The Planning Morons A Blast From the Past from March 20 2013

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

The Planning Morons A Blast From the Past from March 20 2013

Sometimes I think that reading the news is what I do instead of exercise.  I mean, the whole purpose is to increase your heart rate, right?

Yesterday, Instapundit had a link to the Chinese creating super-genius-babies.  I thought “Okay.  This sounds like everything is going according to my predictions.*)

Of course, I found it a bit disquieting, because this is China, which ruthlessly puts to death toddler girls, rather than allowing their parents to raise them.  When someone who values human life so little starts messing with the genome, it’s disquieting.  Besides… besides, I didn’t think the science was quite there yet.

This is when I made my mistake.  I went to the site.

It wasn’t even the article.  That is stupid enough. It’s also the comments which raise the stupidity to the Nth degree plus one.  But let’s leave the comments for now and concentrate on the stupid  what China reports to be doing.  (Children, when totalitarians with full control of the press say anything, don’t trust AND verify.  Apply that wherever suitable.)

So… This article says that China is trying to improve the IQ of its population.  This was the first thing that made me go “oy” because, well, why is it that communists, supposed to be government by the people, always end up – one way or another – trying to create a new people?

Then we get to the definition of “intelligence.”  If I got the gist of the article right, they’re not looking for raw IQ as such, but for what I would call credentials “Where have you published?”  and “What college did you graduate from?”

At this point my head was hovering towards the desk, and I had to exert effort not to hit head on desk repeatedly because… Who in H*LL confuses credentials with IQ?  I mean, other than our media and the Chinese?  Take my children (please.  I give you a good price.)  The younger one has some testing issues, but the older on has always taken his tests with flying colors, had great grades and graduated from IB which most colleges respect.  So… why did he end up in a state school and not an ivy?  Mostly?  Because we didn’t have the contacts, we weren’t willing to hire a coach to see us through the application process, and we didn’t know where to go and what to do – in other words, the boys were handicapped by having parents who are out of the loop for these things.  I know for a fact some of the kids in their class who went to the ivy league schools are not only not as smart but not as proficient (and no, this is not a mother talking.  It’s damning my kids with faint praise.)

So… anyway, they’re picking these highly credentialed people from Europe and Asia (where of course, connections family, privilege have nothing to do with credentials.  Excuse me, I have some sarcasm stuck in my throat.)  And they’re examining the DNA to determine which sequence is common to all these people.  (Here, the older boy informs me that we have yet to be able to sequence the DNA of ova or sperm WITHOUT destroying them.  So, while they can determine that some sequence is present, by that time the reproductive material will be gone.  Never mind.)

Then, they plan to inseminate ova with this sequence with sperm with this sequence, sit back and wait for their geniuses to appear.

[Hits head against desk, to distract from greater pain of enduring the stupidity of central planners.]

Smart kids – smart people in general – are something I have a great deal of experience with.  And I find that nothing – nothing, except maybe the creation of great art – is imbued with more symbolic meaning by every day people.  And few myths of humanity, including the entire pantheon of Greece and Rome are more out of touch with reality than the myths that surround genius.

Someone in the comments brought up the existence of multiple forms of intelligence and got promptly pounded down.  To an extent that’s right, because “multiple forms of intelligence” has become code for “everyone is special.”  Which is bull hockey.  On the other hand, particularly when you approach triple niners, they will be very high across the board, but usually only one form will manifest.  They will SURELY not manifest all at once, anyway.  In fact, extremely smart kids often develop slower than other kids, at least for  a while. This is something that alarmed us with both of our kids, and  which led us to learn the phrase “Saltational development.”  This means that gifted (really gifted, not the schools idea of this) kids tend to develop in jumps.  Instead of say developing their drawing skill slowly and along a slope, they’ll be doing stick figures while the other kids in sixth grade are doing perspective drawings.  And then one day – you never see it coming – they pick up pencil and draw like DaVinci.  (This is not common, because there’s such thing as finger memory, but younger son pulled this on us.  I think it was a matter of not showing us the attempts, but the psychologist says I’m wrong and it was a matter of things clicking.)  And it’s that way with everything.  And because – particularly the very smart – will ONLY learn what they’re really interested in, this means none of them will be a genius across the board, and often can approach slow in some things.

There is something we in this house call “inverse genius” most often seen in older son, but often exhibited by all three males.  It is something so stupid only a genius could think of it to do it.  (Yeah, I put my finger in the blender while forgetting to unplug it.  But it can’t be inverse genius.  I’m not a genius.)

What I’m trying to get across is that even for people who have experience of dealing with people smarter than them genius, like pornography, is often a “I know it when I see it.”

There are also cultural variations. The reason China is looking for geniuses by credential is that this is the way genius is established in their culture.  Another component, as I understand it, is that Chinese education (and thus what’s considered “very smart”) is mostly based on memorization.  (It’s the same in Portugal, actually.  I was so so at it, so I made do with wild improvisation.  It served.  But my brother, who had an eidetic memory did much better than I)

This means that though the myth is that “genius” is genius, what China is looking for under that name would not be a genius in America.

Then comes the OTHER myth (in the comments, too) where the idea is that the Chinese are doing this to further their position in international commerce.

Children, we count several geniuses and a number of Mensa members among our acquaintance.  I don’t think a single one of them is a millionaire.  (Maybe one.)  And most of them aren’t even middle management.  Hell, if you’re looking for the Mensans in a business building, you’re more likely to find them in the janitorial service than in the boardroom.  (Dilbert got that absolutely right.)

There are several reasons for this (which make raising geniuses such a challenge) including the fact that they’re likely to try to do five or six things at once (older son: art, comics, writing, graphic design for family and friends, pre-med, fencing club.  And the least said about younger son the better when it comes to how he can find a thousand different things to do) which means less concentrated effort than the mildly intelligent person who pursues only one thing.  But also, and more importantly, geniuses tend to be Odds, which means they range from not fitting into any given human group to making other people run screaming.  Reading other people is NOT usually an ability of the highly gifted, either, which means in anything involving others they’re likely to be kept out in the cold.

However, even if we grant China the idea that they’re selecting for the right “genius” – i.e. that the article is not very faithful to their idea – there are other technical difficulties.  While they might be solved mid-century, they certainly aren’t now.  To put it bluntly, and risking offending people in the commenter pool: High IQ correlates, almost always with highly undesirable characteristics of an intellectual and physical nature (which, supposing it gives geniuses any advantage over other people – debatable – still explains why genius IQ hasn’t propagated through the population like wild fire.)  Autism, in some degree, seems to be almost inescapable above a certain IQ – and when it’s not there, you get the sensory stuff younger son has.  Or you get severe auto-immune disorders.  There might also be epigenetics involved, and I’m told that the gene sequence for genius is PROBABLY the same as for utter moron.  It depends on which geniuses get flipped in gestation or after birth.

