This newsletter for the science and politics of differential psychology appears on Tuesdays. See its Archives and related articles on psychology, heredity, individual liberty and William McDougall FRS. Only the McDNL gives the up-to-date answers of genes-realistic psychology to the tired social-environmentalism of egalitarian ideologues. Only the McDNL challenges the media's worship of: (London) Profs Susan Greenfield, Germaine Greer, Steve Jones and Steven Rose; and (New York) Profs Ronald Dworkin, Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin. Only the McDNL has backed Nobelist Daniel Carlton Gajdusek, multivariate psychologist Raymond Cattell, and philosopher Arthur Koestler as their names have given offence to today's neosocialists and kindred illiberal hysterics.
JANUARY 5
THIS WEEK:
FEMILUNACY: Koestler girlfriend defends her love
NATIVISM: Grammar learning is innate, claims new US research
NEO-SOCIALISM: Virtual pillory arranged for US ex-offenders
NEW YEAR PICK-U-UP: British Bust of the Year revealed
STUDENTS: Get published now -- in a refereed journal!
INTELLIGENCE: The g factor IS 'mental speed'
PSYCHOANALYSIS: Applauded by Science
but
denounced by Babe Bagger
of 1998
NEWS FLASH -- Edinburgh, Causewayside, 3 i 1999, 16:00
CHRIS BRAND encounters
JOHN & FEMINAZIE-GRUPPENFÜHRERIN HALLA BELOFF
as they take a Sunday afternoon constitutional.
CB to
JB: "I trust you'll be doing more for Arthur Koestler
in the new year
than you have done so far."
JB to CB: "I will, I will."
CB to JB: "Good!"
British intellectuals have a problem for 1999. They must decide whether to condemn Edinburgh University's
In their deliberations, members of the vanguard elite should recall that Koestler's 'serial rapism' [or whatever his criminality might have been if properly reported and tried and proved at the time] was but a tiny part of his left-wing lifestyle. [Koestler's previous biographer, Ian Hamilton, records that, in 1952, after his second wife had left him, Koestler linked up one night with Jill Craigie (Michael Foot's wife) when he had decided to become an Englishman. Hamilton writes (Koestler, London, Secker & Warburg, 1982): "….to celebrate, they had a memorable pub-crawl together in Hampstead."] Koestler's analyses inspired millions of people -- whether against communism, against behaviourism, or against conservatism.
Koestler's girlfriend, Mamaine [a beautiful and civilized girl, one of the top debutantes of her year, who had surrendered to him the first evening they met, and who stayed on friendly terms with him even after the pair's eventual parting], wrote as follows from their home in Wales, in the dire winter of February, 1947. {A few weeks before, the Koestlers' friend Bertrand Russell had made a pass at her, leading Koestler to explain to her that the only men who didn't fancy her were homosexual. This was far from being the only pass from friends of which Mamaine would complain. Britain may have been on rations and under three months of snow, but life among its left-wing intellectuals continued.}
"K is sweeter than ever, he never gets cross, though he has lost weeks of work through the cold: he's really wonderful, and thinks all the time about whether I'm getting tired or cold or bored, and tries to remedy it by making me stay in bed and sacrificing all available stoves, or thinking up some treat or cooking the dinner or whatever it is. No matter how hard he's working, he always stops if I want him to start the car or bring in a sack of potatoes or mend the electric kettle in a hurry. I now see that his constant niceness creates an atmosphere of mutual affection and helpfulness which is what makes us both happy."
Nor could anyone who knew Arthur Koestler doubt that an evening's drinking might have a violent ending -- though not usually with a woman as the target. Koestler's wife wrote from Paris in October, 1947:
"…Later in the evening, when all had drunk quite a bit and the Kaplans had left, Sartre started attacking Kappy in violent terms. He accused Kappy of being anti-semitic and anti-negro and anti-liberty. Of course we knew he wasn't any of these things, and K got so cross that he let fly at Sartre and said who are you to talk about liberty, when for years you've run a magazine which was communisant, and thus condoned the deportation of millions of people from the Baltic states and so on? Sartre was a bit taken aback by this, and as the atmosphere had anyway become intolerable we left."
During her six-year affair and marriage with Koestler, Mamaine records that Koestler struck on several occasions. However, he also fought with several policemen, an airways official, his friend the Nobelist-to-be Albert Camus (giving him a black eye), and the head of the Israeli Air Force. The intrepidity of the diminutive* Koestler came in handy one evening at a dinner party when a savage fight broke out between two Alsatian dogs which Koestler managed to stop (at some cost to himself in cuts and bruises). Although Koestler had an irritable, domineering and hypomanic personality, he was equally an affectionate, loyal, amusing and inspiring companion who took especial trouble when Mamaine was poorly. In 1950, Mamaine recorded the analysis of Koestler by a renowned graphologist:
"Gusti Oesterreicher came yesterday, and today I gave her Arthur's and my handwriting to look at. She took one look at K's and said as much as I have found out about him in six years. About K, that he used to be rather materialistic but is now becoming more religious, though not belonging to any denomination; that he will go on getting more so, and this is der richtige Weg for him. That he's terrible sensitive to weather and climate, especially to snow, Vorshneewetter, foehn, etc. She said that K will write lots more good books. He is gutmütig [good-natured], warm-hearted, anständig [decent], treu [faithful], aufrichtig aber verschlossen [sincere though reserved]; though not at all cowardly, he has a certain Angst vor dem Leben und vor gewissen Leuten [fear of life and of particular people]. Said, he's very difficult but very worthwhile; has a rather [feminine (not effeminate)] handwriting, like all artists, because very sensitive."
Two months later, just before her marriage [after which things went downhill to separation in 1951 and her own death from longstanding bronchial asthma in 1954] Mamaine wrote to her twin:
"….I am awfully happy with K simply because I do love him so much, not a day goes by without my thinking what happiness it is for me to be with him. . . . Whatever happens to me from now -- and I have no reason to suppose that anything awful will -- I shall consider my life has been well spent since I have spent six years of it with K."
(Episodes reported in Celia Goodman's Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945-51, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985. -- Celia Goodman, née Paget, was the identical twin of Mamaine and sometimes urged less deference to Koestler's ways. But Mamaine agreed with Koestler that his books came first and were their 'children.' "It seems to me a waste of time to sit at a bar drinking and talking to boring people," she wrote to Celia; "but I quite see that K, who sits all day in his tiny room, occasionally feels like an outing, especially as he likes drinking.")
* Of his height, Koestler himself recalled from his schooldays in Budapest and Vienna ('Portrait of the author at sixteen', 1952): "I was the shortest boy but one in the class, and that one happened to be a dwarf. . . I refused to go to dancing classes for fear that I would be forced to dance with taller partners. . . The examples of Napoleon, Beethoven and other undersized great men comforted me, but not much. Nor did they serve as a warning against the short man's traditional vanity, aggressiveness and lust for power. . ."
America owes Koestler as much of a debt as does Britain. In the early Cold War years -- when hot war was feared likely at any moment (not least by Koestler and Bertrand Russell) -- Koestler was the main figure trying to bring European intellectuals over to NATO's side. In particular, Koestler worked hard to make a success of the Berlin Congress of 1949.
In 1951, the Koestlers met Senator McCarthy socially. Mamaine described him as "a hairy-pawed thug of about 40-46 who has, it seems, made a few rather good speeches and shown up several people who would otherwise have remained unnoticed, and most of whom still go on working in important posts anyway." Koestler, himself, was not unappreciative of Republicans: he told Mamaine he was 'allergic to American liberals' [Democrats] and that it took him longer to get bored by Republicans 'because I don't know in advance every single thing they're going to say.' What upset both the Koestlers was the Republican unwillingness to commit troops to avert the Russian threat to Western Europe. Also Republicans were more often dry [anti-drink].
The Koestlers' friends of those days included, as well as Russell [until Koestler took up with Russell's wife], Richard Crossman [later, under one of Harold Wilson's Labour governments, Leader of the House of Commons, 1966-69], George & Sonja Orwell, Raymond Aron [Mamaine: "the only French intellectual I know who is really intelligent and clear-headed without being at all mad"], Erich Maria Remarque [author of All Quiet on the Western Front], Thornton Wilder, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. [Harvard historian and later adviser to JFK], and the gloriously named Agnes Knickerbocker (for a while the wife of the US journalist of that name). Other political buddies of Koestler included David Astor, Victor Gollancz, Sidney Hook, Aldous Huxley and Melvin Lasky. His warm admirers included Herbert Butterfield, Friedrich Hayek, Alister Hardy, Konrad Lorenz, C. P. Snow and Stephen Toulmin. Close friends of Koestler in later years were the Hungarian-born writer, George Mikes, editor Harold Harris and parapsychology enthusiast Brian Inglis.
Koestler's third long-running sexual relationship, from c. 1951 till 1983, with Cynthia Koestler [as she became in 1965] was a devoted affair of love and mutual dependency that ended with a suicide pact when Koestler had leukemia. But Koestler remained, by British standards, something of a 'womaniser.' George Mikes explains (1983, Arthur Koestler: The Story of A Friendship, London, Andre Deutsch): "Arthur most certainly was no saint. He had many faults, some grave ones. He could be incredibly selfish. ….He was quarrelsome, he could be rude, he was obstinate and occasionally obsessive. ….I say this to be able to declare more convincingly that I find the charge of 'womanising' downright ridiculous. It is simply the result of different outlooks in different lands. ….In Hungary, and everywhere in Central Europ[e, you would say [such a man] 'is quite a Don Juan'…. In the past twenty years Britain has become a copulating country, but not an erotic country. The British do not chase women. Perhaps they have no choice: perhaps women say yes in a matter-of-fact and unromantic way before the chase begins. Or else they make it clear that there is nothing doing and the Brit accepts the decision and turns his attention to other targets. Perhaps a growing number of men are chasing other men. ….But Arthur (and I) were brought up in a very different moral climate and it would never have occurred to him that having affairs was something reprehensible. I knew of many of his affairs although he never spoke of them. Sometimes it was the ladies who boasted of their conquest, and often it was gossip, confirmed by observation."
How important was Koestler? In 1954, Emmanuel Litvinoff wrote in The Spectator, "The intellectual leadership of the ideological war against Communism comes from a gifted group of European ex-Communists such as Malraux, Sperber, Koestler, Silone and Weissberg." Koestler -- who had himself spent a hundred days of his life awaiting execution at any moment -- was a leading light in the British campaign to end capital punishment (especially for the mentally defective and women) and was made an honorary member of the Observer newspaper. Reviewing his book Reflections on Hanging in The Spectator, Ian Gilmour wrote: "his moral fervour combined with his usual literary grace and distinction may conceivably penetrate the cocoon of complacency which protects many retentionists from the realities of the case."
