If Bureaucracies Secede, Can Countries Be Far Behind?

According to this article, Scotland will soon assume its rightful place among nations, if the answer to the title is "no". (Interesting to note, the Scottish bureaucracy is about the size of my old agency when I was young.)

Feminism Score--Four Stars

The Post and Times have pieces on Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody, now nominated to be a four-star general, probably the first one to have graduated from Cortland State (i.e., upstate NY). And apparently a Scotch-Irish background.

Scotch-Irish and Elections

The conventional wisdom seems to be encapsulated in this post by Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo--Sen. Clinton does well in Appalachia, which is a white, poor, underdeveloped portion of the country, settled by Scots-Irish, that was strongly anti-slavery and anti-black in ante-bellum America and retains those beliefs today.

But there's a paradox--when you go to this site, of the U.S.Census, you get a long comparison of Scotch-Irish (apparently the Census' preferred term) with U.S. statistics. There you find that those people who identify themselves as Scotch-Irish are older and white (so far fitting the conventional wisdom for Appalachia) but they're also significantly better educated and wealthier than the average for the country. (Like 20 percent wealthier and 30 percent better educated and more managerial/professional and less agriculture and mining.)

I don't know how one explains the paradox, except by saying those of us who left Appalachia did very very well, those of us who stayed did very very poorly.