Some information regarding racist IQ numbers.

Myth: Some ethnic groups have genetically inferior IQ's.Fact: Poverty creates large IQ differences even between groups of the same ethnicity. Summary There are too many examples of discriminated minorities even within ethnic groups that score worse on IQ tests to believe the myth that the differences are genetic. Argument On average, African-Americans score 7 to 15 points lower than European-Americans on IQ tests. Many conservatives believe this is because blacks are genetically inferior to whites. But liberals believe that the IQ gap is the result of nearly three centuries of slavery and yet another 130 years of segregation and institutionalized racism. Even the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action have not eliminated discrimination against blacks -- they've merely reduced it somewhat. The result of this discrimination is that a disproportionate percentage of blacks work at lower-paying jobs, live in poverty and squalor, lack health care and child care, and do not receive the quality of education and personal development available to richer members of society. All these deprivations work to suppress IQ and educational achievement in children during their critical developmental years. Which viewpoint is correct? The answer becomes obvious when you compare the lower IQ results of other discriminated minorities around the world, many of whom are of the same genetic stock. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the Northern Irish. Even though they come from the same ethnic group, Catholics (the discriminated minority) score 15 points lower on IQ tests than Protestants. In the U.S., both Korean and Japanese students score above average in IQ tests; many scholars agree that, genetically, they are about as close as two ethnic groups can get. But the Korean minority living in Japan scores much lower on IQ tests than the Japanese. Why? The Japanese are extremely racist towards Koreans; they view them as stupid and violent, and employ them only in the dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs. Tensions are so great between the two groups that violence often erupts in the form of riots. In the U.S., Polish Jews arriving before 1910 were also perceived as stupid (for no other reason than they were accustomed to a different culture and spoke another language). So many "Pollock" jokes arose that Americans still tell them to this day, even if no one remembers why. The Polish Jews suffered heavy job discrimination and suspicion of criminality; not surprisingly, their children suffered low grades and IQ test scores. Today, of course, many Americans hold the opposite prejudice; Jews are viewed as the most brilliant of ethnic groups. Russian-born Jews who became American soldiers in World War I also scored low on IQ tests. So low, in fact, that Carl Brigham, the creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, declared that the results "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent." There are countless examples around the world where the dominant ethnic group scores higher on IQ tests than the discriminated minority, even when the two groups are of the same ethnic stock. Here is a partial list:
Group Differences Around the World (1)

