November 1, 2011

Richard Lynn's "The Chosen People"

In VDARE.com, I review Richard Lynn's new book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement.
It has long been predicted that Jewish achievement in science will slow down, as affluent younger Jews turn to more lucrative or fun careers, such as Wall Street and Hollywood. But we don't yet see that in the Nobel Prize data. In the 21st century so far, Jews have won 24 of the 91 hard science Nobels, or 26 percent, which is even higher than their 20th Century rate.

Read the whole thing there.

160 comments:

Jim Bowery said...

The reason it is taboo to talk about Jewish achievement as an explanation for over-representation in various privileged positions, is that the question becomes fair:

"Aren't people so over-represented in positions of public trust and authority required to be even less ethnocentric than the rest of us?"

Anonymous said...

Nobel awards (real ones - not Peace or Economics) lag actual achievements by many years or decades.

My favorite is the southern California dude who, while driving down the Pacific Coast Highway (probably stoned), invented the polymerase chain reaction.

He was an idiot who went on to advocate tin-foil explanations for AIDS. But, one shining moment between Redondo and Manhattan Beaches (or whatever), and he is a Nobel immortal.

Anonymous said...

The good performance of British (and Commonwealth generally?) gentiles relative to their Ashkenazi population in Nobel prizes is somewhat puzzling.

Why would this be the case? Better British Universities? But are they really better than, say, German Universities? And why wouldn't the effect repeat itself in the US, where the culture isn't _that_ different from the UK? Presumably the gentile population IQ is similar in Britain and Germany, perhaps even higher in Germany.

When comparing the US and UK, perhaps you could discount for the African American fraction of the population, about 10-15% of the total population. That might get the AQ down to 8 or 9, at least within hailing distance of the British results.

Anonymous said...

I would assume that there are a variety of cognitive traits which correlate with high achievement. Perhaps IQ tests don't fully measure them.

"This suggests that the success of the Ashkenazim is attributable to more than just their high IQs and that they also possess strong motivational and work-ethic qualities."

Jews probably are harder working and more motivated than white gentiles, but East Asians tend to be the most stereotyped as grinds.

clarity said...

Some Jews are smaht; others, not so much.

eh said...

In the 21st century so far, Jews have won 24 of the 91 hard science Nobels, or 26 percent, which is even higher than their 20th Century rate.

It is, overall, quite an impressive record of achievement. Primarily by the individuals themselves of course.

ex-K5er said...

Looks like marriage has been good to you, Jim. Good for you.

Simon in London said...

"I found a few. British gentiles are pretty good at winning Nobels. They've won 76 while British-born Jews have won only three, for an Achievement Quota of six. This low AQ not appear to stem from British Jews being untalented or terribly discriminated against, but instead because British gentiles are unusually good at doing Nobel-worthy work."

This is an interesting point. I've noticed before that Americans and other non-English often seem to have trouble distinguishing English elite gentiles from English elite Jews, sometimes I'm not sure myself, especially with journalists - Polly Toynbee? Rod Liddell? To some extent it's because English elite Jews are more integrated with the indigenous population; but I think there may also be some cultural affinities which contribute to English & Scottish success in science and other intellectual areas. Compared to the US & Europe, the English gentile elites don't seem to be intimidated by Jewish intellectual superiority, and English Jews don't show the kind of fear/animosity response to English gentile elites that's common in the US or (understandably) in continental Europe.

It's not that the English are philo-Semitic, either - compared to Americans they are quite anti-Semitic - "lazy Jews, they never prepare a case" said an English barrister to me once, concerning the opposing legal team he had just vanquished. That was within an hour or so of me meeting him. "...You're not Jewish, are you?" he continued (I'm not).

Kaz said...

I don't want to diminish the achievements of Jews but there's a hell of a lot more to scientific achievements beyond the nobel prizes.. Though this is just something that has bothered me for a while, has nothing to do with the Jews.

Anonymous said...

Well-written & thoughtful piece. What's the interplay between IQ and "motivation?" And yet I can't help thinking back to that "California and Bust" article linked here, which in its own blinkered way insinuated some connection between lack-of-moral-judgment and underdeveloped intellect (as if IQ could ever tame self-interest)

Anonymous said...

Over representation, even accounting for IQ, is also common among Asians in the better colleges. Like Jews, hey represent a disproportionate share, even accounting for IQ, of the applicant pool.
Robert Hume

Anonymous said...

Re the last sentence of your review: "This profound subject has only just begun to be explored."

Why no credit to Kevin MacDonald who as we all know has explored this in depth in "The Culture of Critique" and his later works? Short answer - the components of Jewish over-achievement are high intelligence, high ethnocentrism and ethnic networking, and high psychological intensity ... a pretty potent and explosive combination.

Tim Howells

bjdubbs said...

I may be deluded in this, but I think I can guess whether an author is jewish just by the style of argument. They have different political views, but Yglesias or Bryan Caplan have similar affective/intellectual styles. Of course, I would've guessed that Arnold Kling, to name another blogger, was Danish, not jewish. And I was wrong, so I'm probably nuts. But there's a warmth in jewish affective style that cold Europeans don't share. Clint Eastwood is not Spielberg, and it's impossible to imagine a jewish Dirty Harry. (Now I'll find out that the writer of Dirty Harry was jewish).

dearieme said...

"Do you think it was a coincidence that they gave the Nobel to the best experimental astronomer of his generation, the guy whose technique was so good that he found what nobody else could find?"

Interesting that an astronomer can't distinguish accurately between 'experimental' and 'observational'.

Anonymous said...

Comment number 2: I'd be careful about labeling Nobel prize winners as "idiots". There are loads of things that the consensus has been wrong about in the past, and there is no reason to think that in 2011 any viewpoint not consensus is "tin-foil". Just look at HBD, the public consensus is that race is skin deep etc.

Perhaps Mullis is right on the AIDS thing.

Luke Lea said...

Something curious I've noticed about Ashkenazi intellectual achievement in modern times: it is mostly, indeed, almost exclusively of theoretical as opposed to practical significance.

Twentieth century theoretical physics is of course the prime example. But if I am not mistaken Jewish "Nobel" prizes in economics, a field where you might expect discoveries of more pragmatic value, have likewise been largely barren in so far as contributions to general human welfare is concerned.

Even more striking is the shortage of Jewish invention in the field of technology. Unless I've overlooked something, one will be hard-pressed to identify even one world-changing practical invention among the many dozens that have been made over the past 200 years.

Innovations in the fields of finance, wholesale and retail trade, and business enterprise in general are a different matter altogether of course, and there can be no question that they are disproportionately of Ashkenazi origin and that some of them at least have benefited society. But these are not for the most part innovations in the fields of science and technology and the men who made them were not scientists or engineers (there have been relatively few Jewish engineers).

How do we explain this curious skewing? I'm not sure but I would suspect it might have something to do with the nature of intellectual achievement fostered by centuries of Talmudic study together with success in commerce and business administration, all of which have played a role in shaping the process of natural selection within this small, endogenous population group.

This is not of course a "group evolutionary strategy" (a meaningless, incoherent concept if ever there was one) but it does bare some relationship to the Harpending-Cochran hypothesis, which has lately been getting some press.

I'm way out of my depth here, granted, so may come out looking like a fool.

Luke Lea said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
W Baker said...

So one side of the Nobel organisation can clearly and rightly see the important of this or that scientific achievement and, yet, get wrong the global importance of people like, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, Tawakkol Karman?

Really?

Or try this one on. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner recently removed himself and the organisation he represents from the brutal and warmongering outfit, UNESCO. The reason: a large proportion of those Nobel scientific winners along with their kith and kin took umbrage when a vicious bunch of stone-throwers, who have a silly penchant of living behind razor wire and concrete walls, decided they liked the idea of "education" and maybe declaring a few shit-hole mosques, World Heritage Sites, and joined UNESCO! To make matters worse, a lot of the scientific winners and their kind are so pissed, they're going to start building even more buildings on the stone-throwing savage's "land", hack their internet connection, and really show them by getting aforesaid Nobel Peace Prize winner to cut 20% of their prison stipend.

Talk about a fucked up world...! I don't know who's worse, the stupid Swedes or "brilliant" Jews.

Conatus said...

Steve said, "But the absolute numbers of gentiles is much larger"
At Mangans, a commenter said this about the right side of the bell curve and absolute numbers.


Anonymous said...

"Jewish over-representation appears to be a function of more than just IQ.

"For the sake of argument, let’s assume 200 million White Americans (IQ 100), 6 million Jewish Americans (IQ 115), Normal distribution at the tail ends of the distribution, standard deviations for both populations of 15. That would give us roughly 32 million White Americans with IQ 115 or higher vs 3 million Jewish Americans with IQ 115 or higher. For IQ 130 or higher it is 4.6 million vs 950,000. For IQ 145 it is 270,000 vs 137,000. For IQ 160 it is 6,340 vs 8,100. If it is only 105, IQ 160 would be 6,340 vs 1,400."

The average Harvard undergrads IQ is 130 and thus non-Jewish whites should dominate the Ivy League schools, however, that is not the case. Why?"

I think we are supposed to whisper to one another in our kitchens and say,"Wow look at all the Jewish people in positions of power!" and the proper reply, which is also whispered is, "Well they are much smarter you know."
The subject of absolute numbers never comes up, it is bad enough we even dared to talk about them.

Noah172 said...

I have not read the book. Does Lynn cite Kevin Macdonald's research at all (or at least lines of inquiry similar to Macdonalds')? For example, does Lynn discuss eugenic breeding practices among medieval Jewish communities a la A People That Shall Dwell Alone?

Aaron in Israel said...

I counted about 1,700 words until he finally got to the Jewish Question in Golf Course Architecture. I was wondering when he was going to get to that.

W Baker said...

Why is it that the older Jews get, the more they navel gaze? They generally revert to some form of Judaism, if they ever left, and start blathering on and on about how magnificent their race is? I understand their religion is their race and visa versa, but doesn't that get kind of creepy at some point?

Or does this happen to all aging people? I get the impression that Armenians, when they're not involved in some sort of self promotion or swindle, do this to some degree, but most of their myth is wrapped up with the Turkish genocide. But do ancient folks like the Celts get all excited about their mechanical contributions to the industrial revolution whilst wearing their Depends and Druidic outfits? I know the Brits wax nostalgic about godforsaken foreign climes and their once domination of them, but for the most part they grow old in tweeds and tend to focus on family and gardens. The Indians are extremely racially aware and very proud of their achievements, but their massive population tends to drown out any uniqueness. The same can be said for the Chinese.

What other group worships their identity so much?

Anonymous said...

In another article Lynn estimates that because white gentiles overwhelmingly outnumber Askhenazis and because whites in general have higher IQs (relative to the global scale), genius-IQ whites should outnumber genius-IQ Askhenazis by 7:1 in the US.

Yet, at schools like Harvard, there's a 1:1 ratio of whites and Ashkenazis.

