AN IMPORTANT CAUSE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: Let’s Put An End To Mustache Discrimination.

THOUGHTS ON SECURITY FROM INSTAPUNDIT READER/COMMENTER (and a blogger himself) Eric Cowperthwaite. “Most people in the information security field who know me also know that I am firmly convinced that the bad guys are currently winning the war we are engaged in.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 10% of student loan barrowers defaulting within two years; 16% within three years.

NICK GILLESPIE: GOP “Anarchists” Now Talking About Reopening…National Parks? “In a Washington where 95 percent of Department of Education employees were sent home today because they are ‘non-essential,’ I’d think twice about simply moving to restore pre-shutdown funding to the government. It would be nice to dust off actual budget proposals and start talking about what the government should do and how much (or how much little) it should spend in pursuit of those goals.”

WHAT THEY DO WHEN THE GOVERNMENT IS OPEN: Bureaucrats at tiny federal agency FMCS buy legions of luxuries with purchase cards. “One federal employee leased a $53,000 take-home car with taxpayer money in apparent defiance of federal regulations and regularly billed the government for service at shops such as BMW of Fairfax. Others charged the government monthly for family members’ cell phones and high-end TV packages and Internet at home — and even at second homes. Managers freely made out checks to employees without requiring documentation of how it would be spent, giving $1,316 directly to one who said she was reimbursing herself for furniture she bought for a “home office” and using convenience checks to give workers bonuses. Government employees used federal purchase cards to order items such as a $560 Bose stereo and $1,490 for two high-definition televisions that could not be located. All of these examples happened at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, an obscure runaway government agency where the median annual salary is $120,000.”

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ISN’T THIS SORT OF THE BACKSTORY FOR STARSHIP TROOPERS? Veterans Plot To Expand Revolt Against Government Shutdown.

Military veterans are declaring war on the government shutdown.

After a group of veterans broke down the barricades at the national World War II Memorial Tuesday afternoon, organizers of one Hero Flight Network group told BuzzFeed it wasn’t the last Washington would hear from them. Veterans are plotting another protest at the same place Wednesday, and expressed interest in staging similar events at sites across the nation’s capital, including the Lincoln Memorial — an act of civil disobedience that would likely pour fuel on the already highly flammable politics of the government shutdown.

“We have people here that are 80 and 90 years old and they closed down all the bathrooms?” said Tony Nussbaum, a 25-year veteran of the Air Force from Iowa and a leader of the state’s Hero Flight group. “I’m about to just start pissing on the trees.”

The World War II Memorial on the National Mall became a political battlefield Tuesday, with conservatives excoriating Democrats for the monument’s closure as they escorted busloads of war veterans past bewildered park rangers and into the shuttered monument.

On Wednesday, the scene could repeat itself when groups from the Honor Flight Network — a national charity that brings aging World War II veterans to visit the national monument to the conflict they fought in — are scheduled to arrive at the massive outdoor memorial. Meanwhile, veterans have pondered staging a similar protest at the Lincoln memorial, said Jamie Miller, a five-year veteran of the Marine Corps and another organizer of the Iowa group that stormed the World War II memorial Tuesday.

Related: World War II veterans knock down police barriers to attend memorial on the National Mall; Update: Did a congressman lead the vets through the barricade?; Update: Congressman says Obama administration knew about veterans’ request and rejected it. Putting up barriers around open outdoor monuments was dumb shutdown theater and they deserve to have it backfire on them.

UPDATE: “I said, are you kidding me? You’re going to arrest a 90/91-year-old veteran from seeing his memorial? If it wasn’t for them it wouldn’t be there. She said, ‘That’s correct sir.'”

JIM TREACHER: “Remember: The people telling you a government shutdown is a disaster are the same ones who told you 3 weeks ago that we had to invade Syria.”

I’M SURE THIS WILL GET MASSIVE NATIONAL PUBLICITY: Dem candidate in Pennsylvania angers own party over comments about women, homosexuals.

