You can always learn stuff from the comics.

Read it.

Even the smartest people can be fools.

Ain’t that the truth.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

The picture worth a thousand words.

Antiplanner speaks for all right-thinking people.

So what’s so humiliating about Japan’s maglev? As an American, the humiliating thing is that there are other Americans who fall for the argument that because some other country is wasting a hundred billion dollars on a transportation system that goes half as fast as America’s planes, we should waste at least that much money here. That only goes to demonstrate the failure of America’s educational system to help people gain the analytical skills they need to avoid being taken by con artists.

Ponder the fact that a stupid person’s vote counts just the same as yours. Be thankful that things aren’t as bad as they could be.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist:

Examples of labor-saving technology that were created before the Industrial Revolution include the wheel, the lever, the pulley, the bucket, the barrel, the knife, the domesticated ox and horse, the fishing net, and moveable type.  Examples of such technology created after that revolution are even more numerous; they include the harnessing of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, the assembly line, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, refrigeration, and, of course, today’s many IT marvels.  Yet history knows no example of the introduction of labor-saving technology that caused permanent and widespread increases in involuntary human idleness.  And at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, all advances in such technology in market economies have been followed by improvements in the living standards of the masses – including (contrary to Ms. Tufekci’s suggestion) those advances introduced during the past few decades.

I certainly hope he’s right.

Read it.

Perhaps they realized it was a really bad idea. That’s just a guess, of course.

Sarah Hoyt ‘splains it all to you.

Since Hillary Clinton announced, the feminists of the United States have undoubtedly been getting set to be outraged at things. We’ll see dozens of new wars on women, but we’ll have to check the news routinely to find out what they are because women are so oppressed in the United States that it takes whole academic departments and quite a lot of grant money to find examples of it. I figure this may be a good time, then, to talk about one of my personal pet-peeve memes, the microaggression.

Read it.

Speaking of consumption, any traveler along Interstate 40 or the old Route 66 knows about the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, which has the legendary contest where you get a 72-ounce steak for free if you can eat it (and all the sides dishes too) in under an hour.  A shockingly high number of people have accomplished this feat.  But none greater than the 120-lb California woman who last week succeeded in eating three of the Big Texan’s 72-ounce steaks—in 20 minutes.

Freeberg nails it once again. A slice:

The nonsensical complaint: A grievance, from or on behalf of some designated-oppressed-group, and something passive-voice. Women are “seen” in such-and-such a way, gay people are “seen” like this or black people are “seen” like that. Or, men and women are expected to be such-and-such a way by “society.”

Question that cannot be answered: If this complaint were restated in active-voice, what would be the subject? Who’s doing the seeing? Who’s doing this expecting?

Why we don’t get an answer: Because then the mission of reform would become finite rather than infinite. The subject would become an object. The mission of reform would also become testable, because the reform would have to do with changing the state of an object, and it would have to do with actually fixing a problem, like catching the shark in Jaws. And, it would be practical to ask bothersome questions like “Well, have you got it done yet, or don’t you?”

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. They’re good people; go give them some money.

Little Folkies

Little folkies on the hillside, little folkies made of ticky tacky
Little folkies, little folkies, little folkies, all the same
There’s a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

All the people who are folkies all know how to say “diversity”
But they all think in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there’s artists, and there’s journalists and there’s teachers of social sciences
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

They believe the TV newscast and the newspaper editorials
But they never believe conservatives so they can’t be taken in.
Now they don’t all wear gray ponytails and they don’t all wear Birkenstocks
But they wear them on the inside in the boxes in their brains

And the houses look like summer camp and they all buy organically
And they don’t have any children, except okay, maybe one.
There’s a Green one and a Pink one, an old Red one and a Rainbow one,
But they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

Steve Sailer has some ideas on the subject.

The population of the African continent in 2013 was 1,111,000,000, so one million migrants would be less than one out of a thousand. In other words, there are lots more where those came from. By the way, the UN forecasts that the population of Africa by the end of the century will be nearly four billion.

A simple reform would be to modernize the refugee application system to the 21st Century and run it solely over the Internet. You can apply from your local Internet cafe in your own country, and if you are Einstein, Solzhenitsyn, or Coetzee, you get in. If you aren’t, too bad, stay home. If you show up without your application being already approved, you get a year in a work camp and a one way ticket home.

This would stop the drownings quick.

