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JS, PhD demonstrates how reading comprehension is unnecessary in academia:

Torture/Interrogation does work or it would not be done. If you think that stop trying to get information out of captured terrorist will stop them from cutting the heads off our prisoners is folly. The whole war is about civilization, ours or theirs and the choice should be clear. We don’t try to kill them as a matter of religious doctrine and we will leave them alone if they would do the same. You as a Christian should know that.

One presumes that JS equally enthusiastic about astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis, after all, they must work or they “would not be done”. The degree to which he manages to miss the point is astonishing; whereas I never suggested that refraining from torture would change the way in which our prisoners are treated, I stated outright that torture is an ineffective tactic about as useless as cannibalism. And given his contention that the whole war is about the survival of our civilization, one would think that JS would be seriously troubled by the Bush administration’s desire to abandon what has hitherto been a historic aspect of it.

What this administration wants is to clarify what is acceptable under law and what is not. This will not only protect our professionals but also the incarcerated individuals. I do not understand why anybody could be against that. Are we the ones that go out and set roadside bombs to kill anything that is near it? Do we attack and kill our own on a daily basis because we disagree with them? Do we burn mosques because some Islam cleric makes a derogatory remark about Christians?

Do we eat fish on Fridays? Do we wonder why Larry Johnson has not rushed effectively in the first two weeks of the NFL season? Are we the ones who thought Lamont Jordan’s BTK rating was too high in Madden 2007?

These questions are no more irrelevant to the subject than those posed by JS.

As for the rest of your observations about government influence and growth, this happens everywhere. The politicians have become a group of elitists and are no longer the representatives of the people (with very few exceptions). This holds true on either side in the war on terrorism but at least on our side we can still vote our free will. The unfortunate part is that too many of us like the freebees the government hands out to us instead of getting them out of our life’s and let us fend for ourselves. I won’t speak for other countries but in ours, we have a constitution that is more and more ignored by all and we pay a heavy price for it. Let’s defend our country and help other to do same to remain and/or become free.

Apparently JS fails to see the contradiction between stating how the politicians “are no longer the representatives of the poeple” and how “we can still vote in our free will”. Actually, we can’t. We are given a choice between cow crap and horse crap and expected to regard it as delicious food. It’s absurd.

If you still have the haircut as in the picture with you article, get a life and have it changed. You look silly.

Likewise….

How even the rich manage to go bankrupt:

Financial success can breed its own peculiar set of vulnerabilities. “People who are very successful develop elevated sensibilities about their skills, and when things turn on them they won’t admit they’re wrong because their self-confidence has held them up so long,” says Arnold S. Wood, chief executive of Martingale Asset Management in Boston. “In the face of evidence, even subjective evidence, that suggests that something bad is about to happen to someone, a funny thing happens: They reject the evidence.

“These kinds of people just continue spending because they think the money will keep coming in because they’re so successful,” adds Mr. Wood, who says he is fascinated by the possible neurological and social underpinnings of financial delusion and decision-making.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen again and again, and to be honest, it grows incredibly tiresome. Listening to the same stupid justifications and rationalizations for self-destructive actions ceases to become tragic and devolves into a boring farce. The main problem that I see among those who have earned their own wealth is an inability to stop taking the kind of risks that led to their initial success in the past.

The key to securing financial stability is no more secret than the key to losing weight. In fact, the two are almost precisely the same. Always eatspend less foodmoney than you burnearn.

I play the White Buffalo in both the VPFL as well as THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS LEAGUE IN SPORTS. Apparently the level of competition is rather lower in the former than the latter, but it’s hard to make any definitive statements after Week One. It’s always bad to lose to him, but to lose twice on one day while he’s still flashing his championship bling from last year is simply unimaginable.

Football gods, hear my prayer
In my need you have never been there
Greenfield is my week two game
Let him lose, bring him shame

He sports the ring I might have worn
If I had drafted Larry Johnson.
The seasons die one by one
How soon they fly on and on
And I am out of the playoffs again

Shut him out, home and away
You must admit he is practically gay
You can give, you can take
Let Chad throw like last week’s Jake
If we tie, then we tie
Let him lose
Bring me the win, bring me the win
Bring me the win….

In the wake of the chubbos’ calls for London to follow Madrid’s example in banning “too-skinny” models from the runways, I thought I’d calculate a BMI or two myself. Now, keep in mind that I’m a guy of average height with a 30-inch waist, while Spacebunny, despite being quite slender, can bench more than her own weight. So how did we come out?

Vox: at 26, I’m “overweight”.
SB: at 17.8, she’s so “underweight” that she can’t even model in Madrid.

