Another Lexical Obituary

Living in America as I do, I'm constantly struck by news reports of "migrants" wanting to come here to live. Back in my elementary days, I was taught that a migrant is one who temporarily leaves his native land for seasonal employment, like the migrant workers who lived in Mexico but traveled north with the harvest for about half the year, hand-picking vegetable crops for which meechanical harvesters hadn't yet been invented, as the cotton harvesters which replaced the slaves and sharecroppers in the cotton fields of the American South. A migrant lives part of his year as native, and part as a foreigner. He is thus distinguished from a nomad, who lives always on the move within the bounds of his own territory.

I was also taught two other words: Emigrant, one who was leaving his native land to live somewhere else, and Immigrant, one arriving in a new country to make it his home. The two words were of course used of the same people, just from opposite perspectives. Neither was ever used of a migrant. And of course both were in contrast to Native, which referred to a person living in the land of his ancestors--one who had neither emigrated nor immigrated.

There was another word I wasn't taught in school, but picked up from conversation, that was used in reference to a person whose present situation wasn't well described by any of the other five words: Expatriate. This was someone not living in his native land, but with no intentions of becoming a citizen, or of leaving descendants, in the land where he dwelt. He was there long-term enough not to qualify as a migrant, but still not permanently. He may not have owned a dwelling back in his native land, but no matter how long he was absent, his loyalties and affections remained with it, rather than with the land of his current residence, which at any rate was often likely to change every few years.

One of these six words has never been all that common--and is frequently misspelled as Ex-patriot--but two of them have gone from common to almost extinct in the course of a single generation.
Emigrant and Immigrant have now been almost totally replaced by Migrant, the original meaning of which has been sacrificed to force it to swallow the combined meanings of both other words. The word Native has also been suppressed, mostly narrowing its application--at least in the States--to those with autochthonous tribal ancestry.

Another word which has suffered greatly in connotation and change of meaning is Colonist, which originally referred to a group of expatriates who functioned as immigrants, planting a piece of their own culture on foreign soil, which they never intended to leave. Unlike true immigrants, who abandoned their former loyalties to join another culture, they brought theirs with them. Colonialism in that sense has almost gone extinct, so the word has become attached to other meanings loosely attached to the original one. Colonialsim lives on only in a cultural sense, when immigrants adapt somewhat to the local laws, but retain their original lifestyle, language, and culture. Mennonites are a good example of this, and they do in fact still refer to their settlements as Colonies.

How does this all relate to the so-called Migrant Caravan that is so much in the American news these days? Well, they certainly aren't migrants, in the classical sense of the word: they don't intend to return to live in their Central American homes on a seasonal basis. American immigration laws (ironically, the term will probably live on for centuries in statute after it is abandoned in speech) have made that process increasingly difficult to impossible. By leaving behind their homes and national loyalties, they are true emigrants; they want to come here to settle. But are their intentions in settling in America those of immigrants, expatriates, or colonists?

Arrest me once, shame on you--the continuing saga of Timo Miller

Note: for earlier stories on this topic, search on the label 'agents'.

Well, I don't have any further updates on this story, just some comments.

It is clear from reading the FBI's affidavit that the prosecution's main evidence in this trial is going to come from Timothy Miller himself. The Judge will no doubt rule that the evidence admissible, however, due to the fact that Timo voluntarily provided it--in the form of private emails he sent his friends and associates during the time he was helping Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella move to Nicaragua. This information was, at the time he sent it, liable to interception by the FBI--although it's apparent that they didn't begin tapping his emails until later. If Timo ends up doing time for his crime, it will largely be his own fault, for leaving such a vivid electronic trail from the scene of the crime directly to his own front door.

But, should that come about, the prosecution's victory will be bittersweet. After all, it isn't really Timo they want, but Lisa. And it's not even Lisa, but her daughter, that the FBI was originally tasked with kidnapping. "I am looking forward to having my daughter home safe with me very soon," said Janet Jenkins in a statement released by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, her legal counsel. If she thinks that turning the screws on Timothy Miller will have anything to do with that, she can think again. Her ex-stepdaughter is already home safe--but with her real mother, and intends to keep it that way.

