Rootsie

"What does Hillary want? A smarter, smoother, better-planned interventionism, one that our allies find more amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant than the Republican version—one that “levels with the American people” about the costs of empire and yet doesn’t dispute the alleged necessity of American hegemony."

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_27/cover.html (http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_27/cover.html)

March 27, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative



Hillary the Hawk

The Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details.


by Justin Raimondo


When “the Moose” talks, Democrats listen—just like the Republicans did when he was flacking on their behalf. And the Democrat listening the closest to this Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative is Hillary Rodham Clinton, supposedly the leader of the party’s far-left wing.

With his reputation for giving good quote, “the Moose,” a.k.a. Marshall Wittmann, formerly John McCain’s communications director and now a bigwig at the Democratic Leadership Council, is a legendary character in Washington circles. Once a member of the Trotskyist Spartacist League and an officer in the Young People’s Socialist League, Wittmann, like many admirers of the Red Army’s founder, moved rightward during the Reagan era and eventually wound up as the Christian Coalition’s political director. From this strategic vantage point he jumped on McCain’s Straight Talk Express—and then jumped ship entirely, falling into the arms of the DLC and landing, as always, on his feet.

From Leon Trotsky to Ralph Reed to Hillary Clinton is a long, torturous road to follow, yet the chameleon-like Wittmann—who styles himself a Bull Moose progressive in the tradition of his hero, Theodore Roosevelt—has navigated it expertly. Wittmann’s new role as Hillary’s unofficial Rasputin is perfectly suited to her current political needs. Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

This advice was proffered on the morning of Jan. 18. By that evening, when Hillary gave her scheduled speech at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, it had clearly been taken to heart: “I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran,” she averred. Accusing the White House of choosing to “downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations,” she disdained Team Bush for “standing on the sidelines.”

“Let’s be clear about the threat we face now,” she thundered. “A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime’s pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should not—must not—permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.” To be sure, we need to cajole China and Russia into going along with diplomatic and economic sanctions, but “we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”

Wittmann celebrated his apparent success in influencing the Democratic presidential frontrunner by exulting that “the Moose has a mind meld with Hillary.” Taking the opportunity to rally the shrinking but strategically placed pro-war wing of the Democratic Party around a “united front,” he staked out for her a position in favor of “multi-lateral action, if possible, but unilateral action, including military options, if necessary, against the growing Iranian nuclear threat.”

Hillary’s newfound centrism isn’t completely insincere. Her bellicose interventionism has a history: it was Hillary, you’ll recall, who berated her husband for not bombing Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy relates in Hillary’s Choice:

Hillary expressed her views by phone to the President: ‘I urged him to bomb.’ The Clintons argued the issue over the next few days. [The president expressed] what-ifs: What if bombing promoted more executions? What if it took apart the NATO alliance? Hillary responded, ‘You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?’ The next day the President declared that force was necessary.

Together with Madeleine Albright—who famously complained to Colin Powell, “What good is it having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”—Hillary constituted the Amazonian wing of the Democratic Party during the years of her husband’s presidency. Her effort to outflank the Republicans on the right when it comes to the Iran issue is a logical extension of her natural bellicosity.

Hillary is nothing if not consistent: in her floor speech to the Senate during the debate over the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, she declared, “the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt”—a statement she has never acknowledged regretting. Particularly endearing to the War Party, she framed her “aye” vote in terms of the classic neoconservative myth of Bush I’s betrayal:

The first President Bush assembled a global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after forty-three days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations. The U.S.-led coalition then withdrew, leaving the Kurds and the Shiites, who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging, to Saddam’s revenge.

Hillary would have occupied Iraq a decade earlier, riding into Baghdad at the head of her troops like Pallas Athena descending on the Trojans, striding boldly into what Gen. William E. Odom has described as “the greatest strategic disaster in our history.”

