AZ immigration law

Copyright © 2010 C. R. Edmunds
www.onestillfree.com


AZ signs the toughest immigration law ever and people – not from AZ mostly – protest. This is so typical of the way things work in the US these days. People think “democracy” means we all have to be the same and that The Many have the right to determine how an individual lives (nods to Mr. Spock).

Democracy just ain’t so. We have a constitution that sets rules that are just as much about protecting individuals from government (that means The Many) as anything. Not that anyone in government pays attention to the Constitution any more.

Anyway, this AZ immigration thing is a good example of how democracy has gone sour. The people who protest strong state laws for immigration or other issues (Mexican wolf, anyone?) generally have no idea of what the local conditions are that prompt local laws.

We may all be equal under the law, but life doesn’t work that way. In AZ the problems that legal citizens experience because of illegals are monumental and little like what any of those who protest can imagine.

Here’s a description from a friend of mine who lives in what has become the middle of an invasion zone:

“We are about 40 minutes away from the Kranz family [Kranz and his dog were murdered by illegals] as the crow flies but longer to drive. I know the family through horse deals. We have been hearing lately about how all the unattended vacation and local homes are being broken into, how the locals are putting bars on all the windows and doors and they have been telling us that the illegal problems have escalated hugely in just the last year. People beaten and tied up and robbed, etc...Folks are moving out if they can afford to. What used to be remote and beautiful and quiet is not so tranquil now. People are afraid to leave, and afraid to stay! We are looking to move, too, and we’re looking far away from here.

“Sure Kranz murder is in the news now, but no one really cares. We have had this type of activity here for years, and more you do not know about, and no one north seems to give a shit. The Minute Men were fantastic, but like other good things citizen-organized they were vilified and put down by the press. We had two years of feeling like someone cared and was out there to help us, and they did. Their leader was a good friend of mine from Tombstone and he caught hundreds of illegals just on my roads alone.

“Housewives and mothers are beaten and robbed at bus stops for their cars, kids are in great danger, we have lost half a dozen women and children to the drug trade out of Tombstone (meth) and I mean these people just disappear, period, never seen again. But because they are poor or disadvantaged they are forgotten. A good friend of mine who is a business owner in Sierra Vista had a daughter my age that was living in Sunsites, she was seen buying dog food at the feed store and completely disappeared right afterwards, never made it home, her car was found in Klondyke of all places, with her purse and money in it and no clue as to where she went. Heartbreaking.”

“A Marine taught me that we do not get to choose when and where we are attacked, but to survive we must be ready. I am always, ALWAYS armed with a .45. I live with my guns. I never go out to the shop the barn the greenhouse the garden, out to the fence line, to check my gates without my guns and a cell phone. There is no relaxing.

“Last year I was driving home from Bisbee at 12:00 noon towards the San Pedro and slowed down for a 90 degree curve and three guys dressed in solid black jumped out of the bushes and tried to stop me by standing in the road. They had black hair and very coppery colored skin. I just gunned it and aimed for the closest one and they jumped out of the way. I was told by a rancher friend that they were FEDERALES from Mexico. This was five miles from the border line. Was I mad, hell yes! This is NOT AMERICA, it is MEXICO now. Safety is an illusion perpetuated by the government. These criminals are running amok doing what they please.

“I am definitely moving as soon as we can. But many cannot. Like us they have spent years paying off their ranches and now they are stuck here. Illegals leave mountains of trash, burn our forests, scare people out of the woods all the time here, have caused horrible traffic accidents killing innocent people every year speeding north, and it still goes on. Yet the current president kissed Mexico's ass last time they met. It's ridiculous!”

So what I want to know is, those folks who protest AZ’s stronger immigration laws: Why is it more important to protect an illegal than a citizen? And also – can you really sleep peacefully at night?

Here's something to think about

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859)

Gee - isn't this what we're seeing right now?

