As compared to:

As many as 600,000 Canadians (1 - 2% of the overall population) are thought to be at risk of anaphylaxis stemming from food and insect allergy.
-- http://www.aaia.ca/en/anaphyla...

So what's you point exactly? That marijuana is approximately 10,000 times safer than food?

When you play a bridge tournament, you play as part of a 4-person team. All the cards are dealt and placed in boards such that once they're played, they're replaced back as the North, South, East, or West hand.

Now your team of 4 is split into two partnerships, one playing all the N/S hands, one playing all the E/W hands. For any given hand of N,S,E,W, what counts isn't what your partnership does on your cards (either N/S or E/W), it's the delta between what your other partnership scored and what you scored. So, if you and X are playing North/South, and your other team members are playing E/W, then for every hand its your score - their score becomes your team score for that deck of cards.

In this way, there is no element of luck. Every team plays the same cards, every team plays both pairings (N/S and E/W), and only the difference matters. It's pure skill, both in bidding what you will make, and then playing the cards to actually make your bid. You can "win" the deck by causing someone who bid a grand-slam to lose a trick, and get the maximum points for that deck to your team.

Bridge is a truly excellent game. Simple rules, but incredibly challenging to execute correctly every time.

Simon

As if selective prosecution is not prevalent in the US...

Mod parent up please, this opinion deserves higher visibility.

Your government doesn't need to brutalize its general population in order to control it.
And, as you have noted yourself, it does resort to brutalizing when dealing with less compliant groups.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Nope, we can't. But point was that circumstances might winnow the better or worse minds from the average, and if that's the basis of the population you've got available to test, you'll get skewed results.

Likely the spectrum of intelligence isn't so different, but the bumps in the curve are in different places.

There's also skew that happens other ways because, well, history. Frex, I'd hazard that Africans who got enslaved and shipped off to America were, as a group, not the brightest bulbs in their particular regional box -- cuz the brighter bulbs were doing the enslaving and selling of their unfortunate neighbors.

"This is how the PC establishment thinks. If there is a conceivable way to twist and distort what is said so that it can be labeled racist, they will do it."

Exactly. Which is why we make so little progress in treating genetic disease that happens to afflict mental processes. "Oh no, you couldn't have inherited that; someone must have done something to make you that way."

We select for personality traits, intelligence, etc. in animals... that's all genetics. Is it so hard to consider that different environments would have selected for different mental traits in humans, too? And that a physical or mental advantage in that environment might be a disadvantage elsewhere?

Frank Spinath (best known as the lead singer in Edge of Dawn, but a professor of psychology in his day job) published a paper a few years ago on the heritability of personality traits in humans. He found the heritability was around .3, which is actually very high for a trait that is subject to environmental influence.

(And all the breeders of performance animals are saying, "We told you so...")

That's great, as long as you stay out of Canada.

Unless one party is in California.
See this for an interesting analysis.