Persian Accent. Ads for a new movie reveal that American actor Jake Gyllenhaal affects a BRITISH accent to play a Prince of PERSIA. What the f*k is wrong with him? Is he insane? Even if some stupid, f*king foreign director told him to put on a British accent, he should have said "No. Persians are not British and don't speak with British accents. Are you stupid? What in hell would make you think it appropriate for an American to put on a British accent to play a Persian?" But Gyllenhaal didn't say that. No, he just consented to affect a ridiculously inappropriate accent, insulting to both Persia (modern Iran) and his own country, the United States. We should deport Gyllenhaal to his beloved Britain. Go there, and stay there, you irritating, affected moron.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,400 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 AM

 
Climate Quackery. I turned off an episode of 21st Century, a UN-TV series being broadcast on PBS, because of its assertion that various islands in the Pacific have to be evacuated because of sea-level rise caused by (implied man-made) global warming. When I realized I was so ticked-off that I wanted to address that propaganda piece here, I searched for an online version of the program and watched it carefully, listening for specifics. Exactly how much has the sea risen? Do they say? I backtracked to transcribe exact wording to quote here.
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The episode in question, #41, is titled "Sea Level Rise in the Pacific: Loss of Land and Culture". It's not that islands are inevitably eroded by the action of waves at any sea level. That is not, we are to believe, what's happening now, as it has always happened. No, the ocean is rising, and submerging these islands and drowning their peoples if they don't evacuate. Oh?
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The first group of low-lying islands discussed lie in the independent Pacific countries of Tuvalu and Kiribati. They are all of coral origin, which is to say they were originally ALL underwater. That in turn means that sea levels are now LOWER than they were when these islands formed as coral reefs UNDER water. If sea levels are now rising, it is only to get BACK to what they had been at some point long, long ago, when people had nothing to do with climate change — as people have nothing to do with climate change now.
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One Tuvaluan profiled is less than completely happy in New Zealand, where he is going to school to get a degree he can use there. Narrator Daljit Dhaliwal says, "This is not the sun-drenched Tuvalu. This is Dunedin, one of New Zealand's major urban areas, where temperatures rarely reach into the high 20's degrees Celsius." Oh, the poor guy! 29°C = 84°F. Dunedin is near the southern (cold) end of NZ's South Island. Average temperatures (Fahrenheit) in December, January, and February (NZ summer) are 51, 52, and 52. Winter temps (July, August, September) are 37, 39, and 42. So why did he move there? The same guy is said to have gone to school in Auckland, on NZ's North Island, where summer temps range from 71 to 75, and winter, from 58 to 61. If he's just studying, not permanently relocating, and temperature is important to him, Auckland would seem a better choice if NZ is his target country, but Australia, also within ready reach (if immigration laws permit resettlement of Tuvaluans there), offers much warmer temps (Sydney: winter average between 61 and 64°F; summer, between 77 and 79°F). If that Tuvaluan chooses to live in Dunedin, who are we to mourn for him the loss of an 'island paradise' — where a severe storm can bring waves crashing into your house, as has ALWAYS been the case?
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But let us try to quantify this devastating and, we are to believe, unprecedented sea-level rise — which is actually just one of many sea-level changes up and down over the course of this planet's millions of years of existence. UN-TV refuses to do that, but uses alarmist language like "with the ever-increasing levels of the high tide, the catastrophe seems imminent". At no point in that screed do we hear specifics, exactly how high the sea level has risen, over what period of time.
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While admitting, of migration out of Tuvalu, that "some left for economic reasons", the program insists that "others [left] because of climate change." The impression the viewer is left with is that life was just fine until sea-level rise. Storms never threatened those low-lying islands with devastation, even tho the average height above sea level in the two island nations is 2 meters, or 6½ feet! (presumably meaning above high-tide stage). Of course they did, always.
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Let us look at the reality of sea-level rise, as against the alarmist claims made by people with an ax to grind.
