Saturday, November 24, 2007

Apocalyptic vision of a post-fossil fuel world

Now here's an MSM article on Peak Oil written by a stern realist. May have something to do with the establishment's efforts to revive eugenic public discourse....,

The money shot;

The UN Environment Program had concluded that the planet's water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in "inexorable decline" much of it due to agriculture, which constituted the greatest single source of human impact on the biosphere.

Heinberg said that to get to the heart of the crisis a comprehensive transformation of world agriculture was needed - greater than anything seen in many decades - which would produce a system that was not reliant on fossil fuels.

He cited Cuba as an example of what could be achieved. In the 1980s it had become reliant on cheap fuel supplied by Russia and was using more agrochemicals per acre than even the US. But after the fall of communism, supplies dried up. The average Cuban lost 20lbs in weight, living standards collapsed and malnutrition became widespread.

Cuban authorities responded by redesigning the food supply system. Large state-owned farms were broken up and given to families and they were encouraged to form co-operatives, biological methods were used for pest control, oxen replaced tractors, urban vegetable gardens flourished and people began to keep chickens and rabbits for food. Twenty years later food production was 90 per cent of its former levels.

Heinberg said what was needed was a return to ecological organic farming methods which would require the transformation of societies.

And with oil supplies rapidly running out the full resources of national governments would be needed to achieve it.

Peak Possibilities

This summary MSM treatment of Peak Oil is several years late and several dollars short and written by an economist rather than a pragmatist.

The money shot;

Among the peakists, war and economic breakdown are favorite themes. They figure that cheap oil is the essential fuel of modern capitalism, which will founder without it. A more hopeful take is that innovation is the essential fuel of modern capitalism and that high oil prices will drive rapid advances in conservation and alternative energy. Either way, the beginning of the end of the oil era may be upon us, well ahead of schedule.

Friday, November 23, 2007

VI - The Establishment IS Reviving Eugenics

In all the glib and uninformed references to race that dominate the popular culture, there is always MUCH more un-interrogated social custom than application of science. While skin colour is certainly genetic, perceived race based on skin colour is not. Consequently, skin color is not very useful in medication efficacy studies unless the genes controlling the response to beta-blockers also control skin colour (or the genes are closely linked).

The Black American population is predominantly African and European genetically, and can include someone who is genetically 80-90% European with a skin color running the earthshades gamut of the really big crayon box. Across the Americas one is compelled to ask whether skin colour is a useful proxy for the proportion of African and European heart-disease alleles present in an individual. Until there are genetic tests for the real genes behind the drug response, drug trials have no business staking pseudo-scientific racial claims.

Obviously African and European descent provide somewhat different respective genetic backgrounds. The tragedy for American healthcare, politics, and science is that one of those differences is color, and it is next to impossible for the deductively crippled American psyche to get past that. As Denmark Vesey would say, this is all about marketing. From a marketing perspective, a very great deal of negative baggage has been associated with the brand "Black". Quoting Earl Dunovant;
Everything in America is looked at through, measured in terms of, categorized and stored by race. So we know you have thoughts and opinions about us. Then we look at everything the society produces that depicts us. We consider that to be tangible evidence of the collective attitude. So now we know that the collective opinion of our race is negative.

This is a competitive disadvantage, and when our abilities are immediately discounted to the degree that we can be made to fit people's preconceptions as a tactic, we feel the tactitician and the one who executes the tactic is racist. When the tactic succeeds, we feel those who hold the preconceptions that were played on are racist.
This is precisely the tactic and the negative branding of Blackness that has been ongoing in America for centuries. The great tragedy is that in 2007, at the convergence of a new and astonishing genetic science and technology, we are compelled to grapple with the mental illnesses and social pathologies of an archaic and unjust society. In my opinion, a conscious effort is being made and supported by elements of the U.S. elite to infect the new genetic science and technology with a particularly pernicious and decidedly unscientific form of negative Black branding. In support of their efforts to project racism into the future, these elites have enlisted the rationalizing support of pseudoscientific racists whom they're confident the overwhelming majority of Americans will not carefully investigate for themselves. This is purely and plainly racist propaganda.

Tinkerbell the race fairy might say something along the lines of this;
If you look at the way that science is twisted and abused in current American debates on climate change and creationism, it's impossible to feel that a public debate on the reality of race will be conducted in a spirit of disinterested longing for truth.
But I don't stutter or guard my words like that.

This is why I put up a five part overview of the EVIL history of racial pseudo-science in America as it pertains to racist superstitions regarding genetic determinism in behavior and intellect. Those who don't know about the past, are bound to repeat its mistakes in their future. Those who governed in the past are bound and determined to do everything in their power to continue governing in the future, and this is what brings us to this unfortunate discussion.

Thirty or fewer genes control for skin color.

How many tens of thousands of genes are implicated in central nervous system structure and function?

Is there any correlation between the small cluster of genes that controls for skin color - and is clearly the result of sexual selection* - and the other gene clusters among the tens of thousands implicated though as yet undiscovered which control for nervous system, metabolic, and immunological structure and function - all of which structuro-functional complexes effect intelligence and behaviour?

*(except in the United States with its very unique population genetics history);

It is this second vast and undocumented set of gene clusters that fascinate the racist elements of the U.S. Establishment - because they're looking for an excuse, a rationale for the evil and unjust social policies that have dominated American life, past, present, and by the looks of this undertaking - future.

Racial pseudo-scientists and their racialist supporters won't know enough to say anything scientifically credible for a very long time - because they won't have any idea which genes are involved and even whether these genes cluster. This is true of disease, healthcare and racially targetted medicine, and it's that many more time true of genetic determinism, behavior and IQ.

These facts notwithstanding, the NY Times and Slate.com have each published a series of articles drawing from the blogs of ill-informed people who do not warrant respectful attention in the case of the Times, and in the case of Slate - a conservative commentator draws from both racist blogs and a hardcore racist pseudo-scientist backed by strategic capital going back to the Nazi era.

Slate and the New York Times are supposed to know better. Because I know that they know better - this leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Decision makers at these two media giants have decided for whatever reason to editorially back the reintroduction of racist pseudo-science into the public and political discourse.

