September 11th
World Trade Center Curriculum

8:46am September 11, 2001 Never forget.

2014 The World Trade site is rebuilt.

Back to SECURITY

May 1st 2011 OSSAMA BIN LAUDEN DEAD! WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT

The assault force of Navy SEALs snatched a trove of computer drives and disks during their weekend raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, yielding what a U.S. official called “ the mother lode of intelligence .” The special operations forces grabbed personal computers, thumb drives and electronic equipment during the lightning raid that killed bin Laden.

Educational CyberPlayGround would like to extend our deepest sympathy and concern to everyone affected by Tuesday's 9/11/01 tragedy. We send our condolences to the families of the victims in the disaster.

Many of today's elementary and secondary school students are too young to remember the day and its meaning. To help educators prepare for the difficult but important task of teaching about 9/11, the Educational CyberPlayGround offers free resources and strategies.

CURRICULUM SUGGESTIONS
Public School Curriculum for 5th, 8th, and 11th Grades.

Discussions with content experts and workshop sessions -- recorded and archived online -- identify resources available at each organization, supply background information on 9/11, and encourage conversations on how to document, preserve, and interpret recent history and current events.

1. Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum http://www.911memorial.org/
2. The Pentagon Memorial Fund ( http://pentagonmemorial.org/ ),
3. The Flight 93 National Memorial ( http://www.flight93memorialproject.org/ ) offered a free online conference to provide educators with resources addressing the attacks.
   
   

TEACH THE PUBLIC AND YOUR K12 STUDENTS ABOUT #FAKE NEWS

FAKE NEWS DIDN'T JUST START DURING THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION -- BUT FAKE NEWS HASN'T HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE ONLINE, AND LINKED TO -- MADE PERVASIVE THROUGH IT'S OWN ECOSYSTEM -- USING CRAP ALGORIYTHMS -- TO MAKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FROM ADVERTISING -- USING GOOGLE / FACEBOOK / TWITTER / WIKILEAKS / EMAIL / TV NEWS STATIONS / NEWSPAPERS / RADIO ETC. comments

never underestimate the power of distribution

According to the Oxford Dictionary, reality tv is defined as “ television programs in which ordinary people are continuously filmed, designed to be entertaining rather than informative.”

2016 Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook In Final Months Of The US Election

THERE IS NO DISCUSSION ABOUT ANYTHING :
Twitter's 140 character limit words most frequently used by Trump in his tweets were "great," "winner" or "winners," and "loser" or "losers."

ETHICS

CREDIBILITY

VS.

LIES

"Fake news" didn't come out of nowhere.
I was birthed by "real news" not doing its job for decades.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, EDWARD SNOWDEN, AND THE MODERN WHISTLEBLOWER By Malcolm Gladwell
Daniel Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned .
VIETNAM FAILURE OF POLICY
For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War.
The war in Southeast Asia was costly and pointless. Nonetheless, the White House continued to tell the American people that it was going swimmingly
Ellsberg ~ "You will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess." That feeling of foolishness, Ellsberg continues, will last two weeks, at which point you will become so enthralled by your access to “whole libraries of hidden information” that it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. . . . The danger is, you'll become something like a moron.
Ellsberg was an insider—and that fact puts him in stark contrast with the man who has come to be seen as his heir, Edward Snowden a community-college dropout, a member of the murky hacking counterculture. The elites, Snowden once said, “know everything about us and we know nothing about them—because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class.” Had Snowden been a whistleblower in 1967, at the launch of the Pentagon Papers, he would have blown the whistle on Daniel Ellsberg. the historic indictment rate for leak-law violators would be below 0.3%. The actual rate is probably far closer to zero.”
The whistleblower as insider has become the whistleblower as outsider.
Pozen, a Columbia law professor, cites one estimate that, between 1949 and 1969, 2.3 per cent of the front-page stories in the Times and the Washington Post were based on government leaks. Another study looked at just the first six months of 1986 and found that a hundred and forty-seven stories in the country's eight major newspapers were based on leaks.

Both FBI and ODNI state they do not share CIA's view on Russia & election

The youth stopped the Vietnam War. And they were fueled by music. Never underestimate the power of art. One person can make a difference. One hit song can turn things around.

Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 #NobelPrizeLiterature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” maybe he can step up!!!!

THE PRESS

IT WAS FAKE NEWS - FAKE NEWS - FAKE NEWS

Between 2001 and 2003, Judith Miller wrote a number of pieces in the New York Times asserting that Iraq had the capability and the ambition to produce weapons of mass destruction.

