The Lessons of the Michigan Civil Rights Victory

In Michigan last November the voters spoke loudly on the question of race, affirmative action, and “diversity.”  They voted against it.  Ward Connerly gives us a chance to review the state of the fight against race preferences. There are ten points that need to be made, he argues:

1. Just because the Supreme Court votes against “diversity” it doesn’t mean that the fight is over.
2. Self government means that we must listen to “the collective wisdom of the people.”  And they voted against the “exhortations of nearly every component of the Michigan establishment — social, civic, political, and business.”
3. The race industry is now reduced to persuading white women to support affirmative action.  It has now failed in Michigan, California, and Washington State.
4. Americans now believe that affirmative action equals race preferences.
5. Even “larger-than-life” figures like Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama can’t persuade Americans to support race preferences.
6. The term “ minority” has ceased to have anything to do with numbers.  It just means “social and economic disadvantage.”
7. However nobly it began, “affirmative action is viewed as an entitlement for ‘women and minorities,’ not only to ‘level the playing field’ but to achieve the amorphous objective of ‘diversity.’”
8. The race preference advocates are amazingly disciplined.  It amounts to a “national ‘diversity’ industry.”
9. Republicans who run away from race are despicable.
10. The victory in Michigan is big.

Connerly now proposes that it is time to deliver the coup de grace on affirmative action.  He proposed a “Super Tuesday for Equality” election in November 2008 with a civil rights initiative in several states at once.

PHP Arrays and XML-RPC

Are you frustrated by the XML-RPC technology?  Having trouble figuring how to get a hold of items after they have been transmitted over XML?  So was I.  Now I think I have figured it out.

Blog Ping

Let’s look first of all at a weblog update call using XMLRPC implementation by Keith Devens. You are going to send a ping to weblogs.com.

First, you start with an array:

$params = array(XMLRPC_prepare("my Blog"),XMLRPC_prepare("http://myblog.com/"));

Then you send it off.

$method = "weblogUpdates.ping";

$result = XMLRPC_request( "rpc.weblogs.com", "/RPC2", $method, $params );

When you pack it into the XML file it looks like this.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<methodCall>

    <methodName>examples.getStateName</methodName>

    <params>

      <param>

        <value>

          <string>My Blog</string>

        </value>

      </param>

      <param>

        <value>

          <string>http://myblog.com</string>

        </value>

      </param>

    </params>

</methodCall>

When you get it back from XML into PHP you will want to look at it in a PHP array. Suppose you get the parameters like this:

$xmlrpc_request = XMLRPC_parse($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);
$params = XMLRPC_getParams($xmlrpc_request);

Now you want to know how to get your three parameters. You do it like this:

$blogName = $params[0];

$blogURL = $params[1]

It’s that simple.

Blog Post

OK. Now let’s look at doing a blog post using the metaWebLog API. Now we have to put together a struct. What then?

A struct looks like this in PHP.

$struct = array (

’title’ => ’Blog Title’,

’description’ => ’Blog Post Content’);

When it gets to XML it looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<methodCall>

  <methodName>metaWeblog.newPost</methodName>

  <params>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>id</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>user</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <string>pass</string>

      </value>

    </param>

    <param>

      <value>

        <struct>

          <member>

            <name>description</name>

            <value>

              <string>Blog Post Content</string>

            </value>

          </member>

          <member>

            <name>title</name>

            <value>

              <string>Blog Title</string>

            </value>

          </member>

        </struct>

      </value>

    </param>

  </params>

</methodCall>

You then get it out of the XML file like this:

$xmlrpc_request = XMLRPC_parse($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA);

$struct = XMLRPC_getParams($xmlrpc_request);

How to get the values? Like this:

$title = $struct[’title’];

$content = $struct[’description’];

And that’s it.

The Rule of the Idiots

Suppose that you applied for health insurance and the insurance company said that they wouldn’t insure you because of some pre-existing condition. What should you do?

1. Call your congressman to write a law forcing all insurance companies to insure you.
2. Find an insurance company that will insure you anyway.

As Arnold Kling writes, the two choices represent the market approach to life or the philosopher king approach. Plato vs. Milton Friedman.

One solution, that might be traced to the expression "philosopher-king" associated with Plato, is to hand the reins of government to the best and the brightest. Since the late 19th-century, the Progressive Movement in American politics has championed this approach. The Progressive vision, which [Progressive Brad] DeLong embraces, is to channel brains and technical know-how through government in order to improve people’s lives.

The other approach is the Milton Friedman way. It is the wayof limiting the power that other people have over us, with constitutions andmarkets.

Friedman’s insight is that a market limits the power thatothers have over us; conversely, limiting the power that others have over usallows us to have markets.

Progressive DeLong has a saying, according to Kling: “Why oh Why Are We Ruled by These Idiots?” It’s a good point. But what is the best way to avoid such misery? Find bright, intelligent, wise people to rule over us, or limit the power of any person to rule over us?

That, of course is the great Question of our time and of every time.

A "Civ-Con" Is Born

It must be a measure of the breadth and depth of the American conservative movement that it has such a complex taxonomy.  There are, as John Fonte writes:

economic conservatives, social conservatives, national-defense conservatives, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, and even “crunchy” conservatives or “crunchy cons.”

But is that really enough? There is no better time to think through and revise the organization of the fighting forces than after electoral defeat.  And Fonte wants to try a new label.  

If I had to choose from the labels above, national-defense conservative would come the closest. But it doesn’t quite fit. So let me try a new label. I am a civic conservative, a “civ-con.”

Yes but what is a  “civ-con?”

At the level of highest principle civic conservatism emphasizes the Unum in E Pluribus Unum and puts American national cohesion over any group interest.

In other words it puts the national identity of the United States as the primary group identification.  And that means a certain approach to politics.

In terms of contemporary policy, civic conservatism emphasizes the following principles: the equality of American citizenship; the learning of America’s history and values, properly understood; the imperative of assimilating immigrants patriotically into the American way of life (what we proudly used to call Americanization); and the indivisibility of American sovereignty.

Who could argue with that?  Well, plenty of people.  Our liberal friends, for example. 

Liberals believe that the “traditionally marginalized” deserve special privileges; they subsume American history and values beneath a post-nationalist narrative about a one-world government; they don’t believe in an American way of life, and they don’t believe in American sovereignty.

Ordinary Americans do believe all these things.  A conservative movement that presented a soaring civic-conservatism to Americans could earn and could deserve their political support.

Why Tolerance Is Not Enough For Gays

Ordinary people may wonder at the energy with which gays advocate for “gay marriage” and “gay adoption.” Surely, isn’t tolerance enough?

Philosopher Roger Scruton provides the answer.  The problem with tolerance is that is still regards the heterosexual as normal and the homosexual as abnormal.

[T]his attitude does not satisfy the activists. For to tolerate is to disapprove. It is only when conduct offends you that you need to exercise your toleration, and the activists want people to treat homosexuality as normal.

For homosexuality to consider itself normal, it must acquire the same trappings as heterosexuality: partner benefits, marriage, adoption, inheritance. But God is not mocked, as they say.

The propaganda that has tried to rewrite heterosexuality as an “orientation” is really an attempt to persuade us to overlook the real truth about sexual union, which is that it is, in its normal form, the way in which one generation gives way to the next.

You can say that sexuality is just an “orientation” as much as you like, and you can bully people into agreeing with you.  But alas, it doesn’t make it so.

Middle-Class Secret of Success

Democrats like Senator Jim Webb claim that the middle class is in crisis. In his “barn-burner” of a speech responding to President Bush he claimed:

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

Well, is Jim Webb right?  Money columnist Liz Pulliam takes a look.  Are people “helpless pawns in a game that’s rigged against them” as Jim Webb claims?  Or could it be that they are screwed because it’s their “Own Damned Fault?”

I believe a middle-class life is still possible for most people. But you have to be smarter, more cautious and faster on your feet than ever before. You have to obey some deceptively simple rules. And one thing is certain: Wherever you currently stand on the economic ladder, the surest way to rise is to pull yourself up.

And that sums up the truth in Jim Webb’s diatribe.  We Americans have to be smarter.  We can’t just live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the world to ladle out the gravy.  Sure wages and salaries are low compared to corporate profits.  But then where do higher wages and salaries come from?  Our manufacturing base is being dismantled.  But Americans now work in front of computers, not in front of steel furnaces.

It’s easy to rail about the effects of globalization in barn-burning speeches.  But the only way to stay No. 1 is to work harder and smarter than No. 2.

The problem is that some people may think that a chap like Jim Webb can come along and bring back the good old days of lifetime employment and guaranteed pensions. 

Ain’t gonna happen. 

And Jim, here’s a question.  If medical costs have skyrocketed and college tuition rates are off the charts why would that be?

It couldn’t be that health care and college education are both riddled with government subsidy, could it?

Let's Get Serious About Energy

Why do we keep on this chimera of “energy independence?” Ever since the oil shock of the 1970s the government has been talking about it.  And as Charles Krauthammer notes,

By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the oil embargo of 1973 have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

Now we have another call for energy independence—to switch to ethanol, of all things, ethanol made from switchgrass.

[T]he happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

Oh dear.  We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Now, let’s do a quick analysis to see who is serious about energy in the United States.  Who opposes these serious things?

• Tax gas—conservative oppose
• Drill in the arctic—liberals oppose
• Go nuclear—liberals oppose

So that means that conservatives win in the seriousness stakes, 2 to 1.