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Old November 29th, 2019 #21
Jerry Abbott
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
Posts: 1,048
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 2, section 7.

I'd been afraid that Ruby Pierce would turn out to be like Sarah Weisman. Fortunately, she wasn't. She wasn't as old as I'd thought, being twelve and entering the seventh grade. She was tall for her age, and her pace through puberty's changes was faster than that of most girls, and that had pushed my estimate upward. She knew her way around Brookstone because she'd been here last year, for the sixth grade. Ruby had just hauled her luggage to my room from another wing of the dorm and was unpacking, with her suitcase open on her bed, her laptop computer on the adjacent desk, and her satchel of toiletries on a shelf above the closet.

Like almost everybody else I'd met, Ruby had heard about me. Being from Pembroke, a small town near Savannah, she hadn't seen me on TV, but she had read the article about me in the online Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Speculating about my IQ served to break the ice.

"The representative from the testing company said it was over 180."

"How high do you think it is?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. The test they used only measures to 180. It sure got Brookstone's attention, though. They cut my school fees in half, and they sent one of their executives to shadow me here from Atlanta."

"They did? Who was it?"

"A woman named Vanessa Emory. She—"

Ruby squealed in apparent shock.

"Vanessa Emory! She's not just an executive. She's the daughter of the Brookstone board chairman, who's also the major stockholder. She might soon own the whole school."

Hm.

"Well, then. I'll just have to give the heiress her money's worth, won't I?"

Ruby giggled. She was hanging up her shirts and pants and dresses in the closet on her side of the room.

When you entered our room in the west wing of Mathews Hall, you'd find her dresser drawers and mine on either side. Just beyond the those were the closets, at the upper part of which was a shelf for a suitcase. Ruby had told me that one of the older girls had gotten into trouble for hiding her boyfriend in her closet during a fire drill. She'd locked him in there so that Mistress Klang wouldn't find him, but he must have made some noise because she was waiting like a bird of prey when that girl returned after the all-clear was sounded.

"How much trouble did she get into?"

"She's gone," said Ruby. "If the dorm had really been on fire, that boy might have burned to death. So it was more serious than an ordinary visitation overstay."

Behind each closet were our beds, and behind those were our desks. And then the windows, looking out on the shrubbery, which was dense enough that we could dress in our rooms with the lights on without making a spectacle of ourselves for the amusement of boys.

"Unless one is standing in the shrubbery," I pointed out. "Which isn't impossible."

"If a boy wants to see a naked girl badly enough to get expelled," said Ruby, "then I guess I can give him a show. Maybe I'll turn around and fart at him. That'll mess up his love-life forever because he'll always think about it at just the wrong times."

"What if he has a camera?"

"So the scamp wants to blackmail me, huh? Let him try! I have nothing to be ashamed of." She wiggled her shoulders in a way that drew attention to her breasts.

I laughed. I was getting to like Ruby Pierce.

The room was mirror image on its left and right sides. I'd taken the right side when I'd moved in yesterday, so Ruby had the left. We got our computers hooked into the internet phone lines, arranged our calculators and notebooks just so, and filled the desk drawer with pens, mechanical pencils, and knick-knacks. And then we were wondering what we'd do with the rest of the late afternoon.

"We have to register for our classes tomorrow," said Ruby.

"So let's meet the neighbors," I suggested.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #22
Jerry Abbott
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
Posts: 1,048
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 2, section 8.

If Registration Day served an educational purpose, it was to teach us how to negotiate a bureaucratic maze. If you've never been through the process before, registration is an exercise in figuring out what had to be done first, what next, what after that, etcetera, while simultaneously finding out where all of the appropriate offices were. You went in to see your adviser first. In my case, that was Mr. Klang, who had arrived in the administrative building before Mrs. Klang came in with almost 200 girls, including myself, gathered around her. Since I was among the youngest students who were allowed to live on campus, nearly everyone else was taller than me.

We were told which room to go to, in order to sign up for sixth grade classes. We had to take three courses within the core curriculum, and we were allowed up to three electives, which could be more sixth grade core, or they could be seventh grade courses that ambitious girls could take for credit and get ahead on next year's workload. In my case, the electives would be college courses. I would be taking an honors course in combined differential and integral calculus, with analytic geometry. I probably wouldn't have any trouble with that. I wanted to take college physics, too.

But there was no evading those sixth grade core curriculum courses, so, before I left this building for the administration building on the college campus, I had to pick up my sixth grade course load. I ended up with History of the American Revolutionary War, English Composition 1, and (don't laugh) Algebra 1. Then I went from the registration room to the comptroller's office and showed a clerk which classes I was taking.

"Your name?"

"Brenda Jones."

The clerk looked at me quickly.

"Oh. You're her. Welcome to Brookstone, Miss Jones."

"Thank you." I didn't correct his grammar. My fame was starting to get tiresome, but I suppose that we all have our burdens to bear.

"Student ID number?"

"Five thirty-two eighty-eight."

Mr. Klang had written our student ID numbers on our student handbooks, underneath our names. He had not mentioned what this number was for, but I'd guessed. Ruby had confirmed my guess the previous night. I remembered the number because thirty-two is the fifth power of two, and if you can't remember what eighty-eight means, then shame on you.

"Thank you, Miss Jones. Brookstone School has just charged your account at Brookstone Bank by the sum of one thousand four hundred eighty dollars. That covers your tuition, your dorm fees, and your meal card, which you'll use at the cafeteria. It's use it or lose it, I'm afraid. You don't get a refund if you don't like the food there and decide to eat somewhere else, instead. But this payment does not cover the cost of your books, which are sold at additional expense to you. You'll buy your books at the bookstore. Be sure that you're choosing the right ones for your classes, as the bookstore usually has several titles on the same subject, and if you guess you might pick up the wrong book."

Now that was the most helpful bit of information I'd had yet. A school official had actually warned me, albeit obliquely, about part of the bookstore's quasi-scam. It wasn't illegal, of course, for the bookstore to sell supplemental books. But a student could easily overspend, thinking that she was buying necessary books, when in fact they weren't required.

"Thanks for your help, sir. I appreciate that advice."

"No problem, Miss Jones."

I made my way back to the sixth grade registration room to speak with one of the Deans Klang. I found the Mister.

"Mr. Klang?"

"Ah. Yes, Miss Jones. You're back from the comptroller's office, and I expect that you will be wanting to travel to the college campus at the first opportunity, so that you may complete your registration there, as well."

"Yes sir!" I was pleased that he was keeping track.

"There's someone here who has offered to take you there," said Mr. Klang. "I believe that you have met Ms. Emory?"

I hadn't recognized her until she turned around.

"Hello again, Brenda."

"Good to see you, Ms. Emory."

Mr. Klang nodded in satisfaction and went off to handle other problems. Ms. Emory and I left the administration building, walked to the parking lot, and got into her car. She had a reserved parking spot, I noticed. Executive privilege.

As Ms. Emory turned left at the exit of the grade school campus and began the drive toward the college campus, we chatted about the school's team sports. She wanted to know whether I played any.

"No, ma'am," I replied. "I do some track stuff, though."

