What better way to slow the growth of a dynamic country such as ours, than to impose restrictive and time consuming environmental regulations.  Was  that  possibly  the plan of the Green/Globalist/Marxist Movement?   Ya think???   Nancy

Getting Closer to ‘Shovel Ready’

Environmental impact statements shouldn’t take 13 years and more than 16,000 pages.

Traffic backs up on Interstate 70 near Silverthorne, Colo., Jan. 7, 2018. PHOTO: THOMAS PEIPERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  On Thursday the Trump Administration released a proposed rule to streamline NEPA reviews. One highlight is that the process would have presumptive limits: two years and 300 pages for a full environmental impact statement; or a year and 75 pages for a smaller environmental assessment. Thorny cases could go longer with written approval by “a senior agency official of the lead agency.”

If you visit an aging American megaproject—say, the Hoover Dam—you’ll probably see a startling statistic about how quickly it was built. Congress authorized the damming of the Colorado River in 1928, construction started in 1931, and the 726-foot concrete wonder opened in 1936. That’s a “shovel ready” job.

Today even modest public works, including roads, bridges and airport runways, can spend years in limbo, no thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. That 1970 law requires an environmental study of any major project that involves federal funding or permitting. NEPA hasn’t been overhauled in 40 years, which is why the Trump Administration deserves applause for moving last week to modernize it.

Everybody wants to protect the environment. But NEPA isn’t doing the job sensibly. No single agency has responsibility for its enforcement, unlike the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. There’s no obligation for the feds to keep a specific timeline. Environmental assessments and impact statements are often monstrously detailed, since agencies and sponsors are trying to make them litigation proof.

The result is a regulatory morass. From 2013 to 2017, the average final impact statement took more than four years and ran 669 pages, the Council on Environmental Quality said last summer. The longest file was for a contentious 12-mile expansion of Interstate 70 in Denver. The final report ran 8,951 pages, plus another 7,307 pages of appendices. The whole rigmarole took 13 years.

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‘Social credit score’: China set to roll out ‘Orwellian’ mass surveillance tool

China is developing a new high-tech system of mass surveillance and coercion aimed suppressing political dissent among its 1.4 billion people, while forcing American and Western businesses to conform to the government’s communist policies if they want to operate there.

The system that critics call an Orwellian national-level control system has been dubbed the Social Credit System (SCS) and was set for launch in the coming year, although recent reports from China now say the rollout could be delayed until 2021.

The massive system has been tested in several major Chinese cities and uses millions of surveillance cameras linked to supercomputers containing massive databases. Face and voice recognition technology then identifies and monitors people with the goal of controlling behaviors that range from dissident political activity to jaywalking, ostensibly as part of a financial credit monitoring system similar to those used in the West.

Vice President Mike Pence called out the program in a recent speech, warning that China’s surveillance state is “growing more expansive and intrusive — often with the help of U.S. technology.”

“By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called social credit score,” Mr. Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’”

Facial recognition tools are widely used now in China bolstered by cameras deployed along streets, on buildings, in train stations, in classrooms and subway lines. With the emergence of next-generation 5G telecommunications technology, the reach of the surveillance networks is only expected to increase.

As part of the stepped-up surveillance, the Chinese government announced this month that all who purchase SIM cards for mobile phones must first produce a facial recognition print.

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Steve Baldwin is a 35-year veteran of the conservative movement. He is the author of From Crayons to Condoms, the former executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, the former executive director of the Council for National Policy and a former California state legislator.

You don’t have to like Donald Trump to support him in 2020.  Nor is it necessary for you to agree with everything he says or tweets.  You may even dislike his style, his language and his sometimes abrasive behavior.  But it is imperative for all voters to understand the choice we will have in two years and what the ramifications are if Trump loses the election. If you are a conservative thinking about not voting for Trump due to these petty reasons, well, grow up.  We are now at a tipping point in American history in which the defeat of Trump will most likely launch a series of unconstitutional actions and decisions by the left which could very well lead to the destruction of America as we know it.

There are lots of discussions and chit-chat about a coming civil war on both leftist and conservative blogs, websites, news sites, etc., but is that really a possible scenario in our future?  Let’s face it, we are already in the midst of a form a civil war today, both politically and culturally.  Indeed, America has not been this divided since the Civil War of 1861-1865.  But could this “soft” civil war evolve into more of an actual violent civil war?  Afterall, it is clear to conservatives that many of America’s major institutions are under assault by a fanatical leftist movement that seeks to wipe out our Western and largely Christian heritage and replace it with an atheist, socialist utopia where supposed “equality” will be forced upon everyone and government will be the provider of all goods and services.

We’ve seen this movie before many times – the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, most of Africa, etc. Indeed, these countries were and are nightmare regimes that destroyed individual rights, religious freedom, the free enterprise system and free will. There’s no doubt that once socialism takes root, the accumulation of governmental power eventually leads to an Orwellian police state that controls all aspects of one’s life.  Yes, there have been a few socialist countries the left points to that have not evolved into police states –the Scandinavian countries — but over the last decade those countries dropped their experiment with socialism and have since become, by some accounts, more free market-oriented than the USA.  They were fortunate enough to dump socialism before it evolved into a police state.

The reality is that almost all socialist countries evolve into various forms of authoritarianism; just ask anyone who lived in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  But the socialist revolution here in America is already well under way. If one looks at many of our K-12 schools, our universities, the media and even many of our churches, they have been corrupted by the left and have become propaganda organs advocating socialist causes at the expense of their original missions.   There is little doubt the push to socialism is escalating here in the USA.

It is a shame so many millenillials are unaware of the tyranny that socialism leads to. And that’s what the left is counting on.   Very few millenillials read anything other than phone texts or social media posts and even fewer have ever read any of the great anti-socialist books such as Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, Darkness at Noon and The God that Failed by Arthur Koestler and the Gulag Archipelagoby Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  One would think such books would be routinely assigned in our schools since, after all, it was only 29 years ago the USSR was the most serious threat to our freedom our country had ever experienced. Moreover, communism/socialism still exists today in China, North Korea and a few other places.

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America’s Second Civil War