When you give liberals an inch, they will not be satisfied to take a mere mile and, like terrorists, they will continue pushing the envelope to see how far they can get. Such is the case with political correctness, and the way the left keeps pushing more and more of it on the rest of us as a way of knocking down our defenses against their various agendas, none of which are in the least bit friendly to America and the American way of life.

Here we have yet another example of this phenomenon in action;

In yet another case of Orwellian political correctness run amok, a video posted at MoveOn.org says calling illegal immigrants “illegal” fits the definition of a hate crime and calls for the word to be banned when used in the context of immigration.

The headline at the MoveOn page screams “One word we hear too often on Fox News,” as if only Fox News calls illegal immigrants “illegal.”

As usual, they alter the context to make “illegal” aliens out to mean that the peoples, their existences, are illegal rather than their undocumented presences in the United States, semantics intended to villify enforcement of federal law.

It irks me to no end that this practice is allowed to continue, but I suppose that this is the essence of a country like ours, one endowed with freedom for all, including those that would destroy us from within, taking away those same liberties that allowed them to do so.

Having said that, here is the article quoted above, complete with video.

But of course.

After all, these organisms called liberals won’t have it any other way, especially, it seems, those in and around the education system whose PC contributions help revise history so as to raise the next generation(s) in their dubious “image”.

in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.

Read on.

What a sad state of affairs!

Of course, mentioning Islam in the same breath as 9/11, despite the religion’s prominence in the attacks on WTC and the Pentagon using hijacked airplanes full of innocent passengers would be (shudder!) Racism!

…to Great Britain? The English! The Brits!???

England has got to be the single most globally streetwise nation on earth — in the history of their great country, they have had colonies all over the world, learning first-hand of copious diverse cultures, religious customs, governance systems, ethnic mindsets and so forth and Englishmen travel the globe as easily and familiarly as most others move about their own countries, yet their government sits by and not only allows Islam to transition her gradually into the realm of the Sha’aria, but also prosecutes those who protest this disgraceful surrender.

This is unacceptable.

The Brits need to have an aggressive chat with their politicians, pronto!

…that I have somewhere along the line become a stone Internet (© Algore) addict, the last half week supplied all the proof I need.

I lit up Mr. Inspiron at Zero Dark Hundred Hours on Thursday to find a blue screen informing me that I couldn’t come in, because there was something-or-other afoot that would damage my computer if I did.

“Bummer,” I thought.

I called Dell Tech Support, went through the usual Pomp & Circumstance you go through before you find yourself in touch with a human being in the proper department, and was dumbfounded when I discovered that the homosapien in question was, while obviously elsewhere in the world (it’s hard to say whether she was a Latina or a Bangalorian, and I’ve always been really good with accents, but I think that was because her English, diction and vocabulary both, was nothing short of excellent), was eminently understandable, profoundly knowledgeable and had a real ease about her, the kind that comes, part and parcel, with experience. Our entire exchange was more a conversation, including some mutually enjoyed humorous asides, than it was a report/response exchange.

Her diagnosis was that I needed to reinstall Windows XP Professional, using the back-up CD they should have sent me with my notebook. She also told me that when I’d purchased the computer, Dell hadn’t been including the XP disc among the others in the box, so she had to overnight it to me. She made the soonest appointment available (for she or someone from her unit to call me and walk me through the reinstall, once I had the CD), which was for Saturday Afternoon.

Aaargh!!!! I was contemplating up to 2 1/2 days without being able to get online from a PJ-friendly environment! I repeat, Aaargh!

I must confess to a certain degree of withdrawal symptoms, probably like a heroin addict “Jonesing”, only without the physical stress. To pontificate and employ more scientific language, well, let’s just say it sucked.

So yesterday, a Dell Dude, also uncharacteristically knowledgeable and with undeterminate accent, called and we did the thing with the CD, which entailed him calling me back a few times while the disc took its time doing its job.

After that, it took 2 restarts and I was back in business.

Being of the half full and silver lining persuation by nature, I will say that my computer’s performance has improved quite a bit since the CD and the Dell folks did what they did, it turns out that a lot of a slowness of loading, despite the fastest DSL available from AT&T/Yahoo!, was as much the fault of some sort of deterioration in my operating platform as it was from the drag (as opposed to thrust) of IE-7.

