ITALIAN P.M. RENOUNCES MULTICULTURALISM

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


HARVARD COMING ROUND ON IQ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


LYNN BATTLING ON re IQ SEX DIFFERENCE

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

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

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

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

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

Other Webpages:

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

Brain areas associated with IQ:

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

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


IQ LINKED TO CORTICAL GROWTH IN ADOLESCENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


EDITOR'S SUMMARY

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

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


NEWS & VIEWS

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

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

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Some history.

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RACE REALISM ABOUT PYGMIES CATCHES ON!

At a time in British politics when no-one would dare call anyone a Nigger, Paki or Frog (even if the target were indeed a Negro, a Pakistani or a Frenchman), it suddenly became publicly fashionable to call British politicians "political pygmies". UK ex-Ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, dished out the treatment in his memoirs to Labour Deputy Leader John Prescott and to UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; and in Scotland the same abuse proved popular with Members of the Scottish Parliament for reference to Scotland's egotistical First Minister Jack McConnell. One wonders, has someone been reading what I said in November's "American Renaissance" of the genetic work of Bruce Lahn and colleagues in Chicago linking certain human genetic variations to larger brain size?

See also an earlier post on this blog. Excerpt:

"[Lahn et al.] estimated that one genetic variation ('microcephalin haplogroup D' O.K., let's call it V1) had spread since its appearance in humans of 40,000 BC to some 70% of humans; and it was more common in Europe, Asia, South America and Latin America than in Black Africa. It was especially infrequent (3%) in Congo pygmies, whom Black Africans commonly regard as markedly intellectually inferior to themselves"

IQ MENTIONABLE FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES

Whereas the British press had entirely avoided mentioning the huge IQ differences between Whites and East Asians on the one hand and sub-Saharan Blacks, Congo Pygmies, Kalahari Bushmen and Australian Aborigines on the other (reported in January in Emeritus Professor Richard Lynn’s new book Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis), the far smaller differences between European countries and regions were treated to a colour spread in the Sunday Mail (26 iii) and to half-page coverage in the Scotsman (27 iii) and the new tabloid Times (27 iii). No matter that Scotland (with its huge population of Irish ex-dockers languishing in Glasgow) was only 3.5 IQ points behind England & Wales and that this difference had been known since the 1970’s and had the same explanation in 2006 as in 1976 – differential migration; no matter that the European figures were so unreliable as to switch Poland from IQ 99 in Lynn’s 2002 work to IQ 105 in his more recent survey; and no matter that most European countries in any case bunched closely around IQ 100. No such causes for boredom could be sufficient to keep usually peecee newsies off this story and its amusing possibilities for eliciting outrage from Scots and Romanians; whereas Lynn’s IQ estimate of 54 for Bushmen seemed fated to stay well and truly on the shelves.

PAEDOHYSTERIA SLIPS

Having come forward to denounce an uncle of hers for paedophilia when she was 5-9, ‘Desperate Housewives’ star Teri Hatcher (41 and mother of one) (who had wanted to help a woman having a hard time proving a case against the uncle) gave an interview to Vanity Fair in which she furnished an unusually revealing account of the psychology of the ‘victim of child abuse’:

“I remember once we were going from his house to pick up some other people and I remember trying to manipulate it so that we would be alone together. I knew that he would pull over in some deserted parking lot and do things to me. I feel such shame because it felt like I was special. I was being paid special attention to, told how fabulous I was; this was someone who was supposed to love me, but at the same time you know it’s wrong. I didn’t like looking at him ejaculate; I didn’t want to touch it. These are haunting things I’ve remembered all my life.” {One sometimes wonders where Freud got his idea of ‘the latency period.’}


PETITION FOR FREE SPEECH

An opportunity to sign up for freedom of expression was provided here -- by Peter Risdon, who successfully organized the Saturday, 25 iii, free speech rally (re Danish cartoons) in Trafalgar Square (attended by hundreds of people, including Liberal Democrat M.P. Dr Evan Harris). By the end of 25 iii, there were more than 1,000 signatures.


FUNDAY TIMES TURNS ON ELLIS

True to its longstanding trendiness, as when it odiously attacked the dead Sir Cyril Burt about IQ and heredity in 1976, the Sunday Times (26 iii) provided coverage of the Frank Ellis affair in which it volunteered that IQ tests were “discredited” and that students boycotting FE’s lectures {intimidated by ‘anti-fascist’ thugs} “trumped” FE’s academic record. – The wretched newspaper (Britain’s biggest broadsheet Sunday newspaper, slogan ‘The Sunday Times IS the Sunday papers’) did not even trouble to explain why it had not been able to obtain any comment from FE or any of his academic supporters. {Simply, it couldn’t be bothered to trek to his North Yorkshire home.} Such was Britain of 2006: a place of hysteria and tyranny, with even a complacent media ready to rubbish a brave academic outspeaker (though admitting FE was an excellent translator and had been a fine soldier).

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Some history.

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CLOWNS CAVE IN re ACADEMIC FREEDOM

After two weeks pondering the readily available race-realist views (and a few swipes at yags, femininnies and the ‘too socialist for me’ BNP) of their Dr Frank Ellis, the LUniversity of Leeds suspended him (on full pay) and said they would carry out some more investigations which would take ‘months rather than weeks’ (BBC, 23 iii, 24dash.com, 23 iii). University Secretary Roger Gair was specially worried that "In publicising his personal views on race, Dr Ellis has recklessly jeopardised the fulfilment of the university's obligations under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000" – the first time this tyrannous piece of ‘liberal’-left legislation had been wheeled out to lay siege to a respected academic who had spoken his mind; but he also thought FE may have been guilty of some unspecified form of disobedience – and let’s hope it hurt!

Bleck Britain demanded that Leeds Luni should speed up its disciplinary proceedings (23 iii) but the LUni probably had other ideas, wanting FE on its books until the latest bureaucracy-backed ‘Research Assessment Exercise’ was completed in 2007.

After two weeks of feigned indifference the London Times (24 iii) deigned to mention the Ellis Affair and its links to the fore-running naughtinesses of Herrnstein & Murray (IQ and race), Brand (IQ, race and anti-paedohysteria) and Lynn & Irwing (possible male superiority in IQ). FE also got a mention in the leftist tabloid Daily Mirror, 24 iii, and in the Washington Times (24 iii) (which had a ‘Searchlight’ operative denounce him as ‘dangerous’} and in papers in India and Malaysia, and he had an Asian defend his right to free speech here.


It transpired that FE had declined to offer any assurance to the LUni that he would no longer speak out about race and IQ; and (The Statesman, India, 24 iii) that West Yorkshire Police were scaling back their enquiries into drug-fuelled rapes and burglaries in order to concentrate on the vital case of FE and his naughty thoughts contrary to the outrageous Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 – itself to be castigated by libertarians assembling in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 26 iii ("Rally in Support of Freedom of Speech" organised by Peter Risden of the group ‘March for Free Speech’).

FE was pictured twice by Leeds Today (See here or here). His North Yorkshire home and hide-out in Ampleforth intriguingly turning out to be very close the one-time home of the Reverend Roger Holmes, the Knicker Vicar’ of ‘Unholy Helmsley’ who was long the Chaplain of The g Factor NewsLetter); and his case was summarized and discussed along with those of the other British academic race realists Richard Lynn, Geoffrey Sampson and myself in Times Higher (24 iii, ‘Ellis case first test of race Act’, pp. 2-3; ‘Show a red card or just play on?’, pp. 58-9) – which amusingly pointed out how easily the word DEMOCRACY! could be converted into MEDIOCRACY. American Renaissance helpfully re-issued FE’s 1999 blast against PeeCee, ‘Multiculturalism and Marxism’:

IQ’s REVENGE

In its egalitarian haste to flood the universities with useless students who would go on gratefully to useless state-sector jobs and vote Labour, HMG increased its bribes to schools and universities to interest children from ‘poor’ backgrounds in 'higher education' from 22 million pounds in 1997-98 to a whopping 364 million in 2003-04 (Times Higher, 17 iii). The result? A measly increase in the wretched of the earth at British lunis from 25% of the student body in 1997-98 to a mere 28.8% in 2003-04 – and some put even that slight increase down to changes in the method of assessing ‘poverty.’ Educationalists (and journalistic hangers on) were of course baffled – as they are by most of the other faxalife about IQ and education.


