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And the repercussions of the Rodriguezes:

The number of Hispanics living in the United States grew by 58 percent in the 1990s to nearly 13 percent of the total population, and cracking the list of top 10 names suggests just how pervasively the Latino migration has permeated everyday American culture.

Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place. The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6.

Compiling the rankings is a cumbersome task, in part because of confidentiality and accuracy issues, according to the Census Bureau, and it is only the second time it has prepared such a list. While the historical record is sketchy, several demographers said it was probably the first time that any non-Anglo name was among the 10 most common in the nation. “It’s difficult to say, but it’s probably likely,” said Robert A. Kominski, assistant chief of social characteristics for the census.

Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.”

Lovely. And when their wonderfully corrupt Colombian culture replaces Anglo civilization, I wonder if Senor Padilla, who presumably wanted to escape the barbarity of Colombia 14 years ago, will consider that to be an equally great thing too.

There’s no two ways about it. If you continue to support immigration at this point in American history, you’re stupid,, short-sighted and historically ignorant. Assuming you can cram the concept into what is obviously your tiny little mind, try to think through the implications of the fact that the conservative party in Mexico is a revolutionary socialist one.

Then think about what sort of society those immigrants are going to enthusiastically vote into existence.

If you happen to harbor any desire to listen to last weekend’s interview with the Northern Alliance guys, you can now do so here.

The DM of the Rings:

Aragorn: “We need a name for our group. What do you guys think?”
DM: “I suggest Fellowship of the Ring.”
Legolas: “Gay. how about Legion of the Ring?”
Gimli: “Nay, makes us sound evil.”
Merri: “I know! The Guardians of the Ring!”
Pippin: “Um, we’re not really guarding it, we’re trying to destroy it.”
Sam: “The Seven Keepers of the Ring?”
Frodo: “There are nine of us.”

The thing I love most about geek humor is that while the normal person who comes up with a funny take on something will turn it into an amusing anecdote, only a committed geek can take a single amusing concept and somehow turn it into an ongoing epic that somehow continues to be funny even though it’s merely explication of the one thought.

It’s like the guy who remade Star Wars in ASCII text. You know he’s hopelessly insane, but you have to love him for it. This excerpt from the guy’s bio tells you all that you really need to know about whether reading his graphic saga is worthwhile.

(And as my wife reminds me below: At one point I forgot to pay the phone bill and the phone was disconnected. Took me a week to notice.)

This post brought to you courtesy of our atheist friends at Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

Little Australian Boy: “Wot’s thaht thing agayan?” “

VD: “What thing?”

LAB: “Thaht thing thaht was on yir cah!”

VD: “Oh, the weasel?”

LAB: “Yiea. Was hay fat and juicy loik may?”

VD: (trying not to laugh) “How’d you get so fat and juicy?”

LAB: “Oi exercoise!

Now, that was funny. But you haven’t experienced true humor until you’ve overheard two little kids discussing a ventriloquist who was, very convincingly, using a dog in the place of the usual dummy. I nearly asphyxiated myself trying to keep from laughing out loud.

Little Girl: “That pup is from NARNIA!”

Little Boy: “Narnia’s just a story. I think it’s a parrot in a dog suit.”

How to create a third world country:

Last year, 510,000 foreign migrants came to the UK to stay for at least 12 months, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time 400,000 people, more than half of whom were British, emigrated….

It is the first time the number of foreign migrants has topped half a million and the statistics do not include hundreds of thousands of east Europeans who have arrived to work in Britain in the past two years.

And that’s just the legals. Londonistan and North Mexico, now there’s a winning combination for the ages! At least the food will be spicy.

Update – A Member of Parliament explains why so many Englishmen are emigrating:

The papers today ask why 400,000 left the Uk last year to live and work somewhere else. I would have thought the answer was obvious.

They’ve had enough.

We live in a country where anyone who has gained some qualifications, who tries to pay their own way and to live a decent life feels targetted by this government. We have our identity assaulted, our democratic views ignored, our pockets and purses rifled by the state, our opinions criticised or banned and the public services we do wish to use run incompetently or rationed for us.

Is not going to help this sort of situation:

To make ends meet during hard economic times, I became a “substitute teacher” for the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD – or to put it more kindly, a “guest teacher.” As a guest LAUSD teacher I thought I would be an asset, but the system has never appreciated nor taken advantage of my educational or professional hard-earned accomplishments.

There’s no teaching going on at LAUSD – only confinement of the sort one may find in a penal colony, complete with walkie-talkie-carrying wardens and bullhorns. And I have “confined” at many different schools within central Los Angeles in the last six months. Many students scream “suuuuuuuub” when they see someone like me – a “guest teacher” – in their classroom and trample anyone and/or anything as they push and shove their way inside….

