One Citizen Speaking

WHEN EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE IS THE ANSWER TO ABUSE OF POWER

It is clear to me that Jerry Nadler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Elijah Cummings, Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee are abusing the power of their committees by seeking information unrelated to legislation and the general oversight of the Executive Branch.

In effect, they are attempting to wield subpoena power as if they were a law enforcement agency charged with investigating criminal activities. Truth-be-told, they are nothing more than a corrupt and toxic cabal, an extension of the massive cover-up to protect former President Obama and high-ranking members of his administration from charges that amount to high crimes and misdemeanors and could very well see the participants and top-level Democrats held to account for their various conspiracies and criminal activities.

Everywhere you look, there is an unprecedented attack on the President of the United States by progressive socialist democrats and their propaganda arm in the mainstream media. The one-sided nature of the attack is readily apparent to anyone who possesses common sense and can read and reason.  Including the work of Special Counsel Mueller, himself deeply conflicted by his past and current associations, who abused his office to continue to interfere with a presidential election and damage a sitting president with a selectively-written report.

Therefore, one can only conclude that the correct response of the Trump White House is to withhold documents and invoke executive privilege to keep close aides from testifying before Democrat-dominated committees that are little more than a Kabuki theatre to openly disparage and attack the President of the United States in an open forum prior to the 2020 election.

Let us not forget that ACTUAL OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE USING EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE was a key element in all of the Obama scandals and that Attorney General Eric Holder was held in “contempt of Congress” for withholding documents. Add that to the wanton destruction of documents, perjury while testifying, and other criminal activities and you must wonder who is protecting these miscreants. Perhaps it is the GOP that is being blackmailed and coerced by their own foibles?

THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT TRUMP WAS FORTHCOMING BY NOT USING PRIVILEGE DURING THEE MUELLER REPORT.

Considering that the progressive socialist democrats have become the neo-communist party in the United States and their positions are decidedly un-American, their candidates have only one opportunity to win – make the election about Donald Trump and hope to sneak their toxic policies past the American people.

Say whatever you want about Donald Trump, he has cojones to fight his attackers and is not a mealy-mouthed apologist for the GOP like Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, and others who aspire to the Presidency but refuse to clearly promote liberty, American values, the Constitution, the Rule of Law – and defend the GOP from one-sided attacks in the media. Clearly the right man, at the right time, at the right position, and with the right attitude.

Bottom line …

As for the Congressional Representatives who insist that President Trump waived any claims of privilege when he cooperated with Mueller in a criminal investigation – that is not the same thing as a request from a co-equal branch of government with no duty to investigate “criminal” matters.

How is it that the House of Representatives is willing to spend time and effort on Trump, billions on illegal aliens -- and not strengthen our infrastructure or Social Security?

In the final analysis, President Trump is not obstructing justice but defending the Constitution from those seeking to destroy America from within.

We are so screwed.

-- steve

FROM THE FAKE NEWS EMPORIUM AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: JESUS WAS A PALESTINIAN

Historical revisionism and anti-Semitism at the New York Times is nothing new for a newspaper that often sides with “Palestinian terrorists” than it does with Israel…

As a Black Child in Los Angeles, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes by Eric V. Copage As Christians prepare to celebrate Easter, a Times journalist wonders how others first visualized Jesus as a child — and what those images mean now. Share your experience in the comments.  I must have been no older than 6. I was in church in my hometown, Los Angeles. Parishioners fanned themselves to stay cool in the packed, stuffy room. On one side of each fan was an illustration of an Ozzie and Harriet-like American family — father, mother, son, daughter. All were black, like the parishioners in the church. On the other side was an illustration of Jesus Christ — fair skinned, fair haired, blue eyed. Something seemed amiss to me about that depiction of Christ. Why was he white? Why was he not black, like my family, like me? As I grew older, I learned that the fair-skinned, blue-eyed depiction of Jesus has for centuries adorned stained glass windows and altars in churches throughout the United States and Europe. But Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin. Read the rest of the article, in full and in context, at the New York Times.  Eric V. Copage was a reporter at the New York Times and has also been an editor at the New York Times Magazine. He is also a book author and has written extensively about Kwanzaa. Eric has contributed to the food pages of the New York Times Magazine and is author of Fruits of the Harvest: Recipes To Celebrate Kwanzaa and Other Holidays; Soul Food: Inspirational Stories for African Americans; and Kwanzaa: An African-American Celebration of Culture and Cooking.

