June 11, 2010

What you get in trouble for is saying out loud what everybody else already figures is true

In contrast, the Vice President of the United States frequently says stuff that makes no sense, but nobody cares because it's just random gibberish. Nobody is offended because it's not true.

What gets you in trouble is when you point out that the emperor has no clothes. As Fox and Tiger pointed out, Hans Christian Anderson was all wrong: the crowd wouldn't start to laugh at the naked emperor, they'd get really, really mad at the little boy who said what they all knew.

From the Daily Mail:
'Immigrants are making our country dumber': 
Anger as board member of Germany's central bank cites 'ample statistics'

By Allan Hall

A controversial board member of Bundesbank has come under fire for claiming immigrants are making Germany ‘dumber in a simple way’.

Thilo Sarrazin told a business group in Frankfurt that people arriving in the country from Turkey, the Middle East and Africa are less educated than those from other nations.

The 65-year-old added: ‘There’s a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.’

In his speech this week, Mr Sarrazin, a former finance minister, cited what he called ‘ample statistics’ for proof.

He said the fact that immigrants tend to have more children than Germans - who have the lowest birthrate in Europe - meant this caused ‘a different propagation of population groups with different intelligence because parents pass their intelligence on to their children’. ...

A spokesman for a Muslim group in Berlin said; ‘He is a tired old white Christian male full of prejudice and few ideas.’  

93 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, that's true but also liberalism is making us dumber by eliminating common sense and replacing it with self satisfactory and delusion to ebb their eternal misplaced guilt.

Brent Lane said...

I think it's high time they rounded up all those tired old white Christians, male and female, put them someplace where their prejudice won't harm the rest of the energized, young, non-white non-Christian world.

I'd settle for the part of the continental US east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the Rio Grande.

Let us keep clinging to our guns and religion, though.

Anonymous said...

Could it be? I thought Afro/Islamist immigration had so enrinched the Old Continent as to spark a second Renaissance. Let me just think of an example.... Besides burnt-out Renaults, I mean.

Anonymous said...

Sarrazin has said some more politically incorrect things in the last years and always has got away with it. Interestingly, he himself ascribes that to his personal strategy, namely: Speak about the problem, but don't ever give a hint how the problem may be solved.

But in a way Sarrazin's ranting contradicts the German historical experience. Germany being a class society, higher education was for a long time restrained to the children of the upper classes, and only when the institutions of higher education were opened for everyone, Germans detected that there was a lot of raw natural talent and unused intelligence in the under classes. So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well.

Brent Lane said...

So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well.

Which makes perfect sense, seeing as how once they set foot on Das Vaterland they instantly stop being Turks and become Germans.

Anonymous said...

Man, that Muslim spokesman is going to get in trouble for saying that about Christians and males! He'll be forced to apologize by an angry press!

Just kidding.

Anonymous said...

Seems like a simple word problem. Take a population with a mean IQ of x. Add millions of people with mean IQ (x - y). What do you get?

Europe is probably already too stupid to figure this one out. Math is hard!

Anonymous said...

By the way, let's consider where the needle is pointing these days on the California IQ meter? Average IQ is a simple weighted sum: .43*100 (whites) + 0.07*85 (blacks) + .13*103 (Asians) + 0.37*87 (Hispanic) = 94.5.

Actually, the Hispanic average is lower since the population is mostly Mexican Indians. The average could be as low as 83 according the Jason Richwine's backward digit span data for children of recent legal Hispanic immigrants. And the Asians are a mixture of Southeast Asians (low 80's), South Asians (?), and east Asians (105). I'm guessing 103 is a fair average. That would make CA average IQ < 93.

But hey, we're still smarter than Kosovo.

Anonymous said...

The way muslims and other NAMs in Europe co-opt the language of racial politics in america is worrying.

Simon in UK said...

Rainer:
"a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well"

Well they didn't get to the gates of Vienna twice by being idiots, but going by Lynn's IQ data AIR they're around IQ 90, only slightly below the Balkans but a good 12 points below Germany.

Toadal said...

Anonymous said...
Yes, that's true but also liberalism is making us dumber by eliminating common sense and replacing it with self satisfactory and delusion to ebb their eternal misplaced guilt.

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal points out President Obama's liberal delusions, his attempts to shackle Americans in guilt, and his emotional distance from us.

The Alien in the White House

It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

...
The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally.


Perhaps Rupert Murdoch and the WSJ editorial staff have come to terms with Mr Sailer and Sarrazin's observations that 'difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.’ will result in a dumber populace for any country that hosts the dumber groups.

Anonymous said...

Rainer, I would compare this with what I call The Great Sorting Out in America. In Europe you would do what your father did, regardless of your capabilities. If you had an IQ of 140 and your father was a tenant farmer, you too would be a tenant farmer.

Legions of these peasants came to the US and were largely freed of these restrictions. My grandfather came from Northern Europe as a small boy. He left home at 14 and worked in sawmills all his life. He lost several fingers and most of his hearing and was an alcoholic. My father went to school and aquired advanced science degrees; his brother was not academically inclined but became very affluent through owning a body shop. Regrettably they hung on to the alcoholism.

The process does not continue; once outside constraints are released everybody finds their place in society and more or less stays there. Liberals don't look for this much among white people but they are convinced that black and brown people, more recently liberated, will spawn many doctors, scientists, lawyers and businessmen. The fact that they aren't white Europeans and lack the cognitive ability is not considered.

silly girl said...

"So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well."


Sounds great. Are Turks given an opportunity to go to schools and university in Germany? Yes, they are, which is entirely different from the native German "Untertannen" who did not have opportunity. Therefore unequal outcomes are not the result of unequal access to education.

Glossy said...

"So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well."

I don't think that's reasonable at all. Turkey has always had an upper class of its own. Did the Ottoman upper class develop book printing? Did it discover integral calculus? Did it develop the first automobile? X-rays? I could go on and on.

Did the Ottoman upper class ever contribute anything at all to science or technology? I don't think so.

I'm guessing that during the lifetimes of guys like Leibniz or Gauss the numbers of Turks and Germans who lived in opulence were roughly similar. But the two countries' intellectual production couldn't be more different.

Anonymous said...

