rev 2 2022-10-28 1220am on prejudice can sting development
These are extracts from correspondence with friends. In this case the person is Randy, started out a beat cop, rose on up in the climb to become Chief of Police and then City Manager - of a rather large city in California. He was personally honored by President Ronald Reagan (of which I have a photograph of the event) for his contributions to law enforement and other tasks he took on.
I've included the information below on my discussions as I do not claim any originality in the ideas I have presented. The only thing original was my personal discovery when teaching karate lessons to integrated classes back in the mid 1960s - was that the black students, the negro students, seemed to "catch on" much quicker than the white students - all at that time were male. It would be several decades later, after I had leaned the basic concepts in microprocessor technology and programing, etc., that I came to realize, at least for me, that SPEED OF LEARNING is NOT a FUNCTION of INTELLIGENCE. To some degree we can measure speed of learning, such as rate of grasping concepts - but that DEPTH of LEARNING is another matter.
In the read on this page, please ignore spelling, sentence fragments, etc., as my purpose is simply to elaborate more fully my position - and I am not alone in holding this position that IQ is not a valid measurement of intelligence, which in itself has not yet been clearly defined. If we cannot define a thing, does it exist?
I would ask Dr. G or Dr. Ben Carson whether at autopsy they see any real difference in the anatomical struture between a white brain or a black brain, whether the neurons in the brain of a white scientist with established accomplishments - is found to have "something special" in its composition - from that of say, the brain of a black laborer.
But first, let's look at what this scientific paper has to say on the whole matter
Underlining is mine.
Grey matter matters for intellectIntelligence linked to size of key brain regions. By Helen Pilcher
Size may matter after all, when it comes to IQ. A brain imaging study suggests that human intellect is based on the volume of grey matter in certain brain regions, challenging alternative views about the basis of intelligence.
Researchers have been trying to pinpoint the biological roots of intelligence for decades. More than 25 years ago, a weak correlation was found between IQ and overall brain size. Others have suggested that level of intelligence is due to the size of the frontal lobe.
Now, however, a common view is that more subtle characteristics are likely to be involved, such as the speed at which nerve impulses travel in the brain, or the number of neuronal connections present.
If he is talking about the electrical impulse signals and chemical signals traveling along the axons-dendrite-synapses path, then I agree to the extent that the degree of potential and conductivity and permeability of the path may influence the rate of travel of the signals. If that is the case - then it would confirm for me at least that it is possible that one race compared to another may have faster path travel of signal due to evolutionary selection based on a particular race of people's environment requiring, for example, quick mental resposne to sudden threats to survival.
Geographical regions may result in the expression of certain genetic advantages already in the code which come to the surface as an evolutionary response to the enviroment.
Those bird beaks that differed from one bird to another in Darwin's Galapogos Islands - is it not possible that the beak difference DID NOT evolve as something new - as an adaption to the environoment but rather that which was already within the various bird's genetic programing - raise to the surface - over time - to adapt to the new conditons the birds finds itself.
Just as for instance, macular degeneration (too much drusen garbage collecting in the eye) seems to favor the norther parts of europe, and Kaposi's sarcoma seems to favor middle eastern Jewish decent people, these may be where recessive characteristics became dominant because of close intermarrage, interbreeding within the tribe.
I say from the above development that the faster processing I observed in those of African descendants (not to be confused with Darwin's (Decent of Man) is, assuming I did observe what was and not what seemed, the result of adaptation of their gene base - programming already existing with-in them, and then over time - coming to the fore - expressing itself - to meet the very real and constant dangers of their environment, say, compared to the Eskimos. True, the Eskimos must watch out for the polar bear and even a wolf now and then - but on the average - the danger to the Eskimo from multiple predator attacks is very much smaller than what the African people would have experienced.
As an aside, I would quickly say, yes, I have very little real knowledge in the subjects of genetics and neuroanatomy, etc. I am no Dr. G and certainly not in any comparison with a Dr. Carson.
