Welcome to:
Chris Brand – Psychorealist

DIARY

There are 4 main offshoots from the homepage of the controversial Edinburgh psychologist who has fought for liberalism and realism:
1. 
BRAND's BATTLES against political correctness as seen by others, incl. the media
2. 
ISSUES of scientific importance to differential psychology

3.  HISTORY OF C.B. versus P.C., by Chris Brand  (this page, see below)
4.  QUIZ TIME – find what twenty Gorgeous Girls have in common!

 

LATEST NEWS FROM CHRIS BRAND

 


 

2003 Diary

 

For 200-2001 news, go to http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/index3.htm

    For 2002 news, go to http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/index3b.htm

 

 

 

In January, 2003, I resolved to devote some attention to the world's first and most influential philosopher, Confucius (551-479BC). China's great sage pestered princelings to tax their subjects less and to look after their subjects more via the mechanism of the family, so his advice looks potentially compatible with that given in the McDougall NewsLetters on the modern need for a new type of family (the neofamily, involving self-chosen as well as sexual and genetic links). Confucius thought each individual's chief moral business was to seek, construct and repair relationships of harmony within a family. He supposedly said (like Socrates and Jesus, he had no publications): "Treating your family members properly – this is the root of becoming a person." He thought each individual would produce a unique result: "The exemplary person seeks harmony, not sameness. In a family, each member has his or her unique and particular role" (Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). He was emphatic on human freedom, saying life was constructed and not dictated, and "It is not the way that broadens people, but people who broaden the way." Confucius was apparently sound on the existence of important natural differences, saying of one of his own duller disciples "You cannot carve rotten wood, nor can you whitewash a wall made from dry manure." Though notoriously sympathetic and gentlemanly to the poor, he was unashamedly elitist, saying: "Highest are those who are born wise. Next are those who become wise by learning. After them come those who have to work hard in order to acquire learning. Finally, to the lowest class of the common people belong those who work hard without ever managing to learn." According to one commentator, "Once he understood the character of his students, he was then able to individualize his teaching for the good of each person" – an outcome well in line with the advice of Chapter 4 of The g Factor (1996, 2001). Like Socrates, Confucius' favourite disciple, Yan Hui, came to him as a young teenager when the philosopher was in his forties. Confucius was married and probably had three children, two boys and a girl.
      Following up his batty backing for 'Kwanzaa' (the 'Black' Christmas, actually invented by the CIA as it strove to divide Black radicals of the 1960's – correct Swahili spelling is Kwanza) and for naming-and-shaming all US schools which fail to show year-on-year improvement in test results, President 'Dubya' Bush cravenly prepared to tolerate affirmative racism at the LUniversity of Michigan. The Wall Street Journal  gave the President some good advice: delegate decision-making to someone with at least half a brain.
      An article, 'Race - the final frontier'
by Derek Turner took a mildly optimistic view about the possibly imminent ending of PeeCee – though saying the end might be 'messy and graceless', with leftists increasingly accusing each other of racism (Right Now Magazine i-iii 02, http://www.right-now.org/index.htm). My own fear was that the end of PeeCee might be much worse, with leftists being sure to use every statutory power to ruin and imprison rightists and neolibeREALISTS. What was important was to have an agreeable policy ready for solving the core problem posed by young Black males. I offered my own suggestion to a Conservative weblog: 

It intrigues me that correspondents on this thread feel no need to say just who are the immigrants Britain can do without. Surely these immigrants are people of limited IQ and literacy in English, among whom Black people are spectacularly over-represented. America has conducted a mighty 135-year experiment in desegregation which has largely been a failure (except for baseball stars and substantially interbred 'Blacks' like Colin Powell). Whereas other racial groups in the USA manage to live together, attend church together and intermarry, Blacks are largely segregated -- and not least the million Black men whom the USA has to keep in prison since slavery is not an option. Now that the dramatic over-involvement of Blacks in violent crime is quite clear in Britain too, surely it is time to say that there are some particular forms of multiculturalism that have plainly been shown not to work? Myself, I cannot imagine a serious challenge to New Labour from a party that has not got real about race. Presumably it is time to expect unemployed, criminal, low IQ and illiterate immigrants at least to join groups that would work hard to change or at least cramp the style of the regimes from which the immigrants fled. We will soon be needing such groups to defend the Christians of Africa.
       Responding to Black-on-Black murders of girls by submachine gun in Birmingham UK's Aston area, Government sources announced plans to penalize any gun ownership with a mandatory 5-year custodial sentence and to require Jamaicans to obtain visas before visiting Britain. {Whether such tough talk would lead to action or just be forgotten (like plans to remove failed asylum seekers) remained to be seen; and the offer by Birmingham police of a measly £1,000 for Blacks to shop the Black murderers hardly exuded determination.}

