March 6, 2014

Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea: the ex-wife analogy

From the NYT:
Steeped in Bloody History, and Seeing a Chance to Rewrite It 
By ANDREW HIGGINS   MARCH 6, 2014

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine — Drawing on his experiences as a young artillery officer in imperial Russia’s military during the 1853-56 Crimean War, Leo Tolstoy described in “Sevastopol Sketches” how a wounded Russian soldier whose leg had been amputated above the knee coped with agonizing pain. 
“The chief thing, your honor, is not to think,” Tolstoy’s amputee remarked, “If you don’t think, it is nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.” 
It is advice, however, that virtually nobody in Crimea,particularly not here in Sevastopol, shows any sign of heeding. With nearly every other street named after a Russian general or a gruesome battle, its lovely seafront promenade dominated by a “monument to sunken ships” and its central square named after the imperial admiral who commanded Russian forces against French, British and Turkish troops in the 19th century, Sevastopol constantly feeds thoughts of war and its agonies. 
Bombarded with reminders of the Crimean War, which involved a yearlong siege of the city, and World War II, when the city doggedly resisted Nazi forces until finally falling in July 1942, Sevastopol has never stopped thinking about wartime losses — and has never been able to cope with the amputation carried out in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. 
Wielding a pen instead of a knife, Khrushchev ordered Sevastopol and the rest of the Crimea transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At the time, the operation caused little pain, as both Russia and Ukraine belonged to the Soviet Union, which chloroformed ethnic, linguistic and cultural divisions with repression. 
When Ukraine became a separate independent nation at the end of 1991, however, Sevastopol — the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since the 18th century — began howling, culminating in the Crimean Parliament’s decision on Thursday to hold a referendum on March 16 on whether to break away from Ukraine and become formally part of Russia once again. 

Here's an analogy for the way Russians see Crimea, especially Sevastopol. Say your family has owned a beautiful vacation property on the beach for generations where many of your family's memories were written. Years ago your new bride so charmed your grandmother that grandma rewrote her will to leave it to her personally. That seemed like a sweet, meaningless gesture because you were hitched for life, right?

But years after grandma died, the company you'd started went under and your wife left you. Since you got divorced, your ex-wife has been letting you use the beach house about as often as you can get away, so it hasn't really been an issue. And your mutual children will inherit it, right? And, now that you are back on your feet financially, you figured it was only a matter of time until you won her back.

But you just heard your ex-wife wants to marry your arch-rival in business, the man who ruined your company, especially with all the underhanded things he did after you agreed to sell an interest to him. He's incredibly pushy and entitled, so you can just picture him never letting you use the beach house, and then leaving it to all his kids from his first wife, or maybe they'll have some kids of their own. Whatever he's scheming it's got you hot under the collar.

So, you break into the summer house on the beach and now you are in there. You figure your ex-wife and her new husband aren't brave enough to throw you out physically, and if they try to take you to court, you can always publicize all the bad things her new husband has done over the years to get so rich.

Sounds like a plan, right? (Okay, admittedly, you've been drinking kind of heavily since you heard the news about your ex-wife, but, like the song advises, you've sent for lawyers, guns, and money, so what could possibly go wrong?)
 

Obama is right, mostly

From the NYT:
Obama Says Referendum in Crimea Would Violate Law 
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ALAN COWELL   MARCH 6, 2014

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — The pro-Russian authorities in Crimea pressed ahead on Thursday with measures to break away from Ukraine and become part of Russia, ignoring new steps toward Western sanctions and a warning by President Obama that their plans for a referendum would “violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law.” 
Sending a further message, Russia’s military began what it described as regularly scheduled air-defense drills on Thursday at its testing range of Kapustin Yar in the Western Military District, less than 300 miles from the eastern border of Ukraine, Russia news services reported. The drills, to last for a month, were described by a military spokesman, Col. Oleg Kochetkov, as the largest ever in that part of Russia, the Ria Novosti news agency said. 
The developments came as the United States and the European Union moved to provide new support for the national government in Kiev and sought ways to press President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine. The United States announced a framework for imposing new sanctions, while the European Union suspended talks with Russia on a variety of issues including visa liberalization. 
Mr. Obama said in Washington: “Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected leaders.”

He could have left off the "democratically elected" hypocrisy. "Democratically elected" is increasingly a synonym for "on our side." The change in government in Kiev two weeks ago didn't involve an election. It was more like how the Communist secret policeman taunts the dissident Prague actors he's arresting in Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth:
You get your lads together and we get our lads together and when it's all over, one of us is in power and you're in gaol.

Except the freelancers drove out the salaried goon squad.

If I rewrite Obama's statement less tendentiously:
"We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of internationally recognized governments."

That's not bad.

The world has gotten more peaceful under the post-WWII system that is:

- Mildly averse to redrawing borders (e.g., African countries complain about their legacy borders, but African rulers are very reluctant to allow them to be redrawn: splitting Sudan along sensible racial lines took decades)

- Highly averse to right of conquest (which is why Israel has to engage in all sorts of legal subterfuges to settle the West Bank, rather than just annex it)

- Highly averse to big countries getting bigger (The postwar world is particularly averse to Sudetenland-style annexations where the annexing country grows in military potential. There are exceptions, of course: China absorbing, although not wholly until 2046, Hong Kong, but the Chinese see that as part of the decolonization process, like India annexing Goa in 1962.)

Russian annexation of Crimea following military operations, even if by referendum (but only in Crimea, not in Ukraine) violates all three.

Of course, in Russian eyes, the huge exception to the last point about the big not getting bigger is West Germany absorbing East Germany, and then NATO proceeding to ignore oral promises made by Kohl and Baker to Gorbachev to not extend NATO eastward in return for the Soviet Union withdrawing 380,000 troops from East Germany.

(German re-unification was not wholly noncontroversial in the West, either. A decade afterwards, I watched from four feet away as Mrs. Thatcher and General Odom argue intensely for ten minutes like an umpire and a baseball manager over Thatcher's opposition to German re-unification in 1989-90.)

If Russia wants to annex Crimea, it should offer to buy it from Ukraine (like the U.S. bought Alaska from Russia), with the deal needing to be ratified by a majority of voters in both Ukraine (minus Crimea) and Crimea.
   

Ready, Fire, Aim: New SAT will be validated, eventually

Yesterday, David Coleman of the College Board announced a new SAT that will go into use in early 2016. Some of the ideas sound pretty good, some not so hot, but my big question is: Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along? Or have they actually tested these planned changes and found they work as hoped?