It’s bizarre how as American society gets ever fatter, (and when you haven’t been there in a while, it can be shocking to see how much bigger people have gotten in just a few years), the constant media focus is the peril of being too skinny. Even the questionable CDC study which reduced the number of annual obesity deaths from 400,000 annually to 112,000 is still 112x the highest number of anorexia deaths claimed by anyone with even a vestige of credibility.

(Feminists, naturally, claim 150,000 annual anorexia deaths. The fact that this is more than the number of Americans dying each year by murder, car accidents, airplane crashes, drowning, poison and treehadist terrorism combined doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to Ms Wolf, Ms Steinhem or their clueless parrots. Math is hard! And you wonder why I call feminism the ideology of ignorant idiots?)

I suspect that it is the fattening of America which is inspiring women to go to the opposite extreme. Seeing a super-obese megachub two-fisting a concoction of grease, lard and sugar is understandably enough to put almost anyone off eating for at least a few hours, see enough of that around you on a regular basis and starving yourself suddenly seems not only reasonable, but an aesthetic imperative.

Obsessive girls are probably safest in the weight room. The compulsion to keep their strength up tends to counterbalance the desire to cut calories and they’ll find the same twisted pleasure in rigidly controlling their diet as they did in not eating at all.

This could set US Soccer back 30 years:

Sven-Goran Eriksson is being considered as a replacement for Bruce Arena as coach of the United States, the New York Times reported Friday. The newspaper said that United States Soccer Federation officials have spoken to the former England coach, although the Americans may struggle to meet his wage demands if he seeks a similar pay deal to the one he had with England.

All I can say is that before they even think of making him an offer, they should do two things:

1) Watch the impotent disaster that was the England attack in the last World Cup.

2) Watch the World Cuppa skit with the Sven Goran puppet stalking Natalie then stealiing panties without her realizing it, followed by his running off and sniffing them. “Oh, Heaven!” It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen on TV.

Sven Goran didn’t manage to do anything but bang his secretary at the Football Association. McClaren did all his coaching for him and his team selections were insane. (Four strikers is fine, but not when two of them are injured and one is a teenager who has NEVER PLAYED A FIRST-TEAM PROFESSIONAL GAME IN HIS LIFE!)

Seriously, the problem isn’t that I would be a better choice for US Soccer than Sven Goran Eriksson, it’s that Spacebunny would be too.

The answer that seems to have eluded everyone is this: 3D video games are the most complete realization of Richard Wagner’s vision of Gesamtkunstwerk yet seen. Discuss amongst yourselves….

Redneck Joe asks about my critics’ great bete noire:

Vox I wonder why you use Mensa as an identifier for yourself. I believe that a 1250 SAT score is a prequalifier for Mensa (I looked into joining a couple of years ago). This falls around the same percentile as a 132 IQ, from what I have briefly read.
I’m an electrical engineer, and I would bet that everyone in my office accomplished that. I scored 800 math and 630 verbal in 1987. Sometimes I have to read your articles slowly 2 or 3 times to follow them. I think you should look into the Triple Nine society (99.9th percentile).

It’s funny that you should mention those annoying Triple Niners. Presumably thanks to my spatial relations retardation, Big Chilly qualifies for Triple Nine while I fall a tenth short. Naturally, this has led to many a magnanimous offer to explain things to me in the event that I should fail to understand them.

Mensa, as some commenters have already noted, is no big deal. If there are 2,000 daily visitors here, at least 40 are likely Mensa material. I joined primarily to give myself at least one qualification that some readers might recognize, since at the time I joined the commentary page every other writer had a radio show, an ambassadorship or had been a presidential candidate. Now it’s unnecessary, but at the time it gave the column a unique identity of sorts. It’s a bit shocking how many columnists wouldn’t qualify for Mensa; while they can hide their shallowness of thought by regurgitating talking points, they seldom manage to do so in the sad publications that are optimistically described as their books. The odd Coulter, Frum and Ponnuru aside, most books by columnists are all but unreadable. [Feel free to insert your slam on my novels here….]

I should mention that an additional benefit of Mensa membership was the way in which it defanged the usual left-liberal criticism, which consists of doing nothing but calling the other side stupid. It’s amazing how much it appears to upset them, especially considering that there are literally millions of Americans with 132+ IQs. But leftists often fall prey to the tautological fallacy of believing themselves to be more intelligent on the sole basis of their leftism, which would be odd even if one were to ignore the left’s long and ignominious historical legacy.

A tangential note: I reject the concept of numerical genius. IQ is merely a measure of cognitive potential, genius is the unique and noteworthy application of that potential to create something genuinely new or accomplish something of historical significance.

