This is very interesting considering that the Western part of the US has been suffering from a drought for about a decade, if not longer. My recollection from US history class was that the dam for the Colorado river is what made portions of Southern California farmable and Las Vegas livable. Makes sense that an organization that hates humanity would want to take away things that make living in certain climates impossible.
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The San Francisco Chronicle reports (2022-05-21), “California is about to begin the nation’s largest dam removal project. Here’s what it means for wildlife”:
After decades of negotiation, the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is expected to begin in California’s far north next year.
The first of four aging dams on the Klamath River, the 250-mile waterway that originates in southern Oregon’s towering Cascades and empties along the rugged Northern California coast, is on track to come down in fall 2023. Two others nearby and one across the state line will follow.
The nearly half-billion dollars needed for the joint state, tribal and corporate undertaking has been secured. The demolition plans are drafted. The contractor is in place. Final approval could come by December.
Now, among the last acts of preparation, scientists are trying to make sure the fish and wildlife that are intended to benefit from the emergence of a newly wild river will thrive. While the decision to remove the hydroelectric dams was financial, it was urged — and enabled — by those hoping to see a revival of plants and animals in the Klamath Basin.
Half a billion dollars to destroy a source of fresh water and electricity in a state dependent on artificial irrigation for agriculture and with some of the highest electricity prices in the contiguous 48 states.
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And California at the State and local levels has signed on to just about every single Agenda 20XX plan that has come out of groups like WEF since the late-90s. It’s no wonder California has become impossible to live in if you are subject to the natural elements of State. You cannot have a modern lifestyle available to everyone and not have proper irrigation and electricity production, and California has turned all of that off for its once robust and growing middle class.
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Hunter Biden’s iCloud account has been hacked. In addition to the predictable sleaze, the hack shows that Hunter may have used the nickname “Pedo Peter” to refer to his father in his contacts.
Several videos show Biden walking along a beach and consuming drugs in the shower with a woman who refers to him as her “future baby daddy.”
Another video purports to show Biden arguing with a prostitute about the amount of crack he had in his possession.
Breitbart News reporter Wendell Husebo shared a screenshot of what he claimed was a contact in Hunter Biden’s phone, listed as “Pedo Peter.” Another user alleged that the contact card belonged to President Joe Biden due to his previous use of the pseudonym “Peter Henderson.”
Edit: It gets worse. The “Pedo Peter” monicker is now believed to have been created by Natalie Biden, Joe Biden’s granddaughter.
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Remember that delightful article I posted a couple of days ago by the soon-to-be-ex prime minister of Sri Lanka on the World Economic Forum Web site? Well, it’s gone!
But the Internet never forgets. Here is the page as cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on 2022-06-08, “Sri Lanka PM: This is how I will make my country rich by 2025”.
In other vintage news before the downfall, here is an article from the 2016-01-10 issue of the Sri Lanka Sunday Times, “Soros to boost Sri Lankan economy, Stiglitz to provide ‘sound’ advice’ ”.
Billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros on Thursday exuded confidence in Sri Lanka and told the Sri Lanka Economic Forum in Colombo he wanted to assist and invest in the once, war-torn country.
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Taking part in the high-level forum in Colombo fully packed with ministers, academics, senior officials, and business leaders, Mr. Soros said the members of his foundation and investment decision makers in his business are here to explore investment opportunities and assist the government’s programme. He noted that he was impressed by what the Sri Lankan government has achieved within a short period of one year and it has become a bright spot with the capacity to attract investment avoiding the economic fate experiencing in several other countries. The island nation has moved towards a more open society and this is the cause his (Open Society) Foundation supports, he stressed.
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The Premier noted that the country should move forward from the current status of a low income earning country. Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph Stiglitz told the spellbound audience, Sri Lanka’s challenges are more specific and boils down to public sector performance. The country’s troubles, in that sense, are neither a matter of fiscal policy nor monetary policy. It is a matter of lack of innovative and efficient public sector management. Nevertheless, the gap between deregulated markets and trickle down growth is a significant challenge, and deserves extended debate, he pointed out.