Clearly, ethnic nepotism plays a role in the success of Jews.

The Achilles Heel of Europeans and Diaspora Europeans (i.e. whites) is there current lack of ethnocentrism.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the theory that Jews aren't "as good" in geometry, one outlier is Grigori Perelman.

Perelman is a Russian Jewish mathematician who recently solved one of the greatest unsolved problem in all of math, the Poincare conjecture which is a geometry problem.

Average Joe said...

This suggests that the success of the Ashkenazim is attributable to more than just their high IQs and that they also possess strong motivational and work-ethic qualities

People usually like to invest a lot of time and effort into activities in which they are talented. This means that Jews will invest a lot of time and effort into activities that require a high IQ just as blacks will invest a lot of time and effort into activities that require physical strength and agility such as sports.

Dutch Boy said...

The "idiot" who developed PCR is Dr. Kary Mullis. His AIDS skepticism is shared by other scientists:
http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/

Unknown said...

given the track record... Egypt 2000 BC... Czarist pogroms... unpleasantness in Central Europe... Rita Rudner... umm, dear God: don't choose me. Thanks, so much.

Q said...

Jews have won 23 percent of the Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry Nobels. This is tremendously impressive because Jews have always comprised a small fraction of the world's population. Before the Holocaust, Jews might have made up about 2.5 percent of the population of Europe, North America, and Australasia. Today, they make up roughly 0.2 percent of the world's population.


I'm always mystified by this sort of faux statistic, which deserves it's own name. The implication is that the rest of the Nobel prizes are distributed equally around the much-mentioned "world" and among the "world's population".

Everybody knows that this isn't so. Steve certainly knows it isn't so. So why the deception? I can only assume that the idea is to obsequiously flatter the Jews in the vain hope that they will then become more receptive to public discussion of HBD.

Steve could, with equal accuracy, have noted that 85% (or whatever the number is) of the Nobels in history have been awarded to people of European ancestry. That encompasses Jews and includes a lot of other scientists, but is still a very small percentage of the worlds population.

jody said...

i have a lot to write about, some of it agreeing with lynn, some of it disagreeing with lynn.

the most important critique though is this - will lynn now spend many hours documenting how many nobel science prizes east asians have won, or rather, have not won? and present it as evidence for low east asian intelligence?

quite strange, from my perspective as a scientist. in fact i think i might be one of the only people who ever talks much about this glaringly obvious contradiction. you can't have one set of evidence both support a hypothesis and at the same time be disqualified as a evidence for any other hypothesis.

nobel science prizes are almost always immediately raised as evidence that ashkenazi jews are so much smarter than those stupid whites (there's only like 10 million of them! and look at how many they win!), while at the same time NEVER being allowed to be used as evidence to the contrary for east asians (please don't think about how there are almost 2 billion of these people but they don't do much, that ruins the fun. just stick to the script. we would be banging rocks in caves if we had to rely on stupid whites).

i've never tried to calculate it but the chinese "not as smart as the people say they are" quotient must be staggeringly large. in the past i have only posited rough "achievement" numbers, suggesting that if they really were not only as smart as the english and germans, but smarter, then they should probably be producing about 6 times as much stuff as the united states. using a crude 200 million euro americans : 1200 million han chinese ratio.

one area where i agree with lynn is in that this particular group of jews appears in all fields of human endeavor - you can find some high jewish achievers in many industries, whereas for east asians, typically if you can't study some subject in a book, they just aren't around in the field.

for instance, not only was there nobody like larry brown or marv levy in the brainpower position of head coach, there aren't any east asians in those fields, period.

jody said...

steve, even the science nobels can be controversial. most recently the nobel prize committee excluded ray damadian from sharing in the physics prize for developing MRI. well, he is by far the person most directly responsible for MRI.

instead they awarded the full prize to two mathematicians who long ago had developed critical mathematics that MRI uses for algorithms. while that was also a necessary development...they had no application for it. that math just sat there for a long time doing not much until the medical imaging people came around to using it.

then there's the problem that the prizes have to be awarded every year. which means some stuff which is, relatively speaking, not all that important, is awarded the prize. that last chemistry nobel for instance, was a WTF for me. not like it was not an interesting discovery but it has no application and remains a curiosity for now. at the same time the nobel committee had long ago decided, for example, that stephanie kwolek should never be awarded the chemistry prize for discovering kevlar, which was definitely important and has every day uses.

if the nobels were awarded every other year, they would be more accurate recognitions of "pretty important stuff". they probably do not need to be moved back to an every 4 year schedule like the wolf prize, though.

then there's the problem of extremely important work being done but which the nobel committee has decided is outside the purview of their science awards. more than one of the discoveries that edwin hubble made were critical to human understanding of science - they went far beyond the average, year to year level of work awarded the physics prize, and he could have been awarded the prize for several of his discoveries - yet there he is with no award, and there are brian schmidt and saul perlmutter with their awards.

Steve Sailer said...

"I counted about 1,700 words until he finally got to the Jewish Question in Golf Course Architecture. I was wondering when he was going to get to that."

And I've got lots, lots more on it that I couldn't fit in the review!

Steve Sailer said...

Dear Dearieme:

Don't blame the astronomy professor I tried to quote. He might have said "observational," although I doubt it: Wilson and Penzias weren't doing traditional astronomical observing they were fiddling around with a new piece of technology for doing radio astronomy, trying to get it to work perfectly. When they noticed the faint omnidirectional background they tried everything they could think of to make it go away, including cleaning the pigeon droppings off the antenna.

Anonymous said...

"Compared to the US & Europe, the English gentile elites don't seem to be intimidated by Jewish intellectual superiority"

Well... Americans are not even allowed to say such exists.
Also, the American ethos of 'anyone can become rich' and 'anyone can become president' doesn't like the idea of one group naturally being better. American individualism like to believe 'all men are created equal'.
Europeans are less individualistic but they oppose the idea of natural superiority because it is counter to their ethos of the collective good.

Anonymous said...

Why are Jewish comedians so funny? Is it just the wit and IQ? Or does PERSONALITY have to do with the success. Suppose Rodney Dangerfield and Mel Brooks were just as witty and smart but had bland Minnesota-Swedish personalities. Would they have been driven to success?

Anonymous said...

Jews no good at visuals?

I dunno. Jews are good at music: Carole King and the whole Brill Building crew. And Gershwin, Kahn, Hammerstein, and whole bunch of songwriters. Bernard Hermann and tons of movie composers. Dylan, Simon, Bacharach, and many others. Music is related to visual sense because music is essentially aural-imagery with shapes and patterns. Many composers sort of visualize their music and approach it as forms.
When one closes one's eyes and listens to music, we can feel the musical space and its contours.

In architecture there is Gehry(I don't like him)and the guy who was the subject of the movie MY ARCHITECT.

I don't know about cinematographers, but many seem to have Jewishy names. At any rate, directors work very closely with cinematographers, and great ones like Spielberg and Kubrick got exactly what they wanted from their cinematographers. Spielberg and Kubrick have worked with various cinematographers, but all of their movies looked pretty fabulous, so it must have been more the director than the cinematographers.
Same with Kurosawa. Regardless of who shot his films, they all had the Kurosawan touch.

Anonymous said...

Why are Jewish comedians so funny? Is it just the wit and IQ?


With a few exceptions, I've never found Jewish comedians to be funny. I'd rather have a root canal than be forced to watch a Mel Brooks "comedy".

Anonymous said...

Compared to the US & Europe, the English gentile elites don't seem to be intimidated by Jewish intellectual superiority



Perhaps because it doesn't really exist?

One of the peculiar things which I found in moving from Britain to America was the incredible inferiority complex which so many white Americans possess. You'd think that such a rich, successful, powerful people would be arrogant. But that's not the case. A lot of them are convinced that blacks are physically superior to them and that Jews are smarter than them.

Observer said...

From my observation, you could equally use the term "The People that Choose" as "The Choosen People".

That is, modern AKJ are the result of a lot of selective out-breeding with high-IQ Europeans. How else do you explain the preponderance of red-headed AKJs from Russia and E.Europe like Woody Allen. J. Robert Oppenheimer looked like very idea of a British gentleman much as many prominent AKJ looked more European than Semitic. In the example given, Niels Bohr's mother looks as much European as Semitic yet is always counted as such.

Without exception, I've never known any AKJ of rank in Academia, STEM, Tech Startups or Finance who didn't marry a non-AKJ of exceptional mental and/or financial status. Their genetically gifted kids identify with AKJ in someway.

Conversely, the less successful AKJs who've married out have uniformly raised their less genetically gifted kids as non-AKJs. One of the unique aspects of AKJ culture is that women are far more racially and culturally conscious than women of European cultures and thus perpetuate AKJ values against entropic disintegration.

The result is AKJ groups both selectively absorbs genetic talent and powerful networks from outsiders while also losing the least capable, driven and powerful of their members to larger surrounding cultures.

That is, individuals choose to admit/reject outsiders into the AKJ culture while also choosing to stay or leave it.

syon said...

Luke Lea:"Something curious I've noticed about Ashkenazi intellectual achievement in modern times: it is mostly, indeed, almost exclusively of theoretical as opposed to practical significance.

... have likewise been largely barren in so far as contributions to general human welfare is concerned."

General human welfare: Well, how about the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin). That certainly seems to be something of practical benefit to human welfare that was developed by Ashkenazi Jews

Fred said...

"Why no credit to Kevin MacDonald who as we all know has explored this in depth in "The Culture of Critique" and his later works? Short answer - the components of Jewish over-achievement are high intelligence, high ethnocentrism and ethnic networking, and high psychological intensity ... a pretty potent and explosive combination."

How would "high ethnocentrism and ethnic networking" increase the number of Nobel Prizes won by Jews? Are there are lot of Jewish voting members of the Swedish Royal Academy?

Fred said...

"Even more striking is the shortage of Jewish invention in the field of technology. Unless I've overlooked something, one will be hard-pressed to identify even one world-changing practical invention among the many dozens that have been made over the past 200 years."

Does genetic engineering count? How about the cure for Polio? Or instant photography? Cardiac pacemakers? Lipstick? Ballpoint pens?

SFG said...

"Suppose Rodney Dangerfield and Mel Brooks were just as witty and smart but had bland Minnesota-Swedish personalities. Would they have been driven to success?"

