Story #1 is a frightening story about a new executive order that would allow the government to declare martial law. #2 is another worrisome story about “Stellar Wind.” If you’ve not heard about it before you want to read about it. #3 finds that the Rush boycott seems to have failed. #4 will let you take a quiz about Obamacare. #5 lets you see how liberals (or at least some liberals) see Barack Obama. #6 is an autopsy for environmentalism. And #7 looks at the questions are oil and gas renewable resources?
1. Obama issues Executive Order to Impose Martial Law
This Executive Order was posted on the WhiteHouse.gov web site on Friday, March 16, 2012, under the name National Defense Resources Preparedness. In a nutshell, it’s the blueprint for Peacetime Martial Law and it gives the president the power to take just about anything deemed necessary for “National Defense”, whatever they decide that is. It’s peacetime, because as the title of the order says, it’s for “Preparedness”. A copy of the entire order follows the end of this story.
I remember how liberals got so upset by the steps taken by GWB regarding homeland security. This goes way beyond that.
2. Are you familiar with Stellar Wind?
In the heart of Utah’s desert, the National Security Agency is well underway on a project that has been called the nation’s largest, most expensive cyber-security project. Naturally, almost all details about the building’s soon-to-be inner activities are highly classified and no one is talking — officials in Bluffdale where it is being built and the nearby Salt Lake City are kept in the dark. Still, Wired’s Threat Level has gotten some details on the building and provides analysis on some of its expected activity….
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-details-on-nsas-new-spy-center-and-secrets-from-domestic-eavesdropping-operation-stellar-wind/
Well, its 29 years late, but it appears Big Brother will soon be watching.
3. Rush Boycott a Failure
Today listening to the Rush Limbaugh I heard seven commercials from companies that Media Matters claimed were no longer advertising on the show. I’m a friend, and a former employee of the manager of the local radio station that carries the Rush Limbaugh show.
I asked him just how bad was this boycott on the show was, that is how much of a big deal was it? I might add that my friend is a liberal.
“Not much at all” he said. “Actually we haven’t had too many advertisers specifically ask that their ads don’t run on during the show”. But he added, “Things this week have seemed to died down.” In what way I asked….
The left was hoping that the “War on Women” would be a winner for them. In reality it appears to be another failed leftwing attempt to change the conversation. This election will be determined by the economy and Obama’s performance.
4. Obamacare: A Quiz
This is a questionnaire you might like to take on Obamacare. Here is the 28th and final question
While I worry about your lack of commitment to schoolwork, I am encouraged by the concern you show for your grandparents, many of whom raised you. How might ObamaCare treat your grandparents in their final days?
a. Your family will make end-of-life decisions privately and with your loved ones.
b. The government will decide when grandma needs to be removed from life support.
c. There is no provision for this situation in ObamaCare
The answer is b, but I suspect you knew that even if Nancy Pelosi didn’t.
5. Obama a dream or a nightmare?
In the March/April issue of the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris offers a long essay in defense of Barack Obama. Titled, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama,” it is, in its own way, the clearest and most helpful analysis of the Obama presidency that’s been written so far. Glastris’s main contention is that Obama has “gotten more done in three years than any president in decades.” Yet, “the American public still thinks he hasn’t accomplished anything.” He’s right:
Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Glastris has unwittingly created a glossary of radical statism as a defense of Obama. His own words: “legislative tonnage,” “reform,” “takeover,” “biggest stimulus in history,” “sweeping regulations,” “protection,” “vast expansion,” “Net neutrality,” “greatest increase” in still more “protection,” and “revolutionary reform.” To liberals, this is the poetry of paternalism but to the rest of America it’s a nightmare lexico…
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/18/obamas-triumphal-statist-presidency/
It depends on which side of the aisle you are on, but for me the nightmare can’t end until November 2012.
6. Environmentalism, The Autopsy
More to the point about the slow and agonizing death spiral of the environmental movement: could anyone have predicted this? In fact, some one did, at the very beginning of modern environmentalism around the time of the first Earth Day. The political scientist Anthony Downs offered up his theory of the “issue-attention cycle” in a classic 1972 article in The Public Interest, explaining the five stages that virtually all issues go through in the course of their public life. Downs specifically said that the environmental issue cycle would be longer than most.
The issue-attention cycle begins with a group of experts and interest groups promoting a problem or crisis, which is soon followed by the alarmed discovery of the news media and broader political class. This second stage, significantly, typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call this the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global salvation and redemption. One of the largest debilitations of environmentalism from the beginning was to conceive it not as a practical problem of public health or nuisance, but as an expression, in Al Gore’s view, of deeper spiritual and even metaphysical problems arising from our “dysfunctional civilization.” These people don’t just want to fix our tailpipes; they want to fix our souls.
The third stage is the hinge. As Downs explains, there comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” …
An outstanding article explaining the death of the environmental and more specifically the global warming movement. And it was never by itself. It was grabbed by the Progressive movement that looks for excuses to overthrow liberty and freedom and impose its views on everyone in the name of saving us all from some global disaster.
7. Are Oil and Gas Renewable fuels?
The evidence is mounting that not only do we have more than a century's worth of recoverable oil in the United States alone (even if there is a limit to the earth's oil supply), but that we also actually have a limitless supply of Texas tea because oil is in fact a renewable resource that is being constantly created deep under the earth's surface and which rises upward, where microscopic organisms that thrive in the intense pressure and heat miles below us interact with and alter it.
In other words, we have an unending supply of oil, some of which is constantly migrating upward from the depths at which it is created to refill existing oil deposits, and much more of which remains far below the surface. This oil can be recovered using existing technology.
Scientist Thomas Gold presents the decades-old theory of "abiotic" oil-creation, which supports these facts, in his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere. In it he explains that the idea of the "biotic" creation of "fossil fuels" -- that decaying organic matter is compressed into oil -- is incorrect. In fact, the earth is constantly producing new oil very deep below its surface, and in some cases the oil flows up to replenish existing oil fields thought to be exhausted. In simple terms, the microscopic organisms mentioned above interact with the hydrocarbons, altering them and leaving their footprint, thus disproving the notion that oil is a "fossil fuel."
Here's an example of how the process plays out:
Eugene Island is an underwater mountain located about 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1973 oil was struck and off-shore platform Eugene 330 erected. The field began production at 15,000 barrels a day, then gradually fell off, as is normal, to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989. THEN CAME THE SURPRISE; IT REVERSED ITSELF AND INCREASED PRODUCTION TO 13,000 BARRELS A DAY. PROBABLE RESERVES HAVE BEEN INCREASED TO 400 MILLION BARRELS FROM 60 MILLION. The field appears to be filling from below and the crude coming up today is from a geological age different from the original crude, which leads to the speculation that the world has limitless supplies of petroleum.
The theory of what Gold calls the deep hot biosphere was explored more fully in Stalinist Russia in the 1940s when the Russian dictator demanded that his scientists find a way to increase Soviet oil production. As they explored the idea that oil and other hydrocarbons are constantly being generated deep beneath the earth's surface, Russian technology was developed in the 1970s to test the theory by drilling as deep as 40,000 feet into the earth. As a result, Russia was the first nation to begin to understand and exploit these renewable oil reserves, and today their oil industry is thriving….
This could be the energy equivalent of domesticating plants. If oil and gas are renewable resources, we need to learn how to maximize our harvesting of oil and gas. So much for peak oil.
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