Hillary hails the 1998 bombing of Iraq, ordered by her husband, which killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and recounts the official mythology promulgated by the Bush administration: “[T]he so-called presidential palaces … in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by UN resolution to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.” As we now know, there was nothing even approaching WMD in those palaces, and Iraq had been effectively disarmed at that point. In late February or early March, Scott Ritter, then a UN arms inspector, met with then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson. Ritter was told to provoke an incident so the U.S. could finish bombing by the start of the Islamic New Year holiday.

Hillary, however, didn’t let any inconvenient facts get in her way. She boasted that it was under a Democratic administration that the U.S. “changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change” and took credit for the bright idea of putting Ahmad Chalabi, convicted embezzler and known liar, on the U.S. payroll. Her speech reads like a Weekly Standard editorial, reiterating each of the War Party’s talking points—the bio-weapons fantasy, the links to al-Qaeda gambit, the phantom nuclear arsenal: “This much,” she maintaind, “is undisputed.”

What is undisputed these days is that the entire rationale for war was based on trumped-up evidence of Iraq’s alleged transgressions, but Hillary is unrepentant: “No, I don’t regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade.”

But there was no threat to the U.S. and Hillary knows it. What’s more, her hardcore constituency knows it, and they are becoming increasingly alienated from—even actively hostile to—their putative presidential frontrunner over this issue. Their anger is stoked by evidence that Hillary has imbibed the same neocon Kool-Aid that has intoxicated the Bush administration and blinded it to the failure of its policies in Iraq.

On a trip to Iraq during which 55 people—including one American soldier —were killed by suicide bombers, Hillary was merrily chirping that the occupation was “functioning quite well” and that the surge of suicide attacks indicated that the insurgency was failing. Security was so bad that the road to the airport was impassable, and the Senate delegation had to be transported to the Green Zone by military helicopter. They dared not venture out into the streets of Baghdad.

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality, between the antiwar views of Hillary’s left-wing base and the militant interventionism of Wittmann and the DLC crowd, finally forced her to come to grips with the contradiction—or at least to appear to do so. This occurred not in a public speech but in an e-mail sent to her supporters in which the trouble she is in is acknowledged in the first sentence: “The war in Iraq is on the minds of many of you who have written or who have called my office asking questions and expressing frustration.” Chances are, these callers were expressing frustration not only with the policies of the Bush administration but with her own complicity with Bush’s Middle Eastern agenda of seemingly endless aggression.

She falls back on the old “there are no quick and easy answers” ploy to give an aura of thoughtfulness to a dishonest and constantly shifting position on the war. While insisting that we should not “allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end,” she reassures the War Party by distancing herself from John Murtha and others who want an orderly withdrawal in a relatively short time: “Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately.” She hails the elections as the signal that we can start the withdrawal process sometime “in the coming year,” but not completely: we must leave behind “a smaller contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities”—a tripwire, in short, in the form of permanent bases.

This goes beyond anything the Bush administration would ever admit, even as it starts building those facilities—14 “enduring bases” across Iraq. The White House has been cagey about this, preferring to speak in vague generalities: we are not supposed to notice that construction was begun prior to any agreement with the Iraqi government. With Hillary signing on to this plan for a permanent military presence in Iraq—in effect, a shadow occupation—the debate over U.S. policy in the region is settled.

If we knew then what we knew now, Hillary avers, Congress “would never have agreed” with the decision to go to war, but she forgets her previously expressed “undisputed” certainty that Saddam possessed and posed a grave threat. She complains that the administration did not act to gain international support, but it did go to the UN and made every effort to give the invasion a multinational gloss. She berates the Bush administration for failing to “level with the American people”—as if they would have gone along with it had they known that the American presence would be widely detested. She hectors the White House and Rummy for not heeding the advice of General Shinseki that as many as 200,000 troops would be necessary to occupy Iraq —as if that wouldn’t have caused a great many second thoughts in those who otherwise supported the war. She has called for more troops to be sent—even as she holds out the prospect of reducing the American presence “in the coming year.”