Arresting Timo when they did basically killed the goose that was laying the electronic golden eggs. Timo will sit through a long trial, maybe serve some time, and then go back home, while Isabella marches on toward eventual majority forever outside the clutches of her wicked stepmother. For, thanks to Timo's sudden arrest, it is now obvious to everyone involved that if you want to keep a fugitive hidden, you don't use your regular email account to broadcast the process into cyberspace! Wherever Lisa and Isabella went after fleeing Jinotega, their presence there is under an electronic blackout, and will continue to be so until the statute of limitations has expired.

The Mennonites in Nicaragua were babes in the woods when it came to carrying out their criminal activities undercover. And it is costing them--some more than others. But they're learning from this--and we can be sure that other innocents are learning from their experience.

Finally, I think Timo's lawyer has a definite case that even the black-and-white evidence that will be put before the jury does not sufficiently implicate Timothy David Miller in "Aiding in the removing of a child from the United States, and retaining a child (who has been in the United States) outside of the United States with intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of parental rights."

Aiding he did. Retaining he did. But the law is clear that for these actions to be criminal, criminal intent must be shown, and the only intent evident in Timo's many intercepted emails is one of giving shelter to widows and orphans. He must be shown to have been aware of Janet Jenkin's legal rights as a wicked stepmother, and to have had the intent that his actions in keeping Isabella in Nicaragua would deprive her of those legal rights.  As a lifelong resident of Central America, he can hardly be expected to have kept up on the bewildering proliferation of lawful parental rights in the United States of late.

I have one more piece of advice for Timo: I suggest that he demand a Spanish translator for all further court proceedings. It will drive the point home that he was, as it were, snatched from a foreign country for this trial, for deeds done entirely on foreign soil. The FBI agents who arrested him were dispatched while the plane in which he landed was still in international airspace. His American citizenship was purely incidental to the alleged crime. This despite the affadavit's claim that his crime was committed "in the District of Vermont."

Think about it, folks. To the global enforcers of family law, Vermont isn't a state--it's a Federal District.

Murdoch the Octopus: The money trail behind the media smears of vaccine truthers

It's been over a year since I posted an article on vaccines, and new information continues to come out, both from the US government and vaccine pushers on the one hand, and media investigators on the other. This article in the Vaccine Truth Newsletter reveals that there was corporate pressure directly behind the smearing in The London Times of Dr. Andrew Wakefield's research into effects from the MMR triple vaccine. It also reveals that vaccines now incorporate DNA in a way that suggests genetic modification of an entire populace through the mandatory vaccination of their children.

The medical side of the argument is highly controversial, but no one can deny what happens when you "follow the money." Summing up the article is this excerpt from near the bottom of the piece:

Now here’s where all the above ties up into a huge red bow: Rupert Murdoch has hefty financial interests and ties to the pharmaceutical industry, international banking connections, and stock market power brokers who hold the world’s financial interests in their ‘covetous’ hands. Newton says that Members of this group, along with George Soros-directed assets, virtually monopolized the genetics industry during the 1990s, culminating in the corporate privatization of the Human Genome Project. Of course, everyone knows that George Soros is a backer of U.S. President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Topping off all this is the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s son, James—heir apparent, according to Newton, oversees GlaxoSmithKline, another major H1N1 vaccine maker. Many more of Rupert Murdoch’s business associates sit as members of the boards of directors of Merck & Company; Kolberg, Kravitz, Robertz & Company (KKR); and even one of KKR’s top echelon personnel was one of the founders of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR) now known as “ObamaCare.”

It sounds like Rupert Murdoch is akin to an octopus with tentacles far reaching and some very deeply, especially in pharmaceuticals and the global media, i.e., radio, television, newspapers, and other print media. Let’s see how far the inquiry goes into the British cell hacking fiasco and if it will cross the pond into the United States. If what we are hearing about what went on at his newspapers multiplies, we can only imagine what has been going on behind closed doors in the world of pharmaceuticals.

