Things That Just Piss Me Off

In Texas the law says you can protect your property and your neighbor’s property from criminals. Gun control people want us to believe this is a bad law and that we should not be allowed to defend our property and our family.

Media coverage by liberal newspapers like the NYTimes slant the story to suit their agenda. rather than reporting the news, they choose to write it in a way that is intended to make you feel sorry for the criminals who were breaking into the house.

Questions and Doubts in a Texas Shooting Case
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Even before the police called the night of Nov. 14, Stephanie Storey said, she knew that her fiancé of two days, Miguel Antonio DeJesus, was dead.

She knew it, Ms. Storey said, because she had not been able to reach him all day, and because she was watching the news at 9 o’clock when she saw his body.

It was lying on a front lawn decorated for Christmas in a middle-class subdivision in this Houston suburb ringed by refineries, not far from the body of his sometime construction partner and childhood friend from Cali, Colombia, Diego Ortiz.

Yes, just two poor childhood friends lying on a lawn.

Both men, illegal immigrants, one with a prison record, had been riddled with shotgun pellets fired by a retired computer manager, Joe Horn.

Disregarding the operator’s pleas to stay inside, (Horn) confronted the fleeing pair in his front yard and, saying “Move, you’re dead,” fired three blasts of 00 buckshot from his 12-gauge, striking them in their backs. Both ran short distances before collapsing and dying, leaving behind a tire iron used to break open a window, a lock-punch and a pillowcase holding jewelry and about $2,000 cash from the neighbors, a Vietnamese family that ran a local dry-cleaners.

Just two childhood friends hanging out.

“I knew it was getting hard for them,” said Ms. Storey, 39, a medical assistant from Katy, west of Houston. But she said she doubted that Mr. DeJesus, an avid salsa dancer who had courted her on and off for seven years and wore paint-splattered clothes to job hunts outside the Home Depot, had made a career of theft. But she said she knew he had another identity and false Puerto Rican papers; his real name was Hernando Riascos Torres.

Hard to doubt it when that tire iron, jewelry, and money were there. Let’s just ignore the whole illegal immigrant with a prison record and false papers thing. These were stand-up guys.

Either way, Ms. Storey said, they did not deserve to die. “We saw they were doing the crime; we can’t dispute that,” she said. “I’m not saying they were saints, but I’m sure they’d prefer to be behind bars than dead.”

This goes to having more concern what the criminals would prefer instead of the right to protect ourselves from criminals. This whole soft on the criminals thing carries over into the courtroom and the entire justice system.

There is a move against the death penalty even in extreme cases right now. Opponents of the death penalty claim it is not a deterrant against violent crime. It is a deterrant, but how do you measure how many people DID NOT murder anyone because they were afraid of the death penalty?

How many prosecutors have been able to use the death penalty to get someone to give them information by offering to not seek the death penalty in return for information they need to solve more serious cases and arrest more murderers?

This is directly related to the attacks on laws that are on the books that allow citizens to defend themselves, their families, and their property. The right to keep and bear arms is in the constitution and those who oppose that right are against the constitution, plain and simple.

I personally think Joe Horn could have used more restraint in this case. The police arrived just as he was firing his gun. In this case the criminals would have likely been caught without his action.

But to use this case to try and convince people that laws that allow us to protect ourselves should be appealed is ridiculous. If you are a criminal and in the process of committing a crime and you get shot, I find it very hard to feel sorry for you.

Hillary is running around the country trying to save her campaign and trying to appeal to voters as someone who will help in the area of education.

Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she would “end” the No Child Left Behind Act because it was “just not working.”

She voted for the no child left behind act but now she is getting cheered for coming out against it? Anyone who is thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton should look at how she voted on these issues, not what she says while trying to salvage her campaign.

Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush’s signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser — all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to “scrap” the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a “fundamental” overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. “You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing it,” he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.

I think almost everyone with children in school agrees that no child left behind should be left behind. Another failure of the Bush Administration.

“There’s a grass-roots backlash against this law,” said Tad Devine, a strategist who worked for the past two Democratic presidential nominees. “And attacking it is a convenient way to communicate that you’re attacking President Bush.”

Yes, but supporting it and then backtracking on it shows you do not have a real position on education at all. Hillary Clinton voted for a lot of things that Bush wanted that she now is against as she tries to convince voters that she will change things. Her voting record does not support her verbal claims.

I know everyone is concerned about security and we want the FBI to have the tools they need to fight terrorism but we still have to be careful that they do not go to far. Although privacy is not guaranteed specifically in the Constitution, it is implied, like is the part about search and seizure.

“Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.”

I agree with the FBI having the ability to use biometrics. I’m reluctant, but biometrics can really help them catch criminals and identify terrorists. However, the retention of fingerprints so they can notify employers if a person has a brush with the law is going overboard.

