For years I’ve argued that intelligence is your ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage.
The reason this definition resonates with me is that it’s what separates man from beast. Beasts have every advantage compared to weak, furless, fangless, clawless, slow humans, yet we have this mysterious ability to turn the situation to our advantage and dominate animals twice our size and strength. When other animals enter a new environment they become a new species because the previous species couldn’t adapt. Homo Sapiens by contrast has been adaptable enough to conquer almost every continent while remaining Homo Sapiens.
The question is are we adaptable because our behavior is plastic or because our brains are plastic? The answer is both. Our behavior is plastic because we can solve problems we’ve never seen before but our brains are also plastic because once it’s clear we’re in an environment that favours hunting skills, synapses unrelated to hunting get pruned while those related to hunting get strengthened.
In autism this doesn’t happen. The brain does not prune itself and leading experts in the field are baffled as to why.
My theory is that by not pruning, behavior remains plastic, because the brain has not invested in any one skill. This explains why autistics are good at tasks measuring fluid intelligence (Raven Progressive Matrices, Block Design) but bad on tasks requiring life experience (social skills) and remain childlike in their personalities.
The autistic brain is built for short-term adaptability. Humans in general are built for short-term adaptability because when we entered the arctic 40,000 years ago, we didn’t wait many generations to evolve fur, we simply invented the fur coat in one generation. However among humans, autistics may be the shortest-term adapters. This explains why through most of history, when change happened slowly, neurotypicals were the richest people, but during periods of rapid change like today, autistic type nerds tend to be super rich.
Born with what some have called an amazing photographic memory, Oprah delivered her first sermon at the age of 3.
Jesus rose on Easter Day!
Halleluiah, halleluiah!
All the angels did proclaim!
Oprah’s grandma loved the attention of having such a brilliant granddaughter.
Miss Hattie May, I do declare that chile sure can talk, that chile gifted, that chile gona talk her way clear out of Mississippi.
Packing a cranial capacity 50% larger than even most white womens’, Oprah had the brains to adapt.
With hats custom made to fit her XXXXXX large cranium. “Will it fit my big ol’ head?” she would ask before putting it on. “Put it on before I have to pee” she would say to wild laughter. It takes TONS of intelligence to charm people, and all that peeing talk made Oprah seem as country as corn bread observed one biographer.
Not only did she become one of the richest and most powerful people on the planet by the age of 50, but she became a religion, creating all these metaphysical laws that her millions of worshippers followed.
Everything happens for a reason.
There’s no such thing as luck.
Nothing is ever out of order.,
The purpose of your life is to align your personality with your purpose.
What you focus on expands
Here she is explaining her laws of the universe and doing so at a skill level that the founders of the great religions could only dream of.
One viewer writes:
Oprah raised me. I’m not kidding. She was the person I listened to, went to for advice and she taught me what my parents couldn’t. And i am forever grateful! I miss her show so much!
She brilliantly crafted a persona that was a perfect mix of your fun ditzy materialistic celebrity obsessed best friend and all-knowing, all-wise religious prophet.
And boy does she know how to profit!
Soon that big ol’ head was matched by a big ol’ house:
This weekend many were saddened to learn that Vernon Winfrey, the man Oprah calls her father passed away from cancer.
When Oprah was a pregnant runaway living in Milwaukee, her mother sent her to a juvenile detention centre.
“What am I doing here?”, thought Oprah, who felt she was too good and too smart to end up in such a place. Luckily there were not enough beds so Oprah was sent to live with the legendary Vernon Winfrey, a Nashville barber.
The first thing Vernon and his wife Zelma did was make her scrub off her makeup and dress like a lady. The next thing they insisted on was that she get all As on her report card and do book reports. That was fine with Oprah who had been reading since age three.
Soon Oprah was setting Nashville on fire by winning oratory contests, becoming Miss Fire Prevention, a local radio personality, and Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennesse. All this from a girl was not yet 18.
Had it not been for Vernon taking in the brilliant teen, she feels she might have ended up on welfare with multiple illegitimate kids but instead she became the richest African American of the 20th century and the most influential woman on the planet.
Cro-Magnon man dominated Europe from about 45,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. Although they are sometimes considered the first Whites, they are actually only one of three races that gave rise to the white race (the other two being Anatolian farmers and steppe pastoralists).
Draw-A-Man IQ test
Long ago I looked at their cave art, with an emphasis on drawings of people, so I could apply Dale Harris’s revision of the beloved Goodenough Draw-A-Man IQ test. The first drawing of a man I found was discovered in South-western France and believed to be 17,000 years old. It’s known as “The Wounded Man”.