Boy, don’t I sound high-tech…

Back on-line, I was confronted by a highly daunting quantity of emails to reply to, emailed news/opinion subscription venues to work my way through and 2 1/2 days’ worth of spam that goes around the filters thanks to what is hopefully only negligence on the part of Blogspot (don’t blame “Desenex”, I’m a Munuvian and I use Word Press: They allow megaspammers to use their servers — the only spam that penetrates into my comment sections have Blogspot URLs, and they come both simultaneously and in large quantities). Blogspot is apparently hosting a movie sequel: I, Spambot.

Plus, I have two days’ worth of catching up to do as regards visiting the sites of many, many fellow bloggers, which for me is a priority pursuit after eating and sleeping.

Okay…

Now that we’ve gotten the above “adventure” out of the way, the first thing I want to do is express my intense satisfaction at the election of Bobby Jindal as governor of Louisiana.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.

Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation’s youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday’s election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

This guy is phenomenal, he’s one of those rare politicians who embrace the concept of what I tend to think of as “practice over theory”. He does stuff rather than expound upon it, and at the relatively young age of 36 he has won the respect and confidence of the vast majority (just look at the figures, and these published by Yahoo!, a highly liberal, PC client of the Associated Press) of Louisiana voters.

I lived in Nawlins for many years in earlier periods of my adult life, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, from days when the Superdome and the Hibernia Tower were pretty much the city’s skyline to an era in which there is a full skyline of modern hotels and other high rises.

Truth to tell, I preferred things the old way — I so miss pre-high tech architecture (from back in the days when men were men and sheep were scared — sorry, my own sense of humor, as bizarre as it sometimes happens to be, rendered it impossible for me not to interject that particular semi-appropriate cliche), when an architect was someone who designed buildings via creativity rather than computer model and a mason was permitted to add artistic detail to the project.

But as usual, I digress…

Remember my admission re “half full” and “silver lining”s? Well, keeping in mind Hurricane Katrina’s introduction of profound tragedy to the Crescent City and much of the rest of southern Louisiana, with its resultant out-of-state relocation of so many residents (here, at risk of sounding like the racist I’m not — this is for any readers who tow the PC line rather than the realism one) from the low-income neighborhoods that produce gang bangers and related homicides and draw the bulk of public largesse, and the fact that residents of parishes like Orleans and Jefferson hold the same kind of sway at the polls that NYC voters do in New York State politics, my own interpretation of the Jindal victory is that:

Louisiana voters see their present circumstances as an opportunity to fix the presently (and historically) corrupt, southern Democrat “old boy network” run political system, and they’ve voted in Jindal, exactly “the man for the job”.

Bravo to the Louisiana electorate!

The next item I would have posted on had I not encountered my computer problem would have been linking this must read column by Diana West.

In my opinion, the most powerful segment reads:

The point of my talk — based on my new book, “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization” (linked below) — was to explain why perpetual adolescence is not just a cultural drag, but also dangerous to our way of life. I argued that the leveling of adult authority over the past half century or so was accompanied by a leveling of cultural authority.

This brought on the age of multiculturalism, a time when Western Civ (like the adult) no longer occupies its old pinnacle atop the hierarchy of cultures. The multiculti conception of equally valuable cultures (except for the West, which is deemed the pits) depends on a strenuous non-judgmentalism. This non-judgmentalism expresses itself in a self-censoring adherence to political correctness.

Such non-judgmentalism, such PC self-censorship, is infantilizing because it requires us to suppress our faculties of analysis and judgment.

Finally, we come to one of those topics that’s near and dear, as they say, to my heart: Security.

Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private firm instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

How comforting is that?

Anyone who has visited here over the last couple of years knows that as a protection professional I’ve kinda-sorta expressed my doubts where the TSA, at ground level, is concerned.

From my own considerable domestic airport experience (speaking strictly as a traveller), my personal top rating for professionalism in post-9/11 passenger screening goes to Logan International — those folks have no intention of allowing a second 9/11 from taking off out of Boston.

Look, my air travel is haphazard, I usually fly on short notice and, if the trip is multi-city, I take things one-way by one-way. The security programming in post 9/11 airline reservations systems often forwards requests that TSA search the luggage of/wand the bearers of one way or “day or two before reservations” fares and/or give them “special attention”. I have no problem with that. All “out of the norm” situations should be investigated.

As a human being, I tend to look at issues with the inclusion of “pros” & “cons”.

That is pretty much why I thought I should bring up this product.

Privacy experts are concerned that a full body x-ray scanner the Transportation Security Administration is testing will produce such revealing images that they could violate Americans’ civil liberties. And some experts, who see no civil liberty problems, think the machines are too expensive, too bulky, and not needed given current security procedures at airports.