Wikipedia has an article detailing the different academic performance of different groups in Germany:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_achievement_among_different_groups_in_Germany

RandyB said...

I've frequently said that anti-HBD is liberal's Creationism: a morals-based position on a scientific question, that they must defend at all cost because their entire philosophy depends on it.

Mention scientific research suggesting ethnicities have different average IQ's and you'll get a whole slew of excuses why things APPEAR that way, and no affirmative evidence of their position at all.

Instead, they attack the morals and motivations of their opponents, and explain why we'd all be better off IF their belief were true, or even if we just act like we believe it. Just like Creationists argue that children will behave better if they're not taught they descend from apes.

Anonymous said...

Interestingly, he himself ascribes that to his personal strategy, namely: Speak about the problem, but don't ever give a hint how the problem may be solved.

The solution seems pretty obvious: stop importing low-IQ Third World immigrants. Not much you can do with the alien population already there except encourage them to go home. Maybe subsidies for that purpose if economic conditions get better in the future.

Stanley Ann Marx said...

Imagine this: a spokesman for a patriotic German group in Berlin said of a Turkish activist "He is a tired old brown Muslim male full of prejudice and few ideas."
Jail terms all round for the whites, lads!

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve. Off topic, but here is a long article about a "politically incorrect" proposal by a respected economist to end poverty by letting successful countries establish "charter cities" in unsuccessful ones. There are so many wrong assumptions in the piece that I wouldn't know where to begin, but maybe you could give it the Sailer treatment.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/1/

Black Sea said...

'He is a tired old white Christian male full of prejudice and few ideas.’

It could've been worse; at the least the spokesman didn't describe him as a tired, old white DEAD Christain male.

On the issue of Turkish immigrants to Germany versus Mexican immigrants to the US, I would point out that in both cases they may underperform relative to their national averages. There are certainly some smart, well educated Turks living in Germany, but I can tell you, as someone who lives in Turkey, that many Turks themselves view German Turks as a kind of unsophisticated underclass. Turkish emmigrants often come from Eastern Turkey, the poorest part of the country, and occupy largely the same kinds of jobs performed by hispanic immigrants in America. It seems to me, anecdotally, that many are Kurdish. Of course, that of itself would add its own inflection to the Turkish impression of German Turks. I've heard Turks express anger at the German perception of their nationality, while at the same time ackowledging that the Turks living in Germany do in fact seem particularly ill-suited to the urban, European way of life.

In fact, I've heard Turkish Turks make rather pointed jokes about the backwardness of German Turks, but then again, I've heard Mexican Mexicans do the same about their emmigrant countrymen.

Kurika said...

Christian don´t mean white(great part of the christians are not white)and most muslims are caucasians. In fact, it´s possible that are more caucasians in Islamism than in Christianism. In Germany, imigrants are mostly caucasians, muslims or not. Remember, Italians are not "whites", when they arrive in USA... About Turkish, generally they look like the average Greek or Italian, and many are blonds with blue or grey eyes, like Germans or Russians... So it´s racial or cultural?...

Anonymous said...

"So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well."

Yep, for sure there is a lot of raw, undetected talent in the Turkish underclass (and, here in the US, the Latino underclass).

However, if rampant population growth and lack of parent capacity continues, as well as teen birth and single parenting, our ablility to invest in the undetected talent of people of any color will be vastly diminished.

We seem utterly unaware of the tremendous struggle, constraint and sacrifice it took to make education broadly available.

How foolish we are.

-Puritan Descendant in SF

Anonymous said...

Why should there be any immigrants in Germany at all?

Anonymous said...

Kurika - you're new here arent you...

Anonymous said...

"The solution seems pretty obvious: stop importing low-IQ Third World immigrants. Not much you can do with the alien population already there except encourage them to go home. Maybe subsidies for that purpose if economic conditions get better in the future."

Other inducement to make Hispanics leave:

Cancel food stamps, WIC, & section 8, even for anchor baby "families." Enforce strict zoning laws about the number of unrelated adults who can live in a single dwelling. Provide no immersion or schooling whatsoever for non-English speaking children. Enforce E-verify. Tax remittances sent Mexico by 50%. Steeply upgrade criminals penalties for marijuana use and sales: conviction = years at hard labor + deportation (we could use them to work on levies and other water infrastructure projects).

Mexicans need marijuana the way Chinese need rice and Italians need grappa. If Mexicans can't get high several times a week they get deeply depressed. A lower cost campaign against marijuana might be to genetically engineer a fungus or scale that destroys Cannabis, then spray our national forests and borders with it.

Finally, spike the LA water supply with disulfiram, a drug that makes you violently ill if you drink alcohol. Mexicans will definitely leave if they can't get drunk OR high.

AmericanGoy said...

Steve-o, completely off topic, but do a quick post on the Vuvuzela.

Chief Seattle said...

Damn him for using fact and statistics - the old white male way to make an argument if there ever was one.

Melykin said...

I think fundamentalist Islam makes people stupid. The schools are run by imams who do nothing but make the boys recite the Koran in Arabic (whether or not they speak Arabic). Girls aren't allowed to go to school at all.

How can you even figure out what the IQ is of people whose education has been so stunted? The Muslims in Europe seem to be mostly clinging to their hate-filled Muslim cult and not assimilating. It is looking bad for Europe. Though anti-Muslim Geert Wilder did well in the recent election in the Netherlands. Perhaps people are finally seeing the writing on the wall. But things don't look good for Europe. Either the Muslims will become a majority and take over, or people like Geert Wilder will get elected and there will be civil war. Already Geert Wilder has to always be surrounded by body guards, and must sleep in a different place every night. When you consider this, and the fact that in most European cities there are "no go zones" that have been taken over by the immigrants. Even the police are afraid to go into these zones. So in some sense the civil wars have already begun.

Anonymous said...

We have become too sophisticated for the simple truth.

At least Sarrazin didn't mince his words. But he too will be airbrushed out of public life.

Anon.

Anonymous said...

if an English politician dared to say something similar, he would be crucified not only by the media and 'informed opinion',but by his own party, and his career would be effectively finished.

Anonymous said...

Silly Girl,

You should be aware that the German education system is different from the American. If you speak Turkish at home you are much less likely to be promoted into the gymnasium-track class at age 10 than if German is your mother tongue.

