Go back
to NewsLetters from 2 DECEMBER 1997?
1997, the 'European Anti-Racism Year' (chief event: Brand sacked 8/8/97), may be over, but the same old antics continue. The latest person to find himself at the centre of UK media frenzy is John Motson, 52, the top English soccer commentator. Asked whether he had any problems at his age in the fast-paced world of soccer [the game for the low IQ, with its specially large ball travelling at a snail's pace], he obliged his interviewer. 'Yes,' he said, 'it can be hard to tell the players apart -- especially with all the Black players who have come into the game recently, as I'm sure they won't mind my saying.' Asian MP Keith Vaz and Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan were predictably scandalized and politicians across the party divide united to condemn the 'remarks'(Daily Express, 5 i '98). Instantly the BBC's priestly caste began analysis: Was JM an overt racist, a covert racist, an unconscious racist or an institutional racist?… Should he (a) write an apology for publication in The Voice; (b) pay a life subscription to the Winnie Mandela Football Team; (c) have to provide commentary on Macaroons vs Gold Coast? -- Fortunately for JM, at least he hadn't said he was a race realist or what loonytunes call a "scientific racist."
PS From Daily Mail, 6 i '98, Richard Littlejohn:
"No-one hesitated for a moment to consider whether what Motson
had said, unintentionally or otherwise, was actually racist. No
one made any attempt to examine the facts or maintain a sense
of proportion -- not even the Tory spokesman, in his determination
to prove to his leader's new constituency at the Notting Hill
carnival that he could be even more PC than his political opponents.
"Motson was found guilty
without trial. In late 20th century Britain there is
no defence to a charge of racism. The accusation, especially if
repeated loud enough, is sufficient. Nor is there any more heinous
crime."
PPS Letter in Daily Mail, 9 i '98, from Roger
Neill, Hampshire:
"Well done, John Motson, for stating the obvious. Black things
are difficult to see because there is no contrast, no shadows.
Black faces look alike because of physics, not attitude. MP Keith
Vaz should do something about his attitude and the chip on his
shoulder."
British Labour Prime Ministers have never been known for their specially good taste or refinement. Clem Attlee was gruff and monosyllabic; Harold Wilson wore Gannex raincoats and smoked a filthy pipe; Jim Callaghan was the uneducated policeman's pal -- responsible more than anyone for Britain's own prohibition era re 'drugs'; and the Reverend Tony Blair wanted to run a pop group and has now elevated pudgy, bespectacled Elton John to be the National Bard. More disturbing, however, is TB's choice of scruffy, cadaverous, bespectacled, Woody-Allen-look-alike, Marxist historian Emeritus Professor Eric Hobsbawm (London University -- but EH now prefers to live in the Big Apple) as Companion of the Bath for Her Majesty. Paul Johnson explained it all last year (Evening Standard, 9 vi '97).
//////
Eric Hobsbawm is an old-fashioned figure, a survivor from the
age when to be a Marxist was a respectable intellectual position
to hold, at any rate in universities. And he is faithful to his
household gods. Not long ago I heard him on Start the Week {the
BBC's Melvvyn Blaags Show for pinkoes}, defend Stalin warmly and
say that, without the old monster, Britain would not have got
the welfare state.
As the new Labour government
is now beginning to dismantle much of the welfare state, the true
measure of Hobsbawm's fossilisation is only gradually becoming
clear. It is easy to laugh at him. But that would be a mistake.
Hobsbawm is a serious figure
in that we need to know how he came to hold such absurd views
in the first place, why he acquired considerable academic and
even popular success in propagating them, and why -- even now
-- he refuses to recognise their preposterous and dangerous nature….
Hobsbawm was actually born
in Alexandria and his early formation was in Vienna and Berlin.
He has assimilated himself to English patterns since he became
a pupil at the old Marylebone Grammar School (then going on to
Cambridge), but he remains un-English in some ways. He writes
of "middle Europe", for instance, whereas we all say
"central Europe." {It had better get better than this.
-- Ed.}
His life spans the birth,
expansion and eventual collapse of the Soviet system which he
considers the key development of the 20th century.
As an endangered child in Nazi Germany, he inevitably came to
see Stalin's USSR as a friend and distant comfort, and nothing
that has happened since can efface this impression.
Even today, while recognising
(in a non-specific way) the dark side of the Soviet Union, he
still sees its demise as a "catastrophe" for the "common
people of Russia. ….if Hobsbawm could turn the clock back,
he would restore Communism throughout Eastern Europe.
This puts Hobsbawm on roughly
the same level on the Marxist side of the totalitarian monolith
as, say, David Irving on the Nazi side. In terms of evil, there
is little to choose between the two ideologies….
Yet while Irving is excoriated
and boycotted by academia, and finds it difficult to get his books
reviewed at all, let alone objectively, Hobsbawm has had a distinguished
university career culminating in an Emeritus Professorship, with
honorary fellowships and degrees galore. And his books are popular
textbooks.
That indicates the extent
to which Marxism had a grip on academic life, at least until recently.
It is worth pointing out that, if the Nazis had won the war, the
positions would have been reversed. Nazi race-theory instead of
Marxism would have been the fashionable campus ideology for half
a century. Dons are very obsequious to power. {Wait
till PJ hears of how Dame Stewart Sutherland et al. have bowed
to PeeCee in Edinburgh!}
As
for the last question, why Hobsbawm remains a Marxist believer,
one has to accept….that he believes, as a historian, that
knowledge of Marxism is essential to the pursuit of his craft,
especially at its highest level. {However,} that seems to me a
ridiculous position. Marx was a mid-19th century pseudo-philosopher,
no more impressive than, say, Auguste Comte, whose importance
sprang wholly from the fact that a gang of desperadoes, who saw
themselves as his followers, captured control of a major country,
Russia, and held on to power there for 75 years by force and terror.
As Marx was an intellectual crook, who invented facts and statistics
to suit his purposes, it is no wonder that his theories proved
unworkable and that the state which tried to apply them for three-quarters
of a century totally impoverished its people (as well as murdering
20 million of them). Marx has nothing to teach a historian.
Hobsbawm, however, is not
prepared to examine Marx's intellectual and moral credentials
and sees him, even today, as a secular saint. There is no arguing
with such invincible credulity, and Hobsbawm's [work] has, as
a result, a certain awful fascination, reading the autobiography
of one who thinks the measurements of the Pyramids hold the secrets
of the universe.
\\\\\\
{Yes, that puts half of the story quite well. Hobsbawm's belief in evil of inequality gives him a 'theory'. This is why he is a popular historian -- like anti-corporatist Hugh Thomas and Paul Johnson himself. The other side of the coin (and this helps explain why Hobsbawm is now Chief Rub-a-Dub-Dubber) is simply empiricism. EH does at least admit that actual existing socialism was a failure. Here he is (1994, Age of Extremes, London, Michael Joseph) on Russian cultural achievements after Tolstoy.
"The USSR remained culturally fallow, at least in comparison with its pre-1917 glories and even the ferment of the 1920's, except perhaps for the writing of poetry, the art most capable of being practised in private and the one where the great twentieth-century Russian tradition maintained its continuity best after 1917 -- Akhmatova (1889-1966), Tsvetayeva (1892-1960), Pasternak (1890-1960), Blok (1890-1921), Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Brodsky (1940-), Voznesensky (1933-), Akhmadulina (1937-). Its visual arts suffered particularly from the combination of a rigid orthodoxy, both ideological, aesthetic and institutional, and total isolation from the rest of the world."
Likewise, Paul Johnson would surely admit that British Conservatism, 1979-1997, did nothing to spare British universities from left-wing (increasingly PC and environmentaloony) tyranny; and that the most significant cultural development was the arrival of free-market Classic FM Radio which broke the BBC's stranglehold and brought Prokofiev and Mussorgsky to the masses.}
Science has been rather tardy in reviewing J. H. Jones' biography of the world's original sexologist, Alfred Kinsey. {Science staff have been trying to work out how to tell their readers about Dolly the Sheep without admitting that the publication of her cloning occurred in Nature. -- They have now achieved their objective by giving Dolly their 1997 Scientist of the Year Award, thus acknowledging Dolly's appearances in the media generally rather than in Nature in particular.} However, the result has been well worth waiting for. Here are the key new points made by Minnesota psychiatrist Kenneth Lewes.
More of the Reverend Blair's "tough choices" are on the way in the New Year from Labour.
'Ugly little pugnacious, thieving troglodytes whose language
has fifteen different words for 'I've left my condoms at home.''
This is how London newspaper columnist A. A. Gill has long been
wont to describe the Welsh. Even when wishing his readers a Merry
Christmas, Gill takes the trouble to add "except for the
Welsh." Now the Welsh capacity to take a joke is to be tested
to the limit, for the Campaign for Racial Equality is to initiate
proceedings against Gill. Happily, Gill looks set to stick to
some key guns. "Yes, I'm a racist," he says, "in
the sense that there are differences." (Where Gill
stands on the involvement of biological factors has yet to emerge.)
PS Gill is also frequently in hot water for his appreciation of the merits of blondes as opposed to brunettes.
PPS The monocle-sporting Gill was duly reported to the police for inciting racial hatred (Mail on Sunday, 1 iii '98). The accuser was to to be a Welsh Nationalist and Swanse councillor, Ioan Richard. He said: "There may be many Welsh people who think that Mr Gill is just a nutcase; but I believe a criminal offence has been committed." Four Welsh newspapers have also lobbied for a response; and Gill's London address and telephone number have been pinned up on the boards of dozens of rugby clubhouses in Wales. Gill himself protests he was only joking: "I'm honestly quite depressed by the whole thing. No one would ever try and take you to court for being rude about Americans."
{My own attitude to this is necessarily tinged
by
(a) hostility to Welsh socialism and nationalism;
(b) the fact of the first girl I seriously wanted to screw being
Welsh [Monica (or possibly Maureen or Mona) was slim, vivacious
and raven-haired; I met her at a Bible camp when we were both
15; my plan was to cycle from London to Swansea over Friday night;
screw her in my tent through Saturday and Sunday; then cycle back
through Sunday night in time for school at 9.15a.m. on Monday….
Perhaps mercifully, M. had more sense.];
(c) the fact of major youthful heroes of mine being of Welsh origin,
even if they all stayed out of Wales as long as they could --
hard-drinking poet Dylan Thomas, hard-writing politician Roy Jenkins,
the hard-screwing philosopher Bertrand Russell and the hard-thinking
Enoch Powell. (Admitedly, they all 'got out'….)
