The William McDougall NewsLetter
Edinburgh, Winter 1999/2000
Differential Psychology -- and its Politics
EDITOR: CHRIS BRAND
(cbrand@cycad.com) -- THE BRITISH ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGIST WHO DECRIED
IGNORACISM, ENVIRONMENTOSTALINISM, FEMINAZISM AND PAEDOHYSTERIA (THE MAIN
INGREDIENTS OF INNOCUOUS-SOUNDING 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS').
GUESS
WHAT HAPPENED? CHRIS BRAND'S BOOK, The g Factor, WAS DE-PUBLISHED by Wiley Inc. [New York]
(1996) AND BRAND WAS FIRED by
Edinburgh University (1997) (and stayed fired after an internal Appeal, 1998). BUT EVENTUALLY, FACED WITH THE UK's
PUBLIC COURTS, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY COUGHED UP THE MAXIMUM PAYOUT BRAND
COULD HAVE OBTAINED BY LEGAL ACTION! Latest Press: Evening News [Edinburgh] 9 ii '99; Scotsman
12 vi '99; Daily Record 2 ix '99; Evening News 28 ix '99; Times 29 x '99.
For 'Fourth Way' NeoLibeREALISM : liberty, realism, individualism, contract* and community-choice. Yes: kids should choose their classes; adults should choose the type of marriage they want; democratic countries should have cantons that genuinely differ; and the one million Black men (and one thousand 'paedophiles') who make up a half of America's prison Gulag should be offered generously assisted transportation to any countries that would like to have them. NOT COERCION, NOT 'COMPASSION', JUST CHOICE!
* "In the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth, the U.S. Supreme Court more than once affirmed freedom to
contract to be "part of the rights of personal liberty and private property"
and on these grounds declared unconstitutional attempts to interfere with it.
But in the course of the twentieth century, attitudes toward contractual
freedom have changed, because government has arrogated to itself the right to
intervene on behalf of what it considers the weaker of the contracting parties.
This practice is a reversion to medieval conditions when urban authorities and
sometimes even national governments set "just" prices and
"just" wages [e.g. in dirigiste Tudor England]. The government
of the modern welfare state intrudes on the freedom of contractual parties at
all levels of social and economic life: it sets minimum wages to be paid by
private employerss to private employees; it tells landlords to whom to rent and
sometimes even what rent to charge; it sets racial and sex quotas for the
hiring of personnel by private enterprises and admissions to private
institutions of higher learning; it pressures private banks to lend money to
certain neigborhoods and disadvantaged groups. As a consequence, the principle
of private contractual freedom is in jeopardy, and along with it the
institution of property."
Richard PIPES (Emeritus Professor, University of
Harvard), 1999, Property and Freedom. London : Harvill.
Go to 1999 March, April/May, June, July/August, September,
October/November issues?
Go to Editor's Home Page
(includes all McDNL Archives, starting Autumn 1997)?
DECEMBER 7
THIS WEEK:
LONDON EUGENICS CONFERENCE
ABORTED? BUT ARTHUR JENSEN GAVE HIS TALK, SAYS Science!
'1984' ARRIVES IN
ACADEMIA.
FIDDLING NEW WORLD ORDER KEPT FROM OLD WORLD HIPPIES BY ROBOCOPS WHILE CHECHNYA IS DESTROYED
BLAIR BLASTS BRITISH EDUCOBABBLERS
RACE-REALIST JUDGES TO BE WEEDED OUT BY PSYCHOLOGY
INEXCUSABLE EDINBURGH DOES IT AGAIN!
CANADA ADVISED TO GO FOR EUGENICS
DEATH OF AN ENVIRONMENTALOON
PSYCHOGENETICIST PLOMIN REGRESSES TO THE MEAN
MOZART CURES DANDRUFF -- New PseudoScientist
Millionaires' Corner: Christmas Gift Idea!
British Academia Today
'PROBLEM? -- WHAT PROBLEM?'
There was, around 1980, a famously
fatuous Éirish Agriculture Minister, Brian Lenihan, who, whenever the media
mentioned some new apparent difficulty or crisis, would reply "Problem? --
What problem?" He had apparently learned his line from British Labour
Prime Minister James Callaghan who had flown back from a Caribbean holiday into
Britain's 1969/70 'Winter of Discontent' (when strikers left the dead unburied)
asking "Crisis? -- What crisis?" and thus precipitated seventeen
years of Conservative government.
In September, the Galton Institute's London conference 'Man and Society in the New Millennium' was disrupted by 'People Against Eugenics', throwing
some fifty scientists and genetic counsellors out of the Zoological Society of
London's conference centre (McDNL 22 ix '99).
Now, the Institute has allowed a leisurely period of reflection and decided
that discretion is the better part of valour. It sees no problem -- except that
of providing a minimal old-fashioned courtesy to its speakers who had found
themselves having to fend off and try to reason with noisy and physically
assertive protesters. The Galton has written to its eight speakers saying
neither more nor less than this:
At the November meeting of The Galton Institute Council, it was decided that in view of the events of September 17th, 1999 it would not be possible to publish the usual proceedings of Conference. Council regrets any inconvenience this may cause.
The Council's policy of ostensible indifference has the merit of consistency. The Institute equally took no action when The g Factor was withdrawn by Abominable Wiley in April 1996 -- indeed, a year elapsed before the Galton's Members were advised of Chris Brand's troubles via the quarterly Galton Institute Newsletter. The Council's policy is also well in line with the view of British academia and the press about how to handle assaults on free speech in Britain. When Emeritus Professor Richard Lynn sought support from senior British academics in defence of Chris Brand and free speech in January 1997, he could raise only six signatures and the letter was turned down by several London broadsheet papers -- appearing only in the Scotsman (5 ii 1998, 'University urged to uphold appeal). In the present incident, it was a full five days before any mention of the disruption at the Galton appeared in the London press (Guardian 22 ix '99 -- see McDNL 28 ix '99) even though a professional photographer had been brought along by the protesters. The eminences of today's life of the mind in Britain deem it unremarkable that:
Nor
do such matters trouble the great and good in America -- where the New York
Times has yet to carry the story of any of them. Science even
told its readers (12 xi '99, 'Random Samples') that the Galton Institute
conference had actually gone ahead; and the magazine quoted from the talk which
Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen had 'given.' Far from Chris Brand, Glayde
Whitney or Arthur Jensen receiving apologies or even sympathy for how they have
been treated, great effort is made to pretend that nothing has happened. Soon,
thanks to Roger Pearson's continuing effort as editor of Mankind Quarterly [http://www.mankind.org], news of the aborted
Galton conference and copies of the suppressed lectures will appear on the
shelves of quite a few British university libraries. But British academics and
their students are not great readers these days: they will not read the three
copies of The g Factor kept in Edinburgh University Library (available
nation-wide by Inter-Library Loan); and they do not seem even to read Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
There are signs that ordinary British people are
restive with PC. Last week, a BBC Any Questions audience warmly
applauded all its four panellists who, replying to a question about a city
council telling taxi drivers not to discuss politics [British taxi drivers are
notoriously keen on hanging and flogging most things, especially immigrants and
paedophiles], condemned political correctness. Yet British academics see No
Problem. Fondly, they believe they would have done something to help Jews,
gypsies, homosexuals and those selected for euthanasia in the six years of
Hitler's Germany before the plunge into war was taken by the attempt to carve
up Poland with Stalin. Yet in three-and-a-half years since Wiley DePublisher
began the harassing, intimidation, suppression and sacking of hereditarians in
Britain, British academics have done precisely nothing. Faced with court
action, Edinburgh LUniversity coughed up the full £UK12,000 that could have
been awarded against it for an unfair dismissal; but even that development (McDNL 2 xi '99) has not encouraged academics
to speak more boldly in the country that once faced down the Pope, the Spanish
Armada, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Mr Hitler. 'What,' they would have said on
Plymouth Hoe as the Armada swept past, 'is the problem?' Splendid -- just like
Sir Francis Drake, perhaps! Yet one hopes they won't leave it too much longer
before putting to sea, sweeping up the Channel, and ensuring PC is routed.
The Eugene Anarchists of Oregon are now heading for London. In Seattle, they palled up with disaffected British dole blodgers. Thankfully, neosocialism now has some keen opponents, putting Messrs Bush and Hague in the shade where they belong. Yet what is the new alliance that emerged in Seattle?
"Fat old union
bosses and multi-pierced grunge kids who last saw shampoo in 1992 joined hands
with right-wing militia groups from the Rocky Mountains and frizzy haired
professors who still keep their Vietnam posters in the sideboard."
Andrew SULLIVAN, Sunday Times 5 xii '99.
