Friday, August 25, 2006

FEMINAZISM REVEALED

Uber-femiloon German Greer (who had grown up with a wartime-brain-damaged father whom her mother taught her to regard as a normal male) reminded the world of feminism's love of censorship by campaigning against the filming of Monica Ali's sweet book "Brick Lane" in its East London setting lest any outsider laugh at the quaint, over-ambitious, authoritarian and sometimes none-too-clean ways of the Bangladeshi community in which the novel was set (American Renaissance, 5 viii).

{Greer, well known to be frankly batty as well as lefty, had also declined to support both Salman Rushdie and myself as we battled with censorship in the 1990s.}



BRAIN, GENES AND IQ - MEDIA BREAKTHROUGH

Defying all peecee convention, sexy-and-soulful Wellington-born evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Leroi (see here, early August) entertained a mid-Saturday-evening Channel 4 TV audience (12 viii) to an hour's exposition of how genes (especially the ASPM "new variant," arriving at a Biblical c. 4,000A.D.) account for human brain size (three times larger than that of the merely tree-living chimpanzee), intelligence and social living (with its vital ingredient of `theory of mind'). Yes (albeit after a slow start) the word intelligence was mentioned at least half-a-dozen times, and even IQ, and two Wechsler sub-tests (Block Design and Digit Span) were illustrated; boyish Chicago-Chinese Professor Bruce Lahn (see here, November 2005) was introduced to say that 60% of modern humans carry at least one copy of the new variant of ASPM; and the head-shaven but telegenic and only slightly sinister Leroi claimed that, even if ASPM did not itself finally prove to be directly linked to intelligence, nevertheless "such genes exist" and it was "only a matter of time" before they would be found and enable lovers and parents to embark on the brave new world of "market eugenics."

Altogether, astonishingly daring! But did I say "all" (peecee convention)? No, there were one or two omissions. Leroi bravely showed Pakistani "rat people" shrieking, dancing, begging and being washed - necessary in view of their mutated brain-size gene and typical Mental Age of 1 year - but he did not dare mention the work of Phil Rushton which had done so much to keep alive the brain-IQ link over the past thirty years; and of course the word race did not pass his lips - though, in fairness to him, he had once (2004) told TV viewers of four major racial groupings (presumably Blacks, Whites, East Asians and South Asians).

(Walk-on parts were played by two professors who knew all about The g Factor, Californian Richard Haier [a fine pro-IQ performance, interestingly stressing the need for both grey and white brain matter] and U.Liverpool's Robin Dunbar [who nicely explained the five `levels' of theory of mind involved in Shakespeare's writing of Othello]; and neuroscientist Tony Damasio [trendily concerned with the brain and emotion] was also invited to speculate about something or other.)

{Another rapidly evolving gene boosting human brain growth, oh-so-memorably called HAR1F, was discovered by Californian scientists (David Haussler et al. at U.Cal. at Santa Cruz) and oh-so-helpfully reported in Nature (17 viii, `Homing in on the genes for humanity') as lying "on a non-coding segment of the genome and [producing] RNA."}

{As Channel 4's quid pro quo for all this talk of genes, Leroi was obliged to spend his subsequent and final broadcast (19 viii, 20:10BST) stressing the importance of imitation to human culture; but he was allowed to mention `mirror neurones' that are deficient in autists and chimpanzees (and probably in myself) and found by an Oxford geneticist to be controlled from the FOXP2 gene on Chromosome 7; and he otherwise got his own back by pointing out at length that imitation helped not only chorus girls and language learners and artists but also played a part in such evolutionarily useless phenomena as copycat suicides (apparently quite common today, as after Goethe's descriptions of the unrequited love pangs and final suicide of `Young Werther' - yielding the banning of Goethe's 1774 novel), female self-chosen infertility (now afflicting 15% of Western(ized) young-adult females as they pursue the indoctrinated delights of careers, pop stars and sending their `humanitarian aid' to Black Africa's dictators) and the indoctrination of Muesli terror bombers (apparently reared on a diet of videoed young Mueslis anticipating the delights of their 72 young virgins in Allah's heaven).}



BLACK MULTICULTILOON RUBBISHED

The latest effort of Princeton's ex-Harvard Black `historian,' Kwame Anthony Appiah, to suggest that all people should be able to live happily together (like Kurds, Sunnis and Shi-ites, or Arabs and Jews, or Nigeria's fissiparous factions..) was firmly put down in the Spectator (12 viii) by the realistic Anthony Daniels.