New evidence of innate infant capacities to search for grammatical structure has been submitted the top journal Science. Forty years after Chomsky's analyses of human language sounded the death knell for behaviourism, researchers at New York University find that seven-month old infants are more attentive to sounds structured in ways that they have not heard previously. Normally, intelligent infants attend especially to novelty. After hearing sounds in a particular order, say AAB (ga ti ga was one pattern used), they were more interested in quite new sound pairs have a different sequence ABB (e.g. wo fe fe). The experiments by Gary Marcus and co-workers involved sixteen infants and break new ground in demonstrating previously unrecognized 'prepared' infant capacities of the kind long doubted by behaviourists.
//////
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- State police on Tuesday launched
a Web site with the names, photos, and addresses of convicted
violent sex offenders in Virginia. ….Anyone checking the
site can do a search based on name, street address, zip code,
city or county. The site, at http://www.vsp.state.va.us/ , will
be updated every business day.
Since 1994, Virginia has required
convicted sex offenders to register with the state after they
complete their sentences. Before July, only schools, day care
providers and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts
had access to the registry.
Kent Willis, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said the Web site
is an invasion of privacy against people who have already paid
their debt to society. Moreover, he said the site would encourage
vigilante justice. ``The state, by virtue of creating this
program, is essentially promoting action against these individuals.
This is a scarlet letter.* The state is implying that citizens
ought to do something about it,'' Willis said….
\\\\\\
* In The Scarlet Letter, the most famous novel of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) (b. Salem, Massachusetts), American adulteresses were required to wear the letter 'A' as a punishment for their sin and as a warning to others.
PS (Scotsman 31 xii '98) The Virginia website was jammed within hours of its being opened to the public. Exposing sex offenders [many of them rapists or wife- or husband-beaters] in this way is practised in several US states but has been declared illegal in Tennessee. So far, in a merciful gesture, the names of discharged non-violent sex offenders [such as paedophiles] remain available in Virginia only to relevant authorities (head teachers, youth club leaders etc.).
A Black/marginal student of psychology, Joe Blackwood, 29, has written to the Guinness Book of Records to nominate himself as the world's most handsome man. Supposedly encouraged by British friends to make his claim, the wide-eyed, rubbery-lipped, huge-conked oaf was previously an amateur boxer and a garage mechanic, but has now been studying for a psychology degree for 18 months. "I am the most handsome man in the world," he wrote.
As anticipated in the McDougall NewsLetter
(29 xii '98), the blood bath in British New Labour has
continued in 1999 with the resignation of Chancellor 'Grumpy'
Gordon's chief spinmeister [Personal Press Officer], one Charlie
Whelan. (Informal press 'briefings' from Brown's camp, at the
Red Lion pub, Whitehall, are suggested by some to have led to
the downfall of Trade Secretary and Third Way architect, 'Wendy'
Mandelbrot. But it is equally likely that Grumpy or his brother
did the leaking and that Whelan's is just the head on a platter
demanded by the Reverend Blair in recompense. Whelan, once a Communist
Party member, is now supposed to microwave his own brains with
his mobile phone; but is said to be hanging on around Whitehall
waiting for a new job to turn up. Employers say he should on no
account re-insert the gold-and-diamond ear stud which Grumpy persuaded
him to remove; and that he should try to reduce his usage of his
favourite word, 'Bollocks') The future for the Third Way
is now held to require an early marriage in Westminster Abbey
by Grumpy, 46, to his long-standing yet astonishingly patient
PR girlfriend, Sarah Macauley, 35. (Sarah once read Psychology
at Bristol University and then learned all about the Falklands
Exercise in intimate detail from a member of the 1st
Parachute Regiment.)
President Clinton's alleged liaisons with an under-age
Black girl, which may have culminated in the birth of a son
when Clinton was 34 and Bobbie Ann Williams 24 (McDNL 24
xi '98, Babe Bagger?), is being investigated by a US supermarket
tabloid newspaper, The Star. Apparently, a DNA sample from
the youth, Danny, when matched to the Presidential semen stain
on Monica Lewinsky's famous dress, could identify the President
as the youth's father with 95% certainty -- or could rule him
out altogether. {Danny certainly resembles the Reverend
Wm Jefferson Clintstone (Scotsman 5 i '99); and his cheery
appearance equips him well to begin the second mulatto line originating
partly from Presidential loins.} President Clinton is also facing
fresh claims that he raped a 35-year-old businesswoman, Juanita
Broaddick: this lady had 'bruised lips' after the President had
visited her in a hotel room. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is rumoured
to be advancing family interests by arranging that she will join
the US Supreme Court.
Red China has learned the advantage of sex scandals
so as to take out opponents at a virtually moment of one's choice
(unless, like US Republicans, one first spends six years alerting
the intended victim and his friends, and boring his enemies).
According to the Vatican's Missionary News Agency, Communist China
now runs "priests' brothels" (Scotsman
5 i '99). Members of the 'underground' [i.e. the real] Catholic
Church are first arrested for bicycling without regulation clips.
Subsequently, while in their underwear, they are are visited in
cosy police cells by ladies of night who lure them into photo-opportunities
that wreck the priests' carefully established relationships with
members of the R. C. Ladies Flower Guild.
News of Edinburgh LUniversity dishonouring Arthur
Koestler's memory (McDNL 29 xii '98) was carried on
BBC Radio 4 UK (30 xii '98, 'Today', 06:30ff.). A feminazie
who wanted philosopher Koestler disinterred and ceremonially hung,
drawn and quartered was opposed by the BBC's resident 'right-wing'
intellectual, Dr David Starkey.
Another dishonoured university is Keele (Staffordshire).
This quasi-intellectual holiday camp has sold off its Turner collection
of early books on mathematics -- entrusted to it by executors.
The sale has provoked correspondence to the Daily Telegraph
(24 xii '98) from James Joll, the Chairman of the Museums and
Galleries Commission, saying that something will have to be done
to oblige British universities to honour their promises
to executors. {Edinburgh LUniversity,
too, has a nasty habit of selling off unique collections whenever
it is strapped for cash -- recently, precious pictures of French
birds (sic).}
At the disgraced University of Melbourne (where
a professor just noticed that Japanese girls are short-sighted
[McDNL 15 xii '98, YELLOW SHEILAS BLIND AS BATS, SAY AUSSIES]
and where the Chair of Gifted Education was denied to Chris Brand),
the Department of Computing is so hard up that it issued the same
Honours examination paper two years running (Times Higher
11 xii '98). {Perhaps the idea was to prevent examinees complaining
'If only they had set the questions they set last year!….'}
Redundant Melbourne academics will have time to enjoy the 300
Asian sex slaves just discovered by the Australian government
in Sydney (BBCR4UK 5 i '99, 09:00)….
In Cambodia, a cheerful Mr Nuon Chea was said
to have "apologized" for genocide in the 1970's (Times
30 xii '98). Speaking for other Khmer Rouge Marxists too, he declared
{apparently seeking the animal rights vote}: "Naturally we
are sorry -- not only for the lives of people, but also for the
lives of the animals. They all died because we wanted to win the
war."
Black-run South Africa is showing no inclination
to pay the bill to provide the anti-AIDS drug, AZT, for its millions
of AIDS victims (Nature 17 xii '98). Instead, it is preparing
to join the war now brewing all over west and south-central
Africa. This week, 10,000 people have fled their homes in
Sierra Leone as Black-on-Black bloodshed has escalated.
Germany's main opposition party, the Christian Democratic
Union, is campaigning in favour of the German citizenship law
of 1913 with makes being a German a largely genetic matter. The
alternative to this race realism is that Germany will have
to grant citizenship to some four million of the immigrants which
it has sucked in during its years of post-1955 prosperity.
The highest New Year Honours List award in
Britain this year to an academic was the Order of Knight Bachelor.
It was made to Oxford University's Emeritus Professor Michael
Dummett, said the citation, "for services to philosophy and
racial justice" (Scotsman 31 xii '98).
Lord David Owen, who resigned
from Labour (together with Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill
Rodgers) and handed Britain of the 1980's to Margaret Thatcher,
has come out against Britain signing up for the new single currency
of Euroland, 'the Euro.' In Europe itself, the arrival of the
Eurodollar has been greeted with a surge of interest in such typically
British food as tea, marmalade, muffins, fried soda bread,
stir-fried baked beans, fried tomatoes, bangers, bubble-and-squeak,
and bacon (Times 31 xii '98). {Continentals
have apparently now learned Evelyn Waugh's advice that the way
to enjoy British food all day long is to stick throughout to breakfast
dishes. -- Other traditional British food is oven-cooked and
depends on a woman knowing her oven.}
Police in Dover have warned newspapers to stop printing
racially inflammatory stories about 103 Rumanian immigrants
and 3 local brothels (Independent 17 xii '98). {At
least British police still believe in race even if social anthropologists
have abandoned the concept….}
Two British weenies, both blonde, sisters
of each other, are expecting out-of-wedlock babies on the same
day (Independent 17 xii '98, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown).
A former Royal Navy officer has been given a new
prison sentence for 'stalking.' Supposedly Anthony Barstow,
39, caused 'mental stress' to a 30-year-old woman by sending her
birthday cards, visiting her home and telephoning. Once upon a
time, the officer had stolen some of his girlfriend's underwear;
but the Independent (5 i '98) felt no obligation to provide
any detail of how the man had come by his latest prison sentence
The four most popular babies' names for boys
born in Britain during 1998 were Jack, Thomas, James and Daniel.
For girls, Chloe, Emily, Jessica and Sophie were the top choices
(CFMR 4 i 99). The four most popular girls' names in UK
newspaper headlines were Camilla, Monica, Ffiona [who has ffun
ff****ing a Conservative leader, William Hague] and Kate [as with
the surnames Moss, Winslett and Bush].{The selections Thomas and
Emily were also made by McDNL (29 xii '98, New Year Names).}
At the world's biggest Hogmanay
Party, for 200,000 revellers in Edinburgh, the firework display
this year, 'Birds of Fire', was provided by Christophe Berchonneau
and his 'Group F.' Brandonneau, whose g [and not so much
of the 'group'] factor had previously provided the climax of the
Olympics and the World Cup, was "once dubbed a slightly
barmy metaphysician of the firework" (Scotsman
31 xii '98).
In a parting message to the Queen (via friends 'Chazza' and Mrs Camille Parker Knoll), spinmeister 'Wendy' Mandelson has forbidden Her Majesty to attend the 500,000-strong 'Millennium' celebration in Edinburgh on January 1st, 2000. Instead, the Queen will have to appear at Wendy's DopeyDome ['The Blister' -- how it looks from a distance] in London which can hold only 10,000 of Her Majesty's subjects and a display of elephant dung. {Whether Her Majesty will now be allowed to attend the Real Millennium -- Jan. 1st, 2001 -- in Edinburgh remains to be seen.}
The BBC 'Today' programme's competition for "British
Personality of the Millennium" produced the following
numbers of phone-in votes: Shakespeare 11,717; Churchill 10,957;
William Caxton [who learnt the art of printing in Cologne and
brought it to England] 7,109. Darwin {who never had much 'personality'
in his own lifetime….} came fourth with 6,337, while Isaac
Newton (4,664) and Oliver Cromwell (4,653) were almost equal in
last place. McDNL's candidate, Henry VIII, had done well
but been eliminated as the contest became one for 'the most important
Brit' (or, possibly, for some voters, 'a Brit you have heard of')
rather than for 'the Brit who had most influence on Britain.'
The woman to receive the most votes was Queen Elizabeth I, who
came 11th.
At Times Higher, a
survey of academic opinion as to who are the most "powerful"
academics in Britain included Stephen Hawking (No. 1) and
McDNL stars Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins and Antony Giddens
in the top ten.
British Bust of the Year
-- most in out'n'out demand by New Year male revellers asked to
choose a party playmate -- was that of Denise van Outem ooops
Outen, the blonde presenter of a popular TV programme called 'The
Big Breakfast'. Denise has what it takes for the purpose of this
show and received the first-preference votes of no less than 30%
of the 1,200 British males polled by MORI (Daily Mail 30
xii '98).
VIOLENT patients who abuse doctors, receptionists and others in the waiting room are to be given their own surgery inside a police station. Doctors using the surgery at Bitterne police station in Southampton, Hampshire, will have security cameras and panic buttons to help them cope with aggressive patients who may have been barred from other practices. Work starts this month on building the surgery. ….Superintendent Chris Lee, of Hampshire Police, said it was hoped that the fact that a patient had to attend a police station to see a doctor would be enough to prevent problems. He said: "It is a sad reflection on the society we live in that something like this is needed."
Located in New Orleans, Louisiana, we are a group of four women, ranging in age from 23 - 32, from petite to tall, asian to blond. Ideal Person -- We require a submissive Houseboy to pamper us, perform the mundane chores, and to be used as we see fit. Sex is certainly a part of this, but Only a part. You're just as likely to be commanded to rub our feet or cook our dinner as to have sex. Contact: Orleans Krewe, Email: gang_o_four@yahoo.com. 18:33:23 , 24-12-98 , New Orleans , USA
McDNL readers troubled with remorse at the amount of alcohol consumed over the strangely timed and remarkably prolonged 'festive season' should recall that all Scotland's famous writers were renowned for their consumption of claret. In the writing of James Boswell, there are more references to 'claret' than to 'Doctor Johnson.' With his own brother confined in Newcastle as a lunatic, and with his own proneness to guilt-ridden depression, 'Bozzy' needed all the claret he could swig, leading to more sex, more bastard children, more guilt, more drink and more of his splendid writing. Bozzy even managed his prodigious output of frank and engaging stories of bonnie lasses without much encouragement from The Great Pedagogue. Said Johnson once, watching a moth burn in a flame, "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was Boswell." Rather than counsel despair to those who, over Christmas, learned the delights of all-day drinking, McDNL would merely remind readers of the advice in Iris Murdoch's novels -- that all-day-drinking is best if the drinker sticks to champagne (though perhaps moving on to whisky and a little soda after dinner).
'Early to bed, early to rise,'
goes the adage, 'makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.'
Fortunately, modern research
shows it can be dumped. Morning-bird 'larks' differ from night-bird
'owls' only in having less available cash, fewer mistresses
and fewer cars.
Sceptical McDNL readers
will naturally ask for serious evidence of cause and effect in
this long-awaited breakthrough. Well, the researchers found no
differences between larks and owls in measures of health and wisdom.
So, in 1999, even the the idea that larks may somehow be en
route to becoming successful owls becomes a last and probably
vain hope for self-flagellators.
A NEW anti-impotence pill that works in 30 minutes (half the time of its rival, Viagra) is to be launched in Britain. Vasomax, a triangular, white tablet, does not cause the visual disturbances reported by some Viagra users and is safe for men who take nitrates for heart conditions, according to its manufacturer, Schering-Plough. Paul Quartey, the medical director of the firm's British operation, said: "In Mexico it is doing very well. Men say it improves orgasm and their partners report greater satisfaction." Vasomax, which contains the chemical phentolamine mesylate, is an alpha-blocker that overrides the nerves that prevent erectile tissue becoming engorged with blood.
{The launch of Vasomax will refuel the debate about the availability of impotence drugs from the National Health Service (cf. McDNL 21 vii '98, VIAGRA SET TO UNDERMINE UK SOCIALIZED MEDICINE). When Viagra came on the market in September, the UK Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, said that until guidelines were issued it ought to be prescribed only in exceptional circumstances. Now the British Medical Association describes the situation as "a mess" with some general practitioners prescribing Viagra privately, some on the NHS and others not using it all.}
A long-running sideshow in Yukay is the protest movement of the Ramblers' Association to reclaim most British land as a 'right of way.' Every week, some new claim has to be defended by the Landowners' Association with regard to whether serfs and villeins may cross their land. Though often unused for centuries, paths with associated streams, hedgerows, einfahrts and ausfahrts are rediscovered by urbanite 'walkers' seeking places to bonk, drop rubbish and fan the embers of British class war. Now the landowners have proposed a once-and-for-all solution. They have said they will give a large cash sum over the next ten years to discover as much paedophilia among landowners as possible. After that, harassment of landowners should cease. So far, in response, ramblers have replied that no amount of money could divert them from pursuing paedophile landowners just as far back as they choose. They are certainly unwilling to accept landowners' rights to paedophilia as once settled in the Domesday Book (1085/6). They say they will seek justice until well and truly paid off with a lifetime Government pension for Ramblers' Association officials. The solution to the problem is likely to provide a model for the handling other historic allegations of paedophilia, mass rape, mass sodomy, pillage, enslavement, genocide and cannibalism.
{The Éirish Government is specially eager to buy off retroactive prosecution for Ireland's enslavement in the 6th century of the Welshman who, after making his escape to obtain Papal support, became their patron saint [Saint Patrick].}
NEWS FLASH -- Edinburgh, Middle Meadow Walk, 31 xii 1998, 13:00
Male schoolteacher, to female: "The union has told us to have simply no physical contact with children under any circumstances. Boys of seven or eight can easily gang up on a teacher."
A substantial review of Arthur Jensen's The g* Factor: the Science of Mental Ability contains the following reflection:
Why is the g factor so important? Because it is the foundation which the socialist/communitarian/egalitarian left must destroy so as to remake humans in their preferred image. To do this, the genetic genie must be stuffed back into its bottle at any cost. If the subject were love, or morality, or fairness, and any of these subjects were attacked with the same ferocity that has been expended on attacking intelligence, the media, government, and public debate would come to a halt. For we would have to say: "No-one knows what morality is. Everyone has a different definition of it. So it cannot and does not exist."
For more such spirited matériel (making a much livelier read than the book itself), see http://pweb.netcom.com/~nuenke/jen.htm.
* The real The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications remains de-published by Abominable Wiley.
In academic research, the case for viewing mental speed (especially of 'intake') as intrinsic to general intelligence has remained well supported over the past two years, as follows.
"....it seems that measures related to initial stages of information processing such as inspection time or decision time are more related to initial intelligence than measures involving response processes like movement time, basic unit of information processing parameters, etc. This pattern of relationships seem to be consistent with Brand's theory (Brand, 1984; Brand & Deary, 1982) of intelligence, in the sense that his theory states that the speed of apprehension during the early stages of information processing is the determinant of general intelligence."
Andreu VIGIL-COLET et al. (University of Tarragona), 1997, Personality & Individual Differences 23.
"Two parallel studies (N = 35 & 35, respectively), conducted at different sites (Edinburgh & Aberdeen, Scotland) with independent groups of researchers, examined the associations between IQ, Visual Inspection Time (VIT) and Auditory Inspection Time (AIT). ….IQ-VIT correlations were -.64 and -.51 (both p<.001), and IQ-AIT associations were -.47 and -.71 (p<.01 and p<.001) in the two studies. VIT-AIT associations were .50 and .40 (p<.01 and p<.05). The results suggest that some of the shared IT-IQ variance is not specific to one sensory modality, and may have its basis in some general source of efficiency of early perceptual processing."
I. J. DEARY, D. M. PARKER, L. J. CAMPBELL & Catherine NICOLSON, 1997, to 8th Biennial Meeting of International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Aarhus, Denmark.
"[Our] results do not support a causal role for strategies in the correlation between Inspection Time and psychometric intelligence; {rather,} they are congruent with the notion that strategy reporting in the IT task is a verbal epiphenomenon."
Craig R. SIMPSON & Ian J. DEARY, 1997, Personality and Individual Differences 23.
"Our result suggests that the processing speed advantage of high-IQ subjects is best revealed under optimal attentional conditions. It is suggested that this result supports the speed of processing model of intelligence."
Tim BATES & Con STOUGH, 1997, Personality and Individual Differences 23.
"There is now considerable evidence for a moderate correlation of about -0.5 between inspection time and scores on conventional IQ-type tests....[though there is] disagreement about the extent to which the Wechsler scales capture fluid abilities (Woodcock, 1990, J. Psychoeducational Assessment). The nature of IT is also uncertain. ....recent research does support a speed of processing interpretation (Deary et al., 1998, Intelligence) although there is evidence that, additionally, aspects of attention are involved."
N. R. BURNS, T. NETTELBECK & M. WHITE, 1998, Personality and Individual Differences 24.
Whether a 50-year-old smoker ever attended High School is now the main predictor of whether he or she will manage to quit smoking. From a study of 2,391 long-time smokers in the USA, Dr Linda Wray assembled groups matched for level of familiarity with anti-smoking information/propaganda; yet she still found that, in all such groups, as risk of heart attacks dawned on smokers, it was the better-educated who proved more able to kick the tobacco habit.
"[Arnold Ludwig (The Price of Greatness, Guilford)] has taken as his sample over 1000 men and women whose claim to creative status was the fact that biographies concerning them appeared in the New York Times Book Review between 1960 and 1990. ....Of special interest are two features. One is the mental disorder apparent in different lines of eminence -- high in poets, writers, artists, musical composers and performers and theatricals; low in explorers, the military, natural scientists and holders of public office. This is not unexpected, perhaps, but useful to know. The other point of interest is that when the most creative quarter is compared with the least creative, the more creative showed much more psychopathology."
H. J. EYSENCK, 1996, Personality & Individual Differences 20.
1. BLACK BANANA
A key principle of PC is that designated 'minorities' (including wymmin) have enough in common for PC commissars to maintain the illusion that neosocialism ['tough on crime -- and forget about fatcats'] has something to offer all of them. In 1998, British homosexuals were singularly obliging in this regard. They resisted all temptation to condemn the well-documented persecution of homosexuals in Zimbabwe -- in particular, of the eminent theologian, Methodist minister and ex-President of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana. This restraint was specially remarkable in that the 'gayest' point of 1998 in Britain had been when homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tatchell* had jumped up in the pulpit with the Church of England's Archbishop of Canterbury to demand gay marriage. However, Black people show no inclination to reciprocate. Here's how the club-able Black (well, marginal, but playing his Blackness for all it's worth) Mayor of Atlanta puts it to a fellow Black/marginal professional in Tom Wolfe's new novel, A Man in Full:
"[One 'get-out-the-vote' check on my campaign desk] was from some 'gay rights' organization. All I had to do was sign off on this letter saying that I would come out in favor of same-sex marriages, survivor's rights for same-sex couples, gay-sex education starting in elementary school, criminal sanctions against anti-gay bigotry. I can't even remember it all, and I could have the check, which was for $US20,000. I disdained it, on the merits, and had my secretary send it right back. First, it was absolute rubbish, and second, my core constituency, our brothers and sisters, couldn't care less about making life easier for homosexuals, black or white. And when these gay-rights groups, who are all white boys, of course, start trying to compare their 'struggle' -- it's always 'struggle' -- with our folks' -- I mean, they're comparing a lot of white boys hugging and kissing each other with a people rising from slavery -- it makes the smoke start coming out of your ears."
* Subsequently, Tatchell was only nominally
fined for this sensational publicity stunt.
At
Christmas, a popular present in Britain this year was a PETER
TATCHELL HORROR FACE MASK: wearers can torture priests, teachers
and university lecturers by wearing the mask at meetings and making
victims believe they will at any minute be 'outed.'
{Only jokin'! -- Ed.}
2. BRITISH RAJ HISTORIAN (An Oxford product [Merton College], but now based in St Andrews, Fife)
"[Today,] late-twentieth century political correctness has been added to post-colonial guilt syndromes and the residual Marxism which still lurks on many university campuses, with the result that hardly any British, Indian or American historians have a good word to say about the Raj, or, for that matter, any other type of colonial government. ….[However,] the balance is slowly being adjusted, not least because the recent history of so many of Europe's colonies has been a saga of a decline into tyranny, chaos and internecine war from which they seem unable to rescue themselves."
Lawrence JAMES, 1997, Raj: the Making and Unmaking of British India. London : Little, Brown & Company.
3. A VISUAL AID
A splendid visual representation of the eros and thanatos of the human savage is provided in a sixteenth-century watercolour that is reproduced in Nature for 17 xii 1998. The colourfully tattooed naked sub-tropical man there portrayed has devils' faces painted on his knees and navel; he has pointy ears, a handlebar moustache and a considerable Doctor Johnson; and he carries a kukri knife, a shield and the severed head of a White man. Never was it more true that a picture is worth a thousand words!
CHRIS BRAND WRITES:
In 1998, as well as publishing critiques of feminazies, educationalists and conservatives, I tried to set out a positive way forward -- away from egalitarian and similitarian moralism, and towards reality-respecting freedom, choice and responsibility. In particular, I advocated contractualism and the proper reply to the communitarianism of which President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair have been so enamoured. In the summer, I wrote (McDNL 7 vii '98, subsequently published by Sweden's Financial Times 21 xi '98):
"….what instantiates the placing of value on both justice and liberty better than the contract? When authorities act equitably and individuals honour promises, even when it is inconvenient for them to do so, citizenly life is made possible. Tradition-maintenance and promise-keeping are arguably the biggest creators of human opportunities and indeed freedoms. The liberties that most people want can only be secured by implicit or explicit contracts -- unless the short-lived manipulations of intrinsically capricious state tyranny are called upon. The contracts of employment, marriage and home ownership are central for most people to their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness.
As it happens, three great contracts -- at least, three great sets of familiar expectations to which government is a part -- are being ripped up before people's very eyes in the West at this very moment…."
It is thus agreeable to find a kindred spirit in the editress of Reason magazine, Virginia Postrel. In her new book, The Future and Its Enemies (Free Press / http://www.SimonSays.com) (a "vigorous manifesto for the dynamist world view", say her publishers) Postrel is unequivocal in her support for contracts (or 'The Bonds of Life', as she titles them):
"When people cannot make binding, enforceable commitments, dynamic progress is severely hampered. ….Douglas North (1990, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press), an economic historian who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the relationship between institutions and economic growth, notes that "the inability of societies to develop effective, low-cost enforcement of contracts is the most important source of both historical stagnation and underdevelopment in the Third World." The challenges of Third World and postcommunist development have demonstrated the power of North's once-controversial insight. Corruption and insecure contracts stifle economic development."
Postrel goes on to detail the big difficulty in arranging enforceable contracts in Russia. There, contracts are sometimes written to be paid in natural gas for delivery in Germany -- so as to make the contract subject to German law. The USA, too, has problems from not letting people make and enforce the contracts that they wish. Contracts giving academics security of tenure have sometimes fallen foul of federal laws forbidding their 'age-ist' clauses that specify retirement at 65. As a result, some universities have found themselves becoming clogged with elderly academics who have invoked federal legislation so as to break their contracts and keep their sinecures (New York Times, 15 vi 1994, p. B-9).
Not that there should be any one system -- in a mistaken attempt at instant perfection! Just as I have proposed that people should make their own individual contractual arrangements in matters of marriage, education and health care, so Postrel, too, favours diversity that can be exposed to Popperian criticism, falsification and improvement:
"Having many sources of competing rules, rather than a single, national standard, makes finding good rules -- and eliminating or limiting bad ones -- more likely."
In a Western world that has come to enforce very widely minimum wages, a maximum working week, paternity leave, a single 'age of consent' for all sexual activity by adolescents of whatever maturity, speech codes, and affirmative racism, Postrel is a breath of fresh air on the side of individual choice and local contract. -- Moreover, though she respects that modern convention that racial differences should not be mentioned, she is realistic enough to admit that some societies, notably that of China, have always been more authoritarian, bureaucratic and uniformitarian than others….
NEWS FLASH: Britain will not be able to see Monet's famous painting 'Water Lilies' (1904). Legal disputes surround the painting, which had been at one point seized by the Nazis. The French fear that, just as Britain has detained ex-General Pinochet, it may seize the painting and frustrate a trial which the French themselves would want to organize. The absurdity that even two nation states cannot make an enforceable contract as to how they will temporarily handle a painting will not be lost on all who deplore the social paralyses that result from obsessional legal uniformitarianism.
The Freud Exhibition has now been given
a rave review in Science (Julio Licinio): it is 'multilayered',
and 'superb', and 'there is nothing quite like it.' -- You can
even see the criticisms of Freud (in grey, on a green background)
so long as you are about six feet tall and remember to take your
spectacles.
Interesting facts to emerge
are that Freud finally ended his own life (after eighteen years
of suffering from cancer of the jaw); and that unconscious mental
life can now be charted via brainscans and neuroimaging. It is
true that Freud's therapies were pretty hopeless -- as he himself
admitted. But Freud's stresses on eros and thanatos
were spot-on -- unlike the main emphases of behaviourism and the
rest of social science on learning and environment; and the modern
drug medications that Freud himself urged [and can be said to
have anticipated in his own personal substance use] are themselves
only palliative of symptoms, not curative.
The exhibition lifts off from
Washington in January -- the next stops being New York (Jewish
Museum), Vienna, Los Angeles, Chicago and São Paulo. (Dominated
by feminism, the British Psychological Society has made no move
to bring the exhibition to London.)
Science gives the highest praise to the book by the exhibition's curator: Michael S. ROTH (1998), Freud: Conflict and Culture, Knopf, $US26-00. To order, contact Library of Congress Sales Shop, Washington DC 20540-4985, Telephone: (202) 707-0204.
Pictures of Freud, his mother, his
wife and several of his children (including his daughter Anna)
and more about the exhibition can be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/preview.html.
Less satisfactory news for Freudians
comes from Woody Allen (Independent on Sunday 3 i '99).
Making him surely the Babe Bagger of 1998, Allen, 63, has
now fully 'come out' to the press together with his waifish 20-year-old
half-Asian wife, SoonYi Previn (to whom Allen had played stepfather).
To critics' astonishment, Allen now talks of the wonders of love,
of the uselessness of psychoanalysis, and of how he finds his
sessions on the couch with Soon Yi quite enough.
Yet none of this would have
surprised Freud: he regarded true love as the ultimate in symptom
substitution, and (at least by the 1930's) he readily doubted
the curative power of psychoanalysis and based his recommendations
(as had Socrates) on the hopefully intrinsic value of self-knowledge.
(Nor was Freud averse to drugs for himself or others; and he came
to believe -- correctly -- that psychopharmacology would one day
help rectify the balance of the disturbed mind.)
{With a PaedoScore of 43, Woody Allen could yet win the McDNL Babe Bagger of the Century Competition. -- For the 19th century, the winner must surely have been Alois Schicklgrüber who married his Mrs Hitler when he was 43 and she was 20, yielding a PaedoScore of 23 -- by no means outstanding in its own right, but prizewinning in its overall significance. Alois, a fairly typical civil servant of his day, though livelier and with more of a drink problem, was not able to stand up to the spirited Adolf. He died in 1903, when Adolf was 13 and Adolf's mother, despite her son's devoted nursing, was dead within four years, leaving Hitler to become a feckless art student in Vienna -- living in cheap digs with prostitutes and borrowing from Jewish moneylenders.}
Most students will be relieved when hereditary peers are booted out of Britain's House of Lords -- because they cannot spell 'hereditary.' A THES/MORI poll showed that Britain's university students do have some sense of history -- most know when the Second World War occurred. However, most (54 per cent) do not know that Canberra is the capital of Australia (30 per cent think it is Sydney).
"Practical, radical, feminist and postmodern pedagogies have all attempted to decode the mysteries of power and seek new ways of developing knowledge that is not dependent on relations of domination and oppression. Pedagogies for empowerment have been developed in opposition to the traditional herarchical{sic} relationship between teacher and taught. In this construction, social relations are highlighted."
Louise MORLEY, 1998, in AUT Woman (published by the UK's Association of University Teachers}.
Thank You
Thanks to all McDNL readers for your Christmas cards and e-mails. The picture of the Holy Beamish Blair Family was especially affecting; and I enjoyed a good laugh out at the snap of 'Wendy' Mandelson kissing Santa Claus. I hope you all received your Christmas prezzie, 'Sex and the Twenty-First Century.' Uncollected prezzies will have improving modifications made to them for re-issue on another occasion. (Lapsed McDNL readers in UK academic psychology received an AUTHENTIC SEX ROMP CD which they could play so neighbours would hear cries of enthusiastic group sex and not think ex-readers were sitting on their own, abjectly waiting for my summonsing knock on the door.) -- Ed.
PS
NEED A NEW YEAR RESOLUTION?
-- Count Your Blessings!
A MAN WILL PAY $2.00 FOR A $1.00 ITEM HE NEEDS. A WOMAN WILL PAY $1.00 FOR A $2.00 ITEM THAT SHE DOES NOT NEED.
A WOMAN WORRIES ABOUT THE FUTURE UNTIL SHE GETS A HUSBAND. A MAN NEVER WORRIES ABOUT THE FUTURE UNTIL HE GETS A WIFE.
A SUCCESSFUL MAN IS ONE WHO MAKES MORE MONEY THAN HIS WIFE CAN SPEND. A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN IS ONE WHO CAN FIND SUCH A MAN.
TO BE HAPPY WITH A MAN, YOU MUST LOVE HIM A LITTLE AND UNDERSTAND HIM A LOT. TO BE HAPPY WITH A WOMAN YOU MUST LOVE HER A LOT AND NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND HER AT ALL.
A WOMAN MARRIES A MAN EXPECTING HE WILL CHANGE, BUT HE DOESN'T. A MAN MARRIES A WOMAN EXPECTING SHE WON'T CHANGE, BUT SHE DOES.
A WOMAN HAS THE LAST WORD IN ANY ARGUMENT. ANYTHING A MAN SAYS AFTER THAT IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ARGUMENT.
MEN WILL CLIMB MOUNTAINS BECAUSE THEY ARE THERE. SO WHY WON'T THEY DO THE WASHING UP?
JANUARY 12
THIS WEEK:
'AFRICA HOPELESS WITHOUT WHITE RULE,' WAR HERO MONTGOMERY TOLD UK CABINET, 1947.
'SEX DIFFERENCES ARE BIOLOGICAL', LONDON UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHER TELLS BBC.
r-K IS A REAL TRAIT. -- Even if it's not the g factor.
BRAIN SIZE: WHAT IS IT FOR? -- 'Intelligence' or 'Expertise'?
PHYSICIST BLASTS RELATIVISM: C.W. Rietdijk, D.Sc. -- 'Political Correctness and Egalitarianism: An Interest-Based Ideology.'
'I WAS FED UP WITH MY HUSBAND'S
GENES,'
SAYS JAILED TEACHER
PRESIDENTIAL BASTARDS LATEST
Kept for fifty years as a UK
Cabinet secret, a 76-page memorandum on Africa's future is now
revealed to have been submitted to Britain's post-war Labour government
by the national hero of the great desert tank, the Battle of El
Alamein. Britain -- already committed in 1947 to leaving India
to its fate -- should make sub-Saharan Africa:
a bulwark against communism;
a larder, gold mine and source of cheap labour for Britain; and
a utopia for Africans themselves (who would never be capable of
progress without White organization).
//////
LONDON -- Britain's
most famous World War II commander, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery,
submitted a racist masterplan for Africa that so embarrassed the
postwar government it kept watch on him to ensure he did not repeat
his opinions in public.
Public records [newly released]
reveal that Montgomery -- who was revered as a hero for leading
British troops to victory over the Germans in North Africa --
planned to turn the continent into a white supremacist bulwark
against communism.
A secret, two-month-long tour
of eleven African countries in 1947 led him to conclude that the
African ``is a complete savage and is quite unable of developing
the country himself,'' the official papers revealed. His attitude
to African independence movements was shown in a recommendation
to the government that said, ``We should have no nonsense with
the United Nations Organization about Tanganyika; it should be
absorbed into the British bosom.''
….Senior ministers were
so concerned about the report that Montgomery's lectures were
watched to ensure he did not repeat his racist views in public.
His African tour was kept secret from all but a handful of top
officials. The release of the secret papers under Britain's 50
year rule may tarnish Montgomery's image -- glorified in numerous
films -- as a war hero. Lord Chalfont, a former Labor foreign
minister and biographer of Montgomery, said an icon had tumbled.
``A lot of people will find it extremely surprising. His reputation
is irredeemably damaged. I find it very disappointing and depressing,''
Chalfont said. Montgomery's official biographer, Neil Hamilton,
said Britain would still remember him as a brilliant strategist,
but conceded that in politics he was ``unbelievably naive.''*
….Montgomery reacted
stoically and with humor to the government's rebuttal of his plan,
the records show. ``When I wrote my report I was fully aware that
you would not agree with it; in fact I said so to my staff! It
is obvious that we disagree fundamentally on the whole subject;
time will show which of us is right,'' he said in a letter to
the colonial secretary of state at the time, Arthur Creech Jones.
\\\\\\
* The guesses in this paragraph seem unworthy of a Reuters news report. -- Ed.
The emergence of Monty's views and plan from Britain's Public Records Office on 1st January, 1999 prompted a full-page article in The Times (8 i '99, Michael Binyon) summarizing the largely dismal history of sub-Saharan Black countries in the forty or so years for which most of them have now been independent. The article was titled 'Little Sign of Light in Monty's Heart of Darkness.' The Times' first editorial was still firmer: 'What Monty Saw -- A Racist Verdict that Africa has done Its Best to Prove Right.' It especially noted:
The Sunday Times (www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/) added that Montgomery was highly critical of the lifestyle enjoyed by White settlers in Africa. He wrote in his memo: "Life flows at a very easy tempo; conditions are easy, with no restrictions on food or other necessities of life. There are masses of servants and no one does anything for him or her self. This is bad for character and is particularly harmful to young people and children."
NEWS BRIEFING
A
Black-on-Black massacre of 500 people, with women and children
over-represented among the victims, was reported from the Democratic
Congolese Republic (BBC World Service, 6 i '98). The Namibian
government now refuses to discuss the extent of its involvement
or its casualties in the Congo (http://www.mg.co.za/mg, 6 i '98).
In Freetown, Sierra Leone, people cowered in their homes without
electricity supplies as rebels cannibalized their neighbours and
their government told them it would shoot them if they appeared
in the streets (BBCR4UK 9 i '98, 08:00). H.M.S. Norfolk
remains offshore ready to evacuate the 50 Brits who have remained
in Sierra Leone contrary to advice from the UK Foreign Office.
In Zimbabwe, dictator Robert Mugabe's sentencing of ex-President
Banana for serial sodomy has been postponed till January 18th.
His Royal Highness The Prince Edward Anthony Richard Louis Mountbattenberg Windsor Cake, 34, educated in Scotland, New Zealand and Cambridge [2ii] has made a fine choice of bride in Saint-Diana-lookalike Sophie Rhys-Jones, 24. Man-appreciating Sophie first fell in "puppy love" at age 15 with David Kinder, now a film director; and at 24 she had an affair with a motor car salesman, Jeremy Barkley, 43. The British press forecasts a "fairy-tale" marriage -- just as it did for Chazza x Di and Andy x Fergie.
An English philosopher of Darwinian persuasion has been allowed to say about sex what London School psychologists like Glenn Wilson and Hans Eysenck were saying forcibly from around 1975*:
The lucky philosopher to be given air time was Helena Cronin of the London School of Economics (author of The Ant and the Peacock). Describing herself as 'a Darwinian philosopher', Helena expressed herself clearly and without equivocation. She did not hesitate to accost both Germaine Greer (who had heard of a randy 'Girl Friday') and chat-show host Melvyn Braaggss (who had heard of a successful woman novelist [George Eliot]). Helena insisted that she (and men) talked from scientific generalization and not from the anecdotes, single cases and outright inventions which are the stuff of chat shows. Helena denounced such material as "claptrap." In particular, Helena insisted:
Poor Germaine Greer had little with which to counter
bright'n'bouncy Helena's thesis. Indeed, she agreed with the thesis
of male randiness -- though hoping that girls would soon increase
their modest rates of promiscuity. Greer also attempted a form
of defence against Helena's biologism by insisting that feminism
was internally factious and actually had no agreed alternative
story to propose. In particular, feminists do not agree whether
the relation between the sexes is one of equality or of female
superiority. -- Reculer pour mieux reculer, one might call
this line of defence, for its deep incoherence is plain. Most
notably, Greer and Cronin agreed on the largely unspoken fact
of modern Western 'society' -- that most male sexuality has been
driven underground and is catered for via clubs, pubs, videos,
the Internet. {As de Sade once said, 'One tames a people as one
tames lions, by masturbation.'}
Both girls were at their weakest
on the question of What to Do Next. Cronin did not actually say
that girls should be given classes in Kinder, Küche, Kirche
-- and Greer was so flattened as not to see her opportunity to
make Cronin supply proposals. Instead, Greer foolishly gave her
own agenda. This was socialism, which had 'served the women of
Eastern Europe well'….thus making Cronin's victory complete.
Neither girl had much idea of what the future held, though they
agreed the West may have be in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, having
become long-lived people who have no children and will thus fray
the nerves of even the most nurturant or survival-conscious female.
* It was in the 1970's that Hans Eysenck
and Glenn Wilson researched differences in the hypothetical trait
of psychoticism and found P scores related to sex
and sexual preferences. (Eysenck summarized his view of sex differences
in 1982, in I.Al-Issa, Gender
and Psychopathology. New York : Academic.)
An important early
contribution to fighting feminism by reference to male cognitive
style was that of Broverman et al.,1968, Psychol.
Rev. 75. This was followed findings of sex differences in
field independence and brain lateralization (Witkin
& Goodenough, 1977, Psychol. Bull 84). By 1984, the
novelist Penelope Lively observed, in her According to Mark
(London : Heinemann): "The totally unselective nature
of Diana's attention was indeed, as she sensed, a disability....
Diana's hyperconscious condition was apparent to [Mark], though
mysterious [to him] since it was in such colossal contrast to
his own tendency towards almost exclusive concentration on one
thing. It was this capacity that enabled him to chop his time
up into systematic thinking bouts, an invaluable ability. Diana,
who was incapable of mislaying a glove or forgetting the date,
called him absent-minded. Stupid, when she was in a bad temper.
Which, of course, she knew quite well he was not. She was herself,
Mark considered, well above average intelligence but without powers
of elimination she was unable to concentrate this intelligence."
By 1986, even the feminist social psychologist, Helen Haste, admitted
(in J. Harding, Perspectives on Gender and Science, Lewes
: Falmer Press): "These findings [of different patterns of
attention by males and females in tests of field-independence]
are consistent with the view that females are more willing to
take in the whole field and less willing to select out and focus
on one aspect of it.... [Again, another author] argues that [her
finding on Kohlberg's tasks of moral reasoning] reflects a difference
that boys tend to see the situation as involving separate persons
in conflict, whereas girls see it as persons embedded in
mutual relationships.... For the male [the approach to rationality]
is a tendency towards exclusion, focusing and linear logic;
for the female it is a tendency towards inclusion, broad
scanning and synthesizing rather than analyzing. Now, we must
be very careful about seeing these as actual sex differences....
