I’m No Longer Shadow-Banned On Twitter

I notice all sorts of right-wingers on Twitter are no longer shadow banned! Check your status.

Big Tech bias is a winning issue for President Trump and Republicans. From The Hill:

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is leading the charge against President Trump’s new favorite punching bag: big tech.

The California Republican, who hopes to replace Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) next year, has been aggressively promoting a campaign to “stop the bias,” referring to what critics say is a pattern of discrimination against conservative voices on social media.

To that end, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing requested by McCarthy.

“I’ve had many conversations with the president about how we have to stop this bias,” McCarthy, one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, told Fox News on Thursday.

“I’ve spoken to Jack Dorsey throughout the month,” McCarthy added. “He and I philosophically disagree, but we do agree on one thing: We believe in the First Amendment. But we also believe in transparency and accountability.”

The majority leader’s recent crusade against social media comes at a time when Trump has ramped up his own rhetoric against the tech industry. His eagerness to champion the cause could endear him to both the White House and conservative lawmakers — two constituencies that could be crucial to securing the Speakership.

Trump recently asserted that Google and other platforms are “rigged” against him, an accusation that Google rejected, and one that came on the heels of allegations from conservatives that Twitter has been “shadow banning” certain Republicans so that their accounts are less visible to users.

That controversy started after prominent conservatives aligned with Trump, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) failed to appear on Twitter’s auto-populated drop-down search box when users typed in their names.

The company said that it does not “shadow ban” according to political ideology, but acknowledged that its attempts to crack down on hate speech have unintentionally reduced search results for lawmakers from both parties.

McCarthy was quick to take up the mantle on the issue, tweeting more than a dozen times last month with the hashtag “stop the bias.” He also made the media rounds to step up pressure on Dorsey to publicly testify on Capitol Hill.

Posted in Big Tech, Twitter | Comments Off on I’m No Longer Shadow-Banned On Twitter

Black PhDs In Hard Sciences

Heather Mac Donald writes: “Blacks made up 4.7% of all doctorate recipients nationwide in 2006, 4.9% in 2010, and 5.2% in 2016, according to the National Science Foundation. But black PhDs have historically been concentrated in education; in the sciences, which make up a large proportion of the UCLA faculty, less so. In 2016, for example, 1% of all PhDs in computer science went to blacks, or 17 out of 1,659 doctorates, according to the Computing Research Assn. Many fields — nuclear physics, geophysics and seismology and neuropsychology, for instance — had no black PhDs at all.”

“The ultimate solution to any absence of proportional representation in higher education is to close the academic skills gap. In 2015, only 14% of black eighth graders in California and 13% of Latino eighth graders scored as proficient or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math test, compared with 57% of Asians and 43% of whites. In reading, 16% of black eighth graders and 18% of Latino eighth graders were proficient or above, compared with 50% of Asians and 44% of whites. Such gaps have been constant over many decades.”

Posted in Blacks, Diversity, UCLA | Comments Off on Black PhDs In Hard Sciences

What Comes After Christianity?

MP3 Show.

00:00 The decline of the Roman Catholic church.
57:31 History professor Jonathan Otto Pohl joins us from Kurdistan. https://auis.academia.edu/OttoPohl
57:45 Kurdistan
58:52 Otto on John McCain
1:00:20 Catholic priests molesting kids
1:01:10 Catholic demographic changes (going brown & 3rd world) will end church’s pro-gay stance
1:01:47 Presbyterians come to blows over gay marriage
1:05:11 Christian religious freedom in Kurdistan
1:08:25 The decline of the West
1:15:09 Is there a racial component to the West?
1:46:28 Latest news from Kurdistan
1:52:00 Otto Pohl will present a paper on Soviet genocide against Germans
1:56:13 White genocide
1:58:35 South Africa’s white farmers
2:01:08 Afrikaaner strategy to prevent genocide
2:04:00 ANC’s leadership is now uneducated, unlike Nelson Mandela
2:09:00 Why do American university professors teach in Turkey, Kurdistan?
2:11:00 Why did the Bishop grope Ariana Grande’s breast?
2:13:20 Jonathan Pohl discusses a recent talk he attended by Francis Fukuyama
2:28:00 Jewish success & failure in Soviet Union
2:40:00 Lavrenty Beria, the man, the myth, the monster.

