Warriors of the Wasteland

It is 2019 and the nuclear war that wiped out most of civilization was 9 years ago. Those who remain are either desperate refugees in search of some remaining pocket of civilization or the Templars. The Templars are a death cult who seek to exterminate survivors so that the earth will be purged of all humans. The Templars wear white and drive vehicles that look vaguely like moon buggies that are armed with ridiculous weapons. Being a death cult, there are no women among them and they are described as homosexuals. In fact, there is a sodomy scene in the movie!

Into the mix comes Scorpion, a former Templar who now roams the roads with no particular purpose beyond survival. Of course, he soon takes the side of the refugees and fights his former comrades. If not for the frequent intervention of Nadir the Archer, Scorpion would have been slain. Scorpion also has a mechanical prodigy as an ally. This blond 10 year old is not only a genius at customizing Scorpion’s car but also an amazing combatant with a slingshot.

The movie is a bad Road Warrior knock-off. This is an Italian post-apocalyptic film with an all Italian cast except for Fred Williamson. Fred plays Nadir, an archer who fires explosive-tipped arrows. Guns are fairly common in the setting so it is unclear why he had decided to be an archer. Well, he does look cool. The car battles are a pale imitation of Mad Max.

Of note, I had seen a bit of this on late night TV 20 years ago and thought nothing of it. However, I recently saw Mad Max: Fury Road at the Alamo Draft house. The Draft house always has an applicable clip show before featured movie and it so happened that Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) was prominent. Well, I better check that out and write a review. It is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLkz0tJCzxc

I'm Batman!

If Bruce Jenner had come out and declared that he was actually Bruce Wayne, otherwise known as Batman, we would laugh.  If he pressed the point too long, his family would seek psychiatric help.  Instead, Bruce has declared that she is Caitlyn.  That is laudable, even brave according to many.

Being inclined toward libertarianism, I am not bothered by Caitlyn's choice.  It is her life.  Live it how you wish to live it.  What troubles me is the reaction of our culture to it.  Norms are a thing of the past.  Marriage shall be a compact of two (or more?) loving individuals.  An English woman married a dolphin!  Birth certificates will list parent 1 and parent 2 rather than mother and father.  There are even calls to remove the baby's gender from the birth certificate.  A tiny minority is not demanding just tolerance, but codification of its desires into the law.  A dictatorship of the minority. To many, my failure to openly embrace this transformation of societal norms is akin to hate speech.

 

At this rate, what will be the cause in 20 years?  What modern practice will turn out to be oppressive and discriminatory?  What civil right yet remains?

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.

Unilateral Disarmament

You have to love the Republicans.  They have just won a landslide victory for no other reason than they are not the Democrats.  In that case, I suppose it would be more accurate to say the Democrats suffered a crushing defeat, a rejection of their policies that have given us an anemic economy and a pathetic world standing.  Clearly, the voters want a change in direction.  Therefore, before the new Republican majority takes office in a month, let's pass a budget that will last through September.  What?  Are you nuts?  No, you are spineless Republicans.

Why would the Republicans allow the lame duck Democrat Senate to be involved in a long term budget?  It is not going to reflect Republican spending priorities.  It isn't going to defund Obamacare.  It will be a status quo ante budget that will take the power of the purse out of the incoming majority's hand until October.  Why?  First, fear of a shutdown.  Yes, the Republicans are so terrified of a shutdown that they will do just about anything to avoid it, even if that makes the election meaningless.  Obama knows this.  He will veto the government into a shutdown and then blame Republican intransigence.  That's what I would do!  Duh!  If the Republicans can't answer that, then the election is meaningless.  Second, the Republicans want to spend the money.  What is the point of taking over a multi-trillion dollar government and then reducing the amount of spending?  Sure, that's what the voters want but they don't know how much fun it is to spend it and have people come on bended knee to beg for grants and tax exemptions.

 

It is funny that many Republicans have criticized Obama for taking military action off the table when negotiating with Iran, declaring that such can only embolden Iran and weaken our position.  Are they oblivious to the parallels with government shutdown and impeachment?  Never take it off the table unless you get something in return.