Natocrats in Seattle
wanted free trade -- despite the obstinate little
national boundaries once possessed by countries like Yugoslavia (now
effectively shorn of about-to-be-globalized Kosovo). Steam-age trade unions
wanted free riding -- protectionism via finding
other countries substandard in food hygiene, ecologically unfriendly, guilty of
'dumping' or exploitative of women, children or sea turtles. Youth
understandably fed up with the absurd dominance of neosocialism hopefully wanted
free love as much as brain damage for robocops
in Seattle and London. What none seemed to want was free choice -- for people to spend their own
money on proper education, to make the marital contracts they desire or to live
in areas where they do not need daily to reconcile the world's unadmitted
racial differences.
Though the West cultivates dependency and
conformity in its people -- now even patrolling their reading matter and
speechways, most recently telling English taxi drivers they must not discuss
sex, politics or religion -- it thinks it can impress the rest of the world
with its exemplary prosperity based on the left's acceptance of capitalism and
dole cutbacks. It will not succeed. Freedom is indivisible. This will be
especially clear in the coming weeks as Western gold enables Russia to destroy
lowland Chechnya, massacre convoys of unarmed refugees and burn out Grozny's
embunkered defenders with fearsome fuel-air bombs. It is time for the West to
think seriously about freedom and contract -- including the right of people to
such costless options as fast track learning, polygyny and constituency choice
(McDNL 11 v '99). The Muslim world will
scorn a West where a man can be ruined for holding Aristotle's views (that
there are profound human differences according to sex and intelligence) -- and
where most women now have only a single child which is itself increasingly
likely to be charged to the still-mighty state.
(Reuters 2 xii
'99; UKClassicFMRadio 3 xii '99, 10:00;
New York Times 27 xii '99, Editorial)
THIRD WORLD RAPPED BY EMPEROR CLINTON
WEST TO CONTINUE CHILD SLAVERY TILL 16 -- PLUS FURTHER VOLUNTARY DUMBED-DOWN AND IRRELEVANT EDUCATION FOR BRIBED AND UNTAUGHT 'STUDENTS'
PLUS: McDNL shows how any child can now get to Harvard!!
SEATTLE -- Attending the 135-member World Trade Organization, a previously
unheard-of excuse for international junketing and fashion displays of police
riot gear, President Clinton signed a treaty denouncing the worst forms of
child labour and aspiring to spare children a life of misery as slaves,
prostitutes, soldiers and indentured servants. Amidst scenes of street clashes
reminiscent of London's Grosvenor Square in 1969, where he himself had helped
organize the protest (against American support for South Vietnam), the
President said: ''Children brutalized by the nightmare of prostitution;
children indentured to manufacturers working against debt for wages so low they
will never be repaid; children who must handle dangerous chemicals or who are
forced to sell illegal drugs; children who crawl deep in the unsafe mines.
Children who are forcibly recruited into armed conflicts and then spend the
rest of their entire lives bearing the scars of committing murder when they
were eight or nine or ten years old.''
Whether anyone else signed the treaty was
less clear. Washington had been fighting to have the WTO set up a working group
on labour standards -- something opposed by developing nations who see it as a
protectionist tool to deprive them of their competitive advantage of cheap
labour. The international beano terminated in general failure when, having
exhausted its supplies of police flash bombs, tear gas and pepper spray, the
USA would not pay the other countries enough money or promise to admit all the
cars the Japanese want to dump ooops sell; but all countries and the 25,000
trade unionists bussed to Seattle agreed that choice by parents and children
was the last thing they intended to respect. As a response to the 5,000
youthful demonstrators who had no union cards for beer and sandwiches, and
caused damage costing $2.5 billion per day to Seattle businesses, new taxes
were proposed on henna, beads and combat trousers….
{In fact, sweated child labour in Egypt compares very favourably with state-school activities for British 8-year-olds. Charming children's little fingers work merrily away at lightning speed as they attend to paedophiles ooops rug manufacture for Western tourists. By contrast, British children have to undertake useless 'projects' about Egypt because they cannot be allowed to learn about the massive twentieth-century failures of socialism in Britain and Gulag-running Russia. Whether anything will ever be done for Anglo-Saxon children consigned to slow-track-for-all miseducation-by-the-state in the dumbed-down schools was not stated in Seattle. At present, all American and British children are enslaved by the state till age 16 -- a job creation programme for which parents must pay even when they withdraw their children into private education. Third-world critics are apparently so ignorant that they do not see how the West, where countries spend around 35% of their people's earnings, can be criticized for consigning much of its own population to a daily diet of wall-to-wall televised propaganda for state welfarism and multiculturalism. New British figures show that, at the average 'university', 18% of students drop out even though they are given means-tested grants and have 95% of their fees paid to receive the 'education.' In America, proposals are being seriously considered by East coast broadsheet media to admit pupils to 'universities' as a straight percentage from local schools, quite regardless of big differences among schools in racial composition and attainment levels. -- Such an anti-elitist move would (unless the percentage were kept low or universities became still more internally streamed) dismantle high-grade education for Blacks, Orientals and Whites alike; and it would strip US schools of incentive to teach. (California already gives a 4% quality-free guarantee to its schools; and Florida's Republican governor Jeb Bush is now offering 20% as an alternative to programmes of affirmative racism that have been made illegal by the hard work of neoliberal campaigners.) Hopefully third-world enthusiasts and other hippies will soon be found stripping off to display FAST TRACK LEARNING tattooed on their boobs and willies.}
PROBLEM SOLVED -- A senior McDNL correspondent advises: How to cope with an 'educational' system that promotes children according to percentages? Simple! One sends one's boy -- however regressed to the IQ mean -- for several years of the best private education one can afford. (The boy would take classes pitched at his own ability-level, of course -- thus obtaining maximum educational benefit even if not always being taught in the 'fast track.') When the year for university applications arrives, the youth is given training in semi-automatic weapons and registered at Martin Luther King High School, Boston. Nine months later, he will sail into Harvard as part of the percentage quota assigned to his finishing school.
BLAIR BLASTS BRITISH EDUCOBABBLERS
-- Egalitarianism rejected by neosocialist Third Way leader --
(Times 3 xii '99, p. 1)
In a lecture to Oxford University, celebrating the work of Charles Darwin's friend, the Canadian-born naturalist George Romanes (1848-1894) who wrote Mental Evolution in Man (1888), Oxford graduate (via the elite St John's College) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared himself discontented with British schools. Developing his theme that more 'diversity' was necessary, he said: "We need diversity and excellence to be the hallmark of the secondary system, rejecting completely the notion of comprehensive education treating different provision for different individuals as a betrayal of their worth." Mr Blair also put the boot into Britain's teachers by saying the days of schools working only from 9am till 3.30pm must end. He further thought teachers should work in the schools' current annual six-week holidays.
{It can be confidently expected that Britain's teaching unions will turn on Mr Blair as soon as there is the slightest sign of economic downturn. Meanwhile, Mr Blair's main problem is with his Cabinet Ministers. Most of these have given up most of traditional economic socialism; but too many -- like blind Education Minister for England & Wales, Mr David Blunkett -- still have educational egalitarianism and class envy inscribed on their socialist hearts.}
The human mind can play fancy tricks. Edinburgh students can today claim casually to have been quite unfazed by Chris Brand expressing his views on race, sex, IQ, class, eugenics and paedophilia…. The following letter actually gained the prized spot as 'LETTER OF THE WEEK' in the LUniversity's gaffer-backing Student newspaper (1 xii '99, p. 4 + www.student.com).
//////
Dear Editors,
A little Christian
forebearance {sic, as in foreplay,
a more usual topic in Student}
I write in response to the various comments on
this page raised at the 'Points of View' column on Christians. While those
Christians who feel ridiculed by the column in question have a right to express
their opinions, they have to realise (as do several other groups within the
student community) that those people they are complaining about have that right
too. The right to freedom of expression is something that we, as learned
citizens {forsooth!} , should defend without exception.
Personally, I didn't find the article on
born-again Christians particularly funny, because some of my best friends are
like that and worse. For this reason I considered it fair game. These people
are expressing an opinion -- their religion -- which other people have the
right to refute {i.e.
reject} in whatever
manner they think fit.
At the end of the day, if any of us come
across a point of view that we find unacceptable (as in the case of Chris
Brand), we can always ignore it without denying it a voice.
Name
supplied.
\\\\\\
So 'we never denied Brand
a voice'? Not with banner front-page headlines screaming "SACK HIM!"
and "FIRST IT WAS BLACKS. THEN IT WAS WOMEN. NOW IT'S KIDS!"? If
there were any number of Edinburgh students supporting 'free speech' for Chris
Brand in 1996/7, they kept their views very firmly to themselves.
It is fascinating how people can practise
full-blown PC -- letting books be banned and academics be sacked -- while
actually denying that they are doing it. Denying that one is PC is today as
required in a public speaker in Britain as denying one is a 'racist.' Even
lefter-wing Government Minister Margaret Beckett felt obliged on the BBC's Any
Questions (3 xii '99) to say that she deplored PC -- though adding with
feminine logic that she also deplored those who deplored PC. The new PC
religion is really just like Anglicanism of yore: one could happily attend
divine worship in the Church of England while denying the slightest religious
enthusiasm or even (in the case of the senior bishops) belief in God.
HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS EXCESSIVE, SAYS BLACK FOOTBALL STAR
DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters 1 xii '99) -- Republican Presidential
candidate Gary Bauer was joined by a retired American football star in
attacking an executive order from Iowa's governor that shields state workers
from discrimination based on their ''sexual orientation'' or ''gender
identity.''
''The governor of this great state has made
a very big mistake,'' Bauer said during a rally of 200 people at a Des Moines
hotel. ''I believe that Iowa can show the way, that you can be tolerant of your
neighbours without twisting the law that was there to protect minorities into
something that ends up protecting conduct which most of the civilized world
still rejects,'' Bauer said.
Former Green Bay Packer Reggie White said
the majority of Americans felt homosexuality was wrong. ''I have no problem
with homosexuals,'' White told the crowd. ''No one can prove that I have
problems with homosexuals. If I had a problem with homosexuals, I wouldn't
befriend them and try to minister to them. I have a problem with the agenda.
….What [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] and many people in the civil rights
movement fought for -- for a group of people to say they want those same civil
rights .…based on sexual orientation is an offense to every black person in
America.''
In 1998, White set off a firestorm when he
addressed the Wisconsin state legislature and denounced homosexuality as a sin.
He lost lucrative endorsement and sports contracts in the aftermath.
COCKY GAYS SHOW WHAT FUTURE HOLDS
British homosexuals are too cowardly to defend harmless paedophiles against lengthy jail sentences. They did nothing to defend Chris Brand in Edinburgh when he was fired for saying non-violent and high-IQ paedophilia did little harm. They forget how freedom-loving British heterosexuals campaigned to keep homosexuals out of prison in the 1960's. Yet now, despite the need for politic reticence as Mr Blair prepares legislation lowering the age of homosexual consent, they can scarcely disguise their interest in sodomizing the under-16's.
LONDON (Reuters) -- Britain's Scout Association blasted veteran rock
star 'Sir' Elton John for staging a raunchy dance routine with male strippers
dressed as cub scouts. {Cub scouts were invented when cubs acquired a bad name
for paedophilia.} The flamboyant star, singing at a 10th birthday party for the
gay rights group Stonewall, was accompanied by six 18-19-year-old dancers who
peeled off their toggles, caps and cub-scout short trousers to dance in their
minimalist underwear while clutching their crotches in mock embarrassment.
Celebrities in the audience included Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie,
who was "stunned" by the lurid scout-spoof, according to the Sun tabloid.
The Scout Association, furious at being
thus linked yet again to paedophilia, demanded compensation be given to
charities of its choice, e.g. in Angola. The children's charity Childline also
objected, saying: ''It was clearly intended to be fun but we consider it was
misguided and sent out an unfortunate message.''
{An 'unfortunate message' is like an
'inappropriate' or 'insensitive' message [cf. TgF NewsLetters 1997]. The
use of the terminology announces that the critic does not really want to spell
out the precise criticism being made, since it is so ridiculous. Thus, a man
who compliments a woman on her appearance -- or a cub-scout on the tightness of
his woggle -- will be said to have behaved
inappropriately/insensitively/unfortunately. The real burden of the complaint
is that the offender has touched, however remotely, on unmentionable facts:
that women are vain, that cub-scouts like sex (at least for money), that the
races are different etc. Whatever the law may have once allowed, many allusions
and implications of common and jocular speech are now under a PC curse.}
{Elton John's much publicized act was certainly most unfortunate for the 'gay community' which, while seeking to legalize sodomy at 16, normally likes to disguise its penchant for paedophilia and to say it wants paedophiles locked up for life! Meanwhile, in real life, a 64-year Winchester scoutmaster was jailed for seven 'indecent assaults' and four 'rapes' of enthusiastic cub-scout-aged teenagers who had repeatedly visited his home to drink Strongbow cider and use cannabis.}
(Independent 4 x '99)
RACE-REALIST
JUDGES TO BE WEEDED OUT BY PSYCHOLOGY,
COMMISSION HOPES
Her Majesty's judges will in future be selected by 'Big Five' personality questionnaires if a legal commission has its way. Headed by Sir Leonard Peach, a commission set up to report to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg has accepted that it would be desirable to weed out authoritarian, tetchy and out-of-touch personalities from the Bench of the future. Said psychologist Colin Cooper* of the Queen's University of Belfast, 'The dimensions of Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness can now be measured, so it would be helpful for judges to take the tests.'
* Author of Individual Differences, London:Arnold (1998) £15. For the disadvantages of the Big Five dimensions as opposed to the Comprehensive Six, see McDNL 30 xi '99.
{At last, the monstrous claim of 'Big Fivers' that some people are simply more 'disagreeable' than others will be laughed out of the public domain. 'Disagreeableness' is a bizarre compound of cynicism and tough-mindedness with independence of mind and initiative. The idea that judges should be positively selected to rule out more independent-minded and critical people may appeal to feminazies who wish more judgeships occupied by wymmin; but it will be astonishing if such 'measurement' should be accepted for judges in a society where journalists and politicians dare not mention even such well-established psychometric measurement as that of IQ.}
INEXCUSABLE EDINBURGH DOES IT AGAIN!
Edinburgh LUniversity has twice as many students dropping out as do similarly elite British universities which likewise admit few working class kids (Times 3 xii '99).
New figures from British universities once more put Edinburgh LUniversity to shame. Collected by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC), the assessments allow universities to be evaluated while controlling for the quality of their student intakes. IQs are not available in Britain -- which only records systematically the state of its children's teeth. But the social class of students' parents provides a rough stand-in that is much better than nothing -- and which mercilessly exposes the LUniversity of Edinburgh. The following extracts from the HEFC's new table show the percentage of British universities' 1997 students who came from manual working class origins, the percentage projected from 1999 figures to drop out from the degree courses to which they were admitted, and the inexcusable performance of the LUniversity of Edinburgh.
|
U.K. UNIVERSITY |
% LOW SES ENTRY |
% DROP OUT |
INEXCUSABLE |
|
Cambridge |
8 |
1 |
13 |
|
Oxford |
8 |
2 |
25 |
|
Durham |
12 |
3 |
25 |
|
Bristol |
11 |
4 |
36 |
|
Nottingham |
14 |
4 |
29 |
|
St Andrews [Fife, Scotland] |
12 |
5 |
42 |
|
London School of Economics |
12 |
5 |
42 |
|
Bath |
17 |
6 |
35 |
|
Birmingham |
17 |
6 |
35 |
|
Edinburgh |
11 |
6 |
55 |
|
Warwick |
17 |
6 |
35 |
|
York |
17 |
6 |
35 |
|
Exeter |
14 |
7 |
50 |
|
Leicester |
22 |
7 |
32 |
|
Leeds |
15 |
8 |
53 |
|
Liverpool |
22 |
8 |
36 |
|
Manchester |
17 |
9 |
53 |
|
Univ. College London |
14 |
9 |
64 |
|
Glasgow |
21 |
13 |
62 |
|
Luton |
39 |
26 |
67 |
|
East London |
40 |
36 |
90 |
Edinburgh's is an outstandingly poor result among elite universities. It cannot be explained by other 'external' variables. For example, Edinburgh takes only 61% of its students from state schools, whereas the other 24 universities with lowest drop-out rates (around 6%) took an average 70% of their intake from the state sector. Because of its history and location, Edinburgh is able to attract a top-drawer clientele; but it proceeds to lose them at the high rate that obtains in universities that take on far more 'challenging'/'challenged' students. Either the LUniversity's teaching is singularly appalling or it singularly attracts for some reason the more appalling products of the private [called in Britain 'public'] school sector.
NB Chris Brand played no part in teaching or examining at Edinburgh from May, 1996.
Women's Page
Congratulations to India's divinely delicious debutante Yukta Mookhey on being chosen as Miss World! Just who has mucked with her nookie has not been declared, but Indian girls are among the world's best-preserved while knowing most about s*x. And, being six foot tall, at least Fukta will surely not be tempted to dangle on the arm of a Bollywood star or director.
7 xii '99
NEWS in BRIEF & UPDATE
LONDON 30 xi '99 -- Race-mixin' mayhem -- A computer scientist
arrested for an astonishing attack while naked on worshippers in a Surrey
church, injuring eight, turned out to have been a half-caste -- certainly
partly Black, but also possibly part-Asian. Neighbours say the coffee-coloured
25-year-old with broad lips and nose and an Afro haircut had lived quietly with
his wife and daughter apart from an episode in which he had ripped out the
family's telephone line. He had occasionally complained of racial harassment,
said he had once been attacked in Glasgow, and was sometimes seem walking down
the street with his anorak over his head as if in training for making a
pronouncement about paedophilia.