The president, Hillary charges, does not have a “plan” for “concluding and winning” the war. Disdaining “a rigid timetable” for withdrawal, she calls for devising “a strategy for success”—without defining what a victory would look like. When push comes to shove, her position is the same as the administration’s, albeit with minor modifications: we’ll leave when we’re good and ready and not a moment sooner.

This is not likely to assuage her core constituency—or, indeed, the rest of the country—which is increasingly opposed to continuing the war; the only red meat she throws at her base is a sharp rebuke to the Bushies for “impugning the patriotism of their critics.” Don’t mistake criticism for “softness,” she rails: Hillary, the war goddess, is no softy. Nor should we confuse her critique of the administration’s means with a fundamental objection to the War Party’s ends.

What does Hillary want? A smarter, smoother, better-planned interventionism, one that our allies find more amenable and yet is, in many ways, more militant than the Republican version—one that “levels with the American people” about the costs of empire and yet doesn’t dispute the alleged necessity of American hegemony. As she finds her voice as a would-be commander in chief, it isn’t one the traditional Left in this country will recognize. Hers is not the party of Eugene McCarthy but of the neoconservative Wittmann.

“If some Democrats have a modicum of imagination,” Wittmann recently wrote, “they would move to the President’s right on national security. Of course, that would require them to take on some of those on the left flank. But, if a donkey is ever to occupy the Oval Office in the foreseeable future, he or she must be perceived as being as tough or tougher than the Republicans on national security.”

The Hillary wing of the Democratic Party is taking “the Moose” up on his bet that they can outflank the Bush administration on the war front, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head Congressman Rahm Emanuel taking the lead by working actively to spike antiwar candidates like Paul Hackett. When Congressman Murtha denounced the war, Emanuel snapped, “Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha.” Not true: he spoke for the majority of Americans, who now oppose the war and want out, and especially for the activist base of the Democratic party, which cheered while the bigwigs sought to distance themselves. What then is his party’s position on the central issue of the day? “At the right time we will have a position” on the war, he avers, and yet Emanuel has a position decidedly in favor of continuing and even escalating the conflict.

Asked recently by Tim Russert if he would still vote for the resolution authorizing war with Iraq knowing that the WMD meme was a crock, Emanuel’s answer was an unequivocal “Yes.” His critique of the president’s war policy is, like that of many, if not most, Democrats, limited to means, not ends. “There was not a plan” for the war’s aftermath, says Emanuel, and all he and his fellows in Congress want is not a reconsideration of our policy but only “a modicum of competency in the management of this war.” Taking up the Kerry mantra, Emanuel urges the president to “level with the American people” about the long hard slog fighting to “win” in Iraq will require—as if some magic blueprint could put a wrongheaded policy right.

Russert pulled his quote-out-of-a-hat trick—“So as long as our troops [are] engaged, we should suspend the debate over how and why, focus on the mission, unite as a country, in prayer and resolve, hope for a speedy resolution of this war with a minimum of loss. God bless America”—and wondered whether this didn’t contradict what Emanuel had just said. The answer, a flat “No,” was telling: “In fact, Tim, what I actually believe it’s consistent in this perspective. … I think the president came, as you know, for resolution to Congress. He got that. Second, he asked multiple times for the resources to fight that war. He has got that. What we ask in return is a plan.”

Yet what sort of plan could possibly have prevented the dissolution of the Iraqi state and the onset of civil war? What would have blocked the Iranians from extending their influence into the Shi’ite south of the country and taking over the leadership of the central government in Baghdad? It’s true that General Shinseki warned that we would need 200,000 soldiers to manage the occupation. Without radically reducing our commitments elsewhere, however, such a force is largely imaginary—unless the Democratic plan involves reintroducing the draft. Nothing quite so forthright has come from Emanuel’s direction—only vague hopes that somehow the Europeans will come to our rescue.

If the Democratic establishment’s stance on the war is at odds with the party’s antiwar activist base, then their outright warmongering on the Iranian issue puts the two factions on a collision course. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—who effectively quashed fellow California Democrat Lynn Woolsey’s resolution calling for a withdrawal timetable —has followed the Hillary-Emanuel-DLC party line, while managing somehow to assuage her constituents with plenty of pork and partisan rhetoric. When it comes to Iran, however, she is just as belligerent as the next neocon: Pelosi co-sponsored legislation imposing draconian economic sanctions on Iran and stops just short of calling another war.

If Hillary maintains her lead in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes—and with over $21 million in the bank, she’s way ahead of any potential rivals—and the party establishment effectively strangles insurgent antiwar activism at the grassroots level, an increasingly “isolationist” electorate will be faced with a choice between two interventionist candidates, giving credence to what Garet Garrett, that lion of the Old Right, bitterly observed in 1951:

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people. 

_______________________________________________

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com.

March 27, 2006 Issue

Young, successful, well paid: are they killing feminism?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1739858,00.html

Sunday March 26, 2006
Observer

Chiara Cargnel wants to have it all: a high-flying career and a successful marriage. So far she is halfway there. At 26, she is an investment banker in London working over 70 hours a week and earning more than £80,000 a year. Cargnel, like many other young women, is excelling in a world many thought governed not by their rules, but by rules set and enforced by men.

For the first time in history these 'elite women' can succeed in any career they want. According to a remarkable thesis that has blown open the debate around feminism, sexism and the future role of women, a new generation of bright, rich professionals have broken through the glass ceiling and have nothing to fear from the men around them. They will be just as successful.

The thesis was expounded in a highly controversial article for Prospect magazine by Alison Wolf, a professor at Kings College London and author of Does Education Matter? She argues that the meteoric rise of this new generation of 'go-getting women' who want high-powered, well-paid jobs has dire consequences for society. Wolf says it has diverted the most talented away from the caring professions such as teaching, stopped them volunteering, is in danger of ending the notion of 'female altruism', has turned many women off having children - and has effectively killed off feminism.

'[It is] the death of the sisterhood,' Wolf writes. 'An end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than men.

'In the past, women of all classes shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns. Now it makes little sense to discuss women in general. The statistics are clear: among young, educated, full-time professionals, being female is no longer a drag on earnings or progress.'

The article argues that the most educated women will now earn as much as men over a lifetime if they have no children. Even with children, the gap will be small. The desire to be successful acts as a major disincentive to women starting a family, Wolf argues.

'Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, and yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing,' she writes. 'The repercussions for our future are enormous, and we should at least recognise the fact.' The growth, Wolf argues, of the 'because I'm worth it' generation has led to the end of 'female altruism', where women would see the caring part of their life as normal.

'If you give 100 per cent to the job - if you behave like a man - the fact that you are a woman will not stop you,' Wolf told The Observer

Wolf insisted her argument was not that the workplace revolution had been a 'terrible mistake' and admitted she had gained from it herself: 'I am not saying we should be driven back into the homes and not be allowed to work. I am not suggesting we reintroduce the marriage bar [which required female teachers and civil servants to stay single or resign in favour of male workers]. I am just saying there have been consequences.'

Wolf's views will ignite fierce debate. It is a topic that is discussed at breakfast and dinner tables, and in restaurants and pubs across the country. Many women face the difficult decision of how to strike a balance between pursuing ambitious careers and focusing on motherhood. In that setting, Wolf's two main arguments will be met both with empathy and anger.

She is wrong on one point, according to Katherine Rake, director of women's equality group the Fawcett Society. Rake argues that 'the sisterhood' is very much alive and rejects Wolf's thesis that women of all classes no longer share the same major life experiences. 'Women are not a homogeneous group, but we never have been,' said Rake. 'We are a diverse group, but we still share experiences.'

Rake dismissed as 'an unfair portrayal' the idea that feminism focused overly on getting women into employment. She argued: 'The most interesting and radical strands of feminism value a whole variety of roles. It is about working on a balance between men and women and valuing unpaid work such as looking after the children.' She said women did not have a true choice about whether to take the larger burden of childcare because the pay gap meant it was often more economical for the woman to do it. She highlighted the fact that part-time work was often not available in the professions chosen by 'elite women'.