High IQ/grades, Low IQ/grades,
Country Dominant class Discriminated class
----------------------------------------------------------
Australia Whites Aborigines
Belgium French Flemish
Czechoslovakia Slovaks Gypsies
Great Britain English Irish, Scottish
India Nontribals Tribal people
High caste Low caste
Israel Jews Arabs
Western Jews Eastern Jews
Brahmin Harijan
Japan Non-Burakumin Burakumin
Japanese origin Korean origin
New Zealand Whites Maoris
Northern Ireland Protestants Catholics
South Africa English Afrikaaners (Dutch)
United States Whites Blacks
Whites Latinos
Whites American Indians
Many conservatives argue that people who are smarter tend to go on to college more, and because whites are more intelligent than blacks, there are more whites in college. But regardless of the reason why this is so, it cannot be because of a genetic edge in intelligence. Consider the following information from the U.S. Census on the breakdown of white students who have graduated with a B.A. from college: Proportions of Americans who have completed college by self-identified ancestries (2)
French-Canadian 16.7 percent
Dutch 18.5
Italian 21.0
Irish 21.2
German 22.0
Finnish 24.2
Norwegian 26.0
Danish 27.4
Swedish 27.4
Scotch-Irish 28.2
English 28.4
Welsh 31.8
Scottish 33.6
Russian 49.0
All the above are at least third-generation Americans, which would give them sufficient time to join the college caste. Is it really reasonable to blame the above differences on genetics? Notice that the Scottish have nearly twice the college attendance as the Dutch, even though their ancestors lived right across the Channel… Most geneticists agree that there is far more genetic variation within groups than between groups. According to one commonly cited study, 85% of all human genetic variation is intra-population, 7% intra-race and only 8% inter-racial. (3) Return to OverviewEndnotes:1. Sources for each country are as follows: Australia: L.Z. Klich, "Aboriginal Cognition and Psychological Science," pp. 427-52 in S.H. Irvine and J.W. Berry (eds.) Human Abilities in Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Lesley Clark and Graeme Halford, "Does Cognitive Style Account for Cultural Differences?" Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 14 (September, 1983), pp. 279-96. Belgium: John Raven, "The Raven Progressive Matrices: A Review of National Norming Studies and Ethnic and Socioeconomic Variation in the United States," Journal of Educational Measurement 26 (Spring, 1989), pp. 1-16, esp. fig. 2. Czechoslovakia: Karol Adamovic, "Intellectual Development and Level of Knowledge in Gypsy Pupils in Relation to the Type of Education," Psychologia a Patopsychologia Dietata 14, 1979, 2:169-76 (translated abstract). Great Britain: Research by Richard Lynn discussed in Ciaran Benson, "Ireland's 'Low' IQ," pp. 222-23 in Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman (eds.), The Bell Curve Debate (New York: Times Books, 1995). India: Caste differences - J.P. Das and Amulya Kanti Satpathy Khurana, "Caste and Cognitive Processes," pp. 487-508 in S.H. Irvine and J.W. Berry (eds.), Human Abilities in Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Sohani Das, "Level-I Abilities of Socially Disadvantaged Children: Effects of Home Environment, Caste and Age," Social Science International 10, (1994), 1-2:69-74; Sohani Das and Brahmananda Padhee, "Level II Abilities of Socially Disadvantaged Children: Effects of Home Environment, Caste and Age," Journal of Indian Psychology 11, (1993) 1-2:38-43 (abstract); Tribal differences - Anita Gupta and Qamar Jahan, "Differences in Cognitive Capacity among Tribal and Non-Tribal High School Students of Himachal Pradesh," Manas 36, (1994), 1-2:17-25 (abstract);. Israel: Arabs - Kugelmass et al., "Patterns of Intellectual Ability"; news item that, in 1992, 26% of Jewish high school students passed matriculation exam versus 15% of Arab students - Jerusalem Reports, January 12, 1995; cf. Lieblich et al., "Patterns of Intellectual Ability." Eastern Jews - Gross, Cultural Concomitants of Preschoolers' Preparation for Learning"; Yehezekal Dar and Nura Resh, "Socioeconomic and Ethnic Gaps in Academic Achievement in Israeli Junior High Schools," pp. 332-27 in Nico Bleichrodt and Peter Drenth (eds.), Contemporary Issues in Cross-Cultural Psychology (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1991); Brahmins - Radhe Shyam, "Variations in Concentration of 'g' Level Abilities among Different Groups," Journal of Personality & Clinical Studies 2 (September, 1986), pp. 123-26 (abstract) Japan: Burakumin - A. Shimahara, "Social Mobility and Education: Burakumin in Japan," pp. 327-356 in Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu (eds.), Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrants and Involuntary Minorities (New York: Garland, 1991); Koreans - Yongsook Lee, "Koreans in Japan and the United States," pp. 139-65 in Margaret Gibson, op cit.; George DeVos and William Wetherall, Japans Minorities (London: Minorities Rights Group, 1983). New Zealand: John Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste:The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Ross St. George, "Cognitive Ability Assessment in New Zealand: Some Remarks," New Guinea Psychologist 3 (August 1971), pp. 42-46. Northern Ireland: Richard Lynn et al., "Home Background, Intelligence, Personality and Education as Predictors of Unemployment in Young People," Personality and Individual Differences (1984), 5:549-57. South Africa: J.M. Verster and R.J. Prinsloo, "The Diminishing Test Performance Gap Between English Speakers and Afrikaans Speakers in South Africa," pp. 534-60 in S.H. Irvine op cit. United States: Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Also, for Native Americans - Avery Church, "Academic Achievement, IQ, Level of Occupational Plans, and Ethnic Stereotypes for Anglos and Navahos in a Multi-ethnic High School," Southern Journal of Educational Research (Summer, 1976), pp. 184-201. 2. U.S. Census data reported by Andrew Hacker, "Caste, Crime and Precocity," p. 105 in Steven Fraser (ed.), The Bell Curve Wars (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).3. R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon J. Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (Random House, 1984).

My Venezuela trip cut short.

I got an email telling me that my father is gravely ill back in New York and so I am catching a plane and going back. Marbella and the kids will stay behind.

I´ve become a bit familiar with a few small towns here in Carabobo State and also had a couple of nice beach days. We took a trip to Campo Carabobo which is a park/ monument on the site of the decisive battle that sent Spain packing and led to the independence of what then was Colombia, which included present day Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. We had a guide who is a very knowledgable young soldier in the Presidential guard and he was most pleasant to me and my family. we then went to the aquarium in the city of Valencia and saw a show of a group of Amazon/Orinoco dolphins. We also caught a scene on our video camera of two of them doing what comes naturally. Life goes on.

