History Profs Give Obama "B-." What Do HVAC Techs Say?

History professors across the nation rated Obama "B-" because he's not liberal enough.

I ask the question in my headline "What do HVAC Techs say?" I ask because when you read the article, it specifies areas that the history profs considered:

Complaints:

• The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) “did not go far enough”
• The prosecution of Bradley Manning
• The failure to close Guantanamo Bay
• Drone strikes against terrorists

Compliments:

• “Just about the only aspect of Barack Obama’s presidency which has received universal praise from historians has been the president’s Supreme Court appointments,” the pollsters state. “Both Elena Kagan and especially Sonia Sotomayor are highly respected by academics.”
• They gave him an A- in both the “integrity” and “crisis management” categories
• They also credited him for ending the Iraq War and killing Osama bin Laden.

What do all these have in common? They're all modern, current policy questions for which an advanced degree in history does not qualify one as an expert.

So, you might as well ask HVAC technicians. Their opinions are equally informed.

This is a non-random citizen opinion poll dressed up in the guise of academic expertise.

Foreign Policy For People Who Don't Understand Foreign Policy

In a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocks Obama and Kerry's competence in the proposed intervention in Syria. However, he also mocks those who are unhappy with the solution proposed by Putin and accepted by Obama.



Stewart rants:

Who did we lose to? Sanity? "You've beat us this time, rational forethought, but we'll get you!" Who cares how we avoided a war and got a dictator to give up his chemical weapons if we avoided a war and got his dictator to give up his chemical weapons? ... oh, Putin gets the credit! If we caught Charlie Manson, who gives a beep who gets the collar?

And I get that Fox opposes the Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic, succubus-like existence, and, uh, but--  

wild cheers from the audience

Sorry, I blacked out for a second, was I saying something? But for some reason, even CNN's Chris Cuomo seemed disappointed with the turn of events.... On the one hand, geopolitical reality just shifted one hundred percent, but on the other hand, we built this graphic

shows CNN 'Crisis in Syria' graphic.

Look, Jon, I get that you're making fun of peoples' lack of enthusiasm for the peace plan plan because your modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Fox News and all things Republican to advance your ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which you sustain your parasitic, succubus-like existence, but there are actual reasons why this peace plan is a bad idea.

For the sake of people, like Jon Stewart's viewers, who don't understand foreign policy and aren't interested in it beyond its usefulness as joke fodder on The Daily Show, let me take you back to the classic movie, The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness, Robert de Niro as Al Capone, Sean Connery as gruff Chicago cop Jim Malone, and Billy Drago as vicious mob hitman Frank Nitti.

Except, in our version, Vladimir Putin is Capone, Obama is Eliot Ness, Assad is Frank Nitti and the victims of the gass attack collectively play Sean Connery and Nitti's other victims.

This didn't happen in the movie, but imagine Ness had Nitti caught dead to rights for Malone's murder, but he suffers a crisis of courage, because he knows that if he prosecutes Nitti, he becomes target #1 of the mob. The mayor (Kerry) wonders if there's a better way out of the whole thing. Suddenly, Al Capone steps forward as a concerned member of the community. "This whole thing has been overblown. I'm sure we can settle things if we just make sure Mr. Nitti turns in his guns. I assure you, he'll suffer harsh censure by the Chicago community. And Ness caves. He lets Nitti go.

Meanwhile you're screaming at the screen, "No, you idiot! Nitti works for Capone! He's not going to give up his guns! He's not going to stop killing people!"

That's what just happened. Assad is Putin's client dictator. The chemical weapons will not be turned over, except for some tokens to mollify the press and U.N. inspectors. Assad will not be weakened. He'll get off Scot free and actually emerge with greater international credibility. And Al Capone gets to look like a frickin' hero, while making Ness look cowardly and ineffectual.

That's what just happened in Syria.

Now, as Obama likes to say, let me be perfectly clear. I was never in favor of a military intervention in Syria. That's where the Untouchables metaphor ends. Obama made unwise statement after unwise statement over the past several years and backed himself into a corner. In the long run, it's probably better that Obama look weak than we blunder into an ill-advised war. But this was a major diplomatic defeat, and it will take a Reagan-like individual following Obama's Carter impersonation to win back our prestige.

I have no doubt it can be done, but that, Mr. Stewart, is why people are not happy with the outcome.

A compromise solution might have been to outright reject the weapon turnover plan as unrealistic, Assad's stated willingness to cooperate as insufficient and unconvincing, and continued to try to build international support, but that would have been a whole lot easier if Obama hadn't already been saber-rattling for unilateral strikes without any U.N. or international approval. He could have continued to bully the European and International communities for their own cowardice in failing to address the issue -- put the onus on them, as they seem very fond of moralizing about U.S. actions and inactions. the E.U.'s collective military might is more than enough to handle a tin-pot dictator like Assad. Only express willingness to go in when U.S. forces represent less than 25 percent of those committed.

