MERRY CHRISTMAS!

For a Christmas present from me, collect Knickers Galore! (my edited version of `Memoirs of a `Psychopath'') HERE.

Readers wishing full traditional McDougallian entertainment at Christmas should go HERE


STUDENT JOURNALIST BACKS FREEDOM!

In a new anti-left fortnightly newspaper for Scottish students, called The Journal, staff writer Scott McCombe bravely deplored the Oxford Union being attacked by "unwashed thugs" when it hosted `fascists' for debate (see November). I replied (published 4 xii):

Congratulations to Scott McCombe on backing the freedom of the Oxford Union to invite whomever it likes; and on his percipience in looking to the future! Ten years ago, Edinburgh University fired me, a psychology lecturer, for telling too many home truths about race, IQ, feminazism and paedohysteria. Ten years later, not even Nobelist James Watson (of DNA's 'double helix') is allowed to speak at E.U. -- banned because he had ventured just one sentence of race realism about the problems of Africa. Students need to appreciate the left's remorseless advance towards tyrannical neoStalinism and take action before Government outlawing of criticism of homosexuality and Islam is followed by the banning of jokes about the ugly, the bald, the fat and, of course, mothers-in-law.

SOCIALISM EXPOSED

After ten years of NuLabour socio-environmentalism, egalitarianism and massive increases in state spending on useless crony `trained' `teachers' (many of them obese and/or bedraggled when screened on TV), British children dropped out of the world's top ten in international educational league tables (Sun, 5 xii), exposing the neosocialist target-mad Government's own internal `standards' as a dumbed-down charade of feats of rote memory for girls. The latest study of 57 countries by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed British 15-year-olds as barely "average" in reading and "below average" in maths. Labour's lying-bastard `Government ministers' promptly swore the new results were just wonderful - not even having the grace to do the minimal apologizing that nail-chewing trembly-handed and secretary-slamming P.M. Grumpy Gordon had managed over his party accepting illegal donations from anonymous donors (e.g. the Labour Friends of Israel who had spent fifty years paying out to make Britain a `diverse' `multicultural' society of marching morons run by socialist swindlers).


NULABOUR FUNDED BY JEWISH CASH

After a childless Jewish Newcastle property developer, David Abrahams, was found to have given œ666,000 anonymously, and thus illegally, to the Labour Party, the Jewish community hastened to distance itself from such insalubrious largesse - though, like the rest of the press, without asking, let alone ascertaining what such donation to a sitting Government with a large majority was intended to achieve and whether it was but the tip of the iceberg of other Jewish support for NuLabour multiculti ideals. Subsequently, London's Reform Club also distanced itself from Abrahams, banning him from introducing the socialite and Holocaust-sceptic former beauty queen Michele Renouf, 60 (once married to the 28-year-older financier Frank `the bank' Renouf) (Daily Mail, 15 xii).


CHRISTMAS TALE FOR LEFTIES

Santa showed up early for NYTwits, in the form of Michigan `psychologist' Richard E. Nisbett assuring them that, despite 250 years of scientific racism, `All brains are the same colour' (9 xii) Yes, "In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic," wrote Nisbett - triumphantly citing in his conclusion the work of James Flynn, even though Flynn himself does not think the twentieth century changed actual general intelligence a bit. One correspondent replied:

To the Editor, New York Times:

As heartening as I found Richard E. Nisbett's arguments against a correlation between race and intelligence, I find it difficult to overlook the fact that one of the world's most eminent scientists, James D. Watson, recently lost his job for taking the opposite position. Under such circumstances, essays like Professor Nisbett's take on the air of dogma. One is left to wonder what researchers might find or say if their careers and reputations weren't threatened by academic McCarthyism.

Joshua P. Hill, New London, Conn., Dec. 10, 2007

Art Jensen and Phil Rushton also sent in a letter, but NYT could not be bothered to publish it:

To: Letters Editor, New York Times
December 9, 2007
Re: All Brains Are the Same Color

Nisbett engages in wishful thinking. Larger brains contain more neurons and process information more efficiently. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows that brain size correlates with IQ within race about 0.40. As we reviewed in 2005 in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, the races differ in brain size. One study followed 50,000 children from birth to age 7. The East Asian Americans in the sample averaged a larger head circumference at birth, 4 months, 1 year, and 7 years than White children who averaged a larger head circumference than Black children. By age 7, East Asian American children average an IQ of 110; Whites, 102; and Blacks 90. These findings on race differences in brain size are highly reliable and have been confirmed using four independent procedures-MRI, endocranial volume from empty skulls, wet brain weight at autopsy, and external head size. Black, White, and East Asian twins show equal heritabilities.