Others argued that there was still a glass ceiling blocking the path of young professionals. Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, accused Wolf of 'painting a rosier view than exists of the realities of women's lives' and ignoring the difficulties many women face when trying to resume their careers after a break to give birth.

'Wolf completely misses the point on several key issues,' said Watson. 'She does not reflect the fact that this whole debate about work and family is no longer only about women and these days involves, for example, fathers' increasing desire to be more involved at home. Women experience a thin veneer of equality, but that veneer often cracks once they take on a caring role.'

Watson said many women with children faced difficulties finding flexible work and often ended up with poor pay, reduced promotion prospects and a lack of senior posts available on a job-share basis. It was the archaic rules on parental leave, she argued, rather than some high-flying women's desire to have a successful career, that were responsible for the declining birth rate. More leave for new fathers could address the imbalance.

The decline in child birth rates is one of the 'grave consequences' of the rise of career-focused women that Wolf highlights. She points to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research that tracks the trend. But Julia Margo, co-author of the report, said that 'elite women' who wanted to have more children were forced not to because they would lose too much income. Margo said the pay gap would be closed only if women could have children early on and still maintain their income.

'[The present system] is deeply unfair for women,' she said. 'We will not close the pay gap until men take time out to look after children. Then employers will not think they cannot employ a woman in her late twenties or early thirties because they cannot afford maternity leave. As a society we have not caught up yet with the consequences of women in the labour market. Women manage by holding off one thing or another; they sacrifice children or they sacrifice their career.'

It is a decision that is already haunting Cargnel, an archetypal 'elite woman'. From a young age she knew she wanted to go far in her career and until recently had no desire for children - but that is changing. 'I want to have a child eventually, but I will postpone the decision until the hours become more manageable as I advance in my career. You can't work from 8.30am till 11pm and look after a child.'

She admitted that the ideal would be a husband in a more flexible job who would be prepared to take on above average responsibilities. 'But does such a man exist?' she said.

Finding and keeping a partner is difficult because of her long hours. She is seeing a man who lives 200 miles away and admits that makes life easier. 'It would not last if he lived here. What man in the same city is happy to see you four days a month, and then when he sees you, you are tired?'

It is a high price for success - Cargnel works six days a week and always faces being called in. Once she was called back from a holiday in Italy after just one day. Nevertheless, she finds time for charity and dismisses the idea that women like her fail to show their altruistic side by doing things like volunteering. Cargnel takes disadvantaged young people on week-long trips out of London.

Being an 'elite woman' was not about acting like a man, she said, but about being a 'more complete individual' who no longer worries about finding a partner with enough money to look after her. 'I can choose a partner on affinity and love rather than money,' she said. Brought up to believe her sex did not matter, she was no longer sure. 'I always thought that gender would not matter if I was good at what I did. But I wanted to be in the diplomatic service back home in Italy and I went to see them and a senior diplomatic officer said to me - "You are a woman, why don't you just marry a diplomat?" '

Cargnel said in principle she would do as well as any man if she stayed single and childless. But she said a woman was still expected to be the main carer, and if she had children she would have to work harder than a father to get ahead.

As such, she did believe society discriminated against elite women. 'There is a conception shared by women and men alike that you can be a good professional and have a career or a good woman and have a family. My ex-boyfriend had a mother who was educated but stayed at home and thought I was inappropriate because I wanted to travel the world and study at Cambridge.'

But men, she argued, were allowed to have careers and families. 'Women are given up to a year off in maternity leave and men are given two weeks - that is intrinsically discriminatory, and an assumption that women should stay at home. I believe it should say men and women can take the same leave, so it is a true choice that we face.'

how did "female empowerment" become synonymous with strapping one on and screwing the rest of the world along with the old boys club? sounds more like trying to be one of the boys.

