IQ REACHES NYTWITS – RETURN OF THE REPRESSED!

IQ got a surprise mention in the ever-Commie-loving New York Times (28 xii, Michael Wines, ‘Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa's Future’) as that gruesome and famously Stalin-supporting ‘news’paper declared Ethiopian adults to be”shorn of as many as 15 IQ points” thanks to malnutrition (especially iodine deficiency) – though the full horror of Ethiopia’s actual average IQ of 63 (IQ & the Wealth of Nations, 2002, Lynn & Vanhanen) could not be mentioned to pious readers for fear they would choke on their breakfast Muesli.

Update

"[Malnutrition] may be much less important than has been suggested. Consider, for instance, a study carried out in Holland by Stein and co-workers.* They collected test scores, at the age of 19, of some 20,000 Dutch army recruits whose mothers, during the German occupation, had been subjected to severe starvation in the crucial months around the time of the birth. These recruits showed no lasting general retardation when compared to 100,000 recruits whose mothers had not suffered starvation...." -- Hans Eysenck, 1981, in Intelligence: the Battle for the Mind, Pan Psychology.

* Elsewhere, Eysenck gave the reference as: STEIN, Z., SUSSER, M., SAENGER, G. & MAROLLA, F. (1972). Intelligence test results of individuals exposed during gestation in the World War II famine in the Netherlands. T. Soc. Geneesk. 50, 766-774.

TIMES HIGHER HELPS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN FOR FREE SPEECH

Just ten years after my own free speech case in Edinburgh LUniversity came to a head (resulting, after a year of inquisition and tribunalizing, in my dismissal in August, 1997), the Glasgow Herald (Alan MacDermid, 22 xii) kindly expressed the hope that I might draw consolation from a recently launched campaign in UK academics' weekly newspaper Times Higher to re-instate free speech in British academia.

Nice to be remembered! (I had always had a soft spot for the Glasgow Herald, which had faithfully reported student protests on my behalf in 1996/7; as for Glasgow Uni which awarded my wife a Ph.D. in 2006.) - However, the 64 "influential academics"* (including E.LU.'s mature philosophy postgrad Dan Dennis) little knew as they demanded "unrestricted liberty" for academic speech just what a mountain they had to climb after E.LU. had got it established by a High Court judge in 1998 that it had no more duty to support free speech than did a biscuit factory (see my 6 xii letter to the President of Exeter University Christian Union** and the events at the London School of Economics in May***).

* `Academics for Academic Freedom' (http://www.afaf.org.uk/blog/_archives/2006/10/24/2442478.html#809892), led by Dennis Hayes (President of the University and College Union), included Oxford's Roy Harris (who had once encouraged publication of The g Factor), Tom Ogg (of my second Oxford college, Nuffield), Guardian philosopher A.C.Grayling (Birkbeck College, London), Vincent Egan (Glasgow Caledonian U., my Ph.D. student who had defended me re IQ) and Glen Newey (Keele U., who had defended me in the Independent re paedophilia).

** "..In 1998, Edinburgh University successfully argued (against me and my counsel) before a Scottish High Court judge that any duty that it had to support free speech took second place to its need to support its own reputation and income. In a particularly astonishing passage among complex legal proceedings, it was argued by the University that it had no more duty to support free speech than did *a biscuit factory* -- and this argument was essentially accepted. I honestly advise that [Christian Union] lawyers look carefully at http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm for more (FIND 'Decision of Mr T. Gordon Coutts QC') to see what they would be up against."

*** After LSE bosses pounced on an academic after he had (at their invitation) given a presentation at an Open Day which alluded to the School's weaker as well as its stronger features, the academic wrote: ".academic freedom and the freedom of speech are threatened by the commercialization of education. We must reaffirm [our] rights before we are all turned into salesmen."