So… If they’re really trying to do this, it’s one of those crazy totalitarian eugenics things that should make all sane people shudder.

Only it doesn’t.  The educated morons in the comments were going on about how this just means China is going to dominate everything and is leave us in the dust.

Of course, these same educated morons also believe that Chinese economy is doing great… based on reports coming from within a totalitarian regime with a controlled press.

Which proves that perhaps we DO need IQ improvement.  But NOT the way the Chinese are doing it. For one I should hope we have more respect for the infinite variety of human beings than to create them to order.

*[From Hoyt’s Future History – the background to Darkship Thieves and The Earth Revolution — middle of the twenty first century, it’s discovered that Russia has been creating the first form of “mules” – babies gestated by large animals and created from sperm/ova left over from infertility treatments.  This is a way of increasing young population, in order to have enough laborers to care for the increasingly older natural population.  The children are often mentally handicapped, due to a mistiming of enzimes.]

167 thoughts on “The Planning Morons A Blast From the Past from March 20 2013”

  1. It makes my smile just a little to know I filched my two daughters out from under the Chicoms back in 2002 and 2004.

    It makes me grin that Daughter #2 is an E-4 in the US Army.

    1. My youngest brother brought back a Chinese bride. They have four children now, three daughters and a son. All Americans. Take that ya commie bastiches.

        2. So, as a random aside – how DO talking bovine like their carp prepared?

          No particular reason, I’m just curious…

      2. Of course, (among other things I fixed submarines for a living) if reporting an error, one must be specific, so that it can be properly fixed.

        1. Ah trouble reports.

          Report: “Something loose in cockpit”

          Repair: “Something tightened in cockpit”

          Of course then there was the
          Report: “Hud fails under 3G right hand turn.”
          Maintenance: “Unable to reproduce condition on ground.”

          1. Oh gads, does that bring back memories. Other pilot/mechanic: “Yeah, the autopilot altitude hold keeps screwing up but I can’t duplicate it on the ground.”

            For those who are wondering, it turned out to be a pinhole leak in the atmospheric pressure sensor caused by metal corrosion, possibly dating back to when 45-60 MPH wind drove rain into the static vent.

            1. Ah, fun. They figured the HUD problem was a loose solder joint on one of the zillion micro vacuum tubes on the plane.

              No, they never did figure out which…

              1. That sounds about right. I swear, some airplane things sit around spending their down time trying to find new ways to malfunction and make everyone’s life interesting.

          2. “I did X and Y happened!”

            Weeks later, we manage to watch as he does R, Q, and Z and then X. . . .

            1. Or the “x” doesn’t work. “X” has been pulled and checked a dozen different times and a dozen different ways, and seems to be working fine.

              Finally get sat down with the user. The problem isn’t “x”. The problem is everything around “x” is jacked up, but the user doesn’t know that. They just know whenever they try to use “x” it doesn’t work right.

              Learning experience for everyone there. The customer may not know what they want or shave any idea how to get it, but they are the i person who can tell you where it actually hurts.

          3. My favorite along those lines was
            Report: Engine #3 missing
            Repair: Engine #3 found on wing after brief search

            1. Report: ADF does not operate in the OFF position.

              Repair: Replace loose nut behind copilot’s controls.

                1. Buddy of mine was a TAR airedale (AT) who got the following gripe from the SQUADRON COMMANDER, who was also a command pilot for an airline in his civilian life: Intercom does not work in the on full force position. the unit had one switch. it had two positions, ON and OFF

                1. I tried to find the episode of User Friendly (the webcomic) that used that joke so I could share it, but it looks like UF has vanished from the internet. I can’t even find a functional archive. 😦

        1. Thus exhibiting habits common to most of us geniuses. Do not forget I have seen a fair number of your unedited manuscripts. Takes a keen eye and a strong stomach that does!
          And you are too a genius niece O’ mine. American Mensa does not rescind your brain just because you stop paying dues. We are both living proof.

          1. Thank you, Uncle Lar! I too needed that reassurance. May I hope the same holds true for the 99 and 999 societies? Because otherwise I am in deep trouble and not just for lack of funds. 😉

  3. I think the best way to “improve” humans is the old fashioned way; by incentivizing people with the traits you want to keep or enhance to have more kids with like people. You know, like the Howard Families in Heinlein’s novels. Of course, that would require people to think in terms of centuries, 7 generations ahead of now. Which isn’t likely to happen when most people have a 10-minute attention span; and are more concerned with eating and enjoying themselves than planning who to procreate with so their grandchildren have 10% faster reaction times.

    2. To some degree maybe we have been doing this for a couple generations. By throwing men and women together in colleges/universities where 75-100 years ago the women might not have attended (or if they did attend college might have attended a female only institution). This is especially true in the engineering schools. Many of these were male only (My own alma mater only admitted women starting in 1972). Because we’re thrown together for 4 years (with little to no limitation or separation other than our cultures impose) this has likely increased the mixing of folks with (potentially) greater genetic IQ. This is of course totally speculative, though the number of double legacies (Both Mom and Dad attend the engineering school in question, or another one) seems to be on the increase. Of course having parents with the engineering bent could mean that their is a nurture issue too.

      One thing that I wonder about is the fact that certain classes of people on the milder end of the autism spectrum seem to do well in the sciences and engineering. I wonder if what we have is some complex multigene (like say hair or skin color) where several gene sites influence the overall result. I suspect if you have a few of the genes and it expresses as a high functioning precocious child that might have been called gifted or has what used to be called Aspergers. Have more and you start to run into the Savant model, Yet more and its full blown autism. Trying to play with this with genetic manipulation now is definitely skating into serious moral issues, although that will not bother the CCP. Even via traditional breeding techniques you’re going to tend to have a lot of issues. Not to mention the classic breeding techniques involve back crossing with very close relatives to fix some of the genes. And of course any and all of this assumes that there is some general gene pattern that relates to intelligence and that is not a gene that is activated by some environmental effect. Trying to breed/select for that gets MUCH harder. And of course these are humans we’re talking about and that is solidly into places we would rather not be going. That’s a “Brave New World” kind of universe.