Nevertheless, the allegation that Gill has committed a crime is
monstrous. Hopefully it will merely hasten the day when Britain
will have to adopt the US First Amendment.}
A VERBAL AID (Now, 4 xii '97,
letter)
Is she trying to buy me?
/// I'm a 23-year-old man and was recently seduced
by a woman of 45. I was happy to go to bed with her and find her
very attractive. I see her often and she insists on nuying me
expensive presents. But I don't like her doing this. It makes
me feel as if she's buying me and I really do like her for herself.
She also picks up the bill when we go out for a mean and I have
to agree to that because I can't afford the places she chooses.
Am I silly to carry on seeing her? -- Jason, Cardiff. \\\
Psychologists today often don't believe in thanatos ('the death wish') -- or in much else that Freud said to the eternal annoyance of feminists. Scientists, however, continue with their lively sport of tracing how the human body's cells are programmed to self-destruct unless they receive specific inhibiting messages. (The evolutionary function of apoptosis is pretty clearly to get rid of semi-detached 'rogue' cells before they can do too much damage.) The latest breakthrough in understanding the human body's thanatic system is by T. F. Franke and L. C. Cantley of Columbia University. They have shown that action by agents P13k and Akt leads to dissociation of the thanatic 'Bad' factor from Bcl-xL which is then freed to resume its suppression of cell death functions. In view of such discoveries, only the most blinkered psychologists can now continue to consider thanatos a 'fanciful' and 'unscientific' concept.
Swimming pools in Washington, DC, now forbid access to opposite-sex
changing rooms for children of over six years.
What is the message here?
In truth, the intention cannot be to counteract paedophilia, which
is most commonly male-on-male. Nor to help reduce violent pederasty
-- which can easily involve children under age seven. Presumably
the problem is of 'modesty' -- that children over six might themselves
have sexual thoughts and perhaps report to others what they had
seen of the opposite sex.
In one way, this is progress.
Just subtract a few more years from the limit and Washington will
have acknowledged that Freud was right in thinking children to
be sexual from birth! However, one shudders to contemplate the
weirdly limited sex-education that is considered suitable for
Washington's sexy young children. Not allowed to see ordinary
naked adults (even in Health & Efficiency naturist
magazines -- now abolished for fear of accusations of paedophilia),
the children will be able to view only a mother (already over-familiar
and anyhow past her prime), a father (if still in attendance)
and Sharon Stone et al. providing sex galore à la Hollywood
on TV. Even such viewing in children's own homes will be attended
by dire risks of one or more parents being whisked away by social
workers who have heard tittle-tattle of 'child abuse.'
In their re-make of Cinderella, US Disney have come up against
the multicultural problem of how to make a mint of money these
days: How to prevent minorities complaining that they didn't get
to play (a) Cinderella, (b) Prince Charming or (c) the Fairy Godmother?
ANSWER? Simple, stoopid! Just
have all the nice parts played by minorities (a and c by
Black marginals, b by an Asian marginal) and leave Whites to provide
the Ugly Sisters.
{PS What is the Freudian interest of the Prince's search for the owner of just the one size of tiny but delightful 'slipper'? Why does he automatically reject girls who are too big? (-- Is he a size-ist?) Paedohysteria beckons…. Answers on a postcard as usual to McDNL HQ.}
1. Enter slowly, on hands and knees: A parched African tribesman
2. Scratching his head, the tribesman recalls an ancient nugget of tribal wisdom and digs up a frog to squeeze for moisture.
3. His son, by contrast, opens a fridge and grabs a cool can of Foster's lager.
After this advert was shown in Britain, 130 people phoned to complain that it was 'racist.' The TV standards watchdog subsequently dismissed the complaints (Sun, 7 xi '97); but the sheer number of them indicates the extent of humourless 'anti-racist' religiosity in Britain.
In 1994, Oxford University's Emeritus Professor of Linguistics,
Roy Harris, turned downed The g Factor for specialist London
publishers Duckworth. Now, as a reviewer in Times Higher,
he knows he can turn down other potential best-sellers as well.
Piling into Terence Duckworth's
The Symbolic Species (1997, Penguin, £20), Harris
happily accuses this book of over-doing the 'symbolism' of the
human mind. Apparently, Deacon says: "Prehistoric art is
symbolic. Rituals are symbolic. The universe is a symbol and we
ourselves are symbols. Indeed, the symbolic self is independent
of the particular brain and body that support it." And Deacon
traces the human need to symbolise to men needing to strike deals
with their women so they can go off and do manly hunting things
without being cuckolded.
Now of course Deacon's theory
is wrong in so far as wolves and dogs have no symbolic language.
But Deacon's search for a selection pressure making for talk about
things that are not immediately present (or at least not visible
and audible) is surely correct. It is in fact because of man's
incompetence at hunting (since homo sapiens is chiefly
vegetarian) that hunts had to take a long time and range far afield;
this made for bipedalism to enable all the carrying that was involved
-- and of course for chatter about absent women and what would
be done about them on the men's return. If silly old Prof. Harris
knows a better parlour game, it is time he came up with it. For
him to carp at "guru" Deacon and his "mumbo jumbo"
shows he still has the same blinkered attitude he had when complaining
that The g Factor contained too much about IQ.
Thousands of young working women are literally going bald because of "testosterone overload" caused by occupying traditionally male roles in the workplace, a report said yesterday.
A study carried out at the University of Portsmouth, on England's south coast, found that of 800 women interviewed, 30 per cent were experiencing hair loss, said the Sunday Times.
It quoted Dr Hugh Rushton, a consultant trichologist -- a medical hair expert -- saying women in the workplace were becoming more sensitive to the circulation of male hormones, such as testosterone, in their bodies. Increasingly in recent years, professional women have been seeking treatment for hair loss, acne and deepening voices.
"Women's changing role in society is making them more male-like," said Glen Lyons. "Women in all the professions - journalism, medicine, lawyers, pilots - are trying to achieve success and compete in what was once a male-dominated area. "These career-minded women are working doubly as hard as men. They are placing enormous demands on their bodies." Mr Lyons said he had found prescribing treatment to suppress sensitivity to testosterone helped to reduce hair loss.
The Glasgow Media Unit was long a gaggle of Marxists bent on exposing malign right-wing influences in the meedja. Today, however, under its long-standing Director, Greg Philo, it has become a branch of Whitehouse Enterprises -- endlessly deploring TV's criminogenic influence on the young. At least, when explaining the GMU's work to the Sunday Times, Philo finds no time to show how the unit decides whether TV-violence-viewing actually causes aggression -- or whether aggressive youngsters just watch more violence on TV. Once a communist, Philo has plainly seen the environmentalist light as the needs of his own growing children have dictated; and today there are just as many environmentaloony funders on the 'right' as there ever were on the 'left.'
"My affection for the late William James and my admiration for his great Principles of Psychology make me reluctant to criticize his work.... Other great writers on human nature, notably the late Josiah Royce and Professor John Dewey, have carried to an even greater excess the same error of over-estimating the role of habit in human life, making the human adult appear to be little more than a bundle of habits.... It has been one of the great advantages accruing to Professor Freud from his complete detachment from the academic psychology that he has not had to struggle in the toils of this tough network of error......"
William McDOUGALL, 1932, The Energies of Men: A Study of the Fundamentals of Dynamic Psychology. London : Methuen.
Now that the end of the White West has been confidently predicted by Prof. Steve Jones, readers may wish to begin exploring what the rest of the world has to offer. In Peking, an hour of erotic massage costs just £7-50 at the back of the typical barber's shop; and a SPECIAL SERVICE is often available for around 300 yuan (£23-00) .
Free personality testing by the most advanced means of levels of SURGENCY, SENSE and SCRUPULOSITY is available at <http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Brand/quotes/> (at that website, go to Appendix 2). However, McDNL readers who prefer to be tested by a touch-tone telephone service can now ring 0891 516 490. Calls cost 50P per minute and include an "unbiased intelligence test."
CAIS; 20, East Street; Bromley BR1 1QW.
{This is a timely advertisement in view of
the Conservative Party's decision to advise its local branches
to use personality tests in selecting electoral candidates --
a break from the tradition that that candidates should have a
degree from a decent university (usually Oxbridge).}
Following E.LU.'s inglorious appearance on the front page of the Sunday Times, the LUniversity also provided the front-page-headline story for Times Higher. Here, the accusation was not just of possible malpractices with data (some of it collected by prostitutes, one of whom appeared as first author for a paper in British Medical Journal) but of 'harassment.' Evidently, a letter from Principal Dame Stewart admits there were 'harassment' accusations lodged with him against sociologist Dr Martin Plant. These accusations should have been pursued; and the final outcome -- with Dr Plant simply leaving LUniversity employment -- was, says the Dame, "less than satisfactory." Top E.LUni union man, Douglas Brodie [who didn't lift a finger to help The g Factor] told Times Higher there had been "a prima facie case for disciplinary proceedings." Needless to say, Dr Plant denies the accusations (which apparently do not contain a 'sexual' ingredient) and has counter-accusations of his own.
{Amusingly, Dr Martin Plant -- described by a senior colleague as "not the most diplomatic academic", quite a good sign -- complains that his sociological approach fell foul of the biological bias that is characteristic of modern academic psychiatry. Think of it! If only the LUniversity had brought Dr Plant into Social Science and put me in his stead in Medicine, it would probably have avoided two of its biggest embarrassments of the 1990's. [The biggest was not when the lesbian Professor of Nursing Studies resigned after doubts had arisen over her qualifications, but when the University mysteriously lost several million pounds and not a single head rolled.]}
Here's how it was for John McNaught, a lecturer in architecture
at the University of Dundee (who himself denies all his University's
allegations).
First McNaught was sacked.
Then an internal Tribunal unanimously agreed he had not been unfairly
dismissed. Now an Industrial Tribunal has applauded the extensive
inquiries of the internal Tribunal and said McNaught should stay
sacked.
So what had McNaught done?
According to the accusers, and agreed by the Tribunals:
Clearly, a whole pile of minor, long-standing and remediable grievances has been brought out against McNaught. Naturally, there is no mention of his achievements (publications, citations, etc.) from his years in academic life. His own side of the story re the above allegations is not thought worth more than the one mention given above in brackets. Dundee University claims to have warned McNaught that his conduct was giving displeasure; but whether it actually did give him proper warning is far from clear. Such is the level of analysis to which the rare case of a sacked British academic is treated. It is high time that British academics got themselves some proper contracts. As things stand, they all assume they can rely on 'gentlemen's agreements' -- no longer true in days when students expect passes and 'customer services' rather than inspiration and education in words of more than one syllable.