What is Race?

To the two well-paid and utterly sold out negros pictured here, it's about money. Simple as that - and good science be damned.

Relevant Financial Relationships
Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, has indicated relevant financial relationships as noted: he is a consultant/speaker for Pfizer Inc, AstraZeneca, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation.

Frank Douglas is the former Professor of the Practice at MIT and director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation. He also serves on the board of directors of several pharmaceutical companies, including NitroMed, which developed the drug BiDil.

In the past, African American-only trials have received considerable attention. The heart disease drug BiDil, for example, which Ferdinand helped to study, was the first drug in the US approved for and marketed to just one race of patients. Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., who has been an outspoken critic of BiDil's marketing approach, said that "it sends dangerous messages that race is somehow genetic." Which it is not, Charles Rotimi, the director of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University in Washington, DC, told The Scientist. While race can be useful to understand how diseases manifest in certain groups, hinging studies on race distracts from the underlying causes of health disparities, Kahn said.

The problem with using race as a marker is that any one self-identified group is never homogeneous - there are always more variations genetically within a racial group than between them, he said. "Human variations do not overlap with our notions of race,"

The Scientist: Race-Based Medicine?

Eugenic Intermezzo

Abiola cuts racial realists like Zatoichi cuts yakuza gimps.

Genetic Determinism
Population Genetics
Quantitative Traits
IQ Genes





Few things more gratifying than perfect cuts by superb intellect....,

Thursday, November 22, 2007

The Lucifer Effect - Person, Situation, or System?

“All evil begins with a big lie,” whether it’s a claim to be following the word of God, or the need to stamp out political opposition. A seemingly insignificant step follows, with successive small actions, presented as essential by an apparently just authority figure. The situation presents others complying with the same rules, perhaps protesting, but following along all the same. If the victims are anonymous or dehumanized somehow, all the better. And exiting the situation is extremely difficult.

This lecture is long at an hour and fifty minutes. Near the beginning, Zimbardo makes an ironic freudian slip in which he substitutes NAACP for NCAA. Don't dismiss him for this slight. While I believe that his overview of the Lucifer effect would be exponentially more powerful if he addressed himself to the perennially evil assault on Black folks sanity, don't hold your breath for that, it's not his fight. It's our fight.

All minor quibbles aside, Zimbardo is an ally and he provides a fundamental and powerful tool box useful for the ruthless interrogation of the assault.

Power and Authority

Fundamental Attribution Error

The Big Lie

Deindividuation

Anonymity

Dehumanization

Discernment and description of the situation is a beginning. However, the power to exit the situation is rooted in the organized mastery and proliferation of technique. Zimbardo is a master technician whose work is well worth your time and attention.

Mnemes, Memes, Memeplexes - Viruses of the Mind

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme , meaning "memory"), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translated as "Memory-feelings in relation to original feelings"). According to the OED, the word mneme appears in English in 1921 in L. Simon's translation of Semon's book: The Mneme

Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches. Much of the study of memes focuses on groups of memes called memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes) — such as religious, cultural, or political doctrines and systems. Memeplexes contain mutually supportive memes that together become more evolutionarily successful. These memeplexes may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes which, if they fit with a memeplex, can "piggyback" on that success.

Meme theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection similarly to Darwinian biological evolution through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an organism's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate.

"Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts."

When regarded as non-conscious replicators (much like viruses), individual memes lack moral goodness or badness. However, the behaviors that memes generate in individuals and groups can have definite moral implications. History furnishes many examples of the moral implications of racist ethnic class memes when they interact with politics.

Racism provides an example of a common meme: an ideology that has come to separate people, causing the deaths of many of its targets and some of its practitioners and threatening the lives of those who do not conform with racist norms. Once introduced into a culture, memes evolve and spread through society, becoming both harmful and attractive so that they spread like a virus.

The survival value of consciousness is that it allows us to recognize harmful memes and memeplexes, and with a tremendous effort of will and ingenuity, to extinguish those bad memes before they extinguish us....,

Monday, November 19, 2007

Gurdjieff's Analogy and an Ancient Analogy

BEELZEBUB’S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON
"hackney carriage", (pages 1192-1203)

A man as a whole with all his separately concentrated and functioning localizations, that is to say his formed and independently educated "personalities," is almost exactly comparable to that organization for conveying a passenger, which consists of a carriage, a horse, and a coachman. It must first of all be remarked that the difference between a real man and a pseudo man, that is, between one who has his own "I" and one who has not, is indicated in the analogy we have taken by the passenger sitting in the carriage. In the first case, that of the real man, the passenger is the owner of the carriage; and in the second case, he is simply the first chance passer-by who, like the fare in a "hackney carriage," is continuously being changed.

The body of a man with all its motor reflex manifestations corresponds simply to the carriage itself; all the functionings and manifestations of feeling of a man correspond to the horse harnessed to the carriage and drawing it; the coachman sitting on the box and directing the horse corresponds to that in a man which people call consciousness or mentation; and finally, the passenger seated in the carriage and commanding the coachman is that which is called "I.’,

The fundamental evil among contemporary people is chiefly that, owing to the rooted and widespread abnormal methods of education of the rising generation, this fourth personality which should be present in everybody on reaching responsible age is entirely missing in them; and almost all of them consist only of the three enumerated parts, which parts, moreover, are formed arbitrarily of themselves and anyhow. In other words, almost every contemporary man of responsible age consists of nothing more nor less than simply a "hackney carriage," and one moreover, composed as follows: a broken-down carriage "which has long ago seen its day," a crock of a horse, and, on the box, a tatterdemalion, half-sleepy, half-drunken coachman whose time designated by Mother Nature for self-perfection passes while he waits on a corner, fantastically daydreaming, for any old chance passenger. The first passenger who happens along hires him and dismisses him just as he pleases, and not only him but also all the parts subordinate to him.