BELFAST (BBCR4UK 4 xii '99) -- Multiculturalism for Ulster --
Scrapping Northern Ireland's 11+ examinations (which give access for 20% of
children to selective grammar schools) was declared a priority by socialist Mr
Martin McGuinness. Formerly a butcher and a long-standing member of the IRA,
McGuinness has been appointed 'Minister of Education' in a new 'power sharing'
government of the province in return for a promise to go through motions of
talking about IRA disarmament with Canadian General Jean de Chastelain. {For a
generation, the high educational achievements of Ulster children have been a
legendary success story as comprehensive miseducation was imposed on mainland
Britain.}
DUBLIN (Independent 4 xii '99) -- Dublin says No! -- Though
Éireland has this week given up its claim to the Six Counties of the North,
Dublin City Council has been in no mood to compromise with godless
Protestantism: it has begun pursuing through the courts the city's liveliest
sex shop ('lingerie with attitude', say the staff -- both imported from London).
The shop attracts up to 9,000 visitors daily from all over the Holy Republic,
and it currently declines to stock vibrators; but the Corporation has
determined to set an example in the holy days leading up to Chrissers.
BURLINGTON, Vermont (APBnews.com) -- Judge to get taste of
paedohysteria -- The 23-year-old son of a U.S. federal judge already
charged with sexually assaulting a 7-year-old boy may have molested more than
100 youngsters, say police. While hired as a baby sitter, the son of Judge Fred
Parker of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would apparently play naked
'wrestling games' on their beds with his charges. {Eighteenth-century
witchcraft trials are sometimes said to have ceased as judges, ministers and
their families came themselves to be accused of consorting with the Devil.
Whether Judge Fred has any clout to help his son remains to be seen.}
KIGALI, Rwanda (AFP 2 xii '99) -- Racial paedorealism --
Twelve children under the age of ten have been found to have been sexually
abused in this Rwandan capital in less than three months, some of them by
women, judicial sources have revealed. Paedosadism is encouraged by witch
doctors who persuade Black men that it remedies AIDS and cancer -- one patient
claimed a virtual cure after sleeping on three occasions with a ten-year-old
girl; but homosexual paedophilia is a speciality of White men and women.
Outside the capital, a teacher is accused of raping 12 schoolgirls in the
suburbs of the city; and in Butare, in the south, a domestic servant admitted
raping the eight-year-old daughter of the house, murdering her and hiding her
body in a drain.
FIFE, Scotland (Times 2 xii '99) -- Paedohysteria -- A senior partner in a law firm was sentenced to jail for 18 months for lewd and libidinous cavortings with boys aged 8-14 at the time. The naughtinesses of Julian Danskin, 48, the Chairman of East Fife Football Club, had continued for a decade before charges were brought. Danskin described his accusers as "lying heroin addicts." Danskin, who lives with his elderly mother, was bailed pending an appeal. {As usual, the British press gave no indication of what harm could be traced to the paedophile/homosexual, if any.}
NEW YORK (Times 2 xii '99) -- The New York Times, the fons et origo of much PC doctrine, has sacked forty of its staff for "inappropriate" e-mails in which s*x was mentioned.
LONDON (Times 1 xii '99) -- Black art -- A Black artist has won this year's Turner Prize with a film clip in which a collapsing stage set falls around him. (He 'escapes' unscathed through an open window!!) Steve McQueen, 30, has previously pushed a metal barrel containing cameras around Manhattan, claiming the exercise as art. Another of McQueen's works is a film of a tape recorder on a lawn with spools turning while tap dance music is played. The award to McQueen, who looks perfectly well fed, has confounded London art connoisseurs. They had thought the prestigious prize, commemorating master landscape painter J. M. William Turner (1775-1851), would go to a soiled and unmade bed with condoms submitted by half-caste ooops marginal female 'artist', Tracey Emin.
LONDON -- Multicultural disharmony -- Peter Tatchell leader of the
British gay-activist group, OutRage!, received a death threat at his home Nov.
20 on stationery imprinted with the national colors of Zimbabwe. It read:
"We [sic] out to get you and stab your filthy queer body to death... DEATH
TO ALL HOMOSEXUALS. Now run to the Gay police and beg for protection, because
you are going to need it." This follows an Oct. 30 action in which
OutRage! members attempted a citizen's arrest of President Robert Mugabe of
Zimbabwe. They halted his motorcade and grabbed him by the arm, before police
arrived and took Tatchell into custody. Mugabe has on several occasions called
gays "less than animals" and called for their mass arrest.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Fast track farce --
Officials in America's second largest school district will continue to advance
failing students, saying tens of thousands would flunk next year if the
practice were scrapped. About 350,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified
School District -- about half the 711,000 total -- would be held back a grade
next year if social promotion were dropped altogether, said district leaders.
{Arkansas, Colorado, Florida and Louisiana are cracking down on the practice,
and LAUSD itself plans to scrap it next year for second and eighth grade
pupils.}
NAIROBI (Times Higher, 3 xii '99) -- African higher education today -- Four senior lecturers at Egerton University, Kenya, have been suspended following allegations by 2,500 students of sustained rapism in return for upgrading students' marks. The lecturers say they are merely being accused as sex pests to cover up a scam in which forty students had their marks mysteriously raised, probably in return for a cash payment to other staff.
LONDON (Sunday Times 5 xii '99) -- Glitterphilia -- The Press Council cleared the News of the World of bribing glamrocker Glitter's long-standing girlfriend of first-degree bribery to testify he was guilty of paedophilia. So Allison Brown will apparently receive her £25,000 -- promised her in the event of Glitter being found guilty, as he was, of paedophilic downloadings. {Prizes for Glitter's legal team in realizing how to discredit the in truth highly discreditable Ms Brown have yet to be announced.}
MONACO (Daily Telegraph 6 xii '99) -- Intransigent millionaire -- The Jewish millionaire Edmund Safra, 69, who had supposedly tried to help the West scupper the Russian, American and Italian Mafias made a fatal mistake when he thought the mob had come for him at his penthouse. Declining the company of his charming 40-year-old wife, Lucy, his sister and his mother-in-law, the genial balding financier locked himself in a bathroom with at least one of his eight nurses who help him cope with Parkinsonism. Refusing to come out, despite his wife's repeated pleas on his mobile phone, he perished in the conflagration of his flat that will keep police and politicians bribing each other for years to come.
NEW YORK (Daily Telegraph 6 xii '99) -- Marry'n'tell -- The Rockefeller family is now to be opened up to public scrutiny thanks to a defecting wife and the absurd law that allows no serious redress for super-rich playboys against girls who 'disclose', or invent their secrets. A Rockefeller grandson now stands accused before the US media of drinking, pornographic downloadings, marital infighting, a preference for outsize boobs, and the paedophilic groping of baby-sitters. {Only the wish of governments to intimidate their citizens can explain the extraordinary predicaments in which millionaires are placed -- terrifyingly vulnerable and unable to exert significant come-back. Extraordinarily, millionaires have been slow in signing up for McDNL's proposals that all -- including millionaires -- should be able to make marital contracts of their choice, thus excluding the press from such tittle-tattle if desired.}
LONDON (Sunday Times 5 xii '99) -- Polygyny Corner -- Lord Jeffrey Archer is to protest his essential integrity to the Conservative Party Ethics Committee that is widely expected to expel him from the party which he has enlivened for two decades. Archer maintains reasonably enough that he only plotted and paid bribes to tell white lies to the court that found he had been libelled, that the scripted lies were never used (thanks to a happy accident), and that it was quite understandable that he should have forgotten about them when assuring all enquirers that he had 'no skeletons in the cupboard' as he prepared to run to be elected Conservative Mayor of London. {Lord Archer's lies had been prepared entirely to prevent his dearly loved alpha-plus wife from knowing not that he frequented enormously-nippled prostitutes but that he was having a full-blown and thoroughly romantic affair with his nifty Personal Assistant, Andrina Colquhoun, 23. At one stage, Archer visited a Bond Street jeweller and insisted on buying exactly the same present for both girls for their Christmas -- thus following with commendable strictness the injunctions of The Prophet.}
DENVER (AP) -- Marital contract choice -- Couples can now register their relationships with Denver city, regardless of sexual orientation. A new ordinance, approved by a 10-0 council vote, calls for the creation of a registry in the city clerk's office that "allows certain couples to recognize their relationships." Those who register, for a fee, will not acquire specific legal rights or obligations; but supporters of the measure have called it both symbolic and practical, providing a method of verification for employers who offer benefits to their employees' unmarried partners. Denver extended health benefits to the partners of gay city employees in 1996.
