BIRDS COME HOME TO ROOST FOR BLIAR

In surely the last days of Rev. Bliar’s Fuehrer ooops NuLabour Bunker, it transpired that the National Health Service’s nursing staff – once thought of as ‘angels’ by a public heedless of where socialism would lead -- had been well and truly taken over by obese lesbians wanting nothing more than to screech at prim Health Minister Miss Hewitt (who had run out of money to spend on them); that the Home Office had been comprehensively taken over by anti-racist Blecks and Peks wanting chiefly to maintain their peecee reputations by avoiding talk of deportation and instead releasing foreign criminals (half of them Bleck) on to an unsuspecting British public; and that the illiterate, foul-mouthed and pie-gobbling ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ ‘Two Jags’ John Prescott had been taken over by a sexually casual bespectacled civil servant, Tracey Temple, 44 – and taken to the cleaners in that Tracey won £250,000 from the Mail on Sunday while ‘Two Shags’ Prezza had to stay in hiding consoling his “devastated” Liz Taylor-lookalike wife of the previous 44 years and threatening to complain to the Press Commission about Tracey’s allegations that the two- (or possibly four-) year affair had been conducted in government time and in government offices and limousines (with one bonk taking place just minutes after Prezza and Tracey had attended a service at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the UK’s Iraq War victims).

PROF BLASTS MUSLIMS

After Muslim students protested at Michigan State University against Western publication of mild motoons suggesting some linkage between Islam and suicide bombing, one 55-year-old professor was brave enough to react, as follows (Via US columnist Michelle Malkin)

Dear Moslem Association:

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest.

I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavain girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris, France.

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, agressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile "protests."

If you do not like the values of the West -- see the 1st Amendment -- you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option.

Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially,

Indrek S. Wichman,

Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Uproar duly followed and, though MSU professed to stand by Professor Wichman on ‘free speech’ grounds, it counselled him that any further pronouncements from him “could constitute the creation of a hostile environment, and that could ... form the basis of a complaint.” A firm defence of the professor appeared in News by Us, 26 iv.

LABOUR MINISTER ADMITS BNP ATTRACTIVE TO VOTERS

Britain's Employment Minister and key Blair ally, LSE-educated Margaret Hodge, herself an immigrant to Britain at age 5, shocked Britain by admitting that eight in ten of her White Labour-voting constituents in Barking, East London, were thinking of voting for the BNP because Labour had let them down by supplying council houses and health and welfare services preferentially to immigrants and asylum seekers. Mother of four and MP since 1994, Mrs Hodge said (as rightists had been saying for a decade) that Britain's "political class" had been "often frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race"; and she said Labour voters no longer felt ashamed about switching to the BNP.

She was promptly supported by research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding that one Londoner in four and one English voter in six "might" vote BNP. Phill Edwards, the BNP Press Officer, said the Rowntree report highlighted a sense of "powerlessness and frustration" among communities in Britain which was leading to an increase in support for his party. Dagenham Labour MP. Mr Jon Cruddas, a former adviser to Tony Blair, warned that the BNP was "on the verge of a major political breakthrough" (ITV, 17 iv).

The wretched `Conservative' Party led by "compassionate" Dave Chameleon at first declined to comment (Times, 17 iv); but Dave himself was finally moved to declare the BNP was the opposite of all he stood for (Sun, 18 iv). Some thought a degree of scepticism was called for as Labour had a track record of talking up the threat of the BNP before elections to try to get its core vote out. A rise in both `Islamophobia' and anti-semitism was reported among British children by the National Union of Teachers (17 iv).

In the last European Parliament elections, the BNP won 4.9 percent of the vote. BNP policies for the approaching local council elections in England included: traditional school meals, teachers allowed to smack, separate teaching of children having poor English, widespread closure of teacher training colleges (teachers to be trained by ex-teachers having 30 years experience), compulsory competitive sports restored in schools, no dumping of asylum seekers in White areas, low taxes, no affirmative action {i.e. affirmative racism} (24dash.com, 15 iv).

The BBC responded to the BNP media breakthrough by bringing on a propagandist from the sinister `anti-racist, anti-fascist' Searchlight group; and the Times (18 iv) made sure to grovel to the left by paying the Observer's David Aaronovitch (whose father had been a Communist leader) for a column denouncing the people of Barking for their low educational attainments, Thatcherism and high pregnancy rates (as if there was any point in schoolwork and self-discipline under Rev. Bliar's depraved, tyrannous and dumbed-down neosocialism).

Phil Woolas, NuLabour's Local Government Minister, said later that no politician should underestimate the BNP threat (Daily Telegraph, 18 iv). The Glasgow Herald's political correspondent, Iain McWhirter, predicted that the English local elections threatened to be "a bloodbath for Labour" at the hands of the BNP (19 iv). (But on 24 iv an ICM national telephone poll for the Grauniad newspaper showed BNP support at only 2%, and the Liberals, on 24%, the chief beneficiaries of Labour's recent problems of tyranny, sleaze and incompetence.)



RACE REALISTS ARRESTED

(Update)

Not content with making endless legal trouble for BNP leader Nick Griffin and his colleague Mark Collett (both so far cleared by a judge on all charges tried), Humberside police arrested top British `anti-Semites / male chauvinists / race realists' etc., etc., Luke O'Farrell and Simon Sheppard (18 iv), seeing fit to handcuff them and detain them for five hours in crude cells with a seatless lavatory and with only a copy of the Blairite tabloid Sun newspaper for company. Such work, meeting people with ideas, was evidently (along with flights to Thailand to monitor paedophiles and their girlfriends) proving more attractive to Britain's mightily paid and uniformed `graduate' peecee sleuths than apprehending burglars or getting cut in on drug deals..

As these arrests took place several British firemen were suspended after a supervisor had removed a Union Jack symbol from a vehicle because he found it `smacked of the BNP.' Young Tory MP Philip Davies (Shipley) declared that "political correctness has got completely out of hand and many people feel they can no longer have their say on important issues and that has led them to vote for unwelcome parties like the BNP"; but Commons Leader Geoff Hoon rejected the claims and Labour MPs demanded Davies be disciplined by the `Conservatives.' In Essex, an Indian gentleman of 58, Kiron Mittra, a retired postman, said he would be supporting the BNP because he wanted to fly the Union Jack and `did not believe in political correctness.'



KEY LABOURITE BACKS WHITES

Respected Labour thinker Frank Field MP came out with much sympathy for Whites who found local Council houses allocated not according to their contributions in taxes and length of queueing but according to the `needs' of Black, Pakistani and single-parent-mothers which shot these undesirables promptly into the nicer flats that Councils had on offer (21 iv).



KEY "TIMES" WRITER BACKS CIVILIZATION

Getting near to supporting human intelligence, the ex-Communist columnist of the Times (who saw the light some ten years ago) wrote a fine piece deploring the windy ethics and lack of positive principles of Britain's `leading' parties (21 iv). Mick Hulme's essay appeared just hours after top UK politicians had disgraced themselves on BBC 1's flagship TV programme `Question Time' by failing to raise a decent cheer from the Cambridge audience for *any* of their miserable evasions of Britain's racial problems with its unduly large numbers of low-IQ and psychotic immigrants from Jamaica and Pakistan.