J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 5C2, Canada; Tel: 519-661-3685 E-mail:rushton@uwo.ca

Arthur R. Jensen, The University of California at Berkeley, 3300 Southlake Drive, Kelseyville, CA 95451; Tel: 707-279-8126, E-mail: Nesnejanda@aol.com

The NYT article was followed by an equally desperate and selective piece in the New Yorker (17 xii) in which Malcolm Gladwell backed the much-muddled Flynn (who had given a seminar at the Manhattan Institute at which The g Factor was not mentioned but Japanese IQ was claimed to be merely 99) and castigated Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray for proposing that Americans with low I.Q.s be "sequestered in a `high-tech' version of an Indian reservation" (a criticism for which the magazine had to issue an unqualified retraction).

AmRen correspondents did a good job of picking Nisbett apart (9 xii ff.).


ENVIRONMENTALOSERS

As United Nations health experts moved to remedy iodine deficiencies in the worst-affected countries, it turned out to the dismay of environmentalists about Black IQ that subSaharan Africa [average IQ 70] was not over-represented in the top twenty countries needing to get iodised salt - indeed, three of the top twenty U.N. places went to Russia [IQ 97 for Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006], Vietnam [94] and China [105] (Physorg, 12 xii).


GOOD NEWS FOR PHILOSOPHER

The `dualist' French philosopher-scientist Renee Descartes (1596-1650), who had claimed (to general ridicule) that the interface of mind and body occurred in the brain's tiny (but unitary) pineal gland, was vindicated at the National Taiwan University as researcher Jyh-Horng Chen found it was exactly this area that showed higher activation as students engaged in religious meditation (Daily Telegraph, 13 xii).


SANTA SET TO PRODUCE MULTICULTI MAYHEM

A full-blown race war looked imminent as the Europeans and Japanese of eastern Bolivia (around gas-rich Santa Cruz, and constituting 35% of Bolivia's population) got fed up with the high-taxing socialism foisted on them by the native Red Indians in the poor and mountainous west of the long-troubled country (led by gas-nationalizing President Evo Morales) (Los Angeles Times, 16 xii).

In once-happy Bermuda, home to 4,000 rich Brits and having zero unemployment and average GDP 50% higher than the U.S.A., the Whites prepared to leave rather than face the increasingly preposterous demands from Black P.M. Ewart Brown that the island's international firms introduce swingeing programmes of affirmative action (Daily Telegraph, 18 xii).

South Africa's Whites (and many top ANC Blacks) also seemed likely to leave as Blacks voted for funky obese Jacob Zuma, having 20 children by 9 different women, fresh from having to face accusations of rape and corruption and believed to enjoy the occasional sighting of Whites begging in the streets. President Mbeki was humiliated when, at his ANC party's gathering, Zuma's supporters sang the challenger's campaign song "Bring Me My Machine Gun" at him.

{Yet, amidst all this failed multiculturalism, polls showed that American minorities reckoned Whites were the best thing about the USA - certainly preferring them to each other (American Renaissance, 12 xii).}


JOLLY GENE NEWS FOR XMAS

In an end-of-the-year flurry of good news (unexpected in the dire year of 2007 which had seen even Nobelist James Watson banned from speaking about genes and race and Arthur Jensen banned from posting even a short factual letter in the New York Times), anorexia was linked to brain wiring (University of Pittsburgh), a third of bowel cancer cases were traced to two genetic defects (Cancer Research, London), and a gene was discovered (AVPR1a) which made students 50% more likely to give money to anonymous others (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) (all stories in Daily Telegraph, 17 xii).

In a small breakthrough for race realism, a female Chinese sociologist working in a Californian university was said to be using Richard Lynn's (2006) Race Differences in Intelligence: an Evolutionary Analysis with one of her graduate classes, on race - and the university bookstore had ordered copies for her students to buy.


BNP NO BAR TO LOVE AND CULTURE

English National Ballet principal ballerina Simone Clarke, 37, announced that - even though she had a daughter by fellow ENB dancer Yat-Sen Chang, a Cuban immigrant of Chinese descent - she would wed British National Party councillor Richard Barnbrook, 47, a former art teacher who had met and defended her in early-2007 when her BNP membership became known (Sun, 20 xii).

PAEDOPHILIA LINKED TO BRAIN -- BUT NOT TO DEVIOUSNESS

Male paedophiles have less white matter in the brain than do non-sexual offenders, claimed Toronto researcher James Cantor and team in the Journal for Psychiatry Research (BBC, 28 xi; Times, 28 xi). The result came from MRI scans comparing c.60 paedophiles with 60 controls. Dr Cantor added that paedophiles tend to be shorter and of lower IQ and are three times more likely to be left-handed - all features compatible with an explanation in terms of brain damage while still in the womb. Cantor told journalists that he would no more propose to excuse paedophilic assaults or advances than he would excuse rape by normal heterosexual men - he saw no reason to doubt that paedophiles would have as much self-control as anyone else.