In 2002 United Nations weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix arrive in Iraq. They found no evidence on WMD. See more images here :

2004 The Plot an article by Ron Suskind in the New York Times magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.

You might recall it as the piece that introduced the phrase “the reality-based community” to American discourse . That phrase — and the quotation from the Bush adviser that introduced it — caused an instant sensation.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.

He cut me off. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. ”

2006 Knight Ridder's Washington reporting debunked the administration's case for war.

Knight Ridder's Washington reporting began by citing a Sept. 6, 2002, story. That story, by Jonathan S. Landay, was one of a number written in 2002 by Landay, Warren P. Strobel and Bureau Chief John Walcott that challenged and debunked the administration's case for war against Iraq.Gilbert Cranberg says the DC bureau and Landay, Strobel, Walcott deserve high honors for their reports challenging the Bush administration during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. Three correspondents had the courage to buck the tide and dig out well-grounded misgivings about the build-up to war. There were some 80 probing and revealing war-related pieces between January 2002 and May 2005. In a lecture at Stanford in May 2006, the now-retired Knight Ridder Washington editor, Clark Hoyt, observed of Knight Ridder's reports of bogus and distorted intelligence, "It all seems too tragically obvious today, but believe me this was lonely journalism in 2002 and 2003." How lonely can be judged by the hard time the veteran and respected Walter Pincus of the Washington Post had getting into his paper a major story questioning the administration's case for war.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=showcase.view&showcaseid=43

• Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials
• Some in Bush administration have misgivings about Iraq policy
• 2016 Detecting a shift in political culture away from journalism's grasp by Jay Rosen

Seven Reasons Why America's Corporate Media Is Pro-War
American Media is always pro-war. It isn't that the press is busy trying to be at arm's length and fair that it ignores the truth.

EXAMPLES:
Fascinating archive find: in a 1939 note, NBC regretted not censoring an announcer after he called Hitler a "madman"

A new balance of power where news organizations are everywhere getting poorer while the rich are everywhere getting richer.

Investigations Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste they don't want you to know about.

usING social media
for voicing dissent
directly
to the public

2016 Where Donald Trump got his real power
how @realDonaldTrump used #socialmedia to win #Election2016 http://cnn.it/2fTRA9X
Twitter has truncated our discourse, let candidates get around fact-checkers, created ideological echo chamber. The social media company SocialFlow calculated during the campaign that Trump was getting more than three times more free exposure on social media than Clinton. The company found that, by January, he had become "the most talked-about person on the planet." Trump said that before social media, his only option was to sue his rivals. But with the modern ability to argue on social platforms, he felt he had "more power than they do." President-elect, the famously wealth-obsessed businessman reported that he believed social media is more powerful than money. ""The fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., I think it helped me win all of these races where they're spending much more money than I spent," Trump said. Twitter Audit found that 39% of Trump's Twitter followers WERE BOTS. People in the town of Veles, Macedonia, developed a cottage industry over the past year, creating at least 140 fake news sites that spread pro-Trump stories across social media platforms. False stories likely viewed by tens of millions of people on Facebook.

IN POLITICS
DISINFIO, STORYTELLING AND LEAKS SERVE THE FUNCTION OF GOSSIP

The late LA Gov. Earl Long rule:
"Don't write what you can say,
Don't say what you can nod,
Don't nod what you can wink."
Meaning, as per Uncle Earl's first line,
[YOU are] happy to tell the stories face to face as [YOU] heard theM.

News stations are talking about about Trump's president election win being delegitimized. Remember Trump's 5 year birther lie about President Obama's legitimacy? Trump should be treated NO differently than he treated Obama.

According to Pew Research Center, in 2010
60% of Americans who are aware of the emails thought that the release of State Department cables harmed the public interest, but in 2016 only 28% believe that the release of John Podesta's emails harms the public interest. The shift is most pronounced among Republicans, 75% of whom say that the cable releases were harmful, while only 12% say that the email leak is harmful.

FUNCTION OF UNKNOWN LEAKS
AKA "spokesman"

ODNI, Top U.S. spy agency oversees the 17 agency U.S. intelligence community has not embraced CIA assessment on Russia hacking - An ODNI spokesman declined to comment on the issue. "ODNI is not arguing that the agency (CIA) is wrong, only that they can't prove intent," said one of the three U.S. officials. "Of course they can't, absent agents in on the decision-making in Moscow." Reports of the assessment by the CIA, which has not publicly disclosed its findings, have prompted congressional leaders to call for an investigation.
That is because it is illegal for the CIA to investigate domestically. They cannot even look at the server.

