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Post by Farmduck on Dec 16, 2017 23:03:44 GMT 10
I hate taboos in social discussion. The notion that some things cannot be discussed because someone will get their feelings hurt. I've mentioned this in previous posts about Immigration and Indigenous Australians. In Australia there is nothing more taboo than criticising Aboriginals which is so stupid because, when we look at the social outcomes - life expectancy, incarceration rates, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, chronic health problems - we seem to be making very very slow progress, if any, over the last 40 years. To me this says that we need new ideas if the ones we've had in place for four decades haven't done the job. In order to form these new ideas and policies, we need to put everything on the table, including the participation of those who suffer the negative consequences. One of the zombie issues on YouTube and in the general Raceosphere is the issue of Race and IQ. If you're a fellow YT addict, you may be aware of the long-running feud between Kraut and Tea and some of the Race Realists, or you may have seen David Pakman's appalling opus on Race and IQ. My major concern here is not the issue - there are plenty of low-IQ individuals in every ethnic group and every nation - but the failure of "the Left" and "the Skeptics" to mount any credible rebuttal. One of the biggest obstacles to covering this issue in any intelligent manner is the massive list of disclaimers and definitions that are needed before one can even get into the meat of any arguments. Here are some: - I don't care what race/ethnicity people are. I only care about how they behave towards me and others. I hate Islamic terrorists not because they're Arabs or Muslims but because they kill innocent people indiscriminately. - The word "race" has no strict scientific meaning in relation to humans. Biological taxonomy divides animals and plants into Family, Genus, Species and sometimes Subspecies. One analog to race that I can think of occurs in the plant species Banksia serrata which occurs right down the eastern coast of Australia. Inland, it can grow to a 15m high tree but on windy headlands along the coast it occurs as a 20cm high prostrate shrub. If you propagate the prostrate form by seed you get a mix of tree and prostrate forms in the seedlings. This suggests that the prostrate form may eventually become a subspecies but the process hasn't been completed yet. Given that Banksias have been around for 60 million years - for Creationists, that's roughly 5,000 years - I wouldn't suggest waiting for the subspeciation process to complete. In Geography or Sociology or History we might call people Chinese because they live in China or because they speak Chinese or one of the many other languages spoken in China or because their ancestors came from China but there is no Chinese sub-species of Homo sapiens. So it's important from the start to define the use of the word "race" if you want to discuss Race Realism or the issue of Race and IQ. My definition of race, for this purpose, is: "A group of people with shared ancestral or geographical heritage." Thus there are Africans - including Jamaicans, black Americans and Brazilians, Haitians, etc - there are Europeans, and there are several types of Asians - Central Asians, South Asians, Malay/S-E Asians, and N-E Asians. There are also smaller groups whose pre-history isn't fully known, or who have been isolated from interaction with other major population groups for substantial periods - Melanesians, Indigenous Australians, Arctic Peoples and American "Native" peoples. - I think that, no matter what differences there may be between different groups, societies function best when when they attempt to allow every member of that society to achieve personal goals. - Race Realism/Realists: one obstacle that defeats many attempts to undermine these ideas is the conflation of Race Realism with Alt-Right, Nazi, Ethno-Nationalist, Fascist and any other slur you feel like throwing in. There is no dumber statement in social discussion than, "You're wrong because Hitler something...." I shouldn't have to point out one of the most basic rules in debate: attack the ideas, not the speaker. Don't attack "the Alt-Right." Attack a particular set of statements made by a specific individual to show that his/her statements are incorrect. - Genetics: how much do you know about genetics? Do you know the difference between Quantitative Genetics and Molecular Genetics? Do you understand Heritability factors? A factor of 0.75 means that a trait is 75% hereditary - likely to occur in offspring. - Source material: Have you ever read The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray? It isn't necessary to read it but it is referenced a lot in Race and IQ discussions. The book was released in 1994 and immediately divided people into three classes - 60% hated it and denounced the authors. 39% loved it because they believed it gave an intellectual basis to ideas of White Supremacy. The other 1% actually read the book and understood the main idea - that society would become increasingly stratifed as a rising Cognitive Elite joined the traditional Money and Political Elites. Others worth checking out might be Richard Lynn, widely denounced as a White Supremacist and eugenics proponent, J Phillipe Rushton usually denounced as just your basic racist, Ryan Faulk, who has a YT channel called Alternative Hypothesis who has no simple label that I know of, and Jean-Francois Gariepy, a Quebecois PhD in Biology (I think) who has a YT channel devoted to psychology, genetics, neuroscience and other issues. I have heard JF Gariepy make statements I considered ethno-Nationalist but that may have more to do with his Quebecois background than outright whiteness v. the rest. Now I need a rest and I haven't even finished the lead-up definitions and disclaimers. This shows you why so many people fail at this mission.