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Wikipedia (a source of variable reliability, I concede) says:

Current sea level rise has occurred at a mean rate of 1.8 mm per year for the past century [180mm = 7 inches in the entire past century], and more recently, during the satellite era of sea level measurement, at rates estimated near 2.8 ± 0.4 to 3.1 ± 0.7 mm per year (1993–2003). [Compromise figure of 2.9mm × 100 = 290mm = 11 inches — in a century!] ... Values for predicted sea level rise over the course of this century [presumably, 2001-2100] typically range from 90 to 880 mm, with a central value of 480 mm. Models of glacial flow give a theoretical maximum value for sea level rise in the current century of 2 met[er]s (and a "more plausible" one of 0.8 met[er]s), based on limitations on how quickly ice can flow.

Let us parse that passage. It starts by saying that predicted sea-level rise for this entire century (2001-2100) is expected to be somewhere between 90 and 880mm (3½ to 34½ inches), with a mid-value of 480mm (slitely less than 19 inches). But then it goes on to more than DOUBLE that as "a theoretical value". How much meaning can we give to a "theoretical" projection TWICE as great as the projected sea rise?
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What numbers are we talking about as regards both the area of these island nations and "climate change refugees"? Tuvalu has an area of 10 square miles, and about 12,500 people; Kiribati, about 280 square miles and 93,000 people. Between these two tiny nations, then, we're talking about 290 square miles that might be reduced by half, tho not completely submerged, and, at most, less than 115,000 people who might have to move to some larger, higher island, or mainland. That is less than half the area of one typical U.S. county (622 square miles) and little more than the population of one U.S. county (which is about 100,000).
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The mournful UN-TV video features the President of Kiribati doubting that the entire population could be evacuated to the same place, to preserve the culture. Why not? 93,000 people is not a lot. Australia and New Zealand are both arguably underpopulated, so could take in such a group, especially since English is one of that tiny country's national languages, as it is of Tuvalu.
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But how much of a loss would it be if the cultures of Tuvalu and Kiribati were to vanish entirely? Not much. Both peoples live at subsistence level, not economic wealth. Their cultures consist of very little but languages that are almost certain to die out very soon anyway, exterminated by the world's one great auxiliary language, English; some dance; some song. The Wikipedia articles on these island nations don't even mention textiles, painting, or sculpture. I think humanity will weather the loss of these tiny cultures.
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The issue raised by the UN-TV piece is not whether sea levels might be rising — tho the rise to date has been trivial, and if the middle projection for the remainder of this century is valid, will remain trivial for most of the planet's population: less than 19 inches — but whether there is anything we can do about it but evacuate people from threatened areas, be it as a cohesive group or as individual refugees. But that is not what people viewing the UN video will come away with. Viewers are supposed to be terrified that the seas will drown us all, and it's all our fault, because we caused the warming and aren't doing anything to stop it. That is drivel. We had nothing to do with it, any more than we had anything to do with the lowering of sea levels that converted coral reefs into islands. Perhaps, if you think about it, since we have so many coral islands, the current sea level is abnormal, and the seas SHOULD be higher, by 20 feet or more (the high point in Kiribati is about 15 feet, which was once under water). If that is so, then we should simply accept that those islands may become coral reefs again, and that might be a very good thing.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,400 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:48 PM

 
Flog VW Execs. Volkswagen is now running an insane series of commercials that encourage people to punch each other when they see a Volkswagen. Surely it is criminal behavior to incite indiscriminate violence to sell cars. The law should prosecute the advertising executives who came up with that campaign, all the writers, actors, and other people who created those commercials, and the corporate executives who approved and funded that series of ads. Once convicted, all those a*holes should be flogged as legal punishment, say, 50 lashes or so per criminal.
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This country is being progressively barbarized by evil people in media. It's time for the civilized to strike back, with suchever force as may be necessary to restore decency and good sense to this increasingly insane society.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,397 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:22 PM

 
A Third of the Supreme Court Now to Be Jewish? NO!!! President Obama has INSANELY chosen a Jew for the Supreme Court seat being evacuated by Justice Stevens. There are already two Jews on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Jews are at very most 2% — 1/50th — of the U.S. population, but are already 22% of the Supreme Court, and 40% of a majority. Now Obama wants to load the Court with a third Jew, so that Jews will constitute 33% of the Court overall — 16× their proportion of the population — and 60% of a majority — 30× their proportion of the population! NO. Absolutely not. It's not a matter of bigotry but of fairness to everyone ELSE.