LYNN & VANHANEN LATEST

(Updated)

A warm welcome was given by Phil Rushton to "IQ and Global Inequality", which extended the work reported in "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" (VDare, 7 xii). For example: "In my view, [Richard] Lynn and [Tatu] Vanhanen have made what is arguably the most important contribution to economic understanding since Adam Smith showed that free markets promote economic development. They have shown also that national IQs explain much of the variation between nations in a wide range of economic and social phenomena -- not just income levels. Their book extends the explanatory power of the concept of intelligence in a way that makes a major contribution to the integration of psychology with the other social sciences."

Alas, the prospect of a Nobel Prize for these authors and their mail-order-published book is sadly remote. It is not just that this book largely repeats, with slight extensions (e.g. getting Israeli IQ up from 94 to 95) the review already provided in the authors' 2002 "IQ and the Wealth of Nations". The main problem is the authors' failure to solve convincingly, or even decisively the problem of which of their national variables (IQ, literacy, take-up of tertiary education, health, longevity, wealth, income etc.) are actually causing which.

The authors provide many 'regression coefficients' (the favoured technique of econometricians): but regressions only give the degree to which one variable (or more) can be used to calculate others within a data set; and of course, in L&V's data set, IQ 'predicts' wealth but wealth also 'predicts' IQ. Thus the authors stumble into a morass of "positive feedback loops" and fall into the ultimate scientific fallacy (normally appealing chiefly to desperately environmentalistic proponents of 'complex interaction effects') that X causes Y and Y causes X - invariably a clear sign that more work is urgently necessary.

What should that work be? Well, the first task is to pinpoint X-Y relations where causation can, within reason, only go one way. Thus Touhey (1972, Br.J.soc.clin.Psychol.) found that IQ was strongly related (r = .50) to whether adult testees had in their lives been upwardly or downwardly socially mobile from their fathers' occupational levels - a relationship only readily explicable by saying that IQ causes upward social mobility (for IQ itself changes little from age 8 and, of necessity, the left's beloved variable of SES does not explain inter-generational mobility).

Likewise, I pointed out (in a 2002 review of IQ&WoN at Amazon Books) that national IQs collected around 1980 were correlated with countries' economic advance (or, in African cases, economic decline) over 1983-1996: "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)." It would plainly be bizarre to envisage backward causation from such changes to IQ. Yet Lynn & Vanhanen largely decline to focus on such crucial exercises. Most surprisingly of all, Lynn & Vanhanen make no use of factor analysis - a technique ideally suited in non-experimental data to identifying the most likely causal factors among the variables as a whole, in this case certainly headed up by a big factor highly loaded by g but with substantial loadings for all the other national variables.

Amidst their 400 pages of stumbling (pretty repetitiously) around the issue of causation, the authors occasionally show glimmers of appreciation of the true picture: e.g. the correlations between national g and longevity are spectacularly high (around .80) - indicating a relation which can hardly be explained by anything other than g being causal to longevity (doubtless via self-chosen 'lifestyle' features). But few journalists and no Marxite critics will have the patience to wade through the authors' inconclusive meanderings -- the indecisiveness of which perhaps reflects disagreements between the authors, for Lynn's own writing is normally a model of clarity.

All this borders on tragedy, for these hard-working, knowledgeable and fair-minded authors supply an excellent path analysis (on p. 248 of the book) which makes entirely clear a most plausible hypothesis in which national IQ, economic freedom (i.e. capitalism) and natural resources all contribute causally to 'measures of human conditions' - with IQ as the main contributor (as also envisaged in IQ&WoN). Sadly, the surrounding text does little to explain how the model was derived or whether it is or is not held to be the model of causation that would be favoured by the authors if they could put their "positive feedback loops" behind them. Thus I stand by what I said in 2002: that L&V's work could prove to be of really great significance; but, for the moment, it needs a sympathetic and methodologically informed reader - and the media-dominating peecee 'liberal'-left will gladly accept L&V's lame 'loops' of causation and denials of full-blown hereditarianism and settle for ignoring the volume, as they did in 2002.

