Road Rage

When working Day shift, I am on the road at 4:20 AM. Shift stats at 5 AM and it is a 15 to 20 minute drive. I've had a flat on the way to work and made it on time. Ever seen "A Christmas Story" where the Dad changes the tire.

Even here in L.A. traffic is virtually nonexistant at that hour. I can get on the freeway and set the cruise control at 65 MPH, get in the #2 lane (out of 4) , and just steer. There can be around a mile of road that is mine alone.

Why is it then that the person who is going 75 to 80 (or more) will fly up to within a couple of car lengths of my rear bumper, decelerate rapidly, and sit there for what seems forever. They will then swerve, usually to the right and mostly without signaling, and go screaming by. There were three other lanes open, they had the option of passing on either side, there are no other vehicles to factor in. The only reason for this type of action is that these drivers can only handle one piece of information at a time.

1. There is another car in front of me.
2. I'm catching up to it.
3. I must be going faster than the car I'm catching up to.
4. Oh, I've caught up to it.
5. Better slow down before I hit it.
6. Should I move left or right?
7. I'll go right.
8. Turn indicator, Oh, I'm already changed lanes, too late.
9. Accelerate back to 80 because I was to lazy to leave 5 minutes earlier.

Now each of these steps in thought seem to take anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds to complete. So, for 45 seconds to a minute and a half, two cars are tied up on an otherwise empty freeway.

Oh, and I have tried signaling and changing lanes before they even get close, but inevitably, they seem to change with me which adds another step in the whole process and more tension to the encounter that I don't need to deal with at early hour.

Another driving technique has seemed to appear over the last year. Driving on a straight flowing freeway, cars spaced nicely, speed constant, and then there is a bend in the road. Not a turn, just a slight deviation from straight. Once into the bend, the brakes come on and a slowdown of 10 to 15 MPH occurs. Cars accordion together, then, through the bend, traffic goes back to the previous speed and spacing.

I hate being late, and I dislike the aggravation associated with being late. I've reach the age where I would rather leave for my destination with a large delay factor built in, get to my destination early, and have time to decompress from the drive before dealing with appointments or whatever. Driving is a fact of life with built in stress, being you cannot control those whom you share the road, but sometimes it seems that my fellow travelers just cannot help but create problems that never should have arisen.

Round 'Em Up?

There seems to be only two options offered on what to do about the 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants that are here. Either round them all up and ship them home, or give them amnesty.

To me neither one is feasible. We are not going to pick up that number of people and transport them, I agree, it would be impossible. Do we reward them with a fast track to citizenship, basically just ignore that they thumbed their nose at the law because they wanted to come here and weren't willing to apply.

What if we just did something in the middle. Put their future in their hands. They can go home and apply, give them a grace period to leave, say six months, no penalty. After the grace period expires, if you are involved with government in any way, speeding ticket, drugs, after the use of medical facilities, you will be deported, and there will be no chance of citizenship or residency at all, ever.

At first there will probably be little change, but if enforced fully, after a few hundred get a ride back home, word will spread and those that are serious about wanting to make a life here will start heading home on their own.

Of course the only way this will work is if we seriously apply the deporting, "we warned you and you didn't listen, so hasta la vista, baby". Plus the borders must be controlled. Access only through regulated points. Anyone crossing in other places, free trip back across the line and your future chances for living here out the window. No debate, no excuses, no exceptions.

Maywood, California

A sleepy little city inside of the moetropolis of Los Angeles has decided tha the laws of the United States and California do not apply within their city limits. Maywood is a "Sanctuary City", no immigration laws with be enforced there.

They had run a regular checkpoint to stop DUI's, not having a licence, and proof of insurance, but it turns out that they were catching a disporportionate number of illegals at the stops.

Now we all know if you catch a large number of people who have already broken the law, breaking the law, you must ignore it.

The answer is simple. If Maywood does not want to enforce the laws of the state or federal government, do not accept money form those agencies. No grants for police enhancment, no Medicare or Medi-Cal aid.

Don't wanna be part of the nasty old USA, go for it. Just don't look for a hand as you're going under.

Protesters Fired For Missing Work

21 (the article says 15, but I heard their lawyer say 21 on FNC) immigrants were fired for taking the day off of work to attend the protests yesterday. The company stated that absences would not be excused for that day, but these people decided it was more important than their job. Their choice, now they have to face the consequences of their choice.

The company had to shut down for the day because the workers they had expected to be there didn't bother to show up. They had more important things to do. Just too bad this isn't fwance.

As Fwance Slowly Sinks Into the Sunset

With the surrender by chirac to the students, what once was a bastion of freedom oozes slowly down the drain.