But what seems to be emerging tentatively from these studies is
the possibility of identifying two styles of dealing with the
world...."
** Cronin's thesis enjoys more empirical support than she probably knew when talking with Lord Bragg. Just the day previously, there had been OUTRAGE AT BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY (Times 6 i '98). Dr Tuvia Malmed had shocked British psycholoshits ooops psychologists with his 'Thatcher theory' of female success in business. According to Malmed's research on businesswomen, the only women who seriously succeed are those who have psychological profiles that are similar to those of men. According to the Times, "Equal opportunities campaigners described Dr Malmed's research as unhelpful."
It is not just poor or 'disadvantaged' people who
go in for sex early in life, before a cruel environment overwhelms
them. A study of British aristocrats of the past 1,250 years has
found that lords and ladies who died young left more children
behind them. In contrast, aristocrats who enjoyed longevity left
fewer children. Indeed, of those who lived till age 80, fifty
per cent had produced no children at all -- at least as far as
historical records can show. The study took as its subjects all
the 34,000 British aristocrats born between 740A.D. and 1875.
It was reported by researchers Westendorp and Kirkwood* in Nature.
For twenty years, biologists
have agreed that whole species differ as to whether they pursue
a K strategy -- involving high longevity and massive provisioning
of small numbers of high-quality offspring (as in the big mammals,
including man); or whether they pursue an r strategy --
involving smaller brains, relatively big genitalia and a larger
quantity of offspring (as in oysters). However, only the Canadian
psychologist Phil Rushton has maintained that r-K differences
occur between races and even between individuals. Controversially,
Rushton has thought that Asian races are K strategists,
whereas Africans are r strategists and Europeans are somewhere
in between. Rushton believes that high-K strategies develop
when environments are relatively predictable and can thus be mastered
-- for example by the application of intelligence and social organization
to the inhospitable but predictable environment of northern climes
(and, once, further south, the Ice Age).
From the new research, it
seems clear not only that r-K differences occur in man
but that they require a genetic explanation. To many, the
obvious explanation of a negative correlation between longevity
and progeny would be that parenthood is very draining and that
people who have had more children therefore die younger. However,
Westendorp and Kirkwood's negative correlation is not thus
interpretable, for the aristocrats who had more children would
have nevertheless enjoyed resources (shelter, nutrition, servants)
that would have put them in the top 0.1% of the population. Furthermore,
the negative correlation between lifespan and offspring occurred
in male as much in female aristocrats. (It is conventional among
evolution theorists to hold that males can be quite relaxed about
the numbers of children they have, since offspring present few
'costs' for them -- at least until the arrival of religion.) Additionally,
the negative correlation was found even when all aristocrats who
died at under age 60 were excluded (thus setting aside women who
may have died from the immediate rigours of relatively frequent
pregnancy and labour).
The new research may
weaken Rushton's thesis that K is linked to a higher level
of g -- for aristocratic families would probably have been
restricted in g range because of narrow environmental or
genetic ranges (by population standards). Nor can the research
offer any confirmation that r-K is, as Rushton believes,
a very broad but still unitary trait that affects some twenty
lifestyle variables: in the research, the only reported variables
were longevity and number of offspring. However,
further research might look at the long-term quality of aristocratic
progeny -- especially the capacity of small numbers of high-quality
offspring to produce, eventually, satisfactorily large numbers
of great-great-grandchildren. And the research confirms the existence
of a biologically based trait of r-K -- even though the
strength of the negative correlation between longevity and progeny-quantity
remains to be spelled out.
* Tom Kirkwood is the Professor of Biological Gerontology at the University of Manchester. He is a vegetarian, non-smoker and non-driver who is apparently happy to pursue a high-K strategy, believing like some Californians that 'there are no biological limits to the lifespan' and that he may be able to live for a long while without bothering with children (Times 11 i '99).
{For a discussion of the likely nature of the r-K trait, see 'What is it to be high-K?' -- Chris Brand's review of Phil Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior takes a cautious line about the merits of K and of Asian lifestyles in general while supporting Rushton's thesis that there are race-linked trait differences.}
Why does homo sapiens have such a big brain? Especially, why do men have bigger brains than women? For the past thirty years these questions have baffled differential psychologists. To link brain size to IQ has always seemed attractive; but girls have average IQ's just as high as boys. Plainly there are plenty of types of learning (conditioning and memory) that are little related to IQ [see Chapter 1 of The g Factor (Wiley DePublisher), and 'The n factor']; but the crucial task is to specify skills that require much learning and plenty of brain volume and are especially advantageous to males. Today, an answer is being offered to a 'Colloquy' of the American Psychological Association by Dr. John R. Skoyles (6 Denning Road; Hampstead; London, NW3 1SU -- skoyles@globalnet.co.uk and http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/index.htm). Skoyles' claims for detectable advantages to experienced males need fleshing out; but they seem a possible start -- especially because of the well-known phenomenon that 'genius' (which is far more common in males) involves perhaps as much 'perspiration' [ i.e. plain hard work, application and obsessionality] as 'inspiration'). Here is an extract from the end of Skoyles' paper.
"In the modern world, in-depth knowledge is not required for non-retarded and successful existence, nor for being measured with a normal IQ. In general, skills depending on in-depth knowledge are limited to a few occupations or task domains which require a person to process a large variety of possibilities, variables or options (Ericsson, K. A., & Lehmann, A. C., 1996, 'Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints.' Annual Review of Psychology 47, 273-305).
One example which has been studied in the context of IQ is the ability of those with many years of daily experience in studying racing statistics to predict the odds in races (Ceci, S. J., & Liker, J. K., 1986, 'A day at the races: a study of IQ, expertise, and cognitive complexity.' Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115, 255-266). This requires making complex inferences and trade-offs between statistics concerning horses, jockeys and the physical state of different race tracks. Reasoning among experts can be as complex as considering "the need of horse A to avoid challenging horse B at the first quarter mile mark, if horse C is to have any change of beating horse D." Ceci and Liker measured the IQs (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) of experts in predicting form. For twelve experts, IQs ranged between 81 and 128 (four were between 80 and 90, three between 90 and 100, two between 100 and 110 and only three above 120 Table 6). Ceci and Liker (p. 265) comment "whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning." The expert performance in other domains such as chess (Doll, J., & Mayr, U., 1987, 'Intelligenz und Schachleistung' [Intelligence and achievement in chess]. Psychologische Beiträge 29, 270-289.) and music (Shuter-Dyson, R., & Gabriel, C., The Psychology of Musical Ability. London: Methuen) likewise show expertise that correlates poorly, or not at all, with IQ.
Although the capacity to develop expertise is not necessary for normal life in a modern industrial society, such skills would have been critical for the survival of early hunter-gatherers. Lee (1979, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) noted that in hunting the !Kung use in depth expert knowledge and reasoning. For example, hunters can spot from a particular track the animal which made it, its sex, age, whether alone or ill, what it was eating, and how long ago (to within 15 minutes) since the animal made the track. They can do this by reading the shape, depth and condition of tracks, whether they are alone, and how they are spaced and located. Tracks found to the east side of a tree might suggest that the animal rested there in the morning shade (Lee 1979, pp. 212-213). Such knowledge, like other forms of expertise, takes many years, indeed decades, to learn. Moreover, it is known to be more important than physical skill to hunting success: the individuals most successful at hunting are those in the over 39 age group (with decades of experience tracking), not the more physical able (but less experienced) individuals under this age (Lee 1979, pp. 242-244). Indeed, an old man in his fifties or sixties might go with a young man (usually his son), interpreting the tracks while the young man does the hunting.
This example suggests that among early humans the individuals with the brains that had the greatest capacity to acquire expertise would survive more successfully than those without their extensive knowledge. The reasons for this would not only include expertise in hunting but expertise in many other activities such as gathering, tool manufacture and social communication. Over time, the advantages conferred by success in these activities would result in the natural selection of brains with increased capacity for expertise.
One factor increasing a person's expertise capacity is likely to have been brain size. Expertise….is linked to the number of chunks a person can hold and actively process. Capacity for expertise may be related to the number of cortical columns able to specialise neural networks in representing and processing them, and through this to cerebral mass (Jerison, H., 1991, 'Brain size and the evolution of mind.' Fifty- ninth James Arthur lecture on the evolution of the human brain. New York: American Museum of Natural History.) There is also some recent evidence that the increased information processing requirements of expertise lead to skill expansion over large areas of the cortex. Expertise in violin playing depends upon fine coordination of the left hand fingers and accurate coordination between the two hands. If expertise is related to increased cortical area devoted to finger co-ordination, we would expect expert violinists to devote more of their brain to finger co-ordination. This is indeed the case. Expert violinists have two to three times as much area cortical area devoted to their left fingers as nonviolinists (Elbert, TH., Pantev, C., Wienbruch, C. Rochstroh, B. & Taub, E., 1995, 'Increased cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players.' Science 270, 305-307). Moreover, the need of expert violinists to co-ordinate their two hands leads them to develop a larger connection between the two sides of the brain dealing with motor coordination compared to nonviolinists (Schlaug, G., Jäncke, L., Huang, Y., Staiger, J. F. & Steinmetz, H., 1995, 'Increased corpus callosum size in musicians.' Neuropsychologia 33, 1047-1055). Thus, there is not only theoretical but empirical evidence that expertise needs large amounts of brain to store and actively process its informational chunks. This suggests that a strong connection should exist between the capacity for acquiring expertise skills and brain mass."
To participate in Psycholoquy, go to PSYCOLOQUY <psyc@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>.
The research design that has established use of simple grammatical rule by 7-month infants was as follows. First, infants heard sound sequences until they began to lose interest. Some babies heard ABA sequences such as ga ti ga and li na li; other babies heard ABB sequences such as ga ti ti and li na na. Subsequently, all babies were tested on a mixture of sequences of the ABA (e.g. wo fe wo) and ABB (e.g. wo fe fe) types. The result was that babies showed more interest in sequences of types they had not heard before -- showing that they had had detected the structure of the sequences they had heard first. (Transitional probabilities, from A to B and B to A, were overall the same for all infants; and it was established that babies had equal liking for the various combinations used.)
The Science article is accompanied by an explicatory article from Steven Pinker (Department of Brain & Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Pinker stresses that Marcus et al.'s own position is one of passable neutrality in the nativist vs empiricist and rationalist vs associationist battles that have raged since the days of Descartes and Hume. Marcus is not concerned to deny that learning can occur by (statistical) association; but only to point to the occurrence of rule-detection earlier than it has been the fashion to envisage, and in a context where no such association as 'A B tends to be followed by a A' can have been established. Pinker and Marcus don't doubt that, as adults, we have all learned from experience that 'grandmothers are wrinkly and not sexy'; but they want to insist that such associations can be overridden by the advice that 'Tina Turner is a grandmother', and that rational knowledge of rules and of their sometimes being broken is also available at an early age. They thus dispute the view of D.E. Rumelhart et al. that associationist and connectionist principles underlie all learning and intelligence. (Pinker's article can be seen at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/283/5398/40.)
