swordfish

Ahhh - Dinosaur Farts.......Now it makes sense......

Then explain to SF ......PLEASE.......How did mankind or fossil fuels melt the glaciers years ago that formed the Great Lakes and uncovered Canada?

Yet, SF has been told (many times on the GID that SCIENCE backs "man-made" climate change. Natural Climate change is real, but SF is not convinced mankind is the problem. Nature is. (If we can call nature a problem) Again - until I can be convinced that mankind's effect on the Earth can melt the glaciers that once formed the Great Lakes, and that was a bad thing -- I will remain a "climate change denier"

Wholesale recycling makes sense, but individual recycling appears to cost more than it's worth. Found it interesting when at lunch I was watching the trash truck emptying the recycle bins in the recycle area at the park. He was putting all the bins (the ones we have to separate the plastic, cardboard, paper, etc. into each container and for goodness sake - don't mix them) into the same container. I was stunned. We have to take care to keep the items separate, yet he was putting them into the same truck before heading over to the processing plant. Which led to my question - Why am I separating this stuff if you aren't?

So you are saying that you authored the post I referred to using the data picked from some of these posts? I mean, if so - nice job writing it...... (From the first VOX article) - Border Patrol agents aren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families who travel through Mexico by bus and then turn themselves in at the border. This has arguably contributed to the deaths of multiple children in Border Patrol custody in recent months, and spurred Customs and Border Protection to expand medical care. There are strict limits on how long immigrant children and families can be held in immigration custody; in practice, officials release most families pending an immigration hearing. Asylum seekers can’t be deported without a screening interview, and those who pass (by meeting a deliberately generous standard) are often eligible for release from detention while their cases are resolved. Some of those migrants, either intentionally or accidentally, do not complete the asylum process or lose their cases, and live in the US as unauthorized immigrants. For many Trump officials, this is the heart of the crisis. Officials have spent the last year working on regulations and pushing Congress to expand family detention and reduce asylum protections. Trump critics continue to insist that migration isn’t at crisis levels. To them, the more urgent issue is the administration’s treatment of families, children, and asylum seekers. They are urging the administration to allow more asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry legally. They are calling attention to the conditions in which migrants are being held in custody. Asylum seekers cannot be barred from entry. The question is whether they should be treated as vulnerable migrants who the US is obligated to treat with kindness, or as deportable migrants until (if at all) they win legal status. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increase.html Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly double what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States. More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February, an 11-year high and a strong sign that stepped-up prosecutions, new controls on asylum and harsher detention policies have not reversed what remains a powerful lure for thousands of families fleeing violence and poverty. “The system is well beyond capacity, and remains at the breaking point,” Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters in announcing the new data on Tuesday. The nation’s top border enforcement officer painted a picture of processing centers filled to capacity, border agents struggling to meet medical needs and thousands of exhausted members of migrant families crammed into a detention system that was not built to house them — all while newcomers continue to arrive, sometimes by the busload, at the rate of 2,200 a day. “This is clearly both a border security and a humanitarian crisis,” Mr. McAleenan said. President Trump has used the escalating numbers to justify his plan to build an expanded wall along the 1,900-mile border with Mexico. But a wall would do little to slow migration, most immigration analysts say. While the exact numbers are not known, many of those apprehended along the southern border, including the thousands who present themselves at legal ports of entry, surrender voluntarily to Border Patrol agents and eventually submit legal asylum claims. The main problem is not one of uncontrolled masses scaling the fences, but a humanitarian challenge created as thousands of migrant families surge into remote areas where the administration has so far failed to devote sufficient resources to care for them, as is required under the law. The latest numbers stung an administration that has over the past two years introduced a rash of aggressive policies intended to deter migrants from journeying to the United States, including separating families, limiting entries at official ports and requiring some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico through the duration of their immigration cases. More than 50,000 adults are currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, the highest number ever. Arrests along the southern border have increased 97 percent since last year, the Border Patrol said, with a 434 percent increase in the El Paso sector, which covers the state of New Mexico and the two westernmost counties of Texas. Families, mainly from Central America, continue to arrive in ever-larger groups in remote parts of the southwest. At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before. Understanding what is happening on the border is difficult because, while the numbers are currently higher than