I’m an immigrant to the United States, originally from the tiny Scandinavian kingdom of Denmark. I moved here as an adult, not to better my financial situation, but to marry my American girlfriend and improve my emotional life. It was hard to leave a secure job with good pay; it was a risk of the unknown, but I thought well worth the love of a good woman. After settling in, I managed to find a job in the same field, with an almost identical income. Financially my life should be the same, except it quickly became apparent that I have more disposable income here. A lot more.
It can be difficult to understand the impact that such an increase in disposable income can have on a person’s life, without a tangible example. Americans shrug it off because they take it for granted. They can’t understand what it’s like living paycheck to paycheck or saving up for something trivial on an otherwise decent income. My Danish friends and family can’t understand the difference either. They think what I’m about to tell you shows how irresponsible or foolish I am with money, because spending money in this way is simply not possible without upsetting your financial life for months or years.
Literal disposable income
You get the idea: disposable income is nice, it allows you to be more carefree and buy nice things. But it’s also about more than being able to afford luxuries, and it can mean the difference between life and death for those you love. The main take away from the events you’ll read about here is this: had they played out in my native Denmark, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the medical care that saved my friend’s life. I probably wouldn’t even have been able to find anyone to provide the care because there is no market for something people cannot afford. He would have been killed humanely at my expense instead.
My friend’s name is “BJ.” Scratch that, BJ is more than a friend, he’s family. He also happens to be a cat. We didn’t really plan on getting another pet, but he was irresistibly cute – a real scrapper. He was a skinny little thing and had a lot of scars and scabs, but he was exceptionally outgoing and had very high spirits. His personality is likely why he evaded being killed at least twice while passing through high kill shelters in the first 6 months of his young life. He miraculously found himself in a no-kill shelter near us, and we found him in a pet store that features locally adoptable cats.
BJ had a clean bill of health from the shelter, and we decided to give him a chance. Having lost another cat recently, we decided to protect ourselves from heart-ache by offering to foster him, with the option of later adopting him. Yeah right. We decided to keep him within a couple of weeks. He quickly gained a bit of weight, his scabs healed, and his fur filled in. He got along with our 3 other rescue cats and was living a good life in his new home. He worked his way into our hearts, became part of the family, and we became inseparable.
Cats are prone to upper respiratory infections; they result from a herpes-like virus that is in virtually all cats. Like cold sores in humans, it lays dormant most of the time, but when it flares up the symptoms are a runny nose, sneezing, and maybe a fever. All our cats would suffer from this occasionally, but BJ caught it really bad after having lived in our home for a couple of years. His symptoms were much worse and he didn’t really seem to spring back from it as easily as our other cats. One day last year after a bout of this, he started to drool a lot and bleed out of his mouth. We panicked and took him to a vet immediately
It turned out he had several bad teeth, and one had to be removed. He was also presenting with enough other strange symptoms that the vet decided to do a few routine tests. BJ tested positive for FIV, the feline equivalent of HIV, and on top of that he was severely anemic. Because of the anemia it was uncertain if he also had the FeLV virus, which causes leukemia in cats. Shelters test for these viruses, but a cat can test negative for months after infection, so there are no guarantees.
So cute!
We were devastated. He was quickly getting worse, and we took him to an emergency animal hospital an hour away with an internist on staff. Honestly, it was uncertain if he was going to make it. BJ stayed in the hospital for several days, where he had two blood transfusions, a bone marrow biopsy, and a bunch of other tests and treatment. He was very sick, but through the whole thing he was friendly and alert, and you could tell the staff was rooting for him and giving him extra attention because of his personality. Being cute is a real survival skill for this little guy.
Thankfully he didn’t have FeLV, instead the anemia was caused by something called a “mycoplasma.” This bug had a field day because his immune system was compromised by the FIV virus. It can be easily cured, but was damaging his bone marrow and keeping him from producing and sustaining viable blood cells. He was getting a cocktail of antibiotics to kill the mycoplasma, and steroids/immune-suppressing drugs to give his bone marrow a chance to heal and produce new blood cells and to slow down the FIV. To complicate matters, the steroid made him diabetic, a risk we accepted, and he needs insulin injections twice daily. For months we were taking it one day at a time. BJ will always be sick, but thanks to our ability to provide this care for him, he can feel happy and healthy. He pays us back every day.
It wasn’t cheap–it cost us thousands of dollars, and he still needs medications and frequent trips to the vet. But it was our choice. If BJ lived with me in Denmark, that choice – and consequently his life – would have been extremely limited by how others think my income should be spent. BJ would have died to pay for an artist’s paint, a politician’s plane ticket, and the Queen’s morning cup of organic fair-trade coffee.
The following is in no way the views of Glibs in General, but more a view from Glibville, IMO.
I met an Armenian customer today, inspecting his flooded furnace, and being a businessman himself, we got to talking. He explained that his very nice neighborhood was once run down, but the Armenians came in and fixed the place up, improved property values and generally made a nice place to live and have their kids grow up; not bad. We compared prices for similar homes, mine $295k. The equivalent house in his neighborhood? $760k. (Disclaimer: I live in the sticks, 46 miles East of Glendale.)
We did speak briefly of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the the Turks (who still won’t cop to it, after over 100 years? and Germany?, Fuck the Turks). SoCal has a large Armenian Diaspora. Weather, maybe?
I told him stories of Chinese people who HAD to win, at any cost, and I just jack up the initial price, knowing I will win my price and they “save” face, which is important to them.
When I was growing up, I remember the whole “Jews are shysters and con artists”, banker thing. Try ANY culture from the Middle East, they’re all Jews when it comes to haggling. Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians, it doesn’t matter, everything is “Too much, Lower price”. (I don’t adhere to the Jew Concept, it’s a Middle Eastern thing.)
So many of the immigrants I meet are so proud to be here and be able to haggle in peace, it’s no wonder they want to be here. I often wish they would “fix” their own homeland but I get that it can be hard, if not impossible to do, that’s why they left. Think about that for a moment, you have to leave the place where you were born, your culture, lifestyle, all of it, due to fear of a lack of freedom. I say FUCK YEAH!
I actually love these interactions, I learn a lot about other cultures, but the one thing I have learned in 30 years of Customer service is everyone is different, don’t assume anything. Cultures are different, but the melting pot still exists, is very powerful, and immigrants are very valuable to our country. And some I assume are good people. We at least need to remind people that neo nazis, antifa and all the others aren’t who we are. Hell, I can’t see ’em in my world, and I cover most of SoCal.
