…for tonight (just published), then I visited Raven’s place and watched this spot-on, must see video.

Thanks, Raven!

I honestly don’t know why I can’t get into what is considered Rock these days. Maybe it’s the lack of art in the music, or the lyrics that seem to reflect the narcissism of today’s youth, or the obnoxiousness…or something.

This evening I decided to stay home, catching up on work that was delayed thanks to the computer virus problem I had earlier in the week, and listen to some stuff from my teens, of which I have quite a lot, and work my way into my twenties, via a long playlist from the library in my computer.

I started with the Jefferson Airplane, staying away from the more familiar singles like White Rabbit and Somebody To Love, sticking to material like She Has Funny Cars, My Best Friend and DCBA 25 from Surrealistic Pillow, Last Wall Of The Castle and Rejoyce from After Bathing At Baxter’s, the 2400 Fulton Street version of Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon and Wooden Ships, and a few of their ballads.

It was pretty refreshing, I must say. There was something really clean in their sound that you just don’t hear much anymore, a certain instrumental and vocal clarity, despite the exponentially advanced audio technology available today.

And the music and lyrics were completely original, not derivatives of past recordings by other people or imitations of other musicians’ styles.

Perhaps that’s the problem with today’s Rock – maybe everything’s been said, and there’s nothing left to do but reiterate…

G-d, I hope not.

Dinner break included a bunch of ravioli (stuffed with both beef and ground Italian sausage) a food friend made this afternoon and, thoughtfully, brought some over to impress me. She did, it was awesome. I ate it with some Napa Valley Bistro roasted garlic sauce “with fresh herbs & Napa Valley pinot noir”. For a change of pace, well: last week, said food friend and I were reminiscing on the cheaper wines we’d drank while teenagers, and out of pure nostalgia I ordered a couple of bottles of Yago sant’gria (remember that stuff?) on line and put them in the refrigerator when they arrived. I had a couple of glasses with dinner and it went well not only with the meal, but with the music as well.

Eric Clapton, CSNY, the Who, Marmalade, The Guess Who, The Doors, then…

Having listened to such guitar greats as Jorma Kaukonen and Eric Clapton, it seemed appropriate to listen to some Steve Howe (Yes and Asia) and some Jan Ackerman (Focus), while getting back to work.

Or so I thought, however: as the evening was getting rather long in the tooth, a neighbor stopped by on a break from his Saturday night bar hopping to repay a C-note I’d loaned him a few days ago, and I poured him a generous glass of my favorite tequila, Sauza Tres Generaciones.

I also fired up the cawfee pot, as this meant it was Kona and brandy time for me.

Both of us being about the same age and fans of Yes and Focus, the music was fortuitous – we ended up talking about the art of Roger Dean, who did a number of Yes album covers, such as Fragile, Tales from Topographic Oceans and Relayer among numerous other projects. Coincidentally, I am in the process of obtaining a copy of an old book of Roger Dean art, called Views.

The Relayer cover was a masterpiece.

Prior to Dean’s Yes covers, I’d considered the art on the cover of Santana’s Abraxas to be numero uno, ichiban, numbah one.

The Roger Dean album covers are legendary – when I lived in San Francisco, there was an art gallery on Geary Street that featured Yes cover Roger Dean art as about 90% of its inventory and seemed to be doing quite well.

After three tequilas, my neighbor departed for another round of the bars and now it’s about a half hour later. The live version of Yes’ Awaken is about halfway through (it is 18 ½ minutes long, it is the only other track on the album side it shares with Wonderous Stories on Going For The One). Showcasing the keyboard brilliance of Rick Wakeman, it’s easily one of my favorite Yes pieces. On the studio version, recorded in Switzerland, Wakeman did most of his part in a church, miles away from the recording studio, because he liked the sound he got from the powerful organ therein, and to say the result was spectacular would be an understatement.

Yes has been around for nearly 30 years, and though Progressive (Art) Rock hasn’t been popular since the mid 1980s, they still sell out coliseums, stadiums and concert halls whenever they tour.

The key, I believe, to a band being a super-group on their level is there being no one or two lead musicians in the band, rather all members are equally the lead musicians, all are true masters of their respective instruments and there is utterly perfect team integrity, every member of the band flawlessly complements every other member.

If the Republicans in Congress worked that way, the Constitution would still count for something and the socialist Democrats across the aisle, along with the liberal media, would be as irrelevant as Chihuahuas yapping from behind a chain link fence.

I was just reading a Yahoo! (AP, to be precise) news item on the German woman who was abducted from a restaurant in Kabul, and according to the report, those who gave information to reporters did so on condition of anonymity.