Panel:

Otto Pohl: https://auis.academia.edu/OttoPohl
Dennis Dale: https://twitter.com/eladsinned
Claire Khaw: http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.com/
Babylonian Hebrew: https://twitter.com/BabylonianHeeb

This week’s Torah portion is Nitzavim (Deuteronomy 29:9–30:20).

* The covenant is the foundation of Judaism. It’s a deal between the Jews and God. Covenant is the foundation of citizenship. It’s a recognition of mutual responsibilities between the citizen and the state. However, for the past 500 years, nobody takes oaths seriously like the Anglo-Saxon. Oaths of citizenship tend to be taken more seriously by Anglos than any other people. Overall in America, there seems to be a decreasing value of citizenship. People are less inclined to believe that they owe anything to the wider society.

* Deuteronomy 30: “11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.”

The Torah is not esoteric. It’s not the sole possession of an elite class. You don’t have to pay large sums of money to have it explained to you. Choose life.

15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Ron Guhname writes August 26, 2018:

Want Americans to identify as Americans? Being white helps
The US will function more effectively if its inhabitants define themselves as one people, as Americans.

The General Social Survey asked 1,450 participants: “When you think of social and political issues, do you think of yourself mainly as a member of a particular ethnic, racial, or nationality group or do you think of yourself mainly as just an American?”

Here are the percentages by race of immigrants who responded, “Just an American.”

Percent of immigrants who say they are just Americans
Whites 76.8
Blacks 36.4
Other Non-Whites 57.1

Even when all people compared are born in other countries, whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to say their identity is American. While not as severe as blacks, a majority of other non-whites also do not feel they are simply American.

What happens when people are born here?

Percent of people born in US who say they are just Americans
Whites 96.0
Blacks 68.3
Other non-whites 74.2

Being born here makes almost all whites define themselves as Americans, and while native-born non-whites feel more American than non-white immigrants, there is still a large segment that has ethnic loyalties.

It looks like the “melting pot” idea works best for whites. White immigrants moved here and sooner or later melted into Americans. This doesn’t seem to be working so well for non-whites. Many black families have been here for centuries, and Natives have been her for millennia, but the melt for them is still far from complete.

A similar dynamic seems to be happening to recent non-white immigrants. Some melting happens, but not like it has been for whites.

Is this difference due to the fact that immigrants were expected to assimilate when most whites emigrated? And now that most immigrants are non-white, US elites encourage people to hold on to their ethnic identity? Maybe, but recent white immigrants don’t seem follow the liberal desire for them to hold on to their roots.

Maybe non-whites are simply more clannish than whites.

Liberals would say it’s due to discrimination, but 95% of Americans of Irish descent identify as American only, and they weren’t received with a big wet kiss. America has gotten more and more welcoming, yet it’s the New Immigrants who are more reluctant to let the ethnic loyalties go.

Whatever the case, Americans are on a course to be less and less on the same page about where to take the country. And that’s putting it nicely.

Claire Khaw writes:

Suggested topics:

1) Could the Catholic Church regain its moral authority within the lifetimes of anyone born today?

2) If the world’s most powerful Church has failed, does this mean Christianity has failed?

3) Is the West suffering from a double whammy of a failed religion and a failed political system?

4) If Christianity and liberal democracy have failed, is the answer a one party theocracy?

5) Conceptually, Secular Koranism is the fusion of Ba’athism and Muslim Brotherhood. What other way is there of restoring the patriarchy in the West?

6) Should and must the patriarchy be restored for the continuation of Western civilisation in some form?

7) How many people know the West is now a matriarchy?

8) The perfect patriarchy – 100% married parents

The perfect matriarchy – 100% unmarried parents

Would you agree and what is America?

9) If anything should happen to Trump, white men would once again be without a leader, only left with the option of violence to keep the liberals from returning to power and the real possibility of another American civil war.

10) If there is no obvious successor to Trump, shouldn’t there at least a reasonable plan be prepared capable of being understood and followed by future generations?

Posted in America, Christianity | Comments Off on What Comes After Christianity?

