ZenPundit
Monday, January 16, 2006
 
RECOMMENDED READING EL GRANDE

Many, many, many good things. Sometimes, less is more. But not today.

Dr. Von - " Reasons why U.S. Should Stay Away from an Exam Meritocracy"

Just for the record, Von's correct. The standards movement is primarily about moving failing students and schools into acceptable mediocrity through national standadization of the curriculum. While that's not a bad thing in itself, high stakes testing is not, regardless of what its advocates maintain, about excellence or maximizing intellectual outcomes for top tier students. Or even middle of the road students. It's about reversing the growth of the educational underclass which was reaching crisis proportions in the 1990's. Unfortunately, the hamfisted and draconian provisions, which is what failing bureaucracies needed to start moving, are now poised to deconstruct the good school districts and dumb down their education level to a low national mean.

Bruce Kesler at The Democracy Project- " Cool Tools for Tyrants", "Congress vs. China's Censorship Abettors" and "No 'Right" of Unrestricted International Trade"

This issue may become the " Jackson-Vanik Amendment" of Sino-American relations and Bruce caught on first.

Kobayashi Maru on " Iran, China and North Korea: Why is Kim Jong Il in China Now?"

Chester at The Adventures of Chester on " Interview: army Officer who studied in India"

Brad Plumer interviews Marc " Abu Aardvark" Lynch at Mother Jones.

Paul D. Kretkowski at Beacon on " Arvind Virmani and “National Power Potential” ''

Paul quite usefully is raising the issue of quantifying " Soft Power".

Austin Bay in his column at StrategyPage on " Kennedy and Robertson: Burned by Hot Buttons "

The Colonel dissects two of the least useful humans in the public sphere.

Nathan at Registan on the wisdom of the Kok Turk empire ( Rene Grousset would be proud).

New Blogs Worth Checking Out:

Ideas by Dr. David Friedman - Best described as high quality, counterintuitive, libertarian economics blog. Up there with Becker and Posner.

Mountain Runner - not sure who "Matt" is but this is a damn fine international security and foreign affairs blog.
 
Comments:
TK

I didn't catch everything right at first but I thought Friedman was good for throwing out the provovative logical train of thought. Good for getting people to reexamine their own arguments.

And in general I tend to like people who start in a field with some kind of unorthodox background
 
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