There’s no Saturday Forum tonight, (we have an excellent piece by John Derbyshire instead) because those are edited by our letters editor, Joe Guzzardi, who is not well at all, having suffered a relapse of the health problems he mentioned in March in View From Lodi, CA: Joe Guzzardi Returns!

Get well wishes can be sent to him at  jguzzardi@vdare.com

The NFL requires draft prospects to take the 12 minute Wonderlic IQ test. The average score is 21 (up from 20, perhaps due to the Flynn Effect), with each additional right answer the equivalent of 2 extra IQ points.

The New England Patriots’ All-Galaxy quarterback Tom Brady (a record 50 touchdowns and only 8 interceptions in the regular season) got 33 right out of 50 for an IQ of 124 (about the 95th percentile). The Giants’ younger Eli Manning, little brother of Brady nemesis Peyton Manning (for whom I’ve seen reports of 108 and 114), scored a 39 for a very high 136.

I’d still bet on Brady (if his foot is okay).

How often in American life do we see two competitors going head to head who average 130? We didn’t in the last Presidential, where the average was probably around 120.

A couple of caveats: the Wonderlic is the quickest and dirtiest of the legitimate commercial IQ test, so there’s a bigger margin of error. Players are allowed to take it more than once, so these rumored scores might not be their average, just their high scores. And with so much money riding on draft choices, I wouldn’t be hugely shocked to find that now and then some player’s agent had somehow gotten his hands on the questions ahead of time. (I recall one QB a few years ago who went from something like 88 to 132 when he took it again.)

I don’t see a strong correlation between scores and performance for quarterbacks. But there’s a substantial restriction of range problem: All NFL quarterbacks were previously college quarterbacks, so the players who were really bad at mastering a complicated playbook were already removed from the picture. I could believe that Dan Marino, who had maybe the greatest throwing motion ever, scored below 100 — he peaked in about his third season and didn’t really adjust after that as the league adjusted to him.

Of course, a lot of what NFL quarterbacks need are cognitive skills that aren’t tested well by traditional IQ tests. For example, what the Air Force calls “situational awareness” is very important in a dogfight – you can’t concentrate too much on one thing or you’ll get shot down by somebody you weren’t paying attention to — and in a football game. High IQ people, such as mathematicians, can sometimes have too much focus on what they are concentrating upon to function well in daily life.

I don’t like to mix VDARE.COM with my day job as a financial journalist, but can’t resist making available online for the first time my long article on competing currencies as an alternative to the Federal Reserve. Here’s my intro; we post tonight.[Update: here it is: Golden Oldie: Peter Brimelow’s Absolutely Definitive Account Of This Weird Competing Currencies Idea Ron Paul Keeps Talking About]

OK, I admit it: I tend to be early. The idea of private money—often referred to as “competing currencies”—has always fascinated me. I persuaded Jim Michaels, the late, great editor of Forbes Magazine, to let me translate the little-known academic literature into journalese in this article, which he published under the title Do You Want To Be Paid In Rockefellers? In Wristons? Or How About A Hayek? almost (ahem!) exactly twenty years ago. (May 30, 1988). The Great Inflation of the 1970s was then still a live memory. For some years, my account was regularly assigned in college courses. Now, GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul seems to have single-handedly revived the issue with his relentless criticisms of the Federal Reserve. (Click here for Google web search). I still think it’s going to happen—just as there will eventually be an immigration cut-off.

Piggy-man alert! Mexico has apparently given up on its efforts to end male harassment and assault of women through public service announcements.

Back in 2006, the Mexican government pictured sex dolls dressed up as normal workers in a bizarre anti-machismo campaign–which actually sent the message that all women are whores under their professional duds, I thought at the time.

But today the strategy is simpler and more physical — just keep the men out of public transit vehicles that are reserved for women. Apparently Mexican elites aren’t concerned with damaging the self-esteem of males so restrained.

Mexican men have long gotten a relative pass on their obnoxious behavior toward women because the Arabs are so much worse on the worldwide piggy-man scorecards. So the women-only buses of Mexico City are a helpful reminder of our neighbor’s knuckle-dragger culture.

Groping and verbal harassment is an exasperating reality for women using public transportation in this sprawling capital, where 22 million passengers cram onto subways and buses each day. Some men treat women so badly that the subway system has long had ladies-only cars during rush hour, with police segregating the sexes on the platforms. [...]

And while some men have complained that they have to wait longer for a bus, she said the women are thrilled: “The women are really happy and we have been getting a lot of e-mail and letters from them.”

