1 jan 01 
 
What a binary date. 
 
I suppose I'll try to keep this short (for me), even though this =is= the 
first entry of the new year.  I just want to comment on some silly stuff I 
have seen online of late -- specifically, high-IQ societies.  I've been 
trying to compile a list of addresses of gifted organizations, and many of 
them link to these places - MENSA, the MEGA society, the Prometheus 
Society (not to be confused with the publishing company - I mean it, 
=don't= confuse them), what have you.  MENSA peopl scoring 98th percentile 
and above on intelligence tests (though it also takes results such as high 
SAT scores, which really confuses me.  I don't think SAT shows much in the 
way of intelligence -- sure, a stupid person may not be able to get a high 
score, but I believe a normal intelligence person certainly can score 
high.  Thus the people currently populating our undergraduate 
institutions.  But I digress.)  Some of these other societies try to be 
even more exclusive by admitting those in 99.999th percentile.   
 
Well, what do you get for that extra 1.999 percentile?  From what I can 
see, not much.  Perhaps it is something sociological going on, but from 
reading these societies' journals, I must say I am not impressed.  Some 
supposedly smart people like to crow about how they don't bother with 
mundane stuff like memorizing multiplication tables or spelling rules and 
the like, because evidently this would take up the valuable mental real 
estate they use for concocting their inane theories which happily 
disregard actual facts.  But doesn't quantum mechanics teach us that 
reality is an illusion?  (No it doesn't.  It just tells us that reality is 
different from what we have as our instinctual mental templates.) 
 
(argh!  Stu was =staring= at my crochet cigar box when I asked him where 
it was -- it's sitting on the printer!  I like how =I'm= always blamed 
when something of his goes missing, as if I like to randomly pick up stuff 
and put it in other places -- okay, I do do that, but I generally pick up 
my own stuff and randomly set it down.) 
 
In any case, I like my own exclusive society, the Meep society, composed 
of human beings I like.  No test is involved, and even without the test 
scores taped to their lapels these people seem to accomplish many 
things.  I must say that I am an elitist - I do not like people who crow 
about various attributes but never seem to apply those plusses to anything 
useful.  Ms. vos Savant, you have an over 200 IQ?  And what do you do with 
that intelligence?  Answer questions about stupid word puzzles and write 
books trying to explain hyperbolic geometry isn't real?  (Let me tell you, 
sister, Euclidean geometry isn't real.  And yet the buildings and bridges 
stand up.  Amazing what illusion can do.)  I knew some supposed geniuses 
at S&M who really just stuck their heads up their asses all the time.   
 
And after listening to some biographical tapes on Thomas Jefferson, I 
became less impressed with our supposed most intelligent president - this 
was a man who never admitted he was wrong.  Some like to say he merely did 
not like confrontation, which allowed him to prevaricate about his 
involvement in a smear campaign against John Adams (who was a pompous 
shithead in his own right, but a pompous shithead I think I'd rather be 
around.)  This was a man who sincerely believed in the innate inferiority 
of Black Africans, who thought that such people could not be educated so 
that they would understand Euclid, and originally these weren't totally 
idiotic suppositions (as he had no example of educated blacks in front of 
him).  However, in meeting Benjamin Banneker (I'm sure =that= was a lovely 
meeting) and reading the works of Phyllis Wheatley, and his own personal 
knowledge of the Hemings' family (and the craftwork of his own slaves) he 
did not change that opinion one whit.  He denigrated the poetry of 
Wheatley as trash, supposed someone else did the calculations of 
Banneker's almanac, and didn't even free his own slaves (probably because 
of all his debt) -- the Hemings' children were freed only after they were 
21.  Oh yes, and did I mention Jefferson blamed England for the South's 
dependency on slaves?  He blithely ignored the real reason domestic 
slaveowners wanted to restrict slave importation -- so they couild keep 
prices for slaves high.   
 
Anyway, Monticello is still a pretty neat house, even if Jefferson was a 
sincere asshole.  Perhaps my opinion is harsh, considering his main sin of 
the time (noticed by his contemporaries) was to wish the world the way he 
wanted it to be and to see it that way, ignoring any evidence to the 
contrary.  Such people piss me off now, and I don't care that "standards 
are different in different eras", Jefferson still pisses me off. 
 
By the way, my favorite president right now is the imperialist and 
naturalist Teddy Roosevelt.  Gotta go for a man with whiskers.   
 
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