Who’s The Terrorist?

copyright (c) 2009 CR Edmunds
www.onestillfree.com
Also published in Glenwood Gazette Sept. 2009 (Gale Moore, pub., Silver City NM)

The other day I got thinking about terrorism. So much of our lives these days are dictated by the fight against terrorism. We’ve all come to accept the invasive tactics of the US Government everywhere around us in the name of security. We even have a branch of government, Homeland Security, that has in a short time secreted its tentacles into everything in order to keep us safe from terrorists. We have to accept wands and pat-downs and X-rays of our person and our belongings in airports and public buildings, we have travel restrictions and passports to visit neighboring friendly ally countries, phone taps, email taps, credit checks, security cameras on street corners, photo-traffic citations on and on, all in the name of public safety.

Of course, doesn’t this all assume terrorism is something external to the US, that it comes from bad guys from other countries who want to render the US helpless?

I got thinking about how a bunch of bad guys that were really organized and very well financed could most effectively pull the US or any country down. (I want to point out to Homeland Security that I read a lot of fiction and much of what I’m writing here is already in print don’t come busting my doors down while telling me free speech doesn’t count because of the Patriot Act). Anyway, it has become clear to me that, logically, terrorism really would be just a first step. A kind of softening up a country for the real blows that will bring it down. The KO, if you will.

What would weaken a country more than flying planes into landmark buildings? Homeland Security and/or the media would have us believe that it would be nuking a big city. But really, would that take down the US? Were a resilient bunch of citizens I think that wiping out LA (for instance) would just make us all really, really mad once we got over being really, really sad (think of how sad and mad - wed be at losing our Famous Faces in such an attack).

No, I think what would really work to weaken a country would be to literally weaken its people. And it seems to me that the traditional ways of weakening a people would be just as effective now as they have been throughout history: Starvation and disease and isolation.

Here’s the thing: People who eat well are healthy and they don’t get sick as easily. So, if you think about it, wouldn’t the smartest thing be, if you were terrorists and wanted to take down the US, to destroy the food supply, thereby make people dependent on bad food so they’ll get sick more easily?

My thinking goes like this: The US agricultural base is being destroyed by factory farming and by more and more restrictions on small farming (NAIS, anyone?). Our forests, the biomass from the thinning of which could probably replace the use of petroleum for transportation fuel in 10 years, are being burned up because of more and more restrictions on hazardous fuels reduction projects and a push to expand wilderness and create roadless areas on public lands.

Where are our environmental groups in this picture? Are they supporting local production of healthy foods, which is so much less destructive to Mother Earth than factory farming? No, they work hard to destroy small farmers and ranchers. Are they supporting forest restoration that would result in reduced carbon pollution of our atmosphere by reduction of forest fires? No, they work hard to suppress the cutting of any trees at all. Are they supporting use of biomass to create an alternative to petroleum based transportation fuels? No, they fight efforts to develop sustainable, renewable energy.

What do environmental groups do to make our planet a healthier place, where humans and all species can thrive?

Well, actually, when you add up what they are doing, the answer to that question is: Nothing. In fact, when you look at the big picture of environmental efforts by the Big Name Environmental Groups (whose board members are mostly attorneys, not scientists), what that picture really looks like is a series of well-coordinated actions that are aimed to weaken the citizens of this country through starvation, disease and isolation.

Its so plausible: Destroy the family farms and ranches in the name of endangered species. Further destroy local production of healthy foods in the name of pure water. Destroy the possibility of alternative energy sources by attacking wind farms and use of biomass from forests. Destroy the forests themselves by not allowing restoration work, thereby encouraging massive wildfires only one of which can in a few days or weeks dump as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as one big city does in a year. (Ironically, the supposedly endangered species' habitats are destroyed as well by wildfire). And when things go down the tubes on our planet because of the success of the above actions, blame it on small farmers and ranchers and you and me, average Joe and Jane US citizen, and file even more lawsuits in the name of environmentalism, because, don’t you know, they’ve got to save the planet.

And then… TKO?

How stupid does Obama think we are?

U.S. Raises Estimate for 10-Year Deficit to $9 Trillion
NY Times 08/25/09

The Obama administration, citing an economic downturn that has been deeper than it had first thought, raised its estimate on Tuesday of the government's deficit over the next decade to $9 trillion from $7.1 trillion. More...