Juliana Romero, a 49-year-old secretary, said not riding with men is “fantastic.”

“When the bus is packed, there will inevitably be a lecherous man who will bother you,” she said.

Women-only buses or subways have been rolling for years in India, Brazil, Japan and other countries. Mexico City finally took the action as part of a growing responsiveness to complaints about discrimination against women, Montiel said.
[Mexico City Rolls Out Women-Only Buses, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 24, 2008]

Say, can we get American buses that will keep Mexican men off?

From the Dairy Initiatives Newsletter at the University of Minnesota there’s a story called Working With a Hispanic Person. [Some useful answers to questions about the Hispanic labor force, culture, and work ethic By MARCO LOPEZ, Monsanto Dairy Business, Volume 10 Issue 1 Spring 2001]

Here are couple of samples

Q: I have heard that family is very important to Hispanics. What should I take into account as I work with Hispanics?

A: Keeping close family ties is very important for all cultures. However, Hispanic families like to support each other economically and morally. Most Hispanics come from large families where one house may be the shelter for two or three families, allowing them to develop and maintain close family ties. In the majority of cases, men seek work to support the family while women stay at home and care for the family.

also

Q: Do Hispanic women work outside of the home as frequently as U.S. women?
A: No. Typically, the men work to support the family and the women stay home and care for the family.

Of course, the fact that American families are less likely to have stay-at-home moms than Mexicans is caused by two different factors–the fact that Mexicans don’t think much of women’s rights, and the fact that American families need two incomes partly to pay for the cost of immigration through income tax.

It’s pretty clear that in spite of talking about Hispanics, Latinos, and whatever, the author is talking mostly about recent Mexican immigrants, especially when he says “However, most Hispanic employees prefer to take two to four weeks of time off or vacation during December for Christmas to visit relatives. “

And this is just useless:

 Q: I understand that the level of education and experience can vary a lot from person to person, just like our local folks. Is this true?
A: Yes. The level of education will vary from illiterate to college graduates. Most agricultural migrant workers come from poor rural areas where, quite often, they have to quit school to take a job and help contribute to support the family. However, a few manage to graduate from high school or college.

In fact, Mexican immigrants are much more likely to be illiterate in English and Spanish than American workers, much less likely to be high school graduates than American workers.

There’s a whole genre of articles on working with the Hispanic worker–what we need is articles on working with the American worker.

We link to a lot of stories in the course of writing for VDARE.com, and some of them, in their quest for advertising revenue, ask you to register and login before you can read them, including the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post. You never have to do that on VDARE.com, since your contributions mean we don’t have to sell ads.

This is a different issue from the journals of opinion that hide a lot of their content behind subscriber walls, which to my mind misses the point of having a journal of opinion. However, since these journals include The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and National Review, this may work out for the best. But the reason I’m mentioning this is that there’s a service called Bugmenot.com, which “was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).” It provides you with passwords for the “Registration Required” sites, but not the subscription sites, of course. There’s a tutorial here, and their frequently asked questions are here.

So you don’t have to register for any of these sites, if you don’t want to.

I am amazed by this story from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Jan 25):

ALEXANDRIA, La. — A white man accused of driving past a group of black civil rights activists with two nooses dangling from the back of his pickup has been indicted on federal hate-crime and conspiracy charges, prosecutors said Thursday.

Jeremiah Munsen, 18, was arrested in September after driving past a crowd of people who had attended a civil rights march in Jena, about 40 miles northeast of Alexandria, police have said. The Jena march drew an estimated 20,000 protesters, and many stayed in surrounding cities, including Alexandria.

The indictment accuses Munsen of conspiring to threaten and intimidate the marchers and of committing a federal hate crime.

“It is a violation of federal law to intimidate, oppress, injure or threaten people because of their race and because those people are exercising and enjoying rights guaranteed and protected by the laws and Constitution of the United States,” said Donald W. Washington, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana.

Of course, the idea that one teenager (“man”) could intimidate 20,000 marchers is preposterous. What we have here is a political comment on the Jena hoax, arguably brutal but the Romans probably didn’t like Christian crosses either, being repressed by a totalitarian bureaucracy. {Hat-tip RC]

Another correspondent sends me this extraordinary story about Brandeis University Professor Donald Hindley, who has reportedly been disciplined for explaining to his class the origins of the term “wetback“. It seems you are not allowed to mention the term at all.

As we keep pointing out at VDARE.COM, diversity is strength! It’s also…is this a free country or what?