they have been in several years, they are nowhere near the historic levels of migration seen across the southwest border. Arrests for illegally crossing the border reached up to 1.64 million in 2000, under President Clinton. In the 2018 fiscal year, they reached 396,579. For the first five months of the current fiscal year, 268,044 have been apprehended. The difference is that the nature of immigration has changed, and the demographics of those arriving now are proving more taxing for border officials to accommodate. Most of those entering the country in earlier years were single men, most of them from Mexico, coming to look for work. If they were arrested, they could quickly be deported. Now, the majority of border crossers are not single men but families — fathers from Honduras with adolescent boys they are pulling away from gang violence, mothers with toddlers from Guatemala whose farms have been lost to drought. While they may not have a good case to remain in the United States permanently, it is not so easy to speedily deport them if they arrive with children and claim protection under the asylum laws. Families with children can be held in detention for no longer than 20 days, under a much-debated court ruling, and since there are a limited number of detention centers certified to hold families, the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all. Finally, detaining families even for the first few days after their arrival in the United States, while they are undergoing initial processing, is also a challenging job. Often arriving exhausted, dehydrated, and some of them requiring urgent medical care, the families need food, diapers, infant formula and space to play. They can often spend days inside cramped concrete cells that were built to house the previous generation of border crossers — young, single men who would likely be there only a few hours. As part of the announcements on Tuesday, Mr. McAleenan also said the agency is making sweeping changes to procedures for guaranteeing adequate medical care for migrants — an overhaul brought on by the deaths of two migrant children in the agency’s custody in December. The measures, which include comprehensive health screenings for all migrant children and a new processing center in El Paso that would help provide better shelter and medical care for migrant families, are an attempt to fix years of health care inadequacies that have left many at risk. The agency will also expand medical contracts to place health care practitioners — largely registered nurses and nurse practitioners — in “high-risk” and high-traffic locations along the border. It will also dedicate more money for translation services to meet increasing demand from Central Americans, many of whom speak indigenous languages and dialects and may not be able to communicate their needs in English or Spanish. “These solutions are temporary and this situation is not sustainable,” Mr. McAleenan said. Mr. McAleenan said the authorities believe that the large numbers of families are coming because smugglers have effectively communicated across Central America that adults who travel with children will be allowed to enter and stay in the United States. Brian Hastings, the agency’s chief of law enforcement operations, said that since April 2018, border agents had detected nearly 2,400 “false families,” including cases in which migrants had falsely claimed to be related when they were not, or untruthfully claimed to be younger than 18. The throngs of new families are also affecting communities on the American side of the border. In El Paso, a volunteer network that temporarily houses the migrants after they are released from custody has had to expand to 20 facilities, compared with only three during the same period last year. Migrants are now being housed in churches, a converted nursing home and about 125 hotel rooms that are being paid for with donations. “We had never seen these kinds of numbers,” said Ruben Garcia, the director of the organization, called Annunciation House. He said that during one week in February, immigration authorities had released more than 3,600 migrants to his organization, the highest number in any single week since the group’s founding in 1978. For the most part, Mr. Garcia said that his staff and volunteer workers had been able to keep up with the surge, often making frantic calls to churches to request access to more space for housing families on short notice. But sometimes their best efforts were upended, he said, including on one day last week, when the authorities dropped off 150 more migrants than planned. “We just didn’t have the space,” Mr. Garcia said. So the increasing amount of families crossing the border illegally in remote areas where there is no barrier where smugglers and drug runners are (which takes much more risk to get there, taxes the agency more, and those crossing are in much worse shape medically) and then turning themselves freely into CBP for processing and immediate care is not a real crisis even though the CBP indicates that it is.... https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/03/04/200-cases-of-mumps-confirmed-in-texas-migrant-detention-centers/ Texas health officials report that nearly 200 people contracted mumps in migrant detention facilities located across the state so far this fiscal year. Officials with the Texas Department of State Health Services stated that 186 people in migrant detention centers located in Texas had confirmed cases of mumps. The cases impacted migrant adults and minors as well as detention center workers, the Texas Tribune reported. There have been “no reported transmission (of mumps) to the community,” State Health Services Spokeswoman Lara Anton told the news outlet. She said the state health agency is not aware of the vaccination status of migrant adults and children who enter the United States. However, “all unaccompanied minors are vaccinated when they are detained.”

