I fully believe the 67 IQ finding –the problem is the spin:
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-science-minorities.html

If your heroes are Tom Swift, not sportsball players–it helps.

Asian tiger Moms help too.

“Flowers for Algernon”

https://www.sdfo.org/gj/stories/flowersforalgernon.pdf

This is self evident, even to those who say otherwise, many of whom will say in the same or next sentence that western culture is inferior.

For those who do not agree, ask them whether they believe that NAZI culture is equal to the others. Those who do not agree that there are better cultures will be the NAZIs themselves, who believe their culture to be superior. That was the basis upon which they operated. The Aztecs and the Mayans were not much better.

It is not hard to demonstrate that some cultures are simply better than others. It is somewhat harder to convince them that western culture ranks high. After all, it was western culture, starting with the American northern colonies, that abhorred and banned all forms of slavery, Vermont being the very first place in all of human history.

Union soldiers (many Buffalo Soldiers who helped tame the West) were the worst Indian killers…scalps paid for like crows perhaps.

Native Americans got a long with Confederates…and some indians own slaves. And Barbary pirates enslaved more Europeans than the latter did the former. Go far enough back, and everyone has unsavory family members.

One of the more spooky deals set in the same time frame as Apocalypto was how cross-like the Tree of Life was at Palenque.

That can’t be good.

Where is the diversity? Where is the equity? Where are the slavery reparations?

The ruling elite funds a local quasi-NGO, Church Groups are the biggest local NGO’s that laundry tons of cash for illegals, they then apply for Medicaid on behalf of the illegal immigrant.

Once they have Medicaid, and a Primary Care person; you refer them to someone with credentials like me. I would evaluate them and order additional psychological testing. (My Agency then bills Medicaid $400 for my part.)
If you qualify as a “mental health” “client,” we’ll grab you immediately, and we’d like your children as well—we would get additional supplemental payments if your kids are “autistic,” and surprise, surprise, they generally were, because “everyone” is.

At that point they (almost all) qualify on paper for SSI (supplemental security income) which is a monthly cash payment. They also qualify for a variety of “mental health” services, every one of which is billed to Medicaid. (we had about 50% “poor” and 50% private-insurance, you can’t run an agency on just Medicaid, unless you are shady, you need some private-insurance revenue.)

Contrary to popular myth, Medicaid pays very well, but there are time-limits for “services.”
Private insurance pays less on average but will pay longer. Private insurance also demands weekly progress-reports with documented progress, or the money stops, instantly. Our psychiatrist would spend 4 hours every Friday negotiating with a bachelor’s level “screener” at some call-center, and if they didn’t approve services for that week, we had to eat it all.

(Tangentially– my Agency ran numerous “Day-Programs,” the minimum amount we could bill for that was $4.15 per 15-minute Medicaid-billing Unit increment, with a maximum of a 7-hour day. We would have to generate supporting documentation that the Services were actually performed, but Medicaid is not paying for documented improvement, just that the Services were provided.)

They already qualify for SNAP (food stamps) and Section 8 (housing). They probably also receive a variety of cash & non-cash benefits, globally referred to as “welfare.” (varies by State)

If I’m a totally committed America-hater, I’ll immediately apply for SSDI on behalf of the illegal immigrant. (social security disability income)
–That will take about 3+ years and probably a minimum of 3-5 re-submissions or more. And we are busily billing Medicaid, for some thing, every time we see this person. The applications for SSDI are difficult to get approved, because they are permanent payments.
Once you are on SSDI, it cannot be rescinded except for reasons of fraud, and nobody has a vested interest (at this level) in exposing fraud. Clawing back any of this is near impossible.

Median population IQ in Somalia is 67.
=cognitive impairment, below average intellectual functioning, lack of skills for activities of daily living.

Median population IQ in the United States is 98.
=”100″ is considered “average.”

The United States military uses the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), the lowest score acceptable is 31 of 99 questions, which equates to roughly an IQ of 83.
—————————————————-
“Do the Poor have Low IQ’s?”
Dr. Jordan Peterson
https://youtu.be/zRphm3RSo-A
10:37

“You can make a high IQ person stupider by not educating them up to the level of their possibility but taking someone who has a low IQ and trying to raise that, well, that’s Nobel prize time.”

Edward wrote, ” It sounds like an improved life/lifestyle [from Christianity] did not come at a price but came with additional cultural benefits.”

This is what I have been saying now for years, beginning with Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, though every time I do I get hard pushback (in some cases a refusal to print my work): Some cultures are simply better than others, and western civilization at this moment appears to hold the top position for providing the most wealth and the best lifestyle, for everyone. Or to quote the conclusion from that book:

When we go, we should bring with us a good blueprint for human society. … We should, as free men and women, bring with us the laws of the United States and the capitalistic and democratic principles of our country. … We should also infuse future generations of space settlers with principles of family, freedom, and moral commitment.

Kennedy said we must. And we should, not for nationalistic reasons, but because we as a nation and culture have stumbled upon a good formula for human society. We aren’t better than anyone else, and surely have many faults and weaknesses. And though we have made our share of evil decisions in our history, far more often we have done right for ourselves and for others.

This is an idea that is hated by our modern academics and the last few generations they have indoctrinated. Nonetheless, it is right and grand.

Oh, that was well hidden. It explains why Christianity was so popular around the world. I had assumed that there was some sort of bargain/coercion from missionaries, such as “we will give a sermon while you eat your free food,” similar to some “soup kitchens.” It sounds like an improved life/lifestyle did not come at a price but came with additional cultural benefits.

Edward and Dick: One of the facts modern academia likes to hide is the strong appeal of Christianity to Indian women in both the U.S. and Canada when they were first exposed to it in the 1600s. This is in addition to the practical benefits. Its rules about marriage and family gave a women the kind of security and status she did not have within many Indian tribal cultures.

In this context, a story. When I got my masters in early American history back in the mid-nineties, there was one class where a women professor came in to give a guest lecture about the patriarchy of religion and how Christianity oppressed women. Most of what she said was junk, typical Marxist slogans and jargon.

At one point I raised my hand and asked her one simple question (related to what I noted above as well as what I was learning then in extensive research about the early contacts between the American Indians and westerners, most especially with the Jesuits in Canada): “If Christianity is so oppressive to women, why did it appeal so strongly to Indian women that many in New England and Canada quickly converted, eventually bringing their men along with them? It wasn’t the men who converted first, but the women.”

Of course she had no answer. She made some off-hand comment like “That’s irrelevant,” and immediately continue her lecture.

It was about this time that I realized academia was becoming very bankrupt, probably more than two decades before most anyone else.

A major difference being that one was Industrial Age and the other was Stone Age. There were better comforts and better health care, among other advantages.

Despite the leftist rubbish that passes for “education” in US schools these days, there was never a “genocide” of American Indians. There was an enormous die-off of American Indians that started when the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean with diseases to which the indigenes had little or no immunity. These plagues spread slowly across the entirety of the Americas over the following century.

These deaths occurred because the various American Indian populations – excepting the Plains tribes – didn’t routinely travel long distances and even the Plains Indians didn’t routinely encounter people who were entirely novel in their experience, just the same old competitor tribes year after year. From an immunological standpoint, American Indians were a bunch of insular populations and had been for millennia.

The sort of infectious catastrophe that overtook the American Indians was by no means unique in human history. One reason the new European arrivals got only syphilis in exchange for smallpox, bubonic plague and other horrors was that Europe had been in exactly the same situation as the American Indians only a couple of centuries previously during the era of the Black Death. That, in turn, was a consequence of Europeans having engaged in the several Crusades to far-distant places teeming with, to them, novel pathogens. The Europeans who came to the Americas were the descendants of that minority of their ancestors who did not die during the Plague Years. Everybody pays their dues anent contagions at some point in their histories. Starting in 1492, it was the American Indian’s turn.

None of this was deliberate. Europeans of the time had no more understanding of contagion and disease etiology than did the American Indians.

Later armed conflicts between American Indians and Europeans were of relatively minor consequence by comparison. These, also, were not “genocide.” There are still plenty of surviving members of tribes that can trace their ancestry to pre-Columbian times. If Europeans had decided to completely exterminate American Indians, that would not be so.

The fact is that many American Indians simply deserted their tribal heritages voluntarily for life in European America – particularly women. Being a rank-and-file woman in European America was a lot better deal than being a rank-and-file woman in a typical American Indian tribe. The degree to which modern-day normative Americans have at least a bit of American Indian ancestry, as revealed by retail gene-sequencing companies, simply confirms this assimilation.

American Indians had warred with one another – even to the point of genocide – for millennia. The arrival of Europeans of various national origins was simply seen by American Indians as the addition of newer players to the tribal mix. Some tribes were able to considerably improve their circumstances via alliances with Europeans against traditional enemies. The introduction of horses to the Americas by the Spanish was, for example, pretty much the making of the Comanche as a consequential tribe. They became expert horsemen and likely the finest light cavalry in human history.

There is a lot more texture and nuance to the interactions of Europeans and American Indians than the simple-minded leftist reductionism to an exploiters-exploited/racialist narrative.

“Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Legend”
The Story of John Chapman (Sept. 26, 1774 – March 18, 1845)
https://youtu.be/MKs0VJbB0R4
12:53

Life and Legend of John Colter:
The Original Mountain Man
This Is Yellowstone (Dec. 2024)
https://youtu.be/xNFgI5RZ-Ac
1:14:41

“…the full-length version of the new film series, as told by interpretive guide and storyteller Ken Sinay.”

Tulsa King (se2 ep4)
Dwight Meets with Med Hat, leader of the Quapaw Nation
https://youtu.be/oN6Gas3CePM
3:05

“We will front the windfarm in exchange for 20% of all energy generated and 20% of all your hydroponic weed profits….”

Blackwing1: I am well aware of Colter. He figures prominently in the daily logs of the Lewis & Clark expedition. He also left the expedition on its way home so that he could go back to the mountains and hunt beaver, beginning his life as a mountain man.

In fact, it is difficult to avoid his name in reading any history about those early explorations. I really need to find out if there are any books about him.

His escape from Indians while barefoot and naked created a legend to this day. Heck, the movie “The Naked Prey”, while set in Africa, was basically taken by Cornel Wilde from the accounts of “Colter’s Run”.

Thank you for the recommendation…I have bookmarked a used copy for when I have a long enough list to get free shipping from my preferred (non-Amazon) vendor.

Living here in NW Wyoming you can’t move 10 feet without tripping over a reminder that “Buffalo” Bill Cody was here. The reservoir which bears his name is the source of pretty much all life here in the Bighorn Basin, making possible all of the towns along the Shoshone River. His original house in Cody was moved, and is now at the western edge of town right on the South Fork Highway. His ranch is much farther up the South Fork. The Irma Hotel is still operating in the “downtown” (that’s a stretch of imagination for an area two blocks wide by 6 blocks long) with one of the most impressive wooden bars around. There’s a legend that after the city of Cody got a sheriff the first man arrested was bagged for riding his horse into the Irma bar.

Second point. several people have mentioned the economic advantages of boys working. I read an interesting article recently talking about how humans tend to adapt to their surroundings, if teenaged boys only hang around teenaged boys they will not be motivated to mature. If, however, teenaged boys work with grown men they will take on the traits of the older, more mature coworkers. This is a good thing for society.

Old Patriot: Such books exist, such as my own Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. In the last half century however our academic and educational elites decided that having kids read about American heroes was a bad idea. They no longer promote such books in schools. Instead, they push books that either advocate the queer agenda, or describe American history routinely in negative terms.

Yes, when cultures, because of “differences,” inevitably clash, the potential for the usual brutality, carnage, and injustice becomes potentially loosened on all. Perhaps never more so when tribal and nomadic ones meet one dominated by the values that characterize “Western Civilization!” Well, just what are those values that clashed with the natives of North America?

From the perspective of intellectual and cultural content, America (Western civilization) represents an understanding and acceptance of the following:

The laws of logic; the concept of causality and, consequently, of a universe ruled by natural laws intelligible to man (on these foundations rests the whole known body of physical laws surrounding mathematics and science):

Further, the individual’s self-responsibility based on his free will to choose between good and evil; the value of man above all other species on the basis of his unique possession of the power of reason; the value and competence of the individual human being and their logical corollary possession of individual rights – among them the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:

The need for limited government and for the individual’s freedom from the state. On this foundation, rests the validity of capitalism, with its unprecedented and continuing economic progress in terms of the division of labor, technological development, capital
accumulation, and rising living standards:

Finally, Western civilization represents the importance of visual arts and literature depicting man as capable of facing the world with confidence in his power to succeed; and in music featuring harmony and melody:

Synthesized from endless alternative or opposing values, values that more often than not are irreconcilably in conflict with those embodied by “western” culture, western values fundamentally represent intellectual and cultural achievements “embraced” from all manner of civilizations, past and present. These values are not the product or property of any race, gender, tribe, or ethnicity:

Furthermore, Western civilization did not originate in the West. It stands on the intellectual/cultural shoulders of Greece and Rome that, in turn, derived much of their knowledge of science, for example, from Egypt and Babylon.

When, during what are referred to as “The Dark Ages,” as much – if not all of western Europe reverted to fear, superstition and virtual barbarism, people living in the Middle East and China made far greater contributions to what we now call western civilization than did anyone living in western Europe!

My point is that the tribal cultures of North America, upon being exposed to what descended upon/among them, faced choices. Almost impossible ones – ALMOST!

I would suggest you watch the scene near the conclusion of the movie starring Clint Eastwood, “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” The scene takes place between Josey, played by Clint, and the Indian Chief “Ten Bears,” played so powerfully by Will Sampson. If you have not seen it or if you have seen it but not taken note of the dialog, I would highly recommend that you do so. In its brief minutes are spoken eloquent and timeless truths, truths especially relevant today.

