The Data Are In: Even American PhDs Are … Dumber

America, Education, Intelligence, Literature, Science, Technology

I’ve been saying it for years, based on my encounters with a relatively smart cohort, through this column. My husband, a South African PhD (received at the age of 24), has been saying it for a long time based on encounters in his field. Barely A Blog correspondent Myron Pauli, a physics PhD from MIT (of which he thinks poorly), has been saying it over these pixelated pages:

American millennials, in general—but even with masters degrees and doctorates—are unimpressive, to put it charitably. They do, however, score high in self-esteem, which is part of the problem. From a 2007, Ottawa Citizen article I wrote:

Paradoxically, while our high school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

The Washington Post cites a recent report by “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECDU.S,” according to which “millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet.”

Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality.

The “daunting” PIAAC Test showed that “U.S. millennials performed horribly.”

That might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not what we are seeing.”

By the way, note how forthrightly readers of the liberal WaPo discuss the well-documented racial differences in scholarly achievement. Alas, could the “dumbassery” documented in the WaPo article be manifesting in the reading and comprehension skills of its readers? For the article explicitly states that results were consistent across “class” and “race.” Yet many readers missed this crucial tidbit.

The information comes courtesy of Vox Day, who also quips as follows about the findings:

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about. As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

Presstitutes & Politicians: Seamlessly Unseemly

Democrats, Ethics, Media, Morality

As was noted in “Brian Williams: Member Of Media Circle Jerk,” America’s presstitutes are “no better than the lobbyists and the politicians they petition, they move seamlessly between their roles as activists, experts and anchors; publishers and authors; talkers and product peddlers; pinups and pontificators.”

And their wives follow the gravy train.

In the tradition of keeping you in the loop of the corrupt conflict-of-interest unseemliness that typifies the American media—I’m glad to report that Chris Matthews’ “queen” (no, it’s not Barack Obama) is running for office. The anchor promised that if Kathleen Matthews “runs for office her campaign will be covered fairly by the network.”

That’s not the point, pinhead: The point is that the male Matthews’ access has likely facilitated his wife’s access.

The queen of conflict on interest is Hillary Clinton (and the subject of this week’s column). Just one of her infractions had to do with enabling Anthony Weiner’s long-suffering wife, Huma Abedin, to get “status in June 2012 as a “Special Government Employee,” enabling her to hold down multiple jobs in the private sector while she also collected a State Department paycheck.”

Israel: Why So Safe

Crime, Israel, Neoconservatism, South-Africa

The positions advanced by the “American” Israel Firster, neoconservative fifth column are riddled with contradictions. On his Facebook Timeline, Jack Kerwick points to one of many such gaping inconsistencies.

Jack Kerwick: I don’t speak much of Israel. It’s just not one of my interests. But to hear some movement “conservatives” in the so-called “conservative” media speak, you’d swear that Israel is infallible, for never, ever, do they utter a so much as a peep’s worth of criticism of it. And any criticism aimed at it is abruptly dismissed as a function of “anti-Semitism.” Israel, we are incessantly told, faces an “existential threat” to its existence. But then such ardent Israel supporters as Dennis Prager and Mike Gallagher, while encouraging listeners to sign up for the trip to Israel that they will be hosting later in the year, swear that Israel is among the safest places on Earth, and certainly far safer than many AMERICAN cities. But I thought that it faces an “existential threat?” Can someone please tell me: What’s really going on here?

My reply:

The Israeli state protects its own, unlike the US. I suspect it’s because even politicians can’t emigrate with ease; and their kids must serve in the army as well. No exemptions. Israel, in fairness, is not like the US, where elites and dynastic families, as opposed to the natural aristocracy, run the show to their advantage. Moreover, crime rates are very low. Last I checked, for my book, death-by-murder rates in Israel were 3.7 per 100,000 for civilians only; 4.3 when soldiers were included. That is dazzlingly low—read “Exodus from SA to Israel”—a function, in part, of population composition; its homogeneity, etc., although this too is changing.

Media’s Hillary Straw-Argument Strategy

Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Republicans

Not for nothing are they called the Stupid Party. Republicans (at least someone is now copy-editing S. E. Cupp’s piss-poor prose, which has improved slightly) have fallen for what I suspect is not so much a deliberate tactic on the part of the liberal media, but a reflexive strategy:

Hound Hillary Rodham Clinton for lesser, technocratic offenses, allowing her to evade responsibility for serious crimes: the crime that was the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, for one. Benghazi is another.

Hillary Clinton, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom at the time, had clearly resolved to run the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, as one would an open community center. This was meant to signal that her war on Libya had been a success, when in fact Hillary’s adventure there had as much “host-nation support” as George Bush’s faith-based forays into Iraq and Afghanistan.

The hyperventilating over Hillary Clinton’s unorthodox email account is probably overblown and certainly suspect. Hint: Look at the many left-liberals leading the “charge” against the former secretary of state for conducting the affairs of state via a non-governmental e-mail address.

The New York Times, President Obama’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, CNN groupies Brianna Keilar and DANA BASH, who huffed:

I think concern is an understatement. There is a lot of fretting going on right now. I’ve been talking on the phone, I’ve been e- mailing with Democratic lawmakers, with other Democratic sources because, you know, she’s their horse. She’s it. And, obviously, a concern among Democrats has been about her, her baggage. There’s no other way to put it. And as Jake was just talking about with Chris, what this exposes isn’t just some troubles about these e-mails, but it took, maybe not unlike Mitt Romney and his 47 percent problem, that was a problem because it fed a narrative. And this feeds a narrative that the Clintons feel like they are above everything else. They can get around the laws, fair or not. Perhaps in this case it is unfair if we get all the information. That’s what Democrats are very, very concerned about.

And Ron Fournier of National Journal. He calls this email “scandal” “seedy, sanctimonious, self-important, slick.” Fournier is careful, however, to offer disclaimers.

I admire their intelligence and passion and empathy. They’ve [the Clintons] been good to my family. I’ve actually long thought that she has the potential to be a better president than he was.

Yes, major media are all part of one big “circle jerk.”

In any event, this line of attack on Hillary is not worth a straw. It lets her go scot-free for war crimes.