I’ve been injured more than once. On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to “terrorize [me].” I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I’m told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack “boys will be boys.”

I’ve been burglarized (on June 11, 2007), by a stalker with key access to my locked classroom (likely by another teacher or custodian). This theft occurred during lunch break while I was on a five-minute bathroom errand and included a $2,600 2-week-old Sony Vaio notebook, my RX glasses, credit cards, etc. The incident was also reported to the jurisdictional police. But I will have to take LAUSD to Small Claims Court, because district officials will accept NO responsibility.

The irony is that the LAUSD probably spends more money per student than the vast majority of school systems around the world.

Friar Yid doesn’t get it and it’s not entirely his fault:

Don’t get me wrong, Vox. I’m not pro-slavery. But if you have commandments in the Torah saying, “don’t kill your slave,” while not saying a single thing about, “oh, and don’t have slaves,” it’s pretty hard to argue that the Torah’s anti-slavery.

I don’t think I was quite as clear on this as I could have been. My view is that the Bible is essentially agnostic on slavery. It’s neither pro- nor anti-, except in that God doesn’t appear to take any human views of property all that seriously. The Torah clearly doesn’t view slavery as a good thing, or else it wouldn’t be replete with the message that slavery comes as a negative consequence for various actions. And both the Old Testament and the New Testament repeatedly put forth a message based on the concept of how God sets Man free.

And yet, the Bible clearly doesn’t view slavery as a fundamentally immoral act such as thievery, murder, extramarital sex and so forth. Regardless, I don’t see how anyone could seriously argue that the Bible expresses much of a positive view about kings, slavery or divorce, despite the way in which it offers advice regarding all three.

It really does fall in the nature of a category error, though, to attempt blaming any religion for a very common human institution that predated it by centuries, if not millenium, all around the world. This is the point that those who wish to connecct Christianity and slavery always seem to wish to avoid; it also tends to reveal an ahistorical, US-centric perspective.

So, I’m not saying the Bible is inherently anti-slavery. I’m merely saying that it is absurd to argue that it is inherently pro-slavery, and demonstrably illogical to argue that it is responsible in any way, shape or form for historical slavery.

Germany’s new Nazis are putting parents in jail and freezes their assets for homeschooling their children, while at the same time putting a convicted pedophile to work in a kindergarten:

A convicted paedophile sentenced to do community service in a German kindergarten will return to court next week to face charges of abusing two children there, a regional prosecutor’s office said Thursday.

In this case it appears to be an oversight, but it is nevertheless more than a little ironic that a mother jailed for homeschooling her children could find herself sentenced to working in a school.

Friar Yid doesn’t understand how God can’t explain the proper way to own a slave while rejecting the notion of human property:

It’s all well and good if people want to maintain that slavery is bad and stewardship is good. But Vox’s claim that the God of the Bible doesn’t believe in personal property and “could never endorse” human slavery seems downright bogus, particularly given various Old Testament endorsements of the practice.

It’s not as if there aren’t Biblical examples of precisely what I’m describing. The Bible is very clear on God hating divorce. But, because He knows humanity and knows we’re a bunch of hard-hearted idiots, He says that if you’re going to get a divorce in spite of what He wants, then do it this way. And I note that He wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of kings either, but allowed Israel to have one anyhow.

Given God’s total disrespect of human notions of property and ownership, it seems obvious that His rules regarding the positive treatment of slaves should be regarded the same way. Slavery is, like war, poverty and government, simply an aspect of the fallen human condition. It is foolish to pretend that slavery is not common today, or that humanity has somehow evolved past it.

And from the Biblical description of God’s perspective, we are all slaves, either to sin or to righteousness, and “he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.”

But found it rather difficult to credit and even harder to confirm. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the banks are simply ignoring the law in their feverish attempt to securitize everything:

A federal judge in Ohio has ruled against a longstanding foreclosure practice, potentially creating an obstacle for lenders trying to reclaim properties from troubled borrowers and raising questions about the legal standing of investors in mortgage securities pools.

Judge Christopher A. Boyko of Federal District Court in Cleveland dismissed 14 foreclosure cases brought on behalf of mortgage investors, ruling that they had failed to prove that they owned the properties they were trying to seize….

On Oct. 10, Judge Boyko, 53, ordered the lenders’ representative to file copies of loan assignments showing that the lender was indeed the owner of the note and mortgage on each property when the foreclosure was filed. But lawyers for Deutsche Bank supplied documents showing only an intent to convey the rights in the mortgages rather than proof of ownership as of the foreclosure date.

Saying that Deutsche Bank’s arguments of legal standing fell woefully short, the judge wrote: “The institutions seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test, their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate.”

This could have some very interesting fallout, especially as home prices continue to decline.