As an employer, I do like to know who is working for me. If I employed a terrorist by mistake, I would definitely want to know that. But I do not believe that I have the right to know if one of my employees was questioned about a crime let’s say. That would be a brush with the law. Should I have the right to know that? I don’t think so. If they are convicted of a crime, yes, I should know that. But a conviction notwithstanding, this is an invasion of privacy.

“It’s going to be an essential component of tracking,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s enabling the Always On Surveillance Society.”

Are we willing to accept Big Brother to feel a little safer?

Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a crime scene and run them against the expanded database. Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information worldwide.

This sounds good. Again, I just think we should be very careful about the amount of surveillance we allow on US citizens.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a “rap-back” service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees’ fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

That is the part I take exception to. being arrested does not equal conviction. We are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. This would and likely will lead to someone being falsely accused of a crime and losing their job as a result. Losing your job means you likely won’t be able to afford an attorney and will have to settle for a public defender. So the disparity of justice for the rich and for the poor would be even wider.

The FBI intends to make both criminal and civilian data available to authorized users, officials said.

It’s that civilian data being available that bothers me. The biometrics are not very accurate yet and they are proceeding anyway. False positives on facial or Iris recognition would lead to the detainment of innocent people by police.

In addition to that, there are many people who can spoof or fake a lot of things. Bar codes have been spoofed. Credit Card Magnetic Strips have been counterfeited.

The information, such as your Iris or Face, or even your earlobe are all biometrics and stored digitally.

If someone spoofs your credit card, you can get a new credit card. If someone digitally spoofs your Iris digitally and commits a crime, what happens then? Let’s say you are found innocent. You still can’t just be issued a new eyeball.

We should be very careful in giving more and more power to our government to use surveillance on US Citizens and we should move slowly in that area to be sure that flaws and false positives are at a minimum before it can be used on US Citizens.

Using it against a known terrorist database, yes, move on it right away. Just take it slow when using it on US Citizens. That’s my opinion anyway.

I totally agree that bloggers should have the right to be anonymous. Some countries would persecute bloggers otherwise. Whistleblowers would fear for their jobs if they could not be anonymous. I think some bloggers lose credibility by being anonymous and some use this to attack people for no reason or use it to stalk and harass people. But overall the reasons to allow bloggers to remain anonymous outweight the pitfalls. This judge obviously agrees.

Judge: Blogger identity is safe

MANALAPAN — The undisclosed identity of an Internet blogger whose comments targeted local officials will remain a mystery for now, a state Superior Court judge ruled Friday.

Judge Terence P. Flynn in Freehold ruled to quash a subpoena filed by Manalapan Township against Google, seeking the name and account information of the author of the blog ? daTruthSquad.blogspot.com ? calling the request “an unjust infringement on the blogger’s First Amendment rights.”

The subpoena is part of an ongoing lawsuit filed in June against Stuart Moskovitz, a former township attorney and mayor. The township contends Moskovitz botched negotiations for a recreational land purchase in 2005.

The record industry and the music industry must be reeling since this story came out. They work so hard to sue 13-year-olds for downloading music that they missed getting this one.

In Trade Ruling, Antigua Wins a Right to Piracy
By JAMES KANTER and GARY RIVLIN

In an unusual ruling on Friday at the World Trade Organization, the Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States — an award worth up to $21 million — as part of a dispute between the countries over online gambling.

Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another — the United States — by allowing it to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products.

A W.T.O. panel first ruled against the United States in 2004, and its appellate body upheld that decision a year later. In April 2005, the trade body gave the United States a year to comply with its ruling.

That deadline passed with little more than a statement from Washington that it had decided it was in compliance.

More of we are America, so we must be right. This is the GWBush philosophy. We have legal gambling in 48 states, yet want to make it illegal to gamble online. It’s not a morals issue where bush thinks gambling is wrong or anything. It’s a move to make sure that only US Gambling Enterprises can make money from gambling.

PartyPoker.com is located in another country. They illegally offered US citizens a way to gamble. Warrants were even issued for the owners. Yet you can buy stock in there company on the New York stock exchange.

Does this mean that even though cocaine is illegal, that if the cartels became a corporation it would be ok to buy stock in the cocaine importing business?

People buy stock in AT&T and general Motors and ignore the fact they are or at least were the two biggest porn distributors in the US. GM owns or owned Direct TV and AT&T pipes porn into hotel room across the US through it’s cable systems. It’s a highly profitable part of their business.

I bet the stockholders don’t run around telling people at the country club how much they made in dicidends from porn.

It’s hypocracy to make gambling online illegal while gambling is legal in 48 states. It’s bigger hypocracy to say a corporation is acting illegally and let it sell stock on the stock exchange. So people in the US can’t gamble in their online casinos but they can gamble on their stock?

