Coming up for air after
holidays, LOSCON, and rain in Los Angeles. Saturday it rained all day and a
good part of the night. When I came home Saturday night, Sable, our red
Husky, was lying down by the gate in the rain, soaked; or at least wet. Her
coat is very thick and I doubt she even noticed. She followed me into the
house and didn't bother to shake: what she wanted was her walk since she
hadn't got one Friday or Saturday. I put on a raincoat and took her around
the block. Sable sleeps outside. She has a way into the house if she wants,
but unless one of the boys is home and sleeping in the back bedroom so that
she thinks she has to sleep just outside the door just in case anyone wants
to take a walk in the middle of the night, she sleeps outside. She has a dry
place to sleep and the housekeeper worries about her, putting down towels
and blankets which Sable ignores about as often as not. When it rains the
housekeeper make an igloo by sheltering the dog's bed cave with a ladder
draped with towels and a windbreak of cardboard: which sometimes sends Sable
down by the gate for the night where there's no shelter at all.
We have tried showing Lucy pictures of Huskies bedding down
in snow, but she's having none of it.
Come Sunday morning Sable was still wet but happy. Sunday
was a lovely day and when I got home, here was this dry fluffy dog. And here
I had been worried about taking her off for her monthly bath at the Petwash
place (I am not insane enough to try to bathe a wolf; I put a muzzle on her
and tip heavily). Anyway, she's fine, it's a sunny day, and this morning we
got our full two miles so she's happy, although she still doesn't
understand: if Richard stays here overnight so he can catch an airplane at
bloody dawn, why can't he arrange it so he can take the dog for a walk?
This morning she was trying to drive the gardener out of the
back yard: it's fall, the pool patio is covered with leaves, and Monday is
gardener day, but Sable didn't see any point in letting a guy with a leaf
blower into her yard. Let him work out there, we're just fine in here. So we
had our walk then.
When I got my cell phone account it was with Pacific Bell.
That became SBC who sold my mobile phone account to Cingular. When i got it
I could call from my house. After it was Cingular I couldn't, but if I
walked down to Ed Begly Jr's house down the street I could get 4 bars. Now
when I turn on my phone it says AT&T Wireless and there's no coverage at
Ed's house either; I have to walk about 3 blocks further. I guess every time
they consolidate phone companies they shut down a few more relays or
something. And these outfits wonder why everyone hates them? Studio City
isn't, after all, out in the sticks even if we do have our 50 square mile
sagebrush and scrub oak park just across the street. I used to have coverage
at my house when it was Pacific Bell, and what man has done, surely man can
aspire to?
I'll see what mail we have.
==============
From another conference:
All of these state tests are
constructed to produce artificial test score Increases. As G agrees, the gap
measured in standard deviations Or fail ratios remains just the same even as
failure rates for each group improves. [This conference] is just about the
total live population that understands enough about socio-statistics to
understand this phenomenon, until one of us writes a new Bell Curve sequel
to explain this.
> >
> > From the very last paragraph:
> > > Among fourth-graders, for example, 92% of whites met
> > > state reading standards last year, and so did nearly 70%
> > > of their black classmates, up from a mere 35%
> > > three years ago.
> >
> >This is a *huge* change, if it is not fraudulent. Unfortunately, it
> >is so large that it almost certainly is to some extent...
> >
> >Jim
I hope my friend has seriously underestimated the population
of people who can understand socio-statistics, but I fear he's pretty close
to right. (He's a school administrator doomed to be anonymous for obvious
reasons in today's education climate).
Jane Jacobs points out that a Dark Age isn't when you have
forgotten how to do things. It is when you have forgotten that you ever
could. French peasants in 650 AD were entirely unaware that Roman farmers
could get yields of 10 bushels harvest for 1 bushel planted: they thought it
a gift of God if they could get 3 bushels from each bushel planted, and
generally didn't get more than 2. And American educators have apparently
forgotten that there was a time when 96% of the people who finished 4th
grade could read; we now have 100% attendance at schools and a literacy rate
somewhat lower than Iraq's. But all will be well and No Child Will Be Left
Behind, so long as we can juggle the tests and get increasing test scores.
The purpose of the education system is no longer to educate but to produce
people with certain credentials. Hurrah for the educational reforms of the
past three decades.
RIP. This aye night, this aye night, every night and
all, fire and fleet and candlelight, and Christ receive thy soul...
Billy James Hargis goes to his reward, which, from my experience with him
will be a warm one: Hargis and the Reverend Bob Wells once got hold of a
study document I was working on for North American Aviation. It had an
imagined scenario in which peace breaks out in both the USSR and China (not
the same firm at all in 1965) so, since we couldn't think of any way that
Mao would allow such a thing, we had him commit suicide. The notion was to
show under what world conditions it might make sense for the US to sign the
General and Complete Disarmament Treaty.
An engineer in the
company stole that off my desk one night (it was not a classified study,
merely some aid to the Air Force in arguing against General and Complete
Disarmament, which was taken seriously by some politicians in those days
despite being a terrible idea: the devil is in the details and we were
examining details). He took the document to the Reverend Bob Wells, an
Orange County radio preacher, who sold copies for $25 each as "the most
frightening document I have ever seen." Billy James Hargis got in the
act and went national with it, also selling copies. They had, they believed,
the very war plan of the vast left wing conspiracy to enslave the world, and
I was its author.
Incidentally, one of my associates on this
study was R. N. Clark, Rear Admiral, USN, ret. who had been Robert
Heinlein's room mate at Annapolis, and best man at Robert's first wedding.
Apparently he, too, was part of the leadership of the vast left wing plot to
enslave the world.
We brought in Possony and Russell Kirk to
try to reason with these gentlemen. Hargis was adamant. He hinted that he
might stop selling the thing if we bought him out, but he was raising money
and getting subscribers and after all it might be true, mightn't it? I did
not come away from the meeting with a favorable impression of the Reverend
Billy James Hargis. But in this day of his death we must be charitable. One
way or another, he knows better now.
M. Stanton Evans later
got hold of the incident and it is characteristic of his fact checking that
although many of the people he wrote about and were friends with were
friends and associates of mine, and Russell Kirk was a close friend, fellow
Professor at Pepperdine, and godfather to one of my sons, as was Stefan
Possony, Evans put the incident into one of his books as if it were all
true, naming me as a "brilliant left wing intellectual" who was quite
possibly one of the masterminds of the world conspiracy, with North American
Aviation as one of the parties and sponsors of this conspiracy. I suppose
nonsense like that sells books. I still have mine which I got through the
Conservative Book Club shortly before I cancelled my membership in that
august organization.
The left is often guilty of sloppy scholarship. I have no
control over that, but I can certainly point out the silly failings of one
of the supposed intellectual heroes of the right, and M. Stanton Evans
demonstrated his either incompetence or more likely his indifference in
discovering truth; in any event if that is investigative reporting, and he
failed to make even one phone call -- Possony was at the time on the board
of the American Conservative Union and I was a speaker at its upcoming event
when that book was published -- if that is an example of investigative
reporting by the right, then the right is in as sorry a mess as the left.
Evans eventually apologized to me at a party at one of Buckley's events, or
maybe it was Kathy Krowe's Pasadena party one year, but the fact remains
that it's an example of such shoddy scholarship as to call everything else
he did into question. The notion that a North American space scientist was
high in planning the world conspiracy was so absurd on the face of it that
one might think a bit of investigation was in order before reporting it all
as fact in a book. And that this brilliant left wing intellectual would be
so high in the conspiracy, yet stupid enough to leave an important document
like that to be found by a snooping middle grade engineer who ought to know
better, is merely icing on the cake. The engineer, by the way, was met the
next day at the plant gates by security, informed of his termination, and
told that if we found anything in his desk that was his we would arrange to
have it dumped outside the gates. I am sure this did a lot for his career.
In any event, Billy James Hargis, RIP
===============
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====================
The other item in the paper is the
Supreme Court's hearing on California's marijuana laws. To me the matter is
simplicity itself.
It required the 18th Amendment to the
Constitution to give the Congress the power to outlaw liquor; the Volstead
Act was held to be unconstitutional, so we got the 18th Amendment and
Prohibition. The 18th was repealed.
Under what Article does
Congress have the power to prohibit marijuana? Clearly it can be banned from
interstate commerce, but exactly how it is interstate commerce for someone
to grow pot and smoke it? Or for that matter to sell it to his friends from
in front of his house?
The whole field of drug law is
usurpation, and everyone knows it, but we pretend otherwise.
I have not addressed the merits of California's laws on the subject. I don't
need to. Wise or foolish, they are valid laws, and marijuana and other
drugs, absent Constitutional Amendment, are state matters until the stuff
crosses state lines.
[quote] As a service to Spectator readers who still
have any doubts about the decline in educational standards, we are printing
these exam papers taken by 11-year-olds applying for places to King Edward¹s
School in Birmingham in 1898.[end quote]
Read them, and weep.
(When you get to the Arithmetic questions, remember
that there were no pocket calculators then. And also bear in mind that in
those days, British currency consisted of pounds, shillings and pence, where
one pound equaled twenty shillings and one shilling equaled twelve pence.
The conventional abbreviations were '£' for pound, 's' for shilling & 'd'
for penny--which came from the original Latin names for the coins, as
everyone knew of course.)
Jim Mangles
We have similar articles regarding schools in the
United States at about the same era; I quickly concede that the British exam
was tougher than the American one of the same era, assuming both are
authentic -- there is a bit of controversy about the bona fides of the
American 1890 school exam. Still, from my own memories of schools in the
1930's, the content in schools has been lessened and what students are
expected to know has been lowered, and this by a very great deal.
