How Asian test-prep companies quickly penetrated the new SAT

Wednesday, April 6th, 2016

Asian test-prep companies quickly penetrated the new SAT:

This month, Asian test-prep centers targeted the redesigned SAT.

For the first sitting of the test, on March 5, the College Board barred people who aren’t applying to college from taking the SAT. The step prevented cram school teachers who’d registered for the test from getting a direct look at the exam. Test-prep operators found ways around the measure.

Sanli, the Chinese test-prep chain, says it sent 11 teachers to the United States to collect information on the redesigned exam. They debriefed 40 Sanli students studying at U.S. high schools who took the new SAT as they exited test centers, according to Wu, the general manager. Sanli presented its findings at a seminar at a Shanghai hotel.

Other Asian operators harvested material from the new exam simply by going online. After the test ended, the website College Confidential was full of talk about the exam. The site said last week that it received and complied with one take-down request from the College Board after the new test.

And within hours of the test, a Chinese SAT coach who calls himself “Roy” had pieced together items that were on the reading and optional essay sections. Soon he was sharing his take on the test in a video posted on social media.

“Have you read College Confidential?” Roy said in an interview. “All the detailed material is there.”

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Human Terrain

Tuesday, April 5th, 2016

As US casualties in Iraq went into four figures, John Dolan (a.k.a. Gary Brecher, The War Nerd) explains, the Army was finally ready to grit its teeth and deal with the eggheads again — including a woman he knew back at Berkeley, who turned out to be something of a con artist, now operating under a new name:

That was the beginning of the Human Terrain System.

In 2005, a very bad year for the Army in Iraq, “Dr. Montgomery McFate” and her shadowy colleague, Andrea V. Jackson (try finding a photo of Andrea) started a pilot project, COR-HTS, designed to put anthropological know-how, assuming there be such a thing, to the US armed force’s use. They could have hired any man or woman from A-town for about one-millionth the price, and they’d have said, “Have you tried learning the lingo, talking to people? Oh, and another thing that helps is keeping track, you know, finding out who lives where. The big thing to remember, though, is to make sure you know which families have been in the struggle down the generations; find the head of the house and see what he’ll take to sit home for a while.”

But that’s not how the Army does things, or the US in general. It’s about the last thing any American would do, in fact. They went with a huge program, HQ’d in Fort Leavenworth —because when you think of a base to prep people for the Sunni Triangle you naturally just think “Kansas! Put it in Kansas!”

Then they provided Mitzy and Andrea, two suspiciously academic women (by Army standards) with a minder, a man who has to be seen to be believed. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Col. Steve Fondocaro.

Sometimes I think physical comedy is the essence of America, most of all when it thinks it’s being serious. Fondocaro… well, look at him. You know he was there to calm down the tankers and junior Pattons who didn’t want to know about this softly-softly stuff.

The mix worked, and the US military, in its usual way, ruined it by demanding an instant 400% increase in the slow development the program needed. Just as the services had ruined an earlier CI campaign, the Green Berets, by tossing thousands of shake-and-bake commandos into what was originally a slow, village-based program, the Army decided to hire every unhireable Humanities Ph.D. in the US (which, by this time, was pretty much all of them) to go talk to Pashtun patriarchs and Sunni elders in Anbar about how we might make the occupation more comfortable for them.

Mitzy hit her peak, and it was quite a peak, in 2007, when Petraeus’ Counterinsurgency 101 reforms made the US Iraq effort slightly less spectacularly clueless, and the casualty counts started to go down. Suddenly the woman I knew as Mitzy was everywhere. I got an email from a reporter at SFGate Magazine. He’d written a gushing profile of Mitzy, and wanted to do a followup. She’d mentioned, he said, that I had “taught her the rhetoric of terrorism” at UC Berkeley. I’d never taught any such course, and wasn’t happy about the fact that I’d been airbrushed out of her history now that she was respectable and I was nobody. So I wrote back to say that I doubted we understood “terrorism” in the same way. The reporter’s response began with the exclamation, “Goodness!” and I understood how far I’d wandered from acceptable American discourse. I could hardly read the rest; just kept thinking, “How can you write the word ‘goodness’ with an exclamation point after it?”

