+OK 39313 octets Received: from smtp01.nwnexus.com (smtp01.nwnexus.com [198.137.231.16]) by mail1.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA19027 for ; Tue, 16 Feb 1999 05:40:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from post.mail.demon.net (finch-post-10.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.38]) by smtp01.nwnexus.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA29672 for ; Tue, 16 Feb 1999 05:37:06 -0800 Received: from [193.237.6.75] (helo=Default) by post.mail.demon.net with smtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 10Ckff-00013p-00; Tue, 16 Feb 1999 13:36:16 +0000 Message-Id: <1.5.4.32.19990216133614.006d2720@mail.cycad.com> X-Sender: cbrand@mail.cycad.com (Unverified) X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (32) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 13:36:14 +0000 To: Marian Van Court From: Chris Brand Subject: McDougall NewsLetter HighLights, 16 ii '99 Status: THIS WEEK: VALENTINE SPECIAL -- with Babe Bagger Update! BLACK AFRICAN IQ OF 84 -- IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS LONDON SCHOOL LOVE! Chris Brand -- "WILL THIS MAN EVER STOP?" Edinburgh LUniversity -- "IT STINKS" ICON OF FEMINAZISM: TOP NEO-FASCIST BLONDE STRUGGLES INTO JEANS IN SUPPORT OF THE SISTERHOOD Race Realism Saint Valentine's Day emerged as being 'National Impotence Day' in New Labour Britain. Yet the sun never sets on the London School; and, across the Pond, members were in frisky form. AFRICAN IQ OF 84 -- AND THAT'S IN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS! Phil Rushton here, reporting on my recent trip to South African universities in search of a high-IQ African population. I gave Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices to 300 African and White first- year university students. The African students scored at the 14th percentile -- which is equivalent to an IQ of 84. Assuming these students are {like White college students today} one standard deviation above their own population mean, my study corroborates previous findings of IQ = 70 for the general African population (e.g. as reviewed in The Bell Curve, see especially the Afterword to the paperback edition). The classic Raven's Matrices should have been very easy for university students. Indeed Africans answered correctly 44 of the test's 60 items, so one cannot say they did not understand what was required of them. Yet a score of 44 is what White 14-year-olds obtain. The items behaved in the same way [in their statistical distributions and inter-correlations] for Africans as for Whites. Merely, the items proved more difficult for Africans. The test was effectively given untimed, both Africans and Whites being allowed one-and-a-half hours to finish -- though most did so within 30 minutes. This paper is under editorial review. In another study (also under review), I re-analyzed a set of data from 154 13- to-15-year-old secondary school students from Soweto, Johannesburg, on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). Here, too, the Africans scored 1.5 to 2 standard deviations below U.S. norms (both blacks and whites combined), suggesting a Black population IQ of about 70 to 75. Importantly, the African-White differences were more pronounced on tests loaded more highly for g than it was on tests on which results were less correlated g (r =0.77, p = .05). [g is the general factor on intelligence tests.] This .77 effect remained even when the g factor was extracted from the Black rather than from the White standardization sample (r = 0.60, p <.05). McDNL COMMENT: This is an astonishing result in a Black group that is presumably as test-sophisticated and high-achieving as could ever be found in Africa. -- The usual criticism of population estimates of IQ =70 for Black Africa has been that testees must somehow have been unfamiliar or unhappy with procedures of testing. It should be said that the classic Raven's Matrices is a test on which typical British prisoners (who have virtually never achieved university entrance standards) will score around 40 in just 15 minutes' work. The test essentially involves the completion of abstract wallpaper-type patterns: in each item, the testee picks one of six ways of completing a pattern from which one piece has been removed; and there are plenty of easy items that help testees to understand the principles involved and to feel they have got off to a good start. Warmest Congratulations to Phil Rushton and Elizabeth Weiss on their Engagement! The delightfully endowed Elizabeth, 25, is a proper physical anthropologist, with no Boasian nonsense, whose facility in English, German, Spanish and, especially, Arabic* will bring new talent to the London School. All eugenists will hope that the couple will follow in the better London School traditions: William McDougall 5; Hans Eysenck 5; Chris Brand 3; Ian Deary 3. After early disappointments (Sir Francis Galton 0; Sir Charles Spearman 0; Sir Cyril Burt 0) and recent losses to the Great Reaper (Ray Cattell, Lee Willerman, Hans Eysenck himself), the School needs the boost that dapper Phil and spirited Elizabeth are well equipped to provide. * Elizabeth's views on polygamy are currently unknown. If she tells McDNL, she will earn Ł20 to help with her bottom drawer! {New offer to all contributors of original items to McDNL announced today. -- Ed.