The Daily Skunk

Some of you already know about this and some of you might not. There was a week-long No Borders Camp along the Mexico/U.S. border earlier in November. I went to the Calexico/Mexicali area for this camp. During the last day of the camp, the U.S. border patrol attacked the U.S. side of the camp at the end of a march and rally that ended the camp. Three people were initially arrested and several people beaten and shot with pepperspray pellets. Two of the people were held without charges for 48 hours and then released. The third person, Juan Ruiz, was charged with a felony assault of a federal officer. Juan, a musician, was playing a drum and bumped into a border patrol agent with it; he was then tackled and thrown to the ground. Much of the border patrol’s actions are on videotape and can be seen at:

http://noborderscamp.org/

There is also more information about Juan available at this site. He is a permanent U.S. resident and is facing possible deportation in relation to the charge. At the No Borders Camp website you can sign a petition to drop the charge against Juan. There is also a campaign of sending letters and faxes to the U.S. attorney; more details are available at the website. People are hoping for at least a thousand signatures. When I signed it, I was number 591. So, check out the website, read about what has happened, and sign the petition.

I agree to some extent with you Odd. But, I do think we should have common goals and work towards them. I do believe all children at the least are created equal when it comes to: Health care, education, and simply put, the best life possible.
To answer the question about wages - even in socialism their is a hierarchy of pay based on education.
NEVER will I support the idea that everyone should be paid the same - that is the removal of incentive. When you remove incentive, expect at the best mediocrity and indifferent populations or much worse.
I;m not going to say I agree with this statement entirely “We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.”, but I do think there is some good justification on his part for this statement.
The part of the speech that is most meaningful to me starts here:
“too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”

I read this and think of our current illegal alien situation. Here are my conclusions:

In support of his statements(in my opinion) I offer 3 statements. #1 is basic economic principle and #2 is basic economic principle extrapolated.

1)Educate your countries population regardless of their citizenship.
2)Take care of the sick that are in your country regardless of their citizenship.

Now, an statement why it isn’t practical also using basic economic principle.
1) It isn’t possible to have more people using than contributing.

Basically,there will be a point when the number of people using the resources will exceed the amount of resources available (some states are at this point already).

Anyway, my “take away” here is that I do believe that the first 2 statements are not only the right thing to do morally, they are the only thing to do for OUR societal preservation.

william

I just finished the movie Bobby.  I recommend you watch it.  It was slow going for me in the beginning, but I was really glad that I watched it all the way through.

I feel he really was a pretty incredible person and found the movie showing some very realistic parallels.

I don’t know anything about him other than 2 speeches that I have read by him.   I feel that this one is well worth posting and it has really got my mind turning about some things.

___________________

On the Mindless Menace of Violence

City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas

“Xmas” and “X-mas” are common abbreviations of the word “Christmas“. They are sometimes pronounced “eksmas”, but they, and variants such as “Xtemass”, originated as handwriting abbreviations for the pronunciation “Christmas”. The “-mas” part came from the Anglo-Saxon for “festival”, “religious event”: Crīstesmæsse or Crīstemæsse. This abbreviation is widely used but not universally accepted; some view it as demeaning to Christ, whilst others find it a helpful abbreviation.

The word “Christ” and its compounds, including “Christmas”, have been abbreviated for at least the past 1,000 years, long before the modern “Xmas” was commonly used. “Christ” was often written as “XP” or “Xt”; there are references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as far back as 1021 AD. This X and P arose as the uppercase forms of the Greek letters χ and ρ), used in ancient abbreviations for Χριστος (Greek for “Christ”), and are still widely seen in many Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Jesus Christ. The labarum, an amalgamation of the two Greek letters rendered as ☧, is a symbol often used to represent Christ in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian Churches.^[1]

Some believe that the term is part of an effort to “take Christ out of Christmas” or to literally “cross out Christ”;^[2] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas, as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers). It may also be used as a vehicle to be more inclusive (See political correctness).

