Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, the Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering the News of the World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of royals and celebrities — Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set to either 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.
But last Monday it emerged that the News of the World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voicemails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.
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The News of the World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid–20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling 9 million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought News of the Screws (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros–funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.
I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived 4 million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News of the World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers — whoops, pardon me, “educators” — and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?
The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few illegally had an early report into test-tampering destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children. And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.
In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students in order to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures. The whole rotten, stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?
Unfortunately, the herd mentality is alive and well on Planet Earth and folks (many of them uninformed as well as gullible) blindly follow the loudest voices toward the yummiest feed troughs.
This could be a rather long set of comments if we all contributed a government scandal. Allow me to remind you of the SEC, pornography at (instead of - er, is that best then?) work, and a half billion lease for unneeded space.
When I see all forms of government clamping down for various reasons (green / lightbulbs; health / sodium; diversity / speech ... ... ... ... need we go on?), it's not that the pitchforks are misdirected. It's the incompetents and frauds in government that are wielding those pitchforks and, for whatever the reason, the majority of us think that is the purpose of government anyway. Having handed over the pitchforks, we sure don't want to stand out in front either. All in all, a rather tenuous hold on our republic.
Energy Secretary Chu asserts that government can take away the light bulb because it "... let's people waste their own money." At this level of pitchforkery, the world's smallest pitchfork in the hands of government will be sufficient. And we'll collectively still be OK with that.
P.S. Re: Those GE CAPTCHAs. No, you can just Go Tag Your Own Self.
Quite so, Coach. Ayn Rand put it somewhat more starkly:
“[W]hen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
PS - ditto on the GE captcha - just another hog at the government trough. NRO could keep better company.
I find it impossible to believe that no other reporter in no other British newspaper has ever hacked into a cell phone or database. Selective shaming? You bet!
These examples reflect who we have become as a people:
A lazy mob guided by a slave morality and a human all-too-human sense of "justice", "equality" and "fairness for all" that generates a spirit of resentment of our successful countrymen...Nietzsche was right!!!
Bring on the sulphur! We're given over completely to sin and we must all be cleansed by fire! (Laugh, but know that it's the fool who giggles on the mountain as he sees the storm coming in.)
The APS are concerned with fairness, affirmative action, environmental justice, etc. way more than teaching children basic learning skills. The real sadness here is that the children who were not proficient, but lied about by administrators and teachers, were not given the extra help that was available. In essence, they lied to help themselves, but directly hurt the children at the same time and this needs to be said more.
Shame on the teachers and administrators, but until we put to rest this canard that all these students are failing because the teachers just won't help them even though they're oh-so-desperate to learn. Please. This is what happens when government puts the onus on student success squarely on the schools and teachers instead of also on the parents and, most importantly, the students themselves. Next time we see video footage of some teenagers in a flashmob rioting in Miami or beating up kids in Milwaukee or planning some Facebook flash mob, remember that these are the "poor children" that the teachers are supposedly abusing. Teachers are put in dangerous schools, the students don't do the homework, the teachers can barely maintain class discipline because of the lack of values the kids display, and then the government blames the teachers when the kids do poorly on the tests. I'm not saying it's right that the APS teachers cheated, but it's to be expected. It's like blaming a doctor whose patient skips his meds or exercise regimen if the patient doesn't get better.
If we used real pitchforks, it would be different. I am not endorsing violence, but really, the government does not fear any punishment. Jail? They'll catch up with old friends. And that's only if someone can bring charges and get them convicted in the first place. Congress has a legal responsiblity to pass a budget each year and they haven't, yet no one is being tried for failing to do their legal duty. The media in general spins the story to obscure anyone having responsibility for anything. Or, they claim that following the law would be onerous (e.g. firing all the Atlanta teachers, deporting all the illegal aliens as you find them). Gee, we wouldn't want to do anything ONEROUS, now, would we? Might interrupt our bread and circuses.
I think I'll buy a real pitchfork, before we have pitchfork control laws and F3 (Fast & Furious Forkrunning).
How have we gotten to the point where our "leaders" are incompetent narcissists and we think they're doing a fine job? I think its partly due to the fact that it takes so much money to run for public office that you're average person, who may actually care about what's going on, is excluded from the arena. We really, really, need to change how this works.
As for fast and furious, the only difference between socialism and communism is the right to bear arms. At the very least, Holder should be serving with those detainees he loves so much. He's as much a terrorist as most of them.
Another part of the Federal acronym morass to report on... I recently had lunch with a bureaucrat from the EPA (Nixon's biggest mistake). After talking about the pipeline spill on the Yellowstone River, this "public servant" observed that, "we don't need terrorism when we have commerce."
Reminding him who pays his salary was futile, he's just another apparatchik in the Federal/state regulatory tyranny.
"we don't need terrorism when we have commerce." You may have just stumbled on the motto of every government agency, Tom S. I know a staffer at EPA, so I've heard it before.
Add to the mix Friday afternoon EPA edicts that added restrictions on Texas coal plants, and you have all the ingredients for the dissolution of the Republic. The UNITED States simply can no longer stand.
“Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth.”
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
“I am sure that never was a people, who had more reason to acknowledge a Divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that agency, which was so often manifested during our Revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them.”
Quotes from a bible believing, gun toting American named George Washington
If he could be here now, would he even recognize America?
In another time, and with a Republican administration, the press would be foaming at the mouth. Instead, the press yawns and sleeps through the most scandalous administration in our history. My local rag has yet to write one word about the Atlanta School System (ASS, how appropriate).
Well, Jefferson (typically the Dems favorite founder, when they can actually recognize him) suggested at some point it might be necessary to remove the govt forcibly in the future. How does one know when that should occur? It seems it is getting awfully close. The govt does not care one whit about the population except to bribe them for the lowest cost possible.
Indeed. People think that the Second Amendment is about self-defense, but in reality the Second Amendment is about protecting Americans' rights to forcibly remove their politicians from government. Who knows when that point will be reached, but I think that things like Fast and Furious and the bilking of Americans to pay for the failure of their kids being educated pushes us to that point a bit earlier than expected.
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