Trump’s IQ

Jordan Peterson shows us why Donald Trump’s IQ is likely to be be well above average. Many people must have worked this out for themselves via similar reasoning even if they are not keen on Trump or the notion of IQ. Some won't have worked it out, but we know about those people too.

In which case, by assessing their respective careers one might suggest that Theresa May is a little more intelligent than her detractors tend to imply and Jeremy Corbyn is as thick as a plank. Not to be taken too seriously of course, but compared to Trump, both May and Corbyn are probably rather dim.

The Harry and Meghan show

source

I know very little about Prince Harry and even less about his fiancé Meghan Markle. I know he is the younger son of Charles and Diana and I believe she hails from the entertainment business and is no spring chicken but that’s about it. Probably not an enormously uncommon level of ignorance even if media exposure suggests otherwise.

In years gone by I would have treated such a story as a slice of social information. To know at least something about the people involved would have been very mildly interesting, but more importantly it would have been a kind of insurance against abject social ignorance. Shaky insurance I suppose, but better than nothing.

These days things are different. There is a whole world of fascination out there, but Harry and Meghan aren’t part of it. They are not fascinating. I’m content to be ignorant about this minor soap opera because that is what it is – a minor soap opera. It’s the Harry and Meghan show and it’s not for me.

Is Harry short for Harold? I’ve no idea. Does it matter? 

What happened to Allan Hill?

The video is a few years old so the inevitable question arises - what happened to Allan Hill? An article from last year suggests he was still around even though development appears to be creeping up on his strange kingdom.

I enjoy stories like Mr Hill's even though I could never emulate it and would not wish to. There is an abiding fascination in spite of the obvious gaps in the story and his apparent difficulties in coping with life outside.

It is a common enough fascination because most of us, maybe all of us seem to need some degree of temporary isolation, opportunities to put aside the clamour of the world and pull ourselves together, opportunities to reassert our sense of self within the complex pressures of daily life.

The Tunnel of Oppression

From the University of Kansas

Earlier this month, over a thousand students, faculty members, staff persons, and administrators toured the Tunnel of Oppression. Presented by the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Tunnel is an annual immersive experience of interactive exhibits. Participants engage with different forms of oppression associated with disabilities, economic class, body image, gender, gender expression, sexuality immigration, race and ethnicity. This year, in what is believed to be the first time, the Office of the Provost invited KU’s leadership team to participate in the tour as a group.

We left the tour with decisions to make as individuals and as KU leaders – do we stand idle and tolerate people being treated in a discriminatory manner? Or do we assert our leadership and purposefully act to create greater justice in our part of the world and beyond? We choose the latter and we need you to join us.

We can start by understanding the meaning of oppression for us, our neighbors, and communities. What the Tunnel makes clear is that oppression is violence…and violence takes many forms. In this tour, for example, we experienced brutality visited upon children by police officers; CEOs and government officials choosing to poison the water in low-income neighborhoods; unprovoked viciousness toward queer, trans and gender non-conforming communities; families lying dead together in the aftermath of war; inadequate governmental responses to natural disasters in places such as Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico. While these multiple visual scenes of cruelty and subjugation were disturbing, equally difficult was the collective debriefing discussion that followed. You see, even University administrators struggle with how to understand and do justice work. But we will not shy away from the challenge.

Personally I blame evolution which is clearly going backwards.

Boom time

A number of sources have reported the mysterious planetary boom story.

Something very strange is going on, and it seems to be happening all around our planet. Reports continue to emerge of booming sounds of mysterious origin echoing from the sky, from Colorado and Alabama to the Middle East, United Kingdom and Australia, according to News Corp Australia.

The sounds, understandably startling for those who hear them, are certainly not the voices of gods, although their source has thus far defied scientific explanation as well.

A recent example occurred in Alabama, when a thunderous noise shook houses and frightened residents on Nov. 20. Not long after, explosion-like sounds were also heard in Colorado, although officials now believe that the Colorado clamor was unrelated to the worldwide phenomenon, likely caused by oil and gas extraction.

Other booms around the world, like the one in Alabama, remain unexplained. Locals in Cairns, Australia, were shaken by a loud rumble on Oct. 10. Then two weeks later, another boom was heard over the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Other mysterious sounds have been heard in as far reaching places as Michigan and Yorkshire, U.K.

How exciting. I'm almost tempted to dream up a theory, but the best response I've seen was a reader's comment on the above piece.

C Peterson
Things "boom" all the time. Construction noise. Traffic. Wind gusts hitting the house. We don't pay much attention, we don't remember them. Until there's a news story somewhere that rises high enough for a lot of people to see it. Then, people are tuned in to the idea, and they do remember when they hear something odd. They make false correlations, and before you know it a story like this goes viral and lots of people are sure something unusual or mysterious is going on, when in fact, there's nothing at all.

And the news outlets themselves make news. A small local story gets picked up and lots of other sources either reprint it or essentially copy it. I've seen this same story, citing the same small number of incidents, in dozens of outlets the last few days. This makes it seem like something much larger is going on.

Christmas crap

Today found us wandering through the Christmas section of a large local retail outlet. Mountains of Christmas crap as far as the eye could see, which I suppose one just has to accept at this time of year. Ghastly but traditional.

One of the objects on display was a particularly hideous figurine cast from some kind resin. It was supposed to be a fairy about ten inches high in pastel colours and sparkly bits, priced at a ridiculously expensive £22. It isn't at all easy to find words to describe how unpleasant and absurdly twee the thing was. Even Disney might have rejected it as a step too far.

An equally appalling item was a plastic bird in a plastic tree which played a plastic tune when one pressed a plastic button partly hidden in plastic grass beneath the tree. Again there are no words - 'horrible' just doesn't do it justice.

However there is a spooky side to all this Christmas crap, because as far as I could see nobody was buying any of it. Not a single item was picked up and taken to the till. Strange eh? What is it all doing there? Is it a cunning retail plan to make us sick of the whole charade and even out spending patterns?

Hell of a way to fall

Since the weekend I've been less than 100% health-wise so I passed some time watching a few old black and white films. One featured Constance Smith. Not being a film buff I'd never heard of her and I'm not particularly interested in actors anyway but for some reason a brief biography caught my eye.

Strikingly attractive, but troubled Irish leading lady of the 1950's, born to a struggling family in Limerick. Constance's is, perhaps, one of the more lurid and tragic tales of a promising career ending up on the skids. It began with her winning a 1946 look-alike competition in a Dublin movie magazine, touting her as a dead ringer for Hedy Lamarr. A successful screen test with the Rank Organisation followed...

Briefly in the limelight as a presenter at the 1952 Academy Awards, she was featured in a string of B-movies, including Red Skies of Montana (1952), Treasure of the Golden Condor(1953) and the thriller Man in the Attic (1953). Whether too emotionally frail to mount the pressures of stardom, or simply not talented enough to be thought of as star material, Constance never made it beyond leading lady status...

in 1962 and 1968, she was twice sentenced to brief prison terms for attempting to stab her partner, the well-known documentarist and film historian Paul Rotha. She also tried several more times to kill herself. Her last decades were spent, dissipated, in and out of hospitals. When able to get herself together for brief periods, she worked as a cleaner. Constance died, in obscurity, as an alcoholic on a street in Islington, London. A sadder end is hard to imagine.

From the brink of Hollywood stardom to an alcoholic's death on a street in Islington - that's a hell of a way to fall.