      1. John W. Campbell did a trio of short stories where after the human race becomes soft and less intelligent on average (due to an alien Machine that “helps” them too much), another alien species arrives and starts breeding humans to try and recreate the species that built the magnificent ruins they discover. One group, more ruthless than the other, breeds brothers and sisters together. Of course, within a few of the aliens’ generations they’ve forgotten their good intentions and continue the breeding program to produce useful slaves. The third story tells how the humans get their freedom back.

      2. Already happening. Used to be the up and coming whatever, would marry someone either from the old neighborhood, someone from church, or someone in the executive typing pool (not enough of the last to go around). Now engineers are marrying engineers, lawyers to lawyers, doctors to doctors. Not universal. But common. (In our case forester to forester, for all that one of us ended up writing software.)

        1. On the flipside, they’re folks from different areas– and they tend to have siblings or friends back home that they can introduce.

          1. they’re folks from different areas
            ….

            True. Which for siblings and I, this was a good thing. Littlest sis and I both married from “out of Oregon”. My case because hubby came up to Beaver OS from San Diego. Sis’s case she was in CA and her husband came in from NE USA (somewhere). Middle sister married someone raised in Portland, but his folks came from the midwest somewhere. Reason why this is a good thing is the joke is we’re related to a huge percentage of Oregon. We’re always meeting new cousins (more than two to 4x, or more, removed, but still cousins).

            That is just from paternal grandmothers family. Paternal grandfathers family is local too, but only one each generation has had children. Grandpa finally broke that bad problem (6 of 7 children providing grandchildren, and on down the line). While my maternal line is extensive too, most are still in Montana.

            1. Your family stories are part of why I started poking at it. (another part are the folks having a meltdown about societal stratification and fossilization)

              Now, true, only one of my grandparents lived in the same region they were born as an adult, and her grandparents had all been born and mostly lived over-seas, but that isn’t the historical norm even in super-mobile America.

              1. Most of my relatives stayed close to where they were raised, though there have been some 300 mile moves. OTOH, I’m over 2000 miles from there, and we moved to southern Oregon as refugees from Dot Com Bust (V1.0) in the early Aughts.

                We’ll skip distance from birth, because a few family members moved long distances as tiny kids. One cousin was an AF brat, while the others had fathers with various degrees of wanderlust. Grampa Pete moved from Denmark to the Northern Plains, to Dallas, then lived in metro Midwest for the rest of his life. FIL bounced around California after immigrating from Canada. $SPOUSE is content to stay put as long as we can handle it.

                1. My dad’s oldest sisters family moved a lot. Every 3 to 5 years. Same town. Uncle and Aunt had a construction company. They’d build 3 or 4 homes, put them and theirs on the market, last one on the market came off the market until next set of homes were done. The oldest two were in HS before they were in the same house for more than 5 years. Once the kids were all out on their own, the parents move to a place on the river, which the kids sold when mom & dad both had passed. Those in the Grants Pass area might know the name: Kellenbeck …

                  My parents? My mom has been in her home for 60 years, this December (only original owner on her block). We’ve been in our home for 34 years this last November. We’ve talked about building our “dream home”. That is all it is. Talk. Then we both agree “we’d have to pack to move” …

              2. My generation (be it first cousins to 4th) has moved around some. But surprisingly enough, not that far. Pretty much west coast/PNW furthest. A few headed further east, moving around. Mom’s cousins, for the most part, have stayed in Montana (they were the ones who ended up on the farms/ranches). Then there are the Applegates that didn’t take the trek in wagon trains from the East coast in 1842/1843. They are concentrated in the NE US, with their own private, still in use, historical cemetery, only that one dates back to the 1600s (family has been in the US for nano second or two).

          2. General Universities may be (and in fact are) more women than men. Certainly seems to apply in my wife’s classes (She teaches Chemistry, the introductory Gen Chem 1 and the second semester of Physical Chem) at a small local state school. Engineering schools not so much. My alma mater was 3:1 male to female as of 2018 when younger daughter graduated so ~25%. Other pure engineering schools she looked at were similar (RPI, RIT) General universities with engineering schools (Northeastern, UMASS Lowell) tended towards the 60% plus number or a bit more for female, but the engineering schools seemed to be more male though not as strongly as the pure engineering schools. There are certainly far more women at engineering schools than in the past, it was 7:1 (12.5% half what it is now) when my wife and I graduated in the early 80’s.

            On the other side is a Christian College my elder daughter attended, about 9:1 female to male. The young men often had a hunted look 🙂 . That kind of ratio was consistent at all the other Christian schools she looked at (Messiah, Roberts Weslyan, at least one other). I think the balance is like that because those schools have strong focuses on teaching and nursing and even now those career paths appeal to a smaller portion of the male populace.

            I will note that a women with strong SAT and/grades seemed to have a moderate to strong advantage over males in applying. Younger daughter got into all the engineering schools whereas fairly similar male compatriots didn’t get some of the more selective ones (RPI in particular) so likely some slant there in admissions.

            1. In the early ’70s, the EE department at U of Redacted had 1-2% EEs, though the EE/CS and pure CS areas had more women. I started to see women engineers as coworkers at HP in the early 80s. Not sure of the final percentages as of 2001, but two of the low level engineering managers I dealt with were women.

              The processing side of semiconductors had a lot of women engineers, generally trained as chemists.

              2. Hard to tell which majors had the highest percentages. My major Computer Science seemed to have maybe 20%-25% women almost twice the going rate. Mechanical and Civil Engineering had few women majors. Chem Eng and Management seemed more. EE maybe at the rate. By 2018 things had changed from what I saw visiting my daughter and her friends and attending graduation. Lots of female ME/EE/Chem Eng. The ME were mostly biomechanical focused according to younger daughter (denigrated as a “girly” major ). CS was much more male than it had been in my day (and if anything they’d gotten squirrelier). Some robotics (didn’t exist as a separate field in my day). Civil had increased some but still seemed below the overall enrollment rate for women.

                1. Late ’80s, don’t know the percentage of women in CS to male students. A lot more than the late ’70s percentage of women in Forestry track, even counting the ones in the newer “Forestry Recreation” (Parks) track, which was the majority of the women (rest were Management, Engineering, and Science).

  4. Hrmm… an odd (or Odd?) thought occurred. Are those who are “genius” (or is it ‘adept’?) at ‘reading’ others… are those sociopaths? I suppose not all, but some (what fraction I do not know) realize they have this ability AND can exploit it for their personal gain – whether money/power/jollies…

    The other part is, some folks get a bit freaked by masks – and not merely the COVIDiocy things, but the costume sort. Did a critical (“I know what you are really thinking.”) channel get cut off and now they have to, for a shocking and horrible change, have to resort to other than facial expression reads?