RACE REALIST BY-PASSES GAGGING ORDER

Faced with a ban on his outspeaking about race and IQ, Leeds LUniversity’s Dr Frank Ellis resorted to ‘friends’ who relayed his (alleged) feelings of outrage to the Sunday Telegraph (19 iii). Friends said:

"He feels the fact that a university can threaten one of its academics with disciplinary measures for raising crucial issues on race, feminism and multiculturalism supports his assertion that on these themes universities are craven and corrupt."

RACE REALIST TO BE GAGGED

Desperately seeking to prevent further public mention (before its hypersensitive `students') of the realities about IQ, race, feminism, political correctness, multiculturalism and Britain's neo-Bolshevik media, the LUniversity of Leeds resorted to demanding public silence from its star academic Frank Ellis (a high contributor to the university's status in national ratings), adding that his views "jeopardise our responsibilities" under the Race Relations Act (Guardian, 16 iii). At the same time, the hypocritical LUni did nothing to impede the free speech of 300 screaming `anti-fascists' - mainly its own staff and students -- who called for FE's sacking at an on-campus meeting (BBC, 16 iii). Campaigning against FE and the "theory" that Whites are more intelligent than Blacks was said to be "spreading to campuses around the country" (Education Guardian, 17 iii).

"Times Higher" (17 iii) carried three letters hostile to FE (though only one wanted him sacked) and making the following remarkable claims and suggestions. (The first five come from "a black member of academic staff" in Derby University, the next two from a student "of dual heritage" at LUniversity of Leeds; and the last is from a researcher in "therapeutic education" and the unheard-of Roehampton University.)

1). "Leeds University should seek to improve the quality of the research he engages in. ..[It] should get him to enage in a a peer-review process before publication." - This writer was plainly under the dual misapprehension that (i) FE himself had carried out research on race and IQ (ii) that FE's research had not been peer-reviewed, when it fact it had been judged of high quality and FE himself had a prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship two years ago.

2). Intelligence should be tested before children start school; and such testing in Birmingham has shown "black boys were second only to white middle-class children in achievement." - No reference was supplied for this unlikely claim (unless perhaps Indian children were being counted as `black,' as beloved of `anti-racists.'

3). "Intelligence at the age of five is more a product of parenting than genetics." - Another unreferenced and unlikely claim. And how could it help make sense of the alleged finding in Birmingham?

4). There could be doubts "if babies of a few weeks or months were tested." -- IQ testing long been known to be impossible till children are about age 2; but developmental tests at much younger ages invariably put Black children somewhat ahead.

5). "..there are many who will cite Ellis's findings as evidence for their views, thinking: "ees a yuniversiti professor, ee must be rite." - A patronizing view of those who are likely to refer to the findings about IQ used by Dr Ellis, let alone of those able to work out that the findings came from London School sources (most lately from the work of Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton, Richard Lynn and myself) and not from work by FE himself in Leeds.

6). "Freedom of speech is a concept outlined by classical Libertarian writers who stipulated, along with the positive freedoms, a moral obligation not to cause offence to others intentionally." - A farrago of nonsense, for all classical liberals were well aware that free speech would not need defending in cases where it gave no offence.

7). "I struggle to see what expertise [FE] can possess in the field of the sociology of education." - Again, this writer fails to understand that FE was only repeating the findings of others and is not himself a sociologist or, more relevantly, a psychologist.

8). FE's "positivistic claims" have a "Eurocentric ideological nature" and involve "spuriously self-fulfilling results" reflecting "the West's disreputable imperialist history of exploitation." - `Nuff said. Except perhaps to point out the world's highest IQs come from Western-bombed-and-post-war-directed Japan and Korea; and the lowest IQs are from Africa's pygmies and Bushmen who both kept well out of the way of Western imperialists (respectively in the Congo Basin jungles and in the Kalahari desert).

These letters were a dismal reflection on British academia in 2006. But one good complaint was made, that there had been "no response" to FE from "the Afro-Caribbean Students society, nor from any other body that claims to represent black students at Leeds University." Why indeed? (One guess should do the trick.) (In my own case in Edinburgh, too, Blacks were far from noticeable in coming forward - as were the alleged victims of paedophilia - so most of the work against me was undertaken by feminists.)


"TIMES HIGHER" BACKS RACE REALIST TO KEEP ACADEMIC JOB

Update:

Outright demands for FE to be sacked for his disagreeable views came from a `Liberal' Democrat MP, from the Leeds LUniversity Union (which planned a full-scale demo on 16 iii, with rabble rousers from the Anti-Nazi League [which had been most influential in terrifying luniversity authorities in Edinburgh as my own case began in 1996]), from the Observer's notoriously hysterical columnist Mary Riddell [who, however, interestingly maintained there was - to her distress -- no clause in FE's contract forbidding him to bring Leeds University into disrepute] (`This bigot has no place in the lecture hall,' 12 iii) and from the left's barmy army, the Socialist Workers (14 iii). FE was condemned as homophobic, racist and misogynistic by Pink News (15 iii), which added that he had been said to `pose a threat to student safety' by LU's `Education Officer, one Ruqayyah Collector. The Yorkshire Post took the trouble to announce the date of a rally against FE - though it did not give the time or place and it did give some of FE's rejoinders to criticism, e.g. "Multiculturalism is doomed to failure and is failing. I see no evidence for the view that all cultures are equal, but vast amounts against it."



NORWAY MOVES RIGHT

Having come under attack from Muslims, as had Denmark, in the Cartoon Wars, Norway shifted its poll preferences to the (right-wing, anti-immigrant) Progress Party - giving it 32%, ahead of Labour and 10% higher than PP's share of votes at the last parliamentary election (in September) (American Renaissance, 10 iii). {At the same time, Belgium announced that, with bribes of 175 pounds per adult plus travel fare, it had in 2005 persuaded some 4,000 illegal immigrants to leave - though mainly for Brazil and Eastern Europe, since the Belgian bribe was presumably not big enough to tempt Blacks and Muslims back to their own godforsaken countries (American Renaissance, 10 iii).}



FAMILY SUPPORTED

A fine article appeared from columnist Tom Utley pointing out that the essential socialist attack of modern times has been not so much on employers or owners as in the past but on the nuclear family - aiming to make individuals' chief relationships (including employment, obedience and dependence) be with the state (Daily Telegraph, `Brown won't rest until the state has replaced the family, 10 iii - drawing on new work by Jill Kirby for the Civitas think-tank).



BRAND RE-BRANDED

An unusually fair account of the Brand Affair appeared on the net at http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Chris_Brand.

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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TIMES HIGHER BACKS RACE REALIST TO KEEP ACADEMIC JOB

Responding to the brouhaha at Leeds University, an editorial in Times Higher concluded that, despite the monstrous nature of Frank Ellis’s misdemeanours, “Leeds must endure Ellis” (11 iii). A news article in the paper linked FE’s case to the cases of myself and computer professor Geoffrey Sampson (U. Brighton – and also a Queensman) – though readers possessed of memories would have been mystified to hear that I had “left” my university job [rather than being sacked and compensated in a three-year battle] (Claire Sanders, ‘’I won’t be silenced,’ says race tutor’, p. 4).

FE also achieved support from one brave student who came forward to say his teaching was not biased or threatening to anyone’s amour propre; and the British National Party was apparently one of several ‘right-wing organizations’ which had given support. Less encouraging was an editorial in the ‘Independent’ which declared it was “distressing” that FE had “found work on a multicultural campus such as Leeds” (11 iii); and the National Union of Students called for a full inquiry, as did the blog http://www.pigdogfucker.com/.

Outright demands for FE to be sacked for his disagreeable views came from a ‘Liberal’ Democrat MP, from the Leeds LUniversity Union (which planned a full-scale demo on 16 iii, with rabble rousers from the Anti-Nazi League [which had been most influential in terrifying luniversity authorities in Edinburgh as my own case began in 1996]) and from the Observer’s notoriously hysterical columnist Mary Riddell [who, however, interestingly maintained there was – to her distress -- no clause in FE’s contract forbidding him to bring Leeds University into disrepute] (‘This bigot has no place in the lecture hall,’ 12 iii).

The far-left Sunday Herald (perhaps produced especially for Scottish ‘socialist workers’) carried a pathetic piece about a Black female reporter who, after a sheltered education of peecee piety, was so shocked to hear FE’s views from his own mouth that she broke down in tears and needed six Bacardi breezers to restore a semblance of equanimity (12 iii).

