Courtesy of an EFF minilink, Findlaw has written more on the REAL ID Act than I had previously been aware of.[1] It is one nasty piece of legislation, and it is unfortunate that it has passed.

[1] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/leavitt/20050509.html

I read today of a little girl who does not age. This seems, at the surface, to be something that people would dream of, imagine not getting old … not getting older than six to twelve months.[1] This little girl, now twelve years old, has no language skills, but can crawl across a floor, or pull herself up in her crib. Doctors have no clue what is wrong with her, and she has suffered from all sorts of other things: “strokes, seizures, ulcers, severe respiratory problems and a tumor the size of a lemon.” Pray for her, and her family.

[1] http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/health/4485525/detail.html

As a Native American now heads the park staff for Mount Rushmore, the presentation moves to include some of the history of broken treaties that liter our westward expansion.[1] The Indians quoted here are absolutely right, there is a tendency to whitewash that pattern of expansion, war, treaty, broken treaty that defines that era of American History. There is also however, an even stronger tendency to whitewash Indian history, to paint it as some green utopia. The reality of that life was at least as different from the pattern of public perception and public presentation as “Manifest Destiny” was and is. I wonder if they are also teaching the tourists and children about the torture and incessant war that made up the lives of many tribes. I wonder if they are teaching about hunting buffalo by inciting them to stampede over cliffs, or where cliffs lacked, over gullies where they would break their legs (if cliffs, their necks as well). Perhaps they used all of a buffalo, but they killed far more than they needed to get that one. I wonder if they are teaching both sides of the wars, as our soldiers killed entire tribes, and their warriors did the same to settlers. For that is the true history of that time, but its not one I think the tribes would like known, they are far more happy to simply further the notion that the white man is always evil.

[1] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/632/05-13-2005/64fd001cd70b7c94.html

The federal courts are starting to weigh in on the homosexual “marriage” debate, with unfortunately predictable results. A federal judge in Nebraska has struck down that state’s Constitutional Amendment to ban such false marriages, claiming it goes too far and is too broad in its restrictions on what the state of Nebraska may recognize.[1][2] This sort of action highlights the need to Amend the Federal Constitution. Ideally this would not be necessary, but we have come to accept that the federal government can preempt the state laws and constitutions wherever it so desires. Once it was a given that a state could set up a state religion, that the Federal Constitutional ban on that did not preclude state action. In fact, I am fairly sure that such things happened in New England. Now, we find ourselves protected from that, yet, by virtue of that “protection,” at risk of seeing religion and morality baned from the public sphere entirely by the same reading of the Constitution.

[1] http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/05-12-2005/6d57000d1ea9e9f3.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/13/national/13nebraska.html?ei=5088&en=a54b702be0f1df59&ex=1273636800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Slavery is thriving even in Britain, as Police there find that hundreds of children, mostly black children, are vanishing from the schools each year.[1] Naturally Britain, socialist state that it is, is looking to solutions such as attempting to register each and every child and tracking them to try to solve the problem. But I think and fear that it can only truly be solved by a return of morality to the forefront of every day life. Interestingly, when I first read Mr. Belloc’s essays, I dismissed this one as a prediction that he had gotten wrong. Later, I rethought it in terms of the similarities between slavery as it was and the debt system we have now. Now I am seeing that this is not just a problem in the third world, but even in a first world (declining, highly technical population) country like Britain. As police fail to curb this, I wonder if we will see this become more socially accepted in Europe. If so, it is only a matter of time before it migrates across the border to our own country, if it has not already (Sweat shops with immigrants working in them anyone?).

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4541603.stm

The USCCB has launched an initiative to try to change public opinion, or at least Catholic opinion, on immigrants.[1] Immigrants help our country and society in a number of ways, from doing the hard jobs, to enriching our culture (on a superficial note, would we have the wealth of food types without them?). The bishops are highlighting the problems in the immigration system, from bias against them among us, to the difficulty getting into this country, a difficulty that some claim causes the illegal immigration. Additionally, the ID mess strikes immigrants particularly hard. We use the same few IDs (birth certificate, drivers license, social security number) for pretty much everything, and an immigrant can have trouble getting providing these things.

[1] http://www.catholicherald.com/cns/cns05/immigration.htm