    1. That makes sense. If you have a heightened skill set, one that’s not obvious to others, and you combine it with an innate or learned “rules schmules I’m gonna do what I want” attitude . . . It could get scary if the individual chooses to use his/her/its power for evil or even just for personal gratification.

      I think it was Oliver Sachs or another psych author who described someone who was completely face-blind. For whatever reason, this individual could not process facial expressions, and was having a lot of problems because of it. Just imagining trying to sort out the meaning if someone’s vocal tone and words didn’t match their body language gives me a mild headache.

      1. It can rfesult in a rather skittish person who frequently upsets others while also getting a reputation for being right about things he shouldn’t have been able to know about… which either gets noted as “gosh, kids sure are observant” or suspicions of being a villain.

      2. Before age ten I think, I discovered that I could not elicit laughter nor praise from others– peers, especially– with any sort of regularity. I could unsettle and alarm them quite easily, though. So shock-value gags were my go-to humor for much of my childhood and youth, in social settings.

        (What do you mean, it’s not funny? Your abrupt distress was hilarious!)

      2. People gathered around wearing masks
        and they’re hidden from me well
        what’s in their minds
        what’s in their hearts
        no one can really tell
        so i leave the party and i go outside
        and i see it everywhere
        everyone is still wearing masks
        when the party is no longer there

      3. Yeah, I keep expecting to hear Rod Serling’s voice in the background. Pleasant dreams everyone. Bwahahahahaha.

  5. As far as brilliant people doing really stupid things, the Mensa Bulletin used to have a regular feature titled “Turn of the Table”. The one I remember best was a woman who followed a chain of reasoning that people cooked things in oil because I was hotter and food cooked faster. Therefor, you should be able to do a 3 minute egg in 1 minute. Please don’t try this at home or anywhere else…

      1. I suppose trying it in a hot cell with Waldos and shatter-proofresistant glazing might be safe, but what a mess…

        1. Seems to me that the best approach if one was to actually do it would involved distance, remote control, and a telescopic means of recording video.

    2. Yeah, I have several Mensa members in my family. Some of them are so incredibly stupid on an everyday existence level the rest of the family have joked that their test results must have been switched with the village idiot.
      Some of them are very, very normal seeming and you would never know they were geniuses. And a couple of them are the stereotypical asocial genius.

      Genius is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.

      1. To be clear there is precisely one criterion for Mensa membership. One must at some point in time score in the top two percent on any of a large number of IQ tests approved by the organization. Present certified proof, pay your membership fee, and you’re in.
        Some folks breeze in with school test results, others may take a dozen different IQ tests before one time on a good day making the grade.
        And the benefits of membership? Mostly just bragging rights and a bit of social networking.

      2. Y’know? That explains a lot for me on a family level. My bio-father is casually brilliant, mechanically gifted, and, as you can guess from his designation, not precisely on my Favorite People List. And he’s got an overactive version of the “humans tell stories/find patterns” twitch, so his Very Good Brain makes connections between EVERYTHING, whether they’re connected or not. Which has led to a collection of conspiracy theories that should really go in the Smithsonian (and yes, I know my audience here).

        Just a random thought that caught my interest. Thanks.

    3. Reminds me of our first microwave oven in the early 70’s.
      I thought it would be a good idea to try cooking a “soft boiled” egg in it.
      The explosion (what? – I poked a hole in the top to let steam out!) left an awful mess – and back in those days the perforated metal screen in the door had no glass on the inside. Believe me I never tried that again after having to clean the gunk out of all those holes.

      1. Had a guy at my college summer job put a foil-wrapped sandwich in the brand-new microwave. The blue lightning crawling around the inside was impressive. Scary, too.

  6. And if they ever did succeed in making smarter than the average bears, that does not mean it will end the way they would want it too.

    Been doing world building on a society that actually succeeded in making intelligent fabricants. There is a reason accountants are no longer produced.

    Still need to work through all the various ramifications of all of it. I’m actually not sure they can even reliably make stupid people either, but I don’t want to slot into the “noble savage” trope either.

    Honestly feel like I’m working with themes beyond my skill level. Wondering if I should just shelve this one for now and work on a simpler story.

    1. Just follow a character through a short story interacting with your culture. You’ll put it together pretty quickly. Even better if your character isn’t native to this culture.

  7. Having had an incarnation as a paleontologist I can attest that one problem with all such eugenic schemas being that one cannot predict the traits that might be necessary for the species to survive. That “moron” you sterilize might carry the genetics for humanity to survive the next plague or ice age or whatever. That “genius” trait you encourage might be the next short lived dog incapable of reproduction.

  9. There are two mutually contradictory truths in gene-sculpted children.
    1. It will be a great benefit
    2. Because humans are humans, it will also be a giant disaster

    Why? There are literally thousands of ‘one tick of DNA’ inherited genetic diseases that could be knocked out of the human genome without anybody shedding a tear. Sickle cell? Spherocytosis (something I’m familiar with in my family) A hundred different inherited heart diseases, kidney disorders, bad teeth issues, etc… If the process becomes common, they all go away.

    That being said, the depth of humans’ ability to screw up a good thing is endless. (starting with a single apple, of course) Want a genius kid and pay a lab a few thousand dollars to have the correct genes tweaked? Great, but you wind up with Lex Luthor or some other case of malign hypercognition syndrome that makes ordinary behavior problems look tiny. Want your kids tall enough to play basketball? That’s tall enough for a world of spinal issues and joint problems. The list is endless, and there will be a thousand scam artists for every entry.

    1. The Reader wonders how many times humanity will push on the DNA rope before it figures out that it cannot predict the outcome of doing it. His guess is quite a lot, with much associated tragedy.

      1. After all it’s done as a regular process in animal husbandry. Breed from a limited pool for specific traits, select the successes, and cull the recessive failures. Humans have done something similar within isolated communities through inbreeding and the resultant natural selection. Heinlein touched on this in his stories of the Howard family of long lives.

        1. “cull the recessive failures. ”

          The civilized world frowns on that when its humans you’re culling, which is where the project really breaks down.

          1. Ah and there’s the rub. Methinks we count far too much on the world having become and continuing to be civilized.

            1. And in animal husbandry, you continue to cull the recessive failures on down through the generations…

              What the Reader is skeptical of is poking at a range of human traits with modern DNA processing without the willingness to cull. The system is likely too complicated to predict (to the Reader it makes climate ‘prediction’ look positively possible by comparison).

