Annals of psychological research: No correlation between soccer skills and IQ

Yesterday’s news but still worth a laugh at someone else’s expense:

ENGLAND captain David Beckham has confessed he is befuddled by his six-year-old son Brooklyn’s maths homework.

Beckham, 30, admitted to being baffled when Brooklyn recently asked for help with a school assignment and had to turn to his former Spice Girls popstar wife Victoria to help out.

“Their homework is so hard these days. I sat down with Brooklyn the other day, and I was like, ‘Victoria, maybe you should do the homework tonight’,” Beckham told the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

“I think it was maths, actually. It’s done totally differently to what I was teached (sic) when I was at school, and you know, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this’.

“Brooklyn was like, ‘Please do it with me’, and I’m like, ‘I’ll read your book with you’.”

The Real Madrid midfield player’s son attends the exclusive Runnymede College in the Spanish capital, which follows the British national curriculum.

The paper gave examples of some national curriculum maths questions set for seven-year-olds.

They include: “Bet went to the shop at 11.45. She came back half an hour later. What time did she come back?” and “What is 12 divided by three?”

Beckham also admitted he has no “lucky” pre-match routines, with them too being tough to remember.

“I find that if I follow a routine … it gets to the stage where you are thinking, ‘Right, was it the left side … the left boot I put on first, or the right side?’

“There are so many things that can go through your mind.”

50 years on …

Compilation of comments on the Feb 1956 speech by Nikita Khrushchev that sparked worldwide consternation among the faithful and provoked some premature enthusiasm for freedom (in Hungary for instance).

Happy reading comrades!

The betrayal of liberalism

A review of The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciplines of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Policies of Coercion and Control. Edited with an Introduction by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. 1999.

This collection of papers explores various aspects of the decline of the liberal movement, ostensibly dedicated to peace and freedom, sweetness and light, into the coercive utopian form that dominates in the western world at the present time. As a result of this process the term liberalism has ceased to mean anything unless it is qualified in some way. As John Silber wrote in his contribution, “has any word been used in more senses? Is there another word whose definition is so constrained by time and context?” For this reason, those of us who are not entirely convinced that we are conservatives have to parade as market liberals, evolutionary conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians or “Old Whigs”, the last being the terminology favoured by Hayek in his important statement “Why I am not a conservative”.

The Introduction describes the (socialist) liberal consensus that was supposed to prevail in intellectual circles in the 1950s. This was celebrated by Lionel Trilling’s famous statement to the effect that ‘we are all liberals now’ which must rank in the lexicon of famous last words with Richard Nixon’s ‘we are all Keynesians now’.

Wireless Internet update

Some more updates on the wireless Internet market. This week, more statistics on the decline of PSTN and the rise fo fixed to mobile substitution, Voda and Optus cut their upfront hardware prices, Unwired still a long way off break-even and that cheap iBurst rumour seems to have lacked any substance (so far). More after the jump…

Derbyshire v Bethell

A sign of the times at the intellectually refreshing if archconservative National Review magazine was when its premiere columnist went from being the literate and wry Florence King to the sophomoric Jonah Goldberg.

It is indeed unfortunate that the most politically neanderthal writers on NRO also tend to the most intelligent and sensible ones. So credit where credit is due to the politically neanderthal but scientifically literate John Derbyshire as he debates the creationist conservative author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bethell.

Incidentally here’s a money quote from Derbyshire:

I am at a loss to know how creationism has got mixed up with conservatism. I have always thought of conservatives as the cold-eyed people, unafraid to face awkward facts, respectful of rigorous intellectual disciplines, and decently curious, but never dogmatic, on points of metaphysics. Conservatism thus understood is, in my view, the ideal outlook for free citizens of a free society. Contrariwise, pseudoscientific fads, metaphysical dogmas like “dialectical materialism,” magical explanations for natural phenomena, and slipshod word-games about “agency” and “design” posing as science, arise most commonly in obscurantist despotisms. The old USSR was addled with such things, Lysenkoism being only the best known. You may say that an obscurantist despotism can be conservative in its own way, and you may have a terminological point; but that’s not the style of conservatism I favor.

Getting the policy gong?

The first radio interview on my new paper on why the FEE-HELP loan cap should be increased was on the local Melbourne ABC station 774AM, with Red Symons. Having grown up watching Hey, Hey It’s Saturday, Symons wasn’t an easy person to talk to. The Red Faces segment he made his own was hilarious when happening to other people, but all I could think of while talking to him was the very low scores he used to give the segment’s hapless contestants, and I was half-waiting for him to hit the gong, as he did when the act was so bad that he couldn’t take it anymore. Luckily the interview seemed to come to a natural, if not very successful, conclusion.

Overall, I’ve been happy with the media on this one, with the various papers focusing on different aspects of my proposal: The Advertiser on my suggested increases to the loan cap, The Age on retrieving money from HECS debtors living overseas and deceased estates, and the AFR quoting quite a few other people and organisations in favour of increased lending. People agreeing with me is a novel experience. By pure coincidence, of course, the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee today put out a press release supporting a higher FEE-HELP cap (though typically dodging any difficult decision to raise money to pay for it). The Australian Council for Private Education and Training has also issued a press release, calling for the extension of FEE-HELP to vocational education. I agree with this, but having written more than 7,000 words just talking about universities decided not to make my message even more complex by arguing for it.

I did however get the gong from the National Tertiary Education Union, from nutty Kerry Nettle of the Greens, and from Jenny Macklin, scoring her favourite adjective ‘extreme’ (twice!), but missing out on being labelled ‘ideological’. She seems to think that the paper calls for real interest rates on student debt, though beyond advocating a debt charge – which Labor incorporated in the original HECS scheme – it doesn’t. Surely there was enough controversial material in there to attack without having a go at things I didn’t say?

Andrew Bolt speaks

The Currency Lad has a reproduction of Andrew Bolt’s speech at the launch of his book “Still not Sorry”.

An interesting selection of episodes and an interesting comment from one of the “stolen generation”.

The media gives the microphone to one side and ignores the other. Take Lowitja ODonoghue (former ATSIC chairwoman). One side says she was stolen. She was not. I said to her that everyone including her nephew knows she was not stolen. {O’Donoghue then substituted the term “removed”}.

Nancy Barnes, the first Aboriginal to be head of a kindergarten in the NT/SA Education Dept, wrote her autobiography Munyi’s Daughter, and her first line, which has never got a mention on the ABC, was, “We are referred to as the ‘stolen generation’. I consider myself saved.”

For a fair and reasonable comment on the “lost generation” issue I will later post a link to some statements by Ron Brunton who acknowledged the tragic aspects of the episode and also the gross exaggeration of the numbers and the upside in the case of people who were genuinely saved.

The streets of Mittagong

Street names can be remarkably interesting as they tend to reflect the interests of the local council at the time. Some are not overly imaginative, like the Railway Street or Parade in every suburb with a railway line. Sometimes you strike a series named First Avenue, Second Avenue, Third Avenue etc.

Cricket lovers are pleased to note streets named after Boyle, Bannerman, Spofforth and Murdoch in Cremorne (Sydney). Ermington did better with a cluster of streets naming those four players and several others from the same vintage.

There is a street on the old army base in Mosman named after the destination of the force that went to the Sudan to rescue General Gordon at Khartoum (Suakin), there are clusters of Great War and World War 2 names. And so it goes.

Turning to Mittagong, gateway to the Southern Highlands and the aspiring Book Triangle of the Southern Hemisphere we find:

Bong Bong Road (no comment)
Inkerman Road, Balaclava Road, Cardigan Street and Crimea Street.
Camelia Place and Conifer Place (juxtaposed).
Oxley and Murchison Streets (explorer and sponsor of explorers)
But the streets that started all this:
Lyell, Dalton, Davey, Priestley, Cavendish, Tyndall, Huxley ( scientists), plus Bessemer, refiner of pig iron.

Interesting?
No?
Sorry!

Feel free to make short comments on your favorite street names.

Comments longer than one para are unlikely to be read by me.

Does it matter who pays the piper?

"We were told Blue Poles was a masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism," says Michael Duffy in an essay for the SMH’s Spectrum. The painting became "symbolic of of all that was most golden and promising" about the Whitlam Government. This identification of avant garde with progressive politics explains why he was so surprised to learn how much the CIA did to promote Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock.

Duffy draws on Frances Stonor Saunders’ book Who Paid the Piper — an account of the CIA’s cultural war with the Soviet Union after the Second World War. "Saunders’s revelations deserve more oxygen,” he says “not least because they remind us that aesthetic judgments can be shaped by money and power."

But aesthetic judgments aren’t the only judgments shaped this way. That’s another reason Saunders’ book is worth paying attention to. Anyone who consumes journalism and opinion today is exposed to a constant stream of comment and analysis. In the US newspaper readers have learned that lobbyists are influencing opinion columns by paying sympathetic columnists to focus on certain issues — pundit payola.

Classical liberal vs social democrat worldviews, part 2

Last September I suggested that while social democrats and classical liberals may not always be miles apart on pragmatic policy questions, there are some very different underlying assumptions, as revealed in the social democratic assumption that tax cuts are giving back ‘public’ money. Of course social democrats do not want to take so much of our money for entirely perverse reasons. Indeed the implicit assumption that all money is the government’s and they generously allow us to keep some of it is the corollary of the implicit assumption that most problems are also the government’s, and naturally fixing them is very expensive. This kind of thinking was evident in a story The Age published today about how the August census will include a question on unpaid work. This prompted Carers Australia president Ben Chodziesner to say that

the estimated 2.5 million unpaid carers saved the Federal Government about $30 billion a year.

That’s right, caring for each other is actually the federal government’s reponsibility, and volunteering to do it out of love, duty, sympathy or charity is saving them money they really ought to be spending.

OK, OK, I am being a bit unfair here. Chodziesner is hardly against carers, and many of them probably could do with a hand. But the implict idea that any government is responsible for all of what carers do is one that, as a classical liberal, I find very troubling – not only because it is has helped create the pervasive state we see today, but also because it can squeeze out the virtues realised or developed through voluntary activity.