A comment seen at the NY Times
There was a NY Times upshot article praising the Bernie Sanders ad (hat tip @Steve_Sailer ). There I read the top-most-featured comment:
I don’t watch television so I had never seen the Bernie Sanders ad until now. I think it’s immensely offensive: there must be several hundred people shown in this ad, and I see four fleeting images of African-American faces and one possibly Asian-American. His America is definitely not mine, and I wouldn’t want to live in his.
For what it’s worth, I’m an over-60 white female Democrat, and I have spent all but one year of my life living in cities. The one year I tried living in the country, I felt I was living in Ghostville: all I could see were middle class white faces. So I fled back to MY America, where I see and live with all manner of colors and classes, people of poverty and people with Ph.D.s; Jews, Christians, Muslims, Black Muslims, Hindus and people of no faith.
I believe the commenter is correct, the ad intentionally did what she claimed it did, show almost only white people.
Could Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump be closer to each other than the mainstream media realizes?
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I personally think it was an awesome ad.
Interesting climate change comment
This comment was on Scott Adam’s blog:
My climate change skepticism comes from an entirely different direction — I work in litigation and deal a lot with expert witnesses.
Everything about the “support” for climate change looks like the things that an expert witness does when they want to support their client but have bupkis for facts. It’s not just any particular thing — it is the intuitive pattern of behavior. “It’s too complicated to explain, but me and my colleagues all agree.” “This is all commonly accepted in the scientific community.” “Sure, the raw data appears to disprove my theory, but it hasn’t been properly adjusted yet.” “The predictions I made before didn’t pan out, but that is because I didn’t have X data yet (usually the disproving data that now proves the new but identical-result theory.)
All in all, the climate change crowd acts like a biased expert witness with a bad set of facts.
Obama is smart, deal with it
Another case of commenters disappointing me is the continuing comments disparaging Obama’s intelligence.
1. Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School (HLS). The following was not written by me, but was a blog comment from a long time ago:
If we assume that LSAT 163=IQ 130 and average LSAT at HLS is 173, then the average HLS student has an IQ of 145 or 146, since on the LSAT 10 points is one SD.
Actually I think average LSAT Obama’s year was more like 170 or 171, so IQ = 140 is probably a reasonable estimate.
As an HLS grad, I can confirm that grading is largely blind, however the magna=top 10% rule was only established after Obama graduated. His year as I recall it was more like top 20%, and it varied year to year somewhat before it was changed from a minimum GPA standard to the top 10% rule.
Law Review has a few AA spots, and President of HLR is an elected position, so this means that the mainly white and very smart editors thought highly of him but does not speak directly to his intelligence.
All that said, even assuming the worst, that Obama just barely squeaked by in getting magna and was right at the top 20% and was an above average grade grubber, he still could not have graduated magna without having an IQ well in excess of 140.
HLS students are hardly slackers and the school is about 85% white or asian, so getting to the top 20% of that group is no easy task. I did know one guy who was somewhat less intelligent than the HLS average and got magna, but he studied insane amounts, more than 10 hours a day in addition to attending every class.
If Obama got his good grades this way, it speaks extremely well of his good character and work ethic in particular contrasting it with Bush, Gore, and Kerry with their gentleman’s B- averages, McCain and his bottom 1% grades at the navel academy, Biden with his plagerism, and Palin with her long struggle to find a college and major easy enough to squeak by.
Also, comparing Harvard College and Harvard Law School IQs, only about 1/3 of HC students who apply to HLS are accepted, and many more probably don’t even apply realizing they have no chance. I can’t remember the source, but I read that the average LSAT for HC students is 163, which is tied for the highest in the USA, but still well below HLS’s standards. There is a list floating around there somewhere.
So Obama had well-above-average grades at HLS where the average student has an IQ of 140, and where most of the students are workaholics.
2. HBD supports Obama being extremely intelligent. Some people think that HBD means that all blacks are stupid, but this is absolutely not true, it only talks about the average black. That a few exceptional blacks have IQs of 145 or higher is part of HBD. And Obama is only half black, and his black half is Kenyan and not descended from slaves.
People inherit their genes from their parents, and Obama’s father has a Master’s degree in economics from Harvard, and Obama’s half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, has a degree in math and physics from Brown and a Master’s degree in physics from Stanford. Yes, there’s affirmative action, but students who barely squeak into top schools via affirmative action don’t major in physics which is the most difficult hard science you can major in. In addition to being adept with hard science and math, Mark speaks several languages including Chinese, and he’s also a writer and a musician. He’s one very intelligent and talented guy with the same father as Obama.
