For those who care about such things, here are my latest curve fits for characteristics of main sequence stars of spectral type M.

M = star's mass in units of the sun's mass
L = star's luminosity in solar units
R = star's radius in solar radii
T = star's effective temperature, Kelvins
ξ = star's spectral type (aprox. MKK)

For spectral type M, the range of mass is 0.075 ≤ M ≤ 0.6

Luminosity.

If M≤0.5 then
L = 10^{−216.83305 M⁴ + 337.737823 M³ − 186.0947 M² + 45.1901389 M − 6.1492666}

If 0.5<M≤1 then
L = 10^{0.3124895 M² + 2.35668555 M − 2.66917505}

Radius.

If M<0.67471 then
R = −6.1108745 M⁴ + 13.1850512 M³ − 8.9344 M² + 3.12838735 M − 0.0969583

Effective Temperature.

T = (5779.6 K) ∜(L/R²)

Spectral Type.

ξ = −2.829e-9 T³ + 2.6937e-5 T² − 0.0898178 T + 167.436776
ξ = [60→M0, 61→M1, 62→M2, ... , 69→M9]

Eh phooey. I found a problem. The effective temperature has a local maximum about M=0.3 and begins a slight decline until just before M=0.4. I'd thought that the curvefits for L and for R were pretty good, but something's wrong somewhere. I'll try to fix it.

During the middle ages, gold coins were used as money. Gold is heavy, and thieves often tried to steal it. So people who had a lot of gold, but who didn't have any safe places of their own to keep it, began renting strongboxes from others who promised to keep the gold secure. For a fee, of course. Think of it as a rented locker for gold coins.

Most of the people who owned the deposited gold were European nobles. Most of the people to whom the gold was entrusted for safekeeping were goldsmiths, and most of the goldsmiths were Jews. Whenever a European noble would leave some gold with a Jewish goldsmith for safekeeping, he would get a receipt for the amount of gold he'd deposited, and by this receipt he would claim his gold again when he had need of it, reduced by the amount the Jew charged as his fee.

As the years went by, the nobles discovered that they could use the receipts as money of the "bearer bond" sort. Whenever the noble wanted to buy something, he didn't like to go running to the Jew to make a partial withdrawal of his deposit (especially since the Jew was charging for that service also). Instead, when he made his deposit, he had the Jew write him receipts for 1%, 5%, 10% portions of the gold on deposit, which added up to 100% altogether. And when the noble bought something from somebody, he would sign over the ownership of one of these fractional receipts to the seller. By this means paper money came into common use. Originally, it was a certificate by which an amount of precious metal could be claimed.

For a while, it is possible that the Jewish goldsmiths were scrupulously honest in their accounting. Maybe. But things didn't stay that way. Over time, the Jews discovered that the nobles had come to rely on their paper receipts as money, and they hardly ever came to call upon him for a return of their deposited gold. By careful estimation, the Jews calculated that they could safely begin using about 90% of this gold as they pleased. So what they started doing was lending the gold to third parties at interest. The Jews had no right to do this, since the gold didn't really belong to them, and each loan carried a risk of default or of simply being stolen by thieves.

Remember that the whole point of the Jews keeping the nobles' gold was to keep it safe, in a strongbox, so that thieves would not have an opportunity to steal it. So not only did the Jews begin taking income from lending valuable property that was not theirs to lend, the very act of their using the deposited gold in this manner was a breech of contract with the nobles who really did own the gold. The Jews had begun putting at risk what they had promised to shield from risk.

More time went by, and a further financial development came about. Instead of releasing any of the gold right away, the Jews started writing promissory notes on the deposited gold. That's a note that promised to pay gold to someone who borrowed it—from the Jewish goldsmith, who didn't really own that gold that he was promising to pay with. So now there was, upon each coin of gold in the Jews' strongbox, two written instruments by which it might be claimed. The first one was the receipt that the Jew had given to the noble, whose property the gold really was. The second one was the promissory note that the Jew had given to a borrower. And both the receipts and the promissory notes entered general circulation as paper money.

Since the Jews had taken the step of creating more possible claims on gold coins than could be satisfied by the number of gold coins they had, there didn't seem to be any reason for them to hesitate about issuing a second promissory note upon each gold coin, and then a third, and so on. And charge the full rate of interest against each borrower, as if they could actually have paid them all in real gold.

But, although each gold coin could be claimed by more than one written instrument, the rate at which the Jews had to produce the actual gold coins was low enough that they never got caught short. If anyone had known that the Jews would be caught short of gold were all of the possible claimants to present their demands, there would have been a "run on the bank" as each depositor and each borrower tried to make sure that he wasn't one of the persons upon whom the Jew would have to default. But by maintaining the illusion that there was enough gold to pay everybody, the Jews were able to continue making promises to pay that they could not keep, and so they were also able to continue extracting interest on loans of gold whose aggregate principal was several times greater than the amount of gold (other people's gold!) that was actually in their strongboxes.

This was sort of a gamble for the Jews, during these early days of the Jewish banking swindle. If the nobles and the kings had caught on to the Jews' tricks soon enough, then matters could have been set aright by having the king's soldiers forcibly seize all the gold and execute the offending, presumptuous Jews. But the European nobility did not catch on in time, or else they did not see where the Jews were going with their scam and so did not muster the necessary amount of concern to nip it in the bud. And so the devil's seed grew. The Jews kept getting richer and richer by lending out other people's gold, and lending it in several different directions at once, while the working classes kept getting poorer and poorer because of the interest that the Jews charged on their loans.

Eventually, the Jews had so much money by this means that kings who found themselves in need of funding started coming to them for loans, which meant that the Jews began to have financial leverage over the governments of Europe. Leverage that could be used, for example, to start wars. The Jews had an incentive to start wars because, being expensive, wars forced governments to borrow from them further and going ever more deeply into debt, which provided the Jews with an income from the interest thereupon. The more war, the more borrowing, the more debt, the more interest, the more wealthy the Jews got, the more the Jews could incite more wars, forcing governments to do more borrowing... and so on.

And that's why Europe's history went the way it did, for the past 400 years.

Several Jewish families, including the Rothschilds and the Warburgs, formalized their financial swindles as banking houses. It was still the same assortment of cheats and tricks, only now it had a patina of respectability from the spaciousness of the lobby, the sumptuousness of its furnishings, the dress and grooming of its employees, etc. And this predatory Jewish activity continues today as the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England, the House of Rothschild, and other institutions that might strike you as respectable until you know what they really are.

---

The number of tricks the Jews used to prevent anyone from catching on to how rich they were getting, and to how they were getting rich, are many. I don't claim to know about all of them. They would feign poverty when the tax collector came around, hoping to evade their fair share of the burden of supporting the state that sheltered them. If they were successful in deceiving the tax collector, then their part of this burden would fall on the people whom they were cheating with usury, and the gentile peasant would be robbed by the state after having been robbed by the Jew.

In order to sustain the illusion that they had enough gold on hand to pay any possible legitimate claim by their depositors, the Jews would cart gold from place to place, hidden inside gourds, or under piles of old clothing, hay, or sacks of dried manure. When they had gathered in one place the gold from many regions, they would invite the local royal inspectors to come and view the gold. After these inspectors went away, suitably impressed by the Jews' sense of ethics and responsibility, the scoundrelly Jews would pack the gold up and cart it somewhere else for another showing. The king of France would see the same gold coins that the king in Austria had seen the month previously, yet they never caught on to this.

But the majority of tricks the Jews used were simply a matter of deceptive bookkeeping entries and of silent conspiracy.

Occasionally, a gentile magistrate would suspect what was going on and the Jews would need to pay a bribe. You can imagine how the magistrate's investigation would go.

"Is this court to understand, Mr. Goldsmith, that you became more wealthy than His Majesty the King simply by collecting the fees due you for keeping your gold deposits locked safe inside your strongboxes?"

"Why, yes, Your Honor." (Money changes hands.) "That is what we are saying."

"Well then," says the judge, counting the gold coins. "I suppose that your industriousness and thrift have served you well. Case dismissed!"

Further reading:

A Short History of Banking at Heretical.com

Song Retracto's Theme, by The Army You Have.

Here are some of the known lies and deceptions regarding the fatal encounter between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman that have been disseminated to the American public by the mainstream media, to date.

Lie #1. George Zimmerman is a white racist. Although the media have been so thoroughly exposed on this lie that they no longer tell it, they started their coverage of the story by trying to convince the world that Zimmerman was a white man acting upon racist impulses when he attacked a black boy for no reason at all. The media even digitally lightened Zimmerman's skin color in the photo they used to represent him, to make him seem more "Caucasian." George Zimmerman's father is an Ashkenazi Jew, and his mother is a Peruvian mestizo, which makes George a mestizo with Jewish paternal ancestry. (Remember that Barack Obama is a mulatto, and is usually considered black, for a similar reason.) And whereas the media no longer tell this lie, it has achieved its purpose, which was to inflame the blacks into making a wrong-headed "march for justice," while chanting foolish slogans, in most parts of the United States. The black leaders probably feel that they cannot now afford to admit that they were duped, so they carry on with the crusade against "whitey," while knowing full-well that the media have made fools of them.

Lie #2. George Zimmerman outweighed Trayvon Martin by 110 pounds. Originally, the media claimed that Zimmerman weighed about 250 pounds and that Martin weighed only 140 pounds. But the truth was that Zimmerman had lost weight during the years since the photo of him wearing an orange county jail suit was taken, and he weighed only 170 pounds during his encounter with Martin, who had gained weight during the years since the photo from his family's photo album was made, in which Martin, then 12, is wearing a red shirt and smiling. (And that's still the photo that the media most often use to represent Trayvon Martin.) At the time of his encounter with George Zimmerman, Martin weighed 160 pounds. So instead of a weight difference of 110 pounds, the actual difference was only 10 pounds.

Lie #3. Trayvon Martin was on the ground, screaming for help while George Zimmerman was on top of him and beating him up. The blacks and the media seem to enjoy telling this lie. But, on the other hand, they also seem to enjoy repeating the story told by the funeral director who prepared Martin's body for burial, in which he says that Martin's body didn't show any signs of having been in a fight (except for the gunshot wound). If the funeral director is telling the truth, then the persons who claim to have seen Zimmerman on top of and beating Martin, while Martin screamed for help, are lying. Which means that the the other witnesses, who say that Trayvon Martin was on top of and beating Zimmerman, while Zimmerman yelled for help, are probably telling the truth. To hear the testimony of those other witnesses, you'll probably have to browse the media local to Sanford, Florida, and the Orlando Sentinel. The media don't like to mention it, but Trayvon Martin's own father, Tracy Martin, upon listening to the cries for help, told a reporter "That is not my son." Ever since then, the media have been trying to find somebody with expertise in voice recognition who would be willing to fib for a fee, by contradicting that statement by Tracy Martin.

UPDATE: Since I wrote that paragraph, two things have changed. First, Tracy Martin's lawyers convinced him that it had been a blunder to admit to reporters that the cries for help were not those of his son, Trayvon, and so he changed his story. Second, it has turned out that the "expert" who used software to compare Zimmerman's normal speaking voice to the cries for help on the audio tape was the author of that very software and that he was vending it at $5000 per license. Although we don't know that he did anything dishonest, there is a clear conflict of interest. It is likely that he could expect more free advertising from the media in the event that his software gave the result that they preferred, rather than a result that they didn't prefer.

Lie #4. The police video shows no injury on George Zimmerman's head, proving that Zimmerman lied about what happened during his encounter with Trayvon Martin. On the contrary, the police video does show an injury on Zimmerman's head; it's hard to see because of the video's low resolution. The injury is a gash that starts near the top of the back of Zimmerman's head, about where the hair is thinnest, and goes down toward the right. To see the gash, obtain the clearest copy of the police video that you can, then pause the video during the 2.5 seconds when Zimmerman is standing at a point just to the right of the center of the camera's field of view, with his back toward the camera. It is immediately before he is led by Sanford police officers through a door on the far side of the police station garage.

