A BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Last Tuesday (21st.) was the birthday of J.S. Bach -- of whom I am a great afficianado. So Anne and I went to an organ concert at a nearby Lutheran church to celebrate the occasion. Both the organ and the organist were excellent and Bach's ringingly self-confident music grabbed me from the very first notes.

The thing that inspired this post however was the prominence of East Asians on the occasion. The man selling tickets at the door was Chinese in fact. It reminded me that I have often read that the great Western classical music has a proportionately much bigger following in China and Japan than it does in the West.

I am very grateful for that. It could well be that Western culture is now decadent and much of our glorious cultural heritage stands in danger of being largely lost. I was for instance horrified to find out that, at the end of his high school years, my son had never heard of such great English poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. I promptly sat down and read him some of course. The only introduction to poetry that his school gave him was to a very minor black poet! I happen to have known the black poet concerned (Kath Walker) and can tell you that she was essentially a Leftist whiner and little more.

So our kids are being de-educated and de-acculturated and it seems possible that there will one day be very few of our own people left who will know enough to carry on the knowledge and appreciation of past cultural wonders and attainments. That Asians may keep alive what we do not is therefore some comfort to me. While there is life there is hope.

When I first heard the music of Bach at age 13 (It was a performance of the Toccata and fugue in D minor) it was an electrifying experience for me. It would be sad indeed if the generations to come never got the exposure that would introduce them also to our crowning musical achievements. But I think that lack of exposure is probably already happening in far too many cases. So if Asians keep alive our great cultural traditions it will all be to the good.

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SEX AND IQ

This looks like some independent confirmation that Richard Lynn is right and that the average IQ score for women is lower. To get men and women showing up as scoring equally (on average), the test authors deducted points from the scores of men.

I have just posted here the original Lynn & Irwing paper. The ferocity of the attack on the paper is exactly what we would expect of a genuine contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Work that overturns what has long been believed will of course be resisted. So to allow the general reader to see for himself/herself that the paper is utterly sound, I have reproduced it. Out of respect for copyright, however, I have omitted the Tables and References (Essential to serious scholars).

Most readers of the paper will be amazed to recognize nothing in it that resembles what critics like Blinkhorn have said about it. Those who know of the uneasy relationship that Leftists have with the truth will not be surprised, however.

I have posted a PDF of Blinkhorn's rant here. Blinkhorn was so desperate that he criticized an addendum to the main Lynn & Irwing paper and ignored the main paper altogether. The addendum dealt with results from groups of students and I certainly think that you can conclude nothing from such data. But the main paper was a collection of results from a large number of general population samples and criticisms such as those made by Blinkhorn were anticipated there and fully dealt with.

To tell you in a few words what Lynn & Irwing found: Most IQ test data originates from surveys of students. And from such data it is reasonable to conclude that males and females have equal average IQs. And in the past, everybody concluded that. Lynn & Irwing however submit that males are "late bloomers" and that male IQ goes on increasing beyond the age of 16 while female IQ flattens out. And when they looked carefully at all the past studies of IQ among ADULT populations, that is exactly what the data showed.

Just to be perfectly clear, I should perhaps add that Lynn's finding is in addition to the long-known finding that males have a greater variance in their IQ scores. Female IQ scores cluster much more tightly around the average for their sex than the scores of men do. So there are not only more very bright men than women but also more very dumb men than women.

I have written a fair bit in approval of Lynn's work so in case anybody thinks that I am incapable of being critical of him, I should perhaps point out that I have criticized some of his early work in another field.

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ELSEWHERE

High-taxing Britain: "Gordon Brown is about to raise Britain's tax burden to its highest-ever level, raking in nearly one milion pounds a minute. An analysis by the accountants Ernst & Young, based on the Treasury's own figures, shows the chancellor will match the record high for the tax burden this year and rise above it next year. That means it will be higher than in the 1970s under Denis Healey, when the top rate of income tax was 83%, and the early 1980s, when it was 60%. The Ernst & Young analysis shows that the tax burden excluding North Sea oil revenues, the best measure of the load faced by families and businesses, will be 37.6% of gross domestic product this year, close to the 37.7% peak reached in the early 1980s."

More EU stupidity. A lot of EU countries are in a panic about their slow economic growth. So what are they doing about it? Instead of freeing up business to grow, they are erecting the selfsame economic barriers between themselves that it was the whole idea of the EU to overcome.

London's far-Left antisemitic mayor again: "Ken Livingstone was embroiled in a further dispute last night after suggesting that the billionaire Reuben brothers, who are involved with the 2012 Olympics, could "go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs". ....Conservatives on the London Assembly said that the brothers were not Iranian but born in India of Iraqi Jewish parents. Brian Coleman, assembly member for Barnet and Camden, said: "This is the latest anti-Semitic remark by Livingstone."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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