USA! USA!

Now that that my native land is a world soccer power, I suppose it behooves me to become an official fan.

So I'll practice drinking strong beer until I puke on the guy in the bleacher seat in front of me.  I'll learn to yell   "f++k"  a lot. And when my team does very well I'll run naked up and down Temple Lane after breaking things inside the Temple Bar. 

(These lessons were learned in Dublin when I met some English gentlemen in town  for a tournament,)

Anything else I should be working on?

Fremont and the Illegals -- (And The ACLU gets Unicorny)

It is now the law in Fremont, Nebraska that you must obtain a license to rent a place to live. Washington refuses to do the  job  right, so a fed-up small town is goaded into doing it wrong.

Lawyers from Fremont to K Street are starting their meters, and the ACLU is in the act. The Civil Liberties Union does some excellent work, but it is also capable of missing the the point like a Top Shot reject. On the Fremont decision:

"Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality," said Laurel Marsh, executive director of ACLU Nebraska.

Laurel,  "American values of fairness and equality" is a wobbly chair to stand on. Once upon a not so distant time, lynching black men for looking at white women was within American values of fairness and equality . 

Besides, we have heard so much pseudo -patriotic cant that we are immune.  The Fremont law is vulnerable on Constitutional grounds, and  that is enough for you to  say.

It's always nice to start a day smiling at a well-turned phrase.

Today's grin, about when worlds collude,  comes courtesy of Roberta, who, by the way,  is a dependably dab hand at the  art.

The post is about screwy flying things, and you science fiction fans will like it. Me? The Piper Cub, the DC3,  and the F-86. No other aircraft is required in reality or in fantasy.

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Fremont, Nebraska: Why Not a License to Breathe?

This giant step to toward an  American SSR can be considered with only a little  attention to the snake ball of immigration politics.

Fremont, Nebraska, citizens are angry at and/or fearful of a parade of Hispanics coming to town to work for Hormel and Fremont beef. They're voting today on a law to require a license to rent a place to live.

In Fremont-on-Volga you will go to city hall and fill out a form. Commissars will check to see if you're a legal U.S. resident.  If they like your record, you give them a fee for the license and they give you a chit granting official permission  to live inside, out of the rain. Otherwise, hasta la vista, bambino.  Pitch a tent in the Sand Hills.

The wrongness of this is so appallingly clear I'm wondering how my friends and acquaintances in level-headed Nebraska came to lose their senses.  Perhaps only an unreasoning fear can explain it.

Among other things, I have seen numerous  comments that this will be a great way to  screen all would-be Fremont dwellers for various sins which might make them undesirable. Warrants.  Arrests. Convictions.  Slowly  paid bills. Firearms ownership. Even maybe one of those dastardly library cards.


Little Midwest towns -- like admirable southwest states -- don't do this sort of thing unless they have been badly screwed by a Higher Authority  which is so frightened of irritating one constituency or another that it has found a way to live for years pretending its head is a colonoscopy camera.