If you don't want people using a tunnel, don't build the freakin' tunnel in the first place;)
But there's a simple solution to the illegal alien thing -- execute 'em. Sounds harsh, but it'd put a stop to 99% of 'em right now. (I'm not entirely joking. I live in SoCal and see the effects of the flood of illegals every day.)
Good story about the little white line... I'm afraid I'd be one of the perverse:)
A Canadian friend just sent me three more such tales that you may enjoy: ========== The CBC ran something last week about border stupidity. What I remember:
1) A ditch that's the border line. This guy's lawn is Canadian, the road behind his house American. After the new regs came along, he was stopped by border guards who questioned him about his 'illegal border crossing device' - a few planks he'd made into a footbridge and put over the ditch so he could walk his dog along the quieter American-side road. They didn't make him remove the bridge, but they forbade him from ever using it.
2) Some small peninsular town on the West Coast that used to belong to Canada before the Parallel came in. Now it's a tiny political island - divided from the rest of the US by water or Canada. And it's a small cut - if the Parallel was down another arcminute or so the peninsula would be entirely Canadian. So the kids go to school in the States, but have to go through Canada to get there. 4 border crossings a day. Average of about a 30 minute delay per cross. Parents complain that if anything happens, it takes them well over an hour to get to their kids. But what can you do? If fire trucks and ambulances get stopped, they're not going to expedite transit for a school bus.
3) Showing the futility of guarding the border, the reporter filmed a segment on some godforsaken patch where the line is a broken fence older than I am. The reporter was weaving over the line eliberately. Because they weren't trying to hide and were visible from a distant road, they were spotted and questioned by border guards. Though I noticed something they didn't mention: They'd never have been seen if they'd shot the segment 200 feet down where the trees start, or if they weren't deliberately taking their time and filming a segment, or if it was foggy and not sunny. ========
I guess it's time to close down the International Peace Park -- which after all was created to symbolize friendship and unity between the U.S. and Canada.
========
(BTW, I followed your sig's advice last month, as the only option that didn't make me hurl.)
My college physics prof was a Scot. While most of the time he was perfectly understandable, words containing the letter R tended to get mangled. We were all quite baffled as to what "Toc" was, til he finally gave up and wrote it on the blackboard: "Torque". OH!!!!
Re Toronto -- So it seems. Everyone I've known from the area has done their utmost to live just about anywhere else. I've heard worse of Montreal, tho, since the Haitian, uh, "imports".
And this makes two folks I know from London Ont.:)
I used to listen to Bush's speeches. I thought rather more highly of him back-when. I think where things went wrong was when Bush Sr. was no longer there to provide balance.
True, but this DOES alter our relationship, by casting suspicions where none existed before:(
Yet we seem to have a policy of mostly turning a blind eye to the southern border, despite that country's *declaration* that they would send all their unwanted people to us, with the INTENT of overwhelming us and taking over.:(
Canada might be happy (quite reasonably so!), but if you were to leave the U.S. without a passport, you could find yourself as a man without a country:(
An AC says, "Thanks for not holding that whole burning down the Whitehouse thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington) against us."
[grin] Actually, I thought of that... but both countries were still mighty immature; indeed, Canada wasn't yet out of the British nest, thus not entirely responsible for its actions. But we don't hold juvenile humans' acts against them forever; why hold juvenile countries' acts against them either, once they've grown up??
Besides, I vaguely recall that we burned your place down first.:)
"Just to top it off, one of the biggest domestic issues here is how to deal with guns being smuggled in from the U.S."
Let me guess, this started with some new Canadian gun control laws that I don't know about?
=======
Back to the rest of your post... Aside from all the reasons you cite as to why this is rubbish, it can be directly harmful to Americans:
There is at least one place where to get from Point A, Maine, to Point B, Maine, the road passes briefly through Canadian territory (probably because the area is nothing but rocks and there's no other practical route). In the early stages of the new border restrictions, there was a case where an ambulance going from A to B was stopped at the border (where the road kinked into Canada) and held for some time while officialdom figured out what to do. I don't recall whether the person the ambulance was sent for died or not.
"...most Americans appear to believe that every border is the Mexican border."