"Yes, so I've heard. You surprised everyone in your old school in Atlanta by showing your previously unsuspected speed. Six minutes and six seconds is a very good time for a girl of eleven years to run the mile."

Inwardly, I laughed. But I was careful not to let my amusement show. She didn't know the half of it, and I wasn't going to tell her.

"I'd regarded the mile we had to run each morning as being only exercise," I said. "I didn't think of it as a race until two other girls decided to brag about how fast they were and that nobody else could catch them. So I decided to prove them wrong."

"Well, you certainly did that. As you get older, you'll become even faster, if you keep yourself in practice. Do you think you could compete in track-and-field events, say, as a member of Brookstone's team? We do compete with some of Georgia's other schools in mini-Olympics, which are held in the third quarter of each school year."

"I think I would like that," I said.

In fact, I would enjoy running competitively. Naturally, though, I'd keep quiet about my special advantages.

"Then I'll see that you are enrolled on the track team," said Ms. Emory. "Now, ordinarily this counts as one of your electives. It's a three credit-hour course, and you already have fifteen credit hours of sixth-grade core. You probably were hoping to take three college courses, bringing your total load to thirty credit hours. And then track-and-field would make that thirty-three hours. Ordinarily, twenty-five credit hours is considered a very heavy load. But, then, you aren't ordinary, are you?"

"Ms. Emory, I already know most of what they're going to teach me for my sixth-grade courses, except maybe regarding the history of the American Revolution. Algebra 1? Feh. English composition? Like as not, I'll end up teaching the teacher."

Ms. Emory barked a delighted laugh at my boast.

"I would certainly like to see that," she said.

"So history will be my only real task there. The other classes will be, I think, a matter of me showing up in class and passing the tests."

"That in itself can be difficult," warned Ms. Emory. "You can't be in two places at the same time."

Which was true. As fast as was, I could still be overtaxed by conflicting requirements about where I was supposed to be at any given moment. I nodded to show that I appreciated the fact. I'd have to be careful how I put my schedule together.

"I already know how to differentiate and integrate, and I know conic sections from my studies of celestial mechanics. I don't expect any problem with calculus."

"I think you're referring to 'Honors Calculus' that combines into one course what is usually spread out over three. Be aware that Dr. Roper, who teaches that course, has a reputation for giving diabolically difficult homework assignments. He's one of our more challenging instructors. There are others whom you will encounter, especially if you enroll as a physics major."

So she had remembered my interest in physics from our conversation on the bus.

I could see how travel between the two Brookstone campuses could become a major pain. So, regretfully, I decided that I'd better relinquish a third college course in order to compete in sports. Well, there would be time enough for college courses during the years ahead. I was getting a good enough head start on a bachelor's degree, or several of them, as it was.

We arrived at the college campus, where, I saw, another parking spot was reserved for "Vanessa Emory" right in front of the administration building. We went into the building and found the registration rooms. Ms. Emory took me into several of them and introduced me to some professors who were heads of their departments. I received their guarded approval for whatever courses I might wish to take either this quarter or in the future. Judging by their reserve, it seemed that having Ms. Emory standing nearby, evidently as my patron, was the deciding factor in getting this acceptance.

Then I registered for Honors Calculus and Physics 101, paid my fees, and then Ms. Emory took me to the college campus bookstore to buy my books. I'd been told which book was to be used in each class, by title and author, when I was registering for them. Having researched the prices of those books ahead of time, I was embarrassed, but not shocked speechless, by the fact that I had nowhere near enough money to buy either book, let alone both of them.

"Have you considered a student loan?" asked Ms. Emory.

There was no way I was going to beg the likes of the Weismans for any stinking usurious loan.

"Yes," I said. "But I have an even better idea."

"Buying a used book?"

"Right. Through the internet. I'll just copy the ISBN from the title pages, and later I'll search for the books on eBay and Amazon."
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #23
Jerry Abbott
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
Posts: 1,048
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 2, section 9.

After returning with Ms. Emory from the college campus, I bought my sixth grade textbooks at the bookstore on the grade school campus. The total (with sales tax) came to just short of $700, which, I'm sure you'll agree, is plenty to pay for three lousy textbooks. It left me with hardly any money at all left in my account at Brookstone Bank. No doubt my father could wire more money into it, but it wouldn't do to ask. Explicitly, that is. I might not be as slick as Sarah Weisman, but I knew that the art of getting money out of one's father consists mostly of making him think that giving it to me had been his idea.

I was back in my dorm. It had been a wearing day, even with Ms. Emory's help. I was on eBay looking for my two college textbooks, but nobody was selling those particular titles just now. Ruby was watching over my shoulder as I turned the browser to Amazon. I typed the ISBN for my calculus book into the search window and watched the list of offers come up.

"Eight hundred dollars?" asked Ruby.

"It was almost twelve hundred in the college bookstore," I said, making sure that I was looking at the latest edition of the textbook. Another part of the college textbook scam involved the publishers constantly making trivial changes to the books and republishing them as a new edition, after which all of the professors would regard the previous edition as obsolete.

But I didn't even have eight hundred dollars, so I looked for used books. There was, I discovered, a paperback version of the book. While used hardcover copies were selling for around $500, the used paperback copies began at—

"Forty-nine cents." I laughed.

"Get that one!" Ruby urged.

"No," I said. "See the quality description. It's rated as 'acceptable,' which really means 'not acceptable.' Likewise 'good' means 'okay in a pinch,' and 'very good' really means 'acceptable.' I'm looking a little further down the list."

The store selling the first book was My Grandma's Goodies. Another book, selling for fifty cents, was rated at 'good,' and it was being offered by Goodwill Industries of Central Florida. Then came a listing by Belltower Books, at 'very good' condition, for ninty-nine cents. The next offer was from Alibris, a name I recognized, for a book in 'good' condition.

"I think I'll get the book offered by Belltower Books," I said. "They offer expedited shipping, too, which I'll take because I need to have the book as soon as possible."

"Still a bargain, considering the price tag on a new book at the bookstore."

I agreed. But there was another problem.

"What is my shipping address here?"

"Oh. If you don't have a mail box at the Student Union yet, then you get your mail in care of Norman Klang, Mathews Hall, Brookstone School GSC, Columbus, Georgia, three one nine oh four."

I typed that into Amazon as my shipping address, right below my name. I'd had the account with Amazon already, so it already had my credit card number. I found a similarly sweet deal on a copy of my physics textbook. Then I clicked on the check-out button and paid for my books, selecting the expedited shipping option, which cost me more than the books themselves had.

"Und now ve vait," said Ruby with a mock German accent.

I began writing an email to my parental units.


Dear Dad and Mom,

I'm writing now to give you my email address and to tell you my status. I've moved into Mathews Hall on Brookstone's grade school campus. I'm sharing room #107 with a very nice girl named Ruby Pierce. She's a year older than I am, is in seventh grade, and attended Brookstone last year. She's showing me the lay of the land, so to speak. You can send me packages in care of Norman Klang, Mathews Hall, Brookstone School GSC, Columbus GA 31904.