Argentinian Judge Lilian Herez is demanding
the extradition from Britain of three members of the Parachute
Regiment for 'war crimes' committed on the Falkland [Malvinas]
Islands in 1982. Charges relate to episodes just after the ceasefire
when some Argentinian troops were unaware that their side was
meant to surrender -- so had their brains blown out while trying
to retain their weapons. One of the soldiers wanted is Ken Lukowiak,
formerly the boyfriend of Sarah Macaulay who is now the official
girlfriend of UK Chancellor 'Grumpy' Brown. (Prince Charles, due
to visit South America in March, has already had to cancel a planned
visit to Chile, which is furious with Britain for contemplating
extraditing ex-General Pinochet to Spain for alleged crimes of
thirty years ago.) (Spain, which wants to execute Pinochet for
3,000 deaths, has never executed any of the people who carried
out the 50,000 executions ordered by Generalissimo Franco.)
Prime Minister Tony Blair visited South
Africa's 'President-in-waiting', the lifelong communist Thabo
Mbeki who received his extensive military training in Moscow.
Britain is to sell more arms to Pretoria even though Mbeki has
lately taken to blaming Whites for South Africa's economic mess
[talent flight, lack of inward investment] after five years of
Black rule and talking of the understandable "growing rage"
of Blacks at continuing White-Black income disparities. In his
big speech, Mr Blair seems to have been too embarrassed to say
much about his host country. Instead he sent a message to London
that he would stick to his Third Way -- newly revealed
by his trusty Education Minister back home as involving the privatization
of state schools judged by schools inspectors to be under-performing.
A TV show in the USA, "The Fox Philes" (on Rupert Murdoch's
channel), is now covering the high South African crime rate. Innocent
multiculturalists will be shocked, for the programme is pretty
graphic and features mixed-race couples who pray for the return
of apartheid. However, some say that the serpentine Mbeki, having
put up a show of leftishness to get elected President, will swing
to the right and do what the Rev. Blair tells him.
PAEDOHYSTERIA. In Carollton, near Atlanta,
USA, the girl of a Romeo & Juliet couple is dead and
her boyfriend is gravely wounded after the pair acted on a suicide
pact. The under-age girl, 15, had been forbidden by her parents
to continue to see her boyfriend, 17.
Around the Third World, 300,000
children are now recruited in armies and equipped to kill, says
Amnesty International [which itself seeks a near-death experience
for ex-General Pinochet]. Apparently training usually begins by
persuading a child to kill its father or one of its siblings [in
line with the psychological understandings of family life offered
by Freud and Adler]. Warring forces in Uganda and Sri Lanka make
much use of children -- often drugged before they are put into
the firing line.
'In Britain it gets cold in winter.'
This was the week's big news for New Labour -- along with
ex-wifely revelations that the hard-drinking Foreign Secretary,
Robin Cook, 5' 4", has had more lady gym teachers and pre-prandial
stiffies than President Clinton has had White House interns. In
order to reduce hospital waiting lists as an 'Old Labour' gesture,
the Government had insisted that no beds ever stood idle. Mr Cook
was specially enthusiastic about this policy. So when winter came,
flu victims in Edinburgh were queuing on trolleys for eight hours
before they could find a place in a ward at Edinburgh's Royal
Infirmary -- the Director of which had to resign. [Why
the revelations about ginger-nut Cookie who had lived polygamously
for years (his "string of affairs" tolerated by his
wife)? It was apparently the Reverend Blair who himself blew the
whistle, forbidding Cookie to take all his women together on a
foreign freebie and this obliging him to choose between his wife,
Margaret, and his secretary, Gaynor (now his second wife).] [The
Cooks had been Edinburgh LUniversity's married pair of
graduates to have risen highest in British politics. Chancellor
Grumpy Gordon is also an E.LU. man -- but he has no female partner
and Mrs Cook's memoirs suggest he is a burned-out personality
who is unlikely to find one.] [At last the Europeople have come
in handy: the Austrian President or some such has been
produced by Rev. Blair to tell the BBC that Mr Cook was a ferry
good chep who was no more ambitious, treacherous, spiteful, convictionless,
drink-sodden or penis-driven than other Europoliticos. He was
apparently not amazed to hear that Cookie admitted to his ex-wife
having 'sold his soul to the Devil' in order to stay in Tony's
New Labour Team. Former editor of The Times, Sir William
Rees-Fogg, was not so kind: he compared Cookie to Clintstone and
Adolf Hitler.]
In Washington,
the Reverend Wm Jefferson Clintstone of the Church of the
Seven Day Fornicators refused to accept the exorbitant charge
of High Crimes but agreed to foot the bill for whatever
he was supposed to have done with Miss Demeanour….
The pornographic magazine Hustler is expected soon to produce
'The Flynt Report' which will consign the hypocritical
Republicans to the political wilderness till the end of the American
Empire. Flynt's daughter, Tonya Flynt-Vega, 37, will try to scupper
the report by jailing her father for repeated 'child abuse'; but
Flynt, 56, intends to rely on the defence that he only saw her
for 33 days of her childhood, during most of which he was comatose.
Lesbians
will soon be able to have their own genetic children. "Scientists
will give women the ability to 'father' a baby," said the
Sunday Times (10 i '98), claiming breakthroughs in work
on parthenogenesis [asexual reproduction from unfertilized eggs]
by Dr Rudolf Jaenisch of MIT.
Political openings for women
are on the increase as the new Empire of the West seeks hands
safer than those of such spunky males as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich,
Geoffrey Robinson [till lately UK Paymaster General, and the only
Cabinet Member to have a racy wife], spinmeister Charlie Whelan
and Robin Cook. In the USA, Hillary Clinton and Mrs
Bob Dole are both aiming for high office; and in the UK, Ms
'Red' Dawn Primarolo was made Paymaster General as Beamish
Blair moved against Grumpy Gordon and turned the Chancellor's
Treasury into a female powerhouse where three of the five ministers
are now women. Mrs Cherie Blair, having taken to a Seychelles
beach in a swimsuit, was exposed by unkind photographers as having
fat knees, ginormous thighs and a pot belly (Daily Mail 7
i '98), thus explaining the homosexual tastes of the men in the
Blair Cabinet but perhaps putting down her own marker on a political
future in Lesboland. (Curiously, Mrs Blair often resembles her
husband -- with a far-too-beaming smile and, at the same time,
an inquisitorial frown.) (Revelation that Britain's 'Third Way'
has been a work of camp edged nearer the surface. The left-wing
Guardian quoted the outed 'Wendy' [Wendy House] Mandelson
as musing, with whatever help from her formidable memory banks
and years of close collegiality in the creation of New Labour:
"I don't know whether Mr Brown [UK Chancellor of Exchequer]
is gay, but I think not." Commenting on Labour's Christmas
blood bath, Mr Blair said of his relationship with Mr Brown: "This
partnership is due to last.")
The UK Government's Welsh Office
lost the services of one its top civil servants. Employed in the
Social & Children's Services Department for ten years, with
special responsibility for the protection of children, the administrator
faces criminal charges of a paedophilic nature. (Cost-benefit
analyses of the removal of paedophiles are unlikely to be attempted.)
Polygamy realism
surfaced in Galati, Romania (150 miles north-east of Bucharest)
as a lady heard a guest at her birthday party complain about a
Christmas present. The guest had been sent for her Christmas,
by her lover, a set of black lace underwear that was about three
sizes too big. The birthday girl, named to the Rumanian press
only as Victoria, immediately smelled a rat. For Victoria had
herself been given by her hubby black lace underwear that was
three sizes too small. Soon the girls exchanged underwear, and
Victoria filed for divorce from her husband.
The strict no-smoking regime at Edinburgh's
Royal Scottish Museum (McDNLs 24 xi & 1 xii
'98) was put to its toughest test when a waiter in the newly fashionable
Tower Restaurant [in the recently opened £UK53 million adventure
playground, where starters cost £UK9] was sent to extinguish
the cigarette being smoked by sensationally leggy actress Joanna
Lumley. The ravishing blonde star of TV soap opera is famous for
playing a character, 'Patsy', who is represented as needing nicotine
patches to enable her to survive even taxi journeys across town;
but she graciously obliged the waiter by going out on to the Museum's
roof to sample Scotland's Force 9 gales and thus finish her fag.
A 5-million-year-old humanoid skull
has been discovered by a 13-nation team working near Addis Ababa
(Times 11 i '98). {In December, South African researchers
discovered a 3.6 million-year-old skeleton -- McDNL 15
xii '98.}
A US 'paedophile', James Stanley, 47,
who had raped an 11-year-old boy, has agreed to surgical castration.
The American Civil Liberties Union does not agree and will
contest the case -- fearing mass castration of Presidents and
Foreign Secretaries in the next century if a line is not drawn
somewhere against feminazism.
A 35-year-old businesswoman who married
a police superintendent was so concerned to assert her femiloony
'independence' that, without consulting her husband, she advertised
in the UK's Western Mail that all her friends and colleagues
should continue to call her Ms Liz Shankland (Times
8 i '98).
NEW YEAR CHEER, continued:
The substance that enables wine drinkers to live longer and
solve crossword puzzles better has been identified by scientists
at the University of Milan. It is called whisky, oops, reveratrol
(Daily Mail, 7 i '99). (For ten years, scientists had wondered
whether the greater longevity of moderate drinkers was merely
due to their accidentally being so healthy that no doctor had
yet told them to stop drinking.)
Prostitutohysteria
in New York has met its match. In 1998, Mayor Giuliani ordered
hundreds of les girls to quit Times Square and head for
New York's suburbs (McDNL 28 vii '98); but New York entrepreneurs
have solved the problem by purchasing limousines and installing
the mini-skirted maidens along with Martini shakers. The laid-back
lovelies in "limos with a difference" are legal, for
cars do not yet count as 'public venues' which the Mayor can regulate.
PAEDO-ALERT! Police in rural Dumfries & Galloway have alerted
schools to a 67-year-old man with a long gray beard who usually
carries a shepherd's crook. This terrifying figure, who describes
himself as a writer or artist, is deemed a menace to society.
In 1998 he completed a three year prison sentence for a non-violent
abduction carried out in 1971.
In the Holy Republic of Ireland, pharmaceutical chains are complaining that Éirish gentlemen remain uninterested in the stocks of Viagra that have been laid in for them by shops on their high streets. In Britain, too, doctors are beginning to observe that many men would be unwise to place their marriages under strain by making the slightest attempt to have sex with their wives.
The McDougall NewsLetter is pleased
to publish
a pro-rationalism and anti-relativism statement
from an eminent Dutch physicist, Wim Rietdijk, D.Sc.
