Judging from numismatic evidence, Cleopatra was also, unlike Halle Berry,ummmm, errr,...... ugly.
She must have had one hell of a personality to get both Caesar and Antony. :-)
Posted on 02/06/2004 1:30:19 PM PST by presidio9
AMERICAN academic Charles Murray is a real trooper. It doesn't matter how many people call him a racist, Nazi-esque brain-weigher.
He keeps churning out books that aren't afraid to call a spade a spade and a nigger a nigger.
Oh, I'm sorry. Did I just say nigger? How scientifically incorrect of me. What I meant to say was "biologically inferior".
This was the thesis of The Bell Curve, which was co-written by Murray in 1994. In it he scientifically "proved" that African Americans were dumber than whites or Asians for genetic reasons.
So what if the IQ testing he used to measure intrinsic intelligence included questions on trigonometry? Knowing about computational geometry is something you're either born with or you aren't. It has absolutely nothing to do with your level of education. In fact the word on the street is that Murray's first words as a little white infant were "cosine ratio".
Back in 1984, meanwhile, the academic shock jock caused a similar outcry with Losing Ground, in which he argued that the US government should abolish social security payments to poor adults because it encouraged intellectually inferior single mothers to reproduce.
Welfare schmelfare. Let them eat crack.
Chuck's new book, catchily entitled Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800BC to 1950, unites his low opinion of women and non-whites into a single mighty raspberry.
In it, he proves – once again completely scientifically – that the only people to have ever achieved anything of significant artistic and scientific worth are dead white males.
While it's a bold (and no doubt unit moving) thesis, critics who have accused Murray of repeatedly parading ugly old prejudices in pseudo-scientific drag will have a field day with this one. Human Accomplishment relies on a geriatric 19th century statistical method known as historiometry, which involves counting words in reference books to see who gets the most mentions.
As a result, 97 per cent of Murray's Top 4002 are male Europeans and North Americans.
What he refuses to acknowledge is that history tends to be written by the victors: as long as deadish white males rule the world, their lives will be over-recorded at the expense of their underlings.
An SBS documentary on the clitoris that screened last Friday night offered a fascinating insight into the political exclusion of the clitoris from medical and scientific manuals right up until 1948 when it was excised from Gray's Anatomy, the surgeon's bible.
Anyone for a textual clitorectomy? Given our combined interest in competitive events and extreme prejudice, it's not surprising people are pitting genders and races against each other in order to make a quick buck.
But even the tackiest reality TV programs offer a level-ish playing field. In Bumfights, for instance, desperate hobos are only filmed fighting other desperate hobos.
Murray, however, doesn't care that some sectors of society might have had trouble curing diseases, inventing polyphonic music or writing Macbeth because they weren't allowed out of their kitchens or their leg-irons.
White men are the winners, he trumpets, followed closely by a cackled "na na na na na naa".
It's telling that his survey stops at 1950 – just before feminism and civil rights gave non-dead, white males more room to flex their scientific and creative muscle.
Also intriguing is the notion that coverage automatically equals accomplishment.
While coverage might mean you are genuinely accomplished, it could also mean you have a good spin merchant, own the publishing company or happen to be Kylie Minogue's bum. As Iraq's gigantic stockpile of WMD shows, column inches are not necessarily the best indicator of substance.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to use historiometry to prove that Charles Murray doesn't exist. I'm only going to use resource material written by Pakistani separatist lesbians, but I will make sure they're all familiar with the sine rule.
Mot really relevent to the Graeco-Macedonian period
... However, one would think that after ruling a nation for 300 years, they would not be able to consider themselved pure Macedonians...
The genealogy is fairly clear that they could
best that we could say is that she is a Greek/Macedonian that was born in Egypt (we know nothing of the mother)...
Not true: mother of Cleopatra (VII): Cleopatra V Selene, daughter of Ptolemy IX and Cleopatra IV
Cleopatra IV: daughter of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II
Cleopatra II: daughter of Ptolemy V and Cleopatra I (of Syria - another Macedonian ruling family)
But this contention belies her argument. She begs the question: How did white males come to rule the world? Why has so much power accrued to them? Why are they the victors?
This is the big conundrum that people who hate Western Civilization have: How do you explain its dominance while belittling it?
Most of them, like the author, just ignore the question, which is probably the best move. The most robust explanations have come from Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam.
The Muhammad/Farrakhan texts have lots of explanations for Western domination of the world, involving evil mad scientists and alien motherships. Which makes perfect sense to me. Because if you are not willing to concede at least some kind of superiority to the West, then you can only explain the last 500 years of history by resorting to science fiction.
But I will tell you what I do know: There were a few ringers in here. Not all of those photoed where 100% Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. My husband (and his bother and sisters) are half-Japanese, his mother is 100% Japanese and it is easy to spot the difference -- or the "pure from the semi-pure".
LOL! Or the Irish from holding a grudge!
You mean Geroge I; hence, the term "the King's English". George I and II were born and spend the greater part of their lives in Hanover. George III and his son George VI were born and raised, lived and died in England
This isn't true. Murray quoted a lot of other people's work with IQ testing over many years. He didn't do his own testing, at all, that I recall from the book. I do not know of any IQ tests that include anything like trigonometry. The ones I am familiar with, pretty standard IQ tests, include only general knowldege. Murray's work was based on the results of standard IQ tests, given by many other researchers, over many years.
Judging from numismatic evidence, Cleopatra was also, unlike Halle Berry,ummmm, errr,...... ugly.
She must have had one hell of a personality to get both Caesar and Antony. :-)
...he said while fervently pounding his chest.
I'm much more optimistic than that. We're probably more on a path towards a higher *mean* through cooperative learning, combined with higher *peaks* through our hyper-competitive capitalistic system.
So for me, we are taking a new, hybrid route...one that has never been seen before and one that will vastly outpace our competition worldwide (something that we've been managing to do for more than two centuries back to back).
For example, I didn't learn to read until I was 5. My daughter, on the other hand, knows the entire alphabet.
She's not yet two.
One of her "friends" can count to ten in three languages. Another of her two-year-old friends can precisely articulate the pronounciation, unprodded, of her parents' first and last names, her own name, her aunt, her uncle, and her cousins.
And this is in backwoods, rural Alabama. What's going on today in America is that there is a super-generation of children being raised who will dwarf the results of the education given to earlier generations of Americans.
Now factor in that we'll be living longer due to improved medicine and health habits, plus that in the next 50 years we'll be modifying our own DNA for even longer lives...and you'll quickly see that our children will have the advantage of learning from a lifetime of healthy, mature, well-educated adult parents...putting our children on a path never before seen.
A very good path, by the way.
Of course, that path is hard to see at the moment. It's always difficult to discern that you are *inside* a historical change, after all.
But the anectdotal evidence is there. Whether our children benefit from AI software running in biological interfaces, and/or that they benefit from enhanced mental capacity DNA, or other as-yet-unseen improvements is still open for debate, of course. Though no matter, it is clear that the benefits of superior education (read: internet, home-schooling, competitive educations, healthier parents, etc.) will be enough to raise the bar for the next generation.
That other improvements on top of those known factors *could* happen is just additional weight to my argument.
The Levites were spread among the other tribes as priests and teachers, making it look like twelve.
I would tend to think they couldn't have been black, though. They would have to look like the rest of the tribes. 
You can decipher a code because it's contrived, but you can't decipher a language because it's evolved (unless you have a Rosetta stone or a native speaker). That's why any significance can't be placed on the difficulty of a language versus a code.
That was the point of my question.
I meant: "I have found it while I was blindfolded."
(from across the room)
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