Tag: iq

Somalia’s Average IQ Score Meets the U.S. Standard for Intellectual Disability

Minnesota’s Somali community has been treated for years as a political talking point rather than a population that deserves honest evaluation. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz insists the community poses no financial or public-safety burden. Democrats frame all criticism as racism. 

But the numbers tell a different story—one that Minnesotans have been asked to ignore even as the state confronted one of the largest welfare-fraud schemes in U.S. history.

Federal prosecutors uncovered a $250–$300 million network of falsified child-nutrition and Medicaid claims, much of it operating through organizations rooted in Somali enclaves. 

The total fraud is now estimated by some to exceed $1 billion. The scandal reflects deeper structural problems tied to human-capital realities that Democrats refuse to acknowledge.

Minnesota has a population of about 5.7 million, including approximately 107,000 Somali-born or Somali-American residents—roughly 1.5% of the state. 

Yet according to state data, about 58% of Somali Minnesotans live in poverty, or roughly 62,000 people, compared with 530,000 Minnesotans overall. That means the Somali community represents nearly 12% of the state’s total poverty population despite making up less than 2% of its residents.

This imbalance translates into real fiscal consequences. 

Minnesota spends billions annually on welfare-related programs. Using per-capita calculations, the Somali poverty footprint represents an estimated $2.8 billion in yearly public-assistance obligations. 

That burden falls on taxpayers—many of whom were never told the scale of the dependency they were financing.

State leaders also insist Somali Minnesotans do not disproportionately contribute to crime. Governor Walz has repeatedly made that claim without supplying data to support it.

The federal record tells a different story. 

Across the United States, Black migrants make up 5.4% of immigrants, yet account for 20.3% of immigrants facing removal because of criminal convictions. That category consists mostly of East Africans, including Somali nationals.

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Federal toxicology agency under CDC now says fluoride lowers IQ, in comprehensive meta analysis of 74 studies

The addition of Fluoride to drinking water is one of public health’s most durable achievements. Over 200 million Americans use water from public water supplies to which fluoride has been added. And most use toothpaste to which fluoride was added. One friend was instructed to swallow the fluoride toothpaste after brushing, which he did for many years. Please don’t.

This is what a historical NIH website has to say about the history of fluoridation, patting itself on the back:

In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water. The Grand Rapids water fluoridation study was originally sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, but was taken over by the NIDR (NIH’s National Institute of Dental Research) shortly after the Institute’s inception in 1948. During the 15-year project, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids’ almost 30,000 schoolchildren. After just 11 years, Dean- who was now director of the NIDR-announced an amazing finding. The caries rate among Grand Rapids children born after fluoride was added to the water supply dropped more than 60 percent. This finding, considering the thousands of participants in the study, amounted to a giant scientific breakthrough that promised to revolutionize dental care, making tooth decay for the first time in history a preventable disease for most people.

A Lasting Achievement

Almost 30 years after the conclusion of the Grand Rapids fluoridation study, fluoride continues to be dental science’s main weapon in the battle against tooth decay. Today, just about every toothpaste on the market contains fluoride as its active ingredient; water fluoridation projects currently benefit over 200 million Americans, and 13 million schoolchildren now participate in school-based fluoride mouth rinse programs. As the figures indicate, McKay, Dean, and the others helped to transform dentistry into a prevention-oriented profession. Their drive, in the face of overwhelming adversity, is no less than a remarkable feat of science-an achievement ranking with the other great preventive health measures of our century.

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Higher Cognitive Ability, Less Concern for Political Correctness – Study Finds

Britain’s elite cultural institutions – the BBC, universities, the national trust – are dominated by the woke. Since smart people tend to get ahead in life, you might assume the woke would have higher intelligence. Not so, according to a new study.

Louise Drieghe and colleagues surveyed 300 North Americans adults using the platform Mechanical Turk. To measure participants’ cognitive ability, they administered the Ammons Quick Test, which involves correctly assigning words to pictures. Previous studies have shown that people’s scores on the test correlate strongly with their scores on more comprehensive IQ tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

The researchers also assessed participants’ support for free speech and concern for political correctness. To measure the former, they constructed a 9-item scale, comprising items such as “Every individual has the unalienable right to express their thoughts freely,” and “Censorship of speech leaves little room for debate and diverse points of view”.

To measure the latter, they used a 7-item scale developed by two other researchers. It includes items such as “I get mad when I hear someone use politically incorrect language,” and “I try to educate people around me about the political meaning of their words”.

Drieghe and colleagues’ key finding is shown in the first column of the table below. The values are correlation coefficients – a way of quantifying how strongly related two variables are.

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Government Report Links High Fluoride Exposure With Low IQ Among Children

Exposing children to high levels of fluoride is “consistently associated” with lower IQ, and potentially other neurodevelopmental issues, according to a report by the National Toxicology Program (NTP).

In 2016, NTP started a systematic review of scientific literature to ascertain links between fluoride and cognition. On Aug. 21, it published a report detailing its findings. A total of 72 studies reviewed in the report examined how fluoride exposure affected children’s IQ. Sixty-four of these studies found an “inverse association between estimated fluoride exposure and IQ in children,” meaning higher exposure was linked to lower IQ and vice versa.

“This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher estimated fluoride exposures … are consistently associated with lower IQ in children,” the report stated. NTP is a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

NTP defined high exposure as drinking water with fluoride concentrations that exceed the 1.5 mg/L limit set by the World Health Organization.

The allowable limits in the United States are different. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set a threshold of 0.7 mg/L for fluoride presence in drinking water (including naturally occurring and added fluoride, or fluoridation), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a limit of 2 mg/L.