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Let's take this process of gradual Jewish aggrandizement at the expense of everyone else to its "logical" extreme. Why not have EVERY member of the Supreme Court Jewish? And every member of the House of Representatives? And every member of the U.S. Senate? And both President and Vice President? Why NOT have a hugely diverse, predominantly Christian Nation ruled absolutely by Jews, without any chance of Christian values being considered, much less prevailing? That is not democracy, and not representative of this country's diversity.
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Why not an Oriental — Chinese or Filipino — for the Court? or a gay man? or American Indian? Eskimo? Asian Indian? Chicano? West Indian? MOSLEM?
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Jews have vastly too much power in the United States without a third seat of the Supreme Court's mere 9, and they have abused that power hugely, to produce U.S. actions in the Middle East that have made us hated, detested, by much of the Moslem world, and made us indeed ongoing targets for violence, as shown very recently by the failed bombing of Times Square — in a city with a Jewish mayor. Is the fact that the Mayor of New York is a Jew irrelevant to that particular city's being targeted over and over for violence by Moslem extremists? Hardly.
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California is "represented" in the U.S. Senate by two Jews, only. That is, the one state that is arguably the most diverse has absolutely no diversity in its "representation" in the Senate. Only California's Jews are truly represented in the Senate; everybody else gets the tail end of their Senators' concerns. Israel is first, American Jews second, everybody else third — a distant third.
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The Senate overall is 100 members, so it's very easy to figure the percentage of the Senate represented by any given group. However many members there are of that group, that is their percentage in the Senate. There are 13 Jews in the U.S. Senate: 13% of that body, held by 2% of the population. Plainly, Jews are grossly, grotesquely overrepresented.
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Wikipedia figures the Jewish population of the United States as 1.4% of the general population, not 2%. I guess they count people who are active members of some synagog. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates that Jews are 2.2% of the U.S. The Adherents.com website, however, counts self-identified Jews as 1.3% of the Nation's population in its table of the top twenty religions, but only 1% in the table about self-identification as found by the Pew Research Council. Adherents.com explains why the numbers vary:

Unlike some countries, the United States does not include a question about religion in its census, and has not done so for over fifty years. Religious adherent statistics in the U.S. are obtained from surveys and organizational reporting.

If one regards Jews as adherents (which would of necessity be self-identified) of Judaism, their number is closer to the 1.4% that Wikipedia used. That puts all the figures for the overrepresentation of Jews on the Supreme Court even higher: 33% of the total court would be more than 23× the number they 'should' have; 60% of a majority would be 43× — not 43% higher, but 4,300% of what they should have!
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In the House, the math is more complicated, but it has been done for us. Unfortunately, the same article in Wikipedia gives two different figures, one in a table (8.4%), the other in the text immediately following the table (7.8%). If we round down from the table and up from the text, we get 8%, which is 4× the largest number for Jews in the general population (2%), and nearly 6× (600%, a 500% overrepresentation) the 1.4% figure Wikipedia gave in the article on the Senate.
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For every OVERrepresented group, there is an UNDERrepresented group. Be it South Asians, East Asians, homosexual men, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, lesbians,* the disabled, Mexicans — you name it — the seats hogged in the House and Senate by Jews are not available to other groups, and those other groups' points of view are unheard and unincorporated in legislation and public policy. The United States Government's grotesquely Radical Zionist stance in the Middle East is NOT representative of the general population's attitudes but of the grotesquely too-Jewish Congress that the President must get his legislation, on all matters, past.
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Indeed, U.S. policy isn't even what most American Jews want for the Middle East! The organizations that are heard from and that influence U.S. Government behavior are not really representative of American Jewish opinion.
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Would U.S. public policy be different if the Congress were only 2%, or 1.4% Jewish? You can bet your ass it would be.
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Incumbency matters. Who one is determines how one thinks. That is why Sonia Sotomayor was completely right when she said, long before her confirmation, that her being a Latina gave her a point of view and empathy that non-Latinas/Latinos might not have. Of course, she recanted that view for the confirmation hearings, in an act of blatant dishonesty that should have barred her from the Court. One hopes she has found her integrity again, now that she has passed the gauntlet of fire that was her confirmation hearing.