Most People living in the U.S. are too busy working to pay much attention, IMO, and the antifa/nazi thing is just so much hot air. If I am wrong, well, at least we are all armed. (You are armed, correct?)
Notice the use of the word immigrant. I refer to legal immigrants. I know too many illegals and they are a strain on our system, like dead voters, democrats, feral Dogs and STEVE SMITH.
P.S. I’m told that you Canucks are but redheaded stepchildren to us in the U.S. of A.
At least the Canadians get Caps!
/Canada!
Rush!
Celine Dion!
Kids in the Hall!
/Feel better?
We have a white nationalist administration in the White House. A conclave of priestly bigots, reactionaries, anti-semites, and racialists. And one of their chief objectives, along with forcing their misogynist and heteronormative world view on the country, is to keep out brown people. At no time has this been clearer than when they unveiled their new proposal for immigration reform.
This new ‘reform’ will prioritize so called ‘skilled immigrants’ who speak English above others. When I heard this proposal, I took it personally. My maid, Conchita, immigrated to this country from Honduras a few years ago. If she would have tried to immigrate under the administration’s new proposal, her lack of English proficiency or a skilled trade would have relegated her to the back of the line. Whose job does Conchita’s presence in this country threaten? What American would take her job to be paid eleven dollars an hour? In fact, before Conchita, I couldn’t even find anyone who would clean my home and watch my children for less than twenty-five dollars an hour. I couldn’t pay that and nor should I be forced to when there are immigrants like Conchita that are willing to work for less. I mourn the possible loss of opportunity for people like Conchita and myself, if this immigration ‘reform’ is passed.
Even more personally for me, though, is that this new bill has worried me about my oldest son’s future. My son, Tim, graduated from Stanford a few years ago and got a job working in computer engineering at a nearby manufacturer. He started out making a good salary, for a recent college graduate, and everything seemed to be going good for him. But over the past three years he hasn’t received a raise and he’s noticed that his company has started employing people who aren’t local. For instance, he told me that his new supervisor, Sanjay, just immigrated to the US from India. I’m happy that the company has brought diversity to their workforce, but I don’t understand why they had to import management. I don’t claim to be intricately familiar with the engineering profession, but Sanjay is a graduate of Mumbai University (hardly a well-known name within the engineering field) and yet he is supervising six other employees that have all graduated from Stanford, UCLA, and Boston College. I can’t help but think that Sanjay was hired because of the lower than average salary that he was willing to accept. To me, this is a dangerous precedent that not only suppresses wages, but also cheapens the expertise needed in these professional fields. Do we want to reduce the quality of engineers in order to save a few thousand dollars? If you’re OK with that, then would you say the same about accountants? Or architects? Or even doctors?
Pictured: artist’s interpretation of Sanjay, the bad egg
And besides the obvious skills deficit between a graduate of some foreign university versus our own renowned institutions, there is also the question of timing. Our college graduates today are burdened with high debt and struggle to find even entry level employment in their chosen fields. Why should we be making this situation even more difficult by importing ‘skilled immigrants’ that will undercut their wages and reduce their employment prospects? It’s one thing to have immigrants like Conchita who provide Americans with affordable service, but it is quite another to undermine American expertise. I had thought that we, as a country, had already come to this conclusion, before an uprising of drug-addled bigots in other parts of the country surprised me by electing a buffoonish racist.
We cannot allow this sinister piece of legislation to redefine our country. I say we allow in more Conchitas and less Sanjays. It’s just good economics.
In Part One, we followed the adventures of a pacifist Quaker sailor captured by pirates.
In Part Two, we saw the Quakers, helped by William Penn, defeat an attempt by their religious opponents in the 1790s to have them prosecuted as blasphemers.
But by the late 1690s, William Penn was no longer feeling his oats.
He wasn’t getting any younger, he wasn’t getting the revenue he had expected from being Proprietor of Pennsylvania, and his finances were in a bad condition thanks to his un-thrifty, un-Quakerly spending habits. Worst of all, Gulielma, his beloved wife of twenty-two years, had died in 1694.
“As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” – Psalm 103, 15-16 (KJV)
But there was no time for Penn to sit around feeling sorry for himself….
Hey, what did I just say?
The Board of Trade, the bureaucracy which oversaw the English Empire, had been receiving complaints that England’s Caribbean and North American colonies were tolerating pirates, with Pennsylvania among the worst of the lot. Other complaints about Pennsylvanians were that they were buying and selling goods without regard to the arbitrary British trade restrictions – this voluntary commerce in honest goods was to British imperial authorities about as much of a sin as trafficking in stolen pirate goods. Plus the antiwar views of the colonists meant the Empire wasn’t getting a lot of help from Pennsylvanians in the struggle with France.
As far as the Board of Trade was concerned, the worst of the pirates was Henry Every.
Henry Every (under the umbrella)
Every led a mutiny and took over an English ship in Spain. Renaming the ship the Fancy, Every sought plunder in the Indian Ocean, the latest popular destination for greedy sea-robbers. These East Indies pirates were based in what is now called the Ile Ste Marie off the east coast of Madagascar. From this island the pirates sailed forth against the richly-loaded ships which carried goods and treasure from the Orient.
Pirate Cemetery, Ile Ste Marie, Madagascar
Every left a message to English and Dutch merchants in the area telling them simply to identify their nationality and they would not be harmed. Like other East Indian pirates, Every targeted ships from the Muslim countries in the area (and would be happy to seize French or Spanish ships too). The Barbary Pirates who enslaved Europeans were Muslim. The Turkish armies which had jihaded their way through Europe, almost to Vienna, were Muslim. So there was a convenient conflation between the hostile Muslim powers near Europe and the not-yet-hostile Muslim powers with their tempting loot in the Indian Ocean.
Every’s Fancy came across the Ganj-i-Sawai, a ship belonging to the powerful Mughal Emperor in India, a potentate named Aurengzeb. The Ganj-i-Sawai was part of a fleet which was returning from a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca with many distinguished passengers and a prodigious amount of treasure.
Every and his men captured the ship, stole the treasure and – if we are to believe the Mughal accounts and some of the pirates who later turned states’ evidence – raped the women. Every supposedly married Aurengzeb’s granddaughter, who had been on the captured ship, and she allegedly became a pirate queen.
“Hand over yer booty – we’re talking to you, ladies.”