          2. Not even just the civilized world, any place successful enough to have not-directly-immediate-survival resources.

            Because humans are FAR more than their genetic fitness, and given a chance, we adapt.

            Places that don’t “cull their failures have greater success.

            It can provide a short-term increase in resources, which is why it stays popular… but long term, it’s stupid.

        2. It’s the culling that’s the issue.

          Earnest writers about a century ago would warn how you don’t just breed a Holstein and a Jersey. On the rare occasion where you do, you watch and cull the calves, and since it was evil to do that to humans, it was best to keep different breeds of humans from interbreeding.

  10. Not a genius or even a scientist, but one way of increasing the IQ of the Chinese population would be shooting the leadership of the Chinese Communist party down to the city block level.

    I believe this should be tested with experimental field research.

  11. Nice article, and I know it’s ten years old. I like the bit about Mensa. A fella in our writers group is in Mensa. Let’s just say that his genius does not show up in his writing, but he is a nice guy so we’re friends. And no, when he asks me if I would like to attend their next meeting, I decline. Love the term, inverse genius. Very funny.

    One thing…. this jumped out at me, “Of course, these same educated morons also believe that Chinese economy is doing great… based on reports coming from within a totalitarian regime with a controlled press.”

    Of course in the quote you’re talking about the Chinese press. But that description, “reports coming from within a totalitarian regime with a controlled press.” IS US. That describes the state of our press and system.

    So, that triggers the paranoid bone. When our ‘elected’ ‘representatives’ tell us that, relative to us, the Chinese are no threat, my paranoid bone starts to ache. Why? Cause I think many of our ‘elected representatives,’ were selected, not elected, and I also think that many of them represent China, because they’re whores and China has the money now to pass around.

    So if our betters tell us that China is not a threat… Well…

    I recall reading an article about early reports of the Japanese Zero in Southeast Asia. The early reports were before Pearl Harbor. They reported that the plane could climb faster, higher, etc. And all of these reports were DOWNPLAYED by our genius suits in the Military and Gubmint. After all, they said, a plane of that size would weigh xxxx, and at that weight could never achieve those speeds or climb that quickly. Well, they were all wrong because the Japanese ‘threw away’ the old book (that our Navy relied on for building planes) and started their airplane design from scratch.

    My point, and I know I’ve moved off topic slightly, my point is that China, if their government is wrong-headed and arrogant, is not alone. We seem to have a government like that now too. And stupid or wrong headed and arrogant people can get themselves and those around them in a lot of trouble.

    2. “Well, they were all wrong because the Japanese ‘threw away’ the old book (that our Navy relied on for building planes)”

      You mean the part that said the pilot surviving the first burst was a good thing, so let’s add armor and self-sealing gas tanks? If your pilot is treated as disposable, there are lots of corners you can cut.

      1. Whoa… now I’m throwing the pilot away. No, not the business about armor and self-sealing gas tanks. I’m talking about building the airframe of the plane. Engineering departments have ‘look up tables’ and reference books on materials, stress, weight, flexibility, etc. I’m not an engineer but I helped them put their intel into words. So, there might be a book that tells the designer how many holes they can put in a piece of metal to eliminate weight… that sort of thing. Instead of just going to the reference books to build their wings and fuselage, the Japanese built them from scratch. Complete redesign. There is an article out there somewhere which some eager beaver can look up. It’s in Naval Proceedings Magazine, probably from the 80s or 90s, and it talks about how OUR military intelligence DOWNPLAYED the reports coming out of IndoChina about the new wonder plane the Japanese had, called the Zero.

        I’m not going to comment further on this, I gotta go smoke my crack pipe a while.

        1. and snelson was still right, the Zero got its performance by eliminating things like survivability, not by ‘throwing the whole book out’.

          1. Drachinifel has a really detailed breakdown on the Zero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApOfbxpL4Dg
            Long but massively informative.

            Short answer is, the Zero was an exceptional design for 1940, but the inability of Japan to produce high powered engines meant it was in front line service for far longer than it should have been. Understand, in 1940, almost no fighters had armor or self sealing fuel tanks. The F2A didn’t. The F4F-3 didn’t, and even the Spitfire never had full self-sealing fuel tanks through the end of the war (the top fuselage tank was never able to be made self-sealing so the pilots just drained it first so it was normally empty in combat.)

            The Allies’ ability to produce good quality 100 octane gas in quantity (later up to 150 octane) meant that engines like the 2000hp R-2800 had a first run date of 1937, and was readily available to be built into new high performance fighters like the Hellcat and Corsair. that’s two years before even the 800-1100Hp Sakae engine the A6M used, and that 1100hp is only if you’ve got 92 octane gas the IJN didn’t seem to readily have.

            Late war, Japan was able to field heavily armed and armored fighters, powered by things like the 1800hp Ha-45 Homare. That engine first ran in 1941, four years after its primary American competitor…

            Should the A6M have had armor added later in its career? Yes, and there were designs drawn up to do it without crashing the plane’s performance and range, but the design team appears to have been focused on the A7M, and various spot designs, which ultimately never got fielded largely because it looks like the Ha-43 engine it was supposed to use never seems to have turned into a reliable engine producable in numbers.

            But when you are looking at the A6M vs Hellcat/Cosair/Mustang matchups, you’re really looking more at the equivalent of taking an FM-2 up against a Ki-84 and expecting an equal matchup. the fact that an A6M was still a legitimate threat by that point in the war is a testament to the basic design.

            Now, re-examining all the assumptions sometimes goes wrong too. I believe the entire IJN light cruiser fleet became testament that…

            1. We spend a lot of time talking about equipment, but in 1941 the Japanese pilots were simply better than the US pilots. They had significantly more flying time and they had combat experience over China. The problem for Japan was they couldn’t replace those pilots when they were lost and the US could. Sure better airplanes helped, and Japan took too long to upgrade but the human factor was key. By 1945, Japan had some superb fighters and no one to fly them.

              It’s the same thing with the Germans, In 1940 the Allies had more tanks and better tanks than the Germans, but the Germans used them better, In 44/45, the German tanks, tank for tank, were better than the Allies’ — when they worked, which wasn’t often and much of that not working came from lack of skill by the drivers. The US and British tanks were used better so they won.

              The Soviets … well sometimes quantity has a quality all its own if the leadership is willing to expend men without limit.

              1. Partly because their standards were too high — too many washed out.

                And partly because the US yanked pilots after so many missions, which meant that their new pilots were trained by people with combat experience.

