The folks at the Texas Public Policy Foundation are cranking up the analysis in advance of next year’s budget fight. So this would be the perfect time to offer up a deep, insightful delve into the labyrinth structure of the Texas state budget process, from the roles of the Legislative Budget Board and the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts all the way to the Governor’s desk, to the intricate details of the biannual and supplemental budget processes. Such a piece would also break down the various revenue streams, from oil and gasses leases, property tax, sales tax and federal grants.
Too damn bad I’m not doing that.
It’s not for lack of material. Just in the last few days, TPPF has produced:
But frankly, I’m still recovering from Thanksgiving and have fallen behind on a ton of stuff I need to do (raking leaves, vacuuming, cooking and book cataloging, to name but four), so I’m going to pass on the heavy analytical lifting today, thank you.
The usual Social Justice Warrior types have been talking about how High tech is a “hostile environment” for women. But as this piece by a woman who learned her chops in the hacker culture makes clear, the people who really ruined women’s careers in programming were feminists.
Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I’d never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.
But then feminists ruined everything. Some choice quotes:
“I’ve also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don’t: I was here before the sexism moral panic started.”
“I’m not young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada Initiative who’d have me passive-aggressively redcarding anyone who bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social conflict I have is because of my sex.”
“‘Male privilege is a way to say ‘you are guilty because you don’t have boobs, feel ashamed, even if you did nothing wrong.'”
I disagree with some points (I think the influence of fashion dolls and like like in shaping girl’s choices (rather that reflecting existing preferences) somewhat overrated), but it’s still worth reading the whole thing.
“If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit.”
The Democrats, if they had any remaining intellectual honesty, would hold their convention in Detroit. Democratic leadership, Democratic unions and the Democratic policies that empower them, Democrat-dominated school bureaucracies, Democrat-style law enforcement, Democratic levels of taxation and spending, the politics of protest and grievance in the classical Democratic mode — all of these have made Detroit what it is today: an unwholesome slop-pail of woe and degradation that does not seem to belong in North America, a craptastical crater groaning with misery, a city-shaped void in what once was the industrial soul of the nation. If you want to see the end point of Barack Obama’s shining path, visit Detroit.
“The group toward whom [Obama]’s shown the greatest contempt, however, is low-skilled American workers, particularly blacks.”
Consider: There will be only five red-state Senate Democrats left in the next Congress if, as expected, Sen. Mary Landrieu is defeated in next month’s runoff. Even more striking, there will be only five House Democrats left representing districts that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. The once-influential Blue Dog Caucus of fiscally hawkish Democrats is all but extinct. Republicans now boast twice as many blue-state senators (10) and five times as many blue-district representatives (25) than their Democratic counterparts in red territory.
While lots of ink has been spilled charting the GOP’s drift rightward, the Democratic Party’s move toward ideological homogeneity has been shorter and swifter.
(Hat tip: Instapundit, who notes “The Democratic Party has become an aging, regional party with a diversity problem.”)
You know how California’s Prop 30 tax hikes in 2012 were supposed to prevent university pension hikes? Guess what? “Despite the massive tax hikes ostensibly to keep higher education affordable, the University of California Board of Regents just announced a sizable increase in tuition.” Let’s hope that students at California universities learn the proper lesson: tax hikes are never temporary.
The Ferguson indictment (or non-indictment) is evidently coming down at 8 PM tonight. Why the night rather than the day, and why now rather than during the next polar vortex, I couldn’t tell you. It’s almost like somebody somewhere wants a riot.
Police presence is described as “extremely heavy.” Shops have boarded up their windows. Barricades are already up in the courthouse, and heavy Homeland Security presence there has already been reported.
Descriptions of the “protestors” on site doesn’t sound terribly encouraging:
Protester tells me he has a gun and he has every right to use if the police put their hands on him. Then flashes me the gun. #Ferguson
I had an entire set of stuff lined up for yesterday’s LinkSwarm, but in the rush of amnesty-related news I managed to forget to paste it into the right file. D’oh!
So enjoy your rare complimentary Weekend LinkSwarm!
GamerGate: “A new, radical and dangerously illiberal left which marinates in a hideous quagmire of resentment, smugness, vacuousness and contempt for free discussion.”