How Mitzy, who had a real houseboat tongue on her, managed to talk to these people without offending them every second word, I never understood. But then she’d always been a jargon-sponge, a joiner.

As she rose in the big, bad military/think-tank world, she drew the hatred of the anthro professors guild. Which was annoying, because I had good cause, decades of cause, to hate North American professors, and didn’t want to agree with them about anything. It was especially irksome that Mitzy’s chief accuser was a Canadian leftist anthropologist named Maximilian Forte, a classic of the breed, a privileged white male who makes a tidy sum talking about white male privilege. Worse yet, he taught at Concordia, which was notorious at Berkeley for hiring only the most insufferable, canting, progressive hypocrites among our grad students. A more loathsome group of people it would be difficult to find, and yet I knew they were right. This is a common feeling for Berkeley vets, agreeing with the whole agenda of people whose very names and voices trigger your gag reflex.

What finally brought Human Terrain crashing down onto the, er, human terrain inhabited by us nobodies was opposition from the other side, the hardcore tankers who loathed the idea of doing anything resembling touchy-feely CI warfare. They didn’t want to send their guys to learn Pashtun and learn to wipe their asses with a rock, they wanted to wargame the Fulda Gap, like the good old days. Fuck the wars that actually happen, those bug hunts; they dreamed of the good old Cold War, when nothing real ever eventuated.

And they had their ammunition when Mitzy’s crusading Ph.D.s started dying in ways horrible enough to get publicity. One of them, Michael Bhattia, died from an IED in Khost; Nicole Suveges, “a funny, kind person” according to her HTS death notice, was blown to bits in Sadr City in Baghdad.

But the most cinematic, grotesquely comic, most utterly horrible death was Paula Loyd’s. She—also a nice, funny person who joked “I always wanted plastic surgery” after being burned over 60% of her body, was set on fire by a Pashtun man in southern Afghanistan. Loyd was one of the decent Ph.D.s, you could tell that just reading her nightmare story; a nice person who took the job with HTS because there weren’t any other jobs for our crowd anymore. A nice, blond, middle-class, moderate-feminist American… sent to a Pashtun village in Kandahar Province, Mullah Omar’s home turf. The Children’s Crusade seems like sound military strategy compared to this.

Loyd, her notebook or recorder ready, asked a man named Abdul Salam about the price of kerosene. Salam happened to be carrying a tin of kerosene. The temptation must have been too great; he poured it over Loyd and set her on fire.

After she fell screaming in agony, the grotesque comedy continued. Loyd’s bodyguard, angry that he’d failed to do his job, clotheslined Salam, tied him up. Some soldiers told the bodyguard Loyd was horribly maimed. The bodyguard took out his sidearm and shot Salam in the head. For which, believe it or not, the bodyguard was tried for murder.

Posted in Education, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

The First War the United States Lost

Tuesday, April 5th, 2016

The first war the United States lost was the first war the United States fought, the war with the Barbary pirates:

Adams had been building a navy, but when Jefferson took over he stopped construction on the ships of the line, kept the frigates in commission and preserved every single naval shore station, apparently for purely pork reasons. The United States thereby became a very minor naval power.

The Dey of Tripoli had a habit of sending out his ships to capture merchantmen of countries who could not protect them, and the United States was obviously an example. The ships were captured and the crew enslaved, although he was normally anxious to have them ransomed. He was willing to stop the behavior for any country that was willing to make him regular payments, and some of the other minor powers made such payments.

The Americans took up the slogan “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute’ and sent what was left of the navy out to attack Tripoli. They based themselves in Malta and from time to time sailed to Tripoli where they bombarded the city. Although this attack on civilians rather resembled our air war in World War II, it was obviously much less effective. The guns fired round shot and the city was mainly mud brick and hence easily repaired.

In the course of one of these raids the Philadelphia ran aground and was captured by the Tripolitan forces which floated it into Harbor and put its now enslaved crew at work improving the fortifications of Tripoli. In a daring raid, indeed the only daring raid of the war, Decatur succeeded in burning the Philadelphia at anchor.