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Post by Tom possessed on Dec 17, 2017 1:20:55 GMT 10
I don't have problems with the fundamentals of race realism honestly because it's just pointing out the obvious , but I'm not sure about the application honestly because there are many people with a agenda out there , who would purposely twist results for personal gain etc.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 17, 2017 1:44:41 GMT 10
I don't have problems with the fundamentals of race realism honestly because it's just pointing out the obvious , but I'm not sure about the application honestly because there are many people with a agenda out there , who would purposely twist results for personal gain etc. I'm white in a white-majority country and I have an IQ around the 130 mark so I have no dog in this fight. I'm also on a disability pension so I won't be losing a job to anybody smarter who turns up. The application of race realism to social policy isn't all bad, in one sense. If we know there is 20-30% of IQ that comes from non-heritable sources, we can tailor early childhood education programs to people most likely to need them. We also understand different types of cognitive skills, like language, spatial relationships and so on. We could design simplified IQ tests for 3-year-olds - pretty much like some of the toys they already play with - and determine which areas they need stimulation in. There is another IQ researcher named James Flynn who states that IQ all around the World is increasing with each generation. He even offers a slightly different definition of IQ: IQ is a measurement of a person's ability to interact with the modern World. Under his definition, as more parts of Africa get electricity, TV, books, internet, etc, their IQs will rise. This makes some sense and here's a simple example: Imagine it's 1917 and you tell someone that you can buy things from the other side of the World and pay for them just using a mobile phone. Think about the number of abstract (to a 1917 rural worker) concepts involved in that one sentence. Yet anyone over the age of 5 today can understand it. Flynn is best known for The Flynn Effect, his theory of global rising IQs. What do we do with all the low-IQ people? I grew up in the days when there were still polio victims around. In some schools every class would have at least one kid with a leg brace or arm brace as a result of polio. There were people living in iron lungs, clearly much more "useless" to society than someone with an IQ of 70. We didn't ship them all off to an island and we didn't euthanase them. The biggest challenge faced by low-IQ people isn't social policy, it's automation. I'll pick some of the weakest arguments against the Race Realists later this week and pull them apart. For me, the best retort to the Race and IQ questions is, "So what? We have always had issues in societies and somehow societies still exist. The Bubonic Plague and WWII were, by comparison, much bigger problems."