Lastly, it is notable that the authors continue with their 2002 idea that it would be a good idea to raise African IQ (whether via their own favourite of improved nutrition [strangely they make no mention of remedying iodine deficiency], or via whatever vast new sums of money from UK Chancellor Dr Gordon Brown and his neosocialist ilk, or perhaps via the polygamy recommended for Africans by William McDougall). Yet the Africans who have done best over the past 300 years are surely the slaves who were lifted out to the USA - where their economic level is far higher and even their IQ (c. 85) is today a substantial improvement on that of Black people in Africa (c. 70) despite these Americanized slaves having been originally the criminal riff-raff of their Black societies, which, with encouragement from Muslim traders, decided to sell them off.

Perhaps the best Africans can hope for is that the Chinese (whose 1970s experiments in Malawi etc. came to grief in oceans of mutual misunderstanding, but who are now desperate for natural resources and no longer committed to egalitarian ideology) will in future take the trouble somehow to enslave Blacks once more. If such a process replicated the American success story for Blacks, it would suggest that people of all start-out levels of IQ can flourish economically over time in a well-run hierarchy - a possibility in which L&V are strangely uninterested.

CHRISTIANS vs YAGS - LATEST

The Archbishop of Canterbury, bearded theologian Dr Rowan Williams, wrote (in Times Higher) urging compromise by saying that all groups surely must have the right to criticize the chosen behaviour of others and that Christians' spiritually informed criticism of homosexual acts should not be treated as 'hate speech' (Ulster TV, 7 xii; Pink News, 7 xii). He especially said:"It would be very bad ..if the idea were allowed to gain ground that a student {guild or association} could be an arbiter of publicly acceptable belief."

His statements came after several Christian leaders had spoken out against the new Sexual Orientation Regulations {being introduced in Northern Ireland by Government fiat}, claiming they were an attack on "freedom of conscience." He seemed just about game for confrontation with the likes of E.LU., expressing his belief that the banning by universities of religious groups threatened 'the integrity of the whole educational process'.

Several London medical schools were said to have joined E.LU. & ilk in backing yag 'rights' to disrupt Christian Union meetings by their tireless questioning of the Church's position(s) on homosexuality (This is London, 6 xii).

The National Secular Society prepared for battle, saying Bullying Christians Demand the Right to Mistreat Others On Campus (7 xii) and reckoning Edinburgh's Christian Union would soon launch legal action against E.LU.

Edinburgh and Exeter LUnis were named and shamed on BBC Radio 4's flagship programme 'Any Questions' (8 xii) for their attacks on their Christian Unions.

The director of Share Jesus International, the Rev Dr Rob Frost, criticised the university bans on Christians which he called "a great tragedy". He told Christian Today: "The loving, serving and gracious ways in which the Christian Unions have carried out their ministry over the last 80 or more years is to be applauded. "The fact that they are now being pushed off of university campus property, and out of the mainstream of student life is a great tragedy." (Christian Today, 9 xii)

E.LU.'s compromise offer to its C.U. of 'a room with a health warning' for the PURE course was rejected by C.U. officials (Scotsman, 9 xii).

Pretty Mid-Bedfordhire MP, Nadine Dorries, 39, backed the C.U.'s against the lunis (10 xii). "Any moves to impose on the leadership teams of CUs individuals who do not share their beliefs should also be opposed," she said as she tabled a C.U.-backing motion in the House of Commons.

Pink News recorded E.LU. to be "deadlocked" over the PURE course. Said LUni PR personages: "This is a complex and delicate matter and the university is working to strike a balance which will be acceptable to everyone involved, and is staying in close touch with Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) in this regard."



MULTICULTURALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE PEECEE!

