I don't dismiss your points about much of what is wrong with America. America is a place where the rich and privileged exploit and abuse the less privileged. This makes America a great place to live in you are one of the privileged. I can't think of any country in the world where I would not have to give up some things if I moved there. I can't think of a single thing I would gain (anything that matters to me) if I moved to say Sweden or France.

I guess you are an Atheist and you think that makes you smart. I have rejected religion but that happened when I found I truly believed that there is God.

You miss my point because you were thinking about Americans as a group or about averages not individuals. Yes, some people even many people leave and don't come back but many more stay and don't even consider leaving. There are many Americans who live very well. They live better than almost anyone anywhere. They live with lower taxes, better markets, best services, best shopping, best entertainment, more unpolluted, undeveloped land and more freedom than anywhere in the developed world. Many people come to America to find that.

If you need medical care and price is no object you go to America to get that care.

Regarding belief in God, people on each end of the intelligence and education spectrum are brainwashed by the institutions in their lives. The less educated by their churches and the more educated by their schools to conform to the dominate belief of the institutions population. I am quite intelligent and well educated, I believe in God. Correlation is not causation.

The rise of atheism was not cause by a rise in intelligence it was cause by a rise in attendance at secular institutions of post secondary education.

I wonder how you could have written that racist comment about Asian intelligence, did you not see that it was racist. It could be that Asians in America are more intelligent than other Americans but to say it has a racial origin is problematic. It could be that there is a selection process whereby Asians who emigrated to America were from a pool of more intelligent Asians. Maybe it was mostly smart Asians who came to America and the dumb ones stayed in Asia.

A lot has been written about race and intelligence much of which turns out to be bad science. Someday we might find the genetic basis for intelligence and it might correlate with skin color but again correlation is not causation. Every race has idiots and geniuses.

Oh, the current definition of race that mostly relies on skin color is a mess. Not everyone of the same skin color is the same race and most of us are mutts pretending to be pure breeds.

TEK