More timewasting for the "gifted"

I see they are going ahead with their absolutely horrific proposals to provide even more expensive interference in the lives of any child with an IQ slightly above average. It is very unlikely that the type of ‘educational’ facilities proposed — lectures, classes, groups, summer schools etc — will actually be advantageous rather than disadvantageous, even for those with the lowest IQs in the top 10% of the population.

This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").

If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.

I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.

"Liberal instincts"

Extracts from article

After dinner, Amy popped down to the corner shop. It was 10.30pm. When she returned, she staggered through the front door smeared with mud — and soaked with blood from a dreadful wound in her chest. In the 500 yards between shop and home she had been followed by a youth whose face was concealed by a hood, pushed to the ground, robbed of her bag and stabbed in the ribs with a screwdriver. ...

On our streets today it is the middle-class young people — the products of our liberal homes — who are being targeted. Amy is convinced there is a growing war on London streets between the dispossessed of the graffiti-covered estates and the middle classes: "Trust me, Dad. He wouldn't have gone for one of his own." So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what's going on in the street outside. But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I. ...

We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education — no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here. ...

As I, and all the others with Paul Smith suits and briefcases, strode past the addicts shooting up outside the Tube, and the Special Brew drinkers on the kerb, I used to think smugly: "Well, this doesn't touch me." But, the chances always were that it would in the end. And it did, in the worst possible way. (‘The night my daughter was stabbed — and my liberal instincts died’ by Michael Williams, Daily Mail, 5 March 2007.)

My comments

The writer of this article, as usual, seems to assume that some expected norm of civilised behaviour can be produced by confiscating freedom (by means of taxation) from the functional and non-criminal members of society. “Educational policy” is implicitly blamed for an increase in crime, and the implied solution must be to take more money away from the “middle class” in order to bestow benefits on those who behave badly.

Of course it is true that the schools are producing an ever-increasing population of demoralised young people. But it is questionable whether any tweaking of the system can produce any beneficial effect, since egalitarian ideology is already rampant throughout modern society — not only within the schools and universities — and pours out of every television screen.

If there has been an increase in criminal behaviour it is not necessarily attributable only to social influences. The modern ideology has favoured the expansion of the lower-IQ population by financial support, medical treatment and support for dysfunctional offspring, or offspring of dysfunctional parents, all at the expense of the taxpaying population, which has therefore tended to delay and curtail its own families.

This favouring of reproductive activity by the “poor” may in itself have increased the incidence of crime, regardless of their educational or social experience, as there may well be — and there is some evidence that there are — genetic factors predisposing to crime.

Some time ago I saw a statistic to the effect that men who had at least one criminal conviction were producing 30 percent more offspring than men who had no criminal record. If there are genetic factors involved, this would not have to continue for many generations to create a noticeable increase in criminal activity.

This is a quotation on this subject from Dysgenics by Richard Lynn:

The high correlations obtained by Tygart (1991) of criminality with number of siblings suggests that genetic deterioration with regard to conscientiousness may be about twice as great as that for intelligence. Our finding that the fertility of criminals in Britain is about 50 percent greater than that of the population as a whole corroborates the conclusion that this is a serious problem. It may well be that dysgenic fertility for conscientiousness and criminality – which has received the least attention from eugenicists, and which has made a significant contribution to rising crime rates in many Western nations in the second half of the twentieth century – is the most serious of the dysgenic problems confronting modern populations. (Praeger, 1996, p.209)

Aphorism of the month (March)

The concept of a good social structure is a contradiction in terms. A good escape committee in a prison camp is recognised by the speed with which it renders itself unnecessary.


(from the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Fish oils and intelligence

Professor Basant Puri, described as a ‘scientist’, who is a Professor at Imperial College, London and hence, one supposes, paid out of taxpayers’money, i.e. by confiscation of freedom from individual members of society, has just published some ‘research’ which purports to establish that academic performance can be enhanced by feeding children fish-oils, and hence that ‘mass supplementation’ of school children is called for.

That will, of course, if it happens (which it well may), require further confiscation of freedom from all taxable members of the population, including those who, like myself, were left with no way of making a career or even of earning money at the end of the ruinous ‘education’ (which was paid for largely by confiscation of freedom). Nor with any way of drawing income support from the Social Security, as the reasons for their being unable to earn a living were not socially accepted, and they were not prepared to falsify their position and engage in elaborate pretences of seeking work which they would never accept.

Even such people as myself are, on this proposal, to have their liberty even further reduced by taxation, thus reducing their ability to provide themselves with the excellent diet they need to have, both to remain alive long enough to get started on their long-delayed forty-year adult careers, and to keep themselves out of the clutches of the totally unacceptable, immoral and iniquitous medical profession.

Incidentally, another way in which such legislation would damage people such as myself is that it would probably have the effect of making fish-oils more expensive and difficult to obtain, and perhaps eventually almost unobtainable.

I don’t think we need worry too much that even the ‘poorest’ are prevented from getting fish-oils if they want them. Children on the whole appear to have enough pocket-money, and their parents enough social benefits, to become obese and alcoholic.

Are my books ideological anathema?

This is a comment from someone to one of my books, and to the letter written by Fabian which he found in it. This buyer of Advice to Clever Children sent a message via Fabian’s blog.

I recently bought Celia Greens 'Advice for Clever Children' from a dealer on Amazon. In the book I found a letter written by a certain 'Fabian Wadel' adressed to the Librarian of the Institute of Education at the University of London which says;

"We enclose two complimentary copies of books by Dr Celia Green, which we hope you will accept as gifts to your library" and, "We hope the books may be of particular interest to young people of undergraduate age."

This is dated September 17 2004. I have it now in front of me. Is it at least plausible to surmise that the librarian took one look at this book and was so freaked out by the content that it was immediately donated to another book dealer and put up for sale?

Having read the book myself I can tell you that — if what you describe is true — any academic library would rather accept 10 complimentary copies of Mein Kampf than anything by Celia Green — an ideological closed shop after all.

My comments

Thank you for sending the information about what happened to our presentation of books to the London University Department of Education. It is no surprise; we are heavily censored and it costs us a lot of money (and of course, effort) to get even a few books out into the world.

As usual, my aims and objects are diametrically opposed to those of society at large, so far as I am concerned. I need my books to reach the widest possible audience because those who might give us any assistance, by work, money or moral support, are clearly extremely few and far between. Society at large, and practically every individual representative of it, wants me to remain as inconspicuous, inactive, and as nearly as possible non-existent at possible.

Asking libraries for our books might be of more use to us than buying them, unless (or perhaps even if) you are a person whose bookshelf is frequently visited by other people. But what motive could anyone have for making the exertion involved in asking for one of our books at a library?

You seem to take a very dim view of the objectivity and openness to criticism of academics; of course you are quite right to do so, but the academic world is supposed to be passionately devoted to freedom of expression, as I read only a few days ago, so shouldn’t you sound a bit surprised, or even shocked?

Middle classes hit hardest

Extract from ‘Middle classes are hit hardest in the pocket’, Daily Mail 5 March 2007:

Middle earners are bearing the brunt of the highest tax levels for a quarter of a century to prop up failing public services, a report concludes today. … A family with £45,000 a year in disposable income will see 48.7 per cent of it disappear in direct and indirect taxes. ...

A study, from the centre-right think tank Reform, warns ‘Taxes are rising to their highest level for 25 years. … the billions of pounds raked in to increase spending on schools and hospitals have been squandered in a decade of Labour rule. … Its writers say Britain is ‘very poorly placed internationally for the next ten years, with low taxation and excellence in education crucial for future success. … Less than half of children currently achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths.’

The report... warns that on current trends, from 2012 young people can expect to pay high taxes and compulsory payments towards higher education and pensions. The effective tax burden for a typical graduate will be 47.6 per cent, before any other costs of living are added on.

My comments

There are constantly being new proposals for increasing the burden of taxation, such as prolonging compulsory education, setting up databases, including fingerprinting for 11-year olds, ID cards for all, monitoring and charging for every mile driven by every motorist, more money to be spent on treating obese or alcoholic children and taking them away from their parents, inspectors to invade houses at any time to see if there have been any improvements which could be used as a justification for raising the Council Tax, which is needed to provide ‘help’ and intervention for the dysfunctional, and so on. But who is complaining? It shouldn’t take my IQ to realise that the object of the exercise is to reduce the most intelligent, functional and independent members of the population to poverty, and dependence on a population of agents of the collective (doctors, teachers, social workers etc) with a low average IQ.

The web does us no good

(copy of a letter)

I am fairly sure that however much attention we may seem to get on the internet, it will never do us any good. It is one of those semi-permeable membranes that can never be broken through. We are just seen to be a different sort of being from socially recognised Professors with academic status and salary. At any rate, it has never yet done us any good.

People have come to work here (a few people — not enough, even if they had all stayed) only as a result of seeing my books on library shelves alongside books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who have the salary and social status of which we have been deprived. The only advantage I can see in our somewhat enlarged presence on the internet is that, if and when we manage to get one of our books (distress flares) onto a library shelf, some people may be familiar enough with my name to borrow it, hence reducing the likelihood that the library in question will quickly relegate it to the cellar or the scrapheap.