LONDON (Daily Telegraph, 6 xii '99, p. 1) -- Welfare State -- Reeling from widely accepted allegations that it has cannibalized thousands of child corpses without parents' permission to enable spare part surgery, the National Health Service is facing allegations that it starves elderly patients to death to make room for other Britons queuing up for their birthright of 'the finest treatment that young taxpayers' money can buy.' A top London surgeon has levelled the accusations; and it is widely suspected in Britain that sedatives are given to the elderly to prevent them asking for more awkward things like food, drink, pornographic video and Scrabble games. Police are investigating 60 deaths. {The National Health Service is a key part of socialist Britain's long-term plan to get rid of the family. People are told their elderly relatives are well looked after by experts. This helps them to break up their families and move to distant places. At present, the Government has no plans to create neofamilies in which people would contract with each other to provide services instead of relying on the rather minimal guarantee provided by doctors' Hippocratic Oaths.}
LONDON (Daily Telegraph 6 xii '99) -- Paedophile Pride -- In an astonishing coup, a 79-year-old paedophile managed to take a 10-year-old boy into a maximum-security prison to service a 59-year-old paedophile on remand who had been feeling somewhat deprived and let down by the world. Both men have now been convicted of multiple derelictions, cavortings, indecencies, tomfooleries and downloadings that cannot be named 'for legal reasons', and given long jail sentences.
To National Post [Canada]
Edinburgh; 1 xii '99
Dear Editor,
Congratulations to the National Post
(1 December) for letting Steve Sailer state the case for Sir Francis Galton's
idea of eugenics! That Charles Darwin lies buried in London's Westminster Abbey
reflects a key appreciation by his cousin and other Victorians: there was
nothing sacrilegious about identifying how human intelligence and moral
qualities had evolved and might develop further.
Agitators for minorities like the disabled
are presently determined to keep their welfare-dependent empires going. I saw
this when demonstrators from 'People Against Eugenics' disrupted and closed down
a conference of the Galton Institute in central London this September, throwing
fifty scientists and genetic counselors on to the street.
Today, self-styled socialists are furious
at the proof of genetic factors for low IQ and crime. They terrorize mainstream
publishers to suppress books by psychologists like Arthur Jensen, Canada's Phil
Rushton and myself. They make it illegal for Canadians to import Roger
Pearson's Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe -- a book that simply
details the modern censorship of research and books on IQ. They demand control
of 'bioethics committees' so that parents can be kept in the dark and prevented
from making their own eugenic choices.
Opponents of Darwin and Galton talk of a
'slippery slope' to Hitlerism. Yet 29 states* enacted eugenic provisions in the
1930's -- one of them was Canada. Only a single state, national socialist
Germany, lost patience with eugenics and instead adopted euthanasia and went on
to kill millions. By contrast, 'socialist republics' have killed scores
of millions and devastated their countries.
Egalitarian ideals still attract many who
would like to impose them on others -- even by eugenics, as Steve Sailer
perspicaciously observes. Yet the essence of the Anglo-Saxon West is the scope
it has given historically -- unlike China or Russia -- to human individuals.
Hopefully the West is now sufficiently mature to allow its readers to have the
books, and its parents to have the children that they want.
Yours
faithfully, Chris
Brand.
(Author of The 'g' Factor [1996, Wiley] and Fellow of the Galton
Institute.)
* See the article by Marian Van Court in the Internet magazine PINC [ 'Politically Incorrect'] at http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/dec98/index.html.
DEATH OF AN ENVIRONMENTALOON
'Professor' Ashley Montagu, 94, Popularizer of Science
New York Times 29 xi '99, Anthony Ramirez
//////
Ashley Montagu, the London-born
anthropologist and popular author whose energy, erudition and showmanship
brought genetics, paleontology and other topics in the life sciences to a wide
American audience, died Friday in Princeton, N.J. He was 94.
The author of more than 60 books, Montagu recently
completed a substantial revision, published this year, of his influential 1953
book, "The Natural Superiority of Women," and was collaborating with
his biographer, Susan Sperling, when he was hospitalized in March. He died of
protracted cardiovascular disease, Ms. Sperling said in an interview.
Montagu's wide-ranging career as a freelance
commentator on nearly everything human, along with his white hair, owlish
glasses and pipe, made him the public picture of the professor in the 1950s and
1960s. But despite a voluminous production of scholarly works, he was unable to
win tenure at any of the universities where he taught, according to Ms.
Sperling. That slight was due, in part, to his ideas about the equality of the
races and the sexes, which were startling for their day, she said.
Montagu wrote books on anthropology, human anatomy,
intelligence, marriage, why people cry and the history of swearing, as well as
an account of John Merrick, the severely disfigured man of Victorian England
known as the "Elephant Man." His commentary extended even to the
prehistoric. He bristled at the cartoon depiction of Neanderthal men as brutes
who clubbed their women over the head, and would dash off a scathing letter to
the editor whenever he read such a depiction, which he said ignored evidence of
the essential gentleness of Neanderthals.
Henrika Kuklick, a University of Pennsylvania professor
of the sociology of science, said Montagu was "someone who bridged the
academic and the popular. His works were both accessible and academically
respectable." Ms. Kuklick, author of "The Savage Within: The Social
History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945" (Cambridge University Press,
1991), added that "as a public intellectual, he ranks below Margaret Mead,
but far above many others who I won't name."
Jonathan Marks, who teaches biological anthropology at
the University of California, noted that Montagu's interests included genetics
and anatomy, a range that would be nearly impossible in today's academia.
"He and Max Levitan wrote a standard textbook on human genetics that was
used into the late 1970s, even though Montagu's original training was in
anatomy," said Marks. "It's as if you could write equally well about
architecture and the detailed mixing of concrete."
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was born Israel
Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905, in the East End, or largely working-class section,
of London. In previous biographical articles, Montagu apparently said or
made it known that he was the son of a stockbroker in the City of London, the
financial district, but his father was really a tailor, a Polish-born Jew, and
his mother a Russian-born Jew, according to Ms. Sperling. Although an
agnostic, Montagu later acknowledged his Jewish heritage. He took his last name
after Lady Mary Montagu, an 18th century woman of letters and feminist, and the
other parts of his name after other writers he admired, Ms. Sperling said.
"I don't know why exactly he changed his
name," Ms. Sperling said. "He was ambitious to do great things and as
Israel, well, that would have been an impediment in British academia." The
classic autodidact, Montagu as a teenager puzzled his parents by visiting
London's used-book stores and buying second-hand copies of challenging authors
like Thomas Henry Huxley, the British biologist who championed Darwin. At
15, he won a literary contest and selected William McDougall's "Introduction to Social Psychology" as
his prize. He was perhaps the first
undergraduate to study physical anthropology at the University of London. He
pursued his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1927, interrupting his
studies there to work in ethnology and anthropology in Italy and physical
anthropology at a medical museum in London. He got his Ph.D. from Columbia in
1937 after studying under pioneers of anthropology like Franz Boas.
In 1953, he told an interviewer that the United States
had had a profound effect on him. "I was brought up a stuffed-shirt
Englishman. I wasn't very human. What America did for me was to humanize me.
Democratize me, beginning with the man who examined my luggage on the dock in
1927. He didn't call me 'sir' and I resented it."
Montagu won his first fame in the 1940s by arguing that
race was a social construct, a product of perceptions about race, rather than a
biological fact. He was a principal drafter of a U.N. "Statement on
Race" in 1949 that incorporated these ideas. His most noticed work,
however, was his 1953 book "The Natural Superiority of Women," in
which he argued that men were a form of "incomplete" woman and that
women were in many ways biologically superior. The attention and the sales from
the book allowed him to resign his teaching position at Rutgers University in
1955. The controversy, in those prefeminist days, was enormous, but nonthreatening.
With his willingness to return reporters' telephone calls, Montagu was widely
quoted and therefore influential. His professorial manner and dry wit made him
a frequent guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.
A television producer of the day captured his appeal.
"All he does is play himself -- a professor," Bob Herridge, a WCBS-TV
producer, told an interviewer. "He talks about stuff like early
paleolithic culture and stone artefacts of the upper Mesozoic period and you
should see the fan mail! It's fantastic!"
In later years, he expanded his commentary to things
like Ivy League dress. "The Ivy League look in men's fashions is to be
deplored on a number of grounds, if not on the ground of taste itself," he
wrote in 1958.
Although an occasional pipe smoker at one point in his
life, he opposed tobacco in public places. If smoking cannot be banned on
airplanes, smokers should at least be segregated to the back of the plane, he
wrote in 1971. "It would be a simple act of civility and serve to increase
the pleasure of both non-smokers and smokers -- the non-smokers breathing
relatively unpolluted air and the smokers enjoying the pollution of others as
well as their own."
Montagu is survived by his wife, the former Marjorie
Peakes, and three children, Audrey Murphy of Sutton, Mass.; Barbara Johnstone
of Princeton, and Geoffrey Montagu of Los Angeles. He also had four
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
\\\\\\
Making no contribution at all to Black-White race relations was the man who recently assaulted Spectator columnist 'Taki' in New York's Central Park. Taki has duly relayed in his New York Press column part of a letter of support received (from one Kevin Beary):
"Let's say that a well-known black homosexual journalist who writes on social and homosexual matters is walking in Central Park with his black partner. A white man in his late twenties spits in the journalist's partner's black face, then punches the journalist three times, drawing blood. I dare say this story would have been replayed on NY1 for days... Pledging to civilize the Empire State if elected, Hillary Clinton would have denounced the violence that intolerance breeds. And there would have been a civil rights march through Central Park, which President Clinton himself might have attended, vowing to make the park safe for people 'who are different from us.'"