Book Club: David Golder by 26yo Irène Némirovsky’

* According to Wikipedia:

David Golder is writer Irène Némirovsky’s first novel. It was re-issued in 2004 following the popularity of the Suite Française notebooks discovered in 1998. David Golder was first published in France in 1929 and won instant acclaim for the 26-year-old author.

The novel opens with Golder refusing to help his colleague of many years, Marcus. As a result of this, Marcus, bankrupt, commits suicide. Following the funeral, Golder travels to Biarritz where he has a huge, opulent house. His wife and daughter reside there in luxury, spending Golder’s cash like water. On the train, he suffers a heart attack. Seriously ill, he is forced to re-evaluate his life.

David Golder is a self-made man. From humble beginnings as a Jew in Ukraine selling rags, he is now a cold, ruthless businessman. It is suggested by his wife, Gloria, that Marcus is not the only casualty of Golder’s brutal dealings. However he has an Achilles heel, well hidden: his feckless daughter, Joyce. It is this weakness that eventually ruins him.

Now 68 and dying, he realises that his wealth has not brought him happiness; simply a grim satisfaction that, as “a good Jew” he has provided for his uncaring family. Gloria and Joyce are portrayed as grasping and selfish, barely showing concern or interest in Golder except when they need more money for jewellery, furs, cars and cash for their lovers.

The novel is an astonishing portrayal of a businessman and his family in the years leading up to the Great Depression. It also introduces characters of great depth, like Soifer, the old German Jew who “walks on tiptoe” to save shoe leather; he is Golder’s only connection with the old world from which he himself came. His wife, Gloria, (Havke is her Yiddish name) is as beautiful, cold and hard as the jewels she so treasures. But it is Joyce, Golder’s 18-year-old daughter, who is central to the story. It is she who ultimately causes his ruin.

In 1930 the novel was made into a film David Golder directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Harry Baur as the title character.

In March 2010 the book was dramatised in five episodes on BBC Radio 4, with David Suchet as David Golder. It was directed by Peter Farago.

Nemirovsky’s mother, “Fanny,” whom Irene loathed, had two things in her safe when she died in 1972, copies of her daughter’s novels Jezebel and David Golder.

* Canadian ‘First Man’ actor defends omitting American flag planting on moon: Achievement ‘transcended countries and borders’

* Jews love to give charity. “As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event.” Northern Europeans are more reticent.

* Uncle Jim’s Neighborhood: Fr. James Martin and Black Liberation Theology

* Has the ‘EWTN schism’ begun?

* The Rise of Busybody Journalism.

* Why Are Liberal Women More Likely to Report They’ve Been Sexually Harassed?

* NYT: Specter of Trump’s Car Tariffs Forces Allies to Give Ground in Talks

Posted in Jews | Comments Off on Book Club: David Golder by 26yo Irène Némirovsky’

Steve Sailer: Why Are Liberal Women More Likely to Report They’ve Been Sexually Harassed?

Zach Goldberg writes: “…the more one finds rape sexually appealing, the more likely one is to report an experience of workplace sexual harassment. Alcohol consumption and having a job where one is often alone with others is also somewhat predictive, but number of sex partners + rape appeal.”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I don’t think he has yet ruled out all other reasonable explanations. For example:

– Liberal women turned liberal because they were sexually harassed.

– Liberal men in liberal industries (e.g., Harvey Weinstein) are worse sexual harassers.

– Women in conservative industries (e.g., oil, aerospace) are rarer and thus have more sexual market bargaining power to get a ring put on it than in many liberal industries, such as media, where women are a dime a dozen.

– More conservative industries were subjected to federal sexual harassment regulations back in the 1990s, but liberal industries such as Hollywood assumed they were immune due to their superior morality and Washington connections. But when Obama got done cashing their 2012 campaign contribution checks, he let his minions turn their wrath on fat and happy liberal industries like media, tech, and universities.

* Some obvious possibilities:

1. Conservative women are less likely to report minor unwanted contact or harassment formally as “sexual harassment”?

2. Conservative women are less likely to put themselves in situations where harassment might occur more frequently (alone with a man)?

3. Conservative women are more likely to confront the harasser at the time of the harassment (and put an end to it) rather than putting up with it, stewing about it, and then reporting it formally later?

* Conservative women are less likely to be aggrieved, hysterical and looking for something to be outraged about.