Happy, well-adjusted people rarely become comedians. Not sure why.

jody said...

luke lea: that's just not true. i guess i would consider myself to be the resident expert on this topic. ashkenazi jews are certainly a contributing group with respect to developing important, behind the scenes practical stuff that we use everyday, but never think about, and where none of the technical or engineering pioneers get recognized much or presented with many public awards. ashkenazi jews are definitely represented in this realm, creating key stuff that is outside the range of nobel science prize work. check out alan kay, or hyman rickover, or three dozen other important jewish guys. but, they do appear here at a much lower rate, which is what you were talking about.

it is true that those boring, hated, unvibrant european gentile men do the majority of the work in the behind the scenes realm. they do most of the "stuff that makes the world work" things. energy production, carpentry, drug development, dentistry, criminology, plumbing, music production, firearms, take your pick of stuff which we need and use everyday, and white guys usually came up with the most important things in the field. certainly not every last thing but it's just overwhelming when you go field by field. you don't get a nobel for developing the internet, although al gore would like one, but it has dramatically more effect on the world than say, 30 of the relatively less important science nobels put together. the modern world doesn't work or even exist without tons of this non-nobel but more important tech stuff.

this is before getting into many of the science nobels awarded to jewish scientists where there ARE plenty of direct applications. check out hans krebs for instance and his krebs cycle. now basic, required curriculum for medical students.

jody said...

i will probably do a post on the post-reunification change in germany where they deliberately moved away from science and went all the way into engineering, for rebuilding purposes.

of course, this worked. to bring a communist nation of 17 million people under russian influence for 40 years up to german standards, this was what they had to do. in 1990 the per capita GDP of east germany was about $12,000. in 2010 it was $40,000.

germany is now the number 1 exporter in the world, exporting more per year than even the US, and has the highest trade surplus in the world, higher than even china. they bring in 200 billion dollars a year, net, from trade. all while having no oil.

germany now sits in control of europe and is asked to save european nations from financial destruction.

the price: germans used to do a good amount of nobel science prize range work but stopped after 1990 and the nobels stopped rolling in regularly in after 2000.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the theory that Jews aren't "as good" in geometry, one outlier is Grigori Perelman.

Russian Jews also give the lie to the notion that Jews aren't good at engineering. There were tons and tons of Russian-Jewish engineers. The most well-known of them in the West are probably Mikhail Gurevich of MiG airplanes and Mikhail Mil of Mi helicopters.

It's simply a question of demand. In the West, by the time of the emancipation of Jews, the Industrial Revolution was long in progress, and the technical niches were mostly filled (by the Scots and others). Jews saw that and went to apply their talents elsewhere. Russia, on the other hand, had very few engineers, and most of those left after the Revolution. There was a huge demand for technical professionals, which Jews filled.

Anonymous said...

Something curious I've noticed about Ashkenazi intellectual achievement in modern times: it is mostly, indeed, almost exclusively of theoretical as opposed to practical significance.

Interesting. On the wechsler scales Ashkenazi score much higher on verbal IQ than performance IQ. Folks with higher verbal IQ are described as making a much better first impression than they can maintain in practice. Perhaps Ashkenazi evolved higher verbal IQ as a way of manipulating whites and using white practical achievements
to benefit Ashkenazi. If you lived next to a population with good practical aptitude, it's more efficient to evolve a way to harness their aptitude to your advantage, rather than evolving it yourself because the brain is a metabolically expensive organ. Practical spatial ability may require more expensive brain volume than theoretical verbal ability, analogous to how 3 D graphics require more computer power than word processing.



Ashkenazis verbal ability has done a brilliant job using white media technology to become rich and powerful, and white militaries to fight israel's battles.

Q said...

Why are Jewish comedians so funny?


I don't think that there are a lot of Jewish comedians in the media because they are so darned funny, any more than there are a lot of Jewish actors because Jews are such fantastic actors.

Steve Sailer said...

Minnesota gentile comics:

Charles M. Schulz
Garrison Keillor

And of course, nobody in the history of Canada has ever been funny.

Steve Sailer said...

There are lots of unhappy, un-well-adjusted people in Minnesota: Charles M. Schulz of Charlie Brown fame was a classic depressive artist / funnyman. (It's hard for people today to gauge just how remarkable "Peanuts" was in its day.)

Anonymous said...

"Something curious I've noticed about Ashkenazi intellectual achievement in modern times: it is mostly, indeed, almost exclusively of theoretical as opposed to practical significance...one will be hard-pressed to identify even one world-changing practical invention among the many dozens that have been made over the past 200 years."

Interesting comment. Based on the evidence, it seems that ethnic Germans are the champions of inventions with practical significance: car, television, computer, printing press, bicycle, typewriter, rockets, diesel engine, jet engine, x-ray, etc. Of course, it's not kosher to sing the praises of Germans post-WWII.

Dennis Dale said...

I counted about 1,700 words until he finally got to the Jewish Question in Golf Course Architecture. I was wondering when he was going to get to that.

If the Jews take over golf course architecture, then what's this all been about?

josh said...

Shouldnt we throw out all the 'Economics'Prizes? After all these guys dont seem so smart,or reliable. Re Shakespeare and his sonnets,speaking of love poems,a biblical scholar claims the Song of Solomon is a lot more sexually explicit than Christian guys want to think. He says,for ex.,that the use of the word 'feet' in the KJ,is a code word for,well,heh heh heh,penis. He refers to Ruth meeting Zoab (did they have black guys in the Bible?) and the passage saying she"spent the night at his feet" means she spent the night doing something naughty!

MQ said...

Something curious I've noticed about Ashkenazi intellectual achievement in modern times: it is mostly, indeed, almost exclusively of theoretical as opposed to practical significance...one will be hard-pressed to identify even one world-changing practical invention among the many dozens that have been made over the past 200 years.

As others have pointed out above, this is complete BS...

Perhaps Ashkenazi evolved higher verbal IQ as a way of manipulating whites and using white practical achievements
to benefit Ashkenazi. If you lived next to a population with good practical aptitude, it's more efficient to evolve a way to harness their aptitude to your advantage, rather than evolving it yourself


...as are loopy pseudo-scientific conclusions drawn from it.

Anonymous said...

And of course, nobody in the history of Canada has ever been funny.

That's a good point, Steve. I forgot about all the comedians and comedy actors in the US that are actually from Canada.

Their humor is different too. Jewish humor seems to be very sarcastic/snarky.

Anonymous said...

Without exception, I've never known any AKJ of rank in Academia, STEM, Tech Startups or Finance who didn't marry a non-AKJ of exceptional mental and/or financial status.

This is relatively recent, the magnitude of it especially. It was more rare when there was a WASP ascendancy that controlled elite status and access to elite women.

MQ said...

You could say with equal truth that "people from a long, narrow swath of Europe running from Britain to Moscow are staggeringly overrepresented among the highest achievers in human history". And that European Jews are just a subset of this larger (though still tiny by world standards) group of high achievers.

Quite true. And also very relevant, since Ashkenazi Jews owe much of their intellectual success and cultural distinctiveness to their participation in European civilization. Compare Sephardic (North African) Jews who have a very different tradition and history, despite a close genetic relationship. It's a mistake to try to separate Ashkenazi achievement from European achievement in general.

Anonymous said...

"I'd rather have a root canal than be forced to watch a Mel Brooks "comedy"."

I'll take the Inquistionover a root canal.

Anonymous said...

General human welfare: Well, how about the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin). That certainly seems to be something of practical benefit to human welfare that was developed by Ashkenazi Jews

The gentile John Enders is virtually unknown and doesn't get any credit, but he directly laid the groundwork for both killed virus and attenuated live polio vaccines with his work on mumps:

http://racehist.blogspot.com/2010/03/john-enders-jonas-salk-and-eradication.html

"In 1954, while working at Children's Hospital Boston, Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue". This work was the first to show that viruses of this type could be grown and manipulated outside of the body.[1] It was this technique dubbed the Enders-Weller-Robbins method that Jonas Salk used to develop the polio vaccine in 1952. After a large-scale test of the vaccine proved successful in 1954, Salk appeared on a radio show and announced his success to the world.[2] Although he never claimed the credit for himself, he also did not offer up any credit to any of his colleagues, including Enders, Weller, and Robbins, whose technique made his success possible. Salk became a hero to the public, but was somewhat shunned by the scientific community.[3] Despite this misappropriated credit many professionals in the field still regard Enders', Weller's and Robbins' work as substantial have given Enders the title of "The Father of Modern Vaccines"."

Anonymous said...

Genius-IQ whites should outnumber genius-IQ Askhenazis by 7:1 in the US.

Yet, at schools like Harvard, there's a 1:1 ratio of whites and Ashkenazis.

Clearly, ethnic nepotism plays a role in the success of Jews.

Considering the SAT and so on, I doubt that explains all the Jews in the Ivy League.

Tim Howells at 3:16 (channeling K. MacDonald) might on to something: high intelligence + "psychological intensity", even apart of ethnic networking. I mean, yeah, in my experience Jews are more intense, certainly more so than WASPs, and intensity is winning factor.

Cennbeorc

Simon in London said...

anon:
"Perhaps because it doesn't really exist?

One of the peculiar things which I found in moving from Britain to America was the incredible inferiority complex which so many white Americans possess. You'd think that such a rich, successful, powerful people would be arrogant. But that's not the case. A lot of them are convinced that blacks are physically superior to them and that Jews are smarter than them."

Well the evidence seems to support Ashkenazi being smarter than the general population of white Anglo-Saxons on average; but yes it seems possible that the white English elite is as smart as their Jewish peers. I'd suspect that may be true of the US WASP elite too.

I agree about the inferiority complex of white Americans, it's very noticeable. White Southerners didn't use to have it, but I've even seen it creeping in there over the past few years, on my past couple of visits - at least among the women. By contrast the British don't seem to consider themselves inferior to anyone; neither do the Australians or New Zealanders, from what I've seen.

Is the white American inferiority complex a recent development, perhaps the product of cultural Marxism? Or has the "blacks are much stronger, Jews are much smarter" meme been around a long time?

Anonymous said...

i will probably do a post on the post-reunification change in germany where they deliberately moved away from science and went all the way into engineering, for rebuilding purposes.

I hate to pick on you, Jody, but you say the most bizarre things. For the record, German engineering has been perhaps the best in the world for well over a century, and I would have thought this was common knowledge.

Cennbeorc

Anonymous said...

"Does genetic engineering count? How about the cure for Polio? Or instant photography? Cardiac pacemakers? Lipstick? Ballpoint pens?"

Your examples start out OK (though I think genetic engineering was invented by a number of people, by no means all Jewish), but they end (lipstick, ballpoint pens) mostly arguing for the opposite conclusion -- really, is that what you're reduced to after just four more convincing examples?

And as far as the Soviet engineers go (an example raised in another comment), I'm not sure those examples are very convincing as to the great originality of the invention. A MIG might be an excellent fighter jet, but it's mostly just applying well engineering techniques known to all. In general, I don't think it's very easy to go to the Soviet Union and point out the great practical inventions that came into existence there.

Really, would it just kill you if Jews weren't good at everything?

Anonymous said...

"Merit" in Elite College Admissions

racehist.blogspot.com/2010/07/merit-in-elite-college-admissions.html

"Which is why Michael Silverman proves baffling.