Also acquiring German citizenship is very difficult.

Cordelia said...

Thilo Sarrazin. I tried to figure out what sort of a name that is since it certainly doesn't sound German. Apparently, it's more of a French name.

Amusingly, "sarrazin" -- i.e. saracen -- was a name given to someone who took part in the Crusades. So, perhaps Thilo is just continuing a long-standing family tradition.

;-)

Anonymous said...

What has happened to California reminds me of some nightmarish episode from the first season of the original "Outer Limits" TV series. A town wakes up one morning to find that all its children have been replaced by alien homunculi who can't be easily communicated with and who act like Paul Krendler after being fed part of his own brain by Hannibal Lecter. That's the only way to describe my feelings when I flip through old high school year books, or look at photographic montages from the 40's, 50's and 60's in Kaiser Permanente waiting rooms, then look around at today's school yards, parks, and malls. Once upon a time our parents and grand parents built the houses, roads, factories (now abandoned) and civic buildings, but now the ruins of a once great society are inhabited by mindless pod people bursting out of monstrously fat Latinas.

Anonymous said...

I'm not a big fan of romer; it however undeniable that a just a few hundred square kilometres in africa with effectively enforced with private property rights and rule of law in general would be as a hong kong to early communist china. HDB does not change this fact. It looks like knowledge of HDB to some becomes the hammer that makes everything look like a nail.

Anonymous said...

What a world, where being "white" is a put down . . . . in Germany!

Zach said...

"A spokesman for a Muslim group in Berlin said; ‘He is a tired old white Christian male full of prejudice and few ideas.'"

Hasn't he just summed up Europe :=D

Regardless of immigration the European continental is just ultra-conservative in all the wrong ways.

Irreligious, anti-natalist and anti-capitalist; whereas the US is passionate (on either theism or atheism), pro-natalist (in parts) and pseudo-capitalist (the Tea Party is undoing the B-O legacy of big government).

One thing I will say immigration may have its pros & cons (I can never be neutral since I am a Pakistani immigrant to the UK so I accept I have a biased view) but the difference is what the host society is like.

If its young and energetic immigrants are immediatel absorbed; if its tired and old the immigrants stand out like a sore thumb.

I like to give the example of Pakistan; the 4mn Afghan refugee/immigrants was the largest in the world absolutely and relatively. However the "demographic swamping" was never an issue because the demo profile of the Pak population was quite young and natalist.

When a people stop breeding you have to ask why irrespective of immigration.

Anonymous said...

Japan has the right idea: automation not immigration.

Yep. Even their pop music idols are now artificial!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39lzK2xZjok

Anonymous said...

The people of Anatolia were at the center of world civilization for thousands of years, and the current inhabitants of Turkey are mostly their descendants (the invading Turks didn't really contribute that much genetically.) There's no reason to think they wouldn' do well if one could just pry them away from their rural Anatolian culture.

Anonymous said...

Do you think Turks are significantly different genetically from Germans? Or from Greeks, for that matter?

headache said...

Funny thing is the man is from the socialist party SPD, which considers the immigrant vote as a necessary gateway to power. They have been doing everything in their power to get in more immigrants and get them past the restrictive naturalization laws. The SPD has been a national disgrace since whenever it came into existence, so it is puzzling that Sarrazin and many likeminded politicians are members of that party. I think the difference is that he actually understands economics and also cares about the poor Germans who are carrying the brunt of the immigration costs.

What's more interesting is that Sarrazin is a Huguenot, and a conservative weekly here has surmised based on his surname, that he may in fact originally be from the Arab stock which invaded southern France. Those persons then converted to Protestantism after Martel defeated them, and eventually fled the Catholic clampdown to Berlin, where many Huguenots settled down.

Anonymous said...

Rainer sed:So reasonably we Germans are prepared to think that there's a lot of unused and undetected talent in the Turkish under class as well.


xcept Turks are of a different ethnic background, and the later generations actually become worse.

headache said...

AmericanGoy said...
Steve-o, completely off topic, but do a quick post on the Vuvuzela.


AG, I come from South Africa. Soccer was always considered a low class, mainly black sport by most whites. Stadiums were located in inner cities or outside of town, so that the whites in the burbs didn't have to listen to all that noise.

My gut feel is that Vuvuzelas are a modern transplant from tribal music which is heavy in rhythm and uses noise to intimidate. Southern African blacks are very prone to intimidation which has been a powerful political tool used by revolutionaries and the current regimes in Southern Africa, and has traditionally been a component of their warfare tactics.

Anonymous said...

The Ottomans used (formerly Christian, forced to convert) slaves in many professional/artisan/leadership roles (eg, Sinan the architect, many, possibly most pashas, and of course breeding material in the form of harem slaves to perpetuate their line). That is, they did the exact opposite of contemporary Germany, HBD-wise. Who was/is smarter?

MQ said...

but going by Lynn's IQ data AIR they're around IQ 90, only slightly below the Balkans but a good 12 points below Germany.

In other words, average Turkish IQ is about what average German IQ was forty or fifty years ago. The equation of IQ with genetic determinism on this site is totally unscientific and ideologically driven.

Anonymous said...

I note that there a more than a few commenters on this blog who live in the SF Bay Area, as I do. I would love to find a way to get together for occasional informal conversations...the relief of being able to discuss HBD-related topics openly (in person, vs on chat boards or blog posts) and in a spirit of intellectual inquiry would be such a pleasure.

Anonymous said...

According to Bloomberg Business News, "Minority Population Growth Demands Better Education:"

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-11/minority-population-growth-demands-better-education-groups-say.html

It is apparently unthinkable to instead demand less minority population growth.

Anonymous said...

"Cancel food stamps, WIC, & section 8, even for anchor baby "families."

This is a point not made in news reports about the "immigration problem" in states such as CA, a state that hands out welfare like penny candy.

If an illegal mother goes to the county welfare office and shows that her child was born in the States, voila, welfare payments. So, the mother has another child and another and another. And, whereas once upon a time Hispanic young people married, no longer. Look at any local newspapers under "births" and you'll see a huge number of babies born to a mother with one name and father with another. So much for the Catholic church having an influence on them anymore.

