HR CLINTON GOT CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION FROM SCIENTIST WHO SAID BLACKS WEREN'T AS SMART AS EUROPEANS; TWO DAYS LATER HELPED EARMARK $900K FOR HIS LAB
JIM MCELHATTON, WASH TIMES - Lawmakers, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have taken thousands in campaign cash from an embattled Nobel-prize winning scientist while earmarking federal money for his New York lab. Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Charles E. Schumer, also a New York Democrat, requested a $900,000 earmark in June for the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where James D. Watson served as chancellor before resigning last week after apologizing for comments that suggested that people descending from Africa aren't as intelligent as those from Europe.
Federal campaign filings show that Mr. Watson has donated more than $70,000 to candidates and their political causes, including a total of $3,000 to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign on May 17 and June 25. Two days later, a Senate committee report showed that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer earmarked $900,000 for the lab.
The majority of Mr. Watson's donations over the years have gone to Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, who has received more than $30,000 from the scientist, records show. Mr. Harkin is chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health, human services and education.
22 Comments:
So Don Imus shouldn't be fired for saying something racially insensitive, but a world leading scientific institution shouldn't receive funds from a state it benefits because it's director says something boorish and stupid? CSHL contributed immensely to the study of biology and is a big reason our country is a leader in biology research. They continue to pursue research and educate the next generation of scientists. Watson was rightly encouraged to step away from CSHL. The institution shouldn't be penalized for something a director says.
Exactly. If the money had gone to Watson personally for questionable 'research', that would be one thing. But Cold Spring is a premier institution and deserves the money it gets.
This story is the same old GOP spin. If a Republican does a favor for a corporation that gave them money, the two events are unrelated. If a Democrat does a favor for an organization that does work of vital importance to the nation's health and got money from someone who works there, it's an example of bribery.
Its OK to compare SAT scores by religion at Undernews, not that I have a problem with that. What if Watson had compared SAT scores by race/ethnicity instead of a general statement?
http://prorev.com/2007/10/more-non-theists-than-lutherans.html
And if there actually ended up being some provable slight differences in overall group intelligence based on race/ehtnicity--so what? What would really be the big hairy deal? At this late date, it's not as though such a revelation would really change that much of anything anyway.
I understand the motivation for including religion in the BOR, but it's nevertheless been a bad idea insofar as people forget (and they do!) that religion, unlike 'race', sex, handicap, etc. is elective.
So doing a correlation of IQ and religion is legitimate, since religion can (but shouldn't) be presumed to be a product of IQ.
Whereas any conclusions drawn from a correlation of IQ and 'race' are as ugly and fraudulent as similar conclusions would be if drawn from correlating IQ with wealth.
--Mairead
Any gene pool that can crank out the likes of a Tyra Banks has got something working.
Watson is just intimidated, possibly a classic condition of performance anxiety?
Imagine how the naked man must have felt when the elephant exclaimed, "and how can you possibly breath through that thing?"
I agree with several of the above posters; the necessary relevance link between the two hasn't been satisfactorily demonstrated.
The Nobel Prize was awarded some years back to a physicist who is also a firm (and openly asserted) believer in 'dysgenics', which propound 'proof' that blacks are scientifically demonstrably inferior in intelligence to whites. Does his being awarded the Nobel thus render the prize corrupt and worthless? If you follow the line of reasoning posited here, it must. In that case, where does that leave Al Gore (and others) for accepting this 'tainted' award?
Perople who are more intelligent ARE more likely to do well and achieve material success (i.e. wealth) if that's what they choose to bend their higher intelligence toward attaining, Mairead. That's a fact of life. Deal with it.
Lest anyone else pounce on it, that ought, needless to say, have been 'people' not 'perople'. Though my guess would be that the same observation holds true for perople as well.
Perople who are more intelligent ARE more likely to do well and achieve material success (i.e. wealth) if that's what they choose to bend their higher intelligence toward attaining
The evidence is against you.
Deming demonstrated that success or failure is due 80% to the system, not the individual. The structure and values of the system determine who succeeds and who fails. During the early 20th c., men with university degrees up to and including the PhD worked menial jobs because, being Black, they were kept from better ones.
Warren Buffet, who if material success implied intelligence would be one of the most brilliant people in the world, has acknowledged the role of the system. He noted that had he been born in some other country, Rwanda for example, his net worth right now might well be less than that of his company's receptionist because his only real skill is of significance only in the US capitalist system.
Likewise Bill Gates. He's not highly intelligent, but he was born into a wealthy, connected family. The system privileged him. He seized his advantage and has exploited the hell out of it, but had it not been for his family wealth that funded development of MSDOS, and his family connections that got him a hearing with IBM, there's no reason to think he'd have ever been more than the owner of a minor software company.
On the other hand, Sarah Breedlove Walker became a multi-millionaire in the teeth of the system. Born to former slaves and orphaned at seven, she survived by working in the cotton fields, as a washerwoman, and as a cook before taking up selling hair-care and cosmetic products door-to-door. She built a huge cosmetics company and died at 52, worn out.
