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Potpourri
On Facebook I ran into a rerun of the idea that it is strange that liberals insist on having state ID to own weapons but oppose requiring ID to vote. Many libertarians (with or without quotation marks) and conservatives desire the opposite. I myself have suggested that the same ID be required for both. It dawns on me that this would make fees for ID cards, including licenses to carry or even just own guns, a poll tax, which is forbidden in Federal elections.
While I want a more generous plan to admit immigrants than most I also favor strict vetting to keep out people who are part of gangs, smuggling drugs, been previously deported and are trying to sneak back in. One requirement I think it is only common sense to insist on is requiring that immigrants/asylum seekers be required to state upon entry whether they wish to permanently immigrate or are "birds of passage" come to make their fortune and return home (Like Andrew Carnegie did, for example.). BoP's should be required to renew their status every 19 months or so.
Those who are coming to stay hopefully will become Americanized. I can not imagine why they would come here without intending for this to happen to a certain degree. However, I have noticed that the left is in a rush to erase American History and culture. How can immigrants be Americanized then? Especially if the part that is erased is the part led to the Bill of Rights?
A.X. Perez
[email protected]
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Re: Where do we go from here by L. Neil Smith.
Neil & Ken
The idea that space is the “impossible frontier” is hogwash. I read that same article or one similar a while back and he essentially says it’s too expensive, too difficult and that human physiology is incompatible with long term survival in space. And that was just for getting off Earth and getting around and living in our own solar system.
Anyone who is skeptical of the prospect of space colonization should watch a few Isaac Arthur videos on YouTube—namely the ones pertaining to O’Neill cylinders &rotating habitats and some of the ones about K-2 civilizations like the Dyson Sphere—more appropriately reframed as a Dyson Swarm because of the greater likelihood that such a thing will evolve as a swarm of free floating rotating habitats—maybe eventually linked together by interconnecting tethers as the human population expands into the solar system over time. Those two concepts emerged about the same time—in the late 60s and early 70s in the post Apollo era of disenchantment with space exploration ironically.
Yet that Vision remains a clear roadmap for where to go from here. It may have been that government has no vision or in the case of power hungry elites not wanting the people they are trying to keep under control going off somewhere else and setting up a new society in completion with or becoming a future enemy power. Isaac Arthur has even touched on this a little in some of his videos on interstellar colonization.
One rather amusing phenomenon that I’ve noticed over the years and Mr Arthur has also given treatment to : is this common attitude of skepticism—even in SF fandom; that people are just in disbelief at the notion of living in something like an O’Neill cylinder or a 5 decade trip to Alpha Centauri at 10% the speed of light—which is possible using just lithium deuteride bomblets imploded by lasers. Yet get irate if you tell them that zipping around in the Millennium Falcon or the USS Enterprise at FTL velocities may not be in the cards.
Then again never say never.
However—even if we can’t get to the stars except by the slow boat approach (see Isaac Arthur’s “Ark of a Million Years” episode) we can still have a very rich future history within our own solar system as a K-2 aka Kardashev level 2 civilization that will have the same population as your run of the mill galactic empire or federation hallmark of many a SF novel or TV series with the O’Neills or whatever style of habitat functioning as nations or city states. Hopefully population will be more spread out because you have less social problems when everyone has an abundance of living space and privacy as opposed to densely packed cities. Which is why certain people are so eager to invite the teeming masses of the Third World into western nations. Essentially they want to pack people together (themselves not included because they have no intent on living in the world they proscribe for everyone else—ie gated communities, private schools for their own children and the Obama Care exemption for Congress) and the objective is to simply smother Freedom with lots of warm bodies crowded together stepping on each other’s toes like the overpopulated Earth in Anne McCaffrey’s “Decision at Doona” and many other dystopian Science fiction stories. The obvious solution is to spread our rather than allow ourselves to be piled on top of each other like the cities in Europe—so warned Thomas Jefferson two centuries ago. Stuff like space colonization and affordable energy terrify them so much. Funny one of them equated cheap energy with giving an idiot child a machine gun! No wonder. A person who can go wherever they want and meet all their personal needs for survival,comfort and happiness is equally hard to control.
And poor Crazy Lady Cortez and company won’t get their precious Green New Deal rationing and command economy that they see as their eternal lease on power over the whole of humanity—the boot stamping on the human face forever.
Jeff Fullerton
[email protected]
PS: Oh - and a Bussard Ram might not work for its intended purpose but it can still function as an electrostatic brake or parachute to slow the ship and save the amount of fuel you would have to take to slow down at the destination and the mass penalty of having to accelerate that fuel along with your ship to get up to cruising speed.
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Border News
This is the Joe Friday Version:
On Saturday 3 August 2019 at approximately 1030 Hours a POS (there are limits to my objectivity) from Allan, Texas armed with AKS type rifle entered the Wal Mart at Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, Texas and began shooting the customers there. A 911 call was received at 1039 hours reporting the attack and police arrived at 1045 hours. The suspect was persuaded to surrender unharmed. He killed 20 people and wounded 26, some of whom may still die. A putridly anti immigrant, anti-latino, cultural purity bigoted manifesto (Again, limits to my objectivity)is attributed to this POS as his rationale for his action.
Not Joe Friday Background:
School is starting next week in the El Paso Independent School District, has already started in the Socorro ISD, and will start on the 26th in the Ysleta ISD. There were a lot of women and little kids shopping for school clothes and supplies in that store on 3 August. The neighboring mall is a gun free zone, and to be honest a lot of El Pasoans are not in the habit of going healed. We are a very safe city.More people were killed by POS than are murdered most years in El Paso.
fuck Joue Friday conclusion:
El Pasoans are a pretty Kumbaya bunch. We're going to have to be a pretty Kumbaya bunch that packs heat in a very safe city until racists from other parts of the country decide that it isn't smart to bring their bullshit here.
A.X. Perez
[email protected]
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