The problem was that Aurengzeb was not someone the English wanted to cross – England’s East India Company was beginning its penetration of the Indian subcontinent, but Aurengzeb might put a stop to that if he became angry. At the time Aurengzeb was regarded as very harsh and cruel, though recent historical revisionism suggests he wasn’t that bad (for example, “Aurangzeb protected more Hindu temples than he destroyed”). But it was unwise to provoke the Emperor’s wrath, and Aurangzeb was wrathful that ships from a supposedly friendly power had committed such aggression on his pilgrim ship. What are you going to do about it, he asked the English threateningly, as he commenced retaliating.
Apologizing for the incident,
Here are the English apologizing to Aurangzeb on an earlier occasion
…the English tried to repair the damage by hunting for Every and his crew.
Several of Every’s crew members were captured in Ireland, brought to London, convicted and hanged. Based on the trial and on the confessions of the captured pirates, authorities in London got a great deal of information about the friendly reception which England’s North American and Caribbean colonies gave to Every and other pirates. Reports came in of Every’s former shipmates spending and selling their loot in the colonies, bribing officials, and even settling down and becoming respectable citizens. The Board of Trade believed that Every and the remainder of his crew might be hiding out in America.
Many people in English America were indeed friendly with the East India pirates. Many in the colonies, including many colonial officials, had personal memories of slavery at the hands of the Muslim Barbary Pirates, slavery from which they had had to be ransomed at heavy prices after enduring painful and arduous labor. The East Indies pirates were simply robbing Muslims – who were cut from the same cloth as the Barbary Pirates, the colonists thought. Speaking of cloth, calico, an Indian fabric, was very much the rage at the time, and the pirates brought calico to enliven the wardrobes even of the Boston Puritans. The stolen goods were a great stimulus to local, currency-starved economies in America.
Reports from Rhode Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were particularly disturbing, at least to those willing to believe ill of the Quakers – and many English officials were willing. Tiny Rhode Island had a large measure of self-government, and the rich Quakers who ruled the colony enthusiastically cooperated with the East India pirates. New Jersey, with a heavy Quaker influence, had similar problems. Of course, the non-Quaker colonies, such as New York, Massachusetts, and the Bahamas, also provoked complaints, and these places were not Quaker-run.
In Pennsylvania, Every’s former crew members were selling their loot and settling in that colony, like elsewhere in English America. As deputy governor of Pennsylvania, William Markham, a non-Quaker cousin of Penn’s, was responsible for wielding Penn’s powers while Penn was away in England. Markham had been in the British Navy and had taken part in a naval attack on Algiers, the Muslim pirate-state which Markham may have equated, through guilty by association, with the Muslim kingdoms of India.
Like other American governors, Markham gave commissions to pirates for the ostensible purpose of fighting the French, who were at war with England at the time. The commissions often spoke vaguely about “the King’s enemies,” implying that the French were not the only targets. In any case, the newly-commissioned “privateers” (a term which was beginning to evolve to describe government-sanctioned pirates who fought the government’s wars) went straight to the East Indies and preyed on Muslim shipping while making the French (who didn’t have as much seizable booty) a secondary priority at best.
Markham praised the friendliness of the pirates and the stimulus they gave to the local economy. They also seem to have brought many gifts to Markham, gifts he accepted in pretended ignorance of the givers’ piratical origins. Markham accumulated a collection of East India luxuries Although Markham arrested some of Every’s crew under pressure from London, these prisoners somehow managed to get bailed out or to simply escape. A royal official investigating Pennsylvania affairs suggested that the King wouldn’t act to suppress a rebellion against Markham, if one should develop (hint, hint). The governor of Maryland tried to stir up just such a rebellion in order to add Pennsylvania to Maryland, though that didn’t work.
A Red Sea pirate named James Brown…
Come here mama…and dig this crazy scene / He’s not too fancy…but he has loot from the Red Sea / He ain’t no drag. / Papa’s got a bunch of swag
…sailed into Philadelphia with his ill-gotten treasure, and went to see Markham, presumably with a view toward making some gifts. Brown explained to Markham about his activities, admitting that he’d sailed with the pirate Thomas Wake and also with Every, but in the latter case only as a passenger, Brown insisted. This was probably a cover story – I don’t know if Every even offered passenger service. Of the voluntary kind, that is.
Markham’s daughter fell in love with Brown and the she married the buccaneer.
“Daddy, you can tell William Penn that we totally take piracy as seriously as he does.”
Perhaps this video will give some idea of the wedding ceremony. William Penn, however, probably did not feel good about having a pirate in the family. James Brown settled on a farm in what is now Delaware, then part of Pennsylvania.
Penn had to balance the demands of the imperial authorities and those of his people in Pennsylvania. In 1696, Parliament passed a law increasing royal power over the colonies, including Pennsylvania, partly in the name of getting tough on piracy. Penn feared the loss of self-government and even trial by jury. Penn tried to explain to London authorities that Pennsylvanians had moved to their colony “to have more and not less freedom than at home.”
The colonial legislature of Pennsylvania shared Penn’s concerns to an extreme degree. The Pennsylvania Quakers, as Penn had pointed out, had a longstanding suspicion of the English government, which had oppressed them when they lived in England, would seize on any excuse to extend its persecuting arm across the Atlantic. Even the anti-piracy crusade might be a pretext for colonial officials to mistreat Pennsylvanians. Robert Quarry, the admiralty judge sent to Pennsylvania to crack down on piracy, had been removed from the governorship of South Carolina for collaboration with pirates. Now Quarry had commercial interests in Pennsylvania, which suspicious Pennsylvania officials believed would give him an incentive to use his official powers to harass rival merchants – all in the name of law and order. Quarry catechized Quaker meetings about the religious beliefs, which would have reinforced the suspicion that the anti-piracy crusade was another step in England’s long-term persecution of Quakers.
But Quarry had his own complaints:
All the persons that I have employed in searching for and apprehending these pirates, are abused and affronted and called enemies to the country, for disturbing and hindering honest met, as they are pleased to call the pirates, from bringing their money and settling amongst them.
The Pennsylvania lawmakers made an “anti-piracy” law full of loopholes to shield pirates’ local accomplices. James Brown, Governor Markham’s son-in-law was elected to the legislature but didn’t show up; when he did, he suggested he hadn’t want to risk arrest for piracy. The legislature expelled Brown and Markham acted to arrest his son-in-law, while also helping him out with bail money.
Penn came to his colony to in 1799 (bringing his second wife Hannah with him), to preside over the government in person and address the vehement complaints of the colonial officials in London. He wanted to protect Pennsylvania’s autonomy as far as he could, but he also wanted to check the unrealistic defiance of the locals against the empire. If Pennsylvanians believed themselves put-upon now, how would they like it if London took the proprietorship away from Penn (again) and administered the colony directly, removing the buffer Penn provided between his colonists and the wrath of hostile imperial bureaucrats?
