President Obama’s Last State of the Union Address Finally Done

Part 2

 

Here we go picking up where we left off picking on and picking faults, discrepancies and blatant lies all while trying to maintain our sanity by making light of what will result in the kick-off of President Obama’s long ago promised and much anticipated by extreme leftists and haters of all things America who agree with the President that the problem with the world has been and always was an America that was too powerful, too imperialist, too influential, too concerned and too interventionist even when America seldom kept the lands they liberated returning the greatest majority back to their former governance or to the people to choose their own future with any and all assistance they required in instigating a governance which was chosen and would continue to be chosen by the people in free, open, honest elections where the actual votes mattered and the government was answerable to the ballot box. This President decided that the United States remaining in Iraq and Afghanistan was detrimental to the free choices of the people and was there as a conqueror imposing America’s will onto the people so he removed the United States troops and the vast majority suffered not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but across the Middle East and North Africa as while President Obama had no trouble allowing governments to be overthrown, he saw no role for the United States in preserving the possibility for change if only there was some means of preventing the fracturing in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and starting now in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The sole saving grace in the MENA revolutions was Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power before they could cement their Islamist Sharia nightmare and cast Egypt into another Iran like power except this time Sunni and the Sinai Peninsula is still in open revolt and lawlessness threatening both Egypt and Israel and potentially Jordan and western Saudi Arabia while assisting Iran in arming Hamas even further. So, now let’s get back to the speech after this commercial interruption.

 

“Medical research is critical; we need the same level of commitment when it comes to developing clean energy sources. Look, if anybody wants to dispute the science around climate change, then have at it. You will be pretty lonely.” Then he listed a litany of organizations, branches of government, the military, and so on. Does anybody know what the unifying thing was about that list? Yes, you right here……. Yes, that’s it; they are all financed through the government or are completely beholden as a branch of government. This has been the ugly truth about the climate change debate. Firstly, nobody is claiming that climate does not change as that would be preposterous. What is debated is whether it is predominantly anthropomorphic or whether nature has the far greater effect. Guess which one received the mountain of funding from the United States, United Nations, European Union, and had entire companies whose existence and budget only comes from government and they still manage to go bankrupt, see yesterday’s just above the picture in the article, there is only one. We could argue that right here and never get through the speech so one argument and we’ll move on. Take all the pollution caused by humankind and add to that all the pollution caused by the herds of animals and pets of humankind and add all the pollution caused by factories and power plants, even the coal plant a week Chinese ones with no scrubbers or filters belching pollutants needlessly because they are immune to criticism or pollution control requirements and balance that against the 550 active volcanoes of which an average year has 60 eruptions of which 2/3 are active and constantly erupting such as Stromboli, Kilauea, or Sakurajima. Guess which side of the equation produces more greenhouse gasses and pollutants into the atmosphere, hint, mankind has only once in modern history beaten an erupting volcano on the fly using water pumps, granted, very large water pumps and every last one from Greenland to Britain and beyond was a harbor village in Iceland who slowed and then redirected the lava flow, tens of thousands of cubic yards of lava flow away from directly striking their town losing less than 10% of the buildings. And volcanoes are not the largest producers of greenhouse gasses for which we are very thankful. Anyone know the molecule which generates the greatest amount of greenhouse effect in the atmosphere, and would you like to ban it? We hope not as it is dihydrogen-oxide and the oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of this chemical whose denotation is H2O, yep, water is the greatest producing molecule in the atmosphere that remains a secret because if people ever realized that the oceans beat volcanoes by a factor of hundreds or more and volcanoes beat humanity with all its effects by a factor of thousands then the whole climate change is America’s and the developed world’s fault would be forever buried, but they want to use climate change to change the way you live and then limit your travel demanding you get a license to travel after you pay for a thousand trees to be planted and other garbage coming in the future the way things are heading. So, onward and let’s see the next subject.

 

President made a statement that the United States has cut foreign imports of oil by 60% which he made to sound to be due to renewable energy production and ignored the influence that tripling oil production, largely due to fracking, and the Dakota’s oil boom. An intentional aside, he threw out “gas under two bucks (nice common language rather than the formal dollars) a gallon ain’t (see last comment) bad either” a great little tool politicians use to make a comment, usually to their favor, appear as they just thought of it and threw it out off the cuff, trust one who dabbled in politics, it was on the teleprompter including a signal word to denote its delivery. Enough trees great, cars bad. The “world we preserve,” oh gag me with a spoon.

 

We are now going on to discuss how to keep America safe without isolationism or triumphalism as we cannot be the world’s police. And I have to ask, why not, it had been working somewhat before you broke the entire machine because you were raised in a bubble. The United States spends more on their military than the next eight nations combined. Possibly valid but that is comparing apples to oranges. The United States also spends more on water pipes, telephone equipment, power lines, than those same eight nations, but so what. Let’s talk percentage of GDP to military spending and my bet is that then Israel spends more than the United States. As long as we are making comparisons, my bet is the United States, for the time being as China is about to get into these areas placing their own systems in orbit, but the United States spends more on weather satellites, GPS satellites, satellites to monitor weather on the sun, space telescopes, probes working on or around other planets, and way more on satellites still broadcasting data to Earth from beyond the heliosphere and currently traversing the heliosheath while approaching the so called the heliopause.

 

 

Voyagers 1 and 2 and the Areas in Space with Reference to
the Heliosphere the Heliosheath and the Heliopause as well as
the Shock Wall where the Cosmic Winds from the Milky Way
and the Universal Winds and Energies Exceeds the Solar Effects

 

 

He feels the need to remake NATO. First is protecting Americans, as it should be, because terrorist network, yes, he actually said terrorists, somebody probably told him the value of not hedging when talking about violent extremists, and he named al-Qaeda and ISL which is close to the point, because even a handful of terrorists who care little for human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. No argument here except I would bet he will refer to the small number part in some future argument where he will claim that it is just a small, insignificant number of violent extremists. Well, well, so we sure do not need to push away vital allies in this fight, please tell me this is not where Turkey, or worse, Iran are coming into view, please. The coalition he formed is taking care of Syria which would work better if Congress would authorize use of force in Syria. Further, Iran has been prevented from gaining nuclear weapons and stamped out Ebola in Africa and established trade in Asia if only Congress would act. He claims that we can rid the world of Malaria which could have been accomplished with the judicial and targeted use of DDT back fifty years ago, but because of overuse of DDT by permitting wide swath spraying of even some urban areas to cut down on insects resulted in undernourished birds having overly thin shelled and thus unhealthy eggs. If we had limited the use to only areas where there were stagnant waters, then the judicial use instead of carpet bombing every suburb in America would not have so denuded the areas of insects that it so adversely affected the birds. I can remember the trucks coming every three weeks and spraying unbelievable amounts of what they referred to as bug spray, but our parents knew it was DDT, the chemical which allowed the building of the Panama Canal along with penicillin; but once we were done in the tropics, why continue to allow an inexpensive and easily produced pesticide to continue use worldwide just to rid the world of malaria. But now we must finish the job of eradicating malaria. Why did we refuse to finish the fight a half century ago and saved how many millions of lives? Lives matter even in the poorest of nations where malaria had been a scourge across Africa, South and Central America as well as Asia but not on temperate Europe and America, so ban DDT and watch these continents suffer needlessly. Can you tell this one has stuck in my craw for quite some time?

 

Our glorious future can only happen if we work together and have rational and constructive debates, fix our politics, and now, trust between the citizenry. I fear where he is about to tread. It doesn’t work if we think our opponents are motivated by malice, are unpatriotic, trying to weaken America. Democracy doesn’t work when we fail to compromise, when basic facts are contested, listen only to those who agree with us (then what am I doing here?), public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention, and breaks down when the average person doesn’t think their voice matters, that the system is rigged in favor of the rich, the powerful or some special interest. And we learn that President Obama has regrets and this is one of those few he has about his Presidency, wish I could say the same. He has noticed that the division and relations between the parties had gotten worse instead of better. Talking to the American people he instructs us that it is not enough to change a Congressman or a Senator or even a President to make politics better, we need to change the system. We need to stop drawing congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters and not the other way around, let a bipartisan committee (we think as it was applause overshadowed), reduce the influence of money in our politics so a handful of individuals or (unintelligible) our elections, stutter stutter stutter if campaign finance reform cannot pass muster in the courts, then we have to find another solution, (damn the Constitution and full steam ahead). He can’t do these things on his own, the last time he complained about that he did do it on his own. Look out America, Obama has seen your future and you are going to become a tribal society fighting and killing instead of voting because he has seen it. Um, ah, no, and here we go into the philosophical rhapsody in his view of what is right, imagine an America where there are no differences, no races, no ethnicity and no religion too. Imagined an America where rah rah rah and the son who comes out for who he is and the father who loves him, the woman who waits forever to vote, the new immigrant who votes for the first time and the State of our Union is strong, um, okie dokie.

 

Summary:
It was shorter than his usual but could have been even shorter. I want a President who simply does what the constitution requires, send a report to Congress, written so that they can review where their President who they will need to work along-side and determine where the nation is going in his opinion and they should reply either directly or through whatever channels they need to abide and oblige. Then for the State of the Union Address, as the press will have already posted the report to Congress for any citizen to read, can simply give an emotional and concise speech delineating what he desires and addresses any urgent events or state of the world which he believes the people need to know the President’s views and where he can sway people. That way the report can be lengthy with figures and breakdowns of every little thing and be completely factual or his opinion and go into greater depth than the presentation. As it stands now, the President will actually make two, if he is wise, State of the Union reports, the copy of this speech and the actual SOTU report as a document of greater length and detail than he would ever wish to deliver to the nation. As this system is currently, that second report, if such does exist, will remain unseen by the people and even if the media were to get a copy, the odds are it would never see print or online unless bloggers or other new media types were to have access. The President will never be giving another SOTU address and for that both he and we are likely grateful.
What is actually far more interesting are the rumors floating around which inform us that President Obama will be touring far more than the fifty-seven states he once claimed were the United States, as now he is campaigning for an entirely new position which will present an interesting problem. He wants to be the next Secretary General of the United Nations. He really thinks he should run the world. This has been the funniest rumor I have run across in years and what makes it even better is it would be even funnier if it is for real. Honest, I think President Obama would make a much better Secretary General of the United Nations than he was President of the United States. If President Obama really thinks that Secretary General is a higher post than President of the United States, he will need to have a serious session with people who know better. The Secretary General of United Nations makes pointless speeches, usually unfortunately ever so much longer than necessary, that’s one qualification he has. He needs to enjoy being powerless, not an Obama strong suit. He would have no military and would need to rely completely on his speech delivery to make his point and win the day. They will make sure his translator to the hard of hearing is an actual translator and not some wanna-be comedian. He will get to visit one-hundred-ninety-three nations and the nonfunctional Palestinian Authority. He would still be dead within fifteen minutes of a Gaza visit. He would still be persona-non-grata in Egypt. Turkey’s Erdogan would remain his best friend. He would have the privilege of dealing with Prime Minister Netanyahu even more often and with less influence or power. He could spend great amounts of time in Europe where the politics are presumably more to his liking. He could have two five year terms which is greater job security than his last job where he will be summarily fired after eight too long years of pain and anguish because the Congress would not play fair and just do as they were told, well, except for parts of those first two dreamy years. As Secretary General nobody anywhere will do as they are told, oh the additional anguishes. As Secretary General may he will have miseries like that of a thousand nights shared in a Bedouin tent with a camel. As Secretary General he can make his best speeches even though no one will listen, not even the chair (thank you Neil Diamond).

 

That is a good one to leave in and go listen to Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Israel Hated Similar Reasons as is the United States