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Now we are to have another gauntlet of fire for the Jewess Elena Kagan. How many members of the Senate will have the courage to say that we already have two Jews on the Supreme Court; there are only 9 members to that Court; Jews are already hugely overrepresented, and to add a third would make their overrepresentation not just grotesque but criminally unfair to everyone else? Who will have the integrity and intestinal fortitude to say they are not going to be intimidated by accusations of "anti-Semitism" for saying that 22% of the Supreme Court for a 2% or 1.4% minority — any such tiny minority — is far more than they are entitled to, and it must not become 33⅓%?That a democratic government must be truly representative, in its membership, experiences, and worldview, of the society it claims the right to dictate to? That a Supreme Court dominated by Jews cannot represent a country that is almost not at all Jewish, and that we risk widespread defiance of rulings that are clearly impelled by the Jewish members of the Court AGAINST the predominantly Christian country they seek to control? The Supreme Court is already hated. How far from the people can it get before the people demand that governments whose popular laws are voided, refuse to obey the rulings of the Supreme Court?
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Christians, MOSLEMS, atheists, and others must DEMAND that Elena Kagan be REJECTED by the Senate. Obama should indeed withdraw the nomination, or Kagan herself withdraw from consideration. The history of Germany must be seen to be instructive. Overreaching gave Jews too much power in Germany, and the German people reacted with HATRED. Jews here seem not to remember that part of history, and think that a violent reaction against the Jews cannot happen here. Yes, it really can. Back off. Two seats on the United States Supreme Court is at least one too many. Demanding three is asking for trouble. Very serious trouble. Push too far, expect pushback.
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* I had not yet, when I wrote that sentence, seen a picture of Ms. Kagan. She may or may not be a lesbian, but her haircut is decidedly dyky. If she's not a lesbian, she should be severely criticized for false advertising.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,397 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:45 PM

 
Cross-Purposes. Last nite's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC showed archival footage of several fireboats spraying tons and tons of water onto the listing oil-drilling platform over the underwater spill that is pouring millions of gallons of crude oil onto the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. (The platform had not yet sunk to the bottom of the Gulf.) Why on Earth would anyone put out an oil fire that prevented spilled oil from reaching the water? Are they insane?
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Later, officials talked about setting fire to oil that did get into the water. Why didn't they just let the fire on the platform continue as long as it could?
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British Petroleum — and why is BRITISH Petroleum allowed to drill in U.S. coastal waters, as risks harm to Americans and the environment of the United States? — is now deploying containment "domes" (polygonal, however, rather than round) over the leaking oil, from the top of which pipes would carry the oil onto tanker ships for safe removal from the area. Those structures had to be specially built. Question: why aren't there pre-built containment domes already on hand near every offshore-drilling area, worldwide? Doesn't anybody believe in the old advice, "Plan Ahead"?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,397 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Stephen Hawking, Idiot? Crippled British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking made headlines recently when he suggested that space aliens landing on Earth might want to destroy us, and made the comparison to Columbus landing on the shores of America and producing a catastrophe for "Native Americans". That is an astoundingly stupid pair of assertions, which makes me wonder if Stephen Hawking is actually a genius or just a fool that nobody understands and everybody pretends must be a genius because nobody understands his work.
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"Native Americans" is a preposterous term. For one thing, it suggests that one European, Amerigo Vespucci (Americus Vespucius) should be supremely relevant to the indigenous peoples of this wasp-waisted continent. I suspect that there is in fact no universally agreed term among those indigenes for all of them lumped together, in part because they do not lump themselves together. "Indians" ("indios" in Spanish and Portuguese, the dominant languages of Latin America) is a term that at least derives from a large region of Asia, which Columbus believed he had reached. English variations are "Indians", "American Indians", and "Amerinds". Contrary to what pushers of linguistic "political correctness" might have you believe, a lot of indigenes in the United States are perfectly happy with "Indian", and have even used it in the name of militant civil-rights and cultural organizations like the "American Indian Movement" (AIM).