* “To sum up: When it comes to ideological disparities in reporting, the data strongly points to sexual promiscuity/licentiousness (# of sex partners, “sexual kinkiness”) as important explanatory variables…”

I’m wondering what could explain this correlation. Is it that men either consciously or subconsciously treat good girls differently from promiscuous girls? Is it that promiscuous girls tend to be head cases make up/exaggerate instances of sexual harassment?

* I’ve always worked in relatively male dominated industries with relatively few females, and I can’t ever recall observing harassment; in fact I can only think of one workplace dalliance (which ended in marriage). The handful of women all dressed and acted conservatively. Looking at who they chose for husbands they seemed to go for ‘average’ levels of masculinity, although there were certainly plenty of highly masculine men available to them at work if that had been their preference.

Perhaps I was in a bubble? Is it possible that relatively effeminate fields like media tend to attract relatively effeminate men as well as liberal/progressive women, and that leads to the dynamic that his paper describes? Men feel more confident making advances because there are so few of them. Women don’t want these advances because the men are undesirable and effeminate. Women long for more masculine/dominant men as alluded to in the data.

Perhaps we read so much about sexual harassment because the media assumes that their workplace dynamic is typical of the whole country when in fact it is an outlier.

The other thing I’ve noted is that industries that tend to attract more men than women also tend to attract more introverts. Tech/engineering is much more of an introvert magnet than media and I would guess this might confound the data a bit.

* lefties are trained to see literally everything as an opportunity for government intervention.

* Loose women are going to attract more men making sexual advances. Isn’t that obvious?

Men do not usually waste effort on conservative women who appear to be sexually faithful to their husbands.

Also, conservative women are more likely to believe in individual responsibility, and deal with a problem herself, as opposed to liberals who like to portray women as victims.

* Of course you sexist misogenistic pig do not consider the possibility that liberal women are hotter and that men are unable to control themselves around women who are body positive and have more body piercing than those ugly conservative bitches.

* Prog women are more are more promiscuous, and also report more harassment? Shocking!

Did they ask about smoking cigarettes? I’m not joking. For women, cigarette smoking is a promiscuity ‘tell.’ And many prog women smoke, too, for some reason.

* Conservative women more likely to be married or in a serious long-term relationship, so aggressively hit on less.

Conservative have fewer mentally unstable harpies who get some kind of emotional reward claiming/exaggerating how they were victimized. This aspect is 2 part: the individual personality difference, but also a social peer-group/family difference where less sympathy/brownie points are given. Instead of offering sympathy, male relatives, for instance, would want to send a message to the man.

* Read the full Twitter thread, there’s a graph that shows that conservative and liberal women have similar definitions of what does and does not constitute sexual harassment. 2 and 3 are more in line with his thesis: women who get harassed more are turned on by coercion and thus may subconsciously try to put themselves in positions where they experience it.

* Former Playboy model takes home exciting fun black guy she met in town; he strangles her to death. “I just met this sexy-ass white bitch.”

* There are very few murders here unless you pick up Negro felons downtown and bring them home at 3 AM (to the apartment that your boyfriend is paying for). The woman in question was a hot mess and a belligerent drunk. All the local bars knew not to serve her. Some of the details are still unclear – my guess is that she was going on Tinder or some such and looking for rough trade. But first she would drink herself into an alcoholic stupor. She was approaching the age where she was going to “hit the wall” and had nothing but her looks going for her so her life was effectively over anyway – she was headed for a bad end one way or another, but this was particularly bad. The felon beat her severely before strangling her with some sort of cord.

* Yes, and it’s also obvious that women who are attracted to macho swagger are going to attract more sexual advances, possibily despite themselves. Those of us who are attracted to thoughtful, unassuming guys are not going to attract sexual advances from those guys. They know we don’t like them. The ones we do like aren’t clueless, but you have to make a conscious effort to let them know you’re interested.

There seems to be some sort of presumption that workplace sexual advances are ok, as long as the man has reason to believe the woman is interested. This may or may not be true, depending on the circumstances. I certainly don’t see any harm in asking a non-subordinate colleague for a date, so long as the man is willing to take no for an answer.