Want a laugh? I joined a leftist forum, Democratic Underground, in order to correct the generally accepted, mistaken belief that the police video showed no injuries on George Zimmerman's head. One of the members there, Catherina, didn't approve of what I'd told the forum's readers, and she began searching the web for information about me and about any opinions I'd previously expressed on other websites. She discovered my racial views and campaigned successfully to have me banned from Democratic Underground for a "Terms of Service" violation that I'd never committed—unless, of course, the TOS for DU presumes to govern how its members use their freedom of speech in other venues. (Which it might do; that's the sort of rule that leftists would impose on everyone, if they could.)

But another DU member, alcibiades_mystery, writing in the discussion thread entitled "Zimmerman injured? I call BS," in a post headed "The 'gash' invented by the Daily Caller's silly 'enhancement'," wrote this:

Which is all diversion anyway. The right wing idiot racists spent two days insisting that Trayvon "Mad Dog" Martin beat poor Georgie Zimmerman within an inch of his life, then when the video comes out they have to fake a "gash" on the back of poor Georgie's head because he's walking around 35 minutes later looking like he just finished a moderately stressful game of Go-Fish with a 6 year-old. These right wing racists, scarmbling [sic] for cover once their imbecile story was blown the fuck open by clear videotape, now are actually faking still shots to invent some "gash." The first "gash" not to bleed in the whole history of the human scalp!

Who the fuck are you even kidding. there is no serious head injury, and perhaps no head injury at all. And you can post a million Daily Caller "enhanced" pics and the lame ass CYA "police report." Everyone knows it's bullshit.

Now that ABC News has released their own high-resolution version of the police video and has admitted that they, too, now see the gashes on the back of George Zimmerman's head that the Daily Caller, the Council of Conservative Citizens, and myself, had noticed several days earlier, what do the members of Democratic Underground have to say on the subject? Not a thing, as far as I can tell. I mean, what could they say, other than "Well, we were wrong. I guess the Daily Caller and that racist we banned knew what they were talking about after all." Um, no. Leftists don't do that. When leftists lose an argument, they pretend that it never happened and sweep it under the rug.

A little checking would have told alcibaides that George Zimmerman's gash did bleed. It was treated by paramedics, probably with antiseptics and astringents, and the bleeding stopped.

UPDATE: I knew it had to be around somewhere: a photo showing the bleeding wounds on the back of George Zimmerman's head before the EMS paramedics cleaned off the blood. ABC News, apparently eager to atone for their earlier sins lest Congress call them to account for lying and defamation and tampering with evidence, etcetera and so on, have released this very photo, taken by someone with an iphone camera.

Lie #5. George Zimmerman, while speaking on the telephone to the 911 dispatcher, said "This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black." This lie, now known as Editgate, came from NBC and was aired on the Today show. To create this fabrication, someone at NBC deleted the part of Zimmerman's comment between the two sentences as well as a comment by the 911 operator. The unaltered tape shows Zimmerman saying, "This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about." Then the 911 dispatcher asks "Okay. And this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?" And then Zimmerman answers "He looks black."

Here's a link to the audio recording of Zimmerman's 911 call.

One oddity about these media lies concerning Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman is the ease with which they are disproved, quite in contrast with their usual competence in deception. The Jewish media bosses can, when they really try, tell much better lies than these.

Not Quite A Lie. The police wanted to charge George Zimmerman for a crime related to his shooting of Trayvon Martin. The media have cleverly used that true statement for a deceptive purpose. Yes, the police wanted to book Zimmerman for something. They wanted to do that because it would have removed their risk of political fallout for not charging him. But the district attorney told them that there wasn't enough evidence even for a conviction for "negligent manslaughter," let alone for murder. Since there wasn't a criminal charge that fit the evidence, no charges were filed. Since no charges were filed, Zimmerman was released from police custody. What the media want you to think is that Zimmerman was released on account of racist intervention by some highly-placed official or other. But the truth is that Zimmerman was released because Zimmerman wasn't known to have committed any crimes.

Techniques for deception used by the media.

Technique #1. Get the most brazen lies out early, so they create a false impression in the general public that can "color" all subsequently released information. Also, this will politically entrap many of the leaders of the group that is most outraged by the false news. If those leaders are tempted to admit that they were deceived by the media's early lies, they will look like fools in front of their followers.

Technique #2. Two steps forward, one step back. As the media work toward their political objectives—e.g., inflaming blacks against white people, building momentum for a campaign to repeal the "Stand Your Ground" laws, instilling guilt in white people so they will vote once again for Barack Obama—they'll tell two bald-faced lies, but then they will bring forth "new evidence" (which is usually information they've been sitting on for a week or so) that "casts doubt" on one of them. The media practice this technique in order to project a false appearance of journalistic integrity and to limit their potential legal liability for spreading false news, inciting riots, and so on.

Note that when evidence emerges that really debunks the media's narrative, and damage control becomes necessary, the media begin a variation on the method, Technique 2b, which is "two steps back, one step forward." They do this to limit their legal liability, in case Congress or somebody might be thinking of calling them to account for their earlier misbehavior. That's what you saw ABC News doing when the photo of the bloody wounds on the back of George Zimmerman's head appeared. Showing the photo and making the obvious comment that maybe, just maybe, Zimmerman had been telling the truth the whole time about being injured by Martin was the two steps back. The one step forward was their shift of emphasis to the idea (which will also be proved false, later) that Zimmerman was "the aggressor," who was therefore not entitled to shoot Martin with his gun. How do the ABC commentators understand Zimmerman to have been the aggressor? Because it is a FACT that the Martin family's lawyer "clearly believes" it to be so. It is a fact that someone has that opinion. So there.

Technique #3. Distorting/embellishing previous claims. Initially, the media downplay a fact that doesn't fit the narrative, but they do mention it as unimpressively as they can. Later, however, the media contrive to make that fact disappear. For example, the New York Daily News ran an article with this headline: "EMS tapes show George Zimmerman did not sustain fatal injuries in encounter with Trayvon Martin." Very soon afterward, a revision of that claim asserted that George Zimmerman did not sustain any "serious" injuries. And a few days later, they said this in one of their articles: "...EMS documents obtained by the Daily News suggested the 28-year-old insurance agent didn't sustain any injuries either in the alleged dust-up." Obviously George Zimmerman sustained no "fatal" injuries, or else he'd now be dead. But how did no fatal injuries become no serious injuries, and then become no injuries at all? That's the magic of media deception.

Technique #4. Retrenchment. The news media occasionally publish a statement calling for calm and coolness and lamenting the lack of objectivity of persons who have "rushed to judgment." The purpose of this technique is to redirect guilt to someone other than the media bosses. In this case, for example, the media have tried to portray the lying ("rushing to judgment") as something that only the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been doing. No way, Jose. Jesse and Al were doing it, all right; but they were doing it on this occasion because the news media made fools out of them. Now they're boxed in, politically speaking, because if they admit before their impassioned black followers that they were wrong, those black followers will see them as the fools they are. It was the Jewish bosses of the media who made of the Trayvon Martin shooting into the national circus that it has become, with an extravagant claims about racism—calling George Zimmerman "a white man"—that have since been disproved, but whose effect just keeps rolling along under the political momentum it acquired before it was disproved.

Media Censorship.

On 5 April 2012, ABC News released a high-resolution version of the police station video that shows the gashes on the back of George Zimmerman's head more clearly. The hi-res video appeared on the Huffington Post website, in an article by Danielle Cadet. In her article, Ms. Cadet writes:

Last week, a video was released showing George Zimmerman at the Sanford Police Department the night he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. It originally appeared as though the neighborhood watch volunteer showed no signs of the violent confrontation he told police took place between himself and the teen that night, but ABC news has enhanced the video showing signs of injury on Zimmerman's head.

Ah, that isn't quite true. Zimmerman's injury was certainly visible in the original low-resolution video from the Sanford police station garage. You just had to look for it at the part of the video where Zimmerman was turned so that the camera looked upon the back of his head. I don't believe that it is likely that the news media failed to notice the injury then; I think that they just thought they could get away with declaring that it did not exist, and nobody would check. When people did check, they did see the gashes on Zimmerman's head, and they spoke up. I was one of them.

So it was time for the media to cover their butts again, by offering this re-digitized video with higher resolution, so that they can say "Well, we didn't see it before, but we do see it now, so yeah Zimmerman's head was injured." See how honest they are? Their not seeing the gashes on Zimmerman's head in the low-res original video, even though lots of other people did, was just an honest mistake. One in a long parade of same. In true Jewish fashion, the media bosses have claimed five dollars' worth of moral credit after demonstrating only five cents' worth of honor.

I tried to get that message across in a comment below the article, but I wasn't able to do so. I received a pop-up notice that my account has been banned from The Huffington Post. Evidently, they don't want anyone chasing after the media's highly paid professional liars and crying "Foul!" the instant the lies appear. Here is the comment that I tried to leave:

The news media took two steps forward with the "no visible injuries on Zimmerman's head" idea, and now this is the one step back they're taking. ABC News wasn't the first to report the gashes on the back of Zimmerman's head. The Daily Caller did so a week earlier.

Even in the low-resolution earlier video, the gashes were visible during the 2.5 seconds in which Zimmerman stands with his back to the camera in the Sanford police station garage, immediately before he is led by officers through a door on the far side of the room. Although the gashes were visible to anyone who looked at the video carefully, the media trumpeted to the entire world the false news that Zimmerman's had showed no injuries, which further incited the blacks around the United States to commit acts of "retribution" violence against white people.

Yes, even the early media lie about Zimmerman being a "white man," though it has long since been disproved, still serves to cause the blacks to target the wrong race for their hostile reactions.

Objectives of the Media Bosses.

Whatever the rest of the world does or doesn't know about the encounter between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, the police and the EMS paramedics have the relevant first hand knowledge, and, if Zimmerman goes on trial, they will step forward to give testimony. The police and the paramedics saw George Zimmerman's injuries, and they wrote their reports from personal examination. The media bosses know that police reports and medical records exist that contradict their narrative, which means that the media bosses don't really care what happens to Zimmerman. Whether he's murdered by a mob of vigilante blacks, or whether he's eventually acquitted by a jury, it's all the same to the Jews who control the mass media.

What they care about are the political objectives that they hope to achieve with the racial controversy they've manufactured. The media bosses are mostly Zionist Jews, and they want...

1. Blacks to hate whites more than they already do and to become more belligerent and aggressive than they already are, so that the white people will focus more of their energy defending themselves from blacks and less of it defending themselves from Jewish rapacity.

2. To build up political momentum for repealing the "Stand Your Ground" laws, which they don't like because they empower decent people and burden criminals with the "duty to retreat." In Israel, the media bosses would favor "Stand Your Ground" laws, at least for Jews, but in America they want the opposite.

3. To instill guilt in white people, right before the presidential election, so that they will vote once again for Barack Obama. There's nothing so effective as guilt in making white people do what isn't really in their best interests.

There are, additionally, a number of spinoff benefits to the Jews from a high-profile racial controversy. For example, I would be willing to bet a small sum that there's a Jewish screenwriter around somewhere who is already working on a script for a movie that will dramatize the media's false account of the Trayvon Martin vs. George Zimmerman encounter. Actors will be auditioned for roles in that movie before long. After it is released, the film will do two things: (1) make certain Jewish movie moguls richer and (2) reinforce popular belief in the lies that the Jew-controlled news media have been telling.

This controversy was started by the Zionist Jews who control the mainstream media, including the major TV networks. If it had not been for their malicious deceptions, the Trayvon Martin shooting would have been just another instance in which a man successfully defended himself from an attacker by using a gun—which really is all that happened. Since these media bosses have set in motion events that have brought violence and endangerment to so many others, it is legitimate to ask why these people should be immune to such effects themselves. Shouldn't they get a taste of the medicine they've made others take?

And the lies just keep coming...

On 1 April 2012, the New York Times posted online a partial summary of the encounter between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman that appears biased in favor of Trayvon Martin. It repeats the disproved assertion that the police video shows no sign of injury to Zimmerman's head. It contains "witness" testimony from persons who say they saw Zimmerman on top of, and beating, Martin, but it omits testimony from witness who say they observed Martin on top of, and beating, Zimmerman.

This article is slanted into deception even more than most leftist newsprint is. Perhaps it was posted as an April Fool's Day joke, but, in case it wasn't, here's my feedback to the Times.

I am reasonably certain that what your article shows underneath the subtitle "What detectives told Trayvon's father" is not really what detectives told Trayvon's father. It might be what Trayvon's father said detectives told him, but I rather doubt that any detectives would use the melodramatic "You got me!" as Trayvon's last words. And that casts doubt on the rest of that section.

However, it is true that Trayvon approached GEORGE (if you're going to use first names, be consistent about it, okay?) twice. The first time occurs when George is making his 911 call. He tells the operator that Trayvon has seen him and is coming his way, reaching toward his waistband as he does so. Then Trayvon changed his mind and started running in another direction.

George, suspicious because of recent burglaries in the community, and because he did not recognize Trayvon as a resident of the community, and because of the hour (near sunset), begins following Trayvon. The 911 operator, still on the phone, hears the sounds of George's motion and asks whether George is following. George says "Yeah." The 911 operator says "We don't need you to do that."

Listen to the audio tape, and you will hear when George stops following Martin. His heavier breathing, audible on the tape, ends about 12-15 seconds after the 911 operator suggests that following is unnecessary. Then George turns to go back to his SUV.

At that point, Trayvon could have simply gone on into his father's girlfriend's house and watched TV until bedtime. But, instead, he chose to intercept George and challenge him. Perhaps he meant to teach him a dominance lesson. And he died for his prideful aggression.

You folks in the media have lied repeatedly about events. You've deliberately left out important details, or denied the existence of such details. The NBC alteration of George Zimmerman's words on the 911 audio tape is an example. But there are others.

If you look closely at the right moment in the video tape where George Zimmerman is being searched by Sanford police officers in the police station garage, you can see the injury on his head that was inflicted by Trayvon Martin. The contrast is low, but you can see the gash anyway, by pausing the video at the right point. It starts at the top of George's head, about where the hair is thinnest, and goes down toward the right. By asserting that the video shows no injury to George's head, the Times and other media outlets have lied in a manner likely to prejudice potential jurors in any forthcoming criminal trial against George with false news.

Furthermore, the media have lied about the difference in weight between Trayvon and George, initially stating that George was about 110 pounds heavier than Trayvon. But it has turned out that the difference was closer to 10 pounds only. Again, the media lied in a manner likely to prejudice potential jurors in any criminal trial against George that might take place.

And the "call for peace" by Trayvon's parents and the duo of race-baiting black preachers is a diplomatic deceit copied over from the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. It fools nobody. They're getting ready for war, and, therefore, so must we.

Further observations.

It is rather strange that the organized mestizo groups, such as La Raza, have all abandoned George Zimmerman, who is himself a mestizo, despite his German/Jewish surname. Apparently, provided that there's a substantial enough political gain, the Latino leaders will abandon one of their own and send their groups marching with the blacks.

So that leaves only those who don't have a reason to favor either side, and who are honest enough not to capitalize on it for selfish gain, to buck the Jewish lies in the media and fight for the truth, just because it is the truth. Among those fighters are the white nationalists, who have observed from the beginning that George Zimmerman's story is consistent with the facts as the Sanford police, the paramedics, and the Florida district attorney have presented them, and that therefore George Zimmerman is likely to be the one in the legal and moral right of things. It has come out that George Zimmerman was an anti-racist activist, which means that he has crusaded on behalf of non-whites against white interests, which would make him, politically speaking, the enemy of white nationalists. In other words, the white nationalists, who, given any chance, would kick George Zimmerman's mestizo butt and deport him to Peru, are for the time being his most devoted defenders. Because it isn't Zimmerman per se whom they are defending; it's a truth under attack by the pack of malicious, self-serving Zionist Jewish liars who own and operate the mainstream media.

NBC has claimed that it fired the Miami producer who "accidentally" edited the audio tape of George Zimmerman's 911 call in such a way that Zimmerman sounds like a racist. However, NBC refuses to name the guilty person, so we don't really know whether NBC's statement is the truth or not. NBC has left us with the impression that NBC hires liars (actually all the networks do), and therefore this might be another NBC false claim made by another NBC liar. Until we can check to make sure that it's true, it won't be possible to credit such an unspecific claim about NBC's internal "corrective" measures. In fact, NBC's continuing claim that the edit was unintentionally done makes the rest of their claim easy to doubt. I mean: whoever this wayward producer is, he couldn't have done a "better" job of besmirching George Zimmerman in the eyes of the public if he had tried. It stands to reason that such "good" work probably isn't "accidental."

Update! The furor over the NBC "editgate" began after NBC aired the deceptively altered audio tape of George Zimmerman's 911 call on the Today show on 27 March. However, I have learned that this same deception had appeared, again in audio, on the 22 March segment of the Today show. So NBC kept the "accidental mistake" (ha ha) uncorrected for a week, and played it once again to a national audience. Further, the same misleading edit appeared in text form three times on the NBC Miami website on 19 and 20 March. The three articles were later corrected by revision. In other words, NBC has tried to use this deceptive edit of Zimmerman's 911 call five times, but has only admitted to and apologized for one of them.

Further Reading:

Counter-Currents Publishing
Council of Conservative Citizens
Examiner.com
VDARE 2
The Daily Caller 4
The American Thinker 4 5
Evidence that Trayvon Martin Doubled Back (Detailed map from WAGIST)
WaPo Media Watchdog Barks Up Wrong Tree, Protects NBC, by Tom Maguire of Just One Minute
Angels Wear White Hoodies, by Spirit•Water•Blood
Stand Your Ground, America, by Peter Ferrara of The American Spectator

We Are All George Zimmerman (Daniel Greenfield, Canada Free Press). "George Zimmerman has been chosen to serve as a gladiator in the circus that distracts a bankrupt nation from the criminal folly of its leaders." A very good metaphorical summary of what's behind the George Zimmerman trial, the trial that wasn't necessary for the man who broke no laws.

Something Strange about Zimmerman's (Previous) Lawyers' Defense Strategy.

The word is out that George Zimmerman's (former) attorneys will would have use[d] the "Shaken Baby Syndrome" defense as a way of showing that Zimmerman was justified in shooting Trayvon Martin.

That's just 'way too creative. Zimmerman was justified in shooting Martin because Martin instigated combat with Zimmerman, and, just before Zimmerman shot him, Martin had been bashing Zimmerman's head against the sidewalk.

It's simple. George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. No fancy psychobabble defenses about "syndromes" are needed. Even the "Stand Your Ground" defense isn't needed. Straight-up self-defense is sufficient, all by itself.

Why make it complicated, when simple should work?

Well, one obvious reason is to sabotage the hopes of one's own client by earning the contempt of the jury. Jurors won't like it if they think they're being bamboozled or flummoxed. The lawyer knows this. If the lawyer is honestly serving his client, then he won't engage in behavior that gives the jury the false impression that he "must" resort to fancy psychobabble defenses in a desperate effort to get his client off the hook, when, in actual fact, no such desperate efforts in jury-hoodwinking are needed because the plain truth, simply told, will get the job done.

It's possible that Zimmerman realized this the moment he saw his first legal team, on TV, ventilating their intention to use the "Shaken Baby Syndrome" defense. Zimmerman probably got the idea that his lawyers were getting ready to frame him, to sell him out, even if he could not identify the nature or the source of their motivation. So he quit talking to them, and he understandably disregarded their advice, and, in what might have been a naive assumption that Angela Corey was a more honorable person, he spoke to her instead.

My reply to someone who believed that Zimmerman should not have 'pursued' Martin.

George Zimmerman was the captain of the neighborhood watch, and there had been burglaries in the community he patrolled. It was his JOB to check out unfamiliar persons; it was his JOB to investigate Trayvon Martin.

That said, it isn't true that Zimmerman followed Martin to the point of catching up with him. Zimmerman stopped following Martin 12 seconds after the 911 operator said that following wasn't necessary. Then he turned around and began walking back to his SUV.

It was Trayvon Martin who caught up with George Zimmerman.

Martin, who could have just gone into his father's girlfriend's residence and watched TV until bedtime, chose instead to pursue Zimmerman and challenge him with the words "You got a problem?"

It was Trayvon Martin who instigated combat, gaining the advantage of delivering the first solid punch.

It was Trayvon Martin who, getting the better of the fight, was sitting on George Zimmerman and slamming Zimmerman's head into the concrete sidewalk.

Zimmerman was trying to move so that his head would be over grass instead of concrete when Martin saw Zimmerman's gun. Martin tried to get Zimmerman's gun, probably in order to shoot Zimmerman with it.

In self-defense, then, only then, did Zimmerman draw his gun and shoot Martin.

If it had been me, I'd have shot Martin sooner. I'd have drawn my gun the moment Martin punched me in the face, and I'd have shot him then. By not using his gun when Trayvon Martin started banging Zimmerman's head against the sidewalk, George Zimmerman showed more restraint than a reasonable man must, and more restraint than the "Stand Your Ground" law requires.

The "Middle Ground" Is Not Fairplay.

An essay by Ron Allen, NBC News Correspondent, entitled "Trayvon Martin: Where Do We Go From Here?" and posted on MSNBC. In the essay, Allen wrote:

Some will never be satisfied unless George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old man who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, is arrested, charged, convicted and jailed for a long time.

Others insist fairness demands an innocent man, wrongly accused in the court of public opinion, be allowed to get on with his life.

The outcome, of course, will more likely land somewhere in the middle.

I hope not. The truth isn't evenly divided between the two camps. All of it is to be found on the side that recognizes George Zimmerman to be an innocent man who shot an aggressor in self-defense. There isn't even the tiniest bit of truth in favor of the other side, which wants Zimmerman arrested, charged (with crimes he didn't commit), and sent to prison. There's no reason at all even to put Zimmerman on trial, since the District Attorney found the evidence for criminal behavior on Zimmerman's part to be insufficient even to convict him of "negligent homicide."

To put Zimmerman on trial would mean that the courts have abandoned their duty to establish justice and have bowed to political pressure. To wrongly convict Zimmerman would mean that the judicial system is corrupted, probably beyond any repair short of a civil war and a revolutionary change of government.

To compromise truth is to lie. To compromise fairness is to cheat. If the outcome is "somewhere in the middle," then the outcome will be wrong. So let the blacks march. Let them march for a year. Let them march year after year, so long as that is all they do. If they do anything else, then let them be arrested, or treated to what a SWAT team can do when it means business. Let it become clear to the blacks that they are doing nothing more than making noise and wasting their own time. Let it have no practical effect, ever.

The trial that shouldn't have been necessary might happen anyway.

Not long after the shooting, after the police had all the evidence in hand, after the county district attorney had examined the reports of the police and the records from the EMS paramedics, the district attorney told the police that there wasn't enough evidence of criminal guilt even to convict George Zimmerman of negligent manslaughter.

The black man presently acting as US president has weighed in with a prejudicial comment in Trayvon Martin's favor ("If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon"). Not long afterward, the Florida government sent a special prosecutor to arrange for Zimmerman to be railroaded into prison. Does Angela Corey have any new evidence? Probably not. The Sanford police and the local DA wouldn't have been careless, and it isn't likely that they missed anything that Corey has discovered since.

