StrangeSox

come on cutler, stop being bad

Ugggggggghhhhhhh

Tom the Dancing Bug has some great cartoons. His "Lucky Ducky" series is probably the best.

QEIII on the way

Economists are Hobbesians Big, long post directed at Brad DeLong's defense of the microeconomics view of the world as Lockean. Henry disagrees and goes over why it is instead Hobbesian and that the strict foundations of self-interest that undergird economics aren't a particularly good model of human interactions. I found it interesting, maybe someone else will. More about economic philosophy than anything political.

I got a perfect score in reading comprehension :smug: Math was my worst section. So I went into engineering. Makes perfect sense. A few years ago Naperville's school district had a big cheating scandal with the ACT and I think they had to re-do the testing for everyone.

NSS, s2k5, thanks for some great posts in the last page or two.

CTU chief: Deal likely today but classes may not resume until Monday

My friend who works in CPS teaching 4th grade and my other friend who works with BD high school students in the suburbs recently compared the number of times they've had punches thrown at them.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 10:41 AM) Most of all, it doesn't do anything to help you for the real world. How many professions have standardized answers, which are accepted by all companies? Why is that a needed standard? It is a waste of resources dedicated to bureaucrats being able to say they are "doing something" about education. They're moving to computer-based grading of standardized test essays. Not that the current 1-minute-per-essay review isn't terrible, but this is going to be even worse. The test-grading companies love it though! http://www.npr.org/2012/06/07/154452475/co...not-always-well

Yeah, standardized tests are kinda good for evaluating some things but not good for evaluating other things. There's nothing really funny or ironic about that.

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 10:27 AM) No that isnt really part of the problem because I dont believe reasonable people would agree with this. And if they were firing teachers for this reason and then the union struck, I would strongly support them. You are acting like its impossible to ever tell good or bad. So should they just never be rated? Because how can I tell what a good or bad teacher is?! That seems like a pretty big insult to good teachers. I'm not acting like it's impossible to evaluate teachers. I'm saying that there is no universal definition of "good" and "bad." Those definitions will fluctuate from family to family and community to community and administrator to administrator. So when we hear about how hard it is to fire "bad" teachers, I want to know on what criteria are they being judged. edit: which doesn't mean that it should be difficult to fire incompetent, ineffective teachers. But I wouldn't support an administrator-by-administrator definition. Objective, meaningful standards are what is needed and most school districts are attempting to move towards that. They need to remain flexible and open, however, to changes in criteria if they are found to be lacking.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 10:26 AM) I think this can be said for any job. The issue is, with other jobs, people DO define what's good/bad. And you deal with it. For most other jobs, that's not exactly that same level of public interaction on topics as important to people as the ones education touch. What scores? What are you measuring? How sure are you that you're accurately and precisely measuring what you think you are? Does it make sense to compare language arts scores to math scores? That doesn't seem like a particularly good way to evaluate teachers to me.

Part of the problem is who defines what's good and what's bad? (from digby, towards bottom)

'grats!

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 10:02 AM) And they are faulted for that. But making mistakes when you have to make quick decisions is expected...the expected part of that equation is what you're conveniently ignoring to make your point. I think it would be a bit different if they had 4 years to vet this information and STILL messed it up versus entering office and BAM. Deciding to focus on Iraq regime change was not a quick decision. It was a years-long policy goal of many administration members prior to taking office. Their obsession blinded them. It's not about specifically missing 9/11 links here, it's about not seeing anything but Saddam-WDM links.

But they made firm decisions in the 8 months. Dumb ones. They should be faulted for that.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:44 AM) So one guy was aware...that's still a small fraction of an entire administration that's being blamed here. I'm not saying GW made the right moves here... I'm ONLY saying that given the timeline, I think you're being a bit unreasonably unfair. The Secratary of Defense was aware of a key policy goal. It's not a reach to say that they made important decisions, such as focusing on regime change in Iraq, prior to entering office. PNAC's policies were publicly available, and Bush's administration included members in key positions (Cheney, Rumsfeld, "Scooter" Libby, Wolfowitz, others). What I'm saying is that, if you're going to give them an excuse on making important decisions only 8 months into the administration, then you have to heavily fault them for making the decision to focus so heavily on Iraq. Which, really, is the point of that article; they were blinded by their focus on Iraq to any other possibilities.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:34 AM) After a President takes office, it takes months to construct his cabinet and appoint people to important positions. You're just reaching now. Secretary of State Powell’s awareness, three days into a new administration, that Iraq “regime change” would be a principal focus of the Bush presidency I am not reaching. edit: I'm also not blaming Bush for 9/11. I'll say it again, maybe the pieces couldn't have been put together. I'm blaming him for being incompetent, though, and indirectly for lying us into a war with Iraq because that's what they were focused on from at least Day 3, if not Day 1.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:29 AM) How did "they" make decisions before entering office without a cabinet? That makes ZERO sense. You're just making s*** up now. His administration wasn't even intact before he was in office. The people he chose for his administration had well-known policy preferences and would have begun forming policy goals during his campaign and certainly during his transition period of late-December to late-January. By Day 3, Colin Powell was aware that regime change in Iraq was a top priority. Clearly, decisions had been made, and those decisions were stuck to regardless of any new information.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:25 AM) And again, I think you're being unfair considering the timeline. The CIA had to try to dissuade them of the notion that OBL was running false-flag operations for Saddam. There is no other way to describe that but incompetence.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:24 AM) Stop here for a minute, and join me in August, 2001. How would it have gone over in America, if Bush for seemingly no reason at all, instituted the kind of securities changes that we now accept as normal. Federalizing airport security, long security lines, invasive checks, armed guards, bomb sniffing dogs, chemical and biological weapons detection systems, etc, in order to attempt to stop a potential 9/11, which no one outside of a few think-tanks and terror briefings even believed as a real possibility. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Democrats wouldn't have screamed at every step of the way, as would have 99.8% of American's? They did not need to implement the security theater we have now that would likely not have stopped the attacks anyway. I've accidentally carried a large blade onto a plane myself. Join me in June, 2001. How would it have gone over in the intelligence community if, instead of coming up with absurd scenarios to dismiss anything that didn't paint Saddam as the #1 threat, they took these other reports seriously?

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:23 AM) No, I don't think their obsession with Iraq is justifiable. I don't think we should be there now, even...anywhere in that region. That said, I also think it's unfair to say GW had enough time in office to go through the loads of information they had and what was given to them by the previous administration AND make sound decisions based on that. I think it was just too much too soon. But they still made decisions. Before they even entered office, they made decisions. That's the point. If you're going to go with that defense, that it wasn't enough time to make sound, solid decisions, then that makes their obsession with Iraq all the worse. This is just another layer on the many, many layers of his failure.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Sep 13, 2012 -> 09:21 AM) Careful, SS is going to attack you with his anti GW Agenda. It couldn't have been Congresses fault...it was all GW's! The Bush Admin's incompetence was a critical part, not the only part. As I've said, it may not have been possible for a group who wasn't staggeringly incompetent to connect the dots and prevent the attack, but their decisions guaranteed that it wouldn't happen.