�CULTURAL SENSITIVITY� IN EDUCATION

There seems to be a lot of nonsense around at the moment about offering education in a special mushy form so that �the lesser races� can understand it. Marc Miyake has been especially scathing about the situation in Hawaii, where it is now proposed that �Hawaiian� mathematics be taught in the schools.

Australia�s WogBlog, however has done a delicious spoof of the whole idea in his post of 28th. It helps if you have ever been to the Western suburbs of Sydney to understand it all but I think most people will have a laugh anyway.

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AUSTRALIA'S "RACIST" POLITICAL PARTY

A few years ago, Pauline Hanson, a fish-shop proprietor in a traditonally working-class area, gave voice to what a lot of Australians were thinking at the time about official "racial" policy. The immediate popularity of her views in her area caused her to form a new political party called the "One Nation Party". Her basic call was for more restrictions on immigration and a cessation of affirmative action programmes for blacks.

After some striking initial electoral successes, the party broke up -- partly due to infighting among its leadership and partly because Australian politics as a whole took the hint and moved towards a stance more skeptical about immigration. One of my more learned correspondents has written at some length about the implications in the rise and fall of the party here.

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AUSTRALIA'S PYGMIES

The coverups we get subjected to by the Red/Green brigade in academia and the media never cease to astound me. Before reading this blog, who knew that Hitler was a Leftist or that low-dose nuclear radiation is beneficial, for instance?

I have just learnt of another big academic coverup. Who todays realizes that some of the early Australian Aborigines were pygmies? Yes. Like Africa, Australia too had its own pygmy race. I have seen some of the startling early photos of them. They had been wiped out or interbred in most parts of Australia before the white man came but small communities of them survived in the jungles around my own birthplace in Far North Queensland. This article summarizes the extensive scientific research on them that was done before the whole subject became taboo.

So why the coverup? Because THE PYGMIES WERE HERE FIRST. It is THEY who were the original inhabitants of Australia and the Aborigines we normally hear about are not. So the Aborigines are here by right of conquest just as we are and any claim that we took "their" country off them is false. If anybody has the right to "compensation" as the "original owners", it is the now almost vanished pygmies, not the Aborigines. What a blow to the current Leftist "Aboriginal industry"!

So you will now find references to the pygmies or �negritos� only in older books about Aboriginal Australia. Thank goodness for libraries!

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AUTISM

There has been a bit of discussion on the blogs about autism. Clayton Cramer had a go at it here and here and now Gene Expression has weighed in. The big question is what causes it -- and there is no consensus. It seems to me that a big part of the problem is that two distinct disorders are usually grouped together under the one heading. There are the withdrawn autistics and the hyperactive ones (the latter sometimes being referred to as having �Asperger�s syndrome�). I would be most surprised if these two very different disorders had a common cause but they are customarily lumped together as �autistic� because both feature pronounced social incompetence.

The theory that has most evidence behind it seems to me to be the theory that autistics have overdeveloped cerebral cortices. This accounts both for the larger heads that autistics tend to have and their often high intelligence.

The withdrawn autism at least does appear to be a type of overload protection. The autistic brain is getting too much stimulation so the autistic switches off to reduce the sensory input. So why is the autistic getting too much stimulation? Because the overdeveloped cortex is firing into the rest of the brain at a rate the rest of the brain cannot fully cope with.

The theory favoured at Gene Expression is that autism is exaggerated maleness of the brain. This may not clash with the theory I favour. From my neurophysiology classes back in the 60s I seem to recollect that females have smaller cortices -- which may account for there being proportionately fewer of them in the top IQ ranges.

References:
Asperger H. (1944) Die "Autistichen Psychopathen" im Kindersalter. Arch. Psychiat. NervKrankh. 117, 76-136. (English translation in Frith, 1991)
Frith U. (Ed.) (1991) Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Cambridge University Press.

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CHINESE COMPLEXITIES

China hand has just put up a post on the attitude of young Chinese to the USA. It seems that they want to be friends.

For anybody else interested in China, some other China-oriented sites are
here and here and here. China will be dominating the world in various ways in 50 year�s time so it may be worth knowing about.

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AIRPORT �SECURITY�

Why does the US government pick people with the IQ of a flea to run airport �security�? With boneheads like this in charge, Americans would be safer if the whole lot were sent home to watch TV. This time a paperback NOVEL was deemed to be a deadly weapon. Watch your reading matter when you travel, folks!

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ANOTHER BIG COVERUP

�Senior investigators hired to root out fraud and corruption at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been fired -- just days after revealing what they knew to officials with the Department of Energy's inspector general.� More here.

How can anyone NOT be a libertarian with so much evidence of official corruption and incompetence constantly coming out?

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LINKING �RIGHTS�

A US Dimocrat seems to think he has a right to be linked to somebody else�s blog! How strange! Is there no end to Dimocrat nonsense about rights?

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