Free Republic

There IS a link between creative genius and madness - with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder frequent in highly creative and intelligent people. The idea was investigated by a panel of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison of John Hopkins school of Medicine, who suffers from bipolar disorder, said that intelligence tests on Swedish 16-year-olds had shown that highly intelligent children were most likely to go on to develop the disorder.

How can we explain “acquired savants” — people with extraordinary talent who’ve miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury, or temporarily from a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) session — since they weren’t born with the talent and didn’t learn it later? For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato (video below), who’d never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training? Darold A. Treffert, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of...

"Okay. It is now officially crunch-time for conservative voters. Time for them to grow-up, stand on principle, admit there is not a perfect candidate, cast aside the pretenders, flip-floppers, and flakes, and unite behind the most genuine traditional values espousing candidate in the field. That being Texas governor Rick Perry."

Shocking details have surfaced in the murder of up-and-coming rapper Slim Dunkin (born Mario Hamilton). Atlanta police has told WSB-TV, that the Waka Flocka Flame associate was shot and killed during a fight over a piece of candy. Incredulous as the story may sound, authorities are still investigating the case and the shooter remains at large.

"I'm not supposed to know anything about foreign policy," said Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain the other day after fumbling a question about President Obama's actions in Libya. "Because you run for president [people say] you need to have the answer. No, you don't! No, you don't!" His dearth of knowledge and interest in foreign policy was on full display in last night's GOP debate.... ...On the Patriot Act, Mr. Cain was even more hazy. "If there are some areas of the Patriot Act that we need to refine, I'm all for that. But I do not believe we ought...

Many feared the worst when they heard Meryl Streep was to play Margaret Thatcher in a new film. Not only was Baroness Thatcher to be cast as a rather befuddled, elderly woman looking back on the triumphs and disappointments of her life, but Streep is also of a very different political hue from Maggie. It was commonly agreed that our greatest Prime Minister since Churchill would be vilified. Such fears are misplaced. Having just seen the film in a London preview before its release in January, and then having spoken at length to Meryl Streep about her role in The...

I encourage everyone to take a deep breath, and let the campaign chips fall where they may for a couple weeks, without passing judgement. We are watching political ping-pong right now. We don't have facts on either side yet. Cain has been accused. Perry is now being accused by Cain. Romney is now being accused by Perry. Will Romney turn around and accuse Bachmann or Santorum? Time will bring everything out in the open that we need to know. We are all guilty of jumping to conclusions without any facts. The media is playing us, and we are letting them....

The phrasing’s slightly ambiguous so it becomes a rorschach test on Cain. If you like him and trust that he has a grasp on policy, you’ll think he’s referring here to developing nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The Pentagon’s chief worry right now is China building any sort of carrier, not necessarily a nuclear one, so this would be an odd bit of specificity from Cain. But fair enough — a Chinese nuclear carrier would indeed be a big deal. If you don’t like him and/or don’t trust him on policy, you’ll think he’s referring here to China developing a general nuclear...

The spot was posted on October 19th, according to its YouTube page, but because it was unlisted on Cain's main YouTube page it seems to have gone undiscovered until now. There has been some speculation online that the spot is a hoax, but the Cain campaign late Monday night confirmed to CBS News that it is legitimate. A campaign official said that the video was "just Block being Block." But it's unclear what the campaign planned to do with the video, whether it was intended to be an ad, or why it wasn't publicly available on Cain's page with his...

The Herman Cain campaign released details of the revenue expected to be collected from his 9-9-9 tax plan. Here are the estimates for 2010: $701 billion from the 9 percent personal income tax. $753 billion from the 9 percent retail sales tax. $863 billion from the 9 percent business VAT. Yikes! By far the largest tax haul under the Cain plan would be from the business VAT—a tax which would be hidden from most voters. By the way, the Cain business tax is not a tax on “corporate income,” as some media stories are identifying it. The new revenue data...

(Reuters) - Upstart Republican front-runner Herman Cain on Tuesday came under sharp attack from his rivals at a 2012 debate and struggled to explain his tax reform plan, the signature proposal of his campaign. Cain, the former Godfather's Pizza CEO who has shot to the top of Republican opinion polls, found himself the target at the CNN-sponsored debate, where his rivals began to take him seriously after believing he would simply fade as time wore on.

Herman Cain: Electrify the Border Fence Doug Powers October 15, 2011 It’s now a “9999� plan: 9 percent personal income tax, 9 percent national sales tax, 9 percent business tax, and a 9 amp jolt if you try to illegally cross into the US.New York Times: Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Saturday that part of his immigration policy would be to build an electrified fence on the country’s border with Mexico that could kill people trying to enter the country illegally.The remarks, which came at two campaign rallies in Tennessee as part of a barnstorming bus tour across the...

'The way I think about it," Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, "is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft." He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53% of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as "hope" and...

Ian McKeachie is a freckled 15-year-old who "drifted along" in elementary school. Not because he didn't love to learn or because it wasn't a good school, but because he mastered new concepts so quickly that the classroom work presented no challenge. "My teachers would usually use me as a tutor for the other kids," he says, "so I was engaged in school, just not in a way that had me learning."

Forget all that jive about Obama being some cross between Einstein and Jesus Christ.... evidence continues to mount that this arrogant, unaccomplished nothing isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer...  Can't walk Can't talk Can't think Can't drink No longer grin 'cuz cannot win Yet will not heed... On floor he peed The loafers are light... And he can't even write (!) On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action. ... The response is classic Obama:...

Autum Ashante, a highly academically accomplished 13-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., planned to start her freshman year at the University of Connecticut this fall. Now, her father says, the school has rescinded her acceptance, the Daily News reports. Batin Ashante said that his daughter was "devastated" after university officials called him yesterday to deliver the bad news. "They said they now feel she's not academically ready," he said. "That's BS!" When the story was first reported in mid-June, UConn spokesman Richard Veilleaux confirmed that Autum had been accepted to the school but said university officials were still waiting for the...

Even for DC's worshipful press corps, Washington Post scribe Dana Mil bank's latest column was a doozy. Hoping to explain why the president appears to be an indecisive waffler, Milbank whelped this whopper: Obama's too smart for his own good. That's a new one. But is it true -- is Obama too bright to be president? Milbank consulted his tea leaves -- and a few social scientists -- to help diagnose Obama's malady: Genius in the extreme! "I put Obama on the couch," Milbank wrote, "and came away with a reasonably coherent diagnosis: There's too much going on in the...

Intelligence tests are as much a measure of motivation as they are of mental ability, says research from the US.Researchers from Pennsylvania found that a high IQ score required both high intelligence and high motivation but a low IQ score could be the result of a lack of either factor. Incentives were also found to increase IQ scores by a noticeable margin. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Firstly, it analysed previous studies of how material incentives affected the performance of more than 2,000 people in intelligence tests. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania,...

At 12-years-old, Jacob Barnett is a genius. He’s already in college, his IQ is higher than Einstein’s, and for fun he‘s working on an expanded version of that man’s theory of relativity. So far, the signs are good. Professors are astounded. So what else does a boy genius with vast brilliance do in his free time? Disprove the big bang, of course. Original Story is below: http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011103200369 When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions. From within his 12-year-old, mildly...

U of A researcher questions whether genius might be a result of hormonal influences A longstanding debate as to whether genius is a byproduct of good genes or good environment has an upstart challenger that may take the discussion in an entirely new direction. University of Alberta researcher Marty Mrazik says being bright may be due to an excess level of a natural hormone. Mrazik, a professor in the Faculty of Education's educational psychology department, and a colleague from Rider University in the U.S., have published a paper in Roeper Review linking giftedness (having an IQ score of 130 or...

CINCINNATI, OH - A man has been arrested for hitting a pregnant woman in the head with a hand gun. Jerome Smith, 27, was arrested February 1st, however, the attack happened on January 29th. happened on the 29th. The police report states a man with "Genius" tattooed on his forehead attacked Tiera Bryant, who is eight months pregnant.

Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like "gifted musician", "natural athlete" and "innate intelligence", we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don't. But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes. A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors, always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea....

Since Obama first stepped on the national stage, pundits have fallen all over each other in a race to declare that Obama is special type of genius. Tom Shales of the WaPo recently called Obama "the smartest kid in the class." Billionaire Julian Robertson claimed, "Obama, from all I read, thinks that on every occasion that he is the smartest person in the room. And I think he often probably is. ..." Robertson may be half-right. Obama apparently does consider himself the smartest person in every room. According to Peter Baker of the NYT, "One prominent Democratic lawmaker told me...