I am happy that the movie industry and the record companies took the hit though. Couldn’t think of a better recipient of this Christmas cheer.

You know the issue of illegal immigration is a mess when organizations that represent businesses in the US oppose making the hiring of illegal iimigrants illegal.

If you knowingly hired someone who is wanted for a crime, then you are guilty of harboring a fugitive and possibly aiding and abetting a criminal.

If you knowingly hire an illegal iimigrant, it’s the same thing. Don’t give me the bs about whether you think it should be illegal or not to cross the border illegally. The fact is that it is illegal and therefore the term illegal immigrant.

If an employer hire them and knows they are illegal, they are breaking the law. But let’s not be too ough on them right? After all this whole immigration thing is politically risky. We don’t want to be thought of as racist just because we believe in the laws of this country.

In Mexico you go to prison for being an illegal immigrant. In the US you only get deported. In Mexico, if a business hires illegal immigrants you can bet on them being shut down permanently.

From the NYTimes
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

A new Arizona law considered among the nation’s toughest against employers who hire illegal immigrants will go into effect on Jan. 1 after federal judges on Friday refused to block it.

The law calls for suspending the license of an employer found to have knowingly hired an illegal worker, and revocation for a second offense.

Both a United States district judge in Phoenix and a federal appeals court in San Francisco, ruling on separate lawsuits by business and civil rights groups, declined to stand in the way.

First of all it’s a shame that this is the toughest law in the US for hiring illegal immigrants. Secondly, business organizations fighting against it are not doing so to protect illegal immigrants from persecution, they are doing it so they don’t have to pay a decent living wage to people who work for them.

As for the civil rights groups, using fear of lawsuits to undermine upholding US law is wrong. If the immigrants applied for citizenship and were denied employement unfairly, then they need protection.

The laws that protect US citizens from unfairness are in place. it is part of the benefit of becoming a US citizen. If you want these protections, then apply for US citizenship. That simple.

If you choose to do it the illegal way instead, then you don’t get those protections. Why is that such a difficult concept?

This will piss off all the mac users out there. Mac users are like Bush supporters. No m,atter what the facts show they will still support it no matter what.

You see all the commercials on tv. mac is more reliable. Mac is more productive. Mac is more secure. Buy this Mac. Are you hypnotized yet?

Well here are some facts for the Mac Users.

Back in April of this year, hackers took over a fully patched Macbook and won $10,000 plus the Macbook they hacked.

Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X vulnerability stats for 2007

XP Vista XP + Vista Mac OS X
Total extremely critical 3 1 4 0
Total highly critical 19 12 23 234
Total moderately critical 2 1 3 2
Total less critical 3 1 4 7
Total flaws 34 20 44 243
Average flaws per month 2.83 1.67 3.67 20.25

So this shows that Apple had more than 5 times the number of flaws per month than Windows XP and Vista in 2007, and most of these flaws are serious.

But don’t let facts get in your way. Keep telling people that Macs are better.

Well, finally there is something the spammers are doing that might reduce the number of peolple responding to spam. Right now, if people stopped clicking links in spam emails, the profitablity of spam would go down and along with it the number of spam emails we would receive.

if no one was responding, they would not be making any money and would not continue to send out spam. So you. You know who you are. Stop responding to unsolicited email. You are clogging up the Internet and our email because you are dumb enough to keep clicking on those emails.

If you are not smart enough to use email, then at least set up an email account at gmail so most of it can be filtered for you.

Despite sophistication in ISP e-mail delivery policies and developments by malware services firms, this past year saw spam hit an all time high. According to spam detection services firm Symantec, which monitors more than 450 million inboxes worldwide, spam grew to more than 70% of overall e-mail traffic in 2007.

“There is a lot more money to be made on spam attacks, and spammers are getting more sophisticated,” he said. “Pump-and-dump stock scams — spam that encourages recipients to buy inflated penny stocks at cheap rates, after which spammers sell the stock to profit and then drop the value of the stock — are very profitable.”

As e-mail marketers themselves are embracing new technologies, so are criminals. According to malware detection firm IronPost, spam has become less focused on selling products and more focused on growing spam networks.

If you have ever clicked a link in a spam email, you may now have your computer being used as part of a spam network.

“Earlier versions of spam attacks were primarily selling some type of product such as pharmaceuticals or low interest mortgages,” said Jon Orbeton, strategic product marketing manager at IronPort. “Today’s spam includes an increasing amount of links that point to Web sites distributing malware. This malware is often designed to further extend the size and scale of the bot network that originated the spam in the first place.”

Botnet spam messages are sent out from a host computer, or zombie. These computers can host these botnets for months before being triggered to send spam, usually millions of messages in a very short period of time. This makes them difficult to track and shut down.

So it is not just attachments that you have to avoid anymore. A simple link in a spam email can send you to a website where a virus or malware awaits you. Please stop responding to spam email. get a gmail account, spam arrest or something. Ignore emails you did not sign up for and emails that are not even addressed to you in the first place.

I don’t agree with doing something illegal, then lobbying to pass a law that retroactively grants immunity for that illegal activity.

Illegal means against the law. It means you broke the law. A promise that later we’ll pass a law granting you immunity does not mean you did not break the law. And when there is no guarantee that you will get that immunity it makes it a very poor decision to have broken the law in the first place.

Democrats Delay a Vote on Immunity for Wiretaps
By ERIC LICHTBLAU of the NYTimes

In a setback for the White House, Senate Democrats on Monday put off until at least next month any decision on whether to give legal protection to the phone carriers that helped with the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

The Bush administration had pushed for immediate passage of legislation to grant immunity to the phone companies as part of a broader expansion of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authorities. But that will not happen now.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and presidential candidate, spent much of the day attacking the idea of giving immunity to the phone companies, and he took credit for the delay.

“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy,” Mr. Dodd said in a statement.

I disagree that this sends that message. If it does not get passed at all, then it will send a message. Just delaying it for awhile, then giving in as democrats in congress, including hillary clinton, have been doing on everything else does not send a message.

So far the democrats who are in congress have been no more than a fly in the ointment for president bush. They delay things then give in. They send bills that get vetoed then back off the next time. They threaten and do nothing.

Congress controls the purse strings. They have the power to go up against the president, but this congress has completely failed to do so.

The more I get involved in political discussions on the web, the more I realize that the things that people complain about are not all the fault of the politicians.

The fault lies with people. Especially people who follow their party line no matter what. This is for republicans and democrats both.

So many people have fallen into the trap of it’s us against them so much that even when they really do not agree with something their party ios doing, they support it anyway.

People say, “I am a republican”, or “I am a democrat”, and then treat it like a game where they are on a team and want to win no matter what.

The big loser in that game is this country. People need to start thinking for themselves about each and every issue. People need to evaluate candidates based on how that candidate stacks up against others regardless of which party they declare themselves a member of.

Neither party is always right or always wrong, yet any political discussion will show you that there are people who comment in support of their party no matter what the topic is.

You really need to ask yourself if you are doing this. You need to ask yourself if you really personally agree with everything your party representatives are doing and saying.

Because if you are agreeing with your party 100% of the time, then you are not a free-thinking individual. You are a party robot. The politicians love their party robots. They know these people will support them because they are on the same “team” in the political “game”.

It shouldn’t be a game. There are serious matters being decided every day. Neither party has all the answers and to believe that one party or the other does have all the answers is just naive.

The media makes it worse. By calling everything a “race” for office, people begin to think of it as a game or a competition and they want to be on the winning side.

Take the election where Ross Perot ran for office. It doesn’t matter whether or not you liked Ross Perot, but the media told everyone constantly that he had no chance to win.

Many people I have asked about that election told me, “I would have voted for perot but I didn’t think he had a chance and I didn’t want to waste my vote.”

That has got to be the worst reason in the world not to vote for someone. You should vote for who you think will serve this country the best, period. Your vote is a statement as to who you think will do the best job representing you in office.

If you make that statement, your vote is not wasted. You have done your patriotic duty by voting and by voting what you truly believe rather than just wanting to be on the winning side or just wanting the candidate from your “team” top win.

It’s not a game. Each time an election is held, you are given a chance to state your individual opinion. If you vote by party line all the time just to make sure your “team” wins, then thats when you are wasting your vote and wasting the opportunity to state your honest opinion.

It doesn’t matter if the person you think would do the best job has a “chance” of winning or not. It matters that you vote your honest opinion.

Don’t believe the media when they tell you someone does not have a chance. They don’t know who does or who does not have a chance.

They gave huckabee no chance of winning in Iowa, yet he might win now. They gave obama no chance, now hillary is fighting for her life in iowa. They gave ross perot no chance yet he did get 20% of the popular vote even with the media doing their best to convince everyone not to vote for him because he had no chance.

Polls can be swayed to the right or to the left according to how they ask the questions. The media can influence an election by making the poll numbers seem to favor a particular candidate because they know people want to be on the winning side and don’t want to “waste” their vote on someone who doesn’t have a chance.

Other people who pay for polls to be done can also influence elections this way. So if you are looking at polls and they have anything at all to do with how you might vote, you are falling into the trap of letting others influence your vote.

The bottom line is that whether you are a republican or a democrat, you need to think for yourself and quit worrying that you might not be on the winning side. If everyone did that instead of taking one side or the other all the time no matter what, we might actually get some decent people elected.

Quit drinking the Kool-Aid no matter which “team” is serving it.