You know how it is.  A wet Monday morning in unlovely and unloved Croydon.  You are behind your window as usual, gazing down the usual room-full of staring, blank-faced applicants.  They are bored.  You are bored.  As usual.

Seated opposite you is the usual unstarved central African female and small, unstarved child.  Male.  Twenty billion spermatazoa.  Just what this country needs.

She is, as usual, very deferential and so soft-voiced you can hardly make out her replies to your questions.  Deference isn’t to be scoffed at in your line of work.  It has its uses.  But not this time.  Unthinkable.  No way.

You check the date of birth in her passport.  You check that she knows what she has supposedly written on her application.  You check she knows her tragically deceased husband’s name.  You check she is still staying in her council hostel.  You stamp her application documents in three places, retaining the bottom copy to which you attach her spare passport photograph.  You hand the other copies to her with that massive disinterest only a deeply bored Immigration and Nationality Directorate officer of several years experience can properly communicate.  You duly send her on her way to Floor 2 - from whence, Kafka-style, she will be sent ever onward by other equally bored, equally indifferent Immigration and Nationality Directorate officers.

You file your record of her, return slowly to your seat and, resigned to yet another repeat performance, press your floor-button.  The next lucky candidate with the same deferential manner and the same depressingly cock-and-bull story shuffles over.  Not a woman, not even an ugly one this time.  Your boredom sinks to a new level, a chronic one only just above Utter Desolation.

Then young Birch, who sits next to you, leans over and whispers very soto voce but with that familiar enthusiasm of his, “Other end of the room”.

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Today’s Telegraph alerted me to a survey of leading scientific thinkers conducted by The Edge website.

John Brockman, the New York-based literary agent and publisher of The Edge website posed the question: what is your dangerous idea? in reference to a controversial book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett that argued that Darwinism was a universal acid that ate through virtually all traditional beliefs.

Brockman received 116 responses to his challenge from Nobel laureates, futurists and creative thinkers. These were among them

This one from Craig Venter, Genomics Researcher and Founder & President, J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, is a real breath of fresh air:-

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Heterosity (novel diversity in a local area) is usually portrayed by its proponents as yielding a high rate of symbiosis in human ecologies.  This is not what is observed in other ecosystems however.

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To those of us who value real diversity a maddening abuse of language (there are so many these days) is the use of the word “diversity” to describe the colocation of many different types.  This fallacy is so familiar to us that we are accustomed to living with it.  We bite our tongues and stay silent or we try to construct sentences to describe the horror of taking the great diversity of nature and destroying it with technologically amplified mixing of ecologies. 

No more.

A word is needed—something more specific than “multiculturalism”—to replace the use of “diversity” to describe colocation of different types. 

I propose “heterosity”.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity.  Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’.  Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence.  If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’.  If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous.  It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue.  The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel.  A modern nation cannot afford either of them.  Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.  It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

George Orwell, sounding very modern as he commends love of country in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, published in 1941.

Given our dissident purpose it is fitting that this, MR’s first full calendar year of operation, brought a sharp spate of nasty surprises to our liberal elites.  I mean, of course, 7/7 and 21/7, the Katrina lawlessness, the black v brown riots in Lozells, the 18 days in Paris and beyond and, latterly, the white backlash in North Cronulla.

Naturally, some of these events were greater than others.  But all, in their way, were unprecedented.

Blacks have looted often enough, but always in times when a moral bonfire was to be expected.  No such pass could be extended in post-Katrina NO, where the white norm would have been to rise to the challenge.  Instead, white Americans glimpsed hopeless, irredeemable Africa in their midst and for a moment the narrative of white racist causality, so precious to liberals, was falsified.

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View this QuickTime movie of world crop cover since 1700 for evidence that Northern European “immigrants” to North America pulled their weight by increasing the carrying capacity.  This increase in carrying capacity is something necessary (but insufficient) to justify foreign immigration and it is something no other immigrant group has approached since.  With the exception of trade in African slaves by the southern plantations—plantations best seen as a part of the Central and South American tradition of centralized land ownership where slave trade was part of the practice—the US and Canada were built by Protestants deriving their yeoman farmer tradition from pre-theocratic northern European agricultural practices.

Charles Murray uses citation analysis to account for “human accomplishment” in his book by that name. However he failed to take into account the fundamentally important accomplishment: negative numbers.  He therefore assigns a positive value for citations which might be best viewed as a negation of human accomplishment.  Examples of such negative accomplishments might be such works as “Das Kapital” (which set political economy back a century), “Civilization and its Disconents” (which set psychology back a century), “Anthropology and Modern Life” (which set sociology back a century) and “The Genetic Basis for Evolution Change” (which set human ecology back at least a generation).  He could have avoided this fatal error of epistemology by using a truly important human accomplishment that’s over a century old: Factor analysis.

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I am not sure how to interpret the tale of two not particularly current documents circulated by the Church in Italy, and both disapproving of mixed marriages between Italian women and Muslim immigrants to Italy.  Yes, it’s extremely heartening that this message is being spoken.  But I am puzzled why the BBC’s Rome correspondent should file this article at all.

This is what he says:-

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