President Obama’s low approval status among American voters is being attributed to his “unconstrained brilliance” and “incomparable talent” by a pair of leading Democrats. White House senior adviser and longtime Obama friend Valerie Jarrett contends that “his extraordinary talent is so far above that of the average person that there is a disconnect that fosters envy and jealousy. People are refusing to respond positively to his genius out of spite. They are crucifying him just like they crucified Jesus.” Vice-President Joe Biden argued that “the President is brilliant beyond our comprehension. He makes the rest of us look like morons....

Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself. He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century. Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own...

What’s happening to the boy genius? Outside of fantasy fiction, he seems to be a shrinking breed. New York’s gifted-and-talented schools are overstocked with girls, a recent Times study found. In some gifted classrooms, three-fifths of the students are female. Yes, we know girls are smart and dutiful and hardworking, but this phenomenon confounds what’s long been considered the natural order. Could it really be that boys are now the struggling class, in need of help or affirmative action? Experts have been warning about the boy crisis for years, but the idea has never really taken hold—partly because it originated...

BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle. Since the "top kill," "junk shot" and "top hat" techniques failed to end the environmental nightmare, Alia Sabur -- who started her engineering Ph.D. at age 14 -- is pushing for a more radical idea. The Northport native, who started reading before she could walk and who at 18 broke a 300-year-old record to become the youngest-ever college professor, proposes surrounding a pipe with deflated automobile tires,...

No, you cannot. That title is a lie, and, judging by a recent spate of books on the subject, a popular one. Ann Hulbert of Slate has compiled a list of books which preach the Gospel of Success (HT A&LD). Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success was not, appropriately enough, a bolt of original genius when it appeared in November 2008. Geoffrey Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else had come out a month earlier. The following spring brought Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. …This spring David Shenk’s...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time.

Most three-year-olds are fascinated by cars and trucks. But few can read and remember their number plates like William Potter does. He can also name most towns and cities in the British Isles - and has just become one of the youngest people ever accepted as a member of Mensa. With an IQ of 140, his intelligence is said to be on a par with that of Bill Clinton and, apparently, Napoleon Bonaparte.

America, the Constitutional limitations on governmental power established by the people of this great country has worked to prevent Obama's socialist take over of this country. Our forefathers were genuis when it came to writing a document establishing a government with very limited powers, separation of powers, and keeping the majority of power in the hands of the American people!

The founder of the website "Free Republic", Jim Robinson, has joined a growing boycott of the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) due to a homosexual activist group sponsoring the event. GOProud, a group that advocates same-sex "marriage," a repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and "expanding access to domestic partner benefits" for homosexuals, is listed as a sponsor of the event at CPAC's website. Mr. Robinson has joined a number of conservative activists including Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr., Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver, and Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of...

Leftists who decried the War on Terror now use the same terminology to describe center-Left members of their own party. On last night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Ed Schultz interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel about President Obama’s “sellout” on the health care bill. Katrina complained Obama’s is “a White House which has emboldened the conservadems, people like Joe Lieberman” who “is now holding hostage” socialized medicine. She repeated the elocution moments later while appealing to “citizens who don’t want to be held hostage by the insurance companies.” Schultz thanked her for appearing, adding, “Always the truth coming from you...

In an interview for Nation magazine, former President Jimmy Carter says that current President Barack Obama is “the best in my lifetime, maybe the best this country has ever had.” Key to the high praise was Carter’s assessment that “President Obama is the most brilliant man to ever have held the office. He is wise beyond the boundaries we normally observe for human beings. That is probably why his Administration is our nation’s most unprecedented in history.” “Of course, being the first black man to be elected president has to rank as the most unprecedented accomplishment ever achieved by anyone...

Here is a short horror comedy film by Richard Gale. Saw it at the Nevermore Film Festival earlier in the year. I know many a FReeper will find this as funny and enjoyable as I did. The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

A recent road trip convinced this traveler that the radio airwaves are saturated these days with self-proclaimed experts who are espousing more solutions to our economic woes than there are problems. A recent visit to the Will Rogers Center in Claremore, Okla., convinced this observer that what this country needs is not another talk show host, but instead, someone with the character, integrity and sense of humor of Rogers. Some say that Rogers invented talk radio and at the peak of his career could lay claim to several million daily listeners. His commentaries were never cruel and were based on...

Like all of this year's graduates, Moshe Kai Cavalin is excited that he completed college, with a degree in astrophysics. But unlike the majority of college grads, Cavalin is only 11 years old and stands 4 feet, 7 inches tall. At the age of an average sixth-grader, Cavalin has gradated from East Los Angeles Community College. But, graduating college at 11 may not be his highest goal in life. "I want to be a movie actor and compete in the 2016 Olympics in martial arts," Cavalin told NBC affliate Wood TV.

Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, graduates with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week, but just don't call him a genius. 11-Year-Old Graduates From LA College Watch Video Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, is graduating with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week. "I consider myself a regular kid who works hard and does his best," says this only child of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father. When Cavalin started college at the age of 8, he may have been the youngest person in class, but he ended up tutoring some of his 19- and 20-year-old classmates...

Seeking signs of genius, a researcher recently reconstructed the shape of Albert Einstein's brain with techniques normally used to analyze fossils. This mold of thought, she believes, reveals the imprint of a rare intelligence that transformed our understanding of space, time and energy. By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century's most famous mind....

More Roosevelt… Less Jimmy Carter… that’s what this brand needs! Folks, there’s been a lot of scrutiny of President Obama in these first 100 days. It goes with the territory. The attention is brutal no matter who’s in the Oval Office and it always will be. Exposure is something most marketers covet . . .but over-exposure especially of the wrong features can be deadly for a personal brand. That is why, Barack Obama –whom I’ve called a first-rate poli-marketer (see the past few weeks FOX Forum posts here)– had better stop behaving like Jimmy Carter and start emulating Roosevelt. In...

<p>As was asked when this issue was debated -- and resolved, we thought -- "If you don't trust a pilot to carry a gun, what the fuck are you doing allowing him at the controls of a plane carrying 300 people?"</p>

As a new book speculates that 'Britain's Einstein' was autistic, an autism expert warns that a prenatal test for the condition would prevent brilliant scientists like Paul Dirac from ever being born A new book on the greatest British physicist since Newton speculates that both his profound mathematical abilites and his extreme social awkwardness stemmed from undiagnosed autism. The claims – from a biography of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man – tie in with an article on the BBC website from leading autism researcher Prof Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen says we need a public debate about the prenatal...

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children. The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes. In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of...

An oldie, but a goodie. And it really captures the attitude that Mr. Obama and his supporters have regarding themselves, Liberalism and their candidate.Operation: Rabbit

Bo (woof) In Commentary: Some think this dog is amazing. Me, I’m not surprised. (In case you missed this one, a Mission Viejo woman’s dog — a 9-year-old cockapoo known as Cookie Einstein — has become a celebrity of sorts for her apparent mathematical abilities, the O.C. Register’s Niyaz Pirani reported over the weekend. She [Cookie] adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides and calculates square roots and simple algebra through barking. And Cookie can answer if the question’s asked in either English or Spanish.) Bi-lingual and good in math…she must have scored well on her SATs. Cookie won’t respond to anybody but...

DOWNEY, Calif. - With the end of another school year approaching, college sophomore Moshe Kai Cavalin is cramming for final exams in classes such as advanced mathematics, foreign languages and music. But Cavalin is only 10 years old. And at 4-foot-7, his shoes don't quite touch the floor as he puts down a schoolbook and swivels around in his chair to greet a visitor. "I'm studying statistics," says the alternately precocious and shy Cavalin, his textbook lying open on the living room desk of his parents' apartment in this quiet suburb east of Los Angeles.

Until a week ago, her instinct was always the same: any time she was away from home, Halimahton Yusof would scan the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her daughter's face. "I always looked for her. For the past few years I didn't even know whether she was alive," she says, her eyes moist with tears. "Every time there was a story on the news about an accident, or a death, I feared the worst. I just wanted to know she was alive." Child genius and now prostitute: Sufiah Yusof attended Oxford University at just age 13 Then, last...

Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius. (l-r) George Orwell, Albert Einstein and Thomas Jefferson Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous and brilliant individuals who showed signs of ASDs including Asperger syndrome.Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant have also received post mortem...

Martin Camacho taught himself to read about age 1, his parents said. By 3, he was doing multiplication. As a 5-year-old, he tested into fifth grade, and at age 10, he started classes at Central High School in St. Paul. Now 12, Martin is tied for fourth in the state heading into the final meet of the high school math-league season. (skip) "It's an unusual talent," Roberts said. "We're going to hear a lot from him." It may seem odd to picture a 12-year-old walking the halls of a big city high school, but "it's natural now, after three years,"...

Scientists have discovered a huge active volcano under Antarctica. - The BAS team says data from the volcano will help it predict future rises in sea-levels caused by melting ice.