Just eight years after announcing himself a champion of the multiculturalism which had been Labour policy since 1976, Prime Minister Blair announced that this particular game was over and that 'integration' and 'balanced multiculturalism' were now the flavour of the month (Daily Telegraph, 8 xii). Rev Bliar thus brought welcome annoyance to Muslim 'leaders,' who feared he would insist that females should have full access to mosques; but others* were understandably cynical, noting:

(1) that NuLabour's enthusiastic admission of millions of third-world immigrants had - while generating temporarily a boom economy based on slave-for-the-time-being labour - undermined all possibility of serious integration occurring into the British way of life (itself under attack by Labour, which had weakened the family, eroded free speech and provided the conditions for yag domination) and

(2) that producing 'integration' out of his hat was as likely as Blair ever realizing his former promises of 'education, education, education' or peace and democracy in Iraq. Bliar might also turn out to have upset Christians themselves by saying that "No culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of the UK." Anyhow the likelihood of the new 'policy' resulting in much more than occasional withdrawl of funds from some mad mullah's favourite 'charities' looked slight - for Muesli slave women would be unlikely to respond to any legal liberation of them, never having produced any noticeable Muslim feminist movement in a generation. And Bliar's demand for acceptance by all of the 'British' value of tolerance could well prefigure an actual intensification of peecee pressures to disallow insensitivity to the sensitized.

Bliar's policy change, whatever it might turn out to involve (and 'Opposition Leader' David Cameron - praised by Blair for not 'playing the race card' -- needed to press Bliar urgently for details), was made in a lecture to the Runnymede Trust, which had been working for a 'multi-ethnic Britain,' but with increasing realism; and the change was accompanied with the usual 'celebration' of diversity, which had merely to be 'balanced' with integration. In the left's hands 'integration,' like multiculturalism, could actually have big dangers for Whites - resulting in busing, forced cohabitation and even eventually state-funded pressures for intermarriage as called for by Black Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson in Rituals of Blood.

However, the Labour-backing Daily Mirror tabloid's interpretation (in agreement with the Torygraph) was that some genuine positive change was underway: "His words are a clear sign Labour fears it is alienating working class voters who feel ethnic minorities are a higher priority;" and the Sun said Blair's patience with extremist immigrants had "snapped." The Guardian said the Government had "announced a crackdown on foreign imams by requiring them to have a proper command of English before they are allowed to enter the UK."

* See e.g. the correspondents who wrote in to the Sun newspaper, 11 xii.

Amusingly, Rev Blair's effort had been anticipated a week previously by BNP leader Nick Griffin, who had told followers in the BNP's top Barking & Dagenham constituency that 'multiculturalism was dead - killed by the BNP.' The Rev's advice to immigrants to Britain that they should 'like it or bugger off' was also splendidly reminiscent of the favourite advice of the French National Front to immigrants about France, 'love it or leave it' ('Allez-la ou quittez-la'). Evidently, having bullied the 'Conservatives' into silence on race, immigration, crime and the lunacy of comprehensive schools, NuLabour wanted to move into the political space that the terrified Tories had left wide-open. Rev. Bliar, always supposedly concerned with his 'legacy,' was making sure that Labour would win another election and that he himself would surely go down in history as a political, if no other kind of genius.

It transpired that Mr Blair agreed with a windy and self-contradictory November letter from some 'New Generation Network' in the Grauniad which, while protesting belief in "freedom of expression" went on to advocate the elimination of all prejudice against Blecks, Mueslis, yags etc, (20 xi) - no prize for guessing how such elimination would be achieved. Having bullied the (admittedly timorous) Whites into silence about race, the lordly 'moderate' left suddenly favoured free discussion so as to disguise the rampant 'anti-racist' anti-White authoritarianism which they had permitted until it succeeded. Now, apparently, was the time to put knives back in sheaths and pretend that all was sweetness and light in the oh-so-decent immigrant-slave society which lefties had created, despite that society spawning thousands of new welfare-dependents daily with the importation of ever more slave-women from Pakistan and drug mules from Jamaica.

In the Observer, dotty-leftie columnist Mary Riddell quickly arrived at her own preferred version of Tonyman's new 'integration' proposal: "This is the opportunity to defuse the public power of all gods, to ban religious schools of every hue, to end the cross-contamination of faith and policy and to move towards a secular state." This was the opportunity to get the bishops out of the House of Lords, thought daffy Mary (10 xii, 'Integrate? Tell that to the Christian church, Mr Blair').