The usual practice with the SAT is to slip experimental questions into real SATs. The unvalidated new questions don't count for the students' scores, but ETS checks to make sure they aren't worse than the old questions. I don't see much evidence that this has been done with Coleman's reforms yet.

Ready Aim Fire or Fire Ready Aim?

Research Base 
A fuller review of the evidentiary backbone for the redesigned SAT will be available on April 16, 2014. ...
Many institutions have devoted considerable resources to developing the skills of source analysis and evidence use in their students. 
Please refer to research by these leading universities:


But these links don't go to psychometric studies, just to pages of general advice for undergraduates on how to write college papers.
Test Design 
Work has begun to build strong evidence for validity by testing item types, exam questions, essay prompts, and test forms over time. The College Board will review student performance metrics to ensure that exam questions and test forms are measuring the knowledge and skills they are intended to measure. 
Pilot Predictive Validity Study 
We will launch a pilot study of the predictive validity of the SAT with the partnership of colleges and universities.

"We will launch" -- So they haven't actually launched even a "pilot predictive validity study" even though they've announced what they're going to do.
This study will allow us to gather early evidence of the validity of the SAT for predicting college performance. In particular, we will examine the relationship between high school grade point average (HSGPA) and SAT, and the incremental prediction of the SAT over HSGPA in predicting college English and math grades as well as first-year GPA. As sample sizes permit, we will also examine differences in predictive validity by student subgroups. 

Disparate impact much?
National Predictive Validity Study 
After the introduction of the redesigned SAT, we will begin an ongoing process of documenting the relationship of performance on the assessment to outcomes of interest. Beginning with the first cohort of students to have primarily taken the redesigned SAT (the entering college class of fall 2017), we will launch a longitudinal national SAT Validity Study in partnership with colleges and universities to examine the relationship between SAT scores and college outcomes such as GPA, course grades, persistence, and completion. We will conduct extensive validity analyses by subgroup. The timeframe for this work will be: 
Before summer 2018: Institutions sign up to participate. 
Fall 2018: Data file is received by the College Board, including completed data-sharing agreements. 
2019: Validity study is complete and distributed. 
Those interested in participating should contact nsatvastudy@collegeboard.org. 
Concordance Tables 
Concordance tables will compare old and new exam scores to enable admission offices to have longitudinal consistency in their behavioral models and to evaluate applicants that have taken the different exams. 
Delivery Schedule for Concordance Table
  Concordance  Available
  Redesigned SAT to current SAT  May 2016
  Derived Concordance:
  Redesigned SAT to ACT
  May 2016
So, the College Board won't be able to tell you whether a 500 on the new SAT is better or worse than a 500 on the old SAT until after hundreds of thousands of kids take the new one for real in April 2016.

Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along and is hoping the psychometricians can eventually come up with data to support his intuitions? My guess is that Coleman's intuitions are less stupid than those of most figures in the education reform biz, but still ...
 

The Intermediate Region

The "Intermediate Region" is a Big Picture theory put forward by a Greek historian named Dimitri Kitsikis, who had some influence on Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory. Kitsikis wanted the Greeks and Turks to become friends, so he argued that between the Orient and the Occident resides an Intermediate Region, with its own distinctive cultural flavor once you look past differences like religion and race. To Kitsikis, the natural cultural capital of this civilization would be Constantinople. 

I've spent one night in Istanbul, at the new Marriott near the airport, and, yeah, from looking around the lobby, I kind of get where Kitsikis was coming from. It was full of Muslim businessmen from all over -- the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Central Asia, North Africa, Pakistan, and so forth. To them, Istanbul is a natural hub, the way Chicago is to American corporate travelers.

(By the way, there was an airport-style x-ray booth that checked your luggage before you could get into the lobby, and you couldn't get a beer in the hotel.)

But this Intermediate Region isn't wholly a Muslim thing. Istanbul has some of the flavor of, say, Moscow (and vice-versa). It would take me a long time to list all the tiny details of ways that Moscow and Istanbul resemble each other more than they resemble, say, London. And you could draw up long lists of reasons why, say, Moscow is more similar to London than to Istanbul. But the point is merely that Kitsikis's grand grouping isn't wholly dismissible.
  

March 5, 2014

Where's the civilizational divide in Ukraine?

We've all heard lately that the western and eastern halves of Ukraine have different cultures, with western Ukrainians, from Kiev west voting one way and eastern Ukrainians the other, but I'm wondering if that's not oversimplifying things
Samuel Huntington's famous 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, The Clash of Civilizations, suggested:
As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. The most significant dividing line in Europe, as William Wallace has suggested, may well be the eastern boundary of Western Christianity in the year 1500. This line runs along what are now the boundaries between Finland and Russia and between the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through Belarus and Ukraine separating the more Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox eastern Ukraine, swings westward separating Transylvania from the rest of Romania, and then goes through Yugoslavia almost exactly along the line now separating Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of course, coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they shared the common experiences of European history -- feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution; they are generally economically better off than the peoples to the east; and they may now look forward to increasing involvement in a common European economy and to the consolidation of democratic political systems. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim; they historically belonged to the Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only lightly touched by the shaping events in the rest of Europe; they are generally less advanced economically; they seem much less likely to develop stable democratic political systems.

Doesn't Huntington's line, however, not run through the middle of Ukraine, but instead divides the far west of Ukraine (Lviv/Lvov/Lwow/Lemburg, the Carpathians, and the other places ruled by the Austrians and/or the Polish Republic) from the rest of the Ukraine? The far west, such as Galicia, is the stronghold of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is in "full communion" with Rome. (Does this mean the priests can marry?) While the rest of the country is kind of divided between Orthodox churches, one reporting to Moscow and another to Kiev.

There's a fair amount of evidence that the most dedicated people in the recent Kiev uprising tended to be from Lviv and other points in the far west.
On the other hand, Russian-speakers are concentrated in the east (and Crimea), while the far west and the midwest around Kiev both speak Ukrainian.

You might think that the west would be more industrial and the east more rural, but it's the other way around. By way of analogy, think of the American midwest. In the east of the midwest Chicago was a great industrial city, but was also politically kind of backwards, while Iowa to the west was mostly rural but in some ways more advanced.

So, language, religion, economy, and history don't line up all that well in Ukraine, which makes it kind of unstable. On the other hand, this blurriness offers room to build compromises.

