Is Talibunny a Dummy ?

Her defenders, if they don’t overtly endorse stupidity, as many of them do, will just say “not everyone is a test-taker” or something.

Me, something like this scares me shitless. Do we know if this was her only attempt at the test? I’m pretty sure I was high on the devil’s weed when I took mine (all I will say is that I did very, very well), and she grew up in Wasilla, which may now be a meth capital but back in the day was a major distribution point for the glorious Matanuska Thunderfuck strain of herb.

The scariest part to me is the reading score. But I know from personal experience that when you read all of the reading material available out there, comprehension can’t be priority 1.

Ethnic group = “white”? Not “caucasian” (even in 1982)? I saw this elsewhere as well, and my gut keeps telling me that it’s a fake, though certainly plausible. I have no evidence either way, though, of course.

Credit to Promnight for tossing that our way. I don’t place much stock in standardized tests myself, but it does fit the pattern.

Of course, we know that such tests are slanted towards — oh, wait, she’s white. Never mind.

We know this is for real?

Well, it was posted on Stinque, the internet’s foremost investigative blogging site, so I naturally assumed it was true…

Sometimes really good students “just aren’t test-takers”, but note the impressive 2.2 “self-reported” grade average as well, with a D in Foreign Language. No wonder she never wanted to travel outside the country — not only would she not understand the language, she might be too stupid to find her way back home.

@blogenfreude: We’ll find out if it’s not and gain from the publicity. If it isn’t, it’s a parody. Can someone send a link to the McCain campaign?

@blogenfreude: Unconfirmed.

There’s some talk that SAT scores were rounded to the nearest 10 in the early ’80s. Professional Journalist/Hatchet Man Nick Denton ran with it on Gawker, then updated with a post from their art director suggesting some telltale Photoshop signs.

@nojo: I ran it up to 1600x and couldn’t see any signatures.

I’m pretty sure even meth-heads are smarter, you need a basic understanding of chemistry, lab procedures, y’know, science. If she was cooking speed she’d have blown up the trailer long ago.

@FlyingChainSaw: The argument isn’t jaggies, but suspicious text alignment and possible cloning, plus some curious backdating in the PDF the image was initially contained in.

You would need, say, an SAT blank to work with, then you could layer in the text, collapse everything, age to taste, and “smudge” the SSN and such for effect.

But hey, Talibunny was a journalism major, which, as I told Prommie, is almost as easy as PoliSci. Even if true, the SAT is at best a footnote to what we already know.

I demand an immediate apology for this affront to the dignity and intelligence of meth-heads everywhere!

Vinyl-siding salesmen not so much….

This is even worse than W’s. That’s saying something.

First 3 numbers of SSN indicate state where she lived when parents applied for SSN, in her case Idaho. 574 matches up with Alaska on this chart: http://www.ssa.gov/employer/stateweb.htm

So that part stands up. [ignore what I wrote earlier about Idaho - I misread chart]

MORE: I should also say that this makes sense if her parents applied for her SSN when they lived in Alaska.

/threadjack/

Further proof that the McCain campaign just. doesn’t. get it.

Asked on a just-ended conference call about his candidates’ lack of daily campaign statements on the plummeting of global markets in recent days, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said that too much focus on the stock market could be redundant if repeated every day.

“I don’t know if you really want to turn a campaign into a CNBC news show on the stock market,” he said. “I mean it doesn’t mean that we don’t care and aren’t trying to do something about it. It’s just I’m not exactly sure what you say everyday.”

…

Also in his response, Davis expressed anxiety about the activity of the markets even during the time period immediately preceding the call. “Frankly, I’ve been on this phone for the last hour, I’m kind of worried to get out and see what it’s done to my portfolio,” he said.

Take the “everyday” out of that second quote and it better reflects their complete failure to respond to this crisis in any meaningful way.

TJ/

As I live and breathe, the Snorg girl, and her hideous, enormous, dream-haunting teeth.

Wow, does that take you back or what?

@blogenfreude:

I dunno man…that one section says that English is her “best language”, and that is clearly not the case….

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Meh, just because you test well in something doesn’t mean you’re actually any good at it. I got a lot of Bs and Cs in school, but that indicated my lack of willingness to do homework, not my inability to comprehend it. Likewise, I scored a perfect score on some chunk of an IQ test someone tried to give me once, I think the section on spatial relationships, but I know for a fact that I have friends who are far more intuitive at that stuff than I am.

@blogenfreude: In her era, really parents weren’t forced to get a SSN for the kid to get the deduction, so they’d apply whenever, usually when something at school demanding it for sorting the students. @nojo: Oh, I was checking for smoothies. Illustrator or Freehand or Photoshop would be really smooth. Scanned colored paper would be have a lot of chunky gradation in a scan. Alignment how? Too well aligned? In 1982 these were probably thrown out on an industrial dot matrix printers through a carbon face page on a perforated envelope.

@FlyingChainSaw: I’ve got four years on Talibunny, and I didn’t apply for an SSN until I needed a work permit.

For the forensics, I’ll throw that over to Gawker, where 33k pageviews will sink their credibility long before it sinks ours.

@IanJ: In middle school I tested really high for visual-spatial ability. They told me I should be an architect. Meh.

@mellbell: I was a great student at the Math, but when my dad suggested I become an engineer I thought he was talking about trains. Srsly.

I knew people who scored this low. They became mechanics, got preggers and/or went into the military. All of them prolly have better job security right now than I do.

@nabisco: I scored in the 99th percentile of every standardized test I ever took. It was almost like an intuitive thing: if I didn’t know the answer, I could usually figure out what they wanted me to choose. Or, in the case of math, I would make a pretty pattern on the answer sheet. All this has allowed me to have advanced degrees and make less money than every single plumber I’ve ever had to hire.

@Mistress Cynica: Me, too. I remember how, in Grammar School, the Iowa Tests were the highlight of the year, and I wished they would administer them every year.
I loved standardized tests. I took them whenever I could: PSAT, SAT, Merit Scholarship (yes, I was a Merit scholar), GREs, the standardized tests the Gummint gave for potential employees, etc, etc. I loved (and aced) them all.
Lotta fuckin good it did me.

@Mistress Cynica, @Ewalda: I was a good test-taker, but also a good scholar in those intermittent years when I felt I had something to gain by playing the game. But I hated homework, only started doing it when I thought it would get me something.

And I made a big stink about the (at my rural OK high school) required attendance at some kind of Defense-Department sponsored test, it was the only test I didn’t want to take, but I took it, and then quickly dispatched the rabid recruiters who wanted me to join their Hitler Youth Brigade in exchange for tuition or something, and I was like, “I think I like boys as much as girls, and you’ll never get me anyway you fascist pigs!”

And then I was free to pursue my vague “liberal studies” education across more colleges and universities than Sarah Palin could even contemplate, without the constant pestering of military recruiters.

(Ewalda, I was also a Merit Scholar, but I didn’t last more than a semester sequestered at OU, loved my classes but everything else about life at that time was unbearable. I’m not a closer or a finisher I guess.)

Of course, my uniform fetish wasn’t quite as developed at that time.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: Where, where, I love the snorggirl, and her charmingly imperfect teeth and crazy eyes.

@Promnight:

She was there on the right for me this afternoon…now it’s just an ad for credit reports. Maybe if we just chant “tee Tee TEE” she’ll come back….

@Pedonator: We refer to my brother’s 7 year college career (ending with him getting a BA in English) as “the Tour of North American Colleges.”

@Mistress Cynica: My very favorite Doonesbury, from the late 70s, early 80s, Mike and Zonker were reminiscing about college, and mike said “remember when we were sophomores, and Zonker says “best three years of my life.” I use that line all the time.

@Tommmcatt Yet Again: I have a picture I downloaded from the shortlived website created in her honor, my prize possession, a candid shot from a high school party, taken from behind, and she is in little cotton short-shorts, none of the ads gave that view. le sigh. Youth is wasted on the young.

@Pedonator: Oh, yes, the ASVAB. We were forced as well. Did very well in the ciphering, English (99th percentile); absofuckinglutely flunked the mechanical shit (38th). Had the Navy and Marines calling me, whereupon I told them I was gay, which shut them up. If that had happened now, the recruiters would have been going “lalalalalallalaalican’thearyoulalalalalalalallamoneyforcollege.”

@rptrcub: And I was especially fascinated by Arabic, little did I know at the time…

So did this post start as an invitation to dis Caribou Barbie for her own lack of intellectualism and her drooling followers’ glorification of same, regardless of the authenticity of those freakishly low test scores?

