Even though the traditional media is doing its best to ignore the Epstein scandal and social media is distorting it with QAnon crap, there exists one woman with the intelligence, courage and integrity to do real journalism on the topic and that is Whitney Webb.

Webb has spent hours interviewing Epstein’s accuser and researching the case in general and produced a book that is available on amazon.

I have not read it but she says it’s extremely long and she explains where she got all her information.

Here’s an interesting podcast where she discusses her explosive research. She comes across as a bit of a rube, but she’s still arguably the best Epstein journalist there is (though she has little competition given how reluctant more established journalists are to touch this topic).

I have to say though after listening to the podcast I am more confused about the Epstein case than I was before. She mentions everything from Iran Contra to Organized Crime and even name checks Bob Rubin (LOL) and Roy Cohn.

My sense is that Epstein is a fairly unique case of an intelligence agency blackmailing elites, but she makes it sound like all elites are constantly blackmailing each other and have been for a long time. If this is true, it sounds like it takes even more IQ to get to the top in America, because there are so many traps.

One of the great mysteries of recent evolution is why did the skin of Europeans and Northeast Asians become white? The traditional answer is that in colder climates, you need less protection from the sun so selection for dark skin becomes relaxed or even reversed because dark skin blocks too much vitamin D from the much less potent Northern sun.

One problem with this explanation is that arctic people, despite being further North, retain dark skin, and white skin didn’t become common in Europe until 12,000 to 6000 years ago, despite people living there for roughly 40,000 years.

One theory is that the less vitamin D rich diet imposed by agriculture meant Europeans suddenly needed to absorb vitamin D through their skin to compensate.

But I may have discovered another explanation. White skin appears to have emerged around the same time the human brain suddenly started shrinking (after 4 million years of growth). Now I’ve argued that most of this brain shrinkage was caused by the malnutrition of agriculture and we’ve recovered most of the lost brain mass with improved modern nutrients (giving rise to the Flynn effect).

However not all of our lost brain mass has come back, leading me towards a popular explanation pushed by several prominent scholars: Domestication. It’s well known that domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors.

It seems that the high IQ required to survive the cold Northern Eurasian winters had driven European and Northeast Asian brain size to ridiculously huge levels, but they couldn’t make full use of all that brain mass because they were still wild animals who would rather fight and bite than work as a team. Thus evolution sacrificed a tiny bit of individual brain mass (mostly from regions unrelated to cognition) to create a cooperative collective intelligence so powerful it would one day split the atom.

What does this have to do with white skin? Well, just as the animals they were domesticating would have white patches, perhaps white patches started showing up on Northern Eurasians. This may have inspired sexual selection for white skin against which the white patches would be invisible.

I suspect an even higher level of domestication occurred in India, but the intense sun killed off people born with white patches so skin remained dark.

Alex Jones is being sued for $150 million for his claims that the Sandy Hook shooting never happened and that the parents are a bunch of actors.

It will be interesting to see how much money the jury awards the parents for all the pain and suffering Jones has caused these victims of a tragedy, and how much Jones is ultimately forced to pay. He claims to have a negative net worth, but court documents show that at his peak, he earned 9 figures a year selling crap to his low IQ audience.

I wasn’t planning on doing a third norming of the KAMIKAZE but after a commenter enquired about it, I discovered there was a lot more data to work with.

I now have 20 cases of KAMIKAZE takers reporting Wechsler IQs and the correlation between the two tests is 0.54 which is surprisingly low given how g loaded the WAIS-IV arithmetic subtest is.

It’s likely not the case that the correlation is depressed by range restriction, as the KAMIKAZE takers (mean 131; SD 16.5) were slightly more variable in their Wechsler IQs than the U.S. population (mean 100; SD 15) though this could be because these are self-reported Wechsler scores taken at different years which introduces new sources of variance.

One possibility is that Arithmetic is highly g loaded but math isn’t and the reason for that could be that math is much more dependent on education and practice, while Arithmetic is something few people practice, especially since the advent of calculators.

Another possibility is that the correlation is dragged down by the unreliability of self-reported Wechsler scores, my not correcting KAMIKAZE scores for age, and the fact that Wechsler and KAMIKAZE were not taken at the same time.

Nonetheless, when KAMIKAZE and Wechsler scores are both listed from highest to lowest, we get the following equivalencies: