Illegal – by Cedar Sanderson

512 thoughts on “Illegal – by Cedar Sanderson”

1. Anarchy will just get you tyranny. None of us want that.

   Nit, IMO some of them do want tyranny with them in control. Of course, “their” tyrant might not want them around. 👿

   1. They *say* they don’t want tyranny. As they call the legally elected president a tyrant. Sigh. You and I know what they mean. But to them, words are a mere convenience, full of ephemeral meanings that change depending on what day it is and how the winds blow.

      1. Yet one of Obama’s people loved China’s government where the government didn’t have to listen to the “opposition”.

         Admittedly, while it’s totalitarian China’s government doesn’t match the dictionary’s definition of tyranny (one man rule). 😦

         1. Would that be NY Times columnist and Flat Earther Tommy Friedman? Sheesh, he makes Judge Posner look wise.

            One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
            http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html

            Tommy, when a country has “one-party autocracy” it is always by the “a reasonably enlightened group of people” — you best believe that. Believing otherwise can be very injurious to your health.

            1. That sounds like what I remember hearing.

            2. The local citizenry in various parts of China who have had to deal with things like collapsing schools (while the kids were inside) because the government officials were bribed to turn a blind eye to shoddy construction might have something to say about Friedman’s “enlightened group”.

               1. As an ironclad rule, one party autocratic states will ALWAYS become corrupt.

                  1. Hell, one party autocratic States START OUT corrupt, and rapidly get worse.

                     1. That cannot be true. I read in the news that Cuba is a paradise of happy antique car collectors, all of whom enjoy free health care that is worth every bit of what they pay for it. Venezuela, by all reports, is enjoying so much success that the government can give toys to the kids as Christmas presents and that families often travel to New York city to shop for their groceries!

                        1. (gigglesnort)

                        2. Either your tongue is wedged into your cheek that explosives might be needed to free it, or you’ve been partying with centaurs and have been matching the lot of them drink for drink.

                           1. Bring on the maenads!

                           2. That way lies madness. Very fun madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless.

                              *Looks around*
                              Hrmm…

                              Bring on the maenads!

               2. It used to be very easy to bribe East German workers to …do extra honest work that wasn’t outside of their capability but technically not in their job description. Such as having the delivery men assemble the furniture in exchange for bottles of brandy and whiskey (and my father being the only adult male in the household who could lift the things also was the guy who had to go to the office.) If we weren’t the last delivery on the route, they would promise to come back after the end of the work day. If they did this, there would be gifts to appease the wife (fine wine from France or Spain), chocolate like Kinder Uberraschung for the children, and West German beer for any Stazi that tried to stop them.

                  Eventually it was just easier to give our neighbours – who were Stazi and family – the unwritten benefits of capitalism to leave our regulars alone. Especially since even when investigated, all we gave was food. Food and the occasional clothing, toy or foreign decoration was considered ‘safe’ as ‘cultural presents.’ Our quirky gift giving was excused as an auslander thing.

                  1. Barter, the last safe system when Gov’t goes mad.

                     1. Not in Cuba, unfortunately. The people are so poor that if it starts to look like you have even a little more than your neighbors, you fall under suspicion of using the black market. Anything that suggests generosity on your part is likely to get you jailed.

            3. There are always people who want to revisit the insight that “democracy is the worst kind of government — except for all the others”.
               It’s partly a Not-Invented-Here problem, to which reasonably smart people who desperately want the respect of other smart people, especially those with an inadequate appreciation of history, are particularly susceptible.
               TF seems to be one such.

         2. Ah, yes, Thomas “China for a Day” Friedman who thinks Obama having the power of the Chinese government would mean climate change, energy, and all those issues would be solved by fiat because there are no Republicans while failing to notice that China and similar tyrannies are doing less on those topics than the US.

            1. *snort* And China is totally known for it’s clean air and water, right???

               The stupidity of some of these folks is *breathtaking*

               1. The thing is, China has been run by people who treat common folk like farm animals for all of recorded history. It never really changes. Communism was and is just a brand, slapped onto the Same Old Same Old.