Historically speaking, Jesus was Jewish and looked like the other Jews of his time in and around "Judea." Palestinians are Arabs who were not known to inhabit the area until 700 years after the death of Jesus. Therefore, one can conclude with some degree of historical certainty that Jesus was not a “Palestinian man with dark skin” but more likely an ancient Israelite/Hebrew with somewhat dusky/ruddy olive skin which is neither white nor black. Unfortunately, the biblical prohibition of creating graven images left us with no guidance as to the true look of Jesus. Perhaps it would be prudent to consider his “teachings” and not focus on externalities.

Bottom line…

It would have been nice, as well as historically accurate, to include a single declarative statement that Jesus was Jewish in his story.

For some modern Christians, it may be fashionable to consider Jesus to be an “other,” a Gentile born in a Jewish body but I can only ask, What would Jesus think?

-- steve

SCIENTIFIC TOOLS IN THE WRONG HANDS ARE AS DANGEROUS AS FIREARMS

Today’s email brought a missive from Hewlett Packard Enterprise which was tag-lined “Insights and resources to help IT pros shape the future of business.” And, it serves as an example of how progressive socialist democrat thought infects science writers…

Example one …

Armed with artificial intelligence, scientists take on climate change Researchers are using AI to tackle the flood of data needed to understand and respond to the effects of climate change. [OCS: Man can adapt to varying local weather conditions, but not so much global climate changes on a geological timescale. At this point in time, all we can say is the climate appears to be changing as it has done since the Earth developed oceans and an atmosphere. How it is changing and why it changes is still in the realm of theories which need to be validated or falsified – with the end result being “we do not know that which we do not know” and more research is required.] Science needs to understand and predict how climate change—and the growing onslaught of hurricanes, fires, and floods it’s bringing—affects tropical forests. Will the forests respond to the assault with shorter trees? Will they store less carbon, or support less tree and plant diversity and fewer wildlife species? [OCS: Perhaps researchers should spend more time on the effects of natural oscillations which give rise to storms and extreme weather? Especially the effects of El Niño/La Niña (Southern Oscillation) which have been shown to affect global changes in temperature,  rainfall, and the severity of storms. As for wildfires, they are a natural process where forests are renewed and overgrowth managed by a natural feedback cycle. As for wildfires in the Western United States, they have been potentiated by wrong-headed environmentalist policies and any increase in damages can be laid at the feet of political corruption in zoning and building codes.] To better understand the effects a changing climate will have on tropical forests, Maria Uriarte, Columbia University professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology, needs to analyze images of forests. These bird's-eye view images are the size of a postage stamp. And she’s working with enough postage stamp-size images to cover a 28,000-acre national park. Since it would take her years to analyze even a dozen of those images, there’s no way she could handle enough to get a real understanding of an entire forest. [OCS: Perhaps she will be able to compute an answer to those unable to see the forest for the trees. I wonder if she is going to collaborate with ecologist Dr. Thomas Crowther who specializes in ecology and is the chief scientific advisor to the UN's Trillion Tree Campaign. More specifically, Crowther’s work in tree mapping research to determine the  diversity and distribution of forest trees across the world for the first time which attempted to quantify the scale of human impact over time.]

