Neutered

 http://www.us.mensa.org/Content/AML/NavigationMenu/Join/SubmitTestScores/QualifyingTestScores/QualifyingScores.htm

These are the qualifying scores for various tests to join MENSA, the "high IQ" society. Notice how the current versions of the SAT, ACT, and GRE are no longer considered representative of intelligence. This is because the socialists watered them down into feel-good tests. Result: admittance into college and grad school no longer takes intelligence directly into account. The calculation by the socialists is that if you don't measure intelligence, you shouldn't have to apply affirmative action preferences to stupid minorities since the stupid will be almost indistinguishable from the intelligent. Thus we arrive at the point the socialists have been pursuing all along: promotion by political connections and considerations instead of by merit.

If you look at the bottom of the page, the military has also dropped IQ measurement from its aptitude tests.

Stripping IQ measurements from society reduces economic efficiency by failing to sort people into different professions according to their abilities. Of course, it also deprives individuals of this form of self-knowledge, which may lead them to pursuits above or beneath their natural aptitudes; in other words, it impedes their paths to realizing their full potentials. But, it's like every other form of political correctness. It's a lie. This time the lie is in the form of concealing the truth. Lies lead to more lies, and to inefficiency, and to the corruption of societal morals.

I wonder how many people are even aware of this development or have any sense of its implications. I suspect few professional educators know of it. Consider: our prime geopolitical, economic, and military competitor, China, is heading in the opposite direction, raising standards in its educational system, requiring the demonstration of both effort and intelligence for admission into its professional programs. The U.S. is decadent, eaten away from inside by weakness of will evidenced in endless give-aways that encourage dependence, weakness, stupidity, irresponsibility--led by the socialists, but passively tolerated by the capitalists and the independents.

Our only hope geopolitically is that China will follow Japan and implode. This appears unlikely. China possesses a more primitive psychology which manifests in shameless, unthinking nationalism. It also remembers past imperial power and desperately seeks the high respect that imperial power once commanded. Nor is it a dependent nation, as Japan has been for two generations. Also, it believes it has won its last five wars (against Japan, the Kuomintang, the U.S./"U.N."/S. Korea, India, Vietnam).

Confrontation merely enkindles its self-confidence. The Chinese are engaged in a highly disciplined attempt to raise their nation to the first position--not just in the region (already achieved), but in the world. And they seem to understand that strength of will is as important as any other factor in the competition among nations. This is the decisive difference between the U.S. and the pretender to the throne: strength of will. Here the will is directed at the "end of suffering", physical, psychological, spiritual. In China, for its leaders at least, it is the will to power that trumps all other priorities. But, power can only be achieved through struggle, and struggle means pain. And it can only be sustained through struggle, and struggle means pain. "Therefore," say the socialists, "all struggle must be abolished, and all competition too." Nor would Mr. Hu object if America were to lose its place by forfeit. 

Climate Scientists' Email Scandal

There may well be some ethical lapses on display in these communications, but most (of the random few I read) appear to be demonstrations of the way science works, especially in the case of a rapidly developing field with high stakes politically. Scientists become political and combative when there are major points of contention in their field. This is normal. Kuhn’s “The Stucture of Scientific Revolutions” lays this out in several examples. Why does this process nevertheless result in scientific progress? Probably because there are different scientific camps, each with their own biases, in competition with each other. As more knowledge accumulates, the camps shift in relative power, and, most importantly, as someone said, the older generation eventually dies off and the newer generation can fashion ideological commitments more in tune with current data. The question here, and the risk, is whether the unusual interest in climate change from the non-scientific world will corrupt this process by exerting excessive political and financial pressures.

The Welfare Graph

Why the poor work so little: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/11/is_there_a_poverty_trap.cfm From a graph like that you might think that there aren't any poor people in this country. In any case, it would appear that the welfare machine does not allow too many families with children to slip into poverty--and not a single senior. For poor women, a child produces a shower of government largesse for herself plus free food, education, medical care, etc for her child. Result: no sense of individual responsibility and rampant single motherhood. But, the socialists presume that the world was an intolerably cruel place before all these corrupting handouts were instituted.  It was not. People adapt to their circumstances. They had other buffers to guard against misfortune and deprivation: responsibility, foresight, fortitude, reasonable expectations, religion, family, private charity. All of these natural buffers, cultivated and strengthened and refined by our civilization for centuries, have been badly undermined by the massive socialist-bureaucratic leveling machine. The only real comfort at this point is that the text of our Constitution has been so little altered in the course of the revolution wrought by FDR. But, still, isn't it strange that the government should have suffered such gross alterations as to be rendered unrecognizable--without changing the Constitution? The letter remains, but the spirit is gone.