Investigating the situation, Penn found that, indeed, former pirates had settled in the colony, including his cousin William Markham’s son-in-law. Penn replaced Markham and other colonial officials who had buddied up too closely to the pirates.
After Penn gave the colonial legislators a stern talking to…
WILLIAM PENN SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS BROTHERS AND SISTERS. STOP DOING BUSINESS WITH PIRATES, AND IN GENERAL, PAY MORE RESPECT TO MY AUTHORITY AS PROPRIETOR OF THIS COLONY.
…the solons repealed their defendant-friendly piracy law. Mellowing somewhat, Penn suggested that the reformed pirates who had settled in Pennsylvania be left alone, so long as they earned an honest living far from the ports and coastal areas, where they might be tempted (or tempt others) into piratical ways. Perhaps Penn was thinking of his in-law, James Brown, the pirate-turned-farmer.
Penn left Pennsylvania in 1701, and never returned.
“Goodbye, William, Godspeed, we will take to heart all of your solemn lectures!”
The Board of Trade was not placated, continuing to see the North American and Caribbean colonies as refuges for pirates. The problem, the bureaucrats concluded, was that not all the colonies were governed directly by the Crown. So the Board prepared a bill for Parliament by which the proprietary colonies (like Pennsylvania) and those colonies which were self-governing based on royal charters (such as Massachusetts) would become directly ruled from London Also, the colonies would be merged into larger megacolonies – for instance, Pennsylvania would be merged with Maryland and New Jersey (PenJeryland?).
A bill matching some of the Board’s ideas was introduced in the House of Lords. To opponents of the bill, such as Penn, this was sheer oppression, abrogating charter rights. And anyway, New York was a crown colony but its former governor, Fletcher, had been in cahoots with the pirates nonetheless (Fletcher had spent time as governor of Pennsylvania when Penn had been deprived of his proprietorship). The Quakers and other colonial agents out-lobbied the Board of Trade. Penn defended his powers as proprietor in terms their Lordships could understand: “Powers are as much Property as Soil; and
this is plain to all who have Lordships or Mannours [manors] in England… .” The bill died in Parliament – but not before passing a second reading in the House of Lords. The Board kept pushing for its pet bill, but without success.
There wasn’t a major crackdown on piracy in the colonies until the pirates began relocating their predatory activities to the vicinity of the colonies themselves, as opposed to the remote Indian Ocean. Then the colonists bestirred themselves, and some serious pirate hangings began, putting an end to what some call the Golden Age of Piracy.
Works Consulted
William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism. London: MacMillan and Company, 1919.
Douglas R. Burgess, Jr., The Politics of Piracy: Crime and Civil Disobedience in Colonial America. ForeEdge, 2014.
Leonidas Dodson, “Pennsylvania Through the Eyes of a Royal Governor,” Pennsylvania History,Vol. 3, No. 2 (April, 1936), pp. 89-97.
Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Rufus M. Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies. London: MacMillan and Company, 1911.
John A. Moretta, William Penn and the Quaker Legacy. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.
Andrew R. Murphy, Liberty, Conscience and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
P. Bradley Nutting, “The Madagascar Connection: Parliament and Piracy, 1690-1701,” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul., 1978), pp. 202-215.
I. K. Steele, “The Board of Trade, The Quakers, and Resumption of Colonial Charters, 1699-1702,” The William and Mary Quarterly,Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1966), pp. 596-619.
Alexander Tabarrok, “The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Privateers,” The Independent Review, v., XI, n. 3, Winter 2007, pp. 565-577.
C. E. Vulliamy, William Penn. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934.
A discussion in the Comments this week gave me a flashback to my elementary school days. My parents had moved me from an Orthodox Jewish private school to the local public school in our working-class suburb of Baltimore. The student population was probably 2/3 Jewish, the teaching staff was about zero Jewish; this was contingent, since the suburb had long been a white Christian semi-rural town, as was most of the county, and the housing developments that had recently sprung up were at the vanguard of flight from an increasingly dangerous city, with the Jews being the pioneers of the northwest direction. The old timers were, um, grudging in their acceptance of change. But the reality was, the Jewish kids, almost all 2nd and 3rd generation Americans, were pretty much indistinguishable from the other kids- we watched the same TV shows, played Little League, joined the Boy Scouts, played War, went to the chop suey restaurant once a month…
Nonetheless, the teachers (as proto-progressives) thought that it was important that when we studied American history, some contribution from Jews had to be worked in to make it somehow “relevant” to the kids. The reality was, there weren’t many of (((us))) around during the Founding, and for that matter, before the 20th century. So it was a reach- and every year, when we’d talk about the revolution, there would be a day or two dedicated to… Haym Salomon, who creatively sold financial instruments to raise money for George Washington.
This dive into “relevance” no doubt made our teachers feel better, but I think most of the students were a bit uncomfortable. Way to hit a stereotype, and sound a bit desperate. For the black kids, I’m sure that the teachers trotted out Crispus Attucks, who basically distinguished himself by getting killed as a bystander. At least, unlike the Jew stereotype, they didn’t praise Attucks for being a great dancer.
But “relevance”? Really? What’s relevant wasn’t the ethnicity or gender of the Founders, it was the power of their ideas. The fact that they were Christians and of Western European descent was irrelevant to us- we all knew people with numbers tattooed on their arms, heard stories of family slaughtered, and yet, there we were, in a working-class suburb, seeing our families and friends going about their lives. Sure, there was prejudice, neighborhoods Jews couldn’t live in, clubs we couldn’t join, beaches we couldn’t go to, but we were living in a culture that Jews had shaped. That their influence didn’t start rising until the great immigration waves of 1900-1927 was irrelevant to us.
So seriously, fuck Salomon. And whatever Jewish cowboy token someone could dig up (the case of Wyatt Earp is interesting, though). What we had was a country into which we had all assimilated, while contributing our unique flavors, a country based on universal ideals. Thomas Paine was important, a banker, much less so. We thought ourselves as one with Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Lincoln, and didn’t think of ourselves as somehow being outsiders or “different.”
And here we are today, July 4, 2017, where the biggest problem facing American Jewry is not threats from people on the Right or people on the Left. Those people are marginal at best, a tiny minority of losers who need to invoke bigotry to assure themselves of their own relevance. We have no fear or them or worry that they might actually influence people. Most people, the vast majority, don’t really give a shit whether you’re a (fill in the ethnic blank). This is our home, America, the best and safest place for Jews on the planet. Our actual biggest threat? Being married out of existence.