$7.1 trillion, $9 trillion - what difference does it make? We've been sold out, people. We're talking $9 with 12 zeros after it in debt! In just over half a year we've gone from "mere" billions to trillions in debt. Does Obama really expect us to think this is an economic improvement?

And, perhaps more worrisome - is it possible that the number is even worse than that?

The economics of socialism

I just got this in an email - thought I'd forward it on. Food for thought.

Students in an economics class at a local college insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

Their professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade - no one would fail but no one would receive an A unless everyone got an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D. No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. Bickering, blame and name-calling had resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All the students failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

Common Sense ­ Uncommonly Rare

For millennia human beings survived and thrived because they used common sense. Those who didn’t enabled their own removal from the gene pool (they died). Maybe its just me, but it sure seems that the gene pool is getting a wee bit murky these days as whatever has contributed since the dawn of history to common sense is somehow fading away.

The disappearance of common sense from everyday life is a scary thing, if you ask me, because common sense is really the basis for the success of democracy. The founders of the USA were a pretty brilliant bunch, but they didn’t expect that everyone who was going to have a vote was going to be brilliant. In fact, democracy doesn’t require brilliance to succeed; it just needs good old common sense to keep it going and healthy.

The point of voting is to let everyone who is ruled by our government have a say in how that ruling is going to happen. This was a very bold, exciting concept back in the day, and it still is. Our brilliant founders knew that extremists would be moderated by the overwhelming mass of people who didn’t need brilliance or higher education to see the right thing to do. That’s because people then, who had to rely on common sense applied in their daily lives to survive, would apply that same common sense to identifying what was the right thing to do.

Thing is, it doesn’t take common sense any more to make it in our daily lives. With the mass withdrawal from fundamental interaction with nature (growing our own food, building our own houses, being responsible for our own safety) that has resulted from mechanization, technological innovation and the internet, we have lost the need for exercising our common sense. Industrial farming and the importing of so much of our food and other commodities means that fewer and fewer people in this country are connected to the real world. Fed by the fantasy world of TV, movies and video games, spending all day long indoors, has created a gap between what is real and possible, and what is desired - and the gap is growing faster and faster.

Simply put, most people just aren’t practicing the use of common sense any more because they don’t have to. So, like any other faculty that doesn’t get used, common sense is just dying out. Unfortunately, what we’re losing is what is needed to vote in something approaching a rational manner in order to maintain a living, healthy democracy. Without common sense, it all falls apart.

Today, our health, our well being, our communities, our society and our country are all going away so rapidly that it’s hard to see how things can be brought back to equilibrium again. We’re all being fed information that has so little connection to reality that it’s stunning. There is so little common sense being used that sometimes I wonder if we’ve been taken over by alien beings from another dimension. Such irrational behavior isn’t all that surprising, since that’s pretty much what has happened - just substitute media, government and political correctness for alien beings.

Really, coming up with a solution is tough, but it seems to me that a first step would be to return power to the people via local governments, because it’s obvious that locals know best about local issues. This means that locals should be the ones who implement federal and state programs in the places that they’re meant to be implemented. It’s only common sense that locals would do a good job of it ­ as they have throughout history - because they’d be the ones who’d suffer if they screwed up.

You can’t force people to use their common sense, and you can’t expect people to suddenly begin using any faculty when it has become atrophied. Still, things have a way of balancing out over time. I’m hoping people wake up and shake themselves up on their own before too long, though, because as bad as it’s become, those who will be paying for the folly of this and past generations will be our children, their children and beyond. That’s not a legacy I’m happy about leaving for them.

Swine Flu or Swindle the Public?

In the news today: President Obama Tuesday sent a letter to Congress asking for $1.5 billion to fight the swine flu outbreak, a request he said he was making “out of an abundance of caution,” as U.S. officials confirmed 64 cases of swine flu, including five individuals who had to be hospitalized.

Excuse me - didn’t we get into the economic crisis we’re in today because of spending too much money we didn’t have on too much stuff we didn’t need? Aren’t we all – the taxpayer who is going to have to cough up this money that Obama is spending – being told to stay out of debt right now? Shouldn't our government be following its own advice?

Abundance of caution??? With all due respect to a President of the USA, it appears that he is doing his best to drive this country down the tubes, throwing economic caution to the winds.