Now, men misunderstand women’s interest in being raped, such as it is. If you’re not hot, we don’t want you to ravish us. Is that clear? A non-hot guy can’t make himself hot by turning into a rapist. You’re likely to find yourself behind bars if you try it. On the other hand, if you’re these guys, you may do as you like.

* It’s true that a lot of outwardly “liberated” women love to play scenes where they are the captive and you are the big, bad man. Slave fantasies, mild bondage, spanking, you name it.

This is not true for all women, but it is for a surprisingly large number, whatever their political acts or masks may be.

The thing is, the lefty ones can go on over coffee the next day about “men” in the abstract, as if they weren’t just begging to play the wench the day before. Conservative women just enjoy being female — and are not weak or inferior because of it.

* 1) Conservative women are more likely to be married, and that attracts less “harrassment.” Never forget the marriage gap.

2) Younger women in general tend to be more liberal (and also more attractive). Older women just aren’t going to be harassed as much.

3) Conservative women tend to dress less scantily and are more aware of themselves (and their motives) when they’re doing it. “Of course I’m getting a lot of men staring at me. That’s why I wore these clothes!” – it’s the same lack of self-awareness leftists exhibit in so many other ways.

4) But mostly it’s just victim mentality plus the failure to consider the consequences of your actions (e.g., wearing scanty clothes, getting really drunk, and acting flirty with one or more guys might make them think you actually, you know, want to do something with them).

Posted in Sex | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Why Are Liberal Women More Likely to Report They’ve Been Sexually Harassed?

Theater Thursday: Star 80 (1983)

* Wikipedia: “Star 80 is a 1983 American film based on, though fictionalized somewhat, Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, who was murdered by her husband Paul Snider in 1980. The film was directed by Bob Fosse, and stars Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts. Hugh Hefner sued the producers of the picture, stemming from his disapproval of how he was depicted in the film. In accordance with the family’s wishes, Dorothy’s mother is never mentioned by name in the movie, and the names of her sister and brother were altered. Other names were also changed due to legal concerns.

The film was shot on location in Vancouver, British Columbia and Los Angeles, California; the death scene was filmed in the same house in which the murder-suicide actually took place. The story is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice article “Death of a Playmate” by Teresa Carpenter; the film’s title was taken from Snider’s vanity license plates.”

* NYT: “When Hispanics who identify themselves as white are added in, the white share of the population actually grew modestly between 2000 and 2017 from 75.1 percent to 76.6 percent.”

* NYT: A Broken Relationship and Accusations of Emotional Abuse: The Case of Keith Ellison

* Ben Shapiro whines: “Why doesn’t the Left laud us from crushing dissent on the Right?”

* John Stuart Mill: “It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.”

* Kindness from the Trumps.

* Jews love to give charity and to be recognized for it. “As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event.” Northern Europeans are more reticent.

* Circular firing squad claims Wil Wheaton.

* Join the Navy and see the poz.

* Driven to suicide by bullies, or his mother?

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off on Theater Thursday: Star 80 (1983)

What Is Going On With Ron Unz?

Unz.com has featured some particularly edgy content of late, including Ron’s latest column on Holocaust denial.

A Jewish friend tells me:

He is quite brave.

What has happened is that Unz has recognized that the conventional narrative of WWII, Germany horrible, Axis countries bad, USSR good enough, U.S. and Britain Saintly, doesn’t hold up to actual scrutiny. From that he began to question what anti Semitism before 1941 and 1942 actually meant to German Jews, to Jews in Palestine and Jews who made up a significant portion of the ruling class in the USSR.

Once you reach that point it becomes easy to question the official Holocaust narrative, which in many cases, unfortunately is built on lies. There are so many aspects that need to be explored and most of them are documented in the records of that most bureaucratic nation, Germany, but haven’t been looked at. What are the records on ghettoization of Jews, the economic exploitation of ghetto Jews, the number of Jews in labor or work camps, the number of Jews in concentration camps, the numbers of Jews who were intentionally killed and the number that died of natural causes (resulting at least in part from extreme deprivation) how do we explain how come some very young children who were economically useless survived and some old persons also economically useless were spared. What is the reason that Anne Frank died and her father lived? How much of our picture of what life was like for concentration camp prisoners was shaped by the post war documentary footage of the British liberation of Belsen, which was not an extermination camp, but where thousands died from typhus.

