seems like it’s too late to develop my own in-group with a comprehensive set of guidelines about how how many different ways we could screw over out-group people… so all I can do is say, “That’s awful.”
Your style is interesting–never really read anything like it. If anything, there’s not enough of your craziness by usual standards. You’re more like a curator than an essayist here. But it’s good: just an unfiltered distilling of Prager himself, it seems.
Sometimes I think a serious man needs a mentor as he’s coming into manhood or adulthood, and in modern America, that relationship–which is almost archetypal, with parallels back to Greek philosophy or ancient India–is somehow impossible or out of fashion. You found Prager though.
Posted inDennis Prager|Comments Off on Dennis Prager, Jews & Christians
Steve Sailer writes: On Unz.com, Anatoly Karlin displays an interesting graph of scientists per capita of over 50 Soviet ethnic groups as of 1973.
Not surprisingly, the #1 most scientific ethnicity in the Soviet Union were the Jews and the very last group were the Gypsies, with Gypsies producing about 1/500th as many professional scientists per capita as Jews.
This graph once against demonstrates that UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s otherwise outstanding 2004 book “The Jewish Century” gets off to a bad start by asserting a conceptual grouping of Jews and Gypsies as “Mercurians.”
There was a lot of petty anti-Semitic career discrimination in the USSR by 1973, so the Jewish advantage in talent was probably even greater than this chart shows.
As I’ve mention many times before, my wife’s late uncle, a USAF colonel with a Ph.D. in metallurgy, used to spy behind the Berlin Wall in the 1970s-1980s with Soviet Jewish rocket scientists who were headed to Israel (or America) after their five year cooling off periods. He’d cross into East Berlin as a tourist and meet a Soviet Jewish scientist who was vacationing in East Berlin who was parked on a dark street and debrief him about what his Soviet counterparts were up to.
I wonder how much of Israel’s economic explosion as a high tech center over the last few decades is driven by the exodus from the old Soviet Union? For example, the rumors in the Israeli press that the FBI contracted with an Israeli firm to break the encryption on the San Bernardino terrorist’s Apple iPhone gets me wondering how much of the Israeli advantage in telecom software these days is due to KGB investments in sigint and codebreaking in the old days …
Our old friends the Chechens are fourth from the bottom in this list.
At the top of the list, Jews are first by a mile, but then come Georgians (e.g., Stalin and Beria — don’t let anybody tell you Stalin was stupid) and Armenians (e.g., the Mikoyan brothers), followed by Russians. I believe there was some affirmative action for the Russian majority, but, still, they’re formidable. Then come Krymchaks, Estonians, Latvians, Tats, Buryats, Ossetians, Lithuanians, Azeris, and Ukrainians.
COMMENTS:
* A lot of Soviet Jews (especially the ambitious ones) and nearly all half Jews were officially registered as Russians, Ukrainians, etc. So the true number of Jews among the Soviet scientists was even higher.
* Americans can’t comprehend what a giant prison the Soviet Union was. Soviet citizens did not just get on a plane and take a vacation in E. Berlin. Even within the East Bloc, travel was restricted and you had to get clearances to go to another country, which were not granted unless you had a damn good reason for going and were considered politically reliable. Such permission was highly sought after because the quantity and quality of consumer goods in the satellites was better than in the SU. Vacations were usually inside the Soviet Union at some Black Sea resort and would typically be arranged thru your work unit.
For someone who had already indicated their disloyalty by applying to go to Israel, such permission was not likely to be forthcoming.
Typically, Soviet Jews exited by way of Vienna or Rome. If I had to guess, your uncle met scientists who were already on their way out of the country and were in transit to Vienna or something like that. But they were most likely NOT on vacation.
Regarding Muslim potential, you have to understand that the Soviets tried damn hard, using Soviet style (ruthless) measures far beyond what could be done in the West to de-Islamify Soviet Muslims and to some extent they succeeded.
You have to wonder whether such self-defeating tactics contributed to the Soviet Union losing the Cold War. Having most of its top nuclear scientists in Los Alamos instead of Berlin sure didn’t help the German atomic program.
* What is the breakdown among those who actually accomplished or discovered something in their careers? They seem thin on the ground. I’m under the impression that the Soviet Union employed massive numbers of scientists in factory town type conditions where they tortured wheat seeds and tried to create gorilla-man hybrid soldiers. But a whole lot of their technology, and not just military, came from appropriating the new stuff from Europe and America. Not very impressive. Check out their version of the space shuttle.
* Did Russia lose the Cold War in 1991 by dissolving the Soviet State? American neocons certainly seem upset that she doesn’t act like she lost.
There will almost certainly be a coherent nation state called Russia and filled with Russians in 2091. Americans at that time are predicted to be a 25% minority in a US dominated by Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians.
Russia wisely used its so-called loss to dump its most recalcitrant and intractable minorities in 1991 without losing much of anything that is strategic (Balts, Turkmen and Uzbeks, West Ukrainians – bye, bye!). The shape of the frozen conflicts and the Eurasian Customs Union shows you the shape of Russia in 2091.
* The best cryptographers, cryptologists, and computer scientists in information security have been educated at MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Princeton for more than 30 years. They have been getting grants from and working for the NSA since they were grad students. The Technion is now one of the best schools for this work, but the training their profs had was NSA funded in the US. Overwhelmingly, these scientists are Israeli or American Jews. No KGB necessary.
