Grades and IQ do not necessarily go hand in hand. We have a lot of ways around grades: rich daddy, big college donor daddy, daddy politician. Grade inflation. IQ helps one apply what they actually learn. Voting is another issue, if you have in IQ of 80, you are esily manipulated by candidates. If you have good thinking skills, you hopefully stand a chance of thinkng around what the politician is saying, to what he really intends. In business, good speaking skills with limited intelligence often get people to the to people stupidly think being able to speak to crowds is a sign of intelligence. It may only be a trained seal on that stage, with someone else pulling the strings..

They're not just the show you describe. They're conniving and strategizing to manipulate in a quest for power. The combined ignorance and evil looks like a spectacle, just like you describe it, and it is, but it's much worse. The intellectual state of this country and the threatened consequences are frightening.

By rock star standards, people go on hype, personality, face value and looks. They have reached the point that the show, is what they are buying in politics as well. Obama's stadium primary production, Cortez dancing around in wide- eyed ignorance, real rock stars as back drops. It has become about the show, the personality as presented, not about substance and reality.While we used to judge performers by talent, and that is not even true now, we used to expect a bit more from our leaders, some knowledge of history and economics.

You over estimate the quality of the process! Rock stars are typically more honest about what they are doing, and voters' research would do little to help them when they don't know the proper standards, and the current intellectual state only produces bad candidates. The whole affair is a dishonest, anti-intellectual process from top to bottom.

Elections today have become like rock star popularity contests. People are not doing their homework about what the person is about or will do when elected. They go on face value and empty promises from them.

JFK at least realized that communism was an existential enemy, but did not understand the philosophical reasons for it and embraced the wrong side philosophically, as described in Ayn Rand's "Fascist New Frontier".

Some pursue evil knowing fully well what they are doing. Others pursue it egged on by acceptance of a false morality, which is what is tearing our civilization apart now. The first kind is relatively easier to deal with as criminals defined under accepted standards.

The thing about nearly every evil person is that they do not understand that they are evil. Typically they become evil “for the greater good,” which is a kind of (social) altruism
“Walter White” is a great example, which anyone can learn from.

Not too many “Jokers” exist In comparison.

Absolutely right. Smartness is a double edged sword. Just means you can be quicker at good or evil

I agree with your assment of emotions vs reason.

Being able to win an election is not a high probability indicator of competence as president. For that reason alone, the people that are elected should have very little power.

I have been reading all things Kennedy since the 60s, own most of them. Have read and possess the book you mention. I did not say he was not flawed, but in the issue of understanding the importance of sea power, JFK, knew the issues and had read Mahan. He understood compromise. He was indeed about a c student, but he knew how to apply himself when needed. I left that party some years ago, when they went socialist, could not abide it. But then Bush, elder, was without ethics in many areas. Johnson, totally corrupt. Clinton totally dishonest. Bush jr. was on world, Trans Canada Hwy. with no border checks until St. Louis. Trump, not as well read as he really should be, and likely knows global warming is a crock, but not the details. Does not speak well for out past and present leadership, does it?

No increase in IQ or intelligence in the voting public is a substitute for curiosity and initiating the mental effort required to understand. Rationality is a virtue, not an IQ score. But nor caring to understand what the candidates are is only part of that. Without becoming characteristically rational and taking the effort to understand proper principles no collection of candidate positions, let alone embarrassing biographical details, matters.

If you want a more realistic understanding of Kennedy read Victor Lasky's JFK: The Man and the Myth.

The real issue is the lack of IQ within the voting public. It was not hard to discover who Obama was before the first election, if on did their homework. People are not using their brains, or are too lazy and rely on others to tell them what to think. I actually was impressed with his speaking when the first primary came along, but soon learned about "Rules fro Radicals", and the similarities between Obama and Hillary. I just kept digging. Why did the FBI ignore that he operated with multiple SN numbers, when they were told before he was elected. What about likely daddy commie Davis? It all just seemed to corrupt. Even his own Gram's timely death when she began talking about his real parents. He could not have made it as a lawyer, as he had no license, after he was caught dying on his application. Michelle lost hers in exchange for not being prosecution for insurance fraud when she worked for a hospital. He was never intelligent the way way several presidents were, like JFK, Jefferson, and others who knew US history and how to draw from their learning. JFK was not the smartest grade wise, but he knew about Mahan's book on sea power, and that is significant, as China's sailors still read it to this day. Obama was lazy, let others do his thinking, went to Valerie Jarrett on foreign policy, he had no real history of the US, having lived elsewhere most of his life. He let Soros fill his head with economic manipulations. He was a trained community agitator, and little else has he bothered to learn. Constitutional scholar, no he was not. He needed a book to make him seem one with black, so Ayers came up with one, even thought he did not understand blacks, he did not live in the "hood", he was a spoiled drug user who had rich people backing him, who knew he could give a speech, if someone wrote it for him.

I don't make excuses for Obama. He's a horrible, inexcusable person who did a lot of damage. That does not imply he's dumb. Intelligent evil is the worst kind. Just how intelligent we don't know, but from observation he's politically manipulative, not a genius. We do know that the faculty at Harvard Law thought highly of his intelligence, even though he appears to have gotten in as an alumni 'legacy' applicant. But he has since "made it" as an Alinsky organizer and politician, not a successful attorney.

In all the stories circulating about his private life and education, including his own biography, it's hard to know what is accurate and objective. Some have tried to promote him, others to make him look as bad as possible. That he's a bad person doesn't mean everything biographically bad said about him is true.