In fine fettle after this, Taki went on to urge a reasonable three-year sentence -- and not the life sentence currently demanded by prosecutors -- for the New York police officer accused of sodomizing a drunken Black suspect with his night-stick; to lament that letters to the American press defending 'anti-Semitic' Pat Buchanan now need to be published anonymously for fear of reprisals; and to say that the only thing he lamented about the German occupation of Greece was when German officers billeted on the Taki family saved his older brother's life by giving the sibling rival aspirin when he had a high fever.
"Nobody endows
chairs for Kulak Studies or foundations for studying the victims of
collectivisation. Why not?"
Glenn NEWEY (philosopher), London Review of
Books 2 xii '99.
{Newey was reviewing Humanity, a book by philosopher Jonathan Glover which sets out and laments the wicked deeds of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and the French politicians who backed the Hutu of Rwanda to murder the Tutsi. (The efforts of 'rebels' in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and 'militias' in Dili, East Timor came too late for coverage.) Newey thoughtfully reflects that, despite searching for the psychology of evil, Glover largely draws a blank. For example, what traits or aspects of Hitler's psychology could be seriously thought crucial to his tossing his beloved Germany into the abyss? (Nobody had seen anything wrong with Hitler at least until, at age 28, he was hospitalized after a Russian gas attack in Pasewalk, Pomerania.} What psychological rectifications would make any prison psychologist recommend parole for any of the twentieth century's tyrants? Was Hitler really 'inhuman', as is often implied and wishfully thought? Or was he only too human in his resentment at Germany's defeat thanks to the US finally joining the Great War, his defiance for the democrats who locked him up in Munich, his enthusiasm for his own early political and military successes and his worthy plan to extend German civilization eastwards and rescue millions from communism? Understandably, Newey points out there is no core to the demonologizing of tyrants and writes: "Nobody on earth has a coherent plan for dealing with human nastiness." Nevertheless, Newey's pessimism may be misplaced. A draft Millennium essay, called 'Liberating the Future' is obtainable from the Editor in which the horrors of the Nazizeit are traced to breach of contract and the way is shown to a tyrant-free future.}
http://www.boston.com/globe/
//////
How to Build Kids' Emotional Intelligence
Every year about
this time, after it gets cold but before the first snow, pre-school teacher
Sabrina North asks parents to send in children's snow clothes. For the next few
weeks, she helps 3-year-olds learn how to put on snowsuits, mittens, boots, and
hats.
Again and again and again, she cheerfully
deflects the whining and frustration until all the children can do it
themselves. The practicing pays off once the snow comes, but for North, this
isn't just about teaching independence. She's teaching emotional intelligence,
or EQ.
Huh?
EQ refers to social and emotional skills, to a
person's capacity for relationships and sensitivity to oneself and others. It's
is a bit of a buzzword these days, but the concept of emotional intelligence
has been around for decades; anyone who has been in therapy undoubtedly has
been exposed to it, and many of us as parents promote it intuitively.
That may not be enough, however. In our
increasingly diverse, adversarial, and violent world, researchers, educators,
and psychologists say emotional intelligence is a survival skill, not something
that can be left to chance. Indeed, they argue that EQ is more important than
IQ, in fact that EQ promotes IQ, and that in the next millennium, people who
are low on it will be miserable….
\\\\\\
For more, more, more unsubstantiated gush about 'EQ', see the Boston Globe website. Not even Daniel Goleman, the inventor of the entirely unsubstantiated concept {see TgF Newsletters}, receives a mention, let alone any critic!
This newsletter for the science and politics of differential psychology appears on Tuesdays. See also its Archives and related articles on psychology, heredity, individual liberty and William McDougall FRS.
(Nature 2 xii '99 + www.nature.com)
1. R. PLOMIN REGRESSES FURTHER TO THE MEAN
{Cf. McDNL 11 v '99: "….the psychogeneticists of London's Institute of Psychiatry (under director Bob Plomin) are continuing their policy of only announcing discoveries of genetic factors when they can soften the blow of this information for lefties. This is done by distracting allusions to 'environmental factors' -- never themselves identified in the seventy years in which psychology has been dominated by environmentalistic thinking."}
New Labour's Robert Plomin and
cronies have been allowed pages in a 'toilet book' Pull-Out Supplement in Nature
to speculate on WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS. Here, tenured wafflers vie with each
other to be as boring as possible about such pseudo-exciting and certainly
unresolved topics as Habitable Planets, 21st Century Feeding of the
Population, Climactic Change, the Neurobiology of Cognition, the Cognition of
Evolution, the Evolution of Cognition, the Biology of Evolutionary Cognitive
Neurobabbling etc.
In all this one might have thought that --
after 15 years of research (establishing the supremacy of the g factor,
the similarities of MZ twins, the dissimilarities of adoptees, the strong
correlation of IQ with inspection time, the predictive power of IQ, and the
usefulness of tracked learning) which has turned the tide against
multi-intelligenced environmentalunacy -- the article on intelligence would be
a treasure. Sadly, grant-getting man-of-moderation Plomin has not only failed
to appreciate any of the research on the g factor but he has failed,
despite all his research grants, to discover a single new fact about IQ.
Seeking to cover his behind, he takes refuge in sentiments which he hopes
Steven Rose, Susan Greenfield, Steve Jones and similar BBC dignitaries will
report favourably to Archbishop Moneybags Blair. The broad heritability of IQ
is 50%, thinks this loyal Labourite -- leaving readers to wonder why the
remaining 50% influence of the environment hasn't proved usable by Head Start
operatives to produce the slightest gain for America's Blacks or anyone else
through an entire generation of Great Society expenditures.
This last point is also remarked by
Rosalind Arden in her fine pro-g write-up [Times Higher 3 xii
'99, 'g Whiz! IQ is a clever concept'] of a recent three-day beano for
cogniburblers in London -- courtesy of the Novartis Foundation. Nicely
accompanied by a visual aid of five of the Freud family (Papa, cook and
politician Clement, portrait painter Lucien and two delightful and promisingly
artistic great-granddaughters) which invites intellectuals to think about
genes, Rosalind elaborates the major themes of The g Factor (1996) and
concludes, like that book, "By failing to recognize individual differences
and their causes, I think we let children down." So sure of g is
Rosalind that she even claims, after surveying the assembled Nofarty geniuses,
including Plomin and Douglas Detterman, "Intelligence has moved from the
Salon Des Refusés to Portland Place"; and she adds, "Some of the
discussants {especially parapsychologist Nickerless Humphreys} are former
opponents of g. Today they are won over by evidence that g
exists, is measurable and partly heritable." -- One certainly hopes they
have not been won over only be Nofarty largesse or by the prospects of a
post-conference session with the fair and reasonable Rosalind, who is supposed
to be busy writing a book with Plomin on intelligence for publication in 2001.
However, it is noticeable that none of them dares to say a word to Rosalind
about race.
Instead of obliging enquirers about the
missing 50% of g variance,* the only fun in the Nature colour
supplement is provided by a small picture of a convoluted brain lit up with
hot-spots alongside a picture of a classical phrenological bust. The new
picture gives the modern phrenology of the hemispheres. McDNL
readers will have few surprises: vision is at the back, language on the left,
dressing skills on the right, hand and face representation around the Sylvan
fissure and quite a lot of thinking is at the front -- as has all been known
since 1950, if not 1870. However, the diagram will make a pretty and handy
visual aid; and its identification of the functions of parts of the frontal
lobes -- with 'anticipation of pain', 'mathematical approximations', 'spatial
working memory', 'analytical and figural reasoning', 'olfaction' and [a real
novelty] 'pleasant touch' -- will shock anti-localizers like Jerry Fodor (McDNL
16 xi '99) to their cotton socks.
* Tom Bouchard, Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck and Chris Brand have all reckoned the broad heritability of IQ to be around 75%, allowing about 15% for traditional environmental effects (of social class, parental style, adoption etc.) and 10% for error in IQ measurement -- see The g Factor, 1996, Chapter 3.
2. NEURONAL MODEL PROPOSED
Reviewing Arthur Jensen's The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability for Psycholoquy, Dr Lester Ingber believes he has found a way of linking neuronal functioning with the way in which IQ relates to reaction time (http://www.ingber.com/). Ingber's conclusion:
"The book written by ARJ provides motivation to explore a more fundamental basis of the g factor. I have examined this work in the narrow focus of some specific elements of the statistical mechanics of neocortical interactions (SMNI), previously used to develop a theory of short term memory (STM) and a model of EEG. I have focused on how bottom-up SMNI models can be developed into eigenfunction expansions of probability distributions appropriate to describe STM. This permits RT to be calculated as an expectation value over the STM probability distribution of stored states, and in the good approximation of such states being represented by well separated Gaussian peaks, this yield the observed linear relationship of RT versus STM information storage. This SMNI STM approach also suggests several other studies that can be performed in the context of examining an underlying basis for the g factor."
