China has an upcoming maglev train that will run at 373 miles an hour. By comparison, the United States increasingly looks like a country from an earlier age. Pop Quiz: Was this train engineered (a) by heartwarming, puzzled, oppressed, suffering, agonized minorities who ought to be making pizzas, or (b) by the brightest people China could find regardless sex, color, or “adversity quotient�? (If you choose (a) you are probably a Democrat.)

Diversity over Quality

Perhaps it is time to recognize the stupid as an ethnic group. They are the country’s largest voting bloc. They are hugely influential, having agendas, lobbies, and demands. They work tirelessly to put the cognitively undetectable into positions of power. Usually they succeed. They are the enemies of reason, the sciences, mathematics, schooling, high culture, thought, and recognizable grammar.

For example, New York debates eliminating the entrance test for the city’s elite high schools–e.g., Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant, and Brooklyn Tech. Mayor De Blasio, presumably preferring reelection to sanity, backs the idea. He knows the stupid can’t solve a quadratic, but they can pull a voting handle, at least with preparatory training.

The problem, see, is that the test selects only the incandescently bright, which of course is why it exists. This offends the stupid. Now it seems that the schools need really dim students, specifically HPOCs–heartwarming people of color–who can’t do the work. The idea is to make the schools Look Like America. Which it would, Which should be avoided at all costs.

Somebody should tell New York that elite schools are not playpens for the synaptically challenged–to put it plainly, the stupid. “Stupidâ€� is what exists when intellectual reach exceed intellectual grasp.

De Blasio wants entrance to depend more on factors such as “attendance, GPA, ethnicity, personal recommendation, and geographical locations,� none of which has much to do with academic capacity.

Actually, someone did try to inform the assembled pusillanimous asses. “But when a 12-year-old, Asian-American middle school girl spoke in favor of retaining the test—asking “If I work hard, shouldn’t I have a higher advantage than those who are just being lazy�—the senators were alert to potentially racially insensitive language.�

Video Link

The video is worth watching.

“Lazy,� you see, was thought to be a code word for blacks. Now, why did they think that? Is “stupid� a codeword? We could fall back on the reliable “differently abled.�

Personally, I don’t give a damn about racially insensitive language and neither should you. I don’t care what kind of kids get into Stuyvesant if they get there honestly. You want kids from the Tloxyproctyl tribe of the remote Amazonian rainforest? Fine. If they pass the entrance test. Lemurs? Tarsiers? No problem–on the same grounds.

Actually, the little Asian girl was being kind, or at least publicly cautious. She said “lazyâ€� instead of “stupid,â€� which of course she thought. It is what all smart students think when afflicted by affirmative action admits. Stupid is obvious. The stupid do not belong in a high school where a Mensa level IQ–about 130–is probably a lower bound.

Some stats: Mean SATs, Stuyvesant: 1470, mean math 760. These correlate with an IQ of 143.^:

De Blasio wants entrance to depend more on factors such as “attendance, GPA, ethnicity, personal recommendation, and geographical locations,� none of which has much to do with academic capacity.

The Asian child of course has an excellent point. Since she was chosen to speak to the assembled lickspittles, she presumably is radiantly bright and hopes to make the cut. Why indeed should she, smart, studious, potentially useful to society, be booted in favor of HPOC with his pants dragging around his ankles, just above his IQ? Why deliberately exclude the superior student, because she is superior?

If the new admission standards favored by official cretins are accepted, says a study, the Asian percentage will fall from 61% to 31% and the black and Hispanic rise to 46%, which would destroy the schools–the intention, I suspect. There exists not the slightest chance of finding so many qualified minorities. If they existed, it would not be necessary to lower standards to recruit them.

Maybe the racial admits would survive in a less challenging school. Stuyvesant is not a less challenging school. It is a place for very, very smart kids who will go on to CalTech and MIT and do things like neural networks and protein folding that most of us have never heard of. Allowing the stupid to cripple them out of envy and resentment is crazy. It is a crime.

And, worse, it is a mistake, China is not ahead only in fast trains, but in all manner of things, including five-G. Remember when America was the world’s technological leader? Did it get there by mooing about white privilege and dumb-ass reparations and give me this and give me that, give me, give me, give me?

The elite high schools draw heavily from National Merit finalists, the upper one-half of one percent of the population. (Stuyvesant has 141) They are wicked smart. They are also heavily Chinese. Do we want to replace them with academic disasters-in-waiting from sheer resentment?

Anybody with the brains of a goddam learning-disabled turnip knows what will happen. The HPOCs will fall to the bottom like anvils. One imagines this:

Teacher: “Chin Ping, given a composite function f(g(x)), the first derivative d/dx f(g(x)) is f'(g(x))⋅g'(x).�

Then: “Deewan, if Daddy Beaver has three sticks, and Momma Beaver has one stick, and Little Bitty Baby Beaver has two sticks, how many sticks….?�

Yes, this is cruel and exaggerated. It is also assured. The Affirmative Action Effect effect has been many times demonstrated. It is demonstrated every day in what were once universities.

Following this disaster the war drums will sound. Efforts will begin to drag the school down. Perhaps there will be remedial courses in differential equations. Then we will drop the wave equation from chemistry courses, although the Asian kids, and for that matter all who were admitted legitimately, could learn about probability densities while bouncing on a trampoline and listening to awful music. There will be calls for more-inclusive vector operators. HPOCs in the legislature will say that you don’t really use high-dimensional geometries in daily life. Anyway mathematics is just a tool of white supremacy. (But…but aren’t the Chinese people of color?).

Underlying the hissing and spitting about racism and sexism and thisaprivilege and thataprivilege is America’s profound resentment of superior intelligence. Allied to this is a venomous anti-intellectualism. Years ago I heard a kid in Alabama of perhaps twelve years express this succinctly: “You ain’t no gooder’n me!â€� Exactly.

Here is the foundation of American culture: envy. Historically whites have been more successful than blacks, men than women, Christians than Muslims, and the smart than the less so. The lower halves of these pairs now strive to pull down the upper halves. “If I can’t understand algebra, then nobody can study algebra.�

There is much to be said for knowing one’s place, one’s limitations. For example, I am smart enough to be a mid-rank journalist specializing in sedition, slander, and distortion. I am not smart enough for a doctoral program in astrophysics at MIT. This was doubtless an oversight by God, but there it is. I accept it, so I don’t try to push my way into MIT by political pressure. Consequently I do not have to sit in a classroom of the mathematically brilliant and feel like a idiot. I can do that in the privacy of my living room.

The sin of stupidity does not lie in low ability, for which no one is responsible, but in trying to hamstring the able and outlaw superiority. Which, as a country, we are busily doing.

News Flash: Harvard biology students say that the phrase “white corpuscles� is racist, and demand that it be changed to “indigenous peoples corpuscles.� The head of the Ethnic Studies department said he welcomed the move, and would appoint a committee of students to find out how to spell it.

Local Glimpses

Chapala malecón. Phredfoto

Write Fred at [email�protected]. Put the letters “pdq� anywhere in the subject line or your missible well be heartlessly auto-deleted.