587 As the 2nd semester of the 2010-2011 school year winds down, Karen Walker at the U. of I. passes this along

Karen Walker

Ready to celebrate after grading the last of 30 loooong research reports. 

My favorite student submission from this semester (from a colleague’s course):

“I didn’t like this report very much. Maybe it's because I don’t like to read."

Yesterday at 11:48am ·  · 

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  3 people like this.
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    Mark Ganzer But the student sure CAN write! Amazing how much we can communicate when we find our own voice and speak simply in the king's American English.

    2 seconds ago · 

586 A very revealing letter describing some interesting occurences from the summer of 1969

Dear Reggie, and my Darling and Dearest Tracy,

This letter will inform you of perhaps the most important things you ever need to know about me.

Summer of 1969, after my senior year in high school, I was a virgin, and this worried me greatly, what with college coming around the corner and the summer of free love already past.  So, when the new kid in school, Chris Shanenburg invited me to go with him to Chicago to the apartment he had rented near Montrose Harbor, to fuck his roommate, Cathy, who worked at Sears & Roebuck and had pretty much fucked the Barrington Consolidated High School Class of 1969 at the orgiastic weekend legendary parties that Chris threw there, I leapt at the opportunity.

Clue #1:  Chris had then memorized the complete libretto to "The Assination and Persecution of Jean Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of Charlemagne Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade" other wise known as MARAT SADE.

Clue #2:  We sauntered over to the train station, just missing the 2:18 in to Chicago.  Rather than wait the 55 minutes for the next inbound train, Chris suggests we take a limo to Chicago, which we do.  We arrive at his p lace, and Chris buys beers and wine (for Sneaky Pete's).  We drink.  Mark drunk.  Chris begins chasing Mark around room, wanting Mark to simply kiss him on the lips.  Mark, trying desperately to escape reaches for the door, WHICH IS LOCKED. Son of a bitch.  I did not see that one coming.  WAIT - but take a limo rather than wait 55 minutes for a train?  What's wrong with THAT picture?

Chris, it would later be learnt, had absconded approximately $150,000 from his parents' checking account to pay for the apartment, the limos, the booze, etc, etc, etc.

Chris continues to try to woo Mark, telling him how Jon Peters, who WAS accepted by Harvard didn't care one way of the other about kissing Chris, Ed Evans liked kissing Chris.  Seduction by proxie.  Was not working for me.  Finally, and this might very well have been the last time I ever prayed to God for any thing for myself.  I put up this prayer:  "Oh please Dear God, if you will just get me out of this situation, I will NEVER force myself on a woman.  I will never do this to another human being."

God, in all Her Radiant Splendor, with the Angels, damn near fell out of her chair laughing.  "Mark!  Thou dost cut deals with the Lord of Hosts?  To promise to do something you were never going to do, never would do in the first place, and then VOW to keep you word, which, you are as good as?  This, my most beloved and blessed child, this prayer of yours, it shall be answered."

And Cathy opened the door with her key.  Chris changed the focus of his mad, drunken self-indulgent passion.  "I'll warm her up for you," he assured me as he took her to the bedroom, ripping the clothes from her body, and proceeded to fuck her in a manner far more akin to rape than lust.  "She's all ready for you now," he said.

I entered the bedroom as he pulled out (literally and figuratively).  I lay down beside her.  I was not sexually aroused, but I did feel comfortable, safe, with this woman, dressed only in her bra and panties.  "Do you do this often?" she asked.  "No," I replied.  After a while, we got up, and went to dinner.  I had a greasy hamburger, slathered with onions, ketsup, fries.  Cathy had the same.  Then we bought tickets to see Romeo and Juliet.  Then we went back to the apratment, and lay down together, wearing only our under wear.  Around midnight, Chris awoke from his drunken stupor, and came lumbering into the bedroom with an 8 mm camera, filming the moment in all its embarrassing splendor.

When Les Etters watched the grand showing of the Mark Ganzer does Cathy debacle, he noticed immediately (leave it Beaver head Les), "Look, Ganzer ain't got no erection!"  As if this particular moment would have been erection conducive.  Hardly.

Tbis ought to help explain how I manage to keep "so cool" when it comes to demonstrating my interest in women.  I cut a deal with God, and I take that deal VERY seriously.  So if you never had a clue about how disappointed I was to learn you were married, all those 20 years ago, now you do know; I have told you, and I have told you why.  I am a man of my word, its all the very little I have to offer.  I keep my covenants with the Lord, and She with me.