MOZART's MUSIC GIVES RATS MULTIPLE ORGASM
AND CURES WORMS AND DANDRUFF,
says New PseudoScientist
(New Scientist
6 xi '99, Gary Kliewer;
also at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/Arts/19991201/RV1MOZART.html)
In an astonishing display of indifference to science, the New PseudoScientist has asserted its belief in the Mozart Effect -- that hearing the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K 448) boosts intelligence, or at least something. In August, Harvard's Christopher Chabris published a major review in Nature showing the Mozart Effect was non-existent (McDNL 31 viii '99, 'NO IQ BOOST FROM LISTENING TO MOZART: Years of work triumph over media stupidity'). But now New PseudoMarxist maintains:
"Mozart's music does have a profound effect on the brain, though no one knows why. Rats raised on Mozart run through mazes faster and more accurately. People with Alzheimer's disease function more normally if they listen to Mozart; the music even reduces the severity of epileptic seizures."
On and on goes the New Fraudulist. But even the most gullible readers of environmentalist persuasions will note:
{The researchers whose work impresses Gary Kliewer are neurobiologist Gordon Shaw at the University of California at Irvine and his chica ooops colleague Frances Rauscher, now a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. In September, the New PseudoScientist endorsed a call for a ban on IQ testing -- see McDNL 22 ix '99.}
{For more doubts about any 'Mozart effect' on IQ, see: (1) Steele, Kenneth M., et al., 'The mystery of the Mozart effect: failure to replicate.' Psychological Science 10, 4, July 1999, 366-369; (2) Nantais, Kristin M., et al., 'The Mozart effect: an artifact of preference.' Psychological Science 10, 4, July 1999, 370-373.}
(Times 2 xii '99)
Two MZ twins have both become police inspectors and heads of their own police stations in neighbouring forces. Tony and Barry Harper always had identical tastes and abilities; but they differed in height by one inch and thus joined different police forces, in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Now they work just across the county border from each other. They say their only difference is that each thinks his own police force superior.
(Independent 4 x '99)
A schoolboy of Manchester's down-market Gorton area has become the father of
MZ twins -- by a 17-year-old schoolgirl whom he has known for five years. The
girls twins, Leah and Louise, have supposedly delighted both young
parents even though the mother (who wishes a career in computing science and
business studies) had been on the Pill intending to prevent pregnancy. The boy,
who sometimes works delivering soft drinks, told journalists: "I want to
earn a few quid to see my babies right."
There seem to be no immediate plans to
imprison the young mother for paedophilia. The great thing about Britain's many
laws about kiddyfumbling, paedophilic downloading, date raping, stalking and
race hate is that they are there for use only when one person is pursuing a
vendetta or seeking compensation from another: they allow intimidation of
anyone who is somewhat unpopular but are not enforced when, as in the present
case, the taxpayer is expected under principles of welfare idealism to pick up
the lifetime bill for the pregnancy and its aftermath. However, in the absence
of a statute of limitations, social workers hope to prosecute the 13-year-old's
parent's for their boy's frequent truancies from the state comprehensive school
to which he was assigned.
UniSci: Daily University Science News 29 xi '99, Jim Barlow
http://unisci.com/stories/19994/1129992.htm
//////
More Synapses Seen In Brains Of Intellectually Skilled
Education not only makes a person smarter, it may generate a specific type of synapse in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, Illinois and Russian neuroscientists say. "There clearly were more synapses found in subjects with intellectually skilled professions, such as engineering or teaching," said James E. Black, who is part of a team examining post-mortem brain tissue at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "With our approach, however, we can't determine if extra professional experience actually caused new synapses to form, or if people with more synapses tended to choose challenging professions." The team's preliminary findings were presented in late October at the 29th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Miami….. A study by Arnold Scheibel of UCLA found a correlation between education and neuron branching in another brain region, a finding that would support the synapse data….
\\\\\\
Student Corner -- PC View
The first annual beano for 'Relevance of Assessment and Culture in Evaluation: Race 2000' will take place Jan. 5-7 in Tempe, Arizona. The 'focus' will be 'Exploration of Cultural Bias in Assessment and Testing.' All sorts of boring and/or pious speakers are promised at http://race2000.asu.edu, as are 'THE FACTS ABOUT RACE' (still awaiting posting)….
Race realists in email groups have been keenly discussing journalist Jon
Entine's new book. Taboo:
Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It*
documents the dominance of Black athletes in er, athletics (see McDNL 30 xi '99). (Steve Sailer says:
"Among the 23 superstars who play team sports on Forbes' 1995 list of the
world's highest paid athletes, 16 are black and seven white. The blacks now
average more than twice as much each from endorsements as the whites.")
In particular, 'people of African descent'
totally dominate the 100 meter dash -- the single track event where training
and preparation are least important. And the effect can be traced to West
African genes. In the All-Africa Games, the track events up to 400m are
invariably won by West African men and women. Longer distances are dominated
instead by East, North and South Africans. The World 12km Cross Country
Championships seldom include teams from West Africa. Hence, when environmental
conditions and opportunities are equal (i.e. equally poor), West Africans still
produce the best sprinters. (Kenya has even spent millions of dollars to try to
train 100 meter champions -- quite without success. Kenyan gifts developed
evolutionarily to suit a polygamous, horseless cowboy, cattle-raiding,
spear-in-the-back-if-your-enemy-catches-you culture; whereas West Africa was
more focused on sperm competitions.)
Are there any areas involving physical
competition where Whites or Asians might be expected to maintain an edge?
Riding to hounds, rowing, diving, fencing, fives, gymnastics, squash, golf,
swimming, table tennis, weight lifting and Sumo wrestling come to mind. Sailing
(in medium sized boats) might also qualify. Small overpowered boats like 49ers
are very athletic, but medium-sized boats are slow and mostly unathletic.
Reading the wind and doing the mental geometry are fairly g-loaded,
though longer-distance sailing may also tap leadership qualities like
paedophiling judiciously the available cabin crew. White men are also popular
with Ghanaian girls for their greater application to achieving female orgasm
via talk of passports to England. Steve Sailers adds English channel swimming,
dog sled mushing, and Himalayan climbing as
possibilities.
* Available January 2000 -- see http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/books/tab.html.
CHICAGO (Reuters) -- Researchers say they have found brain damage in soldiers believed to be suffering from Gulf War Syndrome as a result of chemical exposure during the conflict. Magnetic resonance scans of 22 veterans found reduced levels of a brain chemical called NAA, suggesting a loss of neurons in the brain stem and basal ganglia, said the report from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The brain stem controls some reflexes while the basal ganglia affects movement, memory and emotion. Thousands of soldiers who served in operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield in 1990 and 1991 during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait have complained about health problems including memory loss, sleep disorders, balance problems, depression, exhaustion, body pain, diarrhoea and difficulties in concentrating; but females were not over-represented, so hysteria always seemed unlikely as a diagnosis. Robert Haley, an associate professor of internal medicine at the Texas school, says the new findings validate earlier research which found that some Gulf veterans who complained of the symptoms had a genetic predisposition for brain injury because they were born with low blood levels of the enzyme that breaks down the chemical nerve gas sarin.
SIGN IN AN OPTICIAN'S WINDOW:
If you don't see what you want, you've come to the right shop.
DECEMBER 14
THIS WEEK: AS 'MILLENNIUM' ENDS, VENGEFUL VICTIMS SEEK CASH WITHOUT QUESTIONS
'FUCK THE GENOME!' SAY LEFT AND RIGHT, PREFERRING INSCRUTOLUNACY
EAST GERMAN REPARATION FOR COMMIECAUST NEARER
HOMOSEXUALS ARRIVE BIG-TIME IN UK POLITICS AND MILITARY -- WHILE PROMISING TO LOCK 'EVIL PAEDOPHILES' AWAY FOR LIFE
NEOSOCIALISM's TURKEY FOR CHRISTMAS: WIDER STILL AND WIDER GOES MULTICULTURALISM
MULTICULTURALISM CUTS NO ICE WITH VOTERS, SAYS EUROPEAN UNION
REPARATIONS DEMANDED FROM JAPANESE, METROPOLITAN POLICE, FRENCH REVOLUTIONARIES, MARTIN LUTHER, SPANISH INQUISITION, ISMAIL THE BLOODTHIRSTY, DOUBTING THOMAS etc.
CONVICTS DOUBLE IN MULTICULTURAL DECADE
HEAD START BY CHEATING -- 52 TEACHERS SUSPENDED
Books: McDNL's Christmas Suggestions
Genes and Politics
'NOT IN OUR GENES', SAY LEFT AND RIGHT; 'SO WHY DON'T SCIENTISTS JUST BUGGER OFF?'