The occasionally held belief that the “X” represents the cross Christ was crucified on has no basis in fact. St Andrew’s Cross is X-shaped, but Christ’s cross was probably shaped like a T or a †. Indeed, X-as-chi was associated with Christ long before X-as-cross could be, since the cross as a Christian symbol developed later. (The Greek letter Chi Χ stood for “Christ” in the ancient Greek acrostic ΙΧΘΥΣ ichthys.) While some see the spelling of Christmas as Xmas a threat, others see it as a way to honor the martyrs. The use of X as an abbreviation for “cross” in modern abbreviated writing (e.g. “Kings X” for “Kings Cross“) may have reinforced this assumption.

In ancient Christian art χ and χρ are abbreviations for Christ’s name.^[3] In many manuscripts of the New Testament and icons, X is an abbreviation for Christos, as is XC (the first and last letters in Greek, using the lunate sigma); compare IC for Jesus in Greek. The Oxford English Dictionary documents the use of this abbreviation back to 1551, 50 years before the first English colonists arrived in North America and 60 years before the King James Version of the Bible was completed. At the same time, Xian and Xianity were in frequent use as abbreviations of “Christian” and “Christianity”; and nowadays still are sometimes so used, but much less than “Xmas”. The proper names containing the name “Christ” other than aforementioned are rarely abbreviated in this way (e.g. Hayden Xensen for the actor name “Hayden Christensen“). Pop artist Christina Aguilera is known to spell her first name as ‘Xtina’.

This apparent usage of “X” to spell the syllable “kris” (rather than the sounds “ks”) has extended to “xtal” for “crystal“, and on florists‘ signs “xant” for “chrysanthemum“^[4] (though these words are not etymologically related to “Christ”; “crystal” comes from a Greek word meaning “ice”, and “chrysanthemum” from Greek words meaning “golden flower”, while “Christ” comes from a Greek word meaning “anointed”).

In the animated television show Futurama, which is set in the 31st century, Xmas, pronounced “eks-mas”, is the official name for the day formerly known as Christmas (which has become an “archaic pronunciation”).

In Japanese media and goods, Xmas/X-mas is commonly misspelled as “X’mas” in what amounts to an instance of wasei-eigo, or English made in Japan.

Brief Overview of Congressman ….’s Record:

He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.

He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

… also introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.

Give up yet. No, this isn’t some sick joke - it’s congressman Ron Paul.

My sincere thanks to all those who have served and sacrificed by giving years of their life, or their actual life with the intent being to protect and preserve my Freedom and to help others in this world who are less fortunate.

I’m sorry for those who have had to kill. I’m sorry for those who have had to experience things that should never be experienced.

I’m sorry for those who have had to be part of something they didn’t or don’t feel is right.

As defined in wikipedia:

Veterans Day is an American holiday honoring military veterans. Both a federal holiday and a state holiday in all states, it is celebrated on the same day as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other parts of the world, falling on November 11, the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

The holiday is commonly misprinted as Veteran’s Day or Veterans’ Day in calendars and advertisements.

Can anyone fill me in on the current events of OJ Simpson?

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard anything about the robbery and Kidnapping charges until yesterday, even though it happened in Sept.

I haven’t looked too hard, but I haven’t been able to find much good news on it.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2007/11/09/2003386960

You couldn’t make this crap up, what the hell is OJ going to do next?

I recently had an unnerving experience due to unnecessary and unconstitutional regulations. Here is the story.

