Markmaking

Education: Race to the top

Democrats for Education Reform comments on the education component of the stimulus:

To be blunt, the reality of state-level education politics in many states is such that there is tremendous pressure to pass legislation which assures a firewall-like separation between teachers and student performance. In New York (as well as other states such as California and Wisconsin) such legislation has been passed with very little opposition – making it now illegal to base teacher tenure decisions on student achievement. If this nation is to live up to its obligation to bring our education systems into the 21st Century, this type of progress-killing legislation should instantly disqualify a state from even being considered for ―"Race to the Top" funding..

Arrival of the roti-eaters

Queens Ice Cream Stand at Center of Ethnic Divide - NYTimes.com.

“We are the new kids on the block,” Mr. Singh said after the meal, over the sound of workmen hammering on the other side of a drywall partition to expand the space in the temple. 

Mr. Singh predicted that the 2010 census would show that nearly 40 percent of the population of District 23, which includes his neighborhood of Bellerose and several surrounding communities, was of South Asian ancestry. If he could unite voters of South Asian ancestry, or, as he referred to them, “roti-eating people,” and get them to turn out at the polls, he predicted, he would unseat Councilman David Weprin in September’s Democratic primary. 

“Pizza-eating people have representation,” Mr. Singh said. “Burger-eating people have representation. Bagel-eating people have representation. But roti has no representation.”

Death of the California Dream

Death of the California Dream | Newgeography.com .

To many longtime California observers, the inability of the political, business and academic elites to adequately anticipate and address the state's persistent problems has been a source of consternation and wonderment. In my view, the key to understanding California's precipitous decline transcends terms like liberal or conservative, Democratic and Republican. The real culprit lies in the politics of narcissism. 

California, like any gorgeously endowed person, has a natural inclination toward self-absorption. It has always been a place of unsurpassed splendor; it has inspired and attracted writers, artists, dreamers, savants and philosophers. That's especially true of the Bay Area—ground zero for California narcissism and arguably the most attractive urban expanse on the continent; Neil Morgan in 1960 described San Francisco as "the narcissus of the West," a place whose fundamental asset was first its own beauty, followed by its own culture of self-regard.

Cultural devolution - The National Newspaper

Cultural devolution - The National Newspaper.

As the spacecraft Apollo 11 hurtled toward the moon in July 1969, ground control made an unusual request to the three veteran astronauts aboard. It is recorded on the NASA transcript: “Houston: Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill for immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is only standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not recorded.” 

Lunar Module Pilot: “OK, we’ll keep a close eye for the bunny girl.” 

Not long after this exchange the lunar module landed on the Sea of Tranquillity, Neil Armstrong uttered “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, and the jocular request was forgotten – except in the Chinese-speaking world, where Chang’e (as her name is now generally spelt) has been venerated and adored for millennia, especially by women.

World Heritage Kumano discovered stone embankment of the Edo Period "Hitoshi Hara," riparian

Translated version of http://www.asahi.com/culture/update/0221/OSK200902210001.html?ref=rss .

Wakayama Prefectural Board of Education and Cultural Heritage Division, the 16th, former社地World Heritage Kumano Shrine Motomiya "Hitoshi Hara Large (heavy oil field)" (Motomiya town Motomiya Tanabe) Kumanogawa facing the river bank, in the late Edo period found on the stone seawall that was built with. Oda Makoto Taro team leader of World Heritage Cultural Heritage Division, said: "I discovered that it was important to indicate that where the dignity Motomiya Shrine Kumano," he said.

David Swensen on investments

Yale’s Financial Wizard, David Swensen, Says Most Endowments Shouldn’t Try to Be Like Yale - ProPublica.

Where do think things are headed in the endowment world? 

I figured out when I revised Pioneering Portfolio Management that the most important distinction isn't between the institutional investor and the individual. It's between those that are set up to make high-quality active management decisions and those that aren't. The investment management world is a strange place in that the right solution is not in the middle. The right solution is at one extreme or the other. One end of the spectrum is being intensively active. The other is being completely passive. If you end up in the middle, which is where almost everybody is, you pay way too much in fees and end up getting subpar returns. 