Just be glad he's gone; we have another wave coming. What is important is the cause of that wave and what it takes over time to reverse it, not the details of the particular interchangeable bad characters.

You seem to want to make excuses for him, for the most part no one remembers him as exceptional at college. As to Hawaii, he learned to manipulate as he sold himself for cocaine money to white men. Mostly, no one cold figure how he got into that school, and felt he did not belong there, had Gramps not been CIA. He personally thought a two page request, by him, the emperor, would be accepted by the FISA judges, esp. with Lynch sighing off, but they rejected. He was angry at being denied, and told FBI to do whatever they had to do, but get it.
He learned to manipulate farther at the Institute for the study of Alinsky methods to promote Marxism. He, like an encyclopedia salesman, learned how to push a product (Marxism) and then to agitate and set race and gender against each other to create chaos, in hopes of bringing down the system and replacing it with Marxism. He was thought intelligent, because he could speak, and have we not often seen salesmen who are promoted for similar reasons, until the Peter Principle takes them down. Because he is cagey, does not equate to IQ. His advisors were mostly Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran born Jarrett. Thomas Sowell is very bright, Ben Carson also, but we got a player instead. Hi.

I don't know what his IQ is. It could be higher, if he weren't on cocaine when he took the test. To say that he is highly intelligent based on how highly he was regarded by the faculty at Harvard Law and his ability to manipulate people through "community organizing" doesn't mean that he is intelligent in a way that we would want and admire, let alone a genius: ability to understand and integrate abstract concepts and principles and apply them to reality.

His oratorical 'golden tongue' was learned at the private school in Hawaii, and though it sounds 'intelligent' and requires a degree of some kind of intelligence it doesn't mean what we think of as real intelligence the way he impressed so many voters.

He did know how many states there are but was sloppy in thinking about what he was saying for whatever reason, and it was used to embarrass him. But it's not a like a grade school kid who doesn't know the number or believes it's something else.

Most of what he did behind the scenes as President was handled by a hoard of advisors; he may or may not have been personally aware of details on maneuvers like the secret FISA court, though it's hard to believe he knew nothing about it. It isn't possible for anyone to be involved in all the activities of the White House.

Someone else most likely wrote that book, and as I recall the results of the analysis it was likely or could have been Bill Ayers. But that doesn't mean he isn't intelligent. A log of smart people in high positions use ghost writers because they don't have the time themselves.

Do you think his IQ is higher or lower than 117? He certainly lacks critical thinking skills. He did not know ow many US states we had. He can read, but is like a trained seal tied to a teleprompter. He was dumb enough to actually think a two page request for a FISA to spy on Trump was good enough, until they denied it and he turned it over to the FBI, to make it happen. On group analyzed his book about his father (faux daddy), and determined he did not even write that. He is certainly not the genius voters were led to think.

I wouldn't trust an IQ score for Obama claimed to be leaked from legally protected files without knowing more about it. I don't trust Sinclair any more than the Kavanaugh accusers.

Cackles had no right to hide her college thesis idolizing Alinsky, even though she got the Wesley College library to do it for her for awhile. Since then a lot more has come out about how she befriended him, he offered her a job as a trainer in his methods, and her obnoxious graduation speech.

Ethical behavior is not dependent on culture, what is typically regarded as ethical within the culture is. Ethics is not subjective; it is a science of standards for choices proper for human life, as explained in Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics". Ethics is not "following rules" imposed by a culture or in the name of anything else; it is not "duty" at all, although that is what we are commonly told.

We know from observation that intelligence does not guarantee ethical behavior, and should not expect it to be, but the the tests measuring correlation with IQ depend on what they claim to measure about ethics. Jordan Peterson did not define what he means by ethics. Some of it may be proper and some, such as his vague reference to "egalitarianism", is not.

Standards that you imply, such as honesty and not stealing, are not presumed in every theory of ethics, nor presumed to be priorities, in most cultures, such as under the influence of altruism and collectivism.

But your personal standard of not taking government payments you have paid for is not required by a proper ethics. You should try as as a matter of right to get back as much as you can of what they took from you and which you are entitled to under law. Then decide what you want to do with it in accordance with your own values in your own life. You are not the looter.

That is why there are leakers, and expects who determine it based on his writing, nor faux writing. Hillary didn't want her pro-Alinsky thesis out either, and even O'Reilly said he could not find it, yet I had a copy on my computer way way back.The truth is out there. I am sure he also did not want the Larry Sinclair info out therre, but it got out, just like his prostitution connection in his Hawaii years, complete with photos.

Obama wouldn't let his academic records out. How could they get an IQ score for him? If ever too an IQ test at all he was likely on cocaine at the time.

But failure qualifies for increased subsidies.

I am so relieved. Just had an IQ test and placed above average. At 82 years of age, how reassuring. I was really worried. lol!

I was doing a general research on IQ and professions. Preisdent's past and present kept showing up,, once source being from college records. Our daughter was tested at school request in third grade. I also was test while in Catholic school. Later, in college, my professor and advisor requested I have it tested again, and he then made a big deal about it. Before that, I had no idea that doctors were not as high as I expected. He showed me comparisons by professions. Then, a during Obama, I revisited the topic, and found average educators' IQ had dropped. Knowing your IQ, often takes the get off your butt and usie your mind excuses away, and you feel you shuld be using your mind. It also make me much more aware of the "leaders" who had faulty critical thinking skills, and research showed IQ to be a factor.