Here There Be Morons

There's no picture for today's post, because you never have a camera handy when you really need it. So today, you're going to use your imagination (assisted by my Paint skills) to supply the shot I don't have.

Onboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, there are the rifle ranges familiar to everyone in the Corps on the West Coast, at Edson Range. The entire complex sits right next to Interstate 5, across from the relatively new USN LCAC facility. You can see acres of rifle ranges from the freeway if you know where you're looking for them, and nearer the interstate, multiple barracks used by countless recruit platoons on their three-week pilgrimage from MCRD San Diego for rifle training. And even closer to the freeway than that, sits the massive mess hall, to feed those recruits three squares a day during their range weeks. Around that mess hall on one side is a huge cement patio, for recruit platoons to form up on as their members finish their meals. It's surrounded by an even bigger swath of lawn, all within eyesight of the freeway as well.

And right at the border between cement and grass, there sits a wooden sign, about 4' tall, on a 2' square board, all painted in classic USMC scarlet. On it, in 1"-2" high brilliantly contrasting gold, are military stencil letters, with a blisteringly simple message, and that message is the illustration for today's post, as the photograph I never got to take:

I didn't need to pull down heat from the drill instructors when I saw this sign, by asking them why such a sign would be necessary. I knew why, without ever being told (as does anyone who ever spent five seconds in any branch of the military. Even the Air Farce or the Notional Guard):

The sign was there, out in front of God and everybody, because at least once - and probably more than that - some total fuckwit had been standing at ease waiting to get marched back to barracks, and decided out on the concrete at the edge of the lawn, a couple of hundred yards from a busy interstate, that the perfect place to make a head call (that's Marine lingo for relieving one's bladder) was - of course! - right out there at the grassy boundary of the lawn, in plain sight of not just the entire passing conga lines of traffic, but in front of a veritable glass wall of windows of the mess hall, with every officer and drill instructor in plain sight sitting on the other side to keep an eye on you. And at least once, someone had done so.

Your imagination's wildest dreams of the ass-chewing that followed cannot begin to conjure the retribution visited on Pvt. Dipshit at that point, but not least among the several consequences to the event was the creation of the aforementioned sign, as sure as apples fall off apples trees.

The lesson, gentle readers, is thus:
When you see a sign like that, you have discovered the boundary between people with common sense, and where begins the territory inhabited by thorough-going fucktards.
And those fucktards are legion.

It's true in basic training in the military, and it's true in the rest of the world.
I could offer dozens of everyday non-military examples, but just two more will suffice:

Remove shirt before ironing.

Warning: wearing cape does not enable user to fly.

Whenever you encounter boilerplate warning designed for people with mid double-digit IQs, you have discovered how many fuckwit minions live and move amongst you every day.

No one asks why these warning are there, because like me in boot camp, they know why without being told:
Because we suffer morons daily, and have to mollycoddle them, lest they injure themselves, and then sue, or do any thousand and one idiotic acts, then act all surprised when gravity works.

Coffee at McDonald's that's hot. (Who knew??)
Notes on silica gel packets (and now Tide Pods) that say: Do Not Eat.
The "bible" of instructions for the terminally stupid engraved on the barrel of every Ruger firearm.
And on and on.

And when, perchance, you decide that the local walk-up window is a good place to carry your battle rifle inside city limits, but outside the bounds of the common sense of even ordinary morons, you invite government, in its ham-fisted way, to put up another "Do Not Urinate Here" sign. Like they will, and like they do. Blame asshole parents, a public education system that would embarrass Neanderthals, and people with the manners of billy goats who were raised on a womb bill of fare of fetal alcohol syndrome and a steady pre-teen diet of lead paint chips, and being dropped on their heads multiple times before hitting third grade.

But for whatever reason, stupid people breed, usually far out of proportion to the non-jackassical, and even rampant Darwinism in action can't kill them fast enough to keep the mean IQ of the human race in the low triple digits, hardly anywhere.

So laws like the one mentioned yesterday aren't the slippery slope you imagine, they are, in fact, the efforts of the middling bright (which is government on its best day, as anyone who's seen it close-up can testify) to erect, not a slippery slope, but a steep cliff warning to demarcate the line between the sensible and the egregiously stupid. And people still fall over the edge daily. Sometimes, hourly.

One of maybe 100,000 Fail videos available on YouTube,

 besides thousands of hours of the TV show COPS.

Yes, government, given sunlight and water, like all weeds, will metastasize, but let's be fair here: so will stupid people.

Don't believe me: go to any public restroom. Or day care playroom. Or the movies. Or any public highway.

You wanna bitch about your rights? Start by telling me what responsibilities those rights carry.

The Second Amendment conveys no rights, and revoking it outright changes but one thing: the recognition that some rights pre-date all written law, and the duty of government is only legitimate when it protects those natural law rights.

But left unwritten, and no less valid, is the natural law right that you don't get to use your rights as an excuse to be a jackass in public with them. You can swing your fist, but only as far as the next person's nose. And if you do it often enough, even if you stop short, swinging right up to the edge of someone else's nose is going to get you decked, for cause. More so, from mores more ancient than Philadelphia in 1787, where women and children are concerned.

So before someone starts blathering about how this law or that law is a foul, horrific exercise in eventually loading you into a boxcar and fluoridating your drinking water, let's maybe start out by recognizing that letting the biggest morons in society loose and free, and letting them define the boundaries of intelligent behavior, is more than a little bit to blame for the 40 shelf-yards of legal code and regulations you've lived under your entire life in a nominally "free" country.

No, we shouldn't need 39.99998 yards of that law, and we can all wish it weren't so, but over there, at the boundary of society between grass and concrete patio, there's some fucktard making a large wet yellow spot, and screwing it up for everybody, and three chances out of five, it's your own Cousin Dipshit with his tackle out, providing the precise excuse for that sign.

Own that, stop arguing theoretical hypothetical cases where all men are rational and moral, and start living in the real world where they're the exact irrational fuckwits we meet 24/7/365 in the real world.

Then we can talk.

Start with two competing thoughts, both absolutely and equally true:


"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams

Our country's Founders knew the absolute truth of both thoughts, and that's precisely why our Constitution took the form it did.
Bear that in mind before you present some ersatz hagiographized version of it as reality.
You're wrong, and you'll just piss off people brighter than you are, for trying.