CRB comment:

The brain's white matter (involving heavily myelin-sheathed nerves travelling long distances) connects different grey-matter central brain areas rather as cables connect computers, is found in greater quantity in males and is sometimes held to assist with spatial orientation and visuospatial abilities (though females are more likely to use the system for ordinary intellectual work, according to neuropsychiatrist Richard Haier). Press reports did not say whether the paedophiles in the study had boys or girls as their inamorata.

The Cantor et al. finding of white-matter deficiency in paedophiles was intriguingly complemented by an observation of substantial white-matter superfluity in `pathological liars' made in a book newly published to acclaim (e.g. from Steven Pinker) in the USA (by a female ex-US Army linguist, adventurer, mother of four and engineer at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, whose family had suffered at the hands of her her sister, who showed some of the pathological characteristics of psychopathy) (Barbara Oakley, Evil Genes, Promotheus, citing Yang et al., 2005*; Times Higher, 1 xii).

For paedophiles to be biologically `opposite to' pathological liars would shock Britain's tabloid newspapers but not those (like criminologist David Cantor and myself) who have long maintained that most classical paedophiles are gentle souls fixated on the world of childish innocence and even wishing to help children with the transition to adulthood which they failed to make successfully themselves; as such, many would be ill-suited to the lying, deviousness, emotional indifference and cruelty of the classic psychopath or pathological liar. - Paedosadists would of course be a different matter.

* YANG, Y., RAINE, A., LENCZ, T., BIRHLE, Susan, LACASSE, L. & COLLETTI, P. (2005). Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars. British Journal of Psychiatry 187, 320-325. Postdoc researcher Yaling Yang and colleagues compared 12 self-admitted liars (malingerers, conmen and benefit frauds recruited via advertising at temporary employment agencies in Los Angeles) by prefrontal MRI scan to both antisocial and normal controls, finding the liars to have 22-26% extra white matter. Deception itself resembles an executive task: it elicits greater activation of the prefrontal regions (compared with telling the truth) and also incurs a processing cost, manifest in longer response times (for review see Spence et al, 2004). In 2007 Brit.J.Psychiat. 190, 174-5, Yang et al. localized their result more closely, reporting 23-36% greater white matter in 14 liars at orbitofrontal, middle and inferior gyrii. Yang et al.'s liars tested as fully `anti-social' in 25% of cases; and 67% of them were substance-abusers.

NB There are many complexities in results concerning grey and white matter as indicated previously in this diary/blog. Some researchers have found `growth trajectories' more important than simple volume; and, in July, evidence was offered that paedophiles have less grey matter in the right amygdala of the brain (Gene Expression, 30 vii). Excessive white matter may be the result rather than the cause of lying, for Kruesi and Casanova found no such excess in 6 mid-adolescent liars (2006, Brit.J.Psychiat. 188, 293-4). Reduced prefrontal white matter had been reported by others in chronic schizophrenics, elderly alcoholics and the hyperactive.



E.LU. LANGUISHES

Despite priding itself on arranging an `apology for slavery' conference (starring my nemesis, the `Anti-Nazi' former E.LU. Chaplain, Iain Whyte), on banning the energy drink Rockst*r from its student bars (because of the company's link to right-wing U.S. commentator, Michael Savage) and on constructing a giant 20-professor Informatics Department, Edinburgh LUniversity could not have been pleased to get the local blame for its building works blacking out a third of Edinburgh South for several hours of a dark and stormy night in November; nor to find that it remained outside the Times' Good University Guide, dropping from 11th to 13th among U.K. universities; nor to have one of its Student Association officials apparently found sodomizing a homosexual minion in a Student Union toilet - at least that seemed to be the story that E.U.'s Student newspaper was determined to hush up in November.


`ENGLAND JUST A MEMORY' -- MORRISSEY

Irish-parented Los Angeles-based pop star Morrissey, who had grown up in Manchester, told the New Musical Express that England/Britain had been changed out of recognition by immigration. He was reported by the magazine as saying: "It matters because the British identity is very attractive. I grew up into it, and I find it quaint and very amusing. But England is a memory now. Other countries have held on to their basic identity, yet it seems to me that England was thrown away." Later he denied `racism' and threatened to sue, but the NME let his deadline expire.


ABORIGINAL FALLACY

The first act of the newly elected Prime Minister of the Workers' Paradise, loopy-Labour Kevin [sic!] Rudd, replacing US and UK ally John Howard, was to apologize to his continent's throwbacks to prehumanity for having - according to so-advanced socialist t'inking down-under - driven the poor aboriginals to alcoholism, wife-maiming, child abuse, incarceration, unemployability, IQ 62 and general under-achievement. Just how Australians of the past 250 years -- many of them Irish, mostly egalitarian and half of them republican - could have inflicted such a fate on the native people of Oz remained unexplained.