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Putting that aside, we get to the next fact, that by and large the harm that aboriginal populations suffered from contact with Europeans was INdeliberate, such as the passing of diseases not indigenous to their region, to people who therefore had no preexisting immunity, and, in those primitive times, no vaccines, antibiotics, or antivirals to combat those infections. Would advanced alien visitors pay no heed to the possibility of US infecting THEM, or take precautions that would equally prevent THEM from infecting US?
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Columbus and the other Europeans who followed him in general did not willfully set out to eradicate the "natives". That's another problem with the term "Native Americans": "native" means only "born in a place", not present ancestrally for thousands of years. I am a "native American", because I was born on the American continent (New Jersey). Barack Obama is not a "native American" in a geographical sense, because he was born in Hawaii, which is part of Oceania, not the American continent. The "anchor babies" born in the mainland United States to illegal aliens are "native Americans", even if their parents are Pakistani or Nigerian.
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In any case, Spain did want to eradicate the hyperviolent paganism of, for instance, the Aztecs, which killed thousands of people every year in ritual human sacrifice. Good for Spain. Some Spanish conquistador(e)s wished not merely to take gold out of the New World but also to bring "the good news of our Lord, Jesus Christ" to the benited peoples they encountered. They were helped in this task by Jesuit and other missionaries who did their best to temper the racism and intolerance of some members of the conquering horde. Besides, a lot of the Spanish and Portuguese intermarried with local peoples: they reproduced with them; they did not kill them. Indeed, a lot more Spaniards married local women than did northern Europeans in the more northerly European colonies on the American mainland.
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Further, many members of indigenous populations benefited hugely from European conquest. The people among tribes conquered by the Aztecs, many members of which were then slautered by the Aztecs by having their still-beating heart cut from their chest with stone knives (and similar unfortunates victimized by the Incas) benefited enormously from being liberated by the Spanish from Aztec (or Inca) captivity and hyperbrutal colonial misrule.
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Many illiterate, backward peoples were brought into the "modern" world of the day by mission schools. The intertribal wars that regularly rent the various parts of what came to be known as "America", were ended. A common language, be it Spanish, Portuguese, or English, enabled tribes who could not earlier communicate, to speak to and learn from each other. And the geographic area they could safely travel without being enslaved or killed was multiplied many times. Europeans brought medicine, primitive at first, but advanced later. And "natives" who decided they didn't want to live an antique and stifling "traditional" life were free to move to other parts of the much larger nations of which they were now citizens, to live a life of their own choosing.
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Very few "natives" would now choose to return to the status quo ante the arrival of Columbus. So much for that bit of Hawking's idiocy.
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Now let's turn to the notion that advanced civilizations would treat intelligent creatures of other planets with viciousness, perhaps kill them off (and, some interpreters of Hawking's remarks have speculated, even eat them).
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1492 and 2010 are already worlds apart, and our attitudes toward other cultures are profoundly different from those of Columbus and the conquistador(e)s. We are nowhere near ready to embark on interstellar, manned travel, and by the time we are ready to do so, perhaps 100, perhaps 700 years from now, we will likely be much more civilized than we are now. Why on Earth — or elsewhere in the Universe — would Hawking assume that aliens capable of traveling light years in search of new, habitable planets, would be savages? The whole premise is absurd.
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Maybe Stephen Hawking is an idiot, and the reason people have trouble understanding some of his ideas is that they're nonsense, just as his speculation on the potentially disastrous consequences of alien contact with Earth is nonsense.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,394 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:28 PM

 
Illegal Invaders; Annex Mex! There has been a deliberate attempt by, for instance, opponents of Arizona's recent anti-illegal legislation to equate illegal aliens with legal immigrants. That is despicable dishonesty, and fools no one.