That would have put him in the moral high ground, because this was supposedly a crime against international standards (even though Syria isn't a signatory to the chemical weapons ban), so it requires an international response. U.S. interests weren't at stake in any dire way, so U.S. risk should be minimal. If the so-called international community wants international standards to have meaning, it has to show that it has some balls of its own.

Of course, it doesn't, and that would have gotten us off the hook. This isn't the movie High Noon and if the rest of the international community is too cowardly or unwilling to uphold its standards, then the U.S. doesn't have any obligation to go it alone.

Update: It's starting already.

"It's a clever proposal from Russia to prevent the attacks," one Assad supporter said from the port of Tartous, site of a Russian naval base. "Russia will give us new weapons that are better than chemical weapons," he added. "We are strong enough to save our power and fight the terrorists."

Somehow I'm not expecting an apology from Jon Stewart admitting that Neville Chamberlain Barack Obama did not achieve "peach in our time."

Boston University of Physics "Brainteaser" Demonstrates Narrowly Focused Intelligence In Action

I blogged recently about how our educational system produces people with very narrowly-focused knowledge. Here it is in action.

The brainteaser, "The Monkey and the Hunter," from the Boston University Department of Physics is as follows:

A hunter spies a monkey in a tree, takes aim, and fires. At the moment the bullet leaves the gun the monkey lets go of the tree branch and drops straight down. How should the hunter aim to hit the monkey?

1. Aim directly at the monkey
2. Aim high (over the monkey's head)
3. Aim low (below the monkey) 

The BU Physic's dept. answer, compete with equations, is based on the simple fact that gravity acts on the monkey and the bullet at the same rate, so that if you aim directly at the monkey, by the time the bullet reaches the monkey, the monkey and the bullet will have dropped the same amount. Thus, their answer is 1.

Which happens to be wrong.

What this really shows is that few BU physics students are hunters. Hunters deal with gravity-induced bullet drop every time they shoot. A rifle isn't sighted in along a straight line from the barrel to the target. The rifle is sighted in to account for the bullet drop at a known shooting distance (typically 100 yards). The shooter either manually compensates or adjusts his scope/sights on the fly if the distance is different, but the point is, the hunter's point of aim is already taking gravity's effect on the bullet into account. Unless the hunter knew for a fact back when he sighted in his rifle that he was going to be shooting at falling monkeys, he would not aim directly at the monkey, because that point of aim is already lower than a straight line, to account for bullet drop. He would have to estimate how much the bullet would drop due to gravity and adjust his aim by that much.

Unfortunately, an education in physics at Boston University doesn't equip you with any knowledge about how people deal with gravity in practical applications every day.

The U.N.: A Force For Decline?

I was reading Vladimir Putin's Op-Ed in the New York Times and it got me thinking again about the United Nations. My distrust of the organization is not new. I think it's a corrupt vehicle for greedy parasites and stealth world socialists and marxists.

But lately I've been thinking that not only the U.N. is bad, but some of what people consider the civilized norms that the institution is intended to promote are bad. In other worlds, the U.N. isn't just bad because it's a failure at what it does. It's also bad to the extent that it succeeds!

Prior to the 20th century, conquest of one nation by another was something that happened frequently. Nations were not considered to have a fundamental right of existence. Nations were created, destroyed, merged and fractured with great regularity. It was an accepted reality of global politics.

However, during the 20th century, not starting with the U.N., but growing as a general sentiment expressed in the world of international politics and in the failed League of Nations, was the idea that invading another country is wrong. Conducting wars of conquest is wrong.

This assertion is, I think, generally accepted by at least the world at large. The consequence is that international borders have become virtually set in stone. The only time they change is when a state fails so badly that it breaks up into smaller states (the origin of the world Balkanization), such as in Sudan and South Sudan and, of course, the Balkans, or, theoretically, when two independent states jointly agree to merge (has that happened in modern times?).

Many current nations didn't even exist until the early 20th century -- Iraq, Jordan, Israel or Somalia. In fact, if you look at a historical maps of Africa from the early 19th century, the borders are almost unrecognizable compared to modern maps. But now, every nation's sovereign borders are considered inviolate, and wars of aggression, no less conquest, attract international outcry.

And therein lies the problem. We have determined that even the worst nations -- nations that are essentially lawless no-man's-lands like Somalia, are "too big to fail." We acknowlege, enforce and revere their borders long after those borders cease to contain anything like an actual functioning nation state.