You can see how the Soros-Stiglitz “innovative and efficient public sector management” worked out in the video in the original comment.
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https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-cannabis-social-equity-council-20220711-rnkqcey2nndp5brepuk7pnji7a-story.html
https://www.wtnh.com/news/cts-social-equity-council-voted-to-allow-more-companies-to-grow-recreational-marijuana/
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Why would there be a need for social equity viz vie cannabis? I am pretty sure the culture around cannabis has been pretty damned inclusive since the get go. Do we not remember the stereotypes presented to us by Reefer Madness? Plus does Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre not count as “inclusive”? I mean they put out an album called Chronic for crying out loud!!
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Independent of this substance, mean IQ is already on the way down. It is astounding that, in the middle of an “epidemic” of opioid addiction, we have experienced a headlong rush to normalize THC use. There is pretty good evidence that long-term use will lead to even further reduction in population IQ - though some is acute - but much more over 20 years or so.
As a general matter, since results could hardly be worse than under the current “war on drugs”, I favor decriminalization of drugs. That is not to say their use should be normalized or encouraged. It boils down to finding policies which inflict the least harm on society; the lesser of evils.
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I wonder if this isn’t a chicken and egg thing. I mean were people who smoke copious amounts of weed already stupid when they started or were they made stupid by the long term use of weed? I ask because I have known plenty of smart folks who also smoke pot and have for a while. Now they tend to smoke after hours and not while on the clock so to speak. Also, I would suspect that the IQ loss from pot-heads is due to constantly being in the cloud of pot all day every day vs. those who smoke it usually at the end of the day to wind down, like having a couple of beers at the end of the day.
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The positive historical example out there is that China eventually recovered from the depredations of drug use caused by England’s Opium Wars. Thus it may be possible to imagine a better world in which the scourge of drug use can be overcome.
The downside is that apparently China’s successful termination of the opium problem involved a lot of summary executions along with the simple abandonment of drug users to their unpleasant fate. The lesser of evils, indeed!
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Citation needed? Doesn’t this contradict the so-called Flynn effect observation which was generally confirmed by a large number of studies in the 20th century? Or is it meant to say that the rate of IQ increase has been slowing down?
I would add to the list the well documented risk increase in schizophrenia incidence for young males that use cannabis (source).
Before getting banned (and reinstated) by Twitter, Alex Berenson wrote a book (Tell Your Children) on this very topic. Here is review in Mother Jones from 2019, long before it was fashionable to cancel Berenson.
For all the good things that Joe Rogan is doing, I can’t help but think his public dedication to and strong endorsements of pot as a lifestyle choice are a terrible mistake given how many young people look up to him as a role model.
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My take is that like any drugs, “dose makes the poison” and separately, the age and sex of the smoker matter, with young males at a distinct disadvantage.
Separately, modern pot is generally considered to be much stronger than 30-40 years ago. For instance, this article states
The primary problem with the current available cannabis in dispensaries in Colorado is that the THC content is not like it used to be. Prior to the 1990s it was less than 2%. In the 1990s it grew to 4%, and between 1995 and 2015 there has been a 212% increase in THC content in the marijuana flower. In 2017 the most popular strains found in dispensaries in Colorado had a range of THC content from 17–28% such as found in the popular strain named “Girl Scout Cookie.”2 Sadly these plants producing high levels of THC are incapable of producing much CBD, the protective component of the plant so these strains have minimal CBD. For example the Girl Scout Cookie strain has only 0.09–0.2% CBD.
The flower or leaves that are generally smoked or vaped are only one formulation. We now have concentrated THC products such as oil, shatter, dab, and edibles that have been able to get the THC concentration upwards of 95%. There is absolutely no research that indicates this level of THC is beneficial for any medical condition. The purpose of these products is to produce a high, and the increased potency makes them potentially more dangerous and more likely to result in addiction.
Part of the problem is that once you apply Big Marketing techniques to anything that can be packaged as a product, you begin to see Big Results.