See also the scatterplot and discussion here
--Mairead
Taking isolated examples and extrapolating a theory to fit your pet preconceptions is evidence of sloppy thinking, not a wholesale demolition of my contention tht, on the average, highly intelligent people tend to better for themselves, and thus to achieve greater material success (note that I said *if they are so minded*) than their lower IQ brethren.
I know that flies in the teeth of accepted American shilling for mediocrity and indeed downright stupidity (sometimes known as being the 'common man') as being the noblest traits the humanity can aspire to; but your argument here hasn't persuaded me of the truth of that line of thinking.
your argument here hasn't persuaded me of the truth of that line of thinking
I'm sure it hasn't persuaded you. "Those convinced against their will / are of the same opinion still".
But it's true all the same. You can make as many empty assertions as you like, but you can't find a methodologically sound study that supports you.
Wechsler's IQ test is a standard instrument. But it starts wobbling badly above 130. Miller's Analogies is generally used as an additional test to sort out those for whom Wechsler's test can only conclude 'at least high 130s'.
But try giving either of those tests to someone from other than a western, urban culture with at least some affluence. They're going to test out subnormal, because the tests -especially Miller- is normed on western urban privilege.
In other words, we don't know how to measure intelligence. We can't even agree a definition that's not glib and filled with handwaving.
But go ahead, do please try to find a study that supports your thesis. It'll be a revelation, if you're intellectually honest.
--Mairead
And where, precisely, are the 'studies' that support your thesis?
If you're intellectually honest, you'll be forced to admit they don't exist.
And no one has yey been able to explain, in any satisfactory manner, just why certain groups perform poorly on subjects such as mathematics and science, which do not, by definition, carry the weight of 'cultural baggage' that would render them incomprehensible to any but so-called "white, western, privileged" students.
I'm open to revelation. But only when it's been mounted on some better argument than you've thus presented.
You seem to be unclear on how science works.
All humans are of the same species. THEREFORE there's an automatic presumption that individual differences are greater than differences between subgroups. Anyone who wants to claim subgroup differences must provide sound studies to support their claim.
We know, for example, that Tay-Sachs appears mostly in the Ashkenazi subgroup, and that sickle-cell anaemia appears mostly in the African subgroup, etc. But there are NO credible studies showing subgroup differences in intelligence.
You cannot cite a credible study showing the subgroup differences you assert. There aren't any.
--Mairead
My question to you asked for a quotation of 'studies' that demonstrated that those of average or lower intelligence tend to do better in overall achievement than those of above-average intelligenc. But I'm sure you already knew that.
Needless to say, you could not quote from such studies, because no such studies exist.
I have not mentioned one word about studies showing the incidence of certain disease traits among sub-groups, nor have I made mention of any studies purporting to show variations in overall intelligence within various sub-groups. These are not pertinent to my initial question. Your attempts to 'blind me with science' fall rather flat, as you are quoting science that has no immediate relevance to the question asked.
Your 'answer' is simple evasionary tactic, and as such isn't likely to convince anybody of anything.
Mairead is not only evading 230's initial point, she's a;so attempting to put words into his/her mouth.
230 simply asserted their belief that people with higher intelligence levels generally tend to better overall in life, a not unreasonable assertion. Mairead tried to counter this by giving the examples of two white males from what she would deem privileged backgrounds (average to low IQ, she asserts, though I don't see how she can possibly know this), and the example of an African-American woman, a former slave who became a successful entrepreneur. Mairead's ebtire argument is predicated on the socio-economic backgrounds of her three examples, NOT on their levels of intelligence. There is no way whatsoever of her knowing what Sarah Breedlove's IQ level might've been. 230's sole contention is that higher intelligence levels are a not inaccurate barometer of later success; he/she said nothing at all about the class level of a very intelligent person's background, which would tend to suggest that 230 feels higher levels of intelligence in individuals can cause them to be more easily able to trump a disadvantaged background (i.e. Breedlove). Again, this in no wise seems like an unreasonable contention. Without having the relevant data (individual IQ scores for each of her three examples--and I would say, most pertinently Breedlove's, as she came from no background that could have positively aided her rise--Mairead's argument is pointless, because she doesn't have the relevant data available on which to base it; all she really seems to have is an axe to grind against the notion of such concepts as higher/lower intelligence being extant at all; and as a rule of thumb, most individuals who tote these kind of axes are speaking out of unfortunate experience, rather than objective observation of real-world fact.
In America the people most likely to do well for themselves are those with the most "salesman" skills, i.e., those most able to hypnotize others into acting against their own best interests. This skill is unrelated to IQ or other measures of intelligence.
People with particularly high IQs, in fact, tend to lack these skills more than others and actually end up worse off financially and socially.
Good point 6AM. This is the kind of answering-the-question without really answering-the-question our "leaders" are so adept at.
10:26, I wasn't asked any questions and I wasn't answering one. This is my first post to this thread and I was making a comment.
I do thank you, however, for reinforcing my point by reminding us that our leaders rarely if every use any intelligence, preferring smoke and mirrors like all salesmen.
And where are your studies proving this?
Mencken was right.
Nothing terrifeis or raises the ire of the 'average' American as much as the thought that somewhere someone might be his intellectual superior.
Post a Comment
<< Home