Free Republic

... This can be averaged to 68.75 rounded to 69.This figure needs to be corrected because the test was administered to groups rather than individually and the test has been standardized in Britain for individual administration. A previous study has shown that in an Arab sample of this age group that took the test individually and in groups, the group administration gave a score 12.5 IQ points lower than individual administration (Bakhiet & Lynn, 2014). Thus, we propose that 12.5 needs to be added to the 69 to give 81.5 as the best estimate of the British-scaled IQ of the...

PICTURE IN YOUR MIND A HIGHLY COMPLICATED MACHINE. God's IQ And Human Comforts. By JAG October 10,2022 Just how intellectually brilliant is the God that created and designed the human brain that created and designed that machine up there? Answer: His intellectual brilliance would be off the charts. God's intelligence level would be incomprehensible to we humans. The web says there are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe and that the number of galaxies is between 100 billion and 200 billion. God is brilliant. God can add, so to speak, a running list of 20 digit numbers, as fast...

We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~Aesop, Greek slave & fable author Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. ~Plato, ancient Greek Philosopher Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. ~Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Union politician When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. ~Quoted in 'Clarence Darrow for the Defense' by Irving Stone. Politicians are people who, when they see light...

We are living in a time of increasing domestic tension. Some of it stems from the presidency of Donald Trump. Another part of it is various advocacy groups on both sides of the political spectrum demanding one cause or another. But nearly totally ignored is how growing government control over our lives, along with the betrayal of constitutional principles, contributes the most to domestic tension. Let’s look at a few examples. Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent...

During the Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the Americans. His frustration with the American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites are; boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June 28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the...

One thing that frustrated even the most ardent supporters of George W. Bush's administration was his refusal to hit back hard at over the top, abominable personal attacks against him and his family, including his daughters, by those in the media and in the culture at large. Bush revered the office of the president and, unlike his successor, held it to a higher standard than did gutter snipes such as Sean Penn or the New York Times. This is why Newt Gingrich drew cheers and praise during the 2012 election cycle when he hit back at the media for its...

A Meditation on the Sins of the Intellect By: Msgr. Charles PopeWhen I was in the seminary, my Moral Theology Professor, Fr. Robert Zylla (R.I.P.), encouraged us to meditate on the sins of the intellect during the third sorrowful mystery (The Crowning with Thorns). In his years of teaching he had surely witnessed the intellectual pride that could beset theologians and seminary students who figured they knew a few things. And added to this human tendency to intellectual pride was the rather prideful sense of the 20th century that we had somehow “come of age.” Dissent from church teaching was rampant and...

Comedian Evan Sayet described his progression from a “brain-dead liberal” to a “9/13 Republican” in a forthcoming interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas. “There is only one religion now [for the left],” he said. “The religion is that anything that is considered good, right or has become successful has some how been the beneficiary of some sort of injustice.” Sayet went on to pointedly criticize liberals’ “morally and intellectually retarded” philosophy. “The liberal believes if we just regurgitate the apple, give up all knowledge of right and wrong, we can return to paradise”

I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. So Stanford geneticist Gerald R. Crabtree begins back-to-back Forum pieces for Trends in Genetics, entitled “Our Fragile Intellect” (Parts I and II). Crabtree’s thesis: humanity is “almost certainly” losing its superior intellectual and emotional capacities. Crabtree doesn’t seem to be arguing for the intellectual vibrancy of the...

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich would invite mostly scientists and entrepreneurs — including Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution — to a hypothetical dinner party in which he could select the guest list from historical figures, living or dead, he told the Bio channel. "He was the most influential scientist in the modern world, and an extraordinary observer of nature," Gingrich said of the evolutionary scientist. The topic of evolution has become a hot-button issue in the Republican field, after Rick Perry said that it was "a theory that is out there — and it's got some gaps...

I periodically write and regularly broadcast about male-female issues because I want to help men and women, especially husbands and wives, get along better. But I have developed a secondary reason: to elicit left-wing reactions. They reveal an enormous amount about how the left thinks. For example, one of the biggest left-wing websites (Daily Kos) wrote that "Dennis Prager advocates marital rape." Why? Because I wrote a column in which I suggested that if a woman loves her husband, and if he is a loving and good man, she might not want to be guided solely by "mood" in deciding...

As Sarah Palin received criticism that persistently persistently mocked her own intellect, she released to the public about 24,000 of her emails during her time as Governor of the state of Alaska. A representative from AOL Weird News, an unconventional counterpart of AOL.com, handed over some samples of her writing to analysts in order to determine how effectively Palin wrote. If they expected the outcome to verify the media’s anti-Palin disposition, they were in for a big surprise. The conventional Flesch-Kincaid readability test indicated that Sarah Palin’s emails were actually written very well, at around an 8th grade level with...

When I covered George W. Bush’s White House, my job was made easier by the simplicity of the subject. The president had a few defining mantras — Cut taxes! Rally the base! Terrorists hate freedom! With us or against us! — and most of his decisions could be understood, even predicted, by applying one of the overarching philosophies. With President Obama, there is no such luxury. The political right is befuddled as it tries to explain him: First, Obama was a tyrant and a socialist; now he’s a weakling who refuses to lead. The political left is almost as confused,...

When I covered George W. Bush’s White House, my job was made easier by the simplicity of the subject. The president had a few defining mantras — Cut taxes! Rally the base! Terrorists hate freedom! With us or against us! — and most of his decisions could be understood, even predicted, by applying one of the overarching philosophies. With President Obama, there is no such luxury. The political right is befuddled as it tries to explain him: First, Obama was a tyrant and a socialist; now he’s a weakling who refuses to lead. The political left is almost as confused,...

After getting frustrated out of the lemons his problems gave him, David Miller made his own corporate lemonade. Due to the frustration of always having to call technical support to solve his own frequent hardware problems, he started taking the initiative to educate himself.

If We Wait for Armageddon by Norma Zager “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist…” The Usual Suspects Evil never ceases to amaze me. Each moment as man progresses toward the demise of planet earth, he manages to regress by centuries. The terrorist double agent who murdered the CIA operatives recorded himself shortly before the killing. He was not intending to commit such a mass murder, but upon learning of the possibility of taking so many more lives, he commented the extra killings were “a gift from god.” “Whose god?” is what I...

The chattering class was entranced with candidate Barack Obama. So literate. So polished. So cool. We were assured that his lack of executive experience was irrelevant. After all, he ran a campaign. And then there were his years as a community organizer and Harvard Law Review editor, which showed… well… it showed something about his magnificent intellectual skills. But it turns out he lacks some key abilities — executive leadership, decisiveness, deal-making prowess, flexibility, and basic people skills — that are essential to a successful presidency. This is not simply the conclusion of conservatives. The entire country witnessed his agonizing...

“He’s brilliant,” said Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. “He’s brilliant,” say most members of the mainstream media and basically all democrats. Who are they speaking of? President Barack Obama, of course. With the already legendary intellect, unrivaled understanding of any situation - - domestic or global -- and omnipotency being assigned to our 44th President, it’s almost sacrilege to even ask the question. Recently, while riding on a train with an older and admittedly liberal couple from New York, I mentioned Obama. Instantly, the reaction from both was, “He’s brilliant.” When I asked the couple what made Obama “brilliant,” they...

Do we have any prayer volunteers for Christopher Hitchens? He’s the self -proclaimed “atheist/anti-theist,” and stunningly clever wordsmith. He leapfrogged puzzled agnosticism to a pledged rebellion against God. He’ll be a tough turn-around, so thick is his iron-clad ignorance of the divine. In a recent Newsweek he cynically dissects Mother Teresa’s dark theological struggles, a postscript to his derisive 1995 book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” A week ago he was a featured speaker for an Atheist Alliance conference in Washington DC. Hitchens’ latest book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” maligns the devoted,...

Statistical analyses of relationships between SAT scores, Republican Party affiliation, spending on education, ethnic compositions of towns, and tax rates reveal that among those factors (that is, excluding financial components) the ones that matter most in driving comparative and competitive home sales prices (by town medians over time, and over the long-run) are those related to CULTURE -- SAT scores and Republican Party affiliation (and all the value choices that such affiliation incorporates). You may have had a gut feeling that it pays to own a home in a town with high SAT scores and strong republican values. Now here's...