So you are saying that you authored the post I referred to using the data picked from some of these posts? I mean, if so - nice job writing it...... (From the first VOX article) - Border Patrol agents aren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families who travel through Mexico by bus and then turn themselves in at the border. This has arguably contributed to the deaths of multiple children in Border Patrol custody in recent months, and spurred Customs and Border Protection to expand medical care. There are strict limits on how long immigrant children and families can be held in immigration custody; in practice, officials release most families pending an immigration hearing. Asylum seekers can’t be deported without a screening interview, and those who pass (by meeting a deliberately generous standard) are often eligible for release from detention while their cases are resolved. Some of those migrants, either intentionally or accidentally, do not complete the asylum process or lose their cases, and live in the US as unauthorized immigrants. For many Trump officials, this is the heart of the crisis. Officials have spent the last year working on regulations and pushing Congress to expand family detention and reduce asylum protections. Trump critics continue to insist that migration isn’t at crisis levels. To them, the more urgent issue is the administration’s treatment of families, children, and asylum seekers. They are urging the administration to allow more asylum seekers to present themselves at ports of entry legally. They are calling attention to the conditions in which migrants are being held in custody. Asylum seekers cannot be barred from entry. The question is whether they should be treated as vulnerable migrants who the US is obligated to treat with kindness, or as deportable migrants until (if at all) they win legal status. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-crossing-increase.html Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Unauthorized Migrants Cross in a Month The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly double what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States. More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February, an 11-year high and a strong sign that stepped-up prosecutions, new controls on asylum and harsher detention policies have not reversed what remains a powerful lure for thousands of families fleeing violence and poverty. “The system is well beyond capacity, and remains at the breaking point,” Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters in announcing the new data on Tuesday. The nation’s top border enforcement officer painted a picture of processing centers filled to capacity, border agents struggling to meet medical needs and thousands of exhausted members of migrant families crammed into a detention system that was not built to house them — all while newcomers continue to arrive, sometimes by the busload, at the rate of 2,200 a day. “This is clearly both a border security and a humanitarian crisis,” Mr. McAleenan said. President Trump has used the escalating numbers to justify his plan to build an expanded wall along the 1,900-mile border with Mexico. But a wall would do little to slow migration, most immigration analysts say. While the exact numbers are not known, many of those apprehended along the southern border, including the thousands who present themselves at legal ports of entry, surrender voluntarily to Border Patrol agents and eventually submit legal asylum claims. The main problem is not one of uncontrolled masses scaling the fences, but a humanitarian challenge created as thousands of migrant families surge into remote areas where the administration has so far failed to devote sufficient resources to care for them, as is required under the law. The latest numbers stung an administration that has over the past two years introduced a rash of aggressive policies intended to deter migrants from journeying to the United States, including separating families, limiting entries at official ports and requiring some asylum seekers to wait in Mexico through the duration of their immigration cases. More than 50,000 adults are currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, the highest number ever. Arrests along the southern border have increased 97 percent since last year, the Border Patrol said, with a 434 percent increase in the El Paso sector, which covers the state of New Mexico and the two westernmost counties of Texas. Families, mainly from Central America, continue to arrive in ever-larger groups in remote parts of the southwest. At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before. Understanding what is happening on the border is difficult because, while the numbers are currently higher than they have been in several years, they are nowhere near the historic levels of migration seen across the southwest border. Arrests for