The local authorities, in other words, have had all of the evidence that Angela Corey now has, and they've had it longer than she's had it, and they never in all that time found any reason to think that George Zimmerman committed a crime. Not even a little crime, such as negligent manslaughter. But Ms. Corey, on the contrary, finds sufficient reason to charge Zimmerman with the substantially greater crime of second-degree murder. It would seem, then, that Ms. Corey's reasons probably have nothing to do with the evidence, but rather with her own interest in her career, and perhaps with the government's intention to sacrifice George Zimmerman so that the blacks will be appeased and, maybe, won't riot quite as much as they otherwise would.

"We do not prosecute by public pressure or by petition. We prosecute based on the facts on any given case as well as the laws of the state of Florida," Corey said. And that's what you'd expect her to say, whether or not it is true. The historical record of such things indicates that political pressure does change the way the legal system works. Whether the change corrupts the legal system, or whether it serves to counter corruption that is already in the legal system depends entirely on who is telling the truth and on who is telling the lies.

Angela Corey probably didn't take this job expecting to lose. And since the evidence doesn't support conviction, she will have to pick a jury that cares little for evidence. Which means she'll have to avoid older white men, who respect evidence, have an instinctive grasp of epistemology, and are inclined to judge in accord with demonstrated facts. And she'll favor jurors who are younger, non-white, and female because those types have a track record of judging on their emotions, with an aim to demonstrate some sort of feel-good moral lesson, even if it might be an inappropriate one in the case they are deciding.

If a defendant in a criminal case is innocent, and the evidence generally goes his way, then anyone wanting to see justice done (i.e., the defendant cleared of the charges) should want the jury to be twelve reasonably well-educated, politically conservative, white grandfathers. And, for this purpose, "white" includes Saxons, but excludes Jews. A just verdict by that jury becomes less probable with each deviation from that prescription.

Unfortunately, that ideal jury isn't likely to materialize. Sanford FL is 47.3% white, 29.8% black, 17.4% Hispanic, with the remaining 5.5% being Asians and odds&ends. The jury composition that most nearly matches the racial demographics would be 6 whites, 4 blacks, 2 Hispanics.

So expect a jury of blacks, leftists, women and, maybe, a Hispanic or two of the sort that turned their backs on Zimmerman because he was Peruvian instead of Mexican. These jurors will have convicted George Zimmerman before the trial even begins. No matter how clearly and overwhelmingly the evidence supports the justifiability of the shooting as self-defense, no matter how many media lies are exposed in the courtroom, and no matter how many witnesses for the prosecution are revealed to be perjurers, these jurors will vote for conviction. And that will be that.

Sooner or later, in prison, George Zimmerman will be attacked and killed, probably with great torture and gruesomeness, by black prison inmates. We are looking at the steps leading toward a blood sacrifice to political correctness.

This is actually the same kind of thing that has happened to white nationalists and their defenders, like Matt Hale and Edgar Steele. Neither of them were guilty of the charges brought against them. But both were convicted by juries who were either made to hate them or who hated them from the start. The biggest difference is that the trial of George Zimmerman is getting a much wider exposure from the mainstream media whose deceptions, after all, started the whole affair.

Humorous reversal of the media's trick with photographs.

The media have been using a family album photograph of Trayvon Martin as a young boy in order to generate sympathy for him, even though he was considerably bigger at age 17 and was the aggressor during his fight with George Zimmerman. This image is frequently used by leftist newspapers.

Although this is perhaps the least of the mainstream media's deceits in this affair, it nonetheless has had a profound effect in the way much of the public generally, and the blacks in particular, have come to think about the events in Sanford, Florida, on 26 February 2012.

To show you how images can warp judgment, here's an equivalent pair of Zimmerman and Martin photographs, except with the age-reduction effect reversed, so that you see it in Zimmerman's favor.

And now a word from...

Jerry's Aryan Battle Page The media will, if called to account for their actions on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story, assert their free speech rights. But free speech does not protect someone who intentionally starts a riot, and that appears to be what the media bosses have done. They instigated riots from coast to coast, and they ought to be prosecuted for doing so. Their crime is aggravated by the fact that they knowingly used misleading photos and incorrect descriptions of both Martin and Zimmerman, that they knowingly sought after false witnesses, and that they knowingly misrepresented audio and visual evidence before a national audience. I accuse the media of deliberately creating a clear and present danger to the people of the United States by a criminal misuse of their access to the public.

The Stealth Retractions have Begun!

Oh look, the media are starting to be nice to George now. (Like the Abominable Snowman said as he playfully abused Daffy Duck, "I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him and call him George.")

George Zimmerman, Prelude to a Shooting, by Christ Francescani, REUTERS.

But they had no good reason for their earlier nastiness toward him. Rather, they had a sinister motive.

Quote from the article: "On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns, race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States."

That "furor" wasn't spontaneous. It was deliberately incited and fanned into flame by the mainstream media. Murders most foul were overlooked so that the Trayvon Martin shooting would occupy the national center stage for five weeks, during which the media made us think that Zimmerman was "a white man" and "a racist" and "a thug" and "a vigilante" and so on.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson recognized the signals. It was time for another episode of "Hate the White People and Riot," in the tradition of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum. And, as it is turning out, the media were hoaxing again. And the blacks were suckers for the hoax, once again.

The media bosses were looking for a shooting incident somewhat like this one because they had three objectives that publicizing such an incident would help them gain.

First, they wanted to inflame the blacks so that they would be even more belligerent toward whites than they usually are, so that the whites, in turn, having to cope with black trouble, would have less attention left over to watch out for trouble from the ethnic group to which most of the media bosses belong. Jew know whom I mean, I'm sure.

Second, they wanted a pretext for beginning a crusade to repeal the Stand Your Ground laws, which, besides being laws that most Americans favor, have saved more (and better) lives than they've cost. The media bosses don't want whites armed. Armed people can fight back, you know.

Third, they wanted to instill in whites a sense of guilt so that they would vote for Obama again. There's nothing like guilt to motivate someone to do what isn't really in his own best interests.

Quote: "During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because he was black."

Rather, the media defined him that way. They even lied and pulled some of the most awful frauds, such as NBC's Editgate, which was a brazen deception even by their standards. But all of the mainstream media, TV and press, were using unwarranted pejorative language, unspoken assumptions, and retouched, out-of-date photographs to milk sympathy for Trayvon Martin and to slant public opinion against George Zimmerman.

The mainstream media denied for as long as they could the injuries on Zimmerman's face and the back of his head, even though many others saw those injuries more than a week before ABC News grudgingly admitted that they saw them, too.

The mainstream media floated the hoax that Zimmerman had cursed Trayvon Martin with a racial epithet, when, in fact, he had cursed the cold weather.

And now the media are trying to correct without seeming to retract. They've been caught hoaxing us with false news, and now they want to make us forget that the national circus over Trayvon Martin's shooting was their own work.

They could have given this alleged crime equal time with the 13-year-old white boy in Kansas City MO who was doused with gasoline and set on fire by blacks, with the old white woman (Nancy Strait) in Tulsa OK who was raped and beaten to death by blacks, with the white student (John Sanderson) at Mississippi State who was murdered by three black men. But the media kept those stories on the back burner, so that nothing would distract the public from the Trayvon Martin vs. George Zimmerman drama.

The MSM are unreliable, and by now everyone should know it. The only reason they're finally, belatedly, and hesitantly recognizing the George Zimmerman is the good guy—maybe—is that they've realized that this story won't serve them as they had originally planned. Don't let them claim five hundred dollars' worth of moral credit when they've barely demonstrated five cents' worth of honor.

---

Why are blacks so gullible for lies that pander to their self-pity, as well as being so resistant to persuasion by physical evidence in conflict with their self-pitying preconceptions? A famous white explorer of Africa once remarked that whites should regard blacks as big children: simple-minded but dangerous, and that whites should never treat with blacks as equals because it was an error that led only to destruction. It is advice that liberals are famous for disregarding. But it was good advice.

"I have given my life to try to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here like I must learn and know: that these individuals are a sub-race. They have neither the intellectual, mental, or emotional abilities to equate or to share equally with white men in any function of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: the superior and they the inferior. For whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equals they will either destroy him or devour him. And they will destroy all of his work. Let white men from anywhere in the world, who would come to Africa, remember that you must continually retain this status; you the master and they the inferior like children that you would help or teach. Never fraternize with them as equals. Never accept them as your social equals or they will devour you. They will destroy you." —Dr. Albert Schweitzer Nobel Prize Winner 1952 from his African Notebook..

I'll bet that when the truth is known, everyone except the blacks will see that George Zimmerman was telling the plain truth the whole time. Why won't the blacks also reach this understanding? If you have to ask, then you don't know blacks. They'll start a lie, or else gullibly accept one told them—a lie that makes them look noble, or persecuted, or somehow better than they really are—and they repeat it forever. Unlike the Jews, who know the truth but eternally deny it, the blacks actually believe their lies. The dishonesty of blacks is a simple dishonesty, as you might expect, given their generally low intelligence.

I decided to revise and update my reviews of various consumer goods to tell you which ones I think are the best now. The date of this version is 16 March 2012. It is an update to my post of last October.

Flashlights.

Best Brand: Romisen.

Romisen wins as best brand for several reasons. First, I've never had any problems with flaky electrical connections with this brand. Second, Romisen flashlights show good craftsmanship in such details as easy tail cap attachment, with that gliding, well-oiled feel with the screw threads.

Best Model: Romisen RC-E4 with bulb upgrade to the XM-L T6 LED.

The Romisen RC-E4 flashlight is just the right size, not too big, not too small, not too heavy. It has a nylon cord which keeps the flashlight more securely with you than a clip does. The T6 LED is a five-mode bulb: dim, mid, bright, rapid flash, SOS flash. The bright mode is bright enough to get you by when you need a lot of luminous power, which you sometimes do.

But the most important mode is the dim mode, which should optimize for long battery life. The dim mode only has to be bright enough to allow you to distinguish a dark, hairy monster at a distance of 10 meters in otherwise total darkness, and that's about how bright the T6 dim mode is in the RC-E4. On dim mode, a single AW 2900 mAh 18650 Li-ion battery will last about 48 hours of continuous use. Carry a couple of spare batteries and you'll have light long enough to find your way out of Hades. (Note: with the new AW 3100 mAh 18650 battery, the service time of the Romisen RC-E4 with XML T6 LED on dim mode might be extended to as long as four days of continuous use. This has not yet been tested, however.)

Note: Drop-In replacement bulbs meant for the Ultrafire WF-501B or WF-502B flashlights will fit inside a Romisen RC-E4 flashlight. This can be useful to know, since not all T6 LEDs are equal. Some are better than others in one respect or another. However, the reverse is not true. The Drop-In bulb that Romisen manufactures for the RC-E4 will not fit inside either of those Ultrafire flashlights.

Very good other models:

(1) Romisen RC-T601. More powerful with better throw than the E4, this flashlight comes standard with the XML T6 LED. However, as the dim mode is brighter than it really needs to be, the battery lifetime on dim is correspondingly shorter. Uses a single 18650 battery.

(2) Romisen RC-J4-2. This is a two-battery version of the T601. It is a bit more powerful than the T601, but since this flashlight uses two 18650 batteries, it should provide light for more time without a battery change. On high mode, this is my brightest (over 1600 lumens) and best-throwing flashlight.

(3) Trustfire Z3. A focusable flashlight that gives very good throw on narrow beam and an even spread of light on wide beam (none of this core-fringe stuff). It has the five-mode T6 LED and uses a single 18650 Li-ion battery. The Trustfire Z3 does not appear to like button-top batteries. However it is generally the case with flashlights that flat-top batteries work better than button-top ones.

(4) Keygos Z16. A two-battery (18650) focusable (or zoomable) flashlight with a 5-mode T6 LED. As compared with the Trustfire Z3, the Keygos Z16 has a somewhat brighter intensity (1600 lumens vs 1000 lumens) and a slightly larger maximum solid angle for beam.

