My view of the world

Something I ran across on the BBC:
The collapse of President Bush’s recent immigration reform was partly fueled by fears that the English language was under threat from Spanish. But as one food stall owner in Philadelphia illustrates, English has some unlikely champions.

Joey Vento, the owner of Geno’s - a Philadelphia cheese steak stall, had been reported to the authorities for having a sticker on the sliding door of his stall, which featured a picture of an eagle and the phrase: “This is America. Please speak English when ordering.”
For some, he had struck a chord, struck a blow for ordinary Americans. For others, this was brazen discrimination.

English is a language that Joey’s Sicilian grandfather never mastered when he came to the United States in the 1920s. “But he tried,” Joey told me, “and he knew that was what it meant to come here.”

Some people, most notably the traditional “bleeding heart liberal” think that this sort of thing should be banned, while those on the far right say that English should be made our national language.
For my part I think that it’s covered by freedom of speech and basic business. He has the right to say it and if his business stays open then more power to him.

I work in an area that I describe as Little Mexico, most of the people are from Mexico, most of them speak little if any English, and a large number are here illegally.
There are businesses in the area that I can’t do business with because my spanish is too poor and I sound like a gringo.
If I go into the shops that come to mind, I know I will be ignored, made fun of and insulted by people who think that I don’t understand enough to know what was said.
Their choriso may be better than what I can find at Food for Less, but my not buying it will not bring the world to an end.
Therefore I don’t do business where I’m not welcome.

My point is simple, if a place like Geno’s puts up a sign or simply refuses to do business with someone who doesn’t speak English they will be accused of discrimination.
But, if a place like Mariana’s refuses me service because I don’t speak spanish, it seems to be their God given right.

This hypocrisy, this feeling that somebody else has more rights than you do, is one of the many reasons that the Latin immigrants are resented so greatly.

This was caught by my spam filters and has little to do with anything, but the site is interesting.
In the related hubs link you find titles like; Cash for Freedom: Deputy Internal Security Minister & Triads and SCOTLANDS NATIONAL BIRD DEBATE.

Hi friends! Please tell me who knows what is Cameroon ?
Cameronmalaysia

The rest of Hubpages is everything from sales bs to personal pictures.

 
On lake Como in Lombardy, Italy, in the small village of Laglio is the villa of George Clooney.
The problem arose when the mayor and others decided to build a car park, floating bridge, and other “improvements” near Clooney’s villa.

They said it wasn’t about him, but the mayor’s current plans include a car park, lifts and a floating walkway, which would lead from the center of town to a platform right in front of Mr Clooney’s villa.

I normally assume that some celebrity is just throwing a hissie-fit when they protest, pretty much, anything. they have a tendency to behave like ill mannered children who don’t understand that they can’t always get what they want when they want it.
However in this case, I agree with the protesters.
The Mayor and his cronies are, to all outward appearances, simply capitalizing on Mr. Clooney’s fame.
Even celebrities should be allowed some privacy.

In the mean time the Mayor is trying to force a project down the throats of the town’s people.
Experience has taught us that this only happens when there’s something in it for the politician or his friends.

I found this on a new blog called Madness Beckons, how I discovered the site I honestly don’t remember. I sometimes wander the net, following links at random, sometimes I go to one of the large blog compilations like Google, either way, my current obsession is blogging by people who do it, just because they can, and not because they have an agenda.
I took this in it’s entirety, with permission.

From http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Easter_Eggs:
Lucien Lachance, the individual who recruits you into the Dark Brotherhood, is a caricature of Lucien Lacroix, a character on the Canadian television series Forever Knight. Chronicling the journeys of an eight-hundred year old vampire, Nick Knight, Forever Knight introduced Lacroix as the creature who brought Nick into his dark family, as Lachance does the player character.
If you need to ask…

BTW:
I’m still pissed that they killed LaChance

Some time back I built a computer for a friend. At the time the hardware chosen was as fast as anything on the market.
Since the machine was designed around one particular game, it’s name became “One Game.”
When the machine was first built, it would run Oblivion totally maxed out.
Now, some of the modules currently available are capable of bringing this machine to it’s knees, unless some of the settings are reset to less than max.

In about 6 months I should be building him another, this time it looks like it will be designed for another game that will be even more graphics intensive.
The timeline on this next project is still up in the air, it is more dependent on the time of the game’s final release and not so dependent on budget.

The machine I currently envision will have dual AMD Athlon FX-74 processors, 8 gig of high-end memory, 2 Western Digital Raptor Hds, and 2 of Nvidia’s fastest gaming cards. This will undoubtedly require some form of liquid cooling, for both the cpus and the video cards, and a power supply of at least 700 to 800 watts and this may well limit what else can be on that house circuit.

At the rate the hardware power requirements are going, for the machine after this, we’ll have to build a small nuclear power station in his backyard.

I suspect that this whole project will change once the primary game is released, the final specs are known, performance tests have been run, and a budget is set.
As is, the project should run a bit over $4k and be the fastest game machine available, but it will be aimed at one or perhaps two games and tweaked accordingly.
The trouble with any specialty machine is that it will do one thing better than anything else in it’s class, but it will not be the top performer in all other applications.
Still, given the projected hardware selection, it won’t be a slow, no matter what is thrown at it.

Any hardware selection will be based on the abilities of the game to utilize the features. If the game or games in question are unable to take advantage of multiple cpus or sli then the extra expense would be wasted and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Choosing all the right parts, and working out the bugs, was the fun part of the last project.
It took less than 48hrs to get it patched, stable and ready for it’s maiden run.