{Another Scottish university in the public eye is Aberdeen College, Scotland's biggest establishment for teacher training. There, hunky Principal Ray Angus has been pleased to announce the appointment as Vice-Principal of one Alison Hay, the well-endowed and party-loving former personnel director of the college, who is married to…er…Principal Ray Angus. It is good to see democratic elitism at work -- intelligence and talent quite often run in families (see Quotes XVII). In Edinburgh, Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland also has her spouse employed in her own university. Sadly, some staff complain they are too intimidated to begin grievance proceedings against Principal Ray (Scotland on Sunday, 18 i '98.}
Virtually anyone who has been abused as a child remembers the
event vividly. Far from needing help to work to achieve recall,
victims of abuse only wish they could forget. After a year of
agonizing over the findings of its own special subcommittee on
'recovered memories', the Royal College of Psychiatrists has decided
to stand by the findings and release them to the public.
So what about the use of hypnosis,
regression, role playing and dream analysis to reconstruct what
happened in childhood? Such techniques are works of construction,
and not of discovery, says the RCP.
{Here is the beginning of the report in the Guardian (12 i '98, 'Phoney Abuse Leaves Multiple Scars', Rory Carroll):
"Hundreds of families in Britain have been destroyed by people who have emerged from therapy to make false accusations of childhood sexual abuse. The tragedy is compounded because the accusers fervently believe their "recovered" memory and feel the same hurt as genuine victims, often prompting criminal prosecutions against their parents which shatter reputations and lives before being dropped for lack of evidence. According to the report commissioned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the growing army of counsellors, therapists and psychiatrists who help generate the accusations rarely meet the family or seek proof, which would be considered a betrayal of the patient's trust."
The report goes on to document cases of hysterical patients who have been allowed to destroy all before them with accusations that have ended with whole families in 'treatment.' One accuser, Carol, 46, a depressive, admitted, "[Therapists] put sexual things into your head all the time. You hallucinate about things going into your private parts. I was given pen and paper and wrote some awful fantasy-type stuff [under sodium amytal, sometimes administered twice daily]. …[My father] died crying, asking why I'd turned against him. He was in purgatory."}
{Many ordinary adults in Britain now fear to have the slightest tactile or other affectionate contact with children. They fear the smearing, tittle-tattling and 'inquiries' by social workers or the NSPCC that can be unleashed at the drop of a hat even years after their contact with a child. The RCP's decision will bring pressure to bear on loons at the British Psychological Society who have led that body to join in abusohysterical witch-hunting of the adult relatives of female neurotics.}
First the good news. For the second time this year, pinko Melvvynn
Bllaaggs had one or two near-realists on his Monday-morning programme
for Vice-Chancellors stuck in traffic jams. Last week, historian
Hugh Thomas was given a surprisingly friendly reception for his
'revelations' that slavery was invented by Blacks and abolished
by Whites. This week it was the turn of Professor Robert Plomin
(now installed at London's Maudsley Hospital after getting fed
up with Colorado and wanting to vote Labour) who had done a study
of some 200 families and thought genes were somehow important.
Secondly the bad news. That
was about as far as RP got. He was faced with a little bit of
questioning from the Observer's Melanie Phillips as to
how -- when everyone knew child abuse was passed on environmentally
-- RP's studies could show anything. Instantly RP buckled and
decided it was easier to talk about how experts now agree schizophrenia
is inherited -- though only 50% of course, for that is the extent
of MZ concordance.
All RP had to do was to point
to the minimal similarities between adoptive children growing
up together and he would have had his would-be critic on the ropes.
But confrontation is not RP's forte. Other RP softeners
were:
All this softening would be all very well as a prelude to some strong and interesting rendering of the claim that social-environmentalists have been wildly wrong about the role of heredity in human lives. But RP had nothing more to say. Worse still, his softeners are pathetic:
Let it never be said that the McDNL is a parochial organ that limits itself to reporting psychology, academics and luniversities in the English-speaking world.
Whatever may be the terrible impieties of top personality theorist Raymond Cattell that have now detained the American Psychological Association for six months, worry about miscegenation should not be among them, as follows.
"The chances of creating a gray colored, homogeneous uniform America by intermarriage are far smaller than some do-gooders suppose. The first principle found to hold in satisfactory marriages is a high degree of similarity in the partners -- in interests, in temperament and in physique. Failed marriages are found to be far more frequent among the less alike."
R.B.CATTELL, 1994, How Good Is Your Country? Washington, DC : Institute for the Study of Man. {Nice to see someone taking psychology seriously!}
Help with New Year resolutions may be at hand. Boffins have now traced more of the path whereby nicotine releases dopamine into the mesolimbic system and thus keeps its victims hooked. Crucial to the release is a mesolimbic subunit called ß2 -- for which neuropsychocognosurgeons will doubtless soon make the proverbial bee-line.
{Stopping smoking should certainly not require 'resolution.' Quitting
is pure pleasure -- contrary to the foolish beliefs of some psychologists
(see 'What psychologists will do for tobacco.').}
The arrogance and ignorance of cognitive scientists when stepping off their own little patches remains remarkable. The following extract is from Nature's review of a new book, Evolution in Mind, by London University evolutionary psychologist Henry Plotkin. -- Plotkin is one of the few neurocognoevobabblers who does not lose sight altogether of the empirical dominance of the g factor in accounting for individual differences in cognitive abilities.
"….the modularity of mind seems to be not only true but also arguably the most important discovery of modern cognitive science….[There is thus] no justification for Plotkin's alignment with authors who for some reason desire to go back 'beyond' modularity even at the price of smuggling back useless remnants of the defeated theory of general intelligence."
Massimo PIATELLI-PALMARINI, 1998, 'Mental devices', Nature, 8 i, 138-9.
{MP-P is plainly another non-reader who cannot
be bothered to ask at his public library for a copy of The
g Factor on Inter-Library Loan. Still, it is nice to gather
that HP has been ruffling the feathers of cognitive scientists
once more. HP's book is published in London by Allen Lane at £25}
3. Basic Instinct (Times, 9 i '98)
Over the New Year, circus owner and trainer
Richard Chipperfield was badly savaged by a Bengal tiger when
he put his head into the tiger's mouth and made friendly tiger-ish
noises. Afterward, the tiger was shot dead by Richard's brother,
Graham -- worried that it might be too easily tempted again now
that it associated a trainer with the smell and taste of blood.
The Chipperfields are brave
and successful animal handlers. Their circus has had only one
staff member killed by an animal in 313 years. However, one does
not need to be a member of the Born Free Foundation to sympathize
with the McDougallian comment of its Director, Tricia Hodgson:
"You can never breed out or sublimate a tiger's basic instincts."
Apparently, Bengal tigers are known to swim out into lakes so as to tip over small boats and eat the fishermen.
{William McDougall would also have been pleased by one-time Social Democrat leader Lord David Owen's call over the New Year for the United Nations to establish its own rapid deployment force on permanent standby. -- This had been McDougall's proposal for the League of Nations in 1926.}
PS On 25 February, 1998, a 32-year-old
animal keeper for the Chipperfields at Chipping Norton, UK, had
an arm and hand bitten off and swallowed by a tiger while he was
reaching into a cage to adjust a screen (Classic FM Radio,
20:00). The Chipperfield family was said to be "heartbroken"
over its first two serious accidents in fifty years of breeding
tigers. However the keeper, handsome Nigel Wesson, kept his cool.
When asked by paramedics at the gory scene of the accident whether
he was allergic to anything, he replied: "Only tigers."
4. Infertility-busting (BBC Radio 4 UK, 'Any Questions', 9 i '98, 20:05)
Chicago physicist and embryological experimenter, Dr Richard Seed, is now aiming to clone 500 people a year by the Millennium. Facing down critics who call for legal bans, he calls President Clinton "a slick, sleazy Willie" -- thereby reminding the public that the President will go on trial soon for failing to end affirmative racism after six months of concentrated committee work with Paula Jones and White House lawyers.
{Breakthroughs re infertility are always welcome. It is not widely appreciated that one couple in eight has significant fertility problems. Banning such an 'unnatural' practice as cloning is thus not the right response in days when so many other technologies have already been tolerated. What is important is that children should only be produced having at least two parental figures who contract to bear the full costs of the child till (say) age 18 -- including the full costs of education, medicine and custody. Of course, that same provision should also apply to the production of children by old-fashioned, natural methods. (See my review of Dysgenics -- first published in the Internet magazine PINC at <http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/>.)}
{It certainly shows a spirit at once killjoy
and hypocritical for President Clinton to wish to interfere with
the sexual (or even a-sexual) mores of others. The 69-year-old
ex-Harvard physicist himself does not doubt the value of his proposed
work (involving four likely couples, all anonymous so far). Says
Richard Seed (Times Higher, 23 i '98), "cloning and
the reprogramming of DNA are the first serious steps to our becoming
one with God."}
5. Fat-melting
(Times, 9 i '98)
/// A YOGHURT THAT IS SAID
TO TRICK THE BRAIN INTO FEELING FULL WENT ON SALE IN SWEDEN YESTERDAY \\\
Beating public sector neurocogniwankers into a cocked hat is entrepreneur scientist David Horrobin. His firm Scotia is now marketing a yoghurt called Måväl -- which means 'feeling good.' The vital factor in Måväl is 'Olibra', a fusion of natural ingredients which encourages the small intestine to release the peptides which tell the brain that the body is full. At an experimental buffet, researchers in the University of Ulster found that women reduced their calorie intake by 22% after eating yoghurt containing Olibra.
So is
David Horrobin also working on a product to boost intelligence?
Yes, he was as quick as the Edinburgh Structural Psychometrics
Group in the mid-1990's to realize the potential of his existing
product, Evening Primrose Oil, to improve nervous system myelination
and thus to maintain or even increase intelligence. By the time
Edinburgh psychologists approached him to moot a deal, he already
had clinical trials underway in laboratories in Singapore. The
aim is to produce a safe but concentrated version of EPO.
-- The large doses of ordinary EPO needed to reach the human brain
via the digestive system would tend to produce flatulence.