Actually, no. I can't think of a single person I know who isn't appalled by the stupidity of restricting the U.S./Canadian border. However, Officialdom (which seldom represents the actual Will of the People anymore) is certainly trying to make it APPEAR to be as much of a problem as the Mexican border......but just wait til NAFTA and the Corridor makes that a reality!! Can't sneak across the Mexican border? So ride a truck north with your buddy, get off in Winnepeg, and trot back across the Parallel at your leisure (being the central Parallel is a couple thousand miles of nothing-much and no major physical barriers).
"The security departments aren't trying to protect the United States from Canadians - they're trying to protect the US from people who enter the US through Canada."
So... are you saying Canadians are slackers who'll let just anyone pass through their country?
And if DHS is trying to protect the U.S. from threats coming across the northern border -- why do *Americans* need passports to visit Canada??
It makes no sense from a security standpoint; it just makes it look like they're Doing Something. Anyone bent on entering the U.S. illegally from Canada can just invest in a rowboat and paddle across Rainy Lake. Or wait til it freezes in winter and walk across. (If you've ever been there, you'll know that trying to close off Rainy Lake would be about as effective as trying to secure Vietnam from Cambodia. Big lake, 10 bazillion islands, most heavily treed and large enough to be habitable, and no clear lines of sight anywhere.)
THIS is what makes it so obvious that all this "Homeland Security" is primarily *against U.S. Citizens*, not against external threats:
Canada is our FRIEND. Canada has not offered us violence, or a flood of illegal aliens, or a torrent of criminals, or anything worse than the occasional pot smuggler or draft-dodger haven. Canada has been our defense partner for decades, and is consistently our best friend in the world. That Canada is sometimes called "the 51st State" is not entirely a joke.
There is absolutely NO reason that Canadian/U.S. border control should be anything but a smile and a wave whether you're entering or leaving either country -- much as it was through all of the previous century.
The current situation, requiring a passport to visit Canada, tells me that it is WE THE PEOPLE who are regarded as Enemies of the State, and that any border surveillance is designed to keep us in, as much as to keep threats out.
Doesn't *anyone* remember the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall??
Well, I think we're at the "agree to disagree" stage economically... tellya what, if a Dem wins the White House, and things spiral down for small business the way I've seen too many times before, you can fund my bailout.;)
"...afraid that Bush would simply spend any funds, regardless of whether they were designated for withdrawal or not, then dare them not to supply more"
Um... how much control does Bush really have over where the money is used?? didn't the bill as passed specify what went where? since when can money simply be yanked from one project to another without a legislative pass??
Okay, "good" by reasonable standards of conduct within the context of the surrounding society. Happy now?:)
As to that mad dog, well, sometimes it does help to inform the owner that if they don't shoot it, you will shoot it for them -- ***but then you've got to be willing to follow through***.
We DID follow through with WW2 Germany and Japan, and completely convinced both cultures that they had better never, EVER even *consider* keeping another mad dog, or we'd shoot their mad dog and them along with it. (Tho this has had some unintended consequences, such as repression of even the discussion of anything Nazi in modern Germany. I'm not sure that inverse extremism is progress, and may even eventually lead to another mad dog.)
But we're no longer willing to actually shoot that mad dog. Now we wave a stick and say Nice Doggie and hope it won't bite us, and keep backing away and letting it push us closer to the edge of the cliff, and someday we're going to fall off.
"All it would take is for a few of their preachers to start advocating violent revolution, and you've got yourself a Christian Jihad."
Well, maybe on a very small/localized scale. But as a whole, modern Christianity is middle-aged and fat and comfortable with its place in the world, not exactly the conditions that lead to a widespread jihad.:)
Well, my anecdotes go right along with the street after street of closed-down small businesses hereabouts... but being down in these trenches does give you a different perspective, as Senator McGovern (I think it was him) discovered when he retired from Congress and TRIED to go into the Hotel business. The very laws HE had helped pass made it literally impossible to start a new small business... he said that if he'd known how hard he was making it for small business, he'd never have supported such legislation.
And numbers can lie in odd ways. Frex, most farmers are worth millions on paper, yet are broke as hell in real life. But they don't show up as any sort of negative number, even when they're barely making it, because they keep on sending goods to market no matter what.