As of April 2020, community water systems in the United States supplied water containing 1.5 mg/L or more of naturally occurring fluoride to 0.59 percent of the country’s population, which comes to approximately 1.9 million people, NTP stated. Around 1 million people were supplied water with 2 mg/L or more of naturally occurring fluoride.

“There is also some evidence that fluoride exposure is associated with other neurodevelopmental and cognitive effects in children; although, because of the heterogeneity of the outcomes, there is low confidence in the literature for these other effects,” the report stated.

The studies on children’s IQ reviewed in the report were conducted in 10 countries, including Canada and Mexico. No studies from the United States were included in the review.

Fluoride is a mineral that prevents and repairs damage to the teeth caused by bacteria. In 1945, the United States introduced a community water fluoridation program, which has been considered a successful public health measure.

However, there were concerns that children and pregnant women may ingest fluoride in excess amounts due to exposure to the mineral from a variety of sources, including water, beverages, toothpaste, and teas, the NTP said. This led the program to conduct the current study.

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Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing – and some experts argue it’s because humans have reached their intellectual peak

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.

Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998.

And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

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Health Secretary Levine blocked release of federal report confirming fluoride in US tap water lowers children’s IQ

To conceal harms of an apparent “well poisoning” effort, US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel “Dick” Levine tried to prevent Americans from seeing a government report demonstrating brain-damaging, intelligence-lowering effects of fluoride — forced into public water supplies for decades without informed consent — until a court ordered the report’s release.

According to Fluoride Action Network (FAN), a plaintiff in the case:

After a 6-year long systematic review of fluoride’s impact on the developing brain, a court order has led to the National Toxicology Program (NTP) making public their finalized report that was blocked by US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership and concealed from the public for the past 10 months.

The NTP reported 52 of 55 studies found decreases in child IQ associated with increase in fluoride, a remarkable 95% consistency. 

Strong evidence fluoride harms the brain

From the report’s abstract:

In adults, only two high-quality cross-sectional studies examining cognitive effects were available.

The literature in children was more extensive and was separated into studies assessing intelligence quotient (IQ) and studies assessing other cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Eight of nine high-quality studies examining other cognitive or neurodevelopmental outcomes reported associations with fluoride exposure.

Seventy-two studies assessed the association between fluoride exposure and IQ in children.

Nineteen of those studies were considered to be high quality; of these, 18 reported an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children.

The 18 studies, which include 3 prospective cohort studies and 15 cross-sectional studies, were conducted in 5 different countries.

Forty-six of the 53 low-quality studies in children also found evidence of an association between higher fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children.

Yet Levine didn’t want you to see the report.

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Suppressed Government Report Finds Fluoride Can Reduce IQ

On March 15th the National Toxicology Program (NTP) report reviewing fluoride neurotoxicity was finally made public under an agreement reached in an ongoing lawsuit brought against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Fluoride Action Network (FAN).

The long delayed lawsuit that began in 2017 revealed government attempts to limit the evidence available to be reviewed in court.

Internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by plaintiff attorney Michael Connett indicated the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Rachel Levine and the National Institute of Health’s director Lawrence A. Tabak intervened to stop the release of the most recent study on fluoride’s toxicity in May 2022.

According to FAN only one historical example exists of an NTP report being blocked from release, a report on the carcinogenicity of asbestos-contaminated talc. Talc industry groups conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign, including enlisting friendly congresspeople to intervene.

FAN was able to force yesterday’s release of the NTP report by using leverage from the ongoing lawsuit against the EPA.

The report was issued in two parts, a monograph, and a meta-analysis. It included comments from external peer-reviewers and internal HHS departments, along with NTP’s responses.

FAN reported the meta-analysis found that 52 of 55 studies found lower IQ with higher fluoride exposures, demonstrating remarkable consistency. Notably, 19 studies of the studies included were rated to be higher quality and 18 of these linked fluoride exposure with lower IQ. The meta-analysis could not detect any safe exposure, including at levels common from drinking artificially fluoridated water.

In a recent press release, FAN says that fluoridation defenders have falsely claimed draft versions of the report had been “rejected” by a National Academies committee. In fact, the committee recommended that NTP clarify their methods and reasoning for reaching their conclusions because the issue was considered so contentious.

In a statement, FAN said the release of the report makes the situation clear.

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Americans’ IQ Declining for First Time in Almost a Century, Study Finds

Americans’ average IQ is in decline for the first time in nearly a century, according to a new study, a finding that comes as many schools gut curricula standards to promote so-called equity and inclusion.

Young Americans between the ages of 18 and 22 saw the biggest decline in IQ, according to a new study published in the psychology journal Intelligence and reported on by Campus Reform. The study’s authors suggest that these IQ declines occurring between 2006 and 2018 may be due to poor-quality education.

The findings could indicate “that either the caliber of education has decreased across this study’s sample and/or that there has been a shift in the perceived value of certain cognitive skills,” according to the report.

The study comes as school districts across the country eliminate honors curricula from high schools in the name of racial equity. Culver City School District in Los Angeles caught backlash from parents of honors students who lost opportunities to enroll in accelerated programs.

“It’s not working and we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” said one Culver City parent.

Universities have also lowered their standards for admission, with the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University removing their entrance exam requirements.

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FLUORIDE & IQ: 67 STUDIES

As of May 2020, a total of 75 studies have investigated the relationship between fluoride and human intelligence. Of these investigations, 67 studies have found that elevated fluoride exposure is associated with reduced IQ in humans, while over 60 animal studies have found that fluoride exposure impairs the learning and/or memory capacity of animals. The human studies, which are based on IQ examinations of 24,623 children (65 studies) and 245 adults (2 studies), provide compelling evidence that fluoride exposure during the early years of life can damage a child’s developing brain. For a discussion of the 8 studies that did not find an association between fluoride and IQ, click here.

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