At almost this exact time last year, I wrote this in response to a petitioning campaign by MoveOn.org over proposed cuts to government grants to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Don’t get me wrong. I like PBS and NPR is just about all the radio I ever listen to. The issue here isn’t whether they should face a funding crisis or not; I hope that they don’t. Rather, it’s what you should do in the face of that funding crisis. MoveOn just invested an incredible amount of time, money, and energy into mobilizing a bunch of Progressives to whine about it in Congress and beg for the money back. Meanwhile, instead of signing an online petition, calling my Representative, and e-mailing my friends and colleagues to get them to shake the change cup with me, I shut up and put down a pledge of $10 / month to Detroit Public Television.

Now, if 1,091,509 people in MoveOn’s orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, then by my calculations PBS and NPR would have $130,981,080 more money for programming in the upcoming year. More importantly, they’d have that $131 million no matter what Congress and the Senate decided to do.

You might claim that not everyone who gets MoveOn e-mails will put down a pledge, but a lot more people will put down a zero-cost signature. You might think that MoveOn just can’t command that kind of money. Well, that strikes me as making excuses: we are talking about the group that just threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (depending on the as-yet unreleased budget data for their 501(c)(4) branch) down the tubes for electable John Kerry just last year. But fundraising is tricky, and maybe they wouldn’t make as much as they might hope. But think it about it this way: when you give money directly to people doing good work, the economics of failing to meet your goals are different. Lobbying is, more or less, an all-or-nothing game, with very few chances for gains on the margin. Names on a petition may or may not make a difference; but if they don’t make a difference (and, frankly, it doesn’t look like they made much of one here) then the names and pious hopes that NPR and PBS got out of the campaign aren’t worth the electrons that they’re printed on. But if you don’t hit your targets in direct support, the contributions you did get are money in the bank, no matter what. If only half as many people pledged as signed the petition, well, then PBS and NPR would have $65,490,540 that they didn’t have before. If the average contribution was $30 instead of a $10 / month pledge, they’d would have $32,745,270. Maybe that will save Big Bird and maybe it won’t; but even if it doesn’t it’s a darn sight better and more secure than the nothing that failed petitioning campaigns produce.

There’s a general principles here worth mentioning; it’s a principle the Left used to care about. It’s called direct action, and the longer the Progressive wing of the Left keeps ignoring it — the longer that they spend throwing time and organizing effort down the tubes to beg the government to support the institutions that they like — the longer we are all going to be losers.

— GT 2005-06-25: Shut up and put up

Above: Mister Buckles is saving public broadcasting!

Hey, guess what showed up in my inbox last week? Quick! Everybody make a massive public outcry!

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Civic Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: 6/8/2006
Subject: Save NPR and PBS (again)

Everyone expected House Republicans to give up efforts to kill NPR and PBS after a massive public outcry stopped them last year. But they’ve just voted to eliminate funding for NPR and PBS–unbelievably, starting with programs like Sesame Street.

Public broadcasting would lose nearly a quarter of its federal funding this year. Even worse, all funding would be eliminated in two years–threatening one of the last remaining sources of watchdog journalism.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS again this year …

Here’s what Winer was referring to:

Health research, school aid and social services for the poor would bear budget cuts under a bill approved by a House panel Wednesday. … The House Appropriations Labor-HHS Subcommittee approved the bill by a 9-7 party-line vote Wednesday …. The panel’s action also rekindles a battle fought last year over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The bill would cut by 5 percent previously appropriated funds for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 and eliminate subsidies for educational programs and technological upgrades. The bill also fails to provide future-year funding for public television as is the typical practice.

— Andrew Taylor, The Guardian (2006-06-16): House Panel Cuts Health Research Budget

Four days later, Winer was ecstatic to report:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Civic Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: 6/12/2006
Subject: Save NPR and PBS (again)

Dear Charles,

I just wanted to share some very cool news with you.

Over the last couple of days, over 300,000 people (including 80,000 who are totally new to MoveOn) have signed on to our petition to save NPR and PBS. That brings the total number of signers to over 1,400,000–making this not only our largest petition ever, but one of the largest petitions anyone’s done.

But the next vote in Congress will be as soon as tomorrow. To stop Congress’ budget cuts, we need to go even bigger: we’re aiming for 1.5 million of us to sign on by tomorrow. Can you join us by adding your name to the petition to protect NPR and PBS? It just takes a minute, but it’ll make a real impact.

The real impact that this made was to send over 1,400,000 copies of the following note to members of Congress:

TO: Your senators and representative
FROM: (Your Name and Email)
SUBJECT: Save NPR and PBS

Dear senators and representative,

(Your personal note)

Congress must save NPR, PBS, and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.