Rev Bliar's demand for 'integration' by Mueslis was accompanied by a fresh attack on the family as he announced a crackdown on 'deadbeat dads' who declined to support runaway wives and accompanying useless children. Fathers who thus rejected marriage break-ups were to be 'named and shamed' on the internet (this modern version of the pillory being introduced after twenty years of successive governments persecuting fathers who had no wish to finance their wives' adultery and desertion). No wonder it seemed that the Blairite house of cards must soon tumble, even if the wretched 'Conservatives' were incapable of lifting a finger to help the process!

The pseudo-drama of Rev Bliar's pseudo-conversion was captured by columnist Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times (10 xii): "Immigrants to this country have a "right to be different" and a "duty to integrate", according to Tony Blair. I think this means clear off if you don't like it here, but one can never be entirely sure with him. For example, he also said multiculturalism had always been about a balance between conformity and difference, which is a breathtaking assertion - a little as if he had announced: "There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - and, y'know, we never said there were." Government-sponsored multiculturalism for 30 years insisted there was no imperative to share the core values of society - if there were core values of society, which there probably weren't. People who disagreed were branded "racist". If Blair had made his speech 10 years ago he'd have branded himself "racist", which would have been fun to watch, I suppose."

The Torygraph also made good points (9 xii): "True, the ideology which Mr Blair now decries has been advanced chiefly by his own party. Given his readiness to apologise for ancient wrongs, it would perhaps have been appropriate to acknowledge this more recent mistake. Still, we are delighted that Mr Blair has come round to the view that this newspaper has always held, and that our countrymen have clung to through decades of official bullying and hectoring. What, though, are these "British values" that Mr Blair wants everyone to accept. It will not do to carry on about freedom, fairness and tolerance: admirable as they are, these virtues would serve equally well for Ecuador or Finland. British values, surely, are bound up in our institutions: common law, a sovereign parliament, habeas corpus, counties, army regiments: the very institutions that have often been traduced by this ministry. Perhaps Mr Blair might devote his final months to reparing some of this damage."

Top columnist Simon Heffer was still more scathing: "Saying you want people to integrate but remain multicultural is like saying you want them to stay sober but still drink a bottle of vodka each night."

America's National Review welcomed Blair's 'bigger than babyish' steps away from classical Labourite multiculturalism, but noted that he had not dissociated himself from voices in his party wanting still further free-speech-dampening laws against 'stirring up religious hatred' (11 xii).

In the Guardian, columnists Madeleine Bunting, Faisal al Yafai, Simon Woolley [Black] and Dave Hill whinged that Blair's speech had shown insufficient appreciation of the hard times that Muslims had in Britain, especially because of the Government's joining the War on Terror, and virtually denounced as 'racist' Blair's saying "Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. Conform to it; or don't come here."; but they met with rather little support from correspondents, who tended to reckon Blair was sensibly reining in PeeCee so as to halt Labour's slide in the polls.

Rev Bliar found himself fortified in his turn-around by his former Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, revealing that Britain had argued hard in Washington not to disband Madman Insane's half-a-million-strong army, and not to cast equally into unemployment the further half-a-million state servants (doctors, teachers, nurses etc.) who had joined Saddam's Ba'ath Party not as convinced ideologues but only because there was little alternative except emigration. Some high-ranking American civil servants backed up Hoon, saying the USA had simply ignored British advice. The possibility thus emerged of Blair re-branding himself as a pseudo-true son of the Empire - if only he could resist the temptations to make pseudo-apologies for slavery (in which the English had never engaged on their own soil until they allowed the importation of Pakistani brides into forced marriages).


LYNN & VANHANEN LATEST

A warm welcome was given to "IQ and Global Inequality", which extended "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", by Phil Rushton (VDare, 7 xii). For example: "In my view, Lynn and Vanhanen have made what is arguably the most important contribution to economic understanding since Adam Smith showed that free markets promote economic development. They have shown also that national IQs explain much of the variation between nations in a wide range of economic and social phenomena-not just income levels. Their book extends the explanatory power of the concept of intelligence in a way that makes a major contribution to the integration of psychology with the other social sciences."

