Sunday, September 26, 2004

PIAGETIAN INTERACTIONISM FAILS AGAIN

The notion of C20 developmental psychologists that rich and regular 'interaction with the environment' is crucial to the growth of intelligence was falsified yet again as the case of a German composer, Patrick Schoenbach, 33, came to light: he had severe cerebral palsy from birth, but his IQ was tested as 170 at age 4 (to his family's astonishment) and he went on to degrees and interests in chess, computing and music (ChessBase, 10 ix). (The topic of Piagetian interactionism is discussed further in Chapter 2 of The g Factor, 1996/2000, where the palsied young Irish poet, Davoren Hannah, was discussed as an example of 'interactionless intelligence' - a case running contrary to popular belief over many years in the Department of Psychology, LUniversity of Edinburgh.)



OUTSOURCING OF JOBS DOUBTED

Top American economist Paul Samuelson took issue with 'globalization', saying the outsourcing of American skilled jobs to India and China could have a depressing effect on American wages and lose America's competitive edge (New York Times, 9 ix). {In any case, he might have added, it is bound to be dysgenic and a threat to social hierarchy if higher-IQ natives are thrown on the scrapheap.}



ANOTHER FAMILY FLOP FOR TORIES

As 'right-winger' John Redwood, 51 -- a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, for fifteen years - was restored to the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, the media revealed that he had traded in his wife of some 30 years standing for a three-times-married ex-model girl of almost his own age. Redmond thus joined the ranks of the many senior Tories who, during the 1990's, risibly threw away the opportunity to make their party one of 'family values' - Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Willetts, Piers Merchant, Steven Norris, Harvey Proctor, Stephen Milligan, Lord Archer, Michael Portillo, Jonathan Aitken and ex-P.M. John Major himself all turned out to be leading sex lives departing substantially from the standard-issue Christian model (Conservatives' Roll of Shame).

{Just when English Conservatives - with many of their own free enterprise, low income tax and tough-on-crime policies stolen by Labour - needed to adopt a mixture of humanitarian and nationalist concerns (in which the building up of English-speaking multi-adult families would surely be central to socialization of children and to the dispensation of state largesse) they found themselves hamstrung by their own scandals and cover-ups, as also apparently by a leader of Jewish-Romanian extraction who had been brought up in Wales.}



'DON'T TALK ABOUT THE RIOTS!' -- PEECEE BRITISH PRESS

After years of declining to tell readers that arrestees and criminals are often Black, almost all British newspapers declined to mention that Nepalese rioters, seeking revenge for the deaths of 11 Nepalese workers at the hands of Islamic fanatics in Iraq, had set fire to the one mosque in Katmandu and done $20 million dollars worth of property damage before a 5-day curfew brought Hindu mobs under control. Only the Guardian and Scotland on Sunday carried the story - they did not need to prove their leftish credentials.



'MODERATE MUSLIMS' HAILED BY LEFT

Preparing for a Ba'athite future (as mooted in my forthcoming article in Occidental Quarterly), the left-wing New Statesman (13 ix) listed worldwide efforts by some Muslims to think about humanizing Islam - but Staggers couldn't find a single leading Muslim with much achievement to his credit in this area, nor any offering outright condemnation of Islamic atrocities at 9/11 and Beslan. {Rather, the 'moderates' of the 'responsible' Arab press were scrambling over each other to blame the Jews and Western oil interests for the genocide in Sudan's Dafur province (American Outlook, 17 viii).}



TORIES PLAN TO DO BETTER ON RACE

In a tape secretly made in Conservative Party HQ and spirited to The Times (17 ix), Co-Chairman Liam Fox was heard promising to beef up the Conservatives' profile on asylum and immigration. He explained that UKIP owed its succes not to its "totemic" concern with Europe but to supporters appreciating that, beyond the EU issue, the party was intrinsically anti-foreigner and anti-immigration. Soon, Conservative leader Michael Howard brazenly decided simply to adopt UKIP's favoured policy (cut immigration to 100K p.a., admit via a 'points system' crediting education and skills, derogate from the 1951 Geneva Convention re asylum seekers) and was promptly denounced by the immigration lobby for his "shocking" and "unworkable" proposals (Scotsman, 22 ix).

{But still no talk of the vitally necessary electoral pact... Meanwhile, as Conservatives toyed with possibilities, the Swedish announced they had lost control of substantial parts, the Muslim areas, of Sweden's third city, Malmo - allowing a glimpse of what Eurabia would eventually look like (American Renaissance, 16 ix). And in peecee France it turned out that it was illegal to refuse to sell property to an Arab wishing to buy (Independent, 15 ix). In Hartlepool for the forthcoming by-election, Robert Kilroy-Silk said UKIP's campaign was all about the truth, Queen and Country and turfing out "the old liars", but race and immigration did not seem to get a mention.}



FRENCH MISEDUCATORS CHALLENGED

In France, Marc Le Bris, an ex-Trotskyite schoolteacher who had come to favour and to use traditional teaching methods (including the rote-learned 15-times table) found himself feted by the Minister of Education and President Chirac - to the chagrin of the sociologized bureaucrats who have, in France as in Britain, taken the country back to pre-1880 levels of literacy and numeracy (Times, 18 ix). Le Bris denied he was 'playing into right-wing hands,' saying "there is no right or left in teaching."



PAEDOHYSTERIA STRIKES THE COWARDLY

Having failed to educate the public to have a sense of proportion about vintage priestly paedophilia, the Roman Catholic Church found its American diocese of Tucson (involving 350,000 communicants) admitting it had filed for bankruptcy after paying out all its ready cash to priests' 'victims' (whose sufferings and proven lasting damage remained, as ever, unspecified).



AFRICA REALISM FROM TOP BLACK

At a conference in Durban, Moeletsi Mbeki, the younger brother of South Africa's Black Prime Minister, achieved wide publicity for his announcement that 'Africa was better off under colonialism' (Daily Telegraph, 23 ix, Mineweb, 10 ix). Mr Mbeki had studied at Harvard and was President of the South African Institute for International Affairs which arranged the conference. He specially remarked that in twenty years China had brought 400 million people out of poverty; whereas over the same period Nigeria had led 90 million people into poverty. Mr Mbeki also urged opposition to the Black tyrant of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and to much of the rest of Africa's 'political elite'; and he slammed schemes of 'Black Economic Empowerment' as providing wealth redistribution rather than wealth creation (see New Statesman, 20 viii).

{Hacks do not appear to have asked Mr Mbeki whether he knew of Lynn & Vanhanen's demonstration of the likely role of low IQ in producing Black Africa's ceaseless post-independence problems.}


Note from John Ray: I am getting lazy in my old age so I have not included above the few hyperlinks that Chris has given -- but you can find them at the bottom of Chris's original page here if you want to follow anything up.