You targeted my funding very accurately, Dad. I paid my tuition, my housing fee, my cafeteria ticket, and I have bought all of my books. I should say, though, that the college textbooks cost rather more than they did when you were going to school, and I had to order used copies from various vendors through Amazon online. But they will arrive within a few days. It shouldn't be a problem. I bought the three required textbooks for the sixth grade courses at the GSC bookstore for $700. This quarter, those courses will be History of the American Revolution, Algebra 1, and English Composition 1.

I would have gotten out of taking the classes that I could already teach if it were permitted. But they don't let you CLEP the core curriculum here. However, they do permit me to take college courses in addition to the sixth grade ones, and I've been accepted by the college faculty for Physics 101 and for an 'honors' course in calculus that combines differential and integral calculus, and analytic geometry, into a single five-credit hour course.

I've also enrolled in some sort of track-and-field endeavor, though I'm not certain yet of the details. One of Brookstone's executives appears to have taken a personal interest in me, and she has acted on several occasions as my patron, opening doors for me that might otherwise have remained shut. I owe Ms. Vanessa Emory a great deal. I only wish that I knew why she's been such an avid champion for me.

Though expenses have left me broke, I'm in no immediate need of money.




I sent the email.

"Will that work?" asked Ruby, who had read what I wrote.

"It will work once," I said, grinning.

Classes would begin tomorrow. I had all of my sixth grade lessons in the morning, all in the same building here at GSC. Algebra (8:05-9:00), English (9:05-10:00), History (10:05-11:00) with five minutes slack between classes. I'd eat in the cafeteria from 11:30 to noon. Then I'd run from GSC to the college from 12:30 to 12:45. Two miles in fifteen minutes shouldn't be a problem for me. My calculus class began at one in the afternoon, followed by physics (2:15-3:15). At 3:30, I'd run back to GSC and join the track team out by the football field, where practice began at 4 o'clock. With all that running, my wind should be pretty darn good by the end of the quarter.

"That's a very heavy schedule," said Ruby. "You're going to run two miles, twice a day, carrying your books, and begin training for the track team the moment you finish that second two-mile run?"

Put that way, the schedule did look a bit difficult. I'd forgotten about having to carry my books.

"I'd better get a backpack," I said, and called up Amazon again.

"You'd better grow wings," said Ruby.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #24
Jerry Abbott
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
Posts: 1,048
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 2, section 10.

As I'd expected, algebra was boring, easy, and a sure "four" in my GPA basket, provided that I could stay awake long enough to take the midterm and the final exam. English composition was more iffy, since the judgment of the teacher had more play in assigning grades. I'd have to learn the teacher to some extent in order to ace that class. But I'd done the same with Mrs. Fergus at Morningside, and I'd no doubt that I could do it with Mr. Ham at Brookstone.

It was history that presented difficulties. All those doings of the political figures of the American Revolution, the ideas of the philosophers behind the politicians, the adventures of the military leaders in front of the politicians, names, dates, quotes. Bleah. I wondered whether it would be wise for me to disagree with some of the ideas of the Founding Fathers during class, or in an essay for class.

Yes, there are notions, popular with the revolutionary luminaries, that I would dispute. One of them was put forth by Thomas Jefferson, an otherwise sensible fellow who became fond of the silly idea that the common man represented a reservoir of wisdom that would nudge the country back into its true course, if it were to stray from it. Which is nonsense. Common folk are no such resource, and their votes constitute no such restoring force. You don't get wisdom by summing mediocrities, and most people throughout all the ages have been mediocrities.

Democracy is a stupid idea for the simple reason that the wisest people are always outvoted. It really is possible for millions of people, each voting in accordance with their own interests, to drive their national vehicle off the cliff of hard reality, so that they and their country die.

Imagine that you took apart two old-fashioned pocket watches and scattered their parts across a pair of tables. To one of the tables, you invited a hundred people, randomly picked off the street, and told them to vote democratically on how to put the pieces back together again. To the other table, you invited a watch-maker. At which table would a working watch most likely be reassembled first?

However, there's a come-back argument. For a system of government other than democracy, who chooses the leader? That is, who ensures that a statesman is invited to assemble policy at the national table, and not some blowhard politician whose only talent is talking magnificently about himself?

No, not the common people. They aren't wise and are no proper judges of wisdom in others. If you leave the choice of leadership to them, they'll pick blowhard politicians almost every time. That would be true even if blowhard politicians and wise statesmen occurred among the candidates for high office in equal numbers. Of course, the real situation is even worse, since for every wise statesman who comes along, there are about a thousand blowhard politicians.

I'd say that war would determine which countries were the best ruled, with victory going to the more wisely led countries most of the time. People would sooner or later learn their lesson regarding the pursuit of power by those wannabe leaders who are ambitious but unworthy. Or, rather, the people who survived would learn that lesson.

From a divine point of view, it isn't all that important how many countries don't learn it in time, and fall as a consequence. From a cosmic perspective, it isn't important how many people are enslaved or exterminated. What matters is that natural selection would tend to preserve those countries that did learn rapidly enough, and the arrangements that those countries had made for the marriage of wisdom and power would be preserved along with them.

I could speculate about what those arrangements would be, but I would only be guessing. But that's why liberals are foolish to sneer at tradition. Traditional mores and culture are usually well-culled adaptations for the people among whom they evolved. What even the greatest minds would be hard put to contrive through planning, nature brings forth by the processes of natural selection. Including war.

For anyone interested in betting with the odds on his own survival and that of his country, I'd give this advice: if you want to be on the side that wins in the long run, you must first recognize that what decides struggles is power and the skill with which it is put to use.

On the other hand, I doubted that Mr. Ham was another Socrates, and so it probably wouldn't be wise for me to assert my opinions against those of Thomas Jefferson in Mr. Ham's history class.

On the third day of class, my books and the backpack arrived from Amazon. When I entered the dorm lobby, Donna Lane, who was acting as a receptionist for Mathews Hall, waved me over and gave them to me. That was five days ago. It was Monday again, and I was finding out that what you can do easily for one day isn't so easy when you must do it day after day after day.

After history, I headed back to my dorm room, took the sixth grade books out of my backpack, and put the college textbooks and my calculator in. Then, leaving the backpack, I walked to the cafeteria and ate whatever they were serving that didn't wiggle by itself. I returned to the dorm room and picked up my backpack, put it on, went out of the dorm through the wing exit. And started running.

I'm glad that I'd gotten a small pack that had a chest strap. Otherwise that thing would have bounced too much. It was just big enough for two textbooks, a thin notebook, a calculator, and some mechanical pencils. I ran along at about warp factor two, or twice normal speed. It felt no more strenuous than jogging, but my strides were longer, as they were for a run without the speed-up. I'd become so accustomed to running with an altered time rate that adjusting my step was now reflex, and I no longer made embarrassingly high leaps unless I wanted to.

How fast was I running? Oh, maybe about fifteen miles per hour. Fast enough to get me to the classroom before Dr. Roper closed the door, but slowly enough that anyone watching me would think me merely an excellent distance runner in good training. I'd already made this trip ten times, five times each way, running along the sidewalk. I drew looks, but not many, so I know that I must look like a normal running girl, wearing a backpack.

I was approaching an intersection where I'd have to make a right turn, when, from an alley between two buildings came several members of a black gang, obviously interested in me.

Well, I might be late to class, but I had to do my civic duty.