But here is my lesson learned from experience in life. I got my love of learning new things because I got the hell out of the public school system when I legally could - when I turned sixteen. I worked at real life jobs, cutting up old cars and taking the scrap iron and steel across the scales; pushing the lawn mowers and cutting the grass for the rich folks; hauling garbage cans to the truck; labor work; and I loved every minute of it. I learned that I wasn't one bit smarter or dummer than the other guys I worked with.
The snobs in my life came later while working hard to get my diploma (my union card). Sorry to say it - but so many times it seems to me that the public schools teach their students to come to hate learning - not love it - and the students want to escape from the learning experience because, in actuality - the public schools are designed and function more as factories - production lines - than places to invoke a child's curriosity which from our love of learning and discovering new things for ourselves emerge. But, I will allow from my readings that there are many exceptions. States such as Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, should I even say it - almost Yankee states! But it is hard to argue with their results.
I even went for a while to a Connecticut private "prep school" when I was 12, in Hartford, the insurance city, before I got kicked out. But that is another chapter in what it means to be a failure, academically.
By the way, since I am bragging on medical doctors, let me introduce you to two of the real giants in medical research - who risked losing it all to alert the people throughout the world of the giant tsumani coming our way.
Some will have heeded their warnings and will live to continue with life another day; the others who scoffed and riddiculed these doctors of medical science - those moron ''fact checkers'' whose academic credentials, if they even have them, are what we in engineering school called "the crip courses" will be washed away and become food for the ''bottom feeders'' known as the scavengers of the sea.
See also https://thevaccine.net for the complete contents of the above.
2022-10-17, Monday, to be continued
My comments will continue of the article that follows as I find time to study more closely what is being said.
This study challenges that idea, suggesting that the volume of certain brain regions may have an effect after all.
Richard Haier from the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the amount of grey matter in the brains of 47 adults, who also took standard IQ tests.
Scoring the brain
The researchers divided the brain into sections and imaged the amount of grey matter in each one. Grey matter is a diffuse network of brain regions thought to be involved in information processing. It is rich in nerve cell bodies and looks grey to the naked eye.They found that people with high IQ scores had significantly more grey matter in 24 of the regions than people with lower scores. Many of the areas, which are spread throughout the brain, are known to be related to memory, attention and language. Their results are reported online in Neuroimage1
But is it not possible that we are confusing IQ test scores with the sum of associations that are formed whenever we learn new things. In other words, the more educated we become - (and that does not mean that we are educated because we have an academic diploma from some status school of higher learning) - the greater the denisty of the gray matter becomes - as it is taught in many circles of higher learning - if you want to call it that - that each time we learn something new - we create new neual paths, new connections so to speak.
On learning new things, does it increase brain density
by William Klemm, Ph.D (Sr. Professor, Neuroscience, at Texas A&M University)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-medic/202001/how-does-learning-change-the-brain
How Does Learning Change the Brain?
Learning is nature's way of creating the brain's "hardware" and "software."
Posted January 7, 2020Learning programs the brain. It is nature's way to create simultaneously both "hardware" and "software" for the brain. Neuroscientists have long known that learning experiences change the functional circuitry that is used to process and remember a given learning event.
The circuit change is anatomical: Electron microscope photographs reveal that the synaptic changes take the form of little blebs located on dendrites. These blebs are called "dendritic spines," and their size and number change in response to learning and memory formation. You might think of the induced change as a physical location for information storage. What is stored at any given spine is an increase in the probability that the spine will participate in activations that generate recall of the stored memory from all the spines that were enhanced in creating the memory.
Functionally, the change operates as a template that resides more or less permanently and is available not only to recall the original learning event but to respond to similar events in the future. Of course, no one synapse accounts for these recall and programming effects: The learning and memory result from the collective enhancement of all the enhanced dendritic spines in the participating circuitry. The templates thus created provide a way for the brain to program itself for future capabilities. Learning how to solve one kind of task makes it easier to learn new tasks that are similar. This is the basis for the so-called "learning-set," a concept introduced many decades ago by Harry Harlow.