BNP CLEARED OF EXTREMISM

In the Daily Telegraph (21 iv), Lord Tebbitt wrote that he could not find anything in the BNP's 2005 electoral manifesto that could justify the party being called `right-wing' or `racist.' The same day saw the BNP rise to 7% support in a national YouGov poll, whereas the `Conservatives' fell by 3% to 33% -- and was only sustained that high by the 10% increase in support it had enjoyed from Britain's homosexuals since Dave Chameleon's `leadership' had begun. By 23 iv, a Sunday Mirror poll showed 45.5% support for the BNP in the north-east London area of Barking and Dagenham, as compared to only 36% for Labour. The party was condemned as `hate-filled,' "completely unacceptable" and `not worthy of a single vote' by `Conservative' Dave Chameleon, allowing its Press Officer, Phill Edwards, to retort that the BNP was `based on fact, not hate,' and had clearly become `Britain's only opposition party' (23 iv).



BLACK RAPISM DEMONSTRATED

America's National Crime Victimization Survey for 2003 found rape to be overwhelmingly intra-racial. In particular, Black female rape victims reported their attackers were White in less than 0.5% of cases. By contrast, Black-on-White rape was relatively frequent, with 15.5 of White female rape victims reporting that their assailants were Black (American Renaissance, 19 iv). Thus Black-on-White rape rate is at least 31 times what would be expected from the White-on-Black rate - another tribute to the joys of cultural diversity.. (For details of spectacular Black rapism in London - unreported in the British press - see American Renaissance, 18 iv).



MULTICULTURALISM CONDEMNED BY TOP IMMIGRANT



Senior BBC newsman George Alagiah, himself a Tamil from Ceylon who came to Britain at age 11, complained that recent immigrants had done too little to integrate - a complaint echoing that of Black Commission for Racial Equality boss Trevor Phillips in 2005 (BBC, 23 iv ) (see previous Diary/Blog, ii 2005).

------------------------------------

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

-----------------------------------

RACE REALISTS ARRESTED

Not content with making endless legal trouble for BNP leader Nick Griffin and colleague Mark Collett (both so far cleared by a judge on all charges tried), British police arrested top British ‘anti-Semites / chauvinists / race realists’ etc., etc., Luke O’Farrell and Simon Sheppard (18 iv), seeing fit to handcuff them and detain them for five hours in crude cells without a lavatory seat and with only a copy of the tabloid Blairite Sun newspaper for company. Such work, meeting people with ideas, was evidently proving more attractive to Britain’s uniformed graduate peecee sleuths than apprehending burglars or getting cut in on drug deals….

LONDON SCHOOL LEADER BACKS CHOICE

In a cracking new book called "In Our Hands", American economist/psychologist Charles Murray came round to the view long advocated in this Diary/Blog and in The McDougall NewsLetter that government social spending should largely be via annual grants to adults which they would then spend on their own health and welfare as they pleased. His plan did not have the feature of my own that spending should be via families; instead, keeping it simple, he exempted education costs and indeed exempted children altogether. For more (yes, you, David Cameron!) see National Review Online, 27 iii.


FREEDOM - A PREFACE FOR AN ESSAY

As academics Andrew Fraser and Frank Ellis face criminal prosecution, as well as sacking from their universities, for rehearsing summarily some of the more controversial propositions of the London School (though not those that said girls needed equal education or that retardates should not be executed - these arguments, controversial enough as they once were in the past, being entirely accepted by today's left), I want to try to address the main argument AF and FE are up against. Simply, the left's PR people will say (whatever may be the more archetypal hostilities of paid-up lefties):

`Look here, freedom has to be balanced by responsibility. Didn't right-wingers themselves often say that in the past and leave laws against blasphemy on the statute books for handling the more outrageous cases of insults to Christianity (last used in the 1980's to prosecute a suggestion that Jesus was homosexual - resulting in a fine)? Well, likewise today, freedom has to be balanced by at least a superficial respect for the multicultural West in which the vast majority of us are trying to live peaceably (and where employers (including many middle class households) enjoy cheap immigrant labour and leftist parties get most of the new underclass votes). Can't you see a compromise is necessary? And that it's even easy given the historic good nature and sense of British people, and their realization (from our successful propaganda) that they are all mongrels anyhow (and very successful mongrels)? (Not unknown in the doggie world, where pure-bred animals are often pretty temperamental and suitable chiefly to specialized tasks.) By contrast with other peoples, some of them more rigid and authoritarian, Brits have been capable of empire and, with our mixture of political correctness and free-enterprise capitalism, and with the help of Hispanic-immigrant lover President George Dubya Bush, we are arguably doing it again - calling it `globablization'! So why not accept there has to be a balance? - A balance which Chris Brand probably violated (earning him the sack, albeit with compensation and the best of the argument) and which Andrew Fraser and Frank Ellis (both far-right and without any specialist expertise in psychology) have definitely declined by advertising their views not, as Brand did, in a book published by an academic house (Wiley) but in letters to local newspapers. There can surely be no right to unqualified and unfettered free speech, just as there is no right to shout `Fire!' in a crowded room.'

It seems to me this argument deserves a proper answer. So here goes - but I very much welcome corrections.

There are some eight key freedoms which Britain might be said to have nurtured over the last thousand years by means of the following acknowledged rights:

1. Right to life
2. Right to property
3. Right to liberty
4. Right to one's own thoughts and opinions
5. Right to association
6. Right to speech and publication
7. Right to expert free speech (especially in a state-funded university)
8. Right to speech by tenured intellectuals (in state-funded universities) about any subject of their choice

I will in this way try to address the questions of freedom - suggesting in each case that the `balanced' answer has never been a vague compromise but always a quite specific (and intelligently formulated and public) contract.

1. The right to life comes unequivocally from the Bible, but it was expressly tempered by law in quite specific ways, notably in the case of murder (when guilt was found by a court of law). Many qualifications surround murder (and other crimes), forbidding execution or life-sentencing of the insane, the retarded or those who killed in self-defence; but such qualifications are quite specific and do not involve `balancing' a person's right to life against his responsibilities to others. There is no such halfway house, or any set of halfway houses.

2. The right to property (if lawfully acquired) was established under Magna Carta, which importantly meant that properties were secure. - Even a man who became a banished traitor still owned his property in England and could pass it on to his family. Property ownership may seem surrounded by many obligations, such as to pay taxes, maintain the property safely, refrain from intimidating neighbours by noise or fire etc; but in fact these obligations are levied on tenants just as much as owners. Ownership itself is qualified only by the right of the state to make compulsory purchase at market prices - and even this qualification is of recent origin and often contested and subject to complaint.

3. The right to liberty, hard-won over centuries, essentially meant that a man could not be imprisoned for any length of time except by due legal process, including jury trial by his peers. Specific corollaries included habeas corpus and the right of access of pre-trial prisoners to legal advice, visitors, non-prison food and drink etc. Specific qualifications occur when a judge is persuaded that the accused would pose a significant threat of escape or harm to witnesses if bailed. There is no `balancing' of a person's liberty with his `responsibility to others' except in that he must stay within the criminal law and pay for any tangible damage he is proven (with >50% probability) to have done to others. Constraints on liberty are thus quite specific, not a matter for ongoing `sensitivity,' worry and calculation.

4. The right to thought was a gracious gift to England of Elizabeth I who (though her minions doubtless tortured hundreds of apparent traitors --faced as she was by the animosity of the whole of Europe, orchestrated by the Pope and his leading ally, Spain) famously declared "I will not make windows into men's souls" - thus sparing England from the Thirty Years War that devastated Germany. Protection of thought is today chiefly served by rights to privacy (especially, from state snooping by mail and phone taps) which incidentally serve to hinder collection of evidence about a person's morality, political plans, sexual liaisons and business deals. Only important reasons of state allow efforts to compel divulgence of a person's thinking - and these require affirmation by senior government personnel and, in the West generally, do not presently allow torture. It is because of strong protection of thought and opinion that Times Higher (the mouthpiece of British academia), having turned from saying Leeds University `would have to put up with Frank Ellis' (17 iii 2006) to calling for his sacking as `a menace to multiculturalism and danger to campus diversity' (leader, 31 iii 2006), admitted that even if academics could be told not to discuss race on pain of sacking, they would still need to be allowed their own "private views."

5. The right to association is an ongoing problem in Europe and America, but normally it is dealt with by asking locally administered police (perhaps advised by a magistrate) `Do you think you can cope with the proposed demo without serious disorder?' Since association borders closely on action, sometimes violent action, the state's powers are large - quite often thought too large by would-be demonstrators; and, as well as being able to prohibit, move and control whole marches and demonstrations, the British state gives itself the right to control individuals, notably prohibiting known football hooligans from attending particular matches or from travelling abroad at certain times. Universities probably believe that they, too, have some rights to prevent academics attending certain meetings - though Frank Ellis was able to circumvent Leeds' ban on him attending an American Renaissance conference by arguing that he attended only in his own time. However, there is no `balancing' of the right of associate. One can either associate with certain others or not; and a university would probably need some special argument to show that it was acting as an employer to protect its image and thus commercial interests. The fettering of association is thus quite specific and has not so far involved saying to academics `Keep your attendance at certain conferences to a minimum, and keep quiet about your visits, so that you recognize your responsibilities and don't upset students of colour / leftist agitators / student union bossyboots etc.' Restrictions on freedom of association in the West today, whether by the state or employers, are essentially limited to cases where there is a serious likelihood of damage to persons, property or commercial interests - even if the methods of determining such likelihood are dangerously vague and lie all too clearly in the hands of the authorities.

6. The right to speech is problematic in Europe, especially in the past generation, with the apparently rising wish prosecute Holocaust-denial, and then following on quickly to condemn `remarks' about the handicapped, Welsh, Blacks, Islamofascists etc. But, in America, free speech is legally enshrined - you can't be subject to criminal process simply for what you say. The real problem is that you can pay big civil costs if you harm someone else's business. And you lose your job in the left-dominated establishment tout court if you let the words `nigger' or `coon' pass your lips. The power to proceed against individuals for their speech has thus been largely placed in the hands of corporations - an essentially `fascist' arrangement, i.e. involving a conspiracy between government and businessmen (who regard political correctness, multi-ethnic hirings and outright affirmative racism as at worse merely new forms of taxation and at best opportunities to control and replace ageing and unpopular staff). In this case, then, it looks alarmingly as if individuals do indeed have to continuously balance their wish to speak against their responsibilities not to upset others or harm or even threaten commercial interests. Clearly this is grossly vague, subjective and unsatisfactory (though Britain provides immunity from libel actions for speeches made in Parliament). What is needed is not an ever-growing minding of tongues but a precise clarification of what is not allowed, e.g. intentional and realistic threats of physical or financial damage. For even shouting `Fire' in a cinema is surely not criminal or even immoral unless it is actually intended to cause panic and resulting injury. Certainly to go down the road of protecting people's psychological sensitivites and comfort zones can only end in no public criticism at all of others and their ideas being possible, yielding the ban on denigrating Islam which the British Labour Government currently wants (but is frustrated by the House of Lords) and even an informal ban on the Scots criticizing the English which few can surely want (but nevertheless police investigated the famous TV presenter Anne Robinson after she joked on air that she `didn't know what the Welsh are for'). The main point is that criticism (the quickest route to human improvement) will become impossible; but a most practical corollary is that the leftists who back this tyranny will soon destroy themselves - for the political career of any opponent can easily be ended by the slightest accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, paedophilia etc., so the left itself can itself sometimes be upbraided, and anyhow it has now come under close scrutiny and challenge in American universities for its leftist propaganda and intimidation of students.

7. Expert speech has long been protected de facto in that, after Galileo and Darwin, newsies wised up to the idea that science was fun and that scientists usually got the better of divines and politicians. Helpful factors were that Oxbridge colleges were very rich and could easily maintain the privacy of their staff; and that dons were unmarried but with a home for life in college and so in strong financial positions as individuals. Sadly, as the West lost its zip, the post-1945 increasingly state-funded universities became increasingly undistinguished from ordinary firms - not least in their increasingly sharp interest in making money; and mainly leftist but certainly filth- and underclass-soliciting hacks, as they invaded the media, could and did select their own `experts' such as the elderly obese Marxite Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, making `anti-racism' the religion that would allow them their daily parade in their papers of low-IQ `tits `n' bums.' More particularly, truly expert views were being cast before swine not just in lecture halls but in publications available worldwide on the internet for a few keystrokes. Manifestly, academics have reacted to their new situation by `acknowledging their responsibilities' not to upset the Zeitgeist - so much so that, apart from the efforts of the London School, the only defence of AF or FE carried in the past year was one by philosopher A. F. Grayling who merely asserted (via Times Higher) FE's right not to be jailed, not his right to keep his job (`Liberty and responsibility,' 7 iv). This cowardly self-imposed balancing act can only lead on to a similar chilling of the atmosphere for debates on many subjects other than race - notably feminism, homosexuality, abortion, evolution, eugenics and Islam. What is needed is instead a clear and simple stipulation of any cases in which British academics will not be granted free speech having absolute priority over a university's pious and commercial concerns - e.g. for junior staff in non-Russell Group universities, or for academics' communications with the popular press.

8. In some of the criticism of AF and FE, it has been complained that they removed themselves from the umbrella of academic freedom by speaking on subjects `not within their expertise' (they were not psychologists). However, modern state-funded universities involve a fast-changing kaleidoscope of subjects and positive encouragement of interdisciplinary overlaps (so as to appear fresh and new to students}; and subjects like race and sex are of such wide human interest that it would seem impossible to keep them out of the interest of all but, say, astronomers and electrical engineers. AF and FE themselves exemplify the point in that AF is a public lawyer who has every right to concern himself with immigration to Australia - most of it Black or Lebanese in recent years; and FE is a historian of Communism who has very properly pointed out and published the origins of the West's current `political correctness' in the stipulations of Lenin in the 1920s (designed to avoid public criticism of the `minorities' that Lenin wished to keep within the USSR). Another proposal could be to restrict the right to expert free speech to publications in academic journals. But, like university departments, faculties, units and schools, journals too are changing all the time and there are thousands where articles touching on race would sit well (if it were not for universal hysterical denial of race as a topic); and, more seriously, it would seem absurd to cut academics off even more than they are already from the taxpayers that fund them; and the BBC could doubtless argue not to be deprived of its many academic broadcasters who make it in part a virtual university in its own right (able to phone around the globe to solicit opinions - a privilege not allowed to UK academics). Doubtless many academics at present are indeed wary of talking to the media, knowing the pitfalls of entrapment, but such trepidatory balancing is surely an unfortunately vague substitute for what should actually be an intelligent set of specific solutions. Some universities do in fact ban their academics from contacting the media in any way which identifies their university unless they have the permission of their head-of-department - such an authoritarian policy would have saved AF from trouble at Macquarie. It is a way of introducing senior personnel into the process of academic expression, but at least it is a transparently clear restriction and has the advantage of guaranteeing that senior staff will stand by a junior's publication after it takes place. Of course, a better alternative is for universities to say `We took a lot of trouble to select this guy. He is highly qualified and publishes. We back him.'

Plainly, there is in any particular one of the above matters a broad contrast between whether a person favours the existing morality or freedom from it. Indeed, in the psychology of attitudes there is historically a broad contrast between tender-minded conservatism (religiosity / moralism) and tough-minded radicalism (libertarianism / capitalism) (See here). However, intelligence is a quite separate psychological dimension; and society and its institutions exist precisely to provide intelligent solutions such that we can have both freedom and responsibility in a sensible and sustainable fashion. Properly and historically speaking, law is a bastion of freedom, not an opposing force with which some balancing compromise must be achieved. (Even religion can claim to be liberating - as Jesus thought he was freeing people from the more antiquated and obsessional aspects of Judaism while maintaining a new, simplified moral code.)

Anyhow, it seems it can be argued that eight great freedoms that Britons and much of the West have come to enjoy over the past thousand years have not existed and do not need to exist in endless shoddy compromise with vaguely defined responsibilities not to upset others. Today the world is admittedly a far more inter-connected place; and the possibilities of people taking umbrage at others' speech are legion - and worked up daily by the far left as they tirelessly exploit their only 20th-century coup, to have made the world forget that they were pacifists or fellow-travellers with Hitler in the 1930s and were only saved from ignominy by Stalin's conversion to the thorough-going nationalism that allowed him to fight back from Stalingrad. But the idea of qualifying freedom with vague `responsibility' rather than with articulate, specific, examined and examinable law should be a disgrace for anyone considering himself of the left. Yes, today's new Blairite/Brownite left in Britain are the new conservatives, struggling to preserve a mighty and expanding socialist legislature and peecee religion which are even now bringing the universities to their knees - begging especially for government cash, so far have they come from their historic mission of training priests and seeking the truth in faith. But the answer to peecee champions of `freedom with responsibility' lies in intelligent and specific solutions, not in the blanket compromises and frank capitulations endlessly demanded of (and, sadly, all too often achieved from) today's academics.


CHRIS TAME

A fine defence of freedom versus socialist nannying and bullying, a propos the sad death at 56 of British Libertarian leader Chris Tame, was provided by Danny Kruger in Daily Telegraph, 10 iv 2006, `Liberty is a subject they won't teach in Brown's nurseries.'


PAEDOPHILIA REALISM?

The UK Government announced that its Health Service workers [the largest body of employed people in Europe] would not be expected to report to the police even cases of under-13 girls having sex - so long as the girls had sex "consensually" [a term never admitted by paedohysterics] and had sought proper contraceptive protection from a Government whose chief determination was to breed out Whites and introduce low-IQ foreign immigrants so as to maintain the Labour vote. Instead, National Health Service staff would have to report youthful sexual naughtinesses to an in-house officer who him/herself would shoulder the burden of deciding which girls to punish (whether those who went with semi-daft age peers or those who had linked up with responsible 20- or 40-year-olds who were thus `paedophiles').


SEX BRAIN DIFFERENCE AS WOMEN TAMED

A novel explanation of women's smaller brains came from a Russian fox breeder who had selected foxes for tameness over 35 generations, beginning in 1959: as the successive generations of foxes got tamer, their ears became more droopy and their brains became smaller (Times, 3 iv, `Why is a woman's brain smaller than a man's? Maybe because she's a fox.'). The possibility is that the animals were essentially being selected not for lower general intelligence but for what in humans is called `field dependence', involving lower wilfulness, disagreeability and self-sufficiency; field independence, which essentially involves the narrow attention and non-distractibility required in animals which are hunters, is thought to be subserved by the brain's frontal lobes (see Chapter 1, The g Factor, 1996/2000, pp. 45-6). On average, domestic dog, cat, sheep and pig brains weigh 25 per cent less than those of wild animals.

In the West, the last periods of large-scale social dominance by human females are alleged to have been in Greece and South America of pre-civilization times (pre-500 B.C.); civilization is often thought to be essentially patriarchal, binding men to support their offspring via tangible assurances of their paternity such as female compliance, accessibility and immobility (achieved earlier in China by foot-binding). Sticky-out ears, more often seen in males (though worried about more by females), have often been associated with eccentricity, argumentativeness and initiative - as for example in Salvador Dali, Prince Charles and the legendarily critical and sarcastic British female TV news commentator Kirsty Wark..


GERMAN TEACHERS GIVE UP ON MUSLIMS

Central Berlin teachers splendidly wrote to their bureaucratic masters that they were "desperate" about the 80% Muslim schools in which they worked, where most pupils carried knives and the White German kids had to speak `pidgin German' to be able to pass with peers (Sunday Torygraph, 9 iv). The teachers wanted to have the schools closed (though no doubt also to keep their own jobs in the apparat of multicultural lies). Apparently, the new fat dwarf frump pseudo-female German Reichskanzlerine Angela Merkel was horrified, fearing that the problems of the streets of 100%-delusional France (which, without any constraints of genetics or language, had invited 7 million Muslim immigrants to bugger it up) would soon arrive in Germany. Most of Germany's 3.3 million Muslim immigrant population were of Turkish or Lebanese origin.


ECONOMISTS CAN'T PREDICT WEALTH OR GROWTH

Economists were lambasted in Foreign Policy (iii/iv) for the failure of their purely rationality-based science to predict anything interesting, like wealth or growth. - But still critic Moises Naim did not get round to mentioning how Richard Lynn had arguably established IQ as the leading variable when making economic predictions for countries (see my review at Amazon Books).


`CONSERVATIVES' DRIVEN BY ANTI-RACIST MEDIA

Having failed to take a stand as the racists they always were, and having astonishingly chosen to criticize UKIP members as "closet racists," Conservatives found themselves running before the wind after one of their local election candidates in Manchester, a 59-year-old woman, explained on Channel 4 TV that it would be pointless to run a Black candidate in a working-class constituency.

As media hell broke loose at this (surely correct) observation, which supposedly showed a failure of the Conservatives to `modernize,' the candidate grovelled and said she had not meant what she had said and her leader in London, Dave Chameleon, told hysterical newsies that she was "in the wrong party."

UKIP MEP Nigel Farage said: "This is Cameron's boomerang. He tried to throw a stick at us and it has come back to hit him very hard." The next day brought insider testimony as to the `sexism' of the Conservatives: their 47-year-old female parliamentary candidate for the Calder Valley constituency, near Halifax, Mrs Sue Catling, finally stood down blaming local "sexists" who had three times tried to deselect her after they had learned of her affair with local party chairman Barrie Henderson 54 - an affair which finally had to be admitted as Henderson was given 80 hours community service by a court for throwing a wineglass at Mrs Catling (cutting a finger) after she had failed to give him a firm answer as to whether the affair would continue (he had left his wife for her).


EUGENICS RETURNS

As pundits digested the work of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn, showing that Whites and Asians had enjoyed relatively evolutionary recent increases in brain size (see this Diary/Blog, November 2005), the idea began to appeal that some humans could do with "genetic reprogramming" (Wired News, 10 iv 2006). - Naturally, no specific cases were mentioned..


FROGS WANT TO JAIL CRITIC OF ISLAM

Though suffering the ravages of cancer, the once-beautiful and long distinguished Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was sent for trial in France in June (Los Angeles Weekly, 15 iii). Fallaci maintains that, as far back as 1972, Palestinian terror leader George Habash told her the Arab goal: to wage war "against Europe and America" and to ensure that henceforth "there would be no peace for the West." The Arabs, he informed her, would "advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet." So hysterical were French authorities on learning such claims and seeing Fallaci's condemnation of the lack of freedom and female rights under Islam that they decided to prosecute even though a trial would be bound to multiply Fallaci's sales of her new book, The Force of Reason -- which had already sold 800,000 copies in Italy alone and was in the top hundred books at Amazon.


DECISION TIME FOR AMERICA

America's all-too-likely end hove into view on TV screens as more than a million immigrants demonstrated in favour of more immigration, both legal and illegal (American Renaissance, 11 iv).


`BIOLOGIST BACKS PLATO'

My 2002 review for the Nature-stable journal Heredity of The Intelligent Genome became available on the net here.


BLACK MALARKEY EXPOSED

Weeks after two Black girls (strippers) accused three White lacrosse team players of beating, choking raping and sodomizing them after a party performance at Duke University, DNA testing proved negative (American Renaissance, 12 iv) - but, as so often (e.g. Tawana Brawley ) the hoax had been readily believed by a chorus of White liberals and media folk, with the luniversity president closing down the lacrosse team's matches for the season.


LEFTIES REACH FOR GENES

Eager to spare the life of Islamofascist terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui, American leftists sat on their hands as Moussaoui's defence team argued what today's leftists normally hold impossible, that Moussaoui had a "genetic predisposition to mental illness." (Moussaoui himself, however, lambasted his lawyers and said that calling him crazy "would not work.")


`AFRICA NO PLACE FOR ART' - KENYA CURATOR

In a rare admission of African incompetence, the African art and craft works "stolen" by the West were admitted to be in the best hands by top Kenyan curator Kiprop Lagat (Daily Telegraph, 13 iv).


GENES FOR OBESITY FOUND

Known by scientists of the 1980s to be substantially genetic (see my Psycho-engineering, FIND fat, weight, obese), human obesity was traced by a Boston University team to a predisposing region of DNA located near a gene called INSIG2 (insulin-induced-gene 2) involved with fat metabolism (Science, 13 iv; Daily Telegraph, 14 iv). The obesity-inducing variant is found in 10% of people around the world.


YAGS CASTRATE EACH OTHER

New light was shed on `gay' life as it was revealed that three homosexuals in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, aged 49-61, would go on trial for castrating at least six apparently eager victims and videotaping the results (Daily Telegraph, 14 iv).


ISLAMONUT KILLS SISTER

More light was shed on Islamolunacy as a 23-year-old `German' Turk was jailed for shooting his sister three times in the head at a bus stop, killing her (Daily Telegraph, 14 iv). Her offence had been to decline an arranged marriage.


LABOUR MINISTER ADMITS BNP ATTRACTIVE TO VOTERS

Britain's Employment Minister and key Blair ally, LSE-educated Margaret Hodge, herself an immigrant to Britain at age 5, shocked Britain by admitting that eight in ten of her White Labour-voting constituents in Barking, East London, were thinking of voting for the BNP because Labour had let them down by supplying council houses and health and welfare services preferentially to immigrants and asylum seekers.

Mother of four and MP since 1994, Mrs Hodge said (as rightists had been saying for a decade) that Britain's "political class" had been "often frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race"; and she said Labour voters no longer felt ashamed about switching to the BNP. She was promptly supported by research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding that one Londoner in four and one Brit in six "might" vote BNP.

Phill Edwards, the BNP Press Officer, said the Rowntree report highlighted a sense of "powerlessness and frustration" among communities in Britain which was leading to an increase in support for his party. Dagenham Labour MP. Mr Jon Cruddas, a former adviser to Tony Blair, warned that the BNP was "on the verge of a major political breakthrough" (ITV, 17 iv).

The wretched `Conservative' Party led by "compassionate" Dave Chameleon declined to comment (Times, 17 iv). But some thought a degree of scepticism was called for as Labour had a track record of talking up the threat of the BNP before elections to try to get its core vote out.

A rise in both `Islamophobia' and anti-semitism was reported among British children by the National Union of Teachers (17 iv). In the last European Parliament elections, the BNP won 4.9 percent of the vote. BNP policies for the approaching local council elections in England included: traditional school meals, teachers allowed to smack, separate teaching of children having poor English, widespread closure of teacher training colleges (teachers to be trained by ex-teachers having 30 years experience), compulsory competitive sports restored in schools, no dumping of asylum seekers in White areas, low taxes, no affirmative action {i.e. affirmative racism} (24dash.com, 15 iv).

The BBC responded to the BNP media breakthrough by bringing on a propagandist from the hysterical `anti-racist, anti-fascist' Searchlight group; and the Times (18 iv) made sure to grovel to the left by paying the Observer's David Aaronovitch (whose father had been a Communist leader) for a column denouncing the people of Barking for their low educational attainments, Thatcherism and high pregnancy rates (as if there was any point in schoolwork and self-discipline under Rev. Bliar's depraved, tyrannous and dumbed-down neosocialism). Phil Woolas, NuLabour's Local Government Minister, said later that no politician should underestimate the BNP threat (Daily Telegraph, 18 iv).

------------------------------------

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

-----------------------------------

To The Editor, The Dover Express

Dear Sir,

Just to urge you to desist from your hounding of drama tutor Miss Emma Chamberlain for her membership of the British National Party. It took more than three hundred years (1558-1870) to establish freedom of opinion, speech and affiliation in England. If you persist in trying to make people unemployable for their beliefs, you will soon enough find the tables turned on you -- as is already happening in the USA where left-wing domination of the universities is now being ever more closely monitored and challenged.

I am yours sincerely, -- Chris Brand (Edinburgh)

BACKING ARRIVES FOR BELEAGUERED ACADEMIC RACE-REALISTS

Support from eight London Schoolers for LUniversity of Macquarie's Andrew Fraser was published in The Australian: Higher Education; and American Renaissance re-summarized the case of Frank Ellis vs the LUniversity of Leeds and gave the opportunity to sign a petition (along with 200 who had already done so) (11 iv). Times Higher (14 iv) published the following letter (along with two that were critical of London School views and liberty to express them).

"A. C. Grayling's commendable application of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty to the suspension and threatened sacking of Leeds University's Frank Ellis is marred by his assertion that Ellis is wrong about his facts.

In 1995, the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association published a report on the book The Bell Curve. The APA concluded that black-white racial difference in IQ of some 15 points in the US (and larger in sub-Saharan Africa) was real and not attributable to bias.

There is further consensus that East Asians have the highest average IQ, so such work hardly suggests a white supremacist agenda; and even mainly hereditarian scholars such as Richard Lynn attribute black people's problems in Africa largely to malnutrition.

We would do no service to blind people by denying that they lack vision and slandering critics of such denial as "blindist bigots". If we are to help disadvantaged people of other groups, we have to start by being honest about the basic facts of their problems. If universities are not about telling the truth, then they should stop filching the taxpayers' money on false pretences.

Robin Clarke

Further support for Fraser (and his comrade in arms against the hysterical left, historian Keith Windschuttle, author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History) came in the Sydney Morning Herald (Michael Duffy, 15 iv, `Racism phobia can muzzle the truth') in an article which concluded:

"I don't know if what Fraser says is true, yet its truth surely affects whether it is racist. But none of his critics seem to care. Macquarie University made no effort to argue the facts with him, nor did Deakin University. A statement by Fraser's union speaks of racism, not the facts. In its letter to Fraser, the human rights commission doesn't raise the issue of truth: what matters is that someone was offended. We need less moralising, more facts.

------------------------------------

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

-----------------------------------

RACE REALIST PROFESSOR BATTLES ON

In Sydney, Andrew Fraser continued to refuse to apologize for his reservations about Black immigration to Australia and went ahead with plans to publish a book on the problems of immigration into Australia – no longer much opposed in this by his own University, apparently, though threatened by governmental human rights busybodies (Australian, 5 iv; Seven, 4 iv; Sydney Morning Herald, 4 iv). Forthcoming in his support was a letter from the eight academic race realists who had a letter in Britain’s Sunday Times (2 iv) (though sadly deemed a tad too immoderate by the leftish New Zealand professor of political science and psychometrician James Flynn). In America, the illiberalism of modern Europe with regard to speech that gives discomfort or offence was summarized and deplored by the American Enterprise Institute (3 iv) – but they hadn’t got round to noticing the use of modern criminal law against Frank Ellis in Leeds and Andrew Fraser in Sydney.


FEMINAZISM REFUTED

A fine blast at feminasties for preferring Nietzsche to Aristotle, and for not going along with female nature, was mounted (years after everyone knew all this, but hardly anybody did anything about it – except at the LUniversity of Edinburgh) by Harvey C. Mansfield – see review by Christina Hoff Sommers

{Once more, the incoherence of today's semi- and half-hearted and largely paralytic armchair pseudo-realists was exposed: there must by last spring have been a million Westerners who had come to agree with Steven Pinker’s 2002, The Blank Slate, with its excellent chapter on psychological sex differences, yet they lifted not a conspicuous academic finger to help save President Larry Summers at Harvard (after he mentioned to a private meeting that there just might be some genetic factors involved in making men better at maths). And, like Pinker himself, they preferred hysterical denial about the truth of scientific racism, so would not do anything to help the beleaguered Andrew Fraser or Frank Ellis.}


PROF. SCORES re IQ IN TABLOID

"Times" Race realist Richard Lynn zoomed to score in the Thunderer with a neat letter (5 iv) pointing out to a critic that IQs are not standardized around 100 in each individual country (and thus can vary between countries – from South Korea’s 109 to Zimbabwe’s 61); that IQ is indeed linked to attainment, income and much else; and that head size is linked to IQ (as observed by Galton, comparing Cambridge wranglers with passmen).

{The summary reference to head size, which correlates only some .25 with IQ, led on to a jest the next day from Dr Len Hill of Sheffield that apparently one might as well abandon psychological tests and school exams and just assess children by their hat sizes (6 iv) –- licensing a rejoinder that this might indeed be a reasonable idea for females since neuroscientist Sandra Witelson recently showed that verbal IQ correlates .60 with post-mortem brain size (see Diary/Blog for December 2005) (though sadly the ventricles prevent strong correlations between brain size and head size, as the phrenologists had painfully to learn).}


TORIES VERSUS UKIP

Britain’s ‘Conservatives’ (by 2006 rejecting Mrs Thatcher as well as English nationalism) and its ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’ (whose members weirdly drew their salaries chiefly from Brussels), instead of interesting themselves in the last flickers of academic freedom in the country, prepared for full-scale war, with each accusing the other of ‘covert racism,’ having learned from the left that this was the ultimate modern sin – though both had publicly distanced themselves from racism for years, as also from any coherent view of racial differences, of controlling immigration and of how to persuade/force unintegrated (unemployed, unmarried, uncommunicative, unpatriotic) immigrants to leave. (Hostilities broke out while ‘Conservative’ leader Dave Chameleon was actually visiting Leeds. After taking legal advice, UKIP demanded an apology from Chameleon and was supported in this by the Daily Telegraph (5 iv) and by Tory M.P. Bob Spink who said the Tories were just as ‘racist’ as UKIP – however, see here for UKIP’s promising links to racism. All told, the two parties, which had already weakened each other’s electoral success, seemed likely to produce a final battlefield strewn with corpses of hysterical racism-deniers. In particular DC’s denunciation of UKIP members as “loonies and fruitcakes” meant he had lost his option on an electoral pact with UKIP in the future, thus finally dooming Britain to another decade of ever-more-tyrannous New Labour rule.) A UK Black ‘leader’ withdrew his services from a ‘diversity’ conference at the LUniversity of Leeds, trying to goad that body to proceed more quickly to a trial and sacking of Dr Frank Ellis (‘Black UK Online,’ 4 iv). A jokey tabloid-Times article by resident clever-clever columnist Daniel Finkelstein, even drawing a little on Galton, offered – if one thought about it – a modicum of support for FE being allowed to have his own views and perhaps even the right to express them, forsooth…. (Times, 5 iv) (when will Britain’s failed neosocialist-backing elite of the past ten years have the decency to put a pistol to its collective head?).

------------------------------------

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

-----------------------------------

DOC. DALRYMPLE PUTS THE BOOT IN

A fine comparison of the French and British economies arrived from ‘Doctor Theodore Dalrymple’, saying Britain would soon, like riotous France (where youf want jobs for life – which private employers will never grant to Maghrebians), need a secret police force to handle the countless young people misled by socialism. The Doc’s predictions came just a few days before, in the U.K., Rev Bliar’s ‘Government’ made exactly that announcement – of a British FBI with early-retired paratroopers licensed to do plainclothes snooping and plea-bargaining around the country to pursue the ‘war on drugs’ which successive governments had waged to precisely no effect for 40 years, so much do the young need a respite in their evenings from socialist delusions that the unemployed are mainly ‘disabled,’ that hospitals can be run by doctors and nurses who don’t speak English, that retardates and dyslexics are suitable for university education and will one day repay the fees the socialists have charged them, and that Blacks are saintly victims of ‘social injustice’ (Times, ‘The striking idiocy of youth,’ 30 iii).

ELLIS UPDATE

A fine defence of race-and-IQ outspeaker Frank Ellis and denunciation of Britain’s crumbling ‘liberal’-left was provided by the British National Party’s Joe Priestley (3 iv); and Professor Robert Segal (Theory of Religion, University of Lancaster) agreed with those of us academic race realists who had written to the Sunday Times that Leeds LUniversity’s action against FE was a clear violation of the principle of academic freedom which British universities are legally bound to uphold (Guardian Education, 4 iv). (At the same time, in the Guardian, Black journalist and 'anti-Fascist' Gary Younge wrote an article superficially sympathetic to free speech -- but actually mentioning only attempts in America to muzzle left-wingers, critics of Israel and teachers of Darwinism....(4 iv).)

CHINESE CONFORMITY ADMITTED BY HAN SCHOLAR

A senior Han sociologist became the first Chinese intellectual to agree with the thesis of top British historian Lord Hugh Thomas, Richard Lynn [himself a recent convert] and myself (see my 1990 review as referenced in previous Diaries/Blogs, mid-March, 2006) that the Chinese have relatively high group-mindedness and conformity (low-w, as per Chapters 1 and 4 of The g Factor) and are best analogized as (intelligent) `sheep' rather than as `wolves' (Spiegel Online, 21 iii). The Chinese sociologist’s anonymously published book had sold 4 million copies, a volume second only to that for the Thoughts of Chairman Mao, so succinct did the Chinese themselves find this analysis of Chinese psychology. (Hugh Thomas' percipient analysis was based on the Chinese being a rice-growing rather than a wheat-growing people: in rice-growing, water comes from the sides so you need co-operative neighbours to clear their drains; by contrast, wheat-growers of Europe depend mainly on the heavens, not on co-operation from neighbours; indeed a lazy/drunken/out-of-action neigbour is quite an advantage, in that my price at market for my wheat goes up.)




"SUNDAY TIMES" PUBLISHES (A CURTAILED) LETTER FROM RACE REALISTS, DEFENDING FRANK ELLIS (LUNIVERSITY OF LEEDS)

Racial IQ research

IN CLEAR violation of the tradition of academic freedom, the vice-chancellor of Leeds University has suspended Dr Frank Ellis and instituted disciplinary proceedings against him for presenting the research, published in peer-reviewed academic journals and scholarly books which demonstrates that blacks have, on average, lower IQ scores and poorer academic achievement than do whites (Profile, last week). Much solid research also makes it more likely than not that there is a genetic contribution to this (and other) group IQ differences. Dr Ellis, then, has done no more than restate what has been said for half century by a number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists at leading universities.

These include the late John Baker (Oxford), Hans Eysenck (London), Philip Vernon (London), Richard Herrnstein (Harvard), and Henry Garrett (Columbia). A number of behavioural scientists, including ourselves, have reached the same conclusion. Others have put much of this on the record. Many more agree but have been reluctant to put this on the record for fear of the kind of intimidation that Dr Ellis is receiving from the University of Leeds.

There is an important and legitimate debate going on on intelligence and genetics, as there is on climate change and foreign policy. It is a sad day when British universities muzzle their academic staff and threaten them with dismissal for taking part in one of these controversies.

Professor Richard Lynn
University of Ulster

Professor Philippe Rushton
University of Western Ontario
Canada

Professor Arthur Jensen
University of California

Dr Charles Murray
American Enterprise Institute
Washington

Christopher Brand
University of Edinburgh
(1970-97)

Professor Helmuth Nyborg
Aarhus University, Denmark

Professor Linda Gottfredson
University of Delaware

Professor (Retired) Donald Templer
Alliant International University (1978-2005), Fresno, California

However, the newspaper delayed an article about IQ on which it had been working - perhaps because I told them of the sensational turn-around about IQ in Nature - which had carried an article from Bethesda (outlined here recently) together with an unprecedented three favourable comments (from the Editor, in the News section, and in the News & Views section).

Interviewed by Funday Times Education Correspondent Geraldine Hackett, I had confirmed that I did indeed believe the well-known racial differences in IQ were substantially genetic and were likewise believed to be deep-seated by successful African businessmen and politicians, who unfailingly declined to invest in their fellow Blacks and instead got their money (from mineral exploitation and corruption) out of Africa to Switzerland as fast as they could.

Asked about sacking procedures for academics like Frank Ellis and me, I had explained that, in 1996-7, Edinburgh LUniversity had had a long (15-month) struggle to get me out (finally having to use my urging clemency and common sense in the case of the nocturnally arrested and jailed US Nobel Laureate Carleton Gajdusek, 60+, to claim I had `put at risk the LUniversity's reputation') but that the unadvertized and undiscussed 2000 Amendment to Britain's Race Relations Act probably made it quite easy to get rid of academics for the slightest remarks of a race-realist nature.

I had also explained to the Education Correspondent that the title of my book, "The g Factor", did not refer to `the genetic factor' but to `the general intelligence factor' as conceived by London School psychologists since the days of Charles Spearman c. 1904.. Apparently, some or all of the above `revelations' for ST newsies led to a re-think and postponement of their planned article for a week while they stroked their beards.

ITALIAN P.M. RENOUNCES MULTICULTURALISM

Silvio Berlusconi, one the world's richest men and Prime Minister of Italy for an amazingly long period of 5 years, since 2001, announced "We don't want Italy to become a multi-ethnic, multicultural country - we are proud of our traditions" though it remained unclear how and when he would act on his declared principle. Meantime, it was revealed that the most popular name for newborn boys in Belgium was Mahommed..


HARVARD COMING ROUND ON IQ

There were signs that even leftist students at Harvard University were beginning to recognize that they would have to talk about IQ and race: .

Likewise, Science and Theology News admitted Sandra Witelson's claim that 'big brains may make for smarter people.' {Of course, there was no mention of Phil Rushton or Richard Lynn in all this..}

Meantime, however, in drab, terrified, socialist-tyrannised, no-smoking, peerages-for-sale, peecee Britain, Socialist Worker delighted in its triumph over academic free speech at Leeds LUniversity (1 iv).

In oh-so-peecee Toronto, the Black magazine Rabble News assured its readers that Frank Ellis's claims were far from new and anyway "have not held up and will not hold up under close scrutiny" and the Black writer Tricia Hylton, of delightfully bee-stung lips, blamed Black ineducability, criminality and marital irresponsibility on White stereotypes and on Black males deriving too much self-satisfaction from (presumably, the length, girth and performance of) their "sexual appendages."

FE was defended by one of his students in Spiked (30 iii) and in a letter to the Sunday Times signed by eight active race realists in academic psychology of 2006 -- Phil Rushton, Richard Lynn, Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, Linda Gottfredson, Helmuth Nyborg, Donald Templer and myself.

The "fiercely independent" weekly Friday Thing took the trouble to exhibit its gross ignorance by condemning 'the popular racist theory' "that white people are more intelligent than black/brown/yellow ones" (31 iii).

In New Criminologist (1 iv), Black author Richie Moran equally ignorantly prefaced a long rant against racism (Cleopatra, Jesus and Beethoven were probably Black, etc.) with his view that the term 'political correctness' was invented by right-wing racists and homophobes - when in fact it was an approved doctrine or Russian communism in the 1920s and in used by Chairman Mao by the 1950s.

Sadly, while Harvard showed signs of new realism, news came from Australia that law professor Andrew Fraser, having declined to issue an apology, was on the verge of being prosecuted criminally for his letter to a newspaper saying that "[e]xperience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems"


LYNN BATTLING ON re IQ SEX DIFFERENCE

Arguing for average male superiority in IQ turned out to be important to the overall coherence and elegance of Richard Lynn's new book "Race Differences in Intelligence" (reviewed here previously in 2006). The main point was that Lynn wanted to argue that head- and brain-size differences help to testify a genetic basis for intelligence differences between the races; and, since males have markedly bigger brains, RL was understandably keen to argue for a male IQ superiority (at least in adults) - and planned to reply in Nature to the review by Stephen Blinkhorn which had pooh-poohed his quest.

Strangely, RL had not chosen to use the get out long provided by me, that modern work shows complex interactions between sex, brain location (frontal lobes vs other), type of matter (grey vs white), size of brain matter and IQ which make it more reasonable to attribute the overall male brain size advantage to the male brain's support of higher spatial abilities (which abilities sometimes obtrude into culture-fair testing of the g factor. Some details of modern work are below. From CRB Homepage:

"In November 2001, a UCLA team reported in Nature Neuroscience (5 xi) that the amount of gray matter in the frontal parts of the human brain is determined by the genetic make-up of an individual's parents, and strongly correlates with that individual's cognitive ability, as measured by intelligence test scores. The twin researchers wrote: "We found that brain structure is under significant genetic control, in a broad anatomical region that includes frontal and language-related cortices. The quantity of frontal grey matter, in particular, was most similar in individuals who were genetically alike; intriguingly, these individual differences in brain structure were tightly linked with individual differences in IQ."

