Kerry, Smarts, and the Military

candidone1 wrote:

plainoldme wrote:
Let's see how bad this gets.

I was speculating on the mud slinging potential of the thread.

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plainoldme wrote:

Well, this is from someone who has never taught and who doesn't live in the real world.

I run an engineering & scientific consulting business, and I taught undergraduate math and Engineering courses at the University of Virginia for several years. Does that count?

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During the Vietnam War, someone, somewhere published an article on the average IQ of a non-com, or, the average Army sargeant. It was 84.

Not a particularly confidence-building reference. Sounds like a factoid of convenience to me.

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I would suggest that most people who enlist in the Army immediately after high school do not take the SATs and so we have no knowledge of their scores.

This has no logical connection to the argument. I stipulated that the scores would likely be lower.

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As someone currently teaching SPED, I can tell you that these kids are not simply immature. A few years in the army or working in retail is not going to season them.

I assume "SPED" refers to some form of special education, presumable in elementary or high school. If so, you should note that these are generally not the students recruited in the military.

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As for those sorts of people being able to take stress, well, most career soldiers -- not the West Point types -- are kids who couldn't take the stress of high school. Furthermore, most people can not take the stress of killing no matter how well trained they are. Rather, violent types are often attracted to the military.

I submit that in this, you don't know what you are talking about. The vast majority of military recruits successfully graduated from high school. The rigors of military training are evidently quite unfamiliar to you. You make sweeping generalizations and errors of fact that betray your ignorance of the matter and expose your prejudices and closed mind.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

snood wrote:
Candidone,
...He clearly would not have intentionally cast aspersions on the intelligence of the men and women on the ground in Iraq.

Perhaps he inadvertantly revlealed his actual (elitist) attitude.

The elitist tag has often been conveniently lobbed at Kerry because he projects an intellectual or academic character, whereas Bush does not.

The point Brandon, is not the alleged elitism of Kerry, rather, your disdain for that which is not conservative.

President Bush was enjoyed the same patrician upbringing as Kerry.
Grandfather was a US Senator and Father President of the US....he attended Yale and acquired an MBA at Harvard business school. The erudite BernardR earlier pointed out, Bush's academics were quite above average.. He has owned several oil companies, a baseball team, held position if Governor of Texas and President of the United States.
....and you call Kerry an elitist?

The fact remains, it is a charge devoid of significant meaning or value to claim that Kerry is an "elitist".

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Quote:

I should have said: "Perhaps there was some degree of truth to his statement, perhaps it was a blatant falsehood".

Thanks for the clarification candidone, I am too fast to assign sides.

Quote:

snood wrote:
Candidone,
...He clearly would not have intentionally cast aspersions on the intelligence of the men and women on the ground in Iraq.

Perhaps he inadvertantly revlealed his actual (elitist) attitude.

John Kerry lives in a world we do not, I think. He does not actively seek out diverse opinion, I think, and is surrounded by sychophants. His elder wife loves him (perhaps only as long as he has power), the voters in Massachusetts love him apparently, and he almost won in 2004 if it weren't for those darn Ohio cheaters for lack of which he would have still lost by 3 million votes, but would have won. I am not convinced, at all, that he does not hate the military as much now as he did in 1971, when he orchestrated lies to exagerate war crimes by Americans. Any service person who found a cold shoulder upon returning home thereafter can blame him for that. Amazingly, it all seems to have been his plan. Purple heart injuries that barely approached the severity of rough sex, allocuted to by the injured only, the lies in front of Congress, the incessant marrying of rich and otherwise undesirable women, and the firm nose close to Teddy's butt career that has followed.

And we still do not know the details of his release from the military. It is
AMAZING to me that he thinks he would get anywhere without clarifying that issue.

Let's check out that Obama guy, or anyone else, before Kerry, Puh Leeeeze

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plainoldme wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:

If the comparison is restricted to SAT scores and involves only a comparison with Harvard freshmen, the military population would likely be in second place. Alternatively if the comparison involved only the ability to maintain composure and presence of mind under extreme stress, and the military segment was composed of aviators, Navy SEALS. Rangers and Marines, I believe the Harvard freshmen wouldn't even come close.

The military also is very good at giving a second chance to very bright people who, for one reason or another (social, economic, or merely immature behavior during the vital high school years) fell behind their peers during those early critical years in which the different paths people take often mark them for life.

Well, this is from someone who has never taught and who doesn't live in the real world.

During the Vietnam War, someone, somewhere published an article on the average IQ of a non-com, or, the average Army sargeant. It was 84.

