Burton’s predictions for Goa have not come true. It is the richest state in India nowadays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_union_territories_by_GDP_per_capita

wrote:
“(I’m guessing non-industrialized countries have less incidence of brain damage? Probably due to better medical care.)”

I would guess exactly the opposite. Better medical care means more infants and children surviving brain problems that previously would have been fatal. May partly account for increase in autism, gender dysphoria, and other conditions outside previous norms.

Flynn effect is caused by increased consumption of sugar. Sugar consumption worldwide has increased at about the same rate as IQ. The brain uses prodigious quantities of calories. Additional factor: decrease in childhood diseases free up glucose needed previously for fevers for brain development.

Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, the last great viking, and would-be conqueror of England was said to be seven feet tall, or at least that it would take seven feet of English ground to bury him. Even allowing for medieval exaggeration, he likely topped six foot six.

None of the people posting on this thread attended a Xena convention, did they?

Obesity has increased markedly; most lesbians are fat. More obesity = more lesbians.

The reason to keep Puerto Rico is so that when Cuba petitions for statehood, PR can come in too and the donkeys will get two senators to balance the two elephants from Cuba.

I just did a google map search for “Kingdom Hall” for my state and then a neighboring state. It would only take me an hour or so to find and tabulate this data for the entire USA. (Sorry, I’m not volunteering) I imagine the number of JW Kingdom Halls tracks fairly closely to the number of Witnesses.

In other twin news:

The Kaczyski twins first rose to public prominence as child actors in the 1962 film The Two Who Stole the Moon.

Jaroslaw Kaczinski, the identical twin brother to Poland’s late president Lech Kaczinski announced today he will run in the summer elections to replace his twin who died in an airplane crash on Saturday, April 10, 2010.

The United States took Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii and Samoa in order to keep them out of the hands of the Germans.

Had the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam not been taken, then they would have been conquered by Germany, for sure, as the Krauts were even keener on Admiral Mahan's outlook than the USA was. After World War I, Japan received all of Germany's colonies north of the equator, so they would have received the two Pacific territories. So, the Nips would have had some nice advance bases for taking over the Netherlands East Indies.

I imagine the US would have had to get into World War I rather sooner had Puerto Rico been German controlled. As it was, we bought the Virgin Islands to keep them out of the hands of the Huns.

It's presently the politically correct notion, as well as the Steveosphere notion, that imperialism is bad. But maybe we're wrong. For almost all of human history, people have thought imperialism not just right, but as a sign of puissance, a signal that Almighty Providence favored the imperial power.

I believe U.S. Grant received a higher percentage of the black vote in the election of 1868 than Obama did in the 2008 election.

I cannot find confirmation on the internet. Anyone know?

Malthusian dynamics can’t possibly be as potent as Clark suggests. Why do modern humans in advanced societies use the abundant excess calories available to get fat, rather than to have more children? Stage five of the demographic transition cannot fit into a Malthusian model. 
 
Clark’s points seem askew of purpose and unnecessarily scalene.

Humans have not had a world-wide economic system for very long. Only from the time of Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese Mars, has it even been theoritically possible to have a world-wide dark age.

Sustained bad government can lead to worse than the Great Depression. Leon Blum, Stanley Baldwin, FDR, Herbert Hoover — all clueless as to what to do about the Great Depression. So, a barbarian arose to solve the problem. If the barbarian had WON, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we hold dear, would have descended into a new Dark Age, made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science.

Presidential candidates have outsized egos. They almost never pick a veep with lots more charisma. Occasionally, the charisma difference favors the veep a little bit, as with Ferraro in 1984.
The last time there was this big of a gap in charisma between #1 on a ticket and #2 was in 1900, and that particular veep choice ended up getting his face carved in the mountain in South Dakota.

Sex and fecundity are very important to species survival, but provender matters even more; without it a species dies. Moose hunters with lots of children prove themselves most fit.
The previous super-charismatic Veep had six children.

Deportation is impossible. What are you going to do with the people already here? Closing the border doesn't solve the problem.