One day after three provisions of the FISA surveillance program expired, the Senate cleared a 77-day extension as part of a deal allowing more debate and proper vote on real reforms to the program. This was the response to opposition to the House bill, which offered only minor reform.
Senate leadership broadly wanted to just sign off on the House bill, but Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) moved to block it without more serious reforms. Some were still hoping to vote upon that today, but ahead of that vote, the 77-day plan emerged.
The ACLU praised this move, saying that it gives a chance for debate and amendments, limiting large-scale surveillance and ensuring that the government complies with legal obligations that so often they refused to do.
Assuming the Senate passes a more acceptable version, which would start from the House version, it would then have to be reconciled between the two chambers, before ultimately going on to President Trump. Trump had hinted at vetoing the House version, but never confirmed he would definitely do so.
Any surviving records of FISA surveillance sure will be useful to future archaeologists studying how the U.S.A., a world nuclear power with lots of aging nuclear power stations, socially disintegrated panicking over a cold and lost its world leadership position.
I think the COVID-19 has been overhyped but a “cold”?
Yes a cold. You don’t grow horns if you catch it.
I’m sorry, but novel coronavirus is a coronavirus, and, all four pre-existing coronaviruses in human circulation as infections are colds. Many more exist in the wild.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html
COVID-19 is a recent and unwelcome 5th addition to the list of human-afflicting coronaviruses. Since the wild vector is still not confirmed; snakes? bats? rats? all the above? there is the possibility that the threat will persist in nature.
Thus, COVID-19 may become endemic to the human population unless the wild mutation was a one-off and no wild COVID-19 vectors remain.
Absent a wild population, and we succeed in eradicating COVID-19 from the human population, COVID-19 becomes forever extinct except as a lab sample. That’s assuming, COVID-19 isn’t an artificially tweaked but low-level bioweapon.
The decision to move COVID-19 into the realm of… well there is no name, so lets call them Alphabet viruses (SARS, H1N1, MERS,, etc)… is deserved. I’m not denying that. Technically, though, COVID-19 would be still a cold.
Whether as harder-hitting Alphabet viruses or seasonal colds and flus we have become nonchalant to, all share the same victim pool and basic symptoms with their parent groups. If you are vulnerable to catching and dying from an upper respiratory infection, COVID-19 is as dangerous as any influenza or cold virus. That’s pretty much all of us.
Similarly, the defense is the same. Grade school hygiene – wash hands, keep surfaces clean, don’t touch eyes, nose or mouth with unwashed hands. Maintain high vitamin D, C and zinc/copper by diet and some supplementation. Minimize contact with the ill or potentially ill where practical.
Vitamin D is best drawn from the body’s ability to make the stuff from sunlight, but winter reduces sun exposure, and we are entering solar minimum, which means even less solar energy in the winter..
Copper is needed to help balance off zinc supplementation, which as a powerlifter you might know something of from your nutrition routine.
We often in common vernacular conflate cold and flu as the same thing, but the influenza viruses distinguish themselves by being often more virulent and lethal. Thus, the influenza variants are in a class of their own. Symptoms and treatment are a bit different as well.
However, the common cold, (there are 200+ so-defined upper respiratory tract infections) such as a rhinoovirus, can become fatal even to an outwardly healthy and young patient.
https://diseasej14.imascientist.org.uk/question/how-many-people-die-from-the-common-cold-every-year/
Note that we are NOT getting a breathless, dramatic by-numbers accounting anywhere of how influenza and rhinovirus are killing this year. [The wide ranges in annual estimates, suggest infection and death rates for the common cold and influenza may significantly depart from officially cited average numbers, sometimes far less infectious and deadly than COVID-19, but also sometimes far more so.]
Such numbers would kind of blow the pandemic social panic card and illusion of vaccination supremacy. I’m not anti-vax; the science is sound, even if the industry is not. However, COVID-19 is a hybrid hoax and the damage to human lives and society is beyond its physical threat capability.
We are instituting a social cytokine storm over a cold that could severely injure our society and civilization as surely as the biological cytokine storm injures and kills individual people. All for corporate profits and expanded government control.
(A cytokine storm is where the immune signalling system is triggered by infection into a self-destructive recursive loop destroying the body by immune response trying to kill an infection.)
C’mon man. That isn’t what I commented on and I think you know that. The world doesn’t get shut down for a cold whether it’s an accurate definition or not. At least not what one would think of as a cold.
Breaking the COVID-19 panic spell is the first key to breaking this latest autocratic globalist elite rebellion against the Enlightenment democracy that became and still remains the popular middle class order in the West.
The democratic middle class model is the model the rest of the world aspired to. However, under such free societies, even an aristocracy – now a financial aristocracy than agrarian (but still militarized) – exists to serve in turn, not be served exclusively.
Apparently noblesse oblige loses its shine when actually obligated; privilege over duty.
A neo-monarchy of financial meritocratic technocratic families answering to their own petty rivalries and prerogative to privilege s as did the monarchies of old, is not an improvement over the democratically accountable, socially and economically mobile society we can still demand.
This all started with me wondering how you could compare this to a cold. Silly me, I thought you meant the common cold. That is all the point I was trying to make. I respectfully drop out of this conversation.
Enjoy the social cytokine storm this little cold is stirring up.
https://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-cytokine-storm.htm
Its probably just a live pandemic drill nobody voted for and hopefully the official immune system response won’t kill society too much.
Meanwhile, a counter movement is growing to let COVID-19 run its course, deflecting into conventional partisan politics.
The key takeaway is not the Dems versus Reps but that enough people have the guts to openly reject the police state solution and want a vote on further measures.
https://townhall.com/columnists/douglasmackinnon/2020/03/22/should-america-vote-on-letting-covid19-run-its-course-n2565441
After all, the 2019010 Swine Flu was much worse.
https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelreagan/2020/03/14/the-other-virus-to-fear-n2564891
The Senate blows.
And the extension must be allowed to expire, with no “replacement,” period. Warrantless spying on Americans has no place in a free society, period.
Sadly that never even seems to be an option. Those that try are called “terrorist enablers”. Never to end.
Shut the mother fucking thing down. That’s what the people want and that doesn’t give you the right to do anything that you want. You are answerable to us. So, spin the wheel take your chances.