A Moving Experience

…of a sort.

A couple of months have passed since my ”Fatcow sucks dead bunnies through a straw” post, and I can finally say (I think) that I’ve managed the move to a better hosting service.

BlueHost seems to be pretty darned good. I needed help with a few issues (like getting the sql file(s) imported, since the exported files were… a tad large *heh* causing myPhpAdmin to “pharte” and hicough no end) and the guys at BlueHost were right on it.

Nice. Seems the “service economy” has some life in it yet.

 

“Reconquistas“? MHWA!

I was about to put fingers to keyboard and flesh out some thoughts I had last night about borders, sovereignty, a government’s responsibility to its citizens, etc., but then today’s mailbox revealed a post submitted for the blogburst by LomaAlta (Linknzona), with a forward by Heidi (Euphoric Reality). For those of y’all who’ve missed my comments about Linknzona before, let me repeat: THE must-read of the blogosphere on border issues. Read his article below, then visit the site and read ALL his posts on the issues surrounding control of our borders.

Foreword by Heidi at Euphoric Reality

From Spanish-speaking illegal workers, to angry tenured professors and arrogant politicians, we are hearing more and more tenets and demands from a movement called Reconquista. The movement, once dismissed as extreme racist rhetoric, has rapidly gained traction and momentum among millions of ill-educated illegal aliens and well-established Mexicans alike. Reconquista gives voice to the angry demands of present-day Mexicans who mistakenly think they have indigenous rights to the land of the Southwestern United States – which they claim was “stolen” by an imperialist American government. The centerpiece of their agenda is the mythical Aztlan…

(Read the rest of Heidi’s foreword here

Clearing Up A Misconception About Reconquista
by Loma Alta

Introduction.

Spain conquered what was to become modern Mexico and part of the southwestern United States in 1521. Spanish rule lasted 300 years until 1821 when Mexico gained independence. Mexico ruled what is now part of the southwestern United States for a very, very short time. Mexico ruled Texas from 1821 until 1836, some 16 years. Mexico ruled California from 1821 until 1846, 26 years. Mexico ruled most of New Mexico from 1821 until 1848, 28 years, and the southern most portions of Arizona and New Mexico until purchased by the United States in 1853, 33 years. The United States began ownership of these territories in 1845 (Texas), 1846 (California), and 1848-1853 (New Mexico and Arizona). Thus the United States has owned this land since 1845-1853, 153-162 years.

The ownership has thus been: Spanish 1521-1821 or 300 years; Mexican 1821-36 to 1853 or 16 to 33 years; and American 1845-1853 or 154 to 162 years. Almost all development and modernization came under United States ownership. Please see Spain, Mexico, Texas, California, and New Mexico-Arizona for more details.

Comparison of Ownership Time and Development.

Spain owned the area for 300 years and operated it as a colony. The central area, and most developed part was around Mexico City with much of the current southwestern United States being the frontier, relatively undeveloped, and subject to Indian raids and predations. The situation was much the same in the very, very short period, 16-33 years, of Mexican ownership. With the United States ownership, 154 to 162 years, beginning as territories, exploration and development proceeded rapidly and modern civilization came with, or shortly after, statehood.

The Absurdity of Reconquista.

Whether by time of ownership or degree of development and civilization, Mexico had virtually no temporal or civil weight of authority in the southwestern United States. Mexico never really established military or civil control over the area and it was never really a normal part of Mexico, but was always the frontier with vast expanses of nearly unexplored and lightly inhabited regions far from Mexican rule and authority. So tenuous, unpopular, and corrupt was Mexico’s presence and claim to the areas, and the Mexican government so hated by American and Mexican pioneers alike, that it only lasted from 16 to 33 years.

Thus, Reconquista is another myth, promulgated for racist reasons (it is the spawn of Mexican supremacist groups such as La Raza – literally “the Race”) much as the Germans’ “Lebensraum”, or living space, was for the master race. And, Reconquista is equally racist and equally the deranged product of irrational hate groups.

Therefore, we can dismiss the concept of “Reconquista” as a racist, hate group concept that has no place in America, or in any other just and tolerant society or country. There is no need to give any credence whatsoever to the false and meritless claims of any moral attachment to territory by radical, racist groups. They are as phony as last year’s bird’s nest.

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This has been a production of the Guard the Borders Blogburst. It is syndicated by Euphoric Reality, and serves to keep immigration issues in the forefront of our minds as we’re going about our daily lives and continuing to fight the war on terror. If you are concerned with the trend of illegal immigration in our country, join the Blogburst! Send an email with your blog name and url to euphoricrealitynet at gmail dot com.

