EdCone.com

Let’s take seriously for a moment the idea that an utterly unprecedented shift is underway, one that recasts not just our behaviors but also our core assumptions. Following an electronic as opposed to mechanical paradigm, this transformation is dramatically more accelerated and more deeply formative of our way of apprehending the world than any previous technological transformation. The whole business is happening right in front of our eyes, in the space of a generation, and in so total and simultaneous a way that there is no place to stand outside of it in order to calmly assess what is happening.

Somehow I managed to read the whole article. I'm reading Ragtime now, but it has short sentences and short chapters, so maybe it's not a real test. Previously.

We stopped in at Bin 33, the new restaurant on South Elm, for a drink at the swell zinc bar. One drink turned into a couple, and  we ended up eating dinner at said bar. Ran into some folks we knew. Nobody shot at us. Nice night in downtown GSO.

UPDATE: Actual crowd estimates here, along with a link to lots of photos of the event; pic at left by our Richmond correspondent, via Facebook.

Early reports indicate that the Stewart/Colbert rally in DC drew a crowd of approximately 13,000,000 people.

Here's a better slogan than "1/4 Cent Makes Sense", even if it lacks the OMG I did not see that coming cents/sense wordplay: "Property owners who vote against the sales tax are voting for a larger increase in their property taxes."

Courage of their convictions: "An unprecedented wave of money from conservative groups with anonymous donors has swept into four North Carolina congressional races."

Arnold won't apply for County job, Knight will run for reelection.

And the N Club doesn't have a monopoly on armed patrons.

States right:

Unlike the feds’ tepid efforts, this will be a serious investigation, led by a handful of assistant attorneys general who've worked together for years, and who see this as their chance to finally do something for beleaguered homeowners. They've got resources, subpoena power and a justifiable suspicion that the robo-signing shenanigans are just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

Related: "Banks' vast pile of foreclosed homes doesn't appear to be diminishing. That's a troubling sign for the future of the housing market."

Not like it was your $80 billion in the first place: "No further details were released."

Hard to recall a more desultory campaign than the one allegedly underway in support of a sales tax increase in Guilford County.

Semi-related: some of these proposals are said to be quite popular.

Nothing good happens after midnight: "Wake up a few more patrolmen and lock the place down."

NASCAR HoF sputtering at the start.

Like GSO's own troubled civil rights museum and last year's ACC tourney, this thing brings its own set of problems to a shared miserable economic environment.

Saving Private Perriello: Obama visits Charlottesville today.

Previously: "[T]he status quo has been bad for years in Southside VA, so just restoring it doesn't seem like much of a plan."

Roubini says "the US remains on an unsustainable fiscal course," anticipates "the worst of all worlds:"

The Obama administration did the right thing early, and avoided another depression. He is still doing the right thing now in pointing out the risks of early austerity. And he is limited by an unco-operative Republican party trapped in a belief in voodoo economics, the economic equivalent of creationism. Even so, he and his party have been unwilling to tackle long-term entitlement spending.

Spider Solitaire is the king of time-wasters. It predates Microsoft -- the internets say it was a favorite of FDR -- and will outlive the company. A woman I know told me recently she plays on the middle level, and I think less of her now.

Reader JW, sick of politics, requests a photograph by Lisa Scheer. Done. This was taken fairly recently near Burlington.

Fetzer says electronic voting machines (including those in Guilford County) may default to Democrats. GOP threatens legal action; State elections board says no big problems.

I have no insight on this particular situation, but I've interviewed enough computer scientists on the broader subject to have doubts about the voting machine industry and its products.

UPDATE: Email from NCDP boss Andrew Whalen calls Fetzer's allegations "equal parts reckless and absurd."

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

Private prisons and mercenaries are two things I'd expect Americans to be more freaked out about than they seem to be.

Volunteers for Republican Meg Whitman's campaign for California governor are calling voters in Farsi, Korean and two Chinese dialects...The effort is a particularly sophisticated version of voter-mobilization pushes candidates and parties are ratcheting up with less than a week before Election Day.

Joe Trippi has said a superior ground game can be worth 2-3% at the polls, and the 2008 results made him look pretty smart on that subject.

