Stephan: I am not going to say anything about this, but I felt it should be noted.
Credit: Getty
There are a lot of theories why IQ tests are falling. Some say it’s bad food, poor schools, or obscene amounts of screen time. Others suggest it’s a matter of people with lower IQs having more kids, who inherit their lower numbers.
You’ve seen Idiocracy, right?
The thing is, there’s a lot of variation among the U.S. states in terms of IQ averages. So while the nation as a whole averages roughly a 98 IQ, individual states range as much as six points higher or four points below the national average.
So, here are the estimated average IQ rates for residents of each U.S. state, as compiled by Michael McDaniel, formerly a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and reported by The Washington Post.
It’s worth noting that the IQ test in and of itself is controversial to begin with. The Post in fact ranked states according to not just IQ test, but also average SAT and ACT score, along with the […]
Stephan: The Maga world is like an evil comic book, and Arizona is a living examplar of this truth. First the circus audit, and now this.
The Auschwitz concentration camp, which was liberated by Soviet troops in April 1945 (AFP)
On Saturday, Business Insider reported that Arizona has purchased the materials needed to manufacture hydrogen cyanide gas — the same chemical the Nazis used to murder Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and other death camps — just as they are refurbishing a gas chamber used in death row executions.
“The Arizona Department of Corrections spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients for the gas, The Guardian reported, citing the partially-redacted documents,” reported Alexandra Ma. “The ingredients purchased include a solid brick of potassium cyanide, sodium hydroxide pellets, and sulfuric acid, per the documents … The documents published by The Guardian also included instructions on how to operate the gas chamber.”
“Cyanide is lethal in that it prevents the body from using oxygen. It was used in both World Wars — by French and Austrian troops in World War I, and by Nazi Germany in World War II, according to a 2014 fact sheet by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. […]
Stephan: I am running this because I don't think most people understand that media is owned by a tiny number of corporations. Look at the chart. Some of these companies still respect journalism while others, like Fox, are explicitly propaganda disinformation operations. There is another trend though that makes this more complex: the rise of social media. QAnon is a manifestation of that trend's power.
A diagram that organizes distributors, content companies, and internet video companies by market cap — the value investors assign to the companies — and their main lines of business. Credit: Vox
The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies (studios) made stuff (TV shows and movies) and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.
Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, bought much of 21st Century Fox — though much of the early success of its Disney+ streaming service looks like it’s a result of earlier purchases of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar. Meanwhile, distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner, and Verizon, which bought AOL and Yahoo, thought they wanted to become media companies — and have now done an about-face and are bailing out of those acquisitions.
Giant tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple that […]
Stephan: I completely agree with this article. The vote that just occurred about the 6 January Commission, made it as clear as one could make this point that the Republican Party is not at all interested in the substance of democracy, only the form. I tell you now that if the Republicans take the House and the Senate in 2022, the United States as we have known it will be gone.
U.S. Senate and House Republican members attend President Donald J. Trump address Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020 in the East Room of the White House, where the President responded to being acquitted in the U.S. Senate Impeachment Trial.Official White House. Credit: D. Myles Cullen)
During the 2020 presidential race, a wide range of Donald Trump critics — including arch-conservative columnist/author Mona Charen (who worked in the Reagan White House) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described “democratic socialist” — slammed Trump as dangerously authoritarian. They warned that U.S. democracy itself was on the line. Now-President Joe Biden won the election, but the threat of authoritarianism was evident when Trump tried to overturn the election results and a violent far-right mob attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6. Four months into Biden’s presidency, journalist Susan B. Glasser examines the state of American democracy this week in an article for The New Yorker — and she warns that there is a lot to be worried about.
“Far from embracing Biden’s call for unity,” Glasser explains, “Republicans remain in thrall […]
Stephan: It is a measure of humanity's addiction to greed above all, including human wellbeing, that this relatively small portion of the world's economy, nation by nation, has not been committed to saving civilization.
A doll’s head among dead fish at a dam in drought-hit Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, which faces a severe threat of ecosystem collapse. Photograph: Mike Hutchings/Reuters
The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.
Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every yearin restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (£2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem “services” such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said.
The State of Finance for Nature report, produced by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD), said a total investment of $8.1tn was required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation, reaching $536bn a year by 2050, projected to be about 0.13% of global GDP.
More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems […]