One of the mantras heard in the condemnation of Israel in the current struggle to end the rocket bombardment and destroy the infiltration tunnel networks of the Hamas terrorist forces is that while there are hundreds of casualties being suffered within Gaza there are relatively little damage and a near unbelievable lack of noticeable casualties amongst the Israeli populations and cities. This lack of such disaster spread throughout Israel is due to two basic facts, first, the Hamas rockets are unguided and inaccurate with the majority landing in open areas thus doing little other than difficult to measure psychological damage simply from the repeated sirens and the having to hurriedly head for shelters and spend anxious minutes or longer in tense anxiety and second, the next to impossible success of the Iron Dome interceptor batteries which have downed approaching perfect interception percentage which has spared Israel the damage and casualties which previously would reached frightful levels. Take away either of these two factors and Israel would be showing similar levels of damage and significantly higher casualties than are being witnessed in Gaza despite the facts that Hamas places their civilians in the path of dangers and risks their lives in order to attempt to prevent attacks on something they value more than their people’s lives, their rockets to launch in the hope of murdering as many Israelis as possible while Israel invests whatever is necessary to prevent any harm from coming to her civilians. For those hanging on every new broadcast hoping for news of a highly successful attack which brings devastation to those Israelis, it will only take one failure of the Iron Dome batteries which are tasked with protecting Tel Aviv for your dreams to be unfortunately realized. In central Tel Aviv are tall office buildings with ten having forty or more floors and one that clears fifty which could be struck by a Hamas rocket and some of their largest are capable of doing sufficient damage to collapse one such skyscraper making such a strike the worst terrorist strike in Israeli history with a potential of thousands of murdered Israelis as a result of that one rocket which might get through. Those who hold the disparate death tolls and damages as their reason for despising Israel and throwing their sympathies to Hamas in empathy for their greater losses are damning Israel because of her success at protecting her population.

If instead of measuring by damage taken one were to measure the presumed disparity by number of explosive bombs and warheads launched or dropped and number of attempted ground mission and took the period of time leading up to the Israeli ground assault beginning you might be surprised. This comparison does not include the over a thousand rockets launched by Hamas into Israel before Israel launched her first bombing mission and only those rockets and attempted infiltrations by Hamas measured against the number of Israeli bombs and commando raids. The explosive comparison had slightly over a thousand-five-hundred Hamas rockets while the Israelis retaliated with slightly over two-thousand bombs with Hamas having attempted around a half-dozen infiltrations against a single naval commando mission by Israel. When one looks at the attacks and attempts to impart damage, destruction and casualties on the other side the conflict between Israel and Hamas becomes far more even contest with the measurable difference being in the preparation and success in defending and protecting ones people from those attacks.

This holding Israel at fault because of her being the stronger and more technologically advanced also ignores one of the most vital and important facts, Israel did not initiate this war and Israel removed every last Israeli and removed every IDF troop and base from all of Gaza in August of 2005. When people point to the blockade it needs to be pointed out that when Israel removed their presence they tuned the greenhouses and working businesses worth millions of dollars behind for the Gazans to utilize giving them functioning and profitable operations and did not impose any blockade on Gaza until after Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody and violent coup defeating the forces of the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. As long as the Palestinian Authority was governing Gaza the Israelis felt little need to clamp strict control over the ports in Gaza but this sense of security dissipated when Hamas which is sworn to the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews worldwide stipulated in the clearest possible language in the Hamas Charter and is a unifying theme taught in their schools and portrayed throughout their media.

Anybody who has attended one of the liberal arts colleges or universities and received lectures from professors holding the typical anti-capitalist and anti-American views such as often lectured by such as Noam Chomsky you would be familiar with their anti-American programs. They claim that American culture is polluting the world and tainting the natural culture and altering societies claiming that this societal culture creep that is Americanizing many of the cultures in the third world presumably destroying these primitive cultures which they claim are superior to the crass American culture as the more primitive cultures presumably live in harmony with nature. They also claim that the United States is the worst polluter of nature in the world, something far from borne out by actual unmassaged statistics. Was the United States a large pollution engine a number of decades ago? Yes, though not necessarily the worst. The truth is that since the 1970s the United States has been the only nation that has actually met and surpassed the stringent requirements set by the Kyoto Protocols despite the fact that the United States never signed on to these standards. Another canard is that the United States economic wealth has stolen from the less developed world their share of wealth because since the available wealth is presumably constant, their claim, not mine, then by obvious measurement, by the United States having so much wealth they have to have made it unfairly by robbing the poorer nations. What they are intentionally suppressing is that wealth is not a constant and the United States historically has been the greatest creator of wealth.

What, you need some proof that wealth is constantly being created? To use the most obvious proof that wealth grows over time and directly proportionally to technological advancement one need look no further than ancient human history, real ancient human history. Original ancient man, as in Homo erectus, our ancient ancestors hunted with spears and possibly bow and arrows and the keeper of the fire would be put to death if he permitted the fire to be extinguished and was responsible for transporting the embers to spark the fire when the tribe migrated. We could now trend the advances and thus creations of wealth through the ages with the Greeks and Romans who used plumbing, aqueducts and relatively complex weaponry compared to spears but quite primitive and useless against modern weaponry. Then we see what we have today with buildings covering large swaths of Europe and the United States, automobiles and other items which not long ago were considered luxuries or were not yet invented. All of these are indication of increased available wealth and by claiming that American culture and production methods are ruinous to less advanced nations is actually a form of elitism which is using false arguments to keep the third world less advanced and inferior to the technologically modern world by claiming that their lack of modernity is a state of existence that needs to be preserved. Where this is actually more destructive ecologically can also be described by researching the production of a simple product which has been in existence for numerous centuries, the production of charcoal. Modern charcoal is produced using electrical heating elements with the wood chips placed in a chamber which is filled with CO₂ which minimizes escaping pollution while the tried and true old school method is to make large piles of wood chips and allow them to smolder such that the ones buried in the center are oxygen starved and are made into charcoal but produce heavy amounts of smoke and if a large area is used to mass produce charcoal with numerous large mounds smoldering away the area can become absolutely toxic. Which way would any intelligent ecological activist desire to have people worldwide produce charcoal, with modern equipment or the good old fashioned way which is still used in much of today’s world? Criticizing the United States for having a worldwide cultural influence and a greater proportion of the world’s per capita wealth is a form of primitivism and a rejection of advanced technology. This is found in a number of other elitist fads such as rejection of most technological advancements in agricultural preferring “natural” products. The same crippling anti-success jealousy which has infected much of social academia is behind much of the anti-Americanism as it is also behind much of the anti-Israel hatreds. This is most evident in the condemnation of Israel for protecting her people while sympathizing with Hamas because they appear disadvantaged by the resulting casualty numbers and destruction of infrastructure despite the actual number and size of explosives launched by each side being relatively equal, and actually favoring Hamas if one includes the three week buildup of rockets fired into Israel before the initial Israeli response to those attacks. But it is so much more noble to favor the underdog and it gives one a sense of superiority but cannot be assumed to grant them any moral advantage, that takes a more reasoned, systematic and unemotional examination of facts and actual numbers and not kneejerk emotional spontaneous reactions.

Beyond the Cusp

Can We Trust the Government Alphabet Agencies?

It seems every other week we read of yet another breach in security or illegal program spying on individuals, companies, foreign leaders of both friendly and not so friendly nations, and even agencies monitoring other agencies or even Congress. Then there have been the reports of the Administration using the IRS, OSHA, EPA and NSA among other agencies to spy on, impede operations of, obstruct functions in, intervene in daily operations or investigate personnel, personal, intimate and other sensitive information on organizations, businesses and people who they suspected might oppose or otherwise threaten the aims and objectives of their programs or even interfere with campaigning and electioneering that might oppose the President. The breadth, width and depth of these invasive policies have definitively proven that even if you have done nothing wrong or illegal you still might have much to fear and worry about from a government which appears to stop at nothing to compromise personal privacy of those they suspect of any opposition or even simply disagreeing with policies and intended programs. This past week we learned that the NSA not only has the capability to monitor and record every phone call and electronic communication of an entire nation and store the information for review for as long as a full month. Of course this revelation refused to identify the nation the Administration has chosen for such special consideration and inspection though I have a pretty good idea which nation has such a level of interest for such a deep and total level of spying and penetration into even the daily lives of every citizen and it is not the Russians, Chinese or any of the other nations which many American citizens would consider to be adversaries.

 

One of the most threatening and freedom chilling revelations was the level of inspection and extraneous required paperwork, reports, queries and intensive inspection that were utilized by the Administration through challenging the tax status or approval to applications for tax exempt status of agencies, organizations and other political entities which the administration had singled out as possibly having intentions to work against the reelection of President Obama. When it became obvious that many of the particular groups had identifying information or names containing phrases which included Tea Party, Constitution, Freedom, Conservative, Liberty and other identifiers the Administration suspected would indicate largely conservative, libertarian and constitutionalist groups which they considered to be political adversaries. There have been claims by some conservative and Republican sources claiming that these attacks were largely responsible for the apparent disappearance in the last election of Tea Party groups and have even blamed these reputedly illegal actions for Mitt Romney’s loss in the Presidential election. Of course whether those claims are truly valid is something we can argue forever as nobody will ever be able to prove anything one way or the other. The one thing I hope we could all agree on is such abuse of powers and using the brute force of the government for politicized gains is something that must not be condoned no matter who is committing such actions. What makes these accusations even more frightening is that apparently fellow citizens who work presumably for the public good performed these actions without objection or complaint. But then again, the Administration under President Obama has prosecuted both a higher percentage and larger number of whistle-blowers than any previous Presidential Administration in American history. They have also garnered one of the top spots for resistance and outright refusal to release information when responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. In many ways President Obama has operated in one of the most secretive and least transparent Administration ever while also having unheard of levels of malfeasance by government agencies and the worst records on protection and respect of privacy rights of individuals.

 

If none of the above worries you, then perhaps a few other bits of information might place things in a different light. The United States government is working in conjunction with a number of internet companies, technology companies, university researchers and the military on artificial intelligence research with an emphasis on algorithms and programs which can be used to predict both general behavior of the society and to find ways of predicting individual behavior through methods of simple observational data which can be gleamed using current surveillance and other related information. Another threat comes thanks to the Patient Protections and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which will place all of people’s medical records and information in the hands of the most invasive department who already hold massive amounts of your personal financial information, as the IRS will now be tasked to handle your taxes and healthcare. Add to this the NSA and their abilities to record and analyze amounts of electronic data virtually beyond imagination and their working often at the behest of the FBI or the CIA through requests handled by Homeland Security Agency and couple these abilities and place them in the hands of an oppressive government and you are looking at the worst case combination of the most terrible predictions from the heart of political science fiction such as Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and throw in the idea of Carousel from Logan’s Run as the end treatment resulting from the use by Obamacare of a plan named the “complete lives system” for the allocation of very scarce resources, such as kidneys, vaccines, dialysis machines, intensive care beds, and others, as proposed and written by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama. The future which is approaching faster than many of us can realize will either be a place of unbelievable progress and freedom or the most oppressive government which is intrusive to the point where personal liberties and freedoms will be but a fleeting memory and we will fear even exhibiting the slightest unaccepted action and our every emotional reaction will be picked up and recorded for analysis by biometric surveillance possibly provoking government interventions for the slightest hints of thought crimes.

 

Where I have enormous hopes for the future, I also temper that with a healthy level of suspicion and respect for the potentials for misuse of coming technologies. When I worked as a production repair and test technician as well as an R&D technician with the engineers of a company which manufactured leading edge EEG and computer automated seizure detection systems using mathematical algorithms to detect and aid in diagnosing patients and which were used for sleep studies and treating and analyzing epilepsy and other disorders of the brain, I got a glimpse into how much we were able to determine about medical conditions and other systems simply through mathematical analysis of medical data. This was close to thirty years ago and the company had units which not only recorded up to sixty four channels of EEG but also did seizure detection and analysis in real time even with processors as slow and primitive as were available back them. I also had the pleasure and honor of working with the most intelligent person I have ever had the privilege to know, a gentleman who designed circuits and had an understanding of electronics as well as higher math that was astonishing. I was honored when he chose for me to work on any project and realized the full potential of monitoring and predictive analysis which was available at that time and cannot even begin to imagine where those areas of science, medicine and electronic monitoring have progressed to and attained. That is part of why I have a deep respect for the potentials for government to use technology in intrusive and subversive ways which can be turned against the people in order to control the population under the guise of working for the betterment of mankind. For one frightening example of such simply do some research and read about the “complete lives system” and take a few deep breaths and try to relax with that knowledge and knowing it is at the heart of the government’s healthcare plans for the United States.

 

Beyond the Cusp