* I’m a huge Steve Sailer fan and even take the risk of recommending him to people I don’t know to be right-wing, but one things to keep in mind about Steve is that for a guy who coined the term Occam’s Butterknife he isn’t really that careful about avoiding hyper-baroque triple bank shot reasoning himself.
* On balance the movement of people was freer within the USSR than within the US of that time. The number of places with security personnel at the door was orders of magnitude lower in the USSR. A Soviet person expected to be able to enter almost any building without having to explain to anyone why he wanted to do so and without having to show an ID. Usually there was simply no one to show it to. Schools, factories, offices, stores, libraries, etc. were unguarded. The Kremlin was unguarded. You just walked in through one of the towers.
There were no “bad” neighborhoods. That particular restriction on movement was missing.
The propiska system limited movement, but I think that in the psychological sense the two considerations I listed above outweighed it. You generally entered buildings more often than you wanted to permanently move to another part of the country. Also, the propiska system kept the numerous ethnicities of the USSR from being mixed up and assimilated into a giant EU-like gray mass. It promoted ethnic continuity and interethnic peace. So it was actually a good thing. Moscow only began to be filled up with Central Asians once the propiska system was abolished.
* I have worked in Israel a great deal. Most of the top scientists and researchers (who I have met) were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Israeli born. I was told that many of the Russian Jewish scientists who got out went to or had to leave for America or Canada or the UK because Israel was too small to absorb so many highly educated persons – there simply were not enough teaching positions or spots in industry (especially for mathematicians). The guy who founded WhatsApp and one of the Google guys were children of ex Jewish Soviet but I really doubt that they would have become billionaires in Israel. Maybe the true impact is coming from the ones born in Israel or who arrived as children in the 90s and onward. Has to be a good gene pool.
* This is like the claims about the oft-cited but barely experienced Islamic Golden Age of Science, in which most of the notable scientists of the Arabo-Islamic “Golden Age” turn out to be Persians, Jews, recycled Greeks or Helleno-Egyptians, plagiarized Indians, etc., and often they are of only recent or dubious Muslim-ness. Islam takes the credit–or such credit as is available–for the work of what were really subject peoples.
Islam was originally a minority religion of a conquering warrior elite who lived parasitically on the fruits–literal and figurative–of the conquered. As in the modern Western welfare states, a parasite class can be supported for time, providing that there are sufficient Jizyah-payers to keep the parasites in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. With time, the Jizyah-payers think “enough of this” and convert (nominally) to Islam to live on someone else’s Jizyah. This works until the increasing parasites swamp the diminishing hosts. Then you end up with … well, the Muslim world of the last few centuries: moribund, jealous, internecinely hostile. The only ways for Muslims out of this dead end are either
1) to abandon Islam, or at least the most civilizationally destructive aspects of it, which had been happening in a mild way as the more intelligent Muslims recognized and emulated Western superiority, or
2) to find new lands of dhimmi jizya-payers to begin the whole destructive cycle over again.
Fortunately, after centuries of negative experiences with Islam, today none of Islam’s neighbors is stupid enough to allow hordes of hostile Muslims colonists into their lands … oh, wait!
* Estonians are above Latvians who are above Lithuanians. I first learned about the stereotype of Estonians being the most orderly and efficient Balts, and Lithuanians being the most lackadaisical ones about 20 years ago.
There is a north-south gradient in human capital among farmers’s descendents in many, many regions of Europe and of the world in general. Italy, the former Yugoslavia, Spain, etc. Farming in high latitudes must have selected for intelligence and a lot of other traits.
Relatively small north-south-oriented regions like the Baltic area, Italy and the former Yugoslavia are good test cases because they eliminate a lot of extraneous variables. Ceteris paribus the latitude at which a man’s ancestors ploughed the earth is very important.
* Russian speaking Jews (and a minority of non Jews that pretended to be Jews to get the hell out of an imploding former Soviet landscape) are a formidable presence in Tel Aviv and the tech industry. Generally speaking, I’d much rather live in Moscow than Tel Aviv, but there’s no question that many smart people chose otherwise at some point in time.
Also, though I admire Russian intelligence and culture, I’ve not seen research that has caused me to think that the Russian aristocracy per se nurtured a formidable intellectual prowess – I’d be interested to see if there is some evidence to support this idea. In general, it has always struck me that Russian slavs appear to be brighter in general than white Americans or white British, but to a person these are all people that would have come from merchant, peasant or priest stock.
* A long time ago I read the memoirs of Konstantin Simonov, a famous Soviet writer and an official in the Writer’s Union. Stalin often invited him to talk about literature. Who’s good, who’s bad, in what way, what writers should write about instead, etc. Long conversations like that. The interesting thing is that Stalin didn’t delegate this task. All subsequent Soviet leaders did. He read through large quantities of the lit fic of his time and then talked about it with the authors themselves.
To what extent were Louis XIV, Louis XIII, etc. the authors of the styles that were named after them? I don’t know. I would think that Queen Victoria had almost nothing to do with Victorianism. I’ve read enough about Stalin to know that he was the principal author of his style. The look of central Moscow subway stations, of the 7 sister towers, of the Soviet movies of his time, the feel of the novels, the sound of the popular music, etc. are all reflections of what he personally liked.
Napoleon went in a similar direction I think – restrained imperial grandeur. The Trotskyists whom Stalin defeated were all into avant-garde crap.
* In the movies, it’s always some Nazi who says to the hero, “Papers, please”, but, as noted above, internal passports were a Soviet invention first used to find escaping kulaks.