                1. From what I’ve heard on the IJ pilot training, it was exceptionally bad. If you survived it, you could fly, but we’re not combat capable, to the point that the active air wings pretty much had to train the new pilot into something useable. It ultimately meant they could not replace pilots effectively.

                  Greg’s Airplanes and Autos talks about it, I think in his Ki-115 and Ki-84 series.

                1. One of the things the Panzer units didn’t have; they literally taught that if your tank broke you could load it on a train and send it back to the factory….. They designed for a Europe well provided with rails and where everything they wanted to attack was within 500 miles or less. OOOpsie.

              3. IIRC the Japanese problem with pilots was that they kept their pilots flying while Americans would “pull back” our best pilots and use them to train new pilots.

                Thus while the Japanese were training new pilots, the new pilots wouldn’t be trained by their best pilots.

                1. I seem to recall that the Midway carriers were staffed with the most experienced pilots in the IJN, so when the carriers went down, the potential training cadre went down with them.

                  Sounds like TPTB in Imperial Japan were not really familiar with Murphy and how to deal with him.

              4. Two stories come to mind:
                In one of those big budget WWII movies the Germans had captured a US Army mail truck and were going through its contents. They found a boxed chocolate cake sent by a soldier’s family. One German officer remarked “the Americans have the logistics to send cake to their troops. We will lose this war!”
                Early in WWII when Germany and Russia were still allies before Operation Barbarossa the Germans demonstrated the capabilities of their new Panzer tanks to a Russian military team in hopes of overawing them. The Russians went home. By the time the Germans attacked Russia they were met with massive new Russian tanks that could shrug off German guns and literally run over and crush their Panzers.

    3. And once the US found out how the Zero got such great performance (spoiler: they skipped the armor, so the power to weight ratio was wonderful, even with a smallish engine [by fighter aircraft standards]), they were able to make planes to exploit that fact, thus negating the advantages of the Zero. Seems an armor-less airplane is a problem if you can shoot it. OTOH, the contemporary USN aircraft in the early days of the war had problems with the predicate condition.

      On the gripping hand, the Japanese did the same trick with the “Betty” bomber, also known as the flying cigarette lighter.

      1. The U.S. Navy took a brute-force approach. They replaced the F4F Wildcat’s 2,000 HP engine with a 2,500 HP Wright Cyclone II, beefed up the airframe and called it the F6F Hellcat. Not as maneuverable as the A6M Zero, but faster. For a fighter, faster is enough. Faster and tougher is a near-unbeatable combination.

        Japanese pilots got used to out-climbing the Wildcats, then looping back to blast them when they pooped out. Some of them tried that trick on the Hellcats. Once.

        1. If memory serves, the more advanced planes (Corsairs and P-38 Lightnings, I think) would hang around at high altitude and dive on lower-level planes. It’s been a while since I’ve read my books on the Pacific theater, but I believe it was quite effective.

            1. When I read Paul Brickhill’s bio of Douglas Bader, one of the first things he recommended when discussing fighter tactics post Battle of Britain was to plot the sun on the ops board so the controllers could steer aircraft to intercept using it.

          2. Boom and zoom was an established tactic that everyone tried to do when they could. Dogfighting was something you only did when you screwed up.

        2. At least in the propeller world there are two basic schools of design an angles fighter and an energy (or zoom and boom) fighter. The first is intended for very close tight turning battles, the second tends to be heavily armed, high speed with fast climb rates, it is meant to make a single pass and then extend away out of the fight returning once it has gained altitude and an energy advantage over the opponent. Japan with its samurai/ bushido model of warfare leaned towards angle fighters, the Zero is an epitome of this type getting the agility by keeping weight and wing loading low. US fighters were of both types, Classic energy fighters included the P-47, p-38 and the Hellcat and Corsair. The P-51 was more in the angles model but also had good speed and climb. The wildcats were just kind of under powered as were the P-40. if you want to really get into fighter combat tactics, this (https://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Combat-Maneuvering-Robert-Shaw/dp/0870210599) Fighter Combat Tactics and Maneuvering by Robert Shaw is THE bible of that school.

        3. F4Fs had a 1200hp P&W. F6Fs had a 2000hp P&W. Hellcat was faster and also out turned the Zero at 200+knots. Also, F4F tactics were switched to boom&zoom and Thach weave in 1942. That pretty much evened the results until the F6F came out. F6F design was informed by a captured Zero…it was made to take advantage of every Zero deficiency.

        4. Tactics matter.

          We mostly used pairs, for example the “Thatcher Weave”. (Matter of survival. Lone wildcat vs zero were often dead wildcats.) Japanese pilots were more prone to single attacks. (Because demonstrably they could.) Two on one is often fatal.

  12. “Who in H*LL confuses credentials with IQ?”

    People with impressive credentials tend to do that. About ten years ago my daughter told me about having that discussion with her fellow grad students, some of whom didn’t really believe that anyone without a graduate degree could be very smart. Daughter, on the other hand had grown up in a family with lots of very smart people of quite varied educational attainment.

    1. “discussion with her fellow grad students, some of whom didn’t really believe that anyone without a graduate degree could be very smart. ”

      Then either they aren’t very observant, or they’re rich enough that they don’t have to
      consider the option of working as a university janitor to get their degrees on the cheap.

      Seriously, you pick a proper university, and any one of the janitors is as likely to be working on a higher degree than any one of the students.

      1. Sheltered, most likely. Grad students live a very, very constricted life, most of them. Well, anthropology grad’s don’t, because we had to work in the mud out in the world. Similar programs probably work the same way. But a lot of grad students? Rarely poke their noses out of the program.

        For raw intelligence, I’ve met low level secretaries that could run rings around your average post-doc. Instant memory of facts over a broad range weeks to years after the fact, multitasking, prioritization, and specialized knowledge and problem solving- and still just working a desk under a better salaried professional. Ditto veteran nurses working under doctors that ought by rights to know better.

        For general intellectual ability, I think the upper range would not be found near the upper income range, for the most part. The CEO skillset does not require it. Nor does any position in office bureaucracy that I could name off the top of my head.

        1. Sheltered, especially the ones that go straight from HS to College 1.0 and then College 2.0. Those of us who had worked in the Real World™between bouts of academia had a very different take on things. (And went out of our way to make life easier for the custodians and building repair staff.)

          1. I saw the difference between the two groups when I entered the MSEE program 12 years after the BSEE. Those fresh out of undergrad tended to complain that course X or instructor Y were “toooo haaaaaaaard!”, while the few old timers just bore down.