We tend to think about such matters in the education of children. However, the principle applies to all ages, including seniors. The aging brain responds to learning the same way a child's brain does: It grows new task-specific synapses that can be recruited for other uses.
The learning effect is manifest in the growth of existing synapses and the formation of new synapses. In the absence of mental stimulation, the spines degenerate. Indeed, a typical effect of aging is that the brain actually shrinks as a consequence of the cumulative shrinkage of spines. Many neurological diseases—schizophrenia, autism, and dementia—are characterized by reduced synaptic density. An opposite problem occurs with drug addiction, where certain synaptic connections are strengthened by the drug, essentially creating a way to store a memory that drives the addiction.
Until now, we have not learned as much about the chemical changes that occur with learning. A recent study from Thomas Jefferson University reveals that new patterns of molecular organization develop as connections between neurons strengthen during learning. The researchers basically asked the question: What does learning look like at the molecular level? Using super-resolution live-cell microscopy, the researchers confirmed the enlargement of synapses previously reported by others. But they also saw that during a learning experience the molecules involved in sending and receiving the signals between neurons appeared to be organized in clumps, or "nanomodules," that both dance and multiply when stimulated by learning-like signals.
The researchers developed a novel technique wherein they could visualize the chemicals involved in transmitting signals from one neuron to another. Chemicals on the sending, or presynaptic, side appeared green, and those on the receiving, or postsynaptic, side appeared red. Then, while observing the colors, they observed live neurons in real-time as they sent signals to each other via their neurotransmitter chemical systems. The color changes indicated that during signaling activity, the presynaptic chemicals clumped together and bound to clumped molecules on the postsynaptic side. The clumps appeared to have a uniform size. When the presynaptic neurons were stimulated in a way that promoted spine enlargement, they saw that the number of chemical clumps increased. Such stimulation caused nonmoving clumps to jiggle and move around the synaptic spine, with pre- and postsynaptic chemicals moving in lock-step. Maybe this jiggling helps to trigger the biochemical cascade that neurotransmission causes to change activity in the postsynaptic neuron.
Perhaps we don't think enough about the movement of molecules in living tissue. All chemicals in a solution bounce around randomly. Clumping together and jiggling in lock-step create new ways for chemicals to produce their effects. Apparently, the clumping is the triggering event for the enlargement of dendritic spines that creates a structural basis for memory.
This kind of chemical interaction is not only relevant to learning. It also applies in unknown ways to the altered function present in addictions and other neurological diseases in which strong interneuronal connections become too strong. Research on neurotransmitter clumping in disease states has not yet begun, but here we may find clues on how to treat some of these conditions. Clearly, disrupting the clumping would disrupt the strengthening of synapses. While we want our synapses to grow stronger to promote normal learning, we don't want this to happen, for example, in response to opiate pain relievers, which creates addiction. At the molecular level, addiction is a learned condition.
References
Hruska, M. et al., "Synaptic nanomodules underlie the organization and plasticity of spine synapses," Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/s41593-018-0138-9, 2018.
Klemm, W. R. Core Ideas in Neuroscience. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/390780
William Klemm, Ph.D., is a senior professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University.
This gentleman is known to have somewhat "better than average" intelligence.
Oh, look! Texas A&M.
Look here, who hails - (not that type that drops from the sky onto the Texas prairies) - also from Texas A&M. Who, disguised as an irritant to his native undergraduate school, Baylor, and graduated with his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, is probably the preeminent cardiologist in the world, with over 1,000 published peer reviewed research papers dealing with medical issues – is none other than Dr. Peter McCullough, M.D.
And the physician who risked it all, all that he owned (except his honor and his integrity), to try and save lives, the first duty of all physicians. He too joins with those other super greats of medicine, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche (videos, Dr. Bossche )and Dr. Robert Malone. And there are others too who have put it all on the line to keep their oath and to first do no harm to their patient.
See also links A B C D E E = National Anthem of True Doctors of Medicine who see their first duty is to SAVE HUMAN LIVES, not government bureaucrats.
Confucius say
The beginnning of wisdom is to know how to first frame the correct question.