That kind of problem we can live with.
Thank you, Founding Fathers, and thank you America- the country, not the government- for making us part of you.
It was brought up in the morning links (h/t: AmSoc), but deserves expanding upon.
Grande and Mattis
The Nation is more concerned with making President Trump and his administration look foolish than they are about taking terrorism or counterterrorism seriously. And I have no doubt that Ariana Grande means well, but she’s dead wrong. Inclusiveness is no strategy to fight terrorism. It is a strategy to offer people an opportunity to assimilate to an enlightened western culture. Some people will take that opportunity, as evidenced by the millions of Muslims that live peacefully among people of other religions as well as agnostics and atheists throughout the western world. But some won’t. And you can be as inclusive as you want to be, but that won’t take away their desire to impose their beliefs upon everyone else, often resorting to terrorism when people aren’t receptive.
Juan Cole writes:
Secretary of Defense Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis said in an interview on Sunday that US strategy toward ISIL has moved from attrition to annihilation. Since 2014, he said, the United States has been making it difficult for them to stay in one place, disrupting them and chasing them out of their strongholds (through airstrikes). Now, he said, the new strategy is to surround them and kill them all, to prevent the foreign fighters from returning home to foment more terrorism. He also urged a battle of humiliation against them in cyberspace, depriving them of any mantle of legitimacy. He was unapologetic about the recent Pentagon finding that a US air raid set off explosives in a Mosul apartment building, killing over 100 civilians, and seemed to pledge more reckless airstrikes.
Certainly there is a case to be made for non-interventionism. But that’s not the case Ariana Grande is calling for. (If she were, I’d be happy to cheer her on.) She calls for inclusion. Now tell me, what possible good can come from being “inclusive” toward a regime built on terror? Can we “include” into western culture their belief that women caught without an escort should be stoned to death? Can we “include” into western culture their belief that gay men and women should be tossed to their death from the highest point in town? Can we “include” into western culture the taking of sex slaves when they conquer a city? And lastly, can we “include” into western culture the celebration of slaughtering innocent people in our cities because we resist the importation of their insane lifestyle? That’s not inclusion. That’s tolerance and acceptance of barbarism. We, as a society, are better than that. And while I believe we should remain non-interventionist when it comes to global meddling, once they import that activity to out nations, we should destroy those who would perpetrate those violences with every tool that is constitutionally available to us.
The strategy of annihilation is sort of like fighting forest fires with gasoline hoses.
Actually, its not. An enemy can be annihilated. It can be rooted out and extracted like a cancer. Sure it may pop back up again at a future date, but that doesn’t mean its not worth fighting to eradicate. And its a damn sight better to have tried and failed that to succumb to evil in any form. And I have to say, the strain of any religion that accepts massacring innocent people at a concert for the spread of it, or the killing of any gay person for the spread of it, or the taking of sex slaves and stoning of women not adequately subservient for the spread of it, deserves to be wiped from the face of the earth with all haste possible.
I will give him partial credit, though. He wrote this:
George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, in other words, created the exact conditions in that country that were guaranteed to foster terrorism. Washington has never come to terms with its own responsibility for destabilizing the region.
However, he completely omits the expanded war on terror Obama waged, expanding it to nations Bush never bombed. He fomented rebellion in Libya and Syria, directly leading to the soldiers, and in all likelihood the arms, necessary for ISIS to gain a foothold. He also forgets the overwhelming bipartisan support Bush and Obama both received to wage their wars in parts of the world that posed no threat to us. I’m sure it was an oversight and not a deliberate attempt to score cheap political points. But it deserves to be mentioned.
This is real.
Look, there is no surefire way to prevent terrorism. But once it reaches our shores, the individuals carrying it out deserve to be treated harshly, so long as it is within constitutional limits. And people that are guests here who return to the battlefields of the middle east should be forbidden re-entry. We are under no obligation to “include” their idiocy any longer. Neither does Britain, Germany, Sweden or any other nation that chooses to eject those whose sole purpose is conquest through barbarism.
If this runs counter to open borders libertarianism, I’ll happily accept the scorn of those friends of mine on this one issue. But open borders can exist at the same time a strong counter-terrorism operation can be waged within the confines of our Constitution. And its time we allowed the warriors to stand up and properly defend us from those who are using “inclusive” appeasement as a means to infect our society with their oppressive, pre-enlightenment form of barbarism.
**The views in this are mine alone and do not represent the views of other Glibs staff.
Cast your mind back to 2006. It wasn’t a good year for the Republicans; not with George W and his muddled and seemingly endless war. This was the time when a New Republic article came out – one that is still referenced today – concerning the supposed new political fusion called Liberaltarians. There were, of course, several responses to this. Lost in the mix was John Derbyshire’s take. This was before his expulsion from Nation Review for saying, to put it kindly, less than politically correct things about African-Americans. But I won’t dwell on that, but will instead cover his idea of Libertarianism in One Country which, as to be expected, involves immigration restriction.
First some snippets to put this in context:
A liberal, in the current sense of the term, is a person who favors a massive welfare state, expansive and intrusive government, high taxation, preferential allocation of social goods to designated “victim” groups, and deference to international bureaucracies in matters of foreign policy.
It is not difficult to see why such a person would favor lax policies towards both legal and illegal immigration. Immigration, legal or otherwise, concerns the crossing of borders, and a liberal regards borders, along with all other manifestations of the nation-state, with distaste. “International” trumps “national” in every context. The preferences a citizen might have for his own countrymen over foreigners, for his own language over other tongues, for his own traditions and folkways over imported ones, are all, in the minds of a modern liberal, manifestations of ugly, primitive, and outdated notions — nativism, xenophobia, racism. The liberal proudly declares himself a citizen of the world, and looks with scorn and contempt on those narrow souls who limit their citizenly affections to just one nation.
This is some pretty strong proto-alt-right stuff. Viewed eleven years on it prophesied, though to what degree is uncertain, of the rise of Trumpism. There are several issues that I have with this description of liberalism, but let’s move on to the meat of his problem with libertarians.
The affection of liberals for mass immigration, both legal and illegal, is thus very easy to understand. Why, though, do libertarians favor it? And why do I think they are nuts to do so?
So far as the first of those questions is concerned, I confess myself baffled. I think that what is going on here is just a sort of ideological overshoot. Suspicion of state power is of course at the center of classical libertarianism. If the state is making and enforcing decisions about who may settle in territories under the state’s jurisdiction, that is certainly a manifestation of state power, and therefore comes under libertarian suspicion. Just why libertarians consider it an obnoxious manifestation — well, that’s where my bafflement begins. (That some exercises of state power are necessary and un-obnoxious is conceded by nearly all libertarians.)
