The IQ Score and Politics Connection

IT'S A FOOL WHO DENIES THE OBVIOUS

There can be no doubt at all about it.  There is a statistically Very Strong link between IQ scores and one's polotical perswasion.  First of all what you notice in the profile of red states verses blue states is that it's almost entirely all blue at the top of the list and solid red at the bottom.  It seems now as is the "Solid South" is taking on new meaning indeed.  Virginia is about the ONLY red state where the median IQ is in excess of one hundred.  What struck me was the enormous extent, such that I was frankly shocked, of whole States of the union with a median IQ score of its population of ninety, or ten points below normal.  But as someone pointed out to me 45 years ago "If you're up and walking around and not some institutionalized vegetable- your IQ averages 109.  Keep in mind that the state of Mississippi as a whole averages an IQ of only 85 and that's the entire state.  This is a mere ten points above the famed "Forest Gump" character who had a 75 IQ but still made it into the military.  Kansas has an IQ of 96 and Nebraska has an IQ of 95 and there are fully twenty states with a median IQ below 95 - and they are all red states.  In fact what struck me was the scarcity of really high ranking states.  The highest any state could muster was a median of 113.  I hear all these people telling me they have an IQ of 130 or something - and I'm thinking "There are sure an awful lot of those people turning up".  They are saying that President Obama has an IQ of around 140.  So aside from the demographics what accounts for this phenominon?  I explain a lot of this in the following paragraph but right now let us just call it a basic fear of Objectivism.  Dr. Levy has this same fear.  He will not believe me when I say either that "My future looks bleaker than you're willing to admit" or else "The health of the US economy is much better than you're willing to admit".  It's fear of being forced to change.  It's fear of anything new.  It's if you will "hanging onto mama's apron strings" and an inability as President Obama once put it - "Letting go of your guns, your Bibles, and your prejudices".  It's deriving emotional sustenance from such things.  I once knew a guy named Frank who knew that sixties popular music was brilliant but he concluded "It's so brilliant it had to be Satanically inspired".  I inherently had to much intelligence to fall for this bat-crap line. It was too stupid even for my lowered bar of credibity of Christians.  There is the fear of the Different.  It's my belief that the afterlife- - IF it exists at all, will be so Different from anything we'll expect we'll learn more about it ten minutes after we're dead than we ever did through religious instruction OR intuitive speculation - - while we were alive.  There is an abiding lack of curiosity among the tea party set- - an overall aversion to Exploring- - knowledge.  They reserve the word Frontier for Frontier land at Disneyland, and for them Frontier Land IS "Tomorrow land".  We have become so Orwellian that we have actually set aside a day to pay tribute to the Gun.  How much worse can that scene be in Beneathe the Planet of the Apes where they all gather to worship the Atom Bomb warhead.  I mentioned in a recent posting the utter absurdity of actually "Selling" their current beliefs to anybody who was alive forty plus years ago during the Jesus Movement.  Personally I don't want to throw any mud unjustly at anybody.  I'm just saying that anybody looking at this chart must realize that the sheer mathematical ODDS of this political distribution ocurring by mere Chance is - - not even infinitessible.  Think about how we draw statistic significance from a ten or twenty percent risk elevation in some medication and because of that we take it off the market.  Here it's staring you straight in the face - yet they deny it.  But as I've said one of the biggest hurdles you have to overcome to be a successful Christian is "Your ability to Deny The Obvious", the elephant in the tent.  Here's more stuff from earlier.

THE THING THAT SHOULD NOT BE

It’s five o clock and Accronis full backup has started.  David Cruise and on EWN just now they were talking about dozens of cases of child molesting priests were made public today and the DA is going over the files to see which can be prosecuted.  But he warns that the statute of limitations may have expired.  The problem here is the statute of limitations doesn’t “expire” with the victims.  People like David Cruise like to get personally involved in these sex abuse cases and in police abuse cases.  Some may say it’s grandstanding or making an issue out of “something that goes on all the time, so what’s the big deal” kind of thing.  The point however should be that such things shouldn’t be going on at all, and the fact that they are, either in areas of abuse by law enforcement or molestation by a priest or a school teacher or camp leader, these situations should not occur.  I just reran the grounds through with an added spoonful, and to my surprise the coffee was even strong enough when I unintentionally put in just over five cups of water rather than the intended four.   You know it was stated on the Randy Rhodes program that political position on the spectrum is a function of performance on IQ tests as a child.  I don’t know why “as a child” is significant, but it seems to be.  It points to a basic fear of new knowledge or experience or a phobia about ever having to “reassess one’s opinion” on a matter.  Of course some on the right such as Joe Scarborough have reassessed their political stances and warn that the right wing of the Party is in tighter and tighter political straits and is in danger of falling off the cliff entirely.  I know there are people who at least seem to be really intelligent, expousing right-wing fundamentalist Christianity.  But others have made a point of stating that those at the top in a policy making position “know better” but that they pander to the poor and ignorant southern white boys appealing to their inate fears of racial minorities and those who are economically worse off than they are.  If there are three thing Rush Limbaugh hates with an abiding passion it is racial minorities of all stripes, the economically disadvantaged, and children.  I think he’d give up on some of his other proclamations if he could hold onto these.  I’m not ready yet to totally buy into this intelligence argument.  I want to Google the topic and see what various web sites have to say.  That I haven’t done this before now is only an indication how up to this point- - how little importance or weight I have placed on this strident claim.   Personally I would feel very vindicated should the assertion turn out to be true.  Here’s a quick intelligence test.  You have two people before you.  One is a believer of God and “the faith” and the other is a doubter who walks away from it.  Which one is “testing God” more.  If you take seriously the notion not to “test God” then it’s the Believer rather than the Doubter who is sinning.  It’s like if you have a job opening and the employer has to decide which of two people he’s going to hire.  Which person will be “tested” the more by the employer?  The guy he rejects, or the guy he hires?  The guy he hires, naturally.  It’s the same thing with God.  I have “tested” God extensively and mercilessly- - by my mere track record in the past of being to believe any sort of Crap that came down the pike.  The trouble is- - it’s God rather than me who keeps failing the tests.  I don’t need to test myself.  I have a pretty fair idea of where I am at and what I am capable of.  Sometimes I do better than I had expected - - sometimes - - not so much.