Maybe it’s just me, or perhaps it’s my career security orientation, but whenever I run across the quote “on condition of anonymity” in a news article I think, “Oops, another leak“:

In most organizations, public or private, American or Zambuli (think Tanya Roberts in a loin cloth, riding a zebra and leading sports reporter Vic Casey all over jungles and plains, pursued by an OJ type guy and a bunch of hired mercenaries), there are regulations inherent to employment that direct those on the payroll to refer any inquiries by the media or other inquiring entities to specific management personnel.

Such regulations are well within the purview of management, be they government or the private sector, to insist upon as a condition of employment, either as a means of protecting proprietary information, controlling the flow of what might be privileged data, preventing elements of an investigation or other proceedings to be prematurely divulged, perhaps in a stage of incompletion that might disparage the organization because “all the facts” have not yet been disseminated or otherwise contaminate public perception of the organization’s intentions or policies with damaging results. Or, management of the organization in question may be looking to cultivate a specific reputation, or an employee’s volunteering information to the press might not include facts known by those whose responsibilities include functioning as spokespersons for the organization.

At any rate, I believe these regulations are well conceived, and I believe that giving information to the media “under condition of anonymity” should be considered uncontestable grounds for dismissal.

The single exception to this rule would, of course, be in the event that an employee knows that his or her employer, public or private, is actually in violation of the law.

I just had a couple of interesting days where my computer is concerned. Earlier in the week, I had a trackback from a site called “Federal Government” something, and clicked on the URL link to see what the site was about, and… BAM!… my security system regalled me with a small, red-bordered banner proclaiming that I’d just opened the door for a virus about which it could do nothing.

The next 48 hours saw everything deteriorating; I could rarely send any emails, pages took as long as 5 minutes to load and drifted, looking as though they were underwater, or simply shot up or down at will. I could hardly ever get into my music library, and when I did it froze up before I could play anything.

Control-Alt-Delete indicated a false CPU usage of 100%. I tried running a security scan — it lasted 5 hours (3+ hours longer than usual), found no discrepancies and then didn’t even show up under the “last scan” date and time.

This is my first notebook, I’ve had it for about 27 months and it’s been not only my home & office computer, but also my travelling companion. I was getting desperate, concerned that the powerful virus had doomed it, and actually considered buying a new laptop. For me, that would have been the equivalent of trading in a beloved brother or sister for a new model. Had I been one to panic, I would have panicked.

HOWEVER…

Trend Micro 2007, forever searching the Web for new viruses, trojan horses and types of spyware, etc, and downloading updates as they find them, must have run across the virus elsewhere and figured out what to do about it, because it suddenly ceased to be…Mr. Inspiron was abruptly back to normal. My automatically scheduled Friday scan was the usual and exposed no unwelcome entities of any kind. Yay!

The pox on Internet vandals!

Unfortunately, this has left me with a long list of emails to answer and a lot of reading to catch up on, as well as some catch-up on a work project I couldn’t continue while the accursed virus was munching away in my computer. And I do mean munching, as things were indeed deteriorating from hour to hour.

The only silver lining, as regards my work project, was the time I had to do some supplemental research in the Protection Of Assets Manual, a four tome, binder-format mini-library that is pretty much the bible of the Security biz. $800.00 + (well spent, covers about everything). While the bulk of my Protection Industry (security) library currently resides in my storage locker in Charlotte (I am, after all, semi-retired), the above mentioned manual travels with me, though as a priority, it, like all my other possessions, plays second fiddle to my trusty Dell Inspiron 600m.

This is one of those “who would have believed, X years ago…?” things. Throughout the 1990s and long after Alfonse Aloysius Gore, III had invented the Internet, I was one of those people who sneeringly said that I would never become entangled in the World Wide Web. Even in 2000, after voting for Dubya Dubya Dubya, I had no interest in anything WWW. I had no email address, no computer and no intention of ever owning one. I knew how to access programmed, statistical information on an offline computer from previous employment, and that was that.

In late 2001, I was pressured by a lifelong love with whom I had been reunited to at least get an email address. I grudgingly opened free accounts at Yahoo! and Hotmail. We got WebTV and I got hooked almost immediately to surfing, contacting and conversing with friends who were online and, later, we bought an E-Machine desktop computer.

In 2002, a friend of mine who had just returned from Hong Kong turned me on to a blog (the first I’d ever seen) called Gweilo Diaries, a great site out of HK run by an American expatriot who called himself Conrad. His blogroll led me to the Blogosphere and suddenly I was reading and commenting at several conservative blogs — it was awesome, there they were, a whole bunch of sites espousing political opinion that coincided with mine rather than the usual lefty crap that the MSM was spewing!