                  1. Communism is just more efficient in killing the peasantry in job lots. Otherwise the place looked much the same from the bottom looking up.

               2. A nice visual of atmospheric chemical pollutants:

                  https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/overlay=cosc/orthographic=-256.89,39.12,247/loc=-122.242,52.967

                  (click the “Earth” logo bottom left for other options; spin and zoom the globe with your mouse)

                  1. That is so cool!

                     China’s not doing a very good job of equally distributing all of their atmospheric pollutants to their people. The hoarding of atmospheric pollutants by the city-dwelling bourgeoisie is probably a violation of Party doctrine, and who ever is responsible should be sent to farm for re-education.

               3. *breathtaking*

                  Indeed.

                  Time to update Tom Lehrer’s ‘Pollution’?

                  If you visit Chinese city,
                  You will find it very pretty.
                  Just two things you must beware:
                  Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!

            2. What? You aren’t suggesting there might be PROBLEMS with what he would implement?

         3. “Yet one of Obama’s people loved China’s government where the government didn’t have to listen to the “opposition”.”

            You misspelled ‘many’.

            1. I only remember One person actually saying it. 😉

      2. They took linguistics and English Usage from Humpty Dumpty.

      3. Didn’t Ephebe always call its elected officials “Tyrant”?
         (Of Sir Pratchett’s book ‘Small Gods’.”

         1. I saw ‘Wicked’ three times and shecnever said — oh. Never mind.

      4. Those who seek to change the meanings of words, or to ban the use of words with meaning, display their fundamental dishonesty for the entire world to see. Never let them get away with it unchallenged.

   2. What he said.

   3. People who call for violent uprising never seem to realize that *they* will end up caught in the mess.

      1. You know, America was the first, and pretty close to the only nation to have a violent uprising and not immediately turn into an autocracy of some kind. Nobody used to give, and certainly don’t now, the Founding Fathers enough credit. They pulled off a bloody miracle that we’ve been peeing away for several decades.

   4. “Anarchy…that I run!”

   5. They just want it to go their way…not much thought on how.

   6. A telling bit of graffiti left behind at the Berkeley riots:

      “Liberals get the bullet too.”
      — signed with a hammer-and-sickle

      Methinks that one =wasn’t= done by the rioters.

2. You’re exactly right. My wife went through the immigration process–it was long, somewhat costly, and at times frustrating. However, that’s what you do when you want to play by the rules. She took her oath of citizenship a little over a year ago. Being lumped in with those who couldn’t be bothered with the legal process is irritating, probably moreso to me than to her.

   1. Congratulations to her! As frustrating as I sometimes find my fellow citizens, I’m delighted she made the choice to come here and do it up right.

   2. Once she took the oath she wasn’t an immigrant any more.

      The only restriction I know of for a naturalized citizen vs. a native borne one is that “natural born citizen” clause for the Presidency.

      Of course, “natural born” is a legal term, and subject to legal whimsy. Lafayette was declared a “natural born citizen” of the state of Maryland, which was upheld as making him a natural born citizen of the United States…

      I don’t know that any foreign born citizen has ever seriously made a try for the Oval Office, but the legal precedent has been established.

      1. Well, actually, she is still an immigrant, but also a citizen. There is a difference between native born and naturalized citizens. Mostly technical and legal, but naturalized citizens tend to have cultural differences from us native born citizens. And generally better food than those of us whose ancestors came from England and Wales, where flavor goes to die. And the occasional funny/sexy/thick/unintelligible accent.

      2. Once she took the oath she wasn’t an immigrant any more.

         She was still an immigrant (came from another country) but no longer an alien (foreign national).

         1. I’m reminded that until recently, the nitpickity term was “illegal alien”.

      3. At a number of places where people have opined that calling them illegal immigrants is wrong and hurtful and people can’t be illegal, I’ve suggested/commented that they could then use the technically correct word them- invaders. To date, none of them have implemented that.

   3. Bless you. And two thumbs up to your wife. Give her a hug from all of us “deplorables” in New Hampshire.

3. Well said, but understated. In the example you give at the end you are more accurate.

   One illegal immigrant is a squatter. A thousand illegal immigrants is an invasion.