* Why should the Soviet Union allow a citizen to leave when the state picked up the tab for the health care and education of that citizen? That’s the lesson I take. Don’t allow the state to fund your life from cradle to grave, and maybe the state won’t behave as if you were their property.
You would think Americans of the same ethic background who were adversely affected by this rationale in the USSR would be eager to not have similar conditions arise in the USA. In a sane world Bernie Sanders would have taken this lesson to heart and would not be campaigning on ‘everything is free’. Because in the end everything isn’t free and you’ll end up being owned.
* I think if you ask Sanders, he would tell you that what he has in mind is democratic socialism similar to that practiced in Denmark, not soviet socialism.
All modern economies (the US included) have certain “socialist” aspects. We have free public schools, free pensions and health care for senior citizens, free food for people who don’t make enough to buy their own, subsidized housing for various groups (plus a mortgage interest deduction for almost everyone), government operated mass transit, a government owned postal system, etc. At various times, the US government has owned large part of the railroad industry, the auto industry, etc. Other aspects of the US economy combine the WORST aspects of private industry with government funding in order to maximize inefficiency. Government doesn’t build the $5,000 airplane toilet seat or the $1,000,000 heart operation, it just pays for it, with your money. Some of these things as American as apple pie and people don’t even think of them as being socialist, though they are. The train left the station on “socialism” long before Sanders was born.
* I don’t believe Jews were the liquidated [in the Soviet Union], if by the liquidated you mean the ones targeted for mass collective punishment. I don’t doubt some Jews were maliciously attacked. But if Jews were the target then I’d suspect the Hammer and Sickle would have the status today of the Swastika. I doubt open communist parties with their Soviet style party flags would be treated as respectable in today’s media. Instead their symbols would be banned and their parties treated like the Golden Dawn. Even Max Boot feels OK about voting for Stalin. I doubt he’d say that about Hitler.
* The many ways in which NY is far from being a model of democracy never seems to have worried the NYT much. Widespread corruption, long-running organized crime control of much of the NYC economy and the outrageously gerrymandered NY State Senate were mostly ignored while the NYT was preoccupied with how the world should be remade.
* Churchill agreed that driving out the Jews hurt the Nazi war effort. In the famous speech where he spoke of “the Few” he noted: “Since the Germans drove the Jews out and lowered their technical standards, our science is definitely ahead of theirs.”
But Jewish engineers and scientists definitely helped the Soviets overall – even if quotas lowered Jewish chances in some admissions. One invention by a Jew certainly helped the USSR win against the Nazis. The head designer and engineer of the t-34 tank was a Jew (Mikahil Koshkin) and pretty much everyone says that this was the best tank of the war. Again, there were quotas against Jews in the US in the 1930s but this did not hinder Jewish success or contributions to the US at all. Jews who went to City College won many Nobels. Did it really matter that they did not get into Harvard?
* There was only one top german-jewish physicist working on the Manhattan Project, Hans Bethe, and one top italian physicist (gentile, but with a jewish wife), Enrico Fermi. From Europe, there were a few journeymen scientists like Klaus Fuchs (gentile anti-Nazi), and some second rank talent: Otto Frisch and Edward Teller (although how much he contributed to the success of the Manhattan Project is a matter of some dispute. For the most part, the work was done by Americans (many of them jewish. but certainly not all) and, to a lesser extent, Britons.
* There are many indications that Stalin was planning a mass action against Jews shortly before his death. Probably this would have taken the form of a forced exile to some distant corner of the Soviet Union – that was his usual m.o. with other ethnic groups in disfavor. Of course many would have died in transit and due to bad conditions once they arrived.
While Jews were not targeted for collective punishment, plenty were caught up in the net of the purges. And of course Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed – nothing that was not co-opted by the Communist Party could be allowed to exist.
Post Stalin and especially post-1967, traditional Russian anti-Semitism reasserted itself but this mostly took the form of discrimination in jobs, university admissions, etc. rather than large scale violence.
* There are available statistics of GULAG inmates for most years, and the proportion of Jews was at most half of their proportion in the general population throughout. They weren’t targeted in any of the ethnic operations in the 1930s or after the war, though it was rumored that Stalin planned a huge “anti-Zionist” operation and show trial before he died, but he actually killed only maybe 500 during the actual anti-Zionist operation and trials, which is nothing by Stalin’s standards. All the while their proportion among the higher echelons of the party and especially the repressive apparatus was much higher than their proportion among the general population until well into the late 1930s.
* The existence of closed cities in the Soviet Union is a matter of undeniable historical fact. There are thousands of other references beside wikipedia that would confirm this. A search of “soviet union closed cities” has over half a million hits. Read the first few hits if you doubt the wiki. No one (sane) denies that they existed, so I don’t know what your point is.
As I mentioned before, the US had something of an equivalent in Los Alamos during WWII. The Soviets just considered a lot more stuff to be top secret than we did. Instead of considering just their #1 top secret weapon development center to be ultra secret, they set up dozens and stayed permanently on a war footing thru the entire Cold War.
Feynman was not a big fan of the secrecy behind the Manhattan Project. He thought it actually impeded progress. He was sent on a field trip to Oak Ridge and he found out that the people designing the plant hadn’t (because of secrecy) been told what the characteristics of uranium were and what it would take to trigger a chain reaction. Because of this, he discovered that the plant had been designed in such a way that there would have been numerous dangerous criticality incidents if he hadn’t caught them. He lobbied to be allowed to explain a certain amount to them and then they were able to figure out on their own how to design the plant so it would not blow up.