Flashing ahead to the spring of 2005, living alone again (I belong alone where domesticity is concerned, it never seems to work for very long when I share a domicile with anyone else), I bought this notebook and began using it for work purposes — I found that using the computer reduces project time significantly and eliminates quite a bit of work — and that summer I started blogging. We (my Inspiron and I) have been all over the country together, as well as to Mexico and the Caribbean.

I can’t help wondering if there aren’t a lot of other people whose relationships with their computers are as intense as mine…

Every once in awhile you run across a column that is as direct and unwaveringly on target as a solid punch in the gut. A column that presents the truth about its subject in a brief but all-encompassing summation.

While catching up on my reading, I ran across a column by David Limbaugh in the weekend edition of Jewish World Review that is every inch that kind of column.

The 2008 election is shaping up to be one of the most important in decades. With every passing day we are seeing a greater contrast between the Democratic Party platform and the national interest — as witnessed by the positions of the leading Democratic presidential candidates in their debates.

Indeed, the unpopularity of the war in Iraq has fueled a remarkable boldness by these candidates in bringing their liberalism out of the closet. Whether the candidates are sincere in advocating some of their radical positions or merely sucking up to the various interest groups, they are parading their extremism on national television.

I think it’s a little bit of both, myself. There are some people on the left side of the aisle who regularly say some pretty “out there” things that no one with a rational mind would ever utter in a public forum.

The Democrats rail against lobbying, as if to suggest they abhor special interest politics and the undue influence of these interests on policymakers. Yet they are nothing if not beholden to a collection of special interest groups, from labor unions, to gay activists, to race-baiting civil rights leaders, to illegal immigrants, to feminists, to global warming alarmists to antiwar, antimilitary groups to outright class-warfare-waging socialists.

Had Mr. Limbaugh delivered the last in a speech, I could see myself jumping up, applauding vigorousy and shouting “Bravo!”

What he put in that single paragraph sums up the reason I believe that in November, 2008 the GOP will enjoy the same kind of election victory the Democrats did last November, along with a new Republican in the White House. The intense political storm that raged around the recent ill fated (for the left) immigration “reform” bill energized The People and caused our collective will to be exercized upon and by those who represent us in Congress, and the end result is that now, more Americans are watching and listening. It has become plain that this irresponsible, left-dominated Congress cannot be left to its own devices.

It will not take anyone with a doctorate, or even a GED for that matter, to realize where the Democrats want to take us, once The People have begun listening to their “message”, and to vote accordingly.

Read the entire column here.

…such as this item.

Mexican shelters, usually the last stop for northbound migrants, are filling with southbound deportees. Fewer migrants are crossing in the wind-swept deserts along an increasingly fortified border. Far to the north, fields are empty at harvest time as workplace raids become more common.

Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but the remark about fields being empty at harvest time, obviously meaning due to lack of illegal Mexican workers, engenders in me a certain degree of sympathy for the farmers involved, as I understand that this will lead to financial shortfalls if they cannot harvest their crops, however: These same farmers have been knowingly breaking federal laws by hiring criminal aliens, year after year, to harvest for them.

They have been doing so for the sole purpose of getting their labor dirt cheap. In short, they have contributed to felonies in an ongoing, multi-decade violation of the law, to remittance that has collectively taken billions of untaxed payroll dollars out of the U.S. economy and, by the very nature of their transgression, have been instrumental in promoting millions more aliens to sneak into the country for the purpose of finding illegal jobs. Making the U.S. such a hospitable place has also led to ten digit abuse of our Social Security system, the displacement of millions of jobs from legal U.S. citizens to those who are, in effect, trespassing on U.S. soil, the closings of emergency rooms due to the suffocating influx of uninsured and poor illegals seeking every kind of treatment, an increase in drug trafficking by foreign gangs and an increase in violent crime.

So it’s comeuppance time, the cheque has arrived at the table, chickens have come home to roost, there is that long-dreaded knock at the door…

It’s high time these folks found a legal way to get their crops harvested, just as it is for all others who have been (and are still) employing illegals to cut expenses. Maybe the pain they’re feeling or will soon be feeling will serve as a lesson: “Don’t break the law, let alone become complacent about doing so.”

It’s not “okay” to violate federal laws just because it’s financially expedient or “cost effective”, as an accountant would say, just as it is no valid defense that, “the only reason my business survived was because I ignored federal laws”.

They should be overjoyed if they only have to get rid of the criminal alien help and seek legal laborers before they are caught, rather than pay heavy fines and do prison time.

This is very definitely good news…

Mexicans are increasingly giving up on the American dream and staying home, and the federal crackdown on undocumented workers announced Friday should discourage even potential migrants from taking the risks as the United States purges itself of its illegal population.