Time will tell how accurate was Huntington's 1993 prediction that Russians and Ukrainians won't get into an all-out war:
Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civilizations. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and 1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians. 

Well, we shall see.

Still, I recall the video from a few days ago of a large number of Ukrainian soldiers courageously jogging up to some worried Russian soldiers, who fired some warning shots in the air, but then the Ukrainians slowly jawboned the Russians into letting them go about their business. I suspect that would have ended much worse if the Ukrainians didn't understand how to talk to the Russians.

Of course, neighbors are also most likely to go to war with each other, just like brothers punch each other more than random strangers punch each other.
   

Putin's Secret Plan

Here's an op-ed from the NYT by a Muscovite defense analyst. I don't know how much this is accurate -- Here's Putin's secret genius plan! -- and how much of it is intended to say, Hey, Putin, listen up, I love ya, you big dope, so here's a way out of what you got yourself into.
What Putin Really Wants 
By RUSLAN PUKHOV    MARCH 4, 2014

MOSCOW — The decision of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to send forces into Crimea provoked a hysterical reaction, but his motives are less ambitious than is commonly assumed. 
Mr. Putin’s aim is not a de jure separation of Crimea from the rest of Ukraine. That would be legally problematic

My current Taki's column discusses how even though the U.S. invades countries all the time, it doesn't annex them. The dominant prejudice since 1945 has been that redrawing borders should be restricted to cases where no country gets bigger -- a view that Israel has chafed under ever since 1967.

This prejudice against legally accepting that a big country can't use military force to get bigger is strong and reasonable, so Russia would have a hard row to hoe to get annexation of the Crimea widely accepted. Right of conquest is occasionally accepted as a reason for reducing the size of an unpopular country (e.g., Yugoslavia had Kosovo taken from it by bombing in 1999), but enlarging via right of conquest is not at all on the table.
and disadvantageous to Moscow in terms of its future influence over Ukrainian politics. The purpose of Russia’s incursion was to obtain the greatest possible autonomy for Crimea while still retaining formal Ukrainian jurisdiction over the peninsula. 
A referendum on March 30 is likely to result in a vote for further autonomy, and it would provide Crimea with such broad freedoms that it would become a de facto Russian protectorate. Moscow would then aim to keep the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea indefinitely, and remove any limits on its operations, size and replenishment. 
At present, Mr. Putin is seeking to strong-arm the new, weak and unstable government in Kiev into agreeing to full autonomy for Crimea rather than risk a full scale invasion into Ukraine and a partition that chops off the country’s entire south and east. The intimidated government is likely to be compelled to accept this compromise. For its part, in exchange for major Ukrainian concessions, Russia is likely to recognize the new Ukrainian government, withdraw its support for Viktor F. Yanukovych and relinquish the threat of the use of force. ...
That’s because Russia has a strong interest in nominally retaining Crimea as part of Ukraine. From the disintegration of the Soviet Union onward, Crimea, with its traditionally separatist leanings, was always a destabilizing factor. It served as a direct avenue of Russian pressure on Ukraine, and also guaranteed almost a million “pro-Russian” votes in Ukrainian elections, ensuring the dominance of the pro-Russian eastern half of the country over the nationalist western half.

I doubt if the pro-Russian margin coming out of Crimea approaches a million votes, but the directional effect is there. Pro-Western Ukrainian nationalists might well think about trying to sell Crimea to Russia for a lot of money to reduce the number of anti-Western voters in Ukraine.

I was reading about the obscure war in 1919 between Poland and the Soviet Bolsheviks. Poland was the big winner, but the Polish nationalist party in party during the peace negotiations didn't push as hard as they could have for more territorial gains (e.g., Minsk) because they didn't want more non-Poles in their country. Similarly, the U.S. could have taken more of Mexico in 1848 but the American negotiator ignored instructions to grab for more of what is now Mexico because he didn't want America full of Mexicans.
... The final act in Mr. Putin’s calculated gambit is likely to be a return of Yulia V. Tymoshenko to power. It was, after all, Ms. Tymoshenko, not Mr. Yanukovych, who enjoyed Moscow’s de facto support in the Ukrainian elections of 2010; and in later years, Mr. Putin expressed his strong displeasure with her prosecution by Mr. Yanukovych’s government. Although she was released from prison last month, Ms. Tymoshenko was hardly celebrated by the Ukrainian ultranationalists in control of the Maidan. Now it seems that her hour has arrived. 
Mr. Putin’s threat of invading Ukraine makes Ms. Tymoshenko the only national leader with the authority and capability to forge an agreement with Russia.

I have no idea how true that is, but it just goes to show how politics over there are more complicated than we think.

By the way, Ukraine is hardly without resources in this struggle. Much of Crimea's electricity and water comes over the narrow isthmus in the north from Ukraine. Crimea is a summer tourist destination, so politics are bad for business. You probably haven't felt a strong urge to book your August vacation for Yalta over the last week, have you?

On the east, the Crimean peninsula comes within a few miles of Russia at the 3-mile-wide Strait of Kerch, formerly known as the Cimmerian Bosporus, that connects the Black Sea to the south to the Sea of Azov to the north.

For about a week I've been thinking about the Strait of Kerch and it's lack of a bridge. A bridge would tie Crimea more closely to Russia. There is currently no bridge across the strait, although the Nazis built a sort of ski-lift across in 1943. The Germans started building a bridge, but the Red Army took it away and then tossed up a quick one. But ice floes that winter wrecked it.

In 2010 Ukraine boss Yanukovych and Putin's sock puppet Medvedev signed an agreement to build a bridge, but construction hasn't begun yet.

Apparently, Moscow has been thinking about the lack of a bridge a lot recently, too. Wikipedia now says:
Following the outbreak of the 2014 Crimean crisis the Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, signed a decree on 3 March 2014 to create a subsidiary of Russian Highways (Avtodor) to build a bridge along the Kerch Strait.[6][7] The precise location, or intended timeline have not been publicly discussed.

This might be a positive that could be part of negotiations between Moscow and Kiev -- since the Russians intend to spend billions on a bridge, letting mainland Ukrainian firms have some of the construction contracts would be a gesture toward better relations.

So, a rail and road bridge would be a constructive step to tie Crimea closer to Russia de facto, but Ukraine's de jure right to Crimea could be respected with contracts to Ukrainian construction firms friendly with the new Ukraine government.
    

