NSA, Your Friendly Snoop

“One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy, hello, is this the party to whom I am speaking?”

“Hallo Ernestine, Chancellor Merkel here. Ein moment bitte. Barack, you can hank op please. Dis ist nicht ein konferenz call.”

Funny? German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t think so when she found out the NSA has been consistently listening to her call phone calls. In fact, the NSA listens to phone calls of many leaders of our friendly allies. While some allies take it in stride, others who grew up in oppressive governments – like NAZI Germany and communist East Germany – are understandably concerned.

But we’re the good guys! The NSA is just trying to keep the US safe from terrorists. Although that is a laudable goal, just what makes them think Angela Merkel would be having conversations with terrorists. Sure, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood might be cooking up some nasty business, and eavesdropping on them would be a real good idea.

Is there a difference between gathering intelligence and just plain snooping? I believe there is, but to differentiate one would probably be accused of “profiling”. It’s the same affront to logic that requires the TSA to pat down 80-year-old grandmothers and 4-year-old girls at the airport while passing Muslim men for fear of being labeled as profiling.

So now we are paying the National Security Agency to listen to the German Chancellor make a hairdresser appointment, or campaign strategy, or maybe confidential EU strategy with an Italian Minister. It is almost certain, though, that she will not be discussing terrorist hits on America.

The NSA has some of the most technologically advanced equipment in the world, much of it evolved from that of the cold war when spy craft was a necessary factor in survival of the free world. While other countries may not have the advanced technology we do, there can be no doubt they are spying on us too.

When Obama took office, he became the first president to use cell technology – his Blackberry. There was always the fear that wireless technology could be hacked. Apparently, that was a valid fear, but our own security agency seems to be the ones doing the hacking. If we can hack cell phones, it’s a safe bet other technologically proficient countries or groups can too, for instance China or Russia, maybe even Al Qaida. Do you think they might be interested in hearing about Obama’s golf game? Maybe they are spellbound listening to him recount about Michelle’s latest taxpayer-paid multi-million dollar vacation.

I guess the bottom line is even though we have the ability to snoop on anyone in the world, logic and common sense should dictate whom we target. Shame on us for spying on our friends. The thing is, if we can do it, so can other, maybe not so friendly, entities. Folks using unsecured devices for communication should not expect privacy. Critical conversations over these devices should always be handled as if they were being broadcast to everyone in the world.

If Angela Merkel or any other high-profile government leader is communicating critical information over unsecured devices, they are too naïve to be in a leadership position. If your cell phone is limited to benign, droll, personal chitchat, the NSA and probably anyone else listening will become so bored they will eventually give up.

Insanity: noun, the US Government

In our government, there are policies and actions that completely defy rational explanation. Our leaders would like us to believe that budget and spending matters are far to complex for us to understand, so we have to trust them to make the right decisions. Please bear with me as I attempt to simplify and summarize these matters:

Assume you work for a large bakery. The CEO decides to tape $20 bills to every $5 loaf of bread sold in select states. He claims it will make people like our bread. The company doesn’t have enough cash on hand to cover the additional cost, so the CEO gets a loan to cover it. The interest on the loan is so huge, he would need to raise price of the bread to cover the loan payments. Instead, he goes out for another loan to cover the interest costs on the first loan, rather than raise prices and lose customers.

One day you see a report from the warehouse that thieves are breaking in and stealing 20% of your goods. The CEO tells you to just ignore it. We will have to increase production and tack the loss on to the price.

Okay, how long do you thing this business will last? At what point do you think the men in white coats with straitjackets will come and take the CEO to a better place?

If you think this is over-simplifying our government’s fiscal policy, take a look at a real-time view of our monetary situation at http://www.usdebtclock.org. I haven’t seen numbers spin that fast since the last time I put fuel in my truck.

For the 2014 budget, Obama wants $3.77 TRILLION. Our federal government will take in $3.03 TRILLION. That leaves some $744 BILLION to be made up with what, borrowed money? Let’s take a snapshot of the spinning numbers. At this moment, we are some $17 TRILLION in debt. The interest alone on the debt is some $2.8 TRILLION – nearly the entire income for the U.S. Government!

Sad, very sad! But wait, it gets even crazier! We give away BILLIONS to nations just so they will like us. Right now Afghanistan is our largest beneficiary at some $2.2 BILLION requested for 2014. Of course, that probably doesn’t include the “black” money the CIA drops off to Karzai every month. Pakistan is the next runner up at $1.6 BILLION and Egypt had been scheduled to get a billion or so. The list goes on …. Obama tells us the foreign aid is merely 1% of the budget. That’s 1% of a $3.77 TRILLION budget! We’re talking BILLIONS of dollars just thrown at countries that don’t even like us. Money we will never see again.

