Why I don’t go to rallies

The last “anti-war” event I attended was in November. We were all of thirty seconds into things when the first speaker piously informed us that this “isn’t just about war, but about justice for the workers” (with “justice” tacitly defined as the Green agenda on “economic democracy”). Although I don’t endorse that agenda, the fact that my warm body was present allowed the speaker to co-opt my presence as an endorsement of something other than the rally’s purported purpose.

Takes one to know one:

Derided by the White House as “nothing more than a cheap political stunt,” marijuana advocates’ attempt to hold Office of National Drug Control Policy head John P. Walters’ feet to the fire for his overt, taxpayer-funded political campaigning against drug-reform state ballot initiatives bore some small fruit this week.

(Reason, relayed by Rational Review)

In today’s spam harvest:

Now You Can Forget Forever the Pain, Effort and Expense of Having a Large, Manly Penis!

This can be read in at least two ways. (No, I am not going to tell you what pain, effort and expense my manhood has brought me.)

Steve Sailer comments on the Michigan ‘diversity’ case:

. . . the Bush Administration is saying that universities are supposed to achieve their “diversity goals” (a.k.a., quotas). They should just do it in a more cunning fashion.
. . .
Bush’s speech is an unsubtle call to erect a photographic negative of the kind of nominally colorblind devices – for example, poll taxes – that Jim Crow states once used to discriminate against blacks.

One may be reminded of Michael Kinsley’s definition of gaffe as an inadvertent and scandalous expression of truth; we might extend it to include policies that openly declare their shameful purpose.

As usual, Sailer closes thus:

It’s time to start thinking about what can be salvaged from the wreck. Above all: to minimize the damage done by quotas, we must have immigration reform – to slow the growth of racially-preferred groups.

A decade ago, some of my friends were saying “We can’t allow easy immigration so long as there’s a generous welfare-state.” I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t like it now. Why take away what ought to be a right – the freedom of both migrant and native to do business with, or marry, whom they choose, and the migrant’s freedom to live where they prefer – because some subset of the beneficiaries abuse what ought not to be a right? Is it moral to let the abolition of one wrong depend on the abolition of another? (If so, the cause of broad reform – even if everyone favors it – seems hopeless, because you’ll never get consensus on the right order.)
( . . more . . )

I went to mozilla.org to gripe about the multiple petty ways in which Mozilla 1.2.1, the “latest and greatest” stable release, is less convenient to my fingers than the much-maligned Netscape Communicator 4.79; but was put off by the helpful Bug Writing Guidelines:

. . . be sure that you’ve reproduced your bug using a build released within the past three days.

I’m not quite motivated enough (or awake enough) to install and test an alpha version. Oh well.

What am I griping about? Glad you asked – gotta fill up my blogging quota somehow. ( . . more . . )

My good friend Kennita Watson (occasional candidate for various unsexy offices) sent me this column/speech by state senator Tom McClintock (R, Thousand Oaks):

Three numbers tell the entire story of California’s fiscal meltdown: 21, 28 and 36. Understand them and you will have transformed the Byzantine mysteries of the state budget into precise mathematical order.
In the last four years, population and inflation have grown at a combined rate of 21 percent. California general fund revenues have grown 28 percent. General fund spending has grown 36 percent.
The spending lobby insists that California got into its budget mess by irresponsibly slashing car taxes, thus leaving the treasury dangerously vulnerable when the recession struck and state revenues plummeted.
The facts paint a quite different picture. AFTER taxes were cut and AFTER the economic bubble burst, general fund revenues have still outpaced combined population and inflation growth by fully one third during this administration. Obviously, California isn’t suffering a revenue problem.
What it has suffered is a monumental spending problem: growing 36 percent in four years.
Not that we’ve seen a 36 percent increase in highway construction or school construction or water storage or electricity generation or anything else that government is responsible for providing. We’ve paid for it. We just haven’t gotten it.

I don’t actually believe in my bones that voting Republican will help much.

Got a spam today whose headers include:

X-Mime-Key: search words: suspensory graveman conelet thorned neuter unwomanliness

What do you suppose they’re trying to tell me?