Category: Serious Stuff

The following local members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a proposed amendment (the Amash Amendment) to the Defense Authorization Bill. The Amash Amendment would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless-wiretap domestic spying program. Please join me in ushering these people out the door in the next election and replace them with someone who understands civil liberties.

Arkansas

• Steve Womack
• Rick Crawford
• Tom Cotton

Oklahoma

• Frank Lucas
• Tom Cole
• James Lankford

According to this article,

The White House called the amendment a “blunt approach” that is not “the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.” Naturally, the irony of that specific complaint resonates: The intelligence programs in question were not enacted with any of those forms of debate. To ask that their rescinding be held to a higher standard then their enaction is hubris of a real sort.

Underlining how seriously those who are in favor of maintaining the phone record collection program took the amendment’s threat to yank its funding, General Alexander himself — the good general heads the NSA — gave briefings on the Hill to House Democrats and Republicans, albeit in different sessions.

IF you want to know which heads need to roll in your state, there is a record of the votes here. See if your state’s representatives are in the “nay” section. The names in the “nay” section are people who no longer need to be in a position to make law.

Vote while you still can, folks. This whole Big Brother setup is some seriously f@#$ed-up business.… Read more

Just a thought… way too late for Memorial Day, but then I spent the weekend running a megamutt lost–and-found, otherwise I would’ve jotted down much earlier the following thought that’s been coalescing into existence inside the misshapen potato I carry around atop my shoulders:

My dad and all of his brothers were in one branch of the service or another. He was a Marine; one of my uncles was in the Navy; another uncle – the one who everyone has, since I was a little kid obsessed with anything NASA was doing, assured me would’ve been the most in-tune with me of any of them – was killed in action long before I was born. Like so many others, their generation of this family made sacrifices I can barely imagine; thanks to them and everyone who’s ever put on the uniform and served, all I have to do is imagine it.

So I propose this: let us not squander the blood and sweat and deferred dreams of those who have made these sacrifices by failing to fully participate in the freedom they swore to protect. To fall in line behind pundits who are misrepresenting or manufacturing “facts” is to make a mockery of that sacrifice.

So you’ve heard something outrageous on the news that gets your blood boiling? Do the research. Delve deeper. Perhaps even – gasp! – see what the opposing side is saying about the same issue. It may not be what you think.

To be led by someone just because they can get their face on TV, their voice on the radio, or because they can put a web site on the internet, is to waste one sacrifice that should never be wasted.

And remember that government begins at a local level. There’s more to it than what’s going on in Washington. Most of what actually affects you, such as sales tax rates and other taxes, is determined locally. Ignoring this to focus on Washington is like planning to fly to the moon without having quite worked out that whole getting-away-from-Earth business.

In summary: we have freedoms. Countless people have died to preserve them. We owe these people more than thanks.

We owe it to them to make best use of what they died to protect instead of being led around on an ideological leash.

Just a thought. Everyone has a range of views all over the place. Talking things out reasonably without resorting to base emotional “scare” arguments is what has made this country great in the past – and can make it great again. Know more about the issues affecting you than a couple of carefully cherry-picked, out-of-context soundbites. Act on knowledge, rather than fear stoked by someone whose agenda isn’t much more comprehensive than “talk smack about these other guys, without pissing off my advertisers.”

The folks on TV and the radio aren’t running for office, and they’re not running the country, no matter how much they think they should be. Our elected representatives are not answerable to a media entity. They are answerable to us – the voters who put them in office in the first place.

Think. Reason. Debate without resorting to lowest common denominators. Do the research and put the pundits out of work.

… Read more

“…I really like it here, I’m quite attached to it, I hope I’m wrong.” – Ben Folds, “Don’t Change Your Plans For Me”

Part of me wants to laugh this one off. Part of me knows better. I’m sure nearly everyone here has heard of the NSA’s enormous Utah data center, though the details are necessarily vague. According to Wired:

…it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Obviously no mere body of representatives elected by the people was going to stop this, right? 😆 But now we have a better idea of what they’ll be looking for and listening to. … Read more