Congress Catches CIA Illegally Conducting Mass Surveillance on American Citizens, US Gov Slaughters $400K of Cattle, Let's them Rot, VA School Hires Company to Spy on Parents (The Five for 02/15/21)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Due to the rapidly changing situations developing in the Ukraine/Russia conflict and the Canadian Trucker protest, this issue doesn’t attempt to cover those stories, which are developing hour by hour.
With that being said, let’s get into the news.
[one]
Remember that thing called The Patriot Act that kicked off the CIA archiving every text message sent in the U.S.?
The law, passed in the wake of 9/11, officially expired in 2020.
But the CIA was like “ahh, screw it. Let’s just keep spying on everyone and not tell Congress.”
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly collecting Americans’ private information in bulk, according to newly declassified documents that prompted condemnation from civil liberties watchdogs.
The surveillance program was exposed on Thursday by two Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico alleged that the CIA has long concealed it from the public and Congress.
The pair sent a letter to top intelligence officials arguing that the program operates “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection”.
Wyden and Heinrich added: “It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a … CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records.”
The two senators, frequent critics of the CIA, said they are not allowed to reveal specifics about what type of data has been subject to bulk collection and called for more details about the program to be declassified.
Observations:
A. Although I certainly lean right of center, this is why I don’t get too into party politics…because parties move the lines of what they’re about all the time. Good for the two Democratic Senators who called this out.
B. Use a VPN (virtual private network) which keeps you safe on public wifi and makes it harder for anyone (inlcuding the government) to spy on you. I highly recommend Nord VPN.
C. Signal is a free app for iOS and Android, and better than SMS texting because it’s encrypted and your message are hidden from big tech and the CIA. (Well, it’s at least much, much harder to spy on you). Signal is free through donations, so if you like it and want to kick in a couple bucks, do that here.
[two]
In an interview with ABC over the weekend, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that Democratic Party support for “Defund the Police” is apparently ending:
“The other thing that’s weighing on people right now is rising crime,” Stephanopoulos began, adding, “And there appear to be some divisions among Democrats about how to handle it. Your colleague Karen Bass, running for Mayor of Los Angeles, is trying to increase the police force in L.A. Cori Bush, Congresswoman from Missouri, is saying it’s time to defund the police, she’s sticking by that.”
“You’re the Speaker, how do you think Democrats should address rising crime?” he asked.
“Well, with all the respect in the world for Cori Bush, that is not the position of the Democratic Party,” Pelosi replied. “Community safety, to protect and defend in every way, is our oath of office. And I have sympathy, I’m — we’re all concerned about mistreatment of people and that’s why Karen Bass had the Justice in Policing Act, and we would hope to get some of that done.”
Bush, the anti-Semite representing my Jewish wife and daughter in Congress, has been a vocal proponent of defunding the police while protecting herself with $200,000 in private security in the ultimate rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me movement.
Last month, Bush’s parked car was hit by gunfire, and the Congresswoman called the police she allegedly doesn’t believe in, but she’s still doubling down on her “Defund the Police” position, even as the Democratic Party moves in a different direction ahead of midterms.
Locally, the numbers show support of the opposite of Bush’s stance. In the last two mayoral elections, the parts of St. Louis city voted with the highest crime rates and highest minority populations voted overwhelmingly for Lewis Reed (in green on the left map), a hard line supporter of more policing.
It’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, because Bush represents St. Louis County…or, perhaps more accurately, Bush votes for the interests of a very vocal, very small group on Twitter. Perhaps the kairon for her TV appearances should be changed from (D-MO) to (D-Twitter) to more accurately represent her real constituency.
[three]
In New Mexico, the government killed $400,000 worth of wild cattle from a helicopter and left them to rot, despite the fact that several local farmers were concerned some of the cows had escaped and were a part of their respective herds.
