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Wednesday,
August 1, 2007
We have two messages from Colonel Couvillon
"we can probably count on Iran not
causing too much real global trouble for a while. "
Well, first I have a distinct problem with the pilot using
the word 'probably'. Quick question to the officer - would you fly in an
aircraft that you can probably count on not to have any problems?
Apparently his military education is also lacking in the
knowledge of countries where internal strife is increasing - have
traditionally sought external enemies to provide for a common 'good' of the
country, or at least to justify 'internal security.'
My advice is not to trust the Persians... and never let
this guy anywhere near diplomatic or political power.
s/f Couv
==
I requested Colonel Couvillon's (USMCR)
assessment of the situation in Iraq. He was at one time governor of a
province there.
Gen Petreaus' strategy (of which the 'surge' is only a
part) is having positive effects. Bad guys are being driven (even 'herded')
out of Baghdad & Ramadi and Iraqis (with strong US backup) are maintaining
that space - expect to see major military push in the provinces of Karbala,
Salah ah-Din & Ninawah in the near future. (Note that as the military
situation in Iraq is improving, the major media in the US is switching to
carping about the Iraqi government [with some justifiction] corruption and
infrastructure deterioration).
Recruiting for the Iraqi Army and Police is still in high
gear and have no lack of bodies, but training desertions still hover around
20%. US involvement of Tribal leaders is increasing and this is bringing a
calming effect over many areas.
The political climate (nationally) continues to ebb and
flow, mostly ebb, without a STRONG leader and weak incentives for
cooperation among the various groups. The trick is to find an Iraqi 'George
Washington' who is strong enough to force the way forward, but who is also
altruistic enough to do it for the country rather than himself/sect/tribe. I
don't know that that person exists in Iraq - at least in the group of people
that has any reasonable chance of being in a position of power. Still, the
government has not folded, nor has there been a coup or revolt, and that's a
significant positive sign.
Incompetence certainly isn't unique to the Iraqi
government. Furthermore, it is imperative to inhibit, as much as possible,
and by any means possible, the interference in Iraq affairs by the Persians,
Saudis, and Syrians (don't forget the mufsidoon Hirabist's). As long as they
keep 'stirring the pot' we (Or the Iraqi's) will make little headway in
stability, much less prosperity. It should be heartening to everyone, though
to note the amount of pride in IRAQ by all of the country in the form of the
Iraqi National Football team win of the Asian Cup - there can be an national
Iraqi identity. Alas, I feel we do very little to build upon that.
s/f Couv
=========
And on this subject:
Subject: A war we just might win - if Maliki allows it
Jerry,
Supposing that Petraeus has got himself a winning
strategy, I have to wonder if our Iraqi allies will let him win:
http://wtop.com/?nid=105&sid=1203151
"July 28, 2007 - 2:05pm
By STEVEN R. HURST and QASSIM
ABDUL-ZAHRA Associated Press Writers
BAGHDAD (AP) - A key aide says
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's relations with Gen. David Petraeus are
so poor the Iraqi leader may ask Washington to withdraw the overall U.S.
commander from his Baghdad post."
Those who still strongly support
the war seem to love Petraeus and his strategy, so it would be quite a
slap in their faces if the democratically elected government in Iraq
were to ask for his removal. Stories like this have me wondering if we
should be so concerned about "betraying the trust" of this crowd.....
CP, Connecticut
==
This isn't to attack it
or say it is inaccurate, but I would note in passing that the "liberal
main stream media newspaper" article was coauthored by Kenneth M. Pollack,
author of the 2002 book titled "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading
Iraq."
http://www.amazon.com/Threatening-Storm-Case-Invading-Iraq/dp/0375509283
Thanks,
Ian Perry
==============
Meme 101: H.L.
Mencken: The Educational Process sent 7.8.1
From Education, Prejudices: Third
Series, 1922, pp. 238-65. First printed in the New York Evening Mail, Jan.
23, 1918. Revised, perhaps, for A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1949), pp. 301-6, and taken from there.
