Monday, June 25, 2007

NOT-THE-CONSERVATIVES SEEN IN THEIR TRUE COLOURS - ALL SHADES OF YELLOW

It fell to the independent London think-tank Civitas to expose, in its The Corruption of the Curriculum, how most state school teaching in Britain of the 21st century had been converted by Labour, without a squeak from 'Conservatives,' into variants of political correctness, multiculturalism, Hitler-obsession, Greenery, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-homophobism and emotionalism (learning how countries and people 'feel' rather than learning where they are or their actual history) (Daily Telegraph, 11 vi).

Likewise, when Labour moderate Hazel Blears complained that her constituents in Salford objected to immigrants partying on the streets, filling up doctors' surgeries, undercutting the national minimum wage and violating health and safety regulations by living 12 to a room,* she found herself jumped on for 'stereotyping immigrants' not just by leftist John Cruddas but also by 'Conservative' Shadow Home Secretary David Davis.

Mr Davis had also written to Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown asking him to clarify his position on immigration, saying he he was "concerned" by a speech the Chancellor made about training up 'British workers for the British jobs'. Again, it was not a Conservative but a (rebel) Labour MP, Frank Field, who revealed that, in wonky welfare Britain with its endless socialist benefits, allowances and tax credits, a single parent mother could make œ487 per week by working just 16 hours whereas a two-parent family on the minimum wage needed to put in 116 hours.

And President George W. Bush, fresh from his years of allowing America to be overrun by slave-labouring Mexicans, could not resist sucking up to the cheering crowds of Muslims in Albania who expected him soon to hand them Kosovo and put two fingers up to that province's 120,000 Serbs.** (Ironically, among the cheering Albanian crowd which he was glad-handing, Dubya had his Timex wristwatch stolen (Sun, 13 vi).)

In Britain it transpired that Metropolitan Police, scared of being thought racist, had five times failed to pursue reports by a Kurdish girl, 19, that her father was planning to kill her because he didn't approve of her boyfriend - the father and a relative were finally jailed for murdering her, and all the police had done - rather than quiz the father -- was to offer a 'panic button' or a place in a 'women's refuge' (Times, 13 vi).

'Conservatives' who had attacked grammar schools were given a resounding raspberry as research in Northern Ireland (where some 80 grammar schools had been maintained through a generation of indifference from Conservative leaders, serving communities delineated more by religious affiliation than by whether or not parents could afford to live in a grammar school's catchment area) showed selectivity "helped poor pupils as much as those from wealthy backgrounds" (Daily Telegraph, 13 vi).

* Mrs Blears added: "Salford used to be 93 per cent white working class. Our community's changing before our eyes. People can see it and they get worried - if it [i.e. immigration] is not being managed properly. Everyone is working harder now probably than they have worked before and they feel that everyone who can work should. They don't like people to avoid paying taxes: if they have got to do it, everyone else should." She thus joined Labour ministers Ruth Kelly and Margaret Hodge in expressing more (verbal) concern about immigration than had been heard from 'Conservatives' in five years.

A Daily Mail columnist jested: "Ruth Kelly, the honourable member for the Da Vinci Code, is telling Town Halls to sack interpreters and force immigrants to learn English. Blairite muppet Hazel Blears was reported as provoking a 'political row' for suggesting that some of the migrants in her Salford constituency spend their days drinking in the streets and indulging in anti-social behaviour. She didn't provoke a 'political row', she told the truth - something no one on the right of the political spectrum would dare to do."

** Serbia had been a valued ally of Britain and America in two World Wars but had found itself the victim of the liberal-bigot interventionism of Messrs Clinton and Blair when it tried to resist the takeover of its ancient province of Kosovo by crime-prone Albanians (who, once supported by Clinton and Bliar, soon ended up running half the prostitutes in London).



RACE DIFFERENCE IN BRAIN WAVES

"Markedly" less slow-wave activity in the brain during sleep was reported in Afro-Americans (as compared to Whites) (Science Daily, 13 vi).



BLECKS TO BUST BLECKS?