After some quotes from Charles Murray, Derbyshire continues:
As to why I think libertarians are nuts to favor mass uncontrolled immigration from the third world: I think they are nuts because their enthusiasm on this matter is suicidal to their cause. Their ideological passion is blinding them to a rather obvious fact: that libertarianism is a peculiarly American doctrine, with very little appeal to the huddled masses of the third world. If libertarianism implies mass third-world immigration, then it is self-destroying. Libertarianism is simply not attractive either to illiterate peasants from mercantilist Latin American states, or to East Asians with traditions of imperial-bureaucratic paternalism, or to the products of Middle Eastern Muslim theocracies.
And here lies, at least to my eyes, the battle of Open Borders within the (American) libertarian community. What is the effect of culture on an individual? Is there something about American Dynamism that is unique in our historical place? Or, to put it another way, are the concepts of freedom, liberty, and, most importantly of all, individualism truly universal? This outlook, one started by the Reformation, created in the firestorm of 18th century European philosophy, and finally crystallized in the American Revolution may be unique in history. Or maybe not. I’ll let the commentators hash that one out since I know I don’t have an answer.
Now Mr. Derbyshire goes a bit off the rails. I wouldn’t let Stalin run a lemonade stand because he would do more than squeeze the lemons.
The people who made Russia’s Communist revolution in 1917 believed that they were merely striking a spark that would ignite a worldwide fire. They regarded Russia as a deeply unpromising place in which to “build socialism,” her tiny urban proletariat and multitudinous medieval peasantry poor material from which to fashion New Soviet Man. Their hope was that the modern industrial nations of the world would take inspiration from them — that the proletarians of those nations would rise up against their capitalist masters and inaugurate a new age of world history, coming to the aid of the Russian pioneers.
When it was plain that none of this was going to happen, the party ideologues got to work revising the revolutionary dogmas. One of them — it was actually Joseph Stalin — came up with a new slogan: “Socialism in One Country!”
Derbyshire’s final point:
I think that libertarians should take a leaf from Stalin’s book. They should acknowledge that the USA is, of all nations, the one whose political traditions offer the most hospitable soil for libertarianism. Foreigners, including foreigners possessed of the urge to come and settle in modern, welfare-state America, are much less well-disposed towards libertarianism.
If less than one in seven American voters is inclined to libertarianism, then there is much missionary work to be done among present-day American citizens. To think that this missionary effort will be made any easier by a steady stream of arrivals from foreign parts, most of which have never known rational, consensual government, is highly unrealistic, to the point of delusion.
That is why I say that libertarians who favor mass immigration are nuts. If there is any hope at all for libertarianism, it rests in the libertarianism of my title: libertarianism in one country.
What say you? Is libertarianism a unique strain of political thought that resides most strongly in American tradition? Or is it universal – something that transcends across time and culture? If one was to magically transport to Xia Dynasty in China, or to the height of the Roman Empire, would the citizens there understand individualism and freedom in the ways that we do? Or, to put it in more modern terms, would a person with a tribal background, let’ say from the depths of Borneo, understand the basics of the philosophy? (Am I beginning to sound like a certain judge?)
In my discussion of the mad violinist, I mentioned an interview which Judge Roger Pryor gave to the New York Times in 1911. Now let us go back fifty years. Cue the scene-shifting special effects.
It’s early in the morning of April 12, 1861. Pryor, now only in his early 30s, is on James Island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. He’s standing next to the Confederate batteries aimed at federally-occupied Fort Sumter. Guns in the James Island batteries have been ordered to start the firing on Fort Sumter. The captain commanding the battery offers Pryor the opportunity to fire the first shot.
A young Roger Pryor
Pryor was a perfectly logical candidate for the honor of firing the first shot in the Civil War. Born in the Petersburg, Virginia area he had become a Virginia lawyer but instead of practicing, he worked at several newspapers, where he provided an editorial voice in favor of slavery and secession. He served in the House of Representatives in the 36th Congress, from 1859 to 1861, where he used his national platform to make himself famous as a “fire-eating” Southerner. That is, he thought that if the North continued its hostility to slavery, that the South’s downright peculiar institution could no longer be safe inside the United States. Thus the Southern states would have to leave the Union and form their own country.
Pryor thought the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was the last straw. Since his own state of Virginia wouldn’t yet commit itself to secession, Pryor came to a state which had committed itself – South Carolina, which soon was joined by other “deep South” states to form the Confederacy. Virginia still remained in the Union, a technicality which somewhat bothered Pryor, so even though he accompanied a Confederate delegation to demand the surrender of Sumter’s federal commander, Major Anderson, Pryor stayed at a distance during the actual meeting with Anderson. But the delegation, including Pryor, decided that Anderson had not offered suitable surrender terms, so war it must be.
But when offered the chance to literally start the war, Pryor held back for some reason. Another Virginian, even more fanatical than Pryor himself, was chosen to fire the first shot, this was Edmund Ruffin, an editor who had been crusading for years for more efficient agriculture…and a Southern republic.
Interior of Fort Sumter 1860s
Having helped start the war, Pryor decided he should fight in it, too. This decision, unusual for pro-war politicians today, was common among ambitious and/or patriotic statesmen on both sides of the Civil War. Pryor became one of the Confederacy’s “political generals” who made the transition from tough talk to actual battle. Like many other political generals, North and South, Pryor left something to be desired when it came to tactical skill, but there was no doubt of his bravery. He shunned none of the risks his men took, fighting courageously on the soil of his home state which had become the theater of much of the war.
Pryor’s Confederate superiors were not satisfied with his generalship, and they transferred him to Richmond where he cooled his heels as a general without portfolio. He found this unsatisfying, and so he resigned his commission. Then he did something unusual among politicians-turned-soldiers: He rejoined the ranks not as an officer but as a private.
Private Pryor was still able to show his battlefield courage without being responsible for tactical decisions which weren’t necessarily his forte. A true gentleman, he believed in fighting hard and playing hard. Just because he and the Yankee soldiers were trying to kill each other didn’t mean they couldn’t get along civilly – it was a civil war, after all. So Pryor sometimes ventured into the no-man’s land between the armies, chatting with the Northern soldiers and trading Southern papers for Northern ones so each side could keep up with the news. Pryor had been in the newspaper biz, remember.
