View 723 Wednesday, May 09, 2012

A great deal has happened in the past couple of days. The by-elections Tuesday were significant, and a repeat of the pattern of the November 2010 elections. A convict in Texas gets 41% of the vote in a Democratic presidential primary election — http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57430719-503544/4-in-10-choose-convict-over-obama-in-w.va-primary/ . The Tea Party and the Club for Growth bring down Republican Senator Lugar, one of the Republican establishment. The governor of Wisconsin, running unopposed for the Republican nomination in his union-organized recall election has gathered more votes than the two Democratic nominees running to be his opposition in the recall. All across the country the news is bad for Democrats, and not very good for establishment Republicans. The electorate that turned out to vote was pretty conservative – including many Democrats.

Of course President Obama will win next November if the conservatives do not turn out to turn him out. Sitting back and cursing Romney for being a part of the Republican Establishment will pretty well insure four more years of Mr. Obama; and given the president’s proclivity for appointing czars, officers unknown to the Constitution, the republic isn’t likely to survive. Yes, I know – that seems a rather obscure thing to base the fall of the republic on. Appointment of officers not confirmed by the Senate. But think on it, and think on why the Convention of 1787 made the confirmation of officers of the United States a necessary part of the federal government process. For those who don’t know, this confirmation extends down to the lowest ranking commissioned officers in the armed forces. That is more or less ceremonial now in so far as it affects ensigns and lieutenants, but it’s fairly vital when it comes to flag ranks. Think on it. It is and was intended to be a definite limitation on executive power.

As to Mr. Romney, I will have more to say on this over the summer, but I do want to point out that of those considered part of the Republican Establishment, he would be my choice. The primary American virtues are deference to religion – perhaps not quite what the Romans insisted on as pietas, but close enough; industriousness; family loyalty; and adherence to community values. Those, I would say, are also the primary virtues of practicing Mormons, and from what I can see, Romney is more Mormon than Establishment. He is also a firm believer in state’s rights, and limitation of federal power. One may not care for Romney-care as implemented in Massachusetts, but Romney has never said that you should: he has held from the beginning that the federal government doesn’t have the constitutional power to implement anything like that. At one time he may have been an advocate of the Romney-care system for other states, but as experience grows in how it has worked out, we hear less of that.

Now this, I put it to you, is precisely the conservative view of such matters. The States have the right and power to try experiments that are forbidden to the Federal government.

Moreover it’s interesting to hear what Mr. Romney says were his reasons for favoring compulsory health insurance: he says, and although I have no evidence I have no reason not to believe him, that the number of people in the state who didn’t have some form of health insurance was very small – and they were getting it anyway, without paying; the health care law was a way to make them contribute something toward the insurance they were as a matter of practice already enjoying. Put that way I’s still oppose it, but note that it isn’t being sold as an entitlement: it’s being sold as a requirement that you pay for something you are as a practical matter already getting.

My point is that of those in the Republican establishment, I see none closer to traditional American views than Mr. Romney, and much of what he says makes sense. And he is far more likely to restore every day government to the kind of limits the Framers intended than Mr. Obama who, with his czars, and ‘recess appointments’ made when the Senate is not in recess, and a health care bill passed at the last dying moments of a lame duck Congress using arcane procedures, has changed the relationship of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.

And who knows, Romney may actually rid us of bunny inspectors.

The story is even better if Romney wins with a big turnout of conservative voters who also elect conservatives to other levels of office, state and local. He’s not stupid. He can hear that message loud and clear. As all of us should have heard the massage in the votes yesterday.

I was going to write more, but at 1530 Niven came over to pick up Roberta and me, and we went off to a theater where we were joined by Larry’s nephew and family to watch The Avengers.

Great fun. Those who are Marvel Comics fans will love it. Those who aren’t familiar with the Marvel universe might want to look up a few of the characters, but you don’t really have to. You can roll with the flow. It probably helps to understand that Black Widow and Hawkeye (the archer) were lovers, and it certainly helps to have seen the two Iron Man movies, but it’s still a rollicking good adventure with oodles of spectacular special effects. If you hate action adventure movies you’ll hate this one, but then you already know that.

Gwyneth Paltrow is one of my favorite actresses – I particularly liked her performance as Sylvia Plath in what I think is a very underrated film – and she has managed to do something that a lot of ingénues don’t manage, to find a part that isn’t character acting after their ingénue career ends. She has made Pepper Potts into a believable character, a capable and mature woman, still quite attractive and who doesn’t neglect her appearance, but who doesn’t live off her looks. She isn’t a major action character (In one of the Marvel universes she certainly is) but she has a substantial role even so.

Scarlett Johansson has a major part as an action adventure heroine with near superpowers. She is said to have done most of her own stunt work.

I didn’t find any of the men’s performances outstanding although Downey does his usual job of making Iron Man believable, and Tom Hiddleston is quite good as Loki.

It’s a long movie. I thought it perhaps too long, but I’m not sure what I’d cut. The action never stops. I found a few of the plot changes too abrupt (too little preparation) but Niven and my wife hadn’t noticed them until I brought it up, so I’m probably too analytical for this kind of film. Try it, you’ll like it.

Roland had this to add, and I agree:

Avengers.

I thought it was fantastic. I loved the Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Captain America movies (my one quibble with the Captain America movie was that for some reason, the producers of the film didn’t want to show him fighting actual *Nazis*), I liked the Thor movie – but I thought that Avengers was greater than the sum of its parts.

Yes, Robert Downey, Jr. is always superb and makes Tony Stark believable – but Chris Evans stole the show with his all-American maturity, stolidity, and just general overall *goodness*. I’ve always liked tortured antihero types (which probably says a lot about my own character flaws, heh), but Evans’ Captain America as a wholesome, uncomplicated, good guy is a breath of fresh air in both the Captain America and the Avengers movies. I’m shocked that his line in Avengers about religion, "There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that," made it through the Holitburo, but I guess they figured that it would also appeal to Muslims, so they let it slide.

Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner was pretty good, too, IMHO.

Roland Dobbins

Agreed. I wrote that late after we got back from the theater and dinner.

View 723 Tuesday, May 08, 2012

A MALWARE WARNING from a long time subscriber:

Malware warning – NCH software "Doxillion"

Jerry,

A warning for your users, the default windows application search when trying to open up a .wps file leads to malware from "NCH software". It purports to install doxillion software converter which on the face of it appears legit and since microsoft’s own application search listed it, you might think that it is in fact legit. In reality, it doesn’t really do anything worthwhile but now opening almost any data file will lead to a pop-up saying that you need a converter update from NCH doxillion so please click here.

I’m 60 minutes into rooting it out of my registry since microsoft program remover doesn’t come close to removing the damage done, and I’m probably going to have to do a system restore or restore from backup since it has altered document opening/conversion settings for nearly every application on my computer (including itunes features for converting between sound file formats).

This is badly destructive and poorly behaved, and microsoft is part of the problem since the automatic application search feature links to this (instead of the correct microsoft word document converter which works fine) and windows doesn’t offer up a way to undo the damage caused without rolling the system back to a restore point created before the installation.

So, my fault for trusting a microsoft "approved" solution, but your readers might be saved a lot of hassle by a warning to treat this as the worst kind of malware.

Oh btw neither Norton nor Microsoft security essentials nor msie’s site screening feature offered any help. And CCleaner wasn’t able to completely root it out of the registry either, the damage was so widespread.

Sean

I have not experienced this and with luck never will, but be careful.  BEWARE.

As usual, Fred cuts through the euphemisms and gets to the point in his latest essay on education.

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Yet public schools remain very popular, and people are willing to tax themselves (and raise inordinately on others) to “support education” and “support the schools.” Of course this all became inevitable when the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom declared education – something never mentioned in the Constitution or its amendments – as a federal entitlement, rather than as something provided by citizens for whatever reasons appeal to them. When schools are funded by local property owners who also elect the local school board, you get one kind of school; when “education” becomes an entitlement and is paid for by the state (on the basis of attendance, not results) you get quite another.

For my first eight years in grade school, we had about 20 students to a grade and two grades to the classroom. Capleville school was in the middle of nowhere and my classmates were farm children brought in by school bus. In my case the school was about a mile and a half from my house, but the school bus route wandered all through the country east of Highway 78 picking up farm kids. What they learned in Capleville consolidated was pretty standard for Tennessee. The math instruction was arithmetic and pretty well stopped at 6^th grade. English literature included what was standard fare in those days, Ruskin, Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Longfellow, that sort of thing. There was world history, Tennessee history, US history, and in 5^th grade as I recall mostly European history; I remember that because there was a textbook with a picture of something medieval or renaissance (I doubt that we were taught the difference) and the village idiot, a girl about 14 still in 5^th grade, had copied the caption to a picture in the history textbook and read it aloud as her writing assignment.

Fred continues

Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

And that is where I disagree with him. I don’t recall anyone at Capleville who was in misery over schoolwork. Everyone in my classes – gathered from farms all around, there being no more than a couple of hundred families in Capleville itself – could read, and all of them except me learned something. I suppose I learned something too – I would never have read most of the items in our readers if they hadn’t been assigned – but mostly I was on my own. I had the Britannica at home and a pretty good memory, so I often knew more about anything brought up for class discussion than the teachers did, and mostly I learned that this wasn’t always a good thing – adults don’t really appreciate being corrected by ten year olds in sixth grade – and that I hated penmanship classes. And that what you learn from Captain Marvel comic books isn’t very good science, but the notion of an intelligent worm setting out to conquer the earth can be interesting.

Moreover, in my eight years in grade school I didn’t know anyone who couldn’t read. Plenty who didn’t really understand what they were reading, but even the village idiot could read in the sense that she saw words and pronounced them, even though she didn’t see why reading the caption to a picture (The man and the lady are playing chess, a popular game in those times) would be thought amusing to students who had seen that in their history lesson book a week before. Incidentally, the girl in question got pregnant at age 16 and married an Italian prisoner of war who worked on the farm her parents owned, and when I last heard of her she had two children and had inherited the farm.

The point being that the farm owners in the Capleville consolidated district were presumably satisfied with the school. I don’t really know, but I don’t recall any contested school board elections. I think the local general store owner was one of the school board members.

But Fred’s depiction of many schools as sheer hell for bright and stupid pupils alike, and not much use for all those in between is I gather fairly accurate for most of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I happen to live near one of the LAUSD flagship schools and in a neighborhood of mostly behind the scenes movie people – I expect there are more employed writers in Studio City than in any other square mile on earth. Our local school serves us well and people all over the city try to find ways to get their kids into it. There are other decent schools in LA. Alas, Fred’s horror stories apply to a lot of it.

And his conclusion:

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

As I have said, repeatedly, the best way to be certain that no child is left behind is to be certain that no child gets ahead. If you reward schools for attendance and nothing else, then try to modify that by demanding that all the students get over a very low bar, you can predict the result: all the effort will be spent on those who would fail without it. Resources won’t go do bright kids, nor will they go to the average students who could greatly benefit from it. It will go to those below normal and they’ll get just enough to get them over the bar. And of course the unions will insist that there are no incompetent teachers. There never are.

For all its floundering around with the notion that every kid is entitled to a world class university prep education, the Gates Foundation has made one key discovery: you can get about 100% improvement in any school simply by firing the worst 10% of the teachers in it. Don’t replace them, simply get them out and distribute the others into the remaining classes, even if you have to go to two grades to the room. Get the dullards out of the school teaching business and things will get better. Of course twice as good as what we have is pretty awful, but it’s something.

But the only systematic solution to the ‘education problem’ is to go back to transparency and subsidiarity. Let local school boards run the schools, and let them be elected by the people who pay for them. That way there might be some justification for thinking of the schools as ‘investments.’ So long as they remain subject to a central bureaucracy, the Iron Law will see to it that many bright kids, supposedly entitled to a world class university prep education, find themselves sentenced to Hell.

More later, but we have a virus warning.

View 722 Friday, May 04, 2012

New Chinese Motto: “Have One Child. Please.”

Steve Barnes is in town, and Niven, Barnes, and I went up the hill, 4 miles round trip and 750 foot elevation. Sable has hunted gophers on that hill for all of her eight years, and today she caught on. A good day, but I’m exhausted. And the Lakers blew game three in Denver.

Good night…

To remind you of what Scientific American once was and sometimes can be again http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/04/30/dogs-but-not-wolves-use-humans-as-tools/  (This was actually mail but now I can’t find it. I’m good at losing things.) Psychologists have been trying to determine who is smarter, dogs or wolves, but that’s the wrong question. Dogs do what they are good at, and rely on humans to do the rest.  Wolves don’t think they have that option.