The 'elite women' that article writes about have no consciousness of how they are being shafted (excuse the pun). Female perspectives are marginalized in the West every bit as much as everywhere else. The cages here are gilded, but they are cages nevertheless. Given the pathological state of white supremacist patriarchy in the West, it's no surprise that 'female empowerment' is viewed in this distorted way.

thanks to Karibkween for posting the text of this on the Rastafarispeaks board. http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/cgi-bin/forum/config.pl?read=72921 (http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/cgi-bin/forum/config.pl?read=72921)

not so sure of this author's conclusions, but there is some very pertinent information in this article that i think relates to several of the issues brought up in the thread(and many others as well).
_________________

http://www.ajarn.com/Contris/brianhilljune2005.htm (http://www.ajarn.com/Contris/brianhilljune2005.htm)

INTELLIGENCE

Brian Hill MA (Edin)
Edinburgh Techniques

www.edinburghtechniques.co.uk brianwci@hotmail.com

Over the last 25 years we have more than doubled our understanding of how the brain works. All the new research is good news for humans, but it severely dents many long held beliefs.

First of all, intelligence is not fixed at birth. It can, and should be developed throughout life from childhood to old age.

Second. Intelligence does not deteriorate with age. We do not lose 30,000 brain cells every day, or every time we have a beer or a whisky, though an excess of alcohol or drugs can cause brain cell deterioration.

Third. Intelligence isn’t even a single entity. Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard has identified 7 different types of intelligence, two in the left hemisphere of the brain, what I call the masculine brain and five on the right hemisphere, what I call the feminine brain. The masculine intelligences are maths/logic and linguistics and until the mid 80’s were still regarded as the only intelligences worth having. The school system is based on them. Gardner eventually recognised an 8th intelligence, spirituality, based in the right hemisphere.

Fourth and perhaps the most startling point of all. Women are potentially far more intelligent than men. That statement isn’t 100% true. It should read: Feminine thinkers are potentially more intelligent than masculine thinkers, because feminine and masculine in this case cut across the genders of male and female.

The most obvious example of this was Margaret Thatcher, a very masculine, machine like thinker. Her strictly utilitarian, non feminine approach to problems did immeasurable social damage to the UK from which we are still suffering today, almost 15 years later. The late Carl Sagan on the other hand, was primarily a feminine thinker, despite being a scientist. He was brilliant, charming and worked tirelessly for the benefit of humanity.

Feminine of course, in the context of thinking should not be confused with effeminate or female. Many men are born right hemisphere dominant, especially black men. The theatre, the music industry, advertising and films are full of right brain men.

Of our eight intelligences six are on the feminine right side of the brain, our creative intelligences. They can handle information at the rate of one and one quarter bits of information per second i.e. 1,250,000 bits per second whereas the poor old masculine brain can only handle forty bits per second, yes 40, four zero.

Masculine thinking is straight lined, sequential, non-emotional and thinks in words. Feminine thinking is flexible, has depth and breadth, is creative, emotional and almost limitless in it’s imaginative properties and it thinks in pictures, which is why it’s so much faster. A picture tells a thousand words. Masculine thinking demands one task at a time whereas feminine thinking allows multi-tasking. Panorama did a programme in 97 called the Future is Female. What they meant is The Future is Feminine. They failed to take into account the large number of feminine male thinkers.

School Failures
From all this new research has sprung three new terms: Wholebrain Learning or Accelerated Learning and its consequence, Integrated Intelligence. Wholebrain Learning is Left and Right Hemisphere working together. Because the Right Brain is so much faster it is dominant. Despite this, the majority of school failures are Right Brain Dominant. They are totally misunderstood and often put down by a largely left brain teaching staff as being lazy and difficult, either withdrawn or downright disruptive.

Right brain pupils, especially boys, are sensitive, creative daydreamers who take failure and criticism very badly unlike their left-brain counterparts who are much less emotionally affected by other people’s perception of them.

What is Intelligence?
Intelligence is the linking of brain cells (neurones) by connective tissue known as dendrites. Everyone is born with 12 to 15 thousand million, brain cells, each cell capable of holding information. But each cell can make up to 100,000 connections to other cells and it’s those connections, which effectively makes up Intelligence. The more cells which are connected the more information we can work with and the more ideas we can come up with, providing we haven’t killed off our creative right brain intelligences by an over abundance of left brain training at school or by many university courses.

