In my last article I discussed how crazy Ralph tried to warn Annie not to go to camp blood. She ignored his warning and was immediately killed.

Now a police officer is visiting “Camp Blood” to see if Ralph has been harassing them too. The police sees camp councilor Ned Rubenstein goofing off by pretending to be a Native American and he’s having none of it. This scene is wildly politically incorrect by today’s standards and the film gets no woke point for featuring a Jewish character in the main cast in 1980 because Jews were by then already doing well (though not nearly as well as today). One of the tropes of 80s slasher films is the practical joker and that trope appears to have started with Ned.

One of the counselors is played by Kevin Bacon who gives a lame line about not smoking because it causes cancer. The councilors inform the cop they have not seen Crazy Ralph and he leaves them alone.

One of these practical jokes is pretending to drown so that a hot girl will give him mouth to mouth. Through POV shots we see the killer is watching from within the forest and is not amused. Actor Kevin Bacon would admit to Howard Stern that he put something in his speedo to appear more endowed in this scene.

A little later, counselor Alice discovers Ralph hiding in the pantry.

In my last article I discussed the opening scene where an unlucky pair of camp councillors were murdered on Friday, June 13th 1958.

In the next scene we fast forward to Friday June 13th, 1980.

It was a common trope for 1980s slashers to be divided into a past event, where an unspeakable event occurred, and then the present day (which somehow commemorates that evil event, often because it’s the same calendar day). This started with Halloween (1978) which like Friday the 13th (1980), opens with a murder on the same day many years before the day when the bulk of the film occurs.

In this film, the present day starts with an adorable girl next door type named Annie entering a diner to find out how far she is from Camp Crystal Lake.

Even 22 years after the brutal murders, the camp is still considered off-limits but a truck driver who is heading in that direction anyway agrees to drive her half way. If you look closely, you can see the only black or Afromultiracial person in the entire movie (he is holding a broom and standing silently, looking at Annie, as the clerk talks to her). Amazing how little diversity there was in slasher films as recently as the 1980s. Oprah would not smash the color barrier in U.S. media until 1986. These films serve as a time capsule of a bygone era.

As the truck driver takes Annie to his truck, she is confronted by the town crazy, an old man named Ralph who warns her she will never return from Camp blood. The warner is another trope of the 1980s slasher film, also originating with Halloween (1978) (the Donald Pleasence character), though Friday the 13th‘s crazy Ralph became the much more common prototype.

Although the truck driver tells Ralph to get lost, once they are on the road it becomes apparent he agrees with him and advises Annie to quit her job as camp cook. Like the day Friday the 13th itself, the camp seems cursed with bad luck. A couple murdered in 1958, a boy drowning in 1957, bad water in 1962, bunch of fires, and nobody knows who did any of it.

When the truck driver drops her off, Annie has to hitchhike the rest of the way to the camp. When a jeep pulls over to pick her up, she looks so happy and excited as she throws her stuff into the back of the vehicle and hops into the passenger seat.

But something is off. Annie keeps talking about how excited she is to be starting her dream job as camp cook but the driver is silent. The next red flag is when the driver zooms past the exit to get to Camp Crystal lake. When Annie tries to complain, the jeep just drives faster and faster forcing a terrified Annie to jump out and runs into the forest.

But we see the driver’s legs, clad in black pants and black shoes rushing after her. When Annie runs straight ahead, the driver runs left or right, so Annie can no longer see her stalker. She relaxes by a tree, only to see the driver suddenly looming over her, wearing a plaid lumber jack shirt and holding a huge knife.

Some say the film was paying homage to Marianne Crane in Hitchcock’s Psycho in that an attractive young lady is set-up to be the heroine, only to be killed off early.

Friday the 13th (1980) is arguably the best horror film ever made. Although many would consider Halloween (1978) to be the better film, and in many ways it is, every time I watch it I can’t help but think of all the things I would have done differently if I had made it. With Friday the 13th (1980) there’s no room for improvement. It’s pure perfection from the opening shot.