Sure that’s crazy, but what about spending here at home? Watchdog.org recently found that the Internal Revenue Service mailed $4.2 BILLION in child-credit checks to undocumented immigrants. When Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, tried to plug that money leak with a budget amendment Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada cut off debate.

People, our government is certifiably insane! The federal government is so huge we can’t even get an accurate count of how many individually are actually employed by us. The budgetary process uses such muddled accounting methods one can’t get a straight answer on where the money is being spent. Our own legislators look the other way while billions of dollars are simply given to people in our country illegally. We have to borrow money to pay the interest on our debt. And we toss billions of dollars at foreign countries and tell everyone it’s “just” one percent of the budget.

If ANY of this makes sense to you, please give me a call. I’ll sell you the Washington Monument cheap and throw in the Capital building for free. But hurry, before they throw a net over the entire city.

Our Can Has Been Kicked

Well, the impasse is finally over and our government is back in business and driving ourselves deeper in debt just to pay the interest on our existing debt. Pardon me if I don’t appear altogether thrilled with the outcome.

Let me try to recap just what has been accomplished. No reductions in spending were made to the budget, Obamacare remains fully funded (even though the odds of being able to sign up are something akin to winning the lottery), those who suffered furlough during the “shutdown” will all receive back pay, and the government is free to continue borrowing. Unless I have missed something, nothing has been accomplished, and those furloughed have had a nice unscheduled, paid vacation – at our expense.

Okay, that’s sad, but the real tragedy is that the government gets to do this all over again at the beginning of next year. Obama likes to use the term “kicking the can down the road.” Well our can has been kicked, my friends. How does it feel?

The lamestream media are busy pointing fingers. The tax and spend liberals are declaring victory, the Tea Party Republicans are saying they made their point, and the “moderates” on both sides of the isle are taking credit for defusing the standoff.

 While I whole-heartedly applaud the goal of conservative Republicans to reduce the size of government and the budget, their tactics and timing were just not right this time. Sure, they made their point. Shut down the government and people will see that we don’t really need huge portions of it. But did that happen?

Actually, the government didn’t even come close to grinding to a halt. The Obama administration made sure only the high-profile services were closed, but most paychecks went out and the “entitlements” were paid. The Military, NAS, CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and congress were all on duty, albeit without some of the civilian contractors. Were the Department of Energy and Department of Education shut down? Both are a prime example of two departments we easily close with no negative impact.

Despite the predictions in the media of massive catastrophic times with the government closed, there were only slight inconveniences to most of the population. Sure, some government workers (mostly non-union) were temporarily out of work. But even these people will get their pay.

Media pundits and politicians all decried the inability of radical wings of each party to negotiate a suitable end to the shutdown. Nonsense! From the beginning, the congressional Republicans – including the Tea Party members – all agreed to fund the budget and keep the government open. They only wanted to exclude funding for the Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) for one year. Although congress couldn’t predict the debacle with on-line sign up, it now appears that delaying the start for a year might have been a wise move. It may take that long to work the bugs out of the untested software.

As for political “moderates”, these are the ones setting on the fence waiting for a wind strong enough to blow them to one side of the other. They have no convictions or are willing to sell them out for the right price. It is not the radical wings of the political parties that make our government a jumbled mess. It is the moderates that are willing to sell their very souls for the right price that has allowed our government to balloon up to unnecessary proportions.

Let’s hope that the “moderates” are able to grow a spine by the end of the year. 

The Shutdown: A Blessing in Disguise

Did you notice the Federal government recently shut down? Just what does that mean? How many millions of employees are there in our national government?

Tired of all the hyperbola and conflicting and misleading information in the “mainstream media”, I went to that wellspring of all information, the Internet. Bad move! I couldn’t get a consistent or coherent answer there either. Does anybody even know how many people are employed with our tax dollars?

As near as I can tell, there are categories of employees in all three branches of government: full-time, part-time and contractors. The executive branch seems to have the most people, but then it also includes the Military and Post Office. There are also reports on how many employees are in the judicial branch. I couldn’t find any reports of how many legislative branch employees there are, though.

Adding to the confusion, there appears to be some game playing with how the employees are categorized and thus counted. Many reports show the employment in terms of the fiscal budget (October 1 to September 30), the latest of which is the fiscal 2012 budget. Other reports show the budget size of increase or decrease over time for each administration or budget adjusted for inflation, and other slight-of-hand accounting tricks.

