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Oct 192013
Oct 122013
Earlier today, there was a 17-state failure of the EBT (Electronic Bank Transfer… cards that transfer money from taxpayers to the politically correct nonproductive) system which resulted in EBT cards not working at many grocery stores. Sadly, this system failure was not a result of the government shutdown, but just a glitch:
Access restored for food stamp users, Xerox says
This would have been a perfect opportunity to roll out a wholly revised welfare system, such as the Free Food Loaf proposal I made a while back. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems that a number of people who are so grindingly poverty stricken that they can only hope to survive by the use of wealth transfer systems like EBT promptly fired up their laptops, netbooks and smartphones to comment about it on Twitter:
‘Riot time!’: Food stamp users in near-panic over EBT card failures
… where you can read some people saying that the proper response to their not being able to buy a bag of potato chips on someone else’s dime is to commit *murder.* In this age of the NSA knowing every thing about every body, those responsible for the EBT system should check out these comments, find who is making the violent threats and cancel their EBT cards and other welfare payments. Not going to happen, of course, but a guy can dream.
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IN other news relevant to ideas I’ve had before:
Grand Canyon And Other National Parks Reopen, On States’ Dime
Arizona, Utah, South Dakota and other states -including New York – have decided to open up a number of National Parks using their own money. This, as I’ve suggested, would be a good time for states to use eminent domain to appropriate Federal lands that are being poorly run.
Oct 072013
… I’m sure of it. It might be subtle and hard to find, but I have this feeling there’s an angle.
New Air Force cargo planes fly straight into mothballs
Short form: The USAF has spent more than half a billion dollars on an order for 21 C-27J Spartan cargo planes. Sixteen have been delivered so far. Of those, a dozen were sent straight to the Davis-Monthan boneyard. Five more are being built, and apparently are headed straight for the boneyard.
Oct 072013
The List: Unnecessarily Shut Down by Obama to Inflict Public Pain
Some highlights:
The American Forces Network (AFN) that provides American sports and entertainment programming to our troops stationed abroad, has been shut down. For some reason, though, AFN News will still broadcast news, just not any of the popular and fun stuff.
the D-Day memorial in Normandy has been barricaded.
Obama Closes Privately-Owned Hotel, Police Block Parking Lot
Park Service Ranger: ‘We’ve Been Told to Make Life As Difficult For People As We Can’
Obama Forces Residents Out of Private Homes
There is, it seems to me, a straightforward long-term solution to this sort of thing: eminent domain. About two years ago, the Utah state house passed a bill that would allow Utah to use eminent domain to seize federal land, though I believe the bill was struck down in the state Senate. This is a big issue in Utah, since the Feds “own” about 70% of the acreage, and this prevents considerable economic development. I believe it can now be argued that eminent domain can be used on a whole lot of Federal land and property, using the Kelo vs. City of New London decision.
Clearly, the FedGuv cannot properly utilize a lot of the land under its control. States should thus appropriate those lands under eminent domain for the purposes of furthering economic development. As described in the list at the top of the post, the Feds are shutting down places that are not only largely private, they are *profitable,* which is of course ridiculous when the issue is a lack of money. States should thus start with these lands, and seize them from the Feds. If the Feds then show up with armies of lawyers, it can be clearly demonstrated that the Feds have *too* *much* money to burn.
If there is one clear message to be learned from government shutdowns like this it is that the government is far, far too powerful. The functions being shut down are considered “non-essential.” Fine. Good. The Federal government should *not* be spending money on non-essential functions. If they are non-essential now, they should be non-essential when the shutdown is over, and should no longer be done by the FedGuv. Let private enterprise do them without interference. Let states do them.
It should be pointed out that while food and entertainment for active duty troops is being shut down, the golf course on Andrews Air Force Base is being kept open. You know, the course that Obama spends considerable taxpayer time at.
Oct 062013
NPR ran an interesting hour-long piece on the Vietnam veterans memorial wall in D.C. today. If you have an hour and the interest, I recommend giving it a listen (click on the “Stream” button in upper left; keep a hanky or a box of tissues at hand).