“We are not convinced that it is the right thing for America,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program. “We are skeptical of the privacy safeguards that the TSA is touting.”

TSA, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, will be testing the Active Millimeter Wave body scanners at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, with plans to test machines at New York’s JFK and LAX in Los Angeles over the next few months.

TSA will also purchase eight millimeter wave units at a cost of $1.7 million to be used in other cities.

WTF is a “privacy expert”? Is this a bona fide job title or professional designation?

According to TSA, the process — a voluntary alternative to a pat-down during secondary screening — works as follows: A passenger steps into the machine and remains still for a matter of seconds, in two different positions, while the technology creates a three-dimensional image of the passenger from two antennas that simultaneously rotate around the body. Once complete the passenger steps through the opposite side of the millimeter wave portal.

The scanner’s manufacturers, L3 Communications, said the machine “penetrates clothing and packaging to reveal and pinpoint hidden weapons, explosives, drugs, and other contraband,” calling it “more reliable and less intrusive than pat-down searches.”

Yet “this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies,” said Steinhardt. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags.”

“That degree of examination amounts to a significant - and for some people, humiliating - assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate,” he said.

Before I comment on the immediate above, read this:

“They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied,” warned Steinhardt. “And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that the rest of the body will be vividly displayed.”

“Over time, the personnel operating this system will get mischievous, and it will be misused in ways that are very offensive,” added Jim Harper, director of Information Policy Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Right.

“Yo, Ralph! This guy’s wearing a colostomy bag!”

Haw, Haw!!!!

What a bunch of Bee Ess!

Who gives a xxxx?

This is a typical liberal pitch, based upon “what if?” — “This could happen, so we need to flee, capitulate or downright surrender, to do otherwise would be politically incorrect!”

The above paragraph defines those on the far left to the letter.

Thank G-d that we right thinkers don’t follow the same directives that are adhered to by the left.

Okay, that should more than adequately convey my own attitude on the subject.

My other concern here is that –

TSA chief Kip Hawley, responding to previous reports about screeners missing hidden weapons, told a House hearing Tuesday that high failure rates stem from increasingly difficult covert tests that require screeners to find bomb parts the size of a pen cap. “We moved from testing of completely assembled bombs … to the small component parts,” he said.

This is total bullshit (© El Toro). It is “in name only” security. Either you secure a venue or you don’t, period. If you own a dress factory, it’s okay to hire seamstresses who skylark as they work, but if you run a security department, contractor or agency you’d damn well better employ people who can stay focused and for whom you’ve spent whatever sums it takes to see that they are trained and prepared for every eventuality, in their area of responsibility, that might come to pass.

Ex: A friend of mine was the security director for a major tenant brokerage firm in the World Trade Center at the time of the first bombing, which occured on the front end of a weekend. When the markets opened on Monday, he had relocated all the brokers, etc to a location on Hudson Street and they were doing business as though nothing had happened.

Ex 2: When I was employed in casino security in Nevada years ago, I was fortunate enough to work for a security director who believed in training the #&*%^$#& out of his floor officers, investigators and supervisors (After coming in at entry level, I was all of the these as time progressed). We attended classes, courses, workshops, lectures, etc in every area that even remotely affected us and our responsibilities, and it all paid off majorly for the casino in a number of ways that would require either a book or an extremely long post to even scratch…

To continue, however,

Terrorists bringing a homemade bomb on an airplane, or bringing on bomb parts and assembling them in the cabin, is the top threat against aviation. “Their focus is on using items easily available off grocery and hardware store shelves,” Hawley said.

In My Personal and Professional Opinion (s), security concerns are paramount in both the Public and Private sectors, and costs should never enter into the equation. If you’re a guest in My House and tragedy ensues, I’ll put my life on the line to ensure that you emerge unharmed.

Period.

…in the U.S. Congress aren’t all that different from their counterparts that infest the British Parliament. They’re certainly right behind the Brits in engineering this state of affairs.

“We supposedly live in a truly democratic society where freedom of speech is a fundamental right enjoyed by everyone,” friction.tv Chief Marketing Officer Andy West said in a press release. “However these survey results have shown rather powerfully that most adults in the U.K. feel that this is not the case.”

West added, “We live in such a politically correct society that people don’t know what they can and can’t say anymore and there is a constant fear that if you go against the grain, you’ll be vilified by your peers.”

Sally McNamara, a senior policy analyst in European Affairs for the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, blamed recent British policy.