      As President George W. Bush prepared to say whether he wanted to continue with racial quotas and kindred Black-favouring preferences at universities, columnist Linda Chavez did her best to stiffen his backbone (Wall Street Journal, 8 i 03), saying that 92% of Americans oppose affirmative racism and that he himself had clearly opposed it in the past.
      A fractionally sympathetic report on C.R.A.C.K.'s sterilization effort appeared in the Washington Times (8 i 03). It began: "A group that is paying drug addicts and alcoholics $200 apiece not to have babies has expanded its reach into New York amid an outcry from liberal activist groups and a cold shoulder from the health care establishment."
      The Spectator provided a fine indictment by columnist Peter Oborne of tyrannous and murderous Black rule in Zimbabwe (11 i 03). The article concluded:  "Already a mild form of genocide is underway: the constant attrition of state murder, the deliberate starvation of great masses of the people, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of farm workers to remote and inhospitable camps. The ingredients are nearly all in place for something altogether larger and more tragic. But Britain regards herself as powerless to act, while the rest of the world – preoccupied with Iraq – could not care less." {America had a million imprisoned Blacks who could have been let loose against dictator Mugabe, and Britain had a further 15,000. Yet little could be said against Black rule – except a few words in the ears of English cricketers.}
      A major political realignment came a step nearer as, in the House of Commons, 150 Labour MPs made a point of listening to a speech by the anti-war 'Father of the House', Tam Dalyell. {If the liberal-left broke with Mr Blair, leaving him to pursue Americanglish Empire, globalization, the New World Order and its PeeCee religion together with President Bush, the new opposition –  joined by anti-war Conservatives – would have no alternative but to be relatively nationalistic and tough on immigration. After all, if one declines to prevent the growth of terrorism in the world, one is going to need to seal the borders and deal firmly with any enemies within and their supporters – bearing down in ways just as unprecedented as those of President Bush on the families, friends, flatmates and funders of terrorists. It remained to be seen, however, whether the present the liberal-left would turn to classic horrors of national socialism, or whether the position of neofamily-based national liberalism could prove sufficiently attractive. Britain must have learned from its experience of Irish terrorism: either you infiltrate and destroy terror networks or you defend formidably against traitors – otherwise you get the shoddy compromise of the current explosively multicultural and undemocratic Northern Ireland. Could British politicians ever think that even such a disgraceful compromise would ever be on offer from Islamic fanatics?} {For an interesting essay spelling out the differences between empires and nations, go to Michael Walker’s ‘Dream of Empires’.}

      Apparently my name can now be used to scare leftists' children into eating their Cuban Muesli. Last year the Baltimore City Paper reported: "C.R.A.C.K. is funded by a host of social conservatives, including Laura Schlessinger, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Jim Woodhill. Chris Brand, a public-policy consultant to the Woodhill Foundation, is a notorious eugenicist whose book The g Factor attempts to prove differences in white and black racial intelligence based on genes."

      The case that humans are essentially polygamous was ably set out by Lord Robert Winston, Fellow of the Galton Institute, as in his recent TV programmes. Sadly, Lord Winston did not remark the list of famous bastards published by the BBC.

      JOYS OF MULTICULTURALISM  The Metropolitan Police revealed that their Political Correctness had reached new heights as they allowed a Black gunman, a notorious criminal and drug dealer, to hold 100 officers (and doubtless psychobabbling counsellors) at bay from his bedsit in South London (Evening Standard [London], 10 i 03). Officers did not even bring the siege to an end when Eli Hall's only hostage escaped, instead allowing the gunman to set fire to the flat and commit suicide. The whole exercise cost the Met alone at least a million pounds and gravely inconvenienced hundreds of neighbours in nearby shops and flats – not least because loud music was played whenever the gunman showed signs of falling asleep. The excessive caution on the part of the police certainly resulted from fear of criticism by 'Black community leaders' if the police had shot the gunman. It transpired that Hall's father was serving a three-year prison sentence for drug dealing, and that Hall's brother was killed in a street shooting in South London last year.

      Entirely different fears exercised the Black folk of Malawi (Yahoo News, 13 i):

BLANTYRE (Reuters) - Hundreds of angry Malawians hounded a senior political figure from his house and stoned him late Wednesday, accusing him of harboring vampires. Blantire Urban Governor Eric Chiwaya, a member of the ruling United Democratic Front, was the latest victim of a bizarre rumor that the country's government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies.

      In a clear admission that nothing but specialized training can improve the abysmal educational performance of Black children, White teachers were found to be leaving Black schools in droves whenever their pay was tied to general test scores (CNN.com, 13 i, ' White teachers fleeing black schools'). Three Georgia State University professors found that during the late '90s white elementary school teachers in Georgia were much more likely to quit at schools with higher proportions of black students. After the 1999-2000 school year, 31 percent of white teachers quit their jobs at schools where the student population was more than 70 percent black, and those who changed jobs went to schools that served lower proportions of black and poor pupils.
      President George W. Bush bravely tried to deliver what may be the kiss of death to standard issue affirmative racism, announcing:
The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case about admission policies and student diversity in public universities. I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education. But the method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal is fundamentally flawed. At their core, the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students, based solely on their race. So, tomorrow my administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race, and establish numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional.
Instead, the President praised schemes by which universities offer to take the top pupils from all schools, including the poorest. (Aggrieved White parents need only shift their children into sink (or, as is said by British Labour ministers, "bog standard") schools for a year at age 17 to give them a chance of Harvard entry.) The Wall Street Journal (17 i) said the President's statement was "a gutsy call, as anyone can see by the screaming of his critics." But Steve Sailer counselled that slapping down affirmative racism in Michigan could not be the end of the matter, for the real general problem stems from the demand of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that employers prove, if challenged, that their hiring practices are not racist – an impossible task when so many jurors think there is inequity if minorities are not represented in jobs according to their percentages in the population.
      In an article titled '
Sterilization Program Revisits Eugenics Issue', C.R.A.C.K. received the censorious attention of 'Concerned Women of America', many of whom apparently believed that America's 60-year War on Drugs was winnable and that, quite without contraceptive effort, a drop in the numbers of crack-addicted babies could be expected some day, somewhere over the rainbow….
      A Black man was appointed to head the Government milk cow, the Commission for Racial Equality, after he promised not to mount drunken assaults on young policemen (as did the previous occupant of the sinecure, an Indian) and to try to end racial in-fighting at the CRE between Blacks of African origin and Blacks of Caribbean origin.

      REVENGE IS SWEET -- Despite borrowing £30 million under the 1990'S vice-chancellorship of Lady Houndstooth of Sutherland, the LUniversity of Edinburgh has no money to repair its antiquated facilities, many of which are "verging on the illegal" (Student 15 i 03). Tiles fall daily from the wrecked Appleton Tower even though this building is being used to rehouse the university's prestigious computer scientists after their own building burned down. Recent signs around the LUniversity have warned of asbestos leads, and an Estates and Buildings official told Student that "all university buildings have a mouse problem" – indications of the severity of the LUniversity's decline.
      As UK police rampaged through the hard drives of 7,000 suspected paedophilic downloaders, including popstars and TV presenters, top Times columnist Matthew Parris (himself homosexual) bravely expressed reservations about the criminalization of  merely looking at things (18 i). He was backed up by a West London correspondent, S. G. Trembath, who wrote:
It took longer than George Orwell reckoned, but the Thought Police are now with us. They come to our homes, remove possessions and arrest us, because we have looked at something. The internet is Big Brother's dream tool to track our every peculiarity and peccadillo.