New SAT announced

David Coleman, the extremely self-confident fellow behind the Common Core and who is now in charge of the College Board, has announced his changes to the SAT.
Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board 
By TAMAR LEWIN   MARCH 5, 2014

Saying its college admission exams do not focus enough on the important academic skills, the College Board announced on Wednesday a fundamental rethinking of the SAT, eliminating obligatory essays, ending the longstanding penalty for guessing wrong and cutting obscure vocabulary words. 
David Coleman, president of the College Board, criticized his own test, the SAT, and its main rival, the ACT, saying that both “have become disconnected from the work of our high schools.” 
In addition, Mr. Coleman announced new programs to help low-income students, who will now be given fee waivers allowing them to apply to four colleges at no charge. And even before the new exam starts, the College Board, in partnership with Khan Academy, will offer free online practice problems from old tests and instructional videos showing how to solve them. 
The changes coming to the exam are extensive: The SAT’s rarefied vocabulary words will be replaced by words that are common in college courses, such as “empirical” and “synthesis.”

Coleman is an old McKinsey consultant, and he resents the English teacher aspect of a lot of American education. Thus, his Common Core standards reduce the amount of fiction and replace it with non-fiction.
The math questions, now scattered widely across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking. The use of a calculator will no longer be allowed on some of the math sections. The new exam will be available on paper and computer,

The best change would be to go to an all computerized test, where the difficulty level of the questions adjust over the course of the test to how well or badly the student is doing. The military went to this on the ASVAB and it made scores for the not very bright more accurate since they were less likely to give up and bubble in.
and the scoring will revert to the old 1600 scale, with a top score of 800 on math and what will now be called “Evidence-Based Reading and Writing.” The optional essay will have a separate score.

The essay will now be optional, and it will be like one of the essays on the Advanced Placement tests where you have to read some documents and then write a report on them citing your evidence rather than just writing an essay off the top of your head. This reflects Coleman's McKinsey v. English teachers bias, and sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Once the pre-eminent college admissions exam, the SAT has recently lost ground to the ACT, which is based more directly on high school curriculums and is now taken by a slightly higher number of students.

I'm not an expert on this, but my impression is that the SAT was traditionally a superior test at discriminating among high end students. The long term trend toward ACTification of the SAT strikes me as wrong-headed, but that's what the mass market wants.
... Mr. Coleman, who came to the College Board in 2012, announced his plans to revise the SAT a year ago. He has spoken from the start about his dissatisfaction with the essay test added to the SAT in 2005, his desire to make the test mesh more closely with what students should be doing in high school, and his hopes of making a dent in the intense coaching and tutoring that give affluent students an advantage on the test and often turn junior year into a test-prep marathon.

Good luck with that. The test prep book publishers, among others, will make a fortune off issuing all new books. No longer can you use the old one your big sister bought in 2011 and never finished. You need to buy an all new one.
“It is time for the College Board to say in a clearer voice that the culture and practice of costly test preparation that has arisen around admissions exams drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country,” he said in a speech Wednesday in which he announced the changes. “It may not be our fault, but it is our problem.” 

I agree with the rhetoric, but where is the evidence that Coleman's changes will hurt test prep? My guess is that churn in testing benefits professional test preppers because they stay on top of the latest changes.
Some of the changes will make the new SAT more like the ACT, which for the last two years has outpaced the SAT in test-takers and is increasingly being adopted as a public high school test by state education officials. Thirteen states use it that way now and three more are planning to do so. The ACT has no guessing penalty

I can't see why getting rid of the guessing penalty would make the SAT better. Here's how the guessing penalty works: there are five multiple choice answers, so the expected value of sheer guessing is 0.20. But, getting an answer wrong inflicts a 0.25 point penalty, so the expected value of sheer guessing is 0.00.

It's a minor issue, but I don't see why there would be value in getting rid of something that has been in place for many decades.
, and its essay is optional. It also includes a science section, and while the SAT is not adding one, the redesigned reading test will include a science passage. 
But beyond the particulars, Mr. Coleman emphasized that the three-hour exam — 3 hours and 50 minutes with the essay — had been redesigned with an eye to reinforce the skills and evidence-based thinking students should be learning in high school, and move away from a need for test-taking tricks and strategies.

Once again, good luck with that. There are people right now in Seoul brainstorming about how they're going to coach their tutees all the new tricks and strategies that will inevitably be opened up.
Sometimes, students will be asked not just to select the right answer, but to justify it by choosing the quote from a text that provides the best supporting evidence for their answer.

That might be good, might not. What I'd like to see in this article is Coleman citing the extensive testing that his organization has done (they have done extensive research, right?) to prove that his intuitions about how to make the SAT better actually make the SAT better, rather than just being his opinions. Like I've said before, since the American educational establishment has decided to more or less bet the country on one guy, Coleman isn't the worst guy they could have picked. But, does he have evidence to confirm his hunches, or his he just imposing his will?
The revised essay, in particular, will shift in that direction. Students now write about their experiences and opinions, with no penalty for incorrect assertions, even egregiously wrong ones. Going forward, though, students will get a source document and be asked to analyze it for its use of evidence, reasoning and persuasive or stylistic technique.

Sounds reasonable. They already do it on the AP.
The text will be different on each exam, but the essay task will remain constant. The required essay never caught on with most college admissions officers. Few figure the score into the admission decision. And many used the essay only occasionally, as a raw writing sample to help detect how much parents, consultants and counselors had edited and polished the essay submitted with the application.

That's funny.
Starting in the spring of 2016, some of the changes to the SAT will include: 
• Instead of arcane “SAT words” (“depreciatory,” “membranous”), the vocabulary words on the new exam will be ones commonly used in college courses, such as “synthesis” and “empirical.” 

This is part of Coleman's prejudice against Ye Olde Poetry. Does he have any evidence that his reform will actually accomplish anything good? And do his example even make sense? "Depreciatory" is obviously related to "depreciation" which comes up in a whole lot of college classes on accounting and business. "Membranous" is obviously related to "membrane," which comes up in lots of college biology and pre-med courses.

Vocabulary questions are highly IQ-loaded, which is much of the point of the Scholastic Aptitude Test -- it complements high school GPA by helping identify smart kids, the ones who can work out what "depreciatory" more or less means from knowing, say, what "appreciate" means.
• Every exam will include, in the reading and writing section, source documents from a broad range of disciplines, including science and social studies, and on some questions, students will be asked to select the quote from the text that supports the answer they have chosen.