I keep hearing the newspeople talking about the "problem on the borders" as one of violence and gangs as if those are the only problems-- they never ever examine the huge costs that illegals place on our budgets--health care costs, education costs, and welfare costs. Never in a press conference has a reporter directly asked a President why the American people should provide social benefits to people who come here illegally. It's a moral as well as an economic issue--why the hell should I pay for them any more than I should pick up the grocery tab of my next-door neighbor or any more than I should pay for the big screen tv they just bought?

I'm sick of hearing that they do work others won't do. Yeah, okay, then those who wish to pick grapes can have a green card and be here legally, but those who don't work and collect benefits have to get the hell out.

Welfare cut offs need to take place and soon. It's a problem we've had in this state for a long time, long before the illegals began taking advantage of the system. Counterproductive welfare policies were adopted in the sixities in response to the civil rights movement. People believed in those days that if you helped a family which had had a hard time climbing the economic, social, education ladder because of racial discrimination, you'd soon free them up to succeed.

Yeah, we know just how well those policies have worked, don't we? Seeing blacks take the easy way out, whites decided to play the system too. Young girls of all races now commonly see a pregnancy as a way of "earning a living."

corvinus said...

I've heard Turks express anger at the German perception of their nationality, while at the same time ackowledging that the Turks living in Germany do in fact seem particularly ill-suited to the urban, European way of life.

In fact, I've heard Turkish Turks make rather pointed jokes about the backwardness of German Turks, but then again, I've heard Mexican Mexicans do the same about their emmigrant countrymen.


Mark Steyn has a recent column about the differences between Rumelian (European) and Anatolian (Asian) Turks. The smart, better-educated, European Turks are probably more likely to be found as students in the USA rather than in the slums of Duisburg.

The Kurds, meanwhile, are even lower on the totem pole than the Anatolian Turks; many of them seem (to me at least) to have a lot of Gypsy ancestry.

Unfortunately, the minority of European Turks in Germany still identify with their uneducated co-ethics because they share a religion and nationality. Rather like how white Hispanics in the USA (except for Cubans) are almost always commie pinkos and (including Cubans) in favor of more illegal immigration.

Anonymous said...

Average IQ is a simple weighted sum: .43*100 (whites) + 0.07*85 (blacks) + .13*103 (Asians) + 0.37*87 (Hispanic) = 94.5.

I fear that your numbers are wildly [really insanely] optimistic.

As I understand it [and my understanding of it may be wrong], in the 18 years from 1979 to 1997, Charles Murray calculates a dysgenic-fertility-induced plunge in average Black IQ, from 83.7, down to 80.2.

Now if that plunge has continued, on a linear path, in the 13 years since 1997, then we are looking at an average IQ for Black children born in 2010 something like the following:

y = 80.2 + [([80.2 - 83.7] / [1997 - 1979]) * (2010 - 1997)]
= 80.2 +[([-3.5] / 18) * 13]
= 77.6722

Similarly, Lynn and Vanhanen guesstimate an average IQ for Guatemala of 79, which I think is probably fairly representative of the typical Mexican/Salvadoran/Guatemalan illegal alien [& anchor baby] in California.

It's certainly true that Black & Central American Indian & North American Indian high school graduation rates in the United States are all just eerily similar:

LOSING OUR FUTURE: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis
National Graduation Rates By Race and Gender
[PDF, page 6; text, page 2]
urban.org

American Indian/AK Nat, FEMALE: 51.4
American Indian/AK Nat, MALE: 47.0
Hispanic, FEMALE: 58.5
Hispanic, MALE: 48
Black, FEMALE: 56.2
Black, MALE: 42.8

Finally, I noticed recently [after being spurred on, by some iSteve threads, to google into Jim Thorpe's background] that the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in the late 19th and early 20th Century, had a graduation rate of less than 8%.

But as Charles Murray notes, in another eery coincidence, only 7% of all black children are born to women with IQs of 100 and over.

So my best guess is that both American Blacks and the Aboriginal peoples of North and Central America have remarkably similar IQs, with means no greater than 80, and [status post late-20th Century dysgenic fertility] means probably down in the high 70s.

NEXT UP: THE ASIANS

Anonymous said...

Okay, now for the Asians.

What follows are the CST scores for various ethnic categories, with the percentages listed taken from the second grade CST English-Language Arts test-takers.


ALL "Asian": 38,922 = 8.4%

-versus-

Filipino: 12,654 = 2.7%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 86
2nd grade CST results very similar to Whites]

Chinese: 10,433 = 2.2%
Lynn & Vanhanen, China: IQ 100 [2002], IQ 105 [2006]
Lynn & Vanhanen, Taiwan: IQ 104 [2002], IQ 105 [2006]
Lynn & Vanhanen, Hong Kong: IQ 107 [2002], IQ 108 [2006]
2nd grade CST results vastly higher than Whites

Japanese: 2,290 = 0.5%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 105
2nd grade CST results much higher than Whites

Korean: 4,091 = 0.9%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 106
2nd grade CST results vastly higher than Whites

Vietnamese: 7,077 = 1.5%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 96 [2002], IQ 94 [2006]
2nd grade CST results very similar to Whites]

Asian Indian: 6,264 = 1.3%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ ???
2nd grade CST results much higher than Whites

Laotian: 1,149 = 0.2%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 89
2nd grade CST results vastly worse than Whites

Cambodian: 1,215 = 0.3%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ 89 [2002], IQ 91 [2006]
2nd grade CST results much worse than Whites

Other Asian: 6,403 = 1.4%
Lynn & Vanhanen: IQ
2nd grade CST results worse than Whites

Finally, note the statistically insignificant numbers of Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders taking the CST in the second grade:

Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander: 2,917 = 0.6%
Lynn & Vanhanen, Samoa: IQ 87 [2002], IQ 88 [2006]
2nd grade CST results vastly worse than Whites

TO BE CONTINUED.

Anonymous said...

ASIANS, CONTINUED.

Now 2.7 + 2.2 + 0.5 + 0.9 + 1.5 + 1.3 + 0.2 + 0.3 + 1.4 = 11%, which disagrees with the aggregate figure of 8.4% for all Asians, so it's not clear what's going on here.