The Goodenough Harris Draw-A-Man test has a maximum raw score of 73, but because this drawing depicted the man with the head of a bird, not a human, 13 of the items dealing with features unique to the human head could not be scored, so it ended up with a score of 22/60 which I then prorated to 27/73.
Another mysterious cave painting found in the cavern known as ‘The Sanctuary’ at Trois-Frères, Ariège, France, made around 15,000 years ago is known as “The Sorcerer”.
Unfortunately this too is a man-animal hybrid, and the animal features made some of the items inapplicable, in this case, the six items dealing with clothing (items #29,#55,#56,#57,#58 and #59), but out of the remaining 67 items, the picture scored 49, which I prorated into a score of 53/73.
Averaging the two drawings together, Cro-Magnon man scored 40/73 on the Goodenough-Harris Draw-A-Man test. The smoothed mean and standard deviation for U.S. 15-year-olds (considered adult level for the purpose of this test) is 45.2 and 9.83 respectively, so this equates to an IQ of 92 (U.S. norms) or 90 (U.S. white norms). But because these norms were published in 1963, I originally adjusted for the Flynn effect to determine how they might score by today’s standards, however further research (which I have not yet published) shows Draw-A-Man appears to have no Flynn effect. It may be one of the few genuinely culture reduced tests.
Of course with a sample size of only two people, we can’t be very confident that Cro-Magnon had a mean IQ of 90 (U.S. white norms). But there are two reasons why the figure is quite plausible. First Native Americans have a mean IQ of 92, and like Cro-Magnon man, Native Americans evolved as cold adapted hunter-gatherers so their IQs should be similar.
Second, as Peter Frost recently noted, a new study found that polygenic scores for education (a proxy for IQ) continued to increase even after the Paleolithic by up to half a standard deviation, if the chart below is indicative and half an SD below modern Europe is about 90.
So back in 2020, Pew Research asked both Jewish Americans and all Americans about their income. This is an interesting question because in the famous NLSY database used to write the book The Bell Curve, the sample of Jews scored 0.87 standard deviations (SD) higher (13 IQ points) than Americans as a whole on the AFQT. Given about 0.39 correlation between IQ and household income (in a given year) (see table 3), we’d expect Jews to be 0.39(0.87) = +0.34 SD in income.
The normalized distribution of Jewish household income
How close did my predictions come? Hard to say because household income is not normally distributed so applying linear regression to it is problematic.
One theoretical solution is to force income to a bell curve. This I did by comparing the highest and lowest income groups in the poll and finding their respective percentile with respect to both Jewish Americans and all Americans. Each percentile was than assigned its corresponding Z score on a theoretical normal curve.
Thus, if U.S. household income is forced to fit a normalized Z score curve which by definition has a mean and SD of 0 and 1 respectively, the Jewish mean and SD are 0.85 and1.2 respectively, about half an SD higher than expected from the IQ-income correlation.
Of course this is all very rough, because when two different distributions are FORCED to fit bell curves, one can’t assume the two bell curves will fit each other, but this is a very subtle point that few of you have the IQ to worry about.
In the final scenes of the films, the killer (played by Betsey Palmer) has hacked to death everyone at the camp to avenge the drowning of her mentally disabled son Jason, except for Alice who is the lone survivor, who battles the killer on the beach.
But when Alice finally grabs the machete, she is able to vanquish her assailant once and her for all.
The killer gets her head chopped off. The Queen of the Slashers gets a death worthy of a queen.
At this point an exhausted Alice collapses into the canoe and drifts into the lake under the guiding light of the full moon.
As night turns to morning on the placid lake, we are greeted by the most beautiful music I have ever heard in a horror film. Something about film cameras in 1979 made the gorgeous green, orange and pink colours of the changing fall leaves and their reflection on the lake just pop. As the police approach on the shore, we know Alice is going to be all right, and…
BAM!
Just when we least expect it, the corpse of Jason (the killer’s son who drowned decades earlier) pops out of the very lake he drowned in to drag Alice to her death.
Cut to Alice screaming in a hospital bed. Apparently it was all a dream. Or was it? The police found her floating in the lake, put didn’t find the boy she claimed pulled her in, with Alice strangely saying “then he’s still there.”
Still there meaning his corpse is still at the bottom of the lake where he drowned decades earlier, or still there, meaning a zombie is still on the loose? It’s all left so beautifully ambiguous as we cut once again to a shot of the beautiful lake and its majestic Fall colours. Cue beautiful music.
