DECEMBER 1
Two-and-a-half years after Chris Brand last taught classes at Edinburgh LUniversity, the axe has fallen on the censorious Principal Dame Stewart Sutherland and his ilk.
//////
A DRASTIC decline in teaching quality has sent Edinburgh University plummeting to 29th place in a government higher education league table.
In a damning report by an official government education agency, the University of Edinburgh was found to have teaching standards worse than 28 other universities and colleges.
And students fear that the poor placing will have damaging repercussions on the reputation of the University.
Three former polytechnics achieved higher teaching standards than Edinburgh University, while Oxford Brookes {former Oxford Poly} was just one point behind.
….{Dame Stewart replied:} "It is particularly to the credit of my academic colleagues in the University -- which has one of the widest subject spreads of the UK -- to have achieved these very credible teaching quality results." {Student means 'creditable' -- but its journalists have presumably been somewhat mis-selected or mis-taught.} [He] denied the results were significant. He said: "It would be a pretty insecure establishment -- and Edinburgh is certainly not that -- which either relied on or was unduly upset by a one-off league table result, given in particular the complexities of information input and uncertainties about their methodology."
\\\\\\
But Student's editorial (p. 4) did not agree:
"Sir Stewart Sutherland, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, says the standard of teaching is "very credible." It isn't. Standards here should be uniformly excellent if the University is to maintain its reputation, and if students here are to receive a degree whose quality will not be subject to question by employers, the government or other academics."
{Combining Sunday Times rankings of six factors -- student quality, research quality, teaching quality, staff/student ratio, % I+IIi awarded and employment prospects -- Edinburgh LUniversity still came only 17th. This is far from the usual estimate of Dame Stewart and cronies that the LUniversity is among the top five in the U.K.}
{In E.LU. Psychology Department, craven staff have now removed the bust of "rapist" Arthur Koestler that had given offence to its students (McDNL 24 xi '98). Having let the Anti-Nazi League close its teaching at whim, and paedohysteria carry off one of its most cited researchers (the author of The g Factor), the Department has now capitulated to feminazism.}
'Beware Conservatives!' -- the follow-up article by Chris Brand to 'Beware Feminists!' (McDNL 17 iii '98) and 'Beware Educationalists!' (McDNL 19 v '98) -- was published in Finanstidningen (Sweden's Financial Times) on 21 November 1998. In a short preamble, Finanstidningen said:
"Quotas and political correctness are sweeping over the West. Chris Brand, a former professor of psychology and himself a victim, says that the Right must wake up before it is too late."
Finanstidningen also recounted 'Brand vs Edinburgh University' last year for its readers -- see McDNL 23 xii '97, 'The g Factor goes Continental.' The newspaper's website (displaying its entire copy in Swedish) is http://www.fti.se.
'Beware Conservatives!' was translated into Swedish by Bengt Olsson. The problem addressed by the article is:
….the modern right in the West won the Cold War. Thanks to the final efforts of Mr Reagan, Mrs Thatcher and Herr Kohl, and to the revelations of Mr Gorbachev as to the sorry state of the U.S.S.R., liberal capitalism was vindicated to such an extent that even sociology students had to admit the victory. Yet the right has proceeded spectacularly to lose the Peace.
The article warns the Right not to look backward, proposes a Fourth Way as a rival to the Blair/Clinton/Schroeder Third Way, and concludes:
The right must insist that society runs according to the contracts made by its individual members -- contracts which necessarily engage choice and personal responsibility. Rather than look to over-simple, moralistic or nationalistic principles, the right should see that the serious values for which it has always stood can be re-articulated as its own dynamic compromise -- involving not 'community' but 'choice' as the key principle.
Mrs Thatcher and her Secretary of State for Education, Sir Keith
Joseph (All Souls College, Oxford, and the last known eugenicist
in UK politics), waged perpetual war on Britain's schools to persuade
them to produce results; but the schools rejected any idea of
teaching according to children's abilities. So the Conservative
plan changed -- to insist on endless tests, and to allow privatization
for those schools that sought it.
Unfortunately, there is little
point in a school privatizing itself unless it can compete by
the most obvious method in the educational world -- by selecting
high-IQ pupils. So the Conservative plan flopped.
Today, the plans of New Labour
face similar frustration. Messrs Blair and Blunkett have already
had to drop 'fast track learning' -- presumably because of root-and-branch
opposition from Labour supporters. (Hostility to 'streaming' and
'grammar schools' lies much closer to the egalitarian heart of
British Labour than does affection for the works of Marx and Engels).
Instead, Labour has tried to urge improvements in teaching quality
(McDNLs, passim) and has lately considered the spur
of rewarding value-added teaching. Under V-AT, the stress
is on rewarding schools that improve on what would have been expected
from the original IQs or -- as is preferred by New Labour -- the
previous exam results of their pupils (cf. McDNL 2 vi '98
TEACHERS VOW TO FIGHT THATCHER/BLAIR STATE-SCHOOL 'STANDARDS').
Secretary of State Blunkett has not felt able to bite the bullet
on introducing IQ-testing; and his measly alternative proposal,
to reward improvements by age 16 on children's performance
in Government tests at age 14, has been howled out by head teachers.
Many 'good' schools -- in leafy suburbs -- were horrified to find
that they had slumped from being at the top of H.M.G. league tables
to being near the bottom. Reasonably enough, they pointed out
that performance at 14 would itself have reflected their own teachers'
endeavours; so it was hard for H.M.G. to penalize them if little
further improvement was possible by 16 from this already excellent
starting point.
At first, Mr Blunkett stood
by his proposals. He categorically refused to suppress publication
of schools' 'value-added' results -- due in December. But now
he has withdrawn his "progress index." Once more, Britain's
educational establishment has triumphed over politicians who are
unwilling to grasp the nettle of IQ.
Politics are OUT and sociogenic discussions are IN. That's the
news from London dinner tables. Since Mr Blair has a 180-seat
majority but can't even manage to abolish the House of Lords which
has brought him so much grief over Senator Pinochet, the conversation
of debutantes and stockbrokers is turning elsewhere. -- To genetic
engineering of children, to cloning, and to freezing eggs until
career girls have found a suitable playboy, oops, husband to fertilize
them. The names of Steven Pinker, Steven Rose and Richard Dawkins
are now widely bandied about in South Kensington -- a phenomenon
assisted by the new 'sociogenic' theme films Gattaca, 12
Monkeys and Multiplicity.
{McDNL's editor is right there
with the jet set as a 'Brave New World-er' -- versus the
'Millennial Luddites'! He has now submitted to the Goethe Institute
in Berlin a 12,000-word essay on the title set by the magazine
Lettre International, 'Liberating the Future from the Past
and the Past from the Future.' The essay is principally concerned
with how eugenics can be rescued from the long shades of the NaziZeit.
It kicks off with a quotation from the US Jewish magazine, Commentary:
"[The Holocaust has not,] as might have been expected, gradually receded with time to the peripheries of American Jewish consciousness. Rather, it seems to become more central every year."
Mr Hillel Halkin, 1998, Commentary [New York], November 1998.
After time for adjudication in Berlin, it is hoped to publish the essay in whole or part in the McDougall NewsLetter in 1998.}
On St Andrew's Day, November 30, in Edinburgh, Her Majesty the
Queen drew a crowd of 300 at 11.30a.m. as she and the Duke of
Edinburgh opened the £UK64M Royal Scottish Museum
extension (see McDNL 24 xi '98). The royal couple stayed
in the new building for half an hour inspecting the 10,000 exhibits
which included, Curator Hugh Cheek told Classic FM, 'all
sorts of things: furniture, jewellery, weaponry, more furniture
. . . and skeletons!' -- and a guitar contributed by the Reverend
Tony Blair in memory of his schooldays in Edinburgh. For the subsequent
beano in the Museum's next-door gallery, seating 500, Chambers
Street was closed to traffic and diners were fed from seven lorries
that had come from London. {Edinburgh's James
Boswell once famously advised Dr Johnson that it was considered
bad form to bring one's own food up from London -- in the Great
Pedagogue's case, a sack of the then very à la mode
lemons, which was finally left on one of the islands in the Firth
of Forth as the pair began their tour of the Highlands.}
British football hooligans are to have their passports
withdrawn by police even if they have not been convicted of a
criminal offence. {The same New Labour arrangements
that have proved unexceptionable as a way of handling Irish terrorists
thought by police to be violating the Good Friday Accords are
now to be extended. 'Civil liberties' outfits in Britain made
not a squeak at the announcement of the Government's new wheeze
-- any more than they did when Chris Brand's book was withdrawn
from publication and when he himself was fired for one page of
e-mail.} {After weeks of work in London, international experts
on 'civil liberties' have effectively made the same arrangements
for retired national leaders alleged to have sanctioned executions:
such retired Generals and Prime Ministers will have to sit at
home and work on their memoirs until security services have arranged
for their computers to be found with paedophilic pornography downloaded
from the Internet.} {Meanwhile, the Chilean minister, José
Miguel Insulza [himself at one time in exile from post-Marxist
Chile], has visited the UK Trade, Defence and Foreign Secretaries
in London to say Chile will buy no more surplus British frigates
unless Senator Pinochet is safely returned. It is the British
Home Secretary who has, so to speak, drawn the short straw. --
Mr Jack Straw had been relying on the Lords to send Senator Pinochet
back home and end the Government's 40-day ordeal at the hands
of the left. But now, having failed to release the General to
Chile while he had the chance (doubtless quoting 'legal opinion'
as he did so), Straw will have to adjudicate for himself the escalating
threats from Chile, Spain, the rest of the former Spanish Empire
and Switzerland [which, for reasons unknown, takes a specially
keen interest]. The Rev Beamish Blair and his Chancellor, Grumpy
Gordon, are planning to keep at a safe distance.}
Next in line for extradition
from Britain is the elderly wife of an Oxford don. Helena Wolinska,
79, is accused by today's Polish authorities of having been too
hard as a prosecutor of anti-Communists in post-1945 Poland (Observer
29 xi '98). Now she faces a 10-year prison sentence because Britain
has no statute of limitations to forbid such recklessly back-dated
charges. Mrs Wolinska's husband, Wlodzimierz, is Oxford's Professor
of Modern Russian and Eastern European Studies, and a Fellow of
Wolfson College.
British police are bracing themselves for fresh accusations
of racism. A big Black ex-paratrooper, Christopher Alder,
37, was arrested after being taken to Hull Royal Infirmary by
ambulance following a fight at a night-club in which he received
a blow to the head. On arrival at the hospital he refused to co-operate
with staff, was "aggressive" and refused to leave (Electronic
Telegraph, 29 xi '98). Once police collected him in a van,
he was driven to a police station. On arrival he appeared to be
asleep; and, after ten minutes lying face down on the floor of
the station, he was found to be dead. A pathologist's report does
not blame the night-club injury and wonders whether Mr Alder might
have had an irregular heart beat. Five policemen have been suspended
as enquiries continue.
The British pop star Gary Glitter (real name: Paul Gadd)
has been remanded to London's High Court on four charges of lewd
and libidinous cavortings with a girl of less than sixteen years
(cf. McDNL 31 iii '98). The charges date back some fifteen
years and came about as police had Glitter under arrest for downloading
Internet kiddie-porn. (This alleged naughtiness itself had come
to light when the 'glam rock' singer sent his computer for servicing
to a local firm near his home in Bristol.)
Britain's first memorial to Oscar Wilde has been unveiled
by Wilde's grandson in Covent Garden, outside the church of St
Martin in the Fields. The funniest playwright of all time, who
was famously imprisoned in Reading Gaol, subsequently committing
suicide, and whose works Dorian Grey and Salome
were banned in Britain by the Lord Chancellor, is seen sitting
up in his granite sarcophagus smoking a cigarette. Members of
the public are intended by artist Maggie Hambling sit and 'chat'
with the bronze gargoyle of Wilde. (Wilde's surprising, indeed
thanatic audacity in challenging a pretty reasonable allegation
that he was a 'poncing sodomite' was discussed in McDNL
9 vi '98, 'Heroes of Paedophilia.')
One of Britain's relatively courageous
homosexuals today, Peter Tatchell, goes on trial this week
in London, charged with 'indecent behaviour in a church.' Tatchell
had climbed into a pulpit with the Archbishop of Canterbury at
Easter and interrupted sermon by urging more gay rights -- though
he had not said anything that might have brightened the day of
a single Nobel-prize-winning 'paedophile.'
Also drawing a line somewhere was unofficially
'outed' Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson. He had the director
of the British Council's mission to Brazil, Martin Dowle, deny
a story which had appeared in Punch that the pair of them
had made an extensive visit to inspect young transvestite lads
in the gay bars in Rio de Janeiro -- a visit which earned PM the
designation "Lord Mandelson of Rio" from a Conservative
leader, William Hague. Apparently the area visited was a deprived
part of Rio in which Mr Mandelbrot wished to study council renovation
work involving baroque churches; and the BBC will not let anyone
suggest otherwise -- still concerned to protect PM's privacy.
However, the editor of Punch is standing by his magazine's
story of 'nightclubbing' and is promising more "revelations"
this week.
Historians of the rise of feminazism will treasure the
latest 'Woman's Hour' (BBCR4UK 30 xi '98, 10:05). Insisting
that 'equality for people', as practised at Britain's Equal
Opportunities Commission, was not enough, wymmin demanded specialized
state-funded witch-hunting of unacceptable male "behaviour"
that "makes women's lives a misery." Just what this
"behaviour" involved was left unspecified; but the required
state-appointed inquisition would have to accept the current gross
inequality of women as an unquestioned premise of its work.
A Glasgow mother of three, Tracy Nolan, left her children in
a Turkish taxi cab with just 75 pence towards the cost of
the British Embassy flying them home. While on holiday, 'mother
from hell' Tracy had been bowled over by a handsome man who claimed
to be a Jordanian millionaire. Glimpsing a glittering future,
dinner-lady Tracy, 32, dropped everything, including her husband,
to pursue her long-term maternal interest. However, McDNL
analyst Glenn Wilson thinks she will pick up her kids in the end
(Observer, 29 xi '98) -- and this seems likely now it emerges
that her lover-boy, Gasan Abu, 28, is a waiter with no savings
at all.
Hilariously placing a strain at once on Black-Black,
gay-gay and Black-gay relations, the ex-President of Zimbabwe,
the Reverend Canaan Banana, escaped from jail and sought
refuge in neighbouring Botswana. Banana had been found guilty
in ex-Rhodesia on multiple counts of sodomy and kindred molestations
(see McDNL 9 vi '98, 'BANANA OFTEN GOT TO ME' SAYS BLACK
POLICEMAN). Zimbabwe immediately demanded Banana's return. (Botswana
and Zimbabwe are partners to Commonwealth extradition agreements
that facilitate the shifting of wanted criminals from one state
to another.) Banana previously fled to Botswana in the 1970's
to escape the White Rhodesian government of Mr Ian Smith. In Zimbabwe
[now 'run' -- bankrupted -- by the homophobic Robert Mugabe],
Banana has a wife, a ministry in the Methodist Church, and a university
position as professor of theology.
British homosexuals are divided as to
what to say about cases like the prosecutions of Daniel Carleton
Gajdusek and Canaan Banana and the rise of Black homophobic bishops
within the Anglican Communion -- though cowardice normally gets
the upper hand. In Zimbabwe, homosexuals usually pay bribes to
police to look the other way (McDNL 18 viii '98, PC Problems:
Nation of Islam versus Sons of Sodom). This helps with
Zimbabwe's financial crisis, though the government is also busy
stealing the land of 4,000 White farmers (McDNL 18 viii
'98, Zimbabwe Farmer Face Ruin As Squatters Invade Land). 25
percent of the Zimbabwe population now carries the AIDS virus
(McDNL 20 x '98).
{A McDNL
Correspondent writes: Back in the 1980s, the government of Zimbabwe
passed a law making it a crime to make fun of President Canaan
Banana's name. A similar law had been passed in Gabon in reference
to President Bongo's name.}
'Beamish' Blair was in Dublin, Rep. of Ireland, to receive the surrender of the two houses of the Eirish parliament, the Dail, and to talk with the South's prime minister, the Teashoppe. Discussions are thought to have focused on the question of how to arrange for Senator Augusto Pinochet of Chile the same exemption from prosecution for murder that has been granted successfully to the IRA's Chief-of-Staff, Mr Gerry Adams.
One of London's East-end boroughs, Hackney, has been ordered to start promoting its Black bureaucrats (CFMR 25 xi '98). Over the years, Hackney Council claims to have appointed many Black people; but it now admits to having provided them with insufficient 'career support.'
LONDON -- On 25 November, the House of Lords ruled,
after the narrowest of majorities among its law lords, 3-2, that
Senator Augusto Pinochet, the former President of Chile,
on bail in a London hospital, could enjoy no
immunity from arrest, inquiry, prosecution or extradition.
Senator Pinochet is wanted by Spanish authorities for killings
that took place during and in the wake of his military coup against
the Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1973. The Lords' chilly
verdict came on the Senator's 83rd birthday….
The effect of this ruling on tourism to
Britain -- in particular on medical tourism to London's Harley
Street -- remains to be estimated. Plans to arrest most Western
leaders and former leaders as they travel around the world are
now being drawn up by Professor Steven Rose and the Anti-Nazi
League -- spurred on by revelations from ex-MI5 agent David Shayler
(now a free man in Paris) that Britain troubled to spend £100,000
in attempts to assassinate the acknowledged leader of Libya, Colonel
Gaddafi.
It
is turning out that the hounding of elderly 'paedophiles' has
been only one straw in the wind of femi-socialist neo-authoritarianism.
The modern liberal democratic state evidently reserves to itself
the right to punish anyone at all -- no matter how old or ill,
no matter how forgiven and sanctioned by his own countrymen, and
no matter how long ago his alleged crimes were committed. It is
specially interesting that Spain was ruled by General Franco at
the time of Augusto Pinochet's alleged crimes -- which will thus
be tried essentially under retrospective legislation in a country
that had actually supported Pinochet's take-over.
London police investigating the alleged robbery
of former U.K. Labour Cabinet Minister Ron Davies on Clapham
Common (McDNLs3 & 10 xi '98) have now dropped their
inquiries -- which had involved several Black people. The Crown
Prosecution Service says there is insufficient evidence to make
a criminal conviction a likely outcome of prosecution.{Presumably
the Black suspects said they only asked payment for services rendered.}
Whether Mr Davies, who was Minister of State for Wales until what
he called his "error of judgement", will be charged
with wasting police time is not known. Mr Davies -- now known
to have been homosexual and child-abused by his violent father
as well as married with two children -- continues to claim he
was robbed and mugged at knife-point by the Black people whom
the police questioned.
Last week, babe-bagger Mick Jagger, 55, had been spending
long hours at the flat of svelte Parisian model, Carla Bruni,
31. Now a splendidly busty 29-year-old Brazilian underwear
model, Luciana Gimenze Morad,* has surfaced in London, living
near Mick's home, to claim she is three-months pregnant by him
after a steamy and clandestine affair begun in Rio de Janeiro
in March. For the last six years, Mick's wife, Jerry Hall, has
been complaining to the media about her run-about hubby. Further
expenditures for Jagger look likely -- though he is said to be
cross already at how Miss Hall has been spending his money on
their four children. PaedoScore: 26.
* For picture
of lovely Luciana on a beach in glorious technicolour and
little else, see: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=001234642014599&rtmo=VuulwmVx&atmo=99999999&pg=/home.html>.
'Is
a computer more like a man or a woman?' -- 'Like a woman. No sooner
have you made a commitment to one than you find that you're spending
half your salary on accessories."
William McDougall (1871-1938) 5. (Only two children made it into their thirties. There is only one known grandchild -- Sarah, the daughter of the McDougalls' firstborn, Leslie [f.] who last took the surname Brown by a second marriage in Mexico.)
Ronnie D. Laing (1927-1989) c. 10 -- according to girls in the Glasgow area. (Died rather early of many substances.)
Hans Eysenck (1910-1997) 5.
Raymond Cattell (1908-1998) 5?
Bob Dylan 9. (According to the Sunday Times [15 iii '98], Dylan had rather more marriages and children than had been generally believed. Dylan's fortune is estimated at £70 million.)
Mick Jagger 6. (His last child was born in 1997 when Mick was 54.)
Kevin Lloyd (star of British TV's top cop show, 'The Bill'; died of alcoholic poisoning 1998) 7.
Desmond Wilcox (57, British TV director, husband of Saint Esther Rantzen of Child Abuse) 6 [3 by each of his two marriages]. (Said to be 'workaholic.' Heart by-pass operation 1986; new heart problems 1998.)
//////
ATLANTA (AP) -- Decades after the civil rights movement forced
America to confront racial inequities, disturbing disparities
remain on one of the most basic human levels: Blacks get sick
easier, stay sick longer and die sooner than whites. From day
one, a black baby's life expectancy is six and a half years shorter
than a white baby's. Blacks are more likely to be born too little
and less likely to survive their first year.
At
work and in schools, blacks have made impressive gains. Poverty
has fallen. Still, disparities in health remain and in some cases
are worsening -- even among middle class blacks with health insurance
and college degrees. ….In fact, health disparities persist
even among blacks who are in the middle class. Health improves
for all races as income and education increase, yet the gap between
blacks and whites remains.
Why? Public health experts
note that even middle class blacks face extra stresses of living
in a white-dominant society that still contains racism. And they
suggest that some middle class blacks may have grown up poor,
with early influences still affecting their health. ``You're never
dealing with a person just today. You're dealing with everything
they've been exposed to throughout their lives,'' says the nation's
surgeon general, Dr. David Satcher. ``Does it ever end? Our hypothesis
is that it never ends.''
\\\\\\
{US 'experts' apparently don't believe in asking to what extent Black people's problems can be traced to a higher incidence of AIDS or just to low IQ and inattention to medical advice. Or, if they do ask such question, they have more sense than to risk being banned from every US campus by giving the results to the New York Times.}
It is little appreciated today that the ending of the nuclear family in the West has been a very sudden business -- unplanned and unchecked by any of the usual guardians of the public who so believe in the value of 'family life.' The Independent (5 xi '98) published the following estimates for the percentage of births occurring outside marriage:
1840: 6% 1850: 6% 1860: 6% 1870: 6% 1880: 6% Etc….
1940: 9% 1950: 6% 1960: 6% 1970: 8% 1980: 9% 1990: 30%. 1994:34%
Thus, except for 1940 (9 months after the national call-up for World War II) there was little change in rates of illegitimate births till recent times.
Feminists are now in a panic as men are taking to women's boxing -- forced on them by Women's Liberation, but now proving titillating to men especially when conducted topless between girls in thongs for underwear, sometimes just eight years old (Observer, 29 xi '98). Just how many more idiotic girls will bare their breasts as 'Amazons in Action' for the sake of Wymmin's Lib remains to be seen. Hopefully they have been advised what men's boxing is about. The two best high-profile fights of recent years are thought by punters to have been those of Benn vs McLellan and of Eubank vs Watson. In both, the fighters blasted away till they were studies in bloody gore and physical exhaustion; after both, the loser ended up brain-damaged for life in a wheel-chair.
When considering the merits and demerits of affirmative racism, it should be borne in mind that government jobs into which lucky beneficiaries of race prejudice can be promoted are often for life, as follows (CENTER-RIGHT [e-newsletter], 16 xi '98):
"Philadelphia, long famous for civil service excesses, took 10 years to shed a school employee who was late to work nearly every day, and who'd spent the entire period under (remarkably unsuccessful) psychiatric care aimed at remedying his "neurotic compulsion for lateness." ….{Also} the city failed to dismiss (though it did succeed in transferring to a less demanding agency) an employee whose chronic absences over years were occasioned by his habit of going off to play pinball and video games. The union argued in its grievance that the employee's fondness for the arcades counted as a gambling addiction and was thus a protected handicap."
Half-a-century after Britain left India to independence and the civil war which Gandhi expected and which enthusiasts for democracy allowed to happen, a top Indian scientist has provided a blistering review of Indian science for Nature. Apparently, mediocrity, cowardice, plagiarism, complacency, ignorance and self-glorification are pervasive in today's India. "A vast majority of Indian scientists -- especially those occupying high positions -- believe in miracles, homeopathy and astrology. To subscribe to these can be a prerequisite of power, awards and rewards."
Following complaints about Black crime levels in Durban, the BBC has detailed the standard crime prevention measures given to ordinary South Africans (including Black people themselves if their neighbours have not already burgled them down to rough economic parity):
Never willing to listen to the facts of life, the New York Times turned down in January, 1994 the following up-to-the-minute perception when it was offered by Steve Sailer (in reply to a NYT article by an Op-Ed columnist):
….most Arkansas voters have long heard rumors of their Governor's indulgence in industrial scale adultery, yet many seem to take pride in his exploits, as shown by Arkansas being the only state to give him a majority in 1992. In fact, rather than being "pathetically ordinary", as your Op-Ed columnist Frank Rich says, Bill Clinton is quite a formidable man. Mr. Clinton's ability to charm and satisfy large numbers of women, to do without sleep, to lie persuasively, to keep track of his many lies, even his capacity for eating a baked potato in two bites . . . these are not traits of the average man but of a certain kind of natural leader, the type that Africans call a 'Big Man.' -- Where exactly our Big Man may be leading us, however, is a different question.
Plans for London's Millennial 'Dome' continue
to exclude academic psychology. The 'Mind Zone' area of the gigantic
waste of space in Greenwich on Thames will be largely devoted
to the 'neurolinguistic programming' that was fashionable with
businessmen and psychobabblers around 1990 (see Quotes XIX on
'hemispherology' at PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY & SOCIETY
); and it will feature chiefly the work of a dead female architect,
Helen Chadwick, who once designed a working chocolate fountain.
Another revelation from the
striking workers who wish to be paid more to complete the 'Jubilee'
tube line to the Dome is that the 'Spirit Zone' -- expected to
figure blissful scenes of family life under Hinduism, with paedophiles
besporting themselves with 12-year-old brides…. -- is being
funded by the Ministry of Defence. MoD has wanted to keep HMG
sweet, evidently, and no-one else, apart from the Hindus, would
fund religion. So committed in MoD to serving New Labour faithfully
that no advertising by manufacturers of nerve gases or smart bombs
will be allowed.
The centrepieces of the Dome
have now trasmogrified into a Hermaphrodite Womyn and a 'Couple'
whose pudenda are disguised by their copulatory embrace.
Scottish voices are now complaining
that Scotland cannot 'identify' with the London Dome. This is
certainly fortunate for Scotland; but the Domodopes have already
erected a mini-Dotty-Dome the size of the Taj Mahal to rival adjacent
Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. One can only hope the Scots won't
be able to identify with that either.
It is now being rumoured that
Mickey Mouse Inc. will bid to buy the Dome at the time when 2,000AD
draws to a close and the public is ready to celebrate the true
new millennium that will begin on 1 January 2,001.
Britain's greatest twentieth-century political philosopher was
a bald, cadaverous, Latvian-born, fast-talking, bejowelled, watch-chain-using
Jewish refugee from Russia who failed to win the Wardenship of
All Souls College and whose reputation depended chiefly on his
essays and book reviews. An honorary Englishman by aspiration,
a diplomat for Britain in Washington and Moscow, and acclaimed
by Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, Sir Isaiah Berlin, O.
M. (1909-1997) urged tolerance for different political ideas.
According to Berlin, "You cannot establish political government
purely on the basis of what is rational. There are too many irrational
drives in men. If people didn't have deep, irrational impulses
there would be no religion, no art, no love." Berlin liked
to quote Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing
entirely straight can ever be made."
Berlin's stress on the importance
and multiversity of human imperatives would certainly have impressed
William McDougall -- though
McDougall, who believed in intelligence and reason too, did not
hesitate to conclude that, second only to his utopian 'Island
of Eugenia', the USA provided a very reasonable reconciliation
of ideals such as liberty and order. Unexceptionable, too, is
Berlin's support for the tolerance of religious differences enshrined
in the US Constitution.
Yet Berlin did sometimes get
a little further than the anodyne; he greatly upset the Left in
doing so; and, it now turns out, he did it all for love.
It was in 1953 that Berlin met the Russian poetess, Anna Akhmatova
(1888-1966) whose works had just been reprieved from the ban imposed
by Stalin in 1946. From Akhmatova, Berlin learned of the horrors
of communism. Entranced, Berlin spent a whole night in conversation
with her. The meeting resulted in Berlin's two body-blows to Marxism,
Historical Inevitability (1954) -- scorning Marxist determinism
-- and Two Concepts of Liberty (1959) -- lampooning the
'positive' liberties sought by socialists at the expense of massive
state interference. Although Berlin was often criticized from
the Right for having gone no further, his two Akhmatova-inspired
works did much to break the morale of British intellectuals of
the Left.
(On his arrival in Britain in 1928, Berlin joined Corpus Christi College, Oxford -- the same college at which William McDougall had held the Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy till he left for Harvard in 1919. It was only in 1995, just before his death, that Berlin learned of how his own relatives in Moscow had suffered and died in Stalin's purges. Berlin's achievements as a historian and exponent of ideas earned him the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; and he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He was specially instrumental in founding Wolfson College, Oxford.)
A new computer analysis of stylistic features
provides fresh testimony that all but the more obscure Shakespeare
plays (Merry Wives of Windsor, etc.) were written by Edward
de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). The supply of
astronomical references in the plays dries up after 1604; and
the last ten years of actor-manager William Shakespeare's own
life -- though he by then enjoyed great affluence and leisure
-- produced only Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, The Tempest
and (with John Fletcher's help) Henry VIII.
Just how William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
could have written the world's greatest plays has long puzzled
historians and psychologists. There is no documentary evidence
that William ever attended Stratford's excellent Grammar School
-- though the civic status of his father [a glover and wool dealer]
would have entitled him to do so. At age 18, William married his
pregnant girlfriend, Anne Hathaway, 26. By age 20, he had become
the father of three children, including two twins [a boy and a
girl] so sought work with a theatrical touring company which took
him to London. Essentially, the question has been one of whether
largely untutored gfluid could have been sufficient
to the writing of plays involving a good knowledge of Greek, Roman,
Italian and English history -- together with awareness of the
latest advances in astronomy (as in Hamlet, where
a starburst is mentioned that had only just been observed by English
courtiers). Many have thought that gcrystallized would
have been necessary -- but they have been accused of snobbish
elitism that declined to acknowledge the sterling qualities of
English yeomen.
{The Italianate Englishman,
Edward de Vere, came from a distinguished military family. Though
violent and spendthrift, he was a highly regarded Elizabethan
courtier-poet. His lyric poem, 'What cunning can express', is
the best of those securely attributed to him (Chambers Biographical
Dictionary).}
A SHANGHAI BAR -- "….double-dating Chinese fifteen-year-old girls were bobbling drunk on a weekday midnight while their cars and drivers waited outside."
"[The very forms on which students register for university are] reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audience in Burbank. …[Students are] shocked if their professors don't reflexively suck up to them. [The result has been to create an academic Lake Wobegone] where almost no-one fail[s], everything [is] enjoyable, and everyone [is] nice."
Mark EDMUNDSON (professor of English, University of Virginia), 1997, Harper's xii.
DECEMBER 8
THIS WEEK's VICTIMS OF SOCIETY: President Canaan Banana, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Supermodel Naomi Campbell, Frankfurt Prize-winner Sigmund Freud, Supreme Constructibabbler Martin Heidegger, Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg, Eric Hobsbawm (Order of Lenin), Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen, Multiply-orgasmic Nicole Kidman, Recidivist 'Paedophile' Mary Kay Letourneau and Senator Augusto Pinochet.
PLUS:
Christmas Gift
Ideas!!
-- Latest books from Richard Dawkins, Roger Scruton and Martin
Amis. Plus McDougall
Special for Dog-Lovers!!
Six months ago, this NewsLetter (9 vi '98, Head Start Corner) offered readers their own 'Teach Reading Scheme' for use with pre-school children or others of limited mental age.
"The McDougall NewsLetter now makes a special offer, for readers' own personal use, of
Katie and Emmie's
SPEAK-and-SPELL ALPHABET (SSA)
Used with success with the Misses Brand around 1983 to teach them to read at ages 3-4, the SSA provides everything you need to teach reading painlessly at home or at school. Users don't even need a typewriter or a computer. The scheme is rigorously phonetic, yet neither teacher nor children need to learn or discuss any symbols than those of the conventional 26-letter English alphabet. Above all, the SSA is fun -- and especially involves a strong component of child choice (in line with the general principles of The g Factor)….."
Today , the success of just such a phonetic scheme is announced:
Britain's Office of Standards in Teaching and Education (OFSTED) is to declare school 'literacy hours' with their stress on phonics a success (BBCR4UK 7 xii '98, 07:15). The new emphasis on how words sound was forced on British schools two years ago -- fifteen years after Oxford psychologist Peter Bryant had noticed that middle class parents read nursery rhymes to their children and reported in Nature that, after controlling for IQ, children exposed to more rhymes did better at reading. The scheme remains controversial with British educationalists -- possibly because it shows more benefit for higher-IQ pupils. Two versions of teaching-by-phonics have been tried. One, tried mainly in England, involves 'analytic phonics': simply, children are encouraged in the traditional, pre-Look-and-Say manner to break words down into each letter and its sound, as in C - A - T. This has had reasonable success. But better still was the scheme used in Scotland (researched especially by DR Rhona Johnston of St Andrews University) and called 'synthetic phonics.' In this scheme, children first learn 42 alphabet-based symbols for sounds (at the rate of six per day). Then they are given reading materials using not the traditional 26-character alphabet but the enriched 42-character scheme. This has been "staggeringly effective" according to some teachers: children have often ended up within a few weeks advanced by a full year of reading age.
The McDNL scheme -- still on offer to readers -- is of the 'synthetic' type. It uses alphabet-based characters for 18 basic vowel sounds (3 per classic vowel -- short, long and normal [as before letter r]) -- and other distinctions resulting in an effectively 50-character scheme. However, the McDNL scheme does not require any express mention of the new symbols to children: it is thus a 'preconscious synthetic phonics' scheme from which signs can easily be dropped to give children a 'soft landing' back into use of the 26-character alphabet.
Here is that McDNL offer again:
Terms are available to readers who are active supporters of the NewsLetter -- e.g. by compiling indices to it documenting all references to IQ, race, sex, feminazism, paedohysteria, eugenics etc. One way to request a copy is to leave a message titled '2CRISPIAN' at http://www.god.co.uk. Leave your message in the Classified Ads (Personal) section. -- The service is free; and the reply to you will come with the heading 'CRISPIAN2U'. The SSA will be supplied without obligation to bona fide educational researchers. Modifications of the SSA can be supplied for users in France, Germany, Spain and Sweden.
Readers preferring a fully fledged commercial product may like to know that a scheme called 'Jolly Phonics' can be purchased at some child-care shops in England.
Coventry University has been made a laughing stock. A Sunday Times journalist who has a degree in Politics managed to "infiltrate" Coventry's degree course titled 'Communications, Culture and Media Studies.' For this degree, students watch videos and discuss the Teletubbies, skateboarding and body piercing -- one student herself sported twelve items of facial jewellery including tongue studs. Exams are of the 'take-away' variety. One staff member said: "There is nothing so trivial that it doesn't deserve studying." Another, who sported a tweed jacket and bow tie volunteered, 'I am a Revolutionary Communist and I would like the students to share my views. But they pay no real attention to what I say -- they just write it all down." The Head of the Department freely admitted, "A lot of our students can't write a sentence."
* Judith O'Reilly previously reported the decline in university entrance standards in Britain (McDNL 12 v '98 and 8 ix '98).
Following up O'Reilly's journalism is a leading article, "Dumb-down Education", the paper said that the Coventry course was "a state-funded equivalent of three years of pub chat." Commenting at the same time on the uselessness of Britain's state ("comprehensive") schools, it came out {like The g Factor, 1996} in favour of streaming:
"The government should act to improve schools by separating pupils according to ability so they can all thrive, and it should abandon its backdoor campaign against the handful of surviving grammar schools. Only then can Tony Blair hope to achieve his much vaunted ambition of reforming our rotten educational system."
{At Edinburgh LUniversity, Scottish Nationalist students have indicated their own sub-intellectual priorities. They could have supported one of the LUniversity's top brains, Provost Neil MacCormick, who is also a top think-tanking figure in the Scottish National Party, to run in the parliamentary constituency of Edinburgh South; but they preferred the populist SNP figure of Margo Macdonald and left Oxford-trained Inquisitor MacCormick to reflect on the sorry intellectual state of the student body in E. LU.}
A 51-year old male care worker for Dr Barnardo's children's homes in Worcestershire has been found guilty of 25 charges of sexual assault, all of which dated back to the period 1967-1974. About a dozen boys and two girls were the victims of the assaults. The care worker had pleaded guilty to 19 cases but apparently a trial was mounted to cover further charges of involving a degree of force. The offender is a father of four whose working life was devoted to Barnardo's. He has been remanded for sentencing later in December. Court proceedings had been delayed so that victims could come along and see their molester writhe on the hook. A court official proudly announced the case to have shown that justice could even be done after thirty years.
{On the same day, three lifelong St John's Ambulance workers were jailed for 'interfering' with adolescents in the mid-1980's.}
{As usual, media reporting allows no-one to
know what any of the assaults actually involved, how much force
was used, whether tangible harm resulted or why the offences were
not prosecuted nearer the time. There is no more questioning by
the press than there would have been by Pravda of Stalin's
show trials.}
Over the next month, London's High Court will decide whether to proceed with a case against tobacco firms alleging misdeeds from 1957 to 1971 in failing to lower the tar content of cigarettes (BBCR4UK 7 xii '98, 07:00). In fact, through that period, no-one but a complete oaf could have doubted there was a serious risk to smoking -- for the new filter cigarettes meant that cigarettes provided their own visual aid as to what would happen to smokers' lungs. However the High Court must first decide whether to dispense with its own conventional 'statute of limitations.' Normally, in England, cases alleging injury to health have to be notified within three years of the medical diagnosis first being made. Lung cancer patients are arguing that, when diagnosed in the 1980's, they did not realize that the tobacco companies might be blameworthy. The firms are arguing that to defend themselves for their actions of c.1960 is too hard since many key staff have since died. {Not of lung cancer, one hopes….}
The latest 'antiracist' advertisement from the UK's Council for Racial Equality features a Black male face in dim lighting. 'SCARED?', asks the ad. 'YOU SHOULD BE -- HE'S A DENTIST!'
This two-edged joke will be especially appreciated by the British victims of Black medicine, ophthalmology, psychology and dentistry. Evidently, now that qualifying courses in Britain are passed with the help of concessions for agrammatism, acalculia, exam nerves and even schizophrenia,* Black people who disgrace both their race and their chosen professions are taking a role in the professions. In North London, a lady who was stung by a wasp in her garden in August was allowed by a Nigerian woman G.P. to deteriorate so far (as her immune system collapsed and she became dehydrated) that, by November, she required hospital treatment for a month. In Edinburgh, a Black optometrician has been dispensing prescriptions for glasses that bear little relation to prosthetic needs as diagnosed on previous and subsequent consultations by White experts. As to dentistry, it is well known that only Ashkenazi-Jewish G.P.'s have real flair: one, from Edinburgh, recently met the Queen at Buckingham Palace in celebration of his achievements, which he had managed alongside running a gambling machine business from his surgery.
* Edinburgh University Psychology Department in the 1990's even tried to give an Honours degree to a grossly obese (White) girl who had been in treatment for schizophrenia for three years. The student would sit in lectures digging a penknife into herself, drawing blood. Unfortunately for the student-patient, the stress of Final Honours examination proved too much. She made a suicide bid, using Valium, which put her in hospital for what will be permanent damage to her liver.
{This week's Sunday Times carries the story, with visual aids, of how Rwandan Hutu broke into a convent in 1994 and searched it for 22 Tutsi children whom they promptly killed -- together with scores of thousands of adults whose skulls are still kicking about in the Rwandan 'Oxbridge', the town of Butare.}
A UK Labour Prime Minister does a deal in
Number 10, Downing Street, to keep the voting rights in the House
of Lords of 91 hereditary peers of the realm. He and their selected
Lordships will think up a new second chamber for Britain. Liberals
and Mr Hague's Conservatives (those not included in the select
91 of Viscount Cranborne -- whose sacking by Mr Hague changes
nothing) know such a second chamber would be a bunch of cronies
-- or, if it was not, it would be given few powers to inhibit
the democratic tyranny of the House of Commons; yet they have
no proposals of their own.* Meantime,
from Brussels, the new German Finance Minister, Oscar 'the Ominous'
Lafontaine threatens 'tax harmonization.' (The UK currently enjoys
income tax rates almost down to US levels; and Switzerland is
currently busy processing a lot of German men in suits and Mercedes
bringing big bags of notes from Frankfurt for depositing in their
famous banks [promising 'French charm, German efficiency, Swiss
discretion'].) Teasing UK Treasury boss 'Grumpy' Gordon Brown,
who objected verbally to Red Oscar's fresh outrage to UK sovereignty
while staying at the table in Brussels for more Perrier water
and mint thins, Lafontaine picked up a lady's handbag. In mimicry
of Mrs Thatcher, he jested at Grumpy, 'I like it, viz ze hendbeg!'(BBCR4UK
6 xii '98, 09:15). In St Malo, France, Mr Blair has been entertaining
the French President, Jaccques Chirac, on board a British man-o'-war.
Schemes and deals are in the air all round. What is happening?
Mr Tony Blair is the most
powerful politician in the West (except that he is not running
the West's most powerful country). Constitutionally, he is the
deputy of the British monarch who herself is the supreme head
of the church and the military and one of the world's ten richest
women (all the rest are in the USA); and Mr Blair can go on running
for election till he drops. Democratically, he has triumphed over
the economic socialists in his own party in agreeing not to unravel
Mrs Thatcher's settlement; his party has the largest House of
Commons majority this century; and he is way ahead in the opinion
polls. Personally, he is a nice chap, if shallow and easily perplexed
-- all photos show him beaming a little desperately through his
own surprise and annoyance. Like Mrs Thatcher, he had sought the
advice of All Souls College, Oxford. -- In his case, this involved
writing to Sir Isaiah Berlin for scrutiny of his proposed 'third
way' that would bring together champagne socialists, social democrats,
liberals and even pro-Europa conservatives in a coalition hardly
needing proportional representation to ensure its domination of
British politics for half a century.
Sadly, Berlin died a year
ago (McDNL 11 xi '97), so Mr Blair has been left with his
own Christian-socialist ideas and little inclination to temper
his authoritarian communitarianism with any more respect for liberty
than he learned from Mrs Thatcher's free-marketeering. Nor is
there the slightest pragmatic reason for him to do so: having
converted Labour to being officially 'tough on crime', Blair probably
has as near to an ideal left-ish party on his hands as is achievable
{see Quotes XXV}. By all means, he cannot like being on the receiving
end of Eurosocialism -- as at St Malo where his olive branch re
military co-operation with the French (who are still not part
of NATO's full military structure) was met with an open demand
for Britain to pay more for Europa. Yet only a fear of awakening
English nationalism keeps Mr Blair from throwing in his lot with
Europa and accepting the Eurodollar as Britain's currency. He
knows that, once Euro-ism is accepted and the pound sterling abolished,
he will be able to let Brussels take the strain of justifying
tax rises.
Had Berlin lived, he might
have told Blair where all this is heading. Social democracy (as
Berlin's biographer, Michael Ignatieff points out) may be very
nice while it can hold off the redistributive left (the antisocial
democrats, as it were); but it is still about power -- about doing
good for people by relieving them of their earnings. In contrast,
Liberalism, until it began its twentieth-century compromise with
socialism, was about freedom. In particular, it is critical of
established authority and prefers authority to be diffused whether
among individual readers of Scripture or among a country's 'regions.'
(This is why the British Liberal Party is so hard to lead. Likewise,
US libertarians proved unable to keep a serious political act
together once Ronald Reagan's presidencies ended.) Today, the
final deal is probably being done to create a 'social socialist'
Europe that will itself harmonize excellently with the American
Empire of which Western Europe is a military branch. While
economic socialism was always at odds with the American dream,
social socialism is a pretty good fit. Spurred by its own authoritarian
wing of Political Correctness, such neosocialism harnesses religious
enthusiasm (never in short supply in the USA) into a multiculturalism
that justifies ongoing propaganda and witch-hunting exercises
at state expense. It thus provides the token egalitarianism (sometimes
more) that is needed to keep socialist hearts beating. Even the
rabid feminism of abusohysteria finds a shelter in neosocialism
as it nurses the sacred flame of socio-environmentalism and plays
up Diana-likes who are the supposed victims of patriarchy.
It is too much to expect that
late-twentieth-century 'liberals' will be able to resist this
deal, especially as it is fleshed out in Europa's institutions.
Nationalism and Islam will doubtless provide competition for the
neosocialist Empire of the West as the years go by. But support
for them in Europe will be limited unless 'the economy' goes pear-shaped
in the face of revived Asian competition. Anyhow, they will remain
intrinsically illiberal themselves. Only the American developments
of carving out individual and relation-specific rights will constrain
Empire-building: pre-marital contracts, e-mail encryption and
local referenda provide a few seeds from which a new liberalism
might one day grow. Neoliberalism must go beyond defending
property (as the Tories once did, very properly -- against kings,
Roundheads and Liberals) or Protestantism (as Whigs and Liberals
did -- against kings, Tories and radicals) and defend polygamy,
recreational drugs, teenage sex and all the other individually
chosen and creative arrangements under which people in the West
actually like to live their lives. In particular, it will have
to defend people's computers, whether at home or in the office:
for the computer today has become an extension of a person's brain,
and its seizure on one pretext can easily disclose material allowing
the person to be hounded for other matters. Why, neoliberalism
could even arrange an option of proper academic tenure -- at least
for an elite handful of professors who could thus serve as watchdogs
within the academy.
Today, people can feel reasonably
secure from the state itself in their property and their own private
opinions, but there is much fragility in the rest of the lives
-- as when men like Reading University's eminent philosopher,
John Cottingham,** can find their lives undone for no crime after
feminazie allegations of 'insensitivity', 'harassment' and 'molestation'
at a private party. Neoliberalism must defend all human conduct
that does not involve deception; and it should additionally reduce
deception itself by decriminalization -- starting with offences
that do no harm to others. It should allow a person the right
to say 'This is my party / lecture / committee, and you attend
at your own risk of what you may hear and of what sexual overtures
may be made. No claims of crimes or damages will be entertained
subsequently except with regard to any physical violence.' It
should allow a manufacturer to say 'No claims against this product
will be valid beyond ten years after the date of purchase.' Today,
it is no longer enough that 'An Englishman's home is his castle'
and that there should be 'No Popery.' People should have more
say in many aspects of their lives -- and more personal responsibility
for the futures (of themselves and their children) to which their
own lifestyles lead.
The genius of the modern West
was, around 1600, to liberate individual economic initiative.
Today, approaching 2000, neoliberalism should seek to liberate
individuals more widely -- not least in their sexual natures;
and neotoryism should seek to defend and enforce responsible contracts
of choice and commitment wherever they can be found and encouraged.
Socialism has been a failure wherever it has been tried -- except
perhaps in Britain's National Health Service which has been run
by a dedicated and high-IQ elite. The objectives of socialists
are doubtless often admirable -- but, as US Head Start programmes
show {Quotes X}, these objectives are only achievable at colossal
expense that no nation would undertake except in wartime. Whispers
of the creation of a movement of teenagers that will campaign
for common-sense freedoms on sex and drugs (BBCR4UK 6 xii
'98, 09:00) -- and thus to end the blackmail threats under which
most young people currently live their lives -- are to be welcomed.
It is to be hoped that greybeards will link up and help articulate
a Fourth Way that will resist the
new authoritarianism of the left -- however agreeable its happy-clappy
communitarian objectives. Not conservatism but contractualism
is the right way to oppose the less acceptable tendencies of the
new Empire of the West.
* Unlike Chris
Brand, who has proposed that a reformed House of Lords should
represent interest groups -- see McDNL 21 vii '98, IMPROVING
ON MUSSOLINI. Mr Hague was said by the Sunday Times (6
xii '98) to be planning a proposal with which to cover his nakedness
-- probably having the new second chamber selected by the Commons
according to principles of proportional representation. However,
this hurried proposal won't get far -- for it would yield a new
second chamber having far to much authority for the Commons' liking.
** See TgF NewsLetter 24 vii '97, ANGER OF CLEARED SEX CASE PROFESSOR.
{For the tendency of the Left's quest for Equality and Fraternity to yield illiberalism, see Quotes XXV in PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY & SOCIETY}.
After meeting in RED SQUARE
of Washington State University, hundreds of angry students
invaded university offices to demand opposition to Initiative
200 (the new state legislation, passed by a referendum, which
forbids affirmative racism). "We are here to defend our rights,"
said protester Waldo Nambo, a sophomore on a pre-business programme.
Students blocked freeways causing traffic delays lasting several
hours as they made their views known in Seattle. Finally, fifty
students elicited a verbal assurance from University Principal
Richard McCormick in his office that he would do all in his power
to circumvent Initiative 200 -- e.g. by increasing the University's
'outreach' programmes and thus 'replace the function of affirmative
action'(Washington Daily 4 xii '98). Students' demands
had included reaffirming the UW's and McCormick's commitment to:
diversity; increasing enrolment of minority students; maintaining
scholarships and money going to minorities and minority programs;
and maintaining other programs such as MESA, a K-12 outreach program
designed to increase the number of minorities and women in mathematics,
engineering and science.
Black 'homophobic' Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe is now
spending £UK250,000 daily fighting the ongoing war in the
Congo (BBCR4UK 4 xii '98). Trade unions are banned in Zimbabwe,
and 841 White farmers are having their land stolen. Zimbabwe is
propped up by UK and US aid programmes. Meanwhile, ex-Zimbabwe
President Canaan Banana (see McDNL 1 xii '98), the
multiply sodomistic father-of-four, has slipped {geddit?!} into
South Africa to see his son (who works for South African airways)
with an eye to prompt emigration to South America. (The British
homosexual lobby, in its glee that its star campaigner Peter Tatchell
was fined a mere £18 for his publicity stunt abusing the
Archbishop of Canterbury, has presumably been too busy to condemn
Black homophobism….)
A US admiral has been forced into retirement by his ex-mistress.
As he ended their affair, the womyn did not hesitate to shop him
to the Pentagon -- resulting in detention, fines and the end of
his career (Daily Telegraph, 4 xii '98).
American Black rapper 'Coolie', 27, was fined £UK18,000
in Stuttgart for making a nuisance of himself.
The link between neuroticism/emotionality
and memory has now been traced to a physical basis in the
stress-released hormone noradrenalin [norepinephrine] (BBCR4UK
1 xii '98, 'Today', 08:55). Noradrenalin has long been known to
play a role in emotion and to be in short supply in people who
are clinically depressed, but its special role in boosting memory
for all exciting experiences (not just those of a fearful nature)
is new. The discovery has been made by a former student of Chris
Brand's who is now a senior research fellow at the University
of Stirling.
Only 17% of British primary school teachers are male, debates
in the House of Lords have revealed; and even this measly percentage
of male role models is scheduled to drop as male students fear
to enter a profession that is so feminized, low-waged and subject
to accusations of 'paedophilia.'
A massive swoop on council schemes [called 'council estates' in
England] in the Lothian & Borders Region (around and south
of Edinburgh) has involved 800 police, arrested 71 people and
netted £UK250,000 of drugs. Police do not want Edinburgh
to resume its 1980's position as drugs capital of the U.K.
McDNL heroine, lissome blonde sex-bombe Nicole Kidman
(McDNL 6 x '98, '"Phwoar!"
for {White}Nicole Kidman'), has just won multiple orgasms,
oops, Grammies etc., for her sensational Blue Room performances
in London. (Nicole starts baring her all on Broadway this month.
She was first bagged at age 17 by a gentleman of 37.)
The case of Senator Pinochet, having been deposited by
the UK Government in the laps of lawyers, is now proving highly
job-creative. Whatever Jack Straw, the Home 'Short Straw' Secretary,
now does, multiple appeals to the High Court and the House of
Lords will follow -- all at the expense of the British taxpayer.
Collegiality has ended at Yale University. Two geology
postgraduate students found that one of their professors had downloaded
'pornographic images' of a naked adolescent boy from the Internet.
So they had a word with him
and that was the end of the matter?
-- No way, José!
Prof. Antonio Lasaga has been
arrested by New Haven cops and faces a 15-year jail term (Yale
Herald). With masterful overstatement, Lasaga's lawyer claimed
"The amount of concern and love that the Yale community has
shown for Professor Lasaga is heartening."
Non-'scientific racist', Emeritus Professor Art Jensen,
who has been enjoying a retirement away-break in the U.K., favoured
E. LU. Psychology Department with a talk about the g factor
on 3 December. Twelve supporters of the Anti-Nazi League turned
out for a token protest; but Art said nothing interesting about
race, sex, genes, eugenics, feminazism, political correctness,
fast track learning or paedophilia, so the neo-Stalinists packed
their bags after fifteen minutes. For his scholarly trouble to
say that Blacks and Whites differ in g, Jensen was denounced
as "plainly a racist" and "a bigot" by Edinburgh's
Evening News (4 xii '98, p. 10); and the newspaper said
that whoever had invited him to speak was misguided. One of Edinburgh's
Labour MPs also deplored the event. Chris Brand (said to have
been fired for "conduct problems") was recorded as not
wishing to comment.* To conclude his visit, Art spent an hour
admiring the fine facilities of Edinburgh City's Central Library.
* Phoned by journalist Tom Curtis,
Brand expressed surprise that the Evening News and the
Scotsman between them had not been able to whip up more
than twelve Anti-Nazis to bellow outside Psychology. But apparently
little notice had been available. Further comment is given below.
-- Ed.
Britain's top physiological psychologist has
been threatened with death. Professor Colin Blakemore of
Oxford University has been named as one of the ten animal 'vivisectionists'
whom animal rights activists plan to kill when one one their number,
Barry Horne, completes the process of starving himself to death
in a British prison -- to which he had been sent for fire-bombing
humans.
The parents of the murdered Black teenager,
Stephen Lawrence, are to be given a prime TV slot to air their
complaints about how London police failed to convict five White
youths for the crime. The Lawrence's message will go out on Christmas
Day on Channel 4 at the same time as the Queen's invariably soporific
message is broadcast on other channels.
The London lap-dancer and the seven Africans whom
she married so as to let them immigrate have all been given 6-to-9-month
jail sentences, after which expensive custody the men will be
deported. All the men now claim to have been the victims of political
persecution in civil-war-torn Sierra Leone; but the London judge
said that cutting corners when seeking asylum could not be tolerated.
Susan Coates, 30, the polyandrous bride, had
earned upwards of £UK2,500 for each marriage ceremony.
She will not be going straight to jail for she is in hospital
recovering from a physical assault.
Christmas shopping can damage men's health -- as well as
their wealth -- 'researchers' report. {Modern research also vindicates
classical ideas, like that hats keep the heat in and that wasp-waisted
girls are more desirable to men. Yet in the last two years the
media have reported no new research on such topics as race, IQ
and the allegedly frightful harm done by 'paedophilia.' Perhaps
research too, just like university teaching, is becoming a branch
of the entertainment industry?}
TgF NewsLetter heroine, the Black supermodel, nifty Naomi
Campbell is being sued for $2million in Canada. A former female
employee of Naomi's claims the supermodel hit her over the head
with a telephone (CFMR 5 xii '98). {It
is to be hoped that criminal charges can be avoided -- girls will
be girls! Hopefully Naomi will now lead the way in pioneering
suitable contracts for those who want to spend time with supermodels.}
Apparently following up revelations as to how Monica Lewinsky liked to smoke cigars, medical researchers have found a higher rate of cancer in females who smoke. They interpret the effect as arising from different female methods of inhalation (BBCR4UK 5 xii '98, 10:02).
The long debate about why the Nazis never developed the atom bomb is approaching resolution. Some had hoped that Nobelist Werner Heisenberg, an undoubtedly impressive scientist, had declined to co-operate with Hitler in the 1930's and that this had been crucial in depriving Hitler of new-age weapons of mass destruction. However, it now seems far more likely that it was only Heisenberg's own scientific mistakes that held things up. "Heisenberg was no hero," says Nature's reviewer Martin Walker, a New York historian, "and certainly no resistance fighter."
In a notable tribute to perhaps the twentieth century's greatest writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, NYRB has set out the progress that turned a keen young Communist, after his own imprisonment in the Soviet labour camps, into the most influential exposer of the horrors in which Marxism had resulted. Throughout, Solzhenitsyn showed magnificent, indeed McDougallian independence of mind. No sooner was he being fêted by the chattering classes of New York in the 1980's than he blew it all by backing Russian Orthodoxy. Nor did his advocacy of Russian spirituality prove competitive in modern Moscow. Reviewer Michael Scammell observes: "Unlike after World War II, when the defeated Axis powers were obliged to confront their governments' crimes and re-educate their populations under pressure from their conquerors, the Russians now seem to have emerged from party dictatorship untroubled by the horrors of the past."
No week passes without some new UK Government wheeze for annoying
the teaching unions. The latest scheme is for 'fast track teachers.'
Headteachers who 'turn round schools in disadvantaged areas' should
earn £UK70,000p.a., Parliament was told. "Fast track
promotion" and "performance-related pay" are the
official titles for the new gimmicks. Even young pet teachers
will be given more pay: if they suck up sufficiently to headmasters,
they will be able to earn £UK22,000 after just four years
service.
Thus will Mr Blair will be
able to say that he implemented some 'fast track' proposals. He
will hope the 'fast track' nomenclature will now become firmly
associated with this new move, and dissociated from his 1996 speech
advocating 'fast track learning.' Behind all this is plainly
the refusal of the teachers' unions to have anything to with fast
track learning (see TgFNLs and McDNLs, passim).
Sadly, blind Mr Blunkett himself once promised "Read my lips
-- no selection by examination or interview" (cf. McDNL
20 i '98); and Old Labour educationalists
are keeping him to it. Writes ex-Observer columnist Melanie
Phillipps of the passion of such egalitarian teachers who
care nothing for schools' results: "Why should education
matter to these people? This is their holy war." It is
not known whether the new 'superteachers' will be allowed to organize
children by IQ and teach them accordingly; but if it happens it
will be kept a secret from prying Labour eyes.
{The left was not always hostile to educational selection (streaming, tracking, banding, setting, grouping, grammar schools etc.). In 1922, Britain's leading Christian socialist and economic historian, Richard Tawney, declared: "Equality of educational provision is not identity of educational provision, and it is important that there should be the greatest possible diversity of type among secondary schools."}
Despite the New York exhibition in his honour (McDNL 24 xi '98), Freud is not in fashion with academics these days. Even some professors of English literature have given him up (McDNL 17 xi '98). Strangely, however, no-one mentions the long-running critical effort of Hans Eysenck. And at least there are kind words from the University of Melbourne (Times Higher, 27 xi '98, Anthony Elliott, author of Freud 2000, Polity Press, 1998):
"Freud is a great thinker . . . . he demonstrated that a world of secrets, doubts and fictions lurks within our individual and social lives . . . . Freud will continue to have a huge influence on academics."
This may not be as spunky or as sociobiological as the support published in Behaviour Research & Therapy 31 (1993, pp. 129-131) or Times Higher (21 October 1994, p. 28); but it still deserves credit for sheer idiosyncrasy. One day, psychology will be grateful for Galton, Freud and McDougall -- though not while the flight from it of 'cognitive' and 'neuro-' scientists has left it in the hands of feminazies who cannot bear Freud's masterly insights into their sadly emasculated, ignorant and irresponsible condition.
{Illustrating the breach in psychology, the one-time editor of the top journal for scientific psychology, Behavioural & Brain Sciences, took the trouble to write to Times Higher (3 xii '98) to distance himself from Freud. Writes Steve Harnad, now Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University, Freud is "irrelevant to cognitive and neural psychology." -- A brave statement from scientific Steve when, to this day, no-one knows the cause of the most important fact about any person, their sexual orientation of desire!}
À propos vivacious blonde 'paedophile' Mary Kay Letourneau (e.g. McDNL 24 xi '98), a McDNL correspondent writes from the USA:
The boy-father is Samoan. Samoans are possibly the biggest people in the world, and are hugely over-represented in American football. They're not as fast as West Africans, but, man-for-man, they are probably blacks' leading rivals today as the best all-round athletes. Interviewed on why the pair started having sex, MKL produced lots of "two hearts that beat as one" stuff. The Samoan lad said [roughly verbatim] "I was only twelve and had never fucked anybody, so this seemed like a good opportunity".
Labour-backing Prof. Steve Jones (Galton Laboratory, University
College London) has agreed what to do about the handicapped with
scientist and liberal Archbishop of York, John Habgood and one
or two other of the Great'n'Good. Evidently, the BBC's panel agreed,
it should be 'left to individuals' -- i.e. to individual parents
-- to decide with what handicaps they would burden the world in
the future. Arguments that eugenic practices* by parents would
cast a stigma on existing blind, deaf, multiply sclerotic etc.
people were resisted: after all, ordinary medical efforts to prevent
and cure blindness result in no such stigma.
There was only one problem
remained from the panel's agreeable discussion: WHO WAS GOING
TO PAY THE BILL FOR PARENTS' DYSGENIC CHOICES? -- On
this, the BBC's panel remained as dumb as only the hysterical
can be….
* Prof. Steve was insistent that state eugenics had always been "disastrous." However, he offered no evidence; and high rates of schizophrenia and mental defect are not in fact notorious demographic phenomena of modern Germany.
{For Advance Insurance as the proper way to allow individual choice together with passable responsibility, see What about eugenics?.}
NEW YORK (Associated Press 30 xi '97) -- A 27-year-old White teacher accused of racial insensitivity for reading the acclaimed children's book Nappy Hair* to her Black and Hispanic pupils requested a transfer out of her Brooklyn school district, saying she feared for her life. During a school meeting, residents of the city's Bushwick section had yelled racial epithets and profanities at her and threatened her for reading the acclaimed children's book to her students. The book was written by Carolivia Herron, who is Black and has said there is nothing racist in the book. The teacher said she was using it to teach her children a lesson in how to get along despite racial differences.
* The word "nappy" is sometimes used in the USA as a derogatory term to describe a Black person's hair. Black women are extremely sensitive about having matted hair that will not grow as they wish.
NEW YORK (Wall Street Journal 16 xi '98, Ron Unz [the Californian entrepreneur and Harvard graduate who led the successful state initiative to abolish bilingual education]) -- Thanks to its policy of affirmative racism, Harvard now has 15% of its student body Black or Hispanic (cf. 22% in US population -- so the 15% is a matter of continuing complain by multicultural meddlers). What is less often appreciated is that Harvard is now 20% Asian (cf. 3% of US population) and 30% Jewish (cf. 2.5% of US population). Some 5% of Harvard students are from abroad; so that leaves just 30% of Harvard places for the Euro-Americans. (The latter are currently 72.5% of the US population -- but this itself is changing as the US accepts 1.5 million immigrants [legal + illegal] annually, most of whom are Black or Hispanic.)
LONDON -- Dr. Alan Lucas (Institute of Child Health) and colleagues have found that pre-term infants fed an enriched diet beginning immediately after birth achieved higher verbal and overall intelligence quotient (IQ) scores between the ages of 7 and 8 years compared with those fed a standard formula of the early 1980's. The gains were especially pronounced in the verbal IQ scores for boys. Cerebral palsy was also less common among premature infants who were fed the richer diet. The study involved 424 pre-term infants weighing less than 1850 grams (3.7 pounds) who were born between 1982 and 1984. The researchers followed up 360 of the infants until age 7 to 8 in order to measure their intellectual development. Boys on the enriched formula showed a 12.2 point advantage in verbal intelligence and a 6.3 point advantage in the overall intelligence test.
{The finding will ensure the continued interest of baby food manufacturers in researching the possibility that their products can be made as good for babies as breast milk.)
For a balanced presentation of the views of parents on terminating risky pregnancies, it would be hard to beat a recent Woman's Hour (BBCR4UK, 4 xii '98, 10:15). The programme included a full range of views -- from women who wished they had never agreed to amniocentesis, through an experienced nurse who had fallen totally in love with her handicapped child, to an equally loving father who nevertheless wished his Down's Syndrome child [with damage at chromosomes 21/22 and many health problems as well as profound 'learning difficulty'] had been diagnosed by scan and aborted. Most remarkable was a girl who phoned in to declare herself crippled with multiple sclerosis. Cheerily, she said her parents loved her and that her Local Authority provided excellent services; and she plainly sounded as if she was making the very best of her life; but she had been the product of a schizophrenic father and a mother who had once had her tubes tied, and, frankly, she thought she should never have been born. The BBC programme would be an excellent starting-point for discussion of eugenics with typical teenagers.
The 1998 Winter issue of Scientific American Presents (9, 4) contains a range of introductory articles about intelligence. Robert Sternberg muddles along representing 'mainstream' US psychology and its cogniburbling evasions -- for Sternberg has about 666 types of intelligence if one counts carefully; Howard Gardner puts his engaging case for what he now thinks are eight independent 'intelligences' -- virtually none of which he can measure (cf. McDNLs Autumn '98); and Linda Gottfredson* puts the London School argument for a strong g factor. Eventually the papers drift off into issues about whether animals have intelligence, language or self-consciousness (no-one knows) and into the wishes of AI people that they might one day produce a machine functioning at an all-round level of more than IQ 2. But the early papers will be good for younger teenagers seeking some starting points. The website is : <http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198intelligence/1198quicksummary.html>.
* Scientific American Presents notes: LINDA S. GOTTFREDSON is professor of educational studies at the University of Delaware, where she has been since 1986, and co-directs the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She trained as a sociologist, and her earliest work focused on career development. "I wasn't interested in intelligence per se," Gottfredson says. "But it suffused everything I was studying in my attempts to understand who was getting ahead." This "discovery of the obvious," as she puts it, became the focus of her research. ….Gottfredson is the mother of identical twins -- a "mere coincidence," she says, "that's always made me think more about the nature and nurture of intelligence." The girls, now 16, follow Gottfredson's Peace Corps experience of the 1970s by joining her each summer for volunteer construction work in the villages of Nicaragua.
Researchers continue to have difficulty compressing personality variation into the much-touted Big Five dimensions which ignore at once the work of both Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck.
"….we showed once again that the Big Five dimensions do not comprise the first or dominant five dimensions in our Filipino samples…. As in our previous study (Church et al., 1997, J. Personality), it was necessary to extract at least seven dimensions (eight in the present study {Concern [understanding], Negative Valence [troublesome], Conscientiousness [disciplined], Gregariousness [noisy], Self-assurance [strong-willed, daring], Intellect [admirable], Temperamentalness [sulky]}) in order to obtain dimensions resembling all the Big Five dimensions."
A. T. CHURCH et al. (Washington State University), 1998, European Journal of Personality 12.
{For the 'Comprehensive Six' dimensions, see Sections III and VII of PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY & SOCIETY. The six dimensions are also presented and discussed in Chapter I of The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications.}
LONDON, December -- A British artist has won the coveted annual Turner Prize (for modern art) with some pats of elephant dung into which a few glass beads had been prodded. It is not known whether the elephant itself will get any of {marginal/Black}Christopher Ofili's royalties from this latest effort to demonstrate the collapsed artistic standards of the London art élite (CFMR 2 xii '98, 01:00). Previous winning entries for the prize (honouring J. M. W. Turner, 1775-1851) included a sheep pickled in formaldehyde and an hour-long video of policemen yawning. Some say this year's winning entry is 'ironical' in its African themes and is an improvement in taste on the human faeces of two winning artists that won the Prize three years ago.
{Turner was the Beethoven of painting -- interfacing classical and impressionist painting just as Beethoven had made the transition from classical to romantic music. Turner led a highly secretive live and in the end bequeathed 300 of his paintings and 20,000 water-colours and drawings to England. When not staying with his patron, Lord Egremont, he lived in London taverns such as 'The Ship and Bladebone.' He died in a temporary lodging under the assumed name of Booth (Chambers Biographical Dictionary).}
(Literary Review xii, Ray Monk, reviewing a new biography of Martin Heidegger, by Rudiger Safranski.)
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was a keen Nazi who supported Hitler through till 1944. "The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law," said the teacher of Jean-Paul Sartre and thus the grandfather of modern constructivism and neo-relativism. It is often thought that author of such wilful obscurantism as "Das Nichts selbstnichtet" and concepts like Being-in-the-world, Being-on-the-booze and Being-for-bonking just happened to get caught up in Nazi bureaucracy and wore the swastika because it was pretty much expected at Freiburg University. Not so! Heidegger was a special fan of the Brown-shirted Stormtrooper Ernst Roehm, but even Hitler's summary execution of this pederast in 1934 did not dent Heidegger's enthusiasm for the National Socialist cause.
{Heidegger's buzz phrase was 'The meaning of being is time' -- a splendid expression of the importance of the n factor and human memory for experience. However, Heidegger had no place in his system for the g factor or for any of the realms of matter, life, mind, and knowledge without which time would be empty.}
In Pleasanton, USA, a 39-year-old mother of two is being tried for exposing a party of 14-15-year old girls to the talents of a male stripper. The woman's own daughters and several of their friends had wanted a no-holds-barred performance as a fitting climax to a birthday party, and one girl had slipped a $20 bill beneath the 29-year-old stripper's leather thong to have oral sex with him. The stripper claims he thought all the girls in his audience were 17-18.
In Cordele, USA, a teacher is suspended and on trial for having sex with thirteen-year-old boys (one a former pupil) who sometimes worked at her private stables. Debbie Dorough, 29, is charged with three counts each of aggravated child molestation and aggravated sodomy, two of Georgia's "seven deadly sins" that carry mandatory minimum sentences of 10 years without parole. The teacher also faces charges of child molestation, statutory rape and enticing a child for indecent purposes. Encounters allegedly took place at the school, in the horse stables, at Dorough's home and in a pickup truck. One of the boys reported her to the police when he was sacked. The woman's husband is standing by her and assisting with her defence.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1959) was far from being a work of the imagination. In 1948, Nabokov had read the autobiographical account of the paedophile Ernest Machen -- a vain, self-involved and showily multilingual failed scholar who had had his own first experience of sexual relations at age twelve (Times Literary Supplement 27 xi). Machen particularly stressed how feigning ignorance of sexual matters was helpful in leading a Lolita into showing sexual interest and commitment -- the same technique to be used by Nabokov's 'Humbert Humbert.'
How is it that relatively-right-wing historians like Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes have won the Cold War with their estimates putting Stalin's killings into the tens of millions? How did such wets and lefties as E. H. Carr and Eric Hobsbawm lose all credibility in the 1990's for their socialist apologia? The answer is simple (Literary Review xii '98, Nikolai Tolstoy): as the Soviet Union crumbled, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin allowed Moscow's archives to be opened. The sober and empirically fixated British historian, Martin Gilbert (Churchill's primary biographer), now puts Stalin's death toll into scores of millions -- as George Orwell and Arthur Koestler had begun to realize in the 1940's.
À propos the hounding of Senator Pinochet by the British and Spanish authorities, a letter has been published by Times Literary Supplement (27 xi) from the Vatican Archives (Archivo del Sant'Uffizio) cautioning against the idle comparison of modern persecutions with those of the Inquisition. Writes Peter Goodman: "Fanatical prosecutors, abusing due process, were regularly sent to the galleys."
{For the Spectator (5 xii), columnist Bruce Anderson blames the House of Lords verdict against Pinochet on two law lords who had both grown up in South Africa -- loathing apartheid as English liberals usually did. It is ironical, notes Anderson, that two lawyers who disliked the law being influenced by politics in South Africa should finally be able to bring about the imposition of politics on law in England. The wife of one of the judges is a leading light in Amnesty International.}
A verdict is at hand as to the sexuality of master-realist painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610) whose early work was homo-erotic, featuring pubescent lads voluptuously turned out in various guises (McDNL 23 xii '97, Nativity Corner / Paedophilia Special). The Literary Review (xii '98) agrees that Caravaggio enjoyed nothing better than depicting "Roman ragazzo invitingly dressed as Cupid or Bacchus"; but his picture of 'Saint Catherine' cannot have been painted by anyone but a lover of women. VERDICT: AC/DC.
For the kids,
the must-have toy this year is FURGY, the blowsy 5'7" red-headed
doll in the 'Princess' series. Furgy writes children's stories
and talks non-stop when financially squeezed. She says "Super!",
"Great!" and "Wow!" Some parents have worried
that Furgy can lower children's IQ's (Private Eye 16 x
'98). But there is no need for worry: if a child
wants a Furgy, its IQ cannot go any lower!
(Other
'Princess' dolls include DIE, who asks 'Dodie, dear heart, what
is a kilometre? -- Like on that dial where it says 250 kilometres
per hour?' ANNE is a great favourite with Scottish children, asking
'Why don't you f*** off, Chazza, while I'm giving Daddy a ride
in my buggy?')
For everything that a left-hander needs (scissors, corkscrews,
tin-openers etc.), phone:
Diane Paul on 0161 445 0159.
McDougall Special for Dog-Lovers:
To make a dog pay attention, it is helpful to prick up one's ears.
The requisite prick-uppable ears, mimicking those of the dog breed
in question, have now been patented (WO98/21939). The basic outfit
is a face mask with two masts attached at either side; suitable
doggy ears are then attached and users can win the attention of
even the oldest and most laid-back dogs (New Scientist,
29 viii '98, researcher Karola Baumann of Düsseldorf).
NON-FICTION
David C. GEARY, 1998, Males, Females and the Origins of Human Sex Differences. American Psychological Association, $49-95. {Can't be duller than the APA report on IQ!}
Noretta KOERTGE, 1998, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodern
Myths about Science Oxford University Press, pp. 322,
$US35, £UK29-95.
This book was reviewed by philosopher Jonathan Ree (University
of Middlesex, White Hart Lane, London) as utterly contemptuous
of deconstructivism, full of innuendo, obsessed with the importance
of 'objective' truth, and as neglectful of the merits of relativism
(Nature 5 xi '98); so it sounds ideal for McDNL
readers.
Richard DAWKINS, 1998, Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin,
$US26, £UK20.
Dawkins' inspiring idea is to answer Keats' question: "Do
not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy."
No, answers Dawkins, science is absolutely
wonderful: you can be a media don at Oxford with a trophy wife
and even able to say the occasional word in favour of eugenics
(McDNL, 1 ix '97, COMPULSORY
STERILIZATION DEFENDED BY TOP EVOLUTION-THEORIST) without having
to head to join Oxford historian Norman Stone in Turkey. "A
Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, might hear the galaxies
sing," thinks Dawkins. Any problem
with this idyllic scene? Well, pointed out Nature reviewer
Gillian Beer (Clare Hall, Cambridge), "as Keats recognized,
the galaxies may not actually be singing." A poem by John
Updike, called 'Cosmic Gall', makes this more explicit. Here Updike
gives an elegant description of the penetrating powers of the
neutrino.
….Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night they enter from Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed. -- You call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
Another book to avoid is probably Stephen Jay GOULD, 1998, Questioning
the Millennium, Vintage, £UK6-99. Gould and/or his
publishers may know how to spell 'millennium' -- quite an achievement
today; but, like the cowards in H. M. Government, they are not
prepared to challenge the public delusion that the twenty-first
century and the third millennium A.D. begin on 1 January 2000.
Simon HEFFER, 1998, Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell.
Weidenfeld.
Heffer's is about as sympathetic a life of Enoch 'Rivers of Blood'
Powell as one is likely to find. Some say that Powell's 'fanaticism
about race' neglected altogether the likely tolerance of the English
people and thus belied his own professed Englishness. Others say
he used the race issue cynically to get at Ted Heath, who properly
responded by ending his career (e.g. McDNL 10 ii '98).
But the simple truth is that Enoch's 1968 warning of race rioting
in Britain was actually heeded: immigration was restricted
by politicians of both left and right, and racial harmony has
so far been maintained (with the help of the said English tolerance,
pretty full employment and the concentration of Black unemployment
in the ghettos of south-east London and Handsworth, Birmingham).