6. Another disaster for social-environmentalists (Sunday Times, 11 i '98)
Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Newcastle have identified markers for genes yielding autism. According to Antony Monaco of Oxford's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, the breakthrough was made by studying 99 families in which [as happens in 3% of cases] an autistic child has a sibling who is also autistic. The results are due for publication in March.
Managerial Churchwarden Mandelson has now solved the Reverend Blair's problem of how to introduce fast track learning in the Sunday School without Education Secretary Blunkett knowing anything about it. The answer is to offer most of the classes for 'temporary' privatization to Barclays bank, MacDonald's and Tesco's. Once thus privatized, with the help of a Thatcherite sweetener to firms thus 'backing Britain', and without the 'Local Education Authority' to featherbed them in egalitarian ways, the classes will have to put up with whatever big business tells them is 'good practice.' Item One will be trade training schemes that will sweep away the last fifty years of ludicrous efforts to teach grammar to the IQ 90's; and Item Two, fast track learning, will allow the brighter children to perform even up to levels that obtain in continental Europe.
PS Plans for the Millennium Dome in Greenwich forge ahead. No-one knows what will be inside the Dome, but the decision has been taken as to what will happen *outside* it. High above London, projected by all the latest technology, will be the letter M -- for Mandelson.
PPS The Mandelson Plan to end local authority control of state schools has predictably drawn the wrath of Grumpy Nigel de Gruchy, the supremo of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Wymmin Teachers. But Mr Blunkett is still dozing by his fireside with his nice Labrador; and the National Union of Teachers seems also to have been caught napping.
PPS Labour has now expelled two of its Euro-MPs for disloyalty.
The MEPs have been received with honours by the 'Greens' -- who
have a little representation in the Strasbourg EuroParliament.
One of the traitors to Mr Blair, Ken Coates, explained the problem
(Classic FM, 8 i '98, 15:00): 'The Labour Party has been
taken over by aliens -- by a bunch of clever, but heartless aliens.
….I joined the Labour Party at age 15; but Mr Blair only
joined it in a career move at age 27.'
{Hopefully TgF supporters who took
TgFNL advice on how to vote in the UK General Election
last May 1 will now feel they did the Right Thing in the circumstances.}
In its review of Lawrence Wright's Twins -- Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Human Identity (published on 10 November 1997 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14-99; see McDNL 11 November 1997), the liberal-left Observer interested itself largely in the 'experiments' on identical twins of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.* However, after such ritualistic huffing and puffing, it turned out that Matt Seaton had no criticism to offer of Lawrence Wright's broadly pro-heredity, popular review. Says Seaton:
"What Wright does admirably well is distil out of a voluminous scientific discourse on twins the essential kernel of what should concern us about the way twin research has tipped the nature/nurture debate. Marx believed that men were made by their circumstances, 'but not of their own choosing'; what much twin research suggests -- though not unambiguously -- is that we are as much made by genes not of our choosing."
Mengele's work was doubtless cruel, obscene, disgraceful, monstrous and irrelevant to many interesting questions. But just how Mengele's work could have been absolutely and totally useless in its empirical aspect will remain a mystery to readers of Seaton's book review. -- Perhaps Lawrence Wright has the answer.
In the latest move to erode confidence in the male of the species, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has announced that at all intimate examinations of women there should be a chaperone in attendance. It is a peculiar philosophy, denying a woman's ability to consent to private examination and undermining the very confidence that a patient should place in a physician (or take her trade elsewhere). There is also a practical objection. Once, the Prison Service used to think it morally safer, when single cells were not available, to place prisoners with two other prisoners rather than with just one inmate; but gradually it worked out that this three-in-a-cell arrangement only encouraged the more violent forms of homosexuality -- with one jailbird holding the new arrival down while the other sodomized him.
PS The Royal College of Physicians prefers counter-attack
to defence on the 'harassment' issue. According to its own latest
survey (BBC Radio 4 UK, 8 i '98, 08:20), no less than a
quarter of general practitioners have been 'harassed' by patients
-- including repeated phone calls, stalking and demands for 'inappropriate'
full physical check-ups.
Those who worry about males being unduly tempted to exercise their droits de seigneur really should take themselves off as missionaries to South Africa -- the country with the highest rape rate in the world (TgF NewsLetters, 1996). Here is the latest from Johannesburg.
"The early Nineties saw the emergence of "jackrolling", raping sprees conducted by gangs of marginalised youth who target black women who they regard as "getting above themselves." Though it started in the townships, such attacks have also plagued some university residences.
Interviews published by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation reflect the routine victimisation of women: "I have told myself 'cherries' {Black male term for Black girl} can't tell me anything; when I want it she must give," said one man. "Some invite jackroll," said another. They walk in the street wearing minis. You get aroused. They snub you. We can't stand this shit."
"They think themselves better than us; they prefer men with money and big cars. When these women get jackrolled, it's OK," said a third.
According to Rape Crisis, one in two South African women endures rape. Domestic violence afflicts 60 per cent of homes. Researchers are finding that in some primary schools, "catch and rape" and simulated killing games have replaced cops and robbers….
The White press goes into hysterics as the mention of genes and
race in the same paragraph. Not so the Black press! -- Well, not
invariably. In a thoughtful and informed report on why Black people
have higher rates of hypertension [high blood pressure], The
Voice was quite content that the racial difference was genetic.
Was this because they supported the claim of US scientist Clarence
Grimm which blames the slave trade for this Black vulnerability?
(With the horrendous conditions on slave ships, Grimm argues,
only the strongest -- those able to conserve salt and water to
avoid dehydration -- survived.) Not a bit! The Voice faithfully
records: "However, critics of this theory point to high levels
of hypertension in urban Africa as well."
{Verily, it is White liberals, not Black radicals,
who have their knickers in a twist about race. As readers of the
recent National Review (31 xii) are reminded by Steven
Sailer and Stephen Seiler, Black achievements in athletics are
certainly genetic in origin -- unlike the achievements of all
too many doped-up female athletoids of the past two decades.}
////
SCIENCE FINDS KEY TO BRAIN'S MEMORY BANK
….Erich Kandel, a senior scientist at Howard Hughes Medical
Institute in New York, who has discovered the genetic basis of
CREB (Cyclic Response Element Binding Protein) said: "I have
been working on this for about thirty years, and I believe we
will have a drug for use in humans within the next few years."
\\\\
{Apparently the main anticipated problem is that users of an artificial 'CREB' protein may end up remembering too much.}
Two years after the publication of Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism [New York: Free Press], with its revelations on ancient and modern Black-on-Black slavery, the BBC's most up-market TV channel has now made a confession to its viewers. African-American visitors to West Africa are often appalled to discover the extent of native involvement in the slave trade; but now Black enthusiasm for slaving has received the BBC's imprimatur. It will specially have surprised the goody-two-shoes who watch BBC2 that only 5% of the slaves exported from West Africa were destined for North America; and to have seen pictures of a slave market in Ghana that was still in business as recently as 1906.
The first 1998 Badge of Courage for journalists who question paedohysteria must go to Tim Teeman, who has taken issue with the NSPCC's call for a ban on A. M. Homes' The End of Alice [London : Transworld\Anchor] (cf. McDNL 4 November 1996, Censorious Publisher: 'BOOK ONLY REJECTED BECAUSE OF SUBJECT MATTER', SAY HOLIER-THAN-THOU HarperCollins). Here is Teeman's conclusion:
"….at its most contentious, [The End of Alice] is seeks to illuminate the dark contours of a criminal mind rarely explored in fiction and seeks to question the social construction of child sexuality and adult perversion. For all our openness in discussing sexual dynamics,* one must ask what kind of scared society do we live in that finds such questions so undealable with and threatening?"
* {Plainly TT has never visited E. LUni's Psychology Department.}
Here is the episode, early in the book, where the narrator, 'paedophile' convict 'Chappy' (so known from his affection for the product Chap Stick), goes to the special prison block where visitors are received to find his second cousin, 'Burt', awaiting him. {!! X-Certificate !!}
'How are you getting along in here, are you adjusting?'
'It's been twenty-three years,' I say, intending it to sound more like a reminder than a reprimand.
'Well, yes, I know. I'm sorry to have been so out of touch, it's just that, well, the whole thing was very upsetting, scared a lot of people. Frankly, I was never frightened, just hesitant to get involved. Actually, it was more my wife…Anyway, I've been awfully busy, just retired last year.'
….Burt changes the subject. 'Do they offer you any treatment, any hope?'
I suppress the urge to tell Burt the truth, that their idea of treatment was encouraging me to jerk off while watching porno movies with something called a plethysmograph strapped to my penis measuring my hard-on -- and with them watching me through a one-way mirror, no doubt doing a little handiwork of their own. I have the urge to tell him that quite clearly my treatment was for their entertainment, but I don't think he'd take it well.
He goes on. 'Has it been a learning experience? I mean, you wouldn't do it again, would you?'
I shake my head.
'Well, that's good. And it's a decent place? They don't pick on you? There's not a problem with the other men?'
'No problem.' {The reader knows already that Chappy is sodomized once or twice a week.}
'I admire you. For toughing it out.' He blots his forehead with a handkerchief. 'My reason for coming is that there were some boxes. They must have gone from your mother's house to grandmother's and then off to my father's, and somehow they ended up with me. Anyway, we were cleaning out and came upon them, mostly things from your childhood, old clothes, mildewed books, rusty toys, a couple of your mother's pie plates that you made into tambourines, that kind of thing. Long story short, they were in the basement, we thought about having a big garage sale but didn't, and then a letter came from a new museum, the Museum of Criminal Culture?' he says, his voice going up on the end of the word culture, as though he's checking to see if I've heard of it. 'They're opening in Cincinnati?' he says, again his voice rising, curling into a question mark.
I shake my head. 'So?'
'Well, they wrote asking if we had anything of yours, and well, I wanted you to know. I didn't want you to find out from someone else -- that would be cruel. We sold your things. The curator himself came to pick up the boxes -- very pleased with the haul. And, he assures me that they'll be well cared for. And should you ever be released, they'd love for you to come and tell them a bit about some of the items -- you are up for parole or reconsideration or whatever it is very soon, aren't you?
I nod.
'Well, I just wanted you to know.'
'Should I feel honored?' I ask, stalling, wondering if there's a way to get at what I really want to know -- how much they got for me.
