The Expansionist: June 2018

The Expansionist

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Absurd Demonstrations

There are scheduled for today HUNDREDS of demonstrations across the Nation to protest a Trump Administration policy that has been DISCONTINUED! What is wrong with this countyy? What next? Demonstrations to protest the Salem witch trials? Don't we have LEGITIMATE issues to demonstrate about, that we don't have to protest things that have already been fixed?

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:58 AM

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Indefensible Hypocrisy on Illegal-Alien Children; Recklessness on Immigration

Rachel Maddow is a detestable hypocrite. She made a great SHOW of being unable to deal with (tearing-up at) a news update toward the end of her program on MSNBC one nite this past week, about (mis)treatment of illegal-alien children. You might already know but definitely NEED to know that Rachel Maddow is a NOTORIOUS, enthusiastic champion — CHAMPION! — of ABORTION ON DEMAND! Rachel Maddow does not identify with children! She actually regards children as GARBAGE to be ripped out of the womb of ANY woman who might not be willing to bring them to term, puréed by spinning blades, and flushed away as medical waste. BUT she now POSES as, instead, a champion of children's rights. What a contemptible load of crap, and, thus, what a contemptible b* she is! In many matters she is duly moral, but not as regards children.
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This is odd, in that she is a forthright lesbian, and most lesbians cherish children, because they have to go to some considerable trouble and expense to have any of their own. But Rachel Maddow is out of touch with her femininity / womanliness, so takes a drastic, Radical Feminist stance as regards children, that values the woman at the expense of the child, 100% to 0% — every time. Such a one-sided stance doesn't even take into account regret after the fact, sometimes years or even DECADES after the fact, when a woman who killed her child wonders what that child might have looked like, been like; if it could have made a major contribution to society, or if it could have kept her company and helped her with life's daily tasks and financial pressures over decades.
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Perhaps when she is 70 and childless she will see the error of her ways. But how many deaths of children will she have contributed to before then, with her insane, short-sighted, one-SIDED advocacy of abortion-on-demand? As a gay man of very limited means, I could never afford to have children (ideally, sons). My financial means were always limited by the need to devote much of my time and energy to my work for change and sanity in society. If I had been financially rich, I could have worked on my multitudinous projects thruout life and had help with daily maintenance for myself (cleaning, tending to bills, cooking, home repair, and on, and on) and even child maintenance services, leaving me the biggies, such as attention to the emotional, moral, and intellectual needs of my sons. That was not to be. I am now 73 years old and DO have to wonder how my life would have been different had I had my boys. For one thing, I would probably have help now from younger men with various daily and seasonal chores, such as cleaning gutters and cutting back the wisteria that surrounds my house.
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Hype-ocrisy on Immigration. A very large proportion of the publicly-indignant human-rights enthusiasts we have heard spouting off about 'cruelty' to “undocumented immigrant” children are AT THE SAME TIME champions of the “right” of women to KILL children. All of a sudden they pretend to care deeply about the rights of children. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM. They would as soon KILL a child as look at it. NOTHING THEY SAY about caring deeply about temporary immigration policies traumatizing children long-term can be believed, because their way of preventing long-term trauma is to KILL children.
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There is no such thing as an “undocumented immigrant”. That is an instance of language being used to LIE. These international migrants are not “undocumented”. It's not as tho they lost their papers. They never had legal papers, so they are not “immigrants” but invaders, lawless barbarians who are ALL criminals, for violating our immigration laws. So it's nonsense to represent them as law-abiding people. Immigration laws ARE laws, and violating those laws is a criminal offense, so all violators of our immigration laws ARE CRIMINALS.
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The leading voices on BOTH sides of this controversy are full of sh*. The 'sympathetic' people are actually advocating that we give up the right to control our borders and allow everyone who wants to live here to come in without obstacle. If their voice prevails, we will have A BILLION MORE PEOPLE within our current geographical limits within 20 years. Do YOU want there to be 1.3 BILLION people in this country within 20 years? I don't. And I don't want foreign languages to sweep English away. As regards Spanish, there are 170 million speakers of Spanish in Mexico and Central America. In the United States, there are already 41 million speakers of Spanish whose mastery of English is poor, plus 12 million who are fluently bilingual.
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At some point, the features of this society that draw people here would stop working with unrestrained immigration. That wouldn't stop people from coming, however, since there is always a lag between change and general appreciation that there has been a change. But the negative consequences of a mismatch between immigration and the ability of society to absorb immigrants would be felt very soon.
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The Americans who will suffer first are not Princeton University graduates or even graduates of community-college vocational programs, but ordinary people whose highest educational achievement is a high-school diploma, IF THAT. We will have, then, the notorious “race to the bottom” we sometimes hear about, in which the MOST VULNERABLE, such as poorly educated blacks, suffer WORST. Can that really be what we want, as a society, to victimize the most vulnerable among us?
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Even if people born and raised in the United States might be able to compete with illegal aliens if they were in control of their lives and able to focus their energies on success, we must always bear in mind that a LOT of people in the most vulnerable groups in this society are incapable of focusing on success because they are DERANGED by drugs and incapable of functioning efficiently or even competently, and their failures drive them into deeper drug abuse, that subverts their lives ever more, and impels them to make ever more recourse to drugs for solace, and to keep them from thinking about the mess they have made of their lives. That is of course the exact opposite of what they need, which is to focus sober, hard attention on extricating themselves from their miserable condition.