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

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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

INTEGRATION REALISM

After years of claiming to `integrate' Blacks and Muslims into the French Republic, France found itself faced with a Black police officer in Paris shooting into a crowd of 100 White football supporters who menaced him after he tried to stop them harassing a visiting Israeli football fan whose team had just beaten the French team Paris St Germain 4-2 (MetroNews, 25 xi). As inquiries began into the resultant killing of a PSG supporter, breast-beating about the country's multicultural achievements raged in France's media and Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy swore to stamp out racism in football even if French soccer stadia were left half-empty.

Any French ideas that they could exert control over Black genocidal tendencies was undermined as the French ambassador was expelled from Rwanda after he called for President Paul Kagame to go on trial for his share of the 800,000 Tutsi killed by the Hutu.

Within days of the PSG incident, the soccer fans of once-Liberty-loving France found themselves barred from all matches unless they purchased tickets from official fan clubs which would be obliged to monitor them for `racism' (Guardian, 28 xi). PSG itself agreed under government pressure to close its 2,000-seater `Red Boulogne' stand where `racist' fans had been known to congregate.


`ANTI-RACISTS' AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS

A planned London love-in (at 700 pounds per head in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, all bills footed by taxpayers) to celebrate 30 years of British multiculturalism was disrupted as `Red' Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, refused to share twiglets with Commission for Racial Equality boss Trevor Phillips - the latter top Black Bliar toady having given offence by casting the occasional teeny aspersion on multiculturalism and thus put himself, said Ken, `in line for membership of the BNP' (Observer, 20 xi). {Amidst the jollifications, it emerged that NuLabour had arranged no less than 50,000 jobs for its cronies in Britain's race relations industry.}

{Amusingly, Phillips himself had once thrown BNP slurs around at fellow lefties, in 2004, saying to David Goodhart, the Prospect author who had got around to pointing out that relatively `diverse' countries do not have much of a welfare state: "Is this the wit and wisdom of Enoch Powell? Jottings from the BNP leader's weblog?" (Guardian, 24 ii 2004). Likewise, the lordly Goodhart himself surely took the view over the years that I and The g Factor were well beyond the pale.}


RACE UNREALISM

On a day when two Black youths were given life sentences from the Old Bailey for murdering a gifted young White lawyer* in London for just 20 pounds and his mobile phone, Tory MP Bob Spink found himself carpeted by Not-the-Conservative Party leader Daft Dave Chameleon for explaining in email to a constituent that Black males were, pro rata, over-represented in the criminal fraternity (Daily Telegraph, 28 xi; Black Information Link, 4 xii).

* Thomas ap Rhys Jones, 31, had a First Class Degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was also a talented amateur violinist. When police found him dying in a pool of his own blood, a list of wedding guests was among his belongings for he and his lawyer girlfriend, Adele Eastman, 32, had been planning to marry a few months later. The mighty Boris Johnson MP felt moved to advocate the death penality but held himself back because Adele and the Jones family, though devastated, did not seem to want to restore hanging.


BLACK-WHITE IQ GAP DECREASING?

The American Enterprise Institute hosted a fine scholarly debate between its own Bell-authoring Charles Murray and political philosopher-turned-psychometrician James Flynn* who had maintained since the 1980's that IQ was rising and that Blacks would surely soon somehow benefit from an extra score rise of their own.

No victor seemed to be declared in the media - though commentators** did note critically Flynn's heavy dependence on the Eyferth-originating study of (illegitimate) children of Black US servicemen growing up in Germany (for the apparent near-equality of these half-Black children with Whites was easily explicable by the US military not accepting personnel of under IQ 90 and by German girls in post-Hitler days being unlikely to have had sex with Blacks unless the Black soldier himself was extra-presentable and well-monied). One suggested compromise (made by Steve Sailer) was that the B-W gap had been narrowing a little among children but not among adults (perhaps because of schools' limitless concern to ensure children pass tests). Another possible explanation for the Flynn-Murray difference could have been in the different IQ tests used (Education Week, 6 xii).