The Dey showed no signs of being other than mildly annoyed by the bombardment and the war might have gone on indefinitely had not the US army taken a hand. An army officer, with a few Marines, collected another potential heir to the throne in Cairo, moved across the desert taking the second city of the kingdom, Derna, en route, and approached Tripoli with the intention of attacking it. The advance created a crisis, first for the Dey who was apparently uncertain of his ability to defend the city, granted that his relative would have some supporters within the walls, and, more importantly, for the navy which did not want the army to win the war after the navy had spent so much time with nothing to show for their efforts.

An emergency peace was patched up in which the United states paid a large ransom for the Americans held by the Tripolitanians. Thus we ended up paying tribute and clearly lost the war. We were down the tribute and one frigate while the Dey of Tripoli got the money and had his defenses strengthened by the labor of his American prisoners. The part of the wall they had worked on was called the Philadelphia bastion in remembrance of their labor. The millions for defense was responded to by laying up most of the frigates, although the pork rich shore installations were retained.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Blood, Dice, and Darkness

Monday, April 4th, 2016

Games Workshop started humbly, as three game-loving friends selling Go boards and backgammon sets from their London flat. Then their gaming fanzine Owl and Weasel founds its way across the Atlantic to Gary Gygax, who sent them a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. They became the European distributor — still from their London flat:

“We were desperate not to let Gygax know that we were running the company from our flat,” Livingstone said.

“But what we didn’t know at the time was that he was publishing Dungeons & Dragons from his flat as well. Both parties were assuming that the other was some big-time operation, but it was very much a fledgling industry at the time.”

Eventually their side-project, a miniature-making company called Citadel, became the main project, as the games they devised to sell those miniatures took off:

“Bryan told us: ‘We need a game to sell more toy soldiers, get on with it.’ He’s like that,” Priestley said.

“His role was very top-down. He only laid down a couple of paramaters. He told us the game had to have rules for every model the company made at the time, and that it could only use standard six-sided dice, because every kid had them in their Monopoly sets.

“Richard wrote the initial manuscript, and then I did a lot of the production and development work, so a lot of the game mechanics were down to Richard and I did a lot of the refinement and detail.”

Warhammer First Edition

The result of their efforts was Warhammer’s first edition. Published in 1983 as a set of nondescript black and white booklets, it included rules for manoeuvring and fighting with a variety of fantastical creatures and soldiers. But it came with none of the fictional background that’s now synonymous with the Warhammer brand. Instead it was marketed as a “dual system” allowing roleplay gaming groups to fight large battles as part of their ongoing campaigns.

After Warhammer, they created its science-fiction cousin, Warhammer 40,000 — which has a deeper origin story than I realized:

“We just plundered everything. Obviously Tolkien was a big influence, and in terms of 40K there’s a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dune in there. If you’ve read Dune, every chapter starts with a bit of an excerpt, and I rather enjoyed that, so I just copied the idea by putting little bits of pseudo fiction in.”

Other influences included the works of Robert Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft, but it was a much older source – the 17th century poet John Milton – who would provide the inspiration for the game’s greatest conflict.

In a reimagining of the epic poem Paradise Lost, which deals with an attempt to overthrow God by a faction of rebel angels, Warhammer 40,000 featured a cataclysmic schism within the forces of the Empire of Mankind. In an event known as the Horus Heresy, chapters of Space Marines – genetically engineered, fanatically religious super-soldiers – turned against their Emperor after falling prey to the influence of the Chaos Gods, the supreme antagonists of this dark future setting.

“The original idea for Chaos was Bryan Ansell’s,” Priestley said.

“He wrote a Warhammer supplement called Realms of Chaos where he came up with the gods and the demons. He produced this huge hand-written manuscript where he defined all of that, and I took what he’d written and developed it as a book.”

But Priestley’s idea of Chaos differed from Ansell’s, and in 40K he sought to expand on the concept.

“Bryan’s idea of Chaos was very much derived from [science fiction and fantasy author] Michael Moorcock,” he said. “I always thought it was a little too close for comfort, it looked like we were just copying.

“But I’d always had this sense of Chaos existing as described in Paradise Lost. I’d tried to bring elements of that into the background and gradually change it from a description of demons into a kind of force out of which came realities, a kind of literal primal chaos.

“Unless you’ve read Paradise Lost you don’t get it. The whole Horus Heresy is just a parody of the fall of Lucifer as described by Milton.”

Posted in Games | 2 Comments »

A government program that actually works

Monday, April 4th, 2016

The New York Times seems to have found a government program that actually works — mass round-ups of low-level Latino gangbangers:

Traditionally, the LAPD had focused on arresting the “kingpins,” the leaders of the gangs. Kill the head and the body will die! This assumed, however, that there were a few really bad criminals and a lot of marginal kids who would straighten up and fly right once the malign influence of the kingpin was gone. Instead, removing the leadership just led to wars to become leaders.

So, LAPD started using federal RICO indictments to round up all the foot soldiers in massive military-like operations and then packing them off to federal penitentiaries in places like Arkansas, where there was no infrastructure for Latino prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia to control the streets of California from inside the joint in the middle of the country.

Posted in Crime, Policy | No Comments »

Henry Harpending has died

Sunday, April 3rd, 2016

Henry HarpendingHenry Harpending has died, Gregory Cochran reports:

He suffered a stroke 3 weeks ago. Within a few days, he also had a MRSA infection in his lungs. The docs eventually cleared that, but his lungs never recovered. He died this afternoon of Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Harpending was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah.

Cochran and Harpending wrote The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. I didn’t realize Steve Sailer had brought them together:

The great anthropologist Henry Harpending (1944-2016) has died. A genial polymath, Henry bridged the gap in anthropology between the old-fashioned cultural side (having spent almost 4 years in the field in Africa with Bushmen and Herero hunter-gatherers, at one point almost giving up academia to become a safari hunting guide) and the ascendant genetic side of anthropology.

It’s my honor to have brought Henry and Gregory Cochran into contact around 1999.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Slaughter at the Bridge

Sunday, April 3rd, 2016

The distant past is looking even less like the era of Conan the Corded Ware Maker as archeologists uncover a colossal Bronze Age battle:

In 1996, an amateur archaeologist found a single upper arm bone sticking out of the steep riverbank — the first clue that the Tollense Valley, about 120 kilometers north of Berlin, concealed a gruesome secret. A flint arrowhead was firmly embedded in one end of the bone, prompting archaeologists to dig a small test excavation that yielded more bones, a bashed-in skull, and a 73-centimeter club resembling a baseball bat. The artifacts all were radiocarbon-dated to about 1250 B.C.E., suggesting they stemmed from a single episode during Europe’s Bronze Age.

Now, after a series of excavations between 2009 and 2015, researchers have begun to understand the battle and its startling implications for Bronze Age society. Along a 3-kilometer stretch of the Tollense River, archaeologists from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Department of Historic Preservation (MVDHP) and the University of Greifswald (UG) have unearthed wooden clubs, bronze spearheads, and flint and bronze arrowheads. They have also found bones in extraordinary numbers: the remains of at least five horses and more than 100 men. Bones from hundreds more may remain unexcavated, and thousands of others may have fought but survived.

“If our hypothesis is correct that all of the finds belong to the same event, we’re dealing with a conflict of a scale hitherto completely unknown north of the Alps,” says dig co-director Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist at the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage in Hannover. “There’s nothing to compare it to.” It may even be the earliest direct evidence — with weapons and warriors together — of a battle this size anywhere in the ancient world.

Tollense 1

The 10,000 bones in this room — what’s left of Tollense’s losers — changed all that. They were found in dense caches: In one spot, 1478 bones, among them 20 skulls, were packed into an area of just 12 square meters. Archaeologists think the bodies landed or were dumped in shallow ponds, where the motion of the water mixed up bones from different individuals. By counting specific, singular bones — skulls and femurs, for example — UG forensic anthropologists Ute Brinker and Annemarie Schramm identified a minimum of 130 individuals, almost all of them men, most between the ages of 20 and 30.

