IQ and achievement

A useful summary below from the Daily Mail. He is both right and wrong below.  It is true that many high IQ people don't make a great mark on the world but it is also true that those who do make their mark in anything requiring  brainpower do have very high IQs. High IQ is almost always very helpful  and in some occupations is essential

With the example he gives, the writer below does tell us why many SEEM to be low achievers:  They have their own definition of achievement and the good life.  And they work to that.

Many may not even be detected as intelligent at all.  I know a woman who was a duffer at school but somehow got into a very highly-paid job while still young.  She made some very good financial decisions while in that job and was able to retire at about age 30 to a country area where she spends a lot of time in the garden growing her own fruit and veg.  She also has a very bright and supportive husband and an attractive young daughter.  She is one of the most successful people I know by the only criterion that matters:  She has got exactly what she wanted. 

Her IQ has never been assessed as far as I know but her repeated good decisions tell me it is very high

And in my own case I made enough money in business to retire at age 39.  And retire I did.  I did not go on to make more and more.  I had enough not to need a job and that was all I wanted


People who are intelligent tend to be healthier, wealthier and live longer.

But beyond a certain point, being clever can be more a hindrance than a help – and certainly doesn’t guarantee happiness or success.

The cleverest man I’ve ever met is a 67-year-old American called Chris Langan. He has an IQ well over 190 – higher than Albert Einstein, whose score was about 160.

Chris was once known as ‘the smartest man in America’, but he’s not a Silicon Valley supergeek or a multi-millionaire tycoon.

When I met him a few years ago he was a horse rancher working in the Midwest.

He had dropped out of college and spent most of his life doing manual labour, including as a construction worker and a bouncer.

He told me that he enjoyed being a bouncer because it gave him plenty of time to think about quantum mechanics.

He never pursued his obvious gifts – though he did on one occasion enter an American game show where he won the equivalent of about £200,000.

He told me he had enough money, so felt no need to repeat that trick. He was perfectly happy looking after horses.

The first person to properly explore the link between high intelligence and life outcomes was a psychologist called Lewis Terman.

In 1926, he visited Californian schools searching for the most gifted children.

He selected 1,500 with IQs of 140 or more. They became known as The Termites and have been studied now for over 90 years.

While some did achieve wealth and fame, others, Terman noted, became ‘policemen, typists and filing clerks’.

The link between intellect and achievement was far from clear.

So why doesn’t having a very high IQ make you better off? I think it is partly because if people are told when they are young that they are much smarter than others, they often feel burdened by expectations.

After that, they feel whatever they do is not quite good enough.

Another factor is that a lot of really smart people I know also spend way too much time agonising over things, seeing the different side to so many problems they find it hard to make a decision.

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A Five-Step Plan to Fight the International Criminal Court
And to defeat it on its own political terms

Last year, then Knesset member Tzipi Livni convened senior officials from the Justice Ministry and Military Advocate General’s international affairs departments at the Knesset for a conference. The purpose of the conclave was to provide the officials with the opportunity to justify their interference with security decisions that by law are the exclusive purview of the Israel Defense Force’s field commanders and Israel’s elected leaders.

As is their wont, the officials used the opportunity to proclaim that “the legal system is the IDF’s ‘legal Iron Dome’ against accusations of war crimes in foreign and international forums.”

Following International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s decision over the weekend to prosecute Israel—including its armed forces and elected leaders—on phony war crimes allegations, we see that their conceit was a lie. The idea that Israel’s legal fraternity is Israel’s protection against the likes of Bensouda and the lawfare gang she runs with was first concocted in the 1990s by then Chief Justice Aharon Barak. The purpose of this fantasy was and remains to justify interference by the various components of the legal fraternity—the High Court, the Justice Ministry, the Attorney General and the Military Advocate General and others—in the decisions of IDF commanders and elected officials.

As professor Avi Bell of Bar Ilan University Law School explained in Israel Hayom earlier this week, Bensouda’s decision exposed the colossal failure of the legal fraternity’s strategy for protecting the country from the lawfare gang. Bensouda’s decision is a horrible, strategic blow for Israel. It endangers the very lives of IDF soldiers, commanders and elected officials.