And now you also have some insights into why I have never attended a one of my high school reunions.

I don't know who all has seen the erection-less bone-headed, dick-thinking lump of ludicrous teen-aged angst, that did not have to suffer the ignominy of entering college a physical virgin, but suffered a few other things along the way.

With Love to You, and All You Love,

 

Mark Raymond Ganzer

585 Tomgram: William Astore, A New Age of "Enlightened" War By William Astore

Posted on May 12, 2011, Printed on May 13, 2011 http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175391/ In case you hadn’t noticed, they are -- no kidding around -- absolutely the niftiest non-humans on Earth.  I’m speaking about the special operations force of Navy SEALs that took out Osama bin Laden.  They and their special ops colleagues are “supermen” (ABC News), “X-men” (Jon Stewart), “America’s Jedi Knights” (the New York Times), and that’s just to pick the odd example in a sea of churning hyperbole.  For the last week, while the bin Laden operation swallowed almost 69% of all news space according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been the most reported upon Xtra Special Soldiers anywhere, possibly of all time -- from the “square-jawed admiral from Texas” who commanded them right down to the dog (oops... “possible war hero”) they reportedlytook along.  In an era when U.S. troops have become little short of American idols, seldom have the media gone quite so nuts as over those SEALs and the other military and CIA “teams” that make up our counterterrorism forces.  You couldn’t pay for this sort of publicity.  It would, in fact, hardly be an exaggeration to say that all of American society has, for the last 10 days, been “embedded” with them. But here’s the strange thing (or perhaps I mean the strangest thing of all): if you read most of the over-the-top press about America’s special ops troops, you probably think that they are tiny crews of elite forces divided into even tinier teams trained to dispel global darkness and take out the bin Ladens of the world. No such thing. Almost a year ago, the Washington Post reported that there were at least 13,000 U.S. special operations troops deployed overseas in (no, this is not a typo) 75 countries, a significant expansion of these forces in the Obama era.  Since thousands of them remain in the U.S. at any moment, Washington may now have up to 20,000 special operations troops on hand and the odds are that there will be even more after the bin Laden publicity blitz has had a chance to work its charms.  In the latest Pentagon budget, the Obama administration had already asked for $10.5 billion to pay for special forces, a tripling of their budget since 2001 -- and that figure is sure to rise in the years to come, as media slavering turns into congressional slavering.  Keep in mind that this growing set of secret forces cocooned inside the U.S. military, along with the missile-armed pilotless drones fighting the CIA’s semi-secret war in Pakistan (which also got a modest publicity boost from the bin Laden operation), add up to the newly dominant form of American conflict: presidential war fought on the sly and beyond any serious kind of accountability to the American people.  In return for ponying up the necessary dough, for instance, Congress is now practically begging just to be updated on the executive’s counterterror operations four times a year.   As TomDispatch regular and retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore makes clear, “remote war” on the imperial peripheries of the planet is a direct danger to this country, to us, and it’s growing by the day.  Tom The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes Washington Court Culture and Its Endless Wars By William J. Astore The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country”according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world.  Our conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our American world.  They are remote geographically, but also remote from our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to speak of our consciences). And this remoteness is no accident.  Our wars and their impact are kept inremarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged. In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite.  Cynics might say it has always been thus in the United States.  After all, the War of 1812 was known to critics as “Mr. Madison’s War” and the Mexican-American War of the 1840s was “Mr. Polk’s War.”  The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a naked war of expansion vigorously denounced by American anti-imperialists.  Yet in those conflicts there was at least genuine national debate, as well as formal declarations of war by Congress. Today’s ruling class in Washington no longer bothers to make a pretense of following the letter of our Constitution -- and they sidestep its spirit as well, invoking hollow claims of executive privilege or higher callings of humanitarian service (as in Libya) or of exporting democracy (as in Afghanistan).  But Libya is still torn by civil war, and Afghanistan has yet to morph into Oregon. “Enlightened” War, Then and Now History does not simply repeat itself, yet realities of power, privilege, and pride ensure certain continuities from the past.  Consider how today’s remote wars and the ways they reinforce existing power relations for a privileged and prideful elite echo a style of European warfare more than three centuries old. Surveying the wreckage of the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), fought feverishly across Germanic territories by most of Europe, monarchs like Louis XIV of France began to seek to fight “limited” wars.  These they considered more consistent with the spirit of a rational and “enlightened” age.  In their hands, such wars became the sport of kings, the real-life equivalents of elaborate chess matches in which foot soldiers drawn from the lower orders served as expendable pawns, while the second or lesser sons of the nobility, fulfilling their duty as officers, proved hardly less expendable knights, bishops, and rooks. As much as possible, the monarch and his retinue tried to keep war-making and its disruptions at a distance from thriving economic and manufacturing concerns.  In many cases, in the centuries to follow, this would essentially mean exporting war to faraway, “barbaric” realms or colonies.  