Shutdown: If They Won't Run It, Other People Will Be Lining Up To Do So

The usa.gov site has been turned into a Democratic propaganda site for ginning up outrage against the shutdown.

Among its bullet points:

"Every one of America’s national parks and monuments, from Yosemite to the Smithsonian to the Statue of Liberty, will be immediately closed."

Web sites like nasa.gov and nps.gov have been pettily blocked with "shutdown" intro pages rather than simply letting them run would have cost nothing.

You know, I meant to blog about this years ago, but for some reason never got around to it. My family visited the Grand Canyon a few years back, and one thing I noticed while there was that virtually everything interesting and worthwhile that had been done to enhance the site had been done by private individuals.

The first path down for the mule trains was maintained for years by the Kolb Brothers who also built their famous home and photography studio handing over the edge of the canyon. The Hopi House, Lookout Studio, the El Tovar Hotel -- all the really beautiful facilities -- were built by private railroad money and investors.

The park service was antagonistic to the Kolb brothers for years and since the government eventually forced them out, they really haven't done anything except minor improvements to the trail. The government-built hotels are ugly and dingy, nothing like the gorgeous El Tovar. We didn't realize this and ended up getting booked into a terrible piece of crap government motel that would have made a Motel 6 blush in shame.

Honestly, if the government turned the tourist areas of the Grand Canyon over to a private business to run, it would be a huge improvement.

Making Things Work

Hat tip from Ace: Scenes From the Ruling Class

Trent Lott on Ted Cruz: "Cut His Legs Out From Under Him"

Lott said, "They've made their point," Lott huffed. "It's time to say enough and move on." Referring to the die-hard tea partiers in the House Republican caucus, he added, "These new guys don't care about making things work."

This is like being happy that a car being driven toward a cliff at 80 mph is "working."

Those darn guys who stopped the car, they don't care about making things work. We have a car to drive here. All their crazy talk about this so-called cliff, that's at least 200-300 yards off in the distance. No need for this craziness of stopping the car. 

Democrats: Junk E-Mail. Republicans: Junk Paper Mail

It's funny, for many years this pattern has held true. Democrats spam the heck out of my email box. I've gotten ten fundraising emails in the past 24 hours from the DNC and OFA (there appears to be no actual difference). The only time I've ever done anything that could be construed as asking to be on their email lists was sending Ted Kennedy a nasty message on his birthday, and being on Sen. Sherrod Brown's mailing list, and emailing the Obama Whitehouse. I get about one email per month from Brown, tops. Ted Kennedy has gone mostly silent (not completely, though, I still get email from his foundation)

Meanwhile, despite dozens, if not hundreds of emails to my Congressmen, the Bush Whitehouse, Republican state reps and senators, and campaign contributions, my level of Republican email is extremely low. But boy do they send me paper mail. Several pieces a week (which really isn't much compared to the amount of email the Democrats send me).

Slut shaming: bad. Prude shaming: good

You hear a lot about how terrible it is to "slut shame" -- to judge people and call them sluts for their sexual behaviors.

But, apparently, shaming someone because they have conservative relationship and sexual standards is all good. At least, I can't think of any reason this PuffHo article exists except to publicly shame and ridicule the man for wanting a thin, pretty, non-promiscuous girlfriend. How dare he?

Update: Jezebel has jumped on the bandwagon to humiliate this poor guy. They savage him pretty well. They even hunt up an online review he left for a Super 8 Motel to use as part of their hit on him (He wasn't all that impressed with it, by the way. His complaints sound about like what anyone's might be).

They link to his website, and I do get the impression that he's quite the odd duck, a bit of a square peg, but probably a decent guy. The only thing wrong with his list is that he dared to say it out loud and post it on the internet. We all have a list. I think most guys would say the girl he's describing sounds pretty great, and not unrealistic. But most of us don't post our lists to the world, because we don't want the kind of beating this guy is taking.

