| Sunday, August
31, 2008
Things I get in the mail:
The world's first known modern human was a tall,
thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago
and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference:
He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with
Neanderthals, according to a series of forthcoming studies conducted by
multiple international research teams.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/08/22/earliest-human-ethiopia.html
==
studies of why SA is a violent society
from centre for study of reconciliation and violence
http://www.csvr.org.za/docs/crime/compatibility_mode.pdf
You get the impression that they want to impose a
murder quota on whites and Indians as they are not enough being murdered
J
==
==
==
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/082608/met_470886.shtml
86 percent failing test got a pass By Greg Gelpi | Staff Writer Tuesday,
August 26, 2008 Although 1,715 Richmond County schoolchildren failed a
state test required for promotion, most of them have moved on to the
next grade, according to records released by the school system.
In Georgia, pupils must pass certain portions of
the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in order to
automatically advance to the next grade. Third-graders must pass
reading, and fifth- and eighth-graders must pass reading and math.
Of the 1,715 Richmond County pupils who failed a
required portion of the CRCT, however, 1,476 -- about 86 percent -- were
promoted this school year.
State law allows pupils who don't pass to file an
appeal with a committee consisting of a parent, teacher and principal.
With the committee's unanimous consent, the pupil can pass to the next
grade.
In third grade, 72.6 percent of appeals were
successful, 86.9 percent of fifth-grade appeals were granted, and 89.1
percent of eighth-graders won their appeals.
==
The rapid deterioration of our mental abilities as
we age begins far earlier than scientists had suspected, Swedish
researchers said on Wednesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/
idUSLR7826220080827
Here I recover from cancer and find that I'm still
going to get stupid... My impression is that I am slower, but not more
stupid. I hope that's correct.
==
Charles Murray: For Most
People, College Is a Waste of Time
http://www.aei.org/publications/
filter.all,pubID.28460/pub_detail.asp
Publication Date: August 13, 2008
Imagine that America had no system of
post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned
to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this
proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent
educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter
what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that
seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large
numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve
the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then
deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal.
We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel,
not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.
Finding a better way should be easy. The BA
acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for
people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the
20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the
existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely
different purposes.
Outside a handful of majors--engineering and some
of the sciences--a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except
that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and
perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business
administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four
years of barely remembered gut courses.
The solution is not better degrees, but no
degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known,
trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job
interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they
learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a
degree.
The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified
public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is
thorough--four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score
indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual
scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can
assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting
competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online
university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're
a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.
The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply
to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job
qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work,
public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of
business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for
almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that
matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines.
Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or
economics--and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after
studying in the local public library?<snip>
==
Charles Murray: College Daze
http://www.aei.org/publications/
filter.all,pubID.28504/pub_detail.asp
Posted: Thursday, August 21, 2008
A version of this article appeared in the
September 1, 2008, issue of Forbes.
August 2008
Since we have simplified college and used it as a
way to delay adulthood, parents should rethink sending their children to
college immediately after graduating high school. Time spent working or
in the military will not hurt America's youths, and it may help them
become grown-ups who will understand the worth and value of higher
education.
College is not all it is cracked up to be. Dumbed
down courses, flaky majors, and grade inflation have conspired to make
the term B.A. close to meaningless. Another problem with today's
colleges is more insidious: they are no longer good places for young
people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's
colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity.
Once upon a time, college was a halfway house for
practicing how to be a grown-up. Students could not count on the
academic deans to make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they
wanted to avoid getting kicked out, they had to weigh the potential
consequences of their actions, just as in adult life. The
student-teacher relationship was more distant and less nurturing than in
high school--more like the employee-supervisor relationship awaiting
them after graduation. Students had to accept that they no longer got
hugs for trying hard. If they did not get the job done, they were
flunked with as little ceremony as they would be fired by an employer.
This apprenticeship in adulthood has been gutted.
The light workload alone can make college today a joke. The most recent
data say that students self-report only about fourteen hours per week
spent studying--presumably the true figure is even lower. The definition
of "weekend" has sprawled to the point that, as a Duke administrator put
it, "We've run out of classroom space between 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.,
Tuesday through Thursday."
The demanding professor is close to extinction.
Due dates for papers are commonly extended when the student just cannot
get it done. Many professors permit quizzes or even final exams to be
made up if missed--missed not because of an emergency at home or a fever
of 104, but just, "sort of, like, missed." At many schools, student
evaluations of professors are now systematically collected and used as
part of the tenure decision process. Warm and sympathetic is in. Strict
and demanding is out.