I have purchased about 100 guns from dealers in the last 15 or so years. Specifically, I have purchased 3 guns in the last 2 months from dealers in my current state of residence. Note that I moved here almost a year ago, so my out-of-state Driver’s License is still valid, even though the address is not current.
The latest one I tried to buy was another “long gun,” which the federal government has deemed okay for me to buy outside my state of residence, in most cases. Mind that I was purchasing within my state of residence.
After I had filled out the necessary form (ATF form 4473, amended recently with new restrictive language without any law being passed), the salesman caught the discrepancy between my current valid Driver’s License (from another state) and my physical address listed on the form (in my now-home state). He stated that I could not purchase the firearm now, as the addresses are different. The last three guns I have bought in this state, all legally and all from federally licensed dealers, have used the EXACT combination of addresses and ID, and all three of these transactions have gone without incident. Now, according to this dealer, I must have a current, valid state issued ID with a current address, or I cannot purchase a gun. “WHAT,” you ask? Yes, that is indeed the case, I am told. I must produce some other GOVERNMENT issued paperwork that shows my current address, or I cannot buy any gun at all. At this point I am told that I could have filled out the form using the address on my ID, even though it is not current, nor is it in the state in which I live, and the purchase would have been completed, albiet illegally, and noone would have known the difference. But because I chose to be legal, I had to jump through more hoops to buy something that the Constitution has said I can buy for more than 200 years.
So I have to ask you, the reader, what the hell is going on here? I am a legal owner of several federally regulated and taxed firearms (NFA items, all of which require a thorough FBI-type background check to obtain), as well as other guns that have used this same process to acquire, all without incident. But now, I have to change my address every time I move or I cannot legally buy a firearm. So, I deduce that if one moves, one relinquishes his right to exercise the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, because of some arbitrary law that isn’t really a law at all, because it wasn’t voted upon; instead it has been foisted on us by a rogue government agency that started off as a tax collection enforcement agency and is now a multi-BILLION dollar per year agency with NO legal restriction on its actions. See www.jpfo.org for more information, and pay particular attention to their video called “The Gang.” It will send chills of fear up your spine, and it will bring you right to the point that I am, without you having to spend the money to get here. Think of it as a safe full of guns for only $20. Now go vote!

First of all, I want to recognize the poll information post  as my motivation for this post.

To consider the polls, whichever polls, before making up your mind is pure, unadulterated BULLSHIT!  The polls are the media’s way of influencing our decisions.  The media, through their polls, is saying, “Hey, don’t do that, no one else is.  Do this, because everyone else is.”  That is almost always the wrong reason to do anything.  Remember all the feel-good crap the liberals try to peddle about peer pressure? Well, this is it.  Liberal propaganda coming back to bite them in the butt.   I love when we reap what we sew.

Now, to shoot myself in the foot: most online polls favor Ron Paul for President.  Many reasons for this could exist.  Here is the one I choose to believe: People from all walks of life love liberty. People who love liberty are less likely to watch network TV because of all of the mindrot they peddle (this is my case). And the clincher - people who love liberty support Ron Paul for President.  And when we do, we don’t just see him as the best choice or the lesser of the evils, but we see him as the light at the end of the tunnel or maybe even the best thing that could happen to this country in a damn long time.

Ron Paul’s candidacy focuses on liberty.  National liberty, belonging to the USA as well as every other nation on Earth;  state liberty, as in state’s rights; and personal liberty, again applying to each and every human life on Earth, but particularily within the USA.  His beliefs follow the US Constitution, as does his voting record as US Representative.  He uses the Constitution as a test to see what government should or shouldn’t do. 

Now, just who doesn’t adhere to the Constitution?  Er, wait, I know, it’s that guy who… and the other one who…  Yes, you are correct.  And a huge number of others, too, who hold elected office but shouldn’t.  The time has come for them to be voted out.  The time has come for us to take back our government and our nation from overtaxing and overspending greedmongers and cowards.  The time has come for us to begin living by the Constitution again, as our forefathers intended.  The time has come to put our money where our mouths are and VOTE RON PAUL for President!

As of 11/01/07

Republican Presidential Nomination

RCP Average: Giuliani +12.0%

• Giuliani
• 29.0%
• Thompson
• 17.0%
• McCain
• 14.7%
• Romney
• 11.2%

Poll Details >

Democratic Presidential Nomination

RCP Average: Clinton +22.9%

• Clinton
• 44.9%
• Obama
• 22.0%
• Edwards
• 12.4%
• Clinton+22.9%
  • Approve
  • 34.4%
  • Disapprove
  • 59.6%
  • Approve
  • 23.8%
  • Disapprove
  • 63.0%

 

President Bush Job Approval - 59.6% DISAPPROVE!


RCP Average: Spread -25.2%

Poll Details >

 

Congressional Job Approval - 63% DISAPPROVE!


RCP Average: Spread -39.2%

Poll Details >