And has it descended into an excuse for all of us to wave our intellectual freak-flags, in exactly the type of elitist echo-chamber the rabid right-nuts accuse of of inhabiting?

Well, ok, I’m good with that.

@Pedonator: I would never match my cred with you guys. I’m only the smartest guy in the room when it’s just me and the goldfish, and even then it’s a struggle.

@Mistress Cynica: Eight year plan here. Dropped out from two different colleges. My senior year in college was just getting my ticket punched because I was working almost full time at the Albuquerque Tribune for $100 a week as an intern. Spent most of my last semester on the road in Indian country working on my first big project.

Hey guys, can I play?

Never did the SAT thing. Only did the “practice” tests that the Guidance dept handed out to those of us thinking about applying to US America Schools. I was usually around 700-800 on Maths and 550-650 on the Words (and that was a bit of a stretch because I was a lousy writer till 4th year of University.)

Did the standardized University of Waterloo Math competitions though. Always placed in the top 10% and twice in the 5% (highest mark in the school both times.)

I consistently placed in the top 3 in my year on all those aptitude tests. They thought I was going to go somewhere. Heh. Fooled them.

@ManchuCandidate: An astrologer told me that my chart said I would do best if I went to college in Arizona or New Mexico, so I went to school in Colorado just to see what would happen. Heh.

Got really shit-faced Friday, stayed up until 4:30 a.m., took the GRE five hours later, aced the sonovabitch.

Like Cynica says, it’s not what you know, but what you know about standardized tests. They damn near shout the answers at you.

@nabisco, @redmanlaw, @ManchuCandidate: Hey, I don’t claim to be a genius (well, only sometimes when I rely on an early test administered before the mind-altering chemicals I wantonly imbibed subsequently).

I have proudly wasted my potential among at least a dozen institutes of higher learning, without ever having finished a degree.

Y’all intimidate me with your titles and accomplishments. Me, I just somehow lucked into lucrative geek-dom, but that could change at any moment. And I’ve treated education as a life-long endeavor, taking classes whenever, wherever, depending upon what I was interested in at the time.

Now, I’m most interested in the politics which affect all our lives profoundly, and having my borderline-autistic fun with meat-life spent mostly at home, forays on vacation, and the blessing of youz guys and galz on the intertubes to keep me company.

And damn peeps, I’m so glad I found you. Will you all marry me and live with me forever in etherland? Ok, you don’t have to answer me right away, just think about it.

In the end, with tests and advanced placement and International Baccalaureate courses and all of that, some of the brightest individuals I went to high school with, who had very high SATs and completed all of their IB courses with very high, skip-freshman-year-course grades — and also had Ivy League/Ph.D./etc. aspirations and were overachieving to the point of Jesse Spanno levels of craziness — wound up coming back down to earth like the rest of us, going to state schools, getting a bachelor’s and just going to ordinary professional jobs.

@nojo: The analogies tripped me up really bad. I made a 5 on the writing.

@Pedonator: Relax. Shrub has a Harvard MBA.

Besides, in the dawning New Economy, all those advanced degrees will be good for starting the campfire while the cooks and hunters among us actually get shit done.

@nojo: My brother and I have long admitted that they only thing we’re really cut out for, education- and experience-wise, is being Eurotrash. We can tell hilarious anecdotes and wear fabulous clothes, but our only survival skill is getting other people to buy our drinks.

@Mistress Cynica: We are cut from the same cloth, I am brilliant, witty, and have the finest taste, I am perfectly fitted for spending money, not making it. God, I would spend money so well, not the way these philistines spend money, I would spend money tastefully and artistically, it would be almost performance art, not the way these rich idiots I see spend money, so wasteful and, well, so tackily. I am not saying I would be doing anything the least bit good for society, I am saying that I would be pampering myself so much more tastefully, gracefully, stylishly. I would be a great heir.

@Promnight: You could be the Jay Gatsby of the Jersey Shore, throwing sumptuous, luminous, Lost Weekend-style parties for whomever amongst the beautiful and the damned happens to show up at your door…

@Mistress Cynica: My mother always says the only profession I’m constitutionally suited for is becoming one of those archly elegant, uptown women with a scandalous past, who– after putting years of racy misadventures behind her–finally settles down into a muted, tasteful, and discreet middle-age…i.e. her.

I’m not sure yet whether it’s a brilliant or a horrible future.