According to the 2014 Monitoring the Future Study, marijuana is by far the number one drug abused by eighth and twelfth graders.4 Since legalization in Colorado, marijuana use in adolescents and those 18–25 has steadily climbed, well outpacing the national average. Colorado leads the nation in first time marijuana use by those aged 12–17, representing a 65% increase in adolescent use since legalization.5 According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in 2015 the county of Pueblo, Colorado, has the highest prevalence of reported past month marijuana use by high school students at 30.1%.6 It is well documented that when drugs are perceived as harmful, drug use decreases as we have seen with adolescent use of tobacco.7 There is significantly less perception of harm by marijuana primarily because Colorado has normalized it as a society and allowed the perception that it is “organic” and “healthy” and that there is nothing wrong with it.
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Leaving sarcasm aside, legalizing pot with limited regulation is a big own goal for any society that aims to improve living standards for its population.
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John has written a good article about possibly declining IQ scores, “Global IQ: 1950-2050”.
In the “Quarrels, Questions, and Answers” section, John addresses the Flynn effect. However, it remains an unresolved problem in IQ testing.
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A good resource is Dutton and Woodley’s 2018 book At Our Wits’ End (link is to my review). Evidence from Norway, Sweden, and Finland, which have near-universal male conscription and give all recruits a standardised IQ test, with a database going back to 1950, is that IQ rose as predicted by the Flynn effect between 1950 and 1997, where the average score topped out and began to decline. In Norway, the decline was 0.38 points per decade; in Denmark it was 2.7 points per decade. Because these are measures of military recruits drawn from citizens and permanent residents, they minimise the effects of immigration from low-IQ populations,which contributes to an even greater decline.
Immigration is a major factor in the U.S. and Western Europe, as almost all immigration is from countries with lower mean IQ than the legacy population.
My own analysis in “Global IQ: 1950–2050”, based on U.S. Census Bureau forecasts of the population of countries around the world and the Lynn and Vanhaen estimates of mean national IQ from IQ and the Wealth of Nations, is that global mean IQ was 91.64 in 1950, 89.20 in 2000, and will be 87.81 in 2025, and 86.32 in 2050. This is largely driven by a population explosion in low-IQ sub-Saharan Africa and static to falling population in the West and East Asia.
I consider the 90 IQ threshold particularly significant since I can find no evidence for sustained consensual self-government in nations with a mean IQ below 90.
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Great work - though seeing as to how the article was written in 2004 with 2025 predictions, it might be time to check on how well the predictions stand up? For instance, the world population has been increasing at a slightly faster rate than predicted in 2004 (population today 7.96B source), has something similar happened to IQ?
Separately, the Flynn effect is retrospective based on IQ tests, while John’s prediction is based on modeling (as far as I understand). Should prediction be validated against something?
I have not read “IQ and the wealth of nations” but I am curious on how well is the author’s model validated using IQ test data. In the wikipedia page for the book, the following summary outlines the national IQ estimation model
Central to the book’s thesis is a tabulation of what Lynn and Vanhanen believe to be the average IQs of the world’s nations. Rather than do their own IQ studies, the authors average and adjust existing studies and use other methods to create estimates.
For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.
To obtain a figure for South Africa, the authors averaged IQ studies done on different ethnic groups, resulting in a figure of 72. The figures for Colombia, Peru, and Singapore were arrived at in a similar manner.
In some cases, the IQ of a country is estimated by averaging the IQs of countries that are not actually neighbors of the country in question. For example, Kyrgyzstan’s IQ is estimated by averaging the IQs of Iran and Turkey, neither of which is close to Kyrgyzstan—China, which is a geographic neighbor, is not counted as such by Lynn and Vanhanen. This is because ethnic background is assumed to be more important than proximity to other nations when determining national IQ.
I get a sense this topic might evolve into a worthy top-level thread 
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Once Doc Lor finds this thread you are going to be in for a treat.
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Everyone who would be abusing pot is already abusing it. Unlikely that making it legal would cause anybody else to start abusing it.
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