Intelligence tests - widely held by the media not to measure anything -- once more proved their worth in measuring and understanding major human problems as researchers in Aberdeen and Edinburgh found lower IQ's among the smokers in a study of 413 64-year olds (Sunday Times, 5 xii). Since ex-smokers had normal IQs and the smokers themselves had had normal IQs when first tested at school in the 1947 Scottish national survey, the researchers concluded that the smokers' 3% drop in IQ over time must have been due to their continued smoking and thus that "Smoking seriously damages your IQ." The smokers' IQ droop could not be explained by higher alcohol consumption or lower level of education; but unstimulating work - known independently to be associated with IQ droop -- remained to be investigated. {The finding made it into the columns of the Sun (`Years of cigs can cut IQ', 9 xii).}
POOR FAMILIES SHOULD RESTRICT THEIR BIRTH-RATE
Tory peeress Baroness Shreela Flather, 70, Britain's first `Asian' [actually Indian] to be elevated to the House of Lords (in 1990), urged procreational restraint for deprived and dysfunctional families, apparently on the grounds that they would not have enough time or money to give serious help to more than two children. Herself a mother of two, she was supported by an emeritus professor of University College London (a fellow member of the all-party parliamentary group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health) but the Sunday Times (5 xii) nevertheless rallied parents of large families to condemn Flather for `advocating eugenics.'
(Less-well-off parents in Britain have on average 2.7 ‡hildren, whereas middle-class parents have only 2.) {Shreela Flather, Baroness Warnock and a third member of the House of Lords subsequently told a parliamentary committee of their support for self-chosen euthanasia for the very sick and elderly - having changed their minds because of successful experiments with `living wills' in the Netherlands, Belgium and Oregon.}
EQUALITY OF ASPIRATION REFUTED
After P.M. Tony Blair urged all children to aim for the stars (Diary, November), he was promptly refuted by the case of Kimberly Fortier/Quinn, the ambition-crazed American socialite who had betrayed her millionaire husband to have two illegitimate children by the romantically obsessive and power-mad Home Secretary David Blunkett, finally ending with herself in psychiatric treatment after Blunkett's revenge when she tried to close down the affair. The matriarchal Sunday Times columnist, India Knight (looks somewhat Hindu), recorded: "People like Kimberly Quinn have never understood that most of us, the waitresses, the skivvy, the secretary - "the little people" - are big enough to remain "little" and secure enough to know that happiness and status are not necessarily related, that letting greed and ambition distort your world view is the quickest route to misery and that it's always a good idea to at least try to do the decent thing."
RACE REALISM GROWS
A representative poll of Brits reported in the Times (7 xii) found objections to immigration increased substantially over the previous decade - despite non-stop propaganda from Britain's political class and media to pretend that immigration is acceptable and even beneficial. Asked whether they wanted to reduce immigration, 74% said yes (compared to 65% in 1995); and, asked whether immigration caused crime, 39% said `yes' (compared to only 25% in 1995). The change among graduates was particularly striking, with the percentage wanting to reduce immigration rising from 33% to 56%.
COMPREHENSIVE MISMANAGEMENT PROVED
Eight years after Labour leader Tony Blair said his priorities in government would be "Education, education, education", the UK's state schools were announced to have dropped from 8th to 18th in OECD-organized testing of maths performance in 15-year-olds around the world. Significant falls for neosocialist Britain were also seen in science and reading.
AFFIRMATIVE RACISM REJECTED
American Renaissance (14 xii) reported good progress by American universities towards `colour-blind' admissions procedures, returning to judging potential students and scholars according to individual academic merit. The University of Michigan was having to face returning application fees and providing some compensation to 30,000 unfairly rejected Asian and White applicants.
DIVERSITY REJECTED
Two and a half years after this Diary and the Wall Street Journal announced the gross over-representation of leftists in academic life, the Economist (which has still to mention the 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations) got around to telling its readers of the scandal of the left's closed shop in academia (15 xii). In a recent survey, the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans among junior academic staff was 30-1.
ALTRUISM HERITABLE
In new research with the hundreds of identical and fraternal twins, ages 18-75, on the London University Register, top race-realist psychologist Phil Rushton confirmed the result of four previous studies that altruism, nurturance and nonaggression are about 42% heritable. The influence of shared upbringing was also 40% for girls but 0% for boys.
The paper was published on-line November 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences (see DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2004.2941 http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0962-8452&vo -- scroll down FirstCite). News coverage was provided in New Scientist, 1 xii - with a comment from Robert Plomin that his own much younger twins show very little effect of shared environment - and in Financial Times (11 xii, Stephen Pincock).