See The Annals of Confucius Say.
In American English that Confucius quote is translated to, "What comes first, the chicken or the egg." Did the learning, the education, cause the higher gray matter density or did an already existing high density gray matter (at birth) of the person enable that person to learn, to grasp knowledge and a multitude of facts? If the later, that the person is born with a higher innate intelligence and thus higher gray matter density than say his Choctaw neighbor, and that at autopsy, say by Dr. G. all Choctaws are found to have lower gray matter densities - then might we conclude that Choctaw Indians are less innately intelligent than say, for illustration purposes only, the white guy next door? If so, then it could legitimately be argued that the white man is innately smarter than the Choctaw Indian and smarter than the African negro race. And insomuch as the fact that the Chinese man and the Japanese man do test higher in IQ than the white man, certainly white America man, then can we not conclude that the Orientals are, by birth, superior to the Caucasian in intelligence? Heil Darwin!
The woods are lovely dark and deep. But I still have promises to keep. But before taking my leave – let's walk along that road less traveled. It is spring time – and June is busting out all over. The fields are rich with wild flowers everywhere. Endless varieties of color and shape, tall and small, thick and thin.
Look! Over there – a host of golden daffodils – fluttering and dancing in the breeze. And look, over there, beside the lake, tall trees, small trees, mighty oaks, weeping willows, birch trees, pine trees, all of them, the flowers, the trees, the grass of the fields, all the Creator's gift to Mankind.
And the animals in the woods, the deer feeding on the grass of the fields, - and the Creator made them all, great and small. And within each species – endless variety. Is it so strange that within the human species – the Homo Sapiens [and nothing off color intended, please] that there should be such variety too? That God's special creation, man, is the only species which has the unique gift of being able to ask questions (to speak in language) and to make decisions and choices. And that this gift by the Creator, to make decisions and choices is imparted to the child at that very moment when life begins? And why the different races, the different tribes?
The Holy Koran teaches that God, Allah, created the many different tribes that they may learn to get along with each other. But they, the tribes, the people, must first chose to get along – each person must decide to love one another. Why does not the Creator simply bestow on man, a person, a tribe, that they will inherently get along, love each other, and so forth.
Because then God's special creation, mankind, would not have FREE WILL. If the Creator provides Mankind with proof of His existence beyond "a reasonable doubt" then a man is stripped of his need to question, to search, and to have faith. No other living thing asks questions. Man does.
But if the Creator has given His child all the proof, then the child is no different than any other animal in the wild kingdom and the child's search for meaning, his search for his Creator, his search for God becomes meaningless, null and void.
more uninvited comments later.
Haier believes that different aspects of intelligence might depend on the amount of grey matter in these different brain regions. "This may be why one person is quite good at mathematics and not so good at spelling, and another person, with the same IQ, has the opposite pattern of abilities," he says.
However, Haier and his colleagues also found that only about 6% of the total grey matter in the brain seems to be related to IQ.
Nerve cells in these particular areas may work to allow the brain to process information more efficiently, suggests Haier. "There is a constant cascade of information being processed in the entire brain, but intelligence seems related to an efficient use of relatively few structures, where the more grey matter the better," he says.
Cautious reception
The finding is intriguing, according to Robert Plomin, who studies intelligence at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Out of all the possible brain characteristics that could be linked to intelligence, "it's surprising to find that the simplest of all these measures, brain-region size, is the most highly correlated," he says. That said, the correlation is not huge, he adds.Intelligence researcher John Duncan from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge adds a further note of caution, pointing out that it is still possible the correlation the researchers saw is due to chance. "It's difficult to say exactly what the study means," he says.
References
Haier R. J., Jung R. E., Yeo R. A., Head K. & Alkire M. T.. Neuroimage http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.04.025 (2004).
