What we have here are members of two very different self-selected tribes, which we might call (a)the tribe of the challengers, as its members believe that people grow by facing difficult situations–including situations in which success is not guaranteed, and (b)the tribe of the brittle, as members of this tribe tend to implicitly or explicitly believe that people are so fragile that they must be protected from setbacks that might threaten their self-esteem. And, thinking about this story, it struck me that membership in these tribes very much cuts across the usual demographic categories of race, ethnicity, income, and sex. (Although the writer says “the two teams fell out along socioeconomic lines,” I think the dominant factor here is occupation rather than income. And although he refers to “an effort to feminize young boys,” there are plenty of women whose membership is in the tribe of the challenger.)

What seems clear to me is that in any form of competition between societies–economic, military, even artistic–a society in which the tribe of the brittle plays a leading role will always lose out, in the end, to a society in which the tribe of the challengers drives the overall spirit of the society.

Quote of the Day

 

This one's a long way from being confirmed so I'm posting it with a block of salt:

"I am a Muslim," Obama Tells Egyptian Foreign Minister Gheit Islamic Coup on the White House

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said he had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, in which President Obama told him that he was still a Muslim, the son of a Muslim father, the stepson of Muslim stepfather, that his half brothers in Kenya are Muslims, and that he was sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda.

From G. Reynolds: ALLEN: Uh, no one told me about Maine boom company. The country’s in the very best of hands.

And: ER, RIGHT: Obama: GOP to blame for spill, because if I had tried to prevent it, which I didn’t, they would have stopped me. Right. It’s got nothing to do with Obama receiving record contributions from BP, and regulators . . . coincidentally . . . cutting BP a lot of slack. But if he were a Republican, it would be all about that.

And: COMPETENCE: Coast Guard Head Was Informed of Maine Oil Boom on 5/21. Yesterday, He Claimed He Didn’t Know.

And: POLITICO: Environmentalists give Barack Obama a pass on oil spill.

And Jim Hoft weighs in as well: Three days after the Gulf oil rig explosion, the Netherlands offered to send in oil skimmers to pump oil off of the surface of the ocean. The Obama Administration turned them down because they were not 100% efficient and small amounts of oil would be pumped back into the Gulf with the excess water. EPA regulations do not allow for residue water to contain any oil. So rather than use equipment that was not 100% efficient the Obama Administration chose to let all of the oil run into the Gulf.

Want more??? Bureaucracy Standing In The Way Of Oil Spill Clean Up Efforts.

Barack Obama gave his marching orders:

Obama: “They Bring a Knife…We Bring a Gun”
Obama to His Followers: “Get in Their Faces!”
Obama on ACORN Mobs: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”
Obama To His Mercenary Army: “Hit Back Twice As Hard”
Obama to BP: “We talk to these folks… So I know whose a$$ to kick.”

Now it’s playing out on the streets.

On Tuesday June 8, the North Carolina Tea Party Patriots held a protest against government bailouts in front of Rep. Mel Watt’s (D-N.C.) Greensboro office. During the protest a raging leftist goon, Governor Spencer, turned out, disrupted the protest, confronted the patriots, argued with them and then… He started throwing punches!

The whole thing was caught on tape.

Governor Spencer, slugged Nathan Tabor, a business owner and head of the Forsyth County Republican Party and a former candidate for senator.

But, that’s not all…

Governor Spencer is a union organizer, a socialist and a black liberation activist.
Spencer led the Greensboro K-Mart protests of 1995 and mobilized families, communities, and “the Pulpit Forum of Greensboro, a coalition of progressive clergy, to commit acts of civil disobedience.”

Governor Spencer and his associates “enlisted race to resist heirarchy.”

And, maybe you noticed this from the video… Governor Spencer has a black liberation flag bumper sticker on his car.

And, that’s just what we know right now.

The real question is “Was this just a chance beating?”… Or, “Was this Governor Spencer just following orders from above?”
You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

I made this comparison two decades ago with Clinton and NOW!

BATTERED SPOUSES? Environmentalists and Obama.

I had trouble with economics in college. I was a dual major, getting degrees in Political Science and Public Administration. I carried minors in Philosophy (epistemology) and American History (Constitutional Law). And yet I the one step keeping me from being a certified social studies teacher (not that I WANTED to be, but still …) was economics. And it's only been in the last year or two that I've figured out why.