            Saw some cheating in the short-time group, too. Protip: if you are going to copy, don’t do it in the lecture hall (take home exam, big class) an hour before the exam paper is due. At least do it in the pizzeria and buy your source a beer or three. Better yet, DO THE DAMNED WORK YOURSELF! (FWIW, take home exams were rare, and most of the classes had really small sizes. There weren’t too many where such a stunt could have been contemplated.)

          2. My nearest brother went from college to work to graduate school. He said they really liked students who did that (his degree was engineering.) Students who had actually worked in the field had a better grasp of what was actually important.

            Plus his work had paid for his grad degree, even though he didn’t actually go back to them afterwards.

            1. HP would grant certain engineers funding to go to Stanford for an MS. One of my co-workers took advantage of that program, then changed to another company shortly after graduation. Apparently, HP didn’t have any contractual agreements for such people.

              They didn’t for my more modest U. I had to pay the tuition and book costs upfront, then if I got a decent grade (B- was the cutoff, I think–it was in the late ’80s), I’d get reimbursed, plus the books were mine. At that time, two courses plus books ran about $1200 a quarter.

              Sometimes, the challenge was getting the books, but the Valley had a variety of tech bookstores at that time. I knew them all… The courses were usually run by adjunct instructors with indifferent support from the university bookstore. Since it was pre-‘zon, I used and had great luck with Computer Literacy Books (later called “Fatbrain” for dubious reasons). Printer’s Inc (RIP) in Palo Alto was another good source.

                1. Assuming Wiki has it right, Computer Literacy got bought by CBooks Express in 1997, and turned into Fatbrain. They got bought by B & N in 2000. I don’t know if they bothered to keep the Fatbrain brand alive.

                  A websearch on the name brings up a toy company and a cyber-defense one. Love to see a mashup of those two…

        2. Did mine one class at a time, after work. Of course, the program was designed for that so everyone in it was working. I don’t know how come of them did it.

          1. With difficulty. My program was offered by a Silicon Valley university (not Stanford, but decent) that offered engineering classes at 7-9AM, with each class needing two days a week. (Normal quarters. Summer ran 4 days a week. Did it once. Whee.) That meant I could work full time (waggles hand) and get the school work done in the evening, and actually get to bed eventually. Four years worth of sleep deprivation, and the hearing problem (otosclerosis, eventually fixed later) made the lectures “interesting”.

            The legal beagles had a similar setup but their classes ran 5-7PM and 7-9PM. Between the two programs, the U did quite well for itself.

  13. “You’ve been telling me your a genius since you were seventeen,
    and all the time I’ve known you I still don’t know what you mean.
    The weekend at the college didn’t turn out the way you planned,
    The things that pass for knowledge I just don’t understand”.

    Steely Dan “Reeling in the Years”

  14. FWIW
    I’m a retired teacher – I’d taught in urban, rural, and suburban districts. Over my career, probably more than 3,000 students total (yes, a few years, classes were huge). As some years I taught semester classes, that number is, if anything, an underestimate.
    In all that time, I ran across VERY few true geniuses. Maybe 3-4. They didn’t necessarily have the highest grades, but they had minds of a very original turn.
    Most of the kids were smart enough. Capable of getting decent grades in school, benefiting from further education, and earning a decent living.
    A few were absolute dullards. Not that many. A lot more were either behaviorally ‘challenged’ (euphemism for complete brat), or lazy – in some cases, so lazy that if breathing required effort, they’d suffocate.
    More than a few were deliberately self-addled with drugs. There was one kid I always thought a little stupid. Then, after a stay in rehab, he came back to class, and I realized that he’d been seriously using drugs. Hey, it didn’t look that different.
    But, the majority of the ‘better’ students were by no means geniuses. They were smart enough, and had both good skills and the discipline to put them to good use.
    But, not geniuses.
    As it happens, I had a smart brother. WAY smarter than the rest of us, who fell around the 125-135 range. He taught himself to read, made 3-dimensional paper and tape masks that were both beautiful, and fit perfectly – at around 3-4 years old.
    So, clearly gifted.
    He did well enough in school, but – due to our family’s not being middle-class enough, had not been put into gifted level classes. He was unbelievably bored in school. By high school, they’d identified him as capable, and he managed to get into the AP track.
    However, no one in Guidance managed to realize that he needed some help getting into a good school – he literally had no idea how to do it. So, he attended the local community college, got an Associates in Business (Computers focus), and went on to make a decent 6-figure income most of his working life.
    Could he have been another Bill Gates? Possibly, but he lacked what Gates had – a family with connections and money to propel him to success. Pull helps, at least for getting into Elite colleges, and finding investors.
    Now, how does that all relate to China’s plans?
    Nobody really knows what leads to really high IQ. As was pointed out, it often correlates with social ineptitude (which both my brother and Gates suffer from).
    I like to think God balances his gifts – yes, you can be smart – but when making emotional decisions, that same person will fall for an obvious gold digger, or not understand why partners might not like being called ‘stupid’ (Gates had often offended staff with just that sort of putdown).
    You may be beautiful, but lack empathy for others.
    You may be athletic and graceful, but have a shortened career due to injuries.
    It tends to balance out. Read “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming” by Rob Dreher, in which he examines his sister’s life – spent working in her home town, raising a family, and not achieving the fame or money of her brother – and concludes that she followed a better path.
    China doesn’t lack for smart people. What they lack is Lions – independent rebels that challenge the status quo.

    1. Bill Gates is no genius. Gates is an exploitive sociopath, profiting off smarter people’s work. That set the pattern for Microshaft, a company that got ahead by shafting its competitors and its ‘partners’ without compunction.

      1. Gates is a lucky sperm too. His mother’s friendships with the chairman of IBM was why it got put in the PC, which is what made Microsoft. No IBM PC, no Microsoft. On the other hand, you have to be in it to win it and MS Dos did exist so he’s not entirely a lucky sperm, He’s also one of the best identifiers of talent in history. I agree he’s a sociopath, but so were Henry Ford and Sam Colt to pick two at random.

        1. MS-DOS did NOT exist. Gates sold phantomware to IBM, then used the money to take over a small computer company that was working on a multitasking OS for the 8086. During development they hacked up a copy of Digital Research’s CP/M-86 to load and test their new OS. They called it QD-DOS, for Quick’n’Dirty. It was never intended to be used for anything other than internal development. They didn’t have a license to sell it. Gates made them abandon their OS project, hack on QD-DOS some more, and then presented it to IBM as MS-DOS.

          Digital Research sued, but Gates and IBM kept the suit tied up in court for years. I think it was settled out of court for chump change.