London Libertarian Sean Gabb also did a fine job of protesting the new witch-hunt. Meanwhile, 85% of rejected asylum seekers remained in Britain, resulting in the murder of a policeman who was sent to arrest an Algerian Muslim fanatic without first donning body armour.
      Brave John E. Joseph wrote to mention the advantage of race realism to the Times Literary Supplement (17 i). A hundred years ago the French were beginning to realize that they had lost the battle for world empire. Writes Joseph:
[According to Leopold Saussure's Psychologie de La Colonisation Française], Spain and France suffered from the illusion that, through education, they could make 'primitive' imperial subjects the equivalent of Europeans. The Anglo-Saxon, being racist through and through, had no such illusion. So it was that 65,000 British could dominate an Indian empire of 250 million, while France, with 50,000 troops in Algeria, was struggling to control a population of 3.5 million.

Joseph, brave? Why, yes, he penned his race-realistic letter from the new 'School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Science' at the LUniversity of Edinburgh!

      The New York Times complained that President Bush's new 'affirmative percentages' plan would not work and might even be condemned by US courts as racist ('Bush's Affirmative Action Plan Unlikely to End Debate', 19 i). The Bush idea – as implemented already in Texas and Florida – was to guarantee that the top X% from any school would win a state university place. But few Blacks would benefit unless the schools were racially segregated; and the scheme was plainly if indirectly racist in intent. Thus did the NYTwits' newspaper seek to defend traditional affirmative racism. {This was a mean analysis of a rather charming idea which might rapidly bring about school desegregation as Whites try to snap up easy university places for their kids. But the NYT was right that this was not the real way forward for Blacks. Rather, universities wishing to affirm their anti-racist idealism need simply to offer courses which no Whites will want to take. Notably, they should offer degrees in the languages, history and geography of Africa. Any advantage in such a short-term waste of public money? Yes! Perchance Black students of those subjects will get really keen to go and do good humanitarian works in Africa – and stay there permanently! Harvard should start offering postal courses to Black jailbirds immediately, and the US Government should plan to build a mainly-Black 'Task Force Africa' which would police the Dark, Feckless and AIDS-ravaged Continent and keep Blacks out of shooting each other on American and English city streets.} {'Right realist' Steve Sailer also thought Bush's scheme far from ideal: apparently the President favoured the Californian idea of giving university credits to applicants who have suffered hard lives – and special credit for being shot or imprisoned for doing drugs….}

      ASYLUM 'POLICY'  "A Taliban soldier who fought British and American troops in Afghanistan has been granted asylum here because he fears persecution from the new Western-backed government in Kabul." Daily Telegraph [London].

      PAEDOHYSTERIA was roundly denounced in a major centrefold article by the Daily Telegraph's top columnist, Barbara Amiel (married to proprietor Lord Black) (20 i). Amiel specially slammed the criminalization of mere looking at Internet images, said that the idea that material on the Internet caused violence or paedophilia was "totally contradicted by historical evidence", and said it was time to get back to the principle of punishing people chiefly according to the amount of harm they actually caused. She specially lambasted the "pathology of the police" who had found it necessary to send no less than twelve officers to arrest the ageing rock star Pete Townshend and charge him with paedophilic downloading. The first leader in the Telegraph took up Amiel's theme, deploring the fact that thousands of men were literally being broken for minor paedophilic offences and saying it was time to reassert the Christian distinction between hating the sin and loving the sinner. Forty stars wrote a letter to the Daily Mail (21 I) defending popular TV presenter Matthew Kelly, arrested on paedophilic allegations dating back to the 1970's. {For regular coverage of paedohysteria news, see Casualties of false Sexual Allegations New Zealand.}