American Icons: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Wall is in the news again, thanks to Obama’s government shutdown. In order to ‘save money,” the government has ordered the Wall closed to visitors and is spending money to pay police to evict people who walk up to the Wall, which is on open public ground. This is not only stupid, it’s insultingly stupid and a transparently obvious ham-handed political stunt. The claims being made about the National Park Service closing down facilities that normally require little to no actual staff is that without staff on hand, visitors could get injured and need rescue that won’t come, or vandals could sneak in and damage things. Both of these arguments are silly in this case. In the case of the first argument, the Wall is located in an open, public place… not a difficult place for an ambulance to get to. And the second argument, that vandals could cause a ruckus… well, if you’ve ever been to The Wall, you know that the Wall has a security system in place far more effective than a few dozen Park Rangers or random police: the veterans themselves. Anyone who pulls out a hammer or a can of spray paint is going to very quickly find himself the subject of intense… ah, “scrutiny,’ shall we say, from a number of guys like these:
A few anecdotes:
In May of 1996, I was packing up to leave the D.C. area. My first real job after graduating with my Aero E degree was at OSC in Virginia; the job lasted all of a month, because the X-34 I got hired to work on got cancelled the week after I got there. My dad came out to help me pack and move to my next job in Colorado. We went to supper at a restaurant in Arlington and noticed a large number of bikers… bikers with Vietnam veteran regalia. Came to find out that the next day was “Rolling Thunder,” when hundreds of thousands of bikers would roll into D.C. to pay respects at the Wall. The original plan had been to leave that day; we put it off one more day in order to see the procession. We went to the Mall early in the morning, several hours before the bikers were to arrive, and made our way to the Wall. If you’ve ever been there you know that approaching it is unlike approaching pretty much anywhere else on Earth… a level of solemnity not readily found. While my dad looked up his friends on the Wall, among a number of other veterans and family members, a group of tourists approached. These tourists, clearly Asian (Japanese? Vietnamese? Korean? Don’t know, doesn’t matter), were unaffected by the force field of sadness that surrounds the Wall, and were joking and laughing and have a good old time. Anywhere else… nobody would care. At the Wall… that was the wrong reaction. A wave of shock and anger passed among those of us close to the Wall. But the problem came to an *extremely* sudden close. I turned around at the sudden silence and found that this group of a half dozen or so college-age happy tourists were instantly silent and solemn… and surrounded by several times their number of very large, very angry, and very silent Hell’s Angels-looking fellers. There were no raised voices, no threats, no acts of violence, not even the expenditure of a single taxpayer dime, and yet a potential issue at the wall was dealt with quickly and efficiently by those who were there.
A few years later, while living and working in Colorado, a good friend and I were having lunch at a pizza joint in Golden. The TV was on over his shoulder; something on screen caught my attention, and the look of shock on my face caught my friends attention. We instantly shouted for the volume to be turned up. What was going on? In Denver there is a really good military aviation museum, “Wings Over The Rockies.” Sitting outside is a B-52. And what the TV was showing was the cockpit of the B-52 a roaring mass of flames. The volume came up in time for us to hear that some jackass had decided to toss Molotov Cocktails into the cockpit in some form of delusional protest about… something. We were both instantly PO’ed, my friend rather more so since he’d served around B-52s during his time in the Jimmy Carter Peace-Time Fly-In Club (aka: the USAF in the late 1970’s).
But our rage turned very suddenly to laughter. The guy who torched the B-52 was shown sitting in a police squad car… beaten and bloody, apparently lacking a few teeth he’d started the day with. Was this due to Park Rangers or police being Johnnie On The Spot and laying a beatdown? No. His capture and apparent fall down a few flights of stairs was courtesy of a veteran who was simply visiting the museum at the time and who took a dim view of arson.
There are some places where a lack of Park Rangers could reasonably argue towards closing the gates. But the Wall? The WWII memorial? Please. These are examples of places that without government authorities still manage to self regulate. If someone has a heart attack at the Wall, there will be dozens to hundreds in the immediate vicinity who *will* render aid. If someone decides to engage in criminality, there are again dozens to hundreds who will leap in to make him stop, and they will do so much faster than any pre-shutdown collection of Park Rangers.