Likewise, there was a group of bright high school graduates at Los Alamos assigned to run the IBM punch card tabulators that functioned as sort of crude computers. At first they were just given bunch of math problems to solve but not told what they meant and whether higher was better or lower was better or what. As a result they found the work incredibly boring. He got permission to give them some background on the meaning of the math problems and their productivity shot way up and they devise better faster ways to solve the problems on their own and considerably sped up the program.
Given this, you have to wonder how much of the Soviet obsession with secrecy was self defeating.
* As with Chinese and Jews, the thing is, both are correct. Tons of geniuses and tons of fakers. In fact, it’s totally consistent with the artless “ramping-up until the machine breaks,” applied by both Chinese and Jews to most processes, to just crank up the mill and accept more fakers as an externality of more geniuses.
* The other explanation is that by 1989 when more than half of Jews had higher education the percentage of Jews who could access it even based on pure meritocracy had been maxed out. Let’s crudely assume a mean IQ of 100 for Russians and 115 for Jews with an S.D. of 15. This means that 16% of Russians and 50% of Jews will have an IQ of 115 or above. Let’s say that this is the part of the population that had access to a higher education in the Soviet era (this makes sense: The system was, for the most part, meritocratic, and standards for entry where far higher than today when higher education is far more accessible). According to our stats, the actual higher education achievement figures in 1989 were 14% for Russians and 56% for Jews, i.e. Jewish access to education was actually higher than what you would get by assuming reasonable mean IQ’s and no anti-Semitic discrimination. Of course even slight differences in the actual mean IQ levels (e.g. a Russian mean IQ of 97, not 100 – as may be more realistic) will have substantial impacts but they would not cardinally change the overall picture.
* Dear old Germania, where have your clever ones gone? What have you done for us lately?
The University of Berlin’s proud list of Nobel Prize Laureates.
In the fields of chemistry, literature, medicine and physics:
Chemistry
Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901
Emil Fischer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1902
Adolf von Baeyer
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1905
Eduard Buchner
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1907
Richard Willstätter
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1915
Fritz Haber
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1918
Walther Nernst
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1920
Peter Debye
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1936
Adolf Butenandt
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1939
Otto Hahn
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1944
Otto Diels
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1950
Literature
Theodor Mommsen
Nobel Prize for Literature 1902
Medicine
Emil von Behring
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1901
Robert Koch
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1905
Paul Ehrlich
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1908
Albrecht Kossel
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1910
Otto Warburg
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1931
Hans Spemann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1935
Werner Forßmann
Nobel Prize for Medicine 1956
Physics
Wilhelm Wien
Nobel Prize in Physics 1911
Max von Laue
Nobel Prize in Physics 1914
Max Planck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1918
Albert Einstein
Nobel Prize in Physics 1921
Gustav Hertz
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925
James Franck
Nobel Prize in Physics 1925
Werner Heisenberg
Nobel Prize in Physics 1932
Erwin Schrödinger
Nobel Prize in Physics 1933
Walter Bothe
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954
Max Born
Nobel Prize in Physics 1954
Don’t know how many of these great minds would have been purged by Nazi Aryanization. It’s probably wrong for me to focus on the brightest lights of all the millions of innocents who perished, but I can’t help thinking about how much of Europe’s human potential and extraordinary talent were lost to the catastrophes of the 20th century that were either murdered or scared into exile.
If all the aspiring political activists, revolutionary vanguards and SJW crusaders would just put down their megaphones and roll up their sleeves and humbly join us in the labs, we might actually change the world and beat cancer or develop practical fusion power… Perhaps we all can’t be geniuses, but you don’t need to be an Einstein to contribute to the team.
* [Jewish religious and cultural life was destroyed]
What a shame! It meant the Jews in Russia couldn’t replicate their extraordinary scientific achievements prior to 1860, when the Russian state didn’t interfere at all with their “religious and cultural life”.
* On the topic of Soviet Jews, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was a rather intriguing endeavor. Stalin set up at Zionist state within the Soviet Union in the extreme Far East bordering China.
Things did not exactly work out. There is much to admire about the Russians, but when they screw up, they tend to do so in spectacular fashion. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is today less than 1% Jewish. Interestingly, its official flag is the Rainbow Flag.
* Lots of great science is being done in Germany. Max Planck Institutes are a formidable network. On a whole, Germany’s most science metrics (citation impact per published paper, etc) are higher than in the USA. Two relatively recent immigrants from Germany won Nobels – Blobel in 1999 and Sudhof in 2013.
How come the murder of the man in this video stirs no outrage?
AFP: Mexico music video showing woman murder sparks outrage
Mexico City (AFP) – A man finds his lover in bed with another man. He pulls a gun, shoots the rival dead, ties up the woman, drags her to a car, stuffs her in the trunk and smiles as he sets it on fire.
“Fuiste Mia” (“You were mine”), a slick music video by the Mexican-American singer Gerardo Ortiz, has garnered more than 25 million views on YouTube — and provoked a furious backlash in a country that suffers from an ingrained culture of sexual violence and where killings of women have surged.
The 25-year-old Ortiz has a long list of “narcocorridos” — or “narco ballads” — to his credit, a controversial yet hugely popular genre that celebrates the feats of Mexico’s drug lords and is banned from the airwaves in many places.
