news tidbits I don't care about version 899

Obama's still smoking.
They fired the PR person for the party debacle, or whatever that was, a few months ago.

The psychology study that indicates intelligent people are more likely to be liberal, monogamous, and atheists is also not worth my time. I would imagine I'm more likely to be two of those things (one is obvious, but I'm not sure if I fit the categories of the other two or not), but I'm also pretty sure that mostly what they're correlating is the likelihood of intelligent people to be more broadly accepting of ideas which are unpopular or unconventional by way of being able to defend them against the less cogent and underdeveloped arguments of less intelligent people (cases in point: people citing snow as a refutation of global warming or irreducible complexity as a refutation of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Such simple arguments are convincing for many people but not usually for intelligent people). As a result, you would also see intelligent people writing about polygamy and polyandry, religious theology, socialism, and even the appreciation of technocracy and one-party rule in China or Singapore than a "normal" person. This says very little about the types of views that "intelligent" people present as a demographic as a result. Other than high end educational achievements like advanced college degrees, there isn't much that can be shown to correlate with political or social views that would also correlate with intelligence.

So I assume they're simply trying to continue the old philosophical thought experiment about intelligence and democracy and which one should prevail over the other.