Continuing this analogy between a typical contemporary man, with his thoughts, feelings, and body, and a hackney carriage, horse, and coachman, we can clearly see that in each of the parts composing both organizations there must have been formed and there must exist its own separate needs, habits, tastes, and so on, proper to it alone. From the varied nature of their arising, and the diverse conditions of their formation, and according to their varying possibilities in each of them there must inevitably have been formed, for instance, its own psyche, its own notions, its own subjective supports, its own viewpoints, and so on.

The whole totality of the manifestations of human mentation, with all the inherencies proper to this functioning and with all its specific particularities, corresponds almost exactly in every respect to the essence and manifestations of a typical hired coachman. Like all hired coachmen in general, he is a type called "cabby." He is not entirely illiterate because, owing to the regulations existing in his country for the "general compulsory teaching of the three R’s," he was obliged in his childhood to put in an occasional attendance at what is called the "parish church school." Although he himself is from the country and has remained as ignorant as his fellow rustics, yet rubbing shoulders, owing to his profession, with people of various positions and education, picking up from them, by bits here and bits there, a variety of expressions embodying various notions, he has now come to regard everything smacking of the country with superiority and contempt, indignantly dismissing it all as "ignorance. In short, this is a type to whom applies perfectly the definition, "The crows he raced but by peacocks out-paced."

He considers himself competent even in questions of religion, politics, and sociology; with his equals he likes to argue; those whom he regards as his inferiors, he likes to teach; his superiors he flatters, with them he is servile; before them, as is said, "he stands cap in hand." One of his chief weaknesses is to dangle after the neighboring cooks and housemaids, but, best of all, he likes a good hearty tuck-in, and to gulp down another glass or two, and then, fully satiated, drowsily to daydream. To gratify these weaknesses of his, he always steals a part of the money given him by his employer to buy fodder for the horse. Like every "cabby" he works as is said always "under the lash," and if occasionally he does a job without being made, it is only in the hope of receiving tips. The desire for tips has gradually taught him to be aware of certain weaknesses in the people with whom he has dealings, and to profit himself by them; he has automatically learned to be cunning, to flatter, so to say, to stroke people the right way, and, in general, to lie.On every convenient occasion and at every free moment he slips into a saloon or to a bar, where over a glass of beer he daydreams for hours at a time, or talks with a type like himself, or just reads the paper.

He tries to appear imposing, wears a beard, and if he is thin pads himself out to appear more important. The totality of the manifestations of the feeling-localization in a man and the whole system of its functioning correspond perfectly to the horse of the hackney carriage in our analogy Incidentally, this comparison of the horse with the organization of human feeling will serve to show up particularly clearly the error and one-sidedness of the contemporary education of the rising generation. The horse as a whole, owing to the negligence of those around it during its early years, and to its constant solitude, is as if locked up within itself; that is to say, its so to say "inner life" is driven inside, and for external manifestations it has nothing but inertia.

Thanks to the abnormal conditions around it, the horse has never received any special education, but has been molded exclusively under the influence of constant thrashings and vile abuse. It has always been kept tied up; and for food, instead of oats and hay, there is given to it merely straw which is utterly worthless for its real needs. Never having seen in any of the manifestations towards it even the least love or friendliness, the horse is now ready to surrender itself completely to anybody who gives it the slightest caress. The consequence of all this is that all the inclinations of the horse, deprived of all interests and aspirations, must inevitably be concentrated on food, drink, and the automatic yearning towards the opposite sex; hence it invariably veers in the direction where it can obtain any of these. If, for example, it catches sight of a place where even once or twice it gratified one of the enumerated needs, it waits the chance to run off in that direction.

It must further be added that although the coachman has a very feeble understanding of his duties, he can nevertheless, even though only a little, think logically; and remembering tomorrow, he either from fear of losing his job or from the desire of receiving a reward, does occasionally evince an interest in doing something or other for his employer without being driven to it; but the horse-in consequence of there not having been formed in it at the proper time, owing to the absence of any special and corresponding education, any data at all for manifesting the aspirations requisite for responsible existence-of course fails to understand (and indeed it cannot be expected that it should understand) why in general it must do anything; its obligations are therefore carried out quite inertly and only from fear of further beatings.

As far as the carriage or cart is concerned, which stands in our analogy for the body without any of the other independently formed parts of the common presence of a man, the situation is even worse. This cart, like most carts, is made of various materials, and furthermore is of a very complicated construction. It was designed, as is evident to every sane-thinking man, to carry all kinds of burdens, and not for the purpose for which contemporary people employ it, that is, only for carrying passengers. The chief cause of the various misunderstandings connected with it springs from the fact that those who made the system of this cart intended it for travel on the byroads, and certain inner details of its general construction were in consequence foreseeingly made to answer to this aim. For example, the principle of its greasing, one of the chief needs of a construction of such different materials, was so devised that the grease should spread over all the metallic parts from the shaking received from the jolts inevitable on such roads, whereas now, this cart that was designed for traveling on the byroads finds itself stationed on a rank in the city and traveling on smooth, level, asphalted roads. In the absence of any shocks whatsoever while going along such roads, no uniform greasing of all its parts occurs, and some of them consequently must inevitably rust and cease to fulfill the action intended for them. A cart goes easily as a rule if its moving parts are properly greased. With too little grease, these parts get heated and finally red-hot, and thus the other parts get spoiled; on the other hand, if in some part there is too much grease, the general movement of the cart is impaired, and in either case it becomes more difficult for the horse to draw it.

The contemporary coachman, our cabby, neither knows nor has any suspicion of the necessity of greasing the cart, and even if he does grease it, he does so without proper knowledge, only on hearsay, blindly following the directions of the first comer. That is why, when this cart, now adapted more or less for travel on smooth roads, has for some reason or other to go along a byroad, something always happens to it; either a nut gives way, or a bolt gets bent or something or other gets loose; and after these attempts at traveling along such roads, the journey rarely ends without more or less considerable repairs. In any case, to make use of this cart for the purposes for which it was made is already impossible without risk. If repairs are begun, it is necessary to take the cart all to pieces, examine all its parts, and, as is done in such cases, "kerosene" them, clean them, and put them together again; and frequently it becomes clearly necessary immediately and without fail to change a part. This is all very well if it happens to be an inexpensive part, but it may turn out to be more costly than a new cart. And so, all that has been said about the separate parts of that organization of which, taken as a whole, a hackney carriage consists can be fully applied also to the general organization of the common presence of a man.

