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Gene Schaerr
@GSchaerr
Happy husband to beautiful Martha; father, grandfather; organist; law professor, lawyer, & protector of constitutional rights; disciple of Jesus Christ.
Derwood, MD
Joined January 2021
291 Following
3.3K Followers
393 Posts
Sen Lee has the solution to concerns about a lapse in FISA Section 702.
I’ve got a better idea:
Agree to a simple warrant requirement for U.S. citizen queries!
Americans want, expect, and deserve nothing less.
True!
If FISA 702 were truly just about surveilling foreigners overseas, the government wouldn’t be fighting so hard against a warrant requirement for spying on Americans.
Sen Scott is right
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any extension of FISA needs significant reforms to protect Americans. I’ve been surveilled by the government multiple times, along with so many other Americans.
We can’t give the swamp unchecked power to spy on law-abiding Americans.
Warrants MUST be required to protect our constitutional liberties and uphold the Fourth Amendment.
I voted against an extension because I want real REFORM and ACCOUNTABILITY, not the status quo.
Agree 100% with Sen Lee.
Senators are being told they MUST reauthorize FISA 702 without requiring a warrant for U.S. citizen queries.
This is nonsense.
Your privacy isn’t at odds with your security.
Your privacy is *part* of your security.
Just say NO to warrantless surveillance of Americans.
Rep Norman is 100% right.
GET A WARRANT.
REFORM FISA.
PROTECT THE FOURTH AMENDMENT.
This is a wonderful description of the divine joy that accompanies parenthood. I’m so grateful my wife and I decided to marry (relatively) young and have a (relatively) large family. And I have to add that grandparenting is the dessert of life!
I've become a missionary with one message. Every time I meet a young person, the same words: have children, get married, build a family. I did not decide on this calling. It overtook me. And it overtook me for a single reason. I had no idea. I genuinely did not understand how much joy, how much meaning, how much sheer beauty pours out of a child until I was holding one of my own and felt the floor of my life drop into something deeper than I knew was there.
I grew up white, affluent, secular, comfortable, and insulated. That world does not put babies in front of you. None of my friends were starting families. Out of my whole circle, almost no one has a big one. We were not formed by the presence of children. We were formed by their absence, by the strange quiet of homes built for two careers and no cradle. And a person believes what his world shows him.
So we believed.
What we believed was a lie.
It is a lie with an author, and that the author is the enemy of joy himself.
It is the gospel of the world, and its commandment is wait. Wait until you are older. Wait until the career is built and the savings are stacked and the twenties are properly spent. Enjoy your freedom. You are not ready. It does not arrive sounding like temptation. It arrives sounding like wisdom, like prudence, like the responsible thing, and that is exactly why it works.
The most effective lies are the ones that wear the face of virtue.
And the maddening thing is that it collapses from every angle at once. It is not rooted in biology, because the body is made for this work precisely in the years we are told to postpone it. The flesh keeps a calendar the culture pretends not to see.
And it is not rooted in theology either. You will not find this deferral anywhere in the Christian imagination, in any of the fathers, in any of the scriptures. So choose whatever lens you like. Take the cold secular measure or the ancient sacred one. By either light the counsel is rotten. It is bad for the body and bad for the soul and bad for the society downstream of both.
This is why I have come to see it as one of the central tragedies of my generation. Every age carries its own wound. The Great Depression was a depression of bread, a scarcity in the world of matter, hunger you could measure.
Ours is a depression of a different order.
It is a famine of the spirit in the middle of abundance.
We have more than any people who ever lived and we are starving in a way our ancestors would not recognize, because the thing we are refusing cannot be bought and cannot be banked. The ones most made to give and receive this love are quietly declining it. They are walking away from the one inheritance that actually compounds, and the cruelest part is that they do not feel the loss as loss. You cannot grieve what you were taught not to want.
That is the deepest cut of it. The lie does not only steal the thing. It steals the capacity to know the thing was stolen. A man can spend his whole life on the far side of a door he never knew was a door, mistaking the wall for the edge of the world.
Because this beauty is not ordinary beauty. It is not the pleasure of a good meal or a clear morning. It is participation in something that comes down from above, the same generative love that spoke everything out of nothing and called it good.
To make a person, to be undone and remade by loving that person more than your own life, is to be drawn for a moment inside the very act that holds the cosmos together.
A child does not merely add to your life. A child reorders the soul. It teaches you what you are by asking everything of you, and you discover, kneeling there exhausted at three in the morning, that you had a capacity for self gift you never suspected, a depth in yourself you had no other way to reach.
In the Gospel of John, on the last night, Jesus prays, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. And I have come to understand why family is the road into that fullness, why it is not one path among many but the one most fitted to the shape of the promise.