One day, while Pryor was in no-man’s land, some unchivalrous Northerners took the opportunity to capture him – like he was an enemy or something. And he wasn’t treated like an ordinary private, because the North hadn’t forgotten his role as a leading secessionist. Pryor was brought to the prison fortress of Fort Lafayette in New York harbor.
The editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer visited Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to try and get Pryor released. Stanton had Bessie, his baby daughter, on his knee, and the Enquirer editor appealed to the Secretary’s paternal sympathies, suggesting that Pryor too had children who loved him. That sort of sentimental guff didn’t fly with Stanton. “He shall be hanged! Damn him!” Stanton said of Pryor. But President Lincoln, in these waning months of the war, agreed to release Pryor on “parole,” back to his home in Petersburg. Lincoln was apparently influenced by Pryor’s kindly treatment, back when he was a general, of Northern prisoners from Second Bull Run.
With the Confederate defeat, Pryor was in a bad position. He didn’t despair like Edmund Ruffin, who had started the war when Pryor shied away from doing so. Ruffin killed himself rather than live under Yankee rule again. Pryor didn’t go to that extreme, but he faced poverty, he and his wife having pretty much lost, or had to sell off, all their possessions during the war.
Pryor went to New York City on a visit, which changed into a permanent move. The city which the Confederates had tried to burn seemed a poor environment for him to get a friendly reception, or to get clients – for Pryor decided he would study to become a New York lawyer. In reality, though there were plenty of Gothamites embittered against the South, New York City still provided perhaps the friendliest environment in the North for ex-Confederates. With its prewar commercial ties to the South, and its status as a destination for wealthy Southern visitors, it isn’t surprising that the city had a large population of Southerners, Southern sympathizers and of “copperheads” Democrats who had opposed the Northern war effort (Teddy Roosevelt’s mother Martha, for example, was a Southerner and a Confederate sympathizer, which may explain why Teddy’s father bought himself a draft exemption rather than fight against his wife’s side).
After being admitted to the New York bar, Pryor began building his practice. He initially had to fight the prejudice against “rebels,” but he got sympathy and help from some of the former “copperheads,” as well as from other Southerners who were moving to New York City at the time. The migrants, the so-called “Confederate carpetbaggers,” found that there were more opportunities in this Southern-leaning Northern metropolis than in the war-wracked South. It also helped that most Gothamites were Democrats like Pryor, though there were plenty of elite Republicans to win over as well.
In 1868 Pryor was hit by what many white Southerners considered one of the most demeaning of the Reconstruction measures: The Fourteenth Amendment. Section Three of that amendment said that people who had held office before the war, and who then joined the Confederacy, were forbidden from holding state or federal office in the future. Within four years, Congress restored the political rights of most people covered by Section Three, but there were some exceptions. Pertinent to Pryor, people like him who had joined the Confederacy after service in the 36th Congress, the last peacetime Congress, would be denied office holding rights. This exception was aimed at fire-eating Southerners like Pryor, whose rhetoric on the House floor had exacerbated the divisions which led to the war. Supposedly all this wouldn’t make a difference to Pryor, who assured the public that he had no political ambitions and simply wanted to practice his profession, and to work – as a private citizen – for unity between North and South.
In his speeches and writings, Pryor took a more conciliatory tone than he had before the war, suggesting that the North and South should get along better. Pryor conceded that his former divisive speeches had been less than helpful. He was even able to give a let’s-be-friends speech to a suspicious audience of members of the Grand Army of the Republic – the Union veterans’ organization. His reputation was considerably improving.
Henry Ward Beecher
Pryor was able to raise his profile among Northerners, and get in some thwacks against an old enemy of the white South, when he was retained in the famous Henry Ward Beecher/Theodore Tilton case of 1874-75. The powerful Protestant preacher Beecher had sermonized against slavery and for the Northern war effort. Now, Beecher was accused of seducing one of his parishioners – the wife of Pryor’s client Theodore Tilton. The country was fascinated by a saga of alleged adultery and even blackmail involving a top man of the cloth. The jury could not agree on a verdict, but the public’s verdict was that Pryor had displayed great professional skill.
Pryor’s new profile – as a learned lawyer-statesman who had become acclimatized to the North – became significant because one of his neighbors was Winfield Scott Hancock, a former Northern general. The wives of the two men became fast friends, and when Hancock became the Democratic nominee for President in 1880 there were rumors that Pryor might be Attorney General of the United States under a Hancock administration. Congress passed a special resolution to finally restore Pryor’s office holding rights, so the Fourteenth Amendment was no longer a problem. What was a problem was that Hancock lost the election, and so Pryor remained in private practice.
Visiting London on business in 1883, Pryor rescued a young American woman who was being attacked by hoodlums. The young lady’s name was Bessie Stanton, the grown-up edition of the baby whose father had vowed to hang Pryor.
Haymarket Flier
And now we go to Chicago, at or around Haymarket Square, where on May 4, 1886, the police were trying to break up a labor demonstration. Someone lobbed a bomb at the police, and when the bomb went off it killed eleven people, seven of whom were policemen. Several anarchists, mainly German but including an Englishman, were tried for murder, supposedly for inciting and helping the killings. Several death sentences resulted, and the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the convictions. Supporters of the defendants, who believed they had been denied a fair trial, collected some money to bring the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Top-flight attorneys were hired, Pryor being one. There was an important attorney, Benjamin Butler, brought in as well. Butler, a former Union general, wasn’t popular in the South and was regarded as a war criminal, but Pryor maintained professional relations with him.
It would be an uphill struggle to get the Supreme Court to interfere. Pryor placed his hopes in the very Fourteenth Amendment which had formerly branded him unfit to hold office. Section One of that amendment, of course, guaranteed due process of law and protected the privileges and immunities of American citizenship. So Pryor and his colleagues would argue that the trial of the anarchists had violated the Fourteenth Amendment by denying them an impartial jury, using illegally-seized evidence, and so forth. Trouble was, over the past decade the Supreme Court had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment quite narrowly, failing to include the rights in the Bill of Rights among the privileges or immunities of American citizens (which Pryor’s clients weren’t in any case). Nor had the Supremes been very vigorous in using due process to guarantee that state trials met Bill of Rights standards.
In its decision, the Supreme Court reiterated its narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Justices went on to say that even if a more rigorous review of the case were required, the trial would still have been fair. Of eight defendants, four were hanged, one blew himself up before he could be hanged, and three were later pardoned by governor John Peter Altgeld based on the governor’s criticism of the trial’s fairness.