      IMMIGRATION BALLOON GOES UP?  After London police raided and made seven arrests and discovered a stun gun, CS gas and stolen credit cards at the Finsbury Park Mosque, which had been increasingly taken over by al Quaeda-supporting Algerians since 1998, the Government was given an unprecedented opportunity to jettison Britain's lunatic immigration and asylum policies. In the Times, columnists Michael Gove and Libby Purves railed against politicians' peecee cowardice, and the leading article said that what Muslims had permitted at the Finsbury Park Mosque was "true sacrilege." The Muslim Council of Britain said it was "angered" by the preachments (against "Christian pigs") of loopy, one-eyed, one-armed and no-handed fanatic Abu Hamza, and "outraged" that he had never been arrested. Even the more extreme Moslem Parliament of Great Britain was critical that Abu Hamza had not been reined in. Derek Wyatt, the Labour MP for Sittingbourne (where the Government was caught planning to use a 3-star hotel to accommodate 100 asylum seekers) expressed fury and called for  a two-year moratorium on asylum-seeking in Britain. Fine letters calling for Britain to withdraw from the 1951 Convention on Human Rights were printed in the Times from Professor S.F. Bush and Adrienne May. Even the Shadow Home Secretary for the usually peecee Liberal Democrats mused that, where it was not possible to establish the identity of people coming into the country (e.g. if they have no papers) and where there was concern that they posed a security risk, it might be necessary to detain them while they were security-cleared. The centre-left Independent's reporter Johann Hari (a Swiss) reported that the young men he found at Finsbury Park Mosque talked of all English people as "racist and hating Islam" and of all English women as "whores"; he wrote of these "vicious" men having celebrated the deaths of 9/11 and as showing "paranoia in the extreme" and added that the Mosque was plainly "a nest of crime and terrorism." Spectator editor and Tory MP Boris Johnson braved the wrath of  'modernizing' Tories by condemning Britain's failure to extradite Arabs wanted in France for the 1995 bombing in the Paris Metro: apparently Lord Justice Stephen Sedley had essentially ruled that no Muslim could expect a fair trial in France, making extradition impossible in view of the countless rights granted to asylum seekers (though not to British people to have a vote on whether they want asylum seekers, costing £9,000 a week to keep). (Sources: Times 21 i; Daily Mail  21 i; Independent 22 i; Daily Telegraph 23 i).

    Feminist icon Germaine Greer announced she expected to be branded a paedophile after writing a new book challenging conventional views on child pornography – and expressly saying she enjoyed nothing better than looking at pictures of nude under-16 boys. {Her activities would have been quite legal in Britain so long as she did not download pictures from the Internet.} Mick Hume, the Times resident ex-Marxist, said he would not want any paedophiles locked up on the strength of what he could remember from dance halls of the 1970's (20 i). In Times Higher (25 i), sociologist Frank Furedi also criticized paedohysteria, saying he found it "repellent" that, if current trends continue, researchers would soon need a Government license to be able to study paedophilia and its internet images. {However, it still remained for any defensible paedophile to make a successful public appearance – star paedophiles continued to deny their paedophilia or commit suicide or both.}

      After a British National Party victory at a council election in Yorkshire, a Times leader (25 i) managed to commit itself to saying people were right to be angry about Britain's hopeless provision for getting rid of failed asylum seekers. The Spectator complained mildly about Algerian immigrants and brought itself to mention the scores of thousands of cases of disease (HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis B) which had been imported into Britain under Labour rule (Andrew Browne, 25 i) {mentioned at this website last November}. The 'Conservative' Party said nothing because its Shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin, did not want to tarnish the party's supposedly gleaming image as the champion of  the disadvantaged, but Prime Minister Tony Blair saw his opportunity to denounce asylum seeking liberalism as "unacceptable" and to say that if there were no improvement he would consider withdrawing Britain from the United Nations Convention on Human Rights (Times 27 i). {Having 'caught the Tories bathing and run away with their clothes' on so many other isses, this was a case of stealing Tory clothes before they had even been worn.}
      For the Labour Government, Education Minister Charles Clarke said he would allow universities to charge fees of up to £3,000 for UK students and announced his defection from leftist piety about the universities, saying "….the 'emperor's clothes' idea that all universities are broadly the same was always nonsense and needs to be stripped away" (Times Higher, 25 i). The state of 'universities' created in the years of expansion was starkly indicated by research from Australia showing that "Students on Australian campuses are copying material from the internet and textbooks, submitting work by previous students, collaborating on assignments and hiring someone more knowledgeable in a subject to sit their exams" (Times Higher 25 i). No less than 80% of  Australia's undergraduates and 54% of postgraduates admitted to cheating in the course of their degree work – blaming the fact that they were also typically in paid employment for 20 hours per week.

      Having regularly imprisoned a million Black men rather than allow slavery, deportation or conscription, 'colour-blind' America found it had an epidemic of hepatitis C behind bars. Around 30% of prisoners were estimated to have this disease, and each year a million left prison, spreading the disease in the general population.

      The Spectator told its readers the truth about internet 'chat rooms', enabling them to judge for themselves whether the underage 'teen sluts' found exhibiting their pubes and talking dirty would be better falling for a teenage boy or for a responsible adult male.
     