My most sincere apologies in the highly probable event that this is neither as interesting nor as well-written as Middlemarch:

You know, darling, for all my earnest attempts, as well as an IQ score which my mother would never allow me to know, lest I grow up with a swelled head, I am still unable to understand why you believe that IQ is a comprehensive measurement of intelligence. I can think of two reasons, neither of which reflects well on your character as I understand it: 1) that the sociocultural establishment tells you it does, and 2) that it is in your vested ego interests to believe it. I eagerly anticipate your further thoughts on the subject.

The short answer is that I do not. Given the way in which the sociocultural establishment also tells me that I am a naked ape with no inherent value who should nevertheless restrain his bestial desires because, um, just because, I think it is safe to conclude that (1) is not valid. Regarding (2), like the Lady I was not provided with any information about my IQ until I took what was then a form of IQ test at 16. Given the amount of information I had amassed by that time regarding the cognitive capacity of those around me, I was unsurprised to receive confirmation that mine was superlative according to the accepted measure.

It is ironic that parents attempt to hide such information, particularly from those most capable of gleaning it from casual observation. One can no more hide the fact of an individual’s intelligence from the intelligent than height from the tall, weight from the fat or coordination from the graceful. I’ve found that one can even sometimes spot an above-average or a sub-standard intelligence simply from a glance at an individual’s eyes.

Lethal Sangerian elitism aside, it is a greater and more injurious error for the intelligent to insist on treating the less intelligent as if they were as cognitively capable as their superiors. This is incredibly frustrating to both parties and inevitably leads to miscommunication, it is far better to accept the intellectual differences while simultaneously asserting equal human worth and then communicating in comprehensible manner.

Still, the ability to survive in the world and cognitive capacity are two completely different things. The fact that cockroaches are harder to eliminate than humans does not mean they are more intelligent, after all. And while the mere possession of cognitive capacity does not indicate the ability to use it well, or even at all, I have yet to see an individual who performs well on an IQ test be unable to master basic intellectual tasks, nor, all myths of the brilliant but incompetent test taker notwithstanding, have I ever seen anyone who has done poorly on a test revealed to be of even average intelligence.

For example, I was not shocked when my high school girlfriend scored in the 6th percentile on the SATs. Lovely girl, but not exactly cut out for rocket science.

As far as “things as intuition, co-ordination, social and emotional insight, patience, the ability to prioritize” go, they are all good and useful things, but they are not intelligence, although high intelligence does tend to encompass “the ability to integrate seemingly unrelated pieces of information”. For example, I am currently writing an article for BenBella on the connection between Richard Wagner and the video game HALO. Would anyone care to guess what that might be?

And regarding the viability of the human race as a whole, I am not sure that intelligence is necessarily as important to that as was once thought. Our breeding patterns currently appear to be selecting for other traits, and the human race was probably in less danger from being wiped out by sabre-toothed tigers and glaciers than by nuclear weapons, designer diseases and systems of governance conceived by intellectuals.

But none of this indicates that intelligence is any more fictional than athletic ability, or that IQ tests do a poorer job of quantifying the former than tape measures and stop watches do the latter. The fact that intelligence is not a virtue does not make it therefore fictional. In any event, Paul Johnson makes a convincing case that when it comes to writing, talent trumps intelligence as evinced by the curious example of Victor Hugo.

Let me know if you need me to walk you through any of this, ladies:

It is research that is guaranteed to delight men – and infuriate the women in their lives. A controversial new study has claimed that men really are more intelligent than women. The study – carried out by a man – concluded that men’s IQs are almost four points higher than women’s….

A focus on a factors such as the ability to quickly grasp a complex concept, verbal reasoning skills and creativity – some of they key ingredients of intelligence – revealed the male teenagers had IQs that were an average of 3.63 points higher. The average person has an IQ of around 100.

Had they controlled for habitual marijuana usage, no doubt the male advantage would have been another point or two larger. What’s truly frightening, of course, is the reminder that the average person has an IQ of around 100. This means that from my point of view, their cognitive ability tends to the same as that of the average unfortunate with Down’s Syndrome appears to them.

And you wonder why I despise democracy….

I await with interest all of the explanations why this study is invalid, wrong, evil and unconscionable. It’s interesting how arcane studies on the age of the universe are to be accepted unquestioningly, whereas those that deal with matters we observe every day are instantly rejected no matter how many times the same conclusion is reached. Perhaps the study is flawed, but if so, correct the flaws and let’s see how things shake out. In any case, I very much doubt that the sexes are any more identical cognitively than they are physically.

Personally, I don’t think the cognitive gap is a big deal, the emotional gap is a much more problematic one. I’ve seen far too many intelligent women say things like “I know X won’t work, but we HAVE to do SOMETHING” and too many bright men continue to stubbornly stick to a demonstrably untenable path to believe that IQ is the be all and end all of life, the universe and everything.