U.S. border agents detained 55,545 illegal migrants jumping over border walls, walking through the desert and swimming across the Rio Grande River between October and June. That’s down 38 percent for the entire border compared to the same period a year before.

U.S. and Mexican officials say increased border security, including 6,000 National Guard troops, remote surveillance technology and drone planes, have thwarted smugglers who had succeeded for years at beating the system.

Mexicans are increasingly giving up on the American dream and staying home…

There’s some of the usual Mainstream Media spin for you, packaging all Mexicans into one convenient group; They could more accurately have written: “Non-law abiding Mexicans are increasingly giving up on sneaking into America in search of welfare and/or illegal employment.”

Despite loud, well publicized (the MSM are, after all, a predominantly leftist, anti-America bunch) efforts on illegals’ behalf by liberals and activists on the ground, the Democrats in Congress, a few of thier weak Republican colleagues and the President, the Border Patrol and the National Guard have been doing their job, with dedication and success, along the border quite well.

While the majority party in Congress welcomes illegal immigration with open arms, majority output from the American People has been making many illegals and potential illegals feel anything but welcome.

Migrants also say they feel Americans are increasingly hostile toward immigrants.

“It’s the discrimination,” said 28-year-old George Guevara, who was deported to Tijuana last month after living in the U.S. for 18 years. “It’s making people step back. It’s just too much of a risk. It’s better to be out here.”

“Hostile” and “Discrimination”.

I’m pretty hostile towards illegal immigration and I definitely discriminate against illegal aliens. In the vernacular of the left, this would make me a racist, which I am not — I welcome anyone who comes to America with the intention of obeying our laws, becoming an American and assimilating into our society, but I do not welcome any non-citizen who sneaks into the country and preys on our economy.

Deportations also are up for illegal immigrants who have lived in the States for years. Some are caught for minor infractions like a burned-out headlight. Others are rounded up in workplace raids that the Bush administration has vowed to intensify.

The new measures announced Friday will force employers to fire anyone who cannot prove their Social Security numbers are legitimate.

While I am suspicious of the President’s abrupt turnaround on immigration enforcement, others whose opinions I respect and whose projections are usually right on the money have opined that having lost in his amnesty bid for illegals, this is likely a support effort for Republicans running in the 2008 election cycle.

My suspicions might be softened somewhat if the President were to issue complete pardons to Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean, but this lack of support for two brave federal officers who were completely ruined, then railroaded into prison by an assinine, law enforcement hostile federal attorney tells a story of its own. Especially in light of the fact that the key witness was himself a foreign criminal who at the time of the incident in question was in the midst of smuggling a large quantity of an illegal substance into the United States — and he was given immunity to testify against the agents that stopped him! This same Mexican criminal used a “border pass” bestowed upon him courtesy of the same federal attorney to smuggle in some more marijuana, even as the two agents were being prosecuted.

And then, of course,

Many employers join President Bush in blaming Congress for stalling an accord that would allow more people to work legally.

“Pretty shortly people are going to be knocking on people’s doors saying `Man we’re running out of workers,’” Bush said.

This is why I continue to believe that his sudden “get tough” policy may only be a hiatus while a back-burnered amnesty agenda is reworked. The Boss is still plugging his justification for the same agenda he’s followed all along.

So I will continue to wait patiently for the actual deeds that will or will not follow the words. After all, the positive results cited in the linked article have come to fruition over a long period of time, not just since the Administration announced last week that they are going to crack down on that which they’ve hitherto fervently supported.

More Cheek From Mexico

Mexican President Felipe Calderon also lashed out Thursday. “The U.S. Congress, which today turns its back on reality, knows full well that the American economy could not move forward without the labor of Mexicans,” he said.

Can you believe that guy? Here’s yet another in the long line of corrupt Mexican leaders who preside over one eternal failed economy, complete with millions of families living in squalor, and he’s lecturing us on our economy?

HaHaHaHaHaHa…cough!…Hah…whew!…excuse me…heh…

It is my personal observation that Calderone must sound a lot like calzone because both are full of cheese.

Of course, I can see why El Presidente is somewhat concerned –

Fewer Mexicans are sending home cash remittances — Mexico’s biggest source of foreign income after oil — leaving many Mexican relatives with no other resources, the Inter-American Development Bank reported Wednesday.

Basically, the only real basis for Felipe Calderone’s complaint is that his country’s massive “welfare” from America is beginning to dry up. He could care less about the American people — traditionally, leaders of Mexico barely, if at all, even care about their own people — he could care less about the U.S. economy except where it leaks over into Mexico.