What was notable was that (apart from Flynn himself hailing from Ireland and New Zealand) the whole exercise and its media coverage were so exclusively American, rather confirming that, in the aftermath of The Bell Curve's publication, my being sacked and British psychologists and journalists subjected to a reign of terror by their university administrators and editors, the London School of Psychology had possibly moved Stateside -- a new book from Richard Lynn (Ulster) and Tatu Vanhanen (Finland), IQ and Global Inequality, was on its way, but brought out by Washington Summit Publishers, Augusta, Georgia.

* A good friend of The g Factor, it should be said; and just as nice and reasonable on his two visits to Edinburgh as he evidently was in New York.

** John Derbyshire in National Review, 29 xi; Ronald Bailey, 1 xii. Surprisingly, commentators did not note in particular the recent Rushton & Flynn 2006 summary of the totality of evidence, showing the B-W difference virtually unchanged over the past 30 years -- Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2006). `The totality of available evidence shows race-IQ gap still remains.' Psychological Science 17, 921-922.


BLACK-ON-BLACK SLAVERY

Responding to Prime Minister Blair's assertion that he felt "deep sorrow" about the slave-trade, the Daily Telegraph's Charles Moore made many excellent points (that Britain had been the first country to end slave-trading and to stop others - the French Revolutionaries outlawed slavery in French dominions but Napoleon quickly reintroduced it; that slavery was alive and well in Mauritania and Sudan - where the local Arabic word for `Black' was the same as for slave; and that the principal British anti-slaver, William Wilberforce, had been a political conservative, not a radical). However, one did wonder whether British `idealism' was not at least partly the result of American Independence and the subsequent 30-year war with Britain - public protests in Britain at the slave trade seem to have begun in 1787.


RACISM - I JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT CAME OVER ME

Bruce Jones, a star of Yukay's top TV `soap,' `Coronation Street' (where he played `Les Battersby'), admitted and apologized for a `racist remark' against Asians [i.e. Pakistanis] while he was addressing a charity gig, blaming drink and the impending death of his father (News of the World, 3 xii; Sunday Mirror, 3 xii). The Corrie star, not unknown for alcohol problems, thus joined Hollywood's Catholic star and multimillionaire Mel Gibson who, when arrested by a Jewish police officer earlier in 2006 for apparently drunk driving in California, had produced an anti-Semitic tirade - sentence: 3 years probation. In neither case were newspaper readers allowed to hear the precise criticisms that these celebrities had in mind about the racial groups in question,* so imperative was it for the West's peecee-crippled media to avoid the slightest discussion of race (even when the meanderings of these `drunken' celebrities could presumably have been quite easily lampooned by a half-competent scribbler). Although the Western tradition had long been not to accept drink as an excuse for anything, inebriation was coming to be the easiest way of explaining otherwise inexplicable glimmers of race realism.

* Jones had apparently joked that the `Asians' he saw in the charity-bash audience had presumably come because they were waiting for passports which they could then sell in their `market stalls', but no inquiry was made into Jones' actual beliefs that had furnished the basis of his merry insult.


PAEDOHYSTERIA SPECIAL

"Frantic" oral, hand-job and straight sex for several months in 2002 with two 14- and 15-year-old virgin boys, friends of her son, led to the downfall of a busty, blonde, glamorous (Daily Torygraph picture, 5 xii), strong-shouldered and thong-wearing British mother and businesswoman, who employed them at her bouncy castle emporium, Yvonne Renton, then 35: Yvonne made the mistake of dumping the older of the readily zip-opening youths (a boy `not equipped to cope' - later diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic), triggering self-harm by him and herself being sentenced in Kent in 2006 to 18 months jail and general ruin for naughtiness and intimidation. {Of course, had she been a man 'preying' on 14-15-yr girls, the sentence would have been more like 10 years.}