"THEORIES" ARE SELDOM "HOLY WRIT"

People on the right like to manipulate words and fog issues.  For one thing they don't understand linear logic.  Like an electric circuit - - you can't have something that goes around in a perpetual motion circle.  Not even electric "circuits" deo this.  They have a beginning and a termanus.  Logic can branch and fork, (and knowing the difference between the words "branch" and "fork" is significant, too) but they can't cross, and there can't be breaks in them.  Capish?  Words are blocks of both the English Language and of Computer Programs.  Like fractions - comparrisons need a "common denominator" or yardstick of measurement, to be really relevent.  If you don't understand the basic structure of Words you are at a severe intellectual disadvantage.  For instance suppose I said that my cigarette smoking was 25% less, would you know what I meant?  That means if I was smoking twelve and then began averaging nine per day, this would be 25 percent less just as if I were now smoking 15 a day that would be 25 more.  But now what if I say I am cutting my cigarette consumption to but four a day.  Could I then state that "I now smoke three times less than before"?  Not really.  I see how people arrive at that figure.  They say break-ins of homes are three times less if you have an alarm system.  What they mean is that they are 67% less.  Nothing can be more than a hundred percent less.  Just as it's impossible to give a hundred and ten percent effort.  Here is a note for Christian evangelists.  If you want your admonitions to be obeyed- - stop demanding what is intrinsiacly and mathematically impossible.  It's like if you're in a race and for the first half of the race you average thirty miles per hour and you have to average sixty miles per hour in order to even qualify how fast do you NOW have to go to make up the difference.  The answer is YOU CAN'T.  There are times when the word CANT is not an excuse but the fact.  By the way the use of the word "Excuse" in our culture is used in an ass-backwards manner.  You hear some irate adult saying to a kid "That isn't a Reason- - that's just an Excuse".  NO  The truth is that it IS a reason and NOT an "Excuse" as you so snidely put it.  Do you know how I know.  Because if what the kid said were in truth "Just an excuse" then it would be sufficient for you to Excuse his behavior.  Bet you never saw that one coming, did you?  Here is another one I just thought of today because of a recent dining room incident, so we are going all caps.  WELL, IT'S A GOOD IDEA IN THEORY BUT IN REALITY IT DOESN'T PAN OUT How many laments have you heard in your life like this?  You see Christianity is a good idea "in Theory
, it's a lovely - - Theory.  But as they say the Devil is in the details.  Ah but then you go "Who's Theory" and the answer has to come back "Why the one who instituted Christianity in the first place", and you go "who is that?" and they are forced to say "The Lord Jesus Christ" of course.  So now you've just admitted that Jesus Christ's "theory" failed.  How about that.  You follow a Theory and it fails and some how you can't bring yourself to abandon the Theory - - because it, like the Republican Platform last year is seen as inherently flawless.  Keep in mind the Political Mindset of right wingers.  They - - instead will say "The theory is sound but somehow (and they'll never say) it was "improperly exicuted".  Yeah.  Right wing madness would succeed "if only if it were properly executed".  Dream on,k dream on!  Can you see now why many Democrats say that the tea party credibility is already shot?  Stick a fork in them.  They're Done!

MACRO - MORE TELLING THAN MICRO

Many people think New Orleans has suffered the greatest population loss of any major city for all time.  But that’s not true.  Take the case of St. Louis.  This city tallied over 800,000 people in the decade of the ‘thirties.  It shrank to around 700,000 in the early sixties and was in the lower six hundreds in 1970.  Then the city suffered it’s biggest lost.  It went from over eight hundred thousand down to the high 400,000 range in the early 1980’s.  What sort of cataclysm could possibly cause a major US City to lose 27% of its population in a single decade?  I haven’t the vaguest.  So I thought losing 27%, if not more of my body weight in six years was horrendous.  But what of the populations of major denominational churches?  We keep hearing how these populations have been decimated but I really don’t have a statistical profile in my mind.  But it can’t be healthy at all for a major denominational branch like the Protestents to lose most of its major denominations only to be replaced by this non descript “non denominational” stuff we have now.  Of course if you really want to see decimation in action just look at the funding for the Space Program.  This has all been eliminated at this present time.