   1. Yes. I was deliberately being understated, knowing that most who read this article, here, will be able to mentally extrapolate from it. Sadly, there are far too many elsewhere who won’t even be able to accept this small metaphor because they *feel* otherwise.

      1. Precisely. I chose to be blunt on your behalf, and let you be patient on mine. 🙂

         1. As a mother of two teen girls and a lad just on the verge of puberty, I cultivate patience with the fervor of Capability Brown.

      2. Then there’s me, all “Friends come through the gate, enemies come over the wall”.

         1. But if you no wall it is all gates so they are all friends.

            1. It’s a Roman saying. Here the gate is our clearly if incompetently defined legal immigration process. Those that go through it are friends. All others are enemies. Enemies to be killed out of hand, even if they are blood and milk kin to the executioner.

               If you object, you are racist against my culture.

               1. I was attempting to play the clueless prog explaining why the wall was bad…apparently I can’t be that dumb.

                  1. Pretty sure I can improvise a lobotomy so you can. But sadly it’s not just lack of Intelligence that causes proginess

                     1. The difference between intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom can be both subtle and profound.

                        1. Sadly, I doubt I’ll live even a fraction of the time I’d need to be wise so smart and if not knowledgeable then not totally ignorant will have to be my goals.

                        2. Definition given to young’uns: Intelligence is your ability to think. Knowledge is the stuff you put in your brain to think about. Wisdom is knowing whether or not that idea you used your intelligence to get out of your knowledge is a good idea or is going to get you in trouble.

                           1. I’d say that knowledge is what you think *with*.

                              Knowledge is the tool, not the end product.

                           2. Ha. Good one. I’m stealing that for my Gkids. Thanks

                           3. Is it weird that when I read, “Gkids”, I immediately imagined a bunch of little Narns (Babylon 5 reference – G’Kar was a Narn) running around?

                           4. Not weird when it’s coming from a fellow Odd. 😉

                           5. Those are good definitions. Alas, many times people speak of them interchangeably, or in a confused manner. And oft-times wisdom and intelligence will only get a person so far without knowledge. Knowledge may prove of little use without intelligence. Whether one should use that knowledge or not may need to guided by wisdom.

                              (Maybe I have a second career in fortune cookie writing awaiting?)

                     2. “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

                        Proginess is a result of intelligence misapplied.

   2. Article 1 – The Legislative Branch
      Section 8 – Powers of Congress
      “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, ”
      “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;”

      Is it not interesting and concerning that Congress has done nothing to call out the Militia to repel this invasion of illegals?

      Guess it’s just one more instance of elected officials failing to do the job they’re supposed to do. If I did that, I’d quickly stop being paid, and shortly thereafter, stop having a job.

4. That, my dear, was freakin’ awesome.

   -B.E. (no relation) Sanderson

   1. Thank you 🙂 You know, sometime we should compare genealogies.

5. I disagree only on one point. The old term was “illegal alien.” It was not sloppiness, there was an intentional effort to make it politically incorrect so as to confuse the issue. Being a curmudgeon in training, I use the old term.

   1. And given what I do, illegal alien makes me think of, well, betelgeuse invaders. Heh. You’re right, yes. It’s been degraded in meaning by changing words around. But if we don’t object to that missing ‘illegal’ at the very least, we’re in trouble.

      1. The first objection to “illegal alien” I saw in print was in the letters section of the then-new “Omni” magazine. After those letters appeared, Ben Bova, who was the editor, appeared at the San Diego ComicCon. During the Q&A at a panel Bova, in response to a question I have long forgotten, Bova (seemingly accidentally on purpose) said illegal aliens, caught himself, changed it to “immigrants,” and got a chuckle from the crowd.

         (This was so long ago that the whole thing fit inside the old El Cortez Hotel and Convention Center. A bunch of Sandmen caught a bunch of us Runners on the old bridge over Ash street.)