Big Government

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/02/tony_tether_has_1/

We need more agencies like DARPA and ARPA-E. They give quality people a long leash, think long-term, and understand the concept of risk-reward. Result: breakthroughs and high return on capital.

 

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Tony Tether (TT), DARPA head, from the article above:



TT: There’s one that’s really over the horizon, the fact that it goes back to the testing part, too. There’s always been this notion of the "golden hour." If you can get somebody to good medical care, where they can be given blood and all of that stuff within an hour, the survival is greatly enhanced. Well, when you have these small units out there, and especially in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s really six hours before someone can be evacuated. So a person with great blood loss, which is what happens in wars, will die.

We had a guy with an idea. He said, why is it that people die with
60% of their blood gone? Is there any reason for that? What happens, what is going on? So we started an effort. We went out in our normal way and challenged the community. Look, here’s the problem: Is there any way we can keep a person alive with 60% blood loss for six hours as opposed to an hour? And we have found two amazing techniques.

NS: Tell me about them.

TT: These are techniques that could be given by a medical on the spot. One is giving somebody a shot of estrogen. I know that’s sort of strange, isn’t it? And it’s the typical Darpa fashion. Somebody said, "You know, women in general survive blood loss better than men."
And what is one of the chemical differences between a male and a female?  Estrogen. Think about what had to happen in order for us to have survived for all this time and evolve. Childbirth is a very bloody process.  If a woman had a baby 5,000 years ago, and if she couldn’t handle that blood loss and take that baby and go to a safe spot and all the rest of it, we would have gone away. And if you look at what happens with a woman at childbirth, she gets a big shot of estrogen from her own body. So we tried it. By the way, the one difference between Darpa and the National Institutes of Health, for example, is that Darpa will take a bet on an idea to go get the data to see if the idea is worthwhile, whereas at the NIH you typically need to have the data before they give you the effort to get the data. I’m sure you’ve heard those stories.

NS: Yeah.

TT: So we went out and gave this fellow a contract. And, by
God, with a shot of estrogen — the control group is made of rats, mind you –

NS: Yeah, I’m assuming.

TT: The IRB on rats is a little bit easier. [laughs] First we bled all of them 60 percent. The rats that didn’t have the estrogen all died within three hours. Of those that were given a shot of estrogen â??
which, by the way, is very safe â?? right after 60 percent blood loss, 75
percent of them were living after six hours. Now that is not as good as the next technique. One fellow had another idea. When you have severe blood loss, your cells pass electrons. And when you have full blood, this electron passage is somewhat tampered. The doctors will call these the ions. You will take vitamins to try to get rid of –

NS: Yeah, free radicals.

TT: Yeah, get rid of these free radicals. Well, these electrons cause these free radicals. But when you get 60 percent blood loss, these electron passages still go up. And, he said, you know, it’s probably the electrons that are causing the people to die because they are really destroying tissue, and there’s nothing there to stop them, because you’ve got only 40 percent of the blood you had. He found that if you gave a small amount of hydrogen sulfide — this is a poison –??

NS: Oh, right, this is [Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center biochemist] Mark Roth, right?

TT: Yeah. If you give a small amount of hydrogen sulfide, it inhibits the electron generation. So his rats, OK, you bleed them 60
percent. The control group all dead within three hours. The group that you just give a little bit of hydrogen sulfide to, after 10 hours, 90
percent of them are still living. And, by the way, in both of these cases, to resuscitate them you just give them water. I mean you don’t have to even give them blood. You just give them water.

NS: It’s amazing. And also they’re not hibernating — I mean these aren’t hibernators.

TT: They’re not, no.

NS: It is really amazing.

TT: Yes, it is amazing. That’s a typical Darpa type of thing.

 

Illiberal Indoctrination

A blog post from halfsigma below. Between the "indoctrination advantage" possessed by leftists and the continued influx of Mexicans, it's hard to see how the Republican party, as currently constituted, can sustain its competitive position. Recovering power in at least some of the institutions mentioned ought to be one of the highest priorities for conservatives. Also, the recession ought to be used to blacken the perception of illegal immigration and thereby reduce Mexican immigration to the reasonable levels permitted by law. And there is no reason why conservatives cannot capture a significant number of religious Hispanic voters, if they formulate a real strategy to do so.

Permalink