College exit exams as siege engines for the storming of the Cathedral

Don't look now, but there are more than a couple cracks in one of the Cathedral's foundational pillars, and some of them have progressed well beyond the hair line stage:

Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test [CLA+] that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students' real value to employers.

The test is administered on a 1600-point scale, a la the old SAT scoring system, because the public is familiar with it. Parenthetically, and purely speculatively, I suspect the test's non-profit creator, The Council for Aid to Education, chose not to employ a 2400-point scale to match the current SAT scoring system as a means of signalling that this test should be taken more seriously than the softer new SAT is and should instead be treated like the old SAT was.

When everyone starts noticing that Harvard students, scoring around 2100 on the SAT in their junior and senior years of high school, consistently score around 1400 on the CLA+ as seniors in college, while state university students who scored 1500 going in regularly score 1000 going out, the gig is going to be up: Top universities don't churn out the smartest students because of the educational environments the students are exposed to at said universities, they churn out the smartest students because they admit the smartest students to begin with. It's an enormously costly, wasteful, anti-natal signalling charade, and the combination of both pre- and post-testing has the potential to go a long way in exposing it as such.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale aren't shelling out the $35 for their graduates to take set for the test upon graduation:

The CLA + will be open to anyone—whether they are graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs—and students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and Marshall University in West Virginia.

Too much strain on the Ivies' endowments, surely. Better to use those war chests to set the Council for Aid to Education up for a Griggs v. Duke Power fall to shutter the whole approach before it is able to shed too much of the light of truth on all those self-serving pretty egalitarian lies. Indeed, the WSJ article reports on some people in industry who perspicaciously see this as a quicker, cheaper, and more reliable proxy for IQ testing (which they'd love to employ ubiquitously but know that doing so is fraught with all kinds of legal peril) than the current stew of collegiate resumes and GPAs is:

HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not "be able to write well or make an argument," he said. "I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume."

While members of the Dark Enlightenment like to ridicule educational romanticism for being the reality-denying the monstrosity that it is, there are surely improvements to be made around the margins, not to mention optimal and sub-optimal methods of delivering material to students hoping to internalize it. In other words, pedagogy isn't pure junk.

This post-graduate testing should provide a legitimate, broad-based measure of how schools are doing. If Onett U is taking in 1500s and putting out 1100s, Twoson taking in 1800s and putting out 1200s, and Threed taking in 1500s and putting out 800s, we have reason to suspect that Onett is doing something right, Twoson is run of the mill, and Threed is infested with zombies. Prior to post-graduation testing, the consensus in this hypothetical scenario would be that Twoson is the 'best' school in Eagleland, when coupling a little empiricism with HBD-realism reveals that in fact Onett is employing the most epistemological approach.

Spanish beats out others including Urdu, Cantonese, Gaellic for the #2 spot

Pew reports "Spanish is the most spoken non-English language in U.S. homes". In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning and is projected to set in the west later this evening.

In seriousness, predictable social data like these are valuable, even when they're not 'controversial'. But while Pew is deserving of admiration for its acts of data-reporting commission, it often disappoints by way of omission.

Case in point in this very report, conveniently enough. After spending a seemingly inordinate amount of time on the tangential non-Hispanic Spanish speaking population in the US (numbering 2.8 million, compared to the country's 34.8 million Hispanic Spanish speakers), the report closes by informing us about English language proficiency rates of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish in their homes (2.8 million) and of non-Hispanics who do not speak Spanish in their homes (roughly 290 million):

When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English “very well”, 11% say they speak English “well”, and 9% say they speak English “not well” or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it “very well”, 2% who speak English “well”, and 2% who speak English “not well” or do not speak English.

Leaves something to be desired, doesn't it? We get nationwide English language proficiency rates but with the glaring exclusion of the 34.8 million Spanish-speaking Hispanics residing in the US, the figure most readers--especially Dark Enlightenment types like us--are presumably the most curious about.