I regret having to leave so soon, having to miss the baptism of my God Child, a major reason for the voyage.

Venezuelan people are open, friendly and giving even when they can't afford to be. I hope to be able to return within less than a year for another visit. Lots of people have told me that their house is my house and I believe them.

Red Tape in the new Venezuela, a comparison of here and there.

I don´t have a lot of time here in the cybercafe and so I will make this short and ad more later.

I´ve been in Venezuela a few days now, not on an ordinary tourist type itinerary since we are staying with Marbella´s people in Carabobo State. We had a lovely day at the shore and yesterday we went into town. (I had told you that I am in Valencia, not that I lied but I´m in a suburb of Valencia whose name I forget.) Marbella had long ago lost her Cedula, whih is a sort of universal ID card or social security card. We were looking around the neighborhood where our soon to be God daughter will be baptized and I noticed parked near the town square a van of the MisionIdentidad that had a 1-800 phone number on it. We never needed to use it because right in the town square there were tables set up with computers and friendly young staffers guarded by a soldier who didn´t have a gun that I could see and they were getting people their lost or changed Cedulas right there on the spot, no charge, no muss, no fuss not much bother. Marbella had feared this process, feared standing on endless lines, being sent hither tither and yon, like the offices of the old Venezuela, or many in the US.

This put me to remembering how around twelve years ago I was an aging taxi driver seeking more stable and safe employment, and how I had to jump through hoops to get a replacement of my DD214, the document that told the story of my one year, eleven months, and twenty-nine days of honorable sevice as a conscript in the Army of the United States between July 1967 and July 1969. I´ll go into this more later but it was frustrating, insulting and almost too late for the application deadlines I was facing, although I had budgeted three months to get this done.

Anyhow, Marbella has her Cedula, we´re on track to buy a modest house that we can expand, and who knows? It could be that in a year and a half or so I will be coming to you as the Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In Carabobo.

Anyhow Merry Christmas, have a good Channukah, KWANZA and a Happy New Year to you all.

Hello, from Venezuela

Marbella, the kids and I left New York on Wednesday night and had a turbulent flight that took off around three hours late. We arrived in Venezuela early in the morning and went through customs fast and with no problems. We were met by members of Marbella´s true family, people who befriended her when she needed them and who befriend her still. We spent the first two days at a hotel not far from the airport, near a small beach. I have a case of a bad head cold that has gotten worse and has left me bed bound for a while, coughing a lot.

Right now I´m in the city of Valencia which is around eighty miles from Caracas which I went through Thursday night by car driven by a friend. Caracas is a big city that is alive at night. It has lots of advertising billboards, bright lights, night clubs and traffic.

I understand that over the past year the Caracas stock exchange values have more than doubled. It seems pretty plain that there is a lot of money sloshing around. What is new now is that a large part of the wealth is going for social uses and directly to the poor. Illiteracy has been reduced to two percent of adults from forty percent in 1998. Millions of people are getting their first real medical attention. Hunger and dire poverty are greatly reduced. There is construction everywhere.

My unofficial mother in law was able to buy a pretty little apartment near a beach by home baking and selling arepas on the streets. The home where I am staying now is owned by a family that sells dog food and other consumer items out of their home and it is quite more of a home than I could ever have bought either as a child protective worker or as a taxi driver in New York. We have a lovely view of mountains that probably would make this a million dollar home in Westchester County if Westchester County, comparable to a view of the hills that line the Hudson River valley. I am pretty sure I could live here without too much convincing.

Last night I caught a small part of a speech by Presdient Hugo Chavez. I don´t have much to say about the politics of it I want to tell you that Presdident Chavez speaks slowly, deliberately and in language that even I can grasp in the original Spanish. My command of Spanish is simple. I was able to communicate with Spanish speaking people whose homes I visited as an ACS baby snatcher and find out things like the schools the children went to, their ages, whether they had their vaccinations and so forth.

I see President Chavez as a patient and mild mannered teacher. I wish him and his country Godspeed in their quest for a human socialism of this time and age that has a new ethic. I hope that the opposition continues to behave responsibly as they seem to have been doing since they lost the recent elections and most importantly of all I want my country, the US, to accept the decision of the people of Venezuela to embark on their own path and to seek ways of living in peace with this new Venezuela that is coming into being.

Before I catch that plane...