Some say All leaks are justified if the leaks prove corruption or as in the case of DOJ Coomy to use Anthony Weiner's investigation to sway the election.

2016 DISINFORMATION / DISINFO
Example Michael G. Flynn son of Gen. Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump's national security advisor behind spreading lies and disinformation called "PizzaGate" that promoted a child sex trafficking operation involving top Democrats, including Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta - all untrue. The younger Flynn, who has served as his father's adviser, linked to the account of Jack Posobiec, whose Twitter account describes him as the special projects director of a group called Citizens4Trump.

@nytimes @washingtonpost partnered w/SBannon to create Fake News abt HRC

2016 Liberals immediately embraced the term : We're the reality-based community . Conservatives thought this hilarious (and they still do.) Both reactions bypassed what Suskind reported: a tension between factions within the Republican coalition. Bruce Bartlett, Christie Whitman, Paul O'Neill and other loyal Republicans who talked to Suskind were alarmed by what he called “the retreat from empiricism.” The most outstanding example was of course the faulty case for war in Iraq presented to the U.N., to Congress and to the American people, which the press had failed to detect, debunk, or resist. (With one exception.)
http://pressthink.org/2016/11/miss-bigger-missed-story-final-reflections-trump-press-2016/

INTRODUCTION to icann
the DOMAIN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
The Internet Authoritarian Power Grab
In 2015 a coalition comprised of China and 134 other countries submitted a manifesto to another U.N. meeting insisting that national governments—rather than NGOs, civil society, consumers or business innovators—should dictate the digital future. The bloc declared that “overall authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States.”

THE NSA

The NSA leaks ended the power of Obama officials to ration access. No self-respecting journalist believes what they say. That is the punchline of the Snowden affair: when we can't trust what government tells us, we come to trust those whom government doesn't trust. Thus, we no longer necessarily care what the official line is and who delivers it. And when that happens, access - the currency of the Beltway - becomes worthless. Ah, the irony.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/white-house-credibility-deficit

Now Trump offers this guy Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn the job of National Security Adviser which is viewed as critical to implementing a president's worldview on the various departments and agencies involved in national security: similar to Kissinger, Brzezinsk, Scowcroft, and Rice.
Michael Flynn's son and chief of staff pushed conspiracy theories, obscene memes online. He has called President Obama a “liar,” declared the U.S. justice system “corrupt” and insisted that he was pushed out of his assignment as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency because of his views on radical Islam. The claim has left former superiors seething, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/17/politics/kfile-michael-flynn-social-media/index.html

“During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in an deception spree regarding mass surveillance," Wyden said Thursday in a statement after Clapper's announcement. "Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them." “Director Clapper famously gave an untrue answer to that question," Wyden added. "So I had my intelligence staffer call his office afterward and ask them to correct the record. The Director's office refused to correct the record. Regardless of what was going through the director's head when he testified, failing to correct the record was a deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing. And within a few months, of course, the truth came out.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/national-intelligence-chief-clapper-resigns-231547

FAKE NEWS

IS TERRORISM

learn about and

TEACH THE PUBLIC ABOUT #FAKE NEWS

If you don't trust the CIA, who are you going to trust? The established news outlets are now untrustworthy. So the responsibility is upon us. You and me, the rank and file. It it requires all of us to come together
Stop Using Google use this instead

2016 Nancy Pelosi The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation.

Strict laws prohibit government officials from disclosing secrets, yet leaking has been a constant feature of American political life. Since the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917, the federal government has prosecuted only about a dozen cases concerning media leaks of state secrets. That's an astonishingly small number. The entire career of Bob Woodward, perhaps the best-selling political writer of his generation, is based on leaks. And yet, with a few symbolic exceptions, nothing is done. Because the relationship between the government and the press—between the source of leaks and the beneficiary of leaks—is symbiotic. Governments may make a fuss about how much leaks are harming them. But they need leaks as much as the press does.

2016 CIA ADMITS IT BROKE INTO SENATE COMPUTERS: SENATORS CALL FOR SPY CHIEF'S OUSTER Senators state that the violation of the constitutional separation of powers between an executive branch agency and its congressional overseers. “We're the only people watching these organizations, and if we can't rely on the information that we're given as being accurate, then it makes a mockery of the entire oversight function,” said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats. The findings confirmed charges by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the database that by agreement was to be used by her staffers compiling the report on the harsh interrogation methods used by the agency on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons under the George W. Bush administration. The findings also contradicted Brennan's denials of Feinstein's allegations, prompting two panel members, Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to demand that the spy chief resign. “I have no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan,” Udall said in a statement. “The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution's requirement of separation of powers. These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.”