   2. > illegal alien

      see also: criminal trespass

      I love how things get redefined. When some vandal keys your car or spray-paints your storefront, it’s not a criminal, he’s a “street artist.” Prostitutes are now referred to as “unlicensed sex workers.” And I guess dope dealers will be “unlicensed pharmaceutical distributors” next…

      1. “dope dealers will be “unlicensed pharmaceutical distributors”
         Dope dealers will be Pharmacists. The term “unlicensed” is othering, and implies Patriarchy. Report for re-education, Comrade.

         1. Recreational pharmacists. Don’t get the Guild angry at you.

            The Spice must flow.

         2. When I worked in a prison, oops, correctional facility, had an inmate assistant who was an “alternative lender”. In his own words.

            1. Right… like pirates are “involuntary cargo relocation specialists”

      2. I have heard ‘street pharmacist’.

         Then, I have also heard a professional pharmacist describe himself as a ‘drug dealer’.

         1. Well, technically… and it’s funny.

            1. I think I need a drug dealer. Prescriptions will send us over our $3k deductible sometime this month. Then we can heave a sigh of relief because we’ll only be paying 20%…

               1. Ouch. I’m not up with street prices, but it sounds like you might get a better deal

            2. I knew someone from the Ukraine who said that the words for “drug” and “pharmaceutical” were completely different, and that English was weird for having them be under the same umbrella. Which it is, but it’s also good to note that any drug can be a pharmaceutical and vice versa.

               1. In ancient Greek, the word for medicine and poison was apparently the same. We get toxic from the word for arrows, since they poisoned theirs. Pharmacy is from the other word. All medicines are poisons. How they help at one dose is how they hurt at a higher.

                  1. “Pharmakos” is also the Greek word used in Biblical translations for a Hebrew word that in the English translations became “witch” or “sorcerer.” As in “Thou shalt not suffer a pharmakos to live.”

            3. He did for the humor value. I don’t think I ever met him, only heard him, and he is a Silent Key now.

         2. I once saw a neon sign for “Strange Drugs,” done in an 1930s horror style font. Turned it was an old pharmacy run by a man named Strange.

         3. Our older daughter is a professional pharmacist. All through school when asked her major she described herself with “I’m training to be a drug dealer.”

            She occasionally – away from work, with people who know her – will describe herself as a dealer. But she’s seen so many people trying to scam the pharmacy out of fun drugs that she no longer finds it all that funny. She says that she’s not sure whether it’s their desperation or their out-and-out stupidity she finds more dispiriting.

            Pro tips for scammers:

            1) Adding an extra digit to the quantity (by hand, on a printed form) rarely works. Especially since she can and does cross check every prescription online.

            2) Claiming that your husband/wife (who you authorized for pickup) stole your drugs may get you an overnight supply, once – but also an investigation. And claiming it *every* *single* *time* won’t even get an overnight refill.

            3) Stealing your doctors form for a do-it-yourself prescription is a Really Bad Idea

            She’s told many more stories – these are just the tip of the iceberg.

            1. I have often marveled at the professional integrity of pharmacists. As an accountant I reflexively consider the value of inventory entrusted to various positions, the controls in effect and their reliance on the integrity* of personnel. I would be surprised if most pharmacies don’t have inventories with values in the high six figures (at minimum) and they seem to have fairly minimal controls.

               Combine that with the potential liability for erroneously filled prescriptions and I consider pharmacists a very laudable profession.

               *A fundamental principle of inventory controls is the ease with which a determined person can circumvent them in a one-time heist. For a pharmacy (or jewelry) the fact that significant value resides in minuscule items makes looting much simpler than for a maker of tractor-trailer engines.

               1. I believe that modern pharmacy computer systems record who filled each and every prescription, so that’s a fairly obvious thing. I don’t know about after-hours thefts, though. I would imagine the Police have especially short response times for alarms at such places, though.

                  As for inventory? Yeah. Heck, the guy I was standing in line behind the other day was talking to the cashier (because he wasn’t going to be able to pay the $23 his insurance wasn’t covering for diabetic test strips), and through that I learned that a month’s worth of test strips runs over $200 total. Some drugs are four figures for a month. Of course, Just-In