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Post by Tom possessed on Dec 17, 2017 16:14:51 GMT 10
My fears are missed placed ,ather some time of thinking. Do you believe the there's some truth to the gunz,steel and germs theory like crops had a influence on africa development
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 17, 2017 17:34:48 GMT 10
I haven't read the Jared Diamond book but I recall reading excerpts from it when it was released. One of the explanations for the Flynn Effect - the rising global IQ scores - is that, since 1900, long-term malnutrition has largely been wiped out. Even when there's a big drought in Ethiopia or Chad we can deliver food to those places very quickly now, partly because of improved transport and partly because the major food-exporting nations have surpluses available. These recurring food shortages must have had a strong effect on childhood development including brain development. I have seen firsthand a simple example of this. Many Greek people migrated here just after WWII and their children were born and raised in Australia. The difference in size between the two generations was often quite stunning - 5'2" parents with 6'2" children. The simplest explanation was the much better and uninterrupted diet of that Australian-born generation. The most outstanding example of the role played by diet in intelligence is the incidence of cretinism among Tibetans, caused by an iodine deficiency in their diet. Because they live on a high plateau and iodine is readily soluble their farming environment had lost most of its iodine, leached away over a million years. Even their salt came from dried lake beds which had already lost their iodine. The saddest thing was that all those cases of people with IQs around 60 could have been avoided with less than $1 of iodine per year. Similar to malnutrition, disease must have played a role in childhood development and thus brain development. The regular interruption to growth would have an effect on any biological function. Again, the huge effots in Infant Mortality over the last 40 years and their contribution to child health overall would contribute to the Flynn Effect. Diamond's germs theory doesn't contribute much to the Race and IQ debate regarding Africans though. While imported diseases were devastating in Australia and North and Central America, most of the chronic or regularly-recurring diseases in Africa were already there. The "dirty water" diseases like cholera and typhoid are the ones which debilitate people for a couple of weeks every few months and, because of the vomiting and diahrroea, prevent people from extracting any nutrients from the food they do eat. I think the choice of crops is important but, in terms of IQ and Race, it gives some conflicting evidence. I'm not sure what Africans used as their staple diets before maize was introduced but maize was, in many ways, the worst option. Maize, on average, contains about 8% protein whereas the highest-grade Australian Durum wheat can be 15-16% protein. Obviously wheat doesn't do well in the tropics but many legumes are grown in tropical areas. Legume crops like chick peas and lentils can have protein rates of 18-20% and they are grown right across Africa from Senegal to Ethiopia and down to some of the semi-arid areas of Zimbabwe and South Africa. If you want to look into this further here is a paper which outlines the distribution of major crops around the World. There is a flaw in this "diet = IQ" idea though. Rice is also only about 8% protein and yet we find high IQs among Japanese people. Presumably they were topping up their protein intake with something else - fish, soy beans? The situation in China, in terms of "diet = IQ" is slightly different. Northern Chinese eat wheat, Southern Chinese eat rice. The Northerners have always controlled every Chinese dynasty and it might be a reasonable assumption that the high IQ scores for Chinese people are skewed by the high performance of Northerners. There may be a similar distinction among Indians where different ethnic groups and crops dominate the South as opposed to the drier North.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 17, 2017 20:16:11 GMT 10
Some more definitions: Average IQ scores: Generally in this discussion we say “average” but we are really talking about median. In a data distribution, the average is just the combined total divided by the number of participants. The median is the point in a distribution where 50% of the participants are above the point and 50% below. IQ Test: There are standard IQ tests used to determine general intelligence. There are also similar tests often called Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) or American College Testing (ACT) or other names. Here is a list of various other tests used in the USA: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_standardized_tests_in_the_United_States#IQ_testsWhy is the median always 100: Originally the score attempted to give a real-life meaning to IQ. If a ten-year-old scored 150 then that meant he/she was performing at the level of someone 150% of their age – a 15-year-old. This was changed decades ago to give the score a purely comparative meaning – 100 