| Tuesday, March
6, 2007
I'm almost caught up.
I hope. Tip for the day: never speak to any
FBI official or other Federal investigator unless subpoenaed and under oath.
Don't even tell them the time of day or where you were five minutes ago. Ask
Martha Stewart for details. It used to be we thought of "our
police" and "our FBI." These are different times. They like to play gotcha
now. =============
Buckley: My friend, the Watergate conspirator.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/
opinion/la-op-buckley4mar04,1,1820453.story
- Roland Dobbins
There is a very great deal more to this than appears.
Fortunately, I don't know much of it.
My "Washington Career" was cut short (actually it never
quite began) when Nixon's advisors decided that I wasn't a team player. This
turned out to be a good thing: I suppose we would have sold this house and
moved to DC had they not intervened. And it certainly would not have worked
out in Washington. As I said, I was fortunate that "the
Germans" did not trust me to be a "team player". I certainly
would not have been a "team player" regarding idiocies like trying to bug
the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Leave ethics aside: it was
stupid. In the first place, I can't understand what they expected to learn.
I have managed political campaigns, and I never for one moment assumed that
my offices were not bugged -- indeed I had an old Company friend go over one
office we had been loaned, and they found 11 devices including an old carbon
microphone. The office was kept by a real estate office to be loaned to
campaigns they approved of (as a donation) and apparently had been the
target of bugs for twenty years and more. My friend warned me, and I agreed,
that I shouldn't assume they'd got all of them, and I told my staff that
nothing was to be said in those offices that we would regret seeing in the
LA Times the next day... And I cannot conceive of being a
"team player" involved in the assassination of a journalist. Assassination
as a weapon in the Cold War I could understand; Eisenhower ordered the
assassination of Russian officers in the captive nations (but not in the
USSR itself) as retaliation for the Russian downing of the RB-47, and
special teams took out such people as the commandant of the Red Army
garrison in Sofia. The purpose was to make the Soviets understand that some
moves were off limits and would not be tolerated, and the general consensus
is that Eisenhower put that message across. This is, I would say, a
legitimate use of assassination by a Republic. A domestic
conspiracy to assassinate a journalist -- this comment of Buckley's is the
first I have heard of it -- is way beyond the limits. Roosevelt allowed the
Brits to assassinate US political leaders in the run-up to World War II
(read A Man Called Intrepid for a tiny look behind the curtain), and turned
a blind eye to the murder of Carlo Tresca. Lincoln imprisoned a number of
Copperheads without trial and allowed the military to execute some of them
out of hand, but that was during a real shooting Civil War. Conspiracy
to knock off a prominent journalist is far beyond all that.
I only met Nixon a couple of times. I knew people who worked
with him. Every one of those I knew well vanished from his administration,
some of them very quickly. As one of my friends who did go to the Executive
Office of the President told me, "This isn't the way it was supposed to be
at all."
I will say that E. Howard Hunt has always had a reputation
for being fanciful and embellishing his reports with speculation and
opinion. On the other hand, I think I met him precisely once for five
minutes. Buckley knew him well; and of course there is a fairly strong bond
between an operative and his case officer. I have considerable
confidence in Bill Buckley. What I can't understand is why he would put such
a shocking detail in the introduction to a book. ===
In fooling around (mostly to avoid work) I came across
a short disquisition
I wrote in 1999 about The Strategy of Technology and Stefan T. Possony, one
of the great men of the last century. It's not much out of date except that
we now have a pdf copy of the book for sale. I will repeat this on the Ides
of March, which is Steve's birthday. It may be worth your attention. Strategy of Technology in pdf format:
========= Education, Training, and
degrees
Jerry - MIT has opened up their courseware for anyone
who wants to learn what you learn there (minus what you learn from the
interaction, labs, etc) -
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Also note that the project is funded by the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation -
No degree - but then again, which is more important:
the piece of paper or the knowledge? Of course, you miss the interaction
with the professors, the lab work (a key part of MIT education), the
collaboration with fellow students, etc. But, you get the basis of the
material.
Some words from MIT (their Engineering E-newsletter)
on OCW (note a) the non-traditional (10 year olds! & building better
canopies) education uses, and b) the possibility of a secondary education
version of OCW):
OpenCourseWare
OCW (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
provides the MIT faculty's teaching materials for almost all of MIT's
undergraduate and graduate courses on the Web, free of charge, to any
user anywhere in the world. Five years after MIT announced OCW, 1,550
MIT courses, nearly a third in engineering alone, are now available
online. Those materials, including those on translation sites, currently
attract more than 1.2 million monthly visits and have received over one
billion hits.
With plans to offer materials from 1,800
MIT courses by 2008, OCW has contributed to higher education in
remarkable ways. [See impact statistics cited in our last e-newsletter (http://web.mit.edu/engineering/enews/vol3no6-feature.html)
.] We had expected that OCW would be a valuable resource for university
educators including our own faculty at MIT. However, the use has far
exceeded our wildest imagination, and the facts and figures only begin
to tell the story. As examples, the chairman of a high school science
department in Toms River, New Jersey, now utilizes OCW materials and the
video lectures of MIT Professor Walter Lewin about electricity and
magnetism to excite his students about physics. Kenn Magnum, a high
school computer science teacher in Chandler, Arizona, has utilized
materials from several OCW computer science courses to educate himself
and his students. With more than 100 course offerings from the MIT
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Magnum uses
MIT OCW as an invaluable professional development tool for his
after-school Artificial Intelligence Club. In Colorado, a father is
using the lectures and course materials of noted MIT mathematics
professor Gilbert Strang to teach his 10- and 12-year-old daughters.
Captain Kevin Gannon, a Leadership Trainer at the U.S. Navy's Southwest
Regional Maintenance Center at the San Diego Naval Station, has used OCW
materials to train the 3,000 sailors and civilians under his command;
and VR Bill Humes, a U.S. Navy Aerospace Engineer and Researcher at
Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, has made fighter canopies
stronger and safer using information from the site.
We have hundreds of stories from around the
U.S. (and the world) about the impact OCW is having. The staggering
outpouring of positive responses indicates that technology can make a
difference, a big difference. At MIT, we have demonstrated that the
OpenCourseWare model is an affordable and accessible way to transform
education, and our global audiences of users hold MIT accountable to
create and share high-quality materials. Judging by our experience
working with and talking to users from around the world, we believe
there are tremendous positive implications to open sharing of
educational materials. Some of us at MIT are now considering the
possibility of creating a version of OCW for secondary education that
would help close the achievement gap in science and engineering
education in the United States that concerns us all.
------- jeff
So long as we have Affirmative Action Laws I fear that the
credentials are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than the knowledge. That does not detract
from the importance of this announcement. Moreover, other degree granting
institutions can make use of the materials too. What's needed
is some way to certify credentials that doesn't involve the expense of going
to a modern university. We need a system that will do that: that will allow
people to learn something, get certification that they know it, and have
that count when the racial profilers count up the quotas in employment.
Imagine a company that hired someone who can show he has done all the work
of an MIT degree, but does not have the paper, in preference to a minority
graduate of Podunk Junior College who has a certificate. The company would
be sued into bankruptcy.
I ought to work this into a novel about the near future.
And see mail
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