He also forgets that he is an elected official of Mexico, not the United States, and would therefore be more proactive by pursuing ways by which his country can develop its economy on its own. I mean, Mexico is supposed to be an independent nation, isn’t it?

…this looks too much like a hundred eighty degree turn to me, abouuuuut face!

The Bush administration plans to step up immigration enforcement by raising fines on employers who hire undocumented workers, overhauling temporary worker programs and speeding up deployment of border agents, according to a summary of the plans.

More precisely,

An outline of the announcement, obtained by The Associated Press from a congressional aide, said the administration plans to expand the list of international gangs whose members are automatically denied admission to the U.S., reduce processing times for immigrant background checks and install by the end of the year an exit system so the departure of foreigners from the country can be recorded at airports and seaports.

In addition, employers will face possible criminal sanctions if they don’t fire employees unable to clear up problems with their Social Security numbers.

Also, the Homeland Security Department will ask states to voluntarily share their driver’s license photos and records with the agency for use in an employment verification system. The sharing is meant to help employers detect fraudulent licenses, according to the summary.

I’m sorry, but I can’t see a President who has so aggressively pursued amnesty and so failed to support the Border Patrol adopting this abrupt tooth & nail immigration policy unless he’s trying a new approach, some sort of stealth implementation policy. While I remain a supporter of the President on Iraq and the rest of the War On Terror, I take umbrage with his performance on immigration enforcement issues and the policies he wishes to engender granting amnesty to potentially millions of people whose very presence on our soil constitutes federal crimes.

Therefore, this is particularly ludicrous:

Chertoff alluded to the new enforcement tactics in a speech in Boston on Wednesday, calling to it “tool sharpening.”

“We shouldn’t have a patchwork of laws. We should be doing a comprehensive federal solution, but we haven’t got that thing done,” Chertoff said. “What I can tell you is we will certainly use every enforcement tool that we have, and every resource that we have available, to tackle the problem.

Considering that a Republican President might have a stealth agenda is a fairly new concept for me, that is usually a Democrat phenomenon, and it applies not only to their POTUSes, but to pretty much all of their politicians — dubiously in their defense, they have little choice; telling the American People their true intentions would lose them more votes than they’d like to contemplate, for unbeknownst to them, most Americans are both patriotic and smart, certainly more intelligent than today’s mainstream media and Democrat politicians apparently believe us to be.

However, since learning about George W. Bush’s leadership role in the very stealthy trilateral North American Union (NAU) agenda, promoted for obvious reasons as the Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), I have paid a lot of attention to his unrealistic and anti-Republican stance on illegal immigration.

In the event of the United States, Canada and Mexico becoming a three-country version of the EU, we would inevitably have to sacrifice nearly every aspect of our sovereignty to a higher Congress that includes decision making equality for politicians from two other countries, one with a predominantly socialist government, the other a grossly corrupt one that presides over millions of citizens who feel the need to flee their country in order to feed themselves and their families, or simply struggle unendingly in environments of squalor and disease.

The U.S. Constitution would become moot, as would the Supreme Court.

But back on track, the defeat of the latest immigration bill was a major setback for the Bush/ NAU amnesty aspirations (to say nothing of those of the Democrat persuation), and (Curses, foiled again!) — why spend billions of dollars securing our borders when they’ll be nothing more than turnstiles by 2010?

Let’s take another step here…it’s inevitable that as continental unions come together, for better or, more likely, for worse, they will fall under auspices united under a U.N. umbrella (the United States shouldn’t even belong to an organization represented most by dictatorships and socialist governments, in fact dominated by the latter) — it doesn’t speak very healthily for a world whose majority of nations seek, in a most avid manner, to bring down the one country among them that most supports their economies and is most willing to risk every kind of military assets, including the lives of our young warriors, to protect their rights.

The true decision-makers at the U.N. are like members of the Khaki Mafia were in Vietnam.

Uncle Sam (We, The People are supposed to tell him what to do) tends to surrender all too often to anti-America rhetoric at the U.N., wherein nations that support Islamic terrorist organizations, far-leftist regimes and brutal despots are considered credible global policy debate participants.

The MSM forever neglects to explain the non-military power we command throughout the globe, and our membership in the U.N. diminishes whatever the media misses. Today, using a shamefully distorted series of “reporting”, omission fraught accounts and outright fabrications on Iraq, they are suffering significant decreases in circulation, yet they perservere in carrying on the propaganda debate that glorifies the abandonment of the American way of life, a school of thought that’s been becoming increasingly unpopular among Americans.

Do I digress, or what?

Yeah, yeah, I know…

…but I’m not operating on the Conspiracy Theory plane, I’m looking at political “action and reaction”.

