Now the Presidency Has Too Much Power

 

It is simply astonishing to hear left leaning politicians vested in Democrat power and maintaining the government regulatory monster are all of a sudden all awash with examples all about the extent that Presidential power has reached. The latest scream is the rescinding of the President Obama Net Neutrality four-hundred plus regulations being touted as how far President Trump has been capable of reaching. When President Obama imposed these regulations out of the blue with absolutely no Congressional authorization, that was simply wonderful as it gave the government the ability to monitor the internet and assure that it remained free from being overtaken by some evil corporate menace and other undefined catastrophes which only the Federal Government was capable of harnessing and protecting the world from. There was no care or worry that four-hundred plus regulations might be crippling internet freedoms and having the government running herd on the internet might be placing a completely different menace loose on the freedoms the internet should have. The actual main effect of these regulations was to limit information of political manner making it that any internet provider who might have been detected providing conservative sites an overly preponderance or heavy presence, then they could be forced to also find an equal number of left leaning sites. Of all the providers struck by these regulations, over eighty-five percent were sited for not providing sufficient voice to liberal web sites especially in the news they provide. Thank all that is holy that we are advertised as an editorial site and not news source.

 

The rescinding of these four-hundred plus regulations was a great step in freeing the internet as now providers may carry those news sites which provide the best content and the greatest return on their space provided. They can no longer be forced to provide a web presence to news sites which do not generate sufficient traffic to warrant the resources provided by the providers. Simplified, web providers can now use their web resources to maximize their profit and not have to worry that the government might demand that they waste resources on a web presence which does not carry the weight of the resources invested in such a site. Why should a web provider be required by government to provide equal web presence and resources and bandwidth to sites which do not generate the traffic by which these providers are able to sell commercial and attach advertising space wasting bandwidth and losing money with some of their resources just to satisfy some preconceived government idea of fairness. Web providers are not in business to be fair, they are in business to garner traffic and have profitable web sites and balance be damned. That is the hard cold fact just as other media are in business to turn a profit. Imagine if the New York Times or the New York Post were required to have reporters and editorialists which represented the opposing views from their normative political perspectives. Their readers would not be served and such a requirement would eventually drive both newspapers out of business. Neither newspaper would be able to retain their readership. The same should be permitted for when providers, as they also have, in some form, a readership, and if having a balanced view is profitable, then such will become the norm and there would be no government regulations to enforce such a result.

 

Net Neutrality was sold as assuring that all web presence has sufficient bandwidth for fairness, whatever that means. That could be interpreted as requiring that we here at Beyond the Cusp have a similar bandwidth to Netflix. That would be ridiculous, as we are not streaming movies and television shows for thousands of people simultaneously and do not require even the smallest percentage of bandwidth as Netflix. Even if we had a similar number of visitors as Netflix, if only, we still would not require anywhere near their required bandwidth as we provide largely text with occasional videos and some images but not constant streaming once the article is loaded. There would be no reason for the two sites; Beyond the Cusp and Netflix, to be given anywhere near the same bandwidth or memory space and that is also why Netflix pays a premium price and has their own servers and we publish here at WordPress. Oh, and we chose Netflix as our example as one of the great scare tactics used by the left was that many companies and users whose services people love, like Netflix, were all of a sudden not going to get the necessary resources and that competing internet providers were now going to make Netflix no longer available to their users. We can think of no faster way to push away users than to provide shoddy service or by blocking desired services to your customers. When you are using Netflix, two items determine how well it will function beyond the capability of your computer, the baud rate your service provider has available and that will be as high as you pay for and any limit is hardwired into the type of service you buy, and second the ability of the Netflix servers to handle the demand load placed on them, which Netflix will make sure is comfortably above the demanded ability or somebody else will provide the same service with better quality and Netflix will join Blockbuster as a former company providing movies on demand. The idea that your internet provider would block Netflix because they do not provide it with servers if the government was not there to protect you was ridiculous from the start as Netflix was doing just fine before President Obama “guaranteed” through four-hundred plus regulations that did nothing except strangle competition thus making progress and new start-ups from gaining any traction. Net neutrality was simply another vehicle for government to decide what was best for the customers instead of the companies providing service doing so as customer demand required.