Live Longer
What this means is that everyone on the planet has the same intellectual potential. It means also that there is no such thing as stupidity, only levels of intelligence, all of which can be developed up to the day we die. Indeed, if stupidity exists at all, it exists as a defence mechanism. It also means that age is no barrier to intellectual development. On the contrary, the more we keep our brain active, the longer we are likely to live, i.e. healthy mind, healthy body. Couch potatoes beware.

Expectations
Expectations are crucial in any field of development, but especially in education. If you expect something to happen, you are already half way to achieving it. The American psychologist Rosenthal divided a class in two following a series of class IQ tests. He told the teacher he had divided the class in two halves according to the results, bright on the left, less bright on the right, but not to tell them why they were thus divided and above all, not to treat them differently.

Eight months later the class results of the ‘brighter’ group were up by 30%, even their IQ’s scored higher. Incredible really as Rosenthal had chosen the names for the original lists at random, but because the teacher expected the ‘brighter’ group to do better, as much as she tried, she unwittingly conveyed this message to them, over the months which followed Rosenthal dividing the class. She also conveyed the opposite view to the other half of the class.

For this reason it is crucial that all teachers be made aware of the new research which offers neurological evidence, that all intelligence can be developed. Without question, some of us are natural mathematicians, or musicians or organisers or writers, but all of us can and should develop the weaker parts of our intellect to bring them up to at least average.

Social Conditioning and Lack of Confidence
One major reason for poor academic achievement is the switch from really trying to make the grade, to looking as if you have already made the grade. We’re talking image building here. Even those who are making the grade as footballers, pop stars etc get caught up in teenage image building where loud mouth and super cool swagger replace reality. A false confidence often bordering on arrogance masks the reality of fear, lack of confidence and low self-esteem. This means individuals never solve their problems, therefore never move on. Problems? What problems? How can you begin to solve what isn’t there?

This is all perfectly understandable under the circumstances, but unfortunately by not facing up to the problems of lack of confidence, low self-esteem and poor educational standards, it hinders the progress of intellectual development.

To over come any problem we must first of all recognise that the problem exists. Parents and teachers must find ways of encouraging their children to learn without putting them under unnecessary pressure or trying to terrify them into working. Parents and teachers must find ways of learning how to relax so they don’t over-react to their children’s normal mistakes by shouting and they should never physically hit their children for making mistakes. That is so counter productive.

Parents must continue to stretch their own intellectual potential at every opportunity to lead their children by example. Love, kindness and gentleness should be by words in all schools and homes. All children need that. All children deserve that. You deserve that. You also deserve the joy this new approach will bring to your homes and communities.

Defence Mechanisms
Every Human Being is programmed to learn. Therefore any child who shirks the learning process is doing so because his inner defence mechanisms, over which he has no control, have been set up to protect him from further emotional hurt. They are designed to shield him from the pain of failure, which he is experiencing during the learning process. Let us all adopt these simple concepts:

Failure is OK. It’s part of the Learning Process
and
Mistakes are our Best Friends.

The only people who don’t fail are those who never try. We learn from our mistakes, pick ourselves up and try again. And when our students make a mistake let’s not be too ready to point it out before first pointing up the part of the answer they have got right e.g. 95% correct, but just a little mistake here, rather than: WRONG! With the emphasis on the mistake and completely ignoring the bits he got right. Let’s remember that children are easily hurt. Indeed. Are even we as adults not easily hurt if we look silly in front of others? But who’s perfect? People, especially the young should always be given credit for trying and if they fail they should be encouraged to have another go and helped where possible to succeed next time.

Teachers Fail, not Students
Because everyone can learn and is programmed to do so, anyone who is failing to learn is not being taught properly. If our students aren’t picking ideas up, isn’t it up to us as educators and/or parents to find another way of presenting the information? Humans aren’t machines all programmed exactly the same way. We now know there are numerous learning styles, which we should all become familiar with.