These facts -- new nations only form from the dissolution of sufficiently failed nations and wars of conquest are not acceptable -- are almost an ironclad recipe for slow decline. The only direction we willingly let nations go is down.

In previous times, an utterly dysfunctional land would be considered ripe for takeover by a more-functional neighboring land. This is how all successful states grew. There was no sense that Somalia had a "right" to be Somalia instead of, say, Northern Kenya.

The United States may never have been settled at all, if the right of natives to their native lands had been respected, or it may have stopped as a little coastal strip, or with the Louisiana purchase -- at whatever point it was at when the modern world's towering respect for international borders took hold.

This would have been a disaster then, and it's a growing disaster now. We view successful nations as having equal rights of existence to failed nations. We even recognize the right of our sworn enemies, Iran and North Korea, to exist.

We've abandoned the creative destruction that has been the engine of world progress, because we're no longer willing to throw away bad ideas when they're shaped like a nation. It's entirely possible that the current national borders are, in many locations, bad ideas. The idea was touched on in Iraq by the proponents of the three state solution, but even this solution stopped at the borders to Iraq.

It's as if no U.S. car company was ever allowed to go out of business. Ha, yes, I know it seems we actually think this way now. Anytime one of the big three looks like it's in real danger of failing, the government steps in. But once upon a time, the big three wasn't the big three. There was competition with Packard, AMC, Hudson, Dodge, and many others.

Imagine if the list of U.S. automobile manufacturers was frozen in 1920 with all of them being considered "too big to fail" or having a "right of existence?" What kind of dysfunctional, parasitic government tenant corporations would we be saddled with?

We enforce the existence of failed nations, unless they fall apart into smaller states. But smaller states are less capable states: they have fewer resources, fewer people, they're less capable of great things. Switzerland is a wonderful country, but nobody looks to it to lead the space race. Swiss ideals of industry and culture will never dominate the world, because the Swiss are content being an insular people. But even if tomorrow they changed their mind, if they decided to invade and acquire failing Italy to the south, the entire world would have a proverbial cow. It would never be allowed.

Instead, Italy will be able to continue with, in the words of Animal House, its "long tradition of existence" no matter how utterly it has failed as a nation. This despite the fact that Italy in the form of its current borders is less than 150 years old -- a blink of the eye, in historical terms.

This excessive respect and veneration of national boundaries serves, of course, the entrenched interests. The elite. The holders of the reins of power. It's rent-seeking and cronyism on the international level. They all make a lot of noise about the spread of freedom and democracy, but the minute one of them started spreading freedom and democracy in the way that we know worked historically -- conquest -- the rest of the world would have a fit. They're far more interested in maintaining the status quo.

So we're stuck with a lot of ossified states, coasting along on their guaranteed right to exist, until they become so utterly failed that their own citizens tear them apart from within, condemning them to chaos or Balkanization. Historically, we'd been moving away from the city-state. It was a failed model. But that's the only direction allowed, now, and that means trouble down the line.

Things That Show That Someone Is Not Being Objective

I was reading some news and got redirected to an article on a blog called The Duck of Minerva, titled, "So, you want a job in policy."

I'm sure the advice was good. I'll assume so, since, as someone with no interest in a job in policy, I really don't care.

The advice in the post is second hand from Katherine Kidder

Katherine Kidder is a Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where she works on the Military, Veterans and Society Program.

Ms. Kidder is a Doctoral Candidate in Security Studies at Kansas State University, where she focused on defense and development policy. She writes extensively on military retention rates, professional military education, defense budgeting, and foreign aid. Prior to coming to CNAS, Ms. Kidder was the Veteran Student Services coordinator at Kansas State University, where she aided veterans through the transition from military life to university life.

Ms. Kidder holds a Bachelor of Science in History with an emphasis on military history and a Master of Arts in Security Studies, both from Kansas State University. She is the spouse of an active duty Army officer, and remains active in the Army community.

What I found interesting were some of the blanket assertions about Washington, D.C. people and the Washington, D.C. community. If you read between the lines, what you learn more than anything is this: these people think really highly of themselves.

Start with this assertion: "All interns in this city are smart. Really. All of them." Fifty years of life have taught me that anytime you get a sufficiently large group of people together, you're going to get some idiots. Take Congress: we've got a sitting congressman who believes that the island of Guam could capsize if too many people are on it.

I have no doubt that Washington policy interns are no different. I mean, some of the people who thought that Iran would join with us to help oppose Syria's use of chemical weapons if we just showed them good enough evidence had to be interns at some point, right? But it's very important to their image that they think of themselves as the "best and brightest." I really doubt it. There are many thousands of very, very bright people who want nothing to do with that life, for sensible reasons, and many thousands of stupid people who go into that life for all the wrong reasons.