} Brandyballs Evening News [Edinburgh] 9 ii '99, pp. 16-17, Tom Curtis With 3 photos: Brand in central Edinburgh [Waverley Bridge] displaying double chin, nasal hair, Moss Bros tie and high-will-power grin -- "BRAND VIEW: Chris Brand believes his controversial views have made him a victim of social control"; The g Factor, carried by Brand in linen suit (Walker & Slater), sporting Veni, Vidi, Vici tie (Maria) -- "NEW LEAF: Brand's book, The g Factor, sparked a furious row, not least for his claims that "negroids" -- as he calls blacks -- have a low average IQ and a predilection for crime"; Flashback to Evening News 8 viii '97, 'RACE ROW LECTURER AXED' -- "BRAND SACKED BY UNIVERSITY." ////// WILL THIS MAN NEVER GIVE UP? He was sacked by Edinburgh University after the furious reaction to his views on race and paedophilia. But Chris Brand is unrepentant -- and still espouses the opinions which led to his downfall. CHRIS BRAND has a lot of sympathy for Glenn Hoddle. The former Edinburgh University lecturer feels he and the ex-England manager are both victims of what Brand describes as "the new religion of political correctness." He can stretch the comparison to include other victims -- Bill Clinton, Scottish philosopher David Hume, even Italian scientist Galileo. Mr Brand sees himself as a man under siege, a modern-day heretic condemned for exercising his democratic right to express his views. To most people those views are repugnant. He believes paedophilia is not usually harmful to bright children and that black people are less intelligent than whites. His opinions have left him in a mess. Since he was sacked by Edinburgh University, Mr Brand has applied for more than 100 jobs and got none of them. The book which made him infamous -- The g Factor -- has been withdrawn from sale, he cannot find another publisher and the vast majority of fellow academics have condemned his views. As a result, Chris Brand drifts in limbo, only able to get his message across via the Internet. He sits in libraries during the day, researching material for his website newsletter. His only income comes from lodgers at his home near St Leonard's and stints as a waiter. But Chris Brand is not ready to turn around and say "I was wrong." Far from it -- he firmly believes in his views and his right to express them freely. The twice-divorced 55-year-old says simply: "I think I am a pariah. It's a great deal better than being a leper or a witch in the past, but people still spit at me in the street.I applied for a job as a postman and passed the psychological tests, but they didn't follow it up. It's been a common experience." Mr Brand believes he is in the same boat in the "liberal" West as those who criticised the old Soviet regime. "The last people on any scale who couldn't get their work published were the dissidents in the Soviet Union," he says. Mr Brand lost an internal appeal against dismissal from Edinburgh University last March. He was sacked for misconduct1 after a row about an e-mail he sent on the subject of paedophilia, which he says can often be harmless if the child is consenting and intelligent. He had earlier faced controversy over The g Factor which claims intelligence is genetically and racially based and that black people are, on average, less bright than whites. Mr Brand -- who refers to his former employer as Edinburgh Loony-versity -- wants an industrial tribunal to try to get himself reinstated and help academics in the same boat. "I want to go back to try to help staff living in fear because they know their contracts are worthless, and that the moment anyone wants to get them out they can find an excuse in the controversial nature of something they have said," he states. Mr Brand believes the situation with political correctness in general is as serious as the days when scholars could not criticize Christianity. "Here is the new religion, it's called PC, and it says you must talk nicely about any minority group you can think of," he says. His theory is that PC is a new method of social control dreamed up by the Left. "The