Maybe we're starting to see some movement away from the usual panic - even tho' the Cheneys have been trying valiantly to get us to lose our shit every time something scary happens.
David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy has a great take on it.
Obama's reaction to the junkbomber incident was precisely right and just what you want from a leader: Dispassionate, thoughtful, and calculated. He gave his team the time to assess the threat, the breaches and the right next steps to take. At least one person in the United States, Barack Obama, seemed to recognize that the objective of terrorism is to promote terror and sought to defuse that effort by handling the threat with the proportionality and common sense that has long been missing from U.S. counterterrorism strategy.
-and-
(The Republican Party has the collective cool on these matters of Prissy helping to birth Melanie's baby in Gone With the Wind. As for the media, given that the "news" networks probably devoted more live news coverage to the balloon boy hoax than were devoted to say, the invasion of Normandy, you recognize that they are actually in the business of emotional over-reaction. In fact, their constant refrain that every event is an earth-shattering pinnacle of human experience that could well be the biggest thing they have ever seen suggests they have more in common with folks in say, Ashley Dupre's line of work than that of, say, a journalist.)
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
ej-i-kay-shun
A lovely story in NYT.
The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.
“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”
A school oughta be a palace, and a really good teacher oughta be able to make as much as a really good car salesman. But we've come under some kind of spell. It's like we believe we're entitled to a bargain; that we can get Honda quality paying Yugo prices; that everything can be shoe-horned into the Wal-Mart model. We jump up and down and scream about "bad schools", but we refuse even to consider the probability that our policy decisions of the last 25 years are killing the schools that we claim we're trying to help.
This shit's expensive, guys. And for those who insist that we used to do just fine without spending so much money; people who point out that we spend x% more now per-student (adjusted for inflation) and we're still not getting the performance we need, blah blah blah? BULLSHIT. Take a look at some of things schools have to buy now that they didn't have to buy 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Computers, Network Servers and Infrastructure, Internet Access, CCTV, Metal Detectors, Private Security, Messaging Systems, and and and. Now add in the costs of Subscriptions and Software and Maintenance; plus the fact that most of the hardware has to be replaced every 4 or 5 years, plus the software has to be updated/upgraded every year or 2.
Ya want a better, stronger economy? Ya want better national security? Then you make the kind of investment in education that you make in any other business. But you have to start by gettin' your head outa your ass.
The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.
“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”
A school oughta be a palace, and a really good teacher oughta be able to make as much as a really good car salesman. But we've come under some kind of spell. It's like we believe we're entitled to a bargain; that we can get Honda quality paying Yugo prices; that everything can be shoe-horned into the Wal-Mart model. We jump up and down and scream about "bad schools", but we refuse even to consider the probability that our policy decisions of the last 25 years are killing the schools that we claim we're trying to help.
This shit's expensive, guys. And for those who insist that we used to do just fine without spending so much money; people who point out that we spend x% more now per-student (adjusted for inflation) and we're still not getting the performance we need, blah blah blah? BULLSHIT. Take a look at some of things schools have to buy now that they didn't have to buy 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Computers, Network Servers and Infrastructure, Internet Access, CCTV, Metal Detectors, Private Security, Messaging Systems, and and and. Now add in the costs of Subscriptions and Software and Maintenance; plus the fact that most of the hardware has to be replaced every 4 or 5 years, plus the software has to be updated/upgraded every year or 2.
Ya want a better, stronger economy? Ya want better national security? Then you make the kind of investment in education that you make in any other business. But you have to start by gettin' your head outa your ass.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Repub In-Fighting
The wrangling going on with the Rebups looks like a purge. Here's a tho't: If I wanna look like I'm operating in the "center-right" of the spectrum; and I need to be sure nobody sees me as either moving to the left or acting like I'm some kind of Centrist/Moderate, then what I need to do is to make myself appear a little less like a fanatic by encouraging a bunch of nuts off to my right to go crazy, and then pointing out that they're a bunch of crazy nuts to make myself look more acceptable to wide range of voters who are typically camped out in the middle, waiting for me to lead them.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
The Undies Bomber
The good news is that Team Obama is working hard at (and having some success in) keeping us from losing our shit. Napolitano tried to wiggle thru with some spin about 'at least part of the system worked' - and she got spanked for it, but the demands for her scalp were fairly muted and short-lived.
