Decisions, decisions

The Washington Post reports that

State lawmakers are debating whether to designate a semiautomatic pistol as the official gun of Utah, despite protests from people who say they think it’s inappropriate because of recent mass shootings.

The measure has some surface logic, considering that the gun in question was invented by Utah native John Browning a hundred years ago.

The whole thing is nonetheless a farce, and not because it’s inappropriate due to “recent mass shootings.” (Screw that. If, say, Michigan wanted to honor the Ford Model T, few would protest despite the fact that the vehicle’s successors are now involved in more than 30,000 U.S. fatalities a year).

Rather, the “official gun of Utah” discussion is a farce because grown men and women, elected to do the people’s business, are squandering their time and our money to pursue perfectly inconsequential twaddle.

And it’s not just Utah.

• New Jersey is the home of the knobbed whelk (the official seashell), the honeybee (insect), the brook trout (fish) and the square dance (folk dance).

• At least 19 states have designated an official soil.

• In February, legislators in Maine debated earnestly whether the official state dessert should be whoopie pie or blueberry pie.

If they saw an iceberg looming from the deck of the Titanic, no doubt these people would begin a vigorous discussion on what to do — order a Gin Fizz or a Singapore Sling.

Freedom to worship, not freedom from worship

On Sunday, for the second week in a row, the police rounded up scores of parishioners [of the Beijing-based Shouwang Protestant Church] who tried to pray outdoors at a public plaza. Most of the church’s leadership is now in custody or under house arrest. Its Web site has been blocked.

Even after years of economic détente, China remains a dictatorial hellhole for those whose opinions and beliefs differ from the loathsome Beijing sekretariat (see also the recent arrest and disappearance of the artist Ai Weiwei and several members of his entourage). As an atheist, this is one church I’d gladly donate to or support in other ways — partly on the principle of it, and partly just to piss off the creeps in high places who seem to have learned very little since the slaughter at Tiananmen.

I shrugged too

As someone pithier than I first pointed out, I think I now have an idea how Jewish kids feel at Christmas time. Lots of other people in the libertarian blogosphere are really excited about the new Atlas Shrugged movie, but I just can’t bring myself to care.

People have told me that, given my libertarian economic leanings, I really should read Ayn Rand, and I suspect they’re probably right. I had a copy of Atlas Shrugged at one time, but I was never able to get more than a few pages into it. The writing just didn’t grab me, and I lacked the willpower to force myself to read it.

I’ve been thinking of downloading a copy to my Kindle, so I could read it when I had nothing else to do, but the only available version costs $18.99 to download. That’s more than the printed editions, and it’s a crazy price for a book that’s been out for over 50 years.

Note to Objectivists: Of course I have no objections to the owners of Atlas Shrugged making a profit off of it, but if you hope to convert other people to your way of thinking, you might want to try making it easier for them to read the seminal works of your philosophy. By comparison, Capitalism: A Love Story is available on DVD for only $11.49, Keynes’s General Theory is available as an e-book for $2.99, and the Communist Manifesto is free.

Then there’s the problem that Objectivism smells just a little bit like a cult. For one thing, its adherents seem to be trying to tie the whole world into a single philosophy. I mean, I believe in a metaphysics of objective reality, and I believe in the inherent morality of free-market capitalism, but for the life of me I can’t understand how one meaningfully leads to the other, except in the most trivial sense. Throw in an Objectivist theory of art, and it starts to look like a serious case of overreaching.

The second reason Objectivism seems a bit like a cult is that it just seems weird that Ayn Rand and Objectivism are always so closely linked. In contrast, although Sir Isaac Newton invented classical mechanics, which is sometimes even called Newtonian physics, you can study mechanics and use it productively without ever having to learn anything about Newton’s life. Also, you don’t have to read Principia to be a physicist. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. An ordinary physics textbook, or even Wikipedia, will explain everything with far more rigor and clarity than Newton did the first time.

Note that none of this is an objection to the philosophy of Objectivism. As I said at the start, if I learned more about Objectivism, I think I’d probably find a lot that I agree with. In fact, essays like this one make me think I may be more of an Objectivist than I realized. For some reason, that really annoys me.

Tim Minchin, now twice as delicious

I love Tim Minchin’s highly irreverent songs, especially his faux-beat-poet philippic Storm in which he goes toe to toe with an incredibly annoying hippie-dippy dinner guest. I literally yelled with glee the first time I heard it, about a year and a half ago.