 

There is one glaring example of how going from government fully regulated to private provider has brought faster innovations at less cost to the taxpayer with a far greater variety of choices. This example is spaceflight. We used to have a very simple regulation about spaceflight which was used presumably to make spaceflight safe. That regulation was that the government would provide all space related services. That was what gave NASA the freedom to control risk to the public. It worked great as NASA never risked the public until they had an accident and a teacher was killed, Christa McAuliffe (see image below). But other than crewmembers, NASA kept all on the ground safe. Having NASA as the sole provider of entry into space also made numerous companies go overseas to launch their payloads, as it was less expensive and their payloads and satellites reached space faster. Since space has been opened to private competition there has been a virtual explosion of directions being taken and there has not been any loss of life as of yet. Will that change, of course as space is dangerous. The United States did not build a coast-to-coast railway system without a few thousand casualties along the way and that was expected as part of the price for progress. Somehow, the world, specifically the developed world, has come to expect that any venture into the future be conducted with absolutely no cost in human lives. That expectation is ridiculous and if permitted to be pervasive, it will make space travel impossible as well as any development of space. The one item that we can guarantee despite having no ability to influence outcomes is that people will die making any Mars base into an actual working and self-sufficient inhabitance. Eventually going to Mars will be relatively safe and affordable as that is the next frontier but getting there and establishing mankind as a fact will be costly in more than just money, there will be risk to human life and possible catastrophes. It is even likely that the initial settlement on Mars will result in the same end as the Jamestown, Virginia, failed; but future attempt after attempt eventually built a city of that name which served as the capital of Virginia for some years.

 

From left to right the space shuttle Challenger’s STS-51L mission astronauts are
Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Dick Scobee,
Ronald McNair, Michael Smith and Ellison Onizuka

 

Government regulations do not expand service or make something more free. Removing regulations does and that is what cancelling net neutrality did, it made providing a free and open internet experience more possible for those residing in the United States and with time will benefit the rest of the world as well. If net neutrality actually provided what it claimed by those defending the four-hundred plus regulations, then how did people outside the United States have their service survive without net neutrality in their respective countries? The answer was they saw no change with or without for the most part but now that the United States has taken a live and let live approach by removing burdensome regulations from the internet, the world will see improved service largely in the area of variety of available features as new internet companies of all types no longer must wade through four-hundred plus regulations to assure they were compliant with government regulatory demands and restrictions. This is true of every regulation that the government can shed from its overregulated society. Regulations do not necessarily make one safe, as no company actually desires killing off their customers with certain obvious exceptions such as those items posing health risks such as cigarettes. Does anybody believe that any number of government regulations short of a total ban could make cigarettes safe to use? Of course not and cigarette smoking has decreased as awareness has increased and that would be true with or without regulation. The one service the government provided which reduced the numbers of smokers was the public service spots on television and radio. Even the warnings regulated to appear on cigarette packages had minimal effect, and many here are former smokers and can attest to this fact.

 

Government helps when it provides independent and unencumbered scientific investigations and releases true facts. This means that government need provide funds for research into public health issues free of preconceived notions or targeted results. Nowhere is this more obvious than the concept of global warming. Since the initial discovery that the Earth was warming, the idea was hatched that it was caused by man. This gave rise to the concept of anthropogenic global warming or mankind causes global warming. This became “scientific unchallengeable fact” after Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration testified after being sought out and handpicked by Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at the hearing. This bombshell led to the United Nations becoming involved despite almost no witnesses were ever allowed to testify who denied the “scientific unchallengeable fact” of anthropogenic global warming. The United Nations jumped in with both feet and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has paid scientists to prove that their concerns over anthropogenic global warming were and is true. Funding without a predetermined outcome was difficult to find as the United States, European Union, United Nations and several European and other governments were all paying exclusively for proof of anthropogenic global warming, so that was what the world got an preponderance of evidence proving. The evidence against anthropogenic global warming came almost exclusively from individual scientists who investigated global warming independent of government funding. Private funded scientists found no or next to no proof of anthropogenic global warming outside of the government funded research which was predisposed to finding proof if they desired continued funding. The media acted like an echo chamber for the government-funded research and the public bought that as the truth. Only now are people actually starting to question these results and rightfully so. The reason is that the only evidence for anthropogenic global warming comes from computer models which all thus far have failed to give results which mirror reality.