But none of his videos has attracted as much attention as “Fuiste Mia,” which appeared just as two high-profile sexual harassment cases were making headlines in Mexico — and prompted him to cancel several concerts.
Stuffing a woman in a skimpy nightgown into a trunk is reminiscent of the tactics of Mexico’s drug gangs, who often dump bodies, sometimes hacked to pieces and with notes attached to them, inside cars.
Speaking at a press conference from southern California, where he lives as a US citizen, Ortiz said the “horrible publicity” surrounding the video had the merit of raising awareness of femicide, or the violent killing of women.
But his argument did little to appease critics in Mexico.
Videos like this one “objectify women, glorify violence, and reaffirm stereotypes about women causing problems for men and therefore deserving punishment,” said Lucia Lagunes, head of Women’s Communication and Information, a rights NGO.
The subject is highly sensitive in a country where nearly half of all women over the age of 15 — 47 percent — have suffered some form of sexual violence, according to government statistics.
The Mexican interior ministry condemned the singer by name in a statement expressing “profound rejection of this type of content, and in particular, the video of singer Gerardo Ortiz.”
The video “clearly invites violence against women, in addition to minimizing and normalizing this social scourge,” it said.
Ortiz’s video also caught the attention of officials in the western state of Jalisco, who issued a summons for the singer for questioning. Two years ago police seized six AK-47 assault rifles and a grenade launcher at the upscale home in Jalisco where the video was filmed.
Posted inMexico|Comments Off on Mexico music video showing woman murder sparks outrage
* Wikipedia posts [Dennis] Hastert’s teaching career from 1965-81.
One of the four victims was the equipment manager, Steve Remboldt, who died of AIDS in 1995. He graduated in 1971. His sister believes that “Individual A”, the one who blackmailed Hastert, knew about Rembolt. (I don’t know if sister has solid grounds to know that.)
The others seem to describe a massage that ended with a “sexual act”. There wasn’t as much information about homosexuality in the 1960s–there wasn’t as much information period. So a trusted coach giving a therapeutic massage; which turns into a “happy ending”, it’s not immediately obvious to a teenage boy how to feel. (Obviously having your crank yanked felt good, but other than that). Did he “do anything to you”? Well, he did something for you…
Homosexuality was still classified as a mental disorder. My guess is that Coach didn’t come across as mentally disordered. He wasn’t crossdressing or kissing little boys. He was a big buff tough football/wrestling coach.
So maybe that’s part of the medical treatment? IS it any weirder than drinking raw eggs? (IF you don’t know anything about how sexual predators operate.) But on the whole, no thanks coach, I don’t think I want another massage.
That’s my uninformed guess as to why the kids didn’t fight him off, or say anything.
* Hastert was never on trial for sexual abuse. He was not indicted/convicted of any such crime. It is an absolute disgrace for the prosecutor to release such information to the public. The allegations were never proven in a court of law, civil or criminal.
Hastert’s bank withdrawals of his own dam money were flagged ( probably by his bank to FINCEN) because his was withdrawing numerous amounts under the 10k reporting requirement.
To make matters worse, Hastert made statements to the FBI. You never talk the the FBI or any police person without a lawyer. It is insane if you do.
Just ask Thomas Drake who reported a billion dollars of waste at the NSA and made voluntary statements to the FBI. The FBI with the help of the US Attorney used those same statements and charged Drake with espionage.
Hastert pled guilty to structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements and making false statements to federal investigators.
Hard to wrap your head around a case where the victim of extortion goes to jail and the extortionist is lauded a hero.
A law school professor and former criminal defense attorney tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.
“Don’t talk to the Police.”
* I worked for a decade in the Middle East. You learn something very quickly in that world: Find yourself in legal problems and there is something wrong with your politics, nothing more. Otherwise, you would have continued to live exempt from the law.
As we relentlessly drive to become a Third World Country, we are finding ourselves and our legal system in similar circumstances. There was something wrong with Dennis Hastert’s politics, nothing more.
* The Hastert prosecution has politics written all over it. My theory, for which I admit I have no proof save for the timing, was that it was a warning to Chief Justice John Roberts to vote for an interpretation of Obamacare that permitted federal insurance exchanges. Roberts’s votes on Obamacare have been very strange and difficult to explain save a potential blackmail threat.
* There was nothing strange about Roberts’ decisions on Obamacare. Did you notice that health stocks were getting killed when people realized that Obamacare might actually get struck down? Have you heard businesspeople complaining about how our complicated employer-funded system of health care makes it harder for them to compete with businesses from countries with functioning national health care?
Roberts was nominated and confirmed in 2005, before Obamacare existed and when Obama was barely a glimmer on the horizon. Roberts was nominated because he was a sure vote for expansive government authority (particularly executive authority in aid of the GWOT), he would take the right side of the culture wars, and he would be hostile to campaign finance regulation. On all of those subjects, he’s been as reliable as a Swiss watch. So far so good, but no one foresaw that Obamacare would be one of the biggest cases of his tenure. It shouldn’t have stunned anyone, however, that a friend of letting the government do what it wants decided to let it have its way this time, too.
Part of the foolishness of these kinds of theories is that they presume striking down Obamacare would have been bad for Democrats. On the contrary, it would have been catastrophic for Republicans and the Supreme Court. Same as the 1992 abortion case where Souter, O’Connor, and Kennedy joined together to save Roe v. Wade.