One piece of information that has sent up a flag in my “domain” is that while the Administration is suddenly going “great guns” on enforcing immigration laws, the President is going to meet, in Ottawa, with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada later this month. “What a coincidence!”

It appears that now terrorists have discovered a sure-fire way of training for missions on-line in order to successfully practice their Islam.

From NEWS.com.au:

THE bomb hit the ABC’s headquarters, destroying everything except one digital transmission tower. The force of the blast left Aunty’s site a cratered mess.
Just weeks before, a group of terrorists flew a helicopter into the Nissan building, creating an inferno that left two dead. Then a group of armed militants forced their way into an American Apparel clothing store and shot several customers before planting a bomb outside a Reebok store.
This terror campaign, which has been waged during the past six months, has left a trail of dead and injured, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars’ damage. The terrorists belong to a militant group bent on overthrowing the government. But they will never be arrested or charged for their crimes because they have committed them away from the reach of the world’s law enforcement agencies, in the virtual world known as Second Life.

Sounds like just another evening on-line for the average advanced adolescent virtual reality game enthusiast, right? Unfortunately, this isn’t the case — this is a summary of terrorists using an on-line game that is purportedly so representative of real life that it makes a perfect training ground not only for the mounting of terror campaigns, but also practice in the manipulation of public perception and other factors of infiltrating a society under false and malevolent pretenses.

Terrorist organisations al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah traditionally sent potential jihadists to train in military camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. But due to increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering, they are swapping some military training to online camps to evade detection and avoid prosecution.

Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qaeda, says it is a new phenomena that, until now, has not been openly discussed outside the intelligence community.

But he says security agencies are extremely concerned about what home-grown terrorists are up to in cyberspace. He believes the dismantling and disruption of military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan after September 11 forced terrorists to turn to the virtual world.

“They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world,” Gunaratna says. “And unless governments improve their technical capabilities on a par with the terrorists’ access to globalisation tools like the internet and Second Life, they will not be able to monitor what is happening in the terrorist world.”

And they tell me how great the advance of technology is for us. Young people today will often gawk at you like you’re nuts when you tell them how well people got by back in the mid 1960s, when there was no Internet, only a few TV programs were in color, people relaxing at home played games on boards, ponderous telephone directories and yellow pages saw use in every household… And no text messaging, videocam bearing, e-mail accessing, razor-thin, shirt pocket-sized digital wireless phones enabling instant global communication? No way, dude!

Those were the days when corporate security departments didn’t yet have to sweat out the legal and social ramifications of allowing/not allowing employees access to the company database with their own palm devices, the days before hackers threatened the security of both corporations’ proprietary information and John Q. Citizen’s personal finances, before spammers and before…

…Islam realized that said advance of technology is great for terrorism, as well.

What is distressing here, as regards the above linked and quoted article and what it infers, which is quite accurate, is that those charged with our national security are not committing enough resources to preventing acts of terror against not only the U.S., but western countries as a whole.

If every scheme the enemy uses for financing, acquiring weapons, inserting personnel into target countries, training for, prepping and carrying out terrorist missions has already been in effect for some time before our intelligence community stumbles upon it and then relays it into the quagmire of bureaucrats, bean counters, PC politicos and lawyers (to determine how doing anything effective about it will play at the ACLU and CAIR), we’re positively screwed. Self-seeking politicians, PC burdened intelligence, security and law enforcement whips, liberal politicians, lawyers and judges, bureaucrats and bean counters are as much our enemies as…well, the enemy.

The fact that the intelligence community often takes its time about sharing valuable information with the enforcement folks isn’t very reassuring, either. Granted, there are occasions upon which they have to play their proverbial cards close to their chests because actions taken could expose and endanger assets in the field or methods of keeping track of terrorist activities (there-by usurping one role of the New York Times), but this cyber-situation hardly seems such a phenomenon.

This causes me to question the calibre of security decision-makers our tax money is paying for.

It hardly seems unrealistic that they would pay a staff of highly creative, larceny-minded, egomaniacal, mischievous hackers to do nothing but anticipate the enemy on all matters Internet, and determine ways of taking instant action of a close surveillance, disruptive or more decisive covert nature, and in the former two cases worry about the liberal outcry later — the longer we allow these “peaceful” followers of Mohammed the Pedophile to train for “missions”, the more likely we are to experience resultant applied Islam in its consistant form of death and destruction.

I definitely recommend reading the entire linked article.

…that arrived as an email forward, this one attributed to one of my favorite sons of the south, one long haired country boy whom they’d better leave alone.

I don’t know how everybody else feels about it, but to me I think Hispanic people in this country, legally or illegally, made a huge public relations mistake with their recent demonstrations.

