Here’s a BMW blowing down Redhill Avenue in Tustin.

Ha ha. Not really. I’d guess this guy was going about 15 mph when I took this picture. But he sure looks like a bat out of hell, doesn’t he?

The intelligence wars look likely to start up again in the near future. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, here’s the nickel version.

Variation in intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is generally thought to be partly a result of genes and partly a result of environment and upbringing. This is hardly controversial since the same is true of lots of human characteristics, but in the case of IQ it’s inevitably bound up in racial politics: If intelligence is partly mediated by genes, then it’s possible that different races have different average IQs. This is the case that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein made two decades ago in The Bell Curve. The reason this is more inflammatory than, say, racial differences in eye color or curly hair should be obvious.

So far, there’s little persuasive evidence for racial differences in intelligence. What’s more, the evidence we do have is mostly ecological in nature, involving comparisons at a group level. That’s interesting, but it will never be conclusive. Eventually, if you want to make a case for or against racial differences, you’re going to have to get down to the biochemical level and take a look at genes that affect the cognitive factors that make up overall intelligence (short-term memory, pattern recognition, etc.). That’s been a pipe dream for years, but not any longer. Last month, a team of 30 researchers published a study showing correlations between 40 newly-discovered gene variations and scores on IQ tests:

We combined genome-wide association study (GWAS) data for intelligence in 78,308 unrelated individuals from 13 cohorts….All association studies were performed on individuals of European descent….Our calculations show that the current results explain up to 4.8% of the variance in intelligence and that on average across the four samples there is a 1.9-fold increase in explained variance in comparison to the most recent GWAS on intelligence.

You may not think that 4.8 percent is a lot, but it is. And the genomic revolution that led to these results is only a few years old. In another few years we’ll be up to 20 or 30 or 40 percent. Nor is this just about intelligence, either. Here’s a chart showing the association of the newly discovered genetic variations on different characteristics:

OK, now let’s try a post with an image in it. And what better way than to visually deconstruct a Trump administration lie? Here is EPA chief Scott Pruitt this weekend:

Since the fourth quarter of last year until most recently, we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector. In the month of May alone, almost 7,000 jobs.

And here’s the truth:

The actual increase since October is 1,700 jobs. But hey, that’s “almost” 50,000 jobs, amirite?

How about that? The new software seems to work fine. Normal blogging to commence shortly.

This is my last post for the day. Starting in a few minutes we’ll be replacing the guts of our website with something newer and better than what we have now, and no one at MoJo is allowed to edit the site until we’re done. That will be Tuesday morning according to our tech boffins.

I fully expect everything to go flawlessly during this conversion, because that’s how things usually go with computers. Right? Still, there’s an outside chance of something going wrong, which might mean I don’t show up for blogging duty on Tuesday. If that happens, don’t panic. Leave that to us professionals. We’ll get it all sorted.

In the meantime, I have important robot research to do and even more important vacation planning to do. See you Tuesday.

The East Basin in Dana Point harbor.

This is apropos of nothing in particular. I was over at the World Bank site fiddling around with some stuff and happened to look at their chart for health care spending. There’s a good case to be made that as GDP rises, the share devoted to health care also rises. This is because richer countries have more “spare” income and health care is what they spend it on.

But Sweden and Switzerland have per-capita GDPs as high as ours, and they still spend a whole lot less. The sooner we start reining in the growth of health care spending the better.

Pool Reporters via ZUMA

In his NATO speech a week ago, Donald Trump declined to explicitly endorse Article 5, the provision that says an attack on one is an attack on all. I’m on record as suggesting that reaction to this was sort of overblown, but Susan Glasser provides some behind-the-scenes context to suggest it was quite a bit worse than I thought. It turns out that Trump’s entire national security team wanted him to offer a public endorsement:

National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

….The frantic, last-minute maneuvering over the speech, I’m told, included “MM&T,” as some now refer to the trio of Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson, lobbying in the days leading up to it to get a copy of the president’s planned remarks and then pushing hard once they obtained the draft to get the Article 5 language in it, only to see it removed again. All of which further confirms a level of White House dysfunction that veterans of both parties I’ve talked with in recent months say is beyond anything they can recall.

This is…astonishing. MM&T had to lobby just to get a copy of Trump’s remarks? And then, after getting the wording in, it was removed behind their backs? WTF?

“They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,” said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting….“They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

….The episode suggests that what has been portrayed—correctly—as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials—and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.

Holy shit. It’s one thing to lose a battle about what goes into a presidential speech—that happens all the time—but it’s quite another to agree to include something and then remove it without telling your top national security advisors. And then send them out to face the press.

This isn’t a case of Trump listening to the last guy in the room. It sounds more like Trump being unwilling to tell his national security team to their faces that he disagrees with them—and then screwing them behind their backs. How long can you keep working for a guy like that?

The bizarre thing is that what Trump did wasn’t entirely indefensible. It’s obviously not what I (or McMaster or Mattis or Tillerson) would have done, but Trump could have made the case that asking NATO partners nicely for increased defense spending hadn’t worked in the past, and he wanted to tighten the screws. The way to do it is to make everyone just a little nervous by saying nothing about Article 5 one way or the other.

MM&T would have disagreed, but Trump is president and he could have overruled them. Trump took office promising to disrupt the status quo, so they could hardly have been surprised if he had told them he wanted to play a little hardball and that they should be prepared for some blowback. At least then they would have known what to say afterward.

President Trump was busy during his early morning “Fox & Friends” time. Around 6 am there was this:

People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

First he deliberately undermines his own Justice Department by needlessly calling his immigration EO a “travel ban.” Why? Because he got criticized for accidentally doing this over the weekend, and by God, that means he needs to double down. Having done that, he then proceeds to slam the Justice Department as if they worked for someone else. If he wanted them to stay with the original travel ban, he should have told them to. If he wussed out, it’s his fault, not theirs.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that we’re now in the fifth month of Trump’s childish refusal to go ahead with new travel regulations while we wait for the courts to rule on his temporary travel ban that was meant to give him time to write new travel regulations.

Then, after a bit of random whining, Trump decides to go back to the well on the mayor of London:

Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his “no reason to be alarmed” statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

Even for Trump, this is close to unbelievable. His original tweet about this yesterday was a lie, and would have been wildly inappropriate even if it weren’t. The city of London had just been hit by a deadly terrorist attack! Trump got blasted for this breathtaking display of churlishness, of course, and that meant he had to hit back today even more boorishly in front of the whole world. Because Donald Trump never, ever, backs down from anything, no matter how stupid.

Holy hell. 43 months to go.

I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but, um, what’s the deal with Rex Tillerson?

The guy was CEO of ExxonMobil. Out of the blue, Donald Trump decides to make him Secretary of State, a job about as unexpected as if someone made me head of NASA. He gets confirmed, and since then he’s….

What? He refuses to talk to the press. He’s barely hired anyone. He seems happy to go along with plans to decimate the department. He doesn’t appear to have any particular ideology or goals. In fact, it’s not really clear what he even does all day.

So what’s the deal with Rex Tillerson?