I ran past, dodging them, straight into that alley. The black youths came running after me in pursuit, thinking they had me now. It was a blind alley, dead-ending at the wall of a third building, with no exit except the one I'd entered by. I went to warp four and jumped over the blacks, clearing their reaching hands by about eighteen inches, and landing between them and the exit. Then I turned to fight. One of the blacks reached for me. I snapped his arm at the elbow and threw him into the wall on the left. I punched the second on his flat nose and saw blood fly out of his broad nostrils. I kicked the third in the groin so hard that he was punted though the air. I left the fourth with a dislocated jaw and the fifth with some broken ribs.

Job done, I adjusted my backpack's straps, left the alley, and resumed my run. The delay didn't even make me late for class. I got past the classroom door with several minutes to spare.

In the first day of class, Dr. Roper had gone through the theory behind derivatives, or "how much one thing changes when you change something else." And he explained that the derivative of a function is the slope of the line which is tangent to the function. The next day, he taught us about Riemann sums and gave out homework assignments. The day after that, he spoke of limits in general and limits of Riemann sums in particular, followed by another homework assignment. The fourth day, we were introduced to the geometrical idea of integration. You know, those tall, skinny rectangles that fit between the independent variable's axis and the curve of the function?

Yesterday, we got into the rules for differentiating and integrating polynomials. In class, I'd said, "So, they're each others' inverse operations," as if I were catching on. Ha! Dr. Roper was impressed by what appeared to be the quickness of my deduction. Okay, I schmoozed for brownie points, and I got them. But I did discover the inverse relationship between differentiation and integration for myself. I'd just done it a year earlier, and nobody saw me do it then.

So far, my calculus class had not yet caught up with what I'd known about calculus last April, when I worked out part of Mrs. John's homework problem at Morningside.

Physics 101, with Dr. Linder, wasn't even that hard. The only difference between college physics and high school physics is that in college the textbook doesn't pre-digest the differential equations for you. However, they are all easy differential equations that have variables separable and are easily integrated to provide the functions you'd see in the high school textbooks. I knew that more difficult math was ahead, but it didn't look as if I'd get to the heavy stuff in the 100 series of physics courses.

Still, credit is credit. I wished that getting that credit left me with more time to explore the college library and dig for stuff that I didn't already know.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #25
Jerry Abbott
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
Posts: 1,048
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 2, section 11.

"In other news tonight, the police investigation into the beating of some youths has revealed that their assailant was an 11-year-old Brookstone student named Brendalyn Jones. Yes, apparently a little girl beat five members of the Krack gang so badly that all of them were sent to Columbus Memorial Hospital for serious to critical injuries. Police say that the girl, who came forward the moment her classes at Brookstone's college campus were over, testified that the youths attempted to ambush her as she was going to class."

"Mark," said the news anchorman. "Why is an 11-year-old girl going to the Brookstone College campus? She seems a little young to be enrolled there."

"Peter," said the reporter. "She is young. But Brendalyn Jones is the girl who made headlines across America a few weeks ago after tests revealed that her IQ is somewhere above 200. She has been given permission to take college level classes, and she must run each day from Brookstone GSC to Brookstone College because she's too young to drive a car."

"And how is it that a little girl beat up so many gang members?"

"The police aren't too sure of that," said the reporter. "Apparently, Miss Jones has had martial arts training of some kind."

"Will the youths recover from their injuries?"

"Several of them will be in the hospital for a while. One of them has three broken ribs. Another has had to have his lower jaw put back into place. A third has a burst left testicle and a bruised right—"

"My word, Mark, that is one tough little girl."

"Peter, she told the police that it was their good fortune that she hadn't killed any of them. She said that she had no choice other than to use nearly lethal force because the odds were five-to-one against her."

"Well," said the anchorman. "I think we can all understand that. Turning to events at the state capitol..."

The girls in the dorm lobby were clustered around the TV. Watching the local news was a habit with us girls because it told us where the gang activity in Columbus was the thickest, so we could avoid those areas. But never had the lobby been so quiet, with attention so fixed on the 6 o'clock news as it was on that Tuesday evening. I was sitting on the broad central rise of a furry, brown, all-the-way-around couch which half filled the dorm lobby, my legs crossed, reading about the ride of Paul Revere (and the similar rides of William Dawes and Samuel Prescott) from my history book on the rise before me, when the eyes of thirty other girls turned my way.

It was so comical that I couldn't help laughing. What was even funnier is that most of them started asking whether I was all right, even though there I was, sitting on the couch rise, reading a book.

"Nobody better mess with my roommate," said Ruby, acting fierce. "Or they'll have to deal with me!"

Giggles and guffaws broke out among the girls at that. Well, at least the shock-and-awe mood that the newscast had created was broken. The other girls congratulated me on my victory and related horror stories about girls who had been raped or beaten by gang members. Which meant black gang members, but they were careful not to name the race of the perpetrators. It wasn't the first time I'd noticed that people were unwilling to discuss the socially significant differences between the races in a candid manner. Although it seemed such a simple thing to do, nearly everyone had been strongly conditioned to avoid it.

Although I wasn't familiar with the techniques of military brainwashing, I didn't think that psychological conditioning of any sort could be stronger than that which had instilled within so many people a reluctance to talk honestly about racial differences.

An 11th grade girl named Patricia Greenwood excused herself, saying that she had to go study in a less noisy place. I suspected that she wanted to be the one to bear the first gossip about my fight downtown because, on her way out of the lobby exit to the east wing, she told me "It's nice to see the good people win for a change!" Perhaps she meant the white people. It had been a while since we were winners, hadn't it?

About a hundred years.

Survival is the greatest school, and Death is its best teacher. But no living thing graduates, ever. The beneficiaries of nature's lessons aren't individuals, but races, which endure so long as they pass the tests and which prosper by how high they score. The white race had gotten itself into trouble partly by being too generous, and, in its generosity, making itself vulnerable. Other races had been quick to take advantage of that vulnerability. They infiltrated white countries, seeking out key positions of control, of supervision, of decision-making, and of power, which, once they had them, they used to benefit their own people at the expense of white people. Non-whites of every stripe had become favored above whites, and, being favored, they received rewards even when there were white people who deserved them more.

My fight could, conceivably, have landed me in jail. Or it could have imposed on my parents a legal obligation to pay fines and the hospital expenses of those gang members. The reason that didn't happen was that I'm only eleven years old—a little kid—and a girl, and have no prior record of mischief of any sort. All of those things added up to a degree of favor that outweighed the favor that those gang members had just for being black, once their prior records for trouble-making had been subtracted. Or, rather, my favor exceeded my opponents' favor this time. If I had to fight again, especially against blacks, that earlier fight would weigh against me, even if I were as justified next time as I'd been before.

To be sure, I could have outrun those blacks. I hadn't admitted that to the police because, in their opinion, it would have put blameworthiness upon me. Why didn't I just outrun them? Because the next little girl who happened to walk down that street, past that alley, would not have had my advantages. She'd have been robbed, beaten, raped, and probably murdered by those black youths. It was morally necessary that I deprive those gang members of their ability to harm someone who actually was an ordinary child, someone like whom I only appeared to be.