Owing to the absence among contemporary people of any knowledge and ability specially to prepare in a corresponding way the rising generation for responsible existence by educating all the separate parts composing their common presences, every person of today is a confused and extremely ludicrous something, that is to say, again using this example we have taken, a something resembling the following picture. A carriage just out of the factory, made on the latest model, polished by genuine German craftsmen from the town of Barmen, and harnessed to the kind of horse which is called in the locality named Transcaucasia, a "Dglozidzi." ("Dzi" is a horse; "Dgloz" is the name of a certain Armenian specialist in buying utterly worthless horses and skinning them.) On the box of this stylish carriage sits an unshaven, unkempt, sleepy coachman-cabby, dressed in a shabby cloak which he has retrieved from the rubbish heap where it had been thrown as utterly worthless by the kitchen-maid Maggie. On his head reposes a brand-new top hat, an exact replica of Rockefeller’s; and in his buttonhole there is displayed a giant chrysanthemum.

This picture, however ludicrous, of contemporary man, is an inevitable result,chiefly because from the first day of the arising and formation of a contemporary man, all these three parts formed in him-which parts, although diversely caused and with properties of diverse quality, should nevertheless, at the period of his responsible existence for pursuing a single aim, all together represent his entire whole-being, so to say, to "live" and to become fixed in their specific manifestations separately one from another, never having been trained either to the requisite automatic reciprocal maintenance, reciprocal assistance, or to any, even though only approximate, reciprocal understanding; and thus, when afterward concerted manifestations are required, these concerted manifestations do not appear.

Thanks to what is called the "system of education of the rising generation" which at the present time has already been completely fixed in the life of man and which consists singly and solely in training the pupils, by means of constant repetition to the point of "madness,’ to sense various almost empty words and expressions and to recognize, only by the difference in their consonance, the reality supposed to be signified by these words and expressions, the coachman is still able to explain after a fashion the various desires arising in him, but only to types similar to his own outside of his common presence, and he is sometimes even able approximately to understand others. This coachman-cabby of ours, gossiping with other coachmen while waiting for a fare, and sometimes, as is said, "flirting" at the gate with the neighbor’s maid, even learns various forms of what is called "savoir-vivre." He also, by the way, according to the external conditions of the life of coachmen in general, gradually automatizes himself to distinguish one street from the other and to calculate, for instance, during repairs in some street, how to get to the required street from another direction.

But as for the horse, although the maleficent invention of contemporary people which is called education does not extend over the horse’s formation, and in consequence its inherited possibilities are not atrophied, yet owing to the fact that this formation proceeds under the conditions of the abnormally established process of the ordinary existence of people, and that the horse grows up ignored like an orphan by everybody, and moreover an ill-treated orphan, it neither acquires anything corresponding to the established psyche of the coachman nor learns anything of what he knows, and hence is quite ignorant of all the forms of reciprocal relationship which have become usual for the coachman, and no contact is established between them for understanding each other.

It is possible, however, that in its locked-in life the horse does nevertheless learn some form of relationship with the coachman and that even, perhaps, it is familiar with some "language"; but the trouble is that the coachman does not know this and does not even suspect its possibility. Apart from the fact that, owing to the said abnormal conditions, no data for even an approximate understanding of each other are formed between the horse and the coachman, there are also still other and numerous external causes, independent of them, which fail to give them the possibility of together actualizing that one purpose for which they were both destined.

The point is, that just as the separate independent parts of a "hackney" are connected-namely, the carriage to the horse by the shafts and the horse to the coachman by reins-so also are the separate parts of the general organization of man connected with each other; namely, the body is connected to the feeling-organization by the blood, and the feeling-organization is connected to the organization actualizing the functioning of mentation or consciousness by what is called Hanbledzoin, that is, by that substance which arises in the common presence of a man from all intentionally made being-efforts.

The wrong system of education existing at the present time has led to the coachman’s ceasing to have any effect whatever on his horse, unless we allow the fact that he is merely able by means of the reins to engender in the consciousness of the horse just three ideas-right, left, and stop. Strictly speaking he cannot always do even this, because the reins in general are made of materials that react to various atmospheric phenomena: for example, during a pouring rain they swell and lengthen; and in heat, the contrary; thereby changing their effect upon the horse’s automatized sensitiveness of perception.

The same proceeds in the general organization of the average man whenever from some impression or other the so to say "density and tempo" of the Hanbledzoin changes in him, when his thoughts entirely lose all possibility of affecting his feeling-organization. And so, to resume all that has been said, one must willy-nilly acknowledge that every man should strive to have his own "I"; otherwise he will always represent a hackney carriage in which any fare can sit and which any fare can dispose of just as he pleases.

And here it will not be superfluous to point out that the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, organized on the system of Mr. Gurdjieff, has, among its fundamental tasks, also the task of on the one hand correspondingly educating in its pupils each of the enumerated independent personalities separately as well as in their general reciprocal relationship; and on the other hand of begetting and fostering in each of its pupils what every bearer of the name of "man without quotation marks" should have-his own "I."

For a more exact, so to say, scientific definition of the difference between a genuine man, that is, man as he ought to be, and a man whom we have called "man in quotation marks," that is, such men as almost all contemporary people have become, it is fitting to repeat what was said about this by Mr. Gurdjieff himself in one of his personal "lecture talks."

It was as follows:
"For the definition of man, considered from our point of view, neither anatomical, nor physiological, nor psychological contemporary knowledge of his symptoms can assist us, since they are inherent in one degree or another in every man and consequently apply equally to all. Hence they do not enable us to establish the exact difference which we wish to establish between people. This difference can only be formulated in the following terms: ‘Man is a being who can do,’ and ‘to do’ means to act consciously and by one’s own initiative. And indeed every more or less sane-thinking man who is able to be if only a little impartial, must admit that hitherto there has not been nor can there be a fuller and more exhaustive definition. Even suppose that we provisionally accept this definition, the question inevitably arises-can a man who is a product of contemporary education and
civilization do anything at all himself, consciously and by his own will? No... we answer at the very beginning, to this question.