3. Obama wrote a highly rated and admired memoir, which requires high intelligence. There’s a conspiracy theory floating around that someone ghostwrote it. Yes, ghostwriters are common when rich and famous people need to write a book. Obama was poor and an unknown nobody with lots of free time when he wrote his memoir.
Obama is extremely intelligent, learn to deal with it. Stop acting like a bunch of neo-Nazi morons.
Happy New Year, and disappointment with my blog commenters
I am very disappointed in certain blog commenters. I thought it was cool that Serena Williams is marrying a nerdy white guy, and I wish them the best of luck with their marriage, but there were a lot of uncalled for mean-spirited comments about Serena Williams who has done nothing wrong here and in fact has done a lot right. She deserves praise for her smart choice in a mate, and not your petty insults.
Obama, the bitter and vindictive lame duck
Imagine if Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the election instead of Trump. Do you think Obama would have suddenly reversed our Israel policy? Would Obama have expelled Russian diplomats?
The answer, of course is no, he would have quietly passed on these issues and let HRC handle them, and it’s hard to imagine that Russian “hacking” would have been an issue at all.
Obama is in bitter and vindictive mode and the goal is to sabotage Trump’s presidency by giving him a foreign policy mess to start out with.
The Magicians
This TV series can be described simply as Harry Potter but with 20-something magic students, and with sex. Including gay sex. The gaystream media, in its mission to normalize homosexuality, sticks gay sex everywhere these days. And they wait until midway through the season, because they know if they put the gay sex into the first episode, straight men would be grossed out and not watch the rest of the series.
It’s not highbrow fantasy TV like Game of Thrones but it was an enjoyable guilty pleasure. Season 1 is available on Netflix, and Season2 is coming out on the SyFy channel in a month.
Serena Williams to marry nerdy white guy
Wow!
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Absconding an image of the nerdy white guy is the most likely case where some grumpy pissed-at-the-world photographer will sue me for copyright infringement.
To see what the nerdy guy looks like, use Google.
Remember when Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was hacked?
Republicans never blamed the hacker for losing the election.
And this is what I wrote about it back in 2008:
My thoughts on email hacking: I bet that the KGB is regularly reading emails of important Americans. If some teenage hacker can get at an important person’s email, why not a big hostile foreign agency supported by billions of dollars of funding? This should be a wake up call of some sort.
I guess no one heeded the wake up call. People really ought to read my blog.
In a comment a while ago, someone said “Lion, if the Republican candidate was hacked you’d feel a lot differently.”
Well actually, it happened in 2008, and back then I quite enjoyed being able to see some of her emails. I think I’m pretty consistent in enjoying the public viewing of important people’s emails.
I will once again state my opinion that publishing these emails is more like a college prank than a grave threat to the American Way of Life.
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I believe I was right that the KGB was reading people’s emails. Do you think the KGB was reading Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unprotected server? I sure do.
But this doesn’t mean that the KGB gave the emails to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks says that the DNC emails came from an insider, and we know that Podesta’s emails were stolen with a simple phishing scam which didn’t require a sophisticated malware programmed by the KGB’s top hackers.
Julian Assange personally hates Obama and HRC, and I also believe that hackers, even hackers in foreign countries, wanted Trump to win the election because hackers are prole and proles all over the world love Trump. Even proles in Russia love Trump. That proles love Trump is something that the SWPLs working for the CIA just don’t get.
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And even if our government has rock-solid proof the release of the emails was directed by the Russian government (which it clearly doesn’t), the big hissy fit being thrown over it seems more like a last-ditch attempt to hurt Donald Trump then a reasonable response to a very minor public release of emails, especially considering that whomever hacked the emails did Americans a huge favor if they in any way helped to elect Trump (although I don’t think they helped at all because in retrospect no one paid any attention to the emails who wasn’t already a Trump fan, thanks to the MSM not reporting about them in any way that would be negative for HRC). And they also did us a favor by alerting people to take cybersecurity more seriously.
Barenaked Ladies – It’s All Been Done (Video Version)
Talking about music that sounds white, the Barenaked Ladies have a very white sound (even though the video has some black guys with afros dancing).
I don’t particularly care for the fish-eye lens, or that they muffle the sound for twenty seconds to make like you’re inside a fish tank. As a video, I prefer watching Hey Violet.
Hey Violet – This is Why
I like this music video a lot.
Thank you Otis the Sweaty for bringing this girl punk rock group to my attention. Unfortunately, a handful of music videos on YouTube is the extent of their repertoire.