And that opening shot is of the Paramount logo (a mountain) because that’s the company that won distribution rights, but immediately you know you’re watching a Friday the 13th film from the ominous whisper:

Ha Ha Ha

Chew Chew Chew

No that’s not someone sneezing. That’s the film’s demented sound track and are cue that the killer is approaching.

The film begins with a shot of the full moon and the sounds of nature (crickets, birds, frogs) and as the camera pans down, we see we’re at a Camp Crystal Lake in 1958. The sound of campfire songs in the distance.

Soon the camera places us in the POV of a mysterious stalker entering one of the cabins. Every detail meticulously captures the 1950s summer camp experience, from the crossed arrows above word “FOX” on the cabin door, to the abandoned checkers game on the table as the children sleep, not knowing they are being watched by a stalker from whose POV we’ve been placed.

Chew Chew Chew.

Ha Ha Ha.

Meanwhile in another cabin, the camp councilors are singing Down in the Valley, with two of them gazing in each other’s eyes as they seem to sing only to each other.

The two love birds decide to discretely sneak off and find an empty cabin to fool around in upstairs. With their Christian blond blue eyed boy and girl next door look, they perfectly epitomize the 1950s middle American ethos that so many conservatives are nostalgic for.

As the couple makes out, the camera slowly creeps up the stairs from the stalker’s POV:

Chew Chew Chew.

Ha Ha Ha.

“Someone’s there”, the girl says in a panic.

“We weren’t doing anything,” the boy says unconvincingly.

POW! He falls to the floor with blood gushing from his stomach and mouth.

Realizing her boyfriend has just been killed, the girl screams and runs back and forth, like a cornered rat. As we get closer to her from the killer’s POV, all she can do is throw empty card board boxes. Finally, she throws her arms up and screams and the shot is frozen in that iconic image that tells everyone they’re watching a Friday the 13th movie.

Suddenly the title FRIDAY THE 13TH bursts into the screen as if crashing through shattered glass!

This is horror filmmaking at its best.

This is a documentary Lion of the Blogosphere would enjoy. Released in 2015, HBO’s Class Divide tells the story of extreme gentrification in Manhattan’s Upper East side. More specifically, on one side of the street you have housing projects where people live in poverty, and on the other side you have one of the most exclusive private schools in the World, where children of Hedge Fund decamillionaires learn to speak Chinese.

The kids in the housing project are living in an island of low IQ poverty surrounded by the high IQ super rich. Some of the apartment buildings surrounding them are so luxurious they have swimming pools in each individual unit and elevators that lift your car all the way up to your floor!

When the elite private school was built, part of the agreement was that scholarships would be provided for some of the kids in the housing project but as of the documentary’s completion, none were attending. It’s easy to blame the elite school but not everyone has the genetic ability to do calculus. Jensen observed that minorities and lower class kids (like our very own Pill) are every bit as smart as upper class kids when it comes to Level 1 ability (rote learning, school yard interactions) so teachers can’t understand why so many score in the mentally retarded range on IQ tests. Even Jensen himself thought the tests were culturally biased, until he saw these kids try level 2 tasks (abstract reasoning). Only then did their retardation show and it was 100% genetic.

The term “six hour retardate” became wildly popular in the 1970s to describe kids who seemed perfectly normal, except for the 6 hours a day they learned abstract topics in school.

In the documentary there’s a little girl from the housing project who dreams of attending the elite school. Her hero is Beyonce. Sadly she does not get accepted. Kids who admire Beyonce don’t qualify for schools like that:

The stark inequality is bad for the poor kids’ self-esteem but some of the more sensitive rich kids seem even more damaged. The film features a rich boy who went up an elevator with a black woman and her two toddlers. One of the toddlers notes that the boy is going to the 49th floor (where the super rich live) while they’re going to the 14th floor (where poverty lives). The rich boy is so worried that the mother thinks that he thinks he is superior that he is rendered speechless. Sadly, the rich boy kills himself before the documentary is complete for reasons no one understands.

You can watch the full documentary for free here.

