US Politics

A Thousand Pieces

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Newly declassified intelligence documents were the centerpiece of President Trump’s address to the nation last night — documents detailing Chinese interference in our elections, widespread vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure, and declassification of materials exposing that the CIA had this information beginning in 2018 and withheld it from the President during his first term.

“The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election, and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them…. The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him.” —President Donald Trump (via Newsweek)

Meddling in a foreign nation’s elections (as the CIA has done for several decades) is either an attempted or successful coup, depending on the result, both of which are tantamount to an act of war.

Journalists accepting payment from a foreign adversary to slander a sitting president is giving comfort and aid to an enemy. An act of treason.

The President also spoke about FBI investigations into voter fraud, directing Director Kash Patel to reopen the bureau’s 2020 case into a Michigan voter registration drive — canvassers in the Muskegon area allegedly signed registration forms in other people’s names and submitted fraudulent registrations for voters who don’t exist, and were paid in gift cards per the number of applications. He also cited a DHS review identifying more than 275,000 noncitizens registered to vote across just four states.

For the many of us who were aware of the 2020 heist as it took place, and lived through the most destructive administration in American history as a consequence of it, this has been a long time coming.

The question is not whether the allegations in these declassified documents truly happened, it is the same question that we had in the weeks preceding January 20, 2021. Will President Trump cross the proverbial Rubicon, and do whatever is necessary in his power as Commander-in-Chief to restore the republic?

That is the singular lens by which I view this administration and have done so since the second term began. While my reaction to the day-to-day news and operations of the second Trump Administration vary widely, ultimately what it will be defined by is whether President Trump was willing to assert his power to expose the depths of corruption in our intelligence agencies, in our media, and within our elected officials — how they have all been influenced and compromised by foreign nations, and then take steps to remedy that for the future of the United States.

That, in partnership with returning us to a nation of citizens, would be an extraordinary course correction for America. They are, however, not the only issues plaguing the nation.

For that to happen, this would need to be the first step in a series of bold and decisive actions which are not inhibited by negative coverage from the very press who was alleged to have been compromised. And not subject to the wavering public opinion polls that may come out of it. This must be done without reservation or purpose of evasion, head on.

As long as foreign influence by nations such as China, Russia, and Iran is at the forefront, there will continue to be an elephant in the room regarding the foreign nation that demonstrably has, without question, the most influence over our elected officials, their policies, and our media.

As far as the CIA is concerned, it has been functioning as an apparatus outside of executive oversight to the detriment of American sovereignty, and the stability of the world, for several decades. The essential aspects of intelligence gathering can be done by other salvageable three letter agencies and through military intelligence.

There is but one solution for the Company, and it was reportedly stated by President John F. Kennedy in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, that he would splinter the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Sunshine Affectiveness Disorder

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Is this the fabled “Dark Winter” of which Joe Biden hath warned us?

The annual clock changes are not something I look forward to either time, and have long been in opposition to. It feels like such a government mandated absurdity. We don’t merely want to control you, we want to control time itself. It reads like a line from a Dr. Strangelove scene that didn’t make the final cut. I refer to it as the 23 hour day in spring and the 25 hour day in fall. Typically, an extra hour added into a weekend would be something I’d support, but Fall Back leads to the dark winter officially kicking off. When suddenly the sunset begins creeping back towards, and even prior to, 5 PM. And as difficult as that is, it is far better than what the House of Representatives had cooked up to remedy it.

The Sunshine Protection Act would lock the entire country into permanent daylight saving time — the summer clock, all year long. “Permanent daylight savings time was repealed within a year because it didn’t work,” warned Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon as the bill moved through committee. —CBS News

This was, surprisingly, a bit surprising to me. Congress had a 50/50 shot to get this right, with a simple Google they could have found which setting to lock us into year round, and yet they still chose the wrong one. A broken clock may be right twice a day, but a broken congress never is.

If the U.S. were to adopt year round Daylight Savings time, northern states (and I don’t mean that in a Civil War sense) would face sunrises as late as 9:30 AM — places like Bismarck, ND would be hardest hit. I can assure you that a Bismarck winter is hard enough to endure without the sun coming up an hour and a half after school begins. Clearly there are also issues of safety; work commutes, school buses, roads getting plowed and salted, it would all be thrown off by the extended morning darkness. Another crucial factor is circadian rhythms being thrown off. Morning light is the master reset button for the body clock. When sunlight hits the eyes shortly after waking, it signals the brain to shut off melatonin production and start the day’s hormonal cycle — cortisol up in the morning, melatonin back at night, each roughly 24 hours apart. That first dose of daylight is how the body knows when to wake, and it sets the schedule for everything downstream. Get that light late, and the whole rhythm drifts with it.

Congress just voted 308-117 to put half the country on shift fatigue. And yes, if you wake up at 4 AM every day already, go to work when it’s dark out, and are dying to let us know, we salute your service. But it’s not viable for our entire society to operate on such a model.

Permanent daylight savings time has been tried before, in the US in 1974. Nixon signed it as an energy-saving response to the oil crisis, and clocks sprang forward that January with no plans of ever falling back. Support sat at 79 percent when it started and collapsed to 42 percent after one winter of children waiting for school buses in the dark, some carrying flashlights, and after lawmakers cited the deaths of eight Florida schoolchildren in the weeks following the change. The promised energy savings turned out to be barely measurable. By October, the experiment was dead and Ford signed the repeal. It was also tried more recently in Russia, in 2011, which, due to the country’s broad latitudinal range, endured even larger negative effects than in the US. Winter sunrises in the northern regions were delayed until after 10 AM, morning road accidents went up, and the stress and health complaints grew loud enough that Putin signed the reversal in 2014. They have since adopted Standard Time all year long.

Standard is the standard. Do we need sunlight until 10 PM in June? As spring overtakes winter, day by day the sunset pushes back enough that the winter blues are still shaken off without jolting us into the much longer days in mid-March.

It looks like this won’t become law anyway, because Sen. Tom Cotton is putting a stop to it. I’m not quite sure how this bill affects Israel, though, as that is typically the only reason I see Cotton taking any decisive action in Congress these days. Here’s the thing: the medical and sleep-science consensus is overwhelmingly on the side of permanent standard time, and Congress knows this — sleep researchers and health groups have been on record about it for years. Yet the bill that sailed through the House is the one every expert says is the wrong setting. It’s as if Congress chose the wrong time format to lock us into intentionally, knowing it would fail and returning us to the twice a year change as though that is the only alternative, when Standard Time is right there, shining down upon us like the morning sun, just waiting for us to look up and realize it.

Is the Swamp Draining or Leaking?

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“U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham … died at age 71 from a heart ailment, specifically an aortic dissection caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”

— Reuters

Another long-time establishment Republican will no longer be a member of the U.S. Senate, joining a list that includes several not seeking reelection this fall—Mitch McConnell (KY), Thom Tillis (NC), Joni Ernst (IA), Cynthia Lummis (WY)—as well as primary loser John Cornyn (TX), and now Lindsey Graham (SC).

I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

Goon Squad

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What do you call PornHub being blocked in 25 states?

A good start.

The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states.

This is due to age-verification laws. These laws vary state by state, but typically require visitors of a site with over a third of explicit content to submit a government ID or other form of age authentication. Louisiana was the first state to enact such a bill a couple of years ago, and now others have followed suit. In June, the Supreme Court deemed Texas’s age-verification law constitutional, setting a precedent for such bills that come before and after.

— Source: Mashable