(5) UltraOK 7W VS-05. A smallish, zoomable, single 18650 battery flashlight using a CREE Q5 LED. This flashlight has the particular charm of making an excellent "mule," or improvised area lamp, when the front lens and its silver-colored retainer are removed. (Be careful not to lose these items.)

(6) Romisen RC-F7. This is a wee little flashlight that you can use at night to help you find the right key on your key chain. It uses the CREE Q2 LED and is relatively bright for a flashlight powered by a single AAA battery.

(7) Romisen RC-G2. A somewhat larger version of the F7. It uses the CREE P2 LED and is powered by a single AA battery.

Note: the flashlight that I had here for #8, I removed. It turns out that the other size battery that this flashlight will accept is not a 26650, but rather a 22650. While 26650 Li-Ion batteries are fairly common and have good capacity ratings (>3900 mAh), the 22650 batteries are much more difficult to find for sale, and their capacity is much less, usually under 2500 mAh.

Worth Mentioning:

(1) Ultrafire WF-501B with CREE XM-L T6 LED.
(2) Ultrafire WF-502B with CREE XM-L T6 LED.

If you get a sample of either of those Ultrafire flashlights, and it happens to be in good working order, then you have an excellent flashlight. However, Ultrafire flashlights occasionally have electrical problems that, in my experience, have led to the following problems:

Problem A. Some of the modes won't work at all. Such as bright or blink.
Problem B. The flashlight will unexpectedly change modes by itself.
Problem C. The flashlight will unexpectedly cut itself off, even though the battery is still fresh.

Not all Ultrafires have any of those problems. You can get a good one that works fine. But about half of the ones I've ordered through eBay have malfunctioned, so it's hit-or-miss with Ultrafire flashlights. Also, the screw threads aren't as nicely milled as those of Romisens are, and attaching the sections (such as the tail cap) on Ultrafires can be a little more troublesome.

(3) Romisen RC-C6. As well-made as any other Romisen, the little C6 is focusable, giving either a tight, bright beam that throws well, or else a wide and even spread of light, from its CREE Q3 LED. There are two problems with the C6. First, the flashlight gets hot after about six minutes of continuous use. Second, the relatively weak CR123A battery poops out after only 30 minutes of use. If the C6 had a dim mode, it would be a better flashlight, but it doesn't. The only mode it has is "on."


Boots.
The best hiking boots I've found are the Montrail Traverse and the Montrail Torre. They feel good. They wear well. They give good traction on dry surfaces. The only problem with them, that I know of, is that they aren't the best on slick slimy rocks or ice. For that, you want a boot with a soft rubber sole, which, however, won't last as long on hard, dry terrain.


Shoes.
Best General Purpose Shoes: Merrell Primo Mocs.
Hiking Shoes, Best: Montrail TRS Comp Lo.
Hiking Shoes, Quite Good: Merrell Passage Ventilator Mid.
Hiking Shoes, Good: Vasque Catalyst Mid.


Socks.

Summer Hiking, Best for Conditioned Feet: Grey Ragg Wool, 85% wool 15% nylon, tightly knit, snug on the foot (no ballooning).

Summer Hiking, Quite Good, Best for Tenderfoots: Goldtoe Moretz Powersox Merino Classic Lite Crew.

Summer Hiking, Good: Woolrich 10-Mile Day Hiker crew socks.

Comfortable House Socks: Wild Oak 70% Merino Wool crew socks. Hiking will wear the wool off the heels.

Winter/Cold Weather: Catawba 80% Merino Wool Socks, either crew or half-up-the-calf lengths.

Very Cold Winter Hiking: Woolrich Big Woolly 88% Merino Wool Socks, crew or over-the-calf lengths.

The Goldtoe Moretz Powersox Merino Crew socks are very comfortable. The feel on the foot is excellent. They might be the best warm weather socks for light hiking and casual wear. When trying to identify these socks, look for three wide triangles, with the fat vertex pointing forward, on the upper toe. Be sure that you're getting the ones made of (about) 75% merino wool.


Underwear.

Best Long Johns: Filson's Alaskan Merino Wool longjohns, upper and lower.

Best Summer Tee-Shirt: Tommy Bahama Advised Tee, 85% tencel 15% polyester.

An ideal tee-shirt for summer hiking in hot country is a slightly oversized, white cotton shirt with loose long sleeves. You'll stain it up, of course, by wiping the sweat off your face with your sleeve, but what matters to a serious hiker is function.


Hats.

Summer, Dry, Best: Adams Bucket Hat (RN 61999) in the denim color.
Summer, Dry, Good: Toppers Beachcomber Hat (style 1903).
Summer, Dry, Good: Lunada Bay Hat (style 961).
Summer, Dry, Good: Propper Boonie (MIL-H-44105B).
Summer, Dry, Okay: HG 7243/#7804A "Made in China," sold by Simply Fashions on eBay.

Winter, Dry, Best: Carhartt Pullover Face Mask, made of acrylic with thinsulate insulation.
Winter, Dry, Quite Good: Mad Bomber Hat, made of wool, synthetics, and rabbit fur.
Winter, Dry, Good: Carhartt Watch Cap, 100% acrylic, pull-on.

You can wear the Carhartt face mask under the Mad Bomber hat for increased protection from cold.

If you must sleep in a brightly lit, but cold area, you can wear the Carhartt face mask under a bucket hat that is a size larger than your normal hat size. The brim of the hat can be pulled down to keep the light out of your eyes. It is an old cowboy trick.

Rain Hats: I improvised my rain hat by treating a vinyl "cowboy" style hat with automotive silicone sealant to plug up the stitch holes. I'll wear this rain hat on top of the hood of my Columbia Omnitech Titanium Rain Jacket.


Rain Suits.
Best: Columbia Omni-Tech Titanium waterproof coat with hood, and (same brand and style) pants.


Sweaters.
Choose either cashmere or alpaca. Either may be blended with small amounts of angora rabbit fur. The sweater should contain only animal fur, with possibly a small amount of synthetics, such as acrylic or nylon. Avoid plant fibers like cotton. A good cashmere sweater is at least 4-ply and weighs at least 18 ounces dry. When you layer sweaters, try to wear a light, expendable cashmere sweater (1-ply or 2-ply) innermost to catch sweat.

My favorite sweaters are:

(1) Kirkland Signature, 100% cashmere, ribbed, 4-ply, 20.5 ounces, cardigan, five buttons, collar high in back, RN 102400, made in Madagascar.

(2) Marshall Fields, 100% Cashmere, cabled, 8-ply, 33.5 ounces, crew neck, pull-over, RN 17730, made in Macau.


Blanket Coats.
A good blanket coat is a form of thick ragg wool or wool-synthetic blend. It might have a hood that you can use over a Carhartt face mask hat. LL Bean makes an excellent hooded blanket coat that's made of 40% wool, 25% acrylic, 32% polyester; it's trimmed in leather and zips up; made in Portugal. A very good ragg-wool blanket coat, cut to resemble a sweater, is sold by Woolrich. Ragg wool is 85% wool and 15% nylon.


Calculators.
Most Accurate: Base 8 DG 1000.
Handiest for Shopping, Checkbook, Highway calculations: Sharp EL-509D.
Best non-graphing calculator for high school: Casio fx-115ES or fx-991ES.
Graphing, Best: Casio fx-9860gii SD.
Graphing, Best Value: Casio fx-9750gii.
Graphing, Quite Good: TI-89 Titanium.
Graphing, Quite Good: Casio fx-9860g SD (hard to find).

The drawback to the TI-89 Titanium is that the screen can be more difficult to read than is the case with the Casio, and the TI-89T has no SD card slot for the longterm storage of calculator programs. If these defects were remedied, it might be the best graphing calculator.

The Base 8 DG 1000 was sold by Dollar General. It's an ugly contraption, and the user interface is clumsy. However, it is very accurate, using more significant digits for calculation than any other calculator I know of.

The Sharp EL-509D calculators that I have owned have not suffered from electrical problems that seem to plague other Sharp calculator models. The 509D can, of course, also do duty as an algebra-class calculator in high school, since it has raise-to-power, log10, natural log, trig and hyp-trig functions, and their inverses.


Sandwich.
Best Recipe: The Dagwood Bumstead Sandwich.
Put two slices of whole wheat bread on a tray. Leave one slice bare. On the other, sprinkle some cheddar cheese, 12 slices of pepperoni, a thin slice of smoked ham. Put the tray in the oven and set oven at 450 degrees. While the cheese is melting and the bread is toasting, fry an egg, cut a slice from an onion about 1/16th of an inch thin, and two equally thin slices of a tomato. Remove the pan from the oven when the cheese has melted and the bread is just beginning to turn brown. Place the onion slice over the meat and cheese. Squirt some mustard over the onion. Lay the fried egg on top of the mustard. Place some hamburger dill pickles on top of the fried egg. Squirt some catchup over the dill pickles. Put the slices of tomato over the catchup. Spread some sour cream on the slice of whole wheat toast that doesn't have the fixin's on top of it. Put the sandwich together. Eat it with good coffee.


Apple.
Best Varieties: York (Virginia York Imperial) and Goldrush. Also quite good: Pink Lady.

Nearly every apple variety has its fans. These are the varieties that I like best. I've also enjoyed, or heard good things about: Macoun, Winesap, Ida Red, Fuji, Braeburn, and Gala. My mom likes Winesap best. Braeburn and Ida Red were my own favorites, until I tried York and Goldrush. Macoun is, so I've heard, an upscale version of McIntosh, so if you like McIntosh apples, you might like Macoun even better.

The largest Virginia York Imperial apple I've eaten so far weighed 388 grams.


Alkaline Batteries, AA size.
Best Brand: Duracell Coppertop, based on actual battery tests conducted by me, using LED flashlights. Energizer alkaline batteries were a rather distant 2nd place. Kirkland Signature alkaline batteries are good batteries, considering that they aren't of a nationally known name brand. They rank about equal with Energizers. Avoid alkaline batteries from Dollar General: they usually poop out too fast.


Lithium-Ion Batteries.

18650. The highest capacity in 18650 batteries, at present is 3100 mAh. Any claim of a higher capacity for an 18650 battery is fraudulent.

BEST: Callie's Kustoms.
2nd best: Redilast.
3rd best: AW.
4th best: Panasonic Industrial.

How were the rankings determined? I bought and tested one of each brand of battery, charged them all to 4.22V potential difference across their poles, and placed them in a Romisen RC-E4 flashlight, having an XML T6 LED turned to the low intensity setting, which is probably under 60 lumens. The tests were done sequentially, using the same flashlight. The service time was defined by how long it took for the battery to drop from 4.22V to 2.72V. The AW and the Panasonic Industrial both lasted for 75 hours. The Redilast lasted for 79 hours, and for most of the test held a slightly higher voltage than the AW or the Panasonic. The Callie's Kustoms battery lasted slightly under 81 hours, having the longest service time.

All four of these brands are well-respected. The Redilast and the Callie's Kustoms are both a millimeter longer than the AW, which is itself two millimeters longer than the (unprotected) Panasonic Industrial. In addition, the Callie's Kustoms is slightly thicker due to double-wrapping, and it might not slide easily into the narrowest of flashlight tubes.

26650. The best is the KingKong 4000 mAh 26650 ICR. I've redone the tests, and the MNKE 4000 mAh doesn't really come close, and neither does the Keygos 4800 mAh (the claimed capacity might be an exaggeration).

★ Evidently, the Facebook Authorities have turned their censoring eyes my way.

"You made a wall post that violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, posts that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down posts that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled."

I have no idea which of my posts they're referring to. A leftist or a Jew would probably object to a great deal of what I write.

This is nothing new to me. Terms of service are often written by Jews/leftists for the purpose of precluding intelligent dissent with their own views to which they can make no cogent reply. Until I'm otherwise informed, I'll assume that's what is going on this time, too.