“The government’s role in any free society is to ensure the safety of its citizenry and pursue policies that guarantee basic rights for all law-abiding people,” she told Cybercast News Service on Monday. “This has been taken to the extreme; legislating against language, behavior, etc.”

Perhaps we should learn from the Brits’ mistakes before it’s too late — if it isn’t already…

… that inescapable, time-oriented professional responsibilities have prevented me, and not for the first time, from being where I really want to be — in this case, in Washington, DC for “A Gathering of Eagles”. Another example of Murphy’s Law, as usual coming from left field. To do penance {just kidding, donating to one of the most worthy American causes in modern history is by no means penance, it is helping in a modest way to propagate the survival of the greatest successful political experiment since Adam bit into the apple}, I will send a generous (more generous than my already significantly large — from the working man’s point of view, anyway, donations to causes I believe in) contribution to Move America Forward, who are sponsoring the great patriotic event. Unfortunately, due to my upcoming change of employment status, business matters at hand have a time stamp on them and therefore have to take priority over all other activities on my calendar.

My calendar — ahem! — does that sound pontificative, or what?

However, it doesn’t mean I can’t at least get in my opinion on one issue or another, or comment on that which I feel needs to be commented upon.

Recently, my friend Always On Watch posted on her becoming co-host of blog talk radio station The Gathering Storm.

The station’s prime mover is WC, owner of a blog I’d been previously unfamiliar with that bears the same name, The Gathering Storm, but with profound thanks to AOW for posting about it, I have since been pleased to have made its acquaintance and have since added it to my blogroll.

WC puts out a free weekly newsletter you can subscribe to for delivery to your email inbox(subscription can be arranged from a link at The Gathering Storm site) that keeps subscribers updated on attempts by Islamic entities to further their inroads into injecting their religious and political doctrines into western society, particularly an all too unwitting America, with the abettance of organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, which is staffed by supporters of jihad yet given all too much creedence by our very own government) and our very own ACLU, whose Marxist roots dictate that they oppose anything that adheres to the real language or intentions of the Constitution. More than a little of the information you’ll find at the weekly newsletter is unavailable in the liberal mainstream media — duh, wonder why!

The Gathering Storm newsletter is compiled with a tenacity that borders on superhuman vigilance.

I would highly recommend that anyone who is truly interested in the truth about Islam’s intentions for America and the west as a whole subscribe to this newsletter.

That said, despite the fact that I am well aware that our current crop of politicians are by-and-large more interested in political correctness as a way to get votes than they are in the security of our country and the continued freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, I am appalled by the extent of their acquiescence to the blatantly obvious propaganda generated by Islamic venues (of course, much of this is due to the treason-representing, anti-America sycophancy of today’s Democrats to hearty funding by their well heeled liberal masters and leftist DNC politicians like Pelosi, Kennedy, Murtha and Reid — & Co), I cannot help but be appalled by the Republicans’ lack of unconditional verbal rejection of multiculturalists’ and PC advocates’ consideration, even the most picayune of same, of the spewings of Islamic ideas as applied to American laws, customs, educational programs or public sensibilities.

In this week’s Gathering Storm newsletter, for example, there is a link to an article on a Muslim New Jersey high school graduate who charges discrimination because his school’s graduation ceremony is to be held in a church. He claims that his religion forbids him to enter a Christian church, however…

… Other, more “moderate” Muslims see no problem with attending such an event in a church. So this kid is making up his religious beliefs as opportunity presents, and, with the support of sympathetic organizations, filing suit. He stands to set a precedent, if he wins in court, that could further the goals of Islamic fascists toward changing our way of life and impinging on our schools’ (not that they aren’t already infected by liberalism) freedom of choice as to where they hold commencement exercises, etc. Should they hold their graduation ceremonies in a Wahhabi mosque instead, requiring the girls to cover their faces?

Or how about another topic discussed in the same weekly newsletter?

March 9, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLIneNews.org - One might have hoped that the 9/11 attacks would have constituted an “education by murder” for Americans, an example of radical Islam in its most lethal form; so why has the New York City Department of Education decided to open an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the September 11 terrorists?

Why, they ask.

Can it be that New York, already and fairly recently a bastion for leftist ideals (I grew up there and love the place, all of which really hurts me — we New Yorkers are supposed to be some profoundly sharp individuals, yet here we see where our reputed intelligence has been severely diluted by a fresh majority of stupid and award winningly short-sighted, pseudo-intellectual morons) has gone completely overboard in its neauveu(French, SPIT!!!!) hatred of everything American?