Again, the unanswered question is, how many people are we paying for? If I could get a straight answer on that, my next question would be: what do they all do, of course followed by: are these people all necessary? Several reports show that only some three out of five government employees actually do any work.

Despite the hand wringing over the “sequester”, it proved that across-the-board cuts in budgets doesn’t seem to put a major crimp in operations. Without a functional 2013 budget, we are told the government shut down, but reports are that about 80% of the government is still working. As in the “sequester” scare, the administration targeted areas of the government that would be most noticeable; National Parks, passport services, and other often used departments. Still, we are merely inconvenienced, not in dire need or danger.

Many of the really non-essential governmental departments seem to be still operating -- the education department and the department of energy to name two. The CIA is still dropping off sacks of bribe money on Hamid Karzai’s desk and sending “aid” to Egypt. Although I have no actual way of knowing, I’m pretty sure the NSA is still eavesdropping on all of us. And just to rub salt in our fiscal wounds, Obamacare is charging full-speed ahead.

Just around the corner will be the fight to increase the national debt so Obama can pay for the 2013 budget items. The Democrats and Obama believe we don’t pay enough in taxes, yet they keep increasing the size of government then drive us deeper in debt to cover that increase. At what point does our country quit spending money it doesn’t have or declare bankruptcy?

When will the American public finally realize that the “sequester” and this “pseudo-shutdown” have actually shown that our government is bloated and we don’t really need all of these programs and employees that are driving us ever deeper in debt? Maybe then they will quit voting for tax/borrow-and-spend Democrats and RINOs, and we can finally put this country back on track to prosperity. 

This is Going to Bug You

Eat more bugs; they’re good for you. That’s the message the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations promoted in a 200-page report from a Rome, 2013 conference. There’s even a spiffy name for the practice … entomophagy. I kid you not! Here’s the link, http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3253e/i3253e00.htm.

As school kids, our angry retort to each other would often be, “I hope you eat a bug and die.” Is this what the UN is telling the world? After all, they predict that by 2050 there will be some 9 billion people on the planet. That’s 2 billion more than we now have. And every one of those 9 billion people will be addicted to food.

Sure, feeding that many people will be a problem. Contrary to the belief of many city folks, food doesn’t originate at the grocery store. It all comes from land – arable land or water. With 9 billion people, that resource is bound to become a scarce commodity. At what point do we get serious about controlling the population?

Nearly every country has a certain population that are either starving or on the brink of it. Many already include insects in their diet. The FAO report states that, “it is estimated that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide. More than 1900 insect species have been documented in literature as edible, most of them in tropical countries. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.”

I suspect there aren’t many of those 2 billion entomophagers in our country. You don’t often see cans of caterpillars and buckets of beetles on the supermarket shelves, unless they are in the process of being closed down by the local health department.

As repulsive as the thought of eating insects may be to most of us, they are apparently nutritious. The UN report even talks about disguising the fact that they are bugs by grinding them up and mixing then with other foods. Don’t we have laws against that? The Food and Drug Administration regulates how many insect parts can now go into our food. If the UN gets their wish, that number could go to 100-percent.

I am a confirmed omnivore, but the “omni” doesn’t include intentionally devouring insects. I like meat – red meat, white meat, fowl – it’s all good. I even cringe at the thought of veggie-burgers, and tofu. Now they want us to eat bugs! Enough! Quit messing with food! I can’t even imagine what wine goes with grasshoppers or beetles.

The next time you see cockroaches in a restaurant they may actually be on the menu, and the old gag about complaining to the waiter about a fly in your soup will no longer be funny. I have little doubt that school cafeterias would be lonely places with termites and dragonflies as lunch staples.

Once again, and in true form, the United Nations has come up with an absurd one-size-fits-all notion that is bound to fail.

Global Whating?

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Mark Twain (1835–1910). While the exact author of that statement is subject to debate, the arrogance of the line cannot be disputed. Nobody does anything about it because we puny humans are absolutely powerless to do anything about the weather. At best, we can only pray to a much higher power for more clement weather.

The human race is an arrogant bunch. When one views the forces of nature and realizes that we cannot even fully explain them, you then begin to understand just how impotent we mere mortals are. Have we ever been able to cause a volcanic eruption or stop one? Can we even make rain fall to end a drought or stop a rainfall causing flooding? Can we make high or low atmospheric pressure disperse? In all the forces of nature, humankind is merely flotsam.

Why then are we arrogant enough to believe we are causing our planet to warm to the point of disaster? “Scientists” along with the UN climatologists, planetologists, and alarmologists like Al Gore, and maybe one or more shamans with a bone in their noses, would all have us believe that man-made “greenhouse gasses” are causing the planet to grow warmer.