The Dutch finally saw the light and began discussing whether to ban the entry of foreign Islamic religious leaders – on the grounds Holland already had enough jihadists of its own.
      The crazed 'anti-racists' and peecee fanatics of Harvard Law School gave a warm reception to the 'Reverend' Al Sharpton, the Black racist, anti-Semite and Marxist who had taken to calling President G. W. Bush's appointees Colin Powell and Condi Rice "house niggers."

      Because the imprisoned Tony Martin, the 60-year-old Englishman who had shot and killed a gypsy intruder at his isolated farm, was being threatened by gypsies waiting keenly for his release, the Home Office apparently began making plans to buy him a new identity and ship him to Australia. {Thus could other insufficiently multicultural Whites of Britain be got rid of – a modern form of deportation! Just why the gypsies were not being prosecuted was not explained; nor was Tony Martin's own reaction to this plan.}

      The Winter 2002/3 issue of Occidental Quarterly included a fine article by Richard McCulloch contesting the constructivist (neo-Marxist) view that 'race' is just a social contract. In particular, a table and figure detailed the main phenomenon of world racial structure, the differences between Caucasoids, Mongoloids and Negroids – and showed in particular that the groups from which both the English and Japanese are most different genetically are the Nigerians, the Bantu, the Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines. (Ref.: Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, “Evolutionary relationships of human populations on a global scale,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, Sept. 1993 (pp. 927-943): http://www.molbiolevol.org/cgi/gca?sendit=Get+All+Checked+Abstract%28s%29&gca=10%2F5%2F927.)

      Accused of 'racism' by blind Home Secretary David Blunkett, the political editor of the Sun, Trevor Kavanagh, wrote in a Times column that the Government's open-door policy on asylum was a disgrace and that 370,000 Sun readers had written in to agree with the Sun's "crusade against asylum madness." (A front-page Sun headline about Britain's 300 terror suspects had read "Round 'Em Up and Kick 'Em Out.") In Portland, Devon, locals met to express outrage at hearing of a Government plan to dump asylum seekers on them; subsequently the disused ten-story building intended to provide a home for the asylum seekers caught fire, ruining at least one of its floors. In Sittingbourne, locals swore they would burn down a hotel commandeered by Mr Blunkett to house the latest arrivals from Kosovo and Albania. Times columnist and Environment Editor Anthony Browne recorded:
John Lloyd, the former editor of Britain’s main left-wing political magazine, the New Statesman, wrote a long article in that magazine pretty much agreeing with everything I have been arguing. Britain’s most intellectual magazine, Prospect, ran a cover story (February 2003) by a former Marxist Cambridge University economics professor entitled “In Defence of Fortress Europe.” For Prospect to run a piece like this from a right-winger would have been unthinkable just six months ago; that even such unimpeachable left-wingers are coming out against mass immigration, legal or illegal, shows just how far attitudes have changed in Britain.

Even the left-wing Observer has talked of the "coming storm" over immigration – a storm which will damage Britain's 7 million coloured immigrants who misguidedly looked for support to unrealistic leftist politicians.

      A generously endowed Pasadena lady church schoolteacher, 27, pleaded guilty to having enjoyed six months of sex with one of her 13-year-old charges. She faced a possible life sentence in Texas but otherwise neither she nor her teenage lover seemed to have any complaints. A similar case surfaced in Milwaukee, involving a reasonably trim 31-year lady schoolteacher and a young man of 17, formerly her student, who protests love for her and jumps bail whenever there is a possibility of meeting.
       UK police said that the 7,000 paedophilic downloaders currently waiting for a knock on the door at dawn were only the tip of an iceberg. The 7,000 were those who had used Visa cards to access kiddie porn; but once Mastercard and Access card users were investigated the number of suspects could grow to 250,000. {Would some senior personage at last be tempted to bring paedohysteria to a halt? British jails have official room for only 55,000 prisoners, and are already overcrowded with a prison population of 80,000; and the Sunday Herald alleged that one of the suspected downloaders held, or once held a Cabinet job – this allegation being followed by a media blackout, probably because Downing Street issued a 'D' Notice to all editors, urging suppression of the story at risk of grave official displeasure.}

      The January issue of the top intellectuals' magazine, Prospect, brought its readers the new that Bill Hami