This strong show of public outrage produced the following real impact on June 13:

WASHINGTON — The House Appropriations Committee voted Tuesday to restore $20 million of proposed cuts in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money to local public television and radio stations.

The Bush administration originally proposed to cut about 37% of the federal funding for public broadcasting, and a subcommittee last week proposed a cut of $115 million, or 23%.

A net cut of $95 million, if passed by the House and the Senate, would go into effect Oct. 1. It would result in the elimination of some educational programming, including Ready to Learn, a literacy program, and Ready to Teach, an online resource for teachers, according to a National Public Radio spokesman.

—Los Angeles Times (2006-06-14): Smaller Bite Sought Out of Corporation for Public Broadcasting

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) – The House Appropriations Committee voted on Tuesday to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and refused to fund the service for 2009.

— Brooks Boliek, Reuters (2006-06-14): House panel votes to slash public broadcast funds

Meanwhile, I shut the fuck up and made an annual contribution to my local PBS station at the $40 membership level. If those 1.4 million people in the MoveOn orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, public broadcasters would now have over $56,000,000 to put in the bank, no matter what Congressional Republicans say or do or think about it. The time, energy, and money wasted on throwing 1.4 million nearly identical notes about money well spent managed to salvage a bit more than a third of that in reductions to the budget cuts, and it leaves PBS and NPR at the mercy of next year’s round of government budgeting. (Oh, but don’t you worry–when that happens I’m sure that MoveOn will mount another massive public outcry to save PBS and NPR again, again.)

We can do this ourselves, so quit begging. Shut up and put up.

A few days ago, The Guardian newsblog noted the visit that Donald Evil Lord Skeletor Rumsfeld made to Viet Nam. Here’s how the Master of War tried to impress his hosts and express his admiration for the achievements of Vietnamese civilization:

Mr Rumsfeld, who first served as defence secretary almost three decades ago, just a few months after the North Vietnamese defeated South Vietnam, turned on the charm during his visit.

At the Temple of Literature, one of Hanoi’s main tourist attractions, he enthusiastically struck a ritual gong. He also told Vietnam’s defence minister, Pham Van Tra, that when the university was founded, some 700 years before the US existed, people in North America were living in mud huts.

Of course, when the university at the Temple of Literature was founded, 700 hundred years before the U.S. existed, it was A.D. 1076. So the people in North America whose backwardness Rumsfeld was referring to were not, actually, white Americans like Rumsfeld, but rather American Indians. Thus we have the fascinating sight of a white man trying to turn on the intercultural charm and express some cultural humility — by mentioning the primitive living conditions of people in a different civilization from his own that happened to be living, at the time, on the land that he now lives on. I guess that’s one way to practice internationalism.

In any case, let’s check out some of those mud huts that people in North America were living in at the time:

Temple of Kukulcan and El Caracol Observatory, in Chichén Itzá, the metropolis of a Mayan-Toltec civilization ca. 980 C.E.

Tula, located in present-day Hidalgo. 10th and 11th century Toltec metropolis. Estimated population of 30,000 or more.

Taos Pueblo, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico. Northern Tiwa urban center. Adobe structures built between ca. 1050 – 1350 C.E.

Monte Albán, in present-day Oaxaca. Built by the Zapotec people ca. 550 C.E. – 1000 C.E.

Bloody savages.

Incense urn from Mayapan, in the image of the rain god Chaac.

(Link thanks to No Treason 2006-04-23.)

Here’s erudite, conservative intellectual Kim DuToit breaking it down for us on why he has no problem at all with the NSA collecting a massive database of your phone records, and why you shouldn’t have a problem with it, either.

By way of background, DuToit has just spent a great deal of time discussing his experience collecting a huge database of information on customer purchases for the grocery store he worked for, using one of those annoying little loyalty card swipers. The idea is that you collect a lot more data than you could ever reasonably be interested in, and then ignore 80% of it to focus on the folks on the margin that you’re interested in:

Here’s the Big Clue for the Clueless: if you don’t collect all the data, you can’t narrow the search at all. And it’s only once you’ve established that Abdul is a Bad Guy that you ascertain his number, and the numbers of his correspondents, and their names. Most of the calls will be innocent: the dry cleaners, the gas company, the liquor store, whatever.

But out of the couple hundred calls, you may find five that are to Mohamed Semmteks, and to Tariq Pilota, who are also terrorists, and whose calls you can now start investigating.

So from tens of billions to a couple hundred to five. And in these cases, it’s NOW when you, as the investigator, can get a warrant for a wiretap so you can start listening to actual content, which, out of all the data mentioned so far, is the only part protected by the First Amendment.