The current refugee system is like if you showed up at Harvard in person and demanded they let you be a student, so they say, well, we’ll take a couple of semesters to process your application, so in the meantime here’s the Harvard course catalog!

Funny how Harvard doesn’t work that way.

Read it.

Makes you wonder why the states run by Democrats never thought of it.

Read it.

Forget personal freedom, it’s the toilets that are the important thing.

Read it.

Got it covered.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Privacy is imperative because political workspaces are radically different from those of writers. The chief requirement of any email server or device for example, is that it must be able to disappear. The primary tool that public figures use is what might be called the moveable stage. The moveable stage is designed to provide a highly controlled viewpoint of the celebrity to convey the intended effect. In place of a laptop computer sending data into the Cloud,  politicians like Hillary have a portable movie set to broadcast messages to the media universe.

Like the peripatetic software developer who today works from Mexico and the day after tomorrow from Southern Italy,  modern politicians now work on location, broadcasting their screeds from the Temple of Hercules or the Brandenberg Gate. They orate before fake styrofoam Greek pillars or from the Chipotle restaurant in the company of “plain folks”.

Plain folks are the only people who actually live in the real world.  And they pay dearly for this misfortune. The degree to which the creators of memes and ideas now influence the world would have shocked Percy Shelley who extravagantly claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.   Never in his wildest dreams could he have foreseen that workers in the realms of “reason and imagination” could gain such power. Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter who majored in creative writing,  is  a deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration.

Perhaps this is dangerous.  Poetry and imagination were meant to give us a glimpse into possibilities but never to provide quotidian reality.  Formerly we delved into books to visit castles in the air, but we walked out the door to go to work. It’s sad to think that crummy walk-up apartment in New York with a laptop on a mattress now should be essentially equivalent to a high windy tower in Italy, or the back of a garbage truck as a workplace.  One hankers for the days when there were actual nymphs and spirits in the woods with whom we could talk and whose cellphones we didn’t confiscate.  But perhaps those days are gone, and even the nymphs speak into their lapels.  The world is the poorer for it.

Read it.

At the top of our list is a group of cities that have long been identified with tech growth. Our No. 1 city, Austin, Texas, boasts the strongest expansion in tech sector employment of any of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas from 2004 to 2014, 73.9%,  as well as 36.4% growth in STEM jobs, the fourth-highest growth rate in the country. Coming in a close second is Raleigh, N.C.,  part of the renowned Research Triangle region, home to outposts of multinationals like Bayer, BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Cisco. The Raleigh metro area posted a 39% increase in STEM jobs from 2004-14, the fastest growth in the nation, albeit from a smaller base than many of the other biggest metro areas.

This is what happens when geeks have adult supervision, i.e. a state government that refuses to enact their groovy-granola fetishes into law and restricts them to what they do well.

Read it.

On this 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn performs a public service today rebutting the relentless liberal/“Progressive” attempts to pry Lincoln from the Republican Party and claim that Lincoln, were he alive today, would surely be a Progressive Democrat:

Read it.

If it isn’t, it ought to be. (Roper: “That’s an ugly word.” More: “It’s an ugly thing.”)

While the “war on women” is a lie, “social justice warrior” describes the average leftie exactly, and it deftly exposes their most egregious conceit, that they are all non-violent activists that just want peace and justice.

I can understand that the average social justice warrior would prefer to be called a “social justice advocate” or maybe just an “activist,” losing the “social justice” part. That’s because “social justice” has an odor to it.

This is nothing new. Once upon a time “communist” was a wonder word. Then it got a bad odor, and lefties started to call themselves “socialist,” and when socialist went bad they became “social democrats.” In the U.S., the bright young things of the 1890s called themselves “Progressives.” But by 1920 the word had a bad odor and so Progressives rebranded themselves as “liberals.” That lasted for about half a century until the day that Republican politicians discovered that an easy way to win elections was to chant “liberal, liberal, liberal” at their Democratic opponents. So the Soros-funded lefties of the 2000s called themselves “progressives.”

This is such a wuss-fest.

Read it.

What could go wrong?

Read it.

Have you ever marveled at how your abusive wife, girlfriend or ex is able to do and say the most hurtful, underhanded and contemptible things and then portray herself as the innocent victim? Have you ever wondered how she is able to convincingly accuse others, usually her victims, of the abusive behaviors and attitudes of which she is actually guilty? Wonder no more, the answer may be DARVO.

Dr Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD of the University of Oregon identified DARVO in the 1990s at the tail end of the repressed sexual abuse memories hysteria. In spite of its dubious origins, DARVO is a helpful concept with broader applications than Dr Freyd seems to have originally intended. Freyd writes about DARVO in conjunction with her work on betrayal trauma, which I discuss on the original Shrink4Men blog. According to Dr Freyd’s webpage:

“DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility or even blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

DARVO seems to be a combination of projection, denial, lying, blame shifting and gaslighting. Dr Freyd notes that other observers have identified the same phenomena using different terms. My male clients experience this behavior when they try to hold the abusive women in their lives accountable. It also seems to be common behavior in most predators, bullies, high-conflict individuals and/or abusive personality-disordered individuals. DARVO especially seems to occur in high-conflict divorce and/or custody cases.

A better description of the ‘progressive’ mentality I’ve never seen.

Read it.

Sometimes someone from the Filling sneaks into the Washington Post.

Yesterday, in a somewhat useful exercise, my Democratic friend and sometimes sparring partner Carter Eskew compiled a “Republican Nutcase Check List” for Republican presidential candidates to take. (If you want to see how you’d rank, you can take that survey here.) With his quiz as motivation, and in the same spirit, I wrote a corresponding checklist for Democrats in general, given that their presidential candidate bench is so weak.

In order to slant his test and present Republicans as Democrats want them to be, Carter had to scour some remote corners of the country in search of narrow positions and specific incidents. Here, I’ll stick pretty close to what passes for “mainstream” Democratic positions in our nation’s capital.

This is called the Democratic Whackjob Survey, and I propose that all Democrats take it. There are eight questions and the answers will be tallied to give you a score on the whack-o-meter.

…

If you answered “yes” to 8 out of the above, you’re a whackjob who’s probably permanently in a purple haze, camped out in a public park with a Unibomber-inspired protest sign nearby. And if you are not currently working for the Obama administration, working on a Democratic voter-registration campaign or doing commentary on MSNBC, you should look into those opportunities.

Read it.

I have this image of Jimmy Swaggart shouting at a bunch of hairy elephants in a huge tent. But that’s me.

Read it.

Traffic crashes are a cause of ill health, impaired living or curtailed lifespan. Does city growth, in its sprawl-type outward expansion, increase the incidence of fatal and injurious crashes? This factor is the latest addition to numerous attempts to pin a correlation or causality linking traffic accidents with any number of causes.

I can think of no suburb that is as scary to drive through as Chicago, Boston, or New York.

Read it.

Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”

What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.

But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the word: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” reads one tip in his 1971 “Rules for Radicals.”

Yet adopting Alinsky’s tactics may not in this case fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Reminder: You don’t have to be a Little Guy to be a Radical, just as you don’t have to be poor to be a Democrat.

Read it.

And no doubt they are racist, white, Republican, bigot, homophone microbes, at that.

Read it.

That sort of sums up the whole of the last six years.

Read it.

So some folks who have signaled their anger online that places like Memories Pizza have declared a right to discriminate are also angry that these businesses are now getting rewarded for it. That’s what happens with a culture war, folks. You send up your signals and they send up theirs, and on and on and on. People did not want Memories Pizza or Arlene’s Flowers to be punished for the principles they hold, and so they were willing to use their financial backing to counteract the actions of those who do want to punish them. Ignore this signal at your peril. Regardless of whether people want to see pizza parlors or bakeries or florists turning away gay couples getting married, there are enough of them offended by the idea of driving them out of business to counteract these shaming and boycotting efforts. And it goes both ways. How many gay or gay-friendly folks have made sure to do businesses with companies who supported them and had been targeted by the religious right back in the 1990s or so?

In other words, don’t start a pissing contest unless you’ve got the bigger dick.

Read it.

Amen to that.

Read it.

Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they’d be much better off. It’s just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did on the eve of the Great Depression.

“I am all for improving education,” Summers told Wonkblog earlier this month. “But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.”

Summers and his collaborators, the Upjohn Institute’s Brad Hershbein and Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland, calculated what would happen if they could wave their magic wands and give a college education to about 6.8 million American men who don’t already have one. Relatively speaking, that’s an enormous increase — about the same proportion as the increase in the overall share of the population with a college degree since 1979.

Steven Hayward at Powerline thinks like a lawyer.