illegally crossing the border reached up to 1.64 million in 2000, under President Clinton. In the 2018 fiscal year, they reached 396,579. For the first five months of the current fiscal year, 268,044 have been apprehended. The difference is that the nature of immigration has changed, and the demographics of those arriving now are proving more taxing for border officials to accommodate. Most of those entering the country in earlier years were single men, most of them from Mexico, coming to look for work. If they were arrested, they could quickly be deported. Now, the majority of border crossers are not single men but families — fathers from Honduras with adolescent boys they are pulling away from gang violence, mothers with toddlers from Guatemala whose farms have been lost to drought. While they may not have a good case to remain in the United States permanently, it is not so easy to speedily deport them if they arrive with children and claim protection under the asylum laws. Families with children can be held in detention for no longer than 20 days, under a much-debated court ruling, and since there are a limited number of detention centers certified to hold families, the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all. Finally, detaining families even for the first few days after their arrival in the United States, while they are undergoing initial processing, is also a challenging job. Often arriving exhausted, dehydrated, and some of them requiring urgent medical care, the families need food, diapers, infant formula and space to play. They can often spend days inside cramped concrete cells that were built to house the previous generation of border crossers — young, single men who would likely be there only a few hours. As part of the announcements on Tuesday, Mr. McAleenan also said the agency is making sweeping changes to procedures for guaranteeing adequate medical care for migrants — an overhaul brought on by the deaths of two migrant children in the agency’s custody in December. The measures, which include comprehensive health screenings for all migrant children and a new processing center in El Paso that would help provide better shelter and medical care for migrant families, are an attempt to fix years of health care inadequacies that have left many at risk. The agency will also expand medical contracts to place health care practitioners — largely registered nurses and nurse practitioners — in “high-risk” and high-traffic locations along the border. It will also dedicate more money for translation services to meet increasing demand from Central Americans, many of whom speak indigenous languages and dialects and may not be able to communicate their needs in English or Spanish. “These solutions are temporary and this situation is not sustainable,” Mr. McAleenan said. Mr. McAleenan said the authorities believe that the large numbers of families are coming because smugglers have effectively communicated across Central America that adults who travel with children will be allowed to enter and stay in the United States. Brian Hastings, the agency’s chief of law enforcement operations, said that since April 2018, border agents had detected nearly 2,400 “false families,” including cases in which migrants had falsely claimed to be related when they were not, or untruthfully claimed to be younger than 18. The throngs of new families are also affecting communities on the American side of the border. In El Paso, a volunteer network that temporarily houses the migrants after they are released from custody has had to expand to 20 facilities, compared with only three during the same period last year. Migrants are now being housed in churches, a converted nursing home and about 125 hotel rooms that are being paid for with donations. “We had never seen these kinds of numbers,” said Ruben Garcia, the director of the organization, called Annunciation House. He said that during one week in February, immigration authorities had released more than 3,600 migrants to his organization, the highest number in any single week since the group’s founding in 1978. For the most part, Mr. Garcia said that his staff and volunteer workers had been able to keep up with the surge, often making frantic calls to churches to request access to more space for housing families on short notice. But sometimes their best efforts were upended, he said, including on one day last week, when the authorities dropped off 150 more migrants than planned. “We just didn’t have the space,” Mr. Garcia said. So the increasing amount of families crossing the border illegally in remote areas where there is no barrier where smugglers and drug runners are (which takes much more risk to get there, taxes the agency more, and those crossing are in much worse shape medically) and then turning themselves freely into CBP for processing and immediate care is not a real crisis even though the CBP indicates that it is....

