There was a time when I would have whole-heartedly agreed with you about teaching critical thinking and the ability of even slightly below average intelligence people to learn it, but my personal experiences have made me turn sharply away from that idealistic view.
Demographics data:
Currently, over 60% of LA metro residents are not native English speakers as their primary language. (The official number was 54% as of about 10 years ago. There has been massive immigration to the area in the past 10 years and the number tends to get undercounted. (So, over 60% is the best current estimate.) About 40% are native English speakers. About 1/2 of non native English speakers also speak English with some sort of proficiency. The percentage of native English speakers who can speak Spanish with some sort or proficiency appears to be similar at about 1/3 - 1/2 (likely because many 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos speak both Spanish and English). We also know that in general the further south you go in California, the higher the percentage of Spanish speakers.
Spanish is the most common language in Southern California.
As of the year 2000
https://statisticalatlas.com/state/California/Languages
More Than Half of Los Angeles Speaks a Language Other Than English at Home - Curbed LA
Hispanics and Latinos in California - Wikipedia
Los Angeles foreign-born percentage:
The official number is 37.3%, but that number is a from 2014-2018. It has almost certainly risen. In addition, the number tends to be undercounted in official census results. So the most accurate number would be over 40%
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Los Angeles city, California
New York City foreign-born percentage:
The official number is 37%, but for the same reasons as above, the mos accurate, realistic number for 2020 would be over 40%
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/newyorkcitynewyork
Yes, strong nationalism, strong voting laws, severely restricted immigration and not funding the leftists fixes nearly all of the problems.
That is the playbook: even if they fail to collapse the government, they make money by shorting the market while trying to destroy the economy.
The supreme court decision could be extremely impactful. Many countries did the same thing in response to this network of political nonprofit NGOs 10.
Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart is pretty renowned. Galton was looking at twins in the 1800s, data was overwhelming by the 1980s.
If genetics made no difference to a trait, the trait’s correlation for identical and fraternal twins would be the same, but they're not. GWAS and GCTA are more accurate methods which find similar estimates of genetic inheritance on human traits as previously measured by the old twin studies. Estimation and Partition of Heritability in Human Populations Using Whole-Genome Analysis Methods applies this to height, intelligence, and many medical and psychiatric conditions. It's free online, look at table 2.
Most importantly is that even a moderate difference in means between two populations makes a big difference in the fraction that exceeds a high threshold: that’s just a consequence of the shape of the distribution, which falls off more and more rapidly as you get farther from the mean. So the difference in the mean between two groups has many implications. For one thing, it implies that between-population differences become much larger at the highest levels of ability.
Some groups score about one standard deviation lower in IQ than others, so you would expect to see differences in representation that varied according to the intelligence threshold requires for the particular job or field – and there are such thresholds and that’s what you see, do you not?
You find differences in ability among the .5% IQ percentile.
Masks are essentially codpieces: Dr. Simone Gold Commentary: We Do Not Consent | The Michigan Star
This one blew my mind:
Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review - Oral Health Group
And some historical context:
A quick history of why Asians wear surgical masks in public — Quartz
Regarding testing-to-cases ratio:
June 1st you had around 21,000 tests performed/day and around 1,000 new confirmed cases/day.
June 25th, its around 36,000 tests performed/day you're around 5,700 new confirmed cases/day.
You haven't even doubled your testing in that time frame, yet your cases have gone up five fold.
i.e. its getting easier to find cases.
COVID-19
(IHME model site, but everything to the left of 'today' is actual reported data)
The deaths will go up, but not at the rate as before because of what I mentioned previously.
You'll see.
Cases will ebb and flow with your re-occurring lockdowns ...deaths will increase several weeks behind the case increases.
Sure, you may or may not see the aggressive ramping-up of deaths because of what I mentioned before....but deaths will increase all the same.
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Another note:
You should rebrand the Starting Strength Gyms and franchises as Physical Therapy Outlets or something to get around the moniker of "Public Gym"?
From the article, third paragraph:
"The Covid virus was supposed to be contained in the kind of lab where people wear astronaut suits and go through triple sealed doors. It is a con of massive proportion to assert that now, having escaped those environs, a bandana will magically do the trick."
This is something that I have been both bewildered, humored and now disturbed by. When I was in the lab, I worked with viruses regularly. None that cause serious infectious disease though but we still had to prep in order to go in. Amazingly we did not wear cloth masks. We wore much more fortified protective equipment. And all the work was done under a hood that was cleaned by UV and 100% ethanol. I also worked shoulder to shoulder with scientists working with HIV.
I've tried to explain this to a select few friends who are all in on the mask ideology and was immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist (they know my background.) Almost everyone I see wearing a mask, whether cloth or bandanna, paper, or construction, are wearing it loosely or outright incorrectly (nose or mouth exposed.) Even worn as intended, facial hair and the gaps around the nose and mouth render it moot.
Fauci knows this and yet won't say it. I never thought I would live to see a time like this...
From Dr Gold:
"The pore size of cloth face coverings range from ~ 20-100 microns. The Covid virus is 200-1000x smaller than that, at 0.1 microns. Putting up a chain link fence will not keep out a mosquito. Even the most esteemed medical journals admit their purpose is to calm anxiety. “Expanded masking protocols’ greatest contribution may be to reduce the transmission of anxiety …” "
From the CDC CDC - Page Not Found
"Cloth face coverings are recommended as a simple barrier to help prevent respiratory droplets from traveling into the air and onto other people when the person wearing the cloth face covering coughs, sneezes, talks, or raises their voice. This is called source control. This recommendation is based on what we know about the role respiratory droplets play in the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, paired with emerging evidence from clinical and laboratory studies that shows cloth face coverings reduce the spray of droplets when worn over the nose and mouth. "
I'm confused.
It's not quite as pat and English as you portray it. There were entire regiments of Pennsylvania Dutch in the Revolutionary War who spoke no English (and as an aside were scared shitless of the Hessian mercenaries).
The Dutch were heavy on the ground in NY and NJ until the Brits won another war there. But most of the Dutch stayed there. You can see the place names and the family names there even now.
The French influence in Midwest is mostly overlooked, but they left a bunch of Frenchies behind after they lost the French and Indian War to the Brits. If you don't believe that, take a look at all the French names of cities along the Mississippi; Dubuque, Moline, Creve Couer, and of course New Orleans are just some of the more notable examples. Lotta French derived names all over the South and Midwest that have been there ever since.
Then you got the Mexican American War which added hispanics in the Southwest into the mix. Did I mention how Andrew Jackson got his ass in a sling when he took Florida away from Spain? Well, there you go.
All of these altered the course and the nature of the US. In spite of what Rush Limbaugh insists is the unique American culture. He's partly right, but completely wrong when he doesn't acknowledge that this nation's uniqueness is a product of a composite bunch of cultures.