The students would rather be unemployed than have to work and prove they know, or are capable of learning to perform at a job. If in the 25 years of having say on whether to hire someone who maybe didn't look to hot during interviews or keeping them after a year or so, I had to decide on day one if someone would be with the company 5 years down the line, I would have made many mistakes.

I have hired guys that didn't look like they would ever fit, but we needed a body, and they turned into some of the best employees you could want. I have also hired guys that fit everything we were looking for, but you spent half a day looking to see where they were hiding. These guys had the talent, but didn't want to work for the good of the company so it could make money and pay them more.

fwance has now locked themselves into a culture of socialism that cannot support itself. The only answer is to import labor from outside the country, so fwance will lose it's declining cultural identity that it has fought so hard to preserve over the last few decades. fwance is now part of Eurabia.

If I'm Up For Election--The Case Must Go On

The Prosecutor, district attorney Durham County D.A. Mike Nifong-D, of the Duke University LaCrosse team came out today and said that even though the DNA evidence doesn't tie any of the players to the rape charges against them, he will proceed with the case.

Every legal analyst who has postulated on this has opined that should be the death knell as far as going after the team members, but there could be something we don't know, however they sure would like to know what it could be.

My opinion...Mr. Nifong was appointed to fill a vacant position and is now up for his first election. If he lets these white privileged boys off at his point, he will be dead meat. He is going to string this out for political advantage for the next three weeks (past the election) then let the case fade away. The man is letting politics run his enforcement of justice and the voters in his district had better pay attention and make sure they don't come under suspicion of anything around next election time.

In order for him to hold on to his position, he is more than willing to sacrifice the Coach of the LaCrosse team and the 46 young players.

American Flags at Illegal Rallies

Taqiyya:the religiously-sanctioned doctrine, with its origins in Shi’a Islam but now practiced by non-Shi’a as well, of deliberate dissimulation about religious matters that may be undertaken to protect Islam, and the Believers.

Why would I start a post on the gathering of illegal immigrants with a definition from the Qur'an? It struck me that we had two vastly different groups trying to accomplish the same goal using the same tactic to accomplish it.

At the previous rallies, the illegals were waving hundreds of Mexican flags and shouting anti-American sloagans. Watching this occur in U.S. cities kinda pissed alot of the legal citizens off. This time around, after a week of coaching by the Spanish speaking media, they left their Mex rags at home and were supplied (by MECha and La Raza of all people)with U.S. flags and had signs that were pro-American.

Which version of the protest are we to believe? The first one with the demands for "rights", or the second, with the spun contritness of supporting America and love of this country.

That brings me back to the definition at the top. The illegals have adopted Taqiyya, they will lie or mislead us to acheive their goal of fast tracking into the country. They say that they do the jobs that American won't do, but actually make up no more than 25% of the labor force in all of those jobs, so there are obviously citizens and legal residents that will take these jobs.

They have broken the law and are abusing the rights and privileges of being in this country. There is no need to dicuss the situation beyond that point.

A Reason For the Environmentalists to Back Controlling the Border

From the Seattle Times

If this type of information were to be disseminated enough, perhaps the environmentally aware would realize the necessity of controlling the borders.

They were screaming about potential danger of the heated oil pipe line in Alaska upsetting the caribou, which turned out to be not true, in fact the caribou like the warmth and are breeding like crazy.

Yet the damage to the southern desert areas along the border are getting little to no attention at all.

[all emphasis mine]

Mountains of trash, recurring fires, despoiled natural springs, vandalized historic sites and disappearing wildlife are part of the devastating toll that the government's running battle with smugglers and migrants is taking on national parks and wildlife refuges along the U.S. border with Mexico.

This sounds a bit like an man-made ecological disaster.

At Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, 2 ½ million pounds of garbage is scattered through broad valleys and desert arroyos every year, according to Roger DiRosa, the refuge manager.

I know, all we have to do is set out some trash containers along the route and the problem will be solved. We could also hire some of the illegals that come in to do the trash routes to empty the containers. A twofer, cleans up the desert and gives jobs to the new border crashers.

On a recent tour of the damage, DiRosa, who manages Cabeza Prieta for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, steered his truck toward the Growler Mountains, making slow headway through what used to be fertile desert topsoil. A constant stream of vehicles has pulverized the sand into a fine powder that DiRosa and other federal land managers call "moon dust."

This should say something about the sheer number of people crossing this region. They have turned what was a living desert into a dust bowl.

