Travel wear - Do's and Do not's.

So, Sadly, No! took a recent column by Dennis Prager of the National Review, and dismissed it thusly with one of their usual 'shorter' posts:

God says that men flying around on airplanes in women’s clothing, even if their penises are covered, might as well be flying around naked.

While this pretty much does capture the spirit of Prager's post, it's worth it to click on the original to see what exactly has got his panties in such a twist. Upon doing so we find this horrifying tale:

On June 9, a man boarded a U.S. Airways flight from Fort Lauderdale to Phoenix, dressed in women’s panties, a bra, and thigh-high stockings.

No U.S. Airways employee at the Fort Lauderdale airport asked him to cover himself. Nor did any flight attendant ask him to do so. And obviously, no one demanded that he get off the plane.

I have to say, I'm a little sympathetic to Prager's point here. I wouldn't want some middle-aged guy in panties and a tank-top sitting next to me on an airplane. Hell, I wouldn't want most middle-aged women seated next to me in bra and panties. Hell, I usually don't want Anyone sitting next to me on an airplane regardless of his or her personal fashion sense.

Now, I get that as a columnist you often take small events and use them to make a larger point about society, and it's using this common technique that Prager makes himself look like the small-minded ass-hole I have little doubt he is. He continues:

The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one’s breath away.

That a woman speaking on behalf of a major airline can say with a straight face that her airline allows anyone dressed or undressed to fly on its airplanes, so long as they do not expose their genitals, perfectly encapsulates this decline.

The only question is: How did we get here?

For one thing, the concept of decency is dying. I suspect that if an adult were to say to a group of randomly chosen American college students that this man indecently exposed himself and should not have been allowed to fly, that adult would be (a) not understood (what does “indecent” mean?) or (b) roundly condemned for intolerance and bigotry.

Hippies! Damn dirty hippies. This is what is so funny to me about people like Prager. One person acts like a selfish prick and it all goes back to the 60s, when the dirty hippies totally ruined everything. First, the idea that decency is dying has been a theme since well before the 60s. It's called getting old, Prager, you prick. As you get older you have less fun (if you ever did) and everyone having fun seems indecent. Second, I love the blanket statement, that college students would approve of this. I personally suspect they would hand Airport Man a ping-pong ball and ask him to totally come party at the beer pong championship! And my opinion is just as valid, because, I, like Prager, didn't actually ASK any fucking college students what they might think if this guy was trying to waltz onto their flight.

But, the truly great thing about this story is that if you click the link to it on Prager's article, you find things go even deeper.

Six days before a college football player was arrested at San Francisco International Airport in a dispute that began when a US Airways employee asked him to pull up his sagging pants, a man who was wearing little but women's undergarments was allowed to fly the airline, a US Airways spokeswoman conceded Tuesday.

A photo of the scantily clad man was provided to The Chronicle by Jill Tarlow, a passenger on the June 9 flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Phoenix. Tarlow said other passengers had complained to airline workers before the plane boarded, but that employees had ignored those complaints.

So, basically, a black kid with his underwear sticking out couldn't get on the plane, because one airline screener decided it was inappropriate. And one middle-aged white dude got on wearing women's underwear because another airline employee decided to not give a shit. Of course, Prager makes no mention of the guy who DID get sidelined from his flight due to questionable fashion sense, because it would totally get in the way of his wingnut narrative about the hippies who totally destroyed America.

But, given the situation, I believe we can come to only one conclusion, America is completely tolerant, except when we're busy being intolerant, and it all really depends on which asshole is on duty at the check-in desk.

Anyway...

Newt's Moon Mission

So, for those of you with the stomach to handle the Republican Debate on CNN you saw some weird stuff. T-Paw prefers Coke to Pepsi, Herman Cain is a Deep Dish guy, as opposed to Thin Crust. I can only assume that thin crust is for pussies. And there was a lot of fluffing up the base, trashing the opposition, and just in general lying. But it's a Presidential Primary Debate and, well, what you gonna do?

BUT, the award for Dumbest Thing Said has to go to Newt. He said, and I quote,

you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles. And instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure."

So, Newt is a fan of the Space Program. Good for him, but what I think he's really a fan of are Star Trek reruns, otherwise he'd know he was talking complete shit. Or maybe he does, this is Newt after all.

But three or four permanent space stations? A permanent Moon Base? Built by the Private Sector? For What Exactly?

This is one of my major problems with this current dumb and dumbed down version of conservative thought, this simplistic idea that the Free Market is the solution for all problems.

Why the Hell would a company waste money putting people on the moon? The object of the Free Market is to create goods and services, and distribute those goods and services. So what are they doing on the moon? Opening Starbucks? Opening a Gap? For Christ's sake, find me a legitimate marketing plan for putting a base on the Moon. Seriously.

Space Exploration is Exactly the kind of thing the government should be financing. The government can afford to finance activities with no other point than the expansion of human knowledge. That's not what the Private Sector does. How much money can you make by putting three guys in million dollar suits on a rock hundreds of thousands of miles away? Short answer is: None. The slightly longer answer is: fucking less than none and you'll be a trillion dollars in debt to boot.

Now, you can argue against the necessity of the space program. In fact, a great song by the Drive-By Truckers titled, "Putting People on the Moon" does exactly that. The song is sung from the perspective of a man with absolutely nothing marveling that there is enough money to send people to the moon, but not enough to help him with his life. Not exactly a Conservative message, but a legitimate argument against NASA.

You can argue, from a conservative perspective, that the Government should not be involved in funding pure scientific research and that space Exploration is not a legitimate use of taxpayer dollars.

You can argue, also, that we are finally at the point where it makes sense to turn our space exploration over to private enterprise hoping to make a go of the moon tourism 'industry', leaving government exploration, I suppose, to the Chinese and Russians.

But, what you can't argue, and be a serious person, is that the Free Market left to it's own devices, starting in 1960 or so, would've developed an entire space society by now. But there it was, said out loud, by a person considered (at least as of a week or so ago) to be a serious contender for President. Yippee.