 

“Immigration” should not mean “invasion”

What’s with this Mexican flag flown above an inverted American flag by CA high school students?

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“In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American… There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1919

(Yeh, I added the emphasis, but I can imagine Teddy Roosevelt emphasizing those things… )

Is it just me or are there a few other folks who are dead tired of President Bush and our congrescritters spouting lies about illegal immigrants? Deporting them would be “impossible” according to words I heard dripping from Senator McCain’s fangs earlier today—oh! and our economy would be kneecapped too, apparently.

Bushwa.

What was lost in cheap labor could be made up easily on the back end from not having our social services, schools, law enforcement, etc., strained by millions of illegals who export much of their income SOUTH, where it does our economy no good, anyway. Run those numbers, Mr. McCain, before you spout your bullshit. Heck, the monies saved in the pubschool arena alone would be HUGE.

I guess U.S. citizenship doesn’t mean anything any more. How about alla us taxpayers simply declare ourselves citizens of the world and tell the IRS to take a hike. All it’d take would be 50 or 60 million truly fed up taxpayers declaring themselves illegal aliens, claiming all the social net benefits the other illegals do and refusing to play the political elite’s game any more.

Yeh, yeh. Never happen. 60% to 80% of Americans supposedly want real border control (depending on who takes the poll and how much the pollsters wanna lie for their clients). 75%-80% of congresscritters wanna give away the store.

Who do you think will carry the day? The sheeple or their masters?

Well, at least McCain and his lying cronies are hilarious liars. That way we can laugh our way into subjugation to the reconquistas or the muslims. Whichever ends up as our eventual rulers.

UPDATE: This from Jerry Pournelle, today Thursday:

If what we want is control of the border and deportation of illegal immigrants, the remedy is obvious. Close the borders with a wall, station several regiments of light cavalry along the southern border, and be serious about people showing up for immigration status hearings. Require local sheriffs to inform the federal authorities about illegal immigrants. Have the Border Patrol agents do sweeps in the obvious places. Change the Social Security laws to require the Social Security Administration to inform the Border Patrol when payments show up for non-existent social security accounts (at the moment they aren’t even allowed to make such reports, so it’s safe to make up a Social Security number). Make it a federal crime to assume the identity of a citizen.

And offer bounty hunters $2,000 a head for illegal immigrants delivered to a suitable internment camp. Deport those turned over if they don’t protest; if they do, intern them until their status is determined.

More at the link above, of course.

And even more at Right Wing News.

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Open all weekend long:

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at

Linkfest Haven.

Also posted at the new third world county

 

Who would be the “First Pooch” in the Billary White House?

Thanks for the graphic goes to Hugh, who blessed me with it via email.

x-posted

 

A Pearl of Great Price

Actually, the “System Administrator Song” is… priceless.

(No, really: priceless. View/listen for free! *heh*)

h.t. to DNW for the link (via email)

 

One thing I hate about this WordPress thing…

I have so far been completely unable to insert code invoking ANY media player. Strange. I insert the code and WordPress excises it upon saving. Every other blog I have—Blogger, Tripod, Opera, etc. allows insertion of code invoking a media player applet to play a media file.

Not this.

Now, I know other WordPress users who are able to embed media files, so it must be possible. Hmmm… just not on this freebie version? Not a happy thing.

Any answers? (Any readers? *heh*)

 

Climate change/climate schmange

This guy almost had me. First paragraph I saw on his blog:

If you have i.e you will have noticed the formatting problems, i`ve been trying to sort this but no success so far (if you can figure out the problem all advice welcome Calvin dot Jones at gmail dot com). Alternatively to get away from this problem, get yourself a decent browser like Firefox or Opera!

OK, so he has a healthy view of Internet Exploder (and an interesting disregard for capitalization . *heh* But then I read his other posts and saw he was hawking the same old envirocultist dogma about impending doom from a new ice age (’70s enviro-cultist)/global warming (90s enviro-cultist) in the new cant of “climate change.”

How hard is it for these folks to actually look at just the historical record and see that, even through the course of recorded history, the rule for climate has been change—in more extreme amounts than we currently know. Seems this guy, among others, wants to play the part of King Canute instead of actually seeking to understand the underlying causes of climate change (the only constant about climate).

“Nope. Having none of that, thank you,” says the enviro-cultist. “Just give me my pet theories, ‘backed up’ by computer models that cannot ‘post-dict’ previous known data. Using these fake data, we can beat up developed countries in our real goal: the total annihilation of Western Civilization.”

