Reminder, blogmeet Sunday approacheth

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$50 billion?

LATER: Unless maybe it was all smoke and mirrors:

Since my office had previously been in the same building as the Philadelphia Stock and Options Exchange, I knew many of the employees of the exchange and leading market makers.  When I called them, all of them said that they knew Bernie but did not trade with him.  Even though he said that he traded his options over the counter, I still seemed strange to me that none of the giants in the tight-knit options world traded with him. - Laura Goldman  (HT: Insty)

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“Name That Party!” at the WSJ

Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmonson recently told supporters that he plans to run for Governor in 2010.  So voters might be interested in how the AG has treated critics of government...

So begins the editorial “Still Oklahoma’s Most Wanted” on the editorial page of today’s Wall Street Journal.  Seems that Mr. Edmondson doesn’t approve of “outsiders” engaging in political speech in his state, and is persuing criminal conspiracy charges against three “grassroots activists”^[1] for “attempting to defraud the state by hiring people from out[side] of Oklahoma to gather signatures for a ballot initiative...” despite being unanimously overturned by the Tenth Circuit.

The editorial goes on to examine the history and circumstances of the Oklahoma case, the issue of residency requirements vs. freedom of speech in general, and the fate of similar legislation in the courts.^[2] Altogether, a generally through job.

Except for one minor thing.  Only when we get to the eighth of the editorial’s nine paragraphs do we find out that Mr. Edmonson is – taa daa! –

a Democrat.

Gee, you’d think that, of all people, the Journal editors would be alert for this stuff by now.


Previously.
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Posted by: Old Grouch in The Press at 17:09:07 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Rich, steamy goodness!

The first new steam train to run on Britain’s railway since 1960 has completed its first trial run without a hitch.

Note that this a new engine, paid for by public subscription and completed this year.

Related:  The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust

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“Reading and writing” have nothing to do with it...

The National Council of Teachers of English defines “21st Century Literacies.” God help us (or at least, God help their students):

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Next big thing:  After-school reading coaching, to go along with the after-school math coaching. 

Via:  Catherine Johnson

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HuffPo = “bunch of thieves”?

Chicago Reader’s Whet Moser:

The Huffington Post’s local “aggregation” wing straight stole [Note: Since changed to an excerpt, but oops, there’s a screenshot, ha! ha! ha!. - o.g.] our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission (“read the whole article”? that is the whole article, dumbass).

The story continues.  And don’t mess with N’awlins, heah?

HT:  Nancy Nall

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So...?

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Digital photo frame PWN463 redux

This time it’s on the install disc...

We have recently learned that Samsung has issued an alert affecting its SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame...

The alert involves the SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frames w/1GB Internal Memory, designed to work with Windows-based PCs via a USB connector. They were sold between October and December 2008 for about $150.

The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor.

This isn’t the first time...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:11:25 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Tribalism in America

Thought-provoking comment by Ed Foster at Tam’s (excerpted at length here because Blogger doesn’t permlink comments):

...The problem with so many Irish-Americans (I can say this, as I was raised in a Gaelic speaking house by my little old County Galway grandmother) is that they still act as if there were NINA^[1] signs in the windows of every business and school.  I respect the hell out of an ethos and sense of loyalty that could keep a people together through eight centuries of madness and wholesale butchery.  The idea that a poor rural people could stand up and beat the greatest empire the world had ever seen, after being defeated every two or three decades for thirty generations, puts a certain extra cockiness in my step.
...
But America’s been good to its Irish Catholics, and they are the wealthiest, best educated Christian ethnic group in the country, running neck and neck with the Jews in both categories.  In the bigger cities, you’ll still see the big-armed Mick cops and firemen with their bulldog tattoos.  One of them is a son of mine.  But you’re many times more likely to see a stockbroker, a lawyer, a successful businessman.

And yet, the urban Irish, a brutally conservative people, secure in their upscale ghettoes and Catholic schools, are so often still the power brokers in the Democratic political machines their grandfathers created.  They say things they have no belief in, consider public hypocricy nothing more than a tool, and maintain an essentially European political world in the cities they control.

The urban Italians and Poles are no different.  No suprise there, as they were “Americanized” in the churches, parochial schools, and colleges built by the Irish, and prospered in direct proportion to the degree they assimilated into the local machine. In a very real sense, none of these people have ever left Europe.

I’m prouder of the Irish side of my heritage than I am of the Scottish side.  This one small country gave us more presidents than any other, along with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Francis Marion, Simon McKendrick and Simon Girty, Jim O’Hara, Tim Murphy and two thirds of George Washington’s Continentals.  But the “Suicidal stubborness,” the desperate tribalism that showed so well at places like Bennington and Fredricksberg, with the 7th Cavalry and the Lost Batallion, has a dark side, at least in the cities.

It is the cynical ideal that honesty is an absolute only among the tribe or personal friends.  The difference between the kind of Irish Catholic you’re likely to meet in Iowa (think Frankie Morrisson, otherwise known as John Wayne) and a big city politician manipulating the remnants of a people’s cultural memory.  What makes it all the more difficult is that the city Mick is going to have the same cheerful, chatty, likeably gregarious manner as the Americanised Mick.
...
My mother was a private detective, and was not the least bit naive or given to foolish sentimentalism.  But, again out of tribalism, she was on the town Democratic comittee.  She came home one night, laughing to beat the band, and wrote down verbatim what she had just heard from John Bailey, the Connecticut equivalent of the Daleys and Kennedys.  He, after hours of putting up with a roomful of Middletown Sicilians, had found himself in a corner with several other Irishmen and more Jameson whiskey than he needed.  His comment was “I’ll tell you how to run the Democratic Party.  You buy off the Guineas with highway contracts and office jobs for their nieces.  You give the Jew lawyers their fair share.  You throw a bone to whatever witch doctor is running the ghetto this week.  But you never let control out of the hands of the Irish.”

That's what we see in Chicago and New York, Boston and St. Louis.  It’s the mistrust, the clannishness, the ruthlessness that made sense in a beleagued collection of rebels a century or two ago.  And it’s given us one of Boss Daley’s discreet sociopaths as POTUS.

I’d rather have Obama as President, considering the only option is that utter moron (and Irish Catholic machine politician) Joe Biden.  Or, God help us, Nancy Pelosi, one of the few women in politics that make me smile at the name Hillary Clinton.  At least Obama is bright enough to realize he isn’t very bright, and essentially has handed everything except the speech reading over to a melange of Clinton and Bush II bureaucrats.

But the more I look at the mess my cousins have made in urban America, the more I think the next conservative President we get should offer the choice of secession to the big coastal cities.

It’s easy for those of us out here in flyover country to ignore the degree that “big-city Democratic politics” remains “big-city Irish politics.”  Oh we see the names: Kennedy, Daley, O’Neil, but the people in the smaller cities and rural areas who bear those names have, over the last hundred years, by and large assimilated into the community.^[2]  Today for many of us, “Irish” is something you can be on St.Patrick’s Day, not the defining aspect of a person’s identity.  So we forget.

But the tribalism which Ed laments above remains, and it seems to go a long way to explaining how the Democratic Party works, as well as much of its ideology.  When “tribe” is elevated, relations with “outsiders” tend to be tribe-based (Bailey’s “guineas, Jews, and ghetto”).  If government is primarily an engine for dividing up spoils, then strong tribal membership is the way to ensure, in some rough-and-ready way, that you get your share.

And tribes fit very comfortably with the 19^th century left’s penchant for dividing society into classes, although “classes” have an important advantage over “tribes:” All it takes to create a new class is for someone to identify it.   Once created, the new class can join the existing tribes in lining up for “its share.”  It’s all part of the process!

Where’s the individual among all these tribes?  Well, if he’s smart, he’ll find one to align with, lest he become William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man,” the c who pays the cost and takes the consequences of a’s and b’s efforts to “help” tribe x.

On the surface, “tribal” government appears a good way to stay in power:  Give each tribe enough to keep them quiet.  Make them believe they’re getting one up on the others.  Then steal the rest.
 
Of course it all falls apart if, sometime, a tribe turns up that won’t buy in and  can’t be bought off.

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Three cheers!

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