Example Two…

Finding the needle in the haystack Researchers are throwing their weight into better understanding the changing climate and finding ways to stall or even reverse it because of the speed at which the climate is changing and its effects on everything from rising sea levels to agriculture, wildlife, storm patterns, shrinking ice sheets, droughts, and human populations. [OCS: Funny how those who seek funding always fall back on the dodge of looking at the rate of change rather than the gross change itself – which is almost insignificant when you find that the Earth has been hotter, colder, with more atmospheric carbon dioxide and less carbon dioxide, in the past and we are still here. That our forefathers experienced powerful storms and did not label them as the effects of global warming. Cold periods were called winter and warm periods were called summer. People adapted lived in arctic conditions and in deserts by choice. According to the experts, you would have thought that these people would have been smart enough to migrate to less hostile conditions. Scientist/Activists, or those who must pursue “fashionable science” to obtain funding, seem to take delight in overlooking the fact that there is not a single method to directly identify, isolate, and measure man’s climate signal amid the noise of nature’s normal variability.] And with such a massive undertaking, scientists need the most powerful tools they can get their hands on. Massive databases, data analysis tools, and high-performance computing are all being used. But AI, often feared as a threat to humanity, is turning out to be one of the most powerful tools scientists are using to protect the planet. [OCS: Artificial intelligence (as if that really exists) as a method for interpreting patterns is as fraught with danger as those who “see” pictures in random events such as clouds (or with drug-induced hallucinations). Pattern-matching by imperfect brains can result in extreme danger when mapped into public policies. Just because a curve is trending upward, it does not always signify a planetary emergency that requires draconian public policies and the implementation of foreign ideologies.]

Example Three…

Making climate predictions that span decades AI is proving to be a key tool for scientists working on climate change predictions, notes Dr. Eng Lim Goh, vice president and chief technology officer for high-performance computing and AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Unlike weather forecasting, which is more local and has a day-to-day time frame, climate modeling makes global predictions spanning decades and uses enormous amounts of corresponding data. With so much data and a myriad of factors to consider, it’s often difficult for us to ensure that all relevant causes are included. AI, according to Goh, can be a valuable tool to augment humans in taking care of this. [OCS: Thinking in terms of decades is short-sighted because global climate change cycles are hundreds or thousands of years long. And, the shorter the timeframe, the more chaotic the climate system appears, making credible and reliable predictions unlikely.] “The accuracy of traditional top-down rules-based or laws-based approaches is only as good as the scientists having accounted for all factors that contribute to the prediction,” Goh says. “This is not a simple endeavor. For example, after accounting for heat absorbed by our oceans, scientists also have to remember to account for heat reflected by our ice sheets. After accounting for emissions caused by human activity, they need to remember to include livestock emissions, and so on.” [OCS: All of the influences of human activity are relatively insignificant when measured against the real drivers of climate change (the Sun's energy output in all spectral bands, the production of extraterrestrial cosmic rays, the Earth's position relative to the Sun, the Earth's precessional and rotational dynamics, the Earth's vulcanology and plate tectonics, the heat transfer and behavior of deep ocean currents, and the most significant greenhouse gas influence, water vapor (clouds). And that the significant drivers of climate are ignored in favor of nonsensical public policies that are meaningless in the scheme to change global climate. What they really change is human behavior in the pursuit of a political ideology.]

Example Four…

Informing critical climate decisions, policy Lloyd A. Treinish, a distinguished engineer and chief scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, says AI will be increasingly used in climate change research and in helping people make critical decisions. “Ultimately, these are tools that can help people who are on the policy or business side understand the implications of the choices they are making,” says Treinish, who has worked with city officials and utility companies on long-term sustainability issues. “[AI’s] biggest potential role right now is in the decision-making aspects, trying to assess the implications of a changing climate and understand how choices affect it. It’s going to be a matter of policy to make the changes needed to reduce the effects of a changing climate.… We’d use AI to help them make decisions.” [OCS: Funny, those decisions appear to be biased towards a single political ideology and public policy descriptives which reduce man’s freedom, liberty, and choices in favor of  centrally-planned progressive policies that have little or nothing to do with climate, such as wealth redistribution and the equality of misery as the progressives reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. You do not need fancy AI tools to tell you when your inalienable rights are being violated or when the entire capitalist system, which is responsible for the major gains in society, is under assault by those who want to impose their brand of authoritarian socialism.]

Bottom line…

We should not fear AI or any scientific tools, we should fear corrupt individuals who misuse the tool for evil – much in the same manner evil is manifest by the individual who pulls a trigger to kill the innocent.

Just as socialism was sold as the “scientific method” of managing peoples and cultures, it remains a fact that history has proven that socialism is as much a global threat to humanity as unreformed Islam. Both requiring absolute fealty or be subject to draconian punishments.

Where the “science” of climate has been corrupted by political ideology, let us not forget that the purpose of science is to explain our universe, not direct its manipulation to the detriment of its inhabitants.

We are so screwed.

-- steve