Or so it seems to this observer who simply looks for the unstated consequences of enviro-cultists’ desired outcomes.

Does man contribute to climate change (remember: as recently as last year the buzzword phrase was “global warming” from these enviro-cultist bet-hedgers)? Maybe, even probably. To what degree and in what ways?

No one knows. Seriously. Enviro-cultist arguments are all smoke, mirrors and computer models that cannot take 1900 data and “predict” 1950 climate.

Until we know how and how much mankind affects climate, taking actions prescribed by enviro-cultists is stupid.

Originally posted at the “other” third world county, since Blogger seemed to be down (for me, at least) for its “30-minute” maintenance event for over 13+ hours… And yeh, I’m still griping about it. *heh*)

 

Stop the ACLU Blogburst

This in from Jay at Stop the ACLU

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Crossposted from Stop The ACLU Convincing liberals that the ACLU is leading us down a dangerous path is about as productive as talking to a rock. Perhaps this is because I mostly deal with far left liberals who share the same insane views and have the same radical agenda as the ACLU. Anyone who believes that the ACLU is there to purely defend the Constitution is naive at best. Surely there are some moderate liberals out there that can concede that the organization is in need of reform. A balanced society can not survive resting in the fringe. A Nation only concerned with security will drift toward a police state, and one that follows the absolutist views of liberty like the ACLU will drift toward anarchy. The ACLU proudly display a banner that states, Keep America Safe and Free, but any honest person will admit that the ACLU have done nothing for the safety of America. As a matter of fact, all evidence leads to quite the opposite. The ACLU are always ready to put the security of America at risk in the pursuit of its absolutist views of liberty. Many of the ACLU’s former leaders have noticed the irresponsible shifting of the ACLU away from true civil liberty protection into a much more dangerous agenda. For example take the words of this former Executive Director of the ACLU

The right to express unpopular opinions, advocate despised ideas and display graphic images is something the ACLU has steadfastly defended for all of its nearly 80-year history. But the ACLU, a group for which I proudly worked as executive director of the Florida and Utah affiliates for more than 10 years, has developed a blind spot when it comes to defending anti-abortion protesters. The organization that once defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to demonstrate in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., now cheers a Portland, Ore., jury that charged a group of anti-abortion activists with $107 million in damages for expressing their views. Gushed the ACLU’s press release: “We view the jury’s verdict as a clarion call to remove violence and the threat of violence from the political debate over abortion.” Were the anti-abortion activists on trial accused of violence? No. Did they threaten violence? Not as the ACLU or Supreme Court usually defines it, when in the context of a call for social change. The activists posted a Web site dripping with animated blood and titled “The Nuremberg Files,” after the German city where the Nazis were tried for their crimes. Comparing abortion to Nazi atrocities, the site collected dossiers on abortion doctors, whom they called “baby butchers.” … This is ugly, scary stuff. But it is no worse than neo-Nazi calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people, or a college student posting his rape fantasies about a fellow coed on the Web, both of which the ACLU has defended in the past. None of the anti-abortion group’s intimidating writings explicitly threatened violence. Still, the ACLU of Oregon refused to support the defendants’ First Amendment claims. Instead, it submitted a friend-of-the-court brief taking no one’s side but arguing that speech constitutes a physical threat only when the speaker intends his statement to be taken as one. …Before anti-abortion zealots started getting sued, the ACLU had much more tolerance for menacing speech. Few of the 20th century’s great social movements were entirely peaceable. The labor, civil-rights, antiwar, environmental and black-power movements were an amalgam of violence, civil disobedience and highly charged rhetoric. But to gag fiery speakers who call for harm to the establishment because others in the movement pursue their political goals with fists, guns or bombs would do terrible damage to strong, emotive pleas tot social change. It is something neither the ACLU nor, thankfully, the courts have countenanced in the past. That’s why in 1969 the ACLU helped defend a Ku Klux Klan member who had called for violence against the president, Congress and the Supreme Court. At the ACLU’s urging, the Supreme Court ruled that speech advocating violence was constitutionally protected unless it incited imminent lawless action and was likely to produce such action. This case was later used to defend the speech of black militants. The ACLU also applauded a 1982 Supreme Court decision that found that speeches promising violent reprisals were protected by the First Amendment. During the civil-rights movement, a leader of the NAACP called for “breaking the necks” of blacks who violated a boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi, and published a list of those who did. Some of the boycott violators were beaten. The court ruled that despite the atmosphere of fear, all the speeches and lists were part of a debate on a public issue that needed to be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

I would argue that the Constitution doesn’t protect all of these extreme positions of the ACLU, but that isn’t the point he is trying to make. The issue is the ACLU’s curious commitment to “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” free speech when it involves things such as virtual child pornography, but not when it involves a something like a boss making racially offensive statements. Unfortunately, there are some people who are so hypnotized by the ACLU’s absolutist views and of the ACLU’s campaign for pedophilia and child pornography that they are prepared to defend an organization that has become a shadow of its former self–a group that lets its idealistic and skewed understanding of the establishment clause trump freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Stop the ACLU had the opportunity last year of interviewing a former ACLU lawyer. He was concerned with much of the same things.