And, I suppose that it is neither here nor there that Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire is also behind the latest edition of the NIV.

One step closer to Sharia in America

This is rather odd. Or is it? President Obama, America's first president not to grow up in an American family, has appointed two foreign-born Muslims to head the Department of Homeland Security.

Even more concerning: One of them has a track record of arresting Christians for evangelising Muslims.

The NIV and the King of Sheba

The Washington Post reports that a secretary in D.C. is now the king of a village in Ghana.

There's a problem with this; she's a woman. Not a problem for the people who allegedly elected her, but a problem for the English language, which has never referred to a woman as king before.

The word queen has always had an exclusively female connotation, even before it took on specific reference to royalty. In recent centuries it has been used both for the consort of a male monarch and for a female monarch; queen mother is now used for the mother of the monarch (a distinction already made in the NIV). But the editors of the Washington Post now want to call a female monarch king--without bothering to mention what they will call her husband. Or, actually, husbands; kings in Ghana are always polygamous.

The Committee for Bible Translation believes that literary English changes measurably every generation; certainly this is a new English term for female monarch, and they had better take it into consideration for their upcoming revision of the NIV: "Queen of Sheba" is sexist, outmoded, and discriminatory. Time to start getting used to calling her "The King of Sheba," or the New and Improved NIV will be obsolete before the ink has finished drying on its pages.

Sky blue waters?

This photo, provided to sky news by Greenpeace, has got to be as phony as Barack Hussein Obama II's Certificate of Live Birth (click on the image for a closeup of the kayaks).

A System Doomed to Failure

I don't want to overwhelm my readers with more than one post a day, but this one was just too good to pass up. Watch the CNBC anchors scramble for cover after an opening statement by Ron Paul in the House Financial Services Committee Hearing yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW2V50AS7K0

A new twist to an old scam

If you go to http://coreyhasmoney.com, you will see a photo of a bright young man in a tux, informing you that he is originally from your home town, but now he's a millionaire making his money by posting links on Google.

Don't you believe a word of it. Corey Peters is one big urban myth, and the swindler behind this website has figured out how to tap into your computer and identify the location of your web server in order to make you think that Corey's your homeboy. What he wants is your credit card number, and you're going to give it to him because you just can't believe that a nice guy from your home town is lying to you through his pearly white teeth. So what we need to establish right away is that he's not your homeboy, and he is a colossal liar. Here's how we'll do it:

This blog gets hits from every continent but Antarctica (and probably only because there's no ISP HQ'd there--but this post did incite one from north of the 72nd parallel), including a lot of viewers that do an excellent job of concealing their ISP; some are no more specific than the continent, and a rare few are even less so. I'd love to hear back from you as to where 'Corey' claimed to you that he's originally from. Just leave your comments below; and also please tell me whether or not you ran across Corey on Facebook.

Edited five hours later with the following revision: Come on, people. I'm getting hits on this post from several countries--probably at least one of them from Corey himself. Just to make it easy I've removed comment moderation to make it real easy to post comments (anyone who isn't a robot can participate). Please, tell me where Corey Peters told you he's from. And while you're at it, let me know what he's changed his name to this time. "Corey Peters" is less than a week into its run.

Added 2-26: Okay, folks, we can consider this project a success. A commenter alerted me to the following announcement posted to Facebook:

**Alert to Facebook Users**

You may have seen ads appearing on your FB profile in which a young man named Corey Peters or Mike Miller, and who claims to be from or near your home town, explains how he makes thousands of dollars posting links to websites. He claims that Google pays him to do this.

Some websites associated with this are:
coreyhasmoney.com
alexgetsgreen.com
mikemintsit.com

An American blogger asked people to send him a note to tell him where Corey was telling them he was "from" in his ad.
The answers he got back... Bedford, MA... Montreal, Quebec... and New Delhi, India.
Either Corey is quite the globe-hopping guy, or he has great software which detects your ISP address and then adjusts the ad to reflect a better "connection" to you.