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There's not much we can do about the derangement of drug users, unless we forcibly STOP them from using drugs, as by imprisoning them in correctional institutions, mental hospitals, or compulsory drug-treatment programs. We warn and we warn and we warn people NOT to torpedo their future by using drugs, but they don't listen. Should we therefore rightously consign them to a life of misery and let immigrants take their rightful place in society? Oh, we could certainly JUSTIFY that, but should we actually DO it? “You've made your bed. Now lie in it!” That might make the righteous among us feel glorious, but what would it do to society?
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Society should not conspire in the failure of people who have already subverted their future, as by goofing off in school, then dropping out of school, and falling into habitual drug use. It is easy for the vulnerable in American society to see themselves as victims, of laxity in enforcing immigration restrictions not least. Americans should be able to see the Government as being on their side, not the side of illegals, be they adults or children. There are not jobs enuf, housing enuf, places in schools enuf to go around for Americans and foreigners without distinction. If we are to draw distinctions, we must give U.S. citizens preference every time. If that disadvantages foreigners who do not have legal permission to be here, that's tuf. They have their own country. Let them go there.
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It is not cruel to send people to their own country. The issue is NOT “political asylum”, which is the ONLY type of “asylum” society should concern itself with. Political asylum is intended to protect people from political oppression by their own government. It is not to give foreigners shelter here from crime, or drug wars, or domestic abuse in another country, only protection from pervasive, specific oppression by government. If we wish to make individual grants of protection to foreigners out of the goodness of our heart, that is our right — to grant, or deny, on any basis we may choose.
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This is not 1810. Our land is not empty, in need of people to clear the land, plow and farm it, form towns and cities, staff governments, schools, the military, etc. We not only do not need more people, but we actually need to have FEWER people in large areas of this country. Quality of life, not quantity, should be our first concern. Illegal aliens in many parts of this country cram substandard housing units with as many as 20 people in a house or apartment intended for 4 or 5. That's no way to live. We would do them a favor by sending them back to their own country's adequate, ordinary housing,
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Moreover, there is the issue of preserving their culture. Immersion in the culture of the United States will inevitably affect the culture of illegals. Young children might find themselves losing their parents' culture almost entirely. Some kids concerned about acceptance by American children may actively disown their own culture. Do the parents really want that? Or do they want simply to live, here, the cultural life they enjoyed in their country of origin? Cultural interaction — or refusal to interact — is a two-edged sword that can harm everyone. Do the people so indulgent of today's flood of immigrants really want them to lose their own culture? If not, do they want communities of size to become a foreign mass in the body politic of this country?
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The issues are not black-and-white. There are losses as well as gains in both legal and illegal immigration, to both the host country and migrants. What we don't see in today's crisis is an appreciation that there are serious questions for all parties, questions for which we need, in good faith, to seek answers, not just to posture.
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Sentimental Claptrap Can Destroy Our Civilization. The dangers of unrestricted immigration are not hypothetical. We have an actual, perfect example of how dangerous mass immigration can be in the model of a little thing called “the Roman Empire”. It was once the premier military, economic, and cultural power of Europe. But political tumult led to the collapse of the external frontier, with massive inpouring of alien peoples, many of them armed to the teeth. Some of these groups of foreigners took over different parts of the erstwhile Empire, creating multiple separate countries from what had been a unified Empire. Over time, even cultural unity ended, and the Latin language became the language only of the (Roman Catholic) Church. The language the bulk of people spoke was the local dialect, which wandered over time farther and farther from other dialects, so that they became mutually unintelligible, “Roman”ce languages, because few people traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace ever in life, and there was no way to convey sound except personal interaction: no radio, no television, no film, no telephone.
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Nor was there even written communication among most people. Books and other printed materials had to be copied by hand, and there were no newspapers, magazines, advertising flyers, or other printed materials. The Iberian Peninsula, an area smaller than Texas, had two major political units, Spain and Portugal, which spoke dialects that became separate languages, and relatively few people could understand both. We could have the same kind of fragmentation experienced by the Roman Empire. Would the people clamoring for 'humanitarian' immigration like that? I wouldn't.
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Putting Foreigners First. It is one thing to feel sorry for people in bad situations, and quite another to give till it hurts — yourself, your own children, your town, city, state, cultural community, whatever. The instructions given at the start of a passenger airplane flight say that in the event oxygen masks drop from the overhead bulkhead, parents should put their own mask on before they attempt to put a mask on a child, because if the parent does not secure an oxygen supply, s/he could DIE before being able to put one on a child, which could consign the child to death too. If unrestricted immigration destroys our economy and cultural unity, we will end up hurting illegal aliens as well as ourselves. That is not in anyone's interest — well, not in the interest of any patriot or friend of the United States.
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Europe's Migrant Problem. Alarm and countermeasures against mass migration are not unique to the United States. The European “Union” is being seriously affected by a flood of refugees from poor, incompatible societies. Some observers think the strains of this mass migration might end the European project, and break up the European free-movement area, leaving at most a free-trade area, if that. We must all, in the civilized world, face the future with eyes wide open, and brains engaged.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:12 PM