The ACLU played a helpful role in the civil rights movement defending these people, and I can’t turn my back on that. I have to give credit where credit is due.” “But….that being said, what they have done in the past is completely eviscerated by what they do in the present. The ACLU has become a fanatical anti-faith Taliban of American religious secularism.” “The ACLU is involved in the secular cleansing of our history. This is not just a fight about free exercise, but about the protection of our American history. The ACLU want to deny America the knowledge of their Christian heritage.”

It seems that the many of the ACLU’s greatest critics came from their very ranks. The division within the ACLU will continue as long as the ACLU continues on the irresponsible, hypocritical path it is on. America needs a civil liberties union, sadly the ACLU isn’t doing that job. If the ACLU succeeds in the dangerous direction it is steering America, they will ironically be putting in jeopardy the very liberty they claim to protect. This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay at Jay@stoptheaclu.com or Gribbit at GribbitR@gmail.com. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 115 blogs already on-board.

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See other posts on this topic at Stop the ACLU (linked above) and other blogs participating in the Stop the ACLU blogburst.

 

“Wasms”

Communism, socialism, liberalism, pragmatism, utilitarianism and yes, even conservatism all inevitably wreck themselves upon the rock of Unintended Consequences, and their brightest ideals become “wasms.”

The reason why the highest ideals and practical decisions of human wisdom inevitably fail is because we can only guess at their outcomes. Pragmatism is perhaps the most glaring failure, because future events inevitably prove that our pragmatic choices depended upon making choices to create a future we cannot predict.

Better simply “…to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with [our] God.”

Ah, but being just is hard when the world abhors justice. Being merciful is difficult even when we embrace justice (and impossible without justice). And humility is impossible for those who reject both justice and true mercy.

Originally posted at the “other” third world county when Blogger’s “half hour” of downtime extended well into “sudden death overtime”…

Noted at TMH’s Bacon Bits’ open post.

 

What? Blogger’s up?

Hmmm… have to wait on some feedback here, but for me, Blogger was “down” for more than 13 hours past its scheduled 30-minute downtime. Back in the saddle again, I guess.

Sooo… was reading The English Guy’s Networks and Security blog and ran across this:

“Skype may assist botnet attacks”

The post points to the fact that the proprietary technologies of Skype and Vonage and other VOIP providers could pose a security risk. Read the post. He makes some very good points and points to more genuinely interesting observations by a group that watches such things.

OTOH, As much as I appreciate the argument that open standards could increase security in some ways (“many eyes” etc.), I think I’d rather trust my phone service to the market pressures on my provider. Proprietary technology doesn’t always have to mean Microsoft-style security holes, and proprietary tech does offer some shielding from snoops (particularly, govt snoops would need subpoena authority to obtain the proprietary info, or else someone to reverse-engineer it, with no assurances of getting it really on the money or *gasp* and actual warrant to tap would have to be obtained!) that open standards may not.

The “many eyes argument” does, as I implied above, have a lot going for it, but I think mixing open and proprietary tech can offer some advantages. The biggest argument for open tech is a philosophical one, frankly, and like the process-oriented POV that argues for an “open standard” for Wikipedia, doesn’t always lead to the best end product. One notable exception to the open tech/mixed quality problem is the notably consistent high quality in Linux offerings. But there, linus Torvalds still acts as a benevolent dictator-of-last-resort. In much of the open source/open tech community, there is no equivalent overseer.

And the group noted in The English Guy’s post that apparently wants to oversee the technology is… funded by the feds (how’d I misread that? Not feds, a buncha academia nuts). (Who woulda guessed that one?)

I’ll have to give this one some more thought: market pressures vs. socialist idealism. Maybe there’s a “third way”? *LOL*

Oh, yeh. Develop PGP-based/type products for phone encryption over VOIP? Not seeing that one right away, as it would seriously mod the PGP model, but my head’s flipping through ideas…

Maybe that is it: third-party encryption add-ons to VOIP appliance firmware. Yeh. LEOs* would love that one… *heh*

*Law Enforcement Officers