I foresee many headaches with this new design, because a great deal of the project will be cutting edge, and those things never work without a lot of tweaking, research, lost sleep, head pounding, frustration, coffee, and Excedrin.
I would wager it will take at least 3, probably 5, days to get everything patched and working well enough to do the first install of the game. –Yes, I said first install.
I’m looking forward to it.

Authorities have charged NFL football player Adam “Pacman” Jones with two felonies for a melee that erupted before a triple shooting at Minxx strip club.
The shooting injured three people, leaving one man paralyzed.
Police said they have not been able to identify a shooter in the incident, but they do put Jones walking away from the club with a man wearing a baggy black T-shirt and blue jeans. Police said that minutes later, a similarly dressed man is seen standing next to a palm tree firing five or six shots toward people at the front of the club.
Two other persons in Jones’ entourage, 24-year-old Sadia Morrison and 37-year-old Robert “Big Rob” Reid, also face criminal charges in relation to the Feb. 19 shootings. Morrison is charged with one count each of felony assault with a deadly weapon, felony battery with a deadly weapon, felony coercion, burglary and felony coercion with use of a deadly weapon.

Jones, a Tennessee Titans cornerback who was recently slapped with a one-year suspension by the NFL and is being sought for questioning about gunfire that erupted this weekend outside a strip club in Atlanta.
Law enforcers in Atlanta have said they do not believe Jones played any role in the incident, but was at the strip club and may know the persons responsible for the gunfire. No one was injured during the incident.

Apparently Jones had about $80k in a bag that was stolen while he was in the club, he seems to have blamed one of the dancers, and that’s what set him off.

In an earlier interview he club owners had said that the shooter had arrived and then left with Pacman.
One of the local news reports said that Jones and someone else had talked about shooting club employees in retaliation.

The NBA playoffs attracted innumerable bangers, but it’s strange how little of the resultant crime made the news.
Admittedly most of it were things like people doing a dine and dash, petty larceny, and drug deals, but the local press treated all of it just like they treat a mugging in a hotel parking lot, or room burglary’s, if it doesn’t involve shots being fired or someone being stabbed, it doesn’t make the papers.
They say it would be bad for our image and might cause some tourist to stay home, instead of coming to Vegas and losing all their money.

According to PCWorld:
A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent located in Salt Lake City ordered six DVDs from Movies by Mail in March 2007. Three of the movies were obscene by local Utah standards, the FBI alleged.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah will issue a summons to Sami R. Harb and Michael Harb, whose business is based in Cleveland, Ohio, the DOJ said in a press release. The Harbs, whose relationship with one another was not stated in DOJ information, are scheduled to appear in court June 29.

The impression I got from the article was that the DOJ was more concerned with the fact that two of the women were dressed to look underage than anything else.

The DOJ has “stepped up the prosecution of obscenity cases, as evidence increases of the harm of obscenity to American children and families,” U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman of Utah said in a statement. “As obscene materials continue to proliferate, they are becoming more accessible for the young and the innocent among us. At the same time they are becoming more extreme and degrading in content and present a growing threat to the well being of American families and our society as a whole.”

Is it just me? or is our government sounding just a little more like the fanatics in the middle east each day.
There they make radical, sweeping reforms, here they take small bites, but the end result will inevitably be the same.

The powers that be will never understand that you have to teach morality, you can’t legislate it.

According to an article in the Washington Post:
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
Well, how ’bout that, they finally noticed.

The primary point of abuse appears to be the use of NSLs (national Security Letters).
These give agencies like the bureau carte blanc when it comes to our data, down to, and including, what books we check out of the library.
These letters are so secret that nobody can even tell you they received one or that someone is looking at your personal records.

Back in January Old Dude blogged about this problem and cited this quote:
“Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau’s new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.”
I believe his source was the NYT

This audit only covered about 10% of their national security investigations since 2002.
The article also went on to mention exigent circumstances letters, which are meant to be used only in dire emergencies, like kidnapping and ticking bomb situations. Apparently the bureau was a might lax there as well.
Of course FBI officials said the audit found no evidence to date that any agent knowingly or willingly violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged such violations.
Yeppers, they’re all saint, each and every one of them.

If you find yourself believing the FBI’s conclusion, ask yourself this question: What group of cops could resist such a powerful weapon?

To quote Old Dude:
J. Edgar Hoover would be so proud.

These are from a book titled Disorder in the American Courts and is available at Amazon.com.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law!

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy on him!

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

 
On his visit to Albania, President Bush was given a hero’s welcome.
Albania is a staunch ally in America’s “war on terror” and Mr Bush met Albanian soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush reiterated his support for the UN’s plan for Kosovo’s independence, adding it was time to “get moving” despite opposition from Russia.
You’ll never guess what Putin’s position is on this subject.

The President brought up the subject of Kosovo because a large portion of the population are ethnic Albanians.
According to Bush:
“The question is whether there’s going to be endless dialogue on a subject that we’ve already made up our mind on,” he said, after meeting with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha. (I just noticed the phrase “our mind,” –first person singular– )
“We need to get moving and the end result is independence,” he added.

I love the use of the royal “We,” because President Putin hasn’t agreed to anything, except in the most general of terms.

Albania backs the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has tripled its troop numbers in Afghanistan to 140, and has about 120 troops in Iraq.

Every day it feels more and more like the bad old days. It looks like the cold war was merely on vacation.

I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but, if we’re not getting our butts kicked, why are big armies like the Brits pulling out, while we see Bush standing tall in countries that are smaller than my living room, and how many billions did fewer than 300 troops cost us.