Free Republic

Controversy as Oregon couple are forced to give up their children to social services after they were deemed 'not intelligent enough' to care for the babies. Amy Fabbrini, 31, and Eric Ziegler, 38, had both of their children taken into foster care, the youngest right after he was born in the hospital. After taking a required IQ test, Ziegler scored a meager 66 and Fabbrini a 72. The IQ of the average person ranges anywhere from 90-110. Domestic abuse and neglect were not factors in the custody case, but didn't need to be, according to a report. Fabbrini and Ziegler...

A Virginia high sent a disturbing letter to parents and students announcing they would be selecting students for Advanced Placement and honors classes at least partly based on skin color, a concerned parent told Fox News. Martin Luther King, Jr. must be turning over in his grave. A parent forwarded me a copy of the letter sent from John Handley High School in Winchester. “Through our collective work, advanced classes such as AP and Honors will have proportional representation,” read the letter. “Proportional representation is 40% White, 35% Hispanic, 12% African American, 10% mixed race.” The letter went on to...

The University of Iowa’s student newspaper has announced the discovery of a special privilege which intelligent people acquire as an accident of birth. This new privilege — called “cognitive privilege” — functions in essentially the same way as white privilege. The Daily Iowan revealed the discovery of this new privilege earlier this week. Garden-variety white privilege “is an important topic that deserves a public discussion,” the op-ed on “cognitive privilege” explains, but it is also “prudent to at least mention the wider concept contained therein: that of privilege itself.” Privilege in general is “the receipt of certain benefits wholly through...

Suppose it’s true. Suppose that, at the end of the day, people of African descent have lower IQs on average than do other groups of humans, and that this gap is caused, at least in part, by genetic differences. Of late, since Charles Murray was all but physically assaulted when he tried to speak at Middlebury, the issue as to whether his claim (with Richard J. Herrnstein) in The Bell Curve that blacks on average have lower IQs, and that it’s “highly likely” that genes play a role, has entered the public discourse once again, in part through a podcast...

New research from The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality says black girls as young as five are seen as "less innocent" than young white girls and need less protection. Black Americans in Washington, DC, gave their reaction.

Question: “My wonderful wife is pregnant with our second child and I’m very excited to have another kid. As I ponder fatherhood, I get so scared that my kids might feel the same darkness and loneliness I felt when I grew up. I’m afraid that because I haven't really addressed the pain of my childhood, that history will repeat itself and I’ll be like my father and my kids will cry as I did. What can I do, to make sure that if my kids feel pain, it’s not because their father? How do I break the chains of bitterness...

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Murray A. Straus about the prevalence, social causes and scientifically proven negative effects of spanking. Dr. Murray A. Straus is Professor of Sociology and founder of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Straus is also the author of "The Primordial Violence: Spanking Children, Psychological Development, Violence, and Crime."

This Conversation recorded in 1971 between President Nixon and his advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan focuses on an article read by the two men regarding IQ. Nixon was preparing to "close the gap" between high-performing and low-performing students in schools (which has cost billions) and wanted to have as much information before he made his decision. The two men, in the recording do use the slur "eskimos" to refer to Jewish folk, but only in the sense that they say "eskimos" have a higher IQ than Caucasians, so not much of a slur. I just love listening to recordings like this,...

We are seeing a rise in crime and long term disability claims because our ever more complex society does not have ways to keep those with lower IQs engaged in the workforce.

President Trump "has a staggering IQ of 163, making him the second smartest president in history, behind John Quincy Adams at 169," says the latest issue of THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER. The magazine is providing Americans with details about our new leader even as the outdated MSM denigrates him with every newscast. A special investigation and analysis of President Trump says he is a highly focused, driven and charismatic genius who thinks outside the box! Keep in mind that his detractors also denigrate the millions of Americans who voted for him and who are turning off their cable boxes. Trump's flashes...

Scientists say the discovery could explain the "birth order effect," when children born earlier in families reported higher wages and education levels later in life. Economists from the University of Edinburgh, the Analysis Group and the University of Sydney closely reviewed data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than 5,000 children were monitored from pre-birth to age 14, each undergoing assessments every two years. Tests included "reading recognition, such as matching letters, naming names and reading single words aloud and picture vocabulary assessments."

We will never understand liberals and progressives until we recognize that they often see reality as a social construct subject to being challenged and changed. For example, throughout the world, boys and girls have different toy preferences. Typically, boys like to play with cars and trucks, whereas girls prefer dolls. Liberals explain this with the assertion that boys and girls are socialized and encouraged to play with different types of toys by their parents, peers and "society." Growing scientific evidence suggests that toy preferences have a biological origin. Even studies of male and female primates find that they exhibit similar...

Well, apart from the Gulf states – thanks in large part to coming from such a low base that even subcontinental coolies are an improvement over the natives. Otherwise, the cognitive impact of immigration – at least as proxied by the differences in performance on the PISA tests between the national average, which includes immigrant children, versus only native children – is almost entirely negative for its supposed beneficiaries across the entire world. Even those few countries with expressly “cognitively elitist” immigration policies see only the most modest of benefits: Singapore: +0.7; Canada: -0.1; Australia: -0.2. Otherwise, the only countries...

Asians in America faced heavy discrimination and animus in the early twentieth century. Yet, after institutional restrictions were lifted in the late 1940s, Asian incomes quickly converged to white incomes. Why? In the politically incorrect paper of the year (ungated) Nathaniel Hilger argues that convergence was due to market forces subverting discrimination. ... Despite this intense discrimination, Asian (primarily Japanese and Chinese) incomes converged to white incomes as early as 1960 and certainly by 1980. One argument is that Asians invested so heavily in education that convergence has been overstated but Hilger shows that convergence occurred conditional on education. Similarly,...

A new study suggests that people are are overweight tend to be less intelligent than those who are not. According to the study, people who are overweight have less grey and white matter in key parts of the brain, meaning their brain develops an “altered reward processing,” effectively meaning they lack the ability to control their eating. The results were extracted from “very thorough” brain scans of 32 people from Baltimore....

President Obama cautioned Black Lives Matter activists against going too far, saying that attacks on police and overheated, irrational rhetoric undermine their cause. "Whenever those of us who are concerned about failures of the criminal justice system attack police, you are doing a disservice to the cause," Obama said in remarks to reporters in Spain, where he is traveling. "Any violence directed at police officers is a reprehensible crime and needs to be prosecuted," he said. Even rhetorically, if we paint police with a broad brush, or "say things that are stupid or imprudent," it risks losing ground for the...

There is much talk about “the talk.” “Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in...

The Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson will address the 405-605 Patriots meeting on Tuesday night, June 21, at 7PM. It is held in the Rush Park Auditorium, 3001 Blume Drive, Los Alamitos. Jesse will be talking about the problems with Black Lives Matter and his new book: The Antidote: Healing America from the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimhood. He will be entertaining questions after his speech. Prior to his speech, a short presentation on our Constitutional Heritage will be given, as it is in every meeting. The 405-605 Patriots may well be the best attended patriot/tea party group in...

The Shanghai Disney Resort, the first Disney park in mainland China, is scheduled to open on June 16, but tourists apparently can’t wait another month to do what tourists often do – behave badly. Disney Town, located adjacent to the park, opened to the public on Monday – China’s Labor Day – and, according to the South China Morning Post, the behavior of visitors left a lot to be desired.

We’ve long known of the persistent and troublesome academic gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in public schools. We’ve long understood the primary reason, too: A higher proportion of black and Hispanic children come from poor families. A new analysis of reading and math test score data from across the country confirms just how much socioeconomic conditions matter. Children in the school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts. Even more sobering, the analysis shows that the largest gaps between white...