The biggest problem is that there is no actual official order from Hitler calling for extermination. There is every indication that extermination/genocide didn’t begin until the Germans had some reverses on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 when they found huge restive Jewish populations under their control and many of the people in the territory captured by the Germans considered the Germans to be liberators from the harsh yoke of Stalin’s communism often administered by Jewish Commissars.

The problem is it is more complex. I don’t think Unz is correct to seemingly dismiss it. Even David Irving concedes some Jews were intentionally killed by the Nazis. But the Holocaust has been misused in so many ways, that it is now the dominant narrative of WWII where in reality it was a sideshow.

…how do you explain why the Nazis let the Bulgarians get away with a refusal to deport their Jews? Doesn’t the fact that they were asked to deport their Jews strongly suggest the Germans were going to exterminate them? If no plan for genocide was adopted by the Germans until the Wannsee Conference in early 1942, how do we explain the ghettoization of the Jews after the 1939 conquest of Poland, and the mass killings that took place in the east, including at Babi Yar outside Kiev in the late summer, early fall of 1941.

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Lost in Love

Posted in Addiction | Comments Off on Lost in Love

Jews & Charity

Mark Arax writes in January 2018:

Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed California’s landscape, and ruled entire towns.

Together, the Resnicks have wedded the valley’s hidebound farming culture with L.A.’s celebrity culture. They don’t do agribusiness. Rather, they say, they’re “harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands.” Their crops aren’t crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hills — roughly 140 miles — as a “carpetbagger’s distance.” It seems even longer, he says, if you add in the psychological distance of being an East Coast Jew in a California farm belt where Jews are few and far between. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. She’s done giving big gifts to Los Angeles museums and mental health hospitals that name buildings after her and Stewart. The south valley — its people and poverty, its obesity and diabetes — is her newest mission.

In Lost Hills, they call her “Lady Lynda.” She shows up in high fashion and stands in the dust and tells them about another charter school or affordable-housing project she is bringing to them. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. The giving goes to college scholarships and tutors. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud politely and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event. Many are here without documents, after all.

Posted in California, Jews | Comments Off on Jews & Charity

Quillette: The Dangers of Ignoring Cognitive Inequality

Wael Taji writes: “The connection between intelligence and behavioral problems, such as Conduct Disorder (CD) or Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD), was well-known around the time of the Port Arthur Massacre. A review by biostatistician and UCSD professor Sonia Jain cites contemporaneous studies to suggest that low IQ scores in childhood should be considered a risk factor for APD and CD. In 2010, several psychologists published results from a longitudinal study containing data on over a million Swedish men, who were tracked from conscription for a little over 20 years. They found that IQ scores tested during conscription were a significant and robust predictor, not only for APD or CD, but for all categories of mental disorders. Conscripts with low IQ were substantially more likely to be diagnosed with one or more mental disorders, to suffer from mood and personality disorders, and to be hospitalized for mental illness. Those in the lowest band—like Bryant—were most at risk of severe psychological disorders.”

Professor Linda Gottfredson wrote:

1. IQ (as long as it's a good measure of g) predicts a broad range of life outcomes better than does SES [socio-economic status], from GPA to longevity. Corollary: You can wash out IQ's apparent predictive superiority only if you load your SES battery with additional surrogates for parents' or own g.

2. The phenotypic correlations between IQ and measures of social class (education, occupational prestige, income) are from a half to two-thirds genetic in origin.

3. SES cannot explain the big IQ differences among siblings growing up in the same household: They differ two-thirds as much in IQ, on the average (11-12 points), as do any two random strangers (~17 points). This is a glaring fact that SES enthusiasts have studiously ignored.

4. Adult functional literacy (e.g., see the fed's NALS survey) predicts life outcomes in exactly the same pattern as does IQ, though they won't tell you that. Functional literacy is measured by having subjects carry out everyday life tasks, such as using a menu to figure out the price for something. Persons scoring at levels 1-2 (out of 5) have been described as not having the ability to use their rights or meet their responsibilities in the modern world (40% of whites, 80% of blacks). Pick out a few NALS tasks at various levels and ask your critic what % of adults s/he thinks can perform them. They will be shocked and so will you when you see the data–go to my 1997 "Why g matters" article for NALS, or my 2002 "highly general and highly practical" chapter for health literacy items–e.g., on diabetes.