Draft. Rev 0
The following is extracted from email correspondence and has not yet been scrubbed and polished up. It is for now REV 0 but more to come to support the thesis that IQ testing is a myth insomuch as that the philosophers have yet to agree with a definition of intelligence, a product of mind or matter. As Bertrand Russel wrote in his Why I Am Not a Christian, I believe that was the book, there are so many, What is Mind? No Matter. What is Matter? No Mind. Russel is also credited with "better than average intelligence." Is his gray matter brain density higher or lower than say, Einstein? After Einstein's entropy came to zero, his brain at autopsy (He had prior gave permission), was sliced and diced, some of the matter squeezed for brain juice so as to examine the chemical properties in depth, etc., there was found NO dissernable difference between his brain and that of the others sampled, others being us average guys.
2021-03-27, 10:07pm
Take the Asus computer I built up from the motherboard, in 2010 to do the work for GBC and GBS school stuff. It has a primitive (back then) Intel generation 1 processor, i7-860 with 16gb max (my new HP I specified 32gb). To render an 1hr video with a lot of changes using NCH VideoPad would take, like two or three hours. With the new laptop, perhaps 15 minutes. That is the main reason I bought the Asus gaming computer - processor speed! By the that that is part of my general thesis I am developing.
We each process (speed) information at different rates. My personal discovery teaching many negro teens back in the mid 1960s the martial arts, karate, is that they PROCESS information FASTER than whites, including me. Now, do they assimilate the information better? Is their DEPTH of thinking a function of their speed of learning, their quickness in processing new information?
I start from the fundamental premise that God, who is also known as Allah, Brama, Krishna, Jehova, (He is known by many names – yet there is One God of the Universe) HE created all His beings equal, in His most magnificent creation of creations in the universe, the human brain, the thinking brain, the brain that is given free will to choose, to choose life, to choose death, to choose which way he, the individual will express his devotion, his love and his submission to the Lord of the Universe, Almighty God.
And just today, I went again and visited xxxxxs Bookstore, looking for more medical books. And guess what I found! A 1937 edition in perfect condition,
The Psychology of Selecting Employees, by Donald A. Laird, PH.D., SCI. D. 3rd Ed. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. 1937
An in the index, just the intelligence tests, 247-302 60 pages! on the very issue I take. And you know from your legal work and degree that the Supreme Court, U.S.A. ruled in the past that companies CAN NOT administer or factor in IQ as determining employment of an individual. I have not yet the time to locate that ruling in the SCOTUS library. I have used SCOTUS website before, long ago. But I will again.
Look at some of the gibberish just in the tests section, pg. 247.
All underling and bold is mine to emphasize points to be elaborated upon later on in the process.
For each job, there is a minimum of intelligence a worker must possess. If he has too little, his rate of catching on to the work will be slow, his poor grade and amount of production will be costly, and his lack of foresight will make a slack season of work throw him onto the public charities.
For many tasks, conversely, there is an upper limit of intelligence, a certain high intelligence score above which the worker will be bored, uninterested, and soon striking out for other work. While they catch onto the tricks of a new job with pleasing agility, they soon terminate their connection with the company, unless promoted to a higher grade of work where all their native powers of intelligence will be more nearly required for performance of the task.
* The danger of applicants having too high a score in intelligence is not so great as the menace of the low score, yet it is an important fact to consider in guiding an applicant into his best work with the company.
{P.S. and what he has just said, * truly is piss. I know for I was such a menace to the race of the superior men, the , Übermensch. I was a menace to Prof. Donald Laird (and look at his diplomas, Ph.D, SCI. D etc) for at age nine when I came to the United States I could neither read or write or multiply. I was and am, by his reasoning, slavic Untermensch. Garbage! Rubish to be thrown away. Ich bin ein Untermensch! You see where this idea that IQ is the measure of the man leads to. For one, sterilization of innocent but very uneducated negro woman and any other uneducated people these perverted scientists could get their hands on.
Not only are there deep flaws with Professor Laird's logic and reason, but, but when you add "the menace of the low score" to his repertoire of discoveries - you see the etiology, the origin, of racism and bigotry and eugenics thinking (being acted upon at the time and today) – ringing loud in sour and discordant notes.
