Why Americans are so STUPID 2928

Well. to return to the thread. Americans are stupid. Whether they are smart enough to retain a democracy is a moot point, as is whether what really have now, is, in fact, a democracy. There's plenty of data to suggest that Americans are not as smart as earlier generations. And there is more data to suggest why this is so that has come out of the human genome, the biochemistry of the mind, and the variations in neural wiring as revealed by FMRI brain scans.

Simply put, the combination of fast food, junk food, agribusiness chemicals used in food production, industrial pollution, and contagious pathogens all interact with the DNA, having greater or lesser effect on different gene pools. Part of the reason we live in the Untied States of Denial is that nobody wants to consider what damage their parents did to their mental development while growing up, much less consider what they are doing to their own kids now.

In any case, to remain compebreastive in the global economy will require that we maximize the talent we have rather than damage it, as we see with the alarming rise of autism, ADD, ADHD, depression, schizphrenia, and less severe conditions like neurosis. The psychotropic meds we see being advertised on TV may well work to reduce symptomology, but they dont do anything to improve the creativity needed to stay economically compebreastive.

Should you doubt my case consider just this one fact. Robert Kaplan, "Imerial Grunts" reports that 50% of the Green Berets grew up on family farms. This is *1%* of the total population providing *half* of our nation's most competent military personnel. Why is this so?

Farm kids have chores and get more exercise which has been demonstrated to improve mental capacity. Their parents *dont* use agribusiness chemicals on their own veggies they plan to feed to their own kids. The schools these kids go to are small, under a few hundred, so the contagious pathogens dont have as many kids to infect and evolve new strains in.

In Arkansas, 82% of the farms are less than 500 acres, 40% under 100. Nearly half of Arkansas people live in these rural areas. This puts Arkansas at or near the top of all states in the percentage of kids who grew up on family farms. So- there's a *reason* the Arkansas National Guard was sent to Iraq.

The bad news in all this of course, is that to turn it around, you need to convince the voters, whose reasoning powers are clearly impaired. And even if you succeed, it'd be years before the next generation of kids grows up to be the kind of competent adults we need to pay the taxes to support senior citizen enbreastlements.

I've lots more data to present on this, but I've already exceeded the attention span of most posters.