One Last Chance to Make FISA a Little Less Evil

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Even though the House with Speaker Johnson’s vote allowed the FISA laws to remain in force another two years, the House has one last chance on Monday to add an amendment that requires a warrant for almost every kind of surveillance of US citizens.

“House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was among the 86 Republicans who voted against including the bipartisan warrant mandate amendment in the bill to renew FISA through 2026.”

I’m sure the FBI, NSA and CIA put on a very convincing dog and pony show to convince Speaker Johnson that if he allowed a warrant requirement to block FISA surveillance that he would be blamed when the next attack occurs.  Well, it’s time for conservatives to say “We don’t care.”

It’s better to be free in a dangerous world than to be a safe slave.

Let’s hope Johnson has the brains in his head to take this last lifeline to take this one small step to begin undoing the harm that was done to our freedoms after 9/11.

 

Who Will Own the Future?

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The earliest civilization that archeologists have identified is Sumer.  Located in the southern portion of the Tigris-Euphrates basin the Sumerians invented irrigation agriculture, domesticated several of the familiar farm animals and formed the first empire.  Their technological advances allowed them to grow their population until it probably included a million people.  Pretty good for six or seven thousand years ago.

So why aren’t we all speaking Sumerian and praying to Enki and Enkidu (Enki see, Enki do)?

Well as it turns out, using the Tigris and Euphrates as an irrigation source for hundreds of years eventually raises the salinity of the soil to the point where agricultural yield falls way off.  That’s right.  The technology that made their civilization possible was eventually unsustainable.

Sustainability is a buzzword that Gaia worshippers love to bandy about.  And typically, they’re talking about fossil fuels as being “unsustainable.”  But more and more the sustainability of things like wind and solar energy systems have begun to be questioned.

As an example, down in Texas a hail storm destroyed a significant part of a 4,000 acre solar panel array.  And local people are worried about the damaged equipment leaking harmful chemicals into the groundwater.  And this is far from the first occasion when hail has destroyed these arrays.  And wind turbines have been having their own problems.  Maintenance has been found to be more expensive and frequent than estimated.  And the impact on bird life has been shocking for the wildlife lovers among the green energy crowd.  Dead eagles and other raptors are a common sight around these installations.

But the main complaint about these supposedly sustainable technologies is that they have significant environmental costs compared to the limited power production they represent.  In other words, replacing the current power generation capacity with these sustainable technologies would create enormous ecological impact from the production of the equipment and from the sheer size of the area needed to contain this capacity.  Imagine a landscape covered for miles and miles with wind turbines.  And the whole area littered with bird carcasses.

The current green energy technologies remind me of the compact florescent bulbs that the Obama administration tried to push on us.  It was a technology that had more problems than the technology it was supposed to replace.  Basically, it was a pretend solution to a situation that was being presented as a critical problem but was actually a manufactured crisis.

Now here’s the thing.  Problems with technology occur.  One problem that we have anticipated for a long time is what to do when fossil fuels run out.  Now whether that’s a hundred years in the future or a thousand years there will most probably will be a point where we’ll run out of recoverable coal, oil and gas.  And long before that time comes mankind should have a plan to replace this energy source with something else.

But the answer can’t be going back to living in caves as the green energy people want you to believe.  And if this country and the rest of Western Civilization decide that following the lead of the Greens is the answer then someone else will find the better way and move forward without us.

Will it be the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians?  It’s very hard to know who.  But it will happen.  And if we allow ourselves to be bullied by the likes of Greta Thunberg and John Kerry then we’re going to doom our children to living like stone age people and eventually be displaced by more rational societies.

I’m hopeful that the great experiment with green energy that California has pioneered will soon bear fruit and cause some horrific catastrophe.  Maybe a huge number of electric cars will get stuck in a traffic jam out in the desert and thousands of stranded motorists will die of heat stroke.  Something like that could allow rational people to realize how stupid the Greens truly are and return people to a sane way of thinking about energy and its place in our lives.

Well, Enki see Enkidu.

Political Crowd Funding

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What is the Republican Party?  It is a corporation that works for the welfare of the people who control it.  The people who control it are those who run it and those that fund it.  The paradox is that when individual voters donate to it, they are the least influential stakeholders.  Their small individual contributions are essentially ignored when it comes to setting policy and when it comes to choosing candidates.

So, if you’re George Bush or Mitt Romney and you want to run for office, you call up your friends on Wall Street and tell them you’re going to need to raise three hundred million dollars, or whatever it is, to run for president and they’ll get in touch with their friends and they’ll arrange a $100,000 a plate dinner for you and raise fifty million dollars by getting all your friends from Yale together.  And over a good steak dinner they’ll talk about who would be a good campaign manager and maybe they’ll even talk about what they think would be a good slogan for the campaign.  Maybe, “Compassionate Conservatism” or, “Jesus is my favorite philosopher.”  And it will be duly noted by the Republican National Committee chairman that according to the latest handicapping poll it’s your turn to be the candidate.

And during the strategy meeting about how the campaign is going to be run there is sure to be a lot of talk about what Democrat outrage should be singled out as the “get out the rubes” rallying cry.  Maybe it’ll be gay marriage or school prayer.  Today it would be Drag Queen Story Hour.  But whatever it is they’ll pick it because it viscerally angers the normal people and it’s something that will never be addressed by the candidate if he ever becomes president.

Really what he wants to get done while in the White House is invade various third world nations and make sure they have the requisite LGBTQ laws in place.  That and advance the precepts of the WEF.  That means eliminate fossil fuels, meat and masculinity.  So that is what the Republican Party is.