As to Iraq and funding... There's always the troops left in the lurch problem, too -- if your guys are in the field, you've GOT to support them. You can't just yank the funding and say "nyah nyah, try and stop us". But more appropriate would be to fund only withdrawal costs and whatever our guys need when they get back, and to refuse to fund anything else.
As to the notion that we can't just drop the mess in Iraq and walk away... well, maybe that'd be the best solution in the long run, even if uglier in the short run. Trying to be both world policeman and global nanny is sure as hell not working!! Sometimes you've just got to let the brats fight it out for themselves, cuz otherwise the moment your back is turned, they'll revert to fighting with greater zeal than before.
Agreed... Twitter is a smart guy, if only he'd get past his anti-M$ prejudice and off his ubergeek high-horse. Lots of knowledge going to waste there. (And I say that as someone he foe'd a long time ago, because gods forbid that anyone can make a Windoze box stable if HE can't; they must be a M$ shill!)
[goes off, reads your Apple Rant] Well, it's not the topic that got you the bum's rush at the Apple store; it's that you were essentially marketing the competition in someone else's store. No different than if you walked into a Target and expounded to every passing employee that you can buy the very same stuff for less at Walmart, or even get it for free off the curb. Stores exist to sell their own product, not to give away someone else's; that's simple economic fact, and the products' relative merits don't enter into it.
As to your recent spate of -1 mods (none of which are from me, BTW -- I never mod down, only up) -- I was surprised to see so many, so I read a bunch of the posts, and I think it's likely because people have become tired of seeing the same rants over and over, some of which make no sense when viewed against market realities.
Also, there's the fact that you invariably dismiss people as M$ fanboys if they happen to be satisfied, or gods forbid even *happy*, running Windows. People get tired of being dissed over and over when that's your only message, especially when it's so often built around prejudice rather than around knowledge -- as with your repeated insistance that [paraphrase] "all Windoze boxes are botfarms" [/paraphrase] when this is patently not so.
This is sad, because a lot of the time you've got good points to make (in fact I've sometimes modded you up), but these valuable messages are frequently lost amid the noise of your own making.:(
Of course, having foe'd me long ago because you think I'm a M$ shill, you probably won't see this, let alone read it all.
I can tell you from the perspective of 35+ years as a small-business owner, one who lives or dies by middle-class disposable income, the more Democrat policies are in place, the less of that disposable income there is. (And the early warning is that I stop seeing cash. People pay with checks when they're not feeling so flush.) When oil and taxes go up, disposable income dries up. Maybe the numbers look better on paper, maybe the GNP looks better when everyone's money is pre-allocated, but the reality is that the Carter and Clinton years were painful for small businesses like myself -- and that means just about everyone not in consumer staples or entertainment.
Iraq has put a reverse spin on what should be a fairly flush time for all of us.
But as to ending our involvement in Iraq -- the President doesn't have the final say there; Congress does, and can put their foot down simply by denying the funds. Did the Dems have the spine to do so when they had the opportunity?? hell no... and they could have played it as "bringing our boys home" instead of letting it get played as "failing to support our troops".
I remember Vietnam. Same bullshit, different century. Same economic disaster, thank you JFK and LBJ, following hard on the heels of the pork-barrel legacy of FDR and his New Deal Democrats.
I agree that Iraq is a money sink, and the sooner we can disentangle ourselves from that mess, the better; and McCain isn't likely to push for that (but him fighting with Congress might accomplish it anyway, if only from the perversity between Parties). But it's an existing money sink, not a new and different one added to the pile -- and plenty of new and different money sinks, without removing any already extant, are what IMO we can expect from Hillary or Obama (with no significant dissent from Congress).
As it is, they don't want me anyway... my business partner's brother is a lawyer and municipal judge:)
Hmm. Occurs to me that there's no way you and I could have a trial by a "jury of our peers", since OUR peers are all smart enough to get out of jury duty!;)
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If you don't want people using a tunnel, don't build the freakin' tunnel in the first place ;)
... I'm afraid I'd be one of the perverse :)
But there's a simple solution to the illegal alien thing -- execute 'em. Sounds harsh, but it'd put a stop to 99% of 'em right now. (I'm not entirely joking. I live in SoCal and see the effects of the flood of illegals every day.)