THE ELLIS INTERVIEW

BBC Radio 4 invited Frank Ellis for interview on its flagship ‘Today’ programme, 7 iii, 7:30 – 9:00a.m – where he did an excellent job in the 3-4 minutes allowed. Leeds LUniversity’s ‘Unite Against Fascism’ group was due to meet c. 6 iii to discuss how to give Professor Ellis a hard time.

The Daily Telegraph’s Education Correspondent, Liz Lightfoot, front-paged FE and said the Commission for Racial Equality (the equivalent to British PeeCee of Canterbury Cathedral to the Church of England) was trying to get involved; FE was given a good run for his money though he “denied that his views amounted to racism, saying his views were based on scientific evidence.”

A fine defence of FE against the CRE and “the modern Marxist tyranny of political correctness” was mounted by the British National Party, 7 iii. However, apparently stung by criticism from the CRE, Leeds LUni ‘called FE in to explain how his pronouncements fitted with luni policy on respect, diversity and equal opportunity’ (Daily Telegraph, 8 iii).

The BBC carried more from FE – though now demoted to being a mere “Russian tutor”, albeit still credited with a doctorate, and apparently having 500 student signatories screaming for his resignation (Radio 5 Live, ‘Tutor defends ‘racist’ stance,’ 8 iii).

FE rather engagingly called IQ “psychology’s dirty little secret” – correctly in so far as psychologists of the past 40 years had indeed moved heaven and earth to talk of ‘cognition’ rather than ‘intelligence, though “dirty big secret” would have been more apt for, as I wrote in 1987, “g is to psychology what carbon is to chemistry” (in Arthur Jensen: Consensus and Controversy);

and the BBC found one Dr Munira Mirza, a tutor in multiculturalism and community relations at the University of Kent, who, though a monster-raving-loony environmentalist herself, was prepared to say FE’s views on the Black-White difference were *not* just a caricature and that she defended FE’s right to academic free speech.


LYNN (2006) ROCKS AND ROLLS OFF THE PRESSES

Emeritus Professor Richard Lynn’s new book Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis (see this Diary for comment and review, February) was published in America – including a paperback edition. Details: Atlanta, Georgia: Washington Summit Books (PO Box 3514, Augusta, GA 30914) ISBN 1-59368-020-1, pp. 318., US$37.95 HB), $20.95 (PB) (plus $6 for overseas orders).

A helpful forthcoming summary and review by Professor J. P. Rushton in Personality and Individual Differences was given at Richard Lynn’s homepage (though the review, presumably written quite a few months previously, was sadly marred by insistence on a male advantage in intelligence, for which notion Lynn had long been reproved by me and was lately thoroughly mauled by psychometric whizz Steve Blinkhorn in November (‘A gender bender’, Nature 438, 3 xi, 31-2)). Lynn’s work engagingly adopted as its races the ten “genetic clusters” developed (euphemistically, Lynn observes) by top genetics guru L.L.Cavalli-Sforza et al. in 1994 (Princeton University Press) and provided a summary of 500 IQ studies relevant to them.

Perhaps the most novel feature of Lynn’s work was that Lynn accepted that East Asians show, as well as high intelligence, a higher level of conformity and conscientiousness that helps account for their relatively limited philosophical, political and scientific achievement: this view was first articulated by the historian Hugh Thomas in 1979 (An Unfinished History of the World, pp. 75-87) and was drawn to the attention of readers of Personality and Individual Differences by me in 1990 (10, 9, p. 1016) and reiterated in 1996 (The g Factor, p. 147), so it was good there was now wide agreement about the likely evolutionary origins of the Caucasoid – Mongoloid differences in intellect. But, if the media ever got around to acknowledging Lynn’s volume’s existence, it would doubtless be Lynn’s new low estimate of sub-Saharan Negroid IQ at 67 that would understandably captivate attention.

MORE LEFTIST HYSTERIA OVER IQ AND RACE

Just ten years after lefties began pestering Wiley DePublisher to withdraw and pulp my book on IQ, The g Factor, 180 students at Leeds LUniversity, backed by their ‘leaders,’ called for the sacking of a professor of Russian, Frank Ellis, who had the temerity to applaud The Bell Curve and criticize PeeCee as a Communist invention (cf. Brand, 2001, Occidental Quarterly) (Observer, 5 iii).

AMREN CONFERENCE HOSTS NICK GRIFFIN

Fully 250 race realists turned out for the annual conference of American Renaissance in Northern Virginia where they heard talks from BNP leader Nick Griffin and Pioneer Foundation president Phil Rushton. Convener Jared Taylor made a nice point when asked if he was a hate-filled racist. `Just because I prefer my own children to yours,' he replied, `that doesn't mean I dislike yours.' But the media were able to make some mischief when they noticed that, though this right-wing group had probably become less hostile to Jews over the years (and indeed had some Jewish members), it still contained some unreconstructed anti-semites like the brave David Duke who had not yet felt able to focus their disfavour on the low-IQ in general and Muslims in particular.



OPPORTUNITY FOR NATIONAL LIBERALISM CREATED

In the best news for British politics for some while, Britain's `Liberal' Democrats voted to put a sweet old age pensioner at their helm, leaving them free to pursue their mainly socialist agenda while pretending to be a moderate/centrist party (in fact they are pacifist, green and pie-eyed on issues of crime, immigration and Britain's bloated welfare state). With Daft `Dave' Chameleon leading whatever may remain of the Tory Party he inherited so far toward Blairite territory that the Opposition was to support New Labour in Parliament against its own leftist backbenchers on the issue of `top up fees,' an opening was being created for a party that would free British families (and give them tax breaks) to provide the effective powerhouse of liberty-loving, multiple-choice Britain - though whether the British National Party would be able to modernize itself quickly enough to fill the gap remained a question. (The BNP had rightly decided to make a big issue out of whether British Muslims should scream for White beheadings and the "extermination" of the West as a response to a few cartoons published in Denmark which said nothing worse about Islam than was said every day in scores of Muslim on Muslim killings in Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere; but the BNP probably remained committed to socialist/protectionist economics and whether they could appeal more widely to women needed to be considered. To offer a mixture of kindly patriarchy with respect for classical women's lib issues was what was necessary - but that was easier said than done.)



EGALITARIANISM MAY BE GENOCIDAL

I found on the internet an interesting new political article by an Oxford art historian, Malcolm Bull: One of the books considered, by Oxford-trained historian Michael Mann, seems to argue roughly that self-proclaimed socialistic, egalitarian democracies are more likely to engage in genocide; whereas hierarchical societies which incorporate their enemies at the bottom of their societies never end up killing their slaves. An engaging quote from the review is: "Egalitarianism did not arise spontaneously but had to be rigorously enforced by sanctions, expulsions and executions of potential upstarts and free-riders." Another is: "....having duties without rights appears to be the best defence against genocide. One sentence rarely found in the annals of human history is: `And then they killed all their servants.'" To sum it up: "Slavery or genocide may be the ultimate political choice...." (Don't ask me how an art historian gets involved in considering all this; but Malcolm Bull would need to be jolly clever to get invited to review for London Review of Books! He is head of Art History at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall.)

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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BBC WAKES UP TO MUSLIM TRICKERY WITH CARTOONS

By 9 ii, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and BBC Radio 4 began to admit that `Muslim outrage' had actually been sparked not by the original twelve cartoons of Mahomet carried on one page by Denmark's Jylland Posten in September but rather by the 43-page dossier worked up using obscene and sometimes unpublished material by Muslim extremists for touting over four months around the Middle East's elderly and doubtless shockable imams. Malcolm Brabant interviewed Copenhagen imams and ordinary Muslims for a broadcast at 13.30 GMT, 9 ii. The leading imam, Abu Laban, a ranting fanatic, admitted tarting up the dossier with cartoons of Mahomet as a pig, paedophile and bestiality-practitioner (presumably sent to him by members of the public), saying he thought Middle Eastern imams would have had no difficulty realizing that these cartoons had not been published because they were not in colour.. Several ordinary Muslims on the programme expressed serious reservations about Abu Laban's campaign to whip up Muslim sentiment. The Danish Prime Minister dissociated the Government from Denmark's imams, saying they could clearly not be part of the process of integrating immigrants into the country.