By and large, Heffer sympathizes with that view while providing
a very full chronology of a life that was lived very largely in
the public eye. Heffer plays up Powell's broadcasting -- he was
a great favourite on the BBC's 'Any Questions' programme; and
plays down the fact that the famed 'John the Baptist' to monetarism
and anti-Euro-ism was only ever in government for fifteen months.
Heffer cannot explain why Powell failed to distinguish between
Afroid and Srindopakeshi migrants; but he does dig up two touching
'homoerotic relationships' from Powell's younger days (cf. McDNL
10 ii '98); and he captures the moment when the moustachioed ex-Professor
of Greek, as Minister of Health, was required by journalists to
bounce around London's Berkeley Square on a pogo stick.
Roger SCRUTON, 1998, On Hunting. Yellow Jersey
Press. Pp. 161. £UK10-00.
Philosopher Roger Scruton was bought out of British academic life
after the Maggon fell. So he purchased the late Enoch Powell's
old hunting jacket and got going in pursuit of the uneatable.
In 1998, Roger chalked up his first big political success -- for
100,000 countrymen converged on London and persuaded Mr Blair
to leave their favourite sport alone for the time being. Enoch's
jacket (after initially splitting) may now be proving a better
fit; and the romance of fox-hunting (for the hunters really admire
the fox….) must take Roger's mind off the fate of the Conservative
Party -- which has still to decide whether to become an English
Nationalist Party or a Contract Party that will offer pot, polygamy
and a reasonable amount of paedophilia.
Helen LANGDON, 1998, Caravaggio. Chatto, £UK25-00.
Top-rated by the Sunday Times Arts Pages, this study of
the exquisite painter and murderer concludes that it is wrong
to label him as homosexual -- he would do it with anything, and
often did (see also above).
McDNL readers wishing to reach for higher goals than Nature
has so far intended will find encouragement in Anthony O'Hear's
Beyond Evolution (Oxford University Press,
pp. 214, £19-99, ISBN: 0 19 824254 9). Further advice can
be found along The Fourth Way.
FICTION
Tim BINDING presents in his Island Madness (Picador, £UK16-99) a gripping picture of what life would have been like in Britain if Hitler had won in 1945. In particular, the normal rules of sexual engagement are suspended in an occupied Guernsey, allowing considerable fraternization of strapping Aryans with the island's flirtatious fillies.
The latest comic issue from Martin AMIS, Heavy Water and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, £UK14-99), features the usual money men, lowlife, compulsive masturbators and ambitious writers -- with the special addition of a 'straight pride' movement championing heterosexuality in a largely gay West of the future. {Amusingly, as the son's writing becomes increasingly like his famous father's, the boy himself denies that there is any heritable component to gifts for writing popular fiction.}
Ian McEWAN, 1998, Enduring Love (Vintage, £UK5-99). To break your heart -- if it will break again -- a story of crazed infatuation and the disintegration of love, sob.
DECEMBER 15
THIS WEEK: AUTHORITARIALUNACY: Human hierarchies can't all be blamed on WASPS; nor can the left and its friends be relied upon to oppose arbitrary power. SPECIAL: Eugenics Think-piece.
-- WHITE MAN TRIES TO 'EXPLAIN' HOW
BLACKS ENSLAVED BLACKS [THEY DIDN'T REALLY MEAN TO….]
-- TOP BLACK PROF REJECTS WHITE THESIS BUT GETS OWN KNICKERS
IN A TWIST
-- UK 'THIRD WAY' NEO-SOCIALISTS TO LOCK UP UNCONVICTED 'DEVIANTS'
ALONG WITH PAEDOPHILES AND PERFECTIONISTS; BUT PRE-16 PREGNANCIES
AND CANNIBALISM ARE JUST FINE….
-- BLACK AFRICANS SEEK WHITE POLICE STATE TECHNOLOGY TO COUNTER
BLACK CRIME
(New York Review of Books 17 xii '98, pp. 64-72, 'Africa: the Hidden History', Kenneth Appiah, reviewing John Reader, 1998, Africa: A Biography of a Continent, New York, Knopf, $US35-00.)
Blacks were always accidentally violent and massively backward in civilization as a health measure. They thought up slavery as a way of passing the time and showing who was Mister Big -- but they let Europeans have most of the profits.
Who, today, can enunciate such a message and have their book reviewed in the NYRB?
Obviously, it has to be a thorough-going apologist for Black African ways. And the book must still be adjudicated by a Black man -- indeed, by the world's top Black intellectual, the Harvard Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy. Naturally, Kenneth Appiah is allowed an 8-page spread in NYRB to handle the latest White excuse for African failure of mental development. [Only pinko philosopher Ronald Dworkin gets as much space in NYRB -- when called upon to defend affirmative racism so as to try to swing the Washington State referendum against Initiative 200 (McDNL 27 x '98).]
John Reader's book?
Well, Reader's idea is that Africa has a lot of diseases. Lucky were the Whiteys who got out! The poor Blacks who had pushed out their brothers were left to fight the plagues. There was only one way to do this. You had to live pretty far away from each other and hope you didn't catch what the other people had got. Cities were a no-no. Mistrust of other people was a pretty good idea -- systematized in witchcraft and tireless paranoia about neighbours. So the world's first great recorded massacre occurred around 1,200B.C. in Aswan -- where pointed instruments were used to smash the numerous skulls found. Reader's argument is that Africans were really peaceniks; but they got very upset when they met each other and naturally went over the top.
You can believe that?
Well, Kenneth Appiah has a problem too. He grew up in Ghana hearing vague but exciting tales of how Ghana and Kongo [sic] and Niger (around 500B.C.) had been organized in proper empires with kings and had organized slaughter of a systematic kind. Appiah does not find Reader's story of "a continent of peaceniks" appealing. Whether the violence of Africans in 12th century BC Sudan or 19th century AD Zululand is the issue, Appiah would rather not attempt to trace it to health-consciousness or the camaraderie of an isolated clump of mud huts.
Alas for Kenneth, refusing the White pinko's hand of friendship soon finds him left up shit creek without the proverbial paddle. Reader's full thesis is that Africans did not organize slavery deliberately. It was just one of those sociological things. It was "endemic": if you had no farms and granaries and towns, you were prevented from growing rich. So, "in circumstances where the opportunities for converting agricultural surpluses into material wealth are limited, control over people was an alternative option."
Understandably, Kenneth does not fancy this image of African passivity. He keeps on remembering the Zulus' King Chakra who would order hundreds of his slaves to be killed just for fun -- suggesting that slaves were far from being the valued domestic servants that they were to become for the English-speaking peoples in the West Indies and the USA.
Sadly for Kenneth, however, his belief in African civilization (the article comes equipped with the much-used visual aid of The Great Wall of Zimbabwe, showing that the fifteenth-century African Shona tribe -- or perhaps Arabs -- could put one brick on top of another) will leave his readers mystified. Why was slavery allowed to continue by Africa's noble kings? Whereas British sensititivities had dictated the abolition of slave-trading within three centuries of Britain becoming involved in organizing the business, not a single African country showed such development of nicety. Black slave trading pre-dated the arrival of Whites by centuries, probably by millennia; by the sixteenth century, Black-on-Black slaving was already big business across the Bight of Benin; and Black countries continued to bleat to America, Britain and France even in the twentieth century about the losses they had suffered due to the abolition of the slave trade. Citing such authorities as historian P. Manning, Reader calculates that, even through the high years of the Atlantic slave trade (1700-1850), of the 21 million Blacks who were enslaved in Africa (overwhelmingly by Africans themselves) only 9 million arrived in America. Almost as many, 7 million, stayed enslaved in Africa itself; and 5 million died early in the course of their captivity in Africa or on the boats (though the Atlantic journey kille a higher percentage of sailors than of slaves).
What were Kenneth Appiah's wondrous kings and their organized regiments of minions doing to raise the tone in all this? Precisely nothing! Appiah is surely right to doubt the "continent of peaceniks" theory; but he has forgotten the exculpation of Black Africans that John Reader had been attempting. Whereas Readers' Black Africans have the excuse of having declined town-based civilization out of health consciousness, Appiah's Black Africans are irredeemable -- even letting the Portuguese run off with most of the profits of their own wonderfully wall-building empires. One can only hope that Prof. Appiah is more demanding of coherence in the essays of his students at Harvard.
A new surge of White guilt involves a crop of no less than five books on the slave trade that rescued millions of Black people from Black Africa at only a disproportionate cost to the lives of White sailors, the occasional frisson in modern New York penthouses, and a boost to the Political Correctness movement that would otherwise have had to rely on blatant feminazism. However, according to Edmund S. Morgan, emeritus professor, Yale University, at least one or two of the new tomes include admissions that enslavement by Anglo-Saxo-Americans was not as bad as liberals made out -- or as slave owners wanted. And the BBC has been running a charming story of a Black slave who was sold from Black to Black but whose intelligence, loyalty and profits from selling alcohol soon earned him co-command of White ships that helped run the slave-and-gin trades of the eighteenth century.
{Ports on the Ghanaian coast currently do a roaring tourist trade showing Black Americans the quaint white-walled fortresses where their ancestors were kept before the final realization of their genetic good fortune in being sent to America. It is readily admitted to tourists that slaves were sold or donated to the British traders by African chiefs.}
South African researchers have discovered the world's first near-complete skull and skeleton of an ape-'man' estimated to be as old as 3.6 million years. After a couple of toe bones had come to light, lengthy searching 'for a needle in a haystack' discovered the four-foot-tall fossil in the side of a limeshaft at Sterkfontein, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. For the present, most of the remains of "Sterky" are embedded in rock. "The new find at Sterkfontein is, therefore, the oldest hominid skeleton yet discovered anywhere in the world," said palaeontologist Tim Partridge. The oldest previous hominid skeleton was 3.2 million year-old "Lucy," found in Ethiopia. Older specimens recovered from East Africa yielded only fragments of the whole frame. Partridge, together with the Geomagnetism Laboratory of the University of Liverpool, assessed the age of the fossil. Researchers believe that "Sterky" would have been more sophisticated than "Lucy"; but he still had a brain that was only the size of a cup of coffee -- a third of the size of the modern human brain.
The UK's advisory bodies on genetic engineering, the Human Fertility
and Embryology Authority [Chairman: Ruth Deech, Principal of St
Anne's College, Oxford] and the Human Genetic Advisory Commission
want human cloning banned from Britain's sceptr'd isle. Having
been consulted by the Department of Health, the government-appointed
teams have now published a verdict that is meant to last for ten
years -- perhaps forgetting the current pace of scientific research.
(In Japan, cloned cows have been produced while losing only 20%
of experimental embryos; and there are rumours in science circles
that a woman may already be pregnant carrying a clone [BBC
World Service 11 xii '98, 01:00].)
Bowing to medical pressures
to help Alzheimer and Parkinson's sufferers, the HFEA/HGAC will
graciously permit egg-sharing* and the cloning of human embryos
at around ten days old. (A cell is taken