Catallaxy Files

Goodsie, aka Adam Goodes is a champion footballer and most likely a great guy and I never would have picked him as a member of the ‘new class’. But he has taken on board the hair-trigger sensitivity to racism that is a characteristics of the class. The result is a kind of “reverse racism” where racism is called where none is intended. As I suspected, when the truth came out, the girl did not even think that ‘ape’ is racist. How about an apology from Goodsie?

Other forms of political correctness are rampant among sports administrators. The cricket authorities decided that rude tweets from a cricketer warranted a formal interview and a substantial fine. The adult response would have been a private phone call to tell him to act his age.

The NRL probably set the pace. Manly fullback Bret Stewart was stood down for several weeks during a police investigation resulting in the case being dismissed. So much for “innocent until proved guilty”. Currently the NRL “integrity unit” is pursuing a case weeks after the event which the police at the time saw no reason to take futher action after the footballer involved notified the police himself.

Not to mention the apparently politically motivated ASADA fiasco.

PS Adam Goodes is such a fine player that it was amusing to see him twice kick the ball down the throat of unmarked Freo players at the SCG last week:)

Around the blogs, the Adam Smith Institute in Britain. Check out the Keynesian bias in high school economics.

Conservative Teacher in the US on Obamacare. Jo Nova on The Amazon River as a Big Polluter. A great series of posts on Andrew Norton. Stephen Hicks on Joseph Stalin as a bank robber.

Around the town, two weeks go, Revesby Workers, last week The Australian Club actually that is the club in Melbourne but you get the idea, this week The Purple Goanna in Redfern.

Events. Launch of Making Science Pay an R Champion Amazon ebook, last week Jane Austen on the balance of reason and feeling by Dr M Giffin,this week at The Sydney Institute, the history of Geelong Grammar School (1855- ) by a man who taught there for 55 years. Next week, Tuesday 28th at 6 pm The Centre for Independent Studies, launch of another book on Australian Intellectuals, Wednesday 29th 8.00 at Humanist House, Shepherd St, Chippendale (Sydney) R. Champion on the several episodes of conscription and national service in Australia from 1908 to the present.

Hot off the press: CIS Policy, The Spectator, IPA Review. All packed with good things, in the IPA Review don’t don’t miss the speech by Rupert Murdoch at the 70th Anniversary dinner, on the synergy of morals and markets, a motif of classical liberal thinking expressed in many CIS Occasional Papers.

Update. Another event, sadly at the same time as the CIS function, and in London, a speech at the Adam Smith Institute on good deflation that comes from increased productivity.

On the Power Radio with Steve Price and Andrew Bolt.

After a long wait listening to reminiscences of the Seekers 50 years ago and harrowing tales by carers of disabled people.

This administration has zero credibility on concern for disabled people.

If they really cared they would have done something in their first year of office, they could have hit the ground running with funding for respite care, affordable and desperately needed assistance paid from the Howard and Costello surplus. They could have injected funds through existing channels of State and other agencies that are in place and in touch with people in need to provide help in a timely and affordable manner.

They could have learned more about the needs to the sector to provide additional assistance year by year, phased in for maximum benefit. No new bureaucracy, just funding through existing services to the most pressing areas of need.

Some of the people who needed help five years ago will be dead before anything is put on the ground by the NDIS.

Carers and the disabled need some help now, not the distant expectation of a gold-plated scheme that is not affordable, thanks to the criminal mismanagement of the last years. Remember that every billion wasted in administration of the new scheme is a billion denied to people who actually need it.

Previous posts on this topic.

Is this really the way to do disability?

Is the NDIS a cruel political stunt?

Was going to call this “News from Nowhere” but that was taken by the socialist William Morris who made his living designing furniture and wallpaper for the rich and famous.

Should provide a blow by blow descripton of the journey to Revesby, the exchanges of ideas, the dinner, the car raffle and etc but too busy preparing the papers for the fortnightly meeting of Australian School of Economics (Sydney chapter) and drafting materials for the next volume of Critical Rationalist Papers. The best part of the event was meeeting a couple of Cat readers who were pleased to make visual contact with the legendary but shadowy and elusive figure who has been described as “Australia’s foremost blogger”.

This morning the Lower Neutral Bay faction of the Aust School will meet with the Rozelle faction and the part of the ungrouped faction to plot the overthrow of the welfare state and global socialism. The venue is a conveniently located coffee shop near the North Sydney Pubic Library and Cats who might be interested should make contact on rchampATbigpondDOTnet.au to request a set of the application forms to apply for membership.

Almost in press, adding to the list of Critical Rationalist papers, a collection on the topic of productivity in science. Regrettably this collection is several decades too late to avert the damage that has been inflicted on higher education by the Dawkins debacle. One of the pieces did appear in 1988, concluding:

The debate on higher education and its economic benefits needs to be informed by some study of the ecology of excellence in research and development. Agriculture provides numerous examples, and others would be found elsewhere. So far the plans for reorganisation of education and research are guided more by simple-minded notions of bureaucratic efficiency than from understanding of the conditions that promote effective learning and prompt application of the findings.

The papers in this collection address various aspects of scientific productivity, both the production of knowledge and the delivery of economic returns from scientific research, especially research backed by government funding. Rural research provides a case study of succes and there is a record of interview with the late Jim Vincent who was an important pioneer in microbiologh, especially applied to soils, and the mentor a large number of students, some of whom achieved world renown and placed Austrlia at the front of some fields.

The summary of Terrence Kealey’s monumental work on the economics of scientific research is reprinted, it started as a series of posts on the Cat.

There is a piece about Sir John Eccles, an Austrlian Nobel prizewinner, a review of a book by Francis Crick of The Double Helix and a review of a book of interviews with Nobel prizewinners.

And much more.

Cats who are contemplating the list of publications with their fingers poised uncertainly on the mouse as it hovers over “one click to purchase” should bear in mind that half the proceeds of Jacques Barzun and Others go to IPA, half of Quadrant Papers to Quadrant, 10% of the Popper Guides to Jo Nova and half of The Duhem Problem and the forthcoming Productivity in Science to Mannkal Economics Education Foundation.

BUT BE PATIENT

Supplies have resumed to NZ shops after the factory near Christchurch resumed production. This event has been anticipated since January but problems persisted and there is still a limited supply. Some shops are calling foul as others are stocked and they are not.

For people who have been living under rocks or have been distracted by the ephemeral issues of party politics, the world was plunged into crisis when the Marmite factory in NZ went off the air due to earthquake damage over a year ago. This precipitated “Marmegadon” as the Marmite-dependent population of the world desperately tried to make do with substitutes like Promite and Vegemite.

Beating the rush to sign up to Gonksi.

Can you bear it?

The return of the Monster from the Black Lagoon of the Far Right.

10.00 on Channel 10 on Sunday morning.

As Ray Hadley says, on the Power Station (where Bolta moonlights in the evening), if you don’t tune in to the show You need a note!.

The Power Station is Radio 2GB, 873 on your dial. Learned last week that the GB stands for Giordano Bruno was was burned at the stake because he refused to recant his dissident views. Rather appropriate that this station hosts BoltA.

On a tangent, I was amused by a comment on the Is it Mad thread, are they casting for Macbeth?

This is pretty close to the mark, the play Macbeth is about the way that the obsession with power leads to disaster. Lady Macbeth, the villain of the play, drives Macbeth to murder the king and then everything goes rancid. Think of Swan as Macbeth?

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. His reign is racked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath swiftly takes Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into realms of arrogance, madness, and death.

Images.

This is better, more witches.

Lady Macbeth. Pan down to Ambition.

Further off topic. Is it Art (h/t Tim Blair) – enormous cows made from used car parts. Worth a look! Well its better than Mona in Hobart.

Leave those Eels alone! h/t Tim Blair (speaking as a true blue and gold Parramatta supporter).

Programmer jokes.

Kerry-Anne Walsh is upset about the use of polls by the “hate media” for political intervention to derail the Government.

She went on about obsession with polls bordering on the obscene.

The most obscene obsession with polls that I can recall was the relentless hounding of Brendon Nelson by the mainstream media when he was leader of the Opposition after the fall of Howard because he was polling poorly. As if it mattered.

During that time the worst administration in living memory was embarking on a series of half-baked schemes (remember Grocery Watch and Fuel Watch?), and a raft of disastrously expensive white elephants. And the Fair Work Act. And the dismantling of the Pacific Solution, and so on. How come the commentators even bothered to report the popularity of the leader of the Opposion. Really bad things were happening and they were looking the other way.

What was Kerry-Anne Walsh commenting on at the time?

A few more links to supplement BoltA’s report. You get more at the Cat even if you don’t get it first.

News report with map and commentary.

Indoor scenes.

Outside.

A bit of history and perspective, a heap of other meteors.

In 1945 Karl Popper left Christchurch and moved to the London School of Economics where he became the Professor of Logic and Scientific Method.

His main course was Introduction to Scientific Method and he delivered a series of fifteen lectures on this topic for a decade or so through the 1950s. Mark Notturno became the editor of Popper’s work and one of his tasks was to convert the transcripts of the lectures into a publishable form. The recordings included questions and answers, and the usual false starts and half sentences of the spoken word, so the idea was to create an “ideal type” of each lecture, drawing on the best parts of the ten copies that were available for each lecture.

As described in the Introduction, the publication stalled but it is now possible to read the first three lectures on line. Introduction with links to the lectures.

The first lecture on Values began with a welcome from Popper who warned the students. “I am getting old…my English is deteriorating with age…I am getting more and more inclined to ramble…and I am not a good lecturer either”.

In fact he was a captivating lecturer, speaking without notes, inviting and responding to interjections, inserting asides about his projects and references to significant developments events in science at the time. That was all edited out unless it related specifically to the content of the lecture.

On the function of lectures he said “Lectures are sometimes enjoyable, sometimes boring, but always, in a certain sense, unimportant. The important thing is the work that you are doing yourself.”

On the real aim of a university education. “I believe that someone is well-educated only if he realizes in great detail how little he knows. And I think that this is really very important. I think that a man who has the feeling that he knows a lot is somehow badly educated. Yes, one can know a lot…but the main point, at least with regard to pure knowledge, is to recognize the many open problems that lurk in all the knowledge that we have achieved. Without that l would say that you are not really educated…And the more we know and the more our knowledge grows, the more modest we should become about all those things that we don’t know.”

Thanks to Mark Notturno!