Illegal Mexican Wrestlers Taking Smackdowns American Wrestlers Don't Want.
'k, it's the Onion, but...
"The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain."
Martin Luther, German Reformation leader, Table Talk, 1530s(?).
From Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future.
Although he might not be wrong about motivations. This blog aspires to 'mere gain.' Not there yet.
Some of my friends, of both right and left political persuasions, don't quite get the difference between libertarians and conservatives.
Jay at Stop The ACLU blog gives me a good example of the difference with this post about a movie titled “Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters.” The movie explains how to avoid arrest, including advice to hide drugs and related paraphernalia from a police search. Jay objects:
Now before you libertarians jump down my throat, this isn’t about rights. I have no problem with the ACLU informing students of their fourth amendment, and miranda rights not to incriminate themselves, but take notice of what the ACLU are not saying, and what they are advocating. They go beyond teaching basic rights and into the realm of evasion.
This isn't about rights as Jay understands them. Because, I surmise, Jay believes rights are what are enumerated and codified in the Constitution and court cases. But a libertarian knows rights exist without any acknowledgement from the government. They exist as functions of human beings as autonomous agents. That means a person is his or her own owner, not the government. Rights do not begin to exist just when a government recognizes them.
As a self owner a person has the right to do with himself what he pleases, including things I might find distasteful or harmful to himself. This right includes doing things that may be illegal. So, contrary to Jay's assertion, this is all about rights.
For more on Jay's commentary see Hammer of Truth and Drug War Rant.
There have been no cases of Patriot Act abuse.
H/T.
Now that the Supreme Court has paved the way for local government to seize land through eminent domain for just about any economic development, we can do things like this:
Now, perhaps emboldened by Kelo, the mayor of North Hills, Marvin Natiss, wants to confiscate Deepdale [golf club], and has taken some significant preliminary steps--such as hiring consultants and appraisers--toward starting proceedings to do so.Why? Not to put up a public road or a public building, or for some other public use. North Hills doesn't need anything like that: It doesn't need any schools, or police, or firefighters, or libraries and the like because it gets those services from other local governmental units, such as the Manhasset school district, the Town of North Hempstead, and Nassau County.
Nor would the taking fulfill any public need for recreational opportunities. Nassau County teems with golf courses, both private and public.
[...]
No, the mayor of North Hills wants to use the power of government to condemn Deepdale--whose members are a diverse group of people from all over the country and around the world--to make it an exclusive high-end golf course restricted to people who live in his small village and would be willing to pay thousands of dollars in yearly membership fees.
Bully for him, because frankly, I've seen far too many of you middle (and even lower!) class saps out there on the course. Golf is a sport for the wealthy, and some people are just getting way out of line with this 'golf for the masses' drivel. Next thing you know there will be colored people out there playing professional golf, and the fun is all over.
H/T, Jeff.
< /snark>
I don't know anyone who would publicly say the above (privately perhaps), but that the Kelo decision allows this kind of thing to take place should disturb everyone. I'm disturbed that it doesn't.
The Smoking Gun has his list of his demands for hotels he used during the campaign.
Notable; no celery and no tomato allowed in his room. Which, I'm sure each of you immediately grasped, means no bloody marys.
I figure anyone who runs for President had best be sloshed by 10 AM during the campaign, so he was at a serious disadvantage. Unless he was having mimosas.
A little light reading from Dictator of the Month:
The National Guard or state police force in Venezuela has been accused of intimidation and bullying tactics of opposition, reminiscent of the Mussolini brownshirts in the 1930's. It is also troubling that nationalism and xenophobia are seemingly fostered by the government, combined with a push to have the population loyal to Chávez and not to the country. He has created a cult of personality about himself, creating the illusion to the masses that he is infallible; as a speaker Chávez has a bombastic style, literally working his audience up into a frenzy.Chávez seems also to aspire to unite much of South America's sentiment against foreigners, notably the United States. He speaks of a continental vision, but clearly not without much influence from himself.
We pro-liberty types have long argued that authoritarians' left or right political identities matter less the more extreme they are. Chavez is a self described leftist, friend of Cuba's Castro, but what would change if he were to identify himself as a fascist?
The answer is that his allies would change. Foreign leftists couldn't support him if he self identified with the political right. That he harnesses nationalism (regionalism, too), intimidates the press and corporations, and supresses labor unions like any good fascist would matters little as long as he can keep his leftist label.
Most every time I see someone closing down his personal blog I think it's a mistake.
Glenn Reynolds makes what seems to me to be a serious error here:
I'VE GENERALLY FAVORED OPEN IMMIGRATION, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one.Illegal immigrants as individuals just trying to make a better life are sympathetic. Illegal immigrants as a mass movement making demands on the polity are considerably less so.
500,000 in LA, 50,000 here in Denver, and I saw many of them. What makes Glenn think that they are illegals?
This is an error made all to frequently by the closed border crowd, and I'm surprised he falls into it. Not all brown people are here illegally. The vast majority are here legally, and I think its a big stretch to assume these demonstrators are illegals.
Update: (For clarity) Obviously, some of the demonstrators are here illegally. That doesn't make it a mass of illegal immigrants.
I didn't make it down to Civic Center Park, but judging from the traffic and large number of pedestrians in the area there was a very large turnout for the immigration rally here in Denver.
Initial news reports indicate the same.
Update: The AP reports:
More than 50,000 people gathered downtown Saturday as part of a national protest against a crackdown in immigration laws, including federal legislation aimed at criminalizing illegal immigrants and building more walls along the U.S.-Mexico border.Protesters also came out to urge the state Senate to reject a resolution supporting a ballot issue that would deny many government services to illegal immigrants in Colorado.
The large crowd surprised police officers, who were expecting only a few thousand people at Civic Center Park next to the Capitol and Denver city and county buildings, said Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson.
But the crowd, mostly made up of families and older people, was respectful and the four-hour rally ended without incident, he said.
Families with children in tow were what I saw.
The truth at the core of much often-tiresome blog triumphalism is precisely that the Post probably couldn't have vetted anyone as effectively as a blogospheric swarm. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I assume it was something like this: When Domenech got hired, hundreds or even thousands of bloggers and blog readers began looking back at his previous work. Maybe someone saw a phrase they thought looked familiar and started Googling. Once the first instance of apparent plagiarism was spotted and blogged, thousands more began looking through that same body of writing, perhaps with each individual only checking a few pieces, a few phrases at a time. The same task would have taken a committed body of researchers days, but because the task was what Net theorist Yochai Benkler would call highly modular and granular—capable of being broken up into highly fine-grained microtasks—a distributed swarm of bloggers was able to accomplish it incredibly quickly, turning up many more instances in a matter of hours. The blogosphere's virtues on this front are not necessarily the Post's defects...
Not that I feel sorry for the Post. Is there a job opening, then?
Roy Moore (remember him?) argues in favor of the State's right to execute homosexuals.
Denver Reasonoid Gathering II
The Sequel is only the beginning.
7 PM March 24, this Friday.
Rockbottom Brewery
1001 16th Street #A-100
Denver, CO 80265
Email mediageek if you're interested in attending.
The plan: food, conversation, booze, tobacco, and other things The Man
doesn't like.
I was at the last one, and plan to be at this one. See you there?
A Drunkablog visit to the Rocky Mountain News!
Good move on Linda Seebach's part.
Catching up on more stuff I've missed in the last couple weeks, like this bit from Andrew Sullivan, an excerpt of a New Yorker column by Michael Specter:
"Religious conservatives are unapologetic; not only do they believe that mass use of an HPV vaccine or the availability of emergency contraception will encourage adolescents to engage in unacceptable sexual behavior; some have even stated that they would feel similarly about an H.I.V. vaccine, if one became available. 'We would have to look at that closely,' Reginald Finger, an evangelical Christian and a former medical adviser to the conservative political organization Focus on the Family, said. 'With any vaccine for H.I.V., disinhibition' - a medical term for the absence of fear - 'would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to with a great deal of care.' Finger sits on the Centers for Disease Control's Immunization Committee, which makes those recommendations."