1. Iraq Was a “Mistake,” said Gen. James Mattis, Trump's Defense Pick
2. ISIS Victim Suit Ties Twitter Ads to Terrorist Propaganda
3. Under Fire From Donald Trump, Jeb Bush Focuses On 9/11 Even Though Hijackers Got Florida Licenses

Why the CIA is trying to destroy Trump's presidency
Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don't Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote
The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad. Remember: we went to war against Iraq, which turned out to have no WMD, in part because no one read the “minor disagreements” from a few agencies about some aluminum tubes. A number of Senators who didn't read that footnote closely (and at least one that did) are involved in this story.

Here's a list of all the Foreign Governments who donated to the Clinton Foundation .

9/23/11 CIA WhistleBlower Susan Lindauer
Former Congressional staffer Susan Lindauer covered Iraq and Libya at UN as a U.S. Intelligence Asset and back door channel on anti-terrorism from 1993-2003. Summer of 2001, her team warned about a major terrorist attack involving airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center.
Former CIA Asset, Susan Lindauer, provides an extraordinary first-hand account from behind the intelligence curtain that shatters the government's lies about 9/11 and Iraq, and casts a harsh spotlight on the workings of the Patriot Act as the ideal weapon to bludgeon whistle blowers and dissidents. A terrifying true story of "black budget" betrayals and the Patriot Act, with its arsenal of secret evidence, indefinite detention and threats of forcible drugging.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LUHa_-OlA

SaudI

The FBI Has 80,000 Documents on Saudi Ties to 9/11 It Tried to Suppress
As the Daily Beast reported, the discovery of the 80,000 pages came when Irish investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan were contacted by an unnamed counterterrorism official in 2011. The reporters were preparing to publish a book on the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks and were told by the source that a Saudi family who had been living in Sarasota, Florida, prior to the attacks had connections to the attackers. Specifically, they were linked to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian terrorist widely recognized as the ringleader of the attacks. The unnamed official's tip conflicted squarely with the FBI's prior conclusions on that family. Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii, his wife Anoud, and their three small children lived in an upscale Sarasota community, along with Anoud's father, Esam Ghazzawi, a financier and interior designer, who owned the home, and Ghazzawai's American-born wife. The FBI had received multiple calls from the family's neighbors expressing concerns over erratic behavior.

The Smoking Gun: " Document 17 " Links Saudi Embassy In Washington To Sept 11. The document was written by two US investigators examining the possible roles of foreign governments in the attacks. New evidence has come to light of a definitive link between Saudi Arabian officials and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to a US memo, known as document 17, written in 2003 and quietly declassified last year, the FBI learnt that he had buried a cache of papers shortly before he was captured. Sharbi had tried to hide: his US flight certificate was in an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington. And there is your smoking gun , which has been fully available to the US government for the pat 13 years. It should have also been available to the American public.

The Saudi government threatened last week to dump $750 billion in US Treasury securities and other American assets if congress passes a bill that would clear a path for the families of 9/11 victims to file lawsuits against the kingdom."
Obama: We Can't Let Truth Come Out About Saudi Involvement In 9/11, Or Else America's Terrorism Will Be Revealed

Obama told CBS that we can't allow bipartisan legislation subjecting the Saudis to potential liability for terrorism … or else other countries could retaliate against the US (starting at 0:40):

Similarly, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said today:

“The whole notion of sovereign immunity is at stake,” Earnest told reporters Monday. “It could put the United States, and our taxpayers, and our service members and our diplomats at significant risk, if other countries were to adopt a similar law.”

As Cal Thomas points out at the Washington Times:

The intent of the Senate bill is to clarify the immunity normally given to foreign governments. It says such immunity should not apply when nations are found culpable of committing terrorist attacks that kill Americans on U.S. soil.

Why would the U.S. be worried about retaliation by other countries … being held accountable for terrorism?

Well, the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan - Lt. General William Odom - noted:

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In '78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

And - while Saudi Arabia is certainly a huge sponsor of terrorism worldwide - experts from the right and the left agree that the U.S. is actually the world's largest sponsor of terrorism. And see this. [snip]

A RETREAT FROM IMPIRICISM VS. EMPIRE

IT'S NOT A CONSPIRACY IF YOU CAN PROVE STRATEGY

The Political Industrial Complex :

Government of, by and for… Consultants! Politics is a battlefield for a new breed of war profiteer.