          1. OK. I learned something today. I had worked on a pre IBM version of MS Dos [NEC) and thought it did exist. Been a long time so I must have my details wrong.

              1. It was called MS-DOS, which doesn’t make it MS-Dos it could just have been pirated and labeled. This would have been 1982. I think the PC came out in ‘83. That Gates has been a psychopath all along shouldn’t really surprise me.

    2. On beauty… Methinks its a bit more complex. Let me try and explain.

      Beauty, intelligence, these things can be and often are a form of power. And a curse, as well. Everyone with eyes can see beauty. Can’t not see beauty, in fact- males are literally hardwired for it. It’s not a conscious response. Women have it too, though it is a bit different as I understand it.

      But physical beauty has an undeniable affect on other people. People will react to it. Some want to possess it. Others to merely be close to it. Some want attention from the beautiful. Some are jealous of it. But it is rarely, if ever, ignored.

      All that attention, all those expectations, and wants have an effect on the personality of the beautiful. They get things offered to them that normal people do not. They have temptations and threats that normal people do not. And they get it constantly, without relief or cessation save for stolen moments when alone or with trusted companions.

      Beauty warps a personality, if that person’s psyche is not resilient enough to weather it. Rather the pressures that beauty faces do. This does not excuse the callousness, the manipulations, the cynicism or the cruelty that quite often comes with it.

      As the beautiful age and lose their instant attraction, some of them begin to crave the attention they once disdained. They can go to increasing lengths to get it. Plastic surgery is a common route, but they can also begin to act in an increasingly deranged manner.

      Intellect has its own pitfalls. When your brain matches patterns on a broader scale, makes faster connections, and generally works more efficiently, you have more temptations than the person of average intellect, generally speaking, as well. Arrogance, falling in love with one’s own pet theories, and constant underestimation of others’ competence and general intellect are common.

      It can get worse, as one accrues education, too. They can begin to attribute impossible things to intelligence, things that the human mind quite literally cannot accomplish. Things like ordering an entire human economy down to the smallest tack and thread, simply because you are the smartest one and therefore have all the answers. Or thinking that every problem can only be solved properly by the educated, credentialed elite, rather than the ones that work with the problem daily and have a much broader and deeper understanding of the problem than someone that just dropped in and thinks they have the perfect solution.

      It’s not just the smart and the beautiful, though. Power can come from just being one of the bigger guys around. Other people might think you’re slower than you are- mentally and physically. They might be more afraid of you without every even meeting you formally- and believe you me, that can affect a personality right quicklike. One can become a bully, reveling in the power, or try and make themselves smaller, less threatening. Short people, tall people, redheads, the way one dresses and presents themselves- all of this can provoke a reaction in others which can in turn put pressure on the person themselves. Some of those reactions can be very, very bad, and some people handle the pressure very, very poorly. And some transcend those pressures and become better people for it.

      I do not put the blame on Himself for any of this. I mean no disrespect, but the decisions made by Man are the burden of Man alone- and when we inevitably fail, if we’re lucky, those failures can be traced back to our own actions and responses. We can choose to be moral, despite the terrible things that have been done to us. We can decide to be charitable, despite being cheated. We can choose to bear up our burdens with grace, instead of complaining about the weight added because someone else did not do their fair share.

      Life itself is a priceless gift. What we do with it is both our burden and can also be our joy.

      1. We do not see the larger pattern. Had bad fall January16, could have broken hip, but cane I used shifted most of the force to my rotator cuff. So my dominant right hand does not work if you try to lift it. Have had major problems getting Kaiser to do the right thing. Finally have MRI appt for 1-27.

        Stopped to file a complaint with patient services. The guy thanked me. He was going to forward this complaint to upper levels, because it was important. Realized my pain may save someone elses life later, if they change their procedures. Planting a fig tree. I didn’t have to spend another hour to tell my tale, but turned aside. Someone else who didn’t have the stubbornness that I do, might just have been sitting home, without care. So perhaps pain with purpose.

        Perhaps this is the question. “Will you do the right thing without reward?” The author invites us to join His story. Will we? Our every action can be of cosmic significance. We just never know.

        They keep wanting me to take pain medication. I tell them that pain is my friend, to warn me of danger. My subconscious saying: “Don’t do that”.

        1. The doctors are not the ones in charge of your medical treatment; the bureaucrats are. You didn’t check off the right boxes to ‘qualify’ for an MRI scan.

          Semi-Socialized Medicine at its finest, folks — restricted, rationed and by the numbers. The Leftroids tell us full-bore Government Health Care will be even more efficient.
          ———————————
          There are forms of stupidity that businesses can’t indulge in. There are no such limitations on the stupidity of government.

          1. When you reward doctors for not providing services, this is what you get. It is easy to get an xray. Just walk in. The MRI requires appointments. So not Canada bad, but you need to be pushy. It is true that when you get paid to do nothing, you get lots of nothing.

        3. Pain medication is good for reminding your body that you are now okay.

          Pain meds also help you heal by reducing inflammation.

          It is something to watch, because of addiction and also to avoid losing those danger signals. But it is not something to refuse automatically, IMHO. If you would give your dog a pain pill for it, you can take one too.

          1. This is an issue of trust. Do we trust our pain to warn us, or do we ignore it, and make it go away. As long as there isn’t any pain, there isn’t a problem. Pain can be untrustworthy. How do we know we can trust our pain?

            There are two words that explain why men die sooner. “I’m Fine.” Not wanting to admit they are in pain. Not listening to their pain. Will we make pain our friend, not our jailer?

            Headed to hospital for MRI finally. Will learn what my pain has been trying to tell me.

          2. Unless it is from lifting weights, when you don’t want to reduce the benefits from the exercise. (Note – it is far better to take a little something than to be too stiff and sore to move the next day, but all things in moderation. You and your trainer know what’s best for you.)

    3. Governments and Things That Wish To Govern often figure they MUST have their thumb on the scale, as it were. And fail to realize that to aid and abet prosperity by genius and innovation Step One is “Keep your hands OFF of things and let people go …. be people.”

    4. That’s because, should such a “lion” happen along, they’re disappeared as soon as they’re noticed…

  16. So Project Veritas put out a video that showed a very high up executive from Pfizer telling about how they were engaging in some sort of evolution of COVID so they could continue to sell the Vaxx

    This in NOT that video.

    This is the video when O’Keefe himself shows up to confront the guy who actually Loses. His. Mind. It just came out.

    These people are evil and unhinged and must be stopped.

Comments are closed.