Confirmation of this result came swiftly from a Dutch twin-study team (Nature Neuroscience, ii 2002) which found heritabilities around .85 for both IQ and brain volume and that the .40 correlation between them was wholly genetic.

From California came a firm result that higher-IQ have more grey matter in brain areas activated during IQ testing (especially in the frontal lobes) (Haier, 2004). In 2004, University of California researchers led by paediatrician Richard Haier found greater brain activation in grey matter at specific brain sites (especially in the frontal lobes) when subjects took IQ tests.

Other Webpages:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1638755.stm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=19109
http://www.memory-key.com/Neurology/gray_matter_news.htm
http://www.memory-key.com/Neurology/gray_matter.htm
http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1261 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ

Brain areas associated with IQ:

Many different sources of information have converged on the view that the frontal lobes are critical for fluid intelligence. Patients with damage to the frontal lobe are impaired on fluid intelligence tests (Duncan et al 1995). The volume of frontal grey (Thompson et al 2001) and white matter (Schoenemann et al 2005) have also been associated with intelligence. In addition, recent neuroimaging studies have limited this association to the lateral prefrontal cortex. Duncan and colleagues (2000) showed using Positron Emission Tomography that problem-solving tasks that correlated more highly with IQ also activate the lateral prefrontal cortex. More recently, Gray and colleagues (2003) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that those individuals that were more adept at resisting distraction on a demanding working memory task had both a higher IQ and increased prefrontal activity. For a review of this topic, see Gray and Thompson (2004).

Anyhow, it seems strange to bang on about brain size and IQ when even the most supportive modern work (using MRI scanning) only gives a correlation of .40; and when, in RL's own figures (his pp. 210-11), brain size (cc) is higher among the Hindus of India (1362) and the Xhosa of Africa (1,344) than it is among Poles (1,315) and Scots (1,316). And, as Lynn observes, there are plenty of other arguments for race differences in IQ being substantially genetic, especially the strong predictive power of race (whether for one race in across different countries and continents [e.g. Europeans living in Mexico and Zimbabwe still have IQ around 100] or for different races within the same country [the Mongoloid > Caucasian > Negroid difference occurring universally]).


IQ LINKED TO CORTICAL GROWTH IN ADOLESCENCE

From "Nature", 29 iii, News, p. 588, published online 29 March 2006:

"Researchers say that a remarkable data set on the developing brain adds to the idea that IQ is a meaningful concept in neuroscience. The study, which is published on page 676 of this issue, suggests that performance in IQ tests is associated with changes in the brain during adolescence.

Claims that IQ is a valid measure of intelligence tend to attract angry responses, in part because of studies that have attempted to link group differences in IQ with race. In their 1994 book The Bell Curve, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein argued that the lower-income status of some US ethnic minorities was linked to below-average IQ scores among those groups. These were in turn attributed to mainly genetic factors.

Before that, Harvard University entomologist Edward Wilson provoked outrage with work that proposed evolutionary explanations for human behaviour and individual differences in intelligence; critics called the work racist.

And this month, the journal Intelligence printed an editorial note defending its policy regarding the publication of controversial papers. The note comes after a study linking IQ and skin colour (D. I. Templer and H. Arikawa Intelligence 34, 121-139; 2006), published online last November, prompted a string of complaints from scientists. Yet researchers studying IQ say the social climate is becoming more receptive to such studies, in part because it is now widely agreed that cognitive abilities are shaped by environmental factors as well as genetic ones.

The latest result, from a team led by Philip Shaw at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, adds to the debate by linking IQ with changes in the brain over time, rather than fixed attributes such as brain size. "It's not that brainy children have more grey matter," says Shaw. "The story of intelligence is in the trajectory of brain development." Shaw's team tracked a group of more than 300 children as they aged from 6 to 19, running them through a series of cognitive tests -- IQ is determined by combining scores from tests of a range of verbal and non-verbal abilities.

The team also measured the size of brain structures using magnetic resonance imaging at roughly two-year intervals: more than half the children had at least two scans, and around a third were scanned three or more times. When the researchers split the children into three groups according to their initial IQ scores, they noticed a characteristic pattern of changes in the brains of the group with the highest scores. The thickness of the cortex -- the outer layer of the brain that controls high-level functions such as memory -- started off thinner than that of the other groups, but rapidly gained depth until it was thicker than normal during the early teens.

All three groups converged, with the children having cortexes of roughly equal thickness by age 19. The strongest effect was seen in the prefrontal cortex, which controls planning and reasoning. "My first impression was 'wow, this is amazing," says Jeremy Gray, a psychologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He notes that it is difficult to persuade children and parents to return for scans over a long period of time, so imaging studies are usually limited to tens, rather than hundreds, of subjects.

Shaw's study raises questions that could prompt further research. His team did not look at what could be causing the changes in cortical thickness, for example; the group points out that several mechanisms -- including the formation and elimination of connections between brain cells -- could be responsible. Also unknown is how genetic and environmental factors contribute to the change. The study is likely to prompt discussion of the possible social applications of such results, but these are limited. The trend identified by Shaw was significant when results from all the subjects were combined, but would probably be too small to predict how an individual child is likely to fare in school, for example.

There are also likely to be queries about whether the research should have been conducted in the first place. IQ is a good predictor of performance at school and in the workplace. For some neuroscientists, this makes the physiological factors that contribute to IQ worth studying, in order to probe how intelligence works. "There's good evidence from functional imaging studies that very demanding tasks activate the prefrontal cortex, and that activity correlates with IQ," says Shaw. "We're getting at some common processing resource." Gray also points out that metrics related to IQ can help predict speed of recovery from stroke, so studying them could lead to new therapies.

But for many others, the concept of linking IQ and intellect remains socially dangerous and scientifically dubious. Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, says performance on cognitive tasks depends on a large range of factors, from emotive state to recall ability, and that the "IQ approach ignores all of these". He adds that even as a predictor of ability in school it has traditionally been put to negative ends -- to weed out, rather than help, less able children. "We shouldn't go back to measures developed in the 1900s," he says."


EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Here's a subject guaranteed to cause controversy: the relationship between intelligence, measured by IQ tests, and physical brain development in children and adolescents.

A study that followed 307 typically developing subjects from childhood to adolescence (roughly between the ages of 6 and 19 years) now suggests that 'brainy' children are not cleverer by virtue of having more or less grey matter at any one age. Rather, intelligence is related to various aspects of the continuing process of cortical maturation. Specifically, the trajectory of change in the thickness of the cerebral cortex, not cortical thickness itself, relates to intelligence. More intelligent children demonstrate a particularly plastic cortex, with an initial accelerated and prolonged phase of cortical increase, which yields to equally vigorous cortical thinning by early adolescence.


NEWS & VIEWS

Comment in "Nature" by Dick Passingham, Dept. Psychology, Univ. Oxford

This welcoming appraisal of the Bethesda work said that "those [children] of superior intelligence show a prolonged period of prefrontal cortical gain and the most rapid rate of change" and notably remarked "[w]e know that variations in general intelligence, or g, among people depend to a great degree on genetic differences. The authors themselves in their Letter ('Intellectual ability and cortical development in childhood and adolescence', pp. 676-679) specifically report that children in the highest-IQ group (the "superior" group) already had 20% higher thickening of the right superior and medial frontal gyrus at age six.

------------------------------------

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

-----------------------------------