When Michael, a student from Paradise Valley, Arizona, applied to Stanford, his G.P.A. put him in the bottom 10% of accepted students. His SAT scores fell similarly short. "Standardized testing isn't my strong point," he told me. Perhaps more surprising, Michael avoided the crushing course load that diminishes the will of so many college hopefuls, instead taking only a single AP course during the dreaded junior year. He kept his extracurricular schedule equally clean — joining no clubs or sports and dedicating his attention to no more than one outside project at any given time."

"He won a modest grant, and used it, with the help of a retired engineer from his hometown, to retrofit a golf cart to run on biofuels. Leveraging this success, he earned another grant which he used to install solar panels on his school's maintenance shed. This earned him press coverage, and the resulting Superstar Effect helped wow the Stanford admissions department into overlooking his borderline scores.

Notice that nothing about Michael's rise to stardom required a rare natural talent or overwhelming work load."

"Steve Schwartz, who got into Columbia by taking on the role of press officer for a student-run environment advocacy group."

Steve Sailer said...

The first two heads of the Lockheed Skunk Works were Kelly Johnson (Norwegian-American) and Ben Rich (Jewish-American). Johnson is usually seen as the more historic figure, but Rich's autobiography, Skunk Works, is a better read. Rich mentions that there weren't a lot of Jewish aerospace engineers, but my guess is, judging from my father's friends at Lockheed, that that's relative to other fields in Southern California, such as Hollywood. In other words, as I wrote in VDARE, Jewish achievement quotas in engineering are typically above 1.0, but below the very high levels seen in some other fields.

Fred said...

"Your examples start out OK (though I think genetic engineering was invented by a number of people, by no means all Jewish), but they end (lipstick, ballpoint pens) mostly arguing for the opposite conclusion -- really, is that what you're reduced to after just four more convincing examples?"

I included the lipstick and ballpoint pen examples to show that inventions by Jewish inventors haven't all be "egghead", abstract ones, but also everyday, ubiquitous ones. I could certainly come up with more than 4 examples (as could you, using another Jewish invention, Google), but four are enough to refute Luke Lea's claim that there were none.

"Really, would it just kill you if Jews weren't good at everything?"

Who said Jews were good at everything? I didn't. I just refuted a couple of ridiculous claims (that Jews have never invented anything of note, and that Nobel Prizes awarded to Jews are the result of ethnocentrism and ethnic networking).

Anonymous said...

Jews are overrepresented? They're smart. Facts say so. U mad, anti-Semites?

As someone has already pointed out, factor in absolute numbers and IQ and jews are way overrepresented in the Ivy League. So you'll have to do better than that.

And having nailed your 'smart' colours to the mast we certainly wont be hearing from you on the subject of low representation of blacks etc

Q said...

The first two heads of the Lockheed Skunk Works were Kelly Johnson (Norwegian-American) and Ben Rich (Jewish-American). Johnson is usually seen as the more historic figure, but Rich's autobiography, Skunk Works, is a better read. Rich mentions that there weren't a lot of Jewish aerospace engineers, but my guess is, judging from my father's friends at Lockheed, that that's relative to other fields in Southern California, such as Hollywood. In other words, as I wrote in VDARE, Jewish achievement quotas in engineering are typically above 1.0, but below the very high levels seen in some other fields.




The fact that you count Ben Rich as "Jewish-American" goes some way towards explaining their seeming over-representation.

Hail said...

Jim Bowery wrote:
"Aren't people so over-represented in positions of public trust and authority required to be even less ethnocentric than the rest of us?"

Don't you know 6 Million Jews died at the hands of the Europeans?

How dare you!

dearieme said...

On the business of British gentiles and British Jews: an American once asked me "How many of your friends are Jewish?" I replied "How would I know?" He seemed startled.

anony-mouse said...

Joe Biden's daughter is now engaged to a Jewish doctor.

There go the Nobels in the future.

Anonymous said...

Soviet engineers (Jewish and otherwise) did few major breakthroughs because Soviet technological policy focused on copying Western tech instead of rolling their own, as a matter of policy (generally thought to be a very sensible policy too, given the circumstances). And yes, there were indeed lots of Jewish engineering majors. Liberal arts education was no more and no less a joke in Russia than in America, but in Russia this fact was better appreciated by the populace. Also, Soviet government pragmatically limited number of liberal arts degrees and steered people into more useful professional subjects, of which engineering was one of the most prestigious.

ATBOTL said...

"Russia, on the other hand, had very few engineers, and most of those left after the Revolution. There was a huge demand for technical professionals, which Jews filled."

Upper class and middle class Russians were massacred and persecuted by the Jewish dominated Bolshevik party, who then filled managerial and technical positions with their own people.

kaganovitch said...

Q wrote "The fact that you count Ben Rich as "Jewish-American" goes some way towards explaining their seeming over-representation."

What do you take issue with, the Jewish part or the American part?
according to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rich he was jewish (both parents)and a naturalized american so whats the beef here?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The specific type of Ashkenazi intelligence involves also an increase in brain diseases in that population that result in "slippage," and loosening of associations, which could be part of the specifically theoretical insights. East Asians may have less of that, and still rank Scots and Danes in non- "aha!" types of intellectual endeavor.

I belonged to and was president of a Hi-Q society decades ago. It was not considered polite to mention that not only Jews, but NW Europeans in general and males were overrepresented. If you want to press the origin theory by tracking surnames (Empire scattered some, after all) it's a pretty small circle centered on the North Sea, with two interesting tails that extend out into Ashkenazim territory and... Hungary (tough to split those, but you can approximate.) Not much of a gradient, either. Check out the regions of the French hard science men of distinction, and you won't see much Languedoc and Paca. The Renaissance was not "Italy," but a pretty narrow range of northern Italy.

Nobels represent a certain type of achievement. Chess and bridge, composition, wit - these are also IQ related, though not the only qualifier. Clannishness helps in some things, independence in others.

I analogise IQ to height in basketball: it's clearly an advantage, and everyone wants a little more, but the best players are not always the tallest. Other skills are necessary.

TGGP said...

I likewise found the comment about lack of practical invention bizarre, but was beaten to it by other commenters. I work with a couple jews, but they're also immigrants.

Maria Bamford is a Minnesotan comedian, but a lot of her character is based on maladjustment, an ambiguous amount of which is fabricated.
I was going to say there seem to be fewer Canadians in comedy than just a decade or so ago, but perhaps I'm just less aware now than when I was still watching SNL. A lot of the people on this list (at least whose names I recognize) I didn't know were Canadian.

Anonymous said...

"I included the lipstick and ballpoint pen examples to show that inventions by Jewish inventors haven't all be "egghead", abstract ones, but also everyday, ubiquitous ones. I could certainly come up with more than 4 examples (as could you, using another Jewish invention, Google), but four are enough to refute Luke Lea's claim that there were none."

Look, the examples you presented, even taking out lipstick and ball point pens hardly make a convincing case that Jews are anywhere near as good at practical invention as they are at the abstract, logical disciplines in which they excel.

As I said, genetic engineering was invented by a number of people, including the gentile Herbert Boyer (who worked with Stanley Cohen); so acting as though it could attributed strictly to Jews wasn't exactly accurate. Besides, it was at least as much a scientific advance as an "invention" in the more typical sense (though there's obviously some overlap in the notions).

And, yes, the Polio vaccine was invented by Jews -- but it's worthwhile considering how many other vaccines and other medical procedures and devices that have been invented; in that context, a single invention -- or even two, including the cardiac pacemakers -- simply doesn't much impress.

I'll grant that instant photography was a significant and original invention. But even within photography, how many of the basic inventions were generated by Jews?

As for Google: please. Google managed to dominate a market, and has hung onto that domination. They didn't invent search, they simply managed to convince the greatest number of people to use it at the decisive moment. Maybe they had better technology; or maybe people just liked the minimalist design.

In general, it wouldn't be terribly surprising if the particular selection forces in the evolution of Jews tended to accentuate some capabilities at the expense of others. Selection rarely works so that everything is win-win.

Felix said...

Jews did not discover "genetic engineering."

syon said...

Anonymous:"The gentile John Enders is virtually unknown and doesn't get any credit, but he directly laid the groundwork for both killed virus and attenuated live polio vaccines with his work on mumps"

Seeing as how he won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1954, I would hardly say that he has gone unrecognized.

Also not sure how this works against the Ashkenazi contribution to ending polio. Science builds on science; it would be practically impossible to name an invention or discovery that was not indebted in some way to another individual's work.

Anonymous said...

Does genetic engineering count? How about the cure for Polio? Or instant photography? Cardiac pacemakers? Lipstick? Ballpoint pens?

Transistor. (Something I learned just the other week.)

Anonymous said...

We must be living in the post-post-colonial era as well in the post-cold-war era.
What I find almost shocking is the lack of objection in the Third World to the actions taken by the West against Iraq and Libya.
During the Cold War, both US and USSR were more cautious about getting militarilyi involved in other nations cuz the other superpower could back the other side. US might have won the Vietnam War if not for the massive aid provided by USSR and China to North Vietnam. And USSR might have won in Aghanistan if not for the crucial aid provided to the Mujahadeen by the US. So, both superpower knew that militarily getting involved in the Third World could lead to a quagmire situation. If US got involved, the commie side would aid the nation 'resisting US imperialism'. If USSR got involved, the free world would aid the nation 'resisting commie expansion'.

But in the post-cold-war era, US or NATO could go into Yugoslavia, Iraq, or Libya without that nation receiving any support from USSR and its allies. Nato strikes on Yugoslavia during the Cold War would have been unthinkable.
Also, if US had invaded Iraq or Libya during the Cold War, USSR might have rallied its allies to condemn American imperialism and sent aid to Hussein or Gaddafi.

But without such counter-force from the other side, US and NATO can now be far more brazen.
Also, Red China, though poor and backward, did provide considerable aid and moral support to the Third World during the Cold War. Though USSR overshadowed China, China's revolutionary credentials and big-nation-people-of-color status meant something. These days, China may veto certain UN resolutions but otherwise remains mum about what US or NATO does abroad. China's main concern is trade with the West.

However, even if USSR no longer exists and China is no longer playing the 'resist imperialism game', you would expect many people in the Third World to get livid about white/Western/former-imperialist nations invading and attacking third world nations like Iraq and Libya. But there has mostly been silence or tepid criticism from third world nations. If US or NATO had invaded Iraq or LIbya in the 60s or 70s, the Third World would have fumed about neo-imperialism. They were still in the post-colonial 'resist imperialism' state of mind. People then still had fresh memories of living under white 'oppressors'.

Perhaps because new generations of Third Worlders only have memories of domestic tyranny and have no memory of white rule, the new generation isn't shocked or offended by Western intervention. In fact, most people of Libya seems to have welcomed NATO as liberators.
And maybe even third world rulers were somewhat relieved by the riddance of dangerous clowns like Hussein and Gaddafi who were often a menace or hazard to their neighbors.

Felix said...