Also, in glancing through the STAR results for the aggregate "Asian" category, versus the "White" category, it looks like the Asians have a slight "advantage" [lesser percentages] in each of "Proficient", "Basic", "Below Basic", and "Far Below Basic", but have a vastly higher "advantage" [greater percentage] in "Advanced", which suggests to me that there might be a big hump at the right end of the Asian density function, probably representing the children of engineers and university professors in Silicon Valley and the San Gabriel Valley [either that, or else the right end of the white distribution curve is disproportionately enrolled in private schools, which may or may not participate in the STAR exams].

So it's really tough to figure out what an "average" would be for all Asians [and how much use an "average" would be in describing the Asian density function in California].

[If I had the time, I would run a least squares/Lagrange multipliers routine on these numbers, to see how well the various Gaussians would fit as candidates for the density functions, but I am way too busy to do that right now.]

Anyway, let's say that the figure of "103" is low for all Asians - the average is probably more like 105, or maybe even 110 [with a density function which probably doesn't look very Gaussian].

And let's throw out the "Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders" as being statistically insignificant.

NEXT UP: BIRTH DATA & FINAL CALCULATIONS

Anonymous said...

Okay, now for the birth data and the final calculations.

From Table 6 of "Births: Preliminary Data for 2007", as compiled by the CDC:


California, total: 566,352
California, Non-Hispanic white: 155,930
California, Non-Hispanic black: 31,777
California, American Indian or Alaska Native: 3,626
California, Asian or Pacific Islander: 74,292
California, Hispanic: 296,942

Now 155,930 + 31,777 + 3,626 + 74,292 + 296,942 = 562,567, which is in fairly good agreement with the total number of 566,352 [i.e. the overcount isn't too bad].

As far as percentages are concerned, we have:

California, total: 566,352
California, Non-Hispanic white: 155,930 / 566,352 = 27.53%
California, Non-Hispanic black: 31,777 / 566,352 = 5.61%
California, American Indian or Alaska Native: 3,626 / 566,352 = 0.64%
California, Asian or Pacific Islander: 74,292 / 566,352 = 13.12%
California, Hispanic: 296,942 / 566,352 = 52.43%

And with low & high IQ estimates, that looks like:

California, Non-Hispanic white: 27.53%, IQ 100
California, Non-Hispanic black: 5.61%, low IQ 77.5, high IQ 80
California, American Indian or Alaska Native: 0.64%, low IQ 77.5, high IQ 80
California, Asian or Pacific Islander: 13.12%, low IQ 105, high IQ 110
California, Hispanic: 52.43%, low IQ 77.5, high IQ 80

So finally we get the following average IQ estimates for 2007 births in the state of California, with an IQ density function which is probably very badly non-Gaussian:

LOW: [0.2753 * 100] + [0.0561 * 77.5] + [0.0064 * 77.5] + [0.1312 * 105] + [0.5243 * 77.5] = IQ 86.783

HIGH: [0.2753 * 100] + [0.0561 * 80] + [0.0064 * 80] + [0.1312 * 110] + [0.5243 * 80] = IQ 88.906

Glossy said...

"In other words, average Turkish IQ is about what average German IQ was forty or fifty years ago. The equation of IQ with genetic determinism on this site is totally unscientific and ideologically driven."

It's true that the Flynn effect has increased mean IQs in many countries over the 20th century. However, these increases were disproportionally observed at the lower end of the IQ distribution. This is most likely becuase in the 20th century the lower classes had better nutrition than ever before.

The elites, however, have been eating well since pre-historic times. The elites got all the IQ-increasing benefits that good childhood nutrition can provide many thousands of years ago. If you think that very many people today are smarter than Archimedes, Newton, Beethoven and the rest of them were, then you're wrong.

In the past why have Turkey's elites contributed so much less to high culture, science and technology than did Western European elites? Probably because the currently-observed IQ gap between Turkey and Europe has existed for centuries.

Giant Attitude said...

A Muslim spokesperson (by implication) accuses a Western speaker of having an insufficiently enlightened attitude about females?

Gosh, that HURTS!

Gene Berman said...

Puritan Descendant in SF:

What nonsense! By and large, it was elite revulsion at the the idea of rubbing shoulders with incoming slobs (and, especially, a "depraved"-- Catholic--religion firing enthusiasm for compulsory, publicly-financed education. Where exists (especially in a democracy) ethnic or religious difference and friction (particularly where a language difference exists), there compulsory public education is a prize of the first order (giving winners opportunity to subvert the children of perceived "enemies").

Can't wrap your mind around that? Try looking back into historical records for "literacy" in those early years (compare with today!). Naturally, though propagandizing of one or another sort is an equal-opportunity activity, it especially appeals both to the inclinations and the abilities of those anxious to "socialize" the rising generation, to imbue them with whatever are the beliefs, not of their parents or some general ideas of acceptable behavior but with those favored by that elite.

Note well all others (whether you heard it here first or not): this country, at one point literally at the apogee of Western civilization, is going steadily downhill. There won't be "turnaround" or improvement in either economic or social conditions possible without COMPLETE abandonment of the entire system of public instruction (kindergarten thru postgraduate, regardless of field). Though not the cause of our general problems, it's an observable accompaniment to those problems and effectively bars substantive improvement.

Orwell would probably recognize--from your statement--as one raised on his "farm."

Chetak said...

"The people of Anatolia were at the center of world civilization for thousands of years, and the current inhabitants of Turkey are mostly their descendants (the invading Turks didn't really contribute that much genetically.) There's no reason to think they wouldn' do well if one could just pry them away from their rural Anatolian culture."

High IQ did not give that much of an advantage before the industrial revolution except that it increased the probability to win wars. Medium IQ was enough to run a Byzantine like civilization. In those days what mattered was how good your farmlands and rivers were. More grains, larger population, more taxation, bigger armies, more opulent nobles etc...
But the post-Industrial revolution age gives a big advantage to high IQ population over medium IQ populations. Which also explains why Europeans and North East Asians seem to be running the show ever since the Industrial revolution in England.
Just because your people ran a good agriculture based civilization many centuries ago does not guarantee you guys will run a first world nation in this age.

Anonymous said...

>Remember, Italians are not "whites", when they arrive in USA.<

This hasn't been true for almost 100 years.