I was surprised to find myself watching the World Series last night, but there it was on the television and hey, dueling aces -- a plotline that unraveled entertainingly enough for me to pay attention for several innings. I liked it when Lee plunked a batter right after they talked about his phenomenal control. Now I'm a little bit invested in this thing, and I might have to watch more.

They must be loving this at Wrangler HQ on Elm Street

Not just mocking the spokesman, but repeating the brand name a thousand times and getting the logo on-screen. Bonus points for including the word "penis."

Much less oil than previously estimated in Alaska.

It wasn't going to last that long anyway. Time to do something else.

UPDATE: Why should New York get a free ride?

Second most famous graduate of my wife's high school kills tunnel project, again.

I still think not building this thing is a terrible idea.

It's terrible in terms of short-term job creation, and long term benefit. It's penny wise and pound foolish. It's the opposite of visionary.

But I must add that last weekend I found myself talking politics with some actual residents of the Garden State -- affluent and vaguely liberal, distressed by Obama's timidity and the rise of loud and proud know-nothingism, and so on -- and they all said: we can't afford it, taxes here are out of control, and anyway Christie is playing chicken with the feds to get more money from Uncle.

They like the guy.

Email from WFDD general manager Denise Franklin (thnx to CCD for the fwd):

Since the news of NPR’s termination of Juan Williams’s contract broke on October 21st, we here at WFDD have received numerous contacts from listeners and members (77 at the writing of this letter) expressing anger, frustration, dismay, confusion, and a host of other emotions. I want you to know that the termination was as much of a surprise to us as it was to you. I, too, am concerned about the situation and how it was handled.

... I’ve been in Atlanta at a public media conference and have spent time in the company of Ms. Schiller. However, there is still little to no additional information to report. WFDD is not privileged to know what is going on internally at NPR.

What I want to make clear to you is that the decision to terminate Mr. Williams’s contract was made, and carried out, by executives at NPR. There was no involvement with local stations, nor any prior communication with us. WFDD is an entirely locally-owned and operated public radio station. We pay annual fees to several national distributors, including NPR, for the right to purchase and broadcast their programs, and sometimes work together on audience-building initiatives, but that collaboration does not include personnel decisions...

The most powerful man in North Carolina, with the possible exception of Ol' Roy and Coack K:

For Pope, this is a crusade to throw out a corrupt Democratic regime. For Democrats, this is a case of one of the richest men in the state trying to buy the legislature. But despite the charges and counter charges, it is all legal in the new world of campaign laws where the decades old ban on corporate contributions and strict limits on individual contributions is being replaced by free-wheeling and free-spending committees.

Art Buchwald said the world itself is satire:

Conceding almost certain Republican gains in next month's crucial midterm elections, Democratic lawmakers vowed Tuesday not to give up without making one final push to ensure their party runs away from every major legislative victory of the past two years.

Republican poll observers who say they're trying to root out fraud have aggressively approached voters and elections officials inside early voting sites, questioned established voting law and drawn at least two dozen complaints from voters, Wake elections officials said.

Election officials and campaign watchdog groups said the observers' actions could intimidate voters and suppress turnout...It is against the law for observers to talk to voters and argue with poll workers.

At least they haven't stepped on anyone's head yet.

More here and here on pollside activism; more here and here on Bill Randall.

Fortunately we can count on the next Congress to put this right:

This ambiguity is no doubt one reason the financial reform bill passed in the first place. Even its clearest prohibitions are couched in language inviting Wall Street to evade them.

Red shirt won't fit Page alum Rob Lovejoy (link via Greensboro Sports).

Previously.

Even the guy selling in-flight phone call technology hates the prospect of in-flight phone calls:

"Just because Line2 technology makes it possible to make phone calls over airplane Wi-Fi, doesn't mean it's okay," said Peter Sisson, who happens to be the founder and CEO of Toktumi (say it three times fast), the company behind Line2. "I, personally, would go crazy if a loud talker was yapping with someone on the phone on a long flight."

Lede item at NC Tea Party website concerns historically black Winston-Salem State University.

Second item: NAACP.

Third item includes NAACP logo.

I wonder who it is they'll be watching at the polls.

More here on the voter suppression campaign.

This bloodless, if effective, approach to governance has created a perilous disconnect: By any rational measure, Obama is the most accomplished and progressive president in decades, yet the only Americans fired up by the changes he has delivered are Republicans and Tea Partiers hellbent on reversing them.