The constant human pressure is threatening to eliminate the area's wildlife. The refuge's population of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, a deerlike creature, had fallen to 21 - down from 179 in 1992 -— and the species was headed for extinction before a captive-breeding program was established in 2004.

Here is the "caribou" extinction that the enviro's should be screaming about, although with only 21 wild breeding pronghorns outside of zoos, the species will not exist in their natural habitat, if it could support them with the damage done to the ecosystem again for decades at best.

East of Organ Pipe, residents of the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation recently removed more than 7,000 abandoned vehicles.

Figure an average of only five per car that's 35,000 illegals right there.

Wendy Glenn, whose family runs a cattle ranch near Douglas, described the harm done to livestock and wildlife.

"There are at least two semi [tractor-truck] loads of trash in the canyon behind us, and there are probably seven canyons like that," she said. "Our cattle eat the trash. Little animals stick their heads in bean cans and walk around with the cans on their muzzle until they die. Our neighbor had a cow in a corral - it was having a problem calving. They came back in the morning to check on it, and two illegals had killed the calf and were cooking it.

This is the respect for private property that they bring, along with their feeling of right to entitlement. "Hey, the gringos are all rich so they won't miss one little calf if we take it."

"There's constant harassment of wildlife," Glenn said. "Deer don't feed during the night, because there's too many people running around. They need to go into the thickets to shade up during the day, but they go in now and there's people there, along with trash and fecal matter."
At Organ Pipe, on Cabeza Prieta's eastern border, the National Park Service estimates that visitors hiking the park's trails may encounter 200 pounds of trash per mile. Wildlife biologists say trash and human waste spread disease among animals.
Soil compaction across hundreds of miles of roads and trails has killed cactuses' shallow root systems, causing towering saguaro and organ-pipe cactuses to topple, taking with them animal food sources and bird nests.

At Organ Pipe, American Indian relics and pioneer ranch buildings have been damaged or destroyed, Billings said. The corral from Dos Lomitas Ranch, a 19th-century site listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is being taken apart board by board and the wood used for campfires.

Not only are they destroying our present, they are erasing our past.

One would think that those on the left, if they can handle more than one related issue at a time, would be concerned enough to support controlling immigration so as not to destroy the enviroment.

Something To Think About

April 2006 Message from Dan, a very thought provoking piece, in a sci-fi format, from Dan Simmons on our future.

As always, it has stirred up some discussion over at the Rott.

HT: Emperor Misha

UPDATE: The page that I linked to has disappeared. Trying to find someone who saved it and will try to link there or post it here when found.

UPDATE 2: the link is working again.

Banned in the USA

From Right Wing Nation (one of my favorite sites).

RightWingProf covers the absolute intellectual disassociation of the left with reality. Yelling about how they are being banned, suppressed, living in fear of the police state, while standing in the middle of the city bloviating on national TV.

Take a trip "Through The Looking Glass".

Why Americans Hate This “Immigration” Debate

Probably one of the most concise explainations of why the debate on immigration has struck such a cord with so much of the population.
Herbert E. Meyer from The American Thinker

And if you would like an allagorical example of how illegal immigration is viewed, read "Hector" from Parkway Rest Stop

Hat Tip to GuyK of Charming, Just Charming

9/11 Remembered

The release of the 911 tapes has stirred up some memories. For me it started here, which had been stirred from here

It is amazing, like when Kennedy was assassinated (if you were old enough to remember), everyone has the events of the day etched in their mind. It brought tears to my eyes while I posted what I went through that day.

I've posted it before, but I'll do it again, this montage should be viewed so as not to forget what it it was like that day. (I will also post it on my sidebar permanent posts.) Never Forgive, Never Forget

Debbie Schlussel pic

I will not make any money off the posting of this pictue, nor will I lose any, being this is just a little backwater blog, but this person is a know "celeb" and is subject to fair use policies.

Where did this come from...see here, here, here, and here.

Death Penalty

I'm for it.

"Thou shall not murder." 'nough said.

I do agree with another alternative that has be put forward by Bill O'Reilly. I am not a big fan of O'Reilly, because he too often takes the populist viewpoint on a matter and seems to be willing to discount the arguments against what he says.

His proposal in lieu of the death penalty is life without parole, served somewhere in Alaska making gravel.

The rules, You beat big rocks into little rocks for the rest of your life. You get credit for making a lot of little rocks, that will pay for your food, heat, cigarettes, etc. A totally worthless existence just making little rocks, but come the day the script gets handed out for how many little rocks you made to pay your keep, I bet there are those who revel in what they were able to accomplish and how valuable life is.

Perhaps then they could appreciate what they did and ask for and receive forgiveness from God.