Members of the legal fraternity asserted their competence to direct Israel’s responses by presenting the ICC as a legal body. But as the Rome Statute of 1998, which founded the ICC, made clear, the institution’s political nature was evident from the outset, as was its inherent hostility to Israel. Now that Bensouda’s biased ruling has exposed this state of affairs, Israel must replace the lawyers’ failed legal strategy with a political one.

A political strategy for fighting the political ICC has five components:

The first component of the political strategy is institutional. Responsibility for handling the ICC has to be transferred from the lawyers who facilitated Bensouda’s hostile decision to the people who have to clean up the mess they made—the prime minister and the foreign minister.

To this end, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to order all legal officials—from Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to the Justice Ministry’s International Affairs Office to the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser to the Military Advocate General’s International Law Department—to cease and desist from all actions on the matter. These legal officials should be barred from making any statements to anyone about the ICC and prohibited from all communications with the ICC or regarding the ICC.

These government officials are charged with dealing with international legal matters. And Bensouda’s decision to prosecute Israel for imaginary war crimes proves beyond all doubt that the ICC is not engaged in anything resembling international law.

The second step is legislative. Whereas Israelis—the ICC’s No. 1 target—deluded themselves into believing that the ICC was a legal challenge best dealt with by lawyers, the Americans —its No. 2 target—were under no such delusion. To deal with this threat, in 2002 Congress passed the American Service Members’ Protection Act. The goal of the ASPA, popularly dubbed “the Hague Invasion Act” is “to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party.”

The law authorizes the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court.”

The ASPA bars all U.S. government bodies from assisting the ICC in any way and prohibits the transfer of U.S. military assistance to countries that are party to the court.

The Knesset needs to follow Congress’s example. The Knesset should convene from recess in emergency session to pass an identical law. Indeed, it is outrageous that no such law has passed to date.

The third part of the political strategy for fighting the ICC is diplomatic. Here too, it involves following the U.S. example. Led by then Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, between 2002 and 2005 the United States negotiated agreements with dozens of countries to prohibit them from turning Americans over to the ICC.

The Foreign Ministry must engage every country Israel has diplomatic relations with, and particularly those that receive aid from Israel, including African states, and ask them to sign similar agreements. Israel should strongly consider conditioning the provision of further aid on the conclusion of such agreements.

Step four of the political strategy for fighting political war against the political ICC pertains to public relations. For the duration of the ICC’s existence, every Israeli representative everywhere in the world should be directed to attack the ICC at every opportunity. The purpose of the attacks is to delegitimize the ICC’s very existence and work towards its enfeeblement, delegitimization and dismantlement.

It ought to go without saying that Israel needs to cut off all official and unofficial contact with the ICC. All of its officials—indeed anyone even remotely associated with the ICC—must be banned from entering Israel. And any ICC officials presently on territory under Israeli control must be immediately expelled.

The final step Israel must take to beat back the ICC relates to its policies regarding Judea and Samaria. For the past several years, Mandelblit and his comrades have used the ICC inquiry to prevent the government from implementing its policies in these areas.

For instance, according to multiple government sources, the reason Netanyahu has failed to evacuate Khan al-Ahmar, despite a Supreme Court ruling requiring the illegal Bedouin encampment, that threatens the access road to Kfar Adumim, to be dismantled, is that Mandelblit and his fellow lawyers argued that implementing those policies would increase the likelihood that Bensouda would prosecute Israel. Netanyahu reportedly set aside his plan to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria for the same reason.

If this is what happened, then it is now clear that Mandelblit and his associates misled Netanyahu; Bensouda didn’t need an excuse to prosecute Israel for nothing. So Israel should ignore her and act in its own interests. Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett need to order Khan al-Ahmar’s immediate evacuation. And within a week the government should pass a decision to apply Israeli law to all Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley.

Israel’s legal system is responsible for defending Israel in foreign courts and international legal bodies. It is incompetent to defend the country from political onslaughts by hostile political bodies. The ICC’s anti-Semitic decision, which seeks to criminalize Zionism and the State of Israel, demonstrates that it is a hostile political institution.

Israel’s political leaders made a grave mistake in heeding the counsel of our power-hungry jurists. Now that we know the truth, they must clear the decks and let political warriors fight the political war the ICC is waging against the country and its citizens.

