patrick.net

MolotovCocktail says

Dammit, Molotov, you beat me by 10 minutes.

Dems 1965-2015: "Remember CEASAR CHAVEZ! Justice for Farm Labor! Higher Wages for Farm Workers NOW! Stop the Exploitation!"

Dems 2015-: "If illegals are deported, we're going to have to pay decent wages to Farm Workers! Trump will starve America!"

Epic protests in San Francisco originated a few minutes from my home yesterday. But I didn’t go because I had to work. Added to which, I could not help but have questions about how “organic” and “of the people” this country-wide protest was.

For example, where were all these people when our government locked us down, kept us from our loved ones, told us we had to inject untested chemicals in our bodies, under threat of losing our jobs, ability to travel, or enter public places? ...

Oh yeah, it was fine for our rights to be taken away in 2020. For some reason (OK it was repetitive, fear-inducing, propaganda), the People forgot about all the many violations to the US Constitution that happened then:

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Assembly

Freedom of Religion

to name a few. And people were so brainwashed, they shamed anyone who spoke up for those basic rights.

Except for… on a day in June when we were suddenly informed that actually, racism was more dangerous than Covid. All of a sudden, everybody was urged by the government (well, those in Blue States like mine, at least) to go out, gather en masse to protest. Here’s a quick scan of just one end of Dolores Park, and this is just one of many videos I took that day...

Speaking of Alex Soros, Saturday also happened to be his wedding day, to Huma Abedin, former Hillary Clinton sidekick and BFF (and ex-wife of disgraced congressman and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner.) The nuptials happened at the Soros’s Hamptons estate. Cable news covered the fabulous cavalcade of black Escalade limousines conveying the super-elite of Progressive-Wokery to the glorious event. The New York Times, with its habitual lack of self-awareness, styled the event thusly:

The Clintons and Kamala Harris Descend on a Hamptons Wedding of Liberal Royalty
The wedding of Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton,
and Alex Soros, the scion of a liberal philanthropic dynasty, drew
a rare concentration of wealth and power.

“Liberal royalty?” Say, what. . . ? There is such a thing? In the party of No Kings? What’s the deal, then? Just princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, earls, viscounts, baronets, lairds, marquis, knights and dames, and so on. Yet, no king? ...

Their placards lament the withering of “our democracy,” yet they were just fine with “Joe Biden” selecting a 2024 presidential candidate for them — with no customary vote by party delegates, or anything approaching an open democratic process. They shout for the “rule-of-law,” except when it concerns special persons such as the former president’s crackhead, bag-man son. They’re all for the colossal grift around the war in Ukraine. And don’t forget they supported vaccine mandates, the closing and ruination of small businesses (while Walmart and Taco Bell were allowed to thrive), and all the other hypocritical, fraudulent, lethal actions of Covid-19 policy.

I’ve read numberless op-eds in recent years lamenting conservative distrust of scientific experts. Yet, progressives are remarkably anti-expert when it comes to the venerable field of research into human intelligence.

IQ psychometrics emerged as a scientific field of study in the first decade of the 20th century when Charles Spearman invented factor analysis, which led to him proposing the existence of a general factor of intelligence in 1904. And then, the next year, Alfred Binet invented the first IQ test.

By the end of the 1930s, the modern IQ test had largely matured. Over the past eighty years, IQ has proved itself to be the single most useful and reliable metric in psychology.

In the liberal 1960s and 1970s, IQ science was rigorously interrogated, especially over the racial gaps in average IQ, but emerged battle-tested and resilient.