SPECCIE COMES ROUND

All too late in the day, the Spectator (22 iv) allowed its occasional (Belfast- and Cambridge-educated) columnist Leo McKinstry (see e.g. this Diary, 2004) to point out that Blacks and Bangladeshis in Britain commit a lot of crimes and disproportionately consume state welfare and housing benefits. Alas, this was too late for the unimaginative Conservative Mr Howard -- stuck by then with claiming to want nothing more than a few unspecified 'controls' on migration, in line with all Britain's other parties.


RACE IS BIOLOGY -- CLAIMS PUBLISHED

Licensed scholarly warfare broke out in the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law (vi 05, full articles) over whether psychological race differences (especially in intelligence) are substantially heritable.

Race realists Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton and Linda Gottfredson fought their corner excellently, conveniently reviewing the literature (cf. the Cambridge debate (i 97)*) and adding some useful points (e.g. that skin lightness is linked to IQ among South Africa's Blacks -- which it is not among America's Blacks, where lighter skins often came about from historical Black female matings with dull White farmhands during the days of slavery). The hereditarians were opposed by such as Robert Sternberg (sometimes said by me to believe in 666 types of intelligence -- Behav.Res.& Therapy, 1992; Why ignore the g factor? in H.Nyborg, 2003, The Scientific Study of General Intelligence) and Richard E. Nisbett (reviewed by me in Heredity, 2003) who claimed among other things medium-term boosts for children on non-IQ-type tests from Headstart-type programmes involving 8 hours intervention daily

Overall, the race realists had a coherent message with copious evidence and the environmentalists had the scraps; the groups remained respectively the 'stompers' and 'stompees', as amusingly caricatured by Professor Earl 'Buzz' Hunt (Brand, Person.&Indiv.Diffs, 1999) though they strangely neglected to deal with the left's main arguments against the g factor (for the argument and London School answers, see Brand, Constales & Kane, 2003).

Occidental Quarterly reckoned the 60-page Rushton & Jensen article might prove as much of a landmark as Jensen's classic 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, 'How much can we boost IQ and educational attainment?' The race-realist argument was summarized in News-Medical Net, 26 iv, and rejected by the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Stephen Strauss on the grounds that no genes had so far been found for intelligence. Strauss plainly never got the benefit of my March letter to Times Literary Supplement:

"Pittsburgh physiologists reported in 2000 that cognitive impairments are associated with the gene e4; and this gene is at least three times as common in Negroes, Pygmies and Bushmen as in East Asians, with whites falling in between (American Journal of Medical Genetics, Dec. 4; 96(6):707-11". The importance of the strongly race-linked Duffy gene to race differences in cancer and malaria was shown in new work by Cincinnati medics (Occidental Quarterly, 6 iv).


EUGENICS MARCHES ON

A new book by John Glad, Future Human Evolution (downloadable from http://www.whatwemaybe.org), set out a bright future for eugenics and especially noted that eugenics had been (both Biblically and in the 1930's) and still was much favoured by the Jews: the author quoted a contemporary Israeli journalist as saying, "Eugenics is alive and well" [in Israel]. Eugenics was also advocated publicly in 2005 by a leading member of Germany's Free Democratic Party, Daniel Bahr, who criticized the fact that only 40% of Germany's female academics had children.


LIBERAL FASCISM INDICTED

Turning the tables on its hysterical establishment enemies (who freely send the police against it and even its Cambridge-educated leader), the British National Party managed to point out in party political broadcasts on UK TV and radio that they were the only substantial party to back freedom of speech in the UK. At the time, the BNP's Cambridge-educated leader Nick Griffin faced a 17-year jail term for moderate and private verbal criticism of Islamofascism.


ACADEMICS' POLITICAL BIAS REVEALED

The extent of anti-conservative bias in British universities surfaced as Times Higher gave the party affiliations of university-employed parliamentary candidates in the 2005 General Election: Conservative 0; Green 8; Labour 8; Liberal 11; Scottish Nationalist Party 1; United Kingdom Independence Party 1. Times Higher also reported that, for the first time, support for Liberals among academics as a whole was greater than support for Labour.


MULTICULTURALIST CARRIES ON SMEARING

Although Britain's liberal left agreed to avoid calling Conservative leader Michael Howard a 'racist', there were ways round this self-denying ordinance. Thus disgraced ex-CRE drunk -- ooops -- Black boss Herman Ouseley: 'It is racist to try to capture the votes of bigots. .Michael Howard tries to capture votes otherwise destined for the British National Party.' The BBC found another way: its Radio 4 got assorted bishops, social workers and Black community leaders such as Ouseley to say they felt 'uncomfortable' with Mr Howard's tone, which was suggested to be 'subliminally racist'.

{Mr Howard remained firm that he would introduce 'controls' on immigration, but he was non-committal as to their content, saying rather airily that he would leave that to Parliament. Likewise he was not inclined to bravery about taxation, saying only that he would increase state spending by (a measly) 0.3% less than Labour.}


TOP BLACK LEFTIST ADMITS IMPORTANCE OF BIOLOGY

The ex-Harvard homosexual historian Kwame Anthony Appiah (the son of a daughter of UK Labour Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps and a Ghanaian luminary) surprised leftists by announcing in New York Review of Books (reviewed by Alan Ryan, 28 iv) that a person's 'identity' (and thus values and ethics) would depend partly on their biology and basic nationality. Throwing in stinging criticisms of multiculturalism, postmodernism and 'existentialist creativity', he thus announced he wanted to be called a 'rooted cosmopolitan.'

{Just why he had argued with Harvard President Larry Summers about Black issues and left his Chair of African American Studies and moved to Princeton along with Black radical Cornel West thus remained unclear. The mystery was deepened as Harvard's Black humanities professor Henry Gates resigned from his chairmanship of African American Studies without giving reasons. The African Americanists also lost Black political science professor Michael Dawson to the University of Chicago. Perhaps the whole field was in serious disarray as well as being bitter in particular about Summers' victories over leftists at Harvard? Who can learn any truth in these days of spin and gross media bias? Fortunately the truths of IQ live on... }


GENES MENTIONED

After a dismal British General Election in which the words race, IQ, feminism, birth rate, family and eugenics never got a mention, rock wild child Kelly Osbourne, 20 (and daughter of freak 'Ozzie' Osbourne), blamed her druggie problems (and those of her brother, also in rehab) frankly on her genes (Sun, 6 v).

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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