Whining - the New National Pastime

I have a confession to make. I’m not a Greenie. Nowadays that makes me the bad guy, because Green has become the new banner and badge of being part of the politically correct crowd.

I’ve been giving some thought lately to the fact that we have a society run by youngsters (this is because as I age, I find so many in office to be younger than I am), yet we have a population the median age of which is growing older and older.

Used to be that people respected age - being an “elder” meant having wisdom that younger people valued. Over the years that has changed; our older folks have not been considered founts of wisdom or valued parts of family and society for a long time. Rather, older folks are stuffed into retirement homes and assisted living facilities soon as they have no money left to support the younger generations that can’t (or won’t) get jobs to support themselves.

Aha, you say - the reason no one pays attention to elder wisdom is because older folks’ minds wander off the topic - but not so! Bear with me a bit longer.

The reason older folks are founts of wisdom, even though some of us are dumber than doorposts, is that we have experienced more. This is so simple concept as to be profound. No matter how smart you are, how educated you are, how technologically facile you are, if you’re young, you cannot have experienced as much as someone who has lived longer. It’s a matter of sheer numbers, quantity of time. You can never really know what can be known at 50, 60 or 70 or older until you’ve lived 50, 60 or 70 or more years. You can never apply the experience of time until you’ve experienced the time. And you cannot possibly begin to comprehend what we old folks know as we view life from the perspective of just having lived longer.

“Bail me out, save me!” is what I’m seeing everywhere nowadays. I see lots of this whining going on, and see few solutions offered that encompass the big picture. I see this as a result of inexperience (i.e., young folks’ reaction) because we’re all here on the same planet and ultimately there is no one to bail us out or save us other than ourselves. That’s something it just takes time to learn.

Let me pick on the Greens as an example. Go to any petition website these days and it’ll be Green. What is a petition? It’s a bunch of names of people who’d rather whine about a problem than roll up their sleeves and do something directly. That’s whining, in my opinion, I don’t care how noble the label.

Or look at proposed (and, more scary, passed) legislation that “fixes” things by imposing more rules and regulations in our lives, legislation which takes away personal responsibility and substitutes government responsibility. Being bailed out ends up with giving up our rights and making us dependant - like children.

Whining happens because the people who are doing it don’t have any real answers. They feel the pressure, the pain of the situation, but they don’t know how to effectively make it go away. Like children, they don’t know how to fix things properly because they just don’t have the tools, the experience and perspective to see the whole picture. In other words, they don’t go to their founts of wisdom for answers: to the old folks, their elders.

We older folks pretty much don’t qualify as real Greenies because we’re not young enough to have tunnel vision any more, we can’t see things as black and white so easily. Life has taught us painful lesson by painful lesson how unrealistic that is. We older folks - at least those of us who have moved beyond the flower power years - have been around long enough to know first hand that everything is connected to everything, and that disenfranchising anyone or disallowing anything isn’t going to solve any problems. Tunnel vision isn’t wrong, it’s just so very limited as to throw everything out of kilter when acted on.

The innocent ignorance of tunnel vision is not going to go away, so it’s up to us old folks to fix things - if only we ourselves would pay attention to our own elders. Answers for today’s problems won’t be Green, won’t even necessarily be in what we know ourselves here at this time today. The big answers for the questions facing humanity and for the planet are going to be found in the wisdom of the ages, of our own elders. I don’t think they will be Green.

What's the real crisis?

Today's NY Times Headlines:
As Oil Giants Lose Influence, Supply Drops
By JAD MOUAWAD
It is harder than ever for the major Western oil companies to find new prospects, even though they are awash in profits and eager to expand.

Excuse me? Awash in profits? Am I the only person who is outraged by this?

Yes, we need to come up with energy sources, and I for one want to see it come from renewable resources. That's something that should have been started in earnest 40 years ago when we had another "fuel crisis", but NOOOOO - the US government did not support alternatives to fossil fuels (petroleum) - and from what I heard, research in to fuel alternatives was pretty much squashed.

So here we are again with another crisis - actually, we have two: one energy and one economic.