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I don't regret breaking the unwritten rule British clergy should not intervene in party politics

by Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romaine

Rabbi Jonathan Romain reflects on the backlash against his decision to publicly urge congregants to vote against Labour

rabbi-dr-jonathan-romain Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain wrote to 823 families in his shul (Photo: Getty Images)
On October 30, just after the election was announced, I broke ranks with the longstanding, unwritten rule that clergy in Britain do not intervene in party politics.

It is common for bishops, rabbis and imams to speak out on specific issues about which they feel strongly — from homelessness to climate change — but never to back or berate one particular party.

It would compromise their status as neutrals able to minister to the entirety of their flock, and was not considered the British way of doing things — unlike in Israel or America, where politics and religion often form an unholy mix and are not admired over here.

However, I felt that the situation Britain now faced was so dire with Jeremy Corbyn as a possible Prime Minister that it was no time for political correctness.

Until Mr Corbyn, antisemitism had been largely limited to the extreme right and street graffiti. It was astonishing, therefore, to see a mainstream political party being tainted with the same brush.

It was not just the threat to Jewish life, but a negation of British values. I could see concepts such as tolerance, communal harmony and mutual respect beginning to be an endangered species. Other parties were also at fault, but none so wilfully as Corbyn-led Labour.

So I wrote an email to all members of Maidenhead Synagogue — which covers several different constituencies throughout Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, including Labour ones — suggesting they vote for whichever party was most likely to defeat Labour in their particular area.

There was an enormous response, far beyond anything that I have ever experienced when dealing with other controversial issues, from mixed-faith marriages to faith schools to assisted dying.

What was even more astonishing was the total disconnect between reactions by my community and those of fellow rabbis.

For the former, and Jews throughout the UK who got in touch after reading about the email in the JC, there was almost overwhelming support.

No one was suggesting that Mr Corbyn was a Nazi or was about to introduce anti-Jewish legislation, but when you have lost one in three of your family in living memory, you get nervous at the slightest whiff of antisemitism.

It was no wonder that some Jews had thought of packing their bags and leaving England if Mr Corbyn had come to power. If you have been nearly annihilated, you do not hang around for more.

I articulated the deep sense of unease they felt. Whatever their political views (and many were long-standing Labour supporters), never before had antisemitism been on the agenda as a political issue, and they felt it needed calling out.

By contrast, virtually all rabbis (the one public exception being Yuval Keren), reckoned I had made a major error: either because they did not think Corbyn was a danger, or because they agreed with my analysis, but thought I had crossed a red line in criticising him.

I was also accused of stoking fears in the community instead of trying to calm them down. It begged the question of whether rabbis should always seek a middle path or sometimes take the high road?

In addition, it meant that rabbis of all denominations now felt pressurised by my action to take a stand themselves. Their own congregants began asking “What do you advise?”

I do not know if that applied to the Chief Rabbi, but I am sure it made his subsequent intervention easier to contemplate.

Did “coming out” make a difference to the national vote? Yes it did. Mr Corbyn’s failure to tackle antisemitism did not just worry Jewish voters, but alerted many others to the fact that something was wrong within Labour.

Much had been made of him being a man of integrity — a person in the political wilderness who had stuck to his principles throughout his time on the backbenches. Now people began to realise why he had been in the wilderness for so long.

The carefully constructed halo around him began to be dented and rot away. As one person told me: “If he can have a blind spot about antisemitism, what other blind spots does he have?”

Among the many messages of the election is that antisemitism — or any other prejudice — has no place in this green and pleasant land.

On a personal note, I have no regrets at going public but, respecting the traditional position, I shall now return to observing non-partisan politics. I hope that no rabbi will have to cross that red line again.

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My church

Peter Smith must be an Episcoplian:

I have had to put up this year with a lady praying that God would intervene to change the minds of climate deniers; with regular prayers extolling us to take better care of the environment and in support of refugees and asylum seekers.

Now, I believe in taking care of the environment and being compassionate towards those in trouble in the world, but I can’t help but feel that I am being preached at in an ABC kind of way. Incidentally, our rector stands above the fray and sermonises on scriptural matters. He is an anchor of belief, sanity and reason.