I'm told that my family name Weixel is spelled as it is due to the decision of a clerk on Ellis Island long ago and that I have relatives who have the name Wexler. The story goes that there was a terrible argument between my paternal grandfather and his brother who had also brought his family to America (and who was dubbed Wexler on Ellis Island) and that all contact was broken off. Hence I do not know whether or not I am related to the author of the piece I recommend here, nor to the Congressman from Florida nor to other well known personages.

(My mother once told me that I am a third cousin to the notoriously corrupt former Taxi and Limousine Commissioner Jay Turoff, who was an Edward I Koch appointee, but I never met him nor received any favors from him.)





NCCPR Child Welfare Blog
Usually updated at least weekly, usually on Mondays
By Richard Wexler, NCCPR Executive Director


December 4, 2006

REMEMBER THE NEEDIEST! (OR THEY COULD WIND UP IN FOSTER CARE)

As the song says, it's the most wonderful time of the year! It's the time when child welfare agencies, which, during the rest of the year, insist they would never separate a family because of poverty, come clean and start encouraging reporters to write about the impoverished families they'll have to separate - unless readers make donations. And it’s the time when newspapers, which, during the rest of the year, dismiss the notion that poverty is confused with neglect, write stories about families at risk of losing their children solely because of their poverty – in order to get their readers to offer donations....http://www.nccpr.org/reports/blog.htm

Venezuela Bound

Well I'm headed South for the voyage of a lifetime (perhaps) to sunny red Venezuela. I'll be there for a few weeks and I do not know what sort of time or computer access I will have there. My wife Marbella and the kids have not been there in ten years and I know that there is a lot of catching up they will do. Depending on computer access and itinerary I'll keep in touch and possibly post from time to time. Hopefully my resident teenage technology experts will also show me how to post the videos we expect to make. That would be nice.

Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza, and Channukah to my readers.

Boycott Israhell

The Book Hugo Chavez Should Have Held Up

September 24, 2006 The Wisdom Fund



by Enver Masud
One in three Americans has serious doubts about the conspiracy theory offered by the U.S. government that 19 Arabs armed with box-cutters were responsible for the hijacking of four airplanes, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
A Scripps Howard poll found: "More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East".
Yet major news media refuse to investigate alternative hypotheses offered by dozens of independent researchers and groups. When they do report on them, they are dismissive of these hypotheses, but do not address the evidence offered.
Until last week, had I been asked where should one begin to examine the alternative hypotheses, and the vast amount of evidence available, I would have recommended "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" by David Ray Griffin, Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology.
Now I'm not so sure.
I have just finished reading a new book that claims, "9/11 was a 'false-flag' attack, orchestrated by forces within the U.S. government".
This attack was used, claims the author, "to launch the kind of 'clash of civilizations' that Samuel Huntington had predicted. As illustrated by the fact that all the countries on the Pentagon's hit list are predominantly Muslim, this war pits the predominantly Christian West (along with its ally Israel) against the Islamic world."
"One of the evils of this civilizational war," writes the author, "is that it has implanted in Western minds an association between 'Muslim' and 'terrorist,' so that Muslims tend to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent."
The author calls upon the church to reflect on the "truth of this thesis -- that 9/11 was a false-flag operation carried out by forces within our own government in order to advance the American empire." He urges them to reflect upon "the implication of this book's thesis" and suggests several courses of action.
For Muslim leaders who are genuinely concerned about their community, and for all Americans, the truth about 9/11 may be the most important issue of our time.
So where should one begin to examine the alternative hypotheses, and the vast amount of evidence available?
Read "Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11" by David Ray Griffin -- the book that Hugo Chavez should have held up during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2006.
--- General Smedley Darlington Butler, "'War Is a Racket'," 1933
Leon T. Hadar, "The 'Green Peril': Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat," Cato Policy Analysis No. 177, August 27, 1992
Enver Masud, "Deadly Deception, Pretexts for War," The Wisdom Fund, July 30, 2001
David Ray Griffin, "The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie," st911.org, 2005
Enver Masud, "What Really Happened to 7 World Trade Center?," The Wisdom Fund, April 17, 2006
Enver Masud, "FBI: Bin Laden Not Wanted for 9/11?," The Wisdom Fund, June 8, 2006
VIDEO: David Ray Griffin, "David Ray Griffin speaks in Den Sorte Diamant," Google Video, September 19, 2006
Enver Masud, "Fatally Flawed: The 9/11 Commission Report," The Wisdom Fund, October 12, 2006