On a certain level, the media lacked the vocabulary to describe what was happening. What Bush and Cheny did with totalitarian propaganda, which does not attempt to depict the world but rather substitutes for it a ruthlessly coherent counter-narrative that is untroubled by any contradiction between itself and people's experience. The goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader's power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. The campain openly intended to distort reality and it was a show of power. Power over journalist. Exactly the way Trump did in the election. “When we act, we create our own reality” was a boast in the Bush White House, a bit of outrageousness intended to shock the reporter. Now we have Trump's attempt to substitute his reality for news of the world.

PREPARING FOR MOVIES ABOUT 9/11: A PARENTS GUIDE
Advertising and media controversy surrounding the release of "United 93" is saturating the airwaves, making exposure to violent 9/11 images an inevitability. When confronted with news or images about 9/11, some people may find that they will experience feelings similar to those they had soon after 9/11 itself, such as sadness, anger, confusion, disappointment, and nervousness. Others may feel that they are able to more effectively cope, and that they are in fact more ready than they were in the past to talk about their feelings. Undertaken in an informed and sensitive way, talking about 9/11 or other potentially frightening topics will not increase childrens feelings of worry or sadness. In fact, it is usually through discussions with a trusted adult that children are able to feel safer and less afraid. By being proactive and preparing your children for the media attention they are likely to be exposed to, you will be taking animportant step toward helping your children cope.

September 11th World Trade Center Curriculum & Resources - CURRICULUM,
CHARITY, EXPERTS, EMERGENCY NUMBERS, MILITARY, NEWS, POLITICIANS , HUMOR, VIDEO,CENSORSHIP

NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION

SECURITY

Economist Magazine States "Self-doomed to failure" An unsparing new report by Arab scholars explains why their region lags behind so much of the world
1) 1 in 5 Arabs live on less than $2.00 a day.
2) 1 in every 2 woman can't read or write.
3) They lack three things that doom them: Freedom, Knowledge & Women Power
The actual UN Report can be downloaded from here.
4) Unfortunately, if one actually follows the link to the actual UN report, the UN report includes in it's overview a section describing why all of the arab's problems are caused by Israel (and by implication the US), and, of course, no mention of terrorism. Why can't someone publish anything in the arab world that is at all critical unless it first blaming Israel for all of the problems. We have a long way to go.

IQ and the Wealth of Nations

All Nobel Winners - last updated in 2002

IQ and the Wealth of Nations
The Intelligence Of Nations: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Westport, CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S.
$64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X
A review By Philippe Rushton

IQ and the Wealth of Nations. is a brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book that does for the global study of economic prosperity what The Bell Curve did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine IQ scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They document that national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national IQ correlates powerfully-more than 0.7-with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic growth rates. Second in importance is whether the countries have market or socialist economies. Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural resources, like oil.

One arresting fact emerges: the average national IQ of the world is only 90. Fewer than one in five countries have IQs equal or near the British average of 100. Almost half have IQs of 90 or less. This poses a serious problem if the book's conclusion that IQ = 90 forms the threshold for a technological economy is correct. Lynn and Vanhanen review the theories advanced over the last 250 years to explain why some countries are rich while others are poor.

These include:

• climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best);

• geographic theories (an East-West Axis is said to be best);

• modernization theories (urbanization and division of labor are said to be
  good);

• dependency theories (exploitationand peripheralization of poor nations are
  said to be bad);

• neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good);

• psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant
  Ethic, and motivation forachievement are said to be good).

Some of these factors no doubt play a role. But it turns out that IQ that does the heavy lifting. Next, Lynn and Vanhanen review the scientific literature and find that IQ is an important determinant of educational attainment, earnings, economic success, etc. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ and earnings for individuals is approximately 0.35. (That is, cleverness is a fairly loose guarantee of economic success for an individual, but is significant across an entire population. If you bet on it at a gaming table you wouldn't win on every throw,but you would make a lot of money over an evening.) Of course, it makes sense that intelligence determines earnings. More intelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively, can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more productively and efficiently.