When you go to these sites, they will ask you for your credit card information to sign up for a "Google Cash Kit".

Here are some comments from ComplaintsBoard, an online site dedicated to exposing web scams:
"ppl sign up for a google money system kit and have a couple $100 charged on their credit account. emails to contact them bounce back, the kit doesn't come and by the sound of it, neither does the promised cheque
13 days ago by T.Khan
I also did the same, no confirmation or e-mails, no such log in website. I found the ad on facebook and thought it was reliable. I am just waiting to see what i can do if they end up attacking my credit card. Such scammers..."

Other commentators on the ComplaintBoard explain how difficult it was to get the Google Cash Kit subscription cancelled... and many, many cases of people having to cancel their credit cards in order to stop the monthly payments.


RECENT NEWS

Official response from Google to an enquiry regarding CoreyHasMoney.com

"Ads like these appear to be the latest iteration of a trend we have observed for some time. Our Legal team reviews them and takes appropriate action if necessary. As Google is not affiliated with these sites, though, we can't comment on individual claims. We recommend that users exercise the same amount of caution they would when evaluating other types of get rich quick claims."

Update March 21, 2009

Well, this post continues to get dozens of hits a day--including one recently from Google Inc., so let's hope they do something about it. In any case, today I did something I'm not ever supposed to do--I actually read one of the ads that I've allowed Google to post on this blog. Boy, was I ever surprized to read a corey-peters type scam from cathysteeth.com being advertized right on my blog! Supposedly Google will cancel my Adsense account for doing this, but I'm going to cancel it anyway, maugre the money I'll be out for doing so. I refuse to participate in these sort of scams. Just look at the fine print for this "free trial offer:"

You have 14-days from the date that your order ships to use the product and evaluate the results. If you enjoy the system, simply do nothing. You will be billed the low price of $78.93 at the end of your 14-day trial period. Additionally, you will be automatically enrolled in the AlwaysBright™ Membership Program and every 30 days from your trial signup, you will receive a new 30-day supply of Bright Teeth™ Whitening Gel (10cc) and Remineralization Gel (3cc) at the low price of $80.93, plus $4.99 shipping and handling, totalling $85.92. . .

It goes on to say as much as that unless you cancel your credit or debit card, these charges will go on indefinitely. Because of course, you'll never be able to get through on their toll-free line, with thousands of other people from Pond Inlet to New Delhi all trying to cancel too.

Well, thanks to corey peters, I've gotten more hits in less than a month than I typically got in a year. But in the end, by participating in such scams, Google Inc. lost my Adsense business. And, I expect, unless they face the music soon, that of a lot of other bloggers as well.

There are ways to make money, and there are ways to take money. This is clearly one of the latter, and I will have none of it.

Update 3/23/09
To the kind folks at Google, Inc., who frequently check this post for new comments:
1) Thanks for deleting my Adsense account. You can keep the change.
2) I'm sorry I'm not able to keep up on approving comments as fast as they come in. I trust, however, that you've seen enough by now to get the picture. So I think I'll be taking this post down again; I could use a break from this issue for a while. Unless you take decisive action, it's not going to go away.

Update 3/26/09 I'm taking this offline again. Way too many hits to handle!

Update:  2013: This post has finally fallen out of my 'top ten' so I'm bringing it back up.

Celebrating the reversal of Babel

It is sometimes enlightening to go back and read an old newspaper--in fact, it is probably far more profitable to read a newspaper 100 years after it was printed than 100 hours. This we shall do today in reflecting on the exuberance and apocalyptic fervor that accompanied the precursor to the Internet. I speak of the laying of the first transatlantic cable on August 16, 1858--which for the first time made possible the idea of instant communication throughout the world; an idea that finally came into fruition with the advent of the Internet nearly 150 years later.

The first trans-Atlantic cable was a fragile thing; it failed shortly after the following series of accounts ends. What isn't mentioned in them is the actual text of the first (test) message. Several hours in the process of transmission, it simply read, "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men." The first actual message was one of congratulations from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. His reply read, "It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world."