It might be interesting to know how the Wall is doing in a few decades. For Baby Boomers – the generation that served in Nam – the Wall is powerful. For many Gen Xers – the children of Nam vets, who grew up with the stories or the silence, who saw at first hand what the war did to the vets – the Wall is powerful. But how about following generations? The kids of the Gen Xers will only get occasional war stories from Grampa, or reminiscences about long-lost Grampa from Mom or Dad. The impact of the Wall will, probably, fade. Who gets weepy at Spanish American War monuments? Time fades the impact of such things. But perhaps the power of the Wall will last longer due to its unique nature. As mentioned in the NPR piece, it has changed the way people relate to memorials in the US. Before the Wall, people rarely left mementos. after the Wall, piles of photos and teddy bears and notes and such *are* the memorials.
Oct 052013
Ever since Imperator Obama shut down the government, officially because there wasn’t enough money to keep all the functions running, the fedguv has been spending a *lot* of effort – and money – to annoy the hell out of people. For example: not only have they shut down Mount Rushmore’s facilities and blocked access to the park, they went out of their way to shut down scenic pulloffs on roads well away from the site to prevent people from getting a good if distant look at the monument:
Mount Rushmore blockage stirs anger in South Dakota
More disturbingly, the fedguv has been shutting down *private* *property* as a way to expand the public annoyance:
National Park Police Close Mt. Vernon, Feel Silly When Told It’s Privately Funded
Federal Shutdown Expands To Privately Run Campgrounds In National Forests
And what’s more: not only are they shutting down private property, they are in some cases telling private property owners to spend their own money to buy the Barrycades needed to block public access.
If this was an *actual* shutdown (considering that the furloughed fedguv workers are going to get back pay, it’s clear the fedguv is not actually serious when it pleads poverty), the areas of the government being shut down would simply… shut down. Instead, we’re seeing governmental over-reach. One need not be a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid to wonder if, if this overreach is successful, this will be used as a stepping stone for even more once things get back to normal. Walmart, after all, is involved in interstate commerce, which is the purview of the fedguv; does this open up Walmart to being shut down at the whim of a imperial President? Hmm.
Sep 282013
Quick! Call up the Discovery Channel! The Learning Channel! Wherever else cryptozoologists looking for the likes of Bigfoot, Nessie, Mokele mbembe and the rest hang out… for the rarest creature imaginable has been found! Gentlemen, I give you… an honest and honorable government bureaucrat!
Denali Commission inspector general: Fire me, stop funding my agency in Alaska
This is, according to the article, only the third time a government employee has asked that the job they do be terminated because it’s a pointless waste of tax dollars. The prior two? Their job weren’t cancelled, no reason to assume it’ll happen this time. The phrase used in the article was “river of pork.” The government seems to have a real hard time letting go.
Sep 162013
By having your government budget cut, some operations need to be cut back. End result: three and a half times as many people serves, at five percent the cost.
Attendance Triples at Archives Event That Was Forced Online by Sequestration
Sep 142013
A story about Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency.
The Cowboy of the NSA
Amidst the Tl;dr discussion of Alexander and the NSA, there’s this:
When he was running the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a “whoosh” sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather “captain’s chair” in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.
“Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,” says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.
Sadly, the article does not include photos of said Enterprise-like “Information Dominance Center.” Fortunately, the architects who built it have a website that *does* have photos of said sci-fi environment:
I leave it as a discussion topic whether:
A: Does this really look like the bridge of the Enterprise?
B: *Should* this look like the bridge of the Enterprise?
C: So, how about that wacky NSA, huh?
Sep 112013
Anthony Weiner’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night
The best way to summarize it is to simply quote the relevant Fark headline:
Now, if Now Yorkers can elect a Mayor who will overturn Bloombergs insanities and restore basic rights to the people of NYC, they’ll be well on their way to recovery.
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And in similar news, the people of Colorado have started to redeem themselves:
2 Colorado Lawmakers Lose Jobs In Recall Over Gun Votes
The “lawmakers” in question supported Colorados recent new gun control laws. May more gun grabbers find themselves out on the streets.