Good story about the little white line
A Canadian friend just sent me three more such tales that you may enjoy:
==========
The CBC ran something last week about border stupidity. What I remember:
1) A ditch that's the border line. This guy's lawn is Canadian, the road behind his house American. After the new regs came along, he was stopped by border guards who questioned him about his 'illegal border crossing device' - a few planks he'd made into a footbridge and put over the ditch so he could walk his dog along the quieter American-side road. They didn't make him remove the bridge, but they forbade him from ever using it.
2) Some small peninsular town on the West Coast that used to belong to Canada before the Parallel came in. Now it's a tiny political island - divided from the rest of the US by water or Canada. And it's a small cut - if the Parallel was down another arcminute or so the peninsula would be entirely Canadian. So the kids go to school in the States, but have to go through Canada to get there. 4 border crossings a day. Average of about a 30 minute delay per cross. Parents complain that if anything happens, it takes them well over an hour to get to their kids. But what can you do? If fire trucks and ambulances get stopped, they're not going to expedite transit for a school bus.
3) Showing the futility of guarding the border, the reporter filmed a segment on some godforsaken patch where the line is a broken fence older than I am. The reporter was weaving over the line eliberately. Because they weren't trying to hide and were visible from a distant road, they were spotted and questioned by border guards. Though I noticed something they didn't mention: They'd never have been seen if they'd shot the segment 200 feet down where the trees start, or if they weren't deliberately taking their time and filming a segment, or if it was foggy and not sunny.
========
I guess it's time to close down the International Peace Park -- which after all was created to symbolize friendship and unity between the U.S. and Canada.
========
(BTW, I followed your sig's advice last month, as the only option that didn't make me hurl.)
Chaka, when the sewers backed up.
Where were those engineers when we really needed them?!
My college physics prof was a Scot. While most of the time he was perfectly understandable, words containing the letter R tended to get mangled. We were all quite baffled as to what "Toc" was, til he finally gave up and wrote it on the blackboard: "Torque". OH!!!!
"...you shouldn't alienate your allies just to protect yourself from the threat of enemies who won't respect your allies' borders"
Perzactly!!
Re Toronto -- So it seems. Everyone I've known from the area has done their utmost to live just about anywhere else. I've heard worse of Montreal, tho, since the Haitian, uh, "imports".
:)
And this makes two folks I know from London Ont.
I want to see them try to stop me at all if I take a rowboat across Rainy Lake. :D
Hmm. Could be we did you a favour. :)
:)
BTW which part of the Northern Wastes are you from? I used to live in Montana, which is almost the same as Alberta
I'm not sure of your point, but...
I used to listen to Bush's speeches. I thought rather more highly of him back-when. I think where things went wrong was when Bush Sr. was no longer there to provide balance.
True, but this DOES alter our relationship, by casting suspicions where none existed before :(
:(
Yet we seem to have a policy of mostly turning a blind eye to the southern border, despite that country's *declaration* that they would send all their unwanted people to us, with the INTENT of overwhelming us and taking over.
Canada might be happy (quite reasonably so!), but if you were to leave the U.S. without a passport, you could find yourself as a man without a country :(
Which I gather is... none??
So why doesn't Congress just ignore him back??
*Someone* has to be knuckling under here, or such earmarked money =could not= be misspent.
An AC says, "Thanks for not holding that whole burning down the Whitehouse thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington) against us."
:)
[grin] Actually, I thought of that... but both countries were still mighty immature; indeed, Canada wasn't yet out of the British nest, thus not entirely responsible for its actions. But we don't hold juvenile humans' acts against them forever; why hold juvenile countries' acts against them either, once they've grown up??
Besides, I vaguely recall that we burned your place down first.
Even if he was, should one idiot change our relationship with our best friend in the world?
... how does an American passport keep him out?
And if the guy was an American citizen (I don't recall one way or the other)
"Just to top it off, one of the biggest domestic issues here is how to deal with guns being smuggled in from the U.S."
...but just wait til NAFTA and the Corridor makes that a reality!! Can't sneak across the Mexican border? So ride a truck north with your buddy, get off in Winnepeg, and trot back across the Parallel at your leisure (being the central Parallel is a couple thousand miles of nothing-much and no major physical barriers).
Let me guess, this started with some new Canadian gun control laws that I don't know about?