Marxists and High Tories find common ground in interactiloonery {see McDNL 30 xi '99, 'WE ARE ALL INTERACTILOONS NOW,' SAYS MARXIST PROF}.
(New Statesman 13 xii '99)
To greet the announcement by scientists that the human genome is now being 'read' -- i.e. analysed for the A, G, C, T sequences it contains in its multi-volume library -- Britain's political papers agreed in rubbishing the breakthrough. Notably, Jacques Le Fanu, the medical correspondent of the Torygraph supplied an article for the left-wing New Statesman titled 'Stop all this fuss about our genes.' (The Torygraph frequently features the pooh-poohing noises about genes of Galton-hating Professor Steve Jones, Galton Laboratory, University College London.) For example, says Le Fanu, if it is desired to understand schizophrenia -- which is surely not carried on Chromosome 22! -- one has to look at neurotransmitters. Well, perhaps. So what happens? Not very much -- perhaps Le Fanu has forgotten. Yet one thing is clear: "their blueprint in the genes is of no more help than consulting an architect's drawing when trying to understand why your roof is leaking." In case some might think that a word with the architect might not be such a bad idea in such circumstances, Le Fanu adds the standard interactibabbling caveat of the Steves (Jones, Rose, Gould, Ceci etc.): "the information locked away in each and every cell is of such inscrutable complexity as to defy the imagination." So that's all right, then. There is plainly not much point in all this genetic stuff after all!
While backdated prosecutions and apology demands persist from neosocialists re crimes of the Holocaust, slavery and paedophilia in orphanages, the attentions of the censorious should be drawn to the far more extensive evil perpetrated by communists -- and to opportunities for truth, reconciliation, compensation and proper punishment….:
BERLIN (Reuters 12 xii '99) -- German officials have cracked the code of computer files identifying the code names of thousands of former foreign spies for Communist East Germany, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday. It said the files contained information on some 47,000 agents used by the regime from 1950 until its fall in 1989, including their targets and how long they were in service. However, the real names of the spies were not included in the files. These are thought to be held on files which were spirited out of Germany by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade ago.
PC vs Heterosexism
BRITISH HOMOSEXUALS LOVE A PARTY;
AND THE PARTIES LOVE THEM.
LONDON -- Establishing the dominance of feminazism in British politics, the Conservative Party decided to sack its only remaining heterosexual who might have proved electable as Mayor of London. Evidently, several wymmin from the constituency of Steve Norris had approached the Party privately to tell tales. Now the Party is in total confusion, with top committees split 10-10 as to whether Norris should be reinstated.
Already the Conservatives have had to do without the raunchy Lord Jeffrey Archer, found guilty by media of planning to tell a white lie to a court. Yet instead they have had to accept back into their closest counsels the notoriously gay Spanish-British cross, Michael Portillo -- widely supposed to be after Mr William Hague's job as 'Opposition' leader. On the Labour side, several top party positions are now occupied by unmarried men: the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, 48, can never quite manage to tie the knot with his girlfriend Sarah; and Cabinet members Peter Mandelson (now Northern Ireland Secretary) and Chris Smith (Minister of Farts) are known to be homosexual.
It is possible that the flamboyant Norris, who makes no bones about mistresses in his past, might stand as an independent candidate in what would be a fascinating race against 'Red Ken' Livingstone whose socio-sexual life is supposed to consist chiefly of newts. Livingstone is popular with Londoners -- though not with the Reverend Tony Blair -- for his Cockney accent and for wanting to subsidize Tube fares out of taxation. Yet party preferences are apparently for the acting abilities that homosexuals often possess: the remaining two front-runners for the Conservative nomination for Mayor of London are both gay. Unlike in America, where the Christian right has established in the public mind the shading of homosexuality into paedophilia, British homosexuals enjoy a media positioning of claiming to have no interest in paedophilia. Certainly they show no willingness to urge clemency for paedophiles while they themselves eagerly await parliamentary agreement to legalize sodomy from age sixteen.
{In America, President Clinton admits that his policy that homosexuals in the military should lie about their sexual orientation has proved a failure. (His wife Hillary was the first to make the announcement -- for she wants the votes of New York's allegedly sizeable gay community.) The President adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy in 1993; but expulsions from the Army have doubled as gays can sometimes scarcely avoid occasional frankness and the Army then feels obliged to prosecute them. Policies of downright lying have lately proved successful: Kosovo has been ethnically cleansed by Nato and IRA/Sinn Fein has taken control of policing in Catholic/Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. But to have expected members of the armed services to disguise their sexual interests while they showered together, slept in barracks together and carried each other through rivers on exercises was too much -- beyond even the legendary acting abilities of male homosexuals.}
{The failure of Mr Clinton's policy for homosexuals will not prevent Britain making its own even stronger demand on homosexual acting abilities. In the Ministry of Defence, the current plan is that homosexuality will become quite OK, like heterosexuality, so long as it does not involve 'inappropriate' behaviour between serving personnel while on duty (Times 13 xii '99). The MoD claims to believe that it must try out this policy not of its own accord but in deference to the European Court of Human Rights. But Chiefs of Staff can see the excellent potential in being able to pounce on any serviceman for ill-defined 'inappropriate' naughtiness at a moment of their choosing. It is perhaps fortunate that serving troops now have a function that is chiefly ceremonial -- while most of the bombing of former allies like Serbia is conducted by a small number of aircraftmen so strapped into their rubber gear and computers, and travelling at such high speeds that few thoughts of sexual assignations or jealousies can cross their minds.} {Not that such aircraftmen themselves are indifferent to pussy when off-duty. McDNL's US Military Attaché writes: Fighter pilots are the horniest bastards in the world, as shown by the Gulf War victory party in a Las Vegas hotel of the "Tailhook Association" [nudge nudge wink wink] of Navy fighter pilots, where they groped every woman in attendance -- as they had for the last 20 years [women from all over America rides buses to attend this annual shindig and party with carrier pilots, the ultimate exemplars of the Right Stuff]. Anyway, there were female navy officers in attendance, and they complained about getting felt up, and it became the biggest scandal in the history of the world, and dozens of America's finest warriors were thrown out of the Navy.}
Anglo-Saxon/Jewish Empire
HELSINKI -- The Neosocialist World Order is probably to be expanded by the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union from 2004. Despite the reservations of France (where 80% of people dislike the idea) and Greece (100%), the European side-show of the Atlantic Alliance is to be extended -- eventually to include Israel and much of North Africa. The idea is at least to pull in substantial Muslim support before the Chinese get around to offering Muslim alliances and using the oil weapon against the West; and possibly to extend the NWO to include the entire Caucasian race. Citizens will enjoy considerable affluence and liberty but will be required to subscribe to multiculturalism so as to prevent any rise of monocultural nation states splitting away or causing trouble. The planned expansion will mark the end of any political or cultural entity of 'the Christian world.'
Whether men will settle for the restrictions of 'political correctness' remains to be seen; but they have been obliging so far, and the alternative of China's one-child policy combined with proscription of virtually all religion will not look especially inviting -- certainly not till eugenic policies bring to an end the Chinese habit of spitting.
'Antiracism'
A decade of unprecedented 'antiracist' propaganda sponsored by governments, universities and the media has failed, says a report of the European Union.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/03_world/story_10750.asp
//////
Europe becoming more racist: EU report
Racist attitudes are growing in Europe but fewer and fewer Europeans think it is an issue worth worrying about, say the European Union's racism watchdog group. In its first report since it was set up in 1998, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia decried what it called the "rampant" development of discrimination based on colour, creed, ethnicity and race. "The 15 countries (of the European Union) are today threatened by a rise in racism and xenophobia -- certainly not to the extent that it experienced more than 50 years ago under a totalitarian regime, but by new, underhanded forms which can prosper in a democratic society," it said. Citing a 1997 survey that it deemed still relevant today, the Vienna-based centre said one in three Europeans considered themselves as "very racist" or "quite racist" -- an increase from an earlier large-scale poll in 1989. But at the same time, public interest in racism slid to 22 per cent, compared with 36 per cent a decade ago, the centre said. Practically no EU member state was spared mention in the two-volume report, which dealt mainly with incidents in 1998 -- not even Ireland, where it cited "cultural and lifestyle discrimination" against Gypsies and ill feeling towards Jews and Muslims….In a chapter titled "The Perpetrators of Racist Acts", it condemned the rise in Belgium of the Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) "whose slogan 'Our Own People First' has become deeply and lastingly rooted in Belgian society"…..
\\\\\\
{By contrast, Arthur Koestler's biographer was pretty sanguine about the future of globalized multiculturalism when he addressed the Hebrew Union College in May (http://huc.edu/news/cesarani.html). Acknowledging a prize to him for his work at the Wiener Library, London, which monitors 'racist' groups all over Europe, David Cesarani