A Tax on Imports from Mexico Would Be Paid by AMERICANS ...
... so Donald Trump is lying again when saying that Mexico will pay for his silly wall.  Moreover, Trumpistas seem not to know geography. They think that blocking the land border will stop illegal immigration. Have those people never looked at a map of North America? Let me point out to those ignoramuses that Mexico touches on two oceans that also touch on the United States. That means that illegal migrants can bypass the land border and travel to the U.S. by sea, as hundreds of thousands of illegals have migrated from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe! Is Trump going to build walls along every inch of the U.S. shores of the Gulf of Mexico — this well-known geograffic name should have made plain to Trump's idiot supporters that Mexico and the U.S. border on a common body of water — too? There are enormous stretches of the U.S. Gulf and Pacific Coasts that are very litely populated and almost completely unpatrolled by the Coast Guard or local and state police. There are THOUSANDS of miles of coastline on which boats, each filled with hundreds of illegal immigrants, can land, esp. at nite, to make an end run around Trump's "Great Wall of America".
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It's worth noting that China's Great Wall was also a failure. The various peoples it was intended to keep out of China, were NOT kept out, in multiple cases. Ultimately, the Mongols under Jengis Khan — NOT hard-G Genghis Khan — CONQUERED China and took over its government for about 162 years!
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Moreover, illegal migrants nowadays have an option that China's unwelcome neighbors did NOT: air travel. Any 'Great Wall of Trumpland' can easily be jumped over by aircraft of many sizes. Some don't need a paved landing strip — tho there are THOUSANDS of miles of well-paved but litely traveled highways and local roads that planes can land on, then pull off the roadway to a secluded spot before a return flite — but can easily land and take off again from any level surface of a few hundred feet in length, and not just in border states but also hundreds of miles within the United States, where no law-enforcement authority will be on guard.
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Contrast the history of China's Great Wall's great failure, with the history of what started as a (European) Common Market after the most horrendous war in the history of the world. Countries that had been killing as many people in "enemy" countries in Europe as possible, made the astonishing choice, less than 12 years after the end of the war in Europe, not to create walls but to subvert, then largely destroy the borders among former enemies, to create a "European Union" that has worked for many years, but is now endangered by the strains of dealing with hundreds of thousands of mainly waterborne refugees (tho many thousands did travel overland) that the EU could not cope with. One of the most populous members decided to LEAVE the EU due to those strains, in order to regain control over its borders.
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The intent of NAFTA was to BOLSTER borders among the three participating countries. The people in charge of the U.S. at the time understood that if we did not work to raise the incomes and cut the unemployment rate in Mexico, tens of millions of Mexicans would try to pour over the border, so the best way to keep Mexicans in Mexico was to improve their lives in their own country. At the time, there were some 94 million people in Mexico. Now there are 130 million. Would Donald Trump like to have 50 million of them trying to get into our territory?
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Former European enemies understood that their historical animosities were destructive to the interests of their various countries, and tried another solution. That was wise, and has worked pretty well to increase prosperity in the poorer regions of Western and Central Europe, and thus to keep massive numbers of economic migrants from leaving those areas for the richer regions, with all the economic and cultural dislocations that might cause.
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Canada too wanted NAFTA to bolster Canadian independence, because hundreds of thousands of Canadians have LEFT Canada for the United States, including many of its "best and britest". A large part of the "push" that these people felt was economic difficulty, while the "pull" was to be part of a much more exciting society, in which people could dare to aspire to great things in multitudinous areas of life and culture. Canada could not neutralize the "pull" of the U.S., but NAFTA was intended to minimize the "push". It hasn't worked entirely well, and there are now over a million Canadians living, legally and illegally, in the United States. But you never hear complaints about Canadian illegals, do you?
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A Huge Missed Opportunity for Supreme Greatness. In the 1840's, the United States had the opportunity to bring into the Union at least some of the countries of Central America that are sending enormous numbers of migrants, legal and illegal, across our borders, now amounting to over 3 million. The morons in charge of the Nation at the time chose not to annex Central America. We are paying the price for their shortsighted, racist, and anti-Catholic stupidity.
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In 1847, after the Mexican War, some farsighted Americans advocated that the United States should annex all of the territory of defeated Mexico and bring it into the Union, after a suitable period of tutelage in American democracy, as States of the Union, equal in every way to the other states. These were the ideological ancestors of the few of us today who understand that the United States should never have stopped growing geographically: my people, the Expansionists. Had all of Mexico and Central America been annexed, by 1900 all of those areas would have been admitted to the Union as States, and the prosperous, democratic Sunbelt now largely composed of areas formerly owned by Mexico would extend all the way to the northern border of Colombia. All such Sunbelt states would today share in and contribute to the general prosperity and power of the greater Union.
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But that was not to be. The Wikipedia article on the All Mexico Movement does not mention the greatest of the reasons for the failure of these annexations: the slave states opposed the admission of more free states, for fear that they would become powerful enuf to abolish slavery over the opposition of the slavers. Wikipedia does mention a couple of other reasons for opposing that geograffic enlargement: racial and religious bigotry. The United States today is hugely different from the United States of 1840, but, as the electoral triumf of neo-Confederate yahoos in the Presidential contest of 2016 proved, the smallmindedness of the 1840s persists in large geograffic swaths of this country. That bigotry has cost us enormously, weakening us economically, culturally and militarily. The U.S. today is only 4.4% of the world's population, and becomes less and less a percentage with the passing of time. How are we to stave off challenges — even military conquest or vast devastation — if we continue to shrink as a percentage of the world's population and resources?
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Short answer: we are NOT going to be able to hold the whole planet's barbarism and savagery at bay if we persist in thinking small, while the irresponsible and barbarous regions of the planet keep growing and growing in population, poverty, and desperation.
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Gentiles and "The Holocaust". On Meet the Press today, Chuck Todd passed along a lie by writer John Podhoretz in the magazine Commentary that the only people killed in Nazi concentration camps were Jews. Or is it that the only people who MATTER were the Jews?
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I'm a gay man, and know about the Pink Triangle and Nazi extermination of gay men. The Wikipedia article "Nazi concentration camps" states plainly:

The two largest groups containing prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were the Polish Jews and the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held without trial or judicial process. There were also large numbers of Romani people [Gypsies, which is NOT an insult, just the traditional English term for what is now the "politically correct" — censored — term "Romany", which is misleading in suggesting that they are Roman in ancestry!], ethnic Poles, Serbs, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic clergy, Eastern European intellectuals and others (including common criminals, as declared by the Nazis). In addition, a small number of Western Allied aviators were sent to concentration camps as spies. Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or whom the Nazis believed to be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number were sent to concentration camps under antisemitic policies.

Anyone interested in more information about the mass murder of gay men by the Third Reich can do their own Internet research, with search terms such as "how many gay men were killed by nazis". The same search term, with "gypsies", "Poles", "democratic socialists", "Communists", etc., will reveal other victims of the Nazi "Holocaust". More than incidentally, "Holocaust" is a bizarrely inappropriate term for that mass murder, in that it refers to a burnt offering to God, and should thus be regarded by superstitious, "God-fearing" people as a good thing!  Suffice it to say that it is OFFENSIVE of the Jews to clutch "the Holocaust" close to their chest as 'their own' genocide, in which no one else was murdered in large numbers.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:04 PM