After 19 years, Ellen is hanging up the microphone. Just as Oprah had helped end racism by becoming the black best friend to millions of white suburban soccer moms, Ellen has helped end homophobia by becoming their gay best friend. Both women would rank among the World’s most admired people and by given the Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

But sadly, with the advent of social media, jealous losers started to tear Ellen down with stories of how mean she supposedly is behind the scenes (which only made me like her more). Celebrities also began to complain about how mean Ellen was to them. The snowflake generation was especially offended when Ellen coerced Maria Carey into revealing she was pregnant by offering her whine on TV. When her staff began to complain that she was mean to them too and when a sexual harassment scandal involving her producer broke into the spotlight, the powers that be decided it would be Ellen’s final season.

But she had a great run, and daytime TV is a dying medium anyway. Back in 1992, Oprah had 9 million daily viewers in just America alone (one in 20 U.S. adults) giving her God-like power over the culture, but today, with competition from hundreds of cable channels, streaming and social media, the highest rated day-time talk shows are watched by only 2 million American (one in 109 U.S. adults). There are kids on tik tok that sometimes get more viewers. Ellen is smart to jump off that sinking ship while she still has some culture cred left.

Ever since covid, Oprah has refused to leave her six mansions (especially not her $100 million home in Santa Barbara or her 100 acre pad in Maui) but last year she told Ellen she would make a rare exception for Ellen’s final season. But when negative publicity was making Ellen’s brand toxic, would Oprah break her promise?

HELL NO! She would be there in the flesh to support her friend! Having the World’s most influential woman making a rare appearance to celebrate Ellen’s final week meant that Ellen would go out on top!

When Ellen announced her next guest was Oprah, the studio audience full of beautiful suburban white women absolutely lost it. They were screaming and crying for three minutes straight as Oprah, whose sky blue shirt complemented her gorgeous black skin walked onto the stage. When the crowd finally subdued, Oprah told Ellen to enjoy these glory days, because there will never ever, ever again be a time like this.

Time magazine just released their list of the 100 most influential people on the planet and once again, Oprah has made the list. Being listed as one of the 100 most influential by the ultimate cultural authority is such a huge honor that if you make the list even once, it goes in the first paragraph of your wikipedia, but Oprah has made it an astonishing 11 times.

When Oprah first started in the 1970s, it was a huge disadvantage to be black but she’s managed to dominate the culture so long that being black is now almost an advantage in life as corporations like Time compete to show their wokeness. Intelligence is the ability to adapt to even hostile environments, and when you adapt long enough, you live to see those environments become friendly.

But far too brilliant to leave anything to chance, Oprah learned very quickly who has power and how to get on their good side. When Stephen Spielberg was on the cover of Time magazine circa 1985, Oprah was reading it.

“Put that stuff away,” he snapped at her.

“STUFF?” yelled Oprah, “STUFF? STUFF? STUFF?. This isn’t STUFF!!! This is TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!” she shrieked, “this isn’t STUFF?…This is Time’o’la! This is the print World’s Coca-cola!”

“I don’t read the good stuff,” said Spielberg, “so I don’t have to believe the bad”.

Time magazine may have heard about this famous exchange between the two show business heavyweights, and may help explain why she’s been honored by the magazine more frequently than any other woman, and rightfully so.

When Oprah first started in media, we were living under WASP rule so Oprah would cleverly suck-up to people like Johnny Carson.

However after doing a show on Satanic worship, Oprah found herself in BIG BIG trouble.

The show accidentally promoted the age-old antisemitic stereotype that Jews were Satanists to millions and millions of viewers. Despite the fact that she was the #1 talk show on TV, it looked like she was going to be taken off the air as Jewish groups were demanding she be cancelled.

Fortunately Oprah was able to adapt by figuring out which of the angry Jews had the most power and negotiating a compromise in which Oprah would release a statement admitting her show may have caused harm. Oprah was so grateful to this one powerful Jewish man who saved her show, that when he died, Oprah attended his funeral.

“What is she doing here?” the other Jews wondered.

“He did me a favour once” said Oprah, sensing their curiosity.

“What was the favour?”

“I’m not saying”

Another smart move. Why remind Jews that she once did a show that so unfairly harmed them.