'Up to you,' Burt says, standing. He takes his card out from his wallet and, unable to actually hand it to me, holds it pressed to the glass for a minute so that I might memorize it. 'Keep in touch,' he says, stepping out of the booth.
A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.
I stand, and despite all my metallica {he is in leg irons and a belly chain}, my chain-link fencing, I am able to pick up the chair I've been sitting on and hurl it at the glass. Plexy, it bounces off, bounces back and hits me in the head. The guards are on me, tackling me from behind.
Burt turns. 'Good to see you,' he calls as they're hauling me off. 'And take care of yourself.'
Unchained. Tossed into my cell. The door is locked.
A while later Henry {a fellow con} comes and whispers through the slot. 'Do something for you? A tiny taste?'
'Why not,' I say, succumbing after a lifetime of abstinence. 'Just a taste.'
He slips a pack of powder under the door and instructs me to rub it into my gums. I sleep like a baby.
My yellow truck has gone to Cincinnati.
Till now, Lenin-lovers have had to be content with boasting of his legendary chess skills: Lenin could solve problems in one minute that take ordinary chess players an hour. There was more to him, however, as has been revealed by Russia-watching Professor Robert Service of London University's Department of Cold Warriors (aka Slavonic Studies). Lenin was apparently not entirely content with his wife Krupskaya -- a lady like many other wives of Russian politicians [psychologists Mrs Gorby excepted] -- bearing a marked physiognomic resemblance to a cabbage. Thus, on being installed in the Kremlin, Lenin brought in his stunning French-born mistress, chestnut-haired Ineva -- a revolutionary girl whose focus had especially been on FREE LOVE. Loyally supported by Krupskaya, Lenin and Ineva went hard at it for two years till Ineva died of exhaustion and cholera in September, 1920. Heartbroken, Lenin went into his famous decline and did not long outlive Ineva. Was it worth it? Here is the relevant extract about Ineva from the files of the Tsar's police:
she is an intelligent woman with a high education….of medium height, a thin, oval face….hair with reddish shade….a very interesting appearance
Anyone familiar with reports by security services will realize that this is praise indeed.
{It is sometimes forgotten that one of the big attractions of early-day socialism was that of being able to get away from the wife with the excuse of going to evening classes -- or, in Britain, for a year at Ruskin College, Oxford. Support for adultery, divorce and nudism featured strongly among early Russian communists, for whom the prognostications of Marx provided a cover as they liberated themselves from the strictures of Russian Orthodoxy.}
PS Sympathetic coverage of polygamy in today's USA
has been provided by the Sunday Times (11 i '98, "Mormons
Find New Passion For Polygamy", Matthew Campbell, reporting
from Fairview, Utah). Apparently the main problem is the stage
of having just two wives. This leads to jealousy. But the
arrival of subsequent wives restores tranquillity and good agreement
on division of labour between the wives.
So do Mormon polygamists go
to it three-(or more)-in-a-bed? Not at all! 'Troilism' and kindred
sports are quite out. Each marital bed is sacrosanct --
and each marital bedroom is so positioned as not to allow sound
transmission that might annoy a wife who is having the night off
watching telly.
{De facto polygamy may arrive in the UK by the back door. In High Holborn, the Law Commission is now examining what should standardly allowed as the property 'rights' of the members of unmarried partners. It would plainly be better for such teams to be able to make explicit contracts rather than just receive whatever crumbs of regularization and justice may fall from their Worships' table. But at least the Law Commission is beginning to recognize that there is a problem.}
Salvador Dali professed to be a great admirer of Freud as he dined
out on his own supposed Oedipus conflict, voyeurism and general
ability to get it up.
Freud remained unimpressed.
After the two men met at Primrose Hill in 1938, Freud remarked
of the man with the manic eyes and 6" waxed whiskers: "That
boy looks like a fanatic. Small wonder they have a Civil War in
Spain of they all look like that."
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors has now been implicated as having provided crucial advice to the 'Unabomber' Timothy McVeigh, to the bombers of the World Trade Centre, and to hit-man James Perry. (Perry is now on death row in Maryland for killing a woman and her quadriplegic son so that the woman's husband could inherit $2 million from a trust fund intended for the boy). Three US appeal court judges were recently unanimous in finding that Hit Man's publisher, Paladin, is not protected by the First Amendment and can thus be sued by relatives of Perry's victims; in the other corner, Paladin is being joined by the New York Times and the Washington Post for a final free-speech plea to the Supreme Court.
{It would be more impressive if the freedom-loving New York Times et al. had done anything whatever to complain about US Wiley's withdrawal of The g Factor. -- Some publishers object only to censorship that is run by the government rather than by themselves. However, it seems odd that a guide to bomb-making and body-disposal like Hit Man should have been allowed to circulate freely in the first place; and it seems hard to charge Paladin with abetting crime and causing damage when no-one had taken any earlier action to initiate above-board censorship. To let Paladin be sued and doubtless broken is like charging Carleton Gajdusek with offences that must have been widely known to, or suspected by colleagues and relevant authorities for many years; or like charging me with running a crusading newsletter only after months of express toleration for it by Dame Stewart Sutherland and her ilk at E.LU's Old College. If American judges want censorship, let them go about it the proper way!}
////
Why is enforced sterilisation wrong for eugenic motives (to prevent
the spread of genetically transferable disease)? One of Hitler's
worst intellectual legacies has been the exclusion of eugenics
as a subject for reasoned discussion. I hope that my surname will
indicate that I am not a neo-Nazi.
\\\\
Adapting well to British art and its folkways is 'marginal' Chris Ofili ,with a big Afro hairdo and six-inch goatee. Chris was born in Manchester in 1968 and won BP's Portrait Award at the National Gallery in 1990. His latest work, at the Royal Academy draws on his African roots, using a variety of 'media', including elephant dung.
One of President John F. Kennedy's bodyguards has been milking the British press. As has long been presumed, JFK was his own worst security risk, with ladies of the night tripping regularly in and out of the White House saunas. "When Jackie was in residence, it was no fun. He just had headaches. You really saw him droop because he wasn't getting laid. He was like a rooster getting hit with a water hose."
Great Dane Erik {supposedly a pseudonym} paid £2,000 for an operation to have his manhood extended from a tiny 1.8 inches to a whopping 7.6 inches.* The 42-year-old businessman [a father of one, from Odense] told of the agony he endured stretching his willy every night, [but now says] "I feel like a 100 per cent sex machine." ….His 41-year-old wife added: "It's true what they say -- it's not so much what you've got but what you do with it. But if you've got it and you know how to use it, then you are really in business." ….The Sun showed [an Internet picture of the organ] to Dr Rosemary Leonard. Her professional view was: "Crikey."
* The length estimate when erect is variously "no idea" (surgeon Joern Ege Sulana, Sun 27 xi) to a more modest "nine inches" (businessman 'Erik', Sun 28 xi).
Auberon Waugh has now announced the winner of the Bad Sex of 1997 Competition (Literary Review, i '98). As predicted in the Christmas McDNL issue (December 23: CHRISTMAS TAIL OOPS TALE), the winner was not the yummy and lusty Erica Jong. Instead, the prize (100 soothing Hamlet phallic symbols oops cigars) went to Nicholas Royle for his Matter of the Heart. One particular gem must serve to exemplify Royle's lack of talent here:
"Yasmin grinned and writhed on the bed, arching her back, making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren."
Like Jong ("At last he ejaculates, shuddering and growling, making the noise of a seal baying at the Arctic moon."), Royle has wisely taken to heart the sexual majesty of the seal as explained by William McDougall in 1932 (see McDNL December 2: MONSTROUS SEXUALITY -- now in McDNL Archives, Winter 1997/8 ). But, unlike Jong, Royle has failed to appreciate that it is the bull seal, not the cow, that does the baying.
Scotland's pseudo-Parliament is to be given as its pseudo-Prime Minister the trusty Blair-supportive figure of Donald-'um-Dewar. {This is a good choice. Legal eagle Dewar was pretty sympathetic to fast track learning when I quizzed him about it on the UK's top radio programme, Any Questions, at Cumbernauld in c.1993. It will also leave divorcé-to-be Robin Cook with more much-needed time for foreign affairs…} Further keeping extremes of left-ish enthusiasm in check will be the pseudo-Parliament's location. This has now been selected by Mr Dewar and the answer is: Scottish & Newcastle Brewery's 4-acre site on the Cowgate -- Edinburgh's filthiest and meanest street of any length, historically the 'low road' for cattle, paralleling the High Street. While the High Street ('Royal Mile') sports Edinburgh Castle, St Giles' Cathedral, City Chambers, the High Court of Justiciary, the Tron Kirk, the City Museum and numerous 'closes' for yuppies, the Cowgate sports merely the city mortuary and Moron House Teacher Training College. True, both streets end at Holyrood Palace; but Scottish republicans are unlikely to relish that up-market feature. Chief beneficiaries of the Donald-'um-Dewar factor will be home-owners on Edinburgh's South Side -- where property prices should show a healthy rise.
{And how did a fearless Daily Mirror reporter manage to buy cannabis from the son of the Labour Home Secretary while claiming not to have used 'entrapment'? Private Eye believes it has the answer. A sexually deprived 13-year-old schoolboy soccer star was used as the intermediary at the party where the purchase was made. Picture the scene: "Would you like a nice time, big boy? I'm a real goer when I've had a spliff."}
What do you call an older
man kept by a younger woman?
-- You call him FOR ADVICE.
Balding Edinburgh LUniversity's Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland finds it "disgraceful" for Chris Brand to have urged compassion for 73-year-old 'paedophile' Nobel prizewinner, Carleton Gajdusek. Thankfully, a less censorious approach to teaching staff is taken by Local Education Authorities in the West Midlands. In West Bromwich, bearded headmaster Stan Martin stripped to his boxer shorts at a Christmas party and entertained his school's four-year-olds by miming to the Hot Chocolate hit 'You Sexy Thing.' Some of the mothers in attendance (helping with refreshments) fainted clean away. Squawked one Britoid matron: "There wos pelvic frusts and 'is boxer shorts left nuffink to de imagination!" The kids, however, found the show hilarious; and school chiefs later decided "it was all good fun" and that "nothing untoward had taken place."