At the active end of the spectrum, you've got institutions like Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Stanford and others, who’ve really built high-quality investment teams that have a shot at making consistently good active management decisions. But there's a vanishingly small number of such investors. Those on the passive end of the spectrum have figured out that they don't know enough to be active. The passive group is not nearly as big as it should be. Almost everybody should be there. 

But indexes aren’t much fun. 

Yeah, they love the excitement. And they all think that the next guy is making it happen. Because that's what they hear at cocktail parties, so they want to make it happen too. But it's just basic arithmetic. When you pay out a point and a half or two points or two and a half points, and you give away 20 percent of the gains, that gets extracted from you the investor. If you're in an index fund, you're paying tenth of a percent and no percentage of the profits. But the assets that you get when you index are pretty much like the assets that you're invested in with all these fancy fee schemes. So it's just basic arithmetic. It's not complicated.

Forgiveness and Irony by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 2009

Forgiveness and Irony by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 2009.

Muslims show a remarkable ability to turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed in the name of their faith and to rally against anyone who disparages it. The notorious Danish cartoons caused outrage, uniting Muslims everywhere in acts of destruction and calls for revenge. A few days later, the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the Shiite community’s holiest places, was blown up by Islamists. But where were the protests, outside Iraq? Far more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed by Islamic terrorists. But when do those who claim to speak for Muslims mention this statistic? 

For that matter, the whole point of the infamous cartoons was to make us look at the atrocious things done in the Prophet’s name. Does he approve or doesn’t he? Muslims must face up to this question. But a rooted double standard often prevents their turning on fellow Muslims the self-righteous anger that they turn on enemies of the faith. 

Such double standards are the direct result of the loss of irony. They stem from an inability to accept the otherness of everything, to stand outside one’s own opinions, and even one’s own faith, so as to see it as the faith of someone else. Not that Islam has always lacked irony in this respect: the works of the Sufi masters are full of it. But the Sufi masters (I think of Rumi and Hafiz especially) belong to that great and self-knowing Islamic culture on which the Islamists have turned their backs, embracing instead the narrow-minded bigotry of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab or the self-deceived nostalgia of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb.

Asa, the chanteuse

It's pronounced "Asha," as in Bhosle.

Asa, la nigeriana que soñó con París

La chanteuse Asa a reçu le Prix Constantin 2008

Aurgasm.us

BBC music

MBE @ KCRW; Fire on the Mountain

Mike Ragogna, Huffington Post

In India, a shift to meritocracy uproots old elites - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Anand Giridharadas: India's New Men and Women

The newspapers print photographs of those who "top" the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace. 

Visit the companies staffed by this new meritocracy, and you encounter a new elite. In the Indian offices of, say, Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, the paychecks are fat and the intellects razor-sharp. But they seldom speak English in the old, affected British way. They are coarser and yet more confident. They feel the world is theirs, but are less obsessed than the earlier elites with emulating the West. They are proudly indigenous, often preferring Indian food, music and movies to the alternatives. 

They are changing the language. On television, on college campuses, in businesses, you hear new-economy elites who sound much more Indian than their predecessors, their English unapologetically peppered with Hindi: "Let's go have some khana. I'm hungry, yaar." 

...

In Mumbai, this dualism is seared into geography. The northern suburbs were once backwaters. But areas like Bandra are now havens of energy, full of young people who come from elsewhere, thrive without parental string-pulling, pay their own rent, cook their own food. Meanwhile, in south Mumbai, the beauty and history of the place mask an impending social obsolescence.

Mob rule taints Bolivia indigenous law - Los Angeles Times

In an unbelievably shocking surprise, Evo Morales's indigenist Third-Worldist socialist revolution leads to impingements on due process of law and legally established civil liberties! Who could have imagined such a thing?  Next we will hear that Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian revolution has hurt economic growth and fed corruption in Venezuela. What a far-fetched and improbable scenario!

Mob rule taints Bolivia indigenous law - Los Angeles Times.