I would suggest that most people who enlist in the Army immediately after high school do not take the SATs and so we have no knowledge of their scores.

As someone currently teaching SPED, I can tell you that these kids are not simply immature. A few years in the army or working in retail is not going to season them.

As for those sorts of people being able to take stress, well, most career soldiers -- not the West Point types -- are kids who couldn't take the stress of high school. Furthermore, most people can not take the stress of killing no matter how well trained they are. Rather, violent types are often attracted to the military.

All of which misses the point that the jab was at bush.

Regardless of it being a jab at Bush, which he intended-- for the most part kids who enlist in the military are more likely to come from less well-off economic backgrounds. There are economic incentives for these kids who cannot afford college to enlist.

Again, regardless of Kerry's intentions, he ought to know by now (as the Democratic party ought to know and could have muzzled him) he does not have a sense of humor and he's an easy target for Republicans. Kerry is an elitist, and a so-so senator.

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paull wrote:

And we still do not know the details of his release from the military. It is AMAZING to me that he thinks he would get anywhere without clarifying that issue.

Releasing all of his military records is something he has constantly promised to do but never has.

I have a very good idea as to why he refuses to do so.

Because of a little thing called the Constitution. He is not qualified under the Constitution to hold the office of U.S. Senator.

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georgeob -- I'm not going to etch out parts of your quotes: I hate the look of that and it makes the threads too long. Besides, sometimes, that practice implies the original poster can not follow a return remark.

1.) As to your having taught at the University of Virginia, an elite university on par with Harvard, as opposed to having taught in the public schools, the comparison isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and lemurs. How illogical! And you taught engineering?

Had you taught in the public schools, you'd know what it is like to deal with high school kids who ask what the word, "recipient" means or kids who can not work 20 of the same math problem (with different numbers) because they can not remember the operations involved from one problem to the next.

2.) I remember volumes of the things I have read. If you think my memory isn't a "confidence-building reference," what ever that means, it just might be because your memory is as strong as your logic, which you demonstrated can not be relied upon.

Why shouldn't the standard non-com have an IQ of 84? There is a kid in my caseload -- a stunningly beautiful black girl -- whose IQ is supposedly 84. She's in a regular high school program, albeit with an education plan and slots for academic support. What is the difference between this child and men of her grandfather's generation who were career soldiers in the 1950s and 60s?

3.) I wrote that I would suggest that people who enter the army directly from high school do not take the SATs and you responded that there is no logical connection to the argument. At the school where I teach, 80% of the kids go on to 4-yr. colleges and another 10% to 2-yr. colleges or career schools. Their mean score is higher than the mean score for the state of MA which is higher than the national mean.

We might deduce then that more than 80% of the students take the SATs, including many students in SPED. Those whose scores are too low for a 4 yr. school, might elect a 2 yr. school or a trade school or military service or work.

Every single boy who has ever spoken with me about entering the military after high school has either been a SPED student or was in the "CP2 (college prep lower level -- with CP1 being the old fashioned 'average student') track." Many admitted that they saw nothing else in their future and that they saw no reason to waste time and money on the SATs.

4.) I would think that if you had ever read the want ads or if you ever spoke with a parent or a teacher, the acronym SPED would be known to you.

11% of the kids in the US are special education students. They range from the severely mentally impaired and/or physically disabled to kids on the autism spectrum to kids who are behind grade level in reading to kids with mental or emotional illnesses to kids who are hyper-actice and to kids whose parents are determined to put them in the best colleges and maintain them in special ed in order to have them tutored in reading and/or math -- at the expense of the community at large.

These are precisely the kids that the recruiters who appear with some regularity at lunch time want. The kids that are going on to college do not speak to recruiters. Because there is a war going on, the kids, who in peace time, might enlist in the service to later have their educations paid for with federal funds, are seeking other options.

5.) Your last futile attempt at putting me in my place in a series of comments that should embarrass you was that I do not know what I am talking about. Obviously, you live in a social void. Most kids who enter the military while still in their teens have GEDs. Now, it is difficult to pass the GED test. However, we are about to convene a team meeting for a kid who I would estimate to be at level one literacy, who continually picks fights with teachers, who can not write a simple biographical paragraph, who cuts classes constantly, despite having his schedule reduced to four (some kids take seven) classes. After two years at a vocational school and two terms at a standard high school, he has enough credits to be a sophomore. Some staff members feel he should take the GED but feel his literacy level is too low to allow him to pass.

I suggest you research current literacy standards if you are interested in the above paragraph.