Friday, June 08, 2018

Pardoning a Drug Pusher

Donald Trump has, bizarrely, been praised for commuting the life sentence of Alice Johnson, a pusher of cocaine!
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This was not a naive young woman selling "nickel bags" to acquaintances on the assumption that marijuana is at worst harmless and at best actually beneficial. No, she was a mature woman who imported, transported, and sold COCAINE:

The Associated Press article at the time of Johnson’s sentencing is headlined, “Memphis drug dealer gets life in prison.” The story reports that Johnson, then 41, was sentenced to life in prison for "leading a multimillion-dollar drug ring that dealt in tons of cocaine from 1991-94."

"Tons of cocaine", bought from the Colombian drug cartel. Cocaine is not remotely beneficial and not harmless. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that from 2000-2016, cocaine KILLED 10,619 Americans. But Donald Trump pardoned that vicious criminal. Did anyone die from cocaine she sold? That is not stated in the news coverage I have seen, and may not even be known, by her or law-enforcement authorities. Does it much matter? If a person acts with total disregard for (or "depraved indifference to") human life, s/he should be treated as an enemy of society, and life imprisonment for a woman who sold TONS of cocaine is NOT an excessive sentence — save that incarceration costs taxpayers hugely; capital punishment would be much less expensive to society, if we could eliminate endless appeals and the costs associated with meritless appeals to higher courts and to governors or the President for pardon or commutation of a richly deserved death sentence. And we could harvest organs for DECENT people from subhuman scum who continue to harm society thru parasitism in prison. Saving decent people's lives while carrying out a powerfully deterrent punishment for monstrous criminals would be a win-win. Consider these statistics:

114,000+
Number of men, women and children on the national transplant waiting list as of April 2018.
34,770
transplants were performed in 2017.
20
people die each day waiting for a transplant.

Drugs Are Not Harmless. A lot of people have no idea how destructive hard drugs are, because neither they nor people close to them have used hard drugs, so are fallow fields for malicious enemies of society to sow propaganda seeds for legalization of any and even ALL drugs.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, in 2016, there were 63,632 drug overdose deaths in the United States.

Does that sound harmless or trivial to you? And that is WITH most of these deadly drugs being OUTLAWED. How many more deaths would there be if we fell for the lies and allowed everyone to sell and everyone to take drugs? 100,000? 500,000? A million a year? Consider tobacco, which should have been outlawed in 1964, when a report by the Surgeon General of the United States linked smoking to immense risks to life and health. But the most that governments would do is require that explicit health warnings be printed on cigaret packages, and commercials for smoking be banned from television.
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Essentially no one today knows that

Prior to the 1900s, lung cancer was a rare disease.

The lackadaisical attitude of governments at both the state and national levels has produced MASS DEATH:

Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.

That's only one country, albeit the third most populous country on Earth. The CDC states:

Worldwide, tobacco use causes nearly 6 million deaths per year, and current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030.