I wish the guy well. There's a lot of lonely, odd ducks out there looking for someone, and not sure how to go about finding someone.

It's just so cruel of these sites to make him a target of their venom.

What A Bitch

One of the websites I occasionally visit and comment on is glocktalk.com. It has a large collection of forums on various gun topics, and one of the ones I read is Carry Issues.

Recently on that forum was a thread called Ladies Locked and Loaded: How do I conceal my weapon?

The article referred to in the original post discussed, in part, bra holsters. An early commenter (it's all gone now, more on that later), asked if a woman would be able to conceal a Glock model 26 in such a holster.

Now, a Glock 26 is admirably compact little gun for its power and capacity, but it's still quite thick and blocky compared to the truly dimunutive concealed-carry pistols out there. Not many women could unobtrusively have one hanging just underneath their breast bone, concealed by the overhang of their breasts.

As a light-hearted way of empahasizing this point, I replied something to the effect of "Maybe if you're Christina Hendricks."

The poster said he didn't know who Christina Hendricks was. I replied that she was an actress from Mad Men and Firefly known for her "assets" (by which we understand me to mean "large breasts") and I posted a picture:

Point made, right?

There were a few ribald follow-up comments (since they're all gone, I can't evaluate or reproduce them), but also a lot of good information about women's concealed carry. Some of my own posts survived the purge.

And, yeah, the purge. That's what this is all about.

I had not continued to follow the thread very closely, but at some point, it got locked. I don't know exactly how bad it had become, but from what I know of the moderator, probably not that bad. In my opinion, he has a huge stick up his butt and locks threads for a variety of capricious reasons, including his mewling desire to appear enlightened to women like the one I'm about to introduce.

Sometime after the thread was locked, a regular poster penned this rant, So sad, just read the ladies locked and loaded thread. Honestly, what a bitch. Of course her rant is full of replies by people eager to side with her about those terrible, immature, sexist men. Count me out. I view this as anti-male bullying. Men like breasts. Get over it, lady. This type of angry, thin-skinned feminist particularly irks me. They're the type who will loudly complain that they're just as good as any man, but really can't take dealing with men on men's terms. Instead of being a woman succeeding in a man's world, they want all men to act like women in a woman's world.

There's nothing shameful about men appreciating the female form or female attributes. There's nothing immature about sexual humor or comments: we all think it, we all have urges, there's no reason not to be honest about it. Human sexuality is healthy and normal and it finds its way into all areas of our lives. Humor is also normal and healthy and humor often treads uncomfortable territory. If this women can't get past a few comments about Christina Hendricks' breasts and read the valuable information in the thread (of which there was much), that's her psychological problem, not the problem of men with completely normal psyches, hormones and sexual attractions.

Based on this post, the moderator "cleaned out the trash" and re-opened the thread. Christina went out with the "trash." Hmm, who's really anti-woman here?

The Morality Of Lying

People have innate tendencies toward both sin and virtue, and it's these competing urges and how we react to them that form the core of our moral life. Most people feel guilt when they lie, and well-raised people try to be truthful as much as they can. But there are situations where the instinct and the ethical training toward truthfulness is misplaced.

A high school teen realized he had inadvertently brought a pocket knife to a baseball game, and proactively sought out a security guard and handed it over. There were no metal detectors, no pat-downs. In all probability he could have just left it in his pocket and nobody would ever have known. But the kid was obviously raised to try to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, his moral education was incomplete. Most people realize that there are times when it is OK to lie.

When someone has broken in to your home and is threatening your family, if he asks you if there is anyone else in the house, do you have an ethical obligation to inform him of your young daughter, hiding in the basement crawlspace? No, of course not.

If you are held up and have your wallet taken by a mugger, and he asks if you have more, are you obligated to mention the envelope of cash in your inside coat pocket that you were taking to pay your rent? Of course not.

You are not obligated to be honest with criminals who mean you harm.