Up at dear old ONU they taught Keynesianism. And I just couldn't get it. It made no sense to me. It didn't seem to add up. So I told myself that I just wasn't “smart enough in that way” and moved on with the study of law and a constant pursuit of learning of Constitutional history and application. Bu the events of the last five or so years have revealed o me why I didn't “get it.” There's nothing here to get. It really DOESN'T make sense. It's application in the real world has had devastating effect

Had I only been led to Bastiat's Broken Window sooner. Or the Austrians. Von Mises. Hayek. I've been devouring podcasts on them for months now and feel that I FINALLY understand economics. Not textbook economics, bu the real kind. That matter. And I'm becoming convinced ha the sooner we can replace he Keynesians with Hayekians the sooner the recovery of the US economy will be upon us.

And I don't feel NEARLY as bad about not “getting it” way back then. There wasn't anything to “get” save smoke an mirrors.

Let's take a look a the stats:

Contributions? Obama the top recipient of donations from BP

Residential assistance? Remember Rahm Emanuel’s rent-free D.C. apartment? The owner: A BP adviser, Stanley Greenberg.

Regulations in place? Bush gave Deep Water Horizon 6 citations for safety violations.

Regulations ignored? Regulators Under Obama Failed to Inspect Deepwater Horizon

And the hits just keep on coming: Follow these standard Washington links if you can:

Greenberg's consulting firm was a prime architect of BP's recent rebranding drive as a green petroleum company, down to green signs and the slogan "Beyond Petroleum."

Greenberg's company is also closely tied to a sister Democratic outfit -- GCS, named for the last initials of Greenberg, James Carville, another Clinton advisor, and Bob Shrum, John Kerry's 2004 campaign manager.

According to published reports, GCS received hundreds of thousands of dollars in political polling contracts in recent years from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Probably just a crazy coincidence. But you'll never guess who was the chairman of that Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dispensing those huge polling contracts to his kindly rent-free landlord.

A national survey shows that
leftists in America have a
very hard time understanding the law of supply and demand and
other facts of economic life.

Then
there's this from the Donk canditae for the Gov of Cali: The
conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut
welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer
jobs. Jobs for every American is doomed to failure because
of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and
create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the
dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical
care.

That's
Jerry Moonbeam Brown. Vintage. (full transcript here)

And on the floor of the House
even Ben Bernanke appears flummoxed:

And the POTUS isn't exempt.
President Obama in his speech to
the graduates of that school up north (soon to be delivering pizzas
and serving fries from coast to coast) defended the government’s
interference in railroad building and in the Great Depression. “When
we needed a way to reach the Pacific, our government helped build the
railroads,” the president boasted. Then he added, “When the
markets crashed during the Great Depression, and people lost their
life savings, our government put in place a set of rules and
safeguards to make sure that such a crisis never happened
again.”

Wrong on both counts. The Union Pacific and Central
Pacific were poorly built railroads, they went broke, and both cost
the nation over $60,000,000 to build -- a sum higher than the total
national debt just a decade before they were built. By contrast, the
Great Northern Railroad, which was built with private money by James
J. Hill, never went broke and was arguably the best-built railroad in
the nation.

On the Great Depression, government intervention
did not rescue the nation. The U. S. had more than 20 percent
unemployment in 1939, toward the end of FDR’s second term. On the
contrary, government intervention -- through the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,
the Farm Board, and the income tax hike to 63 percent on top incomes
-- triggered the depression, and FDR perpetuated it through failed
stimulus packages and higher taxes.

Because President Obama,
and many others in his administration, do not understand American
history, we seem destined to repeat it. President Obama addressed his
historical confusion on a college campus; when a better and more
accurate version of the American past reaches those campuses, we can
raise up a new generation that appreciates the Founders’ dedication
to limited government and individual liberty.

I keep this bookmarked. It's from Frontpage magazine, 2004: http://smoothstoneblog.com/who-really-owns-palestine

As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn’t take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don’t want it back.

• If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don’t want it back.

• If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don’t even exist any more, so they can’t want it back.

So, going back 800 years, there’s no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel’s title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:

• The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:

• The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:

• The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:

• The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:

• The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:

• The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from:

• The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:

• The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn’t conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:

• The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:

• The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:

• The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:

• The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:

• The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:

• The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:

• The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.

And then there's this, from he NYT no less: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/science/10jews.html