This is part of the triumph of E.D. Hirsch, which doesn't strike me as a bad thing. Hirsch was an English professor who looked into why students at local grade schools were doing so badly and he decided that part of the problem was that they were so factually ignorant. So, he recommended that instead of reading instruction including a lot of poems and fiction, it should have lots more nonfiction passages imparting basic "core knowledge."
• Every exam will include a reading passage from either one of the nation’s “founding documents,” such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, or from one of the important discussions of such texts, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

The boys in Seoul are going to love that part! They'll have their test-cramming students memorize every single Founding Document.

Last year, some insightful college admissions folks had unkind things to say about Coleman's nascent plans for redoing the SAT. If you are interested in this topic, they are worth reading.
     

Amnesty isn't just for immigrants, it's for politicians

We shouldn't overlook the symbolic importance of amnesty (a.k.a., "immigration reform"). It's intended to do two things: retroactively legalize the illegal aliens' lawbreaking and retroactively justify the politicians in using lawbreaking to elect a new people to vote for them.
   

March 4, 2014

Handle's theory of the drug war as honeypot for thugs

From Handle's Haus, an interesting theory of the war on drugs:
But there is a much deeper and more sinister aspect to the drug issue that is both very complex and very dangerous to discuss openly.  It is indeed a dire problem on many levels. 
The problem is that while ‘poverty’ does not cause crime, idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and a heavy-concentration of young men who are either not willing or able (or both) to hold down a job and get busy raising a family is a well-established recipe for disaster that was known to the ancients since time immemorial.  This problem exists in our pockets of crime, no one has any good and politically-palpable idea of what to do about it, and the accelerating three legged stool of immigration, automation, and globalization is making it increasingly worse. 
Without employing some drastic measures that are incompatible with the current norms of our society – that we aren’t even allowed to talk about without severe social sanction because they are so taboo – this situation practically guarantees the generation of all sorts of criminal activity, for kicks and for cash. 
If you are a police chief, prosecutor, or politician, then you want to prevent crime, especially violent crime, and especially violent crimes like burglaries that will spill over into your wealthier, safer neighborhoods whose inhabitants can get you fired very quickly, but who also make excellent targets for theft, muggings, or aggravated robberies because, as with banks, that’s where the money is. 
Or is it?  Because burglary is risky, and burglars don’t get rich.  But what if there were some alternative draw, some other – necessarily criminal – way of making vast sums of money – the stuff of a young thug’s dreams – and that particular way was demonstrably irrepressible no matter what you did, so it might as well be made useful. 
What if, furthermore, it was glorified and celebrated endlessly by your young thugs' subculture?  And what if the violence that emerged out of that traffic – of a thing the sale, possession, and consumption of which arguably needs to be prohibited anyway – was almost entirely geographically contained in areas with zero political clout and mostly between the thugs themselves? 
Why, it would act as an ideal honeypot!  Your thugs will all converge on conducting that particular species of crime, and you can easily arrest, prosecute, and imprison the worst of them and then incapacitate them for long-durations so that they can’t get up to any other (more politically destabilizing) kinds of criminal activity during their youthful years, which, again, you believe they are certain to do and which, really, can’t be prevented. 
And this is how the drug war works.  There are very, very few people who actually, consciously think like this, putting all the pieces together into one extremely tragic but coherent picture.  But the glue that holds certain lasting social institutions together is often unconscious and buried beneath some protective psychological firewalls.
     
     

Sailer: "A Russia-Israel Alliance?"

My new Taki's Magazine column is out. 
I certainly don’t know what’s going to happen next in Eastern Europe, but I’d like to sketch out a scenario that is, while admittedly implausible, even less often contemplated. 
Russia increasingly resembles another country with similar paranoiac geopolitical attitudes and a culture that is yearly becoming less Northwest European: Israel. A rapprochement between Russia and Israeli nationalists remains unlikely, but the chances are growing.

Read the whole thing there.

Did U.S. okay 2008 South Ossetian war?

Military exercises are the standard way to partially mobilize your troops for war without declaring a mobilization, which can turn into a disastrous chain reaction, as in 2014. Thus Putin's announcement of war games on the Ukraine border set in motion Russia's seizure of Crimea and raised fears of a general invasion of the eastern Ukrainian mainland. In contrast, his announcement today that the exercises are complete and his troops are going back to their garrisons caused stock prices to rise in hopes that the Russkies aren't going to occupy a part of Ukraine that lacks the Crimea's clear boundaries and thus would cause even more trouble for everybody than Putin's grab of the Crimea. 

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, lots of hopeful signs that good sense and compromise were about to break out have turned out to be shortlived.

In reading up on the South Ossetian war of August 2008, I see, not surprisingly, that both Russia and Georgia conducted war games in the region in late July, while exchanging highly accurate accusations of what the other side was threatening to do. 

What I hadn't been aware of is that 1,000 American troops took part in the military exercises in Georgia. From Reuters on July 15, 2008, three weeks before Georgian tanks rolled into South Ossetia across the line worked out in a formal agreement between Russia and Georgia in 1992 and since manned by official Western European monitors.
U.S. troops start training exercise in Georgia 
(Reuters) - One thousand U.S. troops began a military training exercise in Georgia on Tuesday against a backdrop of growing friction between Georgia and neighboring Russia. 
Officials said the exercise, called "Immediate Response 2008", had been planned for months and was not linked to a stand-off between Moscow and Tbilisi over two Russian-backed separatists regions of Georgia. 
The United States is an ally of Georgia and has irritated Russia by backing Tbilisi's bid to join the NATO military alliance. 
"The main purpose of these exercises is to increase the cooperation and partnership between U.S. and Georgian forces," Brigadier General William B. Garrett, commander of the U.S. military's Southern European Task Force, told reporters. 
The war games involve 600 Georgian troops and smaller numbers from ex-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. 
The two-week exercise was taking place at the Vaziani military base near the capital Tbilisi, which was a Russian air force base until Russian forces withdrew at the start of this decade under a European arms reduction agreement. 
Georgia and the Pentagon cooperate closely. Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military. 
Georgia last week recalled its ambassador in Moscow in protest at Russia sending fighter jets into Georgian airspace. Tbilisi urged the West to condemn Russia's actions. 
Russia said the flights were to prevent Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from launching a military operation against the separatist South Ossetia region. 
Moscow accuses Saakashvili of preparing to restore Tbilisi's control over South Ossetia and the second breakaway region of Abkhazia by force. Tbilisi says that is a pretext for Russia to effectively annex large chunks of Georgian territory.