Read Slaughter of the Cities by E. Michael Jones. The final political recognition of pan-white identity in the United States came in the wake of the first urban renewal projects.

Besides, which of us is whiter than Michelangelo?

Gene Berman said...

Melykin:

"Perhaps people are finally seeing the writing on the wall."

Machs nix. When the writing appears ("mene, mene, tekel upharsin") and whether or not understood ("you've been weighed and found wanting", it's
already TOO LATE.

Just thought you might like to know that.

B322 said...

I wonder if a state's decision to cut off Medicaid would cut state budget shortfalls even if the Feds retaliated by cutting of Federal income tax-derived funds to the state. It wouldn't in the short term, but I wouldn't be surprised if the exodus from the state decreased unemployment, jail pop., language problems so much that it paid for itself.

New rallying cry:
Stop Medicaid!
?

Anonymous said...

What's more interesting is that Sarrazin is a Huguenot, and a conservative weekly here has surmised based on his surname, that he may in fact originally be from the Arab stock which invaded southern France. Those persons then converted to Protestantism after Martel defeated them, and eventually fled the Catholic clampdown to Berlin, where many Huguenots settled down.

A friend of mine from Switzerland told me about a place in Switzerland called the "Commune d'Iserables", supposedly a very remote, backward community where many of the inhabitants have the surname "Sarrazin" and are the descendants of Saracens who settled there in the Middle Ages, but I have never been able to find much of anything about this community online, and this article is only the second time I have ever heard of this curious surname.

Anonymous said...

Out breeding another ethnic group is what I will call "soft genocide". The reason people are reluctant to think the immigration, IQ issues all the way through is because one of the logical responses to soft genocide is hard genocide.

Groups that breed more are mounting an offensive against those who breed less. One obvious response to having more people born in another group is to redress the balance by also having more deaths in that group.

There that's the terrible idea that everyone is hoping to avoid. Conservatives as well as liberals don't want to engage in genocide - to become some sort of Nazis.

Hermann Kahn at the height of the Cold War wrote Thinking the Unthinkable. He believed that not talking about nuclear war made such a conflict more likely. He talked bluntly about nuclear holocaust and may have contributed thereby to avoiding a nuclear exchange.

Right now any mention of race and/or group differences in IQ immediately triggers the assumption that if groups were indeed different under the skin then the smarter group would end up trying to kill all of the less smart group. The person may or may not know anything about HBD but they know they don't want genocide. So they resort to being uninformed and rely of any kind of argument that allows them to deny that there is any reason to even think about it. The average American doesn't want to be any kind of bad guy much less a Nazi. He would rather spout half baked rationals than have to confront uncomfortable truths that might lead to solutions he can't accept.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

There's no reason to think they wouldn' do well if one could just pry them away from their rural Anatolian culture.

Let them do that in Turkey, its not our responsibilty.

Gene Berman said...

MQ:

"the equation of IQ with genetic determinism on this site is totally unscientific and ideologically driven."

Whether on this site or anywhere else, there may be ideologic factors influencing what some appreciate as either "scientific" or not. While I would caution anyone against strictly deterministic interpretations of IQ
data, I wouldn't agree that such predominate on the site (except with the more "ideologically driven").

If anything, those aligned on the "liberal" side of the general and several controversies seem to have embraced certain conclusions far more
"totally unscientific" and even more "ideologically driven" than almost any here. Even the frequent rants of "white nationalists" or the snide remarks of Jew-bashers literally pale in comparison--especially insofar as effectiveness or influence on the larger society is concerned--with the baleful, destructive intellectual environment fostered and, for quite some time now, enforced (ultimately via violent, i.e., government means) by the ludicrous "tabula rasa" crowd, depending, as it did and still does, on the most labored (tortured, actually) interpretations of reality.

Your days of dominating discussion are over. Unfortunately, whether in my lifetime or not, we may all simply disappear, along with most other vestiges of a brief, almost-great civilization.

Gene Berman said...

MQ:

Germany's particularly inappropriate for making IQ comparisons, whether with other countries or other times. WW II killed millions, probably many from "the best and the brightest." They'd already "final solutioned" not a few of their previous cognitive elite. Thousands of those recognized for scientific achievement were encouraged to emigrate, some of the same were absorbed forcibly by the communist-bloc states, and, finally, partition, to some extent, favored self-selection. Thus I'd not draw conclusions except as to what's shown by current data (and leave the drawing of comparisons to those with nothing better to do except speculate on that about which they know almost nothing.

stari_momak said...

Tangential, but yet another sign of the third worldization of Cali.

Wealthy homeowners seeking privacy are increasingly buying adjacent properties

Compounds are the hottest commodity in L.A.'s high-end real estate market, brokers say.

http://tinyurl.com/2ej5dpm

BamaGirl said...

"Remember, Italians are not "whites", when they arrive in USA."

This is simply false. Some of the first settlers of New Orleans were Northern and central Italians (I've researched this, and I'm descended from some of them), and there is no indication that they were regarded as anything other than white, and they married into the existing British/French population.
I mean come on, use common sense. Even dark Sicilians were never forced to sit in the back of the bus or attend black schools during Jim Crow. Italians might have been regarded with suspicion occasionally, but I don't think the majority of the population considered them anything other than white/European.

stari_momak said...

"In other words, average Turkish IQ is about what average German IQ was forty or fifty years ago. The equation of IQ with genetic determinism on this site is totally unscientific and ideologically driven."

Okay, even in the IQ difference is totally environment driven, why should the Germans import a population 40-50 years behind where they are now? Tje immigrants themselves will be behind and, as the children will be raised in an immigrant household they will likely have lower IQs due to the enviroment in which they are raised.

Anonymous said...

Wealthy homeowners seeking privacy are increasingly buying adjacent properties

From the article: In part, the trend reflects an economic reality: The super-rich are getting super-richer, said Elizabeth Currid, an assistant professor at USC who studies cultural shifts among the wealthy. The average net worth of the world's billionaires increased $500 million in the last year to $3.5 billion, Forbes magazine reported in March.

No kidding.

And it certainly doesn't help matters when a Ben Bernanke is printing funny-money by the super-tanker-load and sending it straight to their bank accounts.