@Pedonator:
Nothing wrong with that. I used to read a lot (then the net took over). And haven’t stopped informal education on anything. Not the crazy in depth stuff that I barely remember from school, but just general tidbits about society.

I read whatever catches my interest. My parents thought I was into drugs when I started reading about the history of Cocaine. I wasn’t but just trying to understand a little about the phenomena that consumes many of us. I followed up with learning about high finance and how the stock market is really played from memoirs of insiders. It’s the only reason I have a flicker of insight into what is going on right now.

It’s sad that I see a lot of people I knew in university who haven’t read a damned book and refuse to learn anything since.

fun story: when i graduated from high school with a perfect 4.0., a near perfect sat and mensa cred. (AND a scholarship to a mighty fine school) the administration had a dilemma.
as it were, i hadn’t attended enough days of school to legally graduate.
they scratched their heads over that one. ultimately, they let me go.

and i def remember taking the LSAT’s and at least one bar exam stoned. so where did it get me?
disalusionment, discontent, rage and a substance abuse problem.
it also got me constructing elaborate sandcastles with rasta children and packing to go live in the belly of the beast of the world to join mr. i’m-giving-him-one more-chance-the-cheating-fuckhead.
(who by the way, dropped out of college, as did all the other really successful people i know) edumacation. yay.

yes nojo, kindling.

Hey Stinque…..Can you pull Health Insurance claims of Trig’s birth ?
It is here we will find out whooooooo “claimed” to be the biological mother.
Too many conflicts! Could there be a possible Insurance Fraud case too?

@Promnight: As my beloved avatar one said, “I’ve never been a millionaire, but I bet I’d be darling at it.”

@ABORT PALIN: We foolishly closed our Wasilla Bureau to devote more resources to covering chihuahua movies, but Andrew Sullivan’s been very diligent about finding the gaps in that story.

Latest twist is that there’s no public record of Trig’s birth at that hospital. Not necessarily incriminating — parents can choose to keep such records private — but curious for a small town with a locally famous pregnancy.

But perhaps that’s just us being nosy. Yet we’re only following the example set by Palin herself, who demanded that her mayoral opponent show proof of marriage. Seems the opponent and spouse kept their own last names, which we all know is a telltale sign of Satanism.

I did find myself wondering that Monday morning past whether the campaign’s announcement of Bristol’s pregnancy was a deliberate smokescreen from the weekend’s Trig rumors. Events moved on, but that question remains on the table.

You dear sweet people, school is a time when either gets slippered or caned. Or both.

As for further education: I did take a course in tap-dancing which I have used professionally (to the mirth of my colleagues). Also singing and acting classes. (Yes, one can learn how to act. It helps to have talent but techniques can be learned)

Seeing everyone go through this economic melt-down reminds me of most of my professional life. The shock to my system is when I do have security not when I don’t.

@nabisco:

I have been deemed “smart” by my associates, but I hated standardized tests or anything that would restrict me from my intuitive ways, also I just never gave a real fuck to prove myself to anyone. Guess that would explain my faltering financial success in life, but I really don’t give a fuck about that either, if you are destitute all the time, an economic collapse doesn’t mean horseshit, as it is same shit different day.

Talibunny’s anemic SAT scores only endears her to the neocon power brokers as they have pretty much only interest in figure heads for presidents since Reagan.

@nojo: My mom mailed me the study prep guide surface mail when I was a peace corps volunteer in Reagantenango. They arrived the day before the exam. Where the power went out for 20 minutes, and the proctor refused to re-set the clock. And I had my foot in a cast.

I still did well enough to have my choice of Big 10 and 12 schools; Hook ‘em Horns (who upset the Sooners today yaay!).

@nabisco:
Seems like proctors everywhere are all bastards (or at least seem that way.)

I was once late for an exam (1/2 hour late entirely my fault.) Rushed through it. Realized I had screwed up a question worth 1/5 the exam and was rewriting it when I was told I was out of time. I just needed 5 minutes. Asshole wasn’t going to give it to me. He yelled. I snapped and yelled back.

After I was warned for the last time, I submitted my exam paper deep into the pile of exams and then I turned around and flipped the proctor off in front of a thousand other shocked students.

It was my fault, but I don’t like it when anyone gets in my face.

Also remembered what also pissed me off. The old geezer ignored several other folks doing the same thing while he locked onto dumbass me. Vaguely remember that the others were white.