The "Secret Mission" of the Minutemen

Another thread, another rant. Oh them awful illegals is the ruination of America. Oh, woe is us.

I'm sorry if your reading comprehension isn't what it used to be Edgar.

I like this guy's thinking. Perhaps it's time we revisited the contributions of other folks who made a "strong statement about the superiority of the individual over the state": the various militia groups, Tim Mc Veigh, the Unabomber...

One wonders what rock the author lives under. I have been saving for my retirement for 20 years. I took that responsibility. The govt didn't have to give me the opportunity by letting me invest money instead of paying FICA taxes.

Let us have what we already have? How stupid can this get? Grow up, get a job and take some responsbility for yourself.

If anything the minutemen proves that we can act OUTSIDE govt. Which is what everyone that has a 401K, 403B or an IRA has already done. I don't see anyone clamoring to eliminate the Border patrol because the Minutemen can do a better job. Nor do I see anyone saying we need to pay the Minutemen with Govt funds. To compare the Minutemen to SS shows a complete lack of logic skills since the comparison destroys the attempted point of the author.

Parados, I've read many of your posts, and for you to say that someone lacks "logic skills" is like the pot calling the kettle black.

Rather than simply calling the author "stupid", why not put forth your own ideas (if you have any) for improving our border protection and saving social security.

There is, of course, the possibility that your neighbors and friends (and maybe even family) are racist rednecks.

None of my neighbors or friends or family would have anything to do with these idiots. Of course my friends and neighbors may include ILLEGAL immigrants (emphasis added to make cj happy). I have always preferred the company of illegal immigrants to that of racist rednecks anyway.

The author is stupid.

And right there the left shows why it supports the ultimate distruction of our sovereign nation. You must love it that Bush seems to be on your side.

You all told us our ultimate destruction was assured allowed the let integrated schools, allowed formation of unions and gave women the vote.

You wonder why we haven't learned to listen to conservatives yet.

The Minutemen are doing a great job, period.

I love it how the media first reported that the Minutemen were tripping sensors located in the desert generating false leads for border patrol agents. You didn't hear much about the fact that it was really ACLU activists tripping the sensors while trying to monitor the Minutemen.

Gotta love our media.

I would love for you to point out where I failed in logic cj. I am always looking to improve myself.

What do you think the author's point was? I addressed the author's comparison of the Minutemen to SS reform and pointed out what I thought was a rather glaring error in the logic. Perhaps you could address the facts there rather than just using an ad hominem against me with nothing to support it. How does a personal action outside govt equate to a govt action? Don't we already HAVE the opportunity to save outside of SS? Wouldn't that savings OUTSIDE the govt be more similar to the Minutemen?

I have posted on a couple of threads about what I feel needs to addressed to fix the present SS problem. Could you comment on my posts there if you feel I haven't put forth any ideas.

I think the author's tying together of the Minutemen project and the privatization of SS to be completely valid. They are, after all, a private militia.

What gets me is that when the story first broke all the media hounds assumed the Minutemen were all armed and going to shoot mexicans or whoever they saw crossing the border illegally or otherwise. When it turned out that they only carried for personal protection, and no one was getting shot, the media turned their attention away.

Paul Streitz
Border Breakdown
By Paul Streitz
May 2, 2005, 13:36

"Thank goodness for the Minutemen," said seventy-eight year, grandmother Mary Rogers. "Since the Minutemen have been here, it has been absolutely peaceful every night. Before they came there was always traffic on my road. Border Patrol cars, druggers and wetbacks going up and down the road all night long."

"I found the knapsack hung up on the fence," said Walter Kolbe. "I didn't think much of it. I thought it had been left by an illegal that was scared away by the dog. I threw it in the garbage. My wife later asked if I had looked to see what was in it and I told her I had not. She looked in it and came back with a small notebook. It had writing in three languages, English, Spanish and Arabic. We called a reporter who came over, took pictures, and later wrote a story. We also called the FBI, who didn't seem to be very interested in it. Later, they got very interested in it and the notebook is now in Washington somewhere. It was an exhibit in a Congressional hearing."