Nations whose people have high IQ levels also have high educational attainment and large numbers of individuals who make significant contributions to national life. On the flipside, nations with low levels of intelligence have low levels of educational attainment and few individuals who make significant contributions. Low intelligence leads to unfavorable social outcomes like crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single motherhood. Lynn and Vanhanen prove that the widespread though rarely stated assumption of economists and political scientists-that all peoples and nations have the same average IQ-is wildly wrong. Their evidence documents substantial national differences in average intelligence.The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental countries of North East Asia (average IQ = 104), followed by the European nations (average IQ = 98), and the mainly White populationsof North America and Australasia (average IQ = 98). Further behind are the countries of South and Southwest Asia, from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (average IQ = 87), as are the countries of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (average IQ = 86), and Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85). Lowest are the countries of Africa (average IQ = 70). Lynn and Vanhanen find that some countries do have higher or lower per capita incomes than their national IQ averages would predict. This is where having a market or socialist economy or sitting atop a sea of crude oil comes in.Some of the countries with a higher per capita income than would be predicted from theiraverage IQs are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark,France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S. Except for Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados, all of these are technologically highly developed market
economies. Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income comes from oil exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by corporations and people from European and North American countries. South Africa's much higher than expected per capita income derives from the high performance of the industries established and managed by the country's European minority. Similarly, Barbados's above average wealth comes from its well-established tourist industryand financial services, which are owned, controlled and managed by American and European countries.Some of the countries with lower per capita income than would be predicted from their average IQ: Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Most of these are present or former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The large amount of ethnic conflict inthe Philippines decreased growth.Lynn and Vanhanen provide a detailed examination how well IQ theory stacks up against its competitors. For example, two significant exceptions to the view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singaporeand Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are rich. Conversely, Lesotho and Swaziland are temperate, lying slightly south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but poor. These differences, however, can be explained in terms of intelligence theory. The people of Singapore and Hong Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest average IQs; the people of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest. Modernization theories, according to which all economies would evolve from subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and industrialization, have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa).

IQ and the Wealth of Nations proposes that modernization theories describe Western Europe and the Pacific Rim because these countries have appreciably the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States. But they did not work for the other four groups of countries because average IQs are below the technological threshold. But why did the peoples of East Asia, with their high IQs, lag behind the European peoples until the second half of the 20th Century? Well, China's science and technology were generally more advanced than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. But in the 15th century, Chinese inventiveness came to an end and from that time on virtually all the important advances were made by Europeans, first in Europe and later in the U.S. The explanation may be that Europeans developed the market economy, while China stagnated through authoritarian bureaucracy and central planning.The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology, and by freeing up theeconomy by transforming state monopolies into private corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics industries. Although it is sometimes asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant scientific and technological innovations of their own, this underestimates their technological achievements: the fiber-tipped pen (1960), "bullet" trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video home systems (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display (1979), video discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial cables and optical fibers (1988).African countries are at the opposite pole from China and Japan in national IQ. This may explain why they are such a major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of economic growth of African countries following their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the major problems in developmental economics. During the years 1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41 countries of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are available is much lower than in the rest of the world. Many of the African countries actually suffered negative per capita growth rate. Economists have quantified all possible factors, such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement, unemployment and the like, and compared the situation to elsewhere in the world, especially Asia. They concluded that these factors do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some "missing element."Some have suggested the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread corruption and lack of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable telephones and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria. IQ and the Wealth of Nations identifies IQ as the missing link. Some of these "social capital" are actually manifestations of a low level of intelligence in the populations. Poor telephone services and electricity supplies, low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government advisory boards reflect low average IQ. With a mean IQ of 70, the populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic growth achieved elsewhere in the world. Finally, Lynn and Vanhanen peer into the future. They predict future growth is most likely in countries with high national IQ scores but currently bad economic systems.The countries of the former Communist Bloc-Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam-are good bets.

What else can be done? Lynn and Vanhanen also list some of the factors, some environmental and some genetic, that might raise IQ scores and somewhat alleviate the disparities in national average IQ. These include: better nutrition, education and health; and ending the dysgenic fertility trends where the lowest IQ people produce the most children. (Obviously, immigration policy has a role to play too.) The take-home message of IQ and the Wealth of Nations: national differences in IQ are here to stay and so is the gap between the rich and the poor countries. Political promises that the gap is temporary, and will be remedied by aid from rich countries to poor countries, or even by poor countries adopting appropriate institutions, will not be fulfilled. Such promises assume that all human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic development. They do not. The authors sound a clarion call for the recognition of national and race differences in intelligence.

Adapted from:
The Bigger Bell Curve : Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global Economy, 22 October 2001, (PDF version) in Elsevier Science Journal Personality and Individual Differences
Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario and the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective 2/27/02