5. IQ predicts on-the-job performance better overall than any other single predictor (SES isn't even in the running), it predicts better when performance is objectively rather than subjectively measured, and when the tasks/occupations are more complex in what they require workers to do. At the same cognitive complexity level, IQ predicts job performance equally well in manual and non-manual jobs (e.g., trades vs. clerical. The exact same complexity pattern is found with functional literacy–the hardest items are the most complex (require more inference, are abstract rather than concrete, contain more distracting irrelevant information, etc.)

6. A large followup of Australian veterans found that IQ was the best predictor of death by age 40 (had 50+ predictors). Vehicle fatalities were the biggest cause (as is typical), and, compared to men with IQs of 100+, men of IQ85-100 had twice the rate and men IQ 80-85 had three times the rate. (Remember, SES could not explain this.) The US (and apparently Australia) forbid induction of persons below IQ 80 because they are not sufficiently trainable–found out the hard way.

7. Finally, if you succeed in describing g as a general learning and reasoning ability (one that gives high g people an increasing edge when tasks are more complex), then it is easy to show g's life and death relevance when you describe how health self-care and accident prevention are highly dependent on learning and reasoning. Consider what it takes to be an effective diabetic–lots and lots of judgment on a daily basis, or you're likely to lose your sight, your limbs, etc.

Gottfredson wrote:

Of all human traits, variation in general intelligence (g) is the functionally most important in modern life. The first question that behavior genetics tackled was ‘‘how heritable are within-group differences in intelligence?’’—the answer: ‘‘very.’’

Gottfredson said: "Keep in mind that false belief in infinite human malleability led to some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. I also think it is patronizing and usually self-serving when elites contend that the American public cannot be trusted with certain facts."

Gottfredson wrote:

If all 13‐year‐olds took the same 15‐minute test (WASI), I could give you each child’s odds for all these adult outcomes without knowing anything else about them.
– Drops out of high school,
– Holds mostly unskilled jobs, skilled jobs vs. professional jobs
– Performs those jobs well
– Lives in poverty AND
– Can find a particular intersection on a map, or grams of carbohydrate per serving on a food label
– Adheres to a medical treatment regimen for diabetes or other chronic illness
– Dies prematurely

Gottfredson wrote:

The first step in assessing the real-life importance of g/IQ is to determine whether scores on highly g-loaded tests (tests that measure g well) predict differences in valued life outcomes. Correlations do not prove causation, but they are a first step in doing so. The most studied outcomes are performance in school (such as school marks and achievement test scores), performance on the job (mostly supervisor ratings), socioeconomic advancement (level of education, occupation, and income), and social pathology (adult criminality, poverty, unemployment, dependence on welfare, children outside of marriage). The relations of intelligence to health, health behavior, resilience in the face of extreme adversity, longevity (length of life), and functional literacy (the ability to do routine reading, writing, and arithmetic tasks in modern societies) have also begun to draw much attention. Thousands of studies have looked at the impact of mental abilities on school and job performance, and large national longitudinal studies in both Europe and the United States have shown that IQ is related to various forms of socioeconomic success and failure. Here are their most general findings about g’s association with life outcomes.

Correlations with IQ are pervasive. IQ predicts all the foregoing outcomes to some degree. Subjective well-being (happiness) is the rare exception: it is regularly found not to correlate meaningfully with IQ level. In general, g relates more to instrumental behavior than emotional reactions.

Correlations with IQ vary systematically by type of outcome. IQ’s predictive value ranges widely, depending on the outcome in question. For example, when averaged over several years, performance on standardized tests of academic achievement correlates about as highly with IQ as two IQ tests do with each other (over .8 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0). In contrast, correlations with IQ are closer to .6-.7 for school marks, years of education completed, and longevity. They are about .5 with prestige level of occupation, .3 to .4 with income (the correlations rising with age), and .2 with law-abidingness.