Dr. Carol Hand was part of the Minutemen project. She and Ed Kolb, a Cochise County resident, took a walk away from Route 90 along Hereford Road leading east. There they found a rape tree, with panties hung up in the tree. "After the coyotes get the women across the border, safely on U.S. soil, they gang rape them to show they have total control over them. They hang their panties in the trees as signs of the conquest. I couldn't leave them there. As a woman, I had to take them down." (A picture of such a tree is at http://desertvisions.us/tree.html) If the women are young and pretty, they are kept in houses of prostitution where they have to have their families buy them out or work their way out. Of course, none will testify to this because the coyotes know where they are from and can seek revenge on their families in Mexico.

The resident Americans along the border are used to it, but to someone coming from Connecticut, the whole scene is that much overused word, "surreal." Border Patrol cars are scurrying everywhere. Some sit along back roads, others along the main highway. There are Border Patrol checkpoints on Route 80 and 90, the main routes north to Interstate 90. (This is the USA. What are we doing with internal checkpoints for border security?) There are portable towers placed in the middle of the fields. They give the Border Patrol clear views over the flat ranch lands and it is most likely that they contain infra-red night scopes to find and collect the illegals heading north.

The locals along the border and inland are accustomed to their dogs barking at night. A few barks for a coyote (animal version) or a javalena (boar pig), but they sometimes bark all night as the illegals walk past.

The border fence in the cities is about twelve feet high and a road runs along side it. In the countryside, the fence gives way to the barbed wire fence erected by ranchers to keep the cows on the right side of the border. There are holes underneath the fence, or the wire has been bent back to allow people to come through. In the area from Douglas to Naco, there is a Mexican railroad track on the southern side of the border. Illegals walk from the cities along the railroad, wait until darkness and then make a scramble for the border. Sometimes, the Border Patrol catches them, sometimes not. Nevertheless, with so many coming at them, some are bound to get across and head north.

You would think that the government of Arizona would be outraged at this treatment of its citizens. But, it is not. Senator McCain, Senator Kyl, Representative Kolbe and Governor Napolitano have all recommended amnesties of one sort or another. However, the Border Patrol agents all tell you that every time an amnesty is proposed, more illegals head for the border.

After a few days, you realize this is not just a few illegals coming across the border as individuals. Rather, it is a massive, illegal criminal smuggling operation supported and encouraged by the government of Mexico. Millions have been encouraged to come to the United States. The government of Mexico publishes a guide, Guid del Migrante Mexican," telling Mexicans how to cross the border and deal with the Border Patrol. By any standards, this is a massive operation of smuggling, transporting and housing thousands of illegals that come across the border every night. They finally end up in cities and towns throughout the United States.

The illegals that come across are charged a thousand dollars or more if they are Mexicans. They charge up to fifteen thousand if they are from a foreign country. The illegals have sold themselves into indentured servitude and the smuggling operation must have tentacles into every town in America to make sure it is paid.

You cannot help but feel sorry for a small group of Mexican peasants huddled at the border after being apprehended by the Border Patrol. They have been driven from their homes by the corrupt, narco government that runs Mexico. They deserve better than to be forced from their farms to travel thousands of miles, to be subject to the brutality of the criminals who run this operation and end up standing on street corners throughout the USA begging for work. The problem starts in Mexico and is shoveled abroad as fast as Presidente Fox can ship them into our country. It is not that Mexico is so poor a country. It has resources and great oil reserves. But this wealth is reserved for the European descendants of the Spanish, while the Mayan Indians are sent north as wage slaves. In short, the Mexican government is engaging in a slave trade of sending its poor to the USA where they are exploited to the fullest by their own countrymen, work for the lowest living wage possible and send much of their money back to Mexico to support their families. This is as abominable as the slave-trade of the 1700's. Americans stopped exploiting slave-labor with the Civil War, but it has started up again but under a different name: illegal immigration.

Diana is a raven-haired beauty, originally a Jersey girl. She seems an unlikely person to meet at the Mexican border sitting in a Border Patrol jeep and chasing down illegals and drug smugglers. She says she likes Arizona, but the food in New Jersey is a lot better. She discusses her job with an air of patience and concludes, "As long as there are jobs for them, they are going to keep coming."

Paul Streitz is the author of a biography of Shakespeare: Oxford Son of Queen Elizabeth I and several musicals. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination in Connecticut for U.S. Senate in 2004. He is a co-director of CT Citizens for Immigration Control and can be reached at mailto:[email protected].

Mr. Streitz's grandfather was Cpl. Jack J. Streitz who served with the Fifth Calvary at Fort Huachuca, AZ in 1906. Mr. Streitz spent a week on the Mexican border with the Minutemen, a century later.

http://magic-city-news.com/printer_3781.shtml

Your explanation doesn't help it make sense. What does a private militia have to do with the merits of privatization of social security except in the most simplistic of word association games?

I'd read this article a while ago, and more than anything found it all just odd. I had to go over it twice because for the life of me I couldn't see how the author expected people to think that the minute-men vigilantes were an argument in favor of privatizing social security.

It just does not follow, and seemed to be merely an arbitrary linking of two issues that right-leaning political demographics tend to have on their platform.

I don't see how fed up private citizens taking matters into their own hands has anything to do with a word association game. And your categorization of the Minutemen as "vigilantes" only damages your argument.

I can try to illustrate it for you but I have little confidence in your interest in it.

The argument the author made was a very simple one:

The vigilantes are private citizens and this shares a word association with privatization of social security.

There's nothing more to the argument. The acts of the minutemen do nothing to establish the merits of privatization, which may or may not stand on its own merit.

The author does not establish any argument that the minutemen acting of their own accord is a better scenario than the government doing the task they undertake. The author merely indicates that it is a job the government does not currently do to the satisfaction of the minutemen and that they have undertaken the task.

This doesn't mean that private citizens will do a better job taking care of social security under the plan favored by the right in America. It may well be the case that they will but the minutemen have no bearing on this.

To use a deliberately absurd example:

I am, to date, far more effective at scratching my buttocks than is the government. While I am a private citizen taking matters into my capable hands in this example it doesn't mean that, say, privatization of our military makes sense. It does not follow.

Privatization of social security may well be a good idea, but the minutemen only share a superficial word association with the issue.



I've seen you toss out something like this several times today. I can comprehend that you'd like to think that this is the case but am confident that you are unable to do anything at all to illustrate it.

The minutemen are vigilantes. This is simple fact. "Vigilante" has as its origin the Latin word for "watchful" and comes to English from the word "watchman" in Spanish.

The word in English can currently be used to describe a "member of a vigilance committee", which these minutemen certainly are.

Whether or not they should do so is something I have made no comment on. I don't know enough about them to opine at present.

I do think that such matters would better be dealt with by the government, with whom the citizenry has a social contract and who are an appointed authority but I have made no criticism of the minutemen's decision to act in the absense of said authority to fill the vaccum that the Border Patrol leaves.

So if you want me to take your feckless charge that the word "vigilante" somehow "damages [my] argument" seriously, you'll have to show me how. At present I think it's merely a reactionary and baseless charge.

Because of word association Craven. When we hear the term "vigilante", we automatically associate it with "vigilante justice", a term popularized by Hollywood and the media, which manifests itself as an image of Charles Bronson, or even Dirty Harry.

I'm surprised that you used it.

Speak for yourself, some people know what the word means. ;-)



I can only hope that you don't become flabbergasted each time someone uses a perfectly appropriate word.

People often takes matters into their own hands when the gov't doesn't act the way certain people want. Back in the '60s and early '70s, it was left-wing groups like the Weather Underground. Now it's right-wing groups.

I guess such activity is OK when one agrees with the group's goals. Otherwise, it's a crime...

Is "neighbourhood watch" a crime? I think there's a middleground, vigilance committees can serve a useful and legal purpose and it sounds like the minutemen know where vigilance ends and where law enforcement needs to take over.