socialists have abandoned an economic agenda because the USSR has proved that to be utterly devastating, so instead they have moved into the social arena. They are saying we won't try to control things like people's finances, but we are going to go for crime instead; and while we're at it we'll also invent a few other crimes as well and play up everything faintly offensive or unacceptable, such as date rape -- which is made worse than burglary. We will happily send you to prison for years if you have, after a drunken evening at a dance, merely crawled into bed with a woman at four in the morning.2 "The latest example is Hoddle. He is supposed to avoid any reference to his religious beliefs and then is condemned by the Prime Minister when he doesn't. In that sense he and I are similar. It was his opinion; and for his opinion he's had the Prime Minister of the UK behave like Henry VIII -- saying off with his head." Mr Brand also hears similar echoes from the impeachment of President Clinton. "They're using the most trivial thing to produce massive public disgrace," he claims. David Hume, whose atheism stopped him getting a university chair in the 18th century, is also in some ways comparable, he believes. And Mr Brand sees Galileo's once unheard-of view that the earth revolved around the sun as the equivalent of his own controversial views. But the most infamous of Brand's PC-unfriendly views remains that on sexual relations with children. Despite the furore, he still says calmly: "The evidence is that classical paedophilia [he refers to 'hands down choirboys' trousers rather than rape] is typically harmless, particularly as long as not too much fuss is made about it." "I'm unhappy about going round locking people up unless they have done some kind of tangible harm." -- FURIOUS CRITICS3 EAGER TO SAVAGE BRAND'S IDEAS CHRIS BRAND's views still have the capacity to irritate and annoy. Professor Steven Rose, director of the Brain and Behaviour research group at the Open University, has been very critical of Mr Brand in the past. He believes that there are two main problems with his approach. "The idea that IQ tests measure intelligence, that there is some fixed lum in the brain that you can call intelligence, is highly debatable," he says. "Mot psychologists would say you can't take a phenomenon like intelligence and boil it down to a single thing. IQ might be a good way to measure how well kids do at school. But we don't pin down something as general as intelligence for very good reasons. Distressing "Secondly, although it's true that in the US, although not elsewhere, black people score on average lower than whites in IQ tests, there are a very large number of reasons for this, such as racism and environmental constraints. So the attempt to say the tests tell you anything at all is not a very useful exercise -- which is why most of the scientific community don't take these views very seriously." Anne Houston, director of child abuse help line Childline Scotland, thinks Mr Brand is completely wrong in his views on paedophilia. She says: "I have never spoken to any child or adult who experienced sexual abuse who did not at some time feel extremely guilty about what happened to them.4 "I suppose if somebody felt perfectly OK about it we might never hear about it. But from the huge numbers of children that have phoned it is evidently very distressing and can cause problems in later life as well." -- Mr Brand is also sticking to his view that average IQs are lowest among "negroids" -- although he concedes "Scottish negroids" are probably cleverer, since they have passed through the selection process of immigration. He believes low IQ is associated with crime, and that low black IQ is associated with black crime. He is also dismissive of black culture. He believes streamed schools would help make blacks in the US more contented with their lot and "amelioriate" the "problems" they pose. "We could say you're never going to read Schopenhauer, but we are going to be able to find something you're relatively good at, like running a small shop" (or a drugs deal, he jokes). He also suggests channelling more black people into domestic service and advocates multiple marriage for black men to reduce the number of single parent black families and the criminality he claims goes with them. Asked if he thinks the world would be a better place without black people, he replies casually: "In terms of contributions to civilisation -- I'm not a follower of basketball myself. And I'm not into jazz." Despite his views, Mr Brand claims to have a good black friend, a London geneticist whom he will not name. He is still an enthusiast for his views, and a man with a mission -- to win his long-awaited tribunal. In the meantime, he can look on the bright side. He is cheerful at the prospect of more greasy plates at an Edinburgh hotel -- and thinks criticism of his views may be easing off. "I very rarely get hate e-mail now," he smiles. McDNL Notes 1. Edinburgh University now likes to claim vaguely that Brand's firing was for "misconduct" -- as if he had blackened Dame Stewart's eye or suggested Dr Halla Beloff can no longer understand New Yorker cartoons. In fact, the sacking was for "disgracefully" sending one page of e-mail urging clemency for a 73-year-old Nobelist who faced a 30-year-jail term for paedophilia. The full report of the University's own internal Tribunal is published on the Net at http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch3b.htm. 2. A bespectacled 36-year-old Lancashire solicitor who slipped into bed for just 15 seconds, at 4a.m., with a 25-year-old female law trainee who had invited him to sleep on a sofa in her London bedroom, after he had taken her to a dinner-dance, received three years imprisonment (for 'attempted rape') (Evening Standard [London], 15 i '98). 3. Evidently no such critics were available from five minutes down the road at Edinburgh LUniversity. 4. That's more like it! Many 'victims' would have been complicit in the activities -- whether because they sought money, treats, thrills, experience or just affection. Paedohysteria (Times 12 ii '99) PLANNING MARRIAGE WHEN YOUR HEART-THROB REACHES 16? FORGET IT! What chance has True Love today? A 37-year-old Briton has just been arrested in Cincinnati for discussing possible marriage with girl who will soon be 16. Ian Waddup, who has four children and lives with his aunt on Tyneside after a failed marriage, had developed a liaison with his Cincinnati girlfriend over the Internet and flew out to meet her for Saint Valentine's Day. Now he faces deportation from the USA by police who claim he may have 'corrupted a minor' and 'interfered with parental custody.' He 'could very well have been a danger,' the cops said. It is true that the man, Ian Waddup, who once ran a fish-and-chip shop, has had minor convictions for sex offences with 13-year-old children dating back to 1977, when he himself was 15; but he has never been sent to prison, and his last recorded offence was in 1994. At first, it was thought he had been cleverly detected at his fearsome paedophiling by a police 'sting' on the Internet; but subsequently it emerged that his own father, on hearing of the Valentine's jaunt, had denounced him to British police as "violent, sick and disturbed." Waddup is not without means to devote to his beloved: he had apparently spent Ł12,000 in Internet and phone bills as the pair became involved. True Puppy Love (Guardian 10 ii '99) To the astonishment of Edinburgh LUniversity psychologists -- who accept neither paedophilia nor thanatos, three girls of ages 11-14 lept to their death from the eighth floor of their Moscow tower block. The reason? They were all three in love with local seventeen-year-old Dima Leonov who had no time for them at all. As media hounds investigated the block of 171 one-room flats for families at Balashikha, they found the girls' love daubings on the walls. The girls had all issued suicide threats but, like E.LU. psychologists, locals did not believe such illegal things were possible -- and so the pretty teenagers perished. {A fine presentation of suicide notes is given by an ex-policeman in this week's New Yorker (15 ii '99). The sheer ordinariness and lack of emotion of the notes is astonishing. The impossibility of shifting some of life's logjams is apparent, especially when no one will take intending suicides seriously.) True Single-Parent Love (Daily Mail [Scotland], 11 ii '99, p. 1) Kenneth Easton, 34, and Kerry-Anne Thomson, 26, are dead. Easton shot his girlfriend and turned his gun on himself after months of meetings ended in disagreement. Both were single parents with children and bright hope had beckoned. Even though Thomson had sometimes claimed she was 'stalked' and had taken out injunctions against Easton, she always drew the line at providing the police with any evidence when they suggested prosecution. Now wymmin's groups are bleating that all alleged stalkers should be castrated at once. In fact, Kerry-Anne would probably have been a lot safer if she had -- as classically -- remained in the care of one man until she was passed into that of another; and if Easton had been allowed reasonable access to pursue his suit. Neosocialism (BBCR4UK 15 ii '99, 08:00 and 22:00) {cf. McDNL 19 i '99, ''Tough on crime' to include 'tough on the personality disordered'') INTERNMENT BECKONS NEW LABOUR The option of unlimited detention for men judged 'dangerous' by a doctor is being pursued by New Labour. Although internment was abandoned by Mrs Thatcher as a way of handling Ireland's troubles, Home Secretary Jack Straw now thinks it would be fine as a way of dealing with cases of 'personality disorder' even where no crime has been committed and the person has no mental illness which doctors can ameliorate or cure. 'Violent paedophiles' [not a single example provided] are at the top of the Government's hit list -- making for good PR. Legislation is now in the pipeline to realize New Labour's draconian vision. The human rights group 'Liberty' has protested, and BBC legal and forensic-psychiatric experts were aghast; but the Government believes it can draft a proposal for locking up crimeless psychopaths that is within the terms of the European Human Rights Convention to which it is a signatory. Moreover, the mental health lobby group 'Sane' likes the idea of untreatable psychopaths being refused the pleasant amenities (books, TV, PCs, visits etc.) that are available to 'deserving cases' such as the flagrantly psychotic, the droolingly incontinent, the cringingly neurotic and the rampantly syphilitic. {H.M.G. dare not intern any 'political' in Ireland but that hardly matters because the Eirish government does the job instead. In its latest function as a feudal administrator for Westminster, the Dublin Government has said the IRA must give up a few weapons before being allowed to draw salaries as Ministers of State in the North -- a pronouncement that Mr Blair himself had declined to make.} {Neosocialism has been blasted in a letter to the Times (11 ii '99) by Thatcherite peer Lord Beloff who long ran Britain's only non-state-funded university. 'Third Way? -- More like the Third Reich!' says Britain's top Pole -- if with a little of the fine extravagance that made Poland itself ungovernable for a century.} Edinburgh LUniversity "IT STINKS" On Saturday, 13th February, in Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, toadies of the University of Edinburgh had to suppress a motion from Mr John Geoffrey Sharps, M.A. Sharps, who had been Chris Brand's Assistant at the E.LU. Tribunal into the Brand Affair (May-July, 1997), was demanding from E.LU.'s General Council an investigation of the University's charge that he himself had 'harassed' its Personnel Department. Sharps had sought to discover how the Personnel Director, Ms Christine E. Wallace [lately retired mysteriously for health reasons], could have repeatedly and publicly presented herself by the forbidden designation 'Member of the British Psychological Society' while being paid ŁUK70,000p.a. to provide expertise to the University across the entire field of 'professional qualifications'. As a result of his attempts to check that Ms Wallace realized how she was designated in University brochures, Sharps found himself accused of 'harassment.' In his ten-minute speech to the Council, Mr Sharps -- talking, he said, "as much in sorrow as in anger" -- accused the University of "incompetence and negligence at the highest level." Thus he alluded not only to Ms Wallace's improper claim but to her failure to produce the University's 'Professional Standards' document until a week before the Brand Tribunal opened; and to Sir Stewart Sutherland's submission of false and inflated figures on University performance to the Government's Dearing Committee. Sharps' point was that the University's top managerial staff 'let slip' inaccuracies and delays -- thus improving the University's key statistics for the public record, inflating their own professional qualifications, and making it easier to remove 'controversial' academics like Brand. At first, the University lied to the Council that the details of Mr Sharps' 'harassment' episode had already been investigated by the University Rector [elected by staff and students to act as ombudsman in the University]. However, if any such investigation had ever occurred, it neither solicited nor heard Mr Sharps' own account of events, nor did was the result of such Rectorial inquiry communicated to Mr Sharps himself. Thus, after Mr Sharps' speech and several expressions of sympathy for his case, the University had to call on its lunchers to defeat the demand for an inquiry, which they did by 4-1. Subsequently, the University was further embarrassed by questioning from Mr Sharps to Sir Stewart Sutherland. This elicited astonishing information. Over several meetings, pressed continuously by Sharps, Sutherland had been made to apologize to the Council for submitting seriously erroneous figures to the Dearing Committee. Now it transpired that, in the course of a whole year since his apology, Sutherland had done precisely nothing to correct the figures either with the national Committee itself or its many readers in the media. [The Dearing Committee was 'the big event'of the 1990's in British higher education.] Small wonder that, over the knees-up that followed, one 65-year-old lady who had previously been neutral in the spat was moved to express her opinion of the University's conduct in stonewalling all of Sharps' criticisms: "It stinks," she declared. Whether a wider public will agree remains to be seen: The Scotsman, Edinburgh's Evening News and The Glaswegian had all taken some interest (in a private meeting which they were not themselves allowed to attend), and Student sent a photographer to take several pictures of the vice-chancellorly figured Geoffrey Sharps as he concluded his damning oration. Rape Realism NEOSOCIALISM = FEMINAZISM = NEOFASCISM (Reuters 11 ii '99; Times 12 ii '99, p. 1, with picture of a blonde, bubbly and rather pudgy Alessandra Mussolini wearing blue jeans) ROME -- Italy's Court of Cassation has outraged feminists by deciding that a 45-year-old driving instructor could not have raped an 18-year-old trainee. The man quite agrees the pair had lusty sex in a Lamborghini but says the girl did not want to admit her enthusiasm to her parents. Quite simply, said the court, the girl was wearing tight denim jeans -- well known to be virtually impossible to remove in a car if a girl puts up the slightest resistance. Nor is it easy to get down to basics in a car with a girl who is (as feminists often allege of these occasions) 'paralyzed by fear.' Italian feminasties are incensed, saying the verdict puts the clock back thirty years. {To days of common sense, indeed! -- Ed.} Outside Italy's Parliament, six women members demonstrated with placards reading 'JEANS -- THE ALIBI FOR RAPE' and urged all Italian women to wear jeans as a protest until the court's ruling was overturned. Leading the demonstrators was Alessandra Mussolini, a deputy for the far-right National Alliance party. Hilariously, the Court had rejected the argument that the girl had given in because of fear of injury. After all, it pointed out, taking feminists at their word, "it is difficult to imagine anything worse than rape." PC / Antiracialunacy (Times 12 ii '99) BLACK POLICE TO BE DRAFTED INTO AMBRIDGE*…. -- Britain: Police Constables to become Political Correctioners -- In a frenzy of 'antiracialism', plans are being made in Britain for Black police to be recruited and sent to country areas where there are no Black criminals to police. Provoked by the Lawrence case -- where the parents of a mudered Black youth, Stephen Lawrence, want a retrial of the 'racist' killers -- Home Secretary Jack Straw wants 10% of all UK police to be people of non-British descent {PnBRIs -- see below, Scientific American}. And the 10% demand is to apply to police forces in outlying rural areas such as Cornwall, Devon, Cumbria, North Wales and North Yorkshire. Further plans include 'monitoring' (i.e. snooping on) 'racists' and advertising them to 'local communities' (i.e. putting them in the stocks): convicted racists will be "named and shamed," say police. Mr Straw is also 'looking at' the possibility of clawing back the pensions of any officers who retire after allegations of 'racism' that are subsequently proven. All this is happening in a country where the police and criminologists now decline to admit publicly that Black youths are over-represented threefold in crime and where anyone can accuse anybody of 'racism' and 'instutional racism' with impunity. -- The wildest dreams of antiracialoons of the 1980's are being realized with astonishing speed. In fact, while the Campaign for Racial Equality says there are 130,000 racist episodes complained of annually by PnBRIs, the Campaign's own figures show 240,000 complaints by people of western European stock. Yet even the 'right-wing'/liberal stalwarts of the BBC's flagship 'Moral Maze' programme found it hard to address the question selected for them, 'Multiculturalism: Is it possible? Is it desirable?' (BBCR4UK 13 ii '99, 22:00-22:30). Hard-core David Starkey would not defend the proposition that police be selected for ability, but said merely that police should 'represent the local community' -- thus abandoning London, at least, to the kind of enforced Black policing from which the USA's cities suffer (not least in terms of wrongful shootings, arrests, frauds and resulting litigation). * In the village that is the legendary home of 'The Archers' (the world's longest-running soap opera), natives are currently exercised by the plan of one of the show's young females to undertake charitable work in Zimbabwe. {Quite rightly! See McDNLs passim! -- Ed.} {One problem is that British police were given so many pay rises by Mrs Thatcher that the older members are now expensive to employ. Thus unloading them for 'racism' and replacing them with docile young immigrant recruits is attractive. -- Such at least is the view of a retired senior police officer who wrote to the Sunday Times (14 ii '99).} Western Criminal Justice (Daily Mail [Scotland] 11 ii '99) A 51-year-old hermit who has roughed it around Dumbarton, Stirlingshire and Falkirk for the past twenty years is being threatened with prison for occasional thefts of cans of baked beans and bottles of whisky. A skilled survivalist who builds tree homes in forests, Robert Sinclair probably deserves a medal for helping trapped animals, lost children and young men threatened with date-rape charges. He has cost the state precisely nothing -- far less than the average Scotoid who needs GPs to call on Saturday nights when 24 hours of solid end-of-the-week drinking have taken their toll. (Scotoids on council housing schemes also call up free veterinary services at any time of day or night. These services to people who shouldn't be possessing animals in the first place are provided by a charity, the People's Dispensary of Sick Animals.) At least Sinclair's story deserves to be told. Almost certainly it will involve unrequited love and broken contracts. Instead, Sinclair will be banged up if he does not promptly find himself a friend and settle down to domesticity. The only consolation is that jail terms in Scotland do not yet involve the standard US punishment of being sodomized by mentally defective and HIV-infected Black males who not uncommonly cut victims' sphincter muscles to effect the rape. Psychopharmacology (New Yorker 15 ii '99, 'Running from Ritalin', Malcolm Gladwell) DOCS into DOPE Fulfilling a lifelong ambition of psychologist Hans Eysenck, British GPs are now being offered the dopamine booster, Ritalin, on a massive scale. Ritalin not only helps GPs keep awake at conferences but is useful in making 1.5% of US children go through the motions of attending to their boring teachers in dumbed-down schools. Ritalin makes up for psychoanalysis which was the only thing in the past that could sustain the interest of psychologists and psychiatrists after lunch. In Edinburgh, the big push to medics came at last week's conference for 150 in the Royal College of Physicians. Especially because the medics assembled in the gracious colonaded building on Queen Street did not know of Eysenck's pioneering crusade to help low-attention extraverts, some of them required all the sustenance that servings of coffee and Ritalin could provide to help them stay the course. Lunch involved chicken in lime and ginger, plum-stewed lamb, salads galore and quiche Lorraine for the ladies. Ritalin is controversial in some quarters -- i.e. with Steven Rose (Open University) who fears the reduction in job creation for social workers and teachers in remedial classes. One problem is that extraversion has hardly been heard of in Britain because Jung and Eysenck only came up with the idea fifty years ago. Essentially, Ritalin works wonders for children who, over more than six months, meet the following DSMIV* criteria: · have difficulty organizing tasks · are distracted by extraneous stimuli · are always 'on the go' · blurt out answers to questions before the questioner has finished. Ritalin improves accuracy of letter cancellation and time estimation in children in whom impulsive action normally takes precedence over any other consideration. Children become better at inhibiting a usual response to a tone if a warning signal occurs just before response-execution is due. Ritalin prevents children needing to buy nicotine and cocaine -- which are also dopamine boosters. (Harvard Medical School's Tim Wilens finds children on Ritalin have 68% less chance of becoming drug addicts in adolescence.) To help medics feel that the whole pharmacotherapeutic operation is OK, the extraverts to be given the drug are said to suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The only side-effects are occasional appetite loss and insomnia -- both to be expected in people who have been made a little more anxious and introverted (e.g. R. Lynn, 1972, Personality & National Character, Oxford, Pergamon). Fortunately, New Yorkers are now having matters explained to them directly in their weekly coffee table magazine; and British GPs will handle the matter in their discrete fashion for UK schemies -- never mentioning the eugenic practices which families might have adopted instead or the possibility of solving kids' problems by introducing tracked learning. As Malcolm Gladwell says, drug companies have not invented the