{In Devon, the 79-year-old Abbot of Benedictine Buckfast Abbey, a monastic settlement since 1018 and famous for its cider, was forced to resign following allegations that he had occasionally importuned choirboys of under 14 between 1972 and 1981 (Sun, 6 xii). Just what had happened to the perhaps-lucky choirboys was not a matter which Britain's hysterical media-folk could allow themselves to explore. In the Kent court, the judge made a point of not blaming Mrs Renton for her impressively-penically-endowed but flawed young partner's paranoid schizophrenia.}


EXETER CHRISTIANS TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

Following the announcement that Exeter University's Christian Union would pursue legal action against the LUni, I sent the following letter to the CU leader, copied to other Christian groups.

To: The President, Exeter University Christian Union

Re: 'Students Consult Lawyers After Refusal to Reinstate Exeter Christian Union'

(The saga started in May this year when one student felt the CU's requirement that members attest biblical principles was too "exclusive" for him -- probably in its not condoning homosexual behaviour.

Full account: here and here)

Edinburgh, 6th December 2006.

Dear James Harding,

It's great to gather from the media that UCCF and Exeter University Christian Union have the will to fight for freedom of belief, speech, expression and association in Britain's universities. Freedom is a most important cause, as is support for traditional family values; and both causes have been abandoned by many British academics over the past twenty years. Times Higher recently reported that 80% of British academics said universities had sacrificed the principle of academic freedom (26th October).

But I write principally to urge a little clever caution in view of press reports of your planned legal action. In particular, I suggest your legal team should not put much reliance on the 1986 Education (No. 2) Act, for this statute only *appears* to oblige universities to support free speech.

In 1998, Edinburgh University successfully argued (against me and my counsel) before a Scottish High Court judge that any duty that it had to support free speech took second place to its need to support its own reputation and income. In a particularly astonishing passage among complex legal proceedings, it was argued by the University that it had no more duty to support free speech than did *a biscuit factory* -- and this argument was essentially accepted. I honestly advise that UCCF lawyers look carefully at http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm for more (FIND 'Decision of Mr T. Gordon Coutts QC') to see what they would be up against.

Of course, Edinburgh University's attitude to free speech was and is disgraceful; but I imagine, in view of all the trouble that Exeter University has given your Christian Union so far, that Exeter will follow suit. One way forward could be to publicize the inadequacies of the 1986 statute via the media, for I'm sure there would be wide public sympathy once it was realized that British universities had spinelessly accepted legislation actually undermining their historic duty to defend free speech. Alternatively, it would be important, apparently, to gather evidence that allowing expression of 'homophobic' views would not diminish, and might actually enhance the reputation and income of a university.

Sorry if this is initially dispiriting; but I want you to win, not lose! You're welcome to let me know if there is anything else you feel I can do to help.
I am yours sincerely,

-- Chris Brand (psychologist, author of 'The g Factor').

PS The latest from Edinburgh University is a compromise offer of accommodation for the Christian Union's (allegedly homophobic) PURE course so long as information (which the University would itself supply) is prominently displayed to the effect that some groups (telephone helplines supplied) think homosexuality is just fine. However, no such 'health warnings' were planned to oblige the Islamic Society to explain that its Hamas speakers were anti-Semitic, or to point biology students to creationist points of view about the origins of life. Rather than litter its clubs and courses with health warnings, the University would surely do better to put up a sign at its Old College HQ declaring 'Anything said in this university may be rubbish -- especially the University's own unprincipled and fast-changing views on freedom of speech.'

The University's Student newspaper carried a fine letter (from Scott George McCombe, 5th December) pointing out the classic error of calling for 'free speech so long as it is responsible/sensitive/inoffensive/balanced etc.': for there is simply *no need* to provide 'freedom' for speech that wouldn't upset anyone -- a point that was made unavailingly to Edinburgh University as it aimed to placate its 'anti-racists' and feminazies back in 1996/7/8.

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

Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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