I recently sent an email inquiry to my congressman, Robin Hayes, regarding this situation (a tax-financed, jihad oriented Wahhabi Muslim school), because local school systems are subsidized by federal tax revenues, stipulating that my email be brought to the attention of staff member Kevin Klein, who responded to my prior communication, and received no reply. I have since sent the above link.

Islam is waging a campaign to assert its dominance on the entire world. In most regions, its adherents employ terrorism to enforce their ambitions — this seems to be working rather well; The Brits are capitulating and other countries, such as Spain, are expressing their capitulation at the polls.

Here in the United States of America, Islam is winning in Congress, the judiciary and in the education system, largely because the mainstream media, in all its multiculturalism, liberalism and PCness, elects to ignore the true facts of that satanic religion’s goals in the west.

That’s right — while in so many other nations (read that as EU countries), the socialist-oriented electorates permit themselves to be cowed by terrorist acts and lick derrier as such by surrendering their freedom in fear of further samples of Islam (the Religion of Peace) in action, we here in the United States of America, as a matter of our historical strength of charactar and downright courage tend to spit our defiance and will to live free back in the face of our enemy, said enemy has to adopt a different strategy — defeat from within, using our very freedoms against us.

They have a distinct advantage there — most Americans, due to our history of security (we haven’t had a war within our own borders for 140 years) tend to be skeptical of any kind of conspiracy of the magnitude that Islam presents. “No way”, they say. “C’mon, you people are paranoid!”

Organizations like CAIR depend on this reaction.

What modern Americans fail to grasp is that we are confronted by a religion that has absolutely no respect for modern thought — there is no chronology to Islam and there are certainly no concessions therein to modern developments — they are still living in the 7th Century, when the pedophile Mohammed walked the earth.

If the skeptics in both the electorate and Congress don’t wake up very soon, the MSM doesn’t begin reporting the truth and we don’t become hardnosed where the Islamic invasion of the west is concerned, our future generations may as well kiss freedom goodbye….

Greg Crosby’s written another of his usual winners, this one on political correctness in the obese children’s arena.

…The way things are done now is tantamount to living in denial. Officials are so afraid of hurting the feelings of kids that they refuse to call their problem by its correct name — obesity. The overly delicate approach adopted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (and used by many doctors) avoids the word “obese” because of the stigma. So a kid who really is obese is simply called “overweight” by the CDC. A kid who is really overweight is called “at risk of overweight.” Don’t want to hurt the sensibilities of the little butterballs.

In my case, I was generally pretty thin until I was into my late twenties, when the indulgences of a “wine, women and song” lifestyle began to catch up with me. Even today, at fifty, I’m somewhat heavier than I’d like to be or than is healthy for me to be, and to that end I’ve enlisted the help of Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning, the best exercise regimen I’ve yet encountered, which is based on using your own body weight as your exercise machine and which is helping me take off pounds and feel better overall, but that’s another story entirely.

Back on topic, when I was a lad, as Crosby points out as his own experience as well, there was none of this feel-good PC stuff a certain segment of our society has forced on the rest of us — if you were fat, you were told so in no uncertain terms, and that was good. Sure, it might well have hurt the feelings, for some reason, of kids who already had to know they were fat, coming into daily contact as they did with other children who weren’t fat, but it was also the best encouragement on earth to do something to remedy the situation, like eat less sweets and get more exercise. As an adult, I have met numerous acquaintances from my childhood days I hardly recognized because being called “fatty” et al finally got to them enough that they did something about it and were now in great shape.

Stroking them with neutral PC terminology doesn’t cut it, and rarely if ever will. I call attention to a quote in Greg Crosby’s OpEd,

According to Dr. Reginald Washington, a Denver pediatrician and co-chair of an American Academy of Pediatrics obesity task force, calling a child obese might “run the risk of making them angry, making the family angry,”

Instead of becoming angry, the family {In addition to the child subject of the diagnosis, I take this to mean the parents of same} should disconnect the kid from the tube, the X-Box or the computer and send him out for some exercise, refrain from over-feeding the child and counsel him/her regarding moderation during those supersized stops at the local fast food franchise after school. They should work at cultivating an interest on the part of the obese child in participating in competitive sports. Additional biproducts of a child’s being physically fit are that it generally helps bring up his or her school grades while augmenting the development of baggage-free social skills.

This is a really relevant OpEd, what I’d call recommended reading, and can be read in its entirety here.