wrote:

"No matter what employment, education, life experience or
government/military service a person has, if that person
disagrees with any of Len's views, or corrects any of Len's
mistakes, he/she will be the target of Len's insults, ridicule,
name-calling, factual errors, ethnic/gender/racial slurs,
excessive emoticons and general infantile behavior."

That's way too much for me to parse at 5am.

Let me see if I can put it in simplier terms

"If you don't kiss Len's ass, expect to be the target of his vitriol".

Yeah, that sounds about right.


The explanation is simple: You were/are a target because you
disagreed with Len.

I laugh about it to this day. Thousands of pages of comments, hundreds (if
not thousands of hams) responding, and Lennie


Well, we agree on the desirability of better written tests. We
disagree on the Morse Code test in that you support complete
elimination of that test and I don't.

Something a few of the posters here (oddly enough, the most vocal/rabid
members of the No-Code Agenda, it would seem) cannot simply seem to grasp is
that gentlemen can agree to disagree without resorting to ad hominem
attacks.

I am not entirely opposed to having a "skills test" in addition to a theory
examination. There is precedent in other testing scenarios maintained by the
government. For example, to get a pilot's license, you not only take a
written test, you also have to take a 'hands on' test.

Of course, CW is a very easy method "skills test" to implement, which makes
it a natural selection for the that component in ham radio testing.

I can understand why you would support such a test. This is, IMO, a
legitimate course of reasoning on your part and I can understand the
viewpoint.

While I agree with it in principle, personally, I do not feel that a morse
test is a good selection for a skills test.

Furthermore, I cannot think of a really good alternative, either. Thus,
until someone can present a very concise idea on how to implement a
pertinent skills test in the ARS today, I'll fall back to the side of having
none.


The other ideas on written test improvement were ignored by FCC

Unfortunately, the trend with licensing in ham radio is very similiar to the
trend we saw wih CB radio licensing back in the mid 70's. It concerns me
that testing gets more and more lax.

Another disturbing trend is the desire to modify our licensing standards for
"quantity". Everyone focuses on license numbers, and continuing to grow the
number of licensed amateurs. I believe the majority of changes in our
licensing system over the past 15 years has been directly related to
people's desires to 'swell our ranks'.

I've always been a proponent of quality over quantity. I would rather have
one person interested in learning radio electronics, antenna theory, etc.
over two people who are nothing more than glorified applicance operators.


You mean you haven't got it "right out of the box"?

I may no longer be a member. Years ago Carl threatened to throw me out of
NCI over my criticism of NCI publically, under the guise of me "really not
being a no-code test advocate". What Stevenson really wanted was an army of
little mindless zealots who reguritated what they were spoon-fed by NCI --
something I was not.


See the paragraph above about Len's behavior here. All anyone has
to do is disagree with Len, or correct a mistake he makes, and it's
showtime.

Lennie's fun to wind-up. Every time I post, you know his blood pressure
rises a couple of points. He can't resist the urge to throw out some acerbic
comments.

73
KH6HZ