I posit that in many cases, government has become equivalent to a criminal adversary in our lives. Government creates thousands of technical violations and regulations that criminalize innocent behavior, then uses those regulations to rob us of our incomes and freedoms.

The pocket knife was doing no harm. It wasn't going to jump out of his pocket and stab somebody, but the criminal public school system is not this boy's friend. He has no more obligation to fess up about the knife than someone in the mugger and home invader examples above. You don't have to admit to an offense when there is no actual moral wrong being done.

You don't have to obey arbitrary authority.

When the government takes your money against your will, with threat of force, they don't call it stealing, they call it taxation, or regulatory costs.

When you lie to the government about a harmless activity to spare yourself from punishment, it's just protecting yourself.

Our government has lost legitimacy because it has criminalized harmless actions, thus making technical "criminals" out of good people. You don't have to go along with that any more than you have to offer your money to a mugger or your child to a home invader.

I think that this was understood better by older generations. We weren't raised to be as respectful of arbitrary authority. We didn't spend our lives in schools with crazy zero tolerance policies that had no relationship to reality. We didn't get punished with the force of law for normal teenage acting-out.

A few years back, I went to a local club with some friends, all of whom were at least ten years younger than me.

One of the friends had just bought several of us bottles of water right before we decided to leave. I hadn't even opened mine yet.

I saw at the door that they were refusing to let people to leave with any drinks, including these very pricey bottles of water. I wasn't about to just abandon it -- it was mine, it was paid-for -- or stand there guzzling it. So I very pointedly absolutely ignored the bouncer when he told me I couldn't take the water with me.

The bouncer really didn't know what to do. It was obvious he was used to being obeyed. But there's no law against leaving a club with a bottle of water. Their business policy doesn't carry the force of law; he couldn't lay a finger on me. "You can't leave here with that bottle!" "I just did." All he could do was bluster at me and tell me that I better never come back to the club. As if they don't want my money, or as if I couldn't live without going to that club. I think my young friends were as aghast as the bouncer. They had all just internalized that if someone in authority tells you to do something, you do it.

When did it get this bad? In my father's generation, the proper response would have been to tell the over-stepping bouncer to take a hike. Even in my generation, we had a general suspicion of arbitrary authority. But I don't think these kids do. They have grown up in a world where so many exercises of authority are arbitrary and defy common sense that they don't differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate authority. They obey authority because it is authority, not because the authority makes sense.

The downside of this is that when they do start disrespecting authority, they don't do it from any place of sound moral judgment -- they just reject authority in general. You get the Occupy movement. They weren't sure exactly what they wanted and what they were rebelling against, but  boy, they sure felt strongly about it!

I have all the respect in the world for people with the authority to catch thieves, rapists and murderers, or who collect reasonable taxes for legitimate purposes, like roads. But I don't have respect when the law becomes arbitrary. If your rifle's barrel is 16" you're a fine, upstanding citizen. If your rifle's barrel is 14" you better have a permit for a short-barreled rife or you're a despicable felon! Short-barreled rifles don't do anything (except reduce the speed of the bullet and make more noise). You don't look at a rifle and see a self-evident moral wrong due to the length of its barrel! It's arbitrary. It's capricious. It criminalizes something meaningless, and makes criminals of people who never hurt anyone. You can't respect that.

Setting Unachievable Goals By Using Moving Goalposts

At the Congressional Black Caucus dinner this year, President Obama said: "We must make this country a place where anyone who works hard can earn their way into the middle class, and until we do, we can't let up and we can't rest."

 Well, there will never be any rest, because the game is rigged. Of course people who want to remake the world never admit that things are good enough, because then what would they do with their time?

If you compare standard of living of even the poorest fifth of Americans to middle class Americans in the 19th century, we arrived. Everyone is middle class -- actually, everyone is rich -- because everyone lives better than a middle class person in the 19th century.

But we judge poverty and the "middle class" relatively. Since there will always be a poorest fifth, there will alway be "poor" people to agitate for.

It never ends.