Apparently, the idea of the final jump scare came from a producer who had just seen Carrie (1976) which had ended with a similar dream jump scare, where the heroine visits Carrie’s grave, only to have Carrie’s arm reach out from beneath the ground:
But when Friday the 13th quickly became one of the most successful horror films of all time with lineups around the block, the film’s producers began demanding a sequel that continued the story.
Continued what story? The killer was beheaded and Jason returning from the dead was just a dream. But the producer’s wanted Jason to come back so part 2 opens with Jason stalking Alice at her own home a couple months later, and what makes this so creepy is he’s suddenly a grown man.
So while Alice being pulled into the lake by the zombie of an 11-year-old drowned boy was just a dream, it foreshadowed an even creepier reality: Jason never drowned at all but survived in the woods all those years and was now a grown-ass man wanting revenge for the beheading of his mother. I think that’s absolutely brilliant, but the creators of the original film thought it was the dumbest idea they ever heard and had little to do with the sequels.
Nonetheless when they saw all the money the franchise would gross with 10 sequels, and a remake, a brief TV show and video games, novels and comics, original screen writer Victor Miller, who was only paid perhaps 5 figures in 1979, sued to gain rights to the series. The judge gave him ownership of Jason as a child, but not the hulking hockey masked homicidal maniac he’d become as an adult.
In my last articles we learned that Alice is the sole survivor at Camp Blood, and the slasher is revealed to be the grieving mother (played by Betsy Palmer) of Jason, a mentally retarded boy who drowned at the camp decades earlier.
For some reason this scene feels so iconic. Alice throws stuff at the killer but the killer keeps coming.
Alice throws a ball of yarn, the killer punches it away. Alice throws something at the killer. The killer deflects it with her chin.
Finally Alice throws her arms up as if in surrender.
This is reminiscent of the girl who got killed back at the start of the movie back in 1957.
At the start of the film this was a freeze frame moment and the films title came crashing through the screen with opening credits. So perhaps when Alice did the same thing, they could have freeze framed it with the film’s title crashing through the screen with closing credits. That might have been a good note to end on, but the film’s actual ending was so much more brilliant, and we’ll discuss that in the next article.
Alice finds herself all on a secluded camp ground late at night. Outside are the dead bodies of all the other camp counselors and the killer who killed them, lurking somewhere in the dark forest under the full moon.
But at least Alice is safe locked in the cabin. Suddenly the corpse of her co-worker Brenda comes flying through the window which means the killer is right outside and can now get in through the smashed window. All she can do is guard the window with a sharp object.
But from the distance she sees the headlights of a jeep driving into the campground. It must be Steve, the owner of the camp finally returning. Little does she know Steve is dead. She runs out to greet him, only to find an all American soccer mom coming out of the jeep.
“Who are you?” she asks
“…an old friend of the Christies”
If Alice looks like the girl next door, this lady looks like the lady next door. She’s the kind of lady every middle class kid in American has known their whole life. She might have been your teacher, or your mom, or your best friend’s mom.
The actress who played her was Betsy Palmer. Palmer was a fixture on daytime TV during the wholesome days of the 1950s, much like June Cleaver. My grandmother used to watcher on the game show I’ve got a secret.
On the most terrifying night of her life, it feels so good to see a face she can trust, the all American soccer mom, the girl scout leader, the lady down the street, here to rescue Alice from camp blood & drive her to safety with her jeep. Alice gives her a big hug as if reuniting with her own mother.
Making matters even better, she’s a strong strapping woman who can protect Alice from whoever is killing everyone. The ultimate girl scout leader. She worked at the camp in her youth and knows the place inside out.
As a kid I remember being so relieved when Palmer took over. She exuded leadership and competence. All I knew about the F13 movies at the time was that the reason Jason killed people was because the camp killed his mother. But why did the camp kill his mother I asked by British Pakistani babysitter one day. Because his mother was a witch who killed people, she said.
I probably took the term “witch” a little too literally and was looking forward to Palmer and Alice heading into the woods like Hansel and Gretel to find the witch’s cabin.
But instead the film took a very different turn which I so stupidly didn’t see coming, despite having had the huge advantage of knowing the killer was a woman. But I was only nine.
The sheer genius of this film is it had the goriest most graphic most spooky killings we had ever seen (axe to the face, arrow through the mattress from someone hiding under the bed) being performed by the most wholesome person we had ever seen cast as a killer (Palmer).