 

Al Gore with his hockey stick graph of global temperatures which would have had the Earth now at a balmy 150o Fahrenheit, or there about, proved completely false as have the other predictions of higher average temperatures and the Earth having a fever. The hysteria caused by government-funded research with a presupposed result and the media echo chamber along with anthropogenic global warming being taught from kindergarten through college paid for with government funding has all combined to taint the scientific research in one direction, scare people into doing whatever the governments demand of them to solve this terrible guilt they have had foist upon them by the false results proving anthropogenic global warming. This was what fueled the brouhaha over President Trump pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement which would have required a tax on carbon, which translates to a tax on any fuel source, including electricity, and eventual restrictions on fuel use most especially on vehicle use. Cities would ban cars from morning to night if not all together and eventually complete travel bans making people pay for a license to take a trip on vacation. This would permit government to predetermine where people would be permitted to reside and skyrocketing cost for housing as building would be restricted with choking regulations. For an example simply look to California and more accurately, San Francisco where new construction has been next to nil for two decades or longer. Steadily the truth is emerging and people are starting to listen and question the government bought-and-paid-for research. The truth is, in science, skepticism is presumably a good thing as a part of science, which was all but starved out in this debate. Questioning every hypothesis and every conclusion should be researched, both to support and find faults, and the latter was lacking in research on anthropogenic global warming. One thing which almost always proves out in the end is truth; the only question is how long it takes us to get there. Government always has an angle where it takes the side of whatever provides it a route for growth and greater control. Emergency crisis give government powers they would not otherwise have and anthropogenic global warming has been a powerful emergency, life or death according to government research, and that is permitting further regulation on business and private lives and has been used to promote a single world power which regulates everyone out of Turtle Bay, the headquarters of the United Nations.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Which World Controls the Future?

 

There are basically two worlds, the technological, industrialized, computer, information, advanced world and the world still back far enough in development that world conquest is their big challenge. That is the face of the complexities in today’s world and it is very uncertain which world will prove to be the more solid and most able to survive persevering over the other one. One is sending robotized scientific probes to the planets, their moons, asteroids, comets, studying the Sun and searching the vast cosmos for other inhabitable planets close enough to Earth-like that they could serve as a second home for mankind and other interests. The other is planning on how they will conquer the entire world and force everyone to follow their religious rules and follow the customs of Islam serving Allah and basing their entire society on the Quran and likely Sharia as the law for all the Earth. These two worlds could not be any more opposite in the future they see for humankind. One is reaching for the cosmos and beyond while taking medicine into new frontiers conquering ageing and making discoveries that will feed the planet and make previously undrinkable water safe for consumption. The other places science aside except in how it can produce more efficient weapons with an emphasis on advance weapons systems, nuclear warheads and the missiles on which to mount them to target the Great Satan, the United States as well as the capitals of Europe and Israel. The contest between these two worlds may come down to the developed world actually understanding the aims of the other world and understanding that they really and honestly believe that conquest of the world and subjecting to Islam is not only possible but their raison d’etre. Where will the future take us?