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The pretense is that any Hispanic, including people like my state (NJ)'s Senator Robert Menendez, if visiting Arizona, could be harassed by law-enforcement, with the blessing of state law. The reality is quite different. I very seriously doubt that local law enforcement, who especially in small border towns know who is local and who is not, would harass local U.S. citizens of Hispanic ancestry. And a white guy in an elegant business suit, even a mestizo in a business suit that obviously fits him, is not likely to be bothered. Who might be? The driver and passengers of an overcrowded pickup truck or van filled with poorly dressed mestizos wearing poorly made clothing of Mexican-peasant types (huaraches, ponchos). Any group of strangers standing outside a Home Depot looking for daywork, until those entitled to be here become known to local law enforcement. The suggestion that even after local law enforcers know full well that a given person is here legally, they will nonetheless harass them over and over for documents — and that the law would permit that — seems to me extremely unlikely. Yes, some cops are bigots and would love to harass Mexican immigrants in hopes of making them "go home"; but most cops know better. They know that they need the cooperation of local Hispanics entitled to be here in fiting drug smuggling, kidnapping, and the other evils that moved the State of Arizona to pass this 'drastic' legislation. The further assumption is that cops, sheriffs, and deputies are too stupid to recognize Mexican A as being different from Mexican B, or that the massive numbers around any law-enforcement officer would make it impossible for any one person to get to know who is here legally and who not. The reality, however, is that much of the border-enforcement activity will take place in small towns, not great cities. And even in larger communities, cops tend to become familiar with their part of town, and recognize the good guys as against the bad guys.
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So some of what people posit as potential problems would not develop in actual enforcement of Arizona's new law — or of any Federal attempt to detect and deport illegals, which the great preponderance of citizens want done.
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The United States accepts more legal immigrants than any other country in the world. We are not anti-immigrant, even tho legal immigration has in some cases done us demonstrable harm. The claim that immigration, legal or illegal, does no harm to Americans is pure, unadulterated bull*. Take two occupations: engineers and actors. U.S. corporations that do not wish to pay enuf to produce a flood of American students into engineering programs in U.S. colleges claim there is a shortage that Americans cannot fill, so ask for the right to bring in engineers from places like India, at salaries and benefits hugely below those that have heretofore been offered to Americans. The Federal Government allows corporations to use immigrants to undercut salaries and benefits for Americans, because the employers aren't the slitest shy about blackmailing the Government with threats simply to move all their engineering operations to India. Computer and other engineers, architects, computer programmers, etc., brought in under such programs of legal immigration are actively injuring American workers in those fields.
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Likewise, thousands of foreign actors are just allowed to march across our borders as if there was no such thing as a border. A very large proportion of all film actors at the highest salary levels in "American" films are foreigners, from Canada, Australia, Britain, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, and other places. Why? How did they get permission to enter the United States when there are at least scores of thousands and possibly even hundreds of thousands of American actors who cannot find work?
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The "American" film industry also outsources all kinds of productions, mainly to Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, even for films ostensibly set in the United States. That should be stopped, by making all foreign production expenses for films set in the United States ineligible for deduction as production expenses. Let all such expenses come out of after-tax profits, and we will see an end to this despicable practice. Let Canadians, Brits, and New Zealanders make their own damn films, at their own damn expense.
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The American film industry should benefit primarily Americans. That is not a revolutionary nor bigoted idea. Half of the "American" film industry's profits come from the United States, one country. The other half derives from all other countries of the world put together. So why are Americans relegated to utter unimportance by Hollywood? The idea that foreigners in Europe would not go to see an American film if all the actors were American, not Australian or other nationalities, is preposterous. Of course they would. Why hire an Australian to appeal to the tiny Australian market? There are only 22 million people in the entire country, which is only 2/3 the population of California. If Australians don't want to watch "American" films starring American actors, who cares?
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In any case, U.S. immigration laws are unfair to Americans, not to foreigners. There is no right of unrestricted access to the United States' economy, geography, and society to people from any area of the world not part of the U.S. legal realm: the 50 states, District of Columbia, territories (various islands), and Commonwealths. If the people of any other area wish to have the automatic right of access to our territory and jobs, they have merely to annex their area or country to the United States. We went from 13 states to 50; we can go to 100 or 150.
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Let Haiti end its hugely destructive independence and petition Congress for statehood. Let Mexico admit that it is a failed state as an independent country, and needs to be transformed by being annexed to and progressively altered by the United States. Mexican society is rotten to the core, and needs a total "Extreme Makeover: Mexican Edition".