I'm a member of an evangelical Christian church. I've never heard anyone say they wouldn't want a vaccine for HIV. I'm not embarrassed to be a Christian, but I would be embarrassed to be any way associated with Mr. Finger.
It's difficult to convert dead people.
Some right-wing blogger I've hardly heard of gets a gig at the Washington Post, which doesn't seem like important news to me, but it has a lot of lefties agitiated.
But why do so many use the term home-schooled as a pejorative?
I admire the impulse that parents have to take responsibility for their children's education themselves instead of farming them out to government schools. I wish it were an option for mine.
Could the critics just be jealous? Nah, too easy.
John Stossel here answers claims that his "Stupid in America" TV special was innacurate.
He concludes, "But the most important point to remember is quite simple: If public schools are good, they have nothing to fear from school choice. Students and parents will choose them."
Boingboing is one of the best sites on the internets, but I'll still chide Cory Doctorow for describing the Cato Institute as "ultra-libertarian, right-wing."
Two contradictory terms, bro.
Tyler Cowen asks, "What is your most absurd view? ... Yes your comment should be crazy but serious too. It should refer to a view which you actually hold, but many other smart people consider untenable and bizarre."
The ensuing comments are interesting, too. But I'm compelled to add my views here. (I sense a meme developing.)
One I've mentioned before, that the federal government could be successfully funded entirely by donations, including maintaining the military at superpower levels.
Here's another, perhaps less contrarian: All drugs could be decriminalized and made available over the counter without making much difference in rates of addiction among the population. Perhaps rates of addiction to the most dangerous drugs would actually drop.
Also, the politics of liberty advance via natural selection, meaning that in spite of popular and political opposition to libertarian politics, the countries which most zealously guard the rights of their citizens are the ones most likely to be successful.
I'm curious to hear from more people on this subject.
"I believe it is fair to say most Republicans did not think George W. Bush was motivated to run for the presidency for the primary reason of cutting or controlling spending. But it is also fair to say that they did not think he was Lyndon B. Johnson. And that's what he's turned into."
Which quote is related to this USA Today article, Federal aid programs expand at record rate. (Published while I was on vacation) Excerpted:
A sweeping expansion of social programs since 2000 has sparked a record increase in the number of Americans receiving federal government benefits such as college aid, food stamps and health care.A USA TODAY analysis of 25 major government programs found that enrollment increased an average of 17% in the programs from 2000 to 2005. The nation's population grew 5% during that time. [...]
It was the largest five-year expansion of the federal safety net since the Great Society created programs such as Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.
Spending on these social programs was $1.3 trillion in 2005, up an inflation-adjusted 22% since 2000 and accounting for more than half of federal spending. Enrollment growth was responsible for three-fourths of the spending increase, according to USA TODAY's analysis of federal enrollment and spending data. Higher benefits accounted for the rest.
That won't stop some Democrats from claiming Republicans don't care about the poor. But considering what the welfare state does to its 'beneficiaries,' that claim may actually have some merit for once.
FWIW, I think its fair to say each of those parties has equal regard for the poor.
Posting from Houston, after a quick 1,000 mile road trip. (and a big happy howdy to my new aquaintance in the Johnson County Sherrif's dept)
Conditions here; unseasonably warm in the mid 80's, humid (of course), and my game is in the dumps.
From an interview published last September:
AVC: It's really interesting to hear you sound so optimistic. One interviewer circa Workbook called you "the most depressed man in rock." That's quite a title.Bob Mould: He's never met Stephin Merritt, obviously. [Laughs.]
Which leads to this question - is every musician I appreciate depressed? Is it something I said?
I heard him speak once during the 2000 election season. It was on that day that I first began to see the madness of a system that would give us George W. Bush and Al Gore as “serious” candidates while treating a man like Harry Browne as a “joke".
I once heard Harry (only half jokingly) say he'd live to be 120 if only we could get rid of the FDA.
Today the FDA is still with us but Mr. Browne is not.
He'll be missed.