 

Expansion of Islam Across MENA and threaten Europe before Ottoman Rule

 

The idea of world conquest by Islam is nowhere near a new idea. This had been the idea since Muhammad gathered his armies in Medina taking that city and followed it with the conquest of Mecca. Muhammad initiated the expansion of Islam and the Arab Empire, which has made them, the greatest colonialists in all of human history (see map above). Their expansion was finally halted in the battle of Tours by Charles “The Hammer” Martel in October 741 A.D., a mere hundred and twenty years after Muhammad began his conquests in the Arabian Peninsula ending the westward conquest in Europe. On the eastern fronts, Islam ran into three forces, which prevented their conquering further lands. At the eastern end of Europe was Constantinople which initially came under attack in the year 330 A.D. and held the Islamic forces in check eventually falling when the Muslims used siege cannons which finally gave the following Ottoman Empire the ability to break through the massive and all but impregnable walls in 1453 (see picture below). The Islamic forces were also stopped after their conquest of approximately one-third of India on their initial thrusts and then over the next eight-hundred years the Islamic forces pillaged their way across all of India into Burma destroying entire cities razing them to the ground slaughtering the entire populations. The conquests in Asia reached their peak until in 1255 when the Mongol Great Khan Mongke placed his brother Hulagu Khan in charge of an army whose goals were to conquer Persia, Syria, and Egypt, as well as to destroy the Abbasid Caliphate. This began the great attacks by the Mongols, which took a heavy toll on the Muslim Empire. In the end, the Muslim faith took roots in the Mongol society, which finally ended their warfare.

 

Great Turkish Bombard Siege Cannon
Utilized by Mehmed II in his Siege
and Breaking of the Impenetrable
Great Walls of Constantinople

 

The second assault on Europe was made after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans who ran into difficulties in virtually every front. In Rumania, they faced Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Dracula. He was a ruthless foe who would impale prisoners on pikes along the roadway, which the Muslims would be forced to utilize and other measures of brutality which spread fear within the Islamic ranks. It was rumored that even one of the Islamic leading generals refused to attack Romania claiming that Vlad the Impaler was far too insane and brutal and he would not place his men in danger of such brutalities. The Ottomans were turned back twice at the gates of Vienna. The more famous of these battles had the Polish King Jan III Sobieski reach an agreement where his neighbors would respect his borders while he and his entire military relieved the siege of Vienna. The Grand Vizer Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha began a siege of Vienna on July 14, 1683, and Polish King Jan III Sobieski led the largest cavalry charge in history: 20,000 mounted Poles, Germans and Austrians and Sobieski himself led the charge with 3,000 Polish Hussars relieving the sieged city of Vienna on September 12, 1683. World War I brought an end to the Ottoman Empire as they allied with Germany and Austria-Hungarian Empire against the Allied Powers consisting of Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Portugal and Romania. Late in the war, the United States joined the war making an immediate impact assisting in facilitating a quicker end to the conflict. The European Allied nations took control for a period of the nations across the Ottoman Empire that stretched across the Middle East to Iran and across Northern Africa. These lands were divided into individual nations by the European victors using rather arbitrary determinations, which have contributed to many of the problems in these countries today. (The nation that controlled each of these new nations and the dates in which they left are on the map below.) The Muslims are feeling that they were cheated of their proper empire and currently there are different leaders who view themselves as the proper leader who should lead the new Caliphate.

 

Dates that the MENA nations received their independence after colonial rule many since the times of the Persians or even earlier

 