It's also good that only a few Repubs (plus of course, all the rocket scientists at Cluster Fox) are saying demonstrably stupid things like:
-it's a horrible thing that Obama took 3 whole days to say anything about the attack.
(Bush took 6 days to address the Shoe Bomber incident in Dec 2001)
-there were no terrorist attacks under Bush.
(can you say Nine-Eleven? Shoe Bomber? Antrax? DC Sniper? UNC Chapel Hill?)
It may be that the bad news has to do with our getting a glimpse of the political intrigue at work in DC. We don't usually get to see much of the real workings of governance, much less the maneuverings of people who lust after power. Some of what I've heard and read the last several days points to a probability that the dots weren't connected because somebody didn't want the dots connected. That doesn't necessarily indicate some big conspiracy to screw Obama or to jack up the stock price of some Security Contractor though. Sometimes, you get a piece of info from a source you've been working on for a long time, and you don't just turn it over to another agency because you're worried about how that colleague will use the info; possibly blowin' your deal with your source, or even endangering people's lives - certainly, there could be ripple affects through operations you've never even heard of.
This time, a Nigerian ambassador directly and openly warned the US State Dept and somehow we either missed it; or purposely ignored it in order to play it to our better advantage in some other way? It's just not adding up.
It's also good that only a few Repubs (plus of course, all the rocket scientists at Cluster Fox) are saying demonstrably stupid things like:
-it's a horrible thing that Obama took 3 whole days to say anything about the attack.
(Bush took 6 days to address the Shoe Bomber incident in Dec 2001)
-there were no terrorist attacks under Bush.
(can you say Nine-Eleven? Shoe Bomber? Antrax? DC Sniper? UNC Chapel Hill?)
It may be that the bad news has to do with our getting a glimpse of the political intrigue at work in DC. We don't usually get to see much of the real workings of governance, much less the maneuverings of people who lust after power. Some of what I've heard and read the last several days points to a probability that the dots weren't connected because somebody didn't want the dots connected. That doesn't necessarily indicate some big conspiracy to screw Obama or to jack up the stock price of some Security Contractor though. Sometimes, you get a piece of info from a source you've been working on for a long time, and you don't just turn it over to another agency because you're worried about how that colleague will use the info; possibly blowin' your deal with your source, or even endangering people's lives - certainly, there could be ripple affects through operations you've never even heard of.
This time, a Nigerian ambassador directly and openly warned the US State Dept and somehow we either missed it; or purposely ignored it in order to play it to our better advantage in some other way? It's just not adding up.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
The Undies Bomber
The freakout wasn't quite so bad afterall. The usual buttheads (Dick Cheney, Peter King, et al) tried the usual crap, but it's not selling as well as it used to. Of course, there's still vestigial traces of the bullshit about "the President's number one job is to keep Americans safe", but at least, we're starting to hear more about ideas for handling terrorism that might actually work.
From Juan Cole:
You can't catch terrorists by casting a broad net. You catch terrorists with good police work. You look at networks, suspicious behavior, clues. Ignoring the desperate plea of a father who goes to the CIA with information about his son being radicalized in Yemen, but then patting down 170 million Nigerians ever after, is brain dead.
From Juan Cole:
You can't catch terrorists by casting a broad net. You catch terrorists with good police work. You look at networks, suspicious behavior, clues. Ignoring the desperate plea of a father who goes to the CIA with information about his son being radicalized in Yemen, but then patting down 170 million Nigerians ever after, is brain dead.
Monday, January 04, 2010
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Saturday, January 02, 2010
George Carlin
I miss him. He got to be a real pain in the ass for me when he flopped over into kind of a standard Glibertarian Mode, but it was always obvious to me that there was some real thinking going on.
This bit with Jon Stewart has some great stuff. My fave is Carlin's take on drugs and the cost/benefit angle. I'm thinking that if we adapted his views into some coherent policy, the war on drugs would already be over.
This bit with Jon Stewart has some great stuff. My fave is Carlin's take on drugs and the cost/benefit angle. I'm thinking that if we adapted his views into some coherent policy, the war on drugs would already be over.
Friday, January 01, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)