Affirmative Action; Where’s Snowden? And beginning the credential discussion

View 779 Tuesday, June 25, 2013

 

Sixty-Three Years Ago Today

http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=36390

"On 25 June 1950 – at dawn – forces of the Korean People’s Army attacked South Korea. There had been skirmishes along the 38th parallel previously. However, this time the North Korean forces pushed south in an attempt to conquer South Korea and forcibly unify the peninsula under communist rule.

Hostilities were to last 3 years, 1 month, and 3 days. The war would claim between 500,000 and 950,000 total KIA (both sides); in excess of 1,200,000 individuals would be WIA.

The war technically has never ended. The agreement to stop fighting in July 1953 was an armistice, not a permanent settlement. A peace treaty formally ending the war has never been signed."

I worry very much that we’ve utterly failed to learn the lessons of this war, and have already spent far too much time wondering if I’ll know, if I trained, soldiers who will be in the next Task Force Smith.

 

 

The Supreme Court said yesterday that in order to achieve racial diversity in a public university, race can be considered in affirmative action. This wasn’t new, but now it’s only as a last resort.

The implications of this seem to have been overlooked. They admit the possibility that some races are so inferior that the only way to get – ANY – member of that race into the University of Texas is through racial preference. While I am sure that no one on the Supreme Court believes this, it sure looks like a logical inference.

Theodore R. Johnson: A Missed Opportunity on Racial Preferences

By THEODORE R. JOHNSON

‘You probably got it because you’re black."

I heard those words two years ago when I had the honor of being selected as a White House Fellow. It wasn’t the first time that at a moment of proud accomplishment I had heard skeptical comments. It happened when I was promoted a year ahead of my military peers. Earning a graduate degree from Harvard University prompted a dismissive remark about admission quotas. Most troubling of all was that, each time, I wondered: "What if it’s true?"

This is the ugly side of racial preferences that gets little attention. No matter what one may think of the policy, the truth is that with it comes an undercurrent of implied inferiority. Even in instances when a black or Hispanic is the best qualified and well-matched for a particular career or academic opportunity, the perception of unfair favoritism follows the person, hovering in the ether. The same suspicion often follows women who succeed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519324168805746.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

I had a similar situation in the 60’s when I was the pre-law advisor to the undergraduates at Pepperdine. I had fairly good relations with the admissions people at UCLA. One of my black students wanted to go there. He was the kind of student that every professor encounters: a B+ student who works so hard that he consistently gets A grades. The “B+” label is the professor’s internal evaluation, of course, and my not be correct. This chap had the misfortune to be classmates with Bill Allen, the kind of student whose blue book essays you read last so you won’t be disappointed in your other A students.

In any event when it came time for recommendations I sent him over to UCLA with a recommendation that he be admitted to their law school. He came back with an odd look: he had been admitted, but in a “minorities program” as affirmative action. I told him he should go back and tell them he didn’t need any damned minorities program. He wasn’t going to be top of his class, but he would be in the top half because he was thorough, and he had every right to a normal appointment, not some affirmative action program. I don’t think he did that, but I wish he had.

I sometimes think we need a constitutional amendment demanding equal protection of the laws to every person regardless of race, with the addendum that “This time we really mean it.”

I have mixed emotions about the Snowden affair, but only just.

A long time ago, during the Goldwater election of 1964, candidate Goldwater in a new interview proposed bombing the Ho Chi Minh “trail”, a system of roads and supply depots running through Laos that supported North Viet Nam regulars in their invasion of South Viet Nam. President Johnson responded that this was one of the most trigger happy suggestions he had ever heard, and that the very suggestion showed why Goldwater was unfit to be President of the United States. I heard that on the radio as I was looking a strike photos of USAF interdiction of the “trail” in Laos. We were evaluating the effectiveness of some new aerial bombardment systems using large caliber guns and a new computer aiming system.

I suppose I felt a momentary impulse to “blow the whistle” (the term wasn’t used in 1964 or as least I don’t recall that it was) but that would certainly have been a violation of the secrecay laws and the end of any career I might have in operations research. I was a bit non-plussed: just who were we keeping the secret from? Surely the North Vietnamese forces being killed knew we were bombing them, and they certainly told their Russian advisors. Or bomber and gunship crews certainly knew. The only people who didn’t know were the American people and some of the Congress.

On the other hand, it wasn’t likely to affect the national election. I also had on my desk an article signed by 26 certified psychiatrists proving that Goldwater was unfit to be president, and the TV ads were running a countdown to the certain nuclear doom the US faced if Goldwater were elected. And I had signed my agreements when I received clearances and when I signed out classified documents. I wasn’t tempted for long, and I did nothing , nor did any of the other pro-Goldwater people at Norton Air Force base.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who spilled U.S. surveillance secrets to the world, is a "free man" biding his time in a Moscow airport, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Tuesday in Finland.

Putin said that Snowden, who flew to Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday, remains in the "transit area" of Sheremetyevo International Airport — the zone between arrival gates and Russia’s passport control checkpoints. And while he said Russia won’t hand Snowden over to the United States, he seemed eager to have the focus of international intrigue off his hands.

"The sooner he selects his final destination point, the better both for us and for himself," Putin said of Snowden, who is wanted by U.S. officials on espionage charges for disclosing classified details of U.S. surveillance programs.

Putin’s confirmation ends, for now at least, the international pastime of "Where’s Snowden?" and speculation that the former CIA worker and National Security Agency contractor had perhaps duped the world into thinking he was in Moscow to throw pursuers off his trail as he seeks a safe haven from U.S. prosecution.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/nsa-leak/index.html

Mr. Snowden exposed the extent of US surveillance over US citizens. He threatens to expose more. The US and Russia are in a complex dance, and it is clear that the US is not prepared to go to the wall over this. Snowden will eventually leave the Russian airport for some place of refuges.It is unlikely to be Russia. If it turns out to be Cuba, it serves him right: survival in Cuba after all this blows over is not likely to be very pleasant but it will be tolerable, and Snowden will be more free than most Cubans. Perhaps he will repay Cuba’s generosity with some exposure of Cuba’s repressions.

I heard somewhere that he wanted refuge in Iceland.

It is well for the American people to know what most of us have suspected for a decade: nothing you say or do on the Web is secret. If you have visited a porn site, someone has a record of that, and if there is any reason for the authorities to turn their attention to you, someone will find it. If you have made an unwise comment on a political site, or sent an unfortunate email in a fit of pique, it exists out there and spins about on a server somewhere. Which, of course, means that anything can be fabricated, too. It’s as easy to manufacture a condemnatory email as to discover one – easier if that email never existed. I don’t think we have any fool proof way of certifying the provenance of electronic activities. But that’s a subject for another essay.

Much of the subject matter for a proper education is available free on line. For $300 you can acquire most of the course material and reading books you will ever need for bright kids from Art Robinson http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/?gclid=CM23wrCLgLgCFQE6Qgod32EAyQ although I’d recommend that you start young children with my wife’s reading program because Robinson’s curriculum includes good literature as well as adventure stories using a large vocabulary, and children without a background in systematic phonics may have needless problems. See Ms. Pournelle’s reading program, The Literacy Connection.

And for higher education – although the Robinson program goes pretty high – nearly everything is available on line. The Kahn Academy, Richard Feynman’s Freshman Physics lectures (which even the brightest kids will need to listen to more than once, but that’s the beauty of on line lectures) and dozens of other courses from beginner to advanced, they’re all out there and more are being added all the time.

The problem then becomes one of certification and credentialing, and you may be sure that The Blob – the education establishment – will fight desperately to keep their monopoly on granting ‘credentials’ and ‘degrees’ even though we all know that in some institutions those credentials certify nothing about the education of those who hold them: only that they showed up for the ‘workshops’ and had an above dismal attendance record.

I’ll return to the education theme later. It’s lunch time.