{It will be fascinating to discover whether the creators of this dodgy dossier were smart enough to realize back in the autumn of 2005 that their hoax would be mightily assisted by subsequent Western reluctance to re-publish the original twelve cartoons out of sensitivity, responsibility, political correctness etc.}

{In an important plot twist, it turned out that an Egyptian newspaper actually had published all the Jyllen Posten cartoons on 5th October: Had they received criticism or attack? Had Egyptian produce been boycotted? - Of course not! It is clear that Muslim outrage was built up by some other route, presumably the dodgy dossier and its obscene but unpublished cartoons.} {There was no sign of abatement of interest in the Cartoon War in the Lebanon, where a crowd of hundreds of thousands turned out to hear Hizbollah demand that all Western countries pass laws forbidding defamation of Mahomet (ABC News, 9 ii.}


"ECONOMIST" BLASTS BRITS FOR FAILURE TO BACK DENMARK

Surprisingly for a magazine that has failed to mention or review either The g Factor or IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the Economist put the boot firmly into such people as Home Secretary Jack Straw who had failed to back Jyllen Posten in its important attempt to show Muslims they could not expect to intimidate Western publishers (9 ii).



MUSLIMS TURN ON EACH OTHER

In a fine demonstration that it needs no provocation from Christians for Muslims to become hysterical and start killing, Sunni and Shi-ite Muslims took to each other's throats in Pakistan (killing at least 32) and Afghanistan (killing 5 and injuring 50) (Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, 10 ii). In Baghdad, Sunnis killed 21 Shi-ites who were coming out of a mosque. Meanwhile, in grotesque over-reaction to the twelve hardly hard-hitting cartoons, Indonesian crowds chanted, "Destroy Denmark! Destroy Israel! Destroy George Bush! Destroy America!"



MODERATE MUSLIM DEMO FLOPS

Supported by far-out British lefties, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and `Respect' MP George Galloway, many British Muslim groups got together to organize a well-advertised rally in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, 11th February, at which no death threats were allowed in speeches or on placards; but such moderation (as extolled most notably by Sairah Khan, Fareena Alam and Johann Hari) proved so boring to British Muslims that only 4,000 Muslims and a few peacenik Christians (including one-time Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament boss Monsignor Bruce Kent) turned up. (A Populus poll (7 ii) found 25% of British Muslims support raging cleric Abu Hamza (`The Hook', jailed for seven years for incitement to murder).

There were no protesters conspicuously present in Trafalgar Square, perhaps because of police activity but certainly because it had become believed that the police would use any vigorous protest as an excuse to photograph and round up protesters and to ban the British National Party; but protest at worldwide Muslim hysteria of the previous week continued, e.g. in cartoon form at DrawMahommed.com (including one of Mahomet with his child-bride Aisha, age 9 at marriage). Denmark announced the withdrawal of its ambassadors from Iran, Syria and Indonesia. British people were found in a YouGov poll to take a tough line favouring publication of the cartoons and the arrest and deportation of Islamic extremists, and blaming `political correctness' in the police for failure to act against the murderously inclined Muslim demonstrators of the previous Saturday (Manchester Evening News, 12 ii). A fine defence of free speech against the West's cowardly government's (except Denmark's, which depended on the 24 votes of the right-wing Danish People's Party) was provided by Wizbang (13 ii).


BLACK PROTEST AT `GET REAL ABOUT RACE'

My ten-year-old article for young Blacks, `Get real about race,' (published in the smart London hip-hop music magazine downlow and at here) attracted a reply - a masterpiece of ignorance, illiteracy and illogicality:

Dear writer of let's get real about race,

Let's get real about race! There is one race. I've surfed the internet, and found a book called "The Bell Curve" which shows conclusively that on average whites have a higher IQ that african americans. This is an undeniable fact, and, even though I'm African American myself, I concede that point. However, both of you logic is flawed in thinking that blacks have a lower IQ because they are black. This is absurd! Blacks are human. Whites are human. We have the same brains; we have the same variation in intelligence. If you look at the parallell in the K-9 kingdom, you could argue that some dogs are just naturally smarter than others. It doesn't matter how you raise the two breeds of dogs, one will always be smarter than the other. THat is why some dogs are selected as police dogs or to sniff for drugs at the airport or the bus station. However, there are so many types of people you couldn't even begin to label them in breeds like this. It's not simply cut as black and white. There are some people you meet, and you can't imagine that they could've ever been smart while others just seem to have the qualities that make on that way: whether they are black, white, yellow, or whatever.

The only way that a study like this or any analysis like this could remotely be taken seriously is if there was a pilot group of human bigs, choosen of the right size and taken at birth; raised under the same conditions, with the same educational opportunities, and in the absence of descrimination based on physical appearance so that the face the same obstacles and the same doors are open to them. Also, raised by the same quality of parent...I think you can see where I'm going here. There are hundreds of variables besides race. We live in a racist society. Just dealing with the anger and emotion that goes with that can drop you a few IQ points (i.e., your focus growing up is away from education and mental development). It is foolish not to realize that there are more variables involved than just race, which is why you would similarly be stupid to compare the IQ of a white american to that of someone raised in tribal life in Africa. Alot of variables influence the intelliectual development of the two very different human beings, from different cultures, and with different environmental challenges. We are all humnans. The same species.

Having said this, honestly, I could really care less if white people were just naturally smarter or had higher IQ's. If that is the case, then fine. What's the big deal about that? IQ is only one aspect of a person and doesn't make one person better than another. Anyone with an IQ over 115 or 120 can lead a decent life and black people are not retards, although they continue to struggle in todays American society. It is impossible to conduct a study like this. There are simply to many variables.



NATIONAL IQ PREDICTS WAGES OF EMIGRANTS TO U.S.A.

It transpired that two economists, Garrett Jones and Joel Scheider had published in 2005 on the net to the effect that "workers from countries with lower national average IQ have lower U.S. wages (even after controlling for education)" - another victory for the genetic claims of The g Factor (1996) and IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002).



CARTOON WAR CONTINUES: MUSLIMS RAMPAGE IN PAKISTAN

Humourless and violent Pakistani Islamofascists who could not see or admit that they had in fact taken over much of the Muslim religion (claimed by moderates to be "peaceful") rioted in their scores of thousands for three days in Lahore, Peshawar and Islamabad, resulting in 2 burned-out cinemas, 200 burned-out cars, 5 deaths and at least 25 injuries (e.g. SFGate.com, 14 ii). {Meanwhile robust U.S. columnist Ann Coulter argued engagingly that the West actually had a solemn duty under NATO to flatten Syria (for its attack on the Danish embassy - technically at least on Danish soil) before disarming Iran (WorldNetDaily, 15 ii).}



SUPPORT FOR BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY

Letters welcoming the acquittal of BNP leader Nick Griffin and criticizing London police for not arresting Muslim anti-cartoon demonstrators (who called for beheadings of Western journalists) appeared in Edinburgh's Evening News (13 ii) -- a surprise development in what is normally a liberal-leftish newspaper. (The Evening News and its sister paper The Scotsman had previously published an article deploring the "double standards" applied by police to the BNP and the Muslim demonstrators and demanding that Muslims should rid their ranks of extremists (10 ii).)



GENES FOR BRAIN SIZE DEBATED

My generally unremarked review (for American Renaissance) of the work of Dr Bruce Lahn and colleagues in Chicago, finding two genes for brain size were rather rare in Pygmies and Negroes, achieved repblication and discussion (of a kind..) here.



WEALTHY BLACKS TURN TO GENETICS

Disregarding the doubts of White social scientists about the existence of races and racial differences, leading Black Americans began turning in droves to DNA testing to work out their own personal racial and tribal lineages ( Guardian, 17 ii). Top TV personage, Black Oprah Winfrey, was apparently content to find she had some Zulu origins; but top Black Harvard intellectual, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, was more likely pretty shocked to find that his own ancestry was actually 50% British.