Maybe, but one problem with this argument is that the public option was more than a "praiseworthy bargaining chip in the push for reform," it was a mechanism of genuine reform that got traded cheap to the insurance industry.

This is worth reading, too.

"The danger is that once the Fed kindles price increases, inflation will be difficult to control."

People are taking this risk seriously enough to bet on it.

On the other hand, things suck now and deflation would be pretty awful.

Maybe "Great Recession" was more than a glib phrase after all.

[T]he American public is barred from examining in detail how Medicare spends roughly an eighth of its funds.

Your tax dollars at work, or play.

In a victory for the free speech and privacy rights of Amazon.com customers, a federal judge ruled today that the company would not have to turn over detailed records on nearly 50 million purchases to North Carolina tax collectors.

Back to the honor system for your online purchases.

Thnx to TC for the link.

I take no pleasure in Romo's injury, but the flagellation of the 1-5 Cowboys (this is choice) I can live with.

FG sent me this clip with the promise that it's funny no matter how you plan to vote next week. FG is correct.

On Friday, October 29, 2010, the Elon Law Review will present a symposium to discuss emerging issues in Internet transparency and accountability. The goal [...] is to explore how the Internet impacts public access to, and interest in, information and how society balances the desire for increased access to information with the need for secrecy, privacy, and control.

Details here. Free and open to the public, lawyers can get CLE credit.

Thnx to Marco for the pointer.

"The debunking of crackpot history is necessary, and ridicule fully deserves its place."

I saw a Woodrow Wilson reference in a comment here the other day. Glad to know we're trendy.

I tend to think of him first and foremost as a former Bryn Mawr professor, but I guess it's all in your perspective.

Be the death of me: "Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk — a departure from reality."

Sometimes it all adds up:

The law of large numbers is one of the simplest and best understood of the universal laws in mathematics and nature, but it is by no means the only one. Over the decades, many such universal laws have been found, that govern the behaviour of wide classes of complex systems, regardless of what the components of that system are, or even how they interact with each other.

Voter fraud or voter suppression?

An NC Tea Party email urging "Tea Party Patriots" to register as poll observers in Forsyth County (full text after the jump) says this is a non-partisan issue, but it arrived in my mailbox with a note from the fwder: "The only way to stop voter fraud (in ANY county) is to disband the American Communist, aka, Demo-Rat Party!"

You can tell they're lying because their lips are moving:

Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive John Stumpf on Oct. 20 said: "I don't know how other companies do it, but in our company the affidavit signer and the reviewer are the same team member." Days later a deposition emerged from a bankruptcy case indicating that Wells Fargo had in fact used a robo-signer who didn't verify documents she approved...

...Bank of America in several recent public comments about the foreclosure issue hadn't previously acknowledged even minor errors. Yet last week it uncovered a group of mistakes as it prepared to resubmit the first batch of documents...

"I told him to shut up and run."

Ol' Roy attempts to "regain total control of his players and his program."

Thnx to G for the pointer.

Just saw a deer in my neighbor's front yard. Less surprising than a Yeti, but still unusual.

Previously, suburban foxes and, in the comments, a pretty good discussion of suburban wildlife. Since then I've noticed the lack of blue jays -- maybe they were displaced by the burgeoning crow population?

Deer are everywhere around my bro-in-law's house in NJ, and I-287 this weekend was a grisly montage of dismembered carcasses and gut-smeared lanes.

Musicology: "Mr. Richards makes it fascinating at the layman's level."

The GSO chapter of Burrito Bikers, a volunteer group that feeds the homeless, is celebrating its first birthday.

The idea has spread from Charlotte to Greensboro to Chapel Hill; info on ways you can help at the second link.

Back before the Great Recession, finding a parking space in the long-term lots at PTI often was a challenge.

Last week, less so.

Kost said county officials thought the words "sex" and "communism" were inappropriate on the fireplace next to the children's area.

If actual communists were having sex on the fireplace next to the children's area, I could see the problem, but this is just silly.

WikiLeaks: Iraqi civilian deaths greater than reported; prisoner abuse well beyond Abu Ghraib; Iraq's pro-Shiite military; privatizing war.