I don’t blame anybody in the world for wanting to come to the
United States of America , as it is a truly wonderful place.

But when the first thing you do when you set foot on American soil is illegal it is flat out wrong and I don’t care how many lala land left heads come out of the woodwork and start trying to give me sensitivity lessons.

I don’t need sensitivity lessons, in fact I don’t have any-thing against Mexicans! I just have something against criminals and anybody who comes into this country illegally is a criminal and if you don’t believe it try coming into America from a foreign country without a passport and see how far you get.

What disturbs me about the demonstrations is that it’s tanta-mount to saying, “I am going to come into your country even if it means breaking your laws and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

It’s an “in your face” action and speaking just for me, I don’t like it one little bit and if there were a half dozen pairs of gonads in Washington bigger than English peas it wouldn’t be happening.

Where are you, you bunch of lily livered, pantywaist, forked tongued, sorry excuses for defenders of The Constitution? Have you been drinking the water out of the Potomac again?

And even if you pass a bill on immigration it will probably be so pork laden and watered down that it won’t mean anything anyway Besides, what good is another law going to do when you
won’t enforce the ones on the books now?

And what ever happened to the polls, guys? I thought you folks were the quintessential finger wetters. Well you sure ain’t paying any attention to the polls this time because somewhere around eighty percent of Americans want some thing done about this mess, and mess it is and getting bigger everyday.

This is no longer a problem, it is a dilemma and headed for being a tragedy. Do you honestly think that what happened in France with the Muslims can’t happen here when the businesses who hire these people finally run out of jobs and a few million disillusioned Hispanics take to the streets?

If you, Mr. President, Congressmen and Senators, knuckle under on this and refuse to do something meaningful it means that you care nothing for the kind of country your children and grand-children will inherit. But I guess that doesn’t matter as long as you get re-elected.
Shame on you.

One of the big problems in America today is that if you have the nerve to say anything derogatory about any group of people (except Christians) you are going to be screamed at by the media and called a racist, a bigot and anything else they can think of to call you

Well I’ve been pounded by the media before and I’m still rockin’ and rollin’ and when it comes to speaking the truth I fear not.

And the truth is that the gutless, gonadless, milksop politicians are just about to sell out the United States of America because they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to face reality.

And reality is that we would never allow any other group of people to have 12 million illegal in this country and turn around and say, “Oh it’s ok, ya’ll can stay here if you’ll just allow us to slap your wrist.”

And I know that some of you who read this column are saying “Well what’s wrong with that?”

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. These people could be from Mars as far as we know. We don’t know who they are, where they are or what they’re up to and the way the Congress is going we’re not going to.

Does this make sense? Labor force you say? We already subsidize corporate agriculture as it is, must we subsidize their labor as well?

If these people were from Haiti would we be so fast to turn a blind eye to them or if they were from Somalia or Afghanistan ?

I think not.

All the media shows us are pictures of hard working Hispanics who have crossed the border just to try to better their life.

They don’t show you pictures of the Feds rounding up members of MS 13, the violent gang who came across the same way the decent folks did. They don’t tell you about the living conditions of the Mexican illegal some fat cat hired to pick his crop.

I want to make two predictions.

No. 1: This situation is going to grow and fester until it erupts in violence on our streets while the wimps in Washington drag their toes in the dirt and try to figure how many tons of political hay they can make to the acre.

No 2: Somebody is going to cross that border with some kind of weapon of mass destruction and set it off in a major American city after which there will be a backlash such as this country has never experienced and the Capitol building in Washington will probably tilt as Congressmen and Senators rush to the other side of the issue.

I don’t know about you but I would love to see just one major politician stand up and say, “I don’t care who I make mad and I don’t care how many votes I lose, this is a desperate situation and I’m going to lead the fight to get it straightened out.”

I don’t blame anybody for wanting to come to America , but if you don’t respect our immigration laws why should you respect any others?

And by the way, this is America and our flag has stars and stripes Please get that other one out of my face.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

H/T Brenda.

Actually, there is one fellow in Congress who does speak his piece, no holds barred and, unlike the three Republican “front-runners” in the Presidential race (Romney, Giuliani and RINO McCain) favored by the uninformed, the indifferent and the obtuse, doesn’t waffle on issues according to prevailing political winds, and embraces strong conservative views on all issues and he, too, is running for President. His name is Tom Tancredo.

My two days at Harrah’s Joliet were awesome, so much so that I intend to go there whenever I need to get away for a bit.

When I lived in Nevada and worked in a casino, gaming establishments became a run-of-the-mill sort of thing, nothing special, day-to-day, etcetera, etcetera.