I've asked the authors to provide a similar breakdown of English proficiency rates among Hispanic Spanish speakers in the US. The comment thread is quite manageable and it looks fairly interactive between readers and the reports' authors, so feel free to ask for the same data I've asked for. Strength in numbers!

Doing the jobs cypress sticks won't do

Prior to the easy-money fueled housing bust, Steve Sailer noticed a contemporary reliance on "human directionals"--people hired to walk around twirling signs at intersections in an effort to direct traffic to whatever it is said directionals are being paid a couple of bucks under minimum wage in cash to promote. Steve presciently realized we were moving diametrically away from Ben Franklin's promised land. And organized labor, instead of trying to turn the caravan around, was driving the oxen full speed ahead. Uh oh.

Comprehensive as he tries to be, though, Steve has consistently failed to mention the working-conditions angle in this whole story. See, standing up for long periods of time while being subjected to the elements is physically taxing and potentially hazardous to worker health. With this concern as their guiding light, labor leaders in several communities across the country (like my own, incidentally) pushed for legislation forbidding the use of free standing marketing materials. Wooden and metal posts had been taking all the jobs that hard-working, new dues-payers should have been doing, while these same dues-payers were being exploited in inhumane conditions. By disallowing the use of stationary signs, businesses had little choice but to look to the menial backbone of 21st century cutting edge technological progress to fill the void.

Before:

Child slavery

After:

The American Dream

Things just keep getting better all the time.

Race and anarcho-tyranny

My knowledge of the world beyond my own front yard being inchoate at best upon Sam Francis' passing, my fellowship with the term "anarcho-tyranny" is superficial, but the contemporary popular portrayal of Racism in America seems like one illustration after another of soft anarcho-tyranny in action. Without delving into the well of mendacity that George Zimmerman has been dunked into head first, held underwater for over a year, consider a couple of other extremely high profile examples:

- Multibillionairess Oprah Winfrey claims, after the fact, that she was denied access to a $37,000 handbag by a store clerk because said clerk, who is white, is racist. There were apparently no other witnesses to the exchange and the putative racism was implicit, as Oprah didn't even accuse the clerk of saying anything explicitly racist. In this she said, she said story, the Establishment took the side of rich and famous media mogul and pointed both barrels at the hapless, powerless prole, operating on the Occident's time-tested rule that the accused must always be presumed guilty until proven innocent. It reacted with an outpouring of sympathy for the hardship Oprah suffered alongside its many lamentations over the fact that, even in places acculturated in cosmopolitanism and even in situations in which world renowned people are involved, irrational bigotry and ugly stereotypes still lurk.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of whites and especially Asians aspiring to be admitted as students at exclusive colleges are denied enrollment at the schools they aspire to because less capable Hispanic and especially black applicants are given preferential treatment at the former groups' expense.

While the latter evinces a blatant disregard for isonomy--which is, perhaps ironically, the foundation upon which our Proposition Nation is built upon--the triviality of the former, even if veracious (which is questionable, as Oprah happens to be promoting an almost too perfectly germane black grievance porn movie at the moment), is well captured in the words of the Derb:

The less blacks have to complain about — and for us working stiffs, it's hard to see that a person with 2.9 billion dollars in the bank has anything to complain about — the more they want to whine and guilt-trip us non-blacks over tiny or imaginary slights.

It would be interesting if an organization like Pew, which is honest enough to conduct this sort of thing, surveyed the public's level of awareness of the perceived snubbing Oprah received and compared it to awareness of widespread favorable admissions sun people receive at the expense of ice people who are denied them. More familiarity with the tyranny than the anarchy, I'd bet.

- A clown in flyover country is figuratively crucified and literally banished for clowning around:

At the rodeo here last Saturday night, a clown wearing an Obama mask stood on the arena’s dirt floor, propped up like a straw man with the appearance that a broom stick was going up his backside. A second clown called him “ya big goober.” Before letting the bull loose to charge at the clown with the Obama mask, the second clown provided live narration over the loudspeakers: 

“Obama, they’re coming for you this time.”

“He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha.” 

“Yahoo! We’re gonna smoke Obama.”

The president of the Missouri NAACP accused the first clown of committing a hate crime.

Tyranny first, again. Poor form on my part, I know.

Anyway, the anarchy stretches from sea to shining sea, encapsulated in FBI crime statistics showing blacks to be some 40 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are to commit violent crimes against blacks. Blacks are even 220% more likely to commit federally designated hate crimes than whites are. Blacks are more likely to identify racially than are whites, and they are more likely than whites are to be influenced in how they cast their votes by the racial compositions of the political candidates they are voting for. Indeed, ornery rodeo clowns are the nation's most pressing problem!

I don't get no

++Addition++South Park's treatment (thanks to Dan).

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... Posthumous respect? Nope, he's still not getting any. A mostly forgotten movie from two decades ago in which he starred presaged the next big 'civil rights' movement in the contemporary West, the crusade for sheilas to be treated as though there isn't a package between their legs. Or maybe to be as though a package has always been there, I forget. In any case, I'm of course referring to Rodney Dangerfield and Ladybugs. The relevant synopsis:

Chester is desperate for a promotion at work. To impress his boss, he claims to have been a good soccer player in his youth and is badgered into coaching a girls' team called the Ladybugs. Dragging his assistant along as assistant coach, Chester figures the gig to be easy as the Ladybugs, sponsored by his company, are a dynasty. Unfortunately, only one player has returned. The team, which includes the boss's daughter, Kimberly, are clueless, make a dreadful start to the season, and the boss is less than impressed. 

In his personal life, Chester is engaged to Bess, who has a son, Matthew, from a previous marriage. Matthew just happens to be a great athlete, but poor grades get him kicked off the soccer team. Chester invites Matthew to watch the Ladybugs practice and to get some tips. Matthew has a crush on Kimberly from school and it is partly due to this that Chester persuades him to dress like a girl and play for the team under the name Martha. 

With only Chester, Matthew and Julie knowing the secret of Martha's identity, the team wins the rest of its games to get to the championship game. Kimberly makes friends with Martha, not knowing "she" is in fact Matthew.

The closing scene in this corny movie from the early nineties demonstrates far more perspicacity in identifying where this strange road leads to than the entire NYT editorial board or our most preeminent legal mind does. As Chester prepares for the first game of the season in girls softball, we see a bus full of cross-dressed male recruits eager to alternately ogle and smash their hapless female opponents.

This is a PG-13 parody of gender bending. It potentially gets a lot more gratuitous. As a commenter at Steve's astutely pointed out:

This problem will be self-correcting. Jocks will start loudly proclaiming their female identity and demand to shower with the cheerleaders. Progressives will quietly throw the fight then.

He's probably being overly optimistic in that assessment, but if you thought traditional, middle American cultural sensibilities were burned and pillaged in same-sex marriage's march to the sea, just wait for what the tranzis sympathizers have in store.

That said, athletics are where we find the most auspicious ground upon which to join combat with the Cathedral's Amazonian termagant forces and their eunuch auxiliaries. HBD realists are always up for a tough fight in the court of public opinion, and the Cathedral doesn't deal lightly with heretics. But the post-Christian West has another religion whose powers of captivation are even stronger--sports. If there is an ideal field for us to join battle on, this is it. Mainstream writers--even ethnically Jewish ones!--like Jon Entine and David Epstein are able to discuss athleticism and HBD in almost unveiled terms because sports competitions are designed to pit athletes against one another on a level playing field, and, because, well, Americans love sports. It's about the only shared cultural experience left in the polyglot country we used to think of as united.

Consequently, they're own lying eyes tell them a lot--it's harder to blame structural/institutional/socio-economic/cultural isms for west African black dominance in speed positions that are especially reliant on fast twitch muscle fibers like cornerback than it is to explain away why the children of wealthy blacks perform worse on standardized tests than the children of poor whites do and how putative white racism is squared with apparent yellow favoritism.

Authentic Dotte

++Addition++Thanks to Jokah's astuteness, I've included graphical representations of two data points that I hadn't previously specified (though I did use them in the regression calculations). Additionally, I confused the axes and inadvertently left out Turner high school in the initial post. The former was an easy cosmetic fix (but nonetheless the fix to a sloppy error on my part).

As the most integrated public high school in the two county region, I was worried Turner's inclusion might contradict the editorial thrust of the post and make me look like a clown for being so hasty. Fortunately for my credibility, Turner's results are exactly in line with the data from the other 22 schools. The correlation between a school's Ice people percentage and its combined math/reading scores remains an astounding .93 (p = .0000000001, three times more certain than before!). Here is the updated graph:

Sumner, the selective and best performing Sunny school under consideration, is regularly held up as some sort of educational polestar for the state of Kansas. Wikipedia relays some of the accolades the school has enjoyed in recent years:

In the May 16, 2005 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Sumner Academy was named 75th in the "100 Best High Schools in America." This was the second time Sumner Academy was placed on the list. In 2004, Sumner Academy was listed in 99th place. As of 2008, Sumner Academy was named the 183rd best high school in America by Newsweek Magazine. As of December 2009 Sumner Academy was ranked the 69th best high school in the nation, reported by U.S. News & World Report, making Sumner the only high school in the state of Kansas to make the top 100 list.

It does well for having a student body that is mostly comprised of NAMs, but it does considerably worse than any of the largely white high schools in the area, even the the ones with the dumpiest reputations.

In MG's world, Sumner's relatively strong performance would indeed be a potential cause of celebration (though upon closer inspection it would almost certainly become clear that said relatively strong performance is primarily a result of skimming the cream of the surrounding NAM crop and consequently not something that could be replicated over any geographically concentrated area). In reality, though, few people are aware of how underwhelming Sumner's test results are. From all the hype I've heard, I must naively confess to being surprised at the scholastic results once I actually started digging. I've lived in this area since elementary school and have been aware of Sumner's existence and putative profile for at least a decade but never dug any deeper than the second-hand media reports on the school's purported success. I subconsciously assumed it was roughly on par with the leafy, suburban high schools in southern Johnson county. Shame on me for being fooled again. The count is well beyond two, by the way!

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I'm getting provincial here, but at the moment location, location, location is what I'm focused on. Anyhow, the graph* above serves as a fairly representative microcosm of how things are outside of my neck of the woods. The graph above shows how the 23 public high schools in the two most populous counties on the Kansas-side of the KC metro area fare on scholastic testing** (x-axis) as well as the percentages of students in each high school who are Ice people. The correlation between a high school's Ice people percentage and its amalgamated math/reading score is a staggering .93 (p = .0000000003). That is, 87% of a school's performance can be predicted by the racial composition of its student body alone.

Race matters, oh how race matters. As our fearless leaders keep telling us, we really do need to have an honest conversation about it. It's long overdue.

The most conspicuous outlier, Sumner Academy, is a magnet school in the Wyandotte district that pulls the more promising kids out of the clump of schools huddled at bottom left of the graph. Even the Dotte's wheat is less luscious than Joco's chaff, though.

Lest I be fingered as a prestidigtator artificially creating a yin-yang contrast by taking one of the most affluent counties in the Midwest and putting it up against one of the Sunniest ones, the correlation between Ice % and reading/math average scores in the Johnson County schools alone--those, with the exception of Bonner Springs, populating the top right cluster of the graph--is still a rigorous .82 (p = .0002).

Parenthetically, it should also be noted that Ice, in this case, refers overwhelmingly to non-Hispanic whites, while Sun is almost equally split among blacks and Hispanics with "other" (primarily Native American and 2+ races) making up the remaining fraction. The mean composition of the high schools under consideration is 62.6% white, 15.2% black, 14.5% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian, and 3.6% other.

Mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-millionaires running Microsoft, and the rest of Silicon Valley's executives in a post like this might seem utterly orthogonal at a stretch, but upon closer inspection, tangential doesn't even do such a mention justice. See, by loaning their prestige and pocket books to the crusade for open borders, the patriots at FWD.us are able to ensure a dumbing down of the nation's students--and, by extension, its schools--thereby giving an ever-thickening air of legitimacy to their lamentations about having a suboptimal domestic labor pool from which to hire from. Virtuous circle, that!

* Taken from an old version of excel and dressed up in... Paint. Apologies for lack of aesthetic crispness.

** Calculated by averaging the percentage of students who are deemed as being up to standards (ie, proficient) on the math and reading sections of the 2011 Kansas State Assessments.

^ For the locals, I am aware that, geographically, the farther south one travels, the Icier the population tends to become and that, conversely, the farther north one heads, the Sunnier the natives are. Directions in the graph's title are meant to be normative rather than directional.

Destiny is child

++Addition++Do read Matt's comment.

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Heartiste points to the writeup of a study by the tenaciously dissident Satoshi Kanazawa claiming to show an inverse correlation between IQ and maternal urge in women. In so doing, the former references a finding from the GSS showing that while fertility trends among women in the US are dysgenic when IQ is used as a measure, men appear to be treading water:

Smart and over-educated lawyercunts are a dying breed. Literally. I believe it was the Audacity of Huge [link mine, though presumably intended by that wily devil] who once tabulated and correlated GSS data to find that smart men have more children than dumb men, while smart women have fewer children than dumb women. I call this the “Alpha Male-Cute Secretary Assortative Mating” theory. You may know it better by its street handle: Female hypergamy. And… wait for it… it will be the salvation of the white race in multicultural miasmas.

Here's the post he had in mind, and the relevant graph (apologies for the atrocious aesthetics, but blogger was having a hell of a time uploading graphics at the time):

We've seen, from several different angles, that educational attainment specifically--rather than the intelligence it tends to correlate with--is where the robust inverse correlation with fecundity makes its bed.

The takeaway message for sharp guys with pessimistic views of the future of our collective demography, and consequently the outlook for modern Western Civilization as we know it, is to not make the perfect the enemy of the good and refuse to join the melee because to follow the aquila would entail condescending to fight alongside allies they perceive to be beneath them.

That thinking is suicidal. Demography is destiny. Find an effeminate, trustworthy, fun, sweet, mildly submissive girl desiring children to start a family with. If she's as sharp as a tac, great. As long as she's not an utter dunce, though, you'll still be striking a direct blow against the Idiocracy.

Incidentally, that's the only way such a blow can be struck--those like Heartiste who are sparring in the Circus Maximus and those of more modest abilities who are doing so in a wooden arena in Illyria alike are merely intellectual auxiliaries in the war against the Idiocracy. They may spur others to action, but they cannot win the actual battles on their own. We need you!

As go the sand states

My house sold this weekend. The offer was about 5% higher than I--in my more optimistic moments--had thought the place could conceivably fetch, let alone would actually bring. 

It's not all jubilation, though. It requires that I cover all closing costs, home insurance for a year, and that I leave my major appliances in the house for the buyers to use. The owners-to-be have a common Hispanic surname (that ends in a "z") and are receiving a loan from the USDA. (Yes, apparently the department of agriculture is in the business of making home loans, it's news to me as well. This looks like a portal for the sort of loan my buyers are receiving.) 

What's the required down payment for their loan, you ask? Why, zilch, of course--as in they're receiving 100% financing and putting zero percent down. My humble abode is no mcmansion, but we're talking about Kansas here. It's right smack in the middle for houses in this state. 

Clearly my buyers, presumably meat packers, fruit pickers, or laborers in some other agricultural capacity, don't have a penny to their names, but why should that stop them from living as well as--or, more likely, better than--I have been living? It's the American Dream, after all. I'm a sucker for not realizing how much more pleasant it is to build at sea level and live on the beach than it is to construct something way up in the mountains, without a mortgage even.