Posts Tagged ‘government’

I want Republicans to be more progressive and less conservative

Posted: December 30, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in election 2024
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…about the issues that matter to us.

Republican lawmakers are some of the weakest people in the world. With the notable exception of Donald Trump and a few Senators and Representatives, the overwhelming majority of Republicans elected to office can be relied upon to negotiate like Pope Francis did with Communist China (as in, sell out on all accounts and get nothing), find excuses for not pushing reforms that matter to the voters, and then reliably asking for more money because otherwise the evil Democrats will come to power.

Meanwhile, progressive lawmakers on the Democrat side push everything from porn in elementary classrooms and allowing sexual assault to go unpunished if the person is transgender to EV mandates and our military bankrolling abortion. They get pretty much all of these things, and since Republicans maybe roll back half of them, this means that “progress” is happening.

I don’t want Republicans to be conservative. Conserving means someone focuses on maintaining the status quo. That status quo is never going to happen. Technology changes our environment. Advances in medicine and communication means we can live longer, instantly communicate around the world, and even travel into outer space. It also brings on new challenges. Who would have thought that we’d be asking ourselves what to do with one million frozen embryos babies? Or how we would keep our faith if we lived on Mars?

The typical conservative response is to stick one’s head in the sand and refuse to accept the change. At my church, I have a parishioner that believes WiFi is damaging to your brain and causes cancer. When I installed a campus-wide WiFi network, every young person was ecstatic, but this guy was incensed. He spent an hour verbally blasting me while I was working, finally causing me to express some notably non-Christian phrases and tell him to…well, you can probably guess.

Yet after the network was complete, every young mom could stream the Mass on YouTube in the parking lot when they had to take their screaming 2-year-old out of the church. My church didn’t want a Facebook page until I pointed out that most of our young people were on Facebook, and if we didn’t put a message out, someone else would. Now we have a Facebook page, a solid following, and another way to build our community.

We cannot afford to simply conserve. It is not enough to just reside in the world, protect what we have and hope someone doesn’t come and upset our little piece of the world. Someone IS going to upset it, whether they come rioting in the streets, stabbing people on the train, or coming for your kids in school. Most of our elected Republicans lack the spinal cord to promise anything but a return to what used to be, which is pointless. We aren’t going back to the age of steam, the 1950s, the Victorian era, or any previous time. Birth control pills, social media, and all the recent advances in technology won’t disappear. Instead of wishing for things the way they were in the past, lawmakers need to push for their own version of progress. Since they seem void of ideas, here are my proposals that would make 2024 a far better year for Republican progressives:

  1. 100% free adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. Fund the health care, maternity leave and all adoption costs. We have so many willing families that end up adopting kids overseas due to the legal and funding hurdles associated with adopting American babies.
  2. End Daylight Savings Time. We already have states that don’t follow it. End it in the U.S. permanently.
  3. Eliminate Physical Education in schools, bring back driving class, home economics and shop class. I mean seriously, physical education is a joke. Just drop it already. Kids need to learn how to drive, balance a checkbook, cook a meal, and build things with their hands. Boys and Girls, we are far better off with more girls knowing how to use a power drill and the more boys knowing how to cook basic meals.
  4. Bring back medical billing transparency. This was a pretty big issue that President Trump signed into law, but has gone largely unenforced. We can’t begin to talk about keeping health care costs in check when we have no idea how much it costs in the first place.
  5. Turn Social Security into a TSP-like structure. Congress will rob Peter to pay Paul using Social Security unless its changed into a defined contribution plan.
  6. Cap Congress Senators and Representatives at 30 total years of service. Seriously, do we need someone hanging around for more than 30 years? After 30 years between the Senate and House, folks need to move on to something else.
  7. Legalize marijuana and tax it. It’s fine if the DoD or other places won’t hire if you use drugs, but we’re probably better off just taxing it instead of trying to ban it.

I’m sure there are plenty of other items to add to this list. The point is, rather than trying to return to the mythical “good ole’ days,” we should be pushing for better rules that reflect the reality we are in.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Governments cannot eliminate risk without eliminating freedom

Posted: October 8, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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This whole government overreaction to the Coronavirus pandemic has proved that the only way government can minimize risk is by minimizing freedom.   There is no other way for governments to minimize risk.  These lockdowns by states and municipalities, which are meant to minimize the risks associated with a supposedly deadly virus spreading wildly throughout their population, have resulted in the almost total loss of freedom for the majority of individuals living in this country.  This loss of freedom has resulted in tremendous harm to the individuals who have lost freedom and to the country as a whole.

Exercising your freedom naturally results in some form of risk.  It is something we as individuals all understand.  Throughout every day we make decisions based on this fundamental truth. We weigh the risks versus the benefits every time we decide to exercise out freedom.  The only person qualified to weigh the risks of exercising our freedom is each and every individual. 

An honest and thorough investigation of history will confirm that when government, even at the most local, attempts to decide for others which risks are more acceptable than others, government does a terrible job.  California, New York, and Massachusetts, with their disastrous lockdowns, have proved that governors of states do a tremendously poor job making these decisions for us.  It is far worse for every individual in the United States when the Federal Government attempts to minimize risk for us.  We should all be extremely grateful that President Trump followed the Constitution and did not lockdown the entire country.

Freedom used to be a concept that was universally cherished by everyone in this nation.  Sadly that no longer is true thanks to the brainwashing that has been taking place in our colleges and universities for decades.  Far too many individuals meekly accept the freedom destroying restrictions placed on them to minimize the risks associated with Coronavirus.  It turns out that Coronavirus is far less deadly than the media and so called experts make it out to be.  Even if it was far deadlier than it actually is that would not justify any freedom destroying restrictions.   Earlier generations would not have put up with these restrictions.

Why your Navy can’t telework (even if you wanted it to)

Posted: July 11, 2020 by ng36b in war
Tags: , , ,
From Breitbart Media

It seems plenty of people want the entire United States to telework and stay at home until a COVID-19 vaccine is created. To be fair to those people, many jobs that we once thought weren’t telework capable are suddenly finding a way to overcome those barriers. But for government workers, especially those in the Navy, telework doesn’t remain a viable option, and we need to stop lying about its viability.

Let’s start with what should be an obvious point: many military members work with classified information. Information gets classified for a variety of reasons: it keeps ship movements safe, protects how sensitive intelligence is made, or where we’ve made breakthroughs in military technology. We spend a lot of taxpayer money to build systems with advantages over our enemies, and protecting the information from our enemies so we can maintain that advantage is important. Or put another way, we throw away taxpayer dollars when we give up classified information.

To protect this information, we make people work in secure facilities. More sensitive information merits more secure facilities. These facilities don’t include your living room couch. Or your home office. Or the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shop. Worse still, we have some mobile technology, but its normally reserved for higher ranking members in the military.

So we’re put in a quandary. Navy leadership at the high level can work from home to some degree. The Sailors doing the work cannot. This inevitably leads to the desire to “talk around” information, or find ways of getting work done that put our information at risk. Remember to keep in mind this information costs money, so putting it at unnecessary risk is the equivalent of throwing money away to our enemies.

A second less obvious point is that the Navy has a lot of equipment that we don’t just lock up and store. Ships require maintenance. Submarine nuclear reactors always have someone at a panel. Without Sailors onboard, these vessels cease to be useful. We can’t drive them into a warehouse, turn on the dehumidifier, shut and lock the door and wait for a vaccine.

So your government, especially your Navy, can’t telework forever. We put information and systems, which are expensive, at risk. Just like the rest of America, we need to get back to work.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.