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paull wrote:

John Kerry lives in a world we do not, I think. He does not actively seek out diverse opinion, I think, and is surrounded by sychophants.

Purple heart injuries that barely approached the severity of rough sex, allocuted to by the injured only, the lies in front of Congress, the incessant marrying of rich and otherwise undesirable women, and the firm nose close to Teddy's butt career that has followed.

Let's check out that Obama guy, or anyone else, before Kerry, Puh Leeeeze

What a tasteless diatribe.

While I was not a willing Kerry supporter during his presidential run -- being of sound mind and body, I could never support bush and do not believe in third party candidates -- I discussed him with my now 28 y/o daughter who told me how, when she was in fifth grade at Lexington Montessori School and had gone to Washington with her class after researching the consequences of drilling for oil in the ANWAR. The kids had taken their research to both Senators Kennedy and Kerry. She described Kerry as warm and friendly and that the visit was like going to the home of a friend and meeting a nice father.

So, I went to one of Kerry's speeches and found myself bowled over. Television is not the Senator's friend, I remarked to his staffers, who agreed with me.

BTW, now that the women here know what sort of sex you like, I am certain that they will join me in wishing you a life of evenings spent with your fist.

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POM,

It is true I have been blessed to have no direct experience with our public educational system. My impression is that, despite a number of truly good schools, the system is burdened by an inward-looking bureaucracy and teacher's unions, both of which appear to resist accountability and responsibility in any form. The system is chronically unable to enforce performance standards, and struggling to meet the requirements of often conflicting social goals.

For your part, you apparently have no direct experience with the military except some indirect contacts with students who might become candidates. You appear to accept as unquestioned fact the supposed 84 IQ of "non-coms" (a group that includes new recruits who have not completed specialty training and others who have either failed at it or were not selected for it), which you claim to remember from some unspecified reference. I don't claim to know the number, but I do know that the services have effective testing programs and manage their selection process to get the best candidates they can and, at the same time, meet their quotas for new recruits. These standards vary by service and by specialty: I suspect your anecdotal references are confined to candidates (perhaps not even accepted) for the lowest categories. The quotas themselves depend on the reenlistment rates of current service members - a figure that currently is quite high, enabling them to be rather selective.

My brief description of the selection standards was accurate, and by all objective measures, the mental, physical, and psychological traits of military recruits are a good deal higher than the average of the general population. Moreover the training provided after entry, particularly that for the various technical specialties, is usually much better and more effective than what they got in the public schools, (I readily admit that the military has advantages here in being able to deal with failure and get rid of chronic non-performers. However, it is the results, not the methods, that you have wrongfully challenged.)

I have a great deal of personal experience with the military and the enlisted men & women who make it work. I completed Navy Nuclear Power training, an 18 month course that was substantially the same for officers and enlisted technicians. I can assure you it was the equivalent of, and in some areas far more challenging, than an undergraduate degree program in civil engineering. Many of the young sailors who completed the course had middling records in high schools that largely ignored them, but learned to thrive in an organization that challenged them directly and personally, and rigorously applied clear, objective standards to their performance.

The same process occurs in many other specialties in all the services. The graduates of these courses become Petty Officers (Navy) or NCOs (Army & Air Force) and presumably might mot count among the "non coms" in the unnamed, undated survey you claim to remember. They constitute the large majority of servicemembers.

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paull wrote:

Quote:
I should have said: "Perhaps there was some degree of truth to his statement, perhaps it was a blatant falsehood".

Thanks for the clarification candidone, I am too fast to assign sides.

Quote:
snood wrote:
Candidone,
...He clearly would not have intentionally cast aspersions on the intelligence of the men and women on the ground in Iraq.

Perhaps he inadvertantly revlealed his actual (elitist) attitude.

John Kerry lives in a world we do not, I think. He does not actively seek out diverse opinion, I think, and is surrounded by sychophants. His elder wife loves him (perhaps only as long as he has power), the voters in Massachusetts love him apparently, and he almost won in 2004 if it weren't for those darn Ohio cheaters for lack of which he would have still lost by 3 million votes, but would have won. I am not convinced, at all, that he does not hate the military as much now as he did in 1971, when he orchestrated lies to exagerate war crimes by Americans. Any service person who found a cold shoulder upon returning home thereafter can blame him for that. Amazingly, it all seems to have been his plan. Purple heart injuries that barely approached the severity of rough sex, allocuted to by the injured only, the lies in front of Congress, the incessant marrying of rich and otherwise undesirable women, and the firm nose close to Teddy's butt career that has followed.