Posted inRape|Comments Off on WP: Prosecutors offer details on Dennis Hastert’s alleged sexual abuse of teenagers
* Just another example of how the real America is getting gang raped on a pile of broken glass while the story is kept dull, dull, dull…
* It’s not about her, Vinny. It’s about the risibly flimsy grounds upon which the media, academia, and government launched (and continue to perpetrate) the moral panic of a rape epidemic by straight white males. Yes, Jackie was played like a pawn and is–at least partially–a victim as well, but that also needs to be exposed.
* Any lawsuit against the University of Virginia involving this case will subject UVA’s discovery, including all relevant deposition transcripts (which UVA will, of course, demand), to FOIA. So UVA will have to release them.
* Has Jackie publicly acknowledged perpetrating this hoax and apologized to the many people and institutions damaged by it? If not, I don’t see why she is entitled to a break.
* The usual response to a hoax like this that blows up in the face of the SJWs is to say, “Everyone was a victim in this unfortunate matter. Let us put it behind us and speak no more about it.”
Sorry, the people responsible for things like this are ruining other people’s lives. As long as they suffer no repercussions, there’s no reason for them to stop.
* I hope that Eramo gets her millions and that Rolling Stone, if not driven out of business altogether, is more circumspect in future, together with Gawker (in a similar boat) and other such organs following the globalists’ agenda.
* If the public interest required unsealing Jack and Jeri Ryan’s divorce proceedings, then it certainly ought to extend to unsealing Jackie’s deposition.
* Either the judge ordered that the parties were not to release the deposition transcript, or the plaintiff’s attorneys agreed to do so, at least for the time being, so as to not have given Jackie’s attorneys other grounds to object to the deposition being taken. It’s not that unusual for parties in civil litigation to agree to keep discovery materials confidential, and will often over designate.
A third party might have to intervene in the case to have the transcript released if the parties are unwilling to do so. Otherwise, unless the transcript or portions of it are part of a motion or are used at trial, it’s not really a public record, so there’s not a freedom of information act angle.
* Off topic, but point three of your post is also the reason that businesses like to use arbitration to resolve their disputes. Confidential business data is better protected in arbitration than litigation. A very senior British judicial official complained recently tht too much justice was being conducted behind closed doors and blamed arbitration.
* She didn’t give that fraternity at which the claimed the rape took place much of a break. I agree, however, that Jackie is not the principal villain–the author of the piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely (I think) is either a psychopath or pure, distilled, from the pit of Hell evil, who should never be allowed near a writing instrument of any kind.
* I think that it’s important to expose the personal sickness and distorted cultural values that underlie this case so that other young females and SJWs don’t get so out of control again.
* Anyone at the law firms representing the parties can release the deposition transcript. Carefully, of course. But doubtless any paralegal, secretary, or interested lawyer can likely view the transcript and make a surreptitious copy. Let’s hope they are civic minded.
* You don’t need a separate lawsuit, you’d file a motion to intervene into the case and then object to confidentiality designations as they are made. That’s easier than a lawsuit, and you also would not have to pay the $450 filing fee for a new lawsuit.
A good lawyer would need maybe 6 hours to do the whole thing. If the judge wanted a hearing on the motion, there could be additional time to go to court. So maybe $3,000 on the low side as the cost of hiring someone to do so. It is prestigious to get media clients and fight for open public records, so finding someone to do it at a discount for a journalist might not be too hard. So maybe $1,200, or $200 an hour, taking this into consideration.
The deposition’s confidentiality would fall into three separate levels of protection.
First, any parts of the deposition that were never submitted to the court would not be a public record of any sort. The parties to the case could agree to do whatever they want with the transcript, but would not usually have any reason to release it. Sometimes the whole transcript just gets submitted by one party or another, in which case the whole thing becomes a public record. Sometimes it is just the relevant pages, or none of it.
Second, any parts of the deposition submitted to the court before trial would have a presumption of public access, but it is fairly easy to keep them under seal.
Third, any parts of the deposition used at a trial are very hard, bordering on but not quite impossible, to keep confidential. This is part of the reason why business disputes that last for years in court are often settled right before trial, neither party wants all of their internal financial data and business e-mails put online for all to see. The lawyers for each side have to get together and agree on a trial exhibit list (no “surprise” exhibits are allowed generally, unlike on TV).
Often third party transcripts are not treated carefully because they don’t have lawyers following the case, or don’t have lawyers at all. It seems like both sides probably blame Jackie for their issues, so might not care to keep them secret, and will just do the minimum required.
If I were Jackie, I’d look for an angry spinster SJW attorney to represent me for free, and she’d argue that since Jackie is crazy the deposition is about mental health issues and subject to medical privacy.
To the extent no mainstream journalist doesn’t want to follow the case too aggressively, Ben Shapiro would be a smart anti-SJW attorney who could represent the public interest in open records on the case.
More practically, you can often get a good sense of what is in a deposition filed under seal by reading the briefs that mention it. Again, neither Rolling Stone nor Jackie’s UVA victims have much reason to try to aggressively conceal the contents of her deposition, and may just do the minimum her lawyer required.
* Everyone at the law firms involved signed a confidentiality agreement when they were hired, and would make themselves unemployable if they leaked a confidential document, especially to serve our unpopular “far right” agenda. For this reason this is very unlikely to happen. Probably over 100 people will have access to it, but they probably all prefer continued employment.