Not surprisingly, both sides' complaints turned out to be fairly accurate about what the other side was up to. Georgia was planning a major offensive across the 16-year-old peacekeeping line, while Russia then used its counteroffensives to consolidate control in both separatist regions.

Georgia has some commercial value to the U.S. beyond the tactical and emotional advantages of Bear-baiting: it's the site of new pipeline that runs from the oilfields of Azerbaijan, skirts Armenia (an enemy of Azerbaijan and ally of Russia), crosses Georgia, and into Turkey. On August 6th, 2008 a section of the pipeline in Turkey was blown up, purportedly by Kurdish separatists. Whether that obscure incident contributed to the war that started within a couple of days or not is unknown to me. (The pipeline was fixed within a few weeks.)

So, the Americans had some reasonable interest in helping train Georgians to defend this useful asset. For example, Georgian air defenses performed well during the war, downing three Russian jets including an expensive bomber and denying Russia effective air supremacy over Georgia.

But the line between defense and offense is always somewhat hazy, although not wholly indistinct.

The obvious questions raised by the presence of 1,000 U.S. troops in Georgia conducting a military exercise with Georgian troops up to about 10 days before Georgia initiated its offensive is whether Washington knew about what was coming, and did the U.S. discourage or encourage Georgia's irredentist bellicosity? Judging from immediately subsequent events, I'd have to say "not discourage sufficiently" and, possibly, some American officials leaned toward "encourage." In turn, how much did this stupid little war exacerbate Russian paranoia about NATO "encirclement?"

But, those kind of questions are lost in the mists of time in American conventional wisdom, which depends upon brute Narrative Control -- just keep reasserting disingenuous, intentionally misleading versions of what happened less than six years ago, and who's going to go look up the facts on Wikipedia? For example, Bush's National Security Advisor at the time of the war, Stephen J. Hadley, has an op-ed in the Washington Post that begins:
Vladimir Putin has done this before. When he invaded Georgia in August 2008, Western diplomacy and pressure denied him his ultimate goal: marching to Tbilisi and deposing Georgia’s democratically elected government. 

Interestingly, the Bush Administration apparently debated on and off for four days bombing the Roki Tunnel through which the Russians were pouring into South Ossetia before permanently junking the idea. 

Condi Rice's memoir blames Saakashvili for being a dangerous hothead. 

Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary under both Bush in 2008 and under Obama, has published his memoir Duty in which he discusses the war at some length. Some excerpts from Gates' book:
As the Soviet Union was collapsing and Georgia (an ancient country in the Caucasus that had been annexed by Russia early in the nineteenth century) declared its independence, two pro-Russian Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, declared their independence. Bloody conflict followed until 1994, when Russia was finally able to negotiate a cease-fire sustained by Russian peacekeeping troops in both provinces. A fragile peace lasted until January 2004, when an aggressive and impetuous Georgian nationalist, Mikheil Saakashvili, was elected president. In the summer of 2004, Saakashvili sent Interior Ministry troops into South Ossetia, on the pretext of putting down "banditry," to reestablish Georgian control. The Georgians were forced into a humiliating withdrawal, but their violation of the status quo infuriated the Russians. When Saakashvili sent troops into a third independence-minded province in the summer of 2006, it signaled that he was prepared to fight to regain the two pro-Russian separatist provinces. Russian hatred of Saakashvili was stoked further when, in 2007, he went to the border of Abkhazia and promised loyalists there they would be "home" within a year. 
The Russians used Kosovo's declaration of independence (it had been a part of Yugoslavia and had long historical ties to Serbia) in February 2008, which the United States and Europeans supported and a pro-Serb Russia opposed, as a pretext to turn up the temperature on Georgia. The West's logic in supporting Kosovo's independence, said the Russians, ought to apply as well to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin in April said Russia might possibly recognize the independence of the two provinces. On April 21, Saakashvili telephoned Putin to demand that Russia reverse course on recognition and cited statements by Western governments opposing it. Putin had used highly colloquial Russian in telling Saakashvili where he could put the Western statements. Soon thereafter Georgia mobilized its troops, and in response, Russia sent 400 paratroopers and a howitzer battery to staging areas near the cease-fire line. Acts of violence in both provinces increased during the summer. On August 7, Georgia launched a massive artillery barrage and incursion to retake the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

So, what I put in bold of Gates' account seems like a good one sentence summary of what turned exchanges of fire into a war.
The next day Russian forces poured into South Ossetia, routed the Georgians, and drove deep into Georgian territory, a punitive attack aimed at the destruction of the Georgian military infrastructure. They attacked military facilities-especially those that had been certified by NATO-and destroyed coastal patrol boats, military equipment, communications, and a number of villages. The deputy chief of the Russian general staff said at the time that the Russian mission was to weaken Georgia's military, but plainly the Russians were also sending a warning to other governments in Central Asia (and Ukraine) about the risks of trying to integrate with NATO. 
The Russians had baited a trap, and the impetuous Saakashvili walked right into it. The Russians, Putin in particular, wanted to reassert Russia's traditional sphere of influence, including in the Caucasus. I was asked by a reporter if I trusted Vladimir Putin "anymore"? I responded, " ‘Anymore' is an interesting word. I have never believed that one should make national security policy on the basis of trust. I think you make national security policy based on interests and on realities." After meeting with Putin in 2001, President Bush had said he looked into Putin's eyes and "got a sense of his soul." I said to some of my colleagues privately that I'd looked into Putin's eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer. 
As the invasion unfolded, President Bush, Condi, Steve Hadley, Admiral Mullen, and I were all on the phone with our counterparts in both Russia and Georgia-urging the Russians to stop and withdraw to the cease-fire lines while urging the Georgians not to do anything else stupid or provocative. When I talked with Serdyukov on August 8, I told him we were alarmed by the escalation of hostilities and urged him "in the strongest terms to halt the advance of your forces and stop the missile and air attacks inside Georgia." I asked him point-blank if they intended to take all of Georgia. He said no. I was equally blunt with my Georgian counterpart. I told him, "Georgia must not get into a conflict with Russia you cannot win" and that Georgian forces needed to cease hostilities and withdraw to defensible positions. Above all, direct contact between Georgian and Russian forces had to be avoided. I assured him we were pressing the Russians not to introduce more forces into Georgia and to respect Georgia's territorial integrity. ...
While there was broad agreement in our government and elsewhere that Saakashvili's aggressiveness and impetuosity had given the Russians an opportunity to punish Georgia, the violence and extent of Russian military (and cyber) operations were eye-openers for many. 