Now I quote from a New-York-based reporter for the Guardian of London. Bear in mind that some of these dispatches may themselves have been amongst the first messages sent over the cable.

August 25: "At Washington the feel shown amounted to 'transport.' At Albany people were 'wild with excitement.' At Boston there was 'great rejoicing;' at Worcester 100 guns were fired; at Rochester a 'feeling of glorification' seized the citizens; Utica was illuminated; at Syracuse a band and a company of militia went about, 'spirited' speeches were made. . . "

September 1: "America has gone mad to a great degree on the subject of the Atlantic Telegraph. Besides the demonstrations we mentioned last week, there were others all over the continent. August 17th was the day agreed upon for a simultaneous demonstration. At New York the day broke with salvos of artillery, including one of 100 guns from the City-hall. At noon there was a further salute of 200 guns, the bells of all the churches were rung, youngsters kept up the fusillade throughout the streets with small arms [!], and by way of making as much noise as possible, the whistles of all the steam-engines in the city screeched continuously from twelve to one o'clock."

September 6: The prevailing topic which has almost absorbed everything else for the past month has been the successful laying of the Atlantic Cable. The people have been almost wild with the excitement, and scare a village throughout the land which has not had a celebration of the event."

Thus far the unprecedented exuberance. Now the apocalyptic fervor, as related to the Guardian by an American journalist:

"The earth has witnessed nothing half as auspicious--nothing so full of glad tidings to mankind--since the birth of the Redeemer. If the 'morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy at the creation of the world, surely the eye of faith, without impiety, may reverently recognise in this union of the two mighty physical divisions of that creation a providential dispensation that may inspire even the angels in heaven with delight. It is well, therefore, that in many of the churches yesterday, the 'telegraph' was in the pulpit, as elsewhere, the one idea--for the Church and Christianity are, in the end, to gather in a rich harvest of its fruits. The golden chain of human brotherhood has had a strong bright link added to it, which, with God's blessing, will in due time bring all nations, all kindreds, all tongues, within its friendly and loving embrace. The Orient and the Occident clasp hands! The East and the West are one, and with the universal diffusion of universal intelligence good men may hopefully look forward to the dawn of the blessed millennium."

So speaks the transcendentalist, who sees in information alone the hope for mankind's salvation, and the more of it the better. But further:

The Mayor of New York said: "The important and beneficial results to our race which this great event promises cannot be wholly anticipated, but that it will tend to the perpetual peace and increased happiness of the two leading nations who have joined in the labour and cost of the enterprise, cannot be doubted, while itself the offspring of science, and that civilisation which is founded on Christian principles, it announces to the whole world the reign of lasting peace and good-will to all men."

Note the universal feeling that the Cable was a work of God which could not help but spread the blessings of Christianity to the whole world, yeah, could not help but bring in the millennium itself. And this feeling was not limited to government officials; it was preached from the very pulpits, as this from the Bishop of New Jersey:

"Was ever utterance so fit? Was ever fittest utterance so startling, so solemn, so sublime--flashing out from the burning land of Christian hearts in Ireland; flashing along through the caverns of the sea; flashing along among the buried treasures of the deep, flashing along through the layers of old Leviathan, flashing along among the remains of them that perished in the Flood, flashing up among the primeval forests of Newfoundland, flashing out from there throughout the world."

The reporter continues: "It seems to me that in a sort the edict of Babel is reversed. The dispersion of the nations is to be undone in God's time, and in God's way, by bringing them together in Him. And I might almost venture to say that we have in prospect as it were a renewal and repetition of the Pentecostal wonder, when all the nations of the world shall hear in their own tongue the wonderful works of God, when man shall speak to man from one end of the world to the other, of the Gospel of Salvation, and of the glory of the Lamb."

Did the Cable bring in universal global harmony? Or did it make possible for the first time such undreamed of apocalyptic nightmares as World War and Thermonuclear Annihilation?
The century that followed gave the lie to both the exuberance and the optimism that greeted this Reversal of Babel.

God is not mocked; there is no shortcut, electronic or otherwise, to His Kingdom.