But now, via Andrew Sullivan, I find there’s a brand new animated version which is even more delicious. I’d say, watch the first one to acquaint yourself with Minchin’s masterful words (they flash on the screen verbatim), then the second one (below) for the pleasure of the elegant, gorgeous visuals offered up by animator and director DC Turner.

Minchin’s YouTube channel is here.

From the Superior Moral Compass Department

• Flying cleric sexually assaults airline passenger.

• God-loving student, intent on disproving atheist talking points, gets stabby with a pen.

• Bible inspires devout Seattle mom to attempt a circumcision with a boxcutter and pliers.

• Allah being a wicked prude (I guess), British Miss Universe contestant must die for the intolerable crime of wearing a torso-covering one-piece swimsuit topped with a sarong.

• Catholic bishop sexually assaults his five-year-old nephew, then goes on national TV to explain it was a lovely  “little piece of intimacy” and that the boy “didn’t seem to mind at all.”

• Rabbi sodomizes young woman during couples counseling, comforts her by saying “It’s good that it happened with me, otherwise you would have cheated on your husband with another man.”

Happy Passover, everyone!

Linkavaganza

• What, no taser?

• Guess whose shitlist you get put on when you dare complain about the TSA.

• Speaking of crap: If your mailman is anything like this mailman, you might want to wear latex gloves when you open your bills.

• Police in New Hampshire charge man with unlawful “interception of oral communications” for using his phone during a traffic stop. The call was a crime, officers say, because the driver ended up leaving a voice-mail message; that recording possibly captured cops’ communications “without their consent.”

• When the government offers gambling services to willing patrons, that’s called a lottery. When entrepreneurs offer gambling services to willing patrons, that’s called a crime and they’ll be prosecuted, jailed, and made penniless. Clear?

• Man has seizure at grandmother’s funeral. Gaggle of cops shows up to handcuff him. Then, of course, it’s time to pepper-spray the mourners who try to explain the situation.

Brits: Meet your new King — Lego man!

Johann Hari sounds off on the royal wedding that has Britain’s monarchists abuzz with excited deference, and slays one feeble pro-monarchy argument after another.

Our head of state is decided by one factor, and one factor alone: did he pass through the womb of one aristocratic Windsor woman living in a golden palace? The US head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps. The British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps. Is that a contrast that fills you with pride?

No, it’s not the biggest problem we have. But it does have a subtly deforming effect on Britain’s character that the ultimate symbol of our country, our sovereign, is picked on the most snobbish criteria of all: darling, do you know who his father was? … This snobbery subtly soaks out through the society, tweaking us to be deferential to unearned and talentless wealth, simply because it’s there.

We live with a weird cognitive dissonance in Britain. We are always saying we should be a meritocracy, but we shriek in horror at the idea that we should pick our head of state on merit. Earlier this month, David Cameron lamented that too many people in Britain get ahead because of who their parents are. A few minutes later, without missing a beat, he praised the monarchy as the best of British. Nobody laughed.

Oh, but the Windsors are wonderful for tourism, their enablers defenders insist, in between all the scraping, the bowing, the curtsying, and the prostrating. Ah. About that. Let’s suppose the Windsors’ reign came to an end tomorrow. Would foreign visitors really stop flocking to Britain? Or would local attractions like Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle actually draw more people, as those royal sites could be almost entirely opened to the public?

Besides, the tourism argument doesn’t fly in any other country, as far as I’m aware — another reason to doubt its veracity. Having been born and raised in the Netherlands, I can confidently state that the Dutch royals are not a factor of any significance when it comes to tourism. They are merely a band of unelected, slightly absurd figureheads who live in majestic splendor (multiple palaces, a golden horsedrawn carriage, etc.) that’s involuntarily financed by hard-working nurses, sales clerks, truck drivers, and other non-blue-blooded riffraff.

But Johann doesn’t need my help pointing out how fatuous the royals = tourism claim is.

Of the top 20 tourist attractions in Britain, only one is related to the monarchy – Windsor Castle, at number 17. Ten places ahead is Windsor Legoland. So using that logic, we should make a Lego man our head of state.

Works for me, as long as the Brits dutifully elect Lego man.