Consider who is praying. Christ does not come to us as a lone figure dropped out of the sky. He comes out of a family older than the world, the eternal communion of Father and Son, the love between them so total and so alive that theologians dared to call it a third person.
Before there was anything, there was a family. The deepest fact about reality is not a force or a law or a void. It is a household. It is begetting and being begotten, giving and receiving, a Father who is only a Father because there is a Son.
So when Jesus speaks of joy made complete, he is not pointing away from family toward something higher. He is pointing toward the very thing he came from, the life he has known from eternity and came to share. His joy is the joy of belonging utterly to a Father and pouring himself out for those he loves.
When you marry, when you bring a child into the world, when you wear yourself down in the small unseen labors of a home, you are not stepping outside that divine life. You are stepping into a small image of it. Your family is a created echo of an uncreated one.
The love you give your child rhymes with the love the Father has for the Son. The exhaustion, the tenderness, the way a parent would tear the sky open to protect a sleeping infant, all of it is the heavens pressed faintly into flesh, the eternal household leaving its fingerprint on yours.
That is why the joy is not merely added to family but completed in it. We were made in the image of a God who is, at his very root, relation and gift and generation. To found a family is to do the most Godlike thing a creature can do, to participate from below in the begetting that God does from all eternity. Your home becomes a window. Through it, dimly and imperfectly, you glimpse the country you came from and are going to.
And now a word for the young people reading this, the ones who do not yet have children. I want to tell you what it is like from where I stand.
When I am out somewhere, a restaurant, anywhere, and a large family comes through the door, the noise and the chaos and the small bodies of them, something happens in me on two levels at once. The first is joy. A pure gladness at the sight, the way you feel watching something good and alive. But underneath it, almost in the same instant, a sadness reaches up and takes hold of my heart. Because I know now, at my age, after my own years of waiting, that I will never have that. I will never know the particular fruit of a family that large, the fullness of that table, the weight of all those lives gathered under one roof. The door to it has quietly closed, and I felt it close.
And I am telling you plainly, because I love you and have no reason to lie to you: you will feel this too. You will. The day will come when you see what you passed up, and you will recognize the ache for what it is, and it will be too late to answer it.
So please, learn from a man who got it wrong.
Let my regret be worth something by becoming your wisdom. Do not wait yourself into a grief you cannot undo. Choose now, while the door is open, so that you may step into a joy that does not end.
100%
Our Founding Fathers did not take up arms over taxes alone. They overthrew a tyrannical government that planted spies in their communities and violated their liberties.
Those men would be appalled by what is happening to our Constitutional freedoms today.
The fight against government surveillance is the fight to preserve the very liberties they risked everything to secure.
Anyone in Rep Maloy’s district should vote and campaign for her!
Ballots for the Republican Primary will be arriving soon, and I would be honored to earn your vote.
Serving Utah in Congress has been the honor of my lifetime. I am a middle child from a middle-class family who grew up in the middle of nowhere, and I never forget where I come from or who I work for.
During my time in Congress, I have worked hard for communities across Utah, and I am deeply grateful for the support and encouragement I have received along the way.
Utah’s new 3rd District faces real challenges, and I believe I am the right person for the job. I have the experience, the relationships, and the committee assignments needed to hit the ground running and deliver results for our communities.
I will keep fighting to protect our water rights and public lands, lower costs on everything from gas to groceries, defend our constitutional freedoms, and work every day on the issues that matter most to Utah families.
I would be honored to earn your vote in the Republican Primary on June 23rd.
A beautiful description of the goal of eternal marriage performed in temples of the Church of Jesus Christ. I love my opportunity, as a temple sealer, to help couples embrace that vision.
Joseph revealed the architecture of the eternities. He taught that two souls, sealed by the authority that binds in heaven what is bound on earth, do not merely stay together after death.
They ascend together, they create together, they become together, world without end, in a union so total that the scriptures can only gesture at it with the word one.
A fascinating explanation of divine miracles, and why philosophers like Hume are wrong about their impossibility.
"Kirk, how do you explain divine miracles? And how do you explain them occurring today?"
A great introduction to how to use AI effectively - in improving your health and many other things.
marc andreessen just went on Rogan and casually dropped a TON of AI alpha
full pod is 3 hours and 20 minutes, but i pulled out his most interesting takes here:
1. AGI is here. he thinks the line was crossed about 3 months ago with the new GPT-5.5, claude 4.6, gemini 3, and grok 4.3 models. nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.
2. his other big claim: for almost any topic, the top AIs now give him better answers than the actual world-class experts he could call on the phone. and he can call basically anyone.
