Where do they find them

[pecunium]

I got a tip today. It was a pointer to a story my dad told me about, one which I chalked up to the usual sorts of unbelievable movie-plot paranoia. Nonsense about Iranians (ooh... bad: they want The Bomb, and they are scary muslims and there's the whole embassy thing) going to Venezuela (land of Hugo Chavez; a guy who refused to stay kicked out of office when we backed a coup, who, moreover, had the guts to speak his mind about Bush fils), and learning Spanish so they can sneak into the US and do bad things.

Big whoop. I mean really, the things I hear people saying... this is bizarro-land.

But, as I said, I got a tip that I might want to comment on it, so I read the article.

All of a sudden I was scared. My father, you see, hadn't told me whom the pearl-clutching, scared of her own shadow person was (heck, he didn't even tell me it was a woman; just a person who was less than completely rational).

Representative Sue Myrick (R-NC). That would be the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. The presumptive head of that committee should the Republicans regain control of the House in November.

Who thinks it would take a border agent who can tell the difference between Venezuelan spanish, and "Mexian" spanish, to spot the Iranian infiltrator. Forget that this shows a really massive failure to understand just how different the two sound (I don't speak spanish, but understands some. I have french and russian, on top of my english; Argentine spanish sounds much more french to me than Mexican spanish does, I can't imagine Venezuelan isn't also fairly different).

Never mind that in six months, I don't see most people being able to learn enough of any foreign language to take in anyone else who has a passing familiarity with the language.

What has she to support this theory... tattoos.

It seems there are inmates with farsi tattoos, in the California prison system. I don't know how she knows this, I presume someone who is fluent has told her; because it's tricky for me to spot the difference between arabic and farsi; I am pretty good at spotting farsi (call it 75 percent) if I have a large block of text (call it 300 words). I can't tell you how I figure it out, but when I was working to ID the language of web pages, I could spot farsi pretty well; with that length of text, but from a tattoo... it need an expert.

From that she adduces they are, hell I don't know what she adduces, the comments she made in the clip are in something which looks like english, but doesn't seem to make sense the way english ought.

It can't be that in a state with 30 million people, and a very large Iranian community, that some of them might be criminals, and some of those criminals might have tattoos; in farsi, nope. It has to be the big bad terrorists, getting help from the big bad Venezuelans, so they can exploit the porosity of the border with Mexico and blow us up.

Really, I can't even begin to make this sort of thing up; who would believe it?

Comments

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

You are either up really really late like me or very very early like a robin?
I think there are different dialects between Argentina and Venezuela.
I'm tired so I apologize if I'm not too coherent. Did this article say that Venezuela was training Iranis to speak Spanish but they are speaking it with an Argentine accent? Is that what I understand Representative Myrick as saying?
If so then we should be hiring Mexican nationals to listen at the check points because our students from Mexico can tell the difference between the dialects of the other Spanish speakers' countries.
I need to read this again after I've slept.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I fixed that, so it says what I meant it to day... up really late.