The article on lucid dreaming on Wikipedia is very low-grade, so that the association with that subject seems likely to do us harm rather than good. I have never yet been able to obtain academic status and funding to do the research that I saw, myself, as arising out of my initial demonstration that there was, in fact, a potential field of research.

One thing that makes me fairly sure that the internet is unlikely ever to do us any good is that people have always been keen on encouraging us to use it as a means of ‘publication’, getting people to pay for downloading, etc. I have always worried about anything other people encouraged me to do, and been pretty sure that what they most violently opposed was probably the right course to pursue.

Home Education

Record numbers of parents are choosing to teach their children at home amid mounting disillusion with state schools, the Government’s own research revealed yesterday. ...The study, commissioned by the Department for Education, suggests the numbers of home-schooled children have almost tripled since 1999 despite the boasts of ministers that state schools have improved. ...

By law, parents who shun the school system must ensure their child receives a ‘suitable’ education according to ‘age, aptitude and ability’. ... Local education authorities are legally required to check on home-educated children who have been taken out of school. Their inspectors can force youngsters back to school if they are not being properly taught.

However, the law also gives parents the right to refuse to ‘present’ their children for monitoring. As a result, they do not have to submit to any checks by the authorities throughout their child’s home schooling.

Most children who do go to school are starting at the age of four — a year earlier than the official beginning of formal education. ... The survey by the Times Educational Supplement prompted warning that increasing numbers of children are starting formal schooling before they are ready — in the rest of Europe it does not happen until the age of six or seven. (From ’150,000 children educated at home’ Daily Mail 24 February 2007.)

My comments

Difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a child can really be got off the hook just by its parents de-registering it with the source of all power and oppression.

What happens about the exam-taking? Can you really get your child accepted at some exam-taking centre without it falling back into the power of the ‘authority’? And practicals, as ever, are a stumbling block. Can you arrange for your child to do the work at a place that can suitably certify it for exam purposes without it becoming the business of the local ‘authority’?

Afterthought

A very good thing that parents educating children at home could do, if they had any sense, would be to come and live nearby and offer voluntary work to my beleaguered academic institution in administrative and other useful capacities. If we were receiving enough such help, it might enable us to provide learning materials for various subjects, including, possibly, classes on investment and other forms of business enterprise.

But the snag is that such parents, like everyone else in modern Britain, have learnt that no help should ever be given to individuals with high IQs, even if it might turn out advantageous to themselves to do so.

No benefits from the Oppressive State

I really do think I should point out that I have not been able to get any benefit at all out of the Welfare (Oppressive) State. The terms on which the medical ‘profession’ operates are too immoral for me to have anything to do with it. I can only proceed with trying to become as rich as possible so that I can go abroad to some country where the restrictions are less prohibitive if I ever have anything so seriously wrong with me that I need something that can only be obtained via the medical Mafia.

Nor have I ever been able to draw ‘Social Security’ even though deprived of any means of earning a living. Since I was thrown out unqualified for the only sort of career I could have, I never drew any benefit. I was not prepared to pretend that I was seeking work and go through the motions of applying for jobs, such as the schoolteaching that everyone wanted to force me into so as to enjoy my suffering and humiliation. I went to the SPR in the first instance, purely for money, because my parents, at the behest of society at large, were trying to force me to ‘earn a living’. I thought, in view of their oppressive attitude, that I would need to collect any pittance that I could get for my return to Oxford in the autumn. At the SPR, I found there was a potential field of research with which I might be able to regain access to an academic career.

But I have never been able to draw benefits, however hard up I was, because I was thrown out at 21 with no usable qualification for the only sort of career I could have and I could not earn money in any other way. I had no income after my brief and intolerable period of employment at the SPR, which was as intolerable as I had known it would be. I had to put an end to it as soon as I could, before the damage being done to me became even harder to reverse.

Although I had no income, the fact that my supervised ‘education’ had left me with no usable qualification at all meant that I could not draw anything from the ‘social security’. If you can do that, when you are unemployed, you get your National Insurance contributions paid for you, so that you still get a basic state pension at the end. I had to pay voluntary contributions myself out of any money that I could make or obtain for myself in any legal way, to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be when I reached retirement age in comparison with someone who had been able to have a salary.

"The over-60s are not worth treating"

Recently the Daily Mail reported that 1 in every 2 GPs said that patients (victims) over the age of 60 were not worth diagnosing or treating. Well, of course, what they say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But in fact we can be pretty sure that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.

Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.

When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).

This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.

Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.

It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.