CONN CARROLL: Facts show Fannie, Freddie led mortgage market to the collapse.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Hawker Beechcraft Layoffs In The Hundreds.

More casualties of Obama’s war against private planes?

AN ECONOMICS LESSON from Gene Simmons.

THE PEREIRAS take the leap.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Strained By Its Debts, EU Is Breaking Up.

EUROPE: Markets rise but contagion fears spread to Spain.

“CRUSHING OUR BETTER ANGELS:” See, though, the thing about tribalism is that it often works. The reason why people are hardwired for tribalism is that our predecessors who didn’t have those instincts were wiped out by the people who did. That doesn’t mean that tribalism is necessarily good of course, any more than other hardwired instincts are necessarily good. But it’s not just an example of stupidity. It’s there for a reason.

Note, too, that people who purport to decry tribalism are often just engaging in propaganda on behalf of their own tribe. “This we-all-have-a-problem sermonizing when liberal incontinence blows up on them would be quite humorous, if not so annoying and self-righteous. Yes, we do all have a problem, and we have it while the libs are piling on people for expressing an opinion they don’t like and playing guilt-by-association with a trace of signs as well as when chaos reigns on the street from radical liberals run amuck. I mean this whole the-left-should-sermonize-for-everbody is part and parcel to the character of liberal ‘tribalism’. They ignore, ignore, trivialize, slant, warp, trivialize, put-down, ignore, then something blows up and we all need to come to Jesus.”

UPDATE: Reader Kenny Hill recommends Bill Whittle’s essay on Tribes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Dan Collins.

JOHN BOOT: “Clint Eastwood’s woeful, inept biopic J. Edgar may not be the worst movie he’s ever made (that’s debatable), but it’s so histrionic, one-sided and unserious that it will stand as the Mommie Dearest of G-man pictures.”

Meanwhile, Edward Jay Epstein emails: “Clint Eastwood’s new movie J. Edgar is a perfect example how liberal Hollywood employs pseudo-psychology to blacken the reputation of its political enemies. Eastwood calls it ‘humanizing’ J. Edgar Hoover. He accomplished this by making him a gay, repressed, fruitcake cross-dresser with an oedipal complex. James Jesus Angleton was treated no better in Robert Deniro’s movie The Good Shepherd.”

VETERANS’ DAY at ORNL.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy protester arrested at conservative conference in Denver.

RICK ACKER has passed John Grisham. Thanks to reader Mark Shelden for pointing that out.

PENN STATE: “Of course we’re going to riot,” Paul Howard, a 24-year-old aerospace-engineering student at Penn State University, told the New York Times. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?” Whatever people expected, it was too much, apparently. Plus this:

People keep saying the cover-up proves the corruption of college football. Maybe so. College football certainly has its myriad and manifest vices.

But what about the riots? These aren’t simply a product of football culture, they’re a product of a campus culture that teaches students they have an absolute right to whatever their hearts desire, starting with a fun-filled college experience and, afterwards, a rewarding career.

Imbued with a sense of victimhood, entitlement, and cultivated grievance that can only be taught, their preferred response to inconvenience is a temper tantrum. Sometimes, as with the Penn State riots, they are physical. Other times, they are intellectual or theatrical. But the tantrums are always self-justifying. Arguments are correct not if they conform to facts and reason, but if they are passionately held. Unfairness is measured by the intensity of one’s feelings.

Perhaps that’s why a “right to riot” has become a staple of campus culture across the country, particularly at big schools. Students riot when administrators take away their beer. They riot when they lose games. They riot when they win games. They riot when the cops try to break up parties. Inconvenience itself has become outrageous.

It is also why idiotic protests have come to be seen as “part of the college experience,” as if chanting inane slogans and spouting weepy canned platitudes is essential to a well-rounded education.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Jon Miles writes: “I wonder how many of the Penn State rioters feel sorrier for Michael Vick’s victims?”

IT’S DESTINY: Local baby makes debut at 11:11 a.m. on 11-11-11.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE: Facing Retirement: Self-Sufficiency Trumps Everything.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Future of Occupy Burlington encampment uncertain after police clear City Hall Park to investigate man’s death.

THINGS BABY BOOMERS won’t tell you.

MENTAL HEALTH CUTS in the news. “Now, many of those people who were in hospitals are in our jails and prisons. Is that an improvement?”

WATCHING GIMME SHELTER WITH THE INSTA-DAUGHTER, and she commented, “It’s weird to think how old all those people are now,” referring to the various hippies in the audience at Altamont as Jefferson Airplane plays its warmup set.

To me, the foreboding growth of Altamont chaos captured so well by the film seems quite evocative of the Occupy movement, or maybe it’s the other way around.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Denver Meets The New Media. More here and here.

THE SUPER-FANTASTIC 11/11/11: “Today is 11/11/11, a day we get only once in a century. It is also my wedding anniversary — our 11th, as a matter of fact. So for me, today is not once in a century; it’s once in a lifetime. But then, come to think of it, every day is a once-in-a-lifetime day. Today is the only day I will face this exact set of challenges and opportunities, the only day I will have this exact set of interactions with others, the only day that I will do the exact set of things I do today.”

Plus, learning from the Manolo.

SMELLS LIKE PENN STATE SPIRIT: Occupy Portland Rape Policy: “Nobody Should Contact the Police.”

HOW A FINANCIAL PROFESSIONAL lost his house. “At moments during our house hunt, I felt in my gut that something wasn’t right. We’d go to open houses for $400,000 homes and see lines of couples in their late 20s — younger than we were — waiting to get inside. I kept wondering where all the money was coming from. How did all these people make so much? But prices just kept rising, and when people kept buying, that made it seem safer. I knew from my work as a financial adviser that following the crowd could be costly. But like everyone else, I felt safer in a crowd.”

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on Cuisinart kitchen gear.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Reader David Torrente notes that, as usual, Saturday Night Live got there first: What’s the best college in the world? Winston University!

A FIRE ALARM IN THE NIGHT: A Fire Alarm in the Night: Darino v. Morgan Hill Unified Sch. Dist. Clearly, you should respond to speech you dislike with violence. That’s the message our responsible authorities are sending, over and over again.