Dick Cheney's memoir is more terse, Saakashvili is mentioned only on p. 513, where he is described as "ordering a response" which gave Putin the excuse he was looking for.

Bush's memoir Decision Points includes this face to face exchange at the Beijing Olympics:
"'I've been warning you that Saakashvili is hot-blooded,' I told Putin. 
"'I'm hot-blooded too,' Putin retorted. 
"I stared back at him. 'No, Vladimir,' I said. 'You're cold-blooded.' "

In summary, my guess (and it's very much a guess) is that Saakashvili was getting conflicting body language from the Bush Administration. Perhaps he misjudged that Cheney was still the power behind the throne, while Bush's favor had actually shifted toward the less belligerent Gates and Rice, who despised the Georgian.

(By the way, I shouldn't be so personally harsh on Saakashvili, whose nationalist irredentism has its admirable aspects. But, I remain alarmed that the highest level of the United States government allowed itself to wind up debating whether to start bombing Russian forces over this guy's ambitions.)
    
So, sorry about such a long investigation into history, but since these events keep getting cited so tendentiously this week, it's worth putting a lot of the information out there.

Allow me to reiterate that all of these factually distorted analogies in the American press right now between Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 are unfair to the new Ukrainian government, which hasn't invaded anybody, and, in general, seems to be behaving quite responsibly.
   

March 3, 2014

Crimean problem practically solved, Part II

Following last week's announcement by Ramzan Kadyrov that his Chechens are ready to bring peace to troubled Eastern Europe, we have word today that another statesman of similar stature, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, has arrived on the scene to help out.

In the Daily Beast, Josh Rogin writes:
Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili knows a thing or two about Russian invasions. ... Saakashvili, who fought the Russian army in 2008 for five days after the Russians invaded, is in Kiev to advise the new Ukrainian government. He says he’s providing counsel on how to hopefully avoid an all-out war with Putin’s army. ...
There several similarities between Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its 2012 invasion of Ukraine and one main difference. Russia has yet to cross militarily into greater Ukraine, outside Crimea, and wage a full scale invasion of the country, as it did in Georgia. 

Well, and another little difference: the Ukraine hasn't invaded anybody. The new Ukrainian government hasn't sent 10,000 men and 72 tanks over the border into a breakaway republic, like Georgia did the night of August 7-8, 2008.

I know it's hard to remember what happened way back during the Beijing Olympics, but there's this thing called Wikipedia and you can read about the whole war there.

If, say, the Ukrainians had last week invaded Transnistria, the Russian-backed breakaway region of Moldova that lies on Ukraine's west border, well, that would be kind of like what Georgia did that kicked off the five days of major warfare in 2008. But Ukraine didn't do that. The worst thing Ukraine's new government did was rescind the law making Russian an official language, but they quickly changed that back. And in any case that's not like sending 10,000 men across a border shooting the whole time.

You can question the legitimacy of the new Ukrainian government -- they came to power by street violence overthrowing an elected president. And a lot of the bravest street fighters have loyalties that are repugnant to most Russians going back to the 1940s.

But, the new Ukrainian government hasn't invaded anybody.
     

Tank porn

A commenter notes:
If you look at the comments sections of Yahoo! News stories that relate the latest from Russia/Ukraine, you will see - not the heartening comments against international military interventionism that were predominant during the past few years (such as: "It's none of our business!") - but bellicose, war-drum-pounding ejaculations of truly mind-boggling jingoism instead. Part of it is that the Russians have some real hardware. People want to see a war with some real hardware. Random militants with AK-47s in the desert just isn't that exciting. People want to see opposing tanks battalions going at each other and stuff.
     
Two weeks ago I was finishing up a Taki's column citing Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature about the declining frequency of war, when it occurred to me to add a postscript:
Of course, optimism about a peaceful future seemed sensible 100 years ago, too.  
The two countries that have the tanks, terrain, and mutual border to conceivably replay the Battle of Kursk are Russia (2,562 tanks in service and plenty more in reserve) and Ukraine (725 tanks running).
       

Crispr for genetic engineering

From the New York Times:
A Powerful New Way to Edit DNA
By ANDREW POLLACK    MARCH 3, 2014

... In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. 
This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. 
Already the molecular system, known as Crispr, is being used to make genetically engineered laboratory animals more easily than could be done before, with changes in multiple genes. Scientists in China recently made monkeys with changes in two genes. 
Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease. Working in a laboratory — not, as yet, in actual humans — researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands showed they could fix a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. 
But even as it is stirring excitement, Crispr is raising profound questions. Like other technologies that once wowed scientists — like gene therapy, stem cells and RNA interference — it will undoubtedly encounter setbacks before it can be used to help patients. 
It is already known, for instance, that Crispr can sometimes change genes other than the intended ones. That could lead to unwanted side effects.
The technique is also raising ethical issues. The ease of creating genetically altered monkeys and rodents could lead to more animal experimentation. And the technique of altering genes in their embryos could conceivably work with human embryos as well, raising the specter of so-called designer babies.

This is a big deal, but a couple of cautions:

-- Nothing moves very fast anymore in human medicine, so  don't expect huge changes real soon now.

-- This could be very useful for fixing one bad gene problems, but positive traits tend to be the results of lots of genes interacting, which raises all sorts of questions.

March 2, 2014

Applebaum's conspiracy theory: maybe Putin overthrew Yanukovych via fake far right?

One of America's most prominent centrist experts on Eastern Europe, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose husband Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, negotiated a powersharing deal to end the crisis in Kiev that was overridden by the triumph of the streetfighters, insinuates an interesting conspiracy theory in Slate:
Certainly the organization formerly known as the KGB has some expertise in destabilizing foreign countries... a rapidly organized political movement of the far right or far left ... Putin, himself trained in KGB methods, knows all of this very well.
Nor will this be the first time that such games have been played in Ukraine. No one has yet explained, for example, why Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not only left Kiev after signing an European Union–brokered treaty last week, but also ordered security guards to abandon all government buildings as well. Was that an unsubtle invitation for the opposition to ransack the offices, so that he could claim he had been chased out by a violent coup? The evolution of Ukraine’s “far right” also bears watching. Although at the moment it is a lot smaller than the far right in France or Holland, I wouldn’t be surprised if it begins to grow: It’s amazing how far the ruble goes in a cash-strapped country. A few Molotov cocktails have already been thrown at synagogues. In the current political environment, it’s important to ask: Did they come from real anti-Semites? From paid agents? From both?