Since then (over ten years ago), I’d only gone into casinos during a two week visit to Atlantic City back in 1998. It was still pretty much same-old, same-old, except I enjoyed the Boardwalk and the Jersey shore atmosphere, falaffel and funnel cakes (yum!). If you’ve never had a funnel cake, you have no idea!

However, visiting Harrah’s in Joliet nine years later was another story entirely.

First, I have to say that having stayed in a gazillion hotels over the last few years, I found the staff at Harrah’s to be the friendliest, most customer oriented I’ve ever met, folks who really bend over backwards (figuratively, don’t start!) to make sure a guest has a flawlessly fantastic time.

It turned out that the only room service they provide is for alcoholic beverages, but if a guest wants to dine in the room, people who work strictly behind desks would be more than glad to deliver a meal from any restaurant in the house (I didn’t take them up on it, but the offer was there).

Even the pit bosses are outgoing and affable, and all employees make a point of learning your first name and interacting on a friendly basis. They all remember all the customers’ names, even at a crowded bar or craps table, it’s amazing.

Speaking of craps, here’s a bit of history: The game, originally called “galloping dominoes”, was invented in New Orleans in the late 1800s by a Frenchman. The slang for Frenchman was crapeaux, meaning “toad-frog”, and that name became the popular name for the game, then was eventually shortened to simply “craps”.

Between visits to the dice tables, I spent some time drinking at a long bar at the back of the casino that had multi-game slots built into the bar. Whenever I was there, I played $1.00 video bonus poker, and sort of lucked out by finding a good machine at the first stool I occupied — no royals, but lots of playing longevity between inserting C-notes in the slots ($5.00 max bets per hand). It’s not the same as it was during my last visit to a casino, instead of coins filling a tray when you cash out, you get a validation slip that can either be inserted in other machines for play or redeemed for folding money at a cashier’s window. I must admit that it’s weird to me to be in a casino without hearing the cacophony of thousands of coins clattering incessantly into hundreds of slot trays.

“Progress” marches on…

I didn’t get to try their best restaurant, I felt my time was better spent gambling, though I did do the buffet the first day. It was adequate, but unfortunately it was an inordinately slow Wednesday evening and the food had gotten a bit old, and tasted such. Bummer. The steam tables are divided into several different types of cuisines, and of all, I enjoyed maybe two items.

However, Ace’s, a cafe/snack bar located in the casino itself puts out a good roast beef and peppers sub, and is open 24 hours. They have free coffee ’round the clock, but alas, it tastes almost as cardboardy as the coffee bags provided with the in-room coffee maker. However, there is a Starbuck’s on the premises, and being the improviser I am (staying at beaucoups hotels teaches one many useful things) as well as a lover of coffee, I had them grind me a pound of “house” and absconded with a stack of their “official” napkins which, properly applied, double well as filters for said in-room coffee makers. Housekeeping, as customer service intensive as the rest of the staff, provided me with a sufficient number of condiment packets to make it work.

If you want a decent cup of coffee in the casino proper, get it at the above mentioned bar.

Anyone who’s read my blog for a couple of years knows of my travails with hotel Internet access. Well, after a few minor problems at first (no fault of Harrah’s, the outside ISP they use mistakenly classified my room as a meeting room rather than a guest room, and once the error was addressed it was smooth sailing), their wireless access was impeccable, on a par with that flawless access I experienced at the Lenox in Boston some time back. I was majorly impressed.

Among the differences between Nevada casinos and Harrah’s Joliet are that at the latter there are no live poker or keno parlors and there is no race and/or sports book. I was told that these are not approved by the Illinois state gaming board. State law also forbids them from serving free alcoholic beverages (wow!), period, and they have to stop serving alcohol altogether at 3:30 a.m. on weekdays and 4:00 a.m. on weekends. The casino itself is closed from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. daily for cleaning. I laughed when a bartender in the casino told me that, thinking that in Nevada, they’ll clean and even do carpentry around you rather than make you stop gambling.

Despite any shortcomings described above, I would profoundly recommend Harrah’s Joliet as a great place for a hotel/casino getaway. The staff there, from gaming to hospitalty, are so exceptional that they make it an awesome experience.

Being as ultra-suburban as they are, they enjoy a large local trade, and at the tables and bars one meets all kinds of down-to-earth, friendly people who frequent the casino as a social focal point. I never felt at all “lonely” at the bars, conversation was consistantly animated and enjoyable.

For the days leading up to my 52nd birthday, I have to give a zillion star rating and now, at going on 5 a.m. on the day, I will say that my visit to Harrah’s Joliet was the best 48 hours I’ve enjoyed for as long as I can remember.