{Hoping to pooh-pooh DNA-based searches, Guardian author Gary Younge implied it would be superior to use the evidence of local historians as did the Black American Alex Haley who famously `traced his roots back through slavery to West Africa' - evidently Younge and the Guardian have not woken up to the fact that Haley's story in his Roots was a hoax, being largely plagiarized by Haley from a Caucasian author (See here).}



PEECEE BUSTED

After a week of peecee shilly-shallying, police and the media admitted that the attempted murderer of pretty baby-faced Nottingham rookie policewoman Rachel Bown, 23, herself at death's door after being shot in the stomach while answering a 999 call, was in fact a Bleck `hardman' with a druggie Rastafarian hairstyle. {Subsequently, the Bleck, Trevon Thomas, was hauled by police off a Heathrow jet bound for his hometown of Trinidad. He had been living in Nottingham with his girlfriend and supposed daughter, quite often behaving threateningly to neighbours and doubtless extensively funded by British taxpayer-cheating `welfare.'}



ISLAM - RELIGION OF `PEACE'

Continuing to show the Muslim spirit in the Cartoon War, Libyan Muslims set fire to the Italian consulate in Tripoli, leaving nine killed and many others wounded as police tried to control the rioters. In Pakistan, with the help of jewellers, a reward of more than a million US dollars was offered for the murder of any Danish artist who had drawn caricatures of Mahomet. Protest even came to New York where (as in cowardly Britain) not a single newspaper had published any of the cartoons - though a student newspaper in U. Urbana-Champagne carried half a dozen of them, resulting in the immediate sacking of its editors. Sixteen Muslim loons died in northern Nigeria as mobs of hundreds hurled themselves against local police.



FRENCH FAR RIGHT LOOKS TO SERIOUS NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Fulfilling my prediction in American Renaissance, Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front showed serious signs of backing France's 7 million Muslims against globalization, free trade, America and, of course, its old enemy the Jews. If it could pull in lefties (as George Galloway has done in his one `Respect' constituency in Britain), the National Front would thus reorient politics in a sensible fashion as Muslims become (at least in France) the main class of `underdogs' in the West - carefully brought in and nurtured for years by left-wing politicians. {Would liberals be able to stand up to this, with the help of their peecee religion? The French riots, Australian riots and Middle Eastern riots of the past six months haven't produced any sign of a firm response backing freedom - daily reduced in the UK by Rev. Bliar with his insistence on hunting bans, identity cards, smoking bans, and bans on anything that could be construed as "glorification" of terror [e.g. justifying Drake's bombardments of Spanish towns, together with countless British acts of piracy; or justifying the IRA with murals on one's Derry house?].



ANCESTORS CONDEMNED BY WIMP DESCENDENTS

The Church of England's General Synod formally apologized to the descendents of Africans for Britain's role in the transatlantic Slave Trade, and France's failed president, Jacques Chirac, declared that France would hold a formal day of remembrance for the victims of slavery every May 10. {Whether the scores of millions of victims of Muslim slavery (including hundreds of thousands from Britain) would be remembered was not specified.}


JEWS RECKON EUROPE WILL SMASH MUSLIMS

A splendidly up-beat assessment of Europe's willingness to stand up to mad Muslims was provided in Israpundit (19 ii).



BRITISH DONS NOTICE THE LOSS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Ten years after the censorship of The g Factor began, two British dons castigated the unfreedom of British academics in an article for Time Higher (`Hang together or we will hang separately,' 17 ii). After the failure of academics to support them in outspeaking at the London School of Economics, Simon Davies and Gus Hosein declared (the simple truth) that British university teachers are "obsessed with research criteria and funding relationships." {Not that their obsession bears happy fruit: a survey found 49% of U.K. dons reporting they had required psychiatric treatment - a percentage comparing with one of 44% for Accident and Emergency consultants, 38% for nurses, and 27% for the general population.}



NEW HEIGHT FOR PEECEE SPITE

British historian David Irving, 67, author of many books including Hitler's War, original exposer of the Hitler's Diaries fraud, and once praised for his professionalism by Oxford historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor, was jailed for three years in Austria after admitting he had been a `Holocaust denier' in 1989. The savage sentence on the scholar, who had later come to believe that 2.7 million Jews were killed by Hitler, was meted out despite Irving having changed his mind in the 1990's (thanks to new evidence he unearthed in Moscow archives), never having hurt a hair on anyone's head, and being supported for a non-custodial sentence by his Jewish antagonist Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein (22 ii).

Thus did Austria continue to draw a veil over the fact that its citizenry had been even keener on Mr Hitler than had the Germans themselves. With the full co-operation of the West's lib-leftified press, the role of the left, Oxford's pinko students, Russia and Austria in assisting the rise of Hitler could be forgotten. {Like Oscar Wilde, Irving had to some extent brought his fate on himself by going to law claiming defamation (against Lipstadt). Next, though bankrupted by the costs of that trial, Irving cheekily decided to enjoy some jollies in Austria with far-right fans despite being banned from that country. Strangely, Irving has always preferred to deny being a racist, though that was the descriptor applied to him - along with `falsifier of history,' -- by the judge in his London case against Lipstadt.}

{Vindicating my Adlerian efforts of the 1990's (in which I supported Adler's stress on the importance of sibling rivalry), one big doubter of Irving's conversion from Holocaust denial turned out to be his twin brother - New York Post, 21 ii. Irving did however win the support of a former beauty queen who stood up at his trial and urged that Auschwitz bodies be exhumed to see whether death had resulted from gassing or typhoid - Brisbane Courier-Mail, 22 ii; a strong defence of his right to free speech appeared from Henk Ruyssenaars (of the Foreign Press Foundation) at an Argentinian site (IndyMedia, 21 ii), with which National Review editor William Buckley on balance agreed (21 ii); and an American history professor also backed free speech (History News Network, 21 ii). In Britain, the New Statesman, the voice of the up-market left, wanted Irving caged straight away and reprinted his little piece of doggerel for his daughter to recite in the vicinity of undesirable immigrants:

I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.

But the Independent expressed "grave misgivings" about making Holocaust denial a prosecutable offence (21 ii). And The Times said curbs on free speech were "always regrettable." - The cowardly Torygraph evaded the issue.} {Nothing daunted, Irving repeated in interviews from his prison cell in Vienna that he had his doubts about the Holocaust - prompting prosecutors to say they would come for him again (M&C News, 1 iii).}



MULTICULTURALISM REVERSED

‘All teaching will be in English,’ announced the new headmistress of a 1,000-strong Tottenham secondary school where 70% of the pupils had between them 59 languages other than English as their mother tongues (Sun, 22 ii). The announcement constituted a reversal of an expressly NuLabour-approved 2003 policy of pandering to pupils’ wilful failures to integrate into Britain. The headmistress said she was making the change to English-only teaching so as to help pupils with their lives in Britain and because of the school’s dismal performance in public examinations


NULABOUR TYRANNY MOUNTS

Following restrictions by Rev. Bliar on jury trials, habeas corpus, smoking, freedom to identify oneself by a method of one’s choice, and freedom to ‘glorify terror,’ a British youth was given an on-the-spot fine of £80 by a policeman for saying the word ‘F***’ when talking (quietly) to friends in a public park. {By contrast, in a blow for British freedoms, the British National Party announced it would be publishing one of the infamous ‘Mahomet’ cartoons – none of them published by Britain’s cravenly peecee press. It thus positioned itself to sweep up the femininnie vote – allowing Britain’s women to continue to contracept, abort, adulterate and divorce in defiance of Muslim demands for Sharia law.}


U.S. ‘INTELLECTUAL’ LEFT GLORIES IN TYRANNY OVER LUNI

Embattled Harvard University President, top economist Larry Summers (see this Diary/Blog above, 2005), resigned more than a year after his infamous claim that women were underrepresented in the sciences due to sociobiological—as opposed to sociopolitical—constraints. The move pre-empted a no-confidence vote by the Harvard arts and sciences faculty the next Tuesday. Robert KC Johnson at George Mason University's ‘Cliopatria’ phlegmatically examined the full executive span of the Summers of Discontent: "The original draft of the 2005 faculty resolution listed three specific events justifying a motion of no confidence: the president's remarks about women in science; his handling of the Cornel West matter; and his denunciation of a proposed faculty resolution urging Harvard to divest from firms doing business in Israel. ... Of the three, the women-in-science issue most clearly demonstrated Summers' political and interpersonal failings."