Having won over Time magazine by badgering Stephen Spielberg, Oprah brilliantly sensed an opportunity to win over the Jewish community since by now they were more powerful than even WASPS.

A black lady on her show said The Piano should win the Oscar for best picture. Sensing her opportunity, Oprah moved in for the kill.

“The Piano over Schinlder’s List? THE PIANO OVER CHANGING LIVES!!!” Oprah yelled indignantly.

A Jewish old lady in the studio audience punched the air in solidarity with Oprah’s anger and God only knows how many more did the same from home.

Such cunning genius paid off. In 2006 Oprah was crowned the ONLY person worthy of visiting Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel. Not even U.S. presidents, royalty, Nobel Prize winners or the Holiest Jews were considered worthy of visiting those sacred grounds with Wiesel herself, and even though she knew little about the Holocaust, she adapted by repeating everything Wiesel said back to him in sacred whisper.

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Arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. Certainly in the top five. One reason is the heroine (Alice) just looks like the girl next door. I could really relate to the film for that reason; she reminded me of the young adults on my street that I was always tagging along with. I saw the film in the 4th grade. It was on TV at around 1 am and I waited for my parents to go to sleep and snuck downstairs to watch.

Sadly, one of the fans of the film became obsessed with the actress who played Alice and started stalking her just as Jason stalked her at the start of the sequel. She was so wierded out by the experience that she didn’t act in another movie for 29 years by which point I doubt anyone would have wanted her because she was no longer young and relevant. Can you imagine, being the heroine of the most influential horror film of the last half-century and then throwing your whole career away and all because some demented fan?

Imagine the career she might have had if that stalker hadn’t ruined it. And it probably wasn’t just her career that it ruined but her relationship with men. Hopefully he went to jail for a long time.

But at least her youth and beauty will forever be preserved in perhaps the greatest horror movie of all time.

And yet she always thanks us fans for getting her through the trauma by showering her with love and support.

Because cold adapted populations tend to score higher than tropical populations on IQ tests, it can be inferred that human intellect reached its pinnacle after we left the tropics. But correlation does not equal causation. Some folks think that because civilization began outside the tropics, that explains why the tropics fell behind and that somehow before civilization, cold adapted peoples were no smarter than warm adapted people. After all, IQ was useless in the stone age right?

WRONG!

Arthur Jensen notes that “On non-verbal reasoning tests given in the first grade, before schooling could have much impact,” Native American “children exceeded the mean score of blacks by the equivalent of 14 IQ points.” Jensen claimed they also score higher on achievement tests from first to twelfth grade, and this DESPITE Native Americans ranking as far below Blacks in socio-economic status as Blacks rank below Whites.

Did you hear that? DID YOU HEAR THAT AMERICA? As Oprah would say.

When I read that today I thought Jensen must be mistaken. Hate to say it but the majority of Native Americans I’ve met were homeless, drunk, barely coherent and missing teeth. I can’t imagine a more environmentally deprived community in a First World country and yet these people outscore black Americans by 14 points on performance IQ (at least in early childhood).

I decided to look for more recent research since Jensen’s book was from 1981. I found a 1996 paper in which 28 American Indian school-aged children ranging in age from 6 years
to 17 years (from a random sample of 30 selected from students participating in a community program through the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, Minnesota) were given the WISC-III. Their verbal, performance and full-scale IQs were 90.5, 102.3, and 97.4 (U.S. norms) respectively.

To put that in perspective, in the WISC-III standardization, the corresponding scores were 103.6, 102.9, and 103.5 for Whites and 90.8, 88.5, and 88.6 for Blacks.

It should be noted that the American Indians were tested in 1994 and the WISC-III standardization occurred in 1989 so at most we could reduce the American Indians to 90, 100.3 and 95.9. Also, the Native Americans were a bit atypical in that they were from an urban as opposed to reservation environment, but this should make the comparison more fair.

If we assume that on a scale where Americans have an SD of 15, White Americans have an SD of 14.5, then on a scale where the White American mean and SD is set at 100 and 15 respectively, Native Americans scored 86, 97 and 92 and Black Americans scored 87, 85 and 85.