Yes, when viewed from the lofty heights of context-dropping value-judgements, the cultures that populated North America (hell, the entire New World!) took a terrible beating. However, individuals among them did not. They adapted to a profound potential for a profoundly better way of life (should you disagree then the cultural differen ce between you and I must never clash)! Unless, of course either their respective “tribal councils” or in WC’s case, their Governments, were summoned to enter the clash…………..
,

My own father grew up in corn country in rural Ohio. About 1920, when he was 11, he went into business as a crow-shooter using a single-shot rifle chambered for .22 cal. shorts. He would take his kills, in a burlap sack, to the county courthouse in his small hometown where the county clerk would count the kills and pay a 25 cent bounty for each. Then he would take the dead birds downstairs to the furnace room where the “colored” janitor would feed them into the firebox. After a couple of years of this, his younger brother joined the hunting business.

This was quite a lucrative business for a boy of his day. Even after paying for ammo, he often cleared more than a dollar a day in profit for what was a part-time job – the equal of what many full-time adult jobs paid at the time.

It was also work not just anyone could do as one had to be a very accurate shooter to avoid excessive misses and consequent extra ammo expense. My dad was a very good shooter and competed many times as a “gravel belly” at the Camp Perry shooting matches during the late 1920s and the 1930s.

He could easily have been a sniper during WW2, but that was a dangerous job and, had he done so, I likely wouldn’t be here. Fortunately, he had a college degree in physics too, so when he joined the USAAF he was put in charge of running aircraft maintenance depots.

The airfields he worked at did sometimes come under enemy fire, but it wasn’t a constant thing. He also did a stint helping engineer and construct expedient bridges to replace those blown up by retreating Nazis during Operation Husky, the allied conquest of Sicily. That was a quasi-front-line job as well.

Oddly, as I now look back on it, I never asked him if he had ever used his marksmanship skills in actual combat and he never volunteered any such information. I guess, now, I can only echo Louis Renault’s remark to Rick in Casablanca, “I’d like to think you killed a man – it’s the romantic in me.”

The West was about new beginnings. A person with a bad rep in one town could be a different man in another. A time when the only baggage you had you took with you. East Germans at least knew about the Stazi. Today it is social media… invisible. In the movie “The Lives of Others” an upright man is protected by a handler taken with his nobility.

Doxxing and the Internet is turning us all into Mean Girls, I fear.

Fretting about the return of child labor is a bit overblown….having young people do something besides household chores is good….and yet–I miss the true 3 month summer vacations from school where I could let my imagination run free:

https://agingwithanattitude.quora.com/Why-were-children-in-the-1970s-and-80s-allowed-so-much-independence

Both (structured) work and play allowed resilience I suppose.

The 1700s, and the mid-20th Century were the best for advancement. Not too poor…not too distracted. The 1800’s were all about pointing towards something…but never arriving.

A favorite tale of mine
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/qi.aspx

Mr. Durant’s Speech; Foreshadowing
Hell on Wheels Se1 Ep1
https://youtu.be/yAHL5oPXOD0
2:59

“Is it a villain you want? I’ll play the part. After all, what is a drama without a villain? And what is the building of this grand road, if not a drama? This business is not for the weak of heart, it’s a thorny brutal affair that rewards the lion for his ferocity….”
“Make no mistake, blood will be spilled, lives will be lost, fortunes will be made, men will be ruined. There will be betrayal, scandal, a perfidy of epic proportions….”
“One-hundred years hence, when this railroad spans the continent and America rises to be the greatest power the world has ever seen, I, will be remembered as a caitiff, a malefactor, who only operated out of greed for personal gain. All true, all true. But remember this, without me, and men like me, your glorious railroad would never be built.”

That’s an odd way to characterize the “take over” of a land mass that had many EXISTING nations. I’m pretty sure that is exactly the playbook for us modern patriots, if we were to be invaded. Resist.

But that isn’t my point.

The point is, that you wonder why some on the left accuse history of glossing over a genocide…

Not here to fight with anyone or argue, just wanted to point out to you that the words you chose have an impact, and as an author, you should be aware..

Mr. Z.,
You should do a deep dive on Annie Oakley!

“The Real Annie Oakley”
Phoebe Ann Mosey; (August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926)
Visiting her hometown & Final Resting Place; Greenville, Ohio
Sidetrack Adventures (June, 2025)
https://youtu.be/xz5ja_wlgy4
12:13

“By the mid 1880’s, Annie joined Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, and the rest is History…”