Louis Lingg set a smuggled blasting cap off in his mouth while in prison
As for the guilt of the defendants, historians have tended to view the trial as unfair or even as a frame-up, but historian Timothy Messer-Kruse changed his mind after reviewing the record and decided that the defendants were guilty (not to mention that at least one defendant – the one who blew himself up – had some knowledge of using bombs for deadly purposes).
Pryor defended the innocence of his clients by attributing chivalry to them: “If there were a plot in existence, do you suppose that they would have had their wives and children [at the demonstration]?”
At the end of his career Pryor got a Supreme Court (trial) judgeship through the influence of Tammany Hall, of which he was an ally. He retired but was still around to tell the New York Times that the U.S. Supreme Court (as Pryor knew too well) was not a big fan of making the states obey the Bill of Rights
Citations
Richard C. Cortner, The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Nationalization of Civil Liberties. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981.
Jonathan Truman Dorris, Pardon and Amnesty under Lincoln and Johnson: The Restoration of the Confederates to their Rights and Privileges, 1861-1898. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. [contains details of the Beecher-Tilton scandal]
Robert S. Holzman, Adapt or Perish: The Life of General Roger A. Pryor, C. S. A. Hamden, Conn: Archon, 1976.
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Innocence in the Guilded Age. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
(Business 101: Pretty graphs make everything better)
Imagine, if you will, a country or city-state called Libertopia. We have just overthrown our evil socialist masters and made a new government from scratch. By some magic video game miracle, we don’t start with any debt, outside enemies, and have a fully functioning market-driven farming and industrial base that trades all over the world. There will be no empty bellies in Libertopia tonight (except for the orphans who aren’t working hard enough in the monocle polishing factory).
In my imaginary country only property owners can vote. So after the revolution we get together, review the collected works of SugarFree, hem and haw, drink our fill of mead. and decide to go with the idea of keeping our borders closed to the nearby Outsiders. We are, after all, a tight community with a shared background.
What would happen?
At first not much at all. Business would go on as usual, and we would stay competitive with our neighbors. But under the “nativist” model, as time goes on, domestic market limitations and labor issues start. The heads of industry and farming may start to clamor for more talent and workers.
The voters finally listen and get together. After a few rounds of brandy and the feasting on deep-dish pizza, we decide to open our borders just a little bit; letting in a yearly allotment to meet our needs. To keep things simple, these Outside workers aren’t citizens, nor do they have a vote or receive welfare (which doesn’t exist in our country, comrade!). This “restrictionist” model, however, still causes worker shortages, especially if the economy starts heating up.
Business is doing great – so great that more Outside workers are needed to meet demand. Once again the voters get together, do a few squats, and finish off a keg or two. We decide to open the borders all the way, allowing everyone who wants to come in. After all, things are looking fantastic for business.
But we begin to notice that the citizens are starting to get angry. There are protests and labor strikes because they have to compete with the Outsides for jobs.
Now what’s the point of this simplified and rather silly story? Using the scenarios above I’m trying to minimize input variables for the idea of something like the Laffer Curve, but instead of dealing with taxation, we are touching on immigration. I imagine such an idea has already been explored before, but hey, I’m no economist (we can tell! – ed). This is not an economic model either, but something soft and political science-y.
Is there an optimum rate of immigrants – we’ll call it the “Jerbs Curve” – before the citizens get resentful (the Resentment Index?) with having to compete for wages with the Outsiders? See Chinese rail workers or the Irish immigrants as an example. And is there a point where they get angry enough at this perceived unfairness that they revolt and put in a new leader? Or in a real world case, have enough electoral votes to put in someone like Trump?
If there is such a thing as a Jerbs Curve, it would only skew the line in one direction or another: adding in welfare, illegal immigration, race, identity politics, war, the state of the economy, political party dynamics, and countless other variables.
Perhaps the conclusion to all of this, if we can make one, it is that the world is a complicated place that often defies the most simple of models. Something as dynamic as a highly populous country with millions of inputs, variations, outputs, needs, and whatnot is impossible for anyone to predict. As far as intellectual exercises go, you can create models that are perfectly logical, but do they reflect the real world at all? How would they be when implemented or exposed to the real world?
I expect this will be a recurring segment. It will cover things that people of a libertarian bent get outraged about every day that finally bubble up into the public consciousness. Suddenly, much outrage is spouted because a particular person, possessing some special trait, attractive to media outlets and their audiences, has been treated badly by the government.
The first in this series is NASA engineer Sidd Bikkannaver, US born citizen who was ordered to unlock his phone at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
It was January 31. Bikkannavar had just arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after a nine-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, where he’d competed in a two-week race from the southern tip of the country to its capital in a solar-powered car. In a few hours, he would board a connecting flight back home to California, where he’s worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for over a decade.
Be still, my beating heart. So smart, so hip. And his phone was property of the JPL! How dare the agent not believe the “it’s not even mine” story! Who does this agent think our hero is? Some scruffy-looking dope mule? This is an outrage!
Actually, the outrage is that ICE agents can hold people indefinitely, or at least long enough to cause them signifcant loss of money and time, to get around 4th Amendment protections that apply to everyone on US soil, citizen, resident, visitor, or illegal. The broad police powers, rather than how or to whom such powers are applied, are the outrage. This example is, sadly, a result of a well-designed program in that it occasionally assigns a random check (probably, I don’t have special knowledge) to even people who ICE has good evidence are solid citizens. Bikkannaver “[is] a part of the Customs and Border Protection Global Entry program, whose members are waved through the line after just scanning their passport and fingerprints. That would lead me to believe that this is not the result of some Border Patrol agent from flyover country picking the guy with the funny name.
So welcome to the party, pal! You’ve done everything right and felt the State’s boot.
I met an Armenian customer today, inspecting his flooded furnace, and being a businessman himself, we got to talking. He explained that his very nice neighborhood was once run down, but the Armenians came in and fixed the place up, improved property values and generally made a nice place to live and have their kids grow up; not bad. We compared prices for similar homes, mine $295k. The equivalent house in his neighborhood? $760k. (Disclaimer: I live in the sticks, 46 miles East of Glendale.)
Most People living in the U.S. are too busy working to pay much attention, IMO, and the antifa/nazi thing is just so much hot air. If I am wrong, well, at least we are all armed. (You are armed, correct?)
We have a white nationalist administration in the White House. A conclave of priestly bigots, reactionaries, anti-semites, and racialists. And one of their chief objectives, along with forcing their misogynist and heteronormative world view on the country, is to keep out brown people. At no time has this been clearer than when they unveiled their new proposal for immigration reform.
,_after_Ambroise_Louis_Garneray.jpg "WHY WASN'T STEVE SMITH INVITED?")