{The trial of Dame Stewart Sutherland for subacademic attitudes and disgraceful authoritarianism begins in Edinburgh LUniversity on February 10th. Even now the Dame is boning up on The g Factor to try to explain why she called it "false and personally obnoxious" in April, 1996 -- before finding an excuse to sack Brand fifteen months later.}
Edinburgh LUniversity was shocked to its foundations in November 1996 by Chris Brand's suggestion that a 73-year-old paedophile Nobel prizewinner might not need to go to prison for thirty years for non-violent offences that no-one had complained of (until a 'colleague' of Carleton Gajdusek's alerted the FBI). In Edinburgh, Brand was suspended, censored, witch-hunted [as he had been for 'racism' in the summer of 1996] and finally sacked. Now, however, Dea Birkett's TV programme 'The Devil Among Us' has been broadcast direct into the Heriot Row luxury home of E. LUni. Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland. In the documentary, 'paedophiles' tried to justify having sex with children and advocated the legalisation of sex between consenting children and adults. Naturally the child abusohysteria industry registered its protests when asked to do so by journalists; but programme-maker Dea Birkett argued that society needs to understand paedophiles in order to protect children properly from them.
{Will the Dame's pals in London manage get Dea fired? Watch this space!}
Britain's great historian, Edward Gibbon famously remarked: "If
a man were to fix the period in the history of the world during
which the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would,
without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of
Domitian [AD 98] to the accession of Commodus [AD 180]."
Squarely within this period fell the reign of the Emperor Hadrian
(r. 117-138). Hadrian lowered taxes (creating a long-running
economic upturn), reorganized the army, ruled justly, patronized
the arts and consolidated the Roman Empire by unusually diplomatic
means (though he did ban circumcision and put down the subsequent
Jewish revolt with ruthlessness). Hadrian's famous Wall is an
apt symbol of an emperor who had the good sense to leave the Scots,
the Parthians and assorted outlying barbarians to their own devices.
He was a far cry from the usual sort of bully-boy who scrambled
over corpses to the top job in the Empire: the epitaph he composed
for his own tomb at Castel Sant'Angelo was LITTLE SOUL, LITTLE
WANDERER, LITTLE CHARMER.
No, the handsome Spanish emperor
was not a happily married man. His wife, Sabina, was probably
a lesbian and the two of them hated each other's guts and produced
no children. But Hadrian was an admirer of Greek ways and one
particular boy, Antinous, "a Bythian of rare beauty"
(says Frederic Raphael), was the great love of his life. -- At
least till 130AD, when the twenty-year-old Antinous drowned in
the Nile, perhaps in a suicide intended to rejuvenate Hadrian
(who was by then tubercular and suffered from dropsy). (Egyptian
gurus encouraged such exercises as part of the cult of Osiris
who had supposedly resurrected after drowning in the Nile.) Alternatively,
Antinous was sacrificed before a charming paedophilic affair could
turn into what the Romans abhorred -- adult homosexuality. Hadrian,
after immediately having Antinous deified, wept for days over
his lover's death and shaved off his beard as a token of his desolation.
Doubtless Dame Stewart will
have Anthony Birley's book rehearsing these facts and possibilities
banned from Edinburgh LUniversity Library as "false and personally
obnoxious", "disgraceful" and "gross misconduct."
However, for the present, Hadrian [pp399] can be purchased
from Routledge at £40.
//////
A gay deputy headmaster facing accusations of allowing paedophiles
contact with children has lost his job -- but takes early retirement
worth £255,000.
Bob Hodgson, 50, was suspended
from Crofton School in Manwood Road, Crofton Park, in September
1996 and retires 15 years early with a lump sum payment of around
£30,000. His annual pension will be around £15,000.
A council spokesman said,
"By agreement with the Crofton governing body and the borough
of Lewisham, Robert Hodgson is leaving teaching in Lewisham on
the basis of early retirement."
Lewisham education chairman
Gavin Moore said Mr Hodgson would not be hired again in Lewisham
schools but there was 'no bar to anyone else employing him.'
Mr Hodgson was sacked when
Lewisham said he failed by letting 'inappropriate persons' in
contact with pupils at a camp in July, 1996.
The London Children's
Camp at Kessingland in Suffolk was run by a trust chaired by Mr
Hodgson; another trustee was convicted paedophile Donald Dunk
{sic}.
A teacher told headteacher
Anne Carhart she had come upon Hodgson and part-time LCC site-manager,
Alec Gair, in a room with two year eight boys who were upset.
Although the boys made no
allegations, Suffolk police and the London Charities Commission
investigated. There were no charges.
\\\\
Californian luniversities are complying with new court restrictions on their affirmative-racist admissions policies -- but only most reluctantly. As the percentage of Black and Hispanic students has been halved on many courses at University of California, Ellen Switkes, an assistant vice president of the university for academic advancement, said all campuses are looking at ways to reduce the impact of the new rules, including de-emphasizing standardized tests for both graduate and undergraduate admissions. Already, she said, the law school at Berkeley had decided that it would not take formal account of the variation in quality of the institutions from which undergraduates apply. (In other words, a 3.5 grade point average from Yale University will not be given any more formal weight than one from a state college.) Plainly, no move is too lunatic to be abjured in the tireless quest to defy the law and return to admitting students by race rather than by merit or ability.
1. Followers of dopamine's role (perhaps via
the brain's 'nucleus accumbens' region), in latent inhibition
and perhaps in Eysenckian Psychoticism, will want to make a dash
for the correspondence from Jeffrey Gray (Maudsley Hospital) and
Andrew M. J. Young and M. H. Joseph (U. Leicester). {The brain's
continuing capacity to throw up new 'areas' for experts to name
is a reminder that the brain is indeed the world's least charted
planet.}
2. ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX DISCOVERED BY CHINAMAN
What is the good of sex? Most of us think we know the answer. As biology genius Hermann Muller once guessed, sexual reproduction smothers the effects of genetic mutations -- normally damaging since they involve chance departures from the originally successful genetic formula. Now a Chinese researcher has proved it: in his laboratory in the University of Maryland he has stopped RNA viruses from fast-breeding in their normal fashion. (NO JOY OF SEX FOR THEM!) The result? -- Lots of naughty mutations! Researcher Lin Chao now has no doubt: "The study show sex is advantageous," he declares.
3. 'Cognitive' enthusiasts will need to see
the latest from Geraint Rees, Chris D. Frith and Nillie Lavie,
pp. 1616-1619. These London authors deserve congratulating, for
it is seldom that a psychology article makes it into Science.
Enthusiasts will doubtless understand the burning importance of
the research -- which establishes that "the perception of
irrelevant distractors depends on the relevant processing load."
Pretty likely, others might have said…. But the authors insist
their research resolves a "long-standing issue": 'Does
the perception of irrelevance depend on attention?' {No
wonder Freud became the most famous psychologist of the lot --
followed closely by Jung and Aristotle!}
'The big bang in biology,' the Human Genome Project, was
given 2-page coverage for non-specialists by regular TH
writer Lucy Hodges. Apparently the problem of whether to patent
genes was solved for a while by the enormous fees that patent
agents proposed to charge for the service. Now, however, the US
Patent Office has agreed to license the patenting of gene strands
and "scientists are once more in disarray."
It may be an exaggeration to say that Carl Jung was a demagogue,
a racial purist, a religious maniac and a polygamist. One should
not perhaps read to much into Jung's being constantly surrounded
by a bevvy of unattached female followers, usually quite well
off; nor of his advising male patients to take mistresses -- as
some wrote to their wives to explain. Still, the quiet place of
refuge, pilgrimage and solitude that Jung created from 1923 at
his 'Turm' on Lake Zurich was far from being just a 'sacred space.'
According to Jung's latest biographer, Richard Noll (The Aryan
Christ: A Secret Life of Carl Gustav Jung, Macmillan, £20):
"[The Tower] also became a sexual space, a pagan sin altar
where, removed from his wife and family in Küsnacht and his
disciples in Zurich, he could enjoy his intimate companion, Toni
Wolff, with orgiastic abandon."
Dictionaries are often unhelpful about what
personal quality is denoted by the word 'charm.' Plainly, 'charming'
people are fascinating and often female. One is affected by them
as if they have cast a magic spell -- the original meaning
of the term. But what specifically are the personal qualities
that are possessed by charmers and lacking in the charmless?
Well, says McDougall, charm
combines sympathy, amiability (or desire to please) and delight
in pleasing with "quickness of understanding in the sphere
of the emotions." Beauty is of course "a great aid to
charm"; and "a beautiful woman who has but little charm
may easily pass for charming." True charm, however,
requires intelligence: "The really stupid person may have
sympathy and amiability, but will hardly have much charm."
University College London has been given £10 million by grocery
earl Lord Sainsbury to bring back from the University of Toronto
the Cambridge expert on 'neural networks', Geoffrey Hinton.
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, intellectual
life is being set ablaze by the arrival of Steven Pinker
to talk at the Royal Scottish Museum and plug his new book about
'the mind.'. A full house of 500 geriatrics and 'cognitive scientists'
awaited the bushy haired Yale psychocackler who has discovered
the delights of evolutionary speculation. (There was hardly a
Psychology student in sight and only one member of Psychology
staff turned up, so much do members of that Department wish to
avoid exposure to the embarrassments of daylight.)
So
what had Pinker come up with? Well, he is no Desmond Morris and
spent far too long explaining the mind is an information processor
and that, since man is omnivorous, children regard all foods as
awful until they see their parents eating them -- the latter a
somewhat unlikely proposition to parents who are still eating
the Christmas Brussels sprouts in the vain hope that their children
will catch on. Still, Pinker did eventually offer a decent idea
re romance: that 'falling in love' offers an extra guarantee
to a partner that one is going to be faithful -- because apparently
in the grip of force majeure. Just how 'hard fallers' persuade
partners that they won't soon fall equally hard for someone
else was left unexplained. Still, the idea that expressed
emotion has the function of getting one's intention-statements
accepted as credible plainly has something to be said for it.
(The more pitiful emotions presumably tend to be veiled -- resulting
in many neurotics feeling misunderstood by their partners. And
Pinker's notion fits with the observation that high neuroticism
is more likely to be associated with spectacular successes
in affairs of the heart -- as reported in the trail-blazing
research published as 'The n factor' at
http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk. -- Needless to say, this research
was conducted in the teeth of feminist opposition: the first research
ever to examine the sexual/romantic advantages of little
n was actually opposed by female neurotics!)