TERROR REALISM

As British police rounded up 24 Muslims and sought scores more following the discovery of a plot to blow up ten American airliners over the Atlantic, a Whitehall official said: "Ministers and civil servants are in a total state of shock. They had no idea just how massive the problem was." Lord Stevens (ex-top cop, able to speak out in retirement) declared it was time to introduce racial profiling rather than delay and otherwise inconvenience millions of travellers all over Europe and America each time a new planned Muslim atrocity came to light. He said:

"those British politicians who have seemed obsessed with pandering to, and even encouraging, this state of denial, must throw off their politically-correct blinkers and recognise the same truth-that Muslim terrorism in Britain is the direct responsibility of British Muslims."

Philip Baum, the editor of Aviation Security International, also called for racial profiling as routinely practised by the world's safest airline, El Al. But Muslim leaders in Britain branded profiling plans "an extreme form of stereotyping." Crazyman Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said targeting people on ethnic grounds would be racist.

{If Britain's multicultiloony authorities continued to rule out profiling, it seemed all too likely that airlines would rapidly progress to having all flyers sitting naked and handcuffed after enduring enemas and vaginal searches and without the comfort of brandy for fear they might ignite it with a concealed match and emery board.} {In the Sunday Telegraph (13 viii), columnist Iain Martin added the truth: "The elephant in the room is multiculturalism, which has become almost a religious tenet for much of our governing classes."}

{Ludicrous ex-government minister Denis McShane had the gall to complain at being delayed by the `privately owned airlines' and their managers who `ran away' as troubles mounted at Thiefrow Airport - when in fact the delays and irksome travel restrictions were largely due to NuLabour's pious multicultural refusals to concentrate security attention on young Mueslis.}



MULTICULTIREALISM

Eight years after NATO illegally bombed Serbia and colonized Kosovo and infested the place with fantastically overpaid agents of multicultural piety, the Serbs of both areas turned out to have no more interest than ever in living alongside or sharing Kosovo with its psychopathic Albanian gypsies, child abductors and pimps (BBC World Service, 14 viii, 11:45a.m. BST).



SOUTH AFRICA REALISM

Even the Guardian's South Africa correspondent admitted to getting fed up during his four years in a Black-`run' one-party state of muggers, rapists and HIV-infected poor (Guardian, 15 viii).



RACE REALISM: A REMINDER

As my contribution to the Edinburgh (Book) Festival, I asked Cambridge U. philosopher-epistemologist Simon Blackburn, before a 300-strong audience in Charlotte Square, by what epistemological mistake or breakthrough the race realism of the Enlightenment (e.g. Kant, Hume and Edinburgh U.'s anatomy professor Robert Knox - "Race is everything: literature, art and science depend on it") could have been replaced by today's Western race unrealism leading to the closing down of the race & intelligence & brain size research of Chinese (Peking-born) evolutionary geneticist Bruce Lahn, Chicago U. (see previous diary/blog entries).

The answer as to this epistemological volte face? The Cambridge genius thought Victorian ideas of the importance of race may have been exaggerated; but he was not in favour of censorship - even though, in this case, he had never actually heard of Lahn. {Subsequently, Blackburn's chairman at the Book Festival, Iain Macwhirter, popped up in the Glasgow Herald to call for a restoration of standards of truth and objectivity - rather than let Mueslis get away with believing that 9/11 was the work of the Jews.

What a pity Macwhirter and his journalistic ilk did not take their opportunity to back race- IQ- sex- and paedophilia-realism back in 1996 when The g Factor was on trial!}

{TAXATION REALISM As a more practical contribution to fun-time Festivalling, my artistic wife and I (fresh from the splendidly delivered `Regina Monologues' of the six wives of Henry VIII) discovered a private drinking club in leafy circumstances near John Knox's house just off the Royal Mile: taxpayer-funded (e.g. by the Scottish Arts Council) and with a staff of eight, the Scottish Book Trust claims to be a `library'; but its magnificent historic building, Sandeman House, has - on the management's own admission -- few books and no researchers and all enquiries as to how to join are met with polite diversions of enquirers to the Scottish National Library, the Edinburgh Central Reference Library, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery etc. For news of select upcoming invitation-only fancy-dress parties, go to info@scottishbooktrust.com....}

{FEMILUNACY QUERIED After Times columnist and Cameronite Michael Gove M.P. urged in the Book Festival the need to confront Islamism, I was among the few to feed him a nice question, as to why Western feminists had done so little to critique Islam. - He was happy to agree with my gist and referred the audience to the splendid Sunday Times feminazie-bashing article by ex-peacenik columnist Sarah Baxter (13 viii). A sample:

"As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today's feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews. On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of "I am woman, hear me roar", there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush - "the world's number one terrorist" as the marchers would have it.

Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah's provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don't more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat?


Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women's page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today's feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. "There's a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist," Cochrane observes." It is excellent that the sometimes-a-bit-boring Sarah should thus have joined the ranks of the few feminists to oppose Islamofascism: Phyllis Chesler, Julie Burchill, Oriana Fallaci, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Melanie Phillips and (amazingly, at the end of her days, but still to her credit) Andrea Dworkin.}



MUESLIREALISM

Although the poor old Church of England is full of wooftahs, femiloons [who don't seem to realize Muesli intentions to make them all low-grade cleaning ladies with ne'er a fat chain-smoking moustachioed lesbian lover in sight], OAPs and assorted socialist headbangers, its appointment of a Muslim convert to Christianity as Bishop of Rochester yielded a rare sane glimpse of reality. Said Michael Nazir-Ali (D. Torygraph, 15 viii):

"It is clear that the multiculturalism beloved of our political and civic bureaucracies has not only failed to deliver peace, but is the partial cause of the present alienation of so many Muslim young people from the society in which they were born, where they have been educated and where they have lived most of their lives. ..if [Muslims] are to adjust to life in this country, they should be prepared to live in mixed communities, and not on their own. Their children should attend school along with those who come from the host culture, or from other cultures and traditions."

{Hardly stirring, but still an improvement on wretched NuLabour's ten-year campaign to provide state funding for Muesli schools in the fond belief that the socialist state would maintain the same control of these `schools' [largely devoted to memorizing the Koran and picking up enough Urdu to facilitate arranged i.e. forced marriages with Pakistani cousins] as it had long done over the wimps of the CofE (for whom the glorious music of Handel was long a distant memory)!}

{Bishop Nazir-Ali's effort was noted approvingly in the Torygraph by Mandarin expert, Queensman and race realist Professor Geoffrey Sampson, U. Sussex (see previous diaries/blogs) (16 viii).}



STREAMING IS BACK

As the Not-the-Conservative Party struggled to find a few policies that Labourites would not vote for, they came up with educational streaming in state schools - the proposal which, in its advanced and parent-guided form of `track choice,' formed the backbone of the practical improvements proposed in The g Factor, 1996, Wiley DePublisher.



PEDAGOGOPHILIA REALISM

Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard (married with two children) outrage femininnies by musing (for Times Higher) that she had a degree of nostalgia for the days when Oxbridge dons would pat the heads and bottoms of their female students, raising the inspirational level all round with such "eroticized" teaching. {No, Baroness Warnock - as she now is - sadly never laid a finger on me, alas, contenting herself with parading in flame red dresses and displaying her splendid legs.}



PEECEE CONCEPT GETS TO CABBIES

As the 8/10 Heathrow terror scare and subsequent chaos for air travellers provoked fresh discussion of the need for (racial) profiling and the need to have armed guards on planes, it transpired that even London's taxi drivers were au fait with the basic problem: "London cabbies tell me "political correctness" lies behind the lack of focus on where danger may lie in the security queues. Correct or not, something has to change to enable the non-destructive 99.99999 per cent of travellers to carry on unaffected" - Earl of Balfour, letter in Daily Telegraph, 15 viii. Cheap-travel Ryanair denounced the Government's own measures as shambolic and "totally ineffective" and threatened to sue unless search demands were promptly reduced from 1 passenger in 2 to 1 in 4.



NATIONAL IQ PREDICTS ECONOMIC GROWTH

Richard Lynn & Tatu Vanhanen at last got around to spelling out what I told them four years ago,* that IQ is a predictor, and thus most likely a cause of national increases in prosperity over time: they found a correlation of .64 between national IQs as measured c. 1975 and growth in per caput GNP between 1976 and 1998.

* http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AGDMFV3NSIUCZ?ie=UTF8 (2002): This book must be a good candidate for being the most important book of the 21st century. British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen find that recent IQ data from scores of countries world-wide show really strong correlations, of around r = .65, with national prosperity -- whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is estimated for 1820 or for the 1990s. Quite contrary to the theorizing of most Western economists of the past fifty years, the underdeveloped (later, 'developing') countries of fifty years ago have not generally closed the gap with the help of ongoing Western handouts and advice. Clearly, several East Asian countries have in that time made enormous strides -- as may also happen soon in the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe; but in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. largely Black Africa), mean IQ estimates hover around 70 and progress has been slight. Of the world's 21 countries which steadily tripled their GDP from 1983 through 1990 and 1993 to 1996, none was on or near the African mainland; whereas of the 27 countries whose GDP decreased by 50%, ten were African (Angola, Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Madagascar, Somalia, Sudan, Zambia and Sao Tome & Principe). ..

Can L&V convince us that IQ actually causes national wealth, rather than vice versa? The literature on the causal importance of IQ is only partially covered here, and L&V settle rather easily for the view that IQ and wealth will both tend to cause each other. This concession will weaken their case in the eyes of those who already deplore the idea that IQ is causal. L&V would have done better to point to the exceedingly slight IQ advantages accruing to Black children in the USA even when their fathers are seriously rich, and to the failure of the American Black-White gap in intelligence to decrease despite many billions of American dollars being thrown at the problem for the past forty years. Even a century of national impoverishment does not lower IQ -- as shown by the cases of mainland China, Poland and Russia in L&V's own data. By contrast, IQ correlates .50 with individual upward social mobility, relative to the position of the testee's father (Touhey, 1972). The simple truth is that a normal national IQ is necessary though not sufficient for prosperity; and that a low IQ holds whole countries back even if individuals can compensate for dullness by good looks or hard work. Neglecting such points, as also the full range of arguments that race differences are of substantially genetic origin, L&V will have partly themselves to blame if their book is set aside.

{A 2006 Wikepedia review of IQ and the Wealth of Nations showed that reviews by psychologists were overwhelmingly favourable - with all four in Intelligence supportive and only Contemporary Psychologist against. Reviews by economists were mixed, but the broadly favourable assessment by economic historian Michael Palairet went unmentioned.}



MUESLI MENACE PINPOINTED

A detailed cover-page article in The Spectator by a Muesli convert detailed how British mosques were being taken over by Sunniloon fanatics with the full approval of NuLabour (19 viii). {So apparently we can at least nuke Shitite Iran with impunity if it weren't for our lads sitting hostage in Basra?....} {What the future held for Whites giving in to third-world terror, as in the once-great city of Detroit, was nicely detailed in AmRen. 19 viii).}



TEACHER TERROR THREATENED BY REV. B.LIAR

After ten years of NuLabour nonsense, Tony's cronies announced they would crack down on teachers who failed to teach spelling, grammar, punctuation and pronunciation (Observer, 20 viii). {Think: `Tough talk about left-liberal teachers, ??tough on the causes of left-liberal teachers.'} Even the ludicrous Labour Lady Warnock who had, over a generation as Britain's Number One BBC philosopher, done so much to boost Nobel prizes for the mentally defective brought herself to admit to the bleeding-heart Observer: "..abhorrence of an elite lies at the very heart of our educational troubles, first at school, then at university."



NEW LEFT LOVES JEW-BASHING

The Jews, having failed to cut a deal with the West by apologizing for PeeCee and volunteering to leave the Middle East for Scotland, Arizona or Nevada if the oil-rich Arabs would pay, found themselves lampooned for their Whatocaust sensitivities in a Teheran art exhibition of cartoons - reported dispassionately by the once Jew-loving Observer (20 viii).



NULABOUR U-TURN ON IMMIGRATION

After a decade of smearing critics of Britain's largely uncontrolled third-world immigration as `racist,' `fascist,' `neo-Nazi' and `same-old-Tory', terrified Bliarite minister `Dr' Reid (seeking to keep the Sun tabloid from defecting to Not-the-Conservative Party leader David Cameron) announced that criticism of immigration was not necessarily racist and said the Government would somehow move (probably quite uselessly, as with all previous such initiatives) to restrict the mass immigration thought imminent from Bulgaria and Romania (Sun, 21 viii).

{In the Spectator (19 viii), playboy Rod Liddle joined the ranks of those British columnists prepared to squeak the occasional criticism of the insaner forms of immigration, saying of the Muesli terror threat: "The problem is of our own making because, through following a multicultural agenda, we first allowed into the country too large a number of immigrants possessed of a culture and beliefs which are antithetical to our own. And then we encouraged them to keep those beliefs rather than integrate."} {As Labour plummeted to 31% support in national opinion polls, the Secretary of State for `Communities and Local Government,' Ruth Kelly (a high-church Catholic hailing from The Queen's College, Oxford) and balded BBC Ceylon-born newsreader George Alagiah also threw their hats into the pro-integration ring - opposing `the ring-fencing of communities provided by multiculturalism' (Guardian, 22 viii). Mother-of-four Ms Kelly announced expressly her latter-day agreement with desperate hitman `Dr' Reid that "it is not racist to discuss immigration and asylum" (Classic FM Radio, 24 viii, 11:00BST). It transpired that Ms Kelly had her own Government mini-department of `Integration and Cohesion' which was said to be determined not to brush Muesli issues under the carpet or just placate Mueslis with more dosh and quango positions for `community leaders' - some hope!}

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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Thursday, August 10, 2006

MAORI PROBLEMS EXPLAINED BY GENES

Following a number of comments by New Zealand politicians on the “endemic” and “shameful” problems of child abuse among the country’s aboriginal people (see May: ABORIGINES LIVE DOWN TO EXPECTATIONS FROM THEIR IQ), a gene for monoamine oxidase was claimed by a Wellington-based Government-employed genetic epidemiologist, Dr Rod Lea, to be substantially responsible for higher Maori aggression and criminality – Maoris account for 65% of NZ crimes while constituting only some 11% of the population (New Zealand Herald, 8 viii, 10 viii; Daily Telegraph, 10 viii, with picture of grass-skirted Maoris performing a traditional war dance; New York Sun, 10 viii; Scotsman, 10 viii).

(The MAO enzyme first became known in the 1960’s for its contribution to serious clinical depression – which could thus remit if patients were given MAO-inhibiting drugs.) Outrage was predictably sparked after Dr Lea had spoken out at the 11th International Conference of Human Genetics in Brisbane, Australia, saying Maori males – famous for their rugby skills -- were twice as likely as White males (60% vs 30%) to carry the gene (which was also linked to smoking, alcoholism, gambling and other risk taking). A respected Maori leader, called Brian Dickson, declared: “I would wrap all [Lea’s] words up in one – colonisation.” Figures showed Maori children under five were being admitted to hospital with "intentional injury" at twice the rate of other ethnic groups. Dr Nicola Poa, research fellow at Christchurch School of Medicine, NZ, said it was unheard of to link a gene to race-based behaviour. Nobelist Sir Paul Nurse, in Christchurch for a public lecture on ‘The Great Ideas of Biology,’ said a single gene was unlikely to be responsible for behaviour. Maori MP Hone Harawira believes social issues, including high unemployment, poor educational achievement and in many cases severe poverty, to be the main contributors to Maori violence rather than a warrior gene. National Urban Maori Authority chief executive John Tamihere said he was keeping an open mind.

{Subsequently, it sensationally transpired that Dr Lea had a Maori wife and two fine-looking sons – the wife, Marino, very much standing by her man, not least because many in her own family had died of cancer and she looked to genetic research to give the couple’s boys more of a chance in life (New Zealand Herald, 12 viii).This development occurred just 24 hours before the TV screening in the U.K. of Armand Leroi’s discovery (see August: THREE GENES CONTROL BRAIN SIZE, EVOLUTION AND IQ -- IMPERIAL COLLEGE EXPERT) of genes for microcephaly that are much over-represented in Pakistanis (themselves in the news for providing – at least by genetic ancestry -- almost all of the 24 young Muslim men detained by British police for plotting to blow up some ten American airliners over the Atlantic).}

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

ENVIRONMENTALISTS REHEARSE ANCIENT ERRORS

The New York Times Magazine (Public Policy Professor David L. Kirp, 23 vii) summarized evidence that extreme environments have substantial effects on IQ - never pausing to acknowledge that such findings had long been embraced and indeed predicted by Arthur Jensen, as summarized in Chapter 3 of The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications, 1996, Wiley DePublisher.


IQ RECOGNIZED BY WOOFTAHS

New York's top magazine for yags, Village Voice (1 viii), devoted a passably sympathetic article to the ongoing American enthusiasm for founding high-IQ societies - including a quote from top London School lady (and mother of twins), Linda Gottfredson.


IQ: MAN > ORANG-OUTAN > CHIMPS > MONKEYS

After decades of dithering with the remnants of behaviourism and multifactorialism (multiple mental faculties being especially beloved of `sociobiologists' and `evolutionary psychologists' in their cowardice about g), one animal psychologist finally got around to developing a validated test battery for the g factor that could be applied to a range of primate species. At last, once psychometric methods had been adopted, proof of the blindingly obvious met the exacting standards of Nature (1 viii): Duke University's Robert Deaner found clear inter-species differences among primates on a range of tasks (e.g. odd-man-out, mazes [cf. Porteus Mazes, used with aborigines back in the 1930's]), with humans streets ahead of their country cousins (though orang-utans are notoriously good escape artistes).


LUNI TERROR ADMITTED

Ten years after the LUniversity of Edinburgh began its 15 months of witch-hunting of me for race realism, forty per cent of U.K. academics made headlines by telling survey researchers that they would be frightened to speak out on `controversial topics' - Times Higher, 4 viii, p. 1. {Thus does terror spread - taking only a decade even among nincompoops who largely declined to interest themselves either in my own case or in the cases across three continents of Phil Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, Geoffrey Sampson, Larry Summers, Andrew Fraser, Frank Ellis and Helmuth Nyborg. The other 60% of Britain's `academics' probably held views so full of liberal-left piety that they could contemplate no reaction other than genuflecting deference to whatever pseudo-Marxist `progressive' peecee gas they cared to emit.}


GOVT PROMISES, PROMISES ON IMMIGRATION

After a decade of labelling critics of third-world immigration to Britain as racist and letting net migration into the U.K. rise to at least 223,000 in 2004, NuLabour, with its new ex-Marxist thug `Dr' Reid (PH.D. in Burkina Faso Studies) in charge of its admitted-to-be "not fit for purpose" Home Office, declared limits on immigration possibly a good idea and appointed a multi-million-pound committee to take the heat off it (Sun, 7 viii).

In the previous week a secret Home Office report had revealed Britain's schools, hospitals and housing to be facing meltdown amid an huge surge in newcomers - often nice young Poles and Romanians, but with Black and Pakistani `Britons' outbreeding Whites and with a flood of Bulgarian gypsies, Iranian homosexuals, Nigerian conmen, Pakistani `husbands' and failed Lebanese `Hizbollah' terrorists imminent. `Dr' Reid admitted that council tax rises (or government subsidies to councils - paid out of central taxation) would be necessary and declared his resolve to make a speech to the `Demos' think-tank calling mass migration the "greatest challenge facing European governments," the Sun patted itself on the back for a "triumph" from its years of campaigning and the Guardian (7 viii) declared Reid's move "a major departure in Labour's immigration policy"; but a more restrained Sir Andrew Green, the ex-civil servant head of Migrationwatch UK, said of Reid: "These are courageous words; but now we need courageous deeds."

{For the previous two years, Labour personages like Blair, Blunkett and Phillips had been steadily moving in their speeches to occupy immigration-wary territory which the cowardly Tories had vacated; but whether action would follow seemed unlikely since Britain needed slave labour to replace the millions of its people on welfare or so sick after sixty years of its Marxist National `Health' Service as to be quite unable to work.}


PENILE SIZE TO COME OUT OF CLOSET

After years of Professor Phil Rushton being criticized by `liberal'-leftists for alluding to individual and race differences in penis size, Britain's Family Planning Association urged a recognition of the subject so that men could be sold sheaths suitable for both maximal sexual satisfaction and maximal contraceptive efficiency (Sun, 7 viii).


BLACK-WHITE IQ GAP RE-ASSERTED

Countering forthcoming claims from Dunedin political scientist James Flynn and Washington economist William Dickens in Psychological Science (5 viii) that the Black-White IQ gap in the USA may have closed by some 5.5 points since 1972, London Schoolers argued (as copied to the email Human BioDiversity Group) that Flynn had ignored major studies on unduly technical grounds (of the greater technical unreliability of short tests that often occurs in big studies - which derive their reliability precisely from their size) and forgotten that modern studies increasingly omit large numbers of the poorer-quality Black children who truant from school (often with the encouragement of school authorities on days of testing). Linda Gottfredson specially pointed out that the previous thirty years had seen Black children advance only in reading and not in arithmetic and science - an improvement not at all suggestive of a rise in the g factor; and Art Jensen and Phil Rushton estimated that the true degree of closure was most likely around 2 IQ points for the generation, despite multi-billion-dollar `improving' schemes having been targeted on under-performing Black children.


MEERKAT REALISM

It transpired that - presumably to the horror of feminists and kindred preachers of piety - the South African meerkat dominant female, once pregnant, does her best to kill her female rivals and to eat their young (Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci., 8 viii). Failing that, she at least stresses her rivals out so much that they are rendered infertile and thus, since they don't get pregnant, are not themselves tempted to eat the dominant's own young. {For further stories of female Machiavellianism, see Sarah Blffr Hrdy's Mother Nature - summary here.}


TOP DANISH DIFFERENTIALIST DEFENDED

To Dean Svend Hylleberg, University of Aarhus, Denmark, at dekan.sam@au.dk

With copies to Rector Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen at rector@au.dk, Dr Helmuth Nyborg at helmuthnyborg@msn.com and others

Edinburgh, 4 viii 2006

Dear Dean,

Further to my letter to Aarhus University concerning Helmuth Nyborg in December 2005 (COPY below for your reference), I have seen something of the lengthy and detailed academic adjudication (see here) which Aarhus proposes to use to sully Nyborg's reputation at the end of a career in which he became Denmark's internationally best known psychologist. I must say I find it astonishing that the University should have tried to undertake the detailed scrutiny which today is normally the job of academic journals. Not only does such a process insult the many experts who have over the years, with Aarhus' full encouragement, blessed Nyborg's work through to publication; but also, as a process of sheer fault-finding, it is calculated to neglect the wide interest of Nyborg's general stances, arguments and conclusions and is particularly dangerous when conducted by his own university colleagues -- one can almost hear the grinding of axes! I would like to see such a narrow (I will not say nit-picking) exercise applied to a representative sample of Nyborg's fellow psychologists. As Hamlet put it: 'If we treated every man after his just deserts, then who would escape whipping?'

Thus you will understand I am underwhelmed by the University's approach and findings in the matter of whether males have higher average intelligence than females; so I stand by my original defence of Helmuth Nyborg. By contrast with the University's fussiness, the top scientific journal Nature has recently published more from Emeritus Professor Richard Lynn attesting this claim -- though, like myself, Nature does not incline finally to agree with it (I give my own comment below*). Nature's approach is to let the evidence and arguments be seen and heard -- I wonder whether Aarhus proposes to let its own ponderous, not to say pedantic deliberations be seen in public. Lastly, by trying to bring into academic disrepute a famous scholar on whom it has, directly and indirectly, lavished vast sums of taxpayers' money (in salary, amenities and grants) over the years, Aarhus is in fact making of itself a much bigger laughing stock than Nyborg could ever be, if not actually bringing itself into far graver disrepute. If you proceed still further with your witch-hunting of Nyborg, I will look forward to seeing discussion in the Danish press of the University's gross irresponsibility in orchestrating what the University itself now proposes to adjudicate as a wasting of state funds for a quarter of a century.