Why not? ...

Solely because, as the Institute-for-the-Harmonious Development-of-Man experimentally proves and from experiments categorically affirms, everything without exception from beginning to end does itself in contemporary man, and there is nothing which a contemporary man himself does. In personal, family, and communal life, in politics, science, art, philosophy, and religion, in short, in everything entering into the process of the ordinary life of a contemporary man, everything from beginning to end does itself, and not a single one of these "victims of contemporary civilization" can "do" anything.
This is at least in part why Gurdjieff famously referred to contemporary humanity as "broken machines". It's certainly why I referred to the contemporary waking state as an artifact of language, and little to nothing more than that.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

V - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?


Preface: This is the 5th of what should conclude as a 6 post series on what appears to me to be a serious effort on the part of the U.S. Establishment to re-ignite eugenic ideology and policy in the American public sphere. This post is about the pernicious long term effect of the systematic application and use of strategic capital to drive popular belief and public policy.

Once upon a time, my man Cobb constructed a race man's home companion. In it, you could find extremely useful and fairly comprehensive information resources like this handy overview of eugenic point sources in the 20th century.

Somewhere between then and now, brah'man let the sharp edge of his vigilance fall off. I can't explain it to you, and I don't expect him to either. This post isn't about him. Rather, it's about the insidious way in which conscious political discourse can be infected, manipulated and ultimately undermined by determined, well funded, and persistent partisans whose backers have taken the long view of politics. Please recall that this was my starting point for questioning the unseemly behavior of the NY Times serving as a platform for neo-eugenic propaganda.

Under the pretense of a column about the convergence of science, technology, and society - Amy Harmon gave a validating mainstream platform and broad national and international distribution to the racist pseudo-scientific blather of an anonymous racist blogger. As one knucklehead at that blog noted;
Nevertheless, she did it, and an imprimatur from the New York Times along with evidence of specific genetic differences is an immensely valuable thing for the debate. I sent the article to a lot of friends, and it really opens up the dialogue. Of course there is still some doublethink to it, but Rome wasn't built in a day. This is a major attitude shift for most people, and there is a lot of race guilt to overcome.
No one seriously expects the NY Times to function as an organ of the most regressive and racist politics in America. To hear conservative talk radio tell it, the NY Times is a left leaning organ of progressive politics, actively engaged in the defeat of "traditional" American interests. To all intents and purposes, both Amy Harmon, and the Times are above reproach. But are they?

A little over a year ago, I had a vigorous set to with Bro. Bowen when he called me out for his First Annual Internet Racist Hunt. Some of the things he wrote then remain instructive;
I basically have no patience with the theory of racism as background radiation left over from the dark ages that selectively infects whitepeople leaving everyone else on the planet unaffected. There are either specific identifiable sources of racist thought which can be objectively dealt with, or not. Basic empirical scientific method.....

I'm talking about ideological racists who are trying to exert influence over Americans as intellectuals, pundits, policy wonks and otherwise trying to literally establish racial policy in American institutions.

I don't think any of them has the political clout required to undo non-discrimination law, but some are trying and some would like to. I'm also talking about racial separatists and people who delight in speculation over racial conflict. People who are overly concerned about the survival of their race or generally see racial conflict as an inevitable biological fact. People who argue very strongly for or against race mixing, ie would like to see some race biologically destroyed.

I believe I met the challenge as he asserted it at that time. The Southern Poverty Law Center certainly indicates that I did - particularly and rather spectacularly in the case of Kevin T. Lamb (scroll down the SPLC page linked) who was a clear nexus connecting hardcore racists with mainstream conservatism. The trouble for those of us on the side of social justice and democratic ideals is that keeping track of racist and eugenic point sources backed by strategic capital to influence popular belief and political policy is a full-time job. Finding and outing these elements is the kind of tiring and thankless task that will wear you out and make you drop your guard.

I believe that that's principally what has happened with Bro. Bowen, i.e., basically he's hung up his vigilant spurs. In certain regards, I don't blame him because there are plenty enough crackpots under the Black partisan banner who forget about the human essentialist core of the undertaking. But weariness aside, it's a job that has to be done because there's entirely too much at stake. Sadly, as the exchange with David Mills bore out, many Black folks have ignorantly or uncritically internalized some deeply pernicious and profoundly unscientific beliefs and this has further compounded the difficulty of the challenge at hand. My former Vision Circle blogmate Ed Brown addressed this issue this past week.
A new Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 40 percent of Blacks think "blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race."

The phrasing of that bothers me. It's as if a "poor" Black person is considered to be a different "race" than a "not poor" Black person. It should be stated that 40% of Blacks are acknowledging class differences. Or better yet, that people are now recognizing class differences and are finally being ASKED about it.

Or maybe not. I'm still thinking... Marinading....

A “Negro” said it! - is a favorite and very effective tactic of the conservative right. It boils down to utilizing a small group of “captive negroes” to say things which otherwise would be considered racist - and to provide cover for white conservatives (”My best friend is a Negro!).

In any oppressed community it’s possible to find folks who are so psychologically damaged that they will work against the very community they come from. Whether selling heroin on street corners to neighborhood kids, or pandering the right’s need for Negroes to provide racial cover - the dynamic and morality are the same. A good article on how the conservative racist right utilizes these folks:
Bashing Black folks is a $40 -100 million industry, funded by the very same folks who fund the conservative movement. Like the enticement of “easy money” in the drug industry, negro conservatives willing to front for “the Man”, can rake in salaries and book sales in excess of $250,000 a year. Indeed, the bashing black folks industry can provide the black conservative far more media and ego polishing recognition than they are ever going to earn in their field of study through quantitative accomplishments.
Having briefly touched upon the pedigree of the silicon valley ku klux kali in installment IV of this series - I'll leave you to connect the dots between this especially noxious fat bastard - Mr. Wardell Connerly - and the bigoted backers providing him with the strategic capital to do his long term dirty work. Wardell is the deliverable work product of precisely that northern california element of the U.S. Establishment that has had us in its eugenic crosshairs for generations.