France's President Sarkozy, fresh from achieving a comfortable majority for his anti-socialist forces in the French Parliament, appointed three Black feminist women (some of them rather pretty) to help him bust Muesli immigrant balls. {Whether this move would do more than Rev. Bliar having Bleck 'Baroness'Amis to heel and Rev. Dubya having piano-sportive Negress Condoleeza Rice (possibly a girlfriend of Grumpy Gordon's jobseeker Jack Straw) remained to be seen.}

Monday, June 11, 2007

UNIVERSITIES REVEAL THEIR NEO-LEFT BIAS

(Update)

At Harvard, Alan Dershowitz found himself in conflict about Israel with evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers, whose two sisters had both married Lebanese men. As a result of an aggressive letter from Trivers, Harvard cancelled a lecture to have been given by Trivers.

In London, top lawyer Anthony Julius (of the firm Mischcon de Reya which had won Princess Diana a 17M pound divorce settlement) announced he would join with Dershowitz to give British universities a hard time. In Israel, the Knesset began debating a proposal that all British imports should be plainly labelled as coming from a country which was involved in anti-Semitic campaigning; and unions said they would likely decline to unload British goods at docks and airports

From Harvard, Dershowitz said "today there is more anti-Semitism in the U.K. than there is in Germany" and swore he would have no trouble getting 10,000 U.S. academics to respond in kind to any British boycott of Israeli universities. He threatened to "devastate and bankrupt" British universities and academics and to cut them off from the rest of the world. He planned to put forward legislative proposals to "impose extraordinarily punitive sanctions on any institution that boycotts Israeli academics." The U.S. House of Representatives began considering a resolution condemning Britain's University and College Union for its proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

In a most unusually forthright leader, Times Higher (7 vi) said the boycott proposal depended on the discredited notion of `collective guilt' and was "spectacularly foolish" and "unethical, unworkable, unpredictable and utterly useless." The proposal had first been put forward by arch-leftist-loon (and decrier of The g Factor and front man for Britain's `Socialist Workers') Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, with a letter to the Guardian in 2002 arguing for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli research.

The leadership of UCU was said to be hoping against hope that a ballot of its entire membership could eventually be used frustrate the 158 - 99 conference vote of delegates to discuss boycotting Israel's universities. And a Labour Government minister was despatched from London to Jerusalem to apologize for the chaos in British university life. But the National Union of Journalists had also voted for a boycott, and a similar demand was thought to be forthcoming from one of Britain's giant labour unions; so the happy prospect beckoned that the Jewish community would finally break with the left and, above all, the causes of multiculturalism and political correctness which leading Jews had disastrously done so much to foster in the West.



PEECEE DEFIED (1)

Contrary to the widely respected piety of political correctness, a book review in Nature (31 v)* admitted that the main factor in the high rate of AIDS in Africa was simply multiple concurrent promiscuity by Africans. For twenty years, official public thinking by U.N. AIDS gurus had been that AIDS should not be blamed on African `cultural practices' {including anal sex and the drying out of the vagina with alum stones to provide the male with more friction}. Instead, AIDS was attributed to poverty, `gender inequality,' racial discrimination, lack of health care, lack of supply of condoms from the West, and penetrative paedophilia {and doubtless `interaction effects'}.

But it turned out in books* by a U. Cal. epidemiologist and an experienced Africa-hand journalist that none of these factors was of much importance; nor was the sheer number of sexual partners. Contrary to the U.N. view that AIDS was a population problem requiring widespread re-education so as to provide jobs for Western carers and sharers, it turned out that the U.N. had substantially overestimated AIDS prevalence in Africa (by using figures handily obtained from pregnant women presenting themselves at clinics); that AIDS invariably took hold in small high-risk groups, all unmentionable by the pious, being principally yags, druggies and whores; and that AIDS spread wider only when there was rampant concurrent promiscuity.

As AIDS ravaged Uganda, local leaders had enough sense to urge that African polygamy be serial rather than concurrent and a government-sponsored campaign of `Zero Grazing' had the impressive result of reducing new AIDS cases for the first time ever in Africa. Thus decades of propaganda pitched at general re-education and welfare had done little but indulge Western peecee idealism and been largely a waste of the West's money.