The economic crisis is looking pretty artificial to me. There may be some sort of slowing of oil production, but the economic problems we are experience are actually caused by opportunistic taking of profits from raised prices based on... fear.

The US government supports this fear by supporting everyone in the oil food chain making massive profits on the the backs of us poor schmucks down here in the real world. And worse, the US government itself is making more and more tax dollars on the price gouging at the oil pump - for every jump in price at the pumps, there is an associated jump in the tax on each gallon.

No one in the chain except we peons at the bottom has any incentive whatsoever to fix anything.

This has all been nicely engineered, don't you think? First weaken the voting population by eroding individual freedom using the fear factor (been to an airport lately?). Then the sucker punch of the "fuel crisis". Throw in some toxic food scares and some global warming threats to keep us all soft. Use environmental litigation to stop any possibility of fixing any of this, even while dangling the hope of alternative (cheap) energy that will never come because there is no incentive to fix anything when everyone but the peons are making so much money. You see where this is going?

It's going to just get worse.

None of this was inevitable. All of this could have been prevented. You want some improvement? Just say NO to politics and start doing what needs to be doing yourself. Find out who's researching alternative energy and support them. Use that technology. Become a locavore (eat locally grown foods). Don't buy into mass media advertising.

And for heaven's sake, pay attention to the real crisis: the gullibility of we peons. The real crisis will end when we stop listening to what people say and start paying attention to what people do.

Is there a scientist in the house?

So today another news release is put out by "environmental" (litigation) groups. WildEarth Guardians - that's a new one. These litigation groups keep combining and recombining (like viruses) so they can have more corporate names to file more litigation.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is how long these people think the population is going to remain gullible. I mean, really - the news release says that a recent poll "shows overwhelming support for Mexican gray wolves among Southwest voters". Overwhelming? Really? 500 people who don't even live in or near the area in question? This is relevant... how?

The news release - and much of the propaganda by these litigation groups - strongly implies that the reason Mexican wolves aren't doing well in the project area is because of illegal killings and legal predator control. And the science behind this idea is where?

What studies have been done that show that wolves would otherwise be thriving if it wasn’t for "poaching"? Come on - everywhere else we've got predators that are breeding like crazy. Gray wolves are doing that in Yellowstone. Isn't it just possible that the real reason that Mexican wolves aren't thriving in Arizona and New Mexico is because... they aren't really native to the area, and they just aren't suited to it?

Science, please! For once can't we have facts and truth about Mexican wolves?

PS - be sure to attend the "Can't Take It Any More" meeting in Reserve NM on Wednesday July 9. If you can't take it any more, then get together with like-minded folks and stop taking it. Contact Bill Aymar, Catron County Manager 575 533-6123 or ccmanager@gilanet.com

Your DNA - now online

Your DNA will soon be coming to the internet. Your family’s medical information, racial information, and everything else that your DNA reveals about you will now be public information, thanks to a new law that President Bush has signed. Our president has ordered that within no more than six months a "national contingency plan" will be created to take a sample of newborns' DNA, and publish the information on the web. This is supposedly in case of a "public health emergency."

Unless you’ve adopted your children, their DNA is your DNA, it’s your siblings’ DNA, your parents’ DNA. It is who you are in every physical way.

It’s true the government will likely not publish individuals’ data - but how much do you trust that that your personal DNA data won’t somehow be available to a hacker, to insurance companies, to anyone who really wants to see it? Did you give permission for this information to be taken from your child, for this information about you and your family to become public?

And if that’s not bad enough, don’t you think that every terrorist who is working day and night to create bio-weapons is thanking our president for his help in providing a national database for research via the internet?

545 PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR AMERICA’S WOES

BY CHARLEY REESE

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - 545 human beings out of the 300 million - are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton- picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it.

No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a SPEAKER, who stood up and criticized G.W. Bush ALONE for creating deficits.

The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.
Who is the speaker of the House? She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow Democrats, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts - of incompetence and irresponsibility.
I can’t think of a single domestic problem, from an unfair tax code to defense overruns, that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red. If the Marines are in IRAQ, it’s because they want them in IRAQ.

There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exist disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power. They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses - provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess.