September 11 revisited: an essay

In my spare time I write. I have done it for many years and it is a way for me to rant and work out issues I have in my thick skull. Most of the time I write short stories but I also like to write essays on various topics.

On September 16th, 2001, still in shock from the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, I wrote an essay as a Humanist repsonse to the incident.

I felt that today, the 3rd anniversy of the attacks I would share that essay I wrote so soon after the event:

A big black smoking hole in one of the World Trade Center towers was the first scene I saw at 8:55 am on Tuesday September 11, 2001. Thick black smoke poured into the air. The reporters said a plane had crashed into the tower. At 9:03 am I witnessed, live on TV, a second jet come into view and plow into the other tower with a resultant explosion as thousands of pounds of fuel ignited.

“What the f***?” I remember saying while the commentators on the morning show were asking if they just saw what they just saw. They reran the video and yes it was a second jet crashing into the other tower.

For the rest go here: September 11: A Humanist Response

Why I can’t vote for President George W. Bush

Blurb from a new essay on my website Doug World!

I have decided that my vote will NOT go to George Bush. I will not vote for him and I am encouraging others not to vote for him. Of course one could say I am a just a liberal elitist who hates America, but I am not either of those things. In fact, my vote for the other candidate this year is not because Bush is a Republican. I am not voting for him because I love my country and I feel Bush’s administration is the one that is at odds with what America is all about.

Why I can’t vote for President George W. Bush

The Bell Curve: Science or Political Statement?

This essay was the result of a discussion I was having on an e-mail list in which I participate called Human_ism back, in 2000.

The person I was debating about The Bell Curve accused me of not reading the book as we debated the merits of it.

I had not read the book. I came to my views about it from articles I read about the book. So, to take that argument away from my opponent, I bought the book (ugh) and read it (My eyes! My eyes).

The conclusions I write in this essay are my own, after reading the book. I thought I had published this on my website but found out, when the discussion came up again recently, that I had not.

I have revised it a bit because some of my phrasing seemed a bit klunky but overall this is the final draft of the essay. — dlb

The Bell Curve: Science or Political Statement?

An essay by Doug Berger
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*Note* To save me some typing I used some abbreviations. TBC = The Bell Curve, H&M= Herrnstein and Murray (the authors), con/lib = conservative/libertarian

The Bell Curve is a controversial book that salted the wound between the “haves and have nots” and those that have and want to help the have nots. H&M have been called a lot of names from racist to bigot and their book has been trashed and supported by many well known scientists in the world.

That is what happens when a political statement is passed off as science. H&M basically showed the trends in IQ between classes of people, asserted that a large “underclass” will emerge, and offer “suggestions” to help deal with a lot of poor dumb people.

Is TBC racist? Are H&M racist? Are TBC implications as profound as Chester Finn said in “Commentary”. Hopefully H&M words in TBC can shed some light on those issues.

I should say now that I won’t be dealing with the nuts and bolts of the science in the book. There has been plenty of debate about that issue by people well versed in those fields [read the side note at the end of this essay]. This little essay will deal with what H&M says in the book as result of the science they present. TBC is really a conservative/libertarian political statement and an old one at that.

The book is long any contains a lot of statistics, graphs, and results. On the whole, for the intended audience, this is just filler. Based on a skim of the book, the words they use and the conclusions they draw, the intended audience seems to be white conservatives who have been fighting government social programs for 30 years for various reasons.

In the preface, one gets a sense of the initial bias H&M has going into the book. They say: “…They propose solutions founded on better education, on more and better jobs, on specific social interventions. But they ignore an underlying element that has shaped the changes: human intelligence….”

The inference for the reader is that the solutions proposed by “They” (social scientists, journalists, and liberal politicians) haven’t solved the problems of poverty and the underclass. One would seem to think that the problem can’t be solved due to dumb poor people who can’t be changed.

On page 64 H&M state the economic efficiency in business between high IQ and low IQ workers:

“Our main point has nothing to do with deciding how large the loss is or how large the gain would be if intelligence test could be freely used for hiring. Rather, it is simply that intelligence itself is importantly related to job performance. Laws can make the economy less efficient by forbidding employers to use intelligence tests, but laws cannot make intelligence unimportant.”

This is the primary premiss in the book. Intelligence is important to humans.

Then H&M spend a bulk of the book presenting evidence that low IQ is the majority of the nation’s ills and it is there where they get into trouble. It starts with how they present the argument. They start by only focusing on whites as an introduction then repeat their arguments using “ethnic groups”. H&M call the section “The National Context” and include evidence of the IQ differences between whites, blacks, and asians. Basically the reader is left with the conclusion that lower IQ is at the root of all our social ills like poverty and blacks have lower IQ than whites and asians have slightly higher IQs than whites. The dots that the reader then connects is that blacks are at the root of the social ills. They would have been more effective and less racist if they had kept their argument to ‘lower IQ is the root of social ills’ rather than bringing in the old worn ethnic differences – that blacks are lower than whites and asians are slightly above whites in IQ. They present a clever basis to justify arguments against government social intervention.

In the final sections of the book H&M examine some current solutions for poverty and how since the programs don’t match the IQ of the people it is intended to help, most don’t work. They also make a complaint about the “gifted minority” who they see as being left out. This is yet another con/lib argument made about education. It seems to con/libs gifted children are almost all white.

I did spot a glaring contradiction in H&M’s argument.

On page 54, H&M said adoption of children into better homes doesn’t improve the job status of those children in the future.

But in Chapter 17, they claim that preschool and Head Start programs don’t raise IQ. They claim that the only thing that seems to work, to the tune of a 6 point rise, is adoption of the child from a “bad” family environment to a “good” one.

In Chapter 18 they make an argument that since education can’t raise IQ, the government should support parental choice through vouchers, tax credits, or within the public schools. They also suggest that some funds that go to the disadvantaged should go to programs for the gifted instead. They make the claim that until the later half of the 20th century, educating the gifted was the chief purposes of education. They argue that education has been dumbed down for those with lower IQ and that puts our future in danger.

This is just a silly assertion on their part. The purpose of education, since our modern educational system began was to be able to make all students, regardless of ability or class status, productive citizens. An educated populous benefits the nation as a whole.

Restricting education to the gifted only, as H&M suggest, ignores the entire history of education in this country.

H&M then use the next couple of chapters to argue against Affirmative Action in education and the work place. They perpetrate the myth that some minorities accepted or hired due to Affirmative Action are not qualified for the school or job. They make that argument since they believe that IQ makes one qualified – not any education or training. They feel that poor dumb people are “naturally” unqualified.

In Chapter 21, H&M talk about the future problems that they think will happen if public policy is not changed in the way they suggest in the previous chapters. This basicially fans the flames of fear about poor dumb people multipling unchecked until they take over the world (or rather that is the sense I got from the chapter). Not only will we have scores of poor dumb people but we will have spent our precious tax money on those lost causes.

They saved Chapter 22 for more “suggestions” to deal with the “problems” outlined in the book and Chapter 21.

They suggest:

A wide range of social functions should be restored to the neighborhoods when possible and otherwise to the municipality.

Making it easier to make a living (less government rules)

Making it easier to live a virtuous life : Crime should be black and white. Marriage should be be restored to it is unique legal status.

Replace welfare payments with an alternative such as the earned income credit.

The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor.

The US should consider accepting immigrants based more on high cognitive ability (IQ).

H&M conclude TBC with a restatement of the con/lib argument that the government should deal with the “small” segment of the population (low IQ) who account for the “large” proportion of the social problems they outlined in the book, but the govt. should leave the rest of us alone.

Conclusion:

TBC is a political statement on public policy that has been heard from the con/lib camp for sometime. H&M talk about returning to local control, less regulations, get tougher on crime, protecting marriage, school choice, ending welfare, changing affirmative action, and restricting immigration. They base their conclusion on the problems that are rooted at those with low IQ, something they argue can’t be changed.

The inferences the reader makes in the IQ discussions are racist on the face no matter what H&M state explicitly. The audience of the book is white conservatives who all ready agree with their conclusions. The “evidence” then justifies their agenda. H&M could have made the same arguments without even dealing with genetics or race, but they did.

H&M don’t offer solutions for low IQ only to state that it is the root of all our problems and it can’t be changed. Since they also show that blacks make up the large portion of low IQ what is a reader to conclude? Murray states in the afterword that he didn’t think that race was a big deal in the book. Why then even mention it?

I am also bothered at the amount of space devoted to IQ when their conclusions and suggestions had nothing to do with IQ.

Is TBC racist? Yes, in that it goes into the IQ/race argument for no apparent reason especially when one of their concerns toward the end of the book was a rise in a white underclass.

Are H&M racists? In a general sense yes since they blame all current social ills on poor dumb people and the added racial argument just makes it more clear they are.

Are the implications of TBC profound? No. They just repeat what they themselves say is known but not talked about and their policy suggestions have been heard before.

Basically I think TBC is just another version of “Darwin’s Black Box” that tries and cloaks a political agenda in science. It tries to use science to prove its conclusions.
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[Side Note: I am not a science person. There has been some heated debate among the science community about the validity of H&M studies. This fact is true. The Bell Curve was never peer reviewed. That is it wasn’t published in any science journals where accepted science come from.

H&M found a publisher and sold it straight to the public much like the scientists supporting the Intelligent Designer idea of Creationism.

Here is one example of a rebuttal of H&M’s research. More can be found at the link at the end of the example — dlb

“The remaining studies cited by Lynn, and accepted as valid by Herrnstein and Murray, tell us little about African intelligence but do tell us something about Lynn’s scholarship. One of the 11 entries in Lynn’s table of the intelligence of “pure Negroids” indicates that 1,011 Zambians who were given the Progressive Matrices had a lamentably low average IQ of 75. The source for this quantitative claim is given as “Pons 1974; Crawford-Nutt 1976.”

A. L. Pons did test 1,011 Zambian copper miners, whose average number of correct responses was 34. Pons reported on this work orally; his data were summarized in tabular form in a paper by D. H. Crawford-Nutt. Lynn took the Pons data from Crawford-Nutt’s paper and converted the number of correct responses into a bogus average “IQ” of 75. Lynn chose to ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt’s paper, which reported that 228 black high school students in Soweto scored an average of 45 correct responses on the Matrices–HIGHER than the mean of 44 achieved by the same-age white sample on whom the test’s norms had been established and well above the mean of Owen’s coloured pupils.”

http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/debunk/dBell.htm

Reason behind this Blog

Some may wonder why I started this Blog.

Well, it is because I got pissed at the antics of two people who were elected to serve the residents of Hancock County, my home county.

I should be up-front and tell you I don’t live there now, but my family still lives there and I read the Findlay Courier on a regular basis. Findlay is the county city.

The two representatives are State Sen. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon and State Rep. Mike Gilb, R-Findlay.

Their public statements concerning the proposed Ohio state budget just smacked of the hypocritical public policy that has infected the nation since 2000.

After an article in the Courier concerning Rep. Glib, I had to write a letter to the editor to complain. I was lucky that it was published. The version I sent them is below. When it was published they edited it a bit from the original. Unfortunately published letters aren’t posted on their website:

[Letter to the Editor of the Findlay Courier – sent 6/10/2003 and published 6/13/2003]

Dear Editor,

I am writing to complement The Courier’s coverage of the on going debate over the upcoming State budget from a Hancock county perspective including the article on State Rep. Mike Gilb published on June 9th.

It is telling how the two people elected to represent Hancock county in Columbus, State Sen. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon and State Rep. Mike Gilb, R-Findlay, are so obsessed with cutting taxes that they refuse to see the revenue problems all local governments are having in these economically slow times and instead base their position on irrational political motives.

Wachtman and Glib want to see education and Medicaid cut. They both failed to stand up for local governments when it looked like their state funding was going to be cut. In fact Wachtman said on April 8th that he supported making some cuts in local government funds.

Both have repeatedly said that government spending is out of control when the opposite is true. The state has already cut the budget in the current fiscal year as well as cutting taxes for at least the past 4 years and revenues have been off since 2001. Where have Wachtman and Glib been for the past 4 years?

Even Hancock county, consistently one of the better local economies in the state, almost had to severely cut its Sheriff’s department and has trouble replacing old bridges and if there are further cuts in state funds as well as a continued soft economy it might get worse. Not to mention the proposed cuts in funds for libraries and parks that will hit the average people hard.

If it is getting difficult here imagine what it is like in the rest of the state. I am sure Wachtman and Glib haven’t.

They sure have ignored the 81% of Ohio businesses who pay $2000 and less in corporate income taxes each year. The current budget bill does nothing to resolve that revenue problem.

Hancock county needs rational representation.

Originally posted on the blog “Hancock County Politics Unfiltered”

I am going to try

I am going to try this story out it. It isn’t fiction but it is long for a Blog.

An Old Diary

I was looking through some papers the other day and I came across a diary I kept when I was in college. I was trying to keep my brain limber because I wanted to be a writer.

I read through the old notes of my life. Boy it all seems silly now. I didn’t hold anything back back then. All my dreams and all my horniness is there in black and white.

There must have been notes on a dozen different women I had met in my time at my dorm that year. I didn’t write anything real filthy but I pointed out who I liked and who I really drooled over.

There was the girl who flirted with me mercilessly. I think she did it to get me to blush and it worked every time.

Then there was the Jewish girl who had way too much energy for me sometimes. I still think a lot of Jewish girls are hot but the one I wrote about rocked my world. We even had a writing class together. I think she might have been interested in me because when it came time to workshop one of my stories she asked if one of the female characters was her. Or she could have been full of herself.

Then there was the girl who had the perfect timing to pop into my room when I was drunk and acting silly. Messing that up kind of bothered me for awhile.

One long log was about a cute girl who worked on the dorm staff who I had a huge crush on. I write about the time I sat in the lobby waiting for friends to go to dinner in the dining hall and I closed my eyes to rest. A short time later someone kissed me and I opened my eyes and there she was smiling – melting my heart completely. I asked what that was for and she said that she just wanted to kiss me awake. *Sigh*

There was also a run down of other girls who lived in the dorm who I thought were hot but I didn’t really know them personally. They were just good to look at.

The largest number of pages was devoted to the one woman who captured then destroyed my heart on October 9th, 1987.

I fell in love with her the day I met her the first day new residents could move into the dorm. Her smile blew me away and she had the same kookie sense of humor I did.

For weeks I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, and I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. I also did stupid stuff like skip class so I could have lunch with her and her friends and skip studying to hang out in her room to talk. I stopped going to class just to be ready if she wanted to talk or go shopping or anything.

One day she tells me on the sly that she just broke up with a guy she had been seeing and that she was interested in my friend. She wanted me to tell her any secrets I knew about him. My ethics were stronger than my heart and I told her the truth about him – nothing negative – that he had a girlfriend back home (which he did).

I had seen enough episodes of “Square Pegs” to know that if I didn’t act fast she and my friend would hook up and my soul mate would be gone. As luck would have it she tried to get together with my friend and he rejected her because of the girlfriend back home. I still needed to keep her from finding anyone else.

On that fateful October day I took her into one of the empty study rooms and confessed my love for her. It was hardest thing I ever did. Even harder than doing the door drill in football practice. To put one’s heart out in the open is not as easy as it looks in those cheesy teen movies.

She smiled, cleared her throat, and in her pleasant voice she said she was flattered by my interest and my honesty but because of the recent break up and rejection she had decided to give up men.

I was crushed, depressed, and melancholy for months afterward especially after her man moratorium ended after only a month and she hooked up with another friend of mine who was unattached.

Our relationship was strained after she rejected me. I kept hoping she would change her mind so while I backed off we did get together from time to time as friends. It was very tense because I was still in love with her. I heard from one of her friends that the woman felt awkward as well when we were together. I not only lost a soulmate, I lost a good friend.

Well I actually lost a couple of friends that year. I was pathetic being depressed and talking to them endlessly about my loss. I had never gone through the trama of losing someone I truely loved. Eventually we drifted apart. When I asked what was wrong, one of them was pretty blunt about getting sick of hearing about my troubles.

The next year I came back to the same dorm but most of the people in my life the previous year had moved on. The guys were living on South Campus as was the girl I was still hooked on. But I was getting better.

One day while I was with my buddies we ran into her at her new dorm. She invited me to visit another day alone since she was on her way to an appointment.

I was nervous going there alone, after our past history. I made a mix tape for her. She accepted it and we chatted. I knew right then something was different. We weren’t the same people from the year before. Our interests had diverged and it became hard to hear her ramble on about her new life in the school year.

She did admit that she didn’t mean to hurt me and I boldly explained it was ok. My guess is my friends kept telling her how much of wreck I was for months. I appreciated her concern and I left that day on good terms.

Although we said, upon parting, that we should get together again, we didn’t. She went on with her life and I went on with mine. I heard, several years later, from a mutual friend, who I did keep in touch with, that she got married. I was happy for her. I still had my old diary.