Later, while putting together a post at the kitchen table: DING DONG
Two earnest cause-mongers campaigning on behalf of the earth. I wanted to say “nature ripped out the bunnies from their soft home and drank their blood, and you want me to help it? With money?” but I just said “sorry, I work at home, and I’m working now” before they even got the chance to start the spiel. Their faces fell from friendly to sullen in a second like souffles collapsing from the sound of gunshot, and they seemed perturbed. I hadn’t been unfriendly; I’d smiled. Just stated the facts. I’m under no obligation to stand here and listen to what you care about. Sometimes I’m tempted to cut out an editorial and tape it to the door, and when I see someone coming around with a Cause, open the door and start reading out the particulars of my cause, and ask them what they would like to do. I’d have a petition and everything. And if they signed, I’d say thanks, and close the door.
I lecture Jehovah’s Witnesses on space theology. They never last long.
…not only is Inman not someone who is likely to back down, he is about infinitely times more creative than whatever drone is running FunnyJunk.com. He has reposted the letter, annotated it and illustrated it, and included an enormous list of links to pages on FunnyJunk.com where his work was even then being displayed without credit. (They have since taken those pages down, because they’re sneaky like that and also probably don’t know about the Wayback Machine.)
He also declared that rather than pay the drone and/or his lawyer $20,000, he would try to raise that much money through donations, “take a photo of the raised money” and “mail you that photo, along with this drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear” before donating the money to charity.
As of today (Tuesday) at 2 pm Pacific time, he had raised $120,414.
We are less than two grand from the goal for the space-safety Kickstarter project. I have an offer from a potential donor to match the next thousand that comes in, which means that the rest of you only have to contribute a thousand on your own over the next two and a half days to get it home. Please, have at it.
I’ve uploaded the video from the Kickstarter project to Youtube in the hope of giving it more exposure, with only a little over four days to go. Unfortunately. I can’t come up with any way to steer people to the project from there. I don’t seem to be able to edit the description of the video, and comments don’t allow links.
Don’t miss Mark Steyn’s latest on Barack Hussein Kardashian:
…there are some cheap seats available. A year and a half ago, big-money Democrats in Rhode Island paid $7,500 per person for the privilege of having dinner with President Obama at a private home in Providence. He showed up for 20 minutes and then said he couldn’t stay for dinner. “I’ve got to go home to walk the dog and scoop the poop,” he told them, because when you’ve paid seven-and-a-half grand for dinner nothing puts you in the mood to eat like a guy talking about canine fecal matter. And, having done the poop gag, the president upped and exited, and left bigshot Dems to pass the evening talking to the guy from across the street. But you’ve got to admit that’s a memorable night out: $7,500 for Dinner with Obama* (*dinner with Obama not included).
At least he didn’t say he had to go home and eat the dog.
Even the best tax regimes are cannibalistic: Every tax is an incentive for the taxpayer to relocate to a more friendly jurisdiction. But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions). The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit? This is not angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. People do not invest in firms, industries, cities, or countries they do not trust. Corruption makes people poor.
And here are some recent graphic images of the results, from (Michigan ex-pat) Amy Alkon. As went Detroit, so will go the country, if the Democrats get their way on a national level, as they did in Detroit.