My favorite part was when she said “Oh I could never let them open this place again, could I?” almost asking Alice to talk her out of her killing spree.
But perhaps the scariest moment is when Palmer pulls out her hunting knife and charges Alice while screaming “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH”
Part of what makes this so scary is how insane she is. She is killing people for the drowning of her son, even though those people were not even born at the time. And the way she slips from competent and coherent to batshit crazy is so spooky. Is this schizophrenia do you think? Or early onset Alzheimer’s? I wish the character had taken the WAIS.
One may ask how someone as respectable as Palmer got cast in such a gruesome low budget horror film. Her Mercedes broke down and she needed $10 K to get a new car.
“Universe find me $10,000” dollars she remembered saying. I wonder if she’s an Oprah fan because Oprah is always preaching to put thoughts into the universe though Oprah was not famous until several years later, but maybe how she much later described the story was influenced by Oprah-speak.
Either way, she was soon offered a part which paid $1000 day for 10 days work.
There’s just one catch. It’s a horror film.
“Oh no,” said Palmer. “Well send me the script.”
“What a piece of shit!” she recalled saying after reading it. “This will come and this will go. No one will see it”
Little did she know it would become the influential horror film of the last 50 years, though the role of Palmer herself has been largely forgotten, eclipsed by the iconic hockey masked Jason.
But that’s why I love the film so much. Everyone knows about Jason but so few know how it all began and the brilliant role Palmer played in its genesis. The film is the ultimate hidden gem.
At first Palmer was embarrassed to be associated with such a cheap gory film but over time she came to embrace her iconic status as Queen of the Slashers. Sometimes while shopping in the store she would hear mysterious customers behind her whispering the film’s terrifying sound track:
Ha ha ha
Chu Chu Chu
Betsy Palmer: 1926 to 2015
RIP America’s sweetheart turned Queen of the Slashers
For most of the movie camp owner Steve Christie has been out on the town drinking coffee. Little does he know that while he was gone, several of the camp councilors he hired had been brutally murdered and that he’s about to meet the same fate. When the rain stops, he runs back to the camp in pitch blackness, only to be confronted by someone shining a bright white light in his face.
“Oh hi,” he says, recognizing the person. “What are you doing out in this mess?” (referring to the storm that juste ended)
The killer stabs him in the stomach with a machete as if to say “I’m killing you, that’s what I’m doing out in this mess”
Meanwhile the only survivors are Bill and Alice. Alice is getting scared because they can’t find any of the other counselors and even found a blood soaked axe in someone’s bed, but Bill convinces her that everything is probably fine.
Still, they try to leave the camp but the vehicle wont start. They try to phone for help but the phone line has been cut. Finally the power goes out and Alice gets some rest as Bill heads to the emergency generator to fix it.
Alice wakes up and decides to make some instant coffee and then goes looking for Bill.
To her utter horror, she finds his corpse pinned to a wall, with an arrows stabbing him in the eye, stomach and private parts.
It is interesting that a film about white people doing stereotypical white things (camping) would have a white killer killing with a bow and arrow (the white man’s first display of dominance over other races). There is an argument that the bow and arrow was invented in Africa long before modern humans split into other races but I don’t buy it and one of the reasons I don’t buy it is that if the bow and arrow was created by such an early ancestor, they’re descendants in Australia would have had it and their descendants in Native America would have had it sooner.
After discovering Bill’s corpse, a terrified Alice runs screaming back to the main cabin, realizing she is now all alone in the big dark camp in the middle of nowhere, with no one to protect her.
Today is June 13th (the same day as the film takes place).
Camp counselors Jack and Marcie are making love in a cabin during a rain storm
Lightening flashes and we see that in the bunk bed above their own, Ned is now dead:
Meanwhile Marcie has to pee so she leaves Jack alone in the lower bunk as she flees into the rainstorm clad only in a shirt and underwear, in search of a washroom. As Jack lights a cigarette a drop of blood from Ned’s corpse falls on his head. Before he has a chance to get up and investigate, the killer (who was under the bed the whole time Jack and Marcie were making love) panics and stabs him with an arrow from under the bed. Perhaps the most creative death scene in the history of horror:
Meanwhile Marcie is still peeing so the killer crawls out from under the bed towards the washrooms. Marcie hears someone has entered the washroom but when she can’t find anyone in either change room, she convinces herself “must be my imagination”.
But as soon as she says that we see the shadow of a huge axe rising on the wall behind her. She turns around and screams as the axe come flying into her face.
Pumpkin Person 