Illustration from the Book of Kells, as suggested by Geoff.  This one is The Four Apostles.

It’s a small, overcrowded world. While browsing through back issues of the monthly newsletter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), I came across a reference to an article by Colin Campbell (the eminence grise of the peak oil community) entitled ‘Petroleum and People’ and published in ‘Population and Environment’ v. 24/2 (November 2002). The former editor of ‘Population and Environment’ was Professor Kevin MacDonald, author of a trilogy on Judaism as a collective evolutionary strategy. 

READ MORE...

Opinion polls usually show that most people oppose high levels of foreign immigration. Yet John Ray frequently claims that it has popular consent. I presume that his logic runs as follows: such immigration is a public policy, we live in democracies in which the majority rules, therefore such immigration must have majority support.

I think John’s fault is to accept the second part of this argument: that in a democracy there is majority rule. I used to accept this idea too, but I came to realise that this is not really a feature of modern democracy. In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule. And that is where majority rule stops.

Now, before John replies that I cut a lonely figure in making such an argument, let me quote some support for this view. In the June Spectator there’s a review by Jonathan Sumption of a book Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy by John Dunn.

It is Jonathan Sumption’s view that “modern democracies might be described as oligarchies tempered by elections” in which a barrier to popular power is created “by vesting the power of decision in an elected political class united by a body of shared values often at odds with popular sentiment.”

Mr Sumption writes that democracy “confers no rights on the electorate apart from the right to dismiss the oligarchy of the moment every few years, and replace it by another, generally of much the same kind.”

These claims, I think, are not far off the mark. They explain why a liberal political class has been able to advance its agenda despite the presence of a largely conservative electorate.

Steve Edwards, an occasional visitor to this site, has come up with a brilliant new Australian flag design.

(You need to know Paul Keating to really get this one.)

The Voice is Britain’s best established black newspaper.  It has much to commend it, no doubt.  For example, there’s a culture page and a fascinating page of international news:-

TUPAC’S CULT KILLER - Member of Tupac cult “chops off daughter’s head and tosses decapitated body into local river”.
HIV ACTIVIST SLAMS COPS - A HIV/Aids activist in Swaziland has called on the police to stop arresting prostitutes.
COURTS CALL FOR GOVT BAN ON DEATH PENALTY - THE Ugandan courts have ordered the government to amend laws that impose the death penalty for certain serious crimes.

All good stuff ... or stuff anyway.  But it was really the careers page that caught my interest.  I thought I might check out what kind of businesses are hungrily searching out ambitious, young, go-getting readers of The Voice.  After all, one has grown mightily suspicious of all those super-smart black men and women that wander nightly across our TV screens - you know, the ones with the indispensable leadership qualities, cutting-edge techie skills and smooth moves no white member of the opposite sex can resist.  Time to find out whether we are being unfair, even prejudiced and just plain ignorant in writing off such “positive images” as all bloody lies, frankly, and social engineering so blatent the liberal media should be seconded en masse for 10 years to Congo TV.

READ MORE...

The “longitudinal data researchers” at Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research have claimed (PDF) that married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework.

These extraordinary and, if you are a lazy buzzard around the house like me, extraordinarily welcome findings are reported by Reuters like this:-

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.

“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labour economist, told Reuters.

“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.

Taylor and Bardasi analysed the hourly wages of 3,500 men who have been interviewed annually since 1991 as part of the British Household Panel Survey.

“We looked at all types of jobs from unskilled up to managers and professionals,” Taylor said.

Bliss.  Best excuse I’ve come across in damned nearly thirty years of married life.

Having little IQ myself, of course, I tend these days to leave the subject to those MR bloggers better informed about it than I.  However, this story caught my interest and concerns something - IVF treatment - about which I do know a little.

Children whose mothers underwent a new form of IVF treatment introduced in the 1990s appear to be brighter than those conceived naturally, it was claimed today.

There had been fears that the procedure, known as Intra-Cellular Sperm Injection (ICSI), may increase the risk of slow development and behavioural problems.

But a new study suggests that, far from being disadvantaged, ICSI children develop higher IQs than children born as a result of natural conception.

The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.

... Those in the ICSI group had an average IQ level of 112, compared with 107 for the children not conceived through IVF.

READ MORE...

A mixed bag from this morning’s British press, national and local ...

First up, probably literally, is the fiesty Sabina Arthurs of Brighouse, Yorkshire.  She is planning to run with the bull in Pamplona next month.  But ... she’s going to do it stark naked.  It’s her way of protesting, of course.  Naked protesters against animal cruelty did the same thing last year.  We are not told whether they left any little things behind afterwards.

Now alright, this display of bovine solidarity may bring the eponymous, testosterone-soaked Spanish male to the realisation that bullfighting is very cruel.  Very, very cruel.  But there again it may not.  Indeed, he may, on hearing Sabina’s uplifting news, ask himself not “Is she right about the bulls?” but “Is she a looker?”  My guess: he will and she is.  Or the local paper wouldn’t be interviewing her.  Alas, there is no picture on-line by which we may judge this important issue.

READ MORE...