THINGS MUST BE GOING SWIMMINGLY! Administration will not release number of Obamacare enrollees on opening day.

Related: CNN: Rough Rollout For ObamaCare Website.

UPDATE: Why Won’t The Exchanges Load? “I was going to write a review of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges this afternoon — go through the process of shopping, and then tell you which exchanges were good, which were bad and so forth. Unfortunately, I couldn’t actually get into most of the exchanges; they wouldn’t load. Or they barfed* at creating a login. Massachusetts let me get almost all the way through, then abruptly melted down when I asked it to show me policies that I might be interested in.”

REASON TV: Three Reasons Why ObamaCare Isn’t Apple.

INCENTIVES: Tom Hanks Leaves Captain Phillips Premiere Early to Avoid NYC Tax Man.

CHANGE: Airlines Promise A Return To Civility, For A Fee.

FREE SPEECH: Court: website alleging police corruption shouldn’t have been shut down.

Lafayette, Louisiana is known as the capital of Cajun culture—and it’ll now also exist as a reference point in First Amendment case law.

On Monday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that previously allowed a website created by current and former members of the Lafayette Police Department, describing allegations of top-to-bottom corruption, to be shuttered. (City officials denied the site’s allegations.)

Initially, the Lafayette Police sued the owners of the site and got a magistrate judge to order that the site be “closed and removed immediately.” This was a way for that court to avoid influencing a prospective jury pool in a related civil case.

The magistrate needs remedial First Amendment training.

CLAIM: Google’s Plan For Autonomous Cars Doesn’t Go Far Enough.

WHEN GENDER GAPS don’t matter.

EUROPE: Swiss Military Maneuvers Based On Defending Against Attack From Bankrupt France. “This is by no means the first imaginary scenario dreamed up by the Swiss army. Last year, it carried out an exercise based on the premise that a huge wave of refugees crossed into the country after the implosion of the European Single Currency and ensuing chaos across the continent.”

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EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: Life On The Island: The digital age has been accompanied by a concerning rise in hyper-individualism.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but note this point, in a different context, from an InstaPundit commenter: “The long-term goal of the government’s social policies are to flatten society out into one atomized mass. There will be only the state and the individual, and the individual will have no protection, no mediating institutions, between itself and the state. Antipathy towards a wide variety of actors–the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, ‘special interests’ of all types, political parties, private universities–can all be understood in light of this fact.”

THIS IS MORE INTENSE THAN MY TEST-DRIVE TO PALM BEACH: 46 hours and 9 minutes, my trip across the US in Audi’s new A6 TDI.

Our results were as follows:

Audi A6: 43.561 mpg; average speed: 65.4 mph; 14.63% over EPA rating

Audi A7: 42.653 mpg; average speed:65.1 mph; 12.25% over EPA

Audi Q5: 38.623 mpg; average speed: 64.9 mph; 24.59% over EPA.

Pretty impressive, and evidence — as I noted — that on long road trips, a diesel can do things a hybrid can’t.

IRS AGENTS USED TO BE FEARED BUT RESPECTED. NOW THEY’RE LOOKING LESS RESPECTABLE: Dr. Ben Carson: I had my first encounter with the IRS after challenging Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Reminder: In 2009, President Obama “joked” about having the IRS audit his enemies.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, THE REVERSE HAS BEEN TRUE FOR YEARS: Some Robots Are Starting To Move More Like Humans.

BILL STRAUB: Anatomy Of A Shutdown With No End In Sight. “All the president has to do is say yes and the government is funded tomorrow.”

ELON MUSK: SpaceX Now Has “All the Pieces” For Truly Reusable Rockets.

You know, this is feeling more and more like Jerry Pournelle’s future history, where a corrupt regime is running the country into the ground even as commercial space pioneers offer the only bright spot of progress. Where’s my Alderson Drive, though?

COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER BIASED PUBLICATION: We Are Googling The New York Times To Death.