{PS A Pinker versus Steve Jay Gould match was apparently staged in the New York Review of Books late in 1997. Gould said there were processes other than Darwinian evolution -- notably events like the bloody French Revolution which Gould so favours as the solution to the problem of mounting evidence for hereditarian views. For his part, Pinker called Gould 'confused, discourteous and misinformed.' As to Pinker vs Rose in London, no ripple seems to have reached Times Higher (23 i '98). Nor did Pinker allude to Rose during his Edinburgh talk. Evidently the secret of Pinker's success is that he is a childless movie-buff who is prepared to amuse journalists by saying 'If my genes think different, they can go take a walk.' He certainly doesn't waste his time reading other cogno-evo-babblers -- barely one of whom was given a mention in his talk. Konrad Lorenz, Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, and Desmond Morris -- RIP!}
{PPS Jumbo Emeritus Professor Stuart Sutherland reviewed
Pinker's book (How the Mind Works, Allen Lane, £25)
for Times Higher (30 i '98). Apparently Pinker thinks we
find flowers beautiful because, evolutionarily, they signalled
the presence of wholesome food, viz. fruit. Well, then, says Jumbo,
why do we not have a singular aesthetic feel for cabbages?
Some might say that Russian
politicians do indeed have such a feeling -- often marrying women
who look remarkably like cabbages, as Lord Home once observed.
Still, Jumbo has seen the main point: Pinker provides merely a
down-market re-hash of the evolutionary speculation that Desmond
Morris once brought to a high point in Oxford about thirty years
ago. Jumbo may have had a lot of alcohol sloshing around in his
system in those days -- see 'Brand at Oxford'
-- but he learned enough not to be taken in by today's showmanship
'hook, line and Pinker.'
Grumpy Gordon Brown not only moans about how Mr Blair ratted on
their deal for Brown to become Labour leader in 1994. He also
moans about the iniquity of selected pupils having been pushed
too hard when selected for the elite 'E' stream (IQs of over 130)
at the Kirkcaldy school of his adolescence in Scotland. Apparently,
this was how Grumpy came by his social conscience. Says Brown
(to his biographer Paul Routledge, Brown: the Biography,
Simon & Schuster, £17-99): "The trouble was they
pushed people too hard and many didn't get even near university
-- maybe only a third, or a half."
{A remarkable complaint from days when only
some 4% of Kirkcaldy adolescents got through to university! It
is also singularly ungrateful in that Brown himself was a star
beneficiary of the scheme and went up to university two years
earlier than he would have done without the 'E' stream. Other
former pupils do not complain -- they just remember Grumpy as
a bit of a genius. Presumably Grumpy finds such groaning to be
music to the ears of unreconstructed Old Labour types.}
{On the policy front, Education Minister David Blunkett still fails to remember to talk about fast track learning when making his speeches. His latest wheeze to improve the lacklustre performance of Britoid schools is to extend Prime Minister Major's clapped out ideas of 'getting back to basics.' Thus English, Maths and Science & Information Technology are to move centre stage -- where everyone thought they were already -- and history, geography, music and Physical Education are to be allowed less time. It looks as if Mr Blunkett's head will have to be the first to roll -- unless DB can upset the tabloids and have Mr Blair rush in admirably to defend him.}
Used to pushing Prime Minister John Major around and to getting The g Factor taken of the shelves, the British tabloid press is now in deep gloom at its lack of influence over Prime Minister Blair. So far, in seven months of office, Blair has not been forced into accepting a single Cabinet resignation. He has 'stood up for' several of his ministers as they have come under tabloid attack --
-- and in each case the media campaign has folded within ten days. Maybe it will soon be possible to speak the truth about IQ, race, feminism and paedophilia without being accused of having a death wish.
Pretty 40-year-old Kikuyu-speaking Naomi, mother of a 16-year-old girl, has just arrived in London from the Kenya of long-time-boss-person Daniel Arap Moi. Naomi had been a guest of the Kenyan police at the 'Nyati', a notorious torture centre in Nairobi.
//////
Today, Naomi hobbles with an ugly limp, and has to lean heavily
on an aluminium crutch. She speaks beautifully with the faintly
old-fashioned 1950s English diction of the East African, enunciating
all her consonants and no slurred Cockney. What happened?
"I was a pro-democracy
worker [for the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy]. Then
they came for me, the police, the Kenyan CID. They handcuffed
and thre2w me down the stairs and I hurt my back. I have not been
able to walk properly from that day to this. They put me in a
solitary cell, in a basement, knee-deep in cold water. The cell
was dirty."
How?
"Faeces. There was no
light. I could hear screams and wailing from other cells in the
basement. They were chilling, those voices."
And then?
"On the second day, after
my arrest I was taken upstairs and my hands were tied behind a
chair. I was naked…." She stopped, and her head fell
on her chest. …."It's inhuman what they did to me. I
was raped and sodomised. They played with me the whole of the
night. The chief of police came and burnt my bottom with cigarettes.
….The policemen inserted red hot peppers into my vagina and
then I passed out. I woke up in hospital."
Psychologists in luniversities may sneer at Freud, but his idea about programmed cell death is catching on. Now scientists investigating how transmission of nutrients occurs between mother and foetus are concluding that some kind of selective cell death must provide the key (Times Higher, 2 i 98).
//////
Best of Intentions
Bruce McNeil, IQ of 79, made a fervent pitch, and the money flowed.
He got $400,000 in grant loans to run a laundry; but the dream
unraveled.
GLOUCESTER, Mass. -- So many people wanted to believe in the dream
of Bruce D. McNeil, an impassioned entrepreneur with an IQ of
79.
They embraced his plea to
create a commercial laundry service that would hire other mentally
disabled workers. Those employees, in the words of Mr McNeil,
would come to "believe in their abilities and their capacity
to grow." For the project, lawyers and business executives
contributed hundreds of hours of free advice. Government, banks
and corporations came up with about $400,000.
McNeil's Laundry Service Inc.
opened for business on Sept. 23, 1994, in a converted garage,
its interior painted lime green and tan, the colours of Mr McNeil's
grade school. Among those in attendance on opening day was a representative
from the President's Committee on Mental Retardation. Emblazoned
across the front door in bold letters: "THE FIRST MENTALLY
RETARDED ENTREPRENEUR IN THE NATION. Bruce D. McNeil, President."
Now, the laundry is closed
-- bereft of customers, deep in debt, and abandoned by supporters
who say Mr McNeil alienated everyone who tried to help him. Most
of the employees are again dependent on government payments, as
is the 38-year-old Mr McNeil.
While serving as inspiring
proof of society's eagerness to help disabled people, McNeil's
Laundry also shows how deeply frustrating such efforts can be.
Most everyone had faith in Mr McNeil, but many now wonder whether
they wanted too much to believe.
\\\\\\
And so the report continues, for another five columns. Some highlights:
"….even early on there were signs that Mr McNeil could be overly tenacious. He spent a day in a Boston jail after his repeated attempts to get an appointment with the governor ended with an arrest for trespassing at the State House. His business judgment, too, seemed questionable at times. Early on, Mr McNeil talked of ….shuttling employees to work in a limousine. When [a customer who was vice president of Sheraton Corp] cautioned against such excesses, [McNeil replied] "You don't understand. These people have no self-esteem….I'm trying to make it possible for them to feel like somebody."
"One of the biggest supporters was Elmer C. Bartels, the head of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission: the agency uses federal and state funds to help disabled people develop vocations. Mr Bartels, a quadriplegic from an injury suffered while playing college hockey, calls Mr McNeil "one of the most unique clients of this commission." ….[But eventually] Mr McNeil began to vilify supporters, especially the head of the MRC. "Bartels manipulated me into believing he was able to do something he couldn't do," Mr McNeil says now. "He robbed me of my employment and robbed me of my dignity."
"[McNeil also] frequently directed his anger at….the accountant charged with paying the laundry's expenses, including the $600-a-month phone bills. When the accountant questioned calls made to state officials, congressmen and the White House, [McNeil replied]: "Don't tell me how to run my laundry. You're looking down on us because we're disabled.""
"[Two lady specialists in training disabled workers] told the MRC [about McNeil]: "He's a danger to himself and a danger to others.""
////
A church worker of 84 yesterday became the oldest person to sign
the sex offenders' register. Frail William Morgan sexually assaulted
a nine-year-old boy after his wife of fifty years had died. Morgan,
from Hale, Greater Manchester, was put on probation and ordered
to sign the register after a judge in Manchester heard he was
suffering from dementia.
\\\\
Police in Manchester and Cheshire are now investigating allegations of child abuse in local-authority-run children's home dating back to 1958.
{Police in London may also be working on the case of Jack the Ripper, 1892.}
There are twelve reasons why President Bill Clinton deserves the continued support of the American people.
{For the latest news of Presidentialunacy, go to the Matt Drudge website.}
The Black Haitian lady who accused US cops of raping her in a toilet at a Brooklyn police station has now withdrawn her allegation unreservedly. The charge had been mightily encouraged, if not outright invented by Black 'radicals' who took an interest in the woman's case.
1. The response by the Economist (3
i '98) to Lawrence Wright's book on human heredity (Twins-Genes,
Environment and the Mystery of Human Identity -- see McDNL
December 2) has been to publish an anonymously authored 3-page
article throwing as much dirt as possible: Josef Mengele's 'experiments'
on twins, the Pioneer Fund's interest in race, Cyril Burt's dodgy
data, Phil Rushton's interest in negative brain-brian* correlations,
and David Lykken's idea for licensing parents -- all are wheeled
in to rubbish hereditarianism and show the Economist's
heart to be in the right place.
Naturally, there is applause
for the absurd conventional piety that 'the dichotomy between
genes and environment is a false one.' [For the antidote to this
nonsense, see Chapter 3 of The g Factor, especially the
discussion of genetic-environmental 'interaction.' -- Evidently
this chapter has still to be read by Professor Sir Michael Rutter
who explained to Times Higher (16 i '98) that 'asking about
how much is genes and how much is environment is not a sensible
question.'] But what is the Economist's bottom line? What
can be concluded from a hundred years of twin study, including
the enormous increase in high-quality research since 1980? Why,
nothing at all! The Economist article ends as follows:
"….those who had feared that the scientists would soon have us neatly dissected on their laboratory tables can take new heart. How we become who we are seems as mysterious as ever. Thank God."
Can there be any other area of scientific enquiry where so little progress has been made in a century of endeavour? It is a tragedy that even a usually responsible and upmarket magazine like the Economist should treat its businessperson readers to such twaddle.