Okay, so the Republican Party is not something that’s there to help you.  But it does think that you are here to help it.  It sends out hundreds and hundreds of emails and letters every year to each person who registers as a Republican and tells you it’s your duty to send $20 or $50 or $1,000 to them to protect you from the Democrats.  It wants your money, but it doesn’t want your advice.  Period.

Well, it doesn’t take a genius to see that the only way the Republican Party can be of any help to the majority of normal Americans is if they can bundle their money in a way that makes them a major donor to the candidates that want to run.  And that means they have to form or find a corporation that can pool their money and help them focus their needs into an agenda that can then be presented to individual candidates that want to represent them.  These can be Republican candidates or independent candidates; hell, they can be Democrat candidates if they’re willing to be bought and stay bought.

Something like this sounds complicated and therefore expensive.  But there are a lot of conservatives.  Many millions of them.  And the power of computing makes it manageable.  And as far as motivating people, just look at what crowd-funding sites are able to raise for everything from a new novel by a favorite author (more than $60,000,000) to a family left homeless by a tornado ($500,000).  Imagine if you told people that they were donating to primary Mitt Romney out of office.  Even I would donate for that.

So maybe that’s the pitch.  Call it crowd-funding for better government.  The corporation identifies issues of interest to the members and matches it up with people to donate for and against.  And it keeps an enormous scorecard for all these officials and keeps track of votes coming up and offers them campaign donations if they vote the right way and promises to primary them if they vote the wrong way.

And for us it allows us to donate specifically to the cause or candidate that speaks to us viscerally.  And playing on the fear and greed of politicians sounds like fun!

The ZMan and the Republicans

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Today’s ZMan post was very thought provoking.  He links to two other articles that take a pro and con stance on whether ineffective “conservative” parties like the Republicans in America and the Tories in England should be totally abandoned or reformed.

The abandonment thesis is that if the British Tories were completely abandoned by their supporters this would have the twin benefits of destroying the spineless Tory part, thus paving the way for a replacement and delegitimizing the whole Uni-party arrangement that the Labor and Tory parties have practiced for generations.

The reform opinion holds that destroying the brake on the power of the progressives that the half-hearted but at least existing opposition party provides will make things much worse with all the worst policies now happening unchecked.

It’s a very difficult argument to pick a side on.  It’s hard to imagine a worse situation than the one we find ourselves in presently with Joe Biden ruling by executive order.  That is until you imagine what would happen if he had even a two thirds majority in the Congress.  They’d impeach and remove Supreme Court justices and anyone else standing in their way.

So, the ZMan is staunchly on the abandonment side of the argument.  He’d let the Republicans go down to complete defeat and depend on an accelerationist scenario to drive the present government into disrepute and depend on a reset to produce a new system that suits him better.

I guess I’m currently in the reform camp.  But I will say, if the Democrats hold onto the presidency this year I may change my mind.  At a certain point you just give up on “working within the system.”

It’s a pretty good read.

My Thoughts on the New Movie, “Civil War”

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I have not gone to see the new movie “Civil War.”  And unless something comes out to convince me otherwise, I won’t be.  I watched a bunch of video reviews by people who went to the early IMAX screening.  And based on these reviews I understood that the director wanted the audiences to feel that the movie is drawing no comparison between the existing political sides in the United States and the fictional factions that are at war in the movie.

The director wants the audience to think that the movie is about the unstoppable desire of the four journalists to document the war and also about the horrors that would break out in the event of an American Civil War.  So that doesn’t sound like a partisan set-up waiting to mug unsuspecting conservatives after they plunk down their hard-earned movie money.  But the more I thought about the details of the movie the less convinced I was that this was an even-handed film.

I think the first “tell” I found was the fact that in the movie the dictatorial three term president had disbanded the FBI.  Now everyone knows that the FBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama/Clinton/Biden crime cartel.  And that Donald Trump has called for the FBI to be purged and possibly closed down.  To me this is the clearest sign that the rogue authoritarian president is meant to be Trump.

The second sign that the civil war is being presented as a battle between the Left and the Right is the scene where a “white” militiaman is pointedly asking the non-white journalist what kind of an American he is.  The implication is that at least one of the seceding entities is made up of white nationalists murdering non-whites.

But for me the thing that makes it most likely that I won’t enjoy this movie is the choice of protagonists.  The heroes of this drama are intrepid journalists.  These pillars of democracy are there to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help them CNN.  After all, when might we have seen journalists reporting from a war zone with less than the complete truth?  Hmmm.  Oh, I remember, the fiery, but mostly peaceful George Floyd riots when half of America’s cities were looted and burned.  Yeah, that was it!  Why wouldn’t I buy into a movie where these paragons of objectivity were the heroes?

Based on the reviews and the statements made by the cast and director they are putting this forward as a completely neutral film.  Well, of course they are.  Alienating the half of the country that enjoys action movies is a recipe for box office failure for a movie like this.  But I’m extremely tired of paying for movies that portray me as what’s wrong with this country.  I’ll let someone else pay for that.

And it’s a shame I won’t be going.  From what I’ve read and seen, the war sequences are pretty exciting.  And they do blow up Washington DC pretty convincingly, which sounds like fun.  Maybe I’ll wait until it’s streaming for free or I can rent it from the public library.  Oh, and one last thing.  The guy who plays the evil president doesn’t look like him but he sounds exactly like Mike Pence.  I’m okay if the Western Alliance takes old Mike away for high crimes and misdemeanors.  That I’d be okay with.