• If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church asks for a bakery to create a cake with their motto “God hates fags,” will the baker be charged with discrimination if she refuses?

• If a baker agrees to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but as matter of practice includes the slogan “God hates fags” in, say, Aramaic script on the side of the cake, wouldn’t this be protected speech and/or “expression” under the First Amendment?

• Just curious: why hasn’t anyone been to a Muslim bakery to press this newfound frontier of anti-discrimination?  Ah—Steven Crowder has.  Will the Human Rights Campaign Fund descend upon Dearborn, Michigan, tomorrow about this outrageous injustice?  I’m not holding my breath.  Video is about 5 minutes long:

The Other McCain muses.

An astonishing phenomenon of the 21st century is the perversely ironic way in which the Information Age has actually increased ignorance. With all the knowledge in the world just a quick Google search away, many people have somehow managed to seal themselves off inside cocoons of confirmation bias, where they only encounter narratives that fit their preconceived personal prejudices. It is not simply a matter of people avoiding opposing opinions, but of filtering out facts in such a way that their worldview becomes wholly unrealistic. Paranoid hostility flourishes inside these online bubbles where kooks cluster, affirming their shared delusions and piling up “evidence” to “prove” their false beliefs to each other.

…

This raises the question of whether “Islamophobia” actually exists. The term “phobia” denotes an irrational fear, yet the history of recent decades offers enough rational basis for concern to make the word “Islamophobia” inherently problematic. One may perhaps distinguish between two phenomena — a vigilant concern about dangerous radicalism, on the one hand, and a simple-minded bigotry on the other — but making that distinction does nothing more than to say, “Ignorant people are ignorant.” To say that fair-minded and educated people should condemn ignorant prejudice isn’t controversial. What is controversial is to assert that “Islamophobia” is a more important problem than the actual dangers posed by radical Islam.

The flat statement that “Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body” is a falsehood, and to then throw in “the suffering of countless victims of . . . baseless hatred” as the emotional freight of an argument requires us to ask, “Are the ‘victims’ truly ‘countless’? Where is the evidence of this ‘suffering’?” In order to sustain such claims, it will not do to cite a list of incidents or anecdotes. No one disputes the fact that ignorant hateful people do ignorant hateful things.

What is in dispute is whether “Islamophobia” — specifically, the concern about Islamic terrorism — has generated such a spree of anti-Muslim violence and harassment as to produce “countless victims.”

To the extent that there are any Muslim victims, they are typically the victims of other Muslims.

Read it.

Read it.

Who knew?

It looks like there are two ways to get countries to reduce their dependence on the American military umbrella. One way is the calculated, tough-love approach: point out that to other governments that they’re capable of fighting their own fights, set a timetable for them to assume responsibilty for defense matters, and stick to it. The other approach is to act so nuts and untrustworthy that allies sense an implosion of crazy and reluctantly take on new responsibilities. This second technique seems to be working miracles in the Middle East as some sort of unified Arab self-help emerges from an anguished watching of whatever the hell it is the United States is up to.

Let’s try NATO next. Imagine how much economic trouble Europe would be in if they had to pay for their own national defense against Putin.

Read it.

This is news? What else is he going to do with it, take it with him? He’s homosexual, so it’s not as if he’ll have any kids to leave it to.

This is the most non-new news I’ve come across in a long time.

My suspicion is that it’s a pre-emptive strike against some Social Justice Warrior group who think he’s not gay enough.

Read it.

A special service from Voice of the Crust the Atlantic to make sure that low-information voters stick to the Narrative and vote for the Peter Pan Party.

Read it.

Now that’s comedy.

Read it.

Well, they already rent their vaginas — it’s not that much of a stretch.

Read it.

When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

The Other McCain adds a dose of reality to the soup.

A California jury on Friday rejected the claim by Silicon Valley executive Ellen Pao that her rights had been violated by her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. And this verdict is a teachable moment.

The modern concept of employee “rights” is antithetical to economic liberty. Employment in a free-market system is always a matter of voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. You need a job. You apply to an employer. Among many applicants for the job, the employer chooses you. This is the basis of a contractual agreement: You do the work, the company pays you. It’s simple.

If you subsequently become dissatisfied with your job, you can quit and go work someplace else. If the company becomes dissatisfied with your work, they can fire you. This is also simple.

Oh, but you’ve got “rights,” you say. So if you don’t get a promotion you want, or you don’t think you’re treated fairly otherwise, you’re going to file a discrimination lawsuit.

Might as well get the word LOSER tattooed on your forehead.

That would certainly make it easier for the rest of us.

Winners don’t file lawsuits. Winners don’t whine about “discrimination.” You know why? Because winners win. Even if, in the course of a lifelong career of winning, the winner suffers an occasional defeat, the winner just grins and moves on with his life. Company X doesn’t treat him right? They don’t appreciate his valuable skills? Fuck Company X.

The winner will find a job at Company Y or, perhaps, he’ll walk out and start his own company. Life’s too short to waste time working for a bunch of losers who don’t appreciate quality work.

If Ellen Pao was such a hotshot in the venture capital field, don’t you think there would have been other companies eager to hire her away from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer? It’s a very lucrative field, and if Ellen Pao was such a goddamned rising star, it stands to reason that some other firm would have jumped at the chance to hire her. So if she felt she was a victim of discrimination, all Ellen Pao would have had to do is to talk to somebody at a rival VC company, “Hey, Kleiner passed me over for promotion. You guys hiring?” Boom — they’d leap at the opportunity to have this young genius Ellen Pao on their payroll.

That’s didn’t happen, did it?

Hell, no, it didn’t happen, because Ellen Pao is a loser.

In the Good Old Days, such women were despised as adventuresses, which has gone out of fashion, although the closely-related gold-digger, while deprecated, is still available for use.

The world doesn’t owe you a living. No employer is obligated to hire you or give you a promotion. Ellen Pao’s claim that she was a victim of “gender discrimination” was just a typical loser’s way of rationalizing her own failure. And the lawyers who thought they could get rich off her case are nothing but greedy parasites exploiting “equal opportunity” nonsense. Pao and her lawyers sued for $16 million and they’re walking away without a nickel, and if they’d gotten a nickel that would have been five cents more than what they deserved. Fuck you, losers.

Amen to that.

Read it.

Welcome to YourMorals.org, where you can learn about your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research. We are a group of professors and graduate students in social psychology at the University of Virginia, The University of California (Irvine), and the University of Southern California. (See us here.)

I have my doubts about people who are ostensibly ‘professors and graduate students’ but who apparently fail the grasp the distinction between ‘morals’ (what a community considers good and bad) and ethics (what an individual considers good and bad). No individual, except perhaps a castaway on a desert island, has morals — morals belong to a social group, as the etymology of the word makes clear.

However, I’ve given up expecting precision of either thought or speech out of the modern clerisy, so I suppose this is the best that can be expected.

Read it.

Austin is pretty much the San Francisco of Texas, the low spot toward which all of the SWPL hipsters in the South and West drain if they can’t make it to one of the Left Coasts or don’t want to suffer from those areas’ anti-growth attitudes (an inchoate feeling that they can’t articulate because it would make their heads explode but which motivates them at the subconscious level).

Read it.

Your DNA genome has “on/off” chemical switches that collectively are known as your epigenome. So your epigenome is unique and changes every time a switch is flipped. Because your epigenome’s switches are considered reversible when they are passed from parent to child, many scientists view this to be “soft evolution,” i.e., not guaranteed to be as enduring as when a mutation arises in the core DNA genome.

The epigenome can be passed on, sometimes reversed, sometimes reinforced. Unlike in classic Mendelian genetics, it is hard to predict and quantify, so you can just imagine how this variation in experimental outcomes has driven many careful, traditional scientists who believed the DNA code was the be?all and end-all of heredity completely crazy. They would try to eliminate all the variables, use genetically identical rats, and sometimes get completely different results. So it is no surprise that for decades epigenetics was ignored or pooh-poohed by funders, senior biologists, and science magazines. There was no reliable way to trace the precipitating event and no way to easily predict which individuals would be affected in future generations.

So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet?to?be?conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.

Charles Murray points out some inconvenient truth.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the school’s diversity profile. But most will go to the offspring of the upper middle class. We all know why, right? Affluent parents get their kids into the best colleges by sending them to private schools or spending lots of money on test preparation courses. Either way, it perpetuates privilege from generation to generation.

The College Board provides ammunition for this accusation every year when it shows average SAT scores by family income. The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the inequality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”

It’s a bum rap. All high-quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable. Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all advanced societies, income is correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test-takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic-achievement test shows higher average test scores as parental income increases.

Read it.

It’s certainly less disturbing than a tattoo.

Almost worth it….