★ And so have the Amazon Authorities.

Many of your recent reviews were derogatory in nature. In order to help customer make informed choices, we encourage them to review the product and information related to it. However, reviews which violate our guidelines or conditions of use will be removed. If this continues, we'll remove your reviewing privileges from your account in accordance with our Conditions of Use. Please take a look at our guidelines before submitting a review again. Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

The book reviews they deleted are two that expose black authors for distorting the historical record regarding the priority and significance of alleged black achievements.

Book Review #1 (deleted by Amazon.com), by David Sims.

The achievements credited to the five persons in this book are exaggerated. With possibly one exception, their contributions were neither as important nor as foremost in priority as the author makes them seem to be.

Elijah McCoy.

Elijah McCoy probably did nothing more than create a counterfeit copy of an already invented lubricating mechanism. Earlier automatic oil-dispensing devices were invented by John Ramsbottom (1860) and by James Roscoe (1862), both of whom were white Englishmen. A hydrostatic lubricator was invented in 1871, a year before Elijah McCoy introduced his version. Rather than deserving credit for inventing something, McCoy might have violated someone else's patent rights.

Incidentally, the phrase "the real McCoy" wasn't minted as a way of distinguishing Elijah McCoy's machine lubricator from presumed imitators. As I've shown, if there was any imitating going on, then McCoy was the one doing it. Rather, the phrase "real McCoy" appeared in Scottish literature around 1856, which was many years before Elijah McCoy could have been its reference.

Madame C.J. Walker.

Born with the name Sarah Breedlove. Began a hair-care product business. Invented a shampoo that treated a scalp disease that could cause hair loss in women. Acquired a lot of money (for the time) from sales of this and various other nostrums, most of which were probably of about the same quality as could be purchased from many another vendor. Walker's rise to a degree of wealth is probably more the result of her persistence than that of any talent as an "inventor."

Granville Woods.

Granville Woods is falsely credited with an 1887 invention of the train telegraph. But the train telegraph was actually invented, 14 years earlier, by Lucius Phelps in 1873, which was adopted by the New Haven & Hartfort Railroad Company in January 1885 and which was praised in an article published in Scientific American for 21 February 1885. By the time Granville Woods chipped in HIS two cents' worth, Lucius Phelps already held 14 US patents on his own telegraph system. There is no evidence that any commercial railway telegraph based on Granville Woods' patents was ever built.

Granville Woods is also falsely credited with an 1884 invention of the steam engine boiler, which, being a necessary part of steam engines and being without any other significant purpose (excepting, perhaps, large moonshine stills) is exactly as old as the steam engine itself. The steam engine has a history, in the United States, going back to 1790, and from that year until 1873 there were several hundred variations and improvements to steam boilers recognized by the US Patent Office. One of these prior steam boiler patents were awarded in 1867 to George Herman Babcock and Stephen Wilcox.

Garrett Morgan.

Garrett Morgan is falsely credited with inventing the traffic signal light in 1923. However, the first known traffic signal appeared in London 55 years earlier, in 1868, the invention of the Englishman J.P. Knight. The earliest electric traffic lights include Lester Wire's version, which was used in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1912. Also: James Hoge's light, which was used in 1914, in Cleveland, Ohio, by the American Traffic Signal Company. The first of our modern, 4-way, red-yellow-green traffic signal lights was invented by retired police officer William Potts and was used in Detroit, Michigan, in 1920.

Garrett Morgan's traffic light not only wasn't the first traffic light, it wasn't even among the first FIFTY patented traffic signals. Nor was it "automatic," as is sometimes falsely claimed. Furthermore, it was the light invented by William Potts, and not that of Garrett Morgan, which evolved into the familiar automatic traffic signal device that is commonly used today.

Garrett Morgan is also falsely credited with a 1914 invention of the gas mask. The fact, however, is that the gas mask was invented by Scottish chemist John Stenhouse in 1854, and it was improved by the physicist John Tyndall in the 1870s. Further improvements, which led to gas masks superior to that created by Garrett Morgan, were already achieved by the time World War 1 began.

Jan Matzeliger.

Jan Matzeliger is another of those "blacks" who had at least as many white ancestors as black ones. His father was a Dutch mechanical engineer who married a native of Dutch Guiana. He moved to Philadelphia in 1873, when he was 21 years old. He does appear to have invented the first machine able to attach soles to the upper parts of shoes, about 1885.

So Jan Matzeliger is the only case, out of the five given in this book, for which it may be said that there isn't a degree of exaggeration that could be considered historical fraud. Furthermore, the abilities of Jan Matzeliger most probably stem from the white part of his ancestry, rather than from anyone in his black mother's line.

Most citations of credit given to blacks for invention are deceptively worded, involving an incorrect assignment of priority or an exaggerated importance to the work, and such credit might on occasion be wholly fabricated.

Book Review #2 (deleted by Amazon.com), by David Sims.

The achievements credited to the five persons in this book are exaggerated. With possibly one exception, their contributions were neither as important nor as foremost in priority as the author makes them seem to be.

Susan McKinney Steward.

Susan McKinney Steward was born in March 1847 and named Susan Maria Smith. Bright for a black (the average IQ of her race is only 85), she went to medical school and graduated, becoming one of the first black doctors in the United States. That in itself isn't any sort of great achievement; it only signifies that she took advantage of the removal of the legal impediments that had prevailed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.

If becoming a doctor is all it takes for a black to be hailed as a "great scientist," then it should likewise be sufficient to declare a white person to be a great scientist, wherefore it can be seen that there are, by far, many more white great scientists than anyone has previously believed.

On the other hand, it is entirely more reasonable to suppose that Susan McKinney Steward has been the beneficiary of an inflated amount of eminence, and that were the credit-beans fairly counted anyone could see that she was merely another doctor, one who just happened to be among the first blacks with a medical degree. She played the organ, too, but that doesn't make her a black equivalent of Johann Sebastian Bach.

George Washington Carver.

George Washington Carver is often falsely credited with the invention of peanut butter and he is sometimes additionally falsely credited with the invention of paper. However, peanut pastes intended for use as food have an ancient history. The Aztecs were making it a thousand years before Carver was born. Paper has a similarly ancient history. The Chinese were making it centuries before Carver was born.

You can go down the list of accomplishments attributed to George Washington Carver, and in each instance observe that none of them was original or as culturally significant as Afrocentrist writers try to make it seem. Like many other black "inventors" and "discoverers" and "scientists," George Washington Carver was merely someone who fiddled around in a field of human endeavor wherein the really pioneering work had been done long ago by other people.

Ernest Just.

Ernest Everett Just is much more deserving of credit than most alleged black "achievers" are. He appears to have done, during the early 20th century, actual pioneering scientific work on the role of the cell membrane in life processes. By so doing, he can be considered to stand with a great many other biological researchers, most of whom were white. However, he shouldn't be counted as standing above them.

The fact that notable white scientists are much more numerous than notable black scientists shouldn't be construed as a detraction from the credit due any particular white notable scientist. Yet that is how things appear to go. Black notables get magnified attention on account of their rarity, rather than because of anything they have actually done.

Percy Julian.

Percy Lavon Julian was primarily a teacher; he was not primarily a scientist. He learned chemistry, which is unusual enough for a black to do, and then he taught it at the university level. Although he did learn to synthesize some useful chemicals, his methods weren't ones of his own invention. Rather, he used methods shown to him by Austrian (white) chemist Ernst Spth, who informally adopted him as part of his household. Though undoubtedly a smart and gainfully employed black, Percy Julian doesn't deserve the "great scientist" status that author Lynda Jones gives him.

Shirley Jackson.

Shirley Ann Jackson studied theoretical physics at MIT, receiving a Ph.D. in physics in 1973. While this in itself doesn't qualify her for "great scientist" status, any more than it does for the thousands of white people that MIT graduated before and since 1973, it does prove that Shirley Jackson was very intelligent, especially for a black.

The distribution of intelligence among blacks is very nearly normal, with an average of 85 and a standard deviation of 12.4. It says something that it took more than 100 years from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation until a black person managed to get an MIT doctorate in theoretical physics, a field in which the representation of black professionals is, to this day, very disproportionately low.

But having earned that distinction for herself, did Shirley Jackson go on to deserve the status of "great scientist"? No. She was a scientist, and her field was one of the most technically complex of human activities, but in that field she was out-ranked by many of her mostly white colleagues. If you read about her career, you'll learn that she "studied" and she "examined" and she "explored" and she "lectured" and she was called "a visiting scientist"—but she discovered nothing.

No doubt she did useful work. But if she weren't black, nobody would be trying to assign to her the elevated status of "great scientist."

Of the five blacks cited by this book, only Ernest Just comes close to having been a "great scientist," and even he doesn't rise above a status that might be more correctly called "competent scientist." The fact remains that blacks in general aren't intelligent enough to compete in technically difficult professions beside whites, and although a very few of them are, it is dishonest for anyone to publish a book about black achievement that does not truthfully and prominently set forth the extreme rarity of genius among blacks.

Of course each of those reviews contains statements that blacks won't enjoy reading. But, as far as I know, neither of those reviews contains any false statements. Everything I said is true, to the best of my knowledge. So what did I write that was, as Amazon put it, "derogatory"?

If you call a cheater a cheater, you haven't defamed him. Rather, you have accurately described him. If you correctly identify a fraudulent assertion, then you haven't done anything derogatory. Assigning blame to me is an expedient means by which Amazon puts a fig-leaf over a censorship that was done for reasons of political correctness, rather than for any reason of righting a wrong.

UPDATE 25 February 2012. I've received a reply from Amazon.com Customer Service. Whereas it might not be polite to display their email without their permission, I can certainly reproduce my reply to it. Here it is.

Hello again, Customer Service.

I appreciate your quick response to my previous inquiry. In that response you said that you found the following remark, which I had made in a book review, to be "hateful."

"The fact remains that blacks in general aren't intelligent enough to compete in technically difficult professions beside whites, and although a very few of them are, it is dishonest for anyone to publish a book about black achievement that does not truthfully and prominently set forth the extreme rarity of genius among blacks."

I would like to know why this remark is a hateful one. It is certainly factually correct. That it is also impolitic is not my fault. The trends of popular opinion are not the standards by which I govern my speech. What I believe to be true is.

For the past hundred years, intelligence testing has noted a significant difference between the races in cognitive ability. Intelligence is distributed within each race in an approximately Gaussian fashion, according to the normal distribution or "bell curve." The differences are well-studied and have been quantified. The normal distributions that best fit the data from IQ tests are as follows:

US resident Whites: 103 plus or minus 16.4
US resident Blacks: 85 plus or minus 12.4

That's average plus or minus standard deviation. The averages are from "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen, published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 235-294. The standard deviations, not found in the Rushton-Jensen paper, were taken instead from a 1963 study by psychologists Kennedy, Van de Riet, and White.

To generate percentages of a race that will have IQs above a specified figure, you must integrate the probability density function for that race's IQ distribution from that specified minimum to infinity. However, in practice you can stop numerically integrating at IQ 300 because there are practically no humans with IQs higher than that.

Let's imagine that there is a certain job for which a minimum IQ of 130 is necessary for adequate performance. When you integrate the respective normal distributions from IQ 130 to infinity, you find that 4.98% of the whites and 0.0142% of the blacks qualify for the job. In other words, about 1 in 20 US-resident whites pass, but only 1 in 7030 US-resident blacks pass.

Given equal numbers of US-resident whites and US-resident blacks in a large, randomly selected group of job applicants, there would be (about) 350 times more qualified whites than qualified blacks. Since whites currently outnumber blacks in the US population by a factor of about 5.5, an employer in a demographically average part of the United States, seeking to hire persons with IQs of 130 or higher, he will, if he is perfectly fair about whom he hires, hire only one black for each 1925 whites. If among his hirelings (for that kind of work) the ratio of whites to blacks is found to be less than 1925, then the employer has been "racist" in favor of blacks though he might have been forced into it by Affirmative Action laws.