=======
Back to the rest of your post... Aside from all the reasons you cite as to why this is rubbish, it can be directly harmful to Americans:
There is at least one place where to get from Point A, Maine, to Point B, Maine, the road passes briefly through Canadian territory (probably because the area is nothing but rocks and there's no other practical route). In the early stages of the new border restrictions, there was a case where an ambulance going from A to B was stopped at the border (where the road kinked into Canada) and held for some time while officialdom figured out what to do. I don't recall whether the person the ambulance was sent for died or not.
"...most Americans appear to believe that every border is the Mexican border."
Actually, no. I can't think of a single person I know who isn't appalled by the stupidity of restricting the U.S./Canadian border. However, Officialdom (which seldom represents the actual Will of the People anymore) is certainly trying to make it APPEAR to be as much of a problem as the Mexican border...
"The security departments aren't trying to protect the United States from Canadians - they're trying to protect the US from people who enter the US through Canada."
... are you saying Canadians are slackers who'll let just anyone pass through their country?
So
And if DHS is trying to protect the U.S. from threats coming across the northern border -- why do *Americans* need passports to visit Canada??
It makes no sense from a security standpoint; it just makes it look like they're Doing Something. Anyone bent on entering the U.S. illegally from Canada can just invest in a rowboat and paddle across Rainy Lake. Or wait til it freezes in winter and walk across. (If you've ever been there, you'll know that trying to close off Rainy Lake would be about as effective as trying to secure Vietnam from Cambodia. Big lake, 10 bazillion islands, most heavily treed and large enough to be habitable, and no clear lines of sight anywhere.)
THIS is what makes it so obvious that all this "Homeland Security" is primarily *against U.S. Citizens*, not against external threats:
Canada is our FRIEND. Canada has not offered us violence, or a flood of illegal aliens, or a torrent of criminals, or anything worse than the occasional pot smuggler or draft-dodger haven. Canada has been our defense partner for decades, and is consistently our best friend in the world. That Canada is sometimes called "the 51st State" is not entirely a joke.
There is absolutely NO reason that Canadian/U.S. border control should be anything but a smile and a wave whether you're entering or leaving either country -- much as it was through all of the previous century.
The current situation, requiring a passport to visit Canada, tells me that it is WE THE PEOPLE who are regarded as Enemies of the State, and that any border surveillance is designed to keep us in, as much as to keep threats out.
Doesn't *anyone* remember the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall??
Well, I think we're at the "agree to disagree" stage economically ... tellya what, if a Dem wins the White House, and things spiral down for small business the way I've seen too many times before, you can fund my bailout. ;)
"...afraid that Bush would simply spend any funds, regardless of whether they were designated for withdrawal or not, then dare them not to supply more"
Um... how much control does Bush really have over where the money is used?? didn't the bill as passed specify what went where? since when can money simply be yanked from one project to another without a legislative pass??
Okay, "good" by reasonable standards of conduct within the context of the surrounding society. Happy now? :)
:)
As to that mad dog, well, sometimes it does help to inform the owner that if they don't shoot it, you will shoot it for them -- ***but then you've got to be willing to follow through***.
We DID follow through with WW2 Germany and Japan, and completely convinced both cultures that they had better never, EVER even *consider* keeping another mad dog, or we'd shoot their mad dog and them along with it. (Tho this has had some unintended consequences, such as repression of even the discussion of anything Nazi in modern Germany. I'm not sure that inverse extremism is progress, and may even eventually lead to another mad dog.)
But we're no longer willing to actually shoot that mad dog. Now we wave a stick and say Nice Doggie and hope it won't bite us, and keep backing away and letting it push us closer to the edge of the cliff, and someday we're going to fall off.
"All it would take is for a few of their preachers to start advocating violent revolution, and you've got yourself a Christian Jihad."
Well, maybe on a very small/localized scale. But as a whole, modern Christianity is middle-aged and fat and comfortable with its place in the world, not exactly the conditions that lead to a widespread jihad.
Well, my anecdotes go right along with the street after street of closed-down small businesses hereabouts... but being down in these trenches does give you a different perspective, as Senator McGovern (I think it was him) discovered when he retired from Congress and TRIED to go into the Hotel business. The very laws HE had helped pass made it literally impossible to start a new small business... he said that if he'd known how hard he was making it for small business, he'd never have supported such legislation.