Tobacco deaths in the United States, a country in which essentially everyone born here can read, and information media have worked for decades to inform people of the dangers of smoking, have caused literally incalculable damage to families, friends, employers, and communities. But there are still insane people who (claim to) believe that drug use is a matter of personal sovereignty over one's own body, and society has no right to interfere with such choices.
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I would not have expected Donald Trump to align himself, even implicitly, with the drug-legalization crowd. Yet he has done precisely that, in effectively saying that because Alice Johnson was a "nonviolent offender", a term that prominently fills the news reports on her pardon, her 'crimes' were trivial, so she deserved pardon. I could not disagree more.
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As a gay man living in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, I saw first-hand the ravages of drugs among gay men, many of whom DIED from immersion in a culture of drugs, Drugs, DRUGS, which destroyed their immune system and produced high death rates among young men. I don't wish that on any other group of naive fools. Society DOES have the right to intervene when people stray into lethally dangerous, self-destructive behaviors on the assertion that they know what they're doing, and whatever they want to take into their own body is their own business and no one else's. WRONG. They don't know what they're doing, and their needless deaths ARE the business of family, friends, and society more generally.
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Trump, a colossally unqualified and unprincipled person, betrays the public trust, yet again, with his irresponsible, brainless pardon of a drug pusher who sold "tons of cocaine".

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:55 AM

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Asylum Is for POLITICAL Refugees

There is enormous confusion and wilful misrepresentation of "asylum" in the present swirl of events at the United States' southern border. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says plainly, at the very top of its article on "Asylum":

Asylum, in international law, [is] the protection granted by a state to a foreign citizen against his own state. The person for whom asylum is established has no legal right to demand it, and the sheltering state has no obligation to grant it.

The term "asylum" without what used to be a clarifying adjective, "political", before it, is being maliciously misused to cover people who are NOT being oppressed by their government, but to people who may be fleeing civil war, drug czar violence, simple poverty or unemployment, and even domestic abuse by a spouse. NO, that is NOT what asylum is for. People fleeing conditions that have nothing to do with governmental oppression are NOT seeking "aslyum". They may be fleeing to what they hope will be refuge from bad conditions, but there's a big difference between refugees and asylum-seekers
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There is NO "human rights" issue in the refusal of the United States, or any country, to allow people to pour over a border without permission from that country. The United States has very generous immigration laws, and does grant asylum to many people fleeing actual persecution. But we have no obligation in law or morality to let just anybody in who wants in, for reasons having nothing to do with governmental persecution. Especially do we have no obligation to let in women who don't want to stay with a spouse whom they claim is abusing them. It cannot be our purpose to break up families when the woman takes her spouse's children away from him and moves them hundreds or even thousands of miles from the father. It is thus grotesque for soft-heated, and soft-headed, Americans to talk of separating children from their parents when a woman takes them across the border without their FATHER.
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The U.S. is not empty anymore. This isn't the nineteenth century, when we had huge expanses of basically unpopulated prairies and woodlands to fill with people who would develop the land and contribute to society. We now have some 328 million people, and a growth rate of 1% a year. The U.S. Census Bureau says we have:

One birth every 8 seconds
One death every 12 seconds
One international migrant (net) every 28 seconds
Net gain of one person every 13 seconds

At the same time as our population keeps growing, the number of jobs keeps shrinking, lost to foreign competition, corporate and government downsizing, and automation. Most illegals willingly accept lower pay and few to no employee benefits, as undercuts American workers, esp. Americans who are most vulnerable to unfair competition. Each of these is a troubling trend; together, they foreshadow economic disaster, and we need to STOP admitting so many foreigners into this crowded nation, esp. people who show no desire to assimilate into our national culture, but hold themselves aloof in linguistic and cultural ghettos of their own creation. This is esp. true of immigrants from Spanish America, who have so many communities of size and so much television, radio and, for those who can read, newspapers and magazines in Spanish that they feel no need, more than just no desire, to learn English and mix with others.
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We have no reason to subvert our civilization for the sake of foreigners. We didn't make their countries, nor their crime-ridden neighborhoods, nor their marriages bad. (Admittedly, American drug users have wreaked havoc in various parts of Latin America by inciting war among competing drug gangs, but that is not the doing of our Government nor American society in general, and it is up to the governments of those other countries to suppress such violence and protect their citizens. We have no authority to intrude into law enforcement in other countries. Nor do we have the resources to be the police force of the entire planet.)
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If the people of this country, acting thru our Government, want to admit refugees from things that have nothing to do with persecution, that is of course a choice we are entitled to make. But if we let in just everyone who wants to live here, some on unrealistic expectations that their life would be hugely better in a country where they do not speak the language and do not have the education to enable them to succeed in THIS society, we could be overwhelmed by hordes of invaders. I don't want a BILLION foreigners within our existing borders. If outsiders want into the United States, let them petition to bring their countries, with their resources, into the Union as States. Then we WOULD have the authority and ability to provide for these masses, and they would for the most part stay in their own culture, with their own people and their extended families, but achieve many of the benefits of our society in relatively short order.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:29 AM

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