And there was one other reason as well. There is no idea more obscene than that decent people should be expected to give ground or right-of-way to vile predators. Good should roar so that evil trembles, not the other way around.

Those five black youths would recover. But would they reform? Had I taught them a lesson that would change their predatory behavior? No. They'd return to their previous lives, maybe a little more cautious than they were before. But sooner or later they would attack another innocent victim.

The conviction was growing in me that I'd made a mistake by not killing them. It was a mistake that I'd made before, in my old neighborhood in Druid Hills, when I had defeated four teenage blacks who had attacked me. By letting them live, I'd made the violent deaths of some number of other people probable. Though it hadn't occurred to me at the time, I'd chosen between the lives of those gang members and the lives of whomever it was they would someday murder, and I'd chosen wrongly.

And now that my fighting skill was known, I wouldn't be presumptively excluded from suspicion if gang members began turning up dead. I could no longer afford to do what was right. My moral weakness, which had made me reluctant to kill when killing was proper, had cost me that much.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #26
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage

by David Sims (a.k.a. Jerry Abbott)

Chapter 3

I was jogging to the college campus the next day when Vanessa Emory's white Mercedes caught up with me, horn beeping. There wasn't much traffic. I stopped. So did she, leaning over to roll down the passenger side window.

"Get in here," she told me.

I did. In a few seconds we were both heading down the street toward Brookstone College.

"I heard last night's newscast," said Ms. Emory. "We don't want a repeat of what happened Monday."

"I'm not especially worried about gang members," I said.

Ms. Emory nodded. Which was strange because I knew why I could be confident, but how could she?

"Your safety is a concern, nonetheless. However, that is only part of it." She turned right at the intersection, just past where I'd been attacked. "Another consideration is that Brookstone might become liable for any injuries you inflict on the upstanding gentlemen of the Krack gang during any future repetition of those curbside negotiations that you had with them yesterday."

I recalled that one of Brookstone's deans was my legal guardian at the moment. I nodded.

"I expect you've already figured out the rest," she said.

I thought that I had.

"I might not avoid legal consequences next time," I said.

"That's part of it. The police granted you favor because you're a preteen who has never been in a fight before, whereas those punks you beat up have lengthy criminal records for assault, robbery, drug dealing, and violations of the gun laws. But if you get into more fights, the police will notice that one name keeps popping up regularly in police reports. Yours. And then you might be presumed to be at fault, even if you are never the one to instigate violence."

I knew about the fallacy. Whether they are police officers, judges, or administrators, the majority of people in authority have difficulty distinguishing between the cause of problems and the focus of problems. That confusion is what enables much of those destructive phenomena known as "backstabbing" and "office politics."

It happens among students in grade school, too. If several kids don't like a certain other kid, they each will contrive to have a problem with him, and report it to the teachers or to the principal. The school officials don't know that the complaints are orchestrated by conspiracy, and they incorrectly presume that they just have this one problem kid to deal with. And, most of the time, the conspiracy achieves its purpose. But Ms. Emory had hinted that there was more.

"What did I miss?"

"You should have guessed. Owing to the stupidity of the media for mentioning your name on television, the Kracks know who you are and, approximately, where you live. And they have a history of vendetta."

I knew I should have killed them. I could have. No one would have suspected me of doing the deed. And because I did not, the girls in my dorm were in danger. As if she were reading my mind, Ms. Emory spoke.

"Not even you can be in two places at once. We will speak again after your classes are finished."
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #27
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 2.

Dr. Roper had set a fast pace, as Ms. Emory predicted he would. Already he was treating higher-order derivatives and their meaning during the first half of class, and presenting different methods for integration during the latter half. He'd given homework, some of which tried to confuse his students about which order of derivative to set equal to zero in order to find a local extreme of the next lower order. Other problems involved integration, which would have been devilishly convoluted for someone without experience in knowing when to use a trigonometric substitution, when to integrate by parts, and when to have a peek in The CRC Handbook of Standard Mathematical Tables and then reverse-engineer the logic behind an integral identity.

So far, my experience had enabled me to surf the class without having to exert myself much. I'd earned the gratitude of a few students one day by dropping by a study hall frequented by math and science majors, and correcting a few of my fellow college freshmen who had neglected to transform the differential dx to its new space, f(u) du, after making a substitution.

Yes, Brookstone College considered me a freshman, even though Brookstone GS called me a sixth-grader.

Dr. Roper had assigned a homework problem in which we were to find the analytic solution to an indefinite integral. The integral looked difficult, but it was not. You started with a trigonometric substitution, x equals the tangent of u, and you worked out the trigonometry until you obtained the transformed integral in its simplest form. Then you used integration by parts, grouped terms, applied a couple of trig relations, and did some factoring. But in the study room, when my older classmates asked me for help, I went to the blackboard and wrote:

∫ [ (7x Arctan x) / (1+x²)² ] dx

(A miracle occurs here.)

= (7/4) [ x + (x²−1) Arctan x ] / (x²+1) + K

The amusement that greeted my abbreviated demonstration was loud enough to bring Ms. van Peenen, a math teacher of Dutch extraction who treasured peace and quiet, out of her office to tell us students to hush. Then I had to get to my next class. I heard voices tapering in decrescendo behind me.

"How'd she do it?"

"Solved it in her head on the way down the hall."

"Damn!"

"I know. I can barely chew gum and walk."

Physics 101 wasn't nearly as challenging. It was almost like high school physics, with a little calculus thrown in. Our hardest homework problem so far had been to derive the formula by which one would calculate the horizontal range of a projectile on a flat, airless world having a gravity field that did not vary with altitude, as a function of its initial velocity. I turned in the ridiculously easy homework assignments and tried to hide my boredom. When would the really good stuff begin?

I'd kept thinking about Vanessa Emory's words "not even you," as if she were Lois Lane reminding Superman that even he had his limitations, through my calculus and physics classes. Since first meeting her on the bus in Atlanta, Ms. Emory had shown an interest in me that had been very unusual for such a highly placed executive, not to mention someone whose aging father owned most of the school I attended. At first, I'd thought that she was shepherding me because my famous IQ-test results made me a feather in Brookstone School's cap, but lately I'd begun thinking that her interest was even greater than that could account for.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #28
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 3.

After class, I was coming down the stairs to the exit of the building that was nearest the street that led back to the grade school campus. Ms. Emory was waiting near the exit, and apparently had been waiting the whole time I was in class. Thinking about that gave me the creeps. She was nice, and she had been very helpful to me, but just what the hell was going on here? A vice president of Brookstone School wouldn't wait two hours in the corridor of a class building just to play chauffeur to a student, no matter how promising the student might be.

"Are you all done?"

"With class? Yes. Where are we going now?"

Vanessa Emory smiled. She knew I'd guessed that she had something in mind.

"To my house," she said. "There are some things I want to tell you in private. I've called Dean Klang and told him that you're with me, and that you'll be late getting back to your dorm."

So we got into her car, and she drove to a large, impressive house a short distance outside Columbus in Muscogee County. We went inside and, first thing, we had a snack. Then we went into her living room and sat down.

"This is one of my father's homes, though he isn't staying here at the moment," she said. "Do you like it?"