Typically it is customary to post the link to indicate who the author is.......You may notice the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and Brietbart were the links I posted so you can see the basis of my opinion.....

On the surface, sounds like Mr. Peeples has a case.....

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-migrant-families-arrested-at-border-in-five-months-than-any-previous-full-year-11551810657 https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/05/illegal-immigration-under-trump-projected-to-surpass-obama-era-levels/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/5/illegal-immigration-worst-rate-2007/ Illegal immigration continues to break records on the southwestern border — and they’re not good ones. The number of families snared trying to sneak into the U.S. soared by 50 percent in one month alone, setting an all-time record with more than 36,000 family members apprehended, Homeland Security officials announced Tuesday. The government has also encountered some 70 groups of at least 100 migrants during the first five months of the fiscal year, shattering records and placing new challenges on Border Patrol agents. The mini-caravans are being funneled to some of the remotest parts of the border, where there is little in the way of medical help and it takes hours to process and transport the groups. That takes agents off the line, and drug smugglers use the distraction to send across their shipments, top border officials said. “We are facing alarming trends,” said Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He said the numbers signal the existence of an immigration and humanitarian crisis, reinforcing President Trump’s assertion of an emergency necessitating his redirection of money to build a border wall. Overall, Border Patrol agents nabbed 66,450 illegal immigrants last month, marking the worst February since 2008. Of those, 6,825 were unaccompanied alien children — juveniles who arrived at the border without any parent. Another 36,174 were family members — a majority of the total and a record-shattering number. The previous high was 27,507 family members in December. Before fiscal 2019, the government had never topped 17,000 family members in any month on record. It has now done so in each of the past five months. In addition to the Border Patrol, CBP officers who man the ports of entry encountered another 9,653 migrants who tried to enter without authorization. That is a slight drop from the past few months, and it suggests that illegal immigrants are defying the government’s goal of having them show up at ports of entry to be processed. An inspector general’s report last year said CBP officers were throttling the pace of people allowed to show up and demand asylum at the ports of entry, and some then attempted to sneak across the border instead. CBP officials say it’s smugglers who determine where migrants enter. Indeed, the formation of mini-caravans is a tactic used by smugglers, officials said Tuesday. The same cartels control drugs and human smuggling, and they use migrants as a distraction by sending a large group of people to occupy agents’ attention and then try to slip drugs into the U.S. in another location. “We have four specific cases here recently that we’ve seen those family units used as a diversionary tactic,” said Brian Hastings, chief of law enforcement operations at the Border Patrol. Caravans as large as 300 people are delivered to places such as Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a beautiful but rugged location in southern Arizona that is far from any substantial infrastructure or medical care. In just five months of the current fiscal year, agents have encountered 70 large groups, defined as those of 100 or more migrants. The previous year’s total was 13 large groups. All told, nearly 160,000 unaccompanied alien children and family members have been encountered at the border over the past five months. That is far more than the 120,000 encountered in 2014, when President Obama first called it a crisis, said Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “It was a humanitarian crisis in 2014, and it is a growing crisis today. It is well past time to develop bipartisan solutions to secure our border and fix our horribly broken immigration system,” he said. Mr. McAleenan suggested some options Tuesday, including investing in Central America, targeting the multibillion-dollar smuggling organizations that funnel the migrants north, constructing more border wall and changing laws to end incentives to migrate to the U.S. At current rates, the Border Patrol is on track to arrest more than 780,000 people trying to sneak across the southwestern border, which would be the highest total since 2007 — before the government’s last wall-building spree. Officials said the current numbers show that a majority of the migrants are children and families from Central America. Under U.S. policy, they are much tougher to deport. That only invites more to make the journey, said Chief Hastings. “The word of mouth and social media quickly gets back to those in northern triangle countries: If you bring a child, you’ll be successful,” Chief Hastings said. The number of people caught at the border is generally considered a proxy for the total flow of illegal immigration, so more apprehensions is believed to mean more people are attempting to cross. However, Mr. McAleenan acknowledged that the formula has changed in recent years based on the new demographics of the migrants. In the past, when most were single adults from Mexico and a majority were men, their goal was to evade capture. Now, the children and families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — dubbed the northern triangle countries — want to be caught. After sneaking across the border, they often “present” themselves to Border Patrol agents and demand asylum, certain that they will be quickly released into communities to await a process that can take years — giving them a chance to disappear into the shadows. Mr. McAleenan said the surge of children and families has grown worse in the past few months as smuggling organizations begin to use charter buses to ferry migrants from Guatemala, in particular, to remote locations at the border in Arizona and New Mexico. Buses also mean more migrants who would normally not be able to make the journey by foot are traveling, and it’s meant a surge in sick people arriving at the border. Fifty-five migrants a day are being sent to clinics or hospitals for care, and the Border Patrol says it’s on track for 31,000 total this year. That is up from 12,000 last year. Agents have to accompany each of those migrants, taking them away from enforcement duties. Chief Hastings said his agents have logged 57,000 hours of medical watch so far this fiscal year. Yeah, there's no crisis......

SF is entering year 2 with no cord. Haven't missed anything.

Thanks for the clarification IO - haven't bought a weapon in a long time.

Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this. At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said. Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: "This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history." The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled. BING-frickin-O.......

For this argument, you are assuming man-made global warming exists....... FTR - If natural occurring global climate change can happen in a way that melted the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes 15,000 years ago, SF isn't too worried that mankind will have much (if any) influence on the crisis being perpetuated as "global warming" today. If you want to discuss mankind's mismanagement of worldwide pollution and better ways to handle that - open the door.

Thought so..... So either black racism CAN exist, or someone (who is black) killing me because I am white is not racist just hateful?

LGBTQ - Now A..... https://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2019/mar/04/age-of-the-autosexual-the-people-sexually-attracted-to-themselves Age of the autosexual: the people sexually attracted to themselves

Hypothetical question - If racism (the MW definition) is not a 2 way street (as some on this site have opined), if an African American hated me because I was white and murdered me (as some on this website would probably celebrate - LOL) would he then be able to be charged with a hate crime?

Shhh - don't tell em that.......

So you must think MLK stood for for black superiority? He stood for equal rights for all........That is what he wanted......

Oh god......

According to my reading - Transfers or sales between family members are exempt from this. So if "strawman" purchases/sales are already illegal......Wouldn't the rampant abuse of this action already be non-existent? (being that the argument that most of the guns in Chicago are being legally purchased in Indiana or other states at gun shows.....) Reading about the Utah incident, I don't agree the new law would have prevented the shooting, but it would give the prosecution the footing to charge the person who loaned the weapon with a crime as well as the mother who is suing him. Either way, I am behind that guy getting anything thrown at him for what I and most gun owners would consider is negligence - you don't "loan" a gun to someone to take away from your control.

THAT FACE YOU MAKE WHEN......