In 2012 they pointed to the alarming loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice – save the Polar Bears -- as proof that we are in a warming period i.e. implicitly caused by greenhouse gasses. Yet, in 2013 the Arctic ice has grown by 60%. Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013, as compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded on Sept. 16, 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

I certainly did nothing to cause this change. I burn wood in my fireplace, drive the same two vehicles (one of them diesel), and use my diesel tractor. Although one of my farting horses did die this year, I doubt that had much affect on the climate, though.

According to scientific sources, the Last 10,000 years have seen some 1500 volcanoes on this planet, of which no fewer than 60 erupted from 1990 to 1999. At any moment in time, there are at least 20 eruptions going on worldwide. The gasses constantly belched out by any one of these volcanoes makes that produced by entire 405 freeway at the height of rush hour look like a pigeon passing gas in a hurricane by comparison.

We can do nothing about erupting volcanoes, so the hubris of powerful people dictates that they place controls on whatever they can. Do humans generate components of what they call greenhouse gas? Undeniably, yes. Do we contribute the major portion of the gas? Debatable. Is greenhouse gas causing “global warming?” Not likely, since we still have greenhouse gas and haven’t warmed in 15 years.

Somewhere deep in some cave around 50,000 years ago, a human noticed that his bunions hurt when the weather changed. It was then that climatology was born. While great advancements have been made since then, we still don’t know exactly what causes the phenomenon we call weather. Mainstream scientific research ties much of the cause to changes in solar radiation and our own magnetosphere – two more forces we are impotent to change.

The tirade against man-made greenhouse gas is merely the product of people whose power has led them to the megalomaniacal idea that since they are powerless against the forces of nature, they can at least control the puny forces of man. Humility is a rare element in the halls of power. And yet here they are still able to only talk about the weather.

Is the First Lady All Wet?

Water; it’s not just for mixing with whiskey anymore. Or so the Obama administration would have us believe. USA Today, that scholarly organ of trivial information, recently reported on yet another world shattering issue from the White House. Michelle Obama wants us to drink more water. "Drink just one more glass of water a day and you can make a real difference for your health, your energy, and the way you feel," Obama said. "So Drink Up and see for yourself."

Yep, that’s a straight line, if I ever saw one. I will, however, resist the temptation to make reference to the states with water rationing, the possible horrors of telling those getting their water from Lake Erie to drink more, and the nasty things fish do in that stuff.

This reproach to the American public was made without caveat, and without actual knowledge of how much water any individual now drinks. My wife insists that I must drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Is that big or little glasses? She points to the ones in the cupboard the size of buckets. But now the current occupant of the White House is telling me to drink more. Somehow, I doubt even fish drink that much.

One “expert” Stanley Goldfarb, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania went so far as to say, "The idea drinking water increases energy, the word I've used to describe it is: quixotic," he said. "We're designed to drink when we're thirsty. ... There's no need to have more than that." That’s exactly what I told the guys down at the bar … right before I ordered another round.

Seriously folks, everyone knows water is necessary for all life on earth to exist – especially someone hiking in Death Valley in July. My doctor is a big fan of drinking water. He even discourages prescribing a diuretic to people in Southern California. He says most of us lose enough water just walking around in the warm, low humidity So-Cal climate.

Most of us get more water than we realize, though. There’s water in coffee, tea, fruit drinks, and just about any other liquid you drink. Even beer is made with water – although, I’ve been warned against drinking alcohol when thirsty. In fact, that is why beer was invented several thousand years ago. The water was so bad, people were dying from drinking it, and they found that fermented barley actually killed the germs in the water. Egyptians building the pyramids were even paid in beer. Although, without refrigeration, I suspect they didn’t wait for the mountains to turn blue.

It seems that First Ladies must grow weary of sitting around the White House watching their husbands tackle knotty issues day-in and day-out. They want to put their mark on the administration. Eleanor Roosevelt continually pushed FDR for a socialist agenda. Nancy Reagan told everyone to just say no to drugs. Hillary Clinton told Bill to just say no to the White House interns. And now Michelle Obama, fresh from her latest taxpayer paid multi-million dollar vacation, is promoting the health benefits of drinking … water.

This campaign can’t turn out any worse than the one where she promoted fresh fruit and vegetables in schools. You know, the one where one school reported throwing out $75,000 worth of uneaten fruit and vegetables a day. Kids will eat what they like and people will drink what they like. 

Maybe after her next multi-million dollar vacation, she might get us to breathe more air. Until then, I guess I’ll have to drink a few more Jack-and-waters. Can’t disappoint the White House.