Next to the clerk in holy orders, the
fellow with the foulest job in the world is the schoolmaster. Both are
underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out
their hearts trying to perform the impossible. How much the world asks of
them, and how little they can actually deliver! The clergyman's business is
to save the human race from Hell. It he saves one-eighth of one per cent,
even within the limits of his narrow flock, he does magnificently. The
schoolmasters is to spread the enlightenment, to make the great masses of
the plain people think--and thinking is precisely the thing that the great
masses of the plain people are congenitally and eternally incapable of. , Is
it any wonder that the poor birchman, facing this labor that would have
staggered Sisyphus, seeks refuge from its essential impossibility in a
Chinese maze of empty technic? The ghost of Pestalozzi, once bearing a torch
and beckoning toward the heights, now leads down dark stairways into the
black and forbidding dungeons of Teachers College, Columbia. The art of
pedagogics becomes a sort of puerile magic, a thing of preposterous secrets,
a grotesque compound of false premisses and illogical conclusions. Every
year sees a craze for some new solution of the teaching enigma, an endless
series of flamboyant arcana. The worst extravagances of *privat dozent*
experimental psychology are gravely seized upon; the uplift pours in its
ineffable principles and discoveries; mathematical formulae are marked out
for every emergency; there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some
superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce
the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some
master formula that will not only take the place of competence and
resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial
receptivity in the child. Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable from
and superior to the thing taught. Its mastery is a special business, a sort
of transcendental high jumping. A teacher well grounded in it can teach
anything to any child, just as a sound dentist can pull any tooth out of any
jaw.
All this, I need not point out, is in
sharp contrast to the old theory of teaching. By that theory mere technic
was simplified and subordinated. All that it demanded of the teacher told
off to teach, say, geography, was that he master the facts in the geography
book and provide himself with a stout rattan. Thus equipped, he was ready
for a test of his natural pedagogical genius. First he exposed the facts in
the book, then he gilded them with whatever appearance of interest and
importance he could conjure up, and then he tested the extent of their
transference to the minds of his pupils. Those pupils who had ingested them
got apples; those who had failed got fanned. Followed the second round, and
the same test again, with a second noting of results. And then the third,
and fourth, and the fifth, and so on until the last and least pupil had been
stuffed to his subnormal and perhaps moronic brim.
I was myself grounded in the
underlying delusions of what is called knowledge by this austere process,
and despite the eloquence of those who support newer ideas, I lean heavily
in favor of it, and regret to hear that it is no more. It was crude, it was
rough, and it was often not a little cruel, but it at least had two capital
advantages over all the systems that have succeeded it. In the first place,
its machinery was simple; even the stupidest child could understand it; it
hooked up cause and effect with the utmost clarity. And in the second place,
it tested the teacher as and how he ought to be tested--that is, for his
actual capacity to teach, not for his mere technical virtuosity. There was,
in fact, no technic for him to master, and hence none for him to hide
behind. He could not conceal a hopeless inability to impart knowledge
beneath a correct professional method.
That ability to impart knowledge, it
seems to me, has very little to do with technical method. It may operate at
full function without any technical method at all, and contrariwise, the
most elaborate of technical methods cannot make it operate when it is not
actually present. And what does it consist of? It consists, first, of a
natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for
putting things in a way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly,
of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a
concern about it amounting to a kind of passion. A man who knows a subject
thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams
it--this man can almost always teach it with success, no matter how little
he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him,
and because enthusiasm is as contagious as fear or the barber's itch. An
enthusiast is willing to go to any trouble to impart the glad news bubbling
within. He thinks that it is important and valuable for to know; given the
slightest glow of interest in a pupil to start with, he will fan that glow
to a flame. No hollow hocus-pocus cripples him and slows him down. He drags
his best pupils along as fast as they can go, and he is so full of the thing
that he never tires of expounding its elements to the dullest.
This passion, so unordered and yet so
potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in
scientific men of high attainments in their specialties--for example,
Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and
Osier--men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of
pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard
them stated. It explains, too, the failure of the general run of high-school
and college teachers--men who are competent, by the professional standards
of pedagogy, but who nevertheless contrive only to make intolerable bores of
the things they presume to teach. No intelligent student ever learns much
from the average drover of undergraduates; what he actually carries away has
come out of his textbooks, or is the fruit of his own reading and inquiry.
But when he passes to the graduate school, and comes among men (if he is
lucky) who really understand the subjects they teach, and, what is more, who
really love them, his store of knowledge increases rapidly, and in a very
short while, if he has any intelligence at all, he learns to think in terms
of the thing he is studying.
So far, so good. But an objection
still remains, the which may be couched in the following terms: that in the
average college or high school, and especially in the elementary school,
most of the subjects taught are so bald and uninspiring that it is difficult
to imagine them arousing the passion I have been describing--in brief, that
only a donkey could be enthusiastic about them. In witness, think of the
four elementals: reading, penmanship, arithmetic and spelling. This
objection, at first blush, seems dismaying, but only a brief inspection is
needed to show that it is really of very small validity. It is made up of a
false assumption and a false inference. The false assumption is that there
are no donkeys in our schools and colleges today. The false inference is
that there is any sound reason for prohibiting teaching by donkeys, if only
the donkeys know how to do it, and to do it well. The facts stand iii almost
complete antithesis to these notions. The truth is that the average
schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be essentially and
next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging
in so puerile an avocation? And the truth is that it is precisely his
inherent idiocy, and not his technical equipment as a pedagogue, that is
responsible for whatever modest success he now shows.
I here attempt no heavy jocosity, but
mean exactly what I say. Consider, for example, penmanship. A legible
handwriting, it must be obvious, is useful to all men, and particularly to
the lower orders of men, It is one of the few things capable of acquirement
in school that actually helps them to make a living. Well, how is it taught
today? It is taught, in the main, by schoolmarms so enmeshed in a complex
and unintelligible technic that, even supposing them able to write clearly
themselves, they find it quite impossible to teach their pupils. Every few
years sees a radical overhauling of the whole business. First the vertical
hand is to make it easy; then certain curves are the favorite magic; then
there is a return to slants and shadings. No department of pedagogy sees a
more hideous cavorting of quacks. In none is the natural talent and
enthusiasm of the teacher more depressingly crippled. And the result? The
result is that our American school children write abominably--that a clerk
or stenographer with a simple, legible hand becomes almost as scarce as one
with Greek.
Go back, now, to the old days.
Penmanship was then taught, not mechanically and ineffectively, by unsound
and shifting formulas, but by passionate penmen with curly patent-leather
hair and far-away eyes--in brief, by the unforgettable professors of our
youth, with their flourishes, their heavy down-strokes and their lovely
birds-with-letters-in-their-bills. You remember them, of course. Asses all!
Preposterous popinjays and numskulls! Pathetic imbeciles! But they loved
penmanship, they believed in the glory and beauty of penmanship, they were
fanatics, devotees, almost martyrs of penmanship--and so they got some touch
of that passion into their pupils. Not enough, perhaps, to make more
flourishers and bird-blazoners, but enough to make sound penmen. Look at
your old writing book; observe the excellent legibility, the clear strokes
of your "Time is money." Then look at your child's.
Such idiots, despite the rise of
"scientific" pedagogy, have not died out in the world. I believe that our
schools are full of them, both in pantaloons and in skirts. There are
fanatics who love and venerate spelling as a tom-cat loves and venerates
catnip. There are grammatomaniacs; schoolmarms who would rather parse than
eat; specialists in an objective case that doesn't exist in English; strange
beings, otherwise sane and even intelligent and comely, who suffer under a
split infinitive as you or I would suffer under gastro-enteritis. There are
geography cranks, able to bound Mesopotamia and Be-Inohistan. There are
zealots for long division, experts in the multiplication table, lunatic
worshipers of the binomial theorem. But the system has them in its grip. It
combats their natural enthusiasm diligently and mercilessly. It tries to
convert them into mere technicians, clumsy machines. It orders them to
teach, not by the process of emotional osmosis which worked in the days gone
by, but by formulas that are as baffling to the pupil as they are paralyzing
to the teacher. Imagine what would happen to one of them who stepped to the
blackboard, seized a piece of chalk, and engrossed a bird that held the
class spell-bound, a bird with a thousand flowing feathers, wings bursting
with parabolas and epicycloids, and long ribbons streaming from its bill.
Imagine the fate of one who began "Honesty is the best policy" with an H as
florid and--to a child--as beautiful as the initial of a medieval
manuscript. Such a teacher would be cashiered and handed over to the secular
arm; the very enchantment of the assembled infantry would be held as damning
proof against him. And yet it is just such teachers that we should try to
discover and develop. Pedagogy needs their enthusiasm, their naive belief in
their own grotesque talents, their capacity for communicating their childish
passion to the childish.
But this would mean exposing the
children of the Republic to contact with monomaniacs, half-wits? Well, what
of it? The vast majority of them are already exposed to contact with
half-wits in their own homes; they are taught the word of God by half-wits
on Sundays; they will grow up into Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, Red Men
and other such half-wits in the day's to come. Moreover, as I have hinted,
they are already fact to face with half-wits in the actual schools, at least
in three cases out of four. The problem before us is not to dispose of this
fact, but to utilize it. We cannot hope to fill the schools with persons of
high intelligence, for persons of high intelligence simply refuse to spend
their lives teaching such banal things as spelling and arithmetic. Among the
teachers male we may safely assume that 95% are of low mentality, else they
would depart for more appetizing pastures. And even among the teachers
female the best are inevitably weeded out by marriage, and only the worst
(with a few romantic exceptions) survive.
The task before us, as I say, is not
to make a vain denial of this cerebral inferiority of the pedagogue, nor to
try to combat and disguise it by concocting a mass of technical balderdash,
but to search out and put to use the value lying concealed in it. For even
stupidity, it must be plain, has its uses in the world, and some of them are
uses that intelligence cannot meet. One would not tell off a Galileo to
drive an ash-cart or an Ignatius Loyola to be a stock-broker, or a Mozart to
lead the orchestra in a night-club. By the same token, one would not ask a
Duns Scotus to instruct sucklings. Such men would not only be wasted at the
job; they would also be incompetent. The business of dealing with' children,
in fact, demands a certain jejunity of mind. The best teacher, until one
comes to adult pupils, is not the one who knows most, but the one who is
most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious
and the wonderful which slips into the infantile comprehension. A man of
high intelligence, perhaps, may accomplish the thing by a conscious
intellectual feat. But it is vastly easier to the man (or woman) whose
habits of mind are naturally on the plane of a child's. The best teacher of
children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
If I had my way I should expose all
candidates for berths in the grade-schools to the Binet-Simon test, and
reject all those who revealed a mentality of more than fifteen years. Plenty
would still pass. Moreover, they would be secure against contamination by
the new technic of pedagogy. Its vast wave of pseudo-psychology would curl
and break against the hard barrier of their innocent and passionate
intellects--as it probably does, in fact, even now. They would know nothing
of learning situations, integration, challenges, emphases, orthogenics,
mind-sets, differentia, and all the other fabulous fowl of the Teachers
College aviary. But they would see in reading, writing and arithmetic the
gaudy charms of profound knowledge, and they would teach these ancient
branches, now so abominably in decay, with passionate gusto, and
irresistible effectiveness, and a gigantic success.
[I am sending forth these memes, not
because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females
of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.]
Frank
I am not sure what it means to
impregnate females of both exes, but then I have never entirely bought
the meme meme.
==========
Two from Russell Seitz
NEVER JUDGE AN AFGHAN BY HIS HAT
Bad Mistake if he turns out to be a Baloch
--The ethnic minority straddling southeast Iran,
southwest Pakistan and south Afghanistan. In February, a Baloch attack on
the Iranian city of Zahedan killed 11 Revolutionary Guards, and mover the
Baloch to the top of Tehran's hit list.
Do these attacks signal the beginning of a covert war
on Iran ?
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/08/never-judge-an-.html
<http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?&id=9743>
<http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?&id=9743>
Russell Seitz
==
Will California Be Blown Into The Gulf Of Mexico?
Cow_collegees <http://adamant.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/31/cow_collegees.jpg>
The DOE's bureaucratic death-wish has morphed into an Aggie Joke: Awarding
the security contract for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to Texas
A&M
I was kind of rooting for Waco, but earmarks are
earmarks.
<http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/time-to-evacuat.html>
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/07/will-texas-fall.html
<http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/07/will-texas-fall.html>
Russell Seitz
For reply from Texas A&M
see below
===============
And we hear from Jim Ransom
Physicists Organized to Prevent Outsourcing
Dear Jerry,
At least some people in the scientific community are
beginning to notice the decline in opportunities for American-grown
physicists.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/
Theoretical_Physicists_Organize_To_Stem_Outsourcing_999.html
Jim Ransom
Perhaps they should join the CIO? Don't
join that cloak maker union it's a tradecraft union, it's a White Guard
union for the boss. Join that CIO union it's an industrial union, it's a Red
Guard union just for us!
(Alas, Google does not know everything: it
can't find that old song. Oh. Well.)
===========
The Death of Sweden.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2278
-- Roland Dobbins
My family came from Skane, which is now
part of Sweden but was then Denmark, but I have always had relatives from
Sweden. It is sad to see national suicide. Apparently it is all right to
have Egypt for the Egyptians but never shall Swedes or Danes have a land of
their own.
============
From another conference:
Copied without commentary:
*** begin quotation ***
U.S. Copyright Office NewsNet
July 30, 2007 Issue 320
** For additional information,
visit the Copyright Office website at
http://www.copyright.gov
***** * NEWS *
-------Copyright
Office------
IMPROVED COPYRIGHT SEARCH SYSTEM
TO REPLACE CURRENT SEARCH SYSTEMS IN MID AUGUST
In mid August, the Copyright
Office will launch a powerful new records search system that accesses
more than 20 million digital records of registrations and recorded
documents from 1978 to the present. The new system allows searching by
title, name, keyword, and registration or document number. Through a
command keyword search, elements of any or all fields can be combined to
search the records.
Users can also search by type of
work, such as sound recordings, dramas, motion pictures, visual
materials, or preregistrations. The search method combines three
separate databases that previously permitted only limited searching. The
search tool uses Voyager software, the same system used by the Library
of Congress Online Catalog.
For a tutorial on searching with
the new system, go to:
http://www.copyright.gov/records
-- ---Federal Register--- ---
COPYRIGHT OFFICE PUBLISHES
TECHNICAL CORRECTIONS (72 FR 40745)
The Copyright Office is making
technical corrections to its interim regulation implementing an online
copyright registration. The interim regulation amends regulations
governing the procedures by which the public submits, and the Office
processes, copyright registrations and recordations. The interim
regulation was published in the Federal Register on July 6, 2007 (72 FR
36883). For further information, go to
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2007/72fr40745.html
********* * CALENDAR *
July 31: Register of Copyrights
testifies before the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and
Intellectual Property in hearing on Ensuring Artists Fair Compensation:
Updating the Performance Right and Platform Parity for the 21st Century
Mid August: Launch of new search
system for copyright registrations and recordations
September 4: Due date for written
comments on the interim regulation on rules for online registration (72
FR 36883)
September 13: Due date for reply
comments on formal written comments, oral and written testimony, and any
other filings associated with the July 23-July 26 hearings (72 FR 28998)
October 1: Due date for reply
comments on issues related to Sections 111, 119, and 122 of the
Copyright Act (72 FR 33776)
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