Here's something we all know is true:

When things go well, whoever is president benefits -- whether he deserves it or not.

When things go badly, the president gets blamed -- whether he deserves it or not.

Let's go from there:

1/11

We all know what Occam's Razor is: The principle that the simplest of competing theories is most likely true.

Folks, we're standing in Occam's Sawmill staring right at Occam's Buzzsaw here.

Covid cost Donald Trump re-election. 2/11
Perhaps he would have lost anyway. Perhaps not. But covid slammed the lid.

If you believe Trump didn't deserve blame for the pandemic, I won't argue.

No one whose house got flattened by a tornado deserved that either.

3/11
Truth be told, the fact Trump's clear and decisive loss wasn't worse than it was is an impressive testament to the underlying political strength of the Republican Party.

4/11
The idea Trump's defeat is attributable to fraud would have been a hard sell before he and his allies racked up a 1-59 win/loss record in court. And the one win, in Penn., was trivial. 5/11
As I have said before, don't use the "Oh, you're saying fraud doesn't exist" argument. Of course fraud exists. Shoplifting exists. But if you're going to accuse me of stealing the shirt I'm wearing, you'd better have some evidence that stands up in court.

6/11
How many months before the election did the president complain there was going to be fraud? Every one of his supporters were on the lookout for it. This was one of the most scrutinized elections in history. Yet the legal challenges all fell flat. And not on technicalities. 7/11
Trump and allies haven't just lost. They've suffered rebukes in some of the harshest language I've ever read in court rulings. Those rulings were often written by very conservative judges, members in good standing of the Federalist Society.

Many were Trump appointees.

8/11
There's no "there" there. More important: The perfectly logical, simple and blatant reason for his loss stares each of us in the face every waking hour.

I don't know if Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan could have won a 2nd term after covid ... 9/11
... if they'd reacted to it the same way with the same results.

Truth be told, the 500K election officials and poll workers in this country pulled off a fair, clean election with a record turnout in the middle of a pandemic. We should be holding tickertape parades ... 10/11
... for these people -- with a few notable screw-ups excepted, far too few to affect a president result in even one state. Instead they're being slandered every day -- shamelessly. 11/11

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)