Now, I don't suppose that any of this information will motivate you to reverse your decision. Truth beating political correctness, when the politically correct are judges of the matter, is something that hardly ever happens. I just wanted you to know that I did check the facts before I made that statement, and therefore I had every reason for believing that what I said was true.

.

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Chapter 9
.

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.

.

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. 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.

In order to find out what fraction of a race exceeds some specified minimum, μ, you'd integrate the normal distribution's probability density function from μ to infinity.

In the equation, x̄ is the average IQ for the race, and σ is the racial standard deviation in IQ. For white US-residents, 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. 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.

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Postscript: The story is obviously unfinished. As I said in the Foreword, I'm not a fiction writer by choice. Yes, it's something I can do. No, I don't much like doing it. Essays about race, about science, and about real-world politics are more my thing.

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Chapter 8
.

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.

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.

.

"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.

.

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.

"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 that destructive phenomenon known as "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."

.

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:

The amusement that greeted my abbreviated demonstration was loud enough to bring Ms. van Neepen, a math teacher 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.

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 about an hour 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.

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Chapter 7
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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Chapter 6
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Classes didn't begin right away. After arrival day, we had a day for orientation, followed by Registration Day, when we got our class assignments and paid our fees, and classes started the day after that. But our orientation began the night after we arrived and moved into our dorm rooms. It turned out that the Dean Klang lived in the dorm. His wife was also a dean of students, in charge of the girls living on the upper floor. They were, for the foreseeable future, my legal guardians, with all the parental powers thereunto appertaining.

I wasn't to address him as Daddy, though. He was Dean Klang, and so was his wife, and none of us had better forget it. We were summoned to the dorm common room—it was more than a lobby, though it served as that, too—where we were given our formal welcomes and had the house rules laid down for us. There were rules in Mathews Hall about noise, and stricter ones about boys. Illegal drugs got you expelled from school, and, for us, alcohol was an illegal drug. Prescription drugs had to be in the prescription bottle.

One girl raised her hand and asked what happened if she accidentally swallowed her mouthwash. Some of the other girls giggled. Dean Klang the Mister asked for her name and room number. The giggling stopped.

"Clara Sanders, room 212."

Dean Klang the Mister looked at Dean Klang the Mistress, who wrote something on a notepad and put it back into her pocketbook, giving everyone the impression that Clara Sanders had just got herself on somebody's bad side. The girls who had giggled were slowly edging away, each of them casting an expression of distaste at Clara Sanders and trying to convey to the room at large the impression that she hadn't been among the gigglers.

The Deans Klang went through some additional rules. Mistress Klang mentioned the proper use of fire alarms and fire extinguishers and told us that improperly using them was another expulsion-level offense. There were rules about using the hall telephones, how many calls per week, how long each call could be, and so on. Cell phones weren't allowed at Brookstone ever since they started being used to trigger flash riots in Columbus. That happened in Atlanta, too, so I thought that it was a good rule. But six girls had brought cell phones with them, and these were confiscated amid their protests.

"You'll get them back when it's time for you to return to your parents' homes, during school recess," said Mr. Klang.

We were told that we might not bring any guns to school. I didn't think any of the girls had them, but you never know. A boy over at one of the other dorms had brought a pistol to school a couple of years ago, just to impress his friends. His dean heard about it, and the boy got expelled and arrested. His dad had to pay for bail, and then a fine, and he never did get the gun back.

The Deans Klang brought us again to the matter of boys. There was a school policy about "visitation," in which a girl could have a boy in her dorm room, or vice versa, if they were studying together. But the hours for visitation were posted and overstays were presumed to be intentional violations, subject to various punishments ranging from loss of privileges, to a fine in lieu of expulsion, to just plain expulsion. The girls in this dorm ranged from my age, 11, to about 18. Most of the college girls lived in another dorm or in a private apartment on Brookstone's college campus, which was about two miles away from the grade school campus. Some of them lived off-campus in an apartment or in a rented house. Since they were legally adults, the visitation rules that applied to us didn't apply to them. If they got themselves pregnant, it was their own tough luck.

We were given our student handbooks, which contained a list of courses available for each grade. Since I was headed into the sixth grade, I checked the relevant courses. And I was disappointed. There were no advanced courses here. No differential equations. No numerical analysis. No mathematical physics. No quantum mechanics. It was all the same kind fluff that I would have taken at Inman Middle School in Atlanta. I didn't see anything that I didn't already know forward and backward, nor any course whose final exam I couldn't ace right then even if I had to take the test while hanging by my knees upside down.

"Is there a problem, Miss Jones?"

"All of the courses for the sixth grade seem too easy, Dean Klang." It was the Mister who had asked.

"Yes. I expect that they do." He stroked a short beard. "Karen—rather, Mistress Klang—and I were advised that we'd have someone special join us this year. And, for you, special arrangements have been made."

He handed me a pamphlet that looked as if it should be an appendix to the handbook. Suddenly, I was very glad that I'd been nice to Vanessa Emory on the bus.

"You will have to take the regular core curriculum, of course," said Dean Klang. "But your electives may come from this addendum, which, you'll notice, contains college level courses in math and in science."

I had noticed. I thanked the dean sincerely.

"Where are you staying, Miss Jones?"

"In room 107, sir."

"I assigned one of your old schoolmates to be your roommate," he said. "Is this satisfactory?"

He knew perfectly well that Sarah Weisman had changed her residence and was testing my morals. He wanted to see whether I'd try to get a room all to myself by keeping quiet about her departure.

"Dean Klang, that girl has received a wavier to live in a private apartment on campus. She won't be living here in Mathews Hall this semester."

"Quarter, Miss Jones. We use the quarter system here. Well, then, if there's another situation such as yours, with one girl in a room, I'll move her into your room as your roommate. It isn't that I'd mind if two girls each had a room to herself, but the other girls would consider it to be unfair favoritism, and we can't have that, can we?"

"I see your point, sir. No sir."

The dean considered me thoughtfully.

"You are quite fair-spoken for an 11-year-old girl. You address me almost as if you'd grown up in a military academy. Where did you learn your manners?"

By reading Robert Heinlein novels and learning how men in authority like to be addressed, that's how. Sir.

"I guess it's just how my parents raised me."

"Well, then. They did a good job. Good luck at Brookstone, Miss Jones."

"Thank you, sir."

.

For our official day of orientation, Mr. and Mrs. Klang took us on a hike of the campus of what was essentially a combined elementary, middle, and high school. The elementary school was on the far side of it, and I got the impression that we weren't supposed to go over there. Elementary school students didn't live on campus. Students of Brookstone's college lived (and studied) on a separate campus elsewhere in the city. So the students of what we regarded as the "main" campus of Brookstone School were of the ages between 11 and 18. Since I was to attend some of my classes at the college campus, I'd need to arrange for my transportation.

A bicycle seemed to be the cheapest option. Since the campuses were separated by only about two miles, I could make the trip in a flash on quick-time. Unless I got arrested for speeding. Somebody was bound to notice a bicycle weaving at sixty miles per hour through the traffic downtown. On second thought, perhaps I'd better tone down my speed-up a little, as I did for running track.

Brookstone has excellent sports facilities: gym, track, basketball and tennis courts, a football field. Nothing was run down or gone to seed, either. I could see custodial employees, often assisted by students, busy trimming hedges, mowing lawns, watering flower gardens, pulling up thistles, and picking up an occasional bit of trash. We saw several of the class buildings, and the administration building where we'd go for class registration. In times past, students would actually fork over their tuition money then. Now, though, you deposit your money in the bank ahead of time, and the school takes it out of your account electronically.

Speaking of the bank, we toured it also. I was wrong about it being a student project. Brookstone Bank was a regular bank, owned by Brookstone's shareholders. But it was affiliated with the Student Union Bank, which did business with it. The SUB was the student project, which began as an assignment given to a senior majoring in Business Administration. It had had enough success that every class of students since has helped keep it going. At Brookstone, "senior" meant someone in his fourth year of college. Those in their last year of high school were called "12th graders."

We also found the bookstore. Do you know that some of the college textbooks cost over $1000 each? And they keep changing the book used by a class so that used copies of the book-in-current-use will be hard to find. What a scam. There's no good reason for why they couldn't use the same book over and over, at least until the advance of human knowledge made a textbook obsolete. All I knew is that I wasn't going to be buying any of those books. My dad couldn't afford them on top of the tuition, even with the discount. The books for grade schoolers were more reasonable in price, most of them selling for under $200 each. I'd probably need to have several of them for this quarter's classes.

We found the cafeteria and went inside for a meal. After registration day, most of the cafeteria's patrons would be students paying their way in with special key cards. Today, though, it was being run just like any other buffet restaurant, except you paid cash or swiped a credit card on your way in, rather than on the way out. That way, if you don't like what was being served, they already have your money, so too bad for you.

On our way to the serving line, I picked up some chatter from the tables where students were eating.

"Hey, they should have a sign in the kitchen that says: Wash your hands after handling the food."

"You're right, Frank. I do believe that I now understand why cafeteria and bacteria end in the same five letters."

Lots of laughs from that table. As we passed another table, I heard this.

"I heard that some of the serving pans are deeper than they look, and that things live at the bottom of them. Under the food."

"That's common knowledge, Bud. Last fall, one of the serving ladies got too close and a tentacle reached up, grabbed her, dragged her screaming into the food, and she was never seen again."

"Uh-huh. Those dishes are the tastiest ones."

I grinned, knowing that being critical about institutional food is a common form of entertainment. Some of the girls in our dorm group thought it would be classier to feign disgust, however.

We joined the line proper, as it slowly moved past the bar with its row of trays and the serving ladies, who were the first blacks I'd seen since stepping off the bus at the edge of the campus with Ms. Emory, who had given me directions to Mathews Hall before leaving me in the direction of the administration building. I thought about that. Blacks are about half the population of Georgia. But where human quality is required, you hardly ever see them. I started to wonder whether there might be something to those criticisms from the students in the eating hall.

The food, however, looked okay. There wasn't anything creative about it, but it appeared to be good basic food. English peas, creamed corn, carrot slices, all probably right out of a can and warmed up. There were fishsticks, bought pre-cooked and frozen, and then thawed and heated. There were little rolls of a kind that I knew was mass produced for sale in supermarkets. I saw no particular culinary talent on display. On the other hand, the food seemed good enough, and nothing was burned. So I took my share when my turn came, and I went out to the tables in a section of the dining hall that Mr. Klang had been saving for us.

"The food seems more wholesome than comments we heard on the way in led me to expect," I said, as I stood beside my place at table.

"Please be seated, Miss Jones," said Mr. Klang. "I've heard the sort of things the students say about the food. And there have been issues in the past. Brookstone is required to submit contracts for outside business to bid, and unfortunately the lowest bidder is often the one that provides the bare minimum of services, and those of the lowest acceptable standards. Fortunately, most of the time the only problem with the food is that it tends to become somewhat overcooked by the middle of the afternoon."

"The cooks open all their canned vegetables in the morning and put them into very large pots," added one of the older girls. "I've worked with the kitchen staff to pay some of my school fees. I was a food runner, carrying the trays from the kitchen to the serving line. They consider it is too much trouble to cook twice and clean the pots twice in the same day. So they halve their work, and as the result the string beans are as limp as noodles by two o'clock, the mashed potatoes are burned at the edges by three, and the rolls are hard as bricks by four."

"That's why I brought you here at noon," said Mr. Klang. "I knew that the best food was served early in the day, but I wasn't certain why that was so until now. Thank you, Miss Lane. I'll have a word with higher school officials on this subject."

Mrs. Klang arrived as the last member of our lunch party, herding the remaining girls to our tables. As she approached, she looked at Mr. Klang, who nodded slightly toward me, whereupon Mrs. Klang gave me the sunniest smile that I've seen in a long time. I had no idea why. I attended to my table manners, ate my food, and pretended not to notice.