Maussoui's Trial

I'm trying to beat a deadline here. Blogspot has slown down to a crawl and I've had trouble getting on and I wanted to do this before the verdict came back, which is due in about.....15 minutes.

Do I think maussoui deserves the death penalty...yes. He was plotting against the United States and was in the loop with Al Queda. I believe he is guilty of everything that the government accuses him of.

Now do I believe he was the key to the whole thing, probably not.

He was a radical muslim with ties to Al Queda, he did take pilot's training, he was an terrorist training camp....however, I also believe that this guy was so uncontrollable that even the Al Queda operatives had to stand back and say "Whoa", this guys gonna get us killed. Of source this boils down to a matter of timing. They planned on dying, just not because some asshat that was in their operation couldn't wait to get his 72 raisins and screwed up their plans on the timing for their fruit baskets.

Should he die for his actions? That is a tricky question. He certainly deserves it for his (minor though it may be) involvement in plotting the deaths of innocents, but that is what he wants. He has inflated his importance to the operations of 9/11 to help him become a martyr, so he should be stuck in a hole for life without parole and just left to sit out his days on earth ignored.

UPDATE: It has been decided that he is eligible for the death penalty. So in about 5 years, this would be settled, the another 20 before the sentence could be carried out...hell, I'll be dead by then.

Jill Carroll Is Free

I held off on writing about this until some time had passed. The video that was put out along with her release was one of those times where you have to look at the situation and weigh your gut reaction with what was really happening.

We had a woman who had been held for 4 months by terrorists and would say anything to be free again. So, was it was a matter of fear, Stockholm Syndrome, or actual conversion.

Once safe from the terrorists she immediately stated that what she said on tape was coerced and done so she could get her freedom.

“During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed,” she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.

“Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not.”

She also gave information to the military on what she knew about the terrorists and other hostages. She did what she felt she needed to do to survive while in the terrorist's control, and there is no dishonor in that.

“I will not engage in polemics. But let me be clear: I abhor all who kidnap and murder civilians, and my captors are clearly guilty of both crimes,” she said.

They Have A Plan

Had to pass this along from iowahawk on the dhimicrats plan for winning the elections: Operation Steel Gazelle: A Smart, Multi-Slide Plan For Toughening American Security with Smartness.

Warning: spew alert

Pirate Action at DailyKos

The Pirate Armada boarded the DailyKos today and had a real discussion going on one of the threads. When I dropped by it was up to 140 comments. That was when it started to get weird. Comments started disappearing. The reason:

Your comments haven't been deleted, you just can't see them.

We have no moderators nor overlords. Comments that are rated as written by trolls become invisible to said trolls. Trusted users can see your spew, in all its idiocy.

Now, run home - your mommies are calling

Ah, nothing like free and open debate. I sure that Uncle Stalin would be proud of them. "We didn't delete it, you are just not allowed to see it". Newspeak at it's finest. If you think you are losing, ignore the argument, hide the evidence, and pretend it never happened.

Dred Pundit Bluto has some hi-lights of the raid here

A Solutiion For The Border

I just heard one of the most idiotic arguments for not protecting our borders yet. I was listening to "The Cost of Freedom" on Fox News and was told that there is a system already in place to weed out the bad illegals from the good illegals. If someone comes into this country and commits a crime, they will get arrested and sent back to their homeland.

I don't know who was more stunned by this piece of "logic", me, or the others on the panel. This asshat thinks the best way to handle the problem is to let them in and then when one of them kills, rapes, or robs, then we'll know they're a bad guy and send them home. Too bad for the person that was sacrificed to figure this out.

What he wasn't going to get into was the fact that, if caught, the taxpayer will get to pay for his court case and prison housing for the next number of years then we get to deport him. Sound like a good system to me.

Burning a Mexican Flag Is A FELONY

I am sure most have heard about the students at the Phoenix HS that pulled down the Mexican flag that was run up the school's pole. Well, it turns out the students that had the nerve to stand up to the assholes claiming American soil for their homeland were ROTC.

Where the story gets interesting is that the students who burned the Mexican rag were arrested and charged with arson and "interfering with an educational institution". WTF?

euphoricreality has the story (with updates) at American Students Retaliate Against Flag Dishonoring.

Oh, what a topsy-turvy world we live in. It is fine for illegals to burn the U.S. flag, but a felony for a American citizen and patriot to burn a Mexican flag.

On top of that outrage, the principal has forbidden the wearing of any representation of a flag, so as not to offend anyone. I could care less if they are offended by a U.S. flag. If they don't like 'em, go home. And don't give me that crap about they were the indigenous people, they weren't.