In the process, death and destruction were outsourced to places and peoples remote from European metropoles. In fact, this was precisely what enraged our founders: that the colonies in America had become a never-ending battleground for French and British imperial ambitions from which the colonists themselves reaped the whirlwind of war while gaining few of its benefits.  A close reading of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, reveals a proto-republic’s contempt for wars fought at a king’s whim and guaranteed to reduce the colonists to so much cannon fodder. Refusing to surrender the hard-fought right as British men to have a say in how they were taxed, how their families and lands were defended, and especially for what purposes they themselves fought and died, the founders forged a new nation.  Given this history, it’s not surprising that they granted to Congress, and not to the President, the power to declare and fund war. In this way, a noble experiment was born, and it worked, however imperfectly, until the devastation of a new thirty years’ war in Europe (better known as World Wars I and II) propelled the United States to superpower status with all its accompanying ambitions stoked by existential fears, whether of yesterday’s godless communists or today’s god-crazed terrorists. Inside the Washington Beltway: The New Court of Versailles In the eighteenth century, France was the superpower of Europe with a military that dwarfed those of its neighbors.  And who dictated France’s decisions to go to war?  The answer: the king, his generals, and his courtiers at the Court of Versailles.  In the twenty-first-century, the U.S. celebrates its status as the world’s “sole superpower” with a military second to none.  And who dictates its decisions to go to war?  Considering the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, the answer is no less obvious: the president, his generals, and his courtiers within the vast edifice of Washington’s national security state. France’s “enlightened” wars were fought by professional armies and mercenaries, directed by a unitary executive who did as he pleased, and endured by the lower orders who had no say (even though they provided the brawn and blood).  Similarly, our twenty-first century masters plunge us into their version of enlightened wars and play their version of global chess matches. The analogy can be pushed further.  In pre-revolutionary France, the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility) constituted less than 2% of the population but controlled nearly all of France’s wealth and power.  Their unholy alliance kept the Third Estate (everyone who wasn’t a churchman or a noble) under their collective thumb. Now, consider the United States today.  Our equivalent to the First Estate would be the clergy of finance and banking (the religion of the almighty dollar).  Look for them in their houses of worship on Wall Street.  Our Second Estate equivalent would be the movers and shakers inside Washington’s Beltway.  Look for them in the White House, the Pentagon, Congress, and on K Street where the lobbyists for the First Estate tend to congregate.  The unholy alliance of these two estates leaves the American Third Estate -- you and me -- with the deck stacked against us. When it comes to war, the American ruling class has relegated the members of its Third Estate alternately to the role of “foreign legionnaires” in overseas service, or silent spectators passively watching moves on the big board.  These, in turn, are continually interpreted for us by retired members of the Second Estate: generals and admirals in mufti, hired by the corporate mediato provide color commentary on Washington’s wars.  Small wonder that today’s Beltway elite is as imperious and detached as yesterday’s Court of Louis XIV.  A colleague of mine recently endured a short audience with some members of our Second Estate near Dupont Circle in Washington.  In his words: “They were at once condescending and puzzled by ‘tea party types,’ as they referred to them, which was to say that they inadvertently admitted to being out of touch and were pretty okay with that.  ‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘you cannot continue to pick someone’s pocket while hectoring him about how stupid and uninformed he is and then be surprised that he gets angry.’” Whether it be unwashed “tea party types,” “retarded” (according to ex-courtier Rahm Emanuel) progressives, or other members of a disgruntled American Third Estate, the Washington elites who wage war in our name simply couldn’t care less what we think, just as Louis XIV and his court couldn’t have cared less about their subjects’ desires. Endless “limited” wars fought for the interests of the ruling class, massive deficit spending on those wars, a refusal to recognize (or even understand) the people’s growing disgruntlement, a “let them eat cake” mentality: all of this is familiar to a historian.  And like those old French masters of limited war, our new masters of war are hemorrhaging legitimacy. The Crash and Burn of Old Regimes In isolating the American Third Estate from war -- indeed, in disengaging it from any meaningful public debate about this nation’s perpetual war-making -- our rulers have conspired to advance their own interests.  Yet in deciding everything of importance out of view, they have unwisely eliminated any check on their folly. Consider again the example of pre-revolutionary Versailles.  A top-heavy, remarkably dissolute, and openly parasitic bureaucracy plundered the commonweal of France in its pursuit of power and privilege.  Can we not say the same of Washington today?  In its kleptocratic tendency to enrich itself and its accountability-free deployment of military power globally, the American ruling class bears a certain resemblance to French kings and their courts which, in the end, drove their country to economic ruin and violent revolution. Fed up with its prodigal and prideful rulers, France saw the tumbrels roll and the guillotine blades drop.  How many more undeclared “enlightened” wars, how many more trillions of dollars in war-driven debt, how many more dead and wounded will it take for the American people to reclaim their power over war?  Or are we content to remain deferential to our ruling class and court -- and to their less-than-liberty-loving overseas creditors -- until such a time as their prideful wars and prodigal trillion-dollar-plus “defense” budgets bring our great democratic experiment crashing down? William J. Astore is a TomDispatch regular, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), and a professor of history.  He welcomes reader comments atwjastore@gmail.com. Copyright 2011 William J. Astore © 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175391/