If Jackie has no lawyer or a bad one, she may not have conditioned her agreement to a deposition on a protective order. Or a hardass judge might have refused to provide one. In that case, leaking it would still be discouraged, but not violate any confidences, any more than leaking a transcript of a conversation two people had on a bus.
Also, if this is the case, then the transcript can be filed with the court and would go online right away. To get access all you would need to do is pay the $3.00 download fee from the court website.
* Twisted is a word better used to describe “this young woman”. She’s a really sick puppy who inflicted enormous suffering on a group of innocent young men. Only a fanatical, virtue-seeking SJW would even pretend otherwise.
* “You really want this young woman’s scalp. Kind of twisted.”
Yes, only men should have to conform to the established legal & moral norms of our civilization. To expect that of a woman, let alone a young woman, is quite twisted indeed. Girls, after all, are not merely the lowbrow product of snips, snails, and puppy dog tails, and as such, deserve a plethora of rights and privileges not granted to us (male) commoners.
* Are you aware of what this woman, Jackie Last-name-redacted, is doing? She fabricated a story about herself being raped, accused other actual real people (the members of a particular fraternity) of having committed this non-existent crime, and now says that it would be too traumatic for her to dredge up the fake events that never happened which she used to attack the character of other people.
* Reminder that a judge decided to release Cosby’s court depos because they didn’t like Cosby’s comments about black youth.
* In spite of the misogynist feminism of our age (women cast in the image of ersatz males), it is interesting to see movement in the opposite direction; that is, retro-casting females in the traditional role of the “weaker sex” … the perpetual victims of malicious males, the malicious circumstances of life, and, yes, even victims of themselves. Ergo, they need LOTS of protection.
Consistent with this retro-thinking, “Jackie” is evidently calling on the courts to protect her from her own fantasies to save herself from a fit of, we can presume, hysteria, panic, and fainting. How could a sensitive, delicate woman such as “Jackie” otherwise survive such devastating trauma?
Posted inJournalism, Rape|Comments Off on Can Somebody Sue to Get Jackie Coakley’s Deposition Made Public?
Yikes, do those free lunches contain a neurotoxin that attacks the brain?
That picture of the little black boy as a young Copernicus is precious.
* …if Copernicus thought the heavens revolved around an afro.
Note that the white kids are flatfooted whereas the black kid is striving.
* Additionally, the kids to the left and right of the striving negro are both left-handed (i.e. right brained) while the negro child is right-handed (left brained, purportedly with stronger math and logic skills).
* I love the NYT illustration. Not only does genius L’il Jabari grok planetary motion, but he’s also setting up a visually devastating Yo Momma So Fat joke at the expense of scowling Da’Quan in the back row.
* Anyone notice that the child on the highest stack of the books (ie most privileged) is an Asian girl? Has the NY Times ever before even implied anyone is more privileged than a white male?
This may portend a future where SWPL parents complain that over-achieving Asian kids are in some ways more privileged than their own children.
* It’s also horribly racist in its depiction of black youth as maturing faster physically than white and Asian peers. One more growth spurt and he’ll be able to dunk.
* Black genius child draws a more elaborate solar system than the mere white and Asian peers who draw simple stars. Sort of like Morgan Freeman playing one genius after another in the movies. It’s all fantasy. The reality would more likely be that he’d be in Special Ed.
* Is there some kind of journalistic “Making Excuses For Minorities” award? It seems like these people are always gunning for it.
* It seems that the same people debunk the value of IQ testing believe very strongly in learning disabilities. What is the relationship between IQs and learning disabilities? Is a person with a high IQ score just a person without any learning disabilities?
* With lower standards for black and Hispanic kids, the pool of kids sent for testing is expanded. They found high IQ kids who scored above 115. They would also find high IQ white kids who scored below 130 and above 115 but they never looked for those kids. Those kids are discarded, the range is restricted to white kids who scored above 130.
* The picture seems to be an interesting bit of subtle propaganda. The Asian and White kid stand on books, presumably representing the well stocked home libraries and support they have access to as advantaged children. And despite this advantage, they don’t know what outer space really looks like and represent it with cartoonish stars, whereas the Black kid, without the advantage of standing on books, correctly depicts the Copernican model of the solar system.
* Who are the teachers and administrators that conspire to racially discriminate against the 115-130 IQ white kids?
How can any white parent trust any of them in any capacity?
* How much nuffin could a dindu do if a dindu dindu nuffin?
* The NYT comment section has closed. No NYT comment picked up on how the thresholds and eligibility criteria were manipulated to inflate the number of “gifted” students from “underrepresented” groups.
Score: NYT 1, Knowledge -1.
* You highlight a gap that I think we all agree deserves our attention and resources, the one between individual potential and achievement.
Even if it’s worthwhile to invest in human potential in all segments of the bell curve, I still wonder how we decide how much of our resources to dedicate to the development of very modest potential on its far left tail? Is there a formula that we use to possibly compare the diminishing returns to investment for special ed versus using the resources to develop human potential among normal or gifted populations?
* Clearly, the I.Q. cut-offs are set by state law: 130 points for non-disadvantaged students, 116 points for ELL or FRL students.
Since these cut-offs are set by state law, I think we can assume that they were the same before and after the introduction of universal screening.
The universal screening tested all students with a non-I.Q. ability test. The difference in cut-offs was similar to that of the I.Q. test cut-offs: 130 points for non-disadvantage students, 115 (instead of 116) points for ELL or FRL students.