would be standard for the group so anyone 120 or higher would be an advanced student and so on. The Flynn Effect tells us that IQs were steadily rising in the USA and other countries so, rather than have more and more people pushing up into some notional genius bracket, the median was set at 100 partly because of simplicty in applications like student progression through grades or selecting students for particularly tough subjects. If we keep resetting the 100, aren’t we “fudging the data?” No, it’s like talking about wages in the 1960s and saying “In today’s dollars that would be ….” or adjusting financial data to allow for inflation or interest rates. Bell Curve: It’s important to understand what a bell curve means in relation to the presentation of data. This is a bell curve: The IQ data would normally be displayed with the 100 point where the 0 is shown on this graph. The numbers 1, 2 and 3 are called “standard deviations.” In the usual IQ bell curve graph, a standard deviation is 15 IQ points. So if you hear someone talking about a group 2 standard deviations above the median, they mean people with IQs of 130 or more. If we ignore the actual numbers used and look at the above example, we can see that there is a tiny group even higher than the “3”. These are your Einsteins and Stephen Hawkings.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 18, 2017 16:37:04 GMT 10
Here are the bell curves which started the whole argument: Well it's an example of the sort of results produced by plotting IQ scores against race. Obviously it is based on specific samples which were analysed at the time. It is not absolute. If I went to a local High School around here I would get a slightly different result for several reasons: - High proportion of Indians and Chinese in my neighbourhood whose parents went through a very tough selection process for immigration so they probably would be above their domestic median scores to begin with. - Possibly worse scores among Africans and possibly the number would be too small to be reliable. I suggest worse scores for Africans because most of the Africans in my area have come from refugee camps in war zones like Sudan, Darfur and Sierra Leone. These children might have suffered considerable deprivation during formative years and it might be interesting to separate them into two groups: those who spent the first 5-10 years in war zones and refugee camps versus those who were born in Australia after the families migrated. This comparison might show some effects of diet and trauma during early childhood in relation to development of IQ. - Dumb white people. Hey, I like my neighbours but ....... how can I put this delicately? I don't live in the MENSA end of town. - We don't have significant numbers of Hispanic people around here and those we have are from such scattered backgrounds that they wouldn't really form a group. For example I worked with a Quechuan woman from Bolivia and I knew a woman from Argentina with mixed Slavic and Italian heritage.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 18, 2017 20:57:00 GMT 10
How much science do we need to know to understand this issue?
There are two answers. Either not much or as much as you want. Genetics is brilliant science but you really need years of structured study to make any molecular-genetics-based arguments around the Race v IQ issue. Fortunately, classical genetics was already well established long before DNA was discovered so the concept and processes of heritability were well-understood. Think of it this way:
I park my car under a tree and go shopping for a couple of hours. I come back and my car is covered in bird shit. I don't see any birds around and I don't know anything about the local bird species or their diets or numbers and I haven't seen any birds shitting on my car. Does this mean that I can't draw a valid, highly-probable conclusion about how all that bird shit got on my car? This brings us to ........
The "name the gene" failure.
One common fail in attempting to dismantle the Race Realist position on Race v IQ is this: If IQ is heritable then we should be able to define which gene carries it and identify that gene in high-IQ individuals. No, it isn't necessary. We can examine statistical data from large populations with known genetic differences and draw conclusions from that data.
But correlation does not equal causation.
This saying is a two-edged sword. I see it used often appropriately but it can also be used inappropriately. It rained heavily 5 minutes ago. My dog was outside 5 minutes ago. My dog is now wet. "Oh but correlation doesn't equal causation." Perhaps we need to rephrase it as: Correlation, without any other evidence, does not necessarily confirm causation. However, correlation, repeated at a very predictable rate, thousands of times every year, in many different countries, at many different socio-economic levels, across all major ethnic populations is a different story. What is "the scientific method?" It is when you come up with a hypothesis and test it repeatedly, trying every variation in the factors influencing the result until you've eliminated them and arriving at a conclusion.
So when would "repeated predictable correlation" become fact?