EXCLUSIVE
(1) In 1789, at the time of the French Revolution, more human equality was arguably long overdue. Lately, however, ideologists have wanted to say that people deserve similar treatment not despite their being different but because they are not different. Alternatively, knowing full well that human differences (in IQ, criminality, psychopathology etc.) are quite hard to deny, egalitarians argue: 'Intelligence, stability or conscientiousness are not very important after all. It does not really matter if a person lacks them.' This view has become a major source of degradation in today's 'permissive' society. It constitutes the main reason why the 'progressive' establishment of recent years -- most of the media, the judiciary, the politicians -- has been permissive with respect to crime. This attitude is a logical consequence of social-environmentalism and of considering even persistently anti-social individuals to be 'of equal value' rather than moral and/or genetic tailenders.
(2) Various interest groups thrive
on the above idea and on its 'politically correct' extensions.
Many of the 'caring' professions and organizations would suffer
if the general public awoke to the fact that psychopaths, recidivists,
drug addicts and chronic problem cases in education are deficient
in genes and/or values rather than being 'underprivileged.' The
ideas that 'nurture makes you' and 'social environment defines
you' are useful to many of today's vested interests in bureaucracies,
whereas the ideas of eugenics are not. Hence, the whole concept
of genetic tail ends has become taboo. Those who 'care' for
the present tail end have a further reason for anxiety. If a 'natural
aristocracy' exists on a genetic basis, as America's Thomas Jefferson
thought, and the relevant genes are partly 'measurable', many
among the present establishment -- who reached the top of the
greasy pole by 'playing games' -- can be less than happy. Few
of them resemble the elite that Jefferson had in mind, so they
don't like ideas of genes and measurability.
(3) The foregoing also explains why
left-ists react so permissively to the mass immigration from the
Third World into Western Europe and the USA -- despite immigrants
(on average) having higher crime rates than autochtones, and requiring
special help at school. Besides creating demand for the relevant
professional helping organizations, third-world immigration is
agreeable to leftist and 'progressive' political parties which
gain many votes from the 'disadvantaged'. Positive discrimination,
progressive education, busing etc. yield welfare jobs and left-wing
votes -- so long as immigrants' problems are attributed not to
genes and values but to discrimination and under-privilege.
(4) Like nationalism and religious
orthodoxy, egalitarianism contributes to the cultivation of
the 'We' feeling -- to 'solidarity', i.e. to the group-mindedness
and conformism in which unenlightened forces have always had an
interest.
(5) Traditional right-ists are no
better than egalitarians. They simply contest enlightened ideas
by means of other kinds of 'solidarity', collectivism and
violations of rational thinking. They are just as sceptical with
respect to the idea of progress as are relativistic 'progressives'.
Right-ists simply shield different vested interests. Like
the left, the right abhors 'scientism', genetic engineering, eugenics
and Jefferson's idea of an objective and measurable basis for
social hierarchy.
(6) The agreement (in this respect)
of left and right means society lacks an enlightened intelligentsia
supporting the Promethean idea of progress. While rightist
thinkers advocate a return to traditional values and institutions
-- opposing sexual freedom, abortion and eugenics -- modern leftists
shield and humour other vested interests such as the under-privilege
industry. How un-enlightened 'progressives' have become is clear
in their anti-scientism, relativism and sympathy for postmodernism
and absurdist art. (Think of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, James
Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake', Harold Pinter and Willem de Kooning.)
They deny that reason and rational values (let alone techno-science,
genetic engineering and eugenics) can do much to improve the human
condition. This is a defeatist and status-quo-friendly
position. -- Small wonder that it is so popular!
(7) CONCLUSION: Our intelligentsia and current orthodoxies -- 'left' and 'right' -- do not fit well in an era of dynamic progress [Internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, advanced brain research etc.]. They are reminiscent of the past, when many religions cultivated orthodoxy and opposed reason and rational values. Today, opposition to Enlightenment values comes from:
a) Relativism -- actually stating: 'Rational arguments cannot have the last word because they are themselves 'context-dependent', 'subjective', or dependent on non-rational premises.'
b) Obscurantism -- exemplified in the writings of Heidegger, Foucault and Lacan and in the incoherent work of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Karel Appel and John Cage.
c) Amorality -- the powers that be are given free reign if the intelligentsia is interested neither in the consistent enforcement of integrity nor in human genetic and moral quality. This amorality is connected with the egalitarianism, politicization and social environmentalism of the intelligentsia.
Actually, the tendencies to relativism,
obscurantism and amorality furnish a virtual censorship -- adapted
to today's ostensibly anti-authoritarian era. They are intended
to frustrate rational and moral argument. They all fit well with
current secularized 'religion' in which the group has become
our Supreme Being -- i.e. the source of the values and identity
of other-directed people.
If you are interested
in pursuing the issues raised above, please visit my website at
<http://www.xs4all.nl/~bcb/rietdijk1.html>. Inter
alia, the site presents extracts from my book, The Scientifization
of Culture (with an Introduction by the top psychologist, Hans-Jürgen
Eysenck).
Bloemendaal; The Netherlands.
January, 1999.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The 'politically
incorrect' Dutch theoretical physicist, C. W. Rietdijk, D.Sc.,
has encountered violent opposition in The Netherlands. He has
broken taboos on discussing IQ, other differences in human quality,
and eugenics; and he has decried anti-rational ideologies and
the intellectual establishments of both left and right.
Apart from his work on quantum physics, Rietdijk first published his views on social and technological progress as Progress, Culture and Society (1959, Leiden:Stafleu). He continued with The Counter-Revolution Against Reason (1975/77, Amsterdam:Athenaeum). Recently, he published a book in English, The Scientifization of Culture: Thoughts of a Physicist on the Techno-scientific Revolution and the Laws of Progress (1994, Assen:VanGorcum, with an Introduction by H. J. Eysenck, pp. 637).
Bubbly blonde Mrs Mary Katherine Letourneau, now
36, is as nutty as her dad, say the critics. The only girl in
a Catholic family of six boys, she doted on her Republican Papa,
a Cold War marine instructor of far-right views. Below-average
at school, she let one of her brothers, at 3, sink to a watery
grave in the family swimming pool at their California ranch while
she, 11, had been left to baby-sit for him.* At Arizona State
University, she got pregnant in her second year to Steve Letourneau,
from a poor* family in Alaska, and went straight into marriage
and from one baby to another (six in all). Finally she was jailed
and re-jailed for 'second-degree child rape' -- for her last two
babies were by the Samoan son of a jailbird to whom she had first
given herself on the Letourneau family sofa when she was 33 and
the youth was still 12 years old. No wonder psychologists called
her manic (and depressive, psychopathic and child-abused [she
had once fellated a brother]) when called upon to diagnose the
one-time cheerleader! She liked only one thing better than being
painted in the nude by her "artistic protégé"
boy-child: the pair made love twice daily for eight months before
her husband's brother put in a report to the police. "Picasso
had better watch out", she told fellow teachers at the state
school in Seattle where she worked.
Well, Mary is certainly quite
something. Athletic, vivacious and with long blonde hair, a cute
upturned nose, a wide mouth and great legs, she was rated in school
yearbooks as "the prettiest girl with the best figure."
Her father, John Schmitz, was quite something too: he and his
young wife were often invited to parties at the White House by
George Bush; and, when he had stood for President in place of
the ailing George Wallace, he had gathered almost three million
votes. His political career only ended when it emerged in 1982
that he had a pregnant mistress who had already borne him a son.
Certainly, Mary Kay's education was disrupted: her father would
not allow sex education and withdrew her from any school where
this was practised. But Mary became a valued schoolteacher whose
dedication was widely remarked, as well as the energetic mother
of four children by her now baggage-handler husband.
To some, nothing will excuse
Mary succumbing, after a year of classroom courtship, to the big,
lightly moustached, pony-tailed, disruptive lad who had bet $US20
with a friend that he could "bone" his teacher and who
openly discussed her anatomy with other pupils. Yes, Vili Fualaau
had real ability -- his own mother had been making regular sums
of $US30 dollars from his drawings since he was seven. And he
was a wow with the girls: he had first got laid at age ten* and,
after teacher Mary went to jail, he -- still under 16 -- had affairs
with several girls of over 18. Yet some take the law's view Mary
that abused her position at the school -- despite Vili's testimony
that he had been mentally undressing her for almost a year in
class before they first kissed and embarked on hundreds of hours
of phone calls. Certainly she abused her home by making love there
-- though her husband was already running an affair of his own
and her elder son, himself 10, was keen on his mother's friendship
with the big Samoan lad.
Yet it now turns out that
there was a method in Mary's madness. By all means, she was and
remains genuinely in love. But her love poetry addressed to Vili
-- begun months before even the pair's first kiss -- already concerned
having what would be her fifth child. "She would be a
perfect Number 5," Mary wrote (guessing correctly the sex
of the couple's first child). "You could go on with your
life / I would have you in her. / You could take her places and
she would know you. / I would teach her and love her and dress
her. / Think of how beautiful she would be and so talented."
Why all this concern with the perfect child? Well, the non-sex-educated
Mary had learned after marriage that Steve Letourneau was not
only no genius himself but had a mentally retarded sister.* "I
was concerned that Steve's genes were not right," Mary now
says, "and that it might affect our own children." Certainly,
her children by Steve, as they grew up, were dull, podgy and unprepossessing
by the standards she could recall from childhood. Yes, Mary, having
grown up without knowledge of sex or eugenics, was learning the
hard way. By contrast, she now told anyone who would listen --
including her own father -- "Vili is a genius and must be
treated properly and encouraged to develop his God-given talents.
Vili has the right genes, he is purebred and that's why he has
genius within him." Mary, whose only previous affair had
been a "meaningless" fling with the father of another
pupil, now knew what she wanted. After dressing for months as
a teenager to go out with Vili, she allowed her husband back into
her bed for one night: it made her physically sick, but she wanted
to cover up her pregnancy by Vili and have her first daughter
from the romance while letting Vili, as she had written, 'go on
with his life.' Now, after state intervention
that has been deplored by both families, the world has four motherless
children, two fatherless children (for Vili is not allowed to
see his daughters), one deserted husband, and a vivacious blonde
in jail -- all for want of education in sex and eugenics. The
law that has jailed Mary Kay has made more victims than
it has managed either to revenge or to protect.
PS
Points above marked * are strongly contested by people close to
Mary.
McDNL supports
a plea in Seattle for judicial clemency to Mary Letourneau. To
add support, please email your name, postal address and e-mail
address to <cbrand@cycad.com>.
Both Science and Nature have carried downgradings of previous claims that US President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) fathered a child by his Black/marginal slave, Sally Hemings. It now turns out that Nature had unduly hyped the DNA analyses. In truth, as researchers E. A. Foster et al. [some from Oxford Uni