Correlations with IQ are higher when tasks are more complex. To illustrate, when jobs are ranked in overall complexity of work, the correlations between IQ and job performance rise from .2 for simple, unskilled jobs, to .5 in middle-level jobs (skilled trades, most clerical work), to .8 in the most complex (doctors, engineers, top executives). Stated another way, it matters little how intelligent workers are in low-level jobs, but it matters a great deal in high-level jobs, regardless of whether the job seems academic or not.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental. IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background…

Social privilege theory also predicts that the impact of environmental conditions will accumulate with age, but longitudinal studies show that IQ actually becomes more heritable over the life span (from 40% before entering elementary school to 80% by mid-adulthood). Perhaps most surprising of all, differences in family advantage have no lasting effect on IQ by adolescence, at least in the U.S. and Europe, so family members are no more alike in IQ by adulthood than their genetic relatedness would predict…To take one example, the post-World War II communist government of Warsaw, Poland, assigned families of all social classes to the same housing, schools, and health services, but this social leveling failed to narrow intelligence differences in the next generation…

The pattern is that, when two groups differ in average IQ, the proportions of their populations found at each point on the IQ distribution differ most at the extremes, or tails, of the IQ distribution. This is seen most clearly by looking at the ratios in the bottom three rows of Figure 3. Take, for example, blacks and whites above IQ 100. Blacks become progressively rarer, relative to whites, at higher IQ levels: 1:3 above IQ 100, 1:7 above IQ 110, and only 1:30 above IQ 125…

IQ 75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies. They are likely to be eligible for special educational services in school and for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from the U.S. government, which is financial support provided to mentally and physically disabled adults. Of course, many do marry, hold a job, raise children, and otherwise function adequately as adults. However, their independence is precarious because they have difficulty getting and keeping jobs that pay a living wage. They are difficult to train except for the simplest tasks, so they are fortunate in industrialized nations to get any paying job at all. While only 1 out of 50 Asian-Americans faces such risk, Figure 3 shows that 1 out of 6 black- Americans does.

IQ 85 is a second important minimum threshold because the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level. Although the military is often viewed as the employer of last resort, this minimum standard rules out almost half of blacks (44%) and a third of Hispanics (34%), but far fewer whites (13%) and Asians (8%). The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs. Individuals in this IQ range are not considered mentally retarded and they therefore receive no special educational or social services, but their poor learning and reasoning abilities mean that they are not competitive for many jobs, if any, in the civilian economy. They live at the edge of unemployability in modern nations, and the jobs they do get are typically the least prestigious and lowest paying: for example, janitor, food service worker, hospital orderly, or parts assembler in a factory.

IQ 85 is also close to the upper boundary for Level 1 functional literacy, the lowest of five levels in the U.S. government’s 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). Adults at this literacy level are typically able to carry out only very simple tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or totaling a bank deposit slip, but they typically cannot perform more difficult tasks, such as locating two particular pieces of information in a sports article (Level 2), writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill (Level 3), determining correct change using information in a menu (Level 4), or determining shipping and total costs on an order form for items in a catalog (Level 5). Most routine communications with businesses and social service agencies, including job applications, are thus beyond the capabilities of persons with only Level 1 literacy. Their problem is not that they cannot read the words, but that they are not able to understand or use the ideas that the words convey…

IQ 105 can be viewed as the minimum threshold for achieving moderately high levels of success. It has been estimated to be the point at which individuals have a 50-50 chance of doing well enough in secondary school to be admitted to a four-year university in the United States. People above this level are highly competitive for middle-level jobs (clerical, crafts and repair, sales, police and firefighting), and they are good contenders for the lower tiers of managerial and professional work (supervisory, technical, accounting, nursing, teaching). Figure 3 shows that Asian-Americans are 6-7 times more likely than blacks to exceed the IQ 105 threshold. The percentages are 53%, 40%, 27%, and 8%, respectively, for Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks.

IQ 115 marks the ability threshold for being competitive as a candidate for graduate or professional school in the U.S. and thus for high levels of socioeconomic success. Partly because of their higher educational promise, individuals above this IQ level have the best prospects for gaining the most coveted occupational positions in a society. This is the IQ range in which individuals can be self-instructing and are, in fact, expected to instruct, advise, and supervise others in their community and work environments. This is therefore the IQ range from which cultural leaders tend to emerge and be recruited. The percentages exceeding this threshold are, respectively, 40% (Asians), 28% (whites), 10% (Hispanics), and 4% (blacks).

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