The Saudi Royals, Turkey President Erdogan, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei all believe they should be the next leader of the Islamic Caliphate. Then there is another issue, whether Iran and Shia Islam should be the true Islam for the future or whether Sunni Islam will prove superior as it has the greatest numbers at eighty to ninety percent. Then inside Sunni Islam, there are different types with the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood that includes Turkey President Erdogan and most of the Imams at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt. Finally, there is the Islamic State and their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who claims that he is the rightful Caliph. Saddam Hussein also had claimed he was the new leader and finally there is some claiming they are the Twelfth Imam known as Muhammad al-Mahdi. The one thing that will slow Islam is their inability to settle on a singular leader or even a single version of Islam. Currently, the Iranians are working towards becoming a hegemonic power in the Middle East and extending Shia Islam into Saudi Arabia where the north eastern and oil rich areas of Saudi Arabia already has a Shia majority population. The Sunni-Shia divides by some of the nations are; Turkey 80% Sunni and 20% Shia; Lebanon Sunni 24.5% Shia 47% with Christian and other 22%; Syria (before war) Sunni 73% Shia 14.7% Christian 9.3%; Saudi Arabia Sunni 52%, Shia 25%, Wahhabi 23%; Iraq Sunni 32.5%, Shia 63%, Christian and other 4.5%; Iran Sunni 11%, Shia 87%, Christian and other 2.5%; Egypt Sunni 87%, Shia 3%, Christian 10.25%; and Kuwait Sunni 61%, Shia 39%. The truth is that there are subsects beyond the more basic and simple Sunni and Shia divide which mostly what comes under discussions in the West, but the entirety of the complications of Islam are far more complicated. This may be the redeeming feature as witnessed in Syria. The initial divide is between Bashir al-Assad who is Alawite, which is basically a form of Shia and thus supported by Iran, the preeminent power of Shia Islam, and through Iran, Hezballah, the Shia terror groups from Lebanon, which has recently become the Lebanese military. Then there are the Kurds who despite being Sunni are targeted by all forms of Islam, especially Turkey and President Erdogan. The Kurds defend their area as best they are able and have had success against the Islamic State. There is the Islamic State which is Sunni, then the al-Qaeda aligned groups who are also Sunni and these two groups are enemies as they swear allegiance to different leaders and who you follow is the second level amongst Islamic forces. The Sunni are far more fractured than are the Shia, which actually may serve to permit Shia to slowly make gains and become dominant; especially should Iran become a nuclear power and through this become dominant. Should Iran actually use nuclear weapons, they may turn many Sunnis to switch and choose to join Shia Islam as in Islam you follow the strong horse and such acts would make Iran the strongest horse. As far as their target, it could be anything from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Israel or the United States.

 

Interstellar Ship Made with Smart Metals

 

All this leads to some commentary about the developed world and what will be required for it to remain the dominant force in the world. First and foremost, the United States will be required to be a force in the world and Europe will need to change direction and find their core beliefs to prevent their perishing under a swarm from Islamic immigrants. Their scientific progress must continue and even accelerate and then be used to raise the standard of living throughout the rest of the world. They will need to set aside more funding for their militaries as only through strength can they avoid Islamic efforts. The remainder of the Christian world needs to take assistance, learn about good governance from the more successful Christian nations, and thus strengthen the Judeo-Christian ethic throughout the world. Space need become a dedicated and central effort with efforts to place permanent bases first on the Moon and soon thereafter Mars and ever further throughout the Solar System. Space is the high ground, which cannot be argued over as whoever holds space holds the highest of mountaintops. Technology is the developed world’s greatest weapon and sharing all of these technologies would be foolish. Once Islam has found a leader brave enough to actually return them to the original Quranic verses from Mecca and away from the verses written as a warlord in Medina, then with Islam taking a form where it is willing to coexist with other religions and not insist on being the superior and only religion, then the world might be capable of finally coming together. There are a fair number of Muslims who currently are working toward just such a goal with one being Egyptian President Sisi. These efforts should be supported when and where possible while the supremacist forms of Islam need be opposed and eventually eradicated if all Islam insist that they must rule the world and force all to do their bidding.

 

Coexistence is the key. The basis of this coexistence would be built upon a new material, which will be forged biological entities, to cooperate; otherwise they are separated and kept aside from all others until they are willing to coexist. The material, which makes sure that all people are willing to coexist and work together, is a living metal which will isolate any supremacist entities which refuse to cooperate with all others. These are the enforcement of coexistence and the enforcers of practical coexistence. Anything uncooperative will be sanctioned by this material until it learns cooperation and coexistence. In this society, the materials themselves will be the police and the enforcers of proper behavior.

 

Beyond the Cusp