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June 22, 2005

EZLN Issues "Red Alert"

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas has issued a "red alert" in response to recent military movements in the state. President Fox claims that nothing is out of the ordinary.

Read the alert notice, or the story in English from IPS News.

Posted by crispy at 02:56 AM | Comments (1)

June 14, 2005

The XE Permit: Amateur radio in Mexico

Shawn and I will have to become re-licensed as amateur radio operators when we enter Mexico, and I suspect we will have to go through the process every time we exit and re-enter. The process is relatively complicated, although supposedly it has been streamlined in recent years. And if you file in Tijuana, supposedly you can take care of everything in one single office. That seems highly unusual for such things in Mexico, but that's what I've read.

Patrick Stoddard has written a comprehensive guide in English for those licensed amateurs that wish to get the proper credentials, the XE permit, to operate in Mexico.

Posted by crispy at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2005

¡Terremoto!

Shawn and I have been talking about how we'll be moving back into an earthquake zone when we move to Guadalajara, and with the 7.9 quake that just hit Tarapacá, Chile, I thought some resources on looking up recent seismic activity might be interesting.

I monitor earthquake activity in the Americas through OS X Planet by Gabriel Otte, the Macintosh version of xplanet. The software generates images of planets from user-specified locations and angles, but for me, the interest is in the images of the Earth that it can generate with current day/night projection, real-time cloud maps, earthquakes, city locations and their current UTC time, volcanic activity and major storms. OS X Planet does this by making your Mac desktop your desired projection, so every day, when I sit down at my computer, I can see what major Earth events have happened recently or are happening currently.

When I see that an earthquake has happened, I then go to one of two "worldwide earthquake locator" sites: USGS Recent World Earthquake Activity [text-only list] or The University of Edinburgh. These list the locations of the earthquakes by date, time, location and magnitude.

As Guadalajara is on the western side of the country, you can see that we're going to be in an area with very high "seismic hazard" once we're there.

Read more about Mexico's earthquake-related geography.

Posted by crispy at 06:38 PM | Comments (1)

June 07, 2005

expatriates.com

All those who think it's time to leave the country might find some interesting information at expatriates.com, which has information on moving to many different countries, although the majority of information is about Europe and Asia. I find that the site isn't very well organized, but with a bit of digging, you'll probably find some stuff that is of interest to you.

Posted by crispy at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2005

Mexicans Run Americans Out of Cities!

According to an article by Frosty Wooldridge, Mexicans have taken over Los Angeles. His proof? A billboard advertisement for a local Univision affiliate.

Actually, Wooldridge is not the only one to get worked up about the billboard. It has raised the blood pressure of many white folks who seem to have nothing more to do than complain about illegal immigrants 'invading' their country.

The arguments of such modern-day critics need never reflect on the fact that their country gained most of the land in question by what can at best be called an exploitation of a cash-strapped Mexico after the Mexican-American War, or that before that it was taken from the Native Americans by force. Nor will you ever hear outrage over the fact that many Mexican-American citizens lost their lands during the 1850s to mostly Anglo squatters thanks to a law that required the legitimate owners to validate their land grants in direct contradiction to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In reality, what's done is done. There is no way to undo past unfairness, even if such events were found to violate the law in our contemporary courts. There are probably better battles out there than the ones history has already decided and about which time has erased the details. But let's not make out like whitey has always been so noble.

There is one central focus in the argument of these folks: Mexicans are invading the country. Yet Wooldridge sees their destruction ranging far beyond the mere loss of low-paying jobs. He also claims illegal immigrants from Mexico have:

He goes on to note that 800,000 Californians left the state last year, and implies that they all left for places like Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, Colorado and Nevada in an attempt to outrun the invading horde.

Imagine Americans fleeing to safer places in their own country because of a foreign nation’s citizens invading our country!

Wooldridge works very hard to avoid being called a racist. He does not blame la raza for these problems. He blames immigration. Illegal immigration. The fact is, the most salient group of illegal immigrants in the country today consists of Mexicans. There is no avoiding that fact.

After the litany of aforementioned grievances, the article continues to cite examples of murders and rape committed by "illegals," and shows that even politicians are complicit in this "Mexicanization of America." Here he raises an important point, but fails to follow through: the politicians do nothing to stem illegal immigration. But why is that?

Politicians know what's up. They know that illegal immigration provides cheap labor to a variety of employers that can pay minimum wage (or less) without fear of complaint, that even illegal immigrants pay sales taxes and that if the American public doesn't make the connection, it will continue to subsidize all the costs associated, not so much with illegal immigration, but with simply having more people in your country using entitlements who are not contributing their fair share to the pot.

Don't blame Mexicans for that though. Only legal workers pay certain infrastructure taxes, and the government isn't handing out enough green cards to meet the demand. Not the demand of Mexicans, but the demand of business. That way politicians can claim to be trying to protect American jobs, but by turning a blind eye to illegal labor, they can continue to allow businesses to avoid meeting the requirements we have in place to protect legal workers.

And still the idea persists that if people are granted citizenship they suddenly get more expensive. But if illegal immigrants are already getting free health care and education, getting away with driving uninsured and filling up American job openings, the "real" Americans are paying for that. It would be in our best interest if we admit that illegal immigration has big economic implications that don't jive with our current legal schema. Only then can we approach it openly and deal with it effectively. But that would raise very sticky moral issues that we'd have to figure out and it would weaken the effectiveness of a certain social scapegoat.

You see, as Wooldridge puts it, "Over 10 million illegal Mexicans overwhelm us, kills us, rape us, rape our welfare and hospitals, steal jobs from our poorest Americans and destroy our schools with their language which they refuse to relinquish. "

Yeah, sure. But bear in mind that the FBI statistics show that 59.7 percent of all violent crime arrestees are white, with blacks comprising 38.0 percent, and other races, 2.3 percent. And there are a few other things that some people refuse to give up that are costing this country a lot more than people speaking Spanish.

Posted by crispy at 08:56 PM | Comments (1)

June 02, 2005

Get Your Own National Scandal!

el caso Pemexgate

Usage:

Tras las millonarias multas a la coalición PRI-PVEM, por el caso Pemexgate, y al PAN, por Amigos de Fox, los partidos políticos ''deben tener más cuidado'' en el manejo de recursos económicos en sus campañas electorales, pues la ley señala que en caso de una reincidencia las penas se incrementan y éstas pueden llegar incluso hasta la cancelación del registro, que significaría la ''muerte política'' del partido acusado, advirtió ayer el presidente del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF), Eloy Fuentes Cerda.

From ''Muerte política'' al partido que reincida en conductas ilícitas: TEPJF, Thursday 2 June 2005, La jornada.

[Pemexgate background]

Posted by crispy at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2005

Mt. Colima Expected to Erupt Again

El informador reports that Mount Colima is expected to erupt again within the next 48 hours.

Check out the recent images from two (1,2) angles.

Known as the volcán de fuego ("volcano of fire"), Mount Colima erupted on Monday, stronger than it has in the past 20 years. Mount Colima is not located in the state of Colima, but rather in the state of Jalisco, 125 km (75 miles) south of Guadalajara.

Posted by crispy at 08:00 PM | Comments (1)

The Latino Comedy Project

This sketch-comedy troupe from Austin offers lots of online video of their Chicano-oriented parodies through their website.

My favorite? Their parody of Monolithic Corporate News.

Posted by crispy at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)