And numbers can lie in odd ways. Frex, most farmers are worth millions on paper, yet are broke as hell in real life. But they don't show up as any sort of negative number, even when they're barely making it, because they keep on sending goods to market no matter what.
As to Iraq and funding... There's always the troops left in the lurch problem, too -- if your guys are in the field, you've GOT to support them. You can't just yank the funding and say "nyah nyah, try and stop us". But more appropriate would be to fund only withdrawal costs and whatever our guys need when they get back, and to refuse to fund anything else.
As to the notion that we can't just drop the mess in Iraq and walk away... well, maybe that'd be the best solution in the long run, even if uglier in the short run. Trying to be both world policeman and global nanny is sure as hell not working!! Sometimes you've just got to let the brats fight it out for themselves, cuz otherwise the moment your back is turned, they'll revert to fighting with greater zeal than before.
Agreed... Twitter is a smart guy, if only he'd get past his anti-M$ prejudice and off his ubergeek high-horse. Lots of knowledge going to waste there. (And I say that as someone he foe'd a long time ago, because gods forbid that anyone can make a Windoze box stable if HE can't; they must be a M$ shill!)
[goes off, reads your Apple Rant] Well, it's not the topic that got you the bum's rush at the Apple store; it's that you were essentially marketing the competition in someone else's store. No different than if you walked into a Target and expounded to every passing employee that you can buy the very same stuff for less at Walmart, or even get it for free off the curb. Stores exist to sell their own product, not to give away someone else's; that's simple economic fact, and the products' relative merits don't enter into it.
:(
As to your recent spate of -1 mods (none of which are from me, BTW -- I never mod down, only up) -- I was surprised to see so many, so I read a bunch of the posts, and I think it's likely because people have become tired of seeing the same rants over and over, some of which make no sense when viewed against market realities.
Also, there's the fact that you invariably dismiss people as M$ fanboys if they happen to be satisfied, or gods forbid even *happy*, running Windows. People get tired of being dissed over and over when that's your only message, especially when it's so often built around prejudice rather than around knowledge -- as with your repeated insistance that [paraphrase] "all Windoze boxes are botfarms" [/paraphrase] when this is patently not so.
This is sad, because a lot of the time you've got good points to make (in fact I've sometimes modded you up), but these valuable messages are frequently lost amid the noise of your own making.
Of course, having foe'd me long ago because you think I'm a M$ shill, you probably won't see this, let alone read it all.
If you have an IPv6-capable router, will it matter? (Serious question, as I also run mostly antique OSs :)
I can tell you from the perspective of 35+ years as a small-business owner, one who lives or dies by middle-class disposable income, the more Democrat policies are in place, the less of that disposable income there is. (And the early warning is that I stop seeing cash. People pay with checks when they're not feeling so flush.) When oil and taxes go up, disposable income dries up. Maybe the numbers look better on paper, maybe the GNP looks better when everyone's money is pre-allocated, but the reality is that the Carter and Clinton years were painful for small businesses like myself -- and that means just about everyone not in consumer staples or entertainment.
Iraq has put a reverse spin on what should be a fairly flush time for all of us.
But as to ending our involvement in Iraq -- the President doesn't have the final say there; Congress does, and can put their foot down simply by denying the funds. Did the Dems have the spine to do so when they had the opportunity?? hell no... and they could have played it as "bringing our boys home" instead of letting it get played as "failing to support our troops".
I remember Vietnam. Same bullshit, different century. Same economic disaster, thank you JFK and LBJ, following hard on the heels of the pork-barrel legacy of FDR and his New Deal Democrats.
I agree that Iraq is a money sink, and the sooner we can disentangle ourselves from that mess, the better; and McCain isn't likely to push for that (but him fighting with Congress might accomplish it anyway, if only from the perversity between Parties). But it's an existing money sink, not a new and different one added to the pile -- and plenty of new and different money sinks, without removing any already extant, are what IMO we can expect from Hillary or Obama (with no significant dissent from Congress).
I'll have to remember that one :)
:)
;)
As it is, they don't want me anyway... my business partner's brother is a lawyer and municipal judge
Hmm. Occurs to me that there's no way you and I could have a trial by a "jury of our peers", since OUR peers are all smart enough to get out of jury duty!