In his most recent anti Black partisan article, Cobb gave undeserved dap to Wardell as an agent of Black nationalist demise;
What's so laughable about it is that only the Socialists and the Commies, as well as throroughly mau-maued dowagers like Jane Fonda bought into this program for any reasonable duration. What a pity. It's rather pathetic to see how somebody as mediocre as Ward Connorly could absolutely devastate the black nationalist agenda by deracinating public institutions. It only goes to show how dependent black nationalists are on the welfare state. Malcolm is spinning in his grave, and you're mouthing psychobabble about prestige-dependency. Who's really the dependent one?
Connerly is not an agent of anybody's political demise, he's an instrument of a much larger institutional agenda systematically carried out over an extended period of time. Absent a clear understanding of the immense strategic capital afforded this icon of Black disenfranchisement - Cobb asserts that a lowly mediocrity has taken out both Affirmative Action and "the" Black nationalist agenda - without any consideration given to the sustained, long-term, generous backing of explicitly racist elements of the U.S. Establishment. No political statement could be further from the truth. Wardell was not the architect of the process most closely identified with him, rather, he is simply the very handsomely compensated mouthpiece for this process, providing it with indispensible memetic camoflauge...,

Much “mainstream” racism is funded by 4 Foundations – variously called the “4 Sisters”.

Wardell Connerly gets his grip from these folks;

• Scaife Family Foundations

The Scaife Family Foundations. Sarah Scaife, Carthage and Allegheny are funded by industrial tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited $200 million from his mother in the 1960s. He was a presidential appointment of the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Scaife gave former U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese $1.9 million to start PLF. Between 1985 and 2005, Scaife gave more than $4.5 million to PLF. He is the primary supporter of the Heritage Foundation, of which he is a trustee and Meese a former staff member. Many Heritage Foundation staff members held or hold high-ranking federal positions, including current Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and former U.S. Civil Rights Commission (UCCR) staff director and Manhattan Institute fellow Linda Chavez, founder of the right-wing Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO).

Scaife funds Connerly’s ACRI, Chavez’s CEO, and the Center for Individual Rights, which together comprise the triumvirate leading the campaign to end affirmative action. Other major grant recipients include the National Association of Scholars, co-author of Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action in California, and the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research. UCCR Vice Chair Abigail Thernstrom, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is on the board of the Equal Opportunity Foundation, which directs funding for CEO.

• Castle Rock Foundation

Coors Brewing Co.’s support for anti-gay groups led to a 10-year boycott led by AFL-CIO in 1977. Pressured to reform, Coors began funding black and Latino groups through the Adolph Coors Foundation and became one of the first companies to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees in 1995. In 1993, the Coors family created Castle Rock to separate the Coors name from its conservative agenda. The Castle Rock and Adolph Coors Foundations have the same board of directors, the same staff and the same address.

Coors co-owner Joseph Coors founded and financed the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later received most of its support from Richard Mellon Scaife. Coors was a Heritage trustee until March 2003. Ambassador Holland Coors, President Reagan’s appointment to the National Year of the Americas, has been on the board since 1998. Major grant recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the Institute for Justice, which was founded by anti-affirmative-action leader Clint Bolick, a disciple of ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Castle Rock gave PLF $340,000 between 1985 and 2005. Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a right-wing legal advocacy group founded in 1973, represents the Seattle parents in the recent Supreme Court case eliminating even voluntary integration. In 2001, PLF represented Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and provided pro-bono counsel to then Calif. Gov. Pete Wilson in a successful effort to expand the scope of Prop. 209, which banned affirmative action in public education, employment and contracting.

• Olin Foundation

The New York-based John M. Olin Foundation grew out of a family-owned chemical and munitions manufacturing business. The foundation, which dissolved in 2005, was charged with spending all assets within a generation of Olin’s death, lest its mission be altered. Grant recipients included CEO, the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the Manhattan Institute. Specifically, Olin funded the research of CEO founder Linda Chavez and former Secretary of Education William Bennett.

When former Olin Foundation President Michael Joyce left to run the Bradley Foundation, William Simon, who was secretary of the treasury for Nixon and Ford, took over. Joyce had worked under Simon at a neoconservative think-tank prior to joining Olin, and it was Simon who asked him to take the helm at Bradley. Olin gave PLF $669,000 between 1985 and 2005.

• Bradley Foundation

The Allen-Bradley Company, a manufacturer of electronic and radio equipment, was one of the last major Milwaukee-based companies to racially integrate, which it did only under legal pressure. In 1968, the company had 7,000 employees, only 32 of whom were black and 14 Latino. When the Allen-Bradley company was sold in 1985, the name of the foundation was changed to the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation to separate the company name from its conservative cause.

Bradley is the principal supporter of Connerly’s ACRI. ACRI co-chair Thomas Rhodes is on the Bradley board of directors. Bradley Foundation President Michael Joyce, formerly with the Olin Foundation, served on President Reagan’s transition team and other presidential commissions and worked closely with William Bennett prior to his appointment as Secretary of Education.

The foundation gives to the Institute for Justice, where founder Clint Bolick drafted a federal bill to eliminate affirmative action. Other major grant recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars and the American Enterprise Institute, a literary outlet for conservative thinkers such as William Bennett and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who will take part in deciding the Seattle case this December. Bradley gave PLF $327,000 between 1985 and 2005.

Attacks from eugenically minded, conservative instruments play on a few basic themes:

Black Dysfunctionality - That black folks are less intelligent, perform worse on tests, have lower educational indicators, commit more crime, etc. Where numbers don’t exist to support the premise, they make them up, and/or selectively parse data to support their points.

Here are the principal funders of eugenic racism actively operating at the convergence of science, technology, and society. In the last installment, I'll address myself to some of the leading "scientific" instruments working in support of this cause.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

IV - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

The first detailed adaptation of Binet's IQ test was published in America in 1916 by Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Lewis M. Terman (1877-1956) was a major figure in the history of American psychology and the eugenics movement. Terman created the Stanford-Binet intelligence test before World War I and is credited with inventing the term, intelligence quotient or IQ in 1916.