The jews did not invent the transistor, either. The transistor as we know it today was developed by a team of three white, non-jewish males. A hungarian jew did however develop a vague theory of a FET transistor decades before such a device could have reasonably been built. If you are to credit him with the invention of the transistor you may as well annoint Leonardo da Vinci as the inventor of heavier than air flight.

An Empire of Their Own said...

Jewish domination of the 20th century entertainment industry (film, music, stand-up, whatever) is hard to disentangle from being well-positioned at the right time. It's easier to get your foot in when the goyim don't realize/care how to manage it at a profit. Except in songwriting/lyrics I've never seen the evidence of special aesthetic genius among Russian-descended Jews in America (old-line European Jews, different story).

With comedy it has been observed that being an "outsider" helps; presumably there is some Canadian gay black nerd on the verge of taking the USA by storm. I believe lots of inconsistently funny Jewish comics benefit from in-group preference, such as the female ones for starters.

Anonymous said...

Fred said: "How would 'high ethnocentrism and ethnic networking' increase the number of Nobel Prizes won by Jews? Are there are lot of Jewish voting members of the Swedish Royal Academy?"

There are a number of steps you have to pass prior to being considered for a Nobel. You have to get into a top research group in a top university for example. Ethnic networking helps a lot. Also in fields where slight differences between brilliant individuals make the difference, psychological intensity can be the determining factor.

Of course high intelligence is absolutely necessary, but it is far from the only thing going on here, as MacDonald and others have noted.

Tim Howells

Anonymous said...

It's interesting how skewed the Nobels are towards Europeans. Denmark has more science laureates than China or India. Japan has only 16, fewer than the Netherlands or Canada. Even globally there are only 8 ethnically Han Chinese science laureates. The whole of Asia - and excepting Russia, I mean ALL of Asia - has fewer than 35 science laureates, fewer than France, Germany, the UK, or the US on their own.

then there's the problem that the prizes have to be awarded every year. which means some stuff which is, relatively speaking, not all that important, is awarded the prize.

It's not as if they're like the Oscars, which have to go to a film released in the last year. They can, and always do, go to work at least a few years old. There's always good and important work to recognize.

(It's hard for people today to gauge just how remarkable "Peanuts" was in its day.)

No, not really. It was truly a work of genius. The series is being released in chronological order, 1 volume/2 years at a time. It was brilliant.

Don't you know 6 Million Jews died at the hands of the Europeans? How dare you!

Some Europeans, iirc, were busy trying to stop that. (Yes, I'm aware you're being sarcastic.)

syon said...

Here's another invention by an Ashkenazi Jew that was of tremendous practical benefit to human welfare:The Haber Process. Developed by Fritz Haber, it allowed the industrial-scale production of fertilizer.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

Why are Jewish comedians so funny?"

Answer: They aren't. Not as a group, anyway. No more funny than any other ethnic group.

"Suppose Rodney Dangerfield and Mel Brooks were just as witty and smart but had bland Minnesota-Swedish personalities. Would they have been driven to success?"

Neither Rodney Dangerfield nor Mel Brooks were witty and smart, and Brooks wasn't even funny. Seeing his old movies, it's stunning just how unfunny there mostly were.

Anonymous said...

Gaffy was goofy.

Anonymous said...

red said: "How would 'high ethnocentrism and ethnic networking' increase the number of Nobel Prizes won by Jews? Are there are lot of Jewish voting members of the Swedish Royal Academy?"
i have been reading some books on creativity - not new age nonsense but studies, etc..

Groups tend to create more than lone artists - even though artists work individually, having a group encourages and refines ideas- look how the impressionists and preraphealites emerged from artistic circles. 1920s paris writers..

couple that with, that within fields jews have higher enthnocentrism they are more likely to exchange ideas, etc (in fact i think there was a study showing jewish scientists cited jews more often than non jews )

WASP scientists for example, don't have that ethnocentrism, nor are they likely to act as a group.

add to that a siege mentality - we have to beat the gentiles, out wit the gentiles, protect ourselves from the gentiles by gaining power..

War brings out extraordinary things in ordinary people who would have otherwise not done much in life (US Grant for example) probably the same could be said with this sense of urgency, which is ignited by jewish identity.

Macalester said...

@ Assistant Village Idiot and Others:

This remark of yours greatly interests me:

The specific type of Ashkenazi intelligence involves also an increase in brain diseases in that population that result in "slippage," and loosening of associations, which could be part of the specifically theoretical insights.

Could you please direct me to some literature, if it exists and you are aware of it, linking "slippage and loosening of asociations" to the making of specifically theoretical insights? Or is this just pure speculation on your part? (More modestly, I would also really appreciate being pointed in the right direction for further reading on your assumption - that certain brain diseases are marked by "slippage and loosening.")

Thank you.

P.S. I wasn't sure what you meant by the following sentence:

East Asians may have less of that, and still rank Scots and Danes in non- "aha!" types of intellectual endeavor.

Less of what? "Rank Scots"? Do you mean outrank Scots in the non-aha? Do Scots and Danes outrank East Asians in aha?

Anonymous said...

Ever notice that countries that Ashkenazi Jews win Nobel Prizes in are also countries that white gentiles also win Nobel Prizes. But the opposite is also true. Countries that never have people that win Nobel Prizes of the majority ethnicity also don't see Jews in their countries winning Nobel prizes either. How many Nobels have been won by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Greece? Virtually none. It seems to me that a scientific foundation needs to be in a country for decades that allow someone to win a Nobel prize

corvinus said...

Not surprising. Jews, particularly Israeli Jews, have a higher birthrate than the high-IQ whites that otherwise dominate the Nobels (especially the Germans), so one should expect them to be awarded an increasing proportion.

Q said...

Does genetic engineering count? How about the cure for Polio? Or instant photography? Cardiac pacemakers? Lipstick? Ballpoint pens?


Fred, you are frequently a good commenter. But that remark reminded me of the Afrocentric insistence that black men invented the elevator and other common items of technology. To pick just one clanger, women have been using lipstick for thousands of years. It's possible that the idea originated with a Jewish person, but there's no evidence that this is so.

Anonymous said...

However, even if USSR no longer exists and China is no longer playing the 'resist imperialism game', you would expect many people in the Third World to get livid about white/Western/former-imperialist nations invading and attacking third world nations like Iraq and Libya. But there has mostly been silence or tepid criticism from third world nations.

Two reasons not to think so.

(1) You assume a third world solidarity that doesn't really exist. ("Woohoo, us third-worlders!" heh.) This is probably true even in the US, despite the "People of Color" coalition whose existence ethnic activists and white 'liberals' so enthusiastically assert.

(2) It's fairly obvious to even uninterested observers that these are not classic wars of conquest and subjugation. Obversely, actions on the ground in line with the humanitarian motive behind the wars is likewise not difficult to detect.

(Not a war proponent myself, just sayin'.)

Silver

Q said...

Q wrote "The fact that you count Ben Rich as "Jewish-American" goes some way towards explaining their seeming over-representation."


What do you take issue with, the Jewish part or the American part?


The American part in particular, but both actually. The "American" part because that's an odd designation for a person born in the Philippines to British and French parents. And the "Jewish" part because the offspring of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent is always said to be Jewish. That's why Jews are the most genetically diverse group of people on Earth.

Q said...

Jews, particularly Israeli Jews, have a higher birthrate than the high-IQ whites


Perhaps, but Israeli Jews have a significantly lower IQ than American Jews. And let's not even get started on Somali Jews or some of the other sub-groups.

That's the problem with this simple word "Jews". It encompasses an exceptionally wide range of people.

Fred said...

"To pick just one clanger, women have been using lipstick for thousands of years. It's possible that the idea originated with a Jewish person, but there's no evidence that this is so."

I should have clarified: a Jew invented the screw-up tube that has been used to hold lipstick for the last ~100 years. You're right that women had been coloring their lips without it for thousands of years.

Anonymous said...

Japan has started to win its share of Nobel Prizes.

The underrepresentation of Chinese among Nobel winners is strange. Perhaps a lack of scientific infrastructure is at fault?

You might be interested to know that of the Chinese Nobel Prize winners, most were from the southeast. People down there are stereotyped as being the smartest in the country.

Anonymous said...

Does genetic engineering count? How about the cure for Polio? Or instant photography? Cardiac pacemakers? Lipstick? Ballpoint pens?
this boarders on the black claims of peanut butter and the paper bag.. and (therefore) they are right up there with Edison, Watt, Whitney, and so forth.
as for polio - evidence is good that he stole the idea...

Q said...

a Jew invented the screw-up tube that has been used to hold lipstick for the last ~100 years.


No, Maurice Levy came up with a tube which used a lever on the side. The current screw or swivel tube was patented by James Bruce Mason Jr.

As I say, a lot of the Jewish history sites bear some resemblance to the Afrocentric sites. Don'r believe everything you read there.

Anonymous said...

Well, here's a list of major inventions that someone composed to make a rather different point: the inventiveness of men as opposed to women.

http://antimisandry.com/great-men-their-historical-accomplishments/list-major-inventions-created-men-behold-our-power-5011.html

Given that the list was composed for other purposes, it likely doesn't display a deliberate skew against Jews.

I should also note that not all the inventions have names attached to them.

But in terms of the proportion of Jews, it is decidedly UNLIKE a list of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.

Even some of the names that at first blush may seem Jewish (Vladimir Zworykin, Max Munk, Karl Jansky, Grote Reber, Hans Berger, Sikorsky, Peter Carl Goldmark) appear to turn out not to be. The Jewish names mainly crop up, it seems to me, in contexts where theoretical science plays a major role.

Anonymous said...

The subject of absolute numbers never comes up, it is bad enough we even dared to talk about them.

Defense in depth. We discussed this here recently. There's the taboo on distinguishing Ashkenazis from Whites in any way that doesn't constitute kissing Ashkenazi ass, the taboo on noticing the differences in group IQ, the taboo on noticing Ashkenazi power, the taboo on attributing Ashkenazi power to anything other than IQ. And that's just a selection of the taboos that overlap on the subject of Ashkenazis.

It all amounts to defense in depth, which weeds out all but the most determined intellectual athletes. I suppose the last one is the taboo on "obsession" (ESPECIALLY anything remotely resembling an ANTI-SEMITIC!!! obsession): after jumping a dozen or so taboo-hurdles, all sweaty and proud of yourself and breathing hard, it's, "why are you so obsessed with J-WS that you would put in so much work jumping all those taboo-hurdles? Want to stuff them into ovens that badly?"

Anonymous said...

Clearly, ethnic nepotism plays a role in the success of Jews.

Clearly, there's a non-IQ x-factor or factors, anyway. I wouldn't begrudge other, non-IQ traits tied to behavioral genetics (intensity, conscientiousness, low agreeableness), but yeah, ethnocentrism's a big chunk that we're definitely not supposed to notice.

Anonymous said...

given the track record... Egypt 2000 BC... Czarist pogroms... unpleasantness in Central Europe... Rita Rudner... umm, dear God: don't choose me. Thanks, so much.

