A conversation with the great Ben Katchor.

"The thing is, wealth doesn’t corrupt you just criminally, it also corrupts your tastes. You don’t look at things, you don’t study things, you become, you know, an

On America's 'Data-Driven Defeat in Afghanistan'

"They mistook war as a matter of process, when its nature is ruled by paradox."
https://t.co/ColMD35yFf
On Our collective Deathwish.

"The true defining characteristic of American political society at present isn’t widespread violence from either the left or the right, but a propensity for dramatic overreach combined with utter toothlessness."
https://t.co/RaBQsrKHTj
On The New Truth.

"And so the new argument proceeds, burying contrary evidence in unmarked graves while erecting new religious monuments and shrines at which the growing number of the faithful pay obeisance."
https://t.co/FotGnphMqX
On the deadly new regime of total information control.

"Perhaps the most messed-up thing about the case of the purged Google doc is that no one seems to care that it happened, aside from those publications that celebrated the monopolist’s censorship."
https://t.co/lCPGd6Csvd
On Our Superdense Foreign Policy Black Hole.

"Russiagate merging with the war in Afghanistan was inevitable because both wield America’s world-powerful military & intelligence apparatus against domestic political foes, dressed up as foreign adversaries."
https://t.co/KfBGVzJkB8
On Left Heretics and the New Media Collective.

"The secret motive driving people in the news business is the fear of standing alone. Most journalists look around to see what the journalists they imagine are important are doing, and they copy that."
https://t.co/Vj5p2qENz8
On Joe Rogan, Aleph.

"Joe Rogan's prominent cranium and bulging physiognomy are physical manifestations of a fluctuating aperture through which one glimpses the cultural mood that is, at that moment, most popular and most repressed."
https://t.co/lKABT6oHzG
And closing out the year, my first piece for @unherd On the Iron Law of the Elite: as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards.

"For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals."
https://t.co/zwWXqQ1DXx

More from Crime

While we'll be celebrating New Year's Eve, thousands of terrified people will languish in cages, locked up by institutional actors who are deliberately indifferent to the grave risks to their health and safety. Here's a brief summary of my 2020 professional activities.

Early 2020: With the indispensable help of @lindar, I migrate #CaliforniaCorrectionalCrisis to
https://t.co/mk2kUVD1XB, which would become the one-stop-shop for the COVID crisis in CA prisons.

February 2020: My book #YesterdaysMonsters, about the hurdles in the path of aging, infirm people seeking parole, comes out. It becomes a frightening omen of things to come in ways I couldn't imagine at the time.

In March it became evident that the only way to prevent an impending catastrophe was to release people. I started collecting resources.

In early April, I linked between the atrocity of Susan Atkins' last hearing and the impending doom of thousands sentenced to death by COVID. It was obvious that the optics of releasing so-called "violent inmates" was going to sabotage relief efforts.

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)