The number suggests the scale of the battle. “We have 130 people, minimum, and five horses. And we’ve only opened 450 square meters. That’s 10% of the find layer, at most, maybe just 3% or 4%,” says Detlef Jantzen, chief archaeologist at MVDHP. “If we excavated the whole area, we might have 750 people. That’s incredible for the Bronze Age.” In what they admit are back-of-the-envelope estimates, he and Terberger argue that if one in five of the battle’s participants was killed and left on the battlefield, that could mean almost 4000 warriors took part in the fighting.

Tollense 2

Posted in Science, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Mishima

Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

Each year, all the calves born in France get names starting with the same letter. A few years ago the letter was I, and friend-of-the-blog Grasspunk named one of his female calves Isegoria. That was vachement genial of him.

This year Isegoria the cow gave birth to a male calf who needed an M name, and GrassPunk suggested Mishima, the name of the infamous Japanese-nationalist writer who committed seppuku after a doomed coup attempt.

That turned into Mishimaburger, whom I envision as a Kobe-style beef trying futilely to rouse the other beeves to go outside and eat grass.

Anyway, this convinced me to find some actual Mishima to read, and the go-to piece seems to be his short story, Patriotism — which, honestly, reads as almost comically Japanese to a modern Western audience. A newlywed Lieutenant and his beautiful young wife commit ritual suicide after his friends fail in their coup attempt, the infamous February 26 Incident:

“I knew nothing. They hadn’t asked me to join. Perhaps out of consideration, because I was newly married. Kano, and Homma too, and Yamaguchi.”

Reiko recalled momentarily the faces of high-spirited young officers, friends of her husband, who had come to the house occasionally as guests.

“There may be an Imperial ordinance sent down tomorrow. They’ll be posted as rebels, I imagine. I shall be in command of a unit with orders to attack them…. I can’t do it. It’s impossible to do a thing like that.”

He spoke again.

“They’ve taken me off guard duty, and I have permission to return home for one night. Tomorrow morning, without question, I must leave to join the attack. I can’t do it, Reiko.”

Reiko sat erect with lowered eyes. She understood clearly that her husband had spoken of his death. The lieutenant was resolved. Each word, being rooted in death, emerged sharply and with powerful significance against this dark, unmovable background. Although the lieutenant was speaking of his dilemma, already there was no room in his mind for vacillation.

However, there was a clarity, like the clarity of a stream fed from melting snows, in the silence which rested between them. Sitting in his own home after the long two-day ordeal, and looking across at the face of his beautiful wife, the lieutenant was for the first time experiencing true peace of mind. For he had at once known, though she said nothing, that his wife divined the resolve which lay beneath his words.

“Well, then…” The lieutenant’s eyes opened wide. Despite this exhaustion they were strong and clear, and now for the first time they looked straight into the eyes of his wife. “Tonight I shall cut my stomach.”

Reiko did not flinch.

Posted in Animals, Media, War | 1 Comment »

The Pinochet Effect

Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

Pinochet’s difficulties came not from his ostensible crimes, but from something far worse:

He favored capitalism and proved that it worked. He will never be forgiven.

Gordon Tullock did not consider Pinochet — or Milosevic — nice, but did not believe that their crimes fully explained their “legal” difficulties:

Pinochet, although not the beau ideal of the Chilean people, was not particularly unpopular during his reign. I was in Chile for a few days and saw him drive by. I presume his car was armored, but he had only motorcyclists as an escort. I was in Jerusalem when Clinton visited it and saw him also drive by. His security precautions were a high multiple of those of Pinochet. Pinochet did not find it necessary to close off the street in front of his house. He finally put his continuance in office up to a vote, and although he lost, he didn’t do badly. His policies are not only being adopted in Europe by nominally socialistic, governments, but his successors in Chile have mainly continued them.