It should also be noted that Black Americans average about 25% white genetically so their scores might be reduced to 83, 80 and 80 if unmixed.

The 17 point gap in Performance IQ between Native Americans and unmixed Blacks can not at all be explained by environment so it must be genetic but it can’t at all be explained by selection pressures related to civilization, since most Native Americans didn’t have any. Maybe it’s genetic drift, but most likely it’s selection pressures related to cold winters and that explains why the Performance IQ gap is quadruple the verbal one. Cold winters require require visuo-spatial motor abilities to sew, hunt, make tools, make shelter, build fire, make clothes etc. This also explains why men tend to outperform women especially on spatial tasks (men did the hunting, women did the child rearing).

Over 589 people have now taken the TAVIS and these have a mean and standard deviation of 9.84 and 2.63 respectively.

When the sample increased to 604, I decided to rank the items by order of difficulty (hat-tip to Kiwi-Anon who suggested this could be easily done in Excel):

At least 48 TAVIS takers reported taking the Wechsler intelligence scales in the U.S. or Canada within the last 10 years (excluding people who reported scores outside the valid score range). This subgroup had a mean TAVIS score of 10.48 (SD = 2.44) and a mean self-reported Wechsler score of 129.92 (SD = 17.61). When I arranged the 48 TAVIS scores from lowest to highest and placed them beside the 48 Wechsler scores ranked lowest to highest, I got the following equivalencies.

TAVIS 7 = Wechsler IQ 100

TAVIS 8 = Wechsler IQ 105

TAVIS 9 = Wechsler IQ 121

TAVIS 10 = Wechsler IQ 125

TAVIS 11 = Wechsler IQ 141

TAVIS 12 = Wechsler IQ 146

TAVIS 13 = Wechsler IQ 151

TAVIS 14 = Wechsler IQ 154

TAVIS 18 = Wechsler IQ 159

Correlation between TAVIS and self-reported Wechsler IQ: +0.04

The correlation with the Wechsler was disappointingly low, but keep in mind that the Mega Test also had an incredibly low correlation with the self-reported Wechsler so this doesn’t necessarily invalidate the test.

Of the dozens of people who took the KAMIKAZE, at least 14 have self-reported math SAT scores. Some people took the KAMIKAZE before an answer key problem with the Dice item was corrected and so, for the purpose of the norming, I corrected the scores of those who were unfairly penalized so the norming would reflect the corrected version of the test.

I also deducted a point from those who were unfairly boosted by a brief scoring error (when I added a research question for comments, this added a point to everyone taking the test until I quickly spotted the problem & corrected it). With these corrections in mind, here is the raw data:

In my first norming, I converted all math SAT scores to the pre-1995 scale and then converted to IQ equivalents using 1980s norms but that seemed to produce inflated results, especially at the low end. This time I converted math SATs to IQ equivalents directly, using estimated means and SDs for the time period.

To get IQ equivalencies for the KAMIKAZE, KAMIKAZE scores and math IQ equivalents were both ranked from highest to lowest and equivalent ranks were equated:

The mean and standard deviation of the KAMIKAZE in this sample is 7.9 and 3.8 respectively while the mean and standard deviation for SAT derived math IQ is 134 and about 11. The relationship between raw scores and IQ looks fairly linear, so one can probably just use the following equation:

IQ (U.S. norms) = (KAMIKAZE score)(2.79) + 111

If this extends to the extrne a score of 0 would put you around the level of the average American university grad. A perfect score of 17 out of 17 would put you just below Prometheus level.

One red flag is the correlation between KAMIKAZE scores and math SATs is 0.0005. Technically this calls into question the whole logic of using math SATs to norm KAMIKAZE scores. However the correlation jumps to 0.43 when I remove everyone who took the old (pre-1995) SAT from the sample. This makes sense because old SAT people have the highest SAT derived math IQ scores because they took the test back when it had as huge ceiling, and yet because these people are now oldish, cognitive decline impairs their KAMIKAZE scores.

To adjust for age, I would advise readers to give themselves a bonus of 0.17 IQ points for every year over 30.

Next, I ranked the items in order of difficulty based on the percent of this norming sample to pass them.