Now, note that she doesn't exactly say that the apparently far right streetfighters who played such a sizable role in rendering her husband's diplomacy nugatory were paid for by Putin to provoke a crisis. She's throwing out two ideas in one paragraph without claiming they are aspects of the same phenomenon.

Still, it's an interesting question: how would you know? 

Presumably, fakers wouldn't get themselves killed for a paycheck. But what if the money was going to real nationalist extremists through cut-outs? Of course, the problem with that line of thought is that anything is then possible.

On the other hand, Applebaum's conspiracy theory sounds a little bizarre. My guess is that she's surprised how crazy things got in Kiev and is turning to convoluted thoughts of false flag operations to reassure herself. But who knows?
   
By the way, is her husband related to WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Sikorski, leader of the Free Polish government in exile during WWII, whose death in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943 has been the subject of endless conspiracy theories? (I have a picture in my head of General Sikorski dying in a helicopter crash, but I'm just confusing him with Igor Sikorsky, the Russian (and somewhat Polish) American from Kiev who did so much to develop helicopters around this time ...)
   

George Kennan, Fareed Zakaria, Kim Kardashian

Fareed Zakaria, the Indian princeling (his father was the deputy leader of the ruling Congress Party in India), has enjoyed a glittering career in America. He reviews the diaries of American diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005), author of the "containment" strategy of the Cold War that successfully threaded the needle between WW3 and Soviet domination of Western Europe. He reviews in the NYT Kennan's newly published diaries.

As I've mentioned before from reading Kennan's late-in-life book Around the Cragged Hill (1994), Kennan was a Gloomy Gus, but exactly the kind of depressive realist an optimistic country like America needs to pay attention to.

Daniel Engerman wrote:
My one conversation with Kennan, who once was ambassador to Moscow, began with Russia and quickly turned to the depth of his conservatism. Asked what shaped his ideas about Russia, he recalled his professors at the University of Berlin in 1927. They had taught him about Realien, the givens of geography, climate and race that shaped nations and international relations. (The English "realities" doesn't suggest the word's resonance in 18th Century German philosophy.) Realien outlasted ephemera like ideology and even political systems--and should, he believed, be the basis of any foreign policy.

(By the way, Henry Kissinger is another follower of this German mindset. I'm rereading his memoirs and he makes relentlessly clear that he viewed each foreign statesman he dealt with as just a variation on the permanent themes of that country's national character. As illustration, here's Kissinger's foray into sportswriting previewing how national soccer teams would play in the 1986 World Cup based on their deep national traits: the Italians play like miserly Mediterranean peasants, the Germans play like the General Staff fought the Great War with lighting counterstrikes when the opponent overreaches -- such as when the Italians' eleventh uphill offensive against the Austro-Hungarians left them exhausted, German reinforcements in October 1917 suddenly swept down into the Italian plains in the attack described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, etc.)

Kennan's views on immigration were hardly a secret in the past. I quoted his 1994 passage in VDARE in 2005:
"However one cuts it, the question is not whether there are limits to this country's ability to absorb immigration; the question is only where those limits lie, and how they should be determined and enforced—whether by rational decision at this end or by the ultimate achievement of some sort of a balance of misery between this country and the vast pools of poverty elsewhere that now confront it. The inability of any society to resist immigration … is a serious weakness, and possibly even a fatal one, in any national society." (p. 19) ...

But, you could actually say stuff like that in the past, before immigration ascended to an unquestionable sacred civil right that the rest of the world's population holds over the citizens of the United States (an ideological development of roughly the period when Carlos Slim bailed out the New York Times -- purely coincidental, I'm sure).

As a former student of Samuel Huntington, Zakaria likes Kennan's foreign policy but is shocked, shocked by Kennan's "racism" and proprietary British-American view of his country. 
Writing on a flight to Los Angeles in 1978, Kennan thinks about how few white faces he will see when he lands and laments the decline of people “of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged.” Instead, he predicts, Americans are destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass, . . . one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity and drabness.” 

The residents of the Los Angeles of 2014 take deep offense at Kennan's 1978 prediction, or at least they would if Kim Kardashian ever brings it to their attention via TMZ.
  

Victoria Nuland's triumph

The Chicago Tribune considers the interesting question of who was behind Eastern European policy in the U.S. government: 
The escalating crisis also raises questions about whether the White House was quick enough to recognize the seriousness of the Ukraine issue and to give it adequate attention. 
U.S. officials and other sources said that the State Department, particularly the hard-charging assistant secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, had for months been raising alarms about Russia's more aggressive posture toward former Soviet states, and Ukraine in particular. 
Washington's engagement accelerated after a November 2013 European summit at which Ukraine - along with Armenia - declined under heavy Russian pressure to sign association agreements with the European Union. 
"That's when you saw the Americans stepping up," said Damon Wilson, executive vice president of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, and a former adviser on Europe to President George W. Bush. 
Nuland, he said, "created U.S. policy really out of very little at the time." 
   

Don't bring back the passenger pigeon

For a long time people have kicked around the idea of bringing back extinct species. Now, the technological hurdles are becoming less overwhelming. Whole Earth Catalog guru Stewart Brand has a guy working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, which sounds like a terrible choice. Back around 1880, passenger pigeons made up about 25%-40% of all birds in North America. Then, after massive hunting and turning forest into farmland, they suddenly were extinct by 1914 .

Passenger pigeons only mate when they live in huge flocks. That's why conservation attempts at the U. of Chicago around 1900 failed. Humans would have to restore immense numbers of passenger pigeons and then they might get out of control. Charles C. Mann in 1491 called the vast flocks of the early 19th Century "pathological." The emergence of stupendous numbers of passenger pigeons probably was the result of European or Indian impact on the landscape in some fashion.

Bringing back the Rocky Mountain Locust would be the only worse plan. Or maybe some kind of vicious flying dinosaur predators.

The right kind of animal to bring back is something that is spectacular, hasn't been gone for long, has a cousin species alive today to bear a cloned fetus, and can't fly or swim away from its preserves and set off unexpected ecological chain reaction.

In other words, wooly mammoths!

The ideal place for a herd of wooly mammoths would be the remote Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.

This French possession is isolated and unpopulated but surprisingly large (over 2,000 square miles). The climate is appropriate for Ice Age beasts.

Billionaires could pay ten million dollars to go wooly mammoth hunting on the Kerguelen Islands with a gun (or only a million to hunt with a spear and atlatl).