In 1917 he joined a team of psychologists to create the famous Army Alpha and Beta IQ tests administered to more than 1.7 million army recruits. After the war Terman promoted the new IQ tests to school districts across the United States. He created the National Intelligence Tests for grades three to eight and the Terman Group Tests for grades seven to twelve. These tests were the most popular IQ tests used in public schools during the 1920s and 1930s to assist in placing students into ability grouping or tracks. Terman has been referred to as the "father of tracking."

Terman rose to prominence in the 1920s. In 1922 he was elected as President of the American Psychological Association and by the middle of the decade he had become the editor of six journals relating to educational research and psychology. He also had been active in the eugenics movement during this time. Terman believed the IQ test measured a relatively fixed and hereditarily determined intelligence and that there existed marked differences in intellectual capacity between different races. Terman was an active member in the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association throughout the 1920s.

Terman's Americanized Stanford-Binet test was published under an explicitly different imprimatur than the test's creator Alfred Binet would have ever even imagined, much less condoned;
all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals. That every feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by anyone. Moral judgement, like business judgement, social judgement, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence....in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the high-grade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship is most important for the State to assume.
You can't know where you're going to, unless you know where you've been..., in my occasionally humble opinion, it's vitally important to know the pedigree and the heritable ideology of key members of the establishment, particularly as toxic eugenic ideas continue to surface in mainstream media outlets such as the NY Times repackaged and broadly reinjected into the American popular culture. That these folks comprised and continue to profoundly and foundationally influence broad sectors of the current U.S. Establishment - means that their influence and the specifics of their belief system continue to hold wide sway and must be vigorously exposed and repudiated.

Unlike Binet, whose goal had been to identify less able school children in order to aid them with the needed care required, Terman proposed using IQ tests to classify children and put them on the appropriate job-track if they passed muster as possessing acceptable intellectual hygiene. If not, then they should be sterilized as sources of contagion in the societal germ plasm. He believed IQ was inherited and was the strongest predictor of one's ultimate success in life. Terman had a self professed IQ of 180. From the very beginning of his testing regime, he administered English tests to Spanish-speakers and non-schooled African-Americans, concluding:


“High-grade or border-line deficiency… is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come… Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes… They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers… from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (The Measurement of Intelligence, 1916, p. 91-92).

Terman's biased tests gave "scientific" proof that, for many Whites, justified racial discrimination, segregation, and even eugenics.

Terman later joined the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group founded by E.S. Gosney in 1928 which had as part of its agenda the promotion and enforcement of compulsory sterilization laws in California.

Lewis Terman was the father of Frederick Terman, who, as provost of the Stanford University, greatly expanded the science, statistics and engineering departments that helped catapult Stanford into the ranks of the world's first class educational institutions, as well as spurring the growth of Silicon Valley.

Frederick Terman is widely credited (together with William Shockley) with being the father of Silicon Valley.

In 1963 Shockley left the electronics industry and accepted an appointment at Stanford. There he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians — an analysis that stirred wide controversy among laymen and experts in the field alike.

Nonetheless, Shockley pursued his inflammatory ideas in a series of articles and speeches. Regularly interrupted by boos and catcalls, he argued that remedial educational programs were a waste of time. He suggested that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.

"Thoughtcrime is The Only Crime That Matters."

The term thoughtcrime is used to refer to crimes (allegorical or legislative) whereby the alleged "criminal" commits a crime not by action but by expressing their thoughts in some way. Real world thoughtcrimes are punishable by measures as severe as death. Even in western countries where freedom of thought is considered a fundamental value, still there are cases where it is possible to incur penalties of the law for saying or thinking something.

Just as technology played a significant part in the detection of thoughtcrime in Nineteen Eighty-Four — a number of technologies have been developed to try to detect thought and emotional states. For example, networks of CCTV cameras are being connected to image-recognition software that intends to detect possible wrongdoers by looking for signs of anxiety.

Remember folks, always and everywhere, it's about the convergence of science, technology, and society....,

Friday, November 16, 2007

III - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

The American importers of Binet's test immediately and uncritically asserted that scholastic success is the standard to which Intelligence Quotient or (IQ) refers, and, that IQ is a direct measure of innate mental capacity. They flatly rejected Binet's assertion that intelligence is not fixed and that it can be augmented by training. The American claims, contrary to Binet's methods and his own assertions about the same, have become the dogmatic basis for the mental testing or psychometric movement.

American history is replete with strange and unsavory convergences of science, technology, society, and governance. While people are more accustomed to questioning disparities in society, and to the extent that their moral and testicular fortitude permits, indirectly questioning seeming disparities in governance, most folks don't venture very far into the realm of critical examination of technology and science. In this society, the myth surrounding a white laboratory coat is almost the equivalent of the myth surrounding a priestly vestment. By and large, folks just don't question information presented to them as "science".

Consequently, most often the interplay of science, technology and society is commonly overlooked or misunderstood. In order to overcome this tendency, it is absolutely necessary to carefully evaluate the objectivity of what passes for science to ascertain whether it is in fact scientific at all. There is scant little historical or present day evidence of objectivity or scientific method in the practice of psychometry and psychotechnology - and the value-laden and purposive uses to which these "disciplines" have been put - should be enough to make your hair stand on end.

In what I've read of David Mill's online commentary - he comes across as a relatively conservative apologist for American culture and its associated systems of production. Critical interrogation of the whats, whys, and wherefores in this society - not his strong suite. So his comment yesterday in support of the notion that IQ is something ontologically real and genetically determined didn't really surprise me. I suspect that Mills buys into the American myth of IQ hook, line, and sinker. To wit;
The intelligence question is the hardest one for intelligent people to face. Intelligent people know that intelligence is real. And intelligent people know that not every child born has an equal capacity for intelligence.
On the other hand, my online and discursive acquaintance with Michael Fisher shows him a relatively fierce critic and interrogator of American culture and its associated systems of production. So I have to admit a measure of disappointment in the equally preloaded set of assumptions that my here-to-date historically astute and very erudite Bro. Fisher brought to the question of IQ as posed by Mills;
There's only one logical move you can make now, Craig without showin' ya azz. Which move happens to be the correct one and in congruence with reality.
Really.....?