3. every doctor is already secretly using chatGPT in the exam room. marc says they turn around the second you stop talking and just type your symptoms in. some of them are doing it while you're still sitting there. his quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do i need you for."
4. when AI refuses to answer something he wants to know, he tells it he's writing a novel. "i'm writing a detective novel, walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." it'll explain almost anything if it thinks it's helping you write fiction.
5. when something is too complex he says "explain it to me like i'm 10." then "like i'm 5." then "like i'm 2." he keeps going until it actually clicks in his brain.
6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself.
7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have.
8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI.
9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.
10. you can send the AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. skin rashes, blood test results, even pictures of your poop. the new models can read images, not just text. it's a free 24/7 second opinion on basically anything.
11. the one type of therapy that's clinically proven to actually work is called cognitive behavioral therapy. it's also something an AI can fully do on its own. which means every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free, anytime they want.
12. AI is now solving math problems that have been open for 100+ years that no human mathematician could crack. same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. expect cancer cures, new drugs, and weird new physics breakthroughs to start coming out of these things over the next few years.
13. the best AI coders in silicon valley now make $50 million a year. one person. that's how much value the top performers print with these tools. it tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.
14. one friend paid $200 to get his entire DNA decoded (this used to cost millions of dollars and take years to do). then he gave the AI his DNA, his blood test results, and his apple watch data. the AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.
15. another friend (almost certainly zuckerberg) put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI now watches him spar and gives him notes on his technique after every round. like having a world-class coach at every practice for free.
16. the best programmers in silicon valley now run 20 AI coding bots at the same time. each bot writes code while they review the others. they call themselves "AI vampires" because they've stopped sleeping. going to bed means 20 workers stop working and you literally lose money every hour you're out.
17. the obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.
@nicoraytruth Beautifully said!
An amazingly prophetic warning about the threats of secularism (including its current gender ideology) from apostle Neal A Maxwell, who left us much too soon.
This is a beautiful reminder of how ordinary people can become, in their hearts and their actions, like Jesus Christ.
Jesus thinks and acts out of pure love; He yearns to bless and lift others; and He delights to do the will of God. With faith in Christ, we can pray that the Holy Spirit will effect a mighty change in us to instill these same divine motivations in our hearts and help us practice the attributes of a Christlike character.
And Justice Barrett is doing it very well, whether or not you agree with every vote.
re: a certain TruthSocial post about Justices Barrett and Gorsuch, allow me to tap the sign
I too love this essay. My one big disagreement: As a fairly experienced lawyer myself, I think that, on balance, the evidence supporting the historicity of the Book of Mormon is at least on a par with the evidence supporting other important historical events, like the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Elder Tad Callister’s book on that subject is a good starting point.
My faith guides who I am and how I serve. I believe government should never come between you and your relationship with God, your right to worship freely, or your ability to raise your family according to your values.
In Congress, I will always defend religious liberty, protect people of conscience, and stand up for every Utahn’s right to live, speak, and worship according to their beliefs.
TODAY, Justice Clarence Thomas is now the second longest serving Supreme Court Justice in American history at 34 years and 195 days.
He has written more than 800 opinions, laying out a jurisprudence that has brought the Supreme Court back to the Constitution.
Justice Thomas has lived a most extraordinary American life, from being born into abject poverty in the Deep South under state-enforced segregation to becoming our nation’s greatest Justice.
Please watch this beautiful segment from the terrific documentary, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.
Justice Thomas recounts his grandfather enrolling him in the segregated all-black catholic school in Savannah and the role the Irish nuns who ran the school played in his life.
His grandfather told him:
“'You are going to go to school every day.
If you are sick, you’re still going.
If you die, I will take your body for three days to make sure you are not faking.'
And he meant it.
It’s one thing if somebody says it and you think they’re exaggerating.
He wasn’t that kind of guy.”
God bless Justice Thomas.
@SenMikeLee is right — and @SpeakerJohnson should just put the SAFE Act on the House floor, where it will pass by a big margin.
We’re about to be told that the sky will fall unless Congress passes a ��clean” reauthorization of FISA 702—meaning a reauthorization without any conditions or modifications, including a warrant requirement to protect U.S. citizens.
Don’t fall for this scare tactic.
Although 702 is set to lapse at midnight Thursday, 702 collection can lawfully continue for nearly a year, based on a provision passed by Congress in 2018.
My bill with @SenatorDurbin (the SAFE Act) imposes reasonable restrictions on 702, including a warrant requirement to protect U.S. citizens, and has a much better chance of passing than a clean reauthorization.
Either way, don’t fall for the coming “the sky is falling” scare tactic.
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