"It's nice," I admitted, looking around at the drapes, the furniture, the carpet, the lighting fixtures. The polished and carved mahogany paneling that faced the walls. The jade statuettes. The antique clock that showed the correct time. "Expensive looking."

"Quite expensive. My father's taste in home furnishings runs to the high end of quality. Now let me get to the reason I asked you to come here."

Vanessa Emory held out her hand. The indoor lights went out. The heavy drapes were drawn against the sun, so, lacking indoor lighting, it had become somewhat dark in the living room. How had she turned the lights off?

"No, I don't have a remote control device," she said. "I turned off the lights by willing the circuit open. It's a divine power that I have, similar to your power to alter the rate at which you experience time."

That startled me. No one else had ever guessed what I could do with time.

"Now watch this," she said, as she made a ball of light appear above her palm. It grew in brightness until the room was as well illuminated as it had been by the electric lights. "About twenty thousand years ago, the gods and goddesses about whom the Greeks would, much later, tell in their legends, actually lived. They built a civilization of which there remain only a few traces, now mostly buried in parts of Europe. If they'd endured, they might have explored space and colonized the moons and planets of our solar system."

Vanessa Emory smiled sadly.

"But they did not endure."

"Why not?" I asked.

"The ancient divines made the mistake that all of the higher races since have made. They married, or informally consorted with, lesser men and women. The Greek legends recollect this failing in the stories about Zeus, or Jove, in which he frequently took mortal lovers and had children by them. In truth, it wasn't just one god who did that. Nearly all of them started doing it. For some reason, race-mixing became popular among the divines of long ago. And after only a few centuries, a half-breed race of demigods arose, and the race of pure gods died out."

"Tragic," I said.

"Yes, it was. Of course, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here. I am a demi-goddess. And so are you."

I considered that. It certainly explained the facts as I knew them.

"Why us?" I asked. "Why aren't powers like ours more common among, um, white people?"

"Ah. You've guessed more than I thought," said Ms. Emory. "Yes, the white race is a degenerate form of the race of demigods. Mortals had outnumbered the gods by a very large ratio. Perhaps by a thousand to one. And the first generation of demigods continued the race-mixing ways of their fully divine parents. So the god-genes became ever more dilute as the generations continued to roll by. Eventually, the only special benefit the white race had from their god side of their family tree was a slightly higher average intelligence than other humanoid races."

"The Asians have a higher average IQ than than whites do," I pointed out.

Vanessa Emory dismissed her ball of light and turned the electric lights back on with another wave of her hand.

"The Asians," she said, "got their advantages from racial admixture with white people." She sat on a soft chair that faced where I was sitting on her sofa. "Do you know what population pressure is?"

I nodded. "It's when there are too many people living in a territory that can't grow enough food for everyone to eat."

"Food or some other necessary resource," said Ms. Emory. "But usually it is food. Well then. About fifteen thousand years ago, after the gods were gone and the demigods had grown few, white tribal groups began wandering from their original homelands in Europe and in northern Asia. They went in all directions. Those who went into central Asia met a new humanoid race, which we refer to as the Yoyoi. The Yoyoi were the original Asian race, a primitive race having an average intelligence inferior to that of the invading whites. And here is where the white race repeated the error that caused the extinction of the ancient gods."

"Whites married, or informally consorted with, the Yoyoi and made a new hybrid race," I guessed.

"Exactly so," said Ms. Emory. "And that new hybrid race, over the course of time, became the modern race that, today, we call 'Asians.' To the extent that they have beauty and mental ability, they got it from our race. It certainly was never present in the original Yoyois."

"But their average IQ is higher than the average IQ for white people," I said. "If dilution lessened our godlike attributes, then surely the further dilution with the Yoyoi would have lessened them the more."

"Before the dilution had spread far, the wisest of the Yoyoi-Aryan hybrids became politically ascendant over the others and determined that their culture would practice a form of eugenics aimed at cultivating two traits. One of them was intelligence. The other was respect for authority. As the centuries passed, those in leadership positions weren't always the wisest or smartest Asians, and yet the Asians kept bowing to them anyway, simply because they were the civil authorities."

"The two traits sometimes get in each others' way."

"Yes. Meanwhile, in Europe, white people were far more divided, more rambunctious, more tempestuous, more prone to rebellion. The lack of discipline made a unification of white civilization late to reappear. However, it had its own eugenic effect on the race. One of the effects was a broadening of the normal distribution for white intelligence. Or, in statistician's terms, the standard deviation rose. With the passing of time, there was a reduction of the hump in the middle of the bell curve and a rise in the percentage of whites found at the extremes."

"So white people have higher percentages of both idiots and geniuses than the Asians do," I said, following the logic. "And a smaller percentage of mediocrities."

"And that's an advantage," said Vanessa Emory. "Can you tell me why?"

"Of course," I said. It was obvious. "Those who do the most challenging tasks, and advance the sum of human knowledge, are always those in the high extreme of the distribution of intelligence. When it comes to pushing the envelope, the mediocrities count no more than the retards do. So flattening the distribution and squeezing equal percentages in both directions increases the percentage of the race that can make significant scientific achievements and contributions to culture."

"Yes," said Ms. Emory. "That's quite a good summary. And that is why the white race, rather than the Asian race, produced the world's first technical civilization. The gods never tinkered with electronics or with nuclear physics because they didn't need to. Their innate abilities were much, much greater than those of their demigod offspring were."

Ms. Emory continued. "But also, in eugenic terms, there's another advantage to a larger standard deviation. It makes culling to improve the race with respect to the trait having the flattened distribution more rapidly effective."

She'd answered my question about why demigods were no longer common. But there remained the other side of the coin.

"If the god-genes became more dilute with time, then why do any demigods or demigoddeses exist today at all?"

"How do you feel about Adolf Hitler?" she asked.

"I think he was a man who underestimated his opponent, and lost a war because of that miscalculation."

"Well, so much is true. However, the Führer had plans to improve his nation genetically. He ordered one of his senior deputies, Heinrich Himmler, to start a program of human breeding. Its purpose was to promote human biological virtues among the German people. Biological virtues in general, that is. But along the way, somewhere, Himmler discovered that there was a bit of truth to the legends of the ancient Greeks, and he began to focus his program on recovering the god-genes as a special task of the Lebensborn project. Whether Hitler himself knew about it is unclear. Himmler didn't always fully account for his doings."

"So the Nazis brought back the god-genes?"

"To some extent, they did. Himmler barely knew that he was on to something when Germany lost the war. Most people believed that the Lebensborn project ended when Germany fell to the Allies. But it continued in secret. Himmler gave the task to SS officers who escaped to Argentina. The project was very quietly expanded to include white people in Australia, then in America, in the United Kingdom, and, finally, back in Europe once again. I am of the fourth generation of the project. You are of the fifth."

"How do you know?" But I'd guessed the answer before my question was completely asked.

"The internet has made genealogical research a rather simple matter," said Ms. Emory. "I looked up your family tree. You have Lebensborn ancestors on both your mother's and your father's sides."

"Do your parents have talents like yours?"