And this mindset held by the professor stems, like his brain - stem principally from the thinking and practice of the late 18th and all of the 19th century industrial production and bled on into the 20th and now 21st century practice and thinking.
2021-03-28 3:50 am
Randy, it is the situation that is eroding the foundations of our country. Trust in the government has all but evaporated into the atmosphere whose condition the government worries about more than those of the people. When most of the wealth is cornered by 1% or even 10% of the people, who are the effective rulers in fact, then we as a country set ourselves up for a Bastille Day. It is going to happen.
When the governing forces of our country spend 10 billion dollars each on 11 super carriers – to threaten and ward off the Chinese and Russian enemies (the creation again of an enemy image) rather than on uplifting the education, and developing the tools and techniques in the process to do so – of millions of minority children, whether black or white, Hispanic or Oriental, living in the slums of the Gettos and places such as Harlem and South Side Chicago – then I prophecy to you – that one day soon there will be a Bastille Day; as the people demand above all else Justice in their lives.
And when there is the implicit assumption that these millions of children and their parents are some-how intellectually inferior, low IQ to label the culprit, it further exacerbates the anger and outrage within them and the hidden feeling whispered in their ears "someday we will get even". You know it's so from your 40 years of police work – walking the beat of reality each and every day.
That is why I am pressed to develop this fundamental assertion that I make, this thesis I am developing – that IQ measurement is a myth. That rather the truth is that we ALL fit under the same rectanglular curve. That the Bell Curve, (Gaussian Distribution Curve to be more precise) is NOT a tool of capitalist imperialist exploitation, neither is a legitimate conception – but rather it is a misconception. It is time to have a shift in the paradigm.
A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=paradigm+definition&atb=v265-7__&ia=definition
At the turn of the 20th century, Max Plank toppled old assumptions in physics and brought us a new way of thinking, the Quantum World, Quantum Physics.
Then along came Albert Einstein; then along came Neils Bohr, then along came Alan Turing and John Von Newman. And there were others too.
What did they do? They brought new light to the world with their discoveries. And nobody at the time ask "What is your IQ sir, or madam, may I ask?"
There are millions of bright children living in the slums of Harlem, in the slums of Chicago, in Bombay and Calcutta (I have been to Calcutta several times, I have seen and walked along the streets of the slums of Calcutta as too I have done in Harlem, a block away from where I once lived; in the slums of Mexico City and throughout the world.
If I can but for a moment use the word "genius" to say, "…in those very slums there are vast numbers of POTENTIAL geniuses, who, given the OPPORTUNITY, and the INTERVENTION [and that Eleanor Roosevelt recognized publicly 62 years ago in a graduation ceremony in Harlem] – these young people in these slums will advance mankind another GIANT step forward, and this time on our Earth.
If we can recognize that indeed IQ is a myth, and that there exists the POTENTIAL in each child and each teenager to truly do truly great things – if given OPPORTUNITY and INTERVENTION, and if we divert national wealth from useless enterprises and constantly making materials for war and making war and creating new enemy images to further that ambition, if we follow scripture, Isaiah 2:4
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Then these young people will reach their majority and indeed do many great things:
Vivien Theodore Thomas, MD (1910 -1985): Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. As a surgical technician, Thomas developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock, MD, in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. In 1976, he was awarded an honorary doctorate and named an instructor of surgery for Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
George Washington Carver, Chemist, discovered 300 Uses for Peanuts
Fast Facts: George Washington Carver
Known For: Agricultural chemist who discovered 300 uses for peanuts as well as hundreds of uses for other crops
Also Known As: The Plant Doctor, The Peanut Man
Born: January 1, 1864 in Diamond, Missouri
Parents: Giles and Mary Carver
Died: January 5, 1943 in Tuskegee, Alabama
Education: Iowa State University (BA, 1894; MS, 1896)
Published Works: Carver published 44 agricultural bulletins laying out his findings while at the Tuskegee Institute, as well as numerous articles in peanut industry journals and a syndicated newspaper column, "Professor Carver's Advice."