Yours sincerely, -- Chris Brand (author of 'The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications').

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

ISLAMOREALISM

After years as a top sage (economist and philosopher), the former Master of King's College, Cambridge (retired 2003), Bengal-born Hindu Amartya Sen, 73, announced that he had grave reservations about Labour's creation of state-funded Muesli-only schools in Britain. Islam was not like other religions, which mainly believed in tolerance of other faiths, he said; and he resented pay cheques going to `Muslim leaders' who got jobs as teachers in Muesli schools but were `mostly extremists' and told pupils "Forget everything else, you are a Muslim." He feared the UK Government had in these ways been "counter-productive" in its war on terror (Daily Telegraph, 27 vii).



WARHORSES STILL GIVING PEECEE THE OCCASIONAL KICK

Two grand old British political warhorses, respectively from the right and left, re-issued some of their welcome warnings about immigration into Britain. In the DailyTelegraph (28 vii), octogenarian ex-editor and columnist Bill Deedes deplored the fact that, in NuLabour Britain, "to remark on the adverse consequences of unchecked immigration is treated as racist," and continued "It is time we dropped this silliness." For his part, brave Labour Party pensions realist and reject Frank Field was recorded by the Telegraph (31 vii) as saying that the immigration that was transforming Britain like nothing before and was like the "brutal policy" of Stalin's forced migration in the Ukraine.



THREE GENES CONTROL BRAIN SIZE, EVOLUTION AND IQ -- IMPERIAL COLLEGE EXPERT

In an amazing development for Daily Telegraph readers (used to getting their genetics from loony IQ-loathing environmentalist Prof. Steve Jones), Dr Armand Leroi of London University advised them that "the discovery of [four] genes that control the growth of the brain suggested that these genes might also have changed in the last six million years since we last shared an ancestor with chimps -- and so it proved [since three of these genes for microphaly] bear the hallmarks of rapid evolution" (1 viii 2006).


Just how this excellent confirmation of the theorizing of the London School in general, J. Philippe Rushton in particular and Bruce Lahn (see above, e.g. November, 2005) most recently** was not explained; but Dr Armand did divulge that his happy breakthrough had begun with study of 'the rat people' of Pakistan -- so known because they have brains only one-third of normal size and have mental ages of about 2; and he did go on to claim that it's our genes that make us human (not talking, walking, nakedness, tools or politics) and that the Pakistanis of Leeds and Bradford unlucky enough to give their children-to-be any of the pairs of recessive genes that make for microcephaly should be offered abortion - claims no different from those over the past century of London's Galton Institute (formerly the Eugenics Society). His article, titled 'What makes us human?' was to be followed up by TV appearances for Channel 4.

* A Reader in Developmental Evolutionary Biology, Imperial College, Leroi grew up overwhelmingly in the English-speaking world; but he had only relatively recently came to Britain and was located at an Imperial outpost in Berkshire so had perhaps missed out on the 80-year existence of the London School of Psychology. In 2005, he was mentioned by hereditarian convert Steven Pinker as a geneticist prepared to stand out for the existence of human races - against the 'Lewontin Fallacy' (that, because racial differences are not absolute, they therefore don't exist) (see Steve Sailer, 2 i 2006; Edge: The World Question Center, 2006). To see Leroi upsetting some two dozen wee 'highbrow' lefties (including Nickerless Humphreys and top U.S. egalitarian loon R. C. Lewontin) in 2005, go to Edge, iii 2005 and SSRC, 2005. For a more positive appreciation of Leroi (and of his fellow race-realist geneticist Neil Risch, of psychologist Helmuth Nyborg, and of blondes..) see the Danish site 'Racism and the fight against immigration.'

** For an informal discussion of Bruce Lahn's race work, his enforced retirement from brain research after my writing him up celebratorily in American Renaissance (xi 2005), and the fear of today's geneticists for their jobs if they breathe a word of truth about race, see Imperial College's distinguished authoress Olivia Judson, vi 06.