This very human tendency to ascribe superior qualities to one's own tribe has a corollary: if your tribe is the best and brightest, other tribes must necessarily be inferior. This explains the natural gravity toward statism in Washington policy and bureaucracy. "We're the brightest, so of course we know best. We know better what they need than they do themselves."

I think an assumption behind this is that all these people come from good schools, they all have M.A.s or Ph.D.s, they must be smart! I've worked with a whole lot of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s over the years and, lord, believe me, they're not all smart. Success in advanced academics selects for a certain set of talents -- the talents of being good at studying, taking tests, writing research papers, and researching deeply into a very narrow academic area. Those skills don't make you a genius. In fact it's a truism that the more advanced the degree the less the person knows in the broader sense.

Once upon a time, we venerated the "Renaissance Man," the sort of man who could paint a masterpiece in the morning and design a new kind of water pump that afternoon. The modern university system is designed -- almost deliberately it would seem -- to ruthlessly weed out that sort of person.

Instead, the typical path is: Get a B.A. or B.S. in some broader but still tightly targeted area, such as Ms. Kidder's history degree, then find a narrower area such as "Security Studies" and pick a thesis in that that hasn't already been done to death by 10,000 other grad students. Then, find an even more esoteric specialization within your doctoral field (in Kidder's case, Security Studies, again) to base your dissertation on, and after many years of study, you are an absolute expert in a very narrow, obscure area of knowledge.

To characterize such a person as "smart" just based on that degree is to demean the notion of what it is to be smart (no offense to Ms. Kidder, I'm just using her academic path as an example). Even worse, it takes genuine smartness and buries it deep in a blinkered academic education.

The university pays lip service to the renaissance ideal by implementing a common core curriculum at the undergraduate level, to supposedly ensure that engineers get some humanities courses and humanities majors have to have some exposure to science and math, but it's widely understood that these core requirements are a joke and that, overall, the system is designed to turn out computer scientists and engineers that know nothing about politics, history and literature, history and English majors who can barely calculate a tip, and economists who have no idea how to run a business.

I work every day with people like this: they are very competent at their jobs. In that respect, I suppose they are smart, but take them outside their comfort zone and they're babes in the woods. Knowing a lot about military retention rates doesn't mean you know a thing about, say, economics. But, my observation of this crew has told me that they simply assume that since they're very well-educated in their areas, they're smart enough to make judgments in many areas where they have towering ignorance. Their culture encourages this.

The strange thing about this town is that what you claim to be an expert on, your [sic] are perceived to be an expert on until proven otherwise (which can be a really good thing or a dangerously bad thing!)

 Hmm. That doesn't sound very smart, does it? In fact, it sounds suspiciously like these highly credentialed people are assuming that credentials equal actual expertise and, even worse, working competence. I suppose that's comforting to them: "I have a Ph.D. This piece of paper means I must be smart!" The assertion that this "can be a really good thing" is never explored or proven. I think the "dangerously bad" part is obvious. It does certainly fit in with the perception of us outsiders that D.C. is filled with charlatans, frauds, sycophants and empty status-seekers.

This is the town that has been trying to sell us on the genius of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Somehow, I'm not convinced.

Just as in Academia, publications carry a lot of weight. But the difference in Washington is that volume kind of counts for more than quality (I know…it makes me shudder).

 Another admission that form is more important than substance.

So start getting your name out there with smaller pieces- op-eds, pieces in smaller publications, etc. Of course, it never hurts to have a piece placed in ForeignPolicy.com or Foreign Affairs- but when in doubt, get something out there. And this is a great way to get an edge on your “expertise.”

It's the unconscious details that mean the most. The "expertise" in scare quotes is particularly telling. Not real expertise, just so-called "expertise."

Do you suppose people like this, a tightly-knit, highly competitive crowd with an inflated sense of their self-worth, an unsubstantiated faith in credentialed academics, and an extreme eagerness to ingratiate itself with senior people in the "really tiny" communities they're competing to be part of  might be susceptible to, oh, group think? Yeah. me too.

Who Needs Pravda When You've Got The New York Times?

It's official: The New York Times is the U.S. propaganda outlet for Vladimir Putin

A Red Line

I'm going to say that Barack Obama has crossed a Red Line with his incompetent handling of Middle East foreign policy.

A year from now. I fully intend to assert that, hey, it wasn't my Red Line, it was the world's Red Line, and the credibility of the world is at stake if they don't get rid of Barack Obama.