8 December 2004 @ 8:23PM >> The New York Times reports (emphasis mine):

High school students in Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best in mathematics among those in 40 surveyed countries while students in the United States finished in the bottom half, according to a new international comparison of mathematical skills shown by 15-year-olds.

The United States was also cited as having the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. It ranked 28th of 40 countries in math and 18th in reading.

Remember that fact next time someone says the solution to our education crisis is simply to spend more money. The system is broken, fundamentally. You don’t fix a broken system by putting more money into it. Throwing money down a rathole does not result in a better rathole.

The real solution would be to give education dollars directly to parents, so that they can choose where to spend it. Otherwise, the money goes to a bureaucracy whose primary purpose is self-preservation.

8 December 2004 @ 5:01PM >> Pat Sajak takes Hollywood to task for its continued silence over the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh:

Somewhere in the world, a filmmaker creates a short documentary that chronicles what he perceives as the excesses of anti-abortion activists. An anti-abortion zealot reacts to the film by killing the filmmaker in broad daylight and stabbing anti-abortion tracts onto his body. How does the Hollywood community react to this atrocity? Would there be angry protests? Candlelight vigils? Outraged letters and columns and articles? Awards named in honor of their fallen comrade? Demands for justice? Calls for protection of artistic freedom? It’s a pretty safe bet that there would be all of the above and much more. And all of the anger would be absolutely justified.

So I’m trying to understand the nearly universal lack of outrage coming from Hollywood over the brutal murder of Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, who was shot on the morning of November 2, while bicycling through the streets of Amsterdam. The killer then stabbed his chest with one knife and slit his throat with another.

The problem for Hollywood is, the van Gogh murder doesn’t fit the template that the threat from radical Islam is phony. In their world, the root of all evil is George W. Bush. Admitting that the threat from radical Islam is real would require the Hollywood left to admit that the War on Terror isn’t just some neoconservative conspiracy.

For them, it’s easier to pretend that the daylight slaughter of Theo van Gogh never happened. Makes sense. After all, the function of Hollywood is to construct fantasy worlds. Let’s not forget, that’s how these guys earn their livings.

8 December 2004 >> Turns out the DLC didn’t have the backbone I thought it did:

CORRECTION: the original sub-headline of this New Dem Daily mistakenly summarized the piece as calling for Kofi Annan’s resignation. Actually, in calling for the secretary general to “step aside,” we simply meant to convey that he should remove himself from any involvement in the oil-for-food investigation, and let Paul Volcker, a man of unquestioned integrity and ability, conduct it independently and publicly release his findings. We deeply regret this error.

Hmmm. Now that Clinton pardon recipient Marc Rich has been implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal, I wonder who got to the DLC and told them to back off Kofi?

Doesn’t matter. Kofi’s still cooked.