Links and Minifeatures 02 02 Groundhog Thursday

Diminishing Returns has an excellent post on the state of the educational system.

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Boxing Alcibiades has a worthwhile "finger in the tyrants eye" idea: Volunteer so anyone in a strongly censored country can email him a request for a Google search, and he'll put it up.



Works for me. Sign me up as an Anti-Censor (Reverse Censor? De-Censor? In-Censor?). If you live in a country where the search engines have been censored, send me an email requesting a search and I'll do it. Depending upon how many request I get, I may do multiple search engines. No pr0n requests please, and anything that a wife or supervisor might find objectionable on the search level will be my discretion and the availability of a time and place where I can execute without consequences. If anything that comes up that may be objectionable, appropriate warnings will be issued.



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HT to Vodkapundit for sending me to twenty questions on Able Danger



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Baby steps: Captain's Quarters has the goods on the first action congress has taken in 9 years to trim the growth of entitlement programs. $40 billion is over $100 saved for every man, woman and child in the country.



We need more and bigger, as Captain Ed tells us. But I'll take a baby step forward over drifting backwards every time.



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La Shawn Barber has a very balanced post up on racial "intelligence" that's well worth reading. For the record, I disagree with her over the likely cause of racial disparities. I do believe that the gaps are there and are real, but are a phenomenon of cultural disparities, not anything innate. Mental acuity is at least partially a function of the effort put forth by and the amount of practice undertaken by a given individual. Some cultural groups within the country encourage this to different extents, some discourage it, also to different extents. It is no great stretch to imagine that if putting effort and education is everything to one group, and actively counter-image to another group, there will be differences in how well, in aggregate, the groups make use of the material. There will always be outstanding individuals in any group, just like there will always be lazy, hostile, and indifferent students. But if 90 percent of group A puts all of the effort into educational success that they can, whereas 90 percent of group B stigmatizes it, a reasonable person will expect differing outcomes from the two groups in aggregate, as measured by identical metrics.



Not to advocate this, but if we randomly assigned kids to parents upon checking out of the hospital, I believe any difference in results between the races would be gone in a generation. Because the same random percentage of babies born to group A parents would have group B parents raising them as of those born to group B parents. This is not a proposal, and in fact I find the idea revolting. It is simply an illustration of where I believe the problem lies. If you're going to tell me your "culture" is different and that you're proud of it and don't want to change, that's fine, but you lose the ability to complain about differences in levels of success brought on by those same cultural differences that you're so proud of.