A fourth fight with lefties concerned whether the US Army could be allowed to recruit on campus. For more see New York Times, 22 ii, and Time, 21 ii (the latter retailing accusations of financial impropriety which may well have proved the last straw as Summers pondered resignation); but Alan Dershowitz emphatically laid the blame for the resignation on the egregious political correctness of Harvard staff. The resignation occurred despite Harvard students voting 3-1 that the Jewish Summers should stay – i.e. the pressure had come from the elderly but since 9/11 Muslim-backing leftie ideologues of the arts and social sciences. In the [London] Times, columnist Gerard Baker saw the significance of all this, titling his article ‘Summers’ end marks the start of a long winter in American universities’ (24 ii). Barker percipiently traced the rot back to the arrival in American universities of relativism and multiculturalism, first charted in 1986 by the mighty literature expert Allan Bloom in ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ According to Barker, Summers is “fiendishly clever” and would have had a Nobel Prize (like two of his uncles) if he had not devoted himself largely to government service alongside Federal Reserve banker Alan Greenspan; apparently Summers is utterly un-smooth and un-co-ordinated and had (till a recent slimming effort) a voracious appetite. Barker concluded by remarking “the poverty of philosophy that characterizes life at so many universities.” Summers was replaced as President by a wringing-wet former President and advocate of affirmative racism, Derek Bok (for whose nonsense see above and McDougall NewsLetters).


‘DERB’ SOUNDS A TIMELY WARNING ABOUT ISLAMOFASCISM:

‘THE HUN IS AT THE GATE’ – a warning he (John Derbyshire, the top British journalist now based in the USA) could not even get published in National Review.




ISLAMOFASCIST IMPERIALISM RECOUNTED

A succinct history of Mahommedans's ceaseless attempts to colonize the West was discovered: `Jihad in the West.'



US AND UK IN DENIAL

As Iraq manifested its civil war in the blowing up of a historic mosque and hundreds of Shiite-on-Sunni killings, the loons of US and UK sat idly by, instead of seizing their chance to pull out their troops and concentrate on the nuclear pulverization of Teheran and its mad democratically elected leader WhoGadMahDinnahJacket.


PC = CP

The mind-blowing extended grip of Bliar-Pushkin PeeCee became clear as even Russia sacked editors who posted cartoons lampooning Islamofascism: See here.



SECRET OF SOCIALISM CONFIRMED

After many years of suspicion that socialism was a mediaeval system of vassalage, i.e. jobs for the boys, crucial evidence was mentioned in a leader in the Daily Telegraph (23 ii). Apparently there are quite a few constituencies in the U.K. where around three quarters of voters derive their income from state employment, state benefits or from firms having their entire revenue from state funds. In the `top ten' of such state-dependent constituencies, no less than nine had a Labour M.P. {For a similar point, powerfully made, see Spectator, (24 ii.}



`F*** OFF TO YOUR OWN COUNTRIES,' MAD MUSLIMS TOLD

British Muslims wanting to deny others' free speech and to live under Shari'a law were advised to emigrate - the newsworthiness of which advice being that it came from the Black Trevor Phillips, the boss of the preposterously titled `Campaign for Racial Equality' and a good friend of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Phillips found himself in synch with Australia's Treasurer, who also told Shari'a-lovers to buzz off (American Renaissance, 24 ii).

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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GENES FOR READING CONFIRMED

In an international study of 600 identical and fraternal twin pairs, Australian researcher Brian Byrne (School of Psychology, U. New England, New South Wales) reported (TVNZ, 8 ii) "What seems to determine most of the differences amongst children, just in the normal school setting in terms of their reading skills, are genetics." Byrne estimated that genes accounted for 70% of variance among age peers.

{The finding that would be partly expected from the .70 correlation between reading age and the g factor that was known to Sir Cyril Burt and confirmed by work in Birmingham linking poor reading strongly to low scores on Raven’s Progressive Matrices (Riding & McQuaid, 1987, Brit. J. Educational Research 13, 1, 51ff.).}

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DEFIED -- SPARKING MUSLIM RAGE AND GIVING A DEMONSTRATION OF ISLAMOFASCIST VIOLENCE

Denmark’s Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, insisted on the right of his country’s media to criticize and lampoon Islam (as had happened in September in Denmark’s biggest daily, the right-of-centre Jyllands-Posten, which had wanted to test a suggestion [from an author who had failed to find a cartoonist for an intended children’s book about Islam – meant to explain Islam sympathetically to Danish children] as to whether the West was engaged in ‘self-censorship’ about Islam).

Newspapers all over Western Europe (and one in Israel) then re-published as a pro-free-speech protest the cartoons about Mahomet* that had sparked Muslim outrage and led to burning of the Danish flag in the Middle East, withdrawal of Arab ambassadors from Copenhagen and total boycotts of Danish produce.

Ex-US President Willy Clinton called the cartoons “totally outrageous”; but, ironically, it was hard for many to tell because they could not see them – and, later, the Sunday Telegraph (5 ii) said the original twelve cartoons, published on just one newspaper page in September, had been massively supplemented to yield a 43-page dossier for circulation to imams in the Middle East, the dossier including obscene cartoons which had never actually been published in Europe.

In Britain, after pro-free-speech protests from several Muslim, Christian and atheist organizations (letter to Daily Telegraph, 31 i), the Government lost (somewhat accidentally, by one vote) in the House of Commons its measure to criminalize ‘religious hate speech’** which would have impacted on comedians and enthusiastic preachers (though the Commons made an exception to its veto for speech actually intended to and calculated to yield inter-racial violence).

{Subsequently, the editor of Egyptian-owned ailing France Soir was fired for publishing the cartoons, as was an editor in Jordan; but the BBC found the courage to carry them briefly on its flagship TV programme BBC 1 (2 ii). Scores of thousands of Middle-Eastern Muslims indulged their feelings by flag-burning, hate mail and threatening to bomb the offending newspapers, to “bomb Denmark,” to behead journalists and to kidnap foreigners. Westerners fled the West Bank and Gaza.}

{The British Government – joined by the White House – grovelled to the mad mullahs as much as it could; but 500 Islamofascists were turned out in Knightsbridge, London, to burn the Danish flag and chant – despite Britain having caved in -- “Britain, Britain, you will pay / 7’7 is on its way.” The Metropolitan ‘Police’ failed to arrest a single person for such threats and instead concentrated on cautioning and detaining Whites who made objections to the Muslim death-threateners, trying to reassure Whites by saying ‘Don’t worry, we have the photographs.’}

{The left was split down the middle as to whether the Danes were entitled to free speech -- Guardian, 4 ii; and the paper’s editor sheltered behind Home Secretary Jack Straw’s feeble formula that it had ‘no obligation’ to publish the cartoons (Guardian, 4 ii), which had by then been published even in the Holy Republic of Éireland. Of 70,000 people who responded to an online survey by France’s left-wing Nouvel Observateur, 53% were in favour of publishing the cartoons and 47% were against. }

{On 4 ii, the Danish and Norwegian embassy building in Damascus was burned out by a Muslim mob; on 5 ii the Danish embassy building and a church in Beirut was were ablaze in a protest involving thousands; and elsewhere stones, rocks and bottles were hurled at a European Commission building, a German embassy, and at police trying to control rioters. Braver than the newspapers of Britain and America, New Zealand’s Dominion Post (serving the capital, Wellington) published the cartoons, saying “We will not be intimidated”; and Canada’s centrist Globe and Mail condemned Muslim “over-reaction” and said most of the many problems of Islamic countries were “home-grown.”}

{An imam at the Omari Mosque in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that the people behind the drawings should have their heads cut off. 'If they want a war of religions, we are ready,' Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon. In Ramallah, protesters burnt a Danish flag, chanting: 'Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up.' 6th February brought Muslim-on-Muslim killing as Afghan police fired on crowds of thousands of enraged religionists, of whom four died.}

{The Muslim protests were highly ironical, partly in using so much violence to contest their religion being portrayed as violent, and partly because Islam is a clear world leader in violence against other faiths – having from 1998 to 2003 killed 10,000 Christians in Indonesia alone and destroyed ancient Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan.}


* One had Mahomet crying to dead suicide bombers waiting to be admitted to Paradise, “Stop, stop! We ran out of virgins.” The cartoons were reprinted in full by American Renaissance, 1 ii – but not by the British media.

** The Muslim Council of Britain had been baying for such a measure since 1997 – though only to stifle criticism of Islam, not to inhibit flagrant Muslim hatred of Jews (which the MCB has never condemned).