This is Ashkenazi ethnic history posing as real history. Real history of Ashkenazis is long periods of exploitation/success at the expense of other populations punctuated occasionally by the bits that constitute Ashkenazi ethnic history (AKA, "The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History").

It does dovetail nicely with the Ashkenazi-apologetic "Chosen means 'chosen for something bad, angry goyim'" thing.

Captain Jack Aubrey said...

"Japan has startedto win its share of Nobel Prizes. The underrepresentation of Chinese among Nobel winners is strange. Perhaps a lack of scientific infrastructure is at fault?"

Yes, over half (10) of its science prizes are since 2000. Germany's won only 8 since 2000, France only 5, and Switzerland only 1. Britain has managed 13 since 2000, however, at least 8 of whom are ethnically British. Counting ethnic Brits from other countries, about 20, or 2/9ths, of science laureates since 2000 are British(assuming ~90 awards since 2000).

Israel has only 4 science laureates, all in chemistry, but all of them are 2004 or later, or 4 of the last ~60 science prizes.

The pace of Indian awards doesn't seem to have picked up, though. One in 1902 (to an ethnic Brit who discovered the source of malaria), then in 1930, 1968, 1983 and 2009 to ethnic Indians.

Anonymous said...

Spielberg and Kubrick have worked with various cinematographers, but all of their movies looked pretty fabulous, so it must have been more the director than the cinematographers.

Lol. I recently went back through fantasy painters and was struck by how practically none of them are Ashkenazi. 'Course, artists don't get paid squat compared to what they produce IMO...

There were plenty of good comic artists who were Ashkenazi back in the day, though not nearly as many as were writers.

Anonymous said...

"Neither Rodney Dangerfield nor Mel Brooks were witty and smart, and Brooks wasn't even funny. Seeing his old movies, it's stunning just how unfunny there mostly were."

I think Dangerfield was pretty smart but the issue here is personality. He had a great one. He could make you laugh by doing or saying ANYTHING.
As for Brooks, just how is this not funny?

Or this which is a send up of Stars Wars and Ben Hur?

Anonymous said...

I kinda like Mel Brooks. He embraces the whole oily Jew thing. Not that I think of Ashkenazis that way, but his lack of ambivalence is refreshing. And Spaceballs is great. White Castle slider great, but great. But I wish the DVD had kept the "Joooooos in Spaaaaaaaaace" thing at the end of the credits.

Not thrilled about the rest of his stuff though.

I like Dangerfield too (more than Brooks), when he's keeping the fangs hidden. Or was - is he still around?

syon said...

Anonymous:"as for polio - evidence is good that he stole the idea.."

No, he built on discoveries made by others;that's how science works (cf Newton's line about standing on the shoulders of giants).

Luke Lea said...

@ anon - "Jewish domination of the 20th century entertainment industry (film, music, stand-up, whatever) is hard to disentangle from being well-positioned at the right time."

Say what you will, the contributions to our culture of Hollywood movies back when the studio system was in place are inestimable. I've recently started watching Turner Classics, in fact it's the only tv I do watch. I just leave it on in the background while lying around in bed (where I spend most of my time :) ) and look up whenever a science catches my ear.

It has been a revelation to me. This was and is not just entertainment, but the high art of entertainment; and a kind of cultural time capsule that may save some of our most valuable cultural traits currently under threat of extinction.

Take Quo Vadis for example. It is by far the most sympathetic and, I think, accurate portrayal of how and why Christianity undermined the power of the Roman Empire and established itself in its stead. You can see nothing like that made nowadays -- and to think the screenplay was by three Jews!

But that's just one example. Turner Classic Movies -- what a mother load! Thank you Ted Turner and thank you Warner Bros,, Goldwyn, Mayor, and all the rest of the gang!

Luke Lea said...

On that list of great inventions and the men who invented them: looks like so far we have five or six (including lipstick slider) on the Ashkenazi side of the ledger -- Ashekenazis, not Jews, are the subject of this discussion. Anybody have an idea how many inventions on the other side? The steam engine looks like a good place to start. ;)

Anyway, I just threw this idea out there, not to make any claims about it.

Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world without Jews, and I doubt that many other regular readers of this blog would either. Our lives would be impoverished without them. (That said, our lives may be impoverished with them, which is why I hope they help us out!)

Anonymous said...

As for Brooks, just how is this not funny?


Dear God!

I think this just goes to show that humor is subjective. I did not find that clip to be even mildly amusing. But if it made you roll on the floor clutching your sides, go for it.

Anonymous said...

As for Brooks, just how is this not funny?

The same way that reading the yellow pages is not like reading PG Wodehouse.
You thought that was 'funny'?

Anonymous said...

It has been a revelation to me. This was and is not just entertainment, but the high art of entertainment;
actually from day one, when the warner brothers stole edison's patent, it was a low ethics industry attacking western civ.
one reason for the moral films because of pressure from gentiles -

but imagine if they didn't take over and actively try to keep gentile companies out (they were able to do this because they rounded the wagons whenever a gentile competitor came along -and gentiles never thought of themselves as a group vs the USA as these askanazi did.

but imagine of a film industry of DW Grittifth (Birth of a Nation) and Disney (The real guy, the company that was taken over by jews in the 80s) and other gentile companies prospered.

Most all of our truly great literature and theatre was created in the absence of Jewish influence, and often, against the interest of Jews (Merchant of Venice, the Jew of Malta for example, and for example look at what the recent merchant of ven film rewrote shakespeare to make Shylock the 'victim')

Seismic Puppy said...

"Most all of our truly great literature and theatre was created in the absence of Jewish influence, and often, against the interest of Jews (Merchant of Venice, the Jew of Malta for example, and for example look at what the recent merchant of ven film rewrote shakespeare to make Shylock the 'victim')"

If this were so, Nazi Germany would have been a haven for great writers. Not so.
And I think you judge literary value on race. If Shakespeare were Jewish, you'd probably say his plays all sucked.

Anonymous said...

Jews, 0.2% of people, have won 27% of the Fields Medals in Mathematics; the Fields Medal is akin to the Nobel Prize. See: http://www.jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html

syon said...

Some Ashkenazi inventors:

Ruth Arnon
Emanuel Goldberg
Fritz Haber (Yeah, I mentioned him before, but I don't think that he gets the recognition that he deserves)
Viktor Kaplan
Samuel Rubin
Reinhold Rudenberg
Theodore von Karman
Dennis Gabor
Paul Eisler
Baruch Samuel Blumberg
Selman Waksman

Anonymous said...

Say what you will, the contributions to our culture of Hollywood movies back when the studio system was in place are inestimable.

You should thank Catholics for creating and promoting the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code). Without it, Hollywood would've just put out the garbage it puts out now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

"Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s[1] and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.

As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, references to homosexuality, miscegenation, illegal drug use, infidelity, abortion and intense violence. Strong women dominated films such as Female, Baby Face, and Red-Headed Woman. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were more heroic than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that were not revisited until much later in Hollywood history. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films."

Sounds like post-1960s Hollywood - just without the Holocaust movies.

The "Golden Age of Hollywood" might not have been so golden without gentile pressure and control via the production code.

Anonymous said...

Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world without Jews, and I doubt that many other regular readers of this blog would either. Our lives would be impoverished without them. (That said, our lives may be impoverished with them, which is why I hope they help us out!)

You're framing this incorrectly. Who here is calling for "a world without Jews"? Framing it as an all or nothing affair attempts to impose totalitarian policies on everyone. People should have choices. There should be many independent environments so that people who wish to be in the kinds of cosmopolitan environments Jews enjoy and flourish in can do so, and those who don't, don't have to.

ben tillman said...

My favorite is the southern California dude who, while driving down the Pacific Coast Highway (probably stoned), invented the polymerase chain reaction.

Wrong SC. Kary Mullis is from South Carolina, not southern California.

He was an idiot who went on to advocate tin-foil explanations for AIDS.

He did no such thing.

Anonymous said...

"Some Ashkenazi inventors"

Ron Popil.

Anonymous said...

Ray Kurzweil and Dean Kamen are Jewish inventors.

Fred said...

Q,

"No, Maurice Levy came up with a tube which used a lever on the side. The current screw or swivel tube was patented by James Bruce Mason Jr."

I stand corrected.

"As I say, a lot of the Jewish history sites bear some resemblance to the Afrocentric sites. Don'r believe everything you read there."

A fair point.

Anonymous said...

I think Dangerfield was pretty smart but the issue here is personality. He had a great one. He could make you laugh by doing or saying ANYTHING.
As for Brooks, just how is this not funny?


A friend brought up Caddyshack and how funny Rodney Dangerfield was in in it not too long ago. I had seen it as a kid but couldn't remember much of it and he recommended I watch it again. So I did.

What a letdown. My friend had talked up Dangerfield so much that I watched in anticipation for him to say or do something seriously funny but it never happened. His character would build up to something potentially funny but there was never a punchline in sight.

As for that Mel Brooks scene you linked to, it certainly made me laugh -- but not in the way you expected. What I found funny was the idea that anyone could actually find that scene funny. (WTF?) I can sort of imagine some 9 year-old kid throwing his head back in laughter, "Bahahaha, they got the stunt doubles, bahahaha," but even that age I can recall being put off comedy films because of the risk of wasting my pocket money on renting rubbish like this that would make me want to throw the remote control at the TV.

And yet... and yet... obviously more than a few people do find this stuff funny. Imagine the writers, the actors, the directors, the producers that all saw something truly funny in the work they did. Mind-boggling as I find it, it's only fair to assume they believed in what they were doing. Still pretty incredible, though. :)

Silver

Fred said...

"Fritz Haber (Yeah, I mentioned him before, but I don't think that he gets the recognition that he deserves)"

Haber was one of a number of highly accomplished German Jewish scientists.

Ted Plank said...

Hey, I have a birthday party for a Jewish friend this Saturday night. Steve, is there a retail outlet in the Greater Los Angeles area that stocks both "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" AND "The Chosen People"? Would Vroman's or Book Soup stock such volatile titles?

I'm excited to purchase these ASAP for the mensch in question!

Ivy League Bastard said...

Nobel and other academic prize numbers are distorted by demographic effects, such as Jews being much likelier (all else equal) to choose academia as a profession.

In physics, a disproportionate number of Jews entered the field due to the adulation of Albert Einstein, who was a superhero to Jews but in racial terms a bit of a pioneer. The physics elite of Einstein's time was not particularly Jewish. Minkowski might have been his only Jewish teacher at ETH, and that was in mathematics. The men in Einstein's family were engineers, not scientists (and probably looked down on his theoretical musings). He compensated later in life by getting patents on refrigeration technology with Szilard.

For decades after Einstein's success, every smart scientifically oriented Jewish kid would have wanted to be the next Albert and many actually chose it as a career path. Of course many non-Jews also wanted the same thing, but Einstein's status among Jews, in his lifetime and for some time afterward, was that of a demi-god; he was offered the presidency of Israel without ever having lived there.