Professors are under pressure to accommodate
students even when it comes to right and wrong answers. Talk to any
college teacher and you will hear bemused accounts of encounters with
students who think that the teacher's criticisms of their work are "just
your opinion"--no more valid than the student's opinion--as well as
stories of students who make serious trouble for teachers who refuse to
adjust their grades.
Meanwhile, colleges today take pride in making
student life as warm and comfy as life at home with Mom and Dad. It used
to be that the girls had housemothers to do bed checks and the guys
might have a proctor living on the dorm corridor, but otherwise students
were on their own. This is no longer the case. Colleges now have large
bureaucracies of "residential life staff" charged with responding to any
scrape that our little darlings might suffer. Barrett Seaman--whose book
Binge is the indispensable guide to this new college world--found that
his alma mater, Hamilton College (a school with 1,700 students), now has
twenty-six full-time people to manage student issues that in the 1960s
were handled by only three. Hamilton is not exceptional.
And so I offer this heretical thought for parents
of high school students nearing graduation: if you want your child to
grow up responsible and independent, sequester the college tuition
money. Encourage your child to join the military; work abroad as a
volunteer for some worthy cause; or just move to a different city, get a
real job, and support himself for a few years.
There is no intellectual loss in delaying college.
On the contrary, your child will probably gain from the wait. Plato and
Tolstoy were not writing for kids. The real danger lies in raising
children who reach their twenties still thinking like children. The
years after high school are for learning how to be a grown-up. Today's
colleges are terrible places to do that.
Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI.
We all know that every word of this is true, and we
continue to pour money into "higher education" and hold out the goal of "no
child left behind" and to act as if we believed that every child deserves a
world class college prep education by age 18.
And they never catch wise! California is about to
experience another blitz. The teacher have 40% more revenue and 30% fewer
students than five years ago, but any failure to raise the education budget
will be treated by the teachers as a measure to infect the children with Red
Death.
==
The blind lead the stupid:
SAT Scores Hold Steady as Minority Participation
Rises
By Maria Glod Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 26, 2008; 11:23 AM
SAT scores held steady for 2008 high school
graduates even as participation rose among minority students and those
who are part of the first generation in their families to go to college,
the College Board reported today.
Nationwide, the number of students taking the
college entrance exam surpassed 1.5 million for the first time, up 8
percent from five years ago and up nearly 30 percent over the past
decade. Forty percent of the test-takers were minority students, up from
39 percent last year, and 36 percent were among a group described as
first-generation college-goers, up from 35 percent.
College Board officials greeted the boost in
participation as a sign that an increasingly ethnically and economically
diverse group of high school students aspire to earn a college degree.
Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board,
said the pool of test-takers "more than ever . . . reflects the face of
education in this country."
"It's essential that all students strive to
attend college -- and then succeed in their classes and, ultimately,
graduate," Caperton said. "We're gratified to see that our country is
moving increasingly toward being a nation of college graduates."<snip>
[Emphasis added]
==
Charles Murray: Acid Tests
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.24711/pub_detail.asp
Publication Date: July 25, 2006
Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB). They have to be, because so little else about
the act is attractive.
NCLB takes a giant step toward nationalizing
elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism. It pushes
classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able
people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds
good students hostage to the performance of the least talented, at a
time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on
the performance of the most talented. The one aspect of the act that
could have inspired enthusiasm from me, promoting school choice, has
fallen far short of its hopes. The only way to justify NCLB is through
compelling evidence that test scores are improving. So let's talk about
test scores.
* * *
The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores
had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights
Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. The Civil
Rights Project has an openly liberal political agenda, but the author of
the report, Jaekyung Lee, lays out the data in graphs that anyone can
follow, subjects them to appropriate statistical analyses, and arrives
at conclusions that can stand on their scholarly merits: NCLB has not
had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the
racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.
Figure 1, The Difference Location Makes
Is it too early to tell? As a parent who has had
children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The
Frederick County (Maryland) schools our children have attended have
turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results,
with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and
devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English
teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. "I want to teach my
students how to write," he said, "not teach them how to pass a test that
says they can write." He quit.
So, yes, I think that if we parents have had to
put up with these kinds of troubling effects on our children's schooling
for four years, we are entitled to expect evidence of results. After
all, "accountability" is NCLB's favorite word, and the Department of
Education is holding school systems accountable for improvements in test
scores with a vengeance. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
The Department of Education will undoubtedly
produce numbers to dispute the findings of the Civil Rights Project,
which brings me to the point of this essay. Those numbers will consist
largely of pass percentages, not mean scores. A particular score is
deemed to separate "proficient" from "not proficient." Reach that score,
and you've passed the test. If 60% of one group--blondes, let's
say--pass while only 50% of redheads pass, then the blonde-redhead gap
is 10 percentage points.
A pass percentage is a bad standard for
educational progress. Conceptually, "proficiency" has no objective
meaning that lends itself to a cutoff. Administratively, the NCLB
penalties for failure to make adequate progress give the states powerful
incentives to make progress as easy to show as possible. A pass
percentage throws away valuable information, telling you whether someone
got over a bar, but not how high the bar was set or by how much the bar
was cleared. Most importantly: If you are trying to measure progress in
closing group differences, a comparison of changes in pass percentages
is inherently misleading.
Take the case of Texas, from which George Bush
acquired his faith in NCLB. As the president described it to the Urban
League in 2003: "In my state, Texas, 73% of the white students passed
the math test in 1994, while only 38% of African-American students
passed it. So we made that the point of reference. We had people focused
on the results for the first time--not process, but results. And because
teachers rose to the challenge, because the problem became clear, that
gap has now closed to 10 points." President Bush's numbers are
accurately stated. They are also meaningless. <snip>
there is little in the above that I have not said,
but Murray says it very well. He calls himself a sociologist, and that makes
him one of the ten or so people I know who have any right to call themselves
"social scientists". Murray understands the tools of real science. Most
"social scientists" have not even mastered the tools of
voodoo science.
==
http://tinyurl.com/5rrgdm
One man's China crusade
Donna Jacobs, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Monday, August 25, 2008
For Canadian diplomat Brian McAdam, it wasn't that
he had uncovered the lucrative sale of Canadian visas during his posting
at Canada's Hong Kong consulate.
Both Canadian and Chinese consular staff, he says,
were selling visas to members of the Chinese mafia and Communist China's
intelligence service. The price, he heard, ranged from $10,000 to
$100,000 per visa.
It wasn't that reports he sent to his bosses in
Canada -- details on murderers, money launderers, smugglers and spies
trying to enter Canada -- were met with silence or mostly destroyed.
It wasn't dozens of threatening calls -- "Stop
what you're doing or you're going to find yourself dead" -- from Triad
members during his 1989-1993 stint in Hong Kong.
What finally broke him down, he says, was "the
incredible feeling of betrayal from my colleagues. I'd worked with these
people for years."
"It goes to your very soul," he says. "It is a
spiritual crisis. It is a psychological breakdown."
There was the day he got a phone call from his
Hong Kong Police Department source, who was wiretapping a Triad kingpin.
"What shocked the Hong Kong policeman was that the
Triad member had phoned someone in the Canadian immigration minister's
office in Ottawa," says Mr. McAdam.
"The officer commented: 'With that kind of
relationship, you've got a really serious problem.' "
What shocked Mr. McAdam was what the officer said
next: The Canadian reassured the Triad boss, "Don't worry about McAdam
and what he's doing. We'll take care of him."
And, says Mr. McAdam, they did.
Immigration Canada offered him a good new job in
Ottawa. He returned -- and found that his ostracism was complete. His
30-year career in Europe, the Caribbean and Asia was over.
That stunning moment of clarity shut him down,
physically and mentally. After two years on medical leave, swinging
between hypersomnia -- sleeping 20 hours a day -- and insomnia, he says
he finally did what his bosses and almost all of his co-workers wanted.
In 1993, at age 51, he took early retirement.
==========
<<Got any more ideas on what Obama and McCain believe
that are wrong, foolish, crazy, damaging?>>
Sure.
Obama:
Believes universal pre-K (at huge increase in cost) is
solution to achievement gap. Has no idea of the existing research. Re: the
gap says we haven't lacked the knowledge as to how to close it, we've lacked
the will.
Believes the sole reason people lack health insurance
is that they can't afford it. In fact lots of people w/o insurance earn >
50K/year but prefer to spend the money on a BMW. Others see no purpose in
insurance because they lack a future orientation.
Believes in crazy educational fads. When he was
Chairman of the Annenburg challenge in Chicago, the program turned down math
and science programs but funded ethnic curricula and gave something like
200K to implement study of Juneteenth in the schools.
Has naive kumbaya-type ideas about nuclear weapons.
McCain:
Believes (as does Obama) that assimilation of illegals
is just a matter of time.
Believes in neo-con theories of the Middle East.
Is something of a nanny-stater (as is Obama). For ex,
considers it appropriate for govt to involve itself in stuff like steroid
use by baseball players. Baseball players don't engage in activity where
they can endanger people if they are under the influence. Congress is crazy
to get involved in this; it should let the baseball league solve it.
Needless to say I could go on, but this will have to
suffice.
Patti
==========
Dear Jerry,
Good article.
"Palin electrifies conservative base - Yahoo! News"
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080831/pl_politico/13016>
"By tapping the anti-abortion and pro-gun Alaska
governor just ahead of his convention, which is set to start here Monday,
McCain hasn’t just won approval from a skeptical Republican base — he’s
ignited a wave of elation and emotion that has led some grass-roots
activists to weep with joy."
...
"The media elite — as well as elite members of the GOP
consulting community — have all but mocked Palin as a former small-town
mayor with zero Washington experience. But that view of her totally misses
the cultural resonance she carries to crucial Republican power centers and
could not be more at odds with the jubilation felt among true believers that
one of their own is on the ticket."
I think that paragraph was unfair to "elites" like the
Egregious Frum. He and his Egregious Neocon associates fully comprehend what
this means. Frum makes this clear here:
<http://www.nationalpost.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=756704>
"Should John McCain lose in November, Sarah Palin has
just pole-vaulted into front-runner status for 2012. Should Mr. McCain win,
her grip on the next Republican nomination will become a lock. So this is
the future of the Republican party you are looking at: a future in which
national security has bumped down the list of priorities behind abortion
politics, gender politics, and energy politics. Ms. Palin is a bold pick,
and probably a shrewd one. It's not nearly so clear that she is a
responsible pick, or a wise one."
I personally translate "responsible" and "wise" as "we
control". In Frum World "national security" doesn't mean something like
securing Flyover Country from illegal alien invaders practicing retail
violence. And it's also clear Frum doesn't consider foreign energy
dependency or high costs to be real problems. "National security" is just
Neocon code talk for unlimited American troop commitments to the Middle East
and central Asia.
Best Wishes,
Mark
==========
Two news stories this morning reminded me of your
comment that we were born free, but …
The first is about police raids in St. Paul aimed at
preventing RNC protests. “Deputies seized a variety of items that they
believed were tools of civil disobedience: a gas mask, bolt cutters, axes,
slingshots, homemade "caltrops" for disabling buses, even buckets of urine.”
‘Tools of civil disobedience’ – an Orwellian phrase, that. So now it’s
acceptable for police to raid people’s homes and seize property to prevent a
possible future crime?
The second story is about two teenaged girls in Denver
who were pushed to the ground, handcuffed, and arrested for chalking
messages on a sidewalk protesting Obama's pro-abortion stance.
Full news stories with links attached.
I guess the First and Fourth Amendments are optional
now...
Bob
http://www.startribune.com/politics/
27695244.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDU
oaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUn
ciatkEP7DhUsr
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/
2008/08/28/Operation_Rescue_
claims_police_abuse/UPI-34661219950239/
==========
Palin Campaigns In Pennsylvania
... along with her steelworkers' union member husband.
Meanwhile home made pics of the Palins hunting, fishing, ATVing and holding
Bibles are flooding the 'net. I just started laughing.
I'm sure the Obama camp are tortured night and day by
incautious remarks about insecure white factory workers "clinging" to Bibles
and guns. That sneering Ivy League session in a San Francisco salon could
end up costing them the election. Even Hillary was able to get a lot of
mileage out it. Now the "clingy" people have appeared bigger than life on
the ballot.
First sign of intelligent life in the McCain Campaign.
Mark
==========
Reuters, Georgia and staged pictures
Hi Jerry,
Reuters, Georgia and staged pictures
At least some of the photos that have been published
by Reuters as proof of russian atrocities seem to have been carefully
stages.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m46819&hd=&size=1&l=e
After questions were asked these pictures where
removed without comment.
This and the concerted efforts by media, US/select
Western politicians makes it look like an initially well orchestrated Sender
Gleiwitz affair executed but not designed by Georgia.
G! uwe
I have no knowledge on this but I would bet
reasonable sums that both sides have staged pictures. There, in Palestine,
in Lebanon, in Iraq, in ...
===========
Subj: INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS: Google Earth Changed
The Game
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20080831.aspx
>>... Crowd sourcing is the unique web phenomenon
whereby large numbers of people applying themselves to a task (like
examining thousands of Google Earth satellite photos), reveals things that
were previously unnoticed (even by the professional spy agencies, although
they won't admit it). This proved to be beneficial for the intelligence
agencies around the world, especially those in democracies. ...<<
Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com
The great equalizer...
==========
American Sign language
Jerry,
My youngest daughter is deaf, so I learned American
Sign Language. The easiest language I ever learned. I encourage everyone to
learn it while they can hear. As you have discovered, it will be the last
language we will all need.
John
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