The fact of the matter is that there are so many different equally effective angles of approach for dismantling the invidious myth of IQ - that one wonders why it persists to the present day at all? As best I can ascertain, the ONLY reason that the myth of IQ persists is that it serves the governance purposes of the U.S. Establishment. In that capacity, it is trotted out periodically under a new version release, frosted over with a new and improved "scientific" veneer, and re-presented as the "new and improved" myth of IQ.

As I indicated in my comments to the first installment, my first encounter with IQ came as an unwitting child under the Nixon Administration's Model Cities program which was conducting IQ testing in the hood under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and the Public Health Service. Around 1970 there were some very serious proposals aimed at the development and deployment of allegedly scientific solutions to some of the "pressing social problems" facing American society. There was considerable social unrest in America at that time - due to the unjust war in Vietnam, racial and social injustice in America, political assasinations, and mass uprisings in many cities.

During that period, psychometricians were very active in support of psychotechnologists who were actively peddling their wares to the government as a means of solving the problem of violence control. Mind you, a nation which had unleashed ultraviolence on southeast asia and conscripted and pressed into service hundreds of thousands of its poor youth, was preoccupied with the problem of violence control here at home? Public officials and prison authorities began to receive and look favorably on proposals to use psychosurgery as a means of "treating" allegedly uncontrollable ghetto residents and prison inmates. I digress...., this is about the heritability of IQ - psychosurgery and other forms of barbarous medieval libertinage deserve a series all of their own.

II - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

In the Republic, Plato presents his self-serving myth of the metals as a useful means of justifying social stratification. The impact of Plato's Republic upon political, social and educational thought within Western civilization is incalculable, and yet, the self-serving deceits underpinning this masterpiece of conservative sophistry are frequently ignored. Plato conceived of political harmony being achieved through five long-term manipulative (eugenic) strategies.

1. Regulated sexuality via marriage festivals involving State-run (i.e., non-random) lotteries

2. Controlled breeding to maintain class purity (via abortion, infanticide and eugenics)

3. Educational streaming (i.e., knowledge apartheid).

4. Guardian selection criteria and associated weeding-out processes.

5. No class mixing. Plato believed that mingling among the three classes does the greatest harm to the state and is the worst of evils.

The Platonic social ideal rested on a foundation myth of metals that proposed that the three stratified classes represented palpable differences between the essential natures of men, and which the gods themselves had deliberately cast. Plato likened these essential differences to gold (representing guardians), silver (representing auxiliaries), and iron-bronze (representing workers).

The contemporary version of Plato's myth of metals is the myth of IQ which purports to assign value to individuals and groups not only more precisely than Plato did, but also in a completely honest and scientific way. The self-serving deceits underpinning this masterpiece of sophistry are frequently ignored.

American society represents social discrimination and the preservation of privilege on a massive scale. According to conservative proponents of the status quo, the hierarchical stratification apparent in nearly all spheres of contemporary consensus reality reflects the "fact" that special mental abilities are required in order to attain wealth, privilege, and prestige in modern society, and these special mental abilities are limited in the general population. According to the conservative myth of IQ, the socially discriminatory distribution of wealth, privilege and prestige is a reflection of nature's unequal distribution of mental abilities.

The relatively poor, underprivileged, and socially subordinate inhabitants of economically depressed urban and rural areas tend to have relatively low IQ test scores. (so when someone upsets the conventional wisdom - the authorities take a very keen interest in such an outlier). Relatively rich, privileged and prestigious inhabitants of cities and suburbs tend to have relatively higher IQ test scores. What does this mean?

Well, according to the Platonic conservative, it means that the first group is comparatively stupid and unworthy because they were born that way. The members of the second group are where they are because they are comparatively smart and they were born that way. This is certainly nothing that the father of modern IQ testing - Alfred Binet would have argued. Instead, Binet constructed an altogether different kind of test intended to subserve an altogether different kind of objective. I wrote about Binet in response to David Mills - Binet's theory goes a little something like this;

After the middle of the 19th century, industrialization in America and western Europe forced a growing demand for universal public schooling as the means by which children could be taught the skills and values desired by industry. It was in this industrially oriented educational climate that the French minister of education Alfred Binet, director of the psychology laboratory at the Sorbonne, developed a testing procedure capable of identifying students in need of special schooling. The task as defined was essentially a technical one, and Binet approached it in a straightforward practical fashion. He amassed hundreds of questions drawn from the school curriculum and covering a broad range of difficulty.

His basic idea was to design a test which could be given to children of varying ages and on which children at a given age or grade level would do either well or poorly - depending on whether they were already doing well or poorly in school. Preliminary versions of the test were given to small groups of children whose scores were compared with their teachers ratings of classroom performance. In the process, items were added or deleted in order to bring about the closest possible correspondence between test performance and educational age norms.

In its final form, Binet's test provided an index of scholastic performance based on the prevailing standard of scholastic success. In other words, scores on his test generally correlated with the ratings assigned by French teachers in the classrooms of his day. By using teachers judgements of classroom performance as the standard by which his test was validated, Binet established a practical basis for its use as a predictor of success in the school system. Because his aim had been to identify children who required special schooling, he did not require, nor did he assert, a theory or definition of intelligence. Moreover, he did not make a distinction between acquired or congenital feeblemindedness and he never argued that poor performance on his test was a sign of innate mental inferiority. On the contrary, he sternly rebuked his contemporaries who contended that intelligence is a fixed quantity that cannot be augmented.

Now then, what do we know about schools and about the performance of Black children in schools? (that first link is a whole book by John Taylor Gatto - The Underground History of American Education - which makes the following extraordinary contention; The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.)

If the U.S. Establishment is reviving Eugenics again, I suspect that it's for somewhat different reasons than in prior go rounds. The core motivation never changes, however, and that's the self-serving justification of the current system of social stratification. What do you suppose the current cycle of pseudo-scientific genetic determinism is all about?

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...