As we move forward to experience the increasingly non-Gaussian shape of the IQ density function for California, look for the super-rich to retreat ever further into their gated [and armed] compounds, so as to protect themselves from all that magnificent diversity of the Hoi Polloi.

How long until Los Angeles starts to experience the kinds of kidnapping-for-profit schemes which are endemic in Rio de Janeiro?

A decade?

Maybe less?

Anonymous said...

When I visited Ukraine, one of the folk sayings I encountered was "dumb as a Turk." call it sour grapes, or call it centuries of experience. This much is true: for sitting on one of best pieces of real estate in the world for going on a millenium, TR's economic development is woeful.

Anonymous said...

"Liberals don't look for this much among white people but they are convinced that black and brown people, more recently liberated, will spawn many doctors, scientists, lawyers and businessmen."


Liberals do have some quaint ideas, but their constant push for 'access to abortion for poor women' who can't take care of their kids properly is their version of eugenics. Poor is a euphemism for black and hispanic because those women have the most abortions per capita. I think the libs get annoyed because they can't come out and say that abortion for poor blacks is the balance to affirmative action and they wish that conservatives would "get" the nuance of abortion on demand. It is a disgusting position, but there it is.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the whiteness of Italians, I've done research into my family tree. All my Sicilian forebearers who came to this country in the 19th century had "white" written on their census records and travel logs. Italians were never officially classified as anything else.

Regarding Hispanics in California, the majority are Mexican mestizos, not indigenous Guatemalans. Their IQ is likely between 90 - 95, since a range of 90 - 98 has been recorded in Mexico among the mestizo population, with the whiter mestizos having the higher average. Why anonymous is substituting Guatemalan IQs for those of Mexican mestizos, I don't know, but it certainly throws off the numbers he so laboriously labored to calculate.

Anonymous said...

"Did the Ottoman upper class ever contribute anything at all to science or technology? I don't think so."

The Ottoman ruling class had trouble just ruling its possessions. A warrior slave class (from the Ukraine region, Mamluks/Kipchaks) effectively ruled Egypt until they were overthrown by Muhammed Ali who was an Albanian from Macedonia.

David Davenport said...

... here is a long article about a "politically incorrect" proposal by a respected economist to end poverty by letting successful countries establish "charter cities" in unsuccessful ones.

That's a good idea. Nice, new charter cities in Central America -- to be populated by Hispanics deported from the USA.

And maybe some penal colonies in Afghanistan for those convicted of felonies in the USA.

Mel Torme said...

"Did the Ottoman upper class ever contribute anything at all to science or technology? I don't think so."

I beg to differ, good Sir. Just as one small example, I present to you an invention that this fine civilization produced from a time long before the beginning of the Reformation in your Western "so-called" Civilization.

Behold, from an empire build around support for your legs:

Exhibit A, the Ottoman:

http://www.target.com/Ottomans-Living-Room-Furniture/b?ie=UTF8&node=13587111


Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Lucky for you it's Saturday already. Try the Shish Kabob.

afasfasdfasf said...

Thought Crime: thinking the 'wrong' thing.

Know Crime: knowing the 'wrong' thing.

Look Crime: seeing the 'wrong' thing.

asdfadsfasfasdf said...

It's funny how liberals contradict themselves. They say immigration is good because the newcomers bring something BETTER than what the natives have.
So, it's okay to say immigrants make the nation 'smarter' but it's wrong to say some immigrants make the nation dumber.

I've often heard Germany got dumber when it kicked the Jews out, white US got smarter.
Well, if some immigrants can make a nation smarter, then other immigrants must make it dumber. That's no brainer.

But PC says white nations must praise non-white immigrants, no matter how dumb(or illegal) they may be.

In truth, some immigrants make a place smarter, some make it dumber. If US took in a million Germans or Japanese, it'd do better in IQ than if it took in a million Jamaicans or Nigerians. OTOH, when it comes to sports and funky music, the blacks might add more.

Steve Sailer said...

My parents decorated their den Ottoman-style. I think it was fashionable in the 1950s. They had an upholstered footstool they referred to as "the ottoman." Tipped on its side, my dog slept in it.

It gets cold in Central Asia, so it's a nice look for a den -- very cozy.

globalist said...

"I've often heard Germany got dumber when it kicked the Jews out, white US got smarter. "

Often heard it from whom? After the war, several thousand top German scientists -- reluctant Nazis naturally (including our own Werner von Braun) -- were divided between Russia and the United States. Their technology was so advanced that some theorized (I won't go there) that they were closer to the atomic bomb than anyone imagined not to mention any number of other top secret activities. Still, over here Oppenheimer was working on the atom bomb and actually made one, there might be something to that. Fortunately the reformed Nazi scientists (surely they were reformed) turned their talents to the space race and in 1957 Sputnik knocked the socks off Americans. Who'd a thunk it? Most famous quote from The Right Stuff, "how could that happen? Our Germans are smarter their Germans!"
Eliminating a smart section of the population was not good for business ultimately, but German technology was hardly dependent on the Jews and their technological advances began long before Jewish students and scientists were interacting with the larger community to any extent.

adsfadfaf said...

"Sarrazin" doesn't sound very German.

Anonymous said...

I've never priorly heard of the individual in question, but one thing I can deduce about this "tired old white christian male" is that he isn't short and fat, both relevant points that would have made it in to his description otherwise.

He may or may not be bald, if he were young and that were left out we'd know for sure, similarly if the spokesman was someone other than a muslim we would have expected the epithet of "straight" to make a showing as well.

Straight short fat bald white Christian males deserve every calumny. It's in the bible somewhere.

Anonymous said...

OT, but this is to address the comments about Italians being considered white. Look at what Ben Franklin had to say about this matter in 1751.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth

Source

corvinus said...

Right now any mention of race and/or group differences in IQ immediately triggers the assumption that if groups were indeed different under the skin then the smarter group would end up trying to kill all of the less smart group. The person may or may not know anything about HBD but they know they don't want genocide.

Wrong... as history has shown consistently, in case of war, it's smarter groups trying to kill other smarter groups in conventional warfare (World Wars I and II), dumber groups killing other dumber groups in disorganized slaughtering matches with a trapping of conventional warfare (Darfur, Rwanda, and other such African take-outs), and smarter groups using the dumber groups for cheap labor.