I don't know how Lynn counted, but
a number of the "Jewish" science prizes are to non-Ashkenazic. In physics, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who shared a Nobel with Steven Chu and wrote the famous QM textbook, is a North African Jew. Most of the Italian Jewish nobel prize winners are Sephardic. Because there is a huge Askhenazi majority in the Jewish populations of the Western countries (other than Italy) that produce science prize winners, this means the rate of Sephardic prize-winning is higher than it appears from the lists. As a similar example, MIT has a couple of physics professors who are Middle Eastern Jews, which as a proportional share of the department is probably higher than the number of European-origin Jewish professors, but this kind of over-representation is invisible in the raw numbers because there are relatively few oriental Jews in the US population.

As to the idea that Jews don't do anything in engineering, I had a look at some of the ASME awards, and Jewish names are well represented on those lists (e.g., one in every 5 or 6 winners of Timoshenko award), and the representation is high considering the smaller proportion of Jews in mechanical engineering compared to fields such as economics, sociology or mathematics. The Jewish representation in the industrial side of engineering would be lower, but I don't think it would be by a very large factor. The Jewish populations in the USSR, the ex-communist countries, and Israel produced huge numbers of practicing engineers compared to the US where only Asians enter engineering at a high rate.

In addition to the academia effect, where Jews have a strong cultural preference for being professors and teachers, there is an American effect intensifying that (vs the European numbers) where in "white" or "WASP" culture, academia is viewed more as a consolation prize or a den for the bright and lazy, while business and money are the true domains for application of intelligence.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

As for Brooks, just how is this not funny?"

It is not funny in every possible way.

"Or this which is a send up of Stars Wars and Ben Hur?"

"Spaceballs"? You want to defend Mel Brooks by citing "Spaceballs"? A tedious dreck-fest of a satire of Star Wars, made so long after Star Wars that people almost forgot what he was satirizing. The childish 8-year-old references to genitalia were not funny the first time, and they didn't gain anything from ceaseless repetition. I'm surprised you didn't mention one of his earlier movies - not that they were especially good either, but they were at least better than the cretinous, juvenile "Spaceballs". By the time he made that, Brooks was nothing but a complete hack.

Noah172 said...

"Personally I wouldn't want to live in a world without Jews, and I doubt that many other regular readers of this blog would either. Our lives would be impoverished without them. (That said, our lives may be impoverished with them, which is why I hope they help us out!)"

This is silly and borders on Godwin's Law. "A world without Jews," ... you mean like after a holocaust? Oy gevalt, are those the only two choices: either wipe out all the Jews in spectacular acts of barbarity, or let them rape our civilization unchallenged?

As Kevin Macdonald has written about, western European nations expelled their Jewish populations (off and on) in the Middle Ages; for most of them, England in particular, the absence of Jews was a factor (among many) in their rise to prosperity and power, and -- **very importantly** -- the growth of indigenous middle classes.

England did pretty well, overall, in the centuries between Edward I's expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and Cromwell's readmission in the 1650's. Literature, art, industry, political development, science, military might -- you name it, all thrived in the long run. (Moreover, even after Jews returned to England, their influence was not felt until the nineteenth century, when England had advanced even further in every field of endeavor.)

Spain serves as a counter-example, certainly. (The disappointing John Derbyshire mentioned Spain as a riposte to Macdonald.) Spain went into decline after in expelled its Jews, but other factors are relevant there (such as the sad reality that Spaniards are not, ahem, Anglo-Saxons). In any case, the centuries-long history of Spanish Catholic-Jewish acrimony, going back to the Moorish period, probably made harmonious intergration of Jews and their talents into Spanish society impossible.

The eastern European nations took in Jews later, after the westerners basically didn't want them anymore. Slavic elites employed Jews in exploitative roles just as other gentile elites had earlier. This, combined with massive Jewish population growth after the rise of Hasidism, inhibited the development of indigenous middle classes in these societies. Gentile backlash against Jewish presence made for explosive interethnic relations; Jews hated and feared the Slavic peasantry, the Slavic peasants hated the Jews. The Jews got pogroms; the Slavs got Communism, with its unfathomable cruelty at the hands of embittered Jews like Trotsky, Kaganovich, Yagoda, Rakosi, and scores of others.

In the US, Jews were about one quarter of one percent of the population until the Ellis Island era of immigration (pre-1880). Did these pre-Ellis Jews make positive contributions in any aspect of American society? The only pre-Ellis Jew that comes to my mind is the hack lawyer-politician who served in Jefferson Davis' cabinet (ie, a traitor). The US seems to have advanced quite well -- science, military, industry, art, literature, constitution, you name it -- from Jamestown to Ellis Island without much help from Jews.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Anon, just what do you have against hacks?

Anonymous said...

If this were so, Nazi Germany would have been a haven for great writers.

Huh? How do you get from one to the other? That quote is just made of fail.

Anonymous said...

The stunt doubles isn't even particularly funny. Now, the "combing the desert" gag - that's funny.

Hacienda said...

"there aren't any east asians in those fields, period."

Nobel Prizes are a white obsession or fetish? A cultural disease? A idol worship of a race? Jews are the worst afflicted?

Could be! Could be!

green mamba said...

I find the 'stunt double' gag moderately clever, giving as it does a post-modern peek behind the process of moviemaking (recall that Blazing Saddles also finished with a postmodern flourish, as a brawl spilled over into nearby studios), but not well-executed. Brooks was always a better writer than a director.

Anonymous said...

For decades after Einstein's success, every smart scientifically oriented Jewish kid would have wanted to be the next Albert and many actually chose it as a career path

So how come Hideki Yukawa didn't inspire legions of smart Japanese kids to become physicists?

Anonymous said...

So how come Hideki Yukawa didn't inspire legions of smart Japanese kids to become physicists?

Hidek...who?

See, there's your answer.

Silver

Ivy League Bastard said...

> "So how come Hideki Yukawa didn't
>inspire legions of smart Japanese
>kids to become physicists?

Is that a serious question? It answers itself if you give it a moment's thought.

Did Yukawa ever achieve the world celebrity status of Einstein, or Einstein's rank among physicists, or make the discovery of the century? Did he appear much in the Japanese press, in the way that Einstein with his grandfatherly eccentric charisma was constantly lionized in the Western media?

Did Japanese kids post WW2 have much choice of profession compared to American Jews? Did the environment in Japan foster the production of Nobel prizewinners, or did said kids (if they got enough food to eat) have to study day and night for college entrance exams, then go to universities where social drinking took precedence over studies, and then enter the workforce as engineers for Japan Inc?

The postwar Japanese had the highest national IQ scores ever recorded. To the extent that is a predictor of future Nobel prizes, that "human capital" went into manufacturing, not physics. So yes, there might have naturally been more Japanese Nobel prize winners (and therefore a reduction in the Nobel prizes for all other groups), had the environment been different in those times.

ATBOTL said...

"Spain serves as a counter-example, certainly. (The disappointing John Derbyshire mentioned Spain as a riposte to Macdonald.) Spain went into decline after in expelled its Jews, but other factors are relevant there (such as the sad reality that Spaniards are not, ahem, Anglo-Saxons). In any case, the centuries-long history of Spanish Catholic-Jewish acrimony, going back to the Moorish period, probably made harmonious intergration of Jews and their talents into Spanish society impossible."

This nonsense again. Spain had it's golden age right after expelling Jews and Muslims and started to decline about 200 years later. It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that this is evidence that expelling your Jews leads to decline. It would be like saying the economic crisis proves that the US made a mistake by declaring it's independence from Britain.

David Davenport said...

Jewish inventors?

What about: The Harvard Prof. Who invented Napalm ?

Napalm was first used by US Army Air Forces in France in 1944.

Luke Lea said...

BTW, that guy Haber who discovered how to mass-produce synthetic fertilizer: now that was a major, earth changing invention, as big as any ever made and right up there with the steam engine, textile machinery, metal milling machines and machine tools in general, interchangeability of parts, the Bessemer furnace, electric motors and generators, radio and the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, plastics, the airplane, the transistor, and the integrated circuit.

Let's give recognition where recognition is due.

Luke Lea said...

I forgot the discovery of Watson and Crick.

Luke Lea said...

Also forgot the railroad, steamship, and all those gadgets Thomason Edison discovered, to say nothing of such mundane inventions as clothes washers and dryers, central heat and air, the automatic dishwasher, the electric range . . .

Who invented the microwave? The graphical user interface? Berniers Lee invented the WWW.

The list goes on and on and I think the few exceptions merely prove the rule: pragmatic empiricism is a largely northwestern European tradition, Scotch and English especially.

It's in their genes, most likely, as they are of the same basic stock as Ice Man, whose survival kit was astonishing.

Luke Lea said...

Shall I add Wikipedia, a most unlikely development if ever there was one?

Luke Lea said...

How many of the objects on the tool aisle at Home Dept were developed by Ashkenazi? Very few I would hazard.

On the other hand Home Depot itself was a quintessentially Ashkenazi idea. As was WalMart -- which makes it all the more surprising that Sam Walton wasn't of East European descent. Has anybody investigated that?

We truly live in the age of the genome.

Luke Lea said...

Speaking of the genome, is Craig Venter gentile?

Luke Lea said...

Galton, Pearson, Fisher and Wright in the fields of statistics and population genetics -- will this list never end?

Luke Lea said...

Pasteur and Fleming -- though let us frankly admit that in the field of medicine Ashkenazis have made more than their share of advances. Credit where credit is due!

Luke Lea said...

I didn't mention the automobile and the humble bicycle. But who invented the mobile phone? The liquid crystal display? The laser? I honestly don't know.

Luke Lea said...

Who discovered superconductivity?

Anonymous said...

Ivy League Bastard said...

Did Yukawa ever achieve the world celebrity status of Einstein, or Einstein's rank among physicists, or make the discovery of the century?

No, he was Japan's top theoretical physicist. Not in the same league as Einstein - heavens no - but brilliant Nobel Prize material nevertheless.

Did he appear much in the Japanese press, in the way that Einstein with his grandfatherly eccentric charisma was constantly lionized in the Western media?

That is a very significant difference.

Did Japanese kids post WW2 have much choice of profession compared to American Jews?

Post-"GPW" Russia produced many physicist and other scientists. Did Russian kids of that era have much choice of profession? Russia and Japan were both horribly devastated in WW2, and had food supply problems, and industries geared towards reconstruction.

Did the environment in Japan foster the production of Nobel prizewinners, or did said kids (if they got enough food to eat) have to study day and night for college entrance exams, then go to universities where social drinking took precedence over studies

That's a litle unfair; many post-secondary American institutions also glorified drinking, partying, and jocking.

Mind you, if you mean that the Japanese / Asian way is work your ass off in high school, then slack off in college (the reverse of the western model), then you do have a point.