The girls sitting around our tables chattered to each other, occasionally giggling at god-only-knows what. Mrs. Klang admonished a few of the gigglers and urged some girls to better posture or to greater decorum.

"Could Brookstone perhaps do its own grocery shopping and cooking?" asked Donna Lane, the twelfth grade girl who had spoken earlier.

"Well, yes," answered Mr. Klang, chasing some creamed corn with his fork. "But there are, um, political considerations of which I'm not fully aware."

Now there was a technical truth if I'd ever heard one. Not fully aware, he might be. But he has some very definite opinions about why Brookstone hasn't horizontally integrated itself an in-house cafeteria. And he doesn't want to share them.

"That's too bad," said Donna. "A cafeteria could be a laboratory attachment to the school of business, teaching students how to run restaurants."

"You have worked for this cafeteria," Mr. Klang pointed out.

"As a menial employee, yes. But I never cooked. I never balanced accounts. I never hired anybody or managed inventory."

"Yes, I see your point."

I didn't see how men with beards could possibly eat neatly enough to avoid getting food on their facial hair, but Mr. Klang somehow succeeded. Small bites, I supposed. And steady hands, so that all the food stayed on the fork until it was in his mouth. I was mentally turning over what he'd said about this cafeteria, which appeared to be the one avenue by which blacks had any presence on the Brookstone campus for middle school and high school students. Blacks handling my food made me feel uneasy. What were those "issues in the past" with regard to the food it served?

In Atlanta, there were scandals once in a while about black restaurant workers deliberately contaminating food with feces, resulting in customers becoming sick. A black man had been prosecuted a few years ago for putting his own sperm into yogurt and selling it to white women, but the mostly black jury wouldn't convict him. I remembered the case because it had been the talk of town for a while. Any of us could have been a victim of the tainted yogurt. The media never did say whether the seller was HIV positive. Were those "issues" something like that?

I'd missed something while my thoughts were wandering.

"I'm sorry sir. I was woolgathering. Did you say something to me?"

"It's quite all right, Miss Jones. I'd just asked you whether you'd like to share your room with Ruby Pierce, the dark-haired girl who is sitting at the next table, facing us, two seats down from Mistress Klang."

I saw her. A pretty brunette, apparently several years older than me.

"Certainly, Dean Klang. I'd be happy to do so."

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Chapter 5
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Summer passed, and I prepared myself to live apart from my parents for the first time in my life. Dad and Mom signed papers contracting my legal guardianship to Brookstone's Dean Norman Klang for the duration of the school year. I would be moving to a room in a girl's dormitory called Mathews Hall. I was allowed one suitcase for clothes, one computer if I had one, and one small satchel for toiletries. Any money over $1000 that I had with me had to be deposited with the Brookstone Bank, which was also on campus. It was, I think, a student project.

Brookstone School is a combined school that can take a student from pre-kindergarten all the way to a bachelor's degree in a wide range of subjects. It's a private school founded in the 1950s, moving twice to new and larger campuses for grade school, adding a college campus in 2020, and just rolling in money because it is widely known as an exceptionally successful school, having an unblemished public safety record (no murders, ever), where the students were self-disciplined, the campus orderly and neat, and the teachers competent and glad to be out of the hell-hole public schools. It had acquired a new school president just this year, the old one having retired last year. I got a whiff of politics behind that, but I didn't delve into it deeply.

I got a 50% discount on my tuition because Brookstone's administration had read my IQ test report, and probably my school transcript, and wanted me badly enough to cut my fees in half. Which was just as well. Brookstone's usual tuition, and its fees for housing and food, were the same as that of a very reputable college, and my poor, hard-working dad would have been billed nearly into poverty if he'd had to pay the full amount.

So, one sunny August morning, I hugged my parents, said my good-byes, and boarded the bus to Columbus. The other passengers were the usual motley bunch, with rebel teens and their loud music boxes, older people telling them to be quiet, a few fellows in suits, a sprinkling of shady-looking types. A well-dressed middle aged woman recognized me, or thought she did. She asked who I was, and I told her "Brenda Jones." She asked if she could sit beside me, and I acceded mostly because otherwise a rambunctious boy might claim that seat. The bus moved out of the station, and we struck up a conversation about where I was going, and what I hoped to do in the future.

Well, it doesn't do to explain what one hopes to do, if what one hopes to do is turn the world upside down, shake it until all the rascals fall off, and then put it back together again one's own way.

"I want to study science," I said.

"Oh, how lovely," said the lady. "Which field of science is your favorite?"

"Physics," I said. "At the moment, astrodynamics. I've been teaching myself how to find transfer orbits. After that, I suppose nuclear physics, along with some nuclear engineering."

"What do you want to study that for? Are you thinking of getting a job in the energy industry?"

Actually, I was thinking about inventing the hydrogen fusion rocket engine and then using it in such a way that my knowledge of celestial mechanics would be put to a serious test. But that's another thing I didn't want to tell a stranger, so I just agreed with her guess. It made a plausible cover story, since almost all the world's electric generators ran with energy supplied by nuclear fission reactors.

When fossil fuels declined sharply about twenty years ago, it was either nuclear or next to nothing. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric power couldn't have bridged the gap between supply and demand. This bus was an electric bus, made by Tesla Motors, running off a huge battery under the floor. Without nuclear power, that battery would never be recharged. Solar power was used to run some homes and charge batteries for flashlights and other small appliances. But all the big jobs were, at least indirectly, accomplished by nuclear energy.

"How do you find transfer orbits?" she asked.

Interesting question. A lot of people would have asked what a transfer orbit was.

"First, you should pick a time when you want to depart from the orbit you're already in, and about how long you want to spend in transit. The time of departure, plus the transit time, equals the time of arrival. When you arrive at the intersection between the transfer orbit and the orbit of the object you want to reach, you want that object to be there, too, and not at some other part of its orbit."

"That sounds simple enough," she said. Have you noticed that I still didn't know her name? I'd noticed, but I didn't want to ask just then.

"No, it really isn't simple. Because the transit time for the destination object, as it follows its own orbital path, isn't necessarily the same as your transit time. In general, you and the destination object won't get to the intersection point at the same time."

"Then how does it work out that you can get to where you want to go?"

"By carefully choosing the time of departure and the transit time so that an exceptional and happy circumstance arises, namely that you do reach the arrival position at the same time that the object does."

She wasn't a reporter. Reporters don't pursue technical subjects even to this depth. They want you to talk about the salacious stuff that titillates TV audiences or tabloid readers. But she wasn't just some woman off the street, either. My curiosity got the better of me.

"Are you, perhaps, affiliated with Brookstone?"

The lady smiled.

"Why, yes I am," she said. "I'm Vanessa Emory, one of Brookstone's vice presidents. I heard you were boarding a bus for Columbus and made sure to follow you. I hope you don't mind."

"Not at all," I said, wondering whether I should mind but knowing that I shouldn't say so. "Emory? There's an Emory University near where I live."

"No relation, as far as I know," said Ms. Emory.

We chatted on a good while. She probed my knowledge of physics, especially in regard to transfer orbits, probably because I'd mentioned the subject. I felt encouraged to ramble.

"A transfer orbit that is geometrically possible usually doesn't satisfy the transit time requirement," I rambled. "But if you specify the departure location, the arrival location, and require that one of the transfer orbit's apsides coexist with either departure or arrival, you can solve for the elements of the transfer orbit. You know, the eccentricity, the semimajor axis, the inclination, the longitude of the ascending node, the argument of the perihelion, and the time of perihelion passage. You would use the sun-departure-arrival geometry to find the eccentricity and semimajor axis of the transfer orbit, and then you'd check whether the transit time for the spaceship was the same as that for the object with which you wanted to rendezvous."

"And if it wasn't?"

"Then you change the time of departure, or the required transit time, or both of them, and try again. Until you get a match in the transit times. After you do that, you proceed to find the rest of the orbital elements and the delta-vees for departure and for arrival. "

"What are delta-vees?"

"Oops. Sorry. That's rocket engineers' jargon for changes of velocity. So much acceleration for so much time."

I didn't need to expound on the rest of the calculation of the Keplerian transfer orbit, or the subsequent tasks of the patched conic approximation and then finding the fully accurate time-integrated trajectory, with its revised delta-vees for departure and for midcourse correction (if one is needed). Instead, Ms. Emory steered our conversation toward personal matters, in which I, rather than she, was the subject of most of the conversation. For my part, I tried to give her the impression that I was just a rather smart little girl who wanted to learn everything I could and do well at Brookstone.

And I could tell that she knew I was doing it.

.

"What are you doing here?" A familiar voice spoke.

What rotten luck. Sarah Weisman had been assigned to my dorm room. She was my roommate. I was fated to have to see her every time I came back from class.

"Dad changed his mind about Inman."

"Too many blacks?"

"Too little challenge."

"I saw that TV newscast about your being some kind of genius." Sarah contrived to smirk. "I wondered how you pulled that off. Nice coup."

"It wasn't a coup. I wasn't looking for fame. An IQ test was required, so my father paid to have me take one. I didn't know that I was going to be the first person ever to go off the charts on it."

"Well, then it must have been an easy test, if you did that."

"I thought so."

I was about to propose that we draw a chalk line down the center of the room and keep all our stuff strictly to our own sides, when Sarah made the suggestion unnecessary.

"You'll be glad to know," she said, "that I won't be staying here. I've gotten a wavier from the dean to live in a private apartment."

"We can do that?" A private apartment might be nice.

"I can. You probably can't. My father is a stockholder in Brookstone, and I'm to work in the Student Union Bank."

"S.U.B." I spelled out the initials. "Sure to go under."

"Very funny. What that means is I'm going to have certain privileges that you won't have. One of them is an apartment, so I won't be bothered by the yelling, running around, slamming doors, and loud music that you'll probably hear, starting tonight. Another is that I'll be paid to attend this school, while you, on the other hand, will have to pay to attend it."

Hm. Something smelled fishy about that summary of things.

"You mean that you're working your way through school, and that your father's recommendation got you a job in the bank to defray your tuition. Your daddy didn't just pay for everything, even though he easily could have."

"I'm wondering just how it is that your father came up with the money to send you here," said Sarah, nastily. "Did he mortgage his house again? If he did, then when my father forecloses on it, he might give it to me."

"No, our house is clear of debt. My tuition was reduced by half on account of my graduating first in class at Morningside."

Okay, so I lied. The tuition discount was the result of my IQ test, but the effect on Sarah was most satisfactory. Have you ever seen a Jewish girl lose her temper? Normally, they strive for poise and for verbal elegance. But when they get mad, they'll sometimes show their real nature.

"You stole that honor from me, you little bitch!" Sarah hissed the words. Her face was sunburn red. She was shaking with anger.

"And remember, Sarah, you were fourth in class. Not second. Peter or Brian would have gotten the honor, if I hadn't. Not you."

She tried to slap me. I intercepted her wrist, turned her around, and slammed her into the wall. Going on quick-time comes naturally to me now.

"Watch it, Sarah. Nobody at Morningside ever had the misfortune to learn about it, but the smartest girl at school was also the toughest girl at school. I don't want to hurt you, but you'd better not try to hit me again."

Fear quelled her anger, as I'd figured it would. She was about to put her Miss Nice mask back on.

"Yeah," she said, turning back around. "I heard about you on the track, those jumps you took right before you set the speed record. Well, I guess I'd better start taking my stuff to the apartment. The school will assign you a new roommate before long."

As she was carrying her suitcase and satchel down the hall toward the dorm wing exit, Sarah turned around. "But remember one thing, Brenda. This isn't Morningside, and there are students of all ages here. Even college age. Most of them are probably nice people, like us."

She pushed the lever bar to open the door.

"But some of them might not be."

Other chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9