And we still do not know the details of his release from the military. It is
AMAZING to me that he thinks he would get anywhere without clarifying that issue.

Let's check out that Obama guy, or anyone else, before Kerry, Puh Leeeeze

This is going way off topic, and I was never a fan of Kerry so it's beyond me why I'm even remotely defending him, but my response to Brandon was intended to illustrate that calling Kerry an elitist is an unfounded jab at making him appear disconnected with the average American, and a haughty prick. True perhaps, but not true only of Kerry.

Let's substitute Kerry for Bush in your above statement:

George W. Bush lives in a world we do not, I think. He does not actively seek out diverse opinion, I think, and is surrounded by sychophants. His elder wife loves him (perhaps only as long as he has power), the voters in Texas love him apparently, and he barely won in 2004 because of Ohio where there were massive voting irregularities. I am not convinced, at all, that he does not hate the military as much now as he did in 1974, when, at the height of the Vietnam War (a war that Kerry in fact faught in), instead of going overseas, he requested that his 6 year obligation to the National Guard be terminated early.
Instead of fighting in a war that divided the country, George W evaded service by becoming a "student", where, instead of studying, he frequently used drugs and alcohol and his Father's power to make a name for himself.

......The elitist tag can go both ways, hence it is devoid of any real meaning if it to be used on Kerry and not equally applied to Bush.
As long as millionaires are President, they can all be called elitists.

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georgeob -- While I do not have personal experience with the military, my brother served in the Air Force during Vietnam and a cousin who was a close friend enlisted in the Army to avoid the draft during the same period.

My brother never worked hard in school and was largely a C and D student. He wanted to enlist in the Air Force in order to be trained in hydraulics and took the Air Force Aptitude Test, which, according to my mother, who supposedly spoke with the recruiter (she was a woman who had a very poor memory), showed my brother had an aptitude for engineering and hydraulics. The Air Force promised him training in the that area . . . after Vietnam.

I also took the Air Force Aptitude Test because the small Catholic high school I attended launched its guidance staff my junior year and the counselor felt we should take all tests available to us. I scored in the 98 percentile on the general part of the test and was told -- by a uniformed interpretor of the test -- should I wish to enlist, I would be put into intelligence.

My brother was sent to Vietnam and, when he returned home, drove a bus. He never received any training of any sort.

My cousin's story was the same. He, unlike my brother, had worked a bit more in high school and had attended junior college. At the end of two years, he had no desire to continue on and enlisted, hoping he would have greater opportunities for advancement in the service that way. He was also given nothing.

Now, you railed against teachers' unions and accountability without knowing anything about either. Funny, you had the gall to accuse me of spilling hearsay about the military.

The unions do not resist accountability. However, what passes for accountability today is just paper pushing. As one regular English teacher -- as opposed to my teaching SPED English -- said, he wishes he could teach instead of filling out so many useless and redundant pieces of paper.

As someone whose job is part adminstrative and part teaching, I have to say that the paper work is ridiculous.

Furthermore, I feel that the demands of parents -- like the idiots who manipulated the system so that their kids (five of them: what ever happened to ZPG?) could be tutored in reading while taking honors classes and are currently absorbing 11 of the 42 time slots the single reading teacher has) which are sometimes (but not exclusively) selfish and self-serving -- hurt as much as help any and all school systems.

Also, as a permanently assigned substitute teacher for the past three years, I had a hand in administering the MCAS, the No CHild Left Behind test. While MA is better than most states insofar as its tests were created by teachers and not by unemployed recent graduates who use the index of books in order to fill the quotas of questions needed to compose said tests, these tests are still punitive, EXPENSIVE to administer and a general pain in the --- which takes valuable time away from class time.

As I have said time and time again, if a school system sends 80% of its graduates to 4-yr colleges and those kids score above the MA average on the SAT which is above the national average, the use of standardized tests is, at best, redundant. The kids essentially demonstrated competency on a more rigorous, more respected test.

Finally, do not challenge me on memory. You are obviously peeved at my having remembered something I read 40 years ago. BTW, the common understanding of non-coms is sargeants, not new recruits.

Let's face it: kids that are in the National Honor Society (top 15% of any school, with outside activities and other credits) do not enlist in the service after high school, even during peace time, even to gain financial aid for college. Nor do the NHS runners up enlist.