"My father doesn't. My mother is dead. But, no, she didn't. Or, I should say, not as far as I know. Apparently, the genes that enable some manifestation of divine power only rarely occur to the necessary extent, or line up in the proper way, even among those who carry them. At the molecular level, they're just alleles. Many of them are probably recessives."

My father and my mother had been introduced to each other by their own parents, by my two sets of grandparents. They didn't just happen to hook up at school and start dating. It fit right into what Ms. Emory was telling me. It was even possible that my parents were part of the Lebensborn project and still didn't realize it.

"How many of us are there?"

"Demi-divines? Not many," she said. "I doubt that there have been as many as ten alive at any one time. Lebensborn has had only a little success in bringing back the gods, but it's a start."

"Why did you tell me this?" I asked.

"To give you an idea of the importance of your staying alive, of not taking unnecessary risks with yourself. And to encourage you, when the time comes, to have children. Many."

"Did you?"

A pained expression crossed Vanessa Emory's face.

"Five," she said. "And all of them were killed before they could grow up."

"Murdered?"

"Well," said Vanessa Emory. "That's what I think. My two daughters were killed in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and the police never found the driver. My oldest son fell to his death from an apartment building rooftop, and the police never found out who had pushed him. In fact, they said it appeared to have been an accidental fall, though I suspect that they simply wanted to close the case. Another died of food poisoning. The last, a boy about your age, was killed by blacks during a flash riot. They swarmed the streets, attacking any white person they saw. They saw him, and so he died."

"I suppose, then, that I ought to marry a demigod once I come of age. It would be the best way to concentrate the god-genes."

"It would," agreed Vanessa Emory. "But there is a problem. There are, at present, no living male demi-divines. You'll have to find the best mortal man you can, the man who is physically and mentally the most perfect, because such a man is likely to have an above-average concentration of the god-genes."

"Such a man is likely to be already claimed."

"Then you cheat," said Vanessa Emory. "You don't have to marry him. You only need to get his genes combined with yours in a baby. Once you've done that, you need trouble neither him nor his wife evermore."

She looked at the antique clock on the marble fireplace mantle.

"I must get you back to your dorm," she said with a curious smile. "Norman Klang might be wondering what I'm doing with you."

"Giving me a stern safety lecture," I suggested.

"Exactly."

We left the house and got back into her Mercedes.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #29
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 4.

My track class was held alongside a general PE class, from which I was exempted because training for a sport, such as track, was considered to be an acceptable equivalent. The event we were training for at the moment was the 400-meter relay race. I was one of four girls who had to run 100 meters with a baton, which I was to hand off on the run to the next girl, unless I were the last girl, in which case I carried it across the finish line.

The girls in the PE class were doing their exercises in the middle of the football field. They were subdued today because yesterday the coach had scolded them for chanting, while doing their push-ups, "We must! We must! We must increase our bust! The bigger the better. The better the bigger. The boys are depending on us!" Repeat. Coach Braun thought it was immodest. I thought it was just girls will be girls.

The coach was pleased with me because I was the fastest girl on the team. I'd been careful not to let my speed-up get out of hand. Warp two was plenty speedy enough. Cheating? Of course it wasn't cheating. Cheating was something like using drugs, such as amphetamines or steroids. Being a demi-goddess who could bend time wasn't against the rules at all.

I heard Coach Braun call "On your mark." The girls crouched into their starting positions. "Get set." Looking on from the other side of the track, I saw six butts rise several inches each, as muscles tensed in twelve thighs. "Go!"

Off they went. Coming around the first curve, the half-dozen girls in the first relay caught up with those in the second, who snatched their batons and took them on around the track. Beth Griffin was the girl with the baton I was to take. I started off as she got close, let her catch me. I went on double-time as I took the baton. My team had been in last place due to a near-fumble of our baton on the first hand-off. I remedied that to the extent of tying with the leading team at the third hand-off. Our final relay girl, Tamara Cook, crossed the finish line in second place.

Oh well.

I jogged over to the finish line on normal time rate. Coach Braun kept shooting quick glances at me. He was holding his stopwatch in his right hand. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I might have run my hundred meters faster than I should have.

The relay race is a team sport, and it isn't polite to ask one's coach about one's individual performance. It would sound too much as if one were trying to take a bigger share of the credit for winning or avoid some of the blame for losing. And that isn't good sportsmanship. So I jogged on by the coach to the bleachers, while the next twenty-four girls took their places around the track for their event.

I swear that my hearing is getting better. Or, I should say, when I want my hearing to improve, it does. When Coach Fuller came out to the track, Coach Braun had a quiet word with her. I tuned in.

"Keep an eye on Brenda Jones," he said. "I timed her in the relay. Perhaps I made a mistake with the stopwatch. But if I didn't, then she ran that hundred meters in ten point two seconds."

"Not possible," said Coach Fuller. "That would be a world's record for the women's 100-meter sprint, and it would be almost a record for the men's."

"As I said, I might have made a mistake with the stopwatch. Just keep an eye on her. Even without timing her, I can see that she's easily the fastest girl we've ever had at Brookstone. And..." I looked away just in time. "I have the feeling she's holding back. As strange as that sounds."

"Well, all right. I'll observe her for you while you're at Glisson Camp. But if she's that fast, then she's from another planet."

"I've been training boys and girls for a long time," said Coach Braun, who was in his sixties. "I can usually tell when a student isn't giving an event his best effort. And while it would be utterly ridiculous for me to find fault with Brenda's excellent event times, it does seem to me that she isn't trying as hard as she can." Coach Braun gave his class over to Coach Fuller and headed off to wherever it was he had to go.

Hm.

All right, then. My IQ had made me famous. And now I'd probably become doubly so, since, now that my coach had discovered (some of) my speed, I could hardly avoid becoming Brookstone's track star. I'd only meant to make up for the sloppiness of two of my teammates in the relay race. I hadn't intended to earn the "fastest woman in the world" title. Maybe I could convince the coach that he'd made a mistake with that darned stopwatch.

The answer turned out to be simple. I reduced the speed-up to about fifty percent above normal. That way I could still go as fast as I needed to, while looking as if I were trying harder, which I was.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #30
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 3, section 5.

I came back to the dorm room after my morning classes feeling very bad. My hips felt as if they were in a vice that was trying to pinch them until my legs fell off. I also felt vaguely nauseous, and I figured that if ever there were a day to cut my afternoon classes, this was it. As I opened the door, I saw that Ruby Pierce had a guest. LaChandra Stints.

As you've probably figured out, blacks make me uneasy. I've never had a good relationship with a black person, and I've found them generally to be a bunch of beggars, cheaters, blame-shifters, and chip-on-the-shoulder makers of many excuses for their own shortcomings. Or else violent predators. So I wasn't expecting LaChandra Stints to be quite a charming girl, as eloquent yet concise in speech as a demi-goddess.

One who wasn't starting her first menses.

Yes, that was what was happening. I hadn't been asleep when Mrs. Joiner had explained to the girls in her elementary school biology class about what to expect. But I hadn't known that I was going to be entertaining when it happened.

"Brenda," said Ruby. "This is LaChandra Stints. She's on the school debate team, and she's really smart, like you. When she found out you were my roommate, she asked if she could come to our room to meet y—"

By this time, I had my suitcase down from the shelf over the closet, had taken the Advil and one of the pads, and was heading back out the door toward the wing bathroom.