One parishioner of English origin that I spoke with the other evening does not sympathise with Folau, favoured Remain in the Brexit argument and dislikes Donald Trump. I thought it was wise to stop there. I have no doubt that except for me, and perhaps one to two others, everyone else is a convinced believer in man-made climate change. I doubt anyone but me harbours any doubts at all about the truth of the so-called “stolen generations.” Why would you if you get your information and news from the ABC and “mainstream” newspapers like the SMH and The Age.

We are caught in a pincer, I think. On the one hand we have militant atheists, the godless Left, who because they have no scriptural guidelines are free to make up stuff. And, as I will come to, we have Christian wets who are ready to compromise scripture to be nice or to serve their political beliefs.

For atheists, there are no externally-set standards. Standards can be adjusted at will to cater for every “woke” cause. From there, live and let live goes beyond a civilised tolerance of differences from norms to an aggressive insistence that there are no norms and, onwards from there, to “cancelling” those who say that there are.

You are now at risk if you say that men can’t have babies. And evidently, to boot, you would be wrong. It was widely reported, via Medicare, that twenty-two men gave birth in 2018/19; fewer miracles than in the previous two years. In a twist of history, such miracles are now clearly embraced by atheists.

It is true that there are many conservatives who are atheists. So, atheism itself does not necessarily lead to a reckless disregard for societal norms built over centuries. Nevertheless, those fighting the conservative cause are hamstrung if they have no religious faith – by which, to be clear, I mean Christian or Jewish faith. For example, same sex marriage should be opposed because it was brought in, in the blink of an eye, against the strictures of millenniums of tradition and convention. But it is also clearly against God’s law, as set out in the Bible. That is a powerful adjunct to the secular argument.

This brings me to Christians who identify themselves with leftist politics. The two simply don’t mix. They don’t mix because Christians should not be willingly complicit in producing misery. And there is ample evidence showing that leftist policy prescriptions do just that.

Take a recent piece (19 December) by editor-in-chief Mark Galli of Christianity Today; a prominent evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham. Billy will be turning in his grave. Or he would be if he were not Heaven bound at the end of days. Galli calls for Trump’s removal from office and is apparently unconcerned about the plight of the disadvantaged if the radical Democrats were to win power. His job is safe. Here he is:

"[T]he facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral … That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments…To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency."

Leave aside the unctuous moral preening and the invocation of God. The facts are not unambiguous. I have followed the case closely and there is no evidence that Trump attempted to coerce a foreign leader in the cause of discrediting a political opponent. That same foreign leader has denied that there was ever coercion as has Trump. You can’t go around as a Christian leader making things up. It is immoral.

Mind you, Trump has a lot to answer for.

He has helped the unemployed find jobs and reduced poverty. Black and Hispanic unemployment is at the lowest level ever recorded. He is supporting school choice for black children living in inner cities. He is establishing “Opportunity Zones” to attract investments into low-income areas. He has appointed judges less likely to take a cavalier approach to killing the unborn.

He has moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognised Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He has rebuilt the US military to keep us all safer. He has defeated ISIS in Syria. He has persuaded NATO countries to spend more on their own defence. He has renegotiated trade deals to help American workers and farmers. He is trying manfully to better secure America’s borders. And there is so much more that he has done or is doing.

Christians better start getting on the right side of things before green new deals and anti-Christian socially dysfunctional movements – militant atheism, post-modernism, libertinism, socialism, transgenderism, radical feminism, Islamism, anti-Semitism, tendentious historical revisionism — tear the fabric of our society apart.

Trump is an all-American heroic president. He was absolutely necessary to hold back the destructive leftist tide which could yet still drown us all. Did God have a hand in his elevation? I reckon He might. God doesn’t necessarily pick the most righteous. Trumps transgressions, such as they are, are not nearly in the same ballpark as were King David’s. But apparently Trump must go. Why? Galli thinks he is immoral.

We are all immoral. “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye.” In this case, no matter how moral or immoral Trump happens to be in the various facets of his life, he is doing great good for a great many. That is a morality to which Christians and conservatives should subscribe.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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