U.S. Forest Service sharp shooters killed 47 head of stray cattle on Thursday, Feb. 10 and were in the air again on Friday as part of the USFS aerial gunning in the Gila National Forest and Wilderness in New Mexico. Numbers were provided to New Mexico Cattle Growers Association from APHIS Wildlife Services Thursday evening and reported no cattle were observed with ear tags or brands prior to engagement.
There are so many issues here, it makes my head spin.
A. The cattle carcasses were left to rot, which means the local population of grey wolves will almost certainly eat them. Which means grey wolves will be predisposed to want beef in the future, and attack domestic cattle.
B. For God’s sake, if they were going to do this, why weren’t local ranchers allowed to try to recover their cows?
C. Why did the government not send in butchers and donate the meat to homeless shelters?
D. How could sharpshooters from helicopters possibly be certain the cows didn’t have ear tags?
If you’ve never heard of something like this happening before, it’s because something like this has never happened before. Local ranchers were given just a few days notice to search 3,000 square miles of national forest before the shooting started.
Given more time, it’s quite possible at least some of the cattle could have been rounded up and returned to their owners, or donated for the needy.
It’s also worth asking what imminent danger 47 cattle posed to such a massive national forest? Given the wolf population, it’s not like the wild herd’s numbers were set to explode and become an invasive species. Sure, cattle trample stuff, but so do Bison, and those are allowed in National Forests.
This is one of those issues that isn’t flashy…but if everyday folks don’t push back hard against it…we’re going to have a very bad precedent on our hands.
The Five isn’t a publication that “tells you what to do,” but this is such an egregious policy that can start happening in other states…so if you feel compelled to contact the forest service, you can use this:
Email: send a message via this page.
Toll Free: 1-800-832-1355.
[four]
If you ban people from drinking soda, they’ll drink more beer, not more water, according to a study of Seattle’s soda tax.
A new study is pouring cold beer on Seattle's soda tax. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, reveals that since the city I call home adopted a soda tax in 2018, residents have swapped out soda and replaced that soda with beer. Pointedly, the study says Seattle's soda tax "induced" consumers to buy more beer.
"The good people of Seattle responded to a tax on sugary drinks by buying more beer," Christopher Snowdon, director of Lifestyle Economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and a leading critic of the nanny state, tweeted after the study's release.
To borrow an example from the last story, people are more like cattle than sheep, because sheep flock (all travel in the same direction). As anyone who’s spent even a day on a farm can tell you, cattle are obstinate and nearly never go where you want them to on the first try…which is how people tend to behave when you try to curb their behaviors with vice penalties.
This isn’t a one-off result, as “sin taxes” just push consumers to a different sin, as a multitude of taxes on tobacco can attest…rather than curbing teen cigarette smoking, the higher prices just push kids to buy marijuana instead.
Teen marijuana use is linked to an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, but cigarette smoking cuts about 20 years off a person’s projected lifespan…so neither outcome is great. But some teens are gonna smoke weed, some people are going to guzzle soda and some people will worship a carton of camels every week until it kills them.
As much as I wish those things could be different (and they can be), we’re not doing a great job of creating positive behavior change via a nanny state.
[five]
An interesting turn of events in research around marriage success rates, which had previously focused on marrying later to minimize the chances of divorce.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
When it comes to divorce, the research has generally backed up the belief that it's best to wait until around 30 to tie the knot. The sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah found that women who got married "too early" (mid-20s or earlier) were more likely to break up than their peers who married close to age 30.
As we recently discovered, however, there is an interesting exception to the idea that waiting until 30 is best. In analyzing reports of marriage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government's National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we found that there is a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky: women who married directly, without ever cohabiting prior to marriage. In fact, women who married between 22 and 30, without first living together, had some of the lowest rates of divorce in the NSFG.
Currently only 30% of Millennials (currently ages 26-41) live with a spouse and at least one child, down from 44% of Gen Xers at the same age.
However, Gen Z may be the anti-Millennials, with a strong preference for marriage and “traditional family values.”
Until the next one,
-sth