Now all of this does not indicate that the specific charges against him are false, indeed I think they are mainly true. But I also think that these charges have little to do with his legal difficulties. In my opinion, it is his general image as a rightist that causes the trouble. No person on the left has been similarly been charged even though many of them have committed similar acts. To take but one example, Castro was in Spain when the Spanish magistrate tried to extradite Pinochet. The Chilean government promptly requested the extradition of Castro on exactly the same charges. The newspapers reported this at the time, but it was quickly forgotten. Since Castro makes Pinochet look like a piker, this would at first seem surprising. But Castro has what may be the most socialistic (and unsuccessful) government in the world. His immunity is not surprising if the actual gravamen of the charge is not killing or torturing, but successful capitalizing.

The newspapers sometimes publish lists of potential defendants in these trials. Interestingly, none of them (except Pol Pot to be discussed below) are on the left. Wulfe in Germany is a particularly interesting case. He was in change of the East German equivalent of the Gestapo. The deal entered into by Kohl to get the Russians to leave not only involved a large sum of money to build officers quarters for the Officers who left, it also provided that no one could be convicted on the basis of activity which was legal at the time.

[...]

In the various areas that are now considered east Europe, the situation is similar. Former members of the Communist apparatus are not prosecuted. Indeed many of them have been elected to positions of power in such places as Poland and Serbia. The United States and its allies who prohibited similar developments in Germany and Japan after the war, made no attempt to keep politicians in their more recent enemy regimes from high positions in the successors. The mere fact that a man was involved in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or pushing the boat people out to sea off Vietnam is not regarded with anywhere near the revulsion given a simple guard in a German Concentration Camp.

[...]

Milosevic is another victim of the same phenomenon. He was in fact an elected official, but in a government which is now perceived as rightist. He is far from a nice man, but he did permit an opposition to exist and hold demonstrations. They had newspapers that did face difficulties, but still existed. It is possible to argue that Serbia was as democratic as Chicago.

Milosevic did not start the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, although he participated. He and some of his officials are the only ones threatened with criminal prosecution for it. Interestingly Holbrook in his book “To End A War” mentions his effort to get the Croats to advance into territory inhabited by Serbs in full knowledge that they would carry out ethnic cleansing without the slightest signs of feeling guilty. Nor has he been criticized for it.

Returning to South America, a minor but significant case of the violation of amnesties for rightist occurred in Argentina. During the dirty war both sides committed fairly numerous crimes. It was ended by a treaty in which the military were given an amnesty for their fairly numerous killings. For reasons that have always rather puzzled me, they did not announce the names of people they killed, and hence the term “disappearances”. In some cases these people had children, and the military arranged for them to be adopted. At the present day this set of acts which, given what had happened to their parents, seems more or less virtuous, is being called kidnapping and the amnesty did not specifically cover kidnapping. As a result a number of officers who would have been quite safe if they had simply killed the children are in danger of imprisonment.

Posted in Crime, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Behind the Scenes

Friday, April 1st, 2016

Puppet MasterOur Slovenian guest has been quietly working behind the scenes, connecting some of his favorite blogs.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Minotaur

Friday, April 1st, 2016

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur had the body of a man but the head of a bull. The name Minotaur simply means Minos’s Bull, because the beast lived in the labyrinth of King Minos of Crete — but the beast had a proper name:

In Crete, the Minotaur was known by its proper name, Asterion, a name shared with Minos’ foster-father.

I don’t remember this part of the story from any of the mythology books I got out of the school library:

After he ascended the throne of the island of Crete, Minos competed with his brothers to rule. Minos prayed to Poseidon, the sea god, to send him a snow-white bull, as a sign of support (the Cretan Bull). He was to kill the bull to show honor to the deity, but decided to keep it instead because of its beauty. He thought Poseidon would not care if he kept the white bull and sacrificed one of his own. To punish Minos, Poseidon made Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, fall deeply in love with the bull. Pasiphaë had craftsman Daedalus make a hollow wooden cow, and climbed inside it in order to mate with the white bull. The offspring was the monstrous Minotaur. Pasiphaë nursed him, but he grew and became ferocious, being the unnatural offspring of a woman and a beast; he had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured humans for sustenance. Minos, after getting advice from the oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos’s palace in Knossos.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

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