The neo-Eysenckian optimism of Harvard’s (by-and-large ‘nature’-committed) psychobabbler Steven Pinker was trashed by (neo-leftist) philosopher John Gray (cf. my own analysis, above) who (though himself not acknowledging deep-seated racial and ethnic differences) doubted (as the ‘Arab Spring’ killed dozens daily and mass killing remained rampant in Somalia and the Congo) we were all becoming more peaceful (Prospect Magazine, ix 2011):
Pinker’s attempt [in The Better Angels of Our Nature] to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence.
They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.
Pinker himself appeared on BBC Radio 4 (18 x, 09:05-09:30BST) to mention what was to the BBC his no-doubt newsworthy view that genes were ‘substantially’ involved in ‘personality’ (the Beeb promptly brought on g-denying Prof. Steve Jones [inheritor of Galton’s money at University College London] to decry this as ‘simplistic’, thus providing the Beeb’s version of ‘balance’ in the programme).
Needless to say, Pinker’s sanitized peecee version of the London School involved no mention of any actual twin or adoption study, of any heritability coefficient, of the words race, Black, IQ or intelligence, let alone of Hans Eysenck or Art Jensen. (In short, Pinker had learned nothing in the ten years since I challenged him about neglecting Eysenck when he lectured to an adoring audience in Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Museum. If you are Jewish, Harvard-educated and –tenured, leftish and peecee-obligeant, you can get away with anything – even with forgetting to defend the {supposed} Long Peace which had provided the pretext for the BBC interview.)
GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS
An empirical paean to the advantages of separating different ethnic groups was provided in international research by the New England Complex Systems Instituee (PhysOrg, 13 x). For rich, peaceful, well-armed and civilized Switzerland’s canton & ‘circle’ system went very much along ethnic lines, separating not only French, Germans and Italians but also Protestants and Catholics. {Any lack of national unity?
ETHNIC ECONOMICS FOR EUROPE
As the West’s wretched politicians and economists laboured through the fourth year of pretending to find an answer to the Clinton-caused mutlculti bubble&crunch (q.v.), the idea of ditching the more reckless borrowers and introducing “the only device that might save the day: a split into ‘hard’ EuroNord, with Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria, and a ‘soft’ EuroSud of the rest,” i.e. a McDougallian separation of a Nordic League from the rest (q.v.), appealed to the Daily Mail’s Gwyn Prins (17 x, Right Minds [ed. Simon Heffer]) and to the Daily Telegraph (leader, 22 x)
The basic analysis of the crisis of hypercapitalism, as caused by reckless (if politician-induced) lending to ‘subprimes’ (q.v. – i.e. initially to Blacks and Hispanics, but then to all and sundry as the bubble grew) was supported in a Channel 4 programme on Labour-knighted ‘Sir’ Fred the Shred (who had made RBS for a while the world’s biggest bank by taking on board the subprime-lending AEG), in a sober analysis by Treasury topman Robert Henderson, and even in the S.Torygraph’s colour magazine.
France’s claim to AAA status came under threat as the 70M-strong country (even with the help of its African empire) lost the rugby World Cup Final 7-8 to 5M-strong New Zealand (despite the All Blacks fielding two Maoris who tended to lose the ball and give away penalties)(23 x).
BRITISH BUREAUCRATS EXPOSED
The high-paid heidjuns of Basildon, Essex, having ‘battled’ for ten years, at the expense of £18M in 2011 alone, to rid the wretched ‘Dale Farm’ of some 50 dysgenic gypsy families who (with leftist help – Grauniad, 20x [though that paper was supposed to support women’s rights and education]) thought themselves above the law (claiming the right to settle without water or waste disposal – in defiance of planning laws), found themselves orchestrating a massive slow-motion confrontation between hundreds of police and bailiffs on the one hand and the out-of-Ireland ‘travellers’ and Red-Army-Faction hangers-on.
The two-day result – though involving tasers and metal cutters to detach protesters from their caravans and gantries -- was a mere 34 arrests (each likely to cost £300K in legal processing, custody and benefits, not to mention any yuman rights compensations) and a promise by the travellers to move on to whatever might be the next bit of unoccupied land they could find in Essex. Verily, Britain’s suits made mediaeval warfar look a triumph of will, planning and technology.
LSE STAR ECLIPSED
Libya’s Col Gadawfu, 69, top funder (with Labour encouragement) of several British lunis, but especially the traditionally leftish London School of Economics,* met a sticky end as Nato (i.e. France and Britain), in its declared mission of “protecting civilians”, bombed to bits an eighty-vehicle convoy in which the 42-yr-tyrant and modernizer was leaving his (heroically resistant) home town of Sirte – the otherwise adaptable pan-Africanist tyrant having held out for an impressive eight months against my advice (q.v.) to divide his country along traditional ethnic lines [Cyrenaica, Tripolitania] (though no doubt keeping most of the oil for himself).
The socialistic IRA-funding Lockerbie-bombing tyrant was believed to have been pinpointed by Nato intelligence officers after voice recognition technology picked up his voice in a satellite phone call. This intelligence breakthrough enabled Nato to train a US drone and eavesdropping aircraft on his base in Sirte to ensure he could not escape.
Hundreds of pro-Gaddafi fighters, ethnic Tuaregs [half-Black Saharan nomads], and Gadawfu’s LSE-doctorated son Saif promptly headed for Niger and Mali, aiming to carve out a state for themselves in those gold-rich wastelands (Reuters, 20 x). Just where Gadawfu’s fortune had ended up remained unknown; ditto his famously delightful nubile female bodyguards; but his armoury had been widely distributed across north Africa, where Kalashnikovs, by September, costed a mere £500.
As Gadawfu’s death liberated them, Western correspondents like the BBC’s top John Simpson revealed tidbits that the ‘mad dog’ tyrant who had fallen for Rev. Tony Blair’s charms (mercifully giving up his WMDs in the process) had been much given to manic laughter at Western journalists’ questions and to loud and unapologized farting. (Hitler’s speciality had been belching.)
But at no point was the loony left’s love of Gadawfu deemed fit to mention – Britain’s most revolutionary leader of the previous century, miners’ leader Arthur Scargill had approached him in 1984 for cash (though apparently without success).
* Long the LSE’s top sociologist, Labour-honoured Lord Anthony Giddens, was caught recalling of a 3-hr interview he was granted with the genial Colonel Muammar Gaddafi: “He is relaxed and clearly enjoys intellectual conversation. He likes the term ‘third way’ {thought up by Giddens to cover Rev Bliar’s empty promises} because his own political philosophy is a version of this idea. He makes many intelligent and perceptive points. I leave enlivened and encouraged.”
WHAT TO ‘OCCUPY’
As thousands of students made happy ‘liberating’ nuisances of themselves across America in the name of ‘Occupy Wall Street Now,’ the Wall Street Journal supplied a succinct analysis of how millions of students had been led to rack up debts (in what could be called the luni multiculti bubble – to be followed in ten years by another crash as ‘graduates’ [with rote memory degrees] and dropouts proved quite unable or unwilling to repay their loans) (21 x, James Taranto).
Growing up, [todays students] were told they needed a college education as a ticket to a productive life. Now they find themselves deeply in debt, their employment prospects limited in the Obama economy. So they're lashing out at the banks that hold their debt and at the corporations that have made a college degree into a license to hunt for a job.
Their anger is understandable but misplaced. The banks were merely doing what banks do; if they had refused to make student loans, these youngsters would have been just as upset. As for the corporations, the reason they demand college degrees, as we wrote in 2007, is that the government forbids them to screen applicants directly for basic intelligence under a doctrine of anti-discrimination law known as "disparate impact" that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Co.:
But why are employers able to get away with requiring a degree without running afoul of Griggs? Because colleges and universities--again, especially elite ones--go out of their way to discriminate in favor of minorities. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with much lower SAT scores than their white and Asian classmates, purportedly in order to promote "diversity," these institutions launder the exam of its disparity.
Thus the higher-education industry and corporate employers have formed a symbiotic relationship in which the former profits by acting as the latter's gatekeeper and shield against civil-rights lawsuits. Little wonder that in 2003, when the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of discriminatory admissions policies at the University of Michigan, 65 Fortune 500 companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that they be upheld.
Now of course the kids at Occupy Wall Street don't know any of this. They have received four-plus years of "education" from mostly left-wing professors who owe their sinecures to this arrangement and who are happy, for reasons of both ideology and self-interest, to vilify the capitalist system they feed off....
If these young people ever figure out the real reasons they're so deeply in debt, maybe they'll "occupy" Columbia and NYU rather than Wall Street.
In London, hundreds of years of lawmaking (i.e. lawyer-feeding) proved insufficient to deal with the threat of arson from the ‘occupiers’ encamped (in tents infinitely smarter than that with which I hitch-hiked, with camp fire, through Europe 1958-62) around St Paul’s, so the cathedral had to close its doors to the public for the first time since WWII – when Nazi arson attacks had been feared. (The closure was a major blow to the cathedral’s £20K-per-day income since St Paul’s was a leading London tourist site.)
g FACTOR FOR MUSIC
After two decades of Florida State Uni behaviourist Anders Ericsson maintaining (contrary to my advice but latterly egged on by NYTwit popularizer Malcolm Gladwell), new research on 57 pianists having put in an exceptionally wide range of practice hours (from a mere 50 to a colossal 300K) found the 50% contribution of practice differences to rated expertise (for previously unseen material) was just about matched by the contribution of individual differences in working memory (cognibabblers’ preferred g-avoidant nomenclature for fluid intelligence) (psychologists David Z. Hambrick of Michigan State University and Elizabeth J. Meinz of Southern Illinois University; Current Directions in Psychological Science, x 2011, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science; Medical Xpress, 21 x).
BRITAIN’S ‘CONSERVATIVES’ WHIP (EVEN IF JOCKEYS CAN’T)
Having failed to provide the expulsion of illiterate immigrants, the sterilization of fourth-sentence offenders, the abolition of lifelong benefits for the workshy and the restoration of same-day GP services for non-invalids, the Coalition HMG celebrated Her Majesty’s tour of Australia with a three-line whip insisting that ‘Conservative’ MPs deny British people a referendum on continuing membership of the E.U. – which by 2011 75% opposed (D.Express, 22 x; Spectator, 22 x). Meantime the nambipambification of Britain continued, with jockeys being told by horse-racing authorities to stop using the whip to get the best speed out of their horses.
TRIBUTE TO The g Factor (1996/2000)
I am not going to resist relaying a kindly tribute from a fan (who seeks publication for the review of TgF from which this sentence is extracted -- any ideas?):
If I were to choose the three most important political works of the twentieth century, I think they would be George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, and Chris Brand’s The g Factor. Orwell’s novel is the most readable and MacDonald’s trilogy the most radical, but Brand’s polemic is of the most general importance.
Naturally, as one would, I recalled the Amazon review which said the prose of TgF “sparkled like champagne”.... And McDougall’s wife being told by top international psychologists on his 1938 death that he would ‘never be forgotten’....
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Comments? Email Chris Brand. -- CV for Chris Brand. -- Some history.
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