584 DOES ANYONE CARE ABOUT BLACK KIDS?

Does anyone care about black kids? Does anyone care enough to report or discuss their educational progress? For us, a recent report in the New York Times raised this important question.

But first, a look at Gail Collins’ attempt to discuss our public schools.

You’re right! We aren’t big Collins fans around here; on the whole, we think her work represents a familiar type of counter-productive, pseudo-liberal hackwork. Last Thursday, she did one of the smaller things for which we dislike her oeuvre. She started with one of her eye-rolling smirks at the comical, lower-class tastes of one of those hopeless red states:

COLLINS (5/5/11): Let us stop for a minute to consider Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana.

Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Many of you may be unacquainted with Daniels. After all, a lot of Americans go for years on end without ever setting foot in Indiana even though it is a fine state, full of lovely people and some first-class universities, not to mention the RV Hall of Fame, the world's largest ball of paint and the Dan Quayle museum.

But about Mitch Daniels...

We know—you think we’re nit-picking here. Sorry. Collins mocks the rube states fairly often. It’s a classic example of the way top-shelf “liberals” tell the unwashed that they aren’t liked or respected. After that, we ask ourselves why these idiots won’t vote the way we prefer.

This is very dumb politics. Collins seems to enjoy it.

To our ear, an element of this sneering seemed to lurk in yesterday’s column, in which Collins pretended to discuss the needs of our public schools. We have no idea how Collins selected her rather narrow issue focus—but we saw no sign that she had any particular knowledge about those issues. We did see a great deal of smirking about those silly redneck rubes in Texas (and, to a lesser extent, in Florida).

The bulk of her column was focused on the stupid things people in Texas do. As Collins notes, this is a fairly typical focus of her work.

Here’s the larger point: Readers may come away from that column thinking that Texas must have lousy schools. This notion is pleasing to pseudo-liberals; a few months ago, the endlessly phony Diane Ravitch wrote a column plainly intended to convey that pleasing impression (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/23/11). This impression is pleasing to some liberal readers because we get to laugh at those dumb-assed Texans. We also get to laugh at George W. Bush, who created the big mess down there.

As we read Collins’ newest column, we couldn’t help wondering: Does Collins know that Texas schools score extremely well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP), the widely ballyhooed “gold standard” of educational testing? Does she know that Texas kids in all major demographic groups outscore their national peers, often by a wide margin? You’d never get any such idea from reading Collins’ smirking column. We don’t know if Collins knows those facts, but we’ll guess she doesn’t.

Technically, Texas test scores aren’t relevant to Collins’ new column. But we think her undercurrent was familiar and rather clear.

