The estimable Troy Southgate has circulated the philosophical cogniscenti of the New Right - and me - with the URL for his revamped Synthesis website.  There is a lot of interesting material there, not too much of it overly conventional.

This is how the site bills itself:-

... an irregularly-published intellectual and cultural journal devoted to Anarchy (the preservation of the Anarch [or Sovereign Individual] in all aspects of life and the possibility of multi-level realities), Occulture (the appreciation and understanding of the Esoteric nature of Life and Culture), and Metapolitics (a rejection of trivial party politics and an interest in global aims, as well as a political belief in grand plans and projects with an anti-Humanist streak). Our aim is to explore key figures such as Ernst Juenger, Michael Bakunin, Julius Evola, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Jean Parvulesco, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, Otto Strasser, Miguel Serrano, Ernst Niekisch, Jean-Francois Thiriart, R.A. Schwaller de Lubitz, Sergei Nechayev, Savitri Devi, Austin Osman Spare, Richard Walther Darre, Alexander Dugin, Karl Haushofer, Arthur Machen, Rene Guenon, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Francis Parker Yockey, H.P. Lovecraft, and Friederich Hielscher.

Troy also organises regular meetings of the New Right in London, only one of which I have been able to attend.  The idea is to generate some interest and excitement around the lost generation of nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers from the right, whose ideas were submerged by the triumph in Europe of communism and liberal democracy in 1945.  Troy’s meetings usually feature four of five speakers on diverse philosophical issues, Aleksandr Dugin being the biggest name to speak so far.

By contrast with all this I am a centrist pussy cat, of course - but one, I hope, with a fairly open and curious mind.  It is necessary if one intends to plant those black roses.

A sublime self-parody of ultra-leftist social engineering in Ireland has been brought to my amazed attention by Michael R.  I particularly admire these “childcare committees in south Dublin and Fingal” who hope to spread their methods throughout the country.  Wonderfully loving people, I’ll bet.  Wonderful.  Clearly, the citizens committees of revolutionary France reverberate down all the Dublin days.

RACISM among Irish toddlers will be tackled at a conference for childcare providers in Dublin later this month.  International research shows that children can form prejudices against other races even as babies and pre-schoolers.

Workers in creches and childcare facilities will be shown how games and activities can prevent such discrimination forming.

The anti-racism initiative is being organised by childcare committees in south Dublin and Fingal who hope it will provide a blueprint for child carers across the country.

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My proposal, first posted here, for how to remove Lewontin’s Fallacy from Hamilton’s presentation of Price’s equations of group evolution, has been posted to Ian Pitchford’s Evolutionary Psychology Yahoo group.  This is significant because men like J. Phillipe Rushton, of Genetic Similarity Theory fame, and Henry Harpending of Ethnic Genetic Interests fame, are recent participants there.

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The top State-wide ecological correlations* with IQ are rather fascinating**.  Make of them what you will but here are the thoughts that occur to me.

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On Saturday it was revealed that the Deputy Minister for Public Works in Canada, David Marshall, had placed a temporary ban on the hiring of able-bodied, white men.

The reason Mr Marshall gave for the employment ban on white men was to make sure that the public service was “representative” and inclusive of “disadvantaged groups” such as women, visible minorities, aboriginals and the disabled.

But the fact is that the representation of women, aboriginal people and the disabled in government employment is already greater than in the Canadian workforce as a whole. Only visible minorities are less well respresented in the public service, and only by a small margin (7.8% compared to 10.4%).

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Readers may recall the extraordinary public response last June to BBC Radio 3’s Beethoven Experience, about which I posted a piece here.  Since that post I seem to recall one or two glowing tributes in our threads to the incomparable JS Bach.  So this post is by way of a “heads up” for the forthcoming baroque bonanza, A Bach Christmas:-

BBC Radio 3 will be celebrating Christmas 2005 by broadcasting continuously over ten days the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The composer’s entire surviving body of work will be performed by some of the world’s greatest musicians including specially recorded performances by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Yo-Yo Ma, Angela Hewitt, Philippe Herreweghe and Ton Koopman.

The round-the-clock broadcast will begin on December 16th, and is available in your home through the priceless agency of the internet.  No doubt, after the closing programme on Christmas Day an MP3 download page will appear once again on the Radio 3 website.

All this and not a single commercial break.  Who says state-run industries can’t be cool?

JR has received some welcome plaudits for the new page design, based on EE’s latest update.  He is entirely responsible, so don’t blame - or praise - me.  I’d like to add my congratulations and thanks.  I am well aware that he has put a lot of thought and a lot of time into it and the result, at least as far as I am concerned, is very satisfying.  It isn’t quite the final article.  We’ve still got to work out the MR Forum details and there are a couple of plug-ins to come on stream, plus whatever creative tweaks are still lurking at the back of JR’s mind.

I’m giving some consideration now to what we want forum-wise.  What we clearly don’t want is anything that might lead to this sad situation.  The main page will always be open-house.  But access to the MR Forum will require members’ log-in.  Either I or JR will post here on access when the facility is up and running.

Content-wise, the areas of off-blog debate which are most profitable for us are political, scientific and daily news, and we will probably start operating the forum accordingly.  Main page content will adjust to the presence of the forum, probably by losing some of the pure link-based content to it and, therefore, concentrating more on originated pieces.

However, this is not set in stone.  I am open to constructive suggestions, and you are welcome to pitch in with your ideas.

So that’s it.  Thanks to all for your continued patronage.  Let’s hope, after all JR’s work, the guys at EE don’t rush out a new and irresistible, improved version tomorrow morning.

Many readers will have already come across this famous statement by John Jay on the founding of the US:

“It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty ... A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together ...

“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs ...”

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