A better question would be "What is a scientific fact?" The answer is a phenomenon whose outcome can be predicted accurately with a high degree of certainty time and time again. Isn't gravity a "fact?" Well, to be pedantic, gravity is an excellent working explanation of why we all stay attached to the Earth. Astronomers might say that it also explains many planetary and astral phenomena consistently, according the same calculations we use to predict gravitational phenomena on Earth. Finally, at this stage of our scientific knowledge, gravity is the best available explanation of a whole range of natural phenomena and the mathematical formulae derived from the theory predict these phenomena with an accuracy above 99%. That's what a fact is. It's the best available explanation unless, or until, newer and better information comes along.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 22, 2017 21:58:47 GMT 10
“People are more genetically varied within a group than between groups.”This is a popular claim. It is commonly known as Lewontin's Fallacy. This term was coined by a later geneticist, Anthony Edwards. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't not invalidate or preclude the notion of consistently-predictable racial differences. I'll quote one of Lewontin's former students, Greg Mayer:
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 25, 2017 22:47:25 GMT 10
Aren’t IQs declining in the Western World and in Asia?This is an interesting point and, from what I’ve seen, the answer is yes but the reasons aren’t completely clear. For instance this study says that simple reaction times have slowed and states “Simple reaction time measures correlate substantially with measures of general intelligence (g) and are considered elementary measures of cognition.” So how does this square with the Flynn Effect? Wouldn’t this contradict the notion that IQs around the World are steadily increasing? Here are a few reasons why some countries are experiencing declining IQ scores: - Smarter people are having fewer children. We know that wealthier people tend to have fewer children and if there is a connection between wealth and IQ (as Jordan Peterson and many others have claimed) then this would be a factor. Statistics then take over: fewer genetically-high IQ children means they form a lower proportion of the total population and thus the average scores of a population decline. - immigration tends to bring in lower-IQ people. This could be a part explanation as even countries with relatively strict immigration standards, like Australia, have a range of categories and some of these aren’t as strict in areas that would indicate higher IQ. One simple example would be Family Reunion where existing citizens can sponsor relatives who would not otherwise have qualified. Another category would be spouse visas where, often because of arranged marriages, people bring in spouses from their “old” country who may never have qualified otherwise. - the decline may be entirely in the 20-30% of IQ influenced by environment. This could tie into the first point, lower-IQ parents having more children who end up in poor living environments and on worse diets because the parents tend to be poorer than average. Poverty has also long been linked to domestic violence and alcohol and substance abuse so these factors would also make a less-satisfactory environment the develop the environmental component of IQ. - samples may have included more older people. Many Western countries have increased their retirement ages and this may have meant more older people taking IQ tests as they stay in the job market longer or attempt to upgrade skills through education or it may be simply that nobody cared about testing older people 50 years ago – I had a couple of IQ tests when I was at school but since then, the only similar tests I’ve encountered were the Public Service entry tests. Older people still have the same genes they were born with but have more years of exposure to environmental hazards which could have affected their brain health. They may also have consumed a lot of brain-cell-killing alcohol or other drugs. Also as Human Resources departments have become more common there may be more companies testing all prospective workers.
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 27, 2017 15:42:40 GMT 10
Further to Lewontin's statement:
Lewontin: "It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance".
Lewontin RC. The apportionment of human diversity. In: Dobzhansky T,Hecht MK, Steere WC, editors. Evolutionary Biology 6. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1972. p 381–398.
Edwards: "These conclusions are based on the old statistical fallacy of analysing data on the assumption that it contains no information beyond that revealed on a locus-by-locus analysis, and then drawing conclusions solely on the results of such an analysis. The ‘taxonomic significance’ of genetic data in fact often arises from correlations amongst the different loci, for it is these that may contain the information which enables a stable classification to be uncovered.
This is from: Edwards, A.W.F. (2003), Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. Bioessays, 25: 798–801. doi:10.1002/bies.10315
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Post by Farmduck on Dec 31, 2017 12:26:15 GMT 10
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Post by Farmduck on Jan 28, 2018 17:16:26 GMT 10
So I never quite got around to putting the conclusion on this. In short, don't argue with the Race Realists because the science is on their side. If you want to argue with racists, White Supremacists or Alt Righters, ask them about their social policies for the Brave New Ethnostate. If they are convinced that the differences between genetic populations are so fundamental that co-habitation isn't possible, desirable or sustainable, then what do they plan to do about it?