"1984" ARRIVES IN BRITAIN?
After its leader Nick Griffin and other members were arrested in dawn swoops, then released uncharged, the British National Party (15 xii) was understandably jubilant at the fall of its arch-persecutor, Home Secretary David Blunkett (whose officials had been helping him with his romantic homework, the man-flattering Sextator socialite Kimberly Quinn) - though the BNP was not so delighted by Blunkett's replacement, ex-Communist (from Cambridge University days) Charles Clarke.
{Soon, news came from Victoria, Australia of two evangelical ministers found guilty of `inciting hatred' of Islam by criticizing it as a violent religion; in St Andrew's University, Scotland, the student newspaper was closed down because a writer had made a joke against the Welsh; and British Muslim organizations went into outraged protest mode over Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore mentioning the case for calling Mahomet a paedophile (he married a girl of nine).}
CENSORSHIP REVEALED
Coming clean about the dominance of PeeCee in British universities, the University of Durham forbade its academics to lecture on `sensitive' topics unless they first won the approval of their departmental ethics committee (Times Higher, 17 xii). The memo read: "All teaching that raises issues that are likely to cause offence to some... must have ethical approval from the departmental teaching and learning committee. It is anticipated that this may cover topics such as race, slavery, witchcraft, abortion, euthanasia, many gender issues etc."
SIKH WOMAN PLAYWRIGHT SILENCED BY VIOLENCE AND DEATH THREATS
As Britain's Sikh community demonstrated its non-acceptance of liberal multicultural values by chucking bricks at a Birmingham theatre till a locally popular play critical of temple gurus was taken off, the Times and Telegraph (21 xii) managed a little outrage (saying playwrights must be "free to offend" and that what was happening was nothing less than censorship) and the Birmingham Stage Company and London's Royal Court Theatre came forward offering to put on the play and give police and authorities a chance of redeeming themselves - but not a single British voice called for the prompt arrest of the Sikhs who had organized and joined in the vandalism after initially peaceful protests turned nasty.
{And the retreat of Christmas and Christianity continued - with a quarter of schools disallowing carols and the majority of local authorities allowing no mention of Christmas or Jesus at their `winter festivals.'}
THE TRUE RELIGION OF AMERICAN REPUBLICANS
George W. Bush's victory in the Presidential elections triggered much speculation as to the distinctive moral and religious values of modern American Republicans. But brilliant livewire columnist Steve Sailer discovered the main empirical basis of Bushite success: with correlations of around .90, Bush did best in States having their White 18-44-yr women married for longer, having lower house price rises in the previous twenty years (making houses more affordable), and having more children per White woman. Evidently, the Democrat vs Republican contrast had become one between people being primarily organized around the family or primarily organized around the state and its deceptive programmes of benefits, job creation, career feminism, affirmative racism and homosexualism. Steve deserves serious congratulation on this concrete breakthrough.
One day (when Occidental Quarterly get around to publishing it..), he will enjoy my family-backing article `Can scholarship `impact' on religion? - The case of The Bell Curve.' -- A SUMMARY:
The impact of Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve on Western policy makers was minimal, probably because `political correctness' has for fifteen years been the virtual religion of the West. Here, the influence of psychology's London School as a whole on public debate (on the internet) is calculated to have been demonstrably small (1.66%) compared to the writings of leading postmodernists, anti-racists and feminists. No blame thus attaches to Herrnstein & Murray - they made no serious mistakes. `Postmodern'-prescribed political correctness, though emanating from authoritarians of the left (believing in the supremacy of will, not intelligence), has even been adopted by the forces of modern capitalism and globalization -- notably by such eminences as President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair who continue to demand multicultural solutions to problems among the mutually hostile ethnic groups within Northern Ireland, Serbia, Nigeria, Rwanda/Burundi, Sudan and Iraq. Three `nationalist' ways of opposing PeeCee are considered; but opposition to multicultural globalization should probably back new choice-empowered extended families to replace Western statism of the past and individualism of the present. In such a mission, The Bell Curve should eventually prove a crucial work.
MAIN CONCLUSION: "..the challenge is clear: to move people from the statism of the first half of the twentieth century and the individualism of the second half towards a more reasonable, local, comprehensible, voluntary and manageable arrangement whereby the overarching state exists primarily to support organized groups of adults who make serious contracts to look after each other and their children and thus provide the chief social nexus of the West."
At a Christmas time when many state-run bodies (including half of Britain's schools) are refusing to mention the Holy Family -- or indeed Christmas itself -- it is good to have Steve's discovery that the cause of the family (not always near to the hearts of churchmen and prelates, it must be admitted) remains a love-based and politically potent organizing principle for many.
[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.]
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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