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Mexico needs to eliminate the obstacles to social mobility placed in the path of hardworking, intelligent people. It needs to provide universal, quality education; universal electrification, sewage treatment, and water treatment systems. It needs to lift itself up from the doldrums of the sleepy, backward, unfair Third World. That effort would produce massive employment. But Mexico WILL NOT do that as long as it remains independent of the United States, at least not if the U.S. keeps providing an escape valve for the pressures for social change, by permitting a porous border to relieve Mexico of the responsibility to provide full employment at decent wages and benefits to its desperate classes.
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If Mexico's rich, and its naive nationalists, refuse to change Mexico drastically, in the direction of the U.S., by annexing Mexico to the United States and thus giving all its people the right to move to and work within the United States (and equally give Americans the right to move to and work within Mexico) the U.S. must deport ALL the illegals back to Mexico, where they will force the kinds of change that Mexico needs, or produce a violent revolution if the ruling elite refuses.
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If we force 6.25 million Mexicans to return to their country of birth, we can expect that that will so strain Mexican society that change will have to happen, peacefully or violently. Those who have spent a lot of time in the United States can be expected to demand the kind of legal and social rights that Americans have, and not consent any longer to be held back by social immobility. They might also form the core of a mass movement to annex Mexico to the United States, such that the 31 states and federal district of the United Mexican States become some lesser number of American states, say, an average of one state per 10 million people, for a total addition of almost 120 million people (including those expelled from the United States earlier), 3/4 of a million square miles of territory (which includes oil-rich areas), 20 or 24 seats in the U.S. Senate and 170 in the House of Representatives (which would be expanded to 605 seats to accommodate the new citizens from our new Mexican states). Mexico's very large oil and natural gas reserves would bring us much closer to "energy independence" than we now are, and from a secure, adjacent land area. No offshore drilling required; no Middle East oil embargo to fear.
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Until Mexico is annexed, the U.S. Government has the right, indeed the obligation, to enforce the border to protect Americans from the economic and crime hazards that illegal immigrants, from Mexico and THRU Mexico, present.
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People who attack the new Arizona law on illegal immigrants do so NOT because legal immigrants and native-born Americans of Hispanic heritage might be harassed, tho that is certainly possible, but because they do not want illegals to be detected, arrested, and deported.
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While it might be lovely if there were a world without borders, such an ideal is unattainable unless we have a democratic Government that can effectively provide services to all the world's peoples. There is no prospect of any such World Government any time soon. The United States' federal union can be enlarged over time to admit more and more of the planet's countries, and provide effective government over all areas brought into the Union. That is because democratic federalism allows people to control many of the operations of government closest to them, at the state and local levels, while contributing to the governance of the whole federal Nation. An effective federal democracy is infinitely expansible.
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Mexico is currently a nitemare, in large part because of impositions by outsiders and the transnational drug trade, which is destroying Mexican society due to the criminal activity of several million American drug users, who provide the demand that the drug cartels supply. The border isn't working for Mexico, because all the worst things from the United States pass the border easily. Mexicans are left with the worst of all possible worlds: everything bad about the United States affects, even controls them; none of the good things benefit them. The only way to get the benefits of the U.S. and neutralize the harms is to join the Great American Union, develop Mexico for the Mexicans (first and foremost), thru powerful state governments that use U.S. Federal aid to transform Mexico completely while retaining the good things about Mexican culture thru local programs to support and educate their citizens as to what is worth preserving from Old Mexico.
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Until Mexico becomes part of the Union, however, the U.S. must protect its citizens from disruptions and economic subversion by Mexican nationals. We could and certainly should revive the former bracero program, whereby Mexicans in search of temporary work, as in planting and harvesting American crops, would get legal permission to work here for a fixed period, then go home after they have made money in work the U.S. needs to be done, with all the protections of U.S. and state law relating to wages, working conditions, and worker safety. Comic and activist Paul Rodriguez advocated this on MSNBC's Countdown this past week, and it is an obvious solution to part of the problem of illegal immigration. Many Mexicans present in the U.S. illegally would be delited to go home if they could come here easily and legally in the future, and send money home. Others are here not just for the money but also for the quality of life, and the dignity accorded the person in an American culture that values individualism and merit above matters like race and family standing.
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People on both sides of the current border need to ask, "Why is this here?" and "Can't we do better together than alone?"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,394 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:04 PM