One of the first answers they may produce isn't particularly problematic since it would be voluntary. They'll say they will give all the non-White immigrants some financial incentives to move back to their own countries. This might get 5 million takers because, if they've already accumulated some wealth in the USA and, like many migrants in Australia, had already planned to move back "home" when they retired, but what about the other 95 million? I don't know the exact numbers but if you use a rough total of 35-40 million blacks, add on all the Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians, Koreans and Filipinos, and then sort out which of the Hispanics are "white" enough, I think my estimate of 100 million is a reasonable number for the purpose of discussing hypothetical social policy.
The you might hear "the Florida option." This comes from a throwaway line by Richard Spencer in a discussion with Roaming Millennial. He suggested that black Americans could be offered their own homeland within the USA and as an example he used Florida. Florida is already 17% black and 23% Hispanic so it's possibly not as dumb as it sounds.
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Post by Farmduck on Jan 28, 2018 20:58:02 GMT 10
The Florida option raises some interesting sub-branches of discussion. If we assume that black Americans already live in a white supremacist society riddled with systemic racial bias, as many black Americans claim, maybe they would be better off having their own State. Overnight we would see an end to racial discrimination in the workplace, in Universities, in Board Rooms and in Government. We would never have another incident of white cops killing a black man. They would be running their own legal system so they could eliminate racial bias from policing and from sentencing.
Of course Florida might be too small but you could add a chunk of Southern Georgia and who says it has to be just one State? Maybe they could have Mississippi as well. It's already 67% black. Perhaps, for all the Northerners, accustomed to the weather in Chicago, Detroit and New York, maybe they could have North Dakota.
Anyway, the next question for the Ethno-Statists is this: You've finished the voluntary and incentivised emigration and internal relocation programmes and you still have 60-80 million of the untermenschen left. What is Phase 2? They might say that the next move is to strip the remaining people of their citizenship and/or rights. Particularly in relation to medical care, employment, education and welfare services. This should be a strong incentive for many more to leave "White America" or at least to congregate in Blacks-only or Hispanic-only communities. Some ethno-nationalists might be satisfied with this "Bantustan" approach which was one of the major policies of Apartheid South Africa. Once the non-whites had self-segregated, you could institute an "Israeli Apartheid" system similar to the West Bank.
So you might ask, "What's the point of this line of questioning?" Simple. You can never achieve 100% results with the programmes mentioned above. Eventually, you will end up shooting people. Don't take my word for it, ask the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, or the Burmese in the Rohingya-dominated areas or the Afghans in the Hazara regions. So the central question for the White Supremacists is: How many million people are you prepared to kill? How important is White America? Is it worth 2 million dead people? 5 million? 20 million?
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Post by Farmduck on Feb 14, 2018 20:52:47 GMT 10
High school science fair project questioning African American intelligence sparks outrage www.sacbee.com/news/local/article199440204.htmlStudents, parents and staff at C.K. McClatchy High School are upset over a science fair project by a student in its elite magnet program that questioned whether certain races of people lack the intelligence to handle the program’s academically challenging coursework. Some of those outraged by the racially charged project say it points to a larger problem: the lack of ethnic diversity in the school’s elite HISP program. The project that started the controversy was titled “Race and IQ.” It raised the hypothesis: “If the average IQs of blacks, Southeast Asians, and Hispanics are lower than the average IQs of non-Hispanic whites and Northeast Asians, then the racial disproportionality in (HISP) is justified.” The project was put on display with others on Monday afternoon to be judged by a team of community members as part of the fourth annual Mini Science Fair. It was removed Wednesday morning after students, parents and staff complained. The science fair was open to students and parents. The saddest part about this, IMO, is that it was a Science Fair. Surely the best approach, at a Science Fair, is to use the scientific method to prove that he was wrong. The programme in question is called the Humanities and International Studies Program (HISP)Now the greatest irony here is that the programme is academically selective and the racial/ethnic composition of its student population is contributive evidence to the accuracy of the project.from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento%2C_California#2010
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