Of course, it’s fairly useless to argue with people whose mental ammunition has all the robustness and durability of soap bubbles. A torrid love of the monarchy is evidently something you feel with your heart, not an actual position you can successfully defend using proper reasoning. Perhaps inevitably, then, some of the more interesting retorts slung at the author on the Independent newspaper site focus on the fact that, although he was born, raised, and educated in England, he’s not truly a Brit, and should shut his nasty foreign gob. You see, Johann’s father was (horrors) a Swiss bus driver. And so:

I am not the slightest bit interested in immigrant opinion about the Royal Wedding. You, Johann Hari, are not English and you clearly have no interest in understanding the institutions that made it safe for your family to come here as welcome immigrants and flourish.

There’s not much one can say to that, other than that it’s a line of debate that, to halfway serious people, is “not cricket.”

And for that matter, neither is the monarchy.

Robbery by checkbook: the devil made me do it!

It’s tax day tomorrow, so let’s look at just one of the people we are forced to entrust with our money. Take Cindy Dunton, a former deputy clerk and treasurer of the town of Newburgh, Maine, pop. 1,500. Take her, please.

You see, Cindy thanked the town and the constituents who gave her a nicely-paid job by robbing them no fewer than seventeen times. She looted almost a quarter million dollars over five years. She’d just write herself a check from the town’s bank account whenever she needed the money.

Finally — imagine that — Cindy got caught; in a small town like Newburgh, eventually they missed a quarter million. Huh. Cindy didn’t see that coming.

But don’t worry about Cindy. She’s fine. The way she sees it, although a supernatural bogeyman with horns and a pitchfork led her astray, luckily God then won the battle for her immortal soul — not by filling her with guilt and remorse, and not by telling her in no uncertain terms to cut it the fuck out (so alas, no thundering voice from the heavens: “Cindy…Thou Shalt Not Steal!”), but by sending law enforcement officers with an arrest warrant to her door.

Now Cindy, while claiming to be contrite, can in good conscience tell a local newspaper that (a) it’s not really her fault — the Prince of Darkness made her do it! — and (b) God intervened on her behalf and so clearly has already forgiven her.

Talking of when she began her serial robbery-by-checkbook, Cindy recalls with a virtual shrug:

“It just happened. I don’t think I thought about it much.”

It just happened. As if by some supernatural magic. Got it.

“And it’s not like I did it every week or every other week. It was sporadic.”

Quite. It’s a distinction sure to give many victims pause.

After she got caught pretty much red-handed… and when no ethereal superpower deigned to make additional money appear out of thin air… Cindy (48) knew just who to call.

After being summoned to the town office and summarily fired by selectmen, Dunton said, one of her first moves was to call her parents for financial help. Despite a lifetime of teaching her the evils of thievery — Dunton’s father is a retired minister and her mother is deeply religious — they never wavered in their support for their daughter.

Cindy “grew up in the church,” she says — and praise the Lord, she can still talk the talk as devoutly as ever. (Maybe it’ll come in handy at her July 1 sentencing hearing.)

“The biggest thing that has come out of this is that I’ve gotten back to church and back to God. … Unless you’re spiritual, I don’t know if you’re going to understand this, but I felt as if Satan had taken over my life. And I think this was the only way that God could get me back.”

That’s nice, isn’t it? That breezy, subtly haughty statement of spirituality, I mean — combined with the fact that she just ripped off 1,500 neighbors.

As for the ill will and the sense of betrayal she’s created locally, well, Cindy simply isn’t bothered.

“Some people get all upset by how people look at you or what they say about you. I never have. That’s not my personality.”

I believe that’s church-speak for “Y’all can kiss my ass.”

“I’ve confessed my sins to God. Jesus blots out your sins, so I don’t worry about it anymore.”

They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. No mystery is bigger than the one wherein piety-spewing little criminals like Cindy Dunton somehow still think of themselves as exemplars of a higher morality.

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P.S. Somewhat related: prison population broken down by religion and lack thereof. About 12 to 15 % of Americans in the general population self-identify as atheists or agnostics. The percentage of atheists and agnostics in the prison system, however, is just over 0.2 percent. The other 99.8 percent of inmates are the ones with the superior God-given moral compass. Ha.

Fraud-Prone Blithering Idiots (FBI)

For years, Bill Hillar made money by giving speeches about his exotic counter-terrorism exploits as a colonel and a Green Beret. It recently emerged that Mr. Hillar made the whole thing up. The report in Army Times says that

…he accepted thousands of dollars in speaking fees from the likes of the FBI Command College.

Gosh, if only there were some kind of government agency dedicated to weeding out con-men and criminals.