That’s how to do it—and more importantly, that’s the only way to do it when you’re starting from scratch.

As far as the vast majority of us are concerned, there’s not much to worry about. Nobody at the NSA is interested in the call you made to your Mom, or even to the call you made to your mistress. Don’t kid yourself: you’re not that interesting.

Just as I was never interested in whether Betsy Smith bought Tide or Tidy-Cat.

But I have to tell you, I am really glad that someone at the NSA was doing their job, and began to collect the data a long time ago—because otherwise it would now be gone, and we’d be behind the curve, just as we were on 9/10/2001.

—Kim DuToit, The Other Side (2006-05-12): Database ClueBat

On the other hand, one wonders whether there’s any guarantee that what No Such Agency is interested in will always line up with your freedom and personal safety. Perhaps the government spooks’ interests aren’t always interests that they ought to be able to pursue. I’m sure I’m just being Terminally Clueless here, and wildly paranoid to boot, but, hell, let’s check and see what an expert thinks about the government keeping massive databases for surveillance of legitimate exercises of individual rights, and the potential for abuse of those databases.

Specifically, here’s erudite, conservative intellectual Kim DuToit breaking it down for us on why he has a problem with the Justice Department collecting a massive database of his gun purchases, and why you should have a problem with it, too:

One of the basic disadvantages of the State knowing who is armed and who isn't, is that the State knows who has to be disarmed, if they are to impose any kind of tyranny. …

As we saw earlier in the case of Nazi Germany, by giving the State the ability to identify gun owners, we give the State the ability to disarm us.

This is not a situation of Trust us, we'll never do that. We would be incredibly naïve to fall for that nonsense. In all of history, assumption of government benevolence has been betrayed, sooner or later, and the greater the power of the State, the sooner comes the betrayal.

Gun owners know the underlying motives behind gun registration, and we are not reassured or fooled by the weasel denials of politicians. Licensing and registration constitute infringement, and that's prohibited by the Second Amendment. Anyway, we know the progression.

— Kim DuToit, The Other Side (2003-02-26): Part VII: Gun Registration

I guess it’s a good thing that freedom of speech and freedom of association aren’t important individual rights like gun ownership is. Otherwise, we might have a real problem here.

Here are some highlights from our Prince President’s recent remarks on immigration policy

1. Existing immigration policy is deeply flawed and in need of comprehensive, liberalizing reform. So our first priority should be to immediately increase the resources devoted to enforcing an admittedly unreasonable policy.

2. The United States is not going to militarize the southern border. The Feds are just going to deploy 6,000 soldiers to to the southern border, with high-tech barricades and air support, in order to secure and enforce their full control of it.

3. The government currently has trouble identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants because they often carry forged identification documents. In order to combat this problem, the government should introduce a new identification document.

4. We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions and that every human being has dignity and value, no matter what their citizenship papers say. On the other hand, Americans are bound together by our shared ideals, an appreciation of our history, respect for the flag we fly, and an ability to speak and write the English language, so those with real lives who aren’t so sure about those ideals, that history, the flag, or who don’t see any reason to learn a foreign language, will still be thrown into newly-expanded detention camps, have their livelihoods destroyed, and will be exiled from the country as expeditiously as possible.

Thank you, and good night.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-03-31: Libertarians Against Property Rights: You Will Be Assimilated edition
• No Treason (2006-05-15): Bush calls for biometric ID
• Majiksthise (2006-05-16): Rejecting mass deportation is the middle ground

From Vox Day, anti-feminist knuckle-dragger, regular WorldNetDaily columnist, and self-proclaimed Christian libertarian:

Dear Jorge plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security — resources which will never materialize — in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America’s wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic — it’s just not going to work.

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

— Vox Day, WorldNetDaily column (2006-05-16): Against a fence

Well, at least you can’t accuse him of weaseling about his position, or about the kind of instrumental means that he’s willing to consider.

Some days From the Horror File just isn’t enough to describe it.

Update 2006-05-17: WorldNetDaily has silently edited Vox Day’s column this morning to remove the reference to the Holocaust from the third paragraph, without any notice either of the content of the change, or even that a change has been made. Here are the edits:

You can compare and contrast for yourself by consulting Vox Day’s unedited archival copy of the column.

Meanwhile, Vox cites the following as a reasonable question about his choice of examples:

Why exactly did you go with Nazi Germany, when Slobodan Milosevic’s tactics toward Kosovar Albanians seems more in line with what you’re proposing?

Well, then. That clears it all up, doesn’t it?