So, since this program did increase the number of ELL and FRL (or otherwise disadvantaged) students, it seems it worked. Universal screening did what it was supposed to, and caught disadvantaged students that were previously overlooked.
Steve’s basic point seems to be that what “identified as gifted” means in article means very different things for different sorts of students. In my opinion it is journalistic malpractice to not inform one’s readers of this.
Mrs. Dynarski did not do so, and for this she is to blame, especially as a professor at Michigan. She also uses a number of weasel words: “many researchers worry”; “psychologists say they believe to be culturally neutral”; “distinguishing between gifted students and everybody else could lock.”
* If you honestly believe that all peoples have identical abilities, then the world must seem an utterly baffling place. No wonder they cook up all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain differing outcomes! You can’t blame them for reaching for Occam’s Butterknife. If you were a racial egalitarian, what would YOU do?
* It’s impossible for a talented minority to go undiscovered. They’re always on the lookout for this fabled being. A minority with two cents worth of brains is a precious find and they get very excited, promoting them beyond their real capability. Resources wasted chasing the Yeti aren’t available to the regular normal to bright students. White adults mostly pay for this nonsense through their taxes and are being robbed along with the white students.
* The eligibility requirements do not appear to be language and SES neutral.
Primary language other than English and low SES each contribute a point to a required 10, and an Underrepresented Gifted Students checklist can contribute an additional 2. These are termed “Environmental Factors” in the matrix.
* It refers to admission to the gifted program. There is no way you get a universal test with a high cutoff and admit 8% of whites and 3% of blacks.
A test that admitted the top 8% of whites would be expected to admit the top 0.79% of blacks using a 1 SD IQ gap and 0.61% using a 1.1 SD gap.
The 8% number should be roughly equal between whites and blacks using the lower 115IQ bar for blacks explicitly. However, some blacks were subjected to the higher “white” standard (middle class blacks), while some whites (poor or immigrant whites) got into the program under the lower “black” standard. So in practice, you don’t get the result that most liberal white institutions want. Instead of getting the 125IQ blacks from middle and upper income families, you exclude them in favor of 115IQ whites and blacks from poor families.
The only reason this program “worked” is that there are few NE Asian immigrants in south florida.
If you did this in California, and admitted whites under a 130 non-verbal IQ threshold but ESL asian kids under a 115 non-verbal IQ threshold, you get gifted classes with 50 ESL asians per black and not all that many whites either.
* The higher the intelligence the more likely the person will be blessed with good physical health, good emotional health, good social skills or the ability to catch up in this area, and ability to rise above adversity, among other advantages. Although it’s not often realized, very bright children are often handicapped in educational settings that are unable to provide them the resources that they are able to take advantage of.
* Every study shows the same. It’s always cherry-picking, self-selection, fraud, or a mistake when you get a result like the NYT headlines.
* And yet higher IQ humans (I’m talking from the 110s onward) are way behind lower IQ humans (I’m talking from the 90s downward) when it comes to violent and/or sex crime. Hence, so many Black and Hispanic violent criminals and/or sex criminals in America when put up with Whites and East Asians.
And let’s not forget disparities in earnings. A signifigant amount of millionaires and billionaires (especially in technology) have IQs from the 120s onward. The movers and shakers in STEM fields (which happen to be both one of the higher earning and more respected fields) are also of the higher IQ persuasion. Being a high fuctioning autistic in today’s economy isn’t really that big of a curse when you look at wage gaps between STEM jobs (favor analytical ability, introversion, and concentration) and jobs in the service sector (tend to focus on ”social skills” but pay much less). Other than exceptions like law (which can be a mixture of both) a significant amount of those who are getting seriously rich or famous these days who aren’t entertainers or someone like Tony Robbins are more in the vein of the SJW’s loathed STEMLords.
* In order to avoid the use of prohibited racial quotas, Chicago Public Schools use a weighted multi-factor system that ranks each census tract within the city. Factors include average income, rate of home ownership, whether or not English was spoke, level of education etc in each census tract. Thus there is no need to muck about trying to deal with the topic of IQ in cognitive testing or even the question of giftedness in this system.
Each census tract is then assigned 1 of 4 tiers. Students applying to schools are classified by the census tract they live in, and are grouped by respective tiers.
The first 30% of students that score the highest in absolute terms on the test and are admitted first to their school of choice. Then each of the four remaining tiers are filled with the highest scoring applicants to the school from each of the four tiers. Students with scores too low for their first choice may be admitted to their second or third choices should their score be above the lowest cutoff in these respective schools.
It is too complex to post all the details but if you care to learn about it, here is a start:
No surprise that with all the tweaking of the socio-economic factors and the respective weights, the overall student body selected for gifted schools (selective enrollment is the term in Chicago) proportionately reflects the racial makeup of Chicago, and the racial breakdown is nearly the same as the prior court ordered selection system that used racial quotas in he first few years. I can’t say for sure what the breakdown is now. This was clearly the intent of its designers.
These are the score cut offs for admission to selective enrollment highschools by various tiers. Be aware that 7th grade grades are also part of highschool enrollment point totals while grades obviously are not used for student entering elementary schools.
You can see not all schools viewed as equal, as the cut offs vary widely by school as well as tier. Some schools have better academic reputations, or are located in less or more desirable neighborhoods in terms of safety or access to public transportation.
Posted inBlacks, IQ|Comments Off on NYT: Why Talented Black and Hispanic Students Can Go Undiscovered
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