Awards and Honors: The George Washington Carver Monument was established in 1943 west of Diamond, Missouri on the plantation where Carver was born. Carver appeared on U.S. commemorative postal stamps in 1948 and 1998, as well as a commemorative half dollar coin minted between 1951 and 1954, and many schools bear his name, as well as two United States military vessels.
Notable Quote: "No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets."
Listen to what this great man is saying: If you feel you are a failure in life, as you see it, academically or whatever way you see yourself being - it is through love and obedience to Allah, God the Creator whom you must first call upon to bring light to the path you must follow[Polonius: "This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!"]. To paraphrase Dr. George Washington Carver, Without God to draw aside the curtain, you will be helpless.
https://www.thoughtco.com/george-washington-carver-biography-1991496
Early Life
Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, in Erode, India, a small village in the southern part of the country. Shortly after this birth, his family moved to Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a clerk in a cloth shop. Ramanujan attended the local grammar school and high school and early on demonstrated an affinity for mathematics.
https://www.biography.com/scientist/srinivasa-ramanujan
When he was 15, he obtained an out-of-date book called A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Ramanujan set about feverishly and obsessively studying its thousands of theorems before moving on to formulate many of his own. At the end of high school, the strength of his schoolwork was such that he obtained a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, (born December 22, 1887, Erode, India—died April 26, 1920, Kumbakonam), Indian mathematician whose contributions to the theory of numbers include pioneering discoveries of the properties of the partition function.
When he was 15 years old, he obtained a copy of George Shoobridge Carr's Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 2 vol. (1880–86). This collection of thousands of theorems, many presented with only the briefest of proofs and with no material newer than 1860, aroused his genius. Having verified the results in Carr's book, Ramanujan went beyond it, developing his own theorems and ideas. In 1903 he secured a scholarship to the University of Madras but lost it the following year because he neglected all other studies in pursuit of mathematics.
Ramanujan continued his work, without employment and living in the poorest circumstances. After marrying in 1909 he began a search for permanent employment that culminated in an interview with a government official, Ramachandra Rao. Impressed by Ramanujan's mathematical prowess, Rao supported his research for a time, but Ramanujan, unwilling to exist on charity, obtained a clerical post with the Madras Port Trust.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Srinivasa-Ramanujan
For General Powell's Bio. See A B C
Colin Luther Powell is a United States statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State (2001-2005), serving under President George W. Bush. He was the first African American appointed to that position. He was the first, and so far the only, African American to serve on the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chief's of Staff report directly to the President of the United States are the Presiden't advisors on military matters.
Born Colin Luther Powell on April 5, 1937, in Harlem, New York, Powell was the son of Jamaican immigrants Luther and Maud Powell. He was raised in the South Bronx and educated in the New York City public schools, graduating from Morris High School in 1954 without any definite plans for where he wanted to go in life. It was at City College of New York, where Powell studied geology, that he found his calling — in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). He soon became commander of his unit. This experience set him on a military career and gave him structure and direction in his life.
https://www.biography.com/political-figure/colin-powell
My point, at the point of redundancy, being that in each case, in each of these lives, there entered in OPPORTUNITY and INTERVENTION.
In America, what I believe Eleanor Roosevelt was attesting to on that evening in Harlem, at the Graduation Ceremony, is that every child living in the slums of America CAN - given Opportunity and Intervention – excel academically.
That is what acts as the bar to this goal, what separates these "slum children" from achievement, the barrier to high achievement, academically, is NOT a low IQ, for that is the MYTH, but the root cause is the lack of opportunity and intervention in their lives – with what appears to be an INDIFFERENCE to their plight.
We will one day soon rue the day (for the kindling is now lit) that we ignored their condition in favor of the 1% and 10% who now rule and own this country of ours.
In closing,
I believe George Washington Carver would close this letter by saying to each boy and girl looking only for OPPORTUNITY and INTERVENTION
Matthew 5:16
16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
George Washington Carver - An Uncommon Life, 2,366,365 views May 8, 2018 video, 56 minutes
Give them that opportunity. Isaiah 2:4 and this great country may once again be Blessed by God.
4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.