need for Ritalin: "Modernity didn't create ADHD -- it revealed it." However, provision by waiters of psychological advice at Edinburgh medical conferences is likely to be in short supply for a while. A US millionaire who read the Commentary issue of last December (see McDNL 24 xi '98) is positively insisting that Chris Brand should for a while concentrate on research work * Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV -- the Bible of American psychiatry. Scientific Censorship Today (Sunday Times 14 ii '99) GAGGED GREEN GAINS PEER BACKING A 68-year-old Aberdeen food scientist who was bundled into early retirement for whistle-blowing about genetic engineering has been backed by twenty international colleagues, including six from Britain. The scientist, Arpad Puszta (of Polish origin), had had his lips sealed by the government-funded Rowett Institute after he noticed evidence that genetically engineered potatoes had bad effects on rats' livers, brains and immune systems; but now geneticists like Professor Pennington of Aberdeen University have agreed there may be real dangers. Arpad Puszta's TV appearance had been with the blessing of his director at Rowett, a Professor James; but James is in line for a senior government appointment, and the Rowett Institute is funded to the tune of ŁUK140,000p.a. by Monsanto, the world's largest producer of genetically modified crops. In the period of stress at Rowett as his job was on the line, Puszta apparently had a heart attack. {As usual in such affairs, the media have paid no attention to the the nature of scientific judgement. That 'more research is necessary to see whether there are dangers, and what they may be' has thus been made to support hysterical demands that all genetically modified crops be withdrawn and that all genetic experimentation should cease forthwith. Greenpeace and The Townswomen's Guild have made common cause in support for bioluddism. Plainly scientists like Puszta working in such areas can create huge upsets by pre-publication talk of their results. Yet if their work needs to be secret the Government should be honest, require them to sign the Official Secrets Act, and not pretend that they are working as ordinary academics who have a right and duty to contribute to public debate. -- Not that such a right is respected at Edinburgh LUniversity!} NEWS BRIEFING and UPDATE WASHINGTON -- Republicans were humiliatingly routed as they could not even muster a simple majority of the 100 Senate votes on either of the articles of impeachment against the Reverend Clintstone of the Church of the Seven Day Fornicators, let alone the two-thirds majority needed to convict him. A 'censure motion' also foundered. Now Presidential advisor James 'Ragin' Cajun' Carville is on the warpath against Blowjobgate Prosecutor Kenneth Starr. "Bury the hatchet?" says Carville, "I'll bury it in him!" As explained in this NewsLetter over the past year, Republicans have wasted valuable time that could have been spent reading The g Factor. Alas, they seem incurably gripped by old-fashioned religious mania: even their new man for the White House, Steve Forbes, who offers a promising 17% flat rate of taxation, feels obliged to denounce abortion and euthanasia rather than leave these matters to individual choice and expense. LONDON's chastened newspapers have now come round to accepting the folly of trying President Clinton for low crimes when the Constitution only mentioned high crimes as impeachable. "The stupidest trial of all time," said the top Times columnist, Simon Jenkins (12 ii '99) after a year in which both tabloids and broadsheets had bayed for Presidential blood. {A thoughtful and fact-rich psychoanalysis of President Clinton by Paul Lowinger can be found at http://zpub.com/un/bcms-b.html -- 'Bill Clinton meets the shrinks.') NEW DELHI (Reuters) -- An Indian news editor said he had written to the country's sports minister to suggest that disgraced English soccer coach, Glenn Hoddle, train India's squad for the Sydney Olympics. "Karma and reincarnation are cardinal beliefs for Hindus and it is unfair that Hoddle should lose his job for professing faith in it,'' Maharajah Features Editor K.R. Padmanabhan wrote in a letter to Minister Uma Bharati. ___________________ Don't forget 'Babe Bagger Update 3' and much more -- at the website! _________________________________________________________________ Chris Brand Edinburgh, UK. My details, psychology articles and weekly (Tuesday) updates appear at . Fax reception by arrangement. -- "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is "not done" to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals". George ORWELL, 1945, Introduction to 'Animal Farm.' -- .