"Pleased to meet you. Be back in a minute. I have an emergency to take care of."

Okay, so it was an awkward first meeting. But what was I supposed to do?

As it turned out, I wasn't bleeding yet. But I could feel that it wouldn't be long. The pain had gotten worse. I dragged myself back from the bathroom and into the room, where I lay down on my bed and groaned.

"Should I come back later?" asked LaChandra.

"I can talk," I said. "I just don't want to move, and I'm cutting my classes for the rest of the day."

"I don't suppose you'll be setting the track on fire today, huh?" said Ruby.

"Uh-uh. Is it always this bad?" I hoped not.

"No," said LaChandra. "But the first time often is. Your body isn't accustomed to the prostaglandins, which is why you're having severe cramps."

I nodded, then wished I hadn't. I had gotten a headache, too.

When her genius IQ was discovered by the media, about two years ago, LaChandra Stints had been held up as a symbol of black equality with whites. Um, no. I take it back. The media had strongly implied that she proved that blacks were smarter than whites. When my IQ proved to be much higher still, nothing was said that implied white mental superiority. Not on television or in the press, anyway. As I thought about it, I seemed to remember that following both her burst of fame and mine, there had been an increase in televised images of blacks using computers and electronic gadgets in incidental spots of television programming and in advertisements.

Still, LaChandra was the real thing. I could tell that much as she spoke. Really intelligent people have a precision of diction that less intelligent people can't reach. It comes partly from having a larger vocabulary, and partly from being able to think ahead while speaking. That's not always a reliable guide to someone's IQ, though, as it can be faked by an actor who has rehearsed his lines. That's why most television personalities aren't really as smart as they sound. But LaChandra wasn't reading from a script.

The only class that she and I had in common was the History of the American Revolution. I'd noticed her there, but it was a large class, and I had always been rushed afterward to eat and then run to the college campus for my classes in calculus and physics. I'd never stopped to speak with her. I was raised in Atlanta, which had been a racial pressure-cooker since before I was born. Blacks prey on whites there with theft, assault, and rape, and the authorities mostly let them get away with it. Atlanta's whites, for their part, pretend (in between getting robbed, beaten, or raped) that there's nothing at all wrong with the city, except for a little of the "random" crime that happens everywhere. So you should understand that I hadn't been in a hurry to acquaint myself with LaChandra.

Why was a ninth-grader taking a sixth-grade class in history? Because she'd missed it at her old school, and she had to take it here because it was part of the core curriculum at Brookstone. Not even I had been allowed to skip any of it. Brookstone allowed me to take college science and math courses, but it wasn't going to let me out of the usual sixth-grade science and math courses, even though I obviously already know the subject matter. Rules don't always make sense. Or maybe it would be better to say that the actual purpose of a rule isn't always what its makers say it is.

LaChandra and I exchanged pleasantries while I tried to deal with my first-ever full-blown attack of menstrual cramps. She probably sensed that it wasn't a good time for a lengthy comparison of life experiences, so she left after a few more minutes. She lived in another dorm. Ruby saw her to the wing exit of Mathews Hall, then returned to the room.

"Biology never was my favorite subject," I said. "Now I know why."

Ruby made sympathetic noises. We spoke a while about LaChandra, whom Ruby seemed to consider my mental equal. I knew better, but I understood that Ruby might not see what I could. A higher mind can sort rank among lower ones much more accurately than the reverse. Although my contact with her had been brief, I could estimate that her IQ was perhaps about 140, making LaChandra the equal of Sarah Wiesman. But not mine.

Let me try to convey how rare it is for a black to have a genius IQ.

Although the distribution of intelligence among the members of a race isn't perfectly normal, the normal distribution does make a good approximation of the population distribution when only one race is present. Or, conversely, one of the ways you can tell that more than one race is in a population is if its IQ spread is bimodal or significantly skewed. The reason that the normal distribution makes a good approximation for the distribution of a characteristic like intelligence is related to the way genetic inheritance works. I'll save that discussion for another time.

The fraction, f, of a race having an average IQ of x̄ and a standard deviation in IQ of σ, which is above the minimum IQ of μ, is found from

f(μ) = ½ − [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(x̄,μ) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

You can avoid integrating the probability density function if you have a handy error function to call.

f(μ) = 1 − ½ { 1 + erf [(μ-x̄)/(σ√2)] }

In the equation, x̄ is the average IQ for the race, and σ is its racial standard deviation in IQ. For white US-residents in the year 2040, those numbers were x̄=103 and σ=16.4. For black US-residents, x̄=85 and σ=12.4. The minimum IQ required by Brookstone School for student enrollment is 130. If you set μ=130, you find that the fractions of whites and of blacks who are eligible to attend this school are 0.0498467387 and 0.0001422428469, respectively. In other words, one white student in twenty has what it takes to get into this school, but only one black student in 7030 does.

Since there are about equal numbers of whites and blacks in this part of the United States (Georgia and Alabama), there should be about 350 white students for each black student here. In fact, the ratio is more lopsided than that, since the total number of students in grades six through twelve is about 1400, and there's only one black student in those grades who actually does meet the customary minimum IQ requirement, namely LaChandra Stints. Where are the three other blacks who should qualify? If I had to guess, I'd say they were attending a less expensive school with which their parents are more comfortable.

There are also two other black students at Brookstone who didn't meet the IQ requirement, but were allowed to enroll on a sports wavier. One of them is a player on the Brookstone high school football team, at which sport, I was told, he is quite good. The other wavier had been granted to the fastest sprinter on the boy's track team.

But, as far as I know, there aren't any white students at all who received a wavier of the minimum IQ requirement to enroll at Brookstone, no matter what their athletic merits might be, and that tells the tale as far as I'm concerned. Brookstone School had recently become infected with political correctness. Possibly the installment of a new corporate president had had something to do with that. As yet the consequential troubles were negligible. But that would not continue. It was the first leak in the levee, the trickle that might easily become a flood. Political correctness would eventually destroy Brookstone School, as it has destroyed so many other institutions, unless the entrance standards were strictly enforced, once again.
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #31
Jerry Abbott
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This is as far as I've written on this book, so far. I don't know whether or not I'll ever finish it. However, I have written bits of other stories about Brenda Lynn Jones and Ruby Pierce, which take place decades, centuries, or aeons later.

David Sims (a.k.a. Jerry Abbott)
 
Old November 30th, 2019 #32
Hugh Akston
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So when is the National Alliance going to set up a Film Division and start making some of these stories? Even if they're low-budget, direct-to-DVD, it's a doable project. It's the same method Hymiewood uses to warp white minds so we better adopt the technique - and soon.
 
Old December 1st, 2019 #33
Hugh Akston
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerry Abbott View Post
Brenda Lynn Jones and the Colonization of the Perseus-Pisces Supercluster

 
Old December 3rd, 2019 #34
Jerry Abbott
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh Akston View Post


Brenda at age 15, Brookstone College (classroom), Columbus GA.


Ruby at age 16, Brookstone Grade School Campus (dorm), Columbus GA.

Last edited by Jerry Abbott; December 3rd, 2019 at 12:04 PM.
 
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