IRS Emails Found!

"The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed."

Washington Times

Look, they found all those missing IRS emails.  Despite the multiple crashed and trashed hard drives, the emails are still there.  Wow!  I don't work at the IRS and I knew the emails were still available.  Somehow, the head of the IRS reported to Congress that the emails were lost.  He claimed to have made much effort into retrieving the emails.  Either he is abysmally ignorant of how email works or he was lying to Congress.  The lowliest of lowly IT personnel at the IRS could have explained to Commissioner Koskinen that the emails were recoverable from offsite backups.  Obviously, he didn't ask.  Or, if he did, then he was clearly lying to Congress.

So why would he lie?  If, as some have told me, the IRS was equally harsh against both conservative Tea Party groups and liberal groups, why try to cover up the evidence that must surely show exactly that?  Obviously, it doesn't show that.  It almost certainly shows that the IRS under the Obama Administration was used to harass enemies.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, there would be demands to track this to its source.  In fact, it would be assumed that the source was the Republican president and the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment.

Link to the story:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/irs-watchdog-reveals-lois-lerner-missing-emails-no/?page=2

Net Neutrality is what we had until today

"The government that governs least, governs best."  Thomas Jefferson

 

Freedom is where there is unrestrained choice.  Law exists to restrain some of those choices, such as murder and theft.  Law provides a framework for a civil society but it also limits freedom.  As such, one desires just enough law to maintain a civil society but not so much as to create a totalitarian regime.  Lack of law leads to anarchy (e.g. Libya or Somalia) where excess of law leads to oppressive dictatorships (e.g. North Korea, Cuba).

The internet and the technology sector, which has existed mostly outside the bounds of government regulation, has been the most dynamic part of the economy.  Coincidence?  No.  One does not put a pallet of bricks in the trunk of the car and then expect that to improve the acceleration.  The same is true with government regulation.  Regulations have both costs and benefits.  The question should be asked if the benefits outweigh the costs.  Government does not ask that question because the answer would lead to less regulation and therefore less government power.  It is a rare person who voluntarily surrenders power.  The regulations and the inevitably lawsuits they will trigger will send the internet into a decade of stagnation.  There is no point investing when there is so much doubt about the future.  Prices will rise and service will get worse.

 

On another point, has the government really demonstrated such good custodianship of late that it should be trusted to stick its fingers into another sector of the economy?  How did that Stimulus fare?  At the end of it, the president admitted that there had been no shovel-ready jobs after all.  Nearly a trillion dollars of stimulus that was supposed to restore our ailing infrastructure and still the administration claims we have a crumbling infrastructure.  Huh?  Or how about the Affordable Care Act?  That is great, right?  Keep your doctor, he said.  Well, maybe not.  Save $2500 per family, he said.  Well, not so much.  Costs went up instead.  Maybe it has done better with foreign policy?  No, it's one embarrassing mess after another.  Yes, this is the government I want to entrust with policing the internet.

 

I am sure the regulations will be balanced, not weighing more heavily on those with views opposite the regulators (3 Democrats to 2 Republicans).  You know, like the IRS jumped on MoveOn.Org just as much as various Tea Party groups.  Oh, they didn't jump on MoveOn.Org?  The regulators have used a 1930s law to regulate the internet.  Maybe they should wait for Congress to pass a law?  Really, shouldn't this be a decision by the elected representative of the people rather than a majority of 5 non-elective bureaucrats?

The Crusades

President Obama recently intimated that Christians had been very bad in the past and had no standing to condemn Islam today.  He brought up the Crusades as an example.  Let us consider that.

At the time of Muhammad's death in 632, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Mediterannean, including what is now Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Armenia, and Turkey.  Then the Umayyad Caliphate arose.  The caliphate spread through the region like wildfire, conquering all the Christian regions in the Levant, sweeping across North Africa, toppling the centuries old Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and invading France.  Not until Charles Martel defeated them at the Battle of Tours in 732 did the Islamic Conquest begin to recede.  Christendom had been on the brink of being swept away.  This was not because Muslim Imams had won hearts and minds with their preaching but because of fire and sword.

 

Europe was still mired in the Dark Ages and the Caliphate needed time to digest its conquests.  The remains of the Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine Empire, fought an ongoing battle with Islam as it sought to gobble up more and more of Christian Anatolia (Turkey).  Late in the 11th Century, the Byzantines requested aid from the West.  Pope Urban II declared a Crusade in 1095.  By 1099, Crusaders had recaptured a sliver of lands between Egypt and Anatolia.  The vast majority of the territory that had been conquered in the 7th Century remained in the hands of the Fatimid Caliphate or the Seljuk Turks.  By 1300, the Crusader States were gone.  The Byzantine capitol of Constantinople finally fell in 1453.  Greece and the Balkans fell also.  In 1683, an Islamic army attacked Vienna, Austria.

 

The idea that the Crusades were an unprovoked attack is nonsense.  The Crusades were a feeble response to centuries of attacks.  Be it the various Caliphates, the Seljuk Turks, or the Ottoman Empire, Islamic states were at war with Christian states since the 7th Century.  This remains true today though the tactics have changed.

 

While Jesus called upon his followers to turn the other cheek, Muhammad was a warlord who justified attacking caravans to gain wealth and power.  This tells you most of what you need to know about both religions.

More Doubts for Global Warming

I stumbled upon this interesting story:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html

Why would the data be adjusted?  Who benefits?  Government is funding this research because the results of the research are that we need to give government more money and more power.  Governments aren't funding the 'climate deniers' because that isn't going to get more money and power for government.