Category Archives: Intelligence

The D’oh* Factor In D.C. & ‘The Washington Compost’

Barack Obama, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

OMG, Dana Milbank of “the Washington Compost” (radio Mouth Mark Levine’s apt moniker) has written a column titled “Obama, the Pariah President.” Not that you’d know it from this column, but it would appear that the love-fest is over. Paraded under the “opinion banner,” the Milbank column is a simple report, the sum total of which is, “Obama went here to campaign and then this bad thing happened to him, and then he went to another place where more shit happened, and ‘people began to trickle out’ on him, but this could have been because they were running to catch a shuttle.”

Pretty much.

The news here is not the diminishing support for the president, which is, presumably, the veiled message embedded in Milbank’s unprepossessing piffle, but, rather, it is that a prestigious newspaper not only mislabels Milbank as an “opinion” writer, when he writes reportage festooned with a suggestion or two.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is a tad more creative on Twitter, following the New York Times’ report today “that Obama is seething about the Ebola response.” What Jindal calls the Barack Obama School of Crisis Management is better termed BHO’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), because the president’s pattern is all sleight of hand; nothing but a self-serving production.

Stage 1: Don’t worry, I got this.
Stage 2: I’m so mad.
Stage 3: More money will fix it.
Stage 4: Republicans are obstructing.

* “Doh is an exclamation popularized by the fictional character Homer Simpson.” (Wikipedia)

Me And The Idiocracy

Healthcare, Ilana Mercer, Intelligence, Internet, Media, Politics, Technology

“Dying For Obama’s Deadly Dogma” must be rather good, if a total of four twitter twits saw fit to “un-follow” me, subsequent to its posting.

I’m used to the Idiocracy! To paraphrase Mark Twain, I can live for two months on a good compliment from worthy, literate people like my editor at Quarterly Review. He wrote:

“Intellectuals are fated to be outcasts.”

And this from the gifted, successful, mystery novelist Sibella Giorello:

“In a word: BRILLIANT.”

Thanks to both. You made my day.

Panetta’s Permissible Critique Of The President

Barack Obama, Critique, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

LEON PANETTA, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY & FORMER CIA DIRECTOR, has provided the left with a permissible critique of President Barack Obama. You just know that whatever it is that Panetta is saying about “Obola” is rather flattering when Gloria Borger, a promiscuous cheerleader for the president at CNN (and a complete idiot), takes time to plumb the Panetta critique, offered in a book, “Worthy Fights.”

Here’s what I mean (thanks, CNN, for the transcript; never stop offering it. Some of us prefer to read, not watch, news):

BORGER (voice-over): The portrait Panetta sketches of Barack Obama sometimes looks more like a professor than a president.

PANETTA: He relies on the logic of his presentation with the hope that ultimately people will embrace that logic and then do what’s right. You know what? In 50 years, my experience is, logic doesn’t work in Washington. You have to basically go after people and make them understand what they have to do. And that means you create a war room. You go after votes. You have to push people.

BORGER (on camera): So did you have a sense that the president found that distasteful or that it wasn’t something he wanted to do or was comfortable doing or —

PANETTA: I think it offended him that people would not really get serious and work on the issues. And I think, as a result of that, he just felt, how can I deal with people that simply don’t want to do the right thing for the country? Well, the reality is, if you want to govern in this country, you have to deal with people you don’t like.

[SNIP]

See what I mean?

Read “Barack Is As Thick As A Brick,” for he is. (“You Can’t Fix Stupid'” is instructive too.)

So long as one infers that the president’s misdeeds arise because he levitates above mere mortals in his idealism and intelligence—your safe. Panetta has provided people with a safe case against Obama.

Parrot Smarts

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Intelligence, Science

Those of us who’re owned by a parrot know of their great intelligence and wish the general public would come to sympathize with their plight in the wild and in captivity. Scientists are slowly becoming hip to this remarkable intelligence. Hat tip to Marc Harper for “Cockatoos teach tool-making tricks”: “Cockatoos learn to make and use tools when shown by another bird, research reveals.”

And Goffin cockatoos have now shown an impressive ability to learn from one another how to use and even how to make tools.
A team of researchers has discovered that the birds emulate tool-making tricks when they are demonstrated to them by another bird.
The results are published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
The researchers are interested in what they call “technical intelligence”, which is essentially animals’ ability to use objects to solve problems.
It confirms how innovative and how adaptable this species is to novel problems”
“Cockatoos are very interesting for this, because they’re very playful with objects,” explained lead researcher Dr Alice Auersperg, from the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna.
She and her colleagues had already noticed that one of birds in their research aviary, named Figaro, spontaneously used sticks to drag nuts under the bars.
Figaro also worked out how to make his “fishing sticks” by stripping long, thin pieces off a wooden block in his enclosure.

For me the more remarkable aspect of a Cockatoo’s fashioning of a tool to retrieve a treat is the superior intelligence of the one bird and the flock’s ability to learn advantageous behavior from this leader.

The one researcher, however, seem a little dim in his disbelief, postulating that the observed learning is but “trial and error learning,” as if the two were mutually exclusive faculties. I wonder how this skeptic thinks kids learn? Modeling, schedules of reinforcement, trial and error: has this guy heard of B. F. Skinner?

Parrots are flock animals: They watch each other, need each other and learn from one another as a matter of survival. In the absence of a flock, humans become their family. Thus nothing is crueler than isolating a parrot.