But then, does anyone care about black kids? Consider this recent news report by Sam Dillon, one of the New York Times’ education reporters.

Dillon discussed an intriguing question: When high school students take “advanced placement” courses, are the courses really advanced? Dillon suggests that, in many schools, these classes are “advanced” in name only. According to Dillon, “Algebra II is sometimes just Algebra I. And College Preparatory Biology can be just Biology.”

This was a perfectly valid topic, although we were underwhelmed by some of Dillon’s analysis. But one fleeting passage brought the analysts right out of their chairs. In the highlighted passage, Dillon discusses American student achievement over the past forty years. He refers to student performance on the NAEP. We think his account is misleading and unfortunate:

DILLON (4/26/11): ''[C]ourse titles may bear little relationship to what students have actually learned,'' said Dr. Mellor, who has analyzed course completion, test records and other student data in Texas. ''We see students taking more and more advanced courses, but still not performing well on end-of-course exams.''

The 2009 results—the most recent available—of the federal test that measures change in achievement levels over decades showed that the nation's 17-year-olds were scoring no higher in reading and math than in 1973. SAT scores have dropped or flat-lined, too, since 2000.

But a federal study released this month of nearly 38,000 high school transcripts showed that the proportion of graduates completing a rigorous curriculum rose to 13 percent in 2009 from 5 percent in 1990.

Let’s get the small errors out of the way. First, Dillon actually refers to the 2008 results of the test in question, the so-called “Long-Term Trend” NAEP; no such testing was done in 2009. Second, the NAEP didn’t give the “long-term” reading test in 1973. Beyond that, the use of SAT scores for this kind of assessment is quite shaky, as everyone knows.

But let’s return to that highlighted passage—a passage which can be defended as technically accurate. According to Dillon, “the nation's 17-year-olds were scoring no higher in reading and math [in 2008] than in 1973.”

We think that statement is highly misleading, in ways which don’t serve the republic.

For now, let’s skip the ways in which that statement is technically accurate. Instead, let’s focus on the story Dillon doesn’t tell. Question: If we just consider the nation’s black students, how did 17-year-olds score in 2008 as compared to 1971 or 1973?

As citizens, we ought to know the answer. Very few people do.

The answer: Black students scored substantially higher in 2008 than in the early 1970s. This was true in both reading and math. For example:

In reading, black 17-year-olds gained 27 points on the NAEP scale over that period. How large a gain does that represent? Experts often apply a very rough rule of thumb in which ten points on the NAEP scale represents one academic year. Applying that rough rule of thumb, black 17-year-old students gained almost three years over that period, despite the fact that fewer such students drop out.

(Over that same period, the score gain in reading for black 13-year-olds was slightly higher.)

In math, the score gains aren’t as large for the older students, but they still exist. Black 17-year-olds have gained 17 points on the NAEP scale since 1973. Since changing drop-out rates can confuse the picture at this age level, a second fact might be noted: The gains for black 13-year-olds are much greater. In math, black 13-year-olds gained a massive 39 points on the NAEP scale over that period.

(Presumably, almost all 13-year-olds are still in school. For that reason, changing drop-out rates don’t cloud the statistical picture at this age.)

Citizens should know these basic facts; journalists should analyze them. Since we liberals routinely announce our greatness in matters of race, we should know these facts most of all. But alas! It is virtually against the law to report good news about American test scores. Liberals thrill to Ravitch’s claims that nothing has been getting better—even though this gloomy, misleading claim undermines the public’s faith in what our teachers and students can achieve within our public schools.

(Many liberals like Ravitch’s claim because it lets us party about George Bush’s consummate dumbness.)

We were bugged by Dillon’s piece last month, as we often are by such reporting. You ought to know that his highlighted claim obscures some promising data. The refusal to discuss score gains is amazingly standard in modern press culture. We liberals thrill to misleading, gloomy claims. In the process, liberal interests get hammered.

Or does no one actually care? These are just black kids, after all. When’s the last time anyone on your “liberal” TV shows said squat or squadoosh about them? 

583 Always keep several get well cards on the mantle..

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  Ginger Johnson Pillman

  Always keep several 

  get well cards on the mantle.. 

  So if unexpected guests arrive, 

  They will think you've been sick 

  and unable to clean.

  
  

  ...