If you'll notice, generally speaking, a smarter group never gets into a conventional war with a dumber group, or if it does, it doesn't last very long (the Iraq War). Eventually, the dumber groups drive out or slaughter the smarter groups' people or troops living amongst them (Iraq War, Vietnam War, revolutionary Haiti, anti-Chinese riots in Southeast Asia...)

Dahlia said...

"Look at what Ben Franklin had to say about this matter in 1751.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth"

Steve has addressed a similar quote from Ben Franklin before which he had made in regards to immigration and the U.S.

My guess is that Franklin was ruling in or out white people based on competition while trying to make it sound scientific. The examples of Swedes and Germans as members of the swarthy group are so extreme that I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the above quote was said in the context of an immigration discussion.

It is true that very much of the discussion about who belongs to what category is based on competition for wives and resources. And they can be extreme about this. I once had a guy who liked me tell me that it wasn't enough for a couple to be of the same race, but they needed to be of the same complexion and looks, too.
Well this would have been quite a problem for me according to his definition as there aren't too many pale, freckled redheaded men running around. But how convenient! He was one! LOL!

ATBOTL said...

"Those persons then converted to Protestantism after Martel defeated them"

What did they do for the 800 years in between the Battle of Tours and the Protestant Reformation?

Steve Sailer said...

Yes, the context was that Franklin's political opponents in Pennsylvania, the Quakers, were recruiting Germans of similar religious inclinations to come to Pennsylvania. Hence, the dubious claim that Germans and even Swedes were swarthy. Also, he was promoting an English-Indian alliance at the time, so there's some stuff in it about preserving America for the Red and the White.

The rest of the essay is the most insightful social analysis published in America in its generation -- Malthus had to admit a half century later in his second edition that it contains much of his theory -- but it's not as polished as most of Franklin's published works. He wrote it in 1751 and didn't publish it until 1754, and then without really perfecting it.

Steve Sailer said...

Sarrazini -- Could be an Italian name. Golfer Gene Sarazen (1902-1999) was born Eugenio Saraceni.

Anonymous said...

Zachary Latif,
You're talking nonsense.Pakistanis in Britain 'stick out like a sore thumb',simply because they are a very alien ethnic group, with alien phenotypes, customs, religion, language, habits, clothing and vrything else that matters, but of course in all of thee things they are vry similar to Afghans.
There has been massive Polish immigration to England recetly.They do not jar as much as Pakistanis do, although their language and customs are different to the English, phenotypically the difference is slight.

Anonymous said...

Off topic, but in the 1.5 years since the election, do you know if there's been any research following up on the Obama effect, the hypothesis that having a Black president would raise Black test scores by making academics seem cool, and boosting self esteem? That is, has anyone bothered to check whether the racial gap has narrowed after November 2008?

Anonymous said...

"There won't be "turnaround" or improvement in either economic or social conditions possible without COMPLETE abandonment of the entire system of public instruction (kindergarten thru postgraduate, regardless of field). Though not the cause of our general problems, it's an observable accompaniment to those problems and effectively bars substantive improvement."

The internet is successfully competing with "public"(government) schools and universities as we speak. There is better curriculum online now than in most Ivy League universities. You can audit entire postgraduate courses in mathematics or physics e.g. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm.

The next revolution will be replacing college diploma's with simple online tests that demonstrate your ability to perform economically valuable tasks. Want a job in a company? Take a battery of tests that show you can either do it or learn it quickly.

Constant feedback from companies about their workforce during performance evaluations and exit interviews could be used to continually improve the tests. The company running the tests could be a non-profit entity selling subscriptions to companies in need of specialized workers.

David Davenport said...

The next revolution will be replacing college diploma's with simple online tests that demonstrate your ability to perform economically valuable tasks. Want a job in a company? Take a battery of tests that show you can either do it or learn it quickly.

Here you are, got what you want right here: the [US} Armed forces Qualification Test set:




The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is a multiple choice test, administered by the United States Military Entrance Processing Command, used to determine qualification for enlistment in the United States armed forces.


... Examinees also receive a score on what is called the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). AFQT scores are computed using the Standard Scores from four ASVAB subtests: Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), Mathematics Knowledge (MK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), and Word Knowledge (WK). AFQT scores are reported as percentiles between 1-99. An AFQT percentile score indicates the percentage of examinees in a reference group that scored at or below that particular score. For current AFQT scores, the reference group is a sample of 18 to 23 year old youth who took the ASVAB as part of a national norming study conducted in 1997. Thus, an AFQT score of 90 indicates that the examinee scored as well as or better than 90% of the nationally-representative sample of 18 to 23 year old youth. An AFQT score of 50 indicates that the examinee scored as well as or better than 50% of the nationally-representative sample....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery

CJ said...

...this article is only the second time I have ever heard of this curious surname.

You've obviously never been to Quebec. There are thousands of them there. Schools, hospitals, and tire stores all carry the name, and Michael Sarrazin had a fairly successful Hollywood career as a leading man in the 1960s and 70s.

Anonymous said...

Now I have to buy an Ottoman.

Gene Berman said...

Anonymous (talking of availability of technical, college, and PG studies via the Net):

I'm not unaware nor discount those developments. However, it makes not the slightest dent in the mass--from kindergarten on--receiving (essentially) political and attitudinal indoctrination foisted on the (paying) public by those who have formed the "progressive" elite now for nearly a century (and, to a degree, even earlier).

As things are going now, it would not surprise me at all, if in a few years, there are fewer and fewer attractive job openings for many of those taking advantage of improved higher-end education. It's not only necessary that a "smart fraction" receive that education enabling adequate performance. Some indeterminable but relatively small fraction of those must also be endowed (and naturally are) by both innovative and entrepreneurial spirit but not hampered at every turn by statist interventionism and politically-correct, egalitarian, socialist gobbledygook. Though we've never had quite the degree of personal and economic freedom which might be "optimum," from some particular viewpoint, we've had a hell of a lot more during most of our history--during the time of America's meteoric rise.

When I was younger, it was common to hear socialist opinion and propaganda--from people who were socialists or left-leaning, and avowedly so. But, as time has passed, it's come to a point where you can hear the same claptrap from people who have no idea that what they're promoting is nonsense--or socialist (and might even be offended were you to tell them so).