* Stephen LEWIS & Paul DONOVAN, 2007, `Time for a change? - Two books on the AIDS pandemic in Africa challenge assumptions at the heart of the U.N.'s response.' Nature, 31 v, p. 31-2.

** 1. James CHIN, The AIDS Pandemic, Radcliffe. 2. Helen EPSTEIN, 2007, The Invisible Cure, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.



PEECEE DEFIED (2)

To the credit of the University of Edinburgh for once in ten years, a committee of senior professors set up by the University faced down PeeCee and recommended withdrawal of the honorary degree which the University had once foolishly - in enthusiasm for the ending of British colonialism -- awarded to African Marxist `freedom fighter' Robert Mugabe who had gone on to tyrannize and wreck the once so prosperous land of Southern Rhodesia; Edinburgh's Senate concurred, so cancellation went ahead - though with the murdering dictator, 83, saying he would `lose no sleep' over the matter, having already had 23 years in which to dine out on his honour.

(The University said that - unlike everyone else -- it had not been aware when conferring the degree that Mugabe, using North-Korea-trained troops, had slaughtered 20,000 Black Africans in Matabeleland -- members of the Ndebele tribe which had stayed loyal to the opposition leader Joshua Nkomo (International Herald Tribune, 6 vi).

The country's agricultural economy had collapsed since 1997 when Mugabe brought in laws allowing the forced seizure of almost all White-owned farms, reducing life expectancy for men to 37, and to 34 for women.)

Prime Minister Blair said he fully endorsed the decision; and Michigan State University and U. Massachusetts-Boston also edged nearer to stripping the monster of the titles which they had given him (his degree at UMass-B being conferred personally by the daughter of Saint Nelso Mandela).

Also, as Professor Ian Deary FRSE, FAMS raised 13.5M pounds from the charity `Help the Aged,' the University found it could allow a widely-publicized fishing expedition in life-history data to go ahead on 1,000 Scottish oldies who had been tested for IQ in childhood (1947), the idea being to replicate the Schwartzman et al. (1987, Canadian J. Psychol.) finding that IQ is massively stable across adult life (r = .78 for the Canadian WWII conscripts) - though Ian Deary was probably required not to mention genes too much to inquisitive newsies, but rather to throw them scraps such as smoking being associated with a 2.5 IQ-point drop by age 70 for reasons needing further research (Glasgow Herald, 1 vi; Guardian, 2 vi; Daily Telegraph, 4 vi).

Saturday, June 02, 2007

SEX DIFFERENCE RE-ASSERTED, SHOCKING EDINBURGH FEMININNIE

Bravely rivalling Harvard's Professor Steven Pinker and President Larry Summers in willingness to admit deep-seated psychological sex differences (as per Chapter 1 of The g Factor), Cambridge University's Simon Baron-Cohen (first cousin of top comedian Sasha and author of The Essential Difference) explained how men were `systematizers' and women were `communicators,' and found himself promptly jumped on (along with Louann Brizendine, the American author of The Female Brain) in Times Higher (25 v) from the LUniversity of Edinburgh, where one Wendy Faulkner, `reader in technology,' declared with all the faith of the 1960's (when `labelling theory' was invented): "The labels `male/female brains' serve to `naturalize' presumed differences in how much women and men care about people."