The postwar Japanese had the highest national IQ scores ever recorded. To the extent that is a predictor of future Nobel prizes, that "human capital" went into manufacturing, not physics.

So very true...

I'll also mention that Yukawa, even though apolitical, was a product of Imperial Japan - which had a surprisingly good national science program, given its military focus and lack of materials.

It was Modern Japan, "Japan Inc." that neglected non-industrial-R&D science even in the 1970-1990 boom.

Anonymous said...

On the other hand Home Depot itself was a quintessentially Ashkenazi idea. As was WalMart -- which makes it all the more surprising that Sam Walton wasn't of East European descent. Has anybody investigated that?"

The British didn't exactly have tons of Jews while building their empire, yet they managed to do fine. The Nazis didn't do a bad job of taking on the world, either, despite sidelining (to put it mildly) their own Jewish population.

Believe it or not, some gentiles are able to walk and play Angry Birds on our iPhones at the same time. There is nothing "quintessentially Ashkenzi" about a really big store. A gentile, Clarence Saunders, invented the first modern grocery store, for example. There have been plenty of non-Jewish retail giants in the history of this and other countries.

David Davenport said...

Two more Jewish inventors:

Isaac Singer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born October 27, 1811
Pittstown, New York
Died July 23, 1875 (aged 63)
Paignton, Devonshire
Nationality United States

Institution memberships Singer Sewing Machine Company
Significant advance sewing machine

Isaac Merritt Singer (October 27, 1811 – July 23, 1875) was an inventor, actor, and entrepreneur. He made important improvements in the design of the sewing machine and was the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Many had patented sewing machines before Singer, but his success was based on the practicality of his machine, the ease with which it could be adapted to home use, and its availability on an installment payment basis.[1]


...

There's also Edgar Brandt, who invented discarding-sabot artillery armor piercing munitions. Everybody's tanks guns nowadays use Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot solid shot made of either tungsten or depleted uranium.

I suspect that Mr. Brandt, who departed France for Angleterre in 1940, was Jewish. Brandt's APDS ammunition was the special sauce that gave the Brtish 76mm 17 pounder gun its potency. The NAZI's didn't have APDS.


Edgar Brandt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...

Edgar William Brandt (1880 – 1960) was a French ironworker, prolific weapons designer and head of a company that designed 60mm, 81mm and 120mm mortars that were very widely copied throughout and subsequent to World War II. He also invented discarding-sabot artillery shells[1], and contributed substantially through his development of HEAT rifle grenades to the development of effective HEAT-warhead weapons for infantry anti-tank use.

His company was nationalised in 1936, and subsequently it purchased several engineering companies including the société Mécanique Industrielle de Précision (MIP) at Tulle in 1938. The same year, Brandt opened a major facility at La Ferté-Saint-Aubin which became the company's headquarters.
In 1956 Hotchkiss et Cie merged with établissements Brandt to form the Hotchkiss-Brandt company, which ten years later merged with Thomson and became Thomson-Brandt Armements. After further evolutions, the company is now called TDA Armements SAS and is a part of the Thales Group.
[edit]Products

....

He also was a very fine artist. He made things out of metal like his very fine Firescreen he created for a fireplace. ...


Singer, Brandt, and non-Carthagenian telegraph inventer Samuel Morse were artists as well as inventors and technologists. Mulit-talented men like that don't seem to be happening these days.

syon said...

Luke Lea:"BTW, that guy Haber who discovered how to mass-produce synthetic fertilizer: now that was a major, earth changing invention, as big as any ever made and right up there with the steam engine, textile machinery, metal milling machines and machine tools in general, interchangeability of parts, the Bessemer furnace, electric motors and generators, radio and the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, plastics, the airplane, the transistor, and the integrated circuit.

Let's give recognition where recognition is due."

Actually, snark aside, Haber's work on extracting nitrogen was quite important, assuming that people like to have food to eat. People have a tendency to discount discoveries that relate to food production, despite the fact that this is a need that has to be addressed before all others.

Luke Lea said...

@ syon said... That remark about Haber was sincere. Obviously an invention that multiplies the world's food supply several fold is of the first importance. Period.

Anonymous said...

It's in their genes, most likely, as they are of the same basic stock as Ice Man, whose survival kit was astonishing.

Actually the Ice Man's background is pretty rare in Europe and isolated to Sardinia:

http://racehist.blogspot.com/2011/09/otzis-y-dna-haplogroup-g2a4.html

Luke Lea said...

@ "Actually the Ice Man's background is pretty rare in Europe and isolated to Sardinia:"

I was (am) assuming his toolkit was not atypical for that kind of harsh, unforgiving environment. By contrast the Hebrew/Jewish stock survived on commerce in a much more civilized matrix not only for the last 2000 years, but from as far back as Abraham (Hebrew words for fairness and honesty being derived from the description of a fair balance beam ("straight") and honest weights ("whole"). And even that branch of West Semitic stock has a 2000 year old background in ancient Mesopotamia. I don't think environment of evolutionary adaptation faced by Germanic Europeans was remotely like that.

Anonymous said...

I suspect that Mr. Brandt, who departed France for Angleterre in 1940, was Jewish. Brandt's APDS ammunition was the special sauce that gave the Brtish 76mm 17 pounder gun its potency. The NAZI's didn't have APDS.



He wasn't Jewish. And the Nazi's made the best anti-tank guns during WWII.

And guess what? Isaac Singer was not Jewish either.

Ivy League Bastard said...

>"Galton, Pearson, Fisher and Wright in the fields of statistics and population genetics -- will this list never end?" <

Statistics has be the worst possible example for anyone trying to demonstrate Anglo/Euro/Christian pre-eminence.

Galton and Fisher did get it started (though of course there was a long earlier tradition of European actuarial science). After that, I don't have a census of the field ready to cite, but am fairly sure that if the development since World War II was not dominated by Jews such as Neyman and Wald, then Jews were, at a minimum, represented at rates as high as in theoretical physics. There was also a black American mathematician (that is, a descendant of slaves) who was one of the early luminaries of the field, with the thematically appropriate surname "Blackwell", and a large number of swarthy subcontinental statistical savants from India.

Which again shows how much demographic distortion there is in these prize and invention counts. India has had a prestigious institute of statistics for some time, and therefore produces a large number of statisticians.
It is a relatively cheap subject to teach, and maybe was considered useful in agriculture or medicine or government. Subjects that are more capital intensive did not see as high a representation of Indian academics.

David Davenport said...

Armour-piercing, discarding-sabot

Armour-piercing, discarding-sabot (APDS) was developed by engineers working for the French Edgar Brandt company, and was fielded in two calibers (75 mm/57 mm for the Mle1897/33 75 mm anti-tank cannon, 37 mm/25 mm for several 37 mm gun types) just before the French-German armistice of 1940. The Edgar Brandt engineers, having been evacuated to the United Kingdom, joined ongoing APDS development efforts there, culminating in significant improvements to the concept and its realization. British APDS ordnance for their QF 6 pdr and 17 pdr anti-tank guns was fielded in March 1944.

For a given caliber the use of APDS ammunition can effectively double the anti-tank performance of a gun.

...

Armour-piercing, composite rigid

Armour-Piercing, Composite Rigid (APCR) is a British term, the US term for the design is High Velocity Armour Piercing (HVAP) and German, Hartkernmunition. The APCR projectile is a core of a high-density hard material such as tungsten carbide surrounded by a full-bore shell of a lighter material (e.g. an aluminium alloy). Most APCR projectiles are shaped like the standard APCBC shot (although some of the German Pzgr. 40 and some Soviet designs resemble a stubby arrow), but the projectile is lighter: up to half the weight of a standard AP shot of the same calibre. The lighter weight allows a higher velocity. The kinetic energy of the shot is concentrated in the core and hence on a smaller impact area, improving the penetration of the target armour. To prevent shattering on impact, a shock-buffering cap is placed between the core and the outer ballistic shell as with APC rounds. However, because the shot is lighter but still the same overall size it has poorer ballistic qualities, and loses velocity and accuracy at longer ranges. The APCR was superseded by the APDS which dispensed with the outer light alloy shell once the shot had left the barrel.
The Germans used an APCR round ( but not an APDS round --DD ), the Panzergranate 40 (Pzgr.40) "arrowhead" shot, for their 5 cm Pak 38 antitank guns in 1942, and it was also developed for their 75 and 88 mm antitank and tank guns, and for anti-tank guns mounted in German aircraft. Shortages of the key component, tungsten, led to the Germans dropping the use of APCR (and reverting to less effective armor piercing -- DD) tank gun ammunition ) during late World War II because it was more efficiently used in industrial applications such as machine tools. ( or because tungsten bcame unavailable as the Wehrmacht retreated.-- DD )

...

Armor-piercing Anti-tank Shells


...

Pershing vs Panther Cologne 1945
Pershing vs Panther Cologne 1945

Charlotte said...

"If this were so, Nazi Germany would have been a haven for great writers. Not so.
And I think you judge literary value on race. If Shakespeare were Jewish, you'd probably say his plays all sucked."

Yeah, some here probably would. Actually in the Merchant of Venice, the Jewish daughter ends up marrying the Christian protaganist, obviously converting and this is seen as a good thing, unlike the black/white marriage he wrote about, that ended in murder.

Snarkiness towards other cultures is common to most people (except Gentile whites nowadays, who aren't allowed).
A Jewish lady once reviewed Riverdance a bit dismissively saying, "anybody could do it." Except anybody didn't. Even with the updates, Irish dance is recognizably Irish dance and only recently has "anybody" else started doing it much--now they have it in places like eastern Europe (excellent btw, The Serbian Orthodox Celts and the Avalon dancers in Prague)) and Mexico (v. good also.) There's a youtube featuring an Israeli folkdance troupe doing Siamsa and they were v. good. Yes, some of the steps are universal to traditional dancing that moved from the EurAsian steppes through Europe,
so anybody can do it, but not anybody could have invented it as we know it now. It grew from the culture and then when other cultures copied it, they did so in a way that is just a bit changed. They can't help it. Russians have a looser step--they're not tight like the Irish tradition. The Czechs are doll-like and graceful, and the Orthodox Celts guys were sexier. That's how culture spreads. Nothing wrong with it, just give credit where credit is due.

I don't think "Nazi Germany" lasted long enough to create its own culture. People were certainly whipped up by a lot of stirring speeches and pagentry, and of course by relentless propaganda, not to mention genuine grievances; but that couldn't have lasted too long. Hitler got pretty exhausted after his speeches--observers said he seemed to become de-possessed after them, a kind of spent force.
If the damn bankers had just left well-enough alone, nobody would have had enough money to do a WWII. The German economy was picking up. But no, they see a way to make money off both sides with war, as Berthold Brecht tried to explain in his play, Mother Courage.
In the early 19th c., Germans were thought to be the mystical, poetic race. Think Goete and Schiller; Beethoven (tho a Jewish guy once tried to tell me he B. was black); I didn't totally buy it despite being v. young.