The November incident, seen around the world on YouTube, provoked outrage here and abroad. It was not an isolated instance. At least 54 people were killed in mostly indigenous Bolivian towns and suburbs last year by mobs taking the law into their own hands. 

Among other lynchings last year, three policemen accused of extortion were killed by a mob in the town of Epizana in February. The incident prompted a United Nations warning that Bolivia's "weak judicial apparatus and the slow reaction of authorities favors an impunity that only encourages a repetition of these acts."

...

The question in the minds of many legal experts is whether incidents such as the lynchings here will decrease as the Indians sense that they have more legal recourse, or increase as they legally dispense the summary justice that characterizes their approach.  [Three guesses... -ed.]

Reducing California state payroll a daunting task - Los Angeles Times

Showing the same acument that has made the Detroit automakers and public schools such undisputed masters in their fields, state employees show their willingness to completely capsize the ship of state for the sake of maintaining their ever-increasing pay and numbers, without any regard to justification, performance, or priorities.

And needless to say, Democratic politicians prove themselves willing to govern exclusively for the benefit of their main constituency -- unionized state workers -- as opposed to that of the state as a whole.

Reducing California state payroll a daunting task - Los Angeles Times.

Cutting the state workforce "is just very difficult to do," said Jason Dickerson, a public employment expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. "It can be a very long and cumbersome process."

Personnel records show that there have been no mass layoffs in state government since 1975, when 2,500 California Department of Transportation employees lost their jobs during a budget crunch...

Schwarzenegger has been stymied in previous efforts to reduce the workforce.

His 2004 California Performance Review, a top-to-bottom examination of state government, proposed various ways the state could consolidate operations to function more effectively. The Legislature rejected every one of them. The governor put the proposals on the back burner, and the state payroll continued to grow...

But Frates said there is a reluctance to irritate the powerful unions with talk of job reductions before it is absolutely necessary. By then, it is usually too late to devise a practical plan. "The political will just isn't there," he said.

Unlike normal organizations, which grow in good times and shrink in bad times, and in which good performance is rewarded and bad performance is punished, public employee unions and their Democratic public servants instead grow like a Behemoth or Leviathan, subordinating all public interest to their quest for more pay for mediocre performance.

The next eight years will be a lot of fun...

Left-Wing Academics Wish for Left-Leaning Supreme Court to Become Yet More Left-Leaning

To Nudge, Shift or Shove the Supreme Court Left - NYTimes.com.

The Roberts court is, then, conservative by the standards of recent history. But is it conservative in some absolute sense? 

“It is fair to say that the Supreme Court both now and historically has been to the left of the American public,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Columbia and an editor of “Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy” (Oxford, 2008). 

“On school prayer, for instance, the Supreme Court is far to the left of the American public,” Professor Persily said, referring to decisions saying that officials may not organize, lead or endorse prayer or devotional Bible reading in the public schools. 

“On racial issues, it’s pretty clear from the Michigan cases that the Supreme Court is out of step with the American public,” Professor Persily said of the pair of 2003 decisions allowing public universities to consider race in admissions decisions. (In a 2007 decision, the Roberts court leaned the other way, forbidding public school systems from explicitly taking race into account to achieve or maintain integration.)

D.C.: Titans Rhee the Excellent, Weingarten the Mediocre Gird Loins for Epic Battle

Education Heavyweights Prepare for D.C. Contract Fight.

"There are a lot of people in the reform community who want her to wipe the floor with Randi," said one Democratic education activist who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly. 

The record suggests that Rhee and Weingarten are far apart on core issues. Weingarten has supported merit pay based on schoolwide performance only and points to the program underway in about 200 New York schools. It is similar to one established by Rhee and the WTU that awards cash bonuses to staffs at schools posting the most dramatic gains on standardized test scores. 

But the D.C. program is based almost exclusively on scores, an emphasis opposed by Weingarten, who wants to see other schoolwide metrics, such as attendance, taken into account. It's also not clear that evaluating teachers as a group will be sufficiently groundbreaking for Rhee or for the private foundations -- yet to be publicly named -- that she says have committed $100 million over five years to underwrite the huge raises she has proposed.