Student failure is a failure of communication between educator and student. It’s the educator’s job to find a way of communicating his information to the student. Accelerated Learning Techniques, which are now available to schools via Classroom Resources in Bristol, can overcome any problems with spelling, tables or reading. We have no excuse for not having the tools to overcome our problems as communicators.

Anxiety Problems
As a therapist in the 70’s and 80’s working in the field of dyslexia and slow learners I soon discovered that all of the students, irrespective of age or background, were being hampered by anxiety or second stage anxiety, namely tension. I used a visualising to help the under 12’s and hypnosis for the over 12’s. The techniques were not only successful in calming the students down (including stopping bed wetting, nightmares and sleepwalking within 7 to 10 days) they also produced a dramatic improvements in the learning process.

Modern research shows why. The seat of short-term memory is in the Limbic System, i.e. mid brain. It also controls, among other things, the emotions. When the emotions are upset, the brain switches to fight or flight mode during which little or no learning can take place until the student is calm again. Fear is the enemy of learning, whether the student is 5 or 55.

The Edinburgh Techniques
Almost everyone who has learning difficulties is right brain dominant, i.e. big picture thinkers. They prefer to see the big picture first then fill in the details as they go along. Despite the right side of the brain being far more powerful than the left, RB children fall behind at school because they can’t pick up on the details of tables and spellings. They appear ‘stupid’ whilst often being far more intelligent than their ‘cleverer’ LB classmates.

The first thing this damages is confidence and self esteem, without which learning is much more difficult. After a short while on this downward spiral, they begin to lose hope and give up. The Edinburgh Techniques, developed in the mid 80’s for children of the rich and famous (as it turned out), are based on Wholebrain Learning which is Right Brain dominant, allowing even 7 year old dyslexics to spell words like Psychiatrist and Encyclopedia in the first session. (Because the technique is visually based, students can also spell the words backwards. That has to be seen to be believed. If anything shows they are not stupid, spelling PSYCHIATRIST backwards does.) The best then go onto learn a technique for the 12 times table (up to 12 x 19) in the same session.

You can imagine what this does for flagging confidence and low self esteem. Suddenly students see a way forward and are keen to learn more. The techniques cover all aspects of learning and include 2 Relaxation CDs, the Magic Garden for the under 12s and the Study Relaxer for 12 and over. A written version of the Garden is now available in 6 languages. Dutch and Turkish will be added in March 2005.

The techniques can be viewed and downloaded at: www.edinburghtechniques.co.uk


Conclusion
Every one of us has the same intellectual potential, but not the same Intellectual abilities. I can give a speech in front of thousands of people from only a few notes and keep the audience interested and amused for 2 or 3 hours. I can organise and run political campaigns with ease. I have a good grasp of BIG subjects like politics and psychology but I am slow at learning languages and other detailed subject matter. Engineering and maths beyond 10th grade leave me cold. Many of you reading this will say no, maths is easy, it’s logical. You can check your work. There are guidelines. I don’t know how you can work with such amorphous subjects like politics and psychology.

The reason for the differences are the way our intelligences link up and whether we are right hemisphere dominant or left, people orientated or fact orientated.

Two important facts to bear in mind are these:

One: It is never too late to take up or resume learning. All learning makes the brain progressively better.

Two: Information in itself is not intelligence. Intelligence is the use of information not the gathering of it.

Finally. As we move through the 21st century change will become even faster and more complicated. We must always be ready to move with the times. No generation in history is right about everything. Even the most deeply held beliefs of past generations have been found to be ridiculous. Spare the rod and spoil the child belongs in the 19th century and has no place in a modern society. If we can’t lead our children to the Promised Land we certainly aren’t going to be able to beat them into it. Let’s take off the pressure. Let’s encourage and applaud effort. Let’s try and be more understanding about the difficulties of our students. Let’s remember to accentuate the positives, not the negatives and we will all be amazed and delighted at the results.
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