One can plausibly make the case that in 1898 in the
US only about 80% of the children went to public school past 4th or 5th
grade; there were many who were kept home to work, and many people who were
never "in the system" at all. In the British case the number who went to the
"Public Schools" (which we would call private schools in the US) was about
all of the upper and middle classes, but didn't include many from the
working classes.
It may be instructive to contemplate what we lose
by insisting on egalitarianism, equal treatment, and "no child left behind."
I could make the case that a society that has 40% or more people able to
pass such examinations might be better off than one with "no child left
behind" and only a very small percentage of the population, student or
adult, able to handle such questions.
Democracy always drives toward egalitarianism, and
toward cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies: that, according to
Cicero, is the trouble with democracy and the reason Rome couldn't stand it.
He had equally valid criticisms of Monarchy and Aristocracy and argued for
the "mixed form" of government which he called a Republic that incorporated
elements of all three forms. The Framers of the US Constitution were all
familiar with that view and most of them seem to have been persuaded of its
truth.
But that was 1787 and we are ever so much wiser
today.
The first words in the old McGuffy Reader were "No
man can put off the Law of God." The first words in the Soviet first
reader (and one presumes the present one, perhaps) were "For the joys of our
childhood we thank our native land." The first words in the most popular
primer in the US at the time when most of our teachers went to school were
"See Spot run, said Jane. Run Spot, run."
It is probably time that we in the US seriously
decide whether we want egalitarianism or to be able to compete in the world
market since our masters seem determined that we shall have universal free
trade at whatever cost to jobs and trade deficits. It is highly unlikely
that we can survive without bankruptcy given the education system we have
now. It is hardly too early to start reforming it. It is also highly
unlikely that we will do anything at all: our schools will probably continue
to move toward credential factories in which all thought of what we used to
know as education has not merely vanished, but is no longer a memory.
It's column time, but I have some thoughts
on the intelligence bill which I'll try to put forth after my morning walk.
The Intelligence Business
It helps if you've ever been in the intelligence business, but even a few
minute's thought will convince you it's a complex game, and that
centralizing everything under a czar who controls all the budgets is a bad
idea.
There are many aspects to intelligence. This ought to be self-evident,
but it doesn't appear to be so: reading Nancy Pelosi's thoughts on the
subject after years of being on the Intelligence Committee is not much of an
education in understanding the intelligence business. (www.speakerpelosi.com/pelosi/
;
http://www.house.gov/pelosi/flFundingIntelAgencies072402.htm ) Of
course politicians on duty seldom say much that is interesting to anyone who
knows an iota about the subject of the politician's attention. Mr.
Sensenbrunner, meanwhile, has held up the President's Intelligence Czar bill
for other reasons, including the very practical matter of insisting that we
enforce some of the immigration laws as a first step toward making the
country more secure. He has been pilloried by the bloggers -- I find
articles about how this rather smart man is "chief whacko" and such -- but
then most bloggers know nothing about the subject on which they wax
eloquently; most politicians are more informative than most bloggers. Pity,
but there it is. Just because someone can afford to maintain a web site
doesn't guarantee they know much about their subjects.
So why am I qualified to write on this? Well, for one thing, I was
for thirty years the protégé of Stefan Possony, one of the best intelligence
officers this nation ever employed. For another, I have several times been
employed as intelligence analyst for many major projects including
restructuring the USAF Strategic Offensive Forces. I have read a very great
deal on this subject. There are other reasons, but those will do.
As practiced in the United States the intelligence business consists of
gathering data, interpreting it, using the analysis to allocate resources
for acquisition of more data, and conducting overseas operations to disrupt
potential enemy operations. Much of what is needed now is not classical
intelligence at all, but counterintelligence: disrupting operations against
us. Within the US -- and, importantly, in the Caribbean -- the FBI has been
responsible for counterintelligence including disruptive operations. The
Bureau ceded jurisdiction to the Agency for the Bay of Pigs operation; the
results didn't help the Agency in the turf wars. In fact the Bay of Pigs was
a pretty well planned operation that might have succeeded had the President
not, at the very last minute, called off the air support operations
including pre-emptive bombing by WW II era medium bombers flown out of
Nicaragua. The original plan had air strikes to completely disable the Cuban
Air Force, so that the landing at the Bay of Pigs would be unopposed. The
beach area was quite defensible against ground assault, and in fact that is
why it was chosen. But given that the Cuban Air Force was unopposed other
than by Agency heroes -- no weaker word will do -- flying B-25's as
interceptors because they weren't allowed to bomb the Cuban air fields, the
disaster was assured.
Leave that. The important point is that in the US, counterintelligence
operations including penetration of enemy organizations belongs to the
Bureau, and since Hoover the bureau has become more and more dominated by
legalistic concerns, and, at least until recently, saw itself as an arm of
the Department of Justice, charged with arresting criminals after a criminal
act, and prosecuting them in Constitutional Courts in which all the rules
had to be followed. This effectively crippled US counterintelligence, and
the success of the 911 attacks was assured. Whether the CIA, given a share
of the counterintelligence mission, might have penetrated the 911 operation
and prevented it isn't known; but it would certainly have had a better shot
at it than the Bureau, and almost certainly would have investigated some of
the reports of Arabs at pilot schools acting as if they were in their last
year on earth. Given that most of those people were aliens who do not
necessarily enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens; and that the
mission of the CIA would be to prevent something like 911, not build
evidence for use in Constitutional courts; one can argue that they might
well have been successful. Perhaps not, but it would have been worth a shot.
And that itself leads us to wonder if we want an intelligence Czar who
controls all the budgets. We don't want to take away the Bureau's
surveillance operations and its building of cases for trial; we want to add
to the counterintelligence capabilities of the United States, which is to
say, we want multiple lines of attack. We want operations sufficiently
independent and suspicious of each other than compromise of one, say in the
FBI, doesn't finish off all the others. We don't want such centralization
that a Kim Philby can in a stroke destroy every intelligence operation we
have. Even the USSR, which was pretty good at the spy business whatever
other failings it had, did not organize intelligence in the silly way the
President's intelligence bill proposes. The USSR had the KGB (or MVD or NKVD
depending on your era) but it also had the GRU (military intelligence) and
both operated spy networks; and the GRU brought off some of the USSR's best
intelligence coup operations.
Before the fall of the USSR we used to say there are three huge
organizations organized the same way: the Soviet system of agriculture,
NASA, and the American system of education; and all are equally successful,
which is to sat all are disasters with a few bright spots.
The proposed Intelligence Bill will create yet another centralized
monstrosity with little chance of success. Yes: intelligence is best handled
by putting a highly competent monomaniac in charge of a lot of resources and
get out of his way. But finding the right monomaniac is never easy, and the
job tends to burn people out. Better to have a number of organizations
swimming in the soup. Navy operations will gather information of interest to
the Navy, State has its own agenda as does Commerce, the Army and Air Force
have their particular interests, and the CIA has several competing agendas
within its bureaucracy. Gathering data is a bit of an art, and the CIA long
ago lost it (we have few language schools and the case officer system hasn't
worked in a long time); letting the other Departments try to do some spying
doesn't hurt and often helps.
At the coordination level it pays to centralize, and have some central
evaluation, which is what the DCI is supposed to do. Our present system was
invented in theory to prevent another Pearl Harbor: prior to Pearl, we had
Army, Navy, and State Department all in the intelligence business. Even
Commerce got in the act. In fact that worked pretty well, but many of the
signs that might have warned us of Pearl Harbor were lost because no one had
all the facts at hand. No one, that is, but the President and his immediate
advisors like Harry Hopkins. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, had all the
information including the Japanese diplomatic coded messages translated into
English not very long after the Japanese Embassy received and decoded them.
We can speculate for a long time on whether having a National Security
Advisor in the White House might have prevented Pearl Harbor since all the
threads would have run into that office: but in the United States no one can
force the President to pay attention to anything if he doesn't want to hear
the messages. I leave it at that.
If we want to create some competing intelligence analysis shops, and give
each of them access to what is known, and let them fight it out and present
reports to the National Security Advisor and the President, that will work;
but creating a czar who controls all the intelligence budgets is an act of
national insanity.
I have said this before but it is worth repeating:
I daily thank heaven for:
which is a nasal pump thing that opens up my nasal passages and sinuses
enough to let me breathe. Without it I'd be addicted to nose drops,
which are pretty awful things. Click on the link.
In fact I am not sure how I would have got through this without being
able to blast open my nasal passages for a night's sleep.
Discussion of the intelligence mess in mail. It's column time.
It ain't the things
you don't know that get you, it's the stuff you know for certain that ain't
so. I've always known that a major part of concrete curing was hydration --
it doesn't "dry" but takes up water -- but when, at a discussion of
Biosphere II by some people who ought to know (they included a physician who
had been part of the experiment), it was said that the process involves
oxidation as well, I had no reason to doubt it.
I said as much in an answer in
mail.
I have since been corrected. The problem is a lot more complicated than I
thought, and the managers did indeed pump in a measured amount of oxygen.
All of which should teach me to be more careful about things I think I know.
Fortunately readers don't hesitate to correct me. As I tell people whose
stuff I review, errors of fact I fix immediately. I'll listen to arguments
regarding errors of judgment. I have to be the one who decides which is
which.
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up
daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column,
8,000 -
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