* 'Brian' is one of the many English terms for the male organ that was known classically as 'Dr Johnson.' Usage stems from a misprint (about 'brian-behaviour correlations') in Phil Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior.
{And why doesn't The g Factor receive a mention? Well, absolute repression works absolutely. TgF exists in some twelve US and six UK libraries; and, as well as the c. 300 copies in private hands in the US and UK, copies can even be found in Croatia, Denmark, Eire, Finland, New Zealand and Zimbabwe [aka Rhodesia]. Yet at the heart of matters, in the London media, the silence about TgF is deafening. PC's control of the media of the English Speaking Peoples is virtually complete. It is a religion: it requires no organization; it is just a natural, untutored expression of happy-clappy egalitarian nonsense promising jobs and influence for left-wing boys and girls.}
{Meanwhile, two genes for Alzheimer's disease have been identified. Showing that the land of paedophilia can score in Nature (22 i '98), Belgium's Bart de Strooper (Flemish Institute of Biotechnology) has just published (with a little help from Germany) an experiment on the embryonic nerve cells of transgenic mice. Apparently the plaque-yielding protein that is a problem in Alzheimer's is dependent on a [genuine] interaction effect of two genes, 'PS1' and 'APP.' It is hilarious to recall that, just 30 years ago, psychiatry textbooks still debated solemnly the possibility that Alzheimer's was social-environmental in its causation.} {The finding might come just in time to save Dame Stewart at the E. LUni. Appeal Committee. Like anti-immigrant Lady Birdwood in London, also charged with disgraceful insensitivity to the young, Dame Stewart could claim total memory failure and clinch the point by revealing her genetic make-up. }
2.
The latest insult to British newspaper readers comes from the
reporting of the London Old Bailey case in which a ten-year-old
girl claims to have been raped by some four boys, of ages
9-11, in the Boys' Toilets at her London primary school. What
had happened? Well, says the girl, the boys took her coat and
ran with it into the toilet and she followed them. (She is tearful
about such pursuit having been a possible mistake.)
Next? "I was scared I was going
to get raped so I took my knickers off."
The girl denies having pleaded with
one of the boys to 'be his girlfriend'; but she does admit a lengthy
previous history of quasi-sexual involvements in Jamaica where
she used to visit the house of a 34-year-old "mad" man
called Frankie who would slap, beat, sexually assault (with his
finger) and "rape" her and her schoolfriends. Naturally
the politically correct Grauniad (20 i '98) did
not report the race or even the nationality of the young accuser;
but the Express (17 i '98) added gratuitous insult to its
readers by supplying a visual aid of a guilty-looking schoolgirl
"posed by a model." The model's race? -- White!
PS It further turned out (Times, 17 i '98) that the girl had sometimes been excluded from school. And she told the court, over her video link: "I got in trouble for fighting. Everybody does. I am like all kids. I'm not saying I'm perfect." She also admitted to starting four fires in her own home. She said she had heard the voices of spirits telling her what to do. According to one of the ten-year-old boys: "No one raped her. She never screamed. She never panicked. She was just enjoying herself" (Daily Mirror, 30 i '98).
PPS (Classic FM Radio, 6 ii '98, 01:00) All
the four boys -- Britain's youngest-ever rape defendants -- were
cleared of all the charges of rape and indecent assault.
According to an editorial
the Daily Mail (6 ii '98), "The girl involved had
a reputation for fantasising and only complained of rape after
a 'leading and wholly improper' question was put to her by a policewoman."
Pretty plainly, the prosecution was only brought out of the Politically
Correct belief that girls are saints and must be allowed to pursue
even the most frivolous complaints against evil men -- or, in
this case, boys.
AN APOLOGY HAS NOW BEEN ISSUED BY THE Express on Sunday TO THE VICAR OF DONHEAD ST ANDREW. THE VICAR WAS ARRESTED BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND RAPIDLY FOUND *TOTALLY* GUILTLESS OF CONSORTING WITH 'PAEDOPHILE IMAGES' ON HIS VICARAGE COMPUTER.
{Hopefully there will be a gigantic sum for the vicar in compensation for this wrongful arrest. -- Only thus will police learn not to ask for search warrants on the basis of malicious or idle gossip.}
(cf. McDNL 14 October 1997, DEATH WISH ALIVE AND WELL; McDNL 6 January 1998, GETTING RID OF THE Bad)
Freud's 'death wish' (thanatos) is enjoying a new burst of popularity with researchers. The latest issue of the top medical journal Lancet lets psychiatric researchers attribute the correlations they discover between psychopathy, substance abuse and suicide to thanatos -- or, at least, to "a common trait of self-destruction."
At the same time, the reluctance of women to take risks has been indicted by top Danish historian Thorkild Kjägaard. Re-appointed (somewhat to his surprise) as one of Denmark's top external examiners for universities in history, TK has infuriated feminists by saying that women are often a bore and that "Men are not attracted by female-dominated courses" (Times Higher, 23 i '98).
More psychologically death-dealing stuff makes the major article in the latest issue of Science (20 i '98). Ted Abel and others at Columbia University have identified a gene which serves to erase memories and allow people to attend to salient features of their experiences -- rather than being inundated with all the rubbish that can sometimes be a burden for high-neuroticism people (see The n Factor at http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk).
"[Contrary to feminist hopes, in the US Armed Forces,] deploying young women in cramped quarters alongside young fighting men does not make the women into better warriors. Rather, it makes them into mothers. For example, the Washington Times reports that, for every year a co-ed warship is at sea, the Navy has to airlift out 16 per cent of the female sailors as their pregnancies become advanced."
Steven SAILER & Stephen SEILER, 1997, National Review [USA], 31 xii.
Congratulations from the McDougall NewsLetter to those
in the Holy Republic of Éireland who have been able to
use the Net over the last year to provide stories exposing the
flagrant corruption which has disfigured Éirish life for
decades! The chief site to view for all the news that can't be
printed about politicians, policemen, leprachauns, criminals and
their wives is: <http://www.primenet.com/~lippard/cogair/>.
Here, the McDNL will
(D.V.) remain Britain's leading source of realism about race,
sex, IQ, feminism, luniversities and paedohysteria. Currently
its resources are in demand by the Sunday Times to explain
how girls have come to score higher in luniversity examinations
than boys.
////
A Gypsy told a jury yesterday how he executed his brother with
a machete. Victim Gary McDonagh, 16, was said to have asked: "Just
make it quick." Gary, suspected of abusing his brother's
children, was taken to a lonely wood at Cannock, Staffs.
William McDonagh, 31, told
Stafford Crown Court: "I says lie down and he did."
"I said 'Spin your head back' so his neck became taut. "I
just let fly with the machete, struck him on the throat, and walked
away.
McDonagh and his wife Noreen,
27, of Bloxwich, West Midlands, deny murder. The trial goes on.
\\\\
The Appeal Committee to punish Edinburgh LUniversity's disgraceful behaviour (in condemning, witch-hunting, censoring, suspending, tribunalizing and finally sacking Chris Brand) is scheduled to meet on 10 and 11 February. Mr Gordon Coutts, Q.C. (see McDougall NewsLetter, 18 November 1997), will preside; Mr John Mayer, Advocate, will appear for Chris Brand; and Mr Matthew Clarke, Q.C., will do his best to represent the LUniversity's confused and hysterical state of mind. Judgment will be made within 14 days. Until then, and perhaps beyond (if there are Judicial Review or Industrial Tribunal proceedings) readers of this NewsLetter will understand that Chris Brand's comments on the case must remain minimal and distinctly sub-defamatory. Needless to say, Brand rejects the LUniversity's sacking of him as a feminazistic outrage against freedom of speech. The use of the ultimate academic penalty over one page of e-mail (unnoticed for three weeks, until another member of the LUniversity took it to the Scottish press) is particularly disgusting, emanating as it does from a body that is supposed to protect academics when they
For consideration of the likely impact of cloning, Lee Silver's new book, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) looks set to be the layman's guide for the next year or two. LS has no doubt that Brave-New-World-style cloning will prove seriously popular and that Clintonian and Euro-pious* efforts at suppression will fail. At a time when President Clinton's opinions in matters of sex and romance must temporarily be discounted, Remaking Eden will assist keen putative cloner physicist Richard Seed who recently told the media, "I'm advancing human nature. Why should the government interfere? You can't stop science." Technical problems lie ahead: it took 227 attempts before Dolly the Sheep was successfully cloned by free-enterprise, non-luniversity scientists in Edinburgh. But Dolly is an atom bomb under the welfare state.
* Nineteen Continental countries are currently preparing to ban cloning. In Britain, human cloning is banned already under legislation of 1990.
{The immediate eugenic effects look likely
to be negative. Cloning will appeal maximally to those who are
infertile for one reason or another. However, human cloning will
immediately raise the question of how to ensure there is proper
advance provision for children brought into the world by any means
whatever.
To supply a newborn child
with only one effective* parent is a big new step in the direction
of irresponsible parenthood. This step will have to be matched
by an insistence that adequate financing will be available for
the child in the event of the parent's demise. Such financing
will have to come in most cases from insurance. Advance insurance
will be particularly for clones since they may experience a higher-than-usual
rate genetic mutations and premature ageing. Obviously such possible
burdens cannot just be dumped in the lap of taxpayer-funded health
services.
Presumably, nation states
will demand the right to treat the cloning agency as equivalent
to a parent and thus liable for all subsequent charges for the
resulting child's health, education and delinquency costs. This
will oblige cloning agencies to ensure that their applicants have
taken out adequate insurance cover.
Once such advance insurance
arrangements are in place for clones, it will seem natural enough
to extend them to ordinary births -- ushering in responsible and
eugenic parenting at last. }
* Strictly, the parents of a woman who clones herself are the resulting child's own parents. But the novelty of cloning will be that (unlike MZ twins) clones will have only one young-ish adult who has a genetic interest in them.
War has broken out between two leading British media feminists.
Inspired by the Blair Government's recent withdrawal of special
supplements from lone-parent mothers, columnist Fay Weldon has
announced to the Indy' pale-pink readers her recent decision
that 'men have a case' -- for example, for easier access to their
own children (so long as they are paying for them).
In her left-feminazie corner,
Polly Toynbee pooh poohs such sympathy for men's liberation: "The
cry of pain you hear from men is their unwillingness to let go,"
she writes. "Don't listen. Plug your ears. Men still have
almost everything -- the best jobs, the most money, the most leisure,
the fewest obligations, and the most freedom."