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Not peeved -- merely quite incredulous. By the way, 40 years ago, we had the draft and the Vietnam war was heating up. Standards were often set by local draft boards and were generally far lower than they are today. There is no more draft: The volunteer Army (and Air Force) are quite different today, and recruitment standards are much higher. That alone makes your statistic irellevant -- even if one was inclined to trust an unnamed source and an unspecified sample.

The standard promise of delayed technical training after two year's initial service was generally made to those marginally qualified (top scorers went directly to training) and was conditional on two factors (1) Performance evaluations during the first two years and (2) Future needs for the specialty itself.

A couple of years ago my company made a good deal of money performing twenty-five years of overdue safery, asbestos and lead paint inspections and remediation for the Washington D.C. public schools. Virtually nothing had been done to maintain the hundreds of facilities during those decades -- even though the budgets were ample , and were fully spent. During this period the head of the local teacher's union was convicted for embezzling several million dollars from union funds over a number of years. When asked why no audits had occurred over the preceeding 10 years the National union explained that it had no legal duty to perform such audits -- even though they were required in the local union charter. At the same time the school district, facing a budget crisis, announced layoffs of 900 employees -- all teachers; despite the fact that the Washington School District is (1) the most expensive per capita in the nation and (2) has the highest ratio of administrative employees to teachers in the nation. It is also one of the worst-performing districts in the country.

While this is no doubt an extreme case, I believe my assertions about the inward-looking and inflated bureaucracy and the teachers unions are largely correct, certainly far more so than yours about contemporary recruitment standards for the military.

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You seem to give yourself latitude and exceptions that you disallow others to take. Why is your opinion of teachers' unions superior to mine on the military? More people are critical of the military than of teachers' unions and the same sort of story as your audit avoidance story could have been -- and has been -- told about the military.

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Interestingly it was the miliitary (The Army Corps of Engineers) that was charged with cleaning up the mess in thee Washington schools -- they were our client.

I have tried to be factual and specific in addressing both your comments on the military and mine on the school system. I don't deny the potential value or relevance of your opinions on the military, however, the late discovery that the unreferenced statistic you offered as proof was 40 years old and belonged to a wholly different era and system for recruitment and training doesn't particularly advance the merits of your case.

I never asserted that the military takes the very top scorers in SAT or achievement tests: rather that the military population traits are a good deal better than those of the general population, and that, after entry to the services, many servicemembers achieve much greater personal development than do their former peers in the civilian world.

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Well, I've been talking to a wall all this time. How's your hearing aid? Is it on? Does it need a battery?

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Fortunately I don't (yet) have the need for one. I don't need to resort to name-calling or childish insults as a substitute for back up for the points I make either.

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But, somehow, the rest of us are supposed to put up with your faulty logic and your contradictions and making rules for yourself and talking across points.

Look, when people need to point out how badly you reason . . . and your reasoning is horrendous . . . then you are not receiving childish insults.

If you had seen the movie Fahrenheit 911, you would have seen recruiters acting exactly like British press gangs from days of yore, picking on and attempting to pick up kids in Flint, MI, high school drop outs who have no future -- something probably engineered diliberately in order to keep people in the ranks of the military -- by uniformed recruiters. Frightening.

They use the same tactics today -- despite your protest that the military has changed and your comparison of it to Harvard in its recruiting politicies.

Yeah, and you're are going to come forward and say that you never compared the military to Harvard. But you do, indirectly.

The military is a raptor, preying on the weak and the stupid, people for whom there is no place in society.

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candidone1 wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
snood wrote:
Candidone,
...He clearly would not have intentionally cast aspersions on the intelligence of the men and women on the ground in Iraq.

Perhaps he inadvertantly revlealed his actual (elitist) attitude.

The elitist tag has often been conveniently lobbed at Kerry because he projects an intellectual or academic character, whereas Bush does not.

The point Brandon, is not the alleged elitism of Kerry, rather, your disdain for that which is not conservative.

President Bush was enjoyed the same patrician upbringing as Kerry.
Grandfather was a US Senator and Father President of the US....he attended Yale and acquired an MBA at Harvard business school. The erudite BernardR earlier pointed out, Bush's academics were quite above average.. He has owned several oil companies, a baseball team, held position if Governor of Texas and President of the United States.
....and you call Kerry an elitist?

The fact remains, it is a charge devoid of significant meaning or value to claim that Kerry is an "elitist".

Omg. Being rich and having a "patrician upbringing," and having an elitist attitude have no relationship to each other. An elitist attitude is an attitude.

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Kerry's remark was idiotic and bushlike two terms which are actually identical.

Course it didn't turn out to be much of a gift to the repubs.

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Kerry, Smarts, and the Military

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