CENSORIOUS LUNIVERSITY LAMBASTED

The LUniversity of Edinburgh - fresh from banning Gideon bibles, prayers at graduation and Christian criticism of homosexuality - provoked complaint (though also much jubilation from Wiccans et al.) when it turned out that was planning to host a convention of pagans scheduled to include practical classes and many colourful visual aids (Scotsman, 26 v. `All hell breaks out as pagans given go-ahead for university gathering'). The university was condemned as "Christianophobic" by a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church; many Scottish Christians were said to be irate at paganism being celebrated by the university just half a mile from the Edinburgh Grassmarket site where hundreds of witches and other heretics were burned to death in the 16th and 17th centuries (Ecumenical News International, 30 v), and top columnist Tim Luckhurst (appointed from June as Professor of Journalism in the University of Kent) tore into it (Daily Mail, 28 v), complaining that "Edinburgh University places pagan beliefs ahead of Christian ones"; that "This great university is in danger of confusing tolerance of the eccentric with discrimination against the reasonable"; that "PC is often trivial, but the elevation of madness above reason is not"; and that the university was "falling into the trap of relativism" by tolerating the mention of some opinions but not others. I wrote as follows to Tim Luckhurst and Scottish media folk.
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Tim Luckhurst is to be congratulated on taking Edinburgh University firmly to task for tolerating the views of pagans better than those of Christians ('Pagans winning the free speech race,' Daily Mail, 28th May, 2007). However his belief that academic staff are 'guaranteed protection from hostility to their opinions' (a protection he wants to extend to the opinions of their students) suggests he is (strangely, for an ex-editor of the Scotsman) unaware of how, over 15 months in 1996-7, Edinburgh University moved heaven and earth to sack me after I had spoken against the pieties of anti-racism, feminazism, egalitarianism and paedohysteria -- eventually succeeding, though the University later paid me compensation for 'unfair dismissal' rather than face a public trial of their actions before an Employment Tribunal. My case, which showed there was no such thing as academic free speech in Britain (I have not since worked as an academic), was soon followed by others where British universities (Sussex, Leeds, Imperial, LSE) managed to persuade academics into silence and/or early retirement after they had expressed politically incorrect views on race, IQ and heredity. Any who doubt the wide extent of 'liberal'-left censorship of contrary opinions in British universities should just try the exercise of phoning E.U. Psychology and asking why race and general intelligence are linked. E.U. can doubtless be praised for contributing to the gaiety of nations by encouraging its girls to get their kit off on Calton Hill or in the warmer environs of university premises, but such entertainment will soon peter out as peecee intolerance spreads its freedom-crushing net to `reconcile' pagan acceptance of drink, drugs and orgies with the preachments of homophobic veiled-up Islam. Sincerely, -- Chris Brand (Edinburgh, author of 'The 'g' Factor', 1996/2000 [http://www.douance.org/qi/brandbook.htm]).
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In the USA, the University of Southern Illinois paid out big-time to its Christian Union, whose beliefs [probably about homosexuality] it had tried to circumscribe (Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 v).



UNIVERSITIES REVEAL THEIR NEO-LEFT BIAS

Showing a further leftward swing in the universities (beyond the Labourism that had gone unremarked and uncontested by `Conservatives' for thirty years) towards the new `wretched of the earth,' the Mueslis, Britain's University and College Union voted at its annual conference in Bournemouth (BBC, 30 v): (1) to refuse co-operation with the Government in pinpointing terrorist suspects on campus, (2) to criminalize any school or college teaching which suggested heterosexuality was more desirable than homosexuality, and (3) to explore (contrary to its leaders' wishes) the option of a full-scale academic boycott against Israel.

The proposed treachery to the only successful universities in the Middle East was promptly noticed by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said that he would "devastate" boycott supporters economically and that a boycott would "mark the end of British academics' reputation as serious scholars" (Times Higher, 1 vi); and top columnist Charles Moore lambasted the "silly dons" who would "half-excuse turbaned torturers for kidnapping our fellow citizens while trying to exclude Jewish biochemists from lecturing to our students (Daily Telegraph, 2 vi). "The UCU boycott motion is an assault on academic freedom," said Jeremy Newmark, the chief executive of Britain's Jewish leadership council. "While the vast majority of academics do not support a boycott, the decision damages the credibility of British academia as a whole."

UCU leader Sally Hunt said she doubted delegates' enthusiasm for cutting of European Union funding of Israeli universities was representative of feeling among the UCU's wider 120,000 membership; but the neo-leftist victory was another straw in the wind, showing the hard left spreading out from anti-racism and a degree of anti-male bias (to keep feminists sweet) to confrontation with Evangelicals, the Roman Catholic Church and Russia over their `homophobia' and with the left's old friends, the Jews, over `Israeli imperialistic warmongering.' A sharp protest was issued by Israel to the British Foreign Office (Haaretz, 2 vi).