Update -- further updated:

{Key Danish products to support are Danish bacon, Carlsberg Lager and the super-sultry, splendidly leggy and niftily-nippled elitist catwalk queen and photographer Helena Christensen (Miss Denmark, 1986). To sign a petition (and comment if desired) expressing sympathy with Jyllands Posten, Denmark and free speech, go here. There were 25,000 overwhelmingly supportive signatures by 9th February (by which time 13 Muslims had died in rioting, chiefly in Afghanistan).

{Unfortunately, a pro-Islam petition here enjoyed 100,000 apparent signatures….} The petitionline website invited supporters to rally in Trafalgar Square at 12a.m. on Saturday, 11th Feb., just one hour ahead of a rally of ‘Muslim moderates’ planned by the Muslim Association of Britain. Who was running the rally remained to be seen. – The BNP? (The BNP denied any association.) The National Front? MI6, intending to get handy pictures of freedom fighters and perhaps close down the BNP (a revenge after failing to jail Nick Griffin)? (This was the BNP’s view.} {The British embassy in Tehran was stoned even though the only British newspaper to have reprinted the cartoons was a student newspaper in Wales – and was rapidly obliged by the lefties of the National Union of Students to collect and pulp all copies.}

SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTALISM BLASTED

A fine critique of environmentalism, "the affirmative action hoax," perpetrated by S. J. Gould and Daniel Goleman (`emotional intelligence'), appeared at http://www.affirmativeactionhoax.com/.



BOOK THROWN AT B.N.P.

As the British National Party's leader went on trial in Leeds, it transpired that even recommendations that immigrants and asylum seekers be deported were considered by the prosecution as the dreaded `incitements to racial hatred.'

{Contrast previously where Muslim supremo Iqbal Sacranie was not even charged with anything when he said homosexuality was unhealthy for society..}



PEECEE TURNS TO DEVOUR ITSELF

A major rift opened up in British PeeCee as top cop Sir Ian Blair, head of the Metropolitan Police (which had been busy purging itself of all `institutional racism' since the MacPherson Report of 1999), accused Britain's media of the dreaded `racism' for over-reporting murders of Whites compared to murders of Blacks and Pakistanis. The pressmen themselves took this spinelessly enough; but Ian Blair had specially criticized `over-reporting' of the Soham murders of two pretty ten-year-old girls by sex-mad Ian Huntley, so the Soham community went up in arms and Blair had to apologize for re-opening old wounds.

{Just as witchcraft allegations in `The Crucible' escalated from a single case to much of the community standing accused, so accusations of `racism' against me in 1996 have now spread to the Met and to the British media as a whole.}



LONDON SCHOOL DEFENDED BY PHILOSOPHER

The fine article by Croatian philosopher Neven Sesardic accusing S. J. Gould, Ned Block et al. of literally ignoring the arguments and evidence on racial differences put forward by Art Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray became available at http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/POS-2000.pdf.


POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DEFIED

As Denmark's Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, insisted on the right of his country's media to criticize and lampoon Islamofascism, newspapers all over Western Europe re-published as a pro-free-speech protest the cartoons about Mahomet* that had sparked Muslim outrage and led to burning of the Danish flag in the Middle East, withdrawal of Arab ambassadors and total boycotts of Danish produce. In Britain, after pro-free-speech protests from several Muslim, Christian and atheist organizations (letter to Daily Telegraph, 31 i), the Government lost in the House of Commons its measure to criminalize `religious hate speech'** which would have impacted on comedians and enthusiastic preachers (though the Commons made an exception to its veto for speech actually intended to and calculated to yield inter-racial violence).

* One had Mahomet crying to dead suicide bombers waiting to be admitted to Paradise, "Stop, stop! We ran out of virgins."
** The Muslim Council of Great Britain had been baying for such a measure since 1997.

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Some history.

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SCHOOL SEGREGATION INCREASES IN CALIFORNIA

As Whites and Asians sought refuge in California's suburbs from the dumbing down, criminality, AIDS and affirmative-racist prejudices of Black areas, California's schools, already some of the USA's most de facto racially segregated, were becoming even more divided along Black/Hispanic vs White/Asian lines, a study found (American Renaissance, 17 i). Evidently race realism was re-asserting itself after a generation of multi-trillion-dollar propaganda and social engineering.


LEFT PREPARES TO CAVE ON RACE

On the happy day that my wife was told she had her Glasgow U. Ph.D. in the bag, the Grauniad began to brace its readers for the London School's success in the race wars, with top lefty columnist Marek Kohn declaring (17 i) "We have gone beyond the stage where the question of racial science could be seen as a straightforward contest between decent values and sinister pseudoscience."


ITALIANS PLAN TO BOOST BIRTHS

Italy's multi-millionaire Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced his Government would in future be providing a birthday present worth 650 pounds for each Italian newborn.


TRENDY ANTI-MULTICULTURALISM

In a surprise development, the Sunday Times published a substantial review article complaining that large swathes of the poorer areas of London had become multicultural wastelands - while Hampstead liberals had to put up only with immigrants paying half-a-million pounds per house (22 ii). The fact that the article was by a homosexual journalist, Peter Whittle, was perhaps the explanation of how such a race-realist article could be published..


CONTINUING FAILURE OF BLACK-BOOSTING EFFORTS

Despite a generation of expensive educational initiatives, including the latest `No Child Left Behind' programme emanating four years ago from the White House, Boston elementary schools announced a comprehensive failure to close the Black/Hispanic - White/Asian gap among children (20% of the former were deemed `proficient' compared to 50% of the latter) (American Renaissance, 20 i).


PEECEE PROFS EXPOSED

After years of leftification of American and British universities, with no opposition from conservatives, right-wing money became available to pay students to tape-record lefty professors at University of California, Los Angeles, and put the results up on the net: www.uclaprofs.com. UCLA authorities expressed outrage and threatened legal action to support their post-Marxist, post-modern and peecee goons in gowns.


RACE-REALISM PEEKS OUT IN (LONDON) TIMES

As a nice young Cambridge-educated lawyer working for the Queen's firm of solicitors was stabbed to death by a Black in the Tube for no apparent reason, and other elite Whites were equally gratuitously attacked, Times columnist Camilla Cavendish was sufficiently daring to publish an article about such `stranger attacks' which concluded: "We must keep the danger in perspective; but we must cease glorifying a world which is colliding with ours" (19 i). Heady stuff!!....


DUTCH DEFY ISLAMOFASCISM

With several of their leading figures killed by Muslims or in hiding, the Dutch Parliament went ahead to ban the burkha in public places and to demand that immigrants have Dutch and show other tested signs of integration - but it was far from clear that the peecee tyrants of the European Union would allow these brave moves to go ahead.

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH

I take this opportunity to relay a fine defence of freedom of speech that was recently drawn to my attention. See here. Myself, I would deal with the argument 'You don't have the right to shout FIRE a crowded cinema' by limiting 'free speech' to well-formulated propositions, i.e. essentially propositional sentences or, better, paragraphs.)


IQ AND CLIMATE

I deplore the the latest measly effort in The Guardian to avoid race realism (and indeed any direct mention of the London School) -- for a critique see here.

The truth is that intelligence has seldom if ever evolved in hot conditions, presumably because heat requires chiefly the specific adapation of finding and storing water (as with the Kalahari Bushmen and their remarkably equipped womenfolk) rather than the general one of providing clothing, shelter and food in harsh conditions. Where it did evolve in hot conditions (Egypt -- no need to search for underground water there!) it was soon lost, as it was when East Asians cross the frozen Bering Strait during the Ice Age and made their way southwards (as 'Red Indians') through the Americas, finally plummeting to IQ c. 88. It's true that 'Just So' stories are not matters of scientific certainty, and that's why Spearman, Burt, Eysenck and Jensen inclined to avoid them. But the likes of lefty Marek Kohn (bright enough to be likely to be the first to jump ship) would be the first to complain if the London School did not accompay its scientific offerings (IQ measurement, strong Inspection Time correlates, hereditary bases, practical demonstrations of the everyday importance of IQ differences) with a plausible evolutionary-functional yarn.


POLITICAL CORRECTNESS TO BE REVISED

As Muslim supreme Iqbal Sacranie came under investigation by police for alleged hate speech (he had criticized homosexuality) (Evening Standard, 13 i), top cop Sir Ian Blair announced a review that would end by restricting accusations of hate speech to members of the British National Party, the Conservative Party and the London School.


LOW INDIAN AND PAKISTANI IQ EXPLAINED

Indians have few Caucasian or even Central Asian genes, researchers at India's National Institute of Biologicals, Uttar Pradesh, reported (National Geographic Magazine, 10 i 06), thus linking the subcontinent genetically with the South Asian pattern of low-ish general intelligence (though probably with a wider range than in the West):

"Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages-but it absorbed few genes-from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida".


BLACK COP COULDN'T COPE

A Black policeman in charge of guarding Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall resigned after unspecified errors and incompetence - but, in the peecee way of things, following initiation of court action against them, London's Metropolitan Police awarded him œ70K compensation because of his "over-promotion" and lack of adequate training as part of an affirmative action programme (American Renaissance, 8 i 06).



GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

I record here with sadness the death at age 68 of my good friend and supporter Geoffrey Sharps who did so much to advise me and keep my spirits up with his unfailing good humour as we battled with Edinburgh LUniversity through 1996-8. Geoffrey long lectured in literature in Scarborough, but his training in Edinburgh had included psychology and he was very sound on genetic questions and, more unusually, game to battle illiberal paedohysteria. He will long be remembered, not least by the principal figures in E.LU. of those days to whom we gave such a very hard time.

(Also not forgotten is my depublished book, The g Factor, recalled - along with Richard Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations (see review) by the Press Officer of the British National Party, Phil Edwards, writing for National Vanguard, 6 i 2006.)



PAEDOHYSTERIA CHALLENGED

As Government Education Minister Ruth Kelly (36, and - like me -- of The Queen's College, Oxford) came under massive media attack for allowing a few barely detectable paedophiles* to teach in schools, she was defended by Lord Tebbit (on BBC 1's `Question Time, 12 i), by columnist Tom Utley (Daily Telegraph, 14 i) and by columnist Simon Jenkins (Sunday Times, 15 i).

* In one case, a young schoolteacher had downloaded some kiddieporn, possibly accidentally. In another, a 59-year-old teacher had had an affair with a 15-year-old as far back as 1980.


PEECEE CHALLENGED

NuTory leader `Dave' Cameron said he would free U.K. police from McPherson-style demands for political correctness and instead reward them for the number of true villains they actually caught (Sun, 16 i).

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Some history.

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RACE REALISM GROWS

In the aftermath of the October riots in France (during which 9,000 cars were torched by Blacks and Arabs), 33% of people said they would call themselves `racist' - up from 25% in 2004 - and 25% said they would vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen. Despite a generation of propaganda from politicians and the press, 50% said they did not welcome immigration, compared to only 30% welcoming it (United Press International, 18 xii). Polling in Australia found that 75% of people thought their neighbours were racist (The Age, 24 xii). On Christmas Day, 100 cars were torched in France - a figure police said was the same as the usual daily average. On New Year's Eve, the tally of voitures flamb‚es was 425.



BRAIN SIZE AND IQ CORRELATED - NEW WORK

Brain size matters for intellectual ability and bigger is better. At Ontario's McMaster University researchers found IQ to be correlated with brain size (McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences, 22 xii). The study, led by neuroscientist Sandra Witelson, a professor in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, and published in the December issue of the journal Brain, provided some of the clearest evidence as to the underlying basis of differences in intelligence. The study involved testing intelligence in 100 neurologically normal, terminally ill volunteers, who agreed that their brains be measured after death. The main finding was that `bigger is better,' but there were differences between women and men. In women, verbal intelligence was strongly correlated with brain size, accounting for 36 percent of the verbal IQ score. In men, this was true for right-handers only, indicating that brain asymmetry is a factor in men. Spatial intelligence was also correlated with brain size in women, but less strongly. In men, spatial ability was not related to overall brain size. These results suggest that women may use verbal strategies in spatial thinking, but that in men, verbal and spatial thinking are more distinct.

In the week after publication, the story was covered in several Indian newspapers and by one in Professor Witelson's native Canada, but virtually nowhere else and without any mention of Phil Rushton's long-standing advocacy of the thesis - such was still the head-in-the-sand of the West's media to IQ having any markedly biological basis.



RACE- AND SLAVERY-REALISM

The Government of Ghana resolved to invite all Afro-Americans of Ghanaian lineage to return to Ghana, with its tourism minister saying "We hope we can bring the African family together again" - though doubtless hoping for massive inward investment from healthy and relatively well-educated Blacks. But ordinary Ghanaians expressed astonishment and doubted whether a single Black American would wish to abandon the countless advantages gained from his ancestors' enslavement - i.e. rescue from Black tyranny, free passage across the Atlantic, being given safe if heavy work (it was the wandering Irish who were used for dangerous work) and finally manumitted and finding whole political parties devoted to their interests (first the Republicans, later the Democrats) (American Renaissance, 27 xii).



RACE REALISM INDIAN-STYLE

After years in which the West's peecee politicos had complained about Israel's wall to keep out Palestinians and had refused to contemplate the U.S.A. building a wall to keep out Mexicans, it transpired that holy Hindu India would, in 2006, complete a 2,500-mile steel double wall (the gap filled with razor wire) to slash terror, illegal immigration, people trafficking and smuggling by its neighbours in Muslim Bangladesh (American Renaissance, 29 xii). The plan followed the success of India's previous use of 1,000 miles of barbed wire fencing and would be supported by a force of 50,000 Indian soldiers, so eager was India to cut the 65,000 Bangladeshis who had annually been crossing the border illegally in the 1990's.



Economist BACKS GENES

After years of ignoring Richard Lynn's work on IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the Economist ran a short article backing the theory of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (see June) that important evolution was still occurring in man, as witness Jewish (Ashkenazi) development of high intelligence just a thousand years ago. The article went on to add that eugenics should not be outlawed in a liberal society - quite a breakthrough for the cowardly neocons who run the Economist! {However, the turn-of-the-year note was accompanied by another to titled `Race is only skin deep' - VDare, 1 i 06.}



NATURE, NOT NURTURE

Of twelve scientists selected to air their views for the New Year in the Daily Telegraph (3 i 06), no less than three of them were hereditarian (and none was environmentalist): my pal David Buss (U. Texas) noted `the beast within'; my one-time drinks partner Richard Dawkins (U. Oxford) said we should remedy faulty genes, not punish their possessors; and formerly race-evasive genetic code-breaker Craig Venter was even allowed to claim there were "strong genetic components" in "most aspects of human existence, including personality sub-types, language capabilities, mechanical abilities, intelligence, sexual activities and preferences, intuitive thinking, willpower, temperament, athletic abilities and so on."



PEECEE DENOUNCED BY MUSLIM M.P.

Glasgow Central's M.P., a Muslim called Mohammad Sarwar, condemned political correctness in the police as it turned out that Asian gangs - left largely unmolested by Britain's cringeing coppers , fearing accusations of political incorrectness - had turned their attention largely to raiding Pakistani shops. Other Muslim luminaries agreed with Sarwar, as did a Scottish Conservative spokeswoman. {But the rest of Britain's peecee media agreed to suppress the story.}



FUNDAY TIMES BACKS FAMILY

In the bizarre scene of U.K. politics, where only newspapers really matter, the top broadsheet Sunday Times (responsible for the blackening of Sir Cyril Burt's name) got as far as blaming NuLabour for showing "scant respect for the institution of marriage" (leading article, 8 i 2006) - though still regarding `families' and `education' as things that might be provided by the beneficent state regardless of individual genetic proclivities). Meanwhile, NuTory `Dave' Cameron feigned to be a "liberal Conservative", suggesting he might have learned something from this Diary's advocacy of "national liberalism."



TORIES FOR The g Factor

Just ten years after my book was published and Labour leader Tony Blair backed its proposal for school streaming, the new Conservative leader David Cameron announced he favoured neither a return to grammar schools nor funding for state-school kids to attend independent schools but simply an increasing number of state-school pupils being educated in classes according to their abilities (Sun, 10 i) by means of subject-based streaming (or `setting'). He also thought schools should be allowed to select 10% of their pupils according to mathematical ability - and not just for dancing, drawing and languages as at present. That streaming helps children of all ability levels was confirmed in figures from England's exam boards: when `value-added' effects were studied (as advocated in The g Factor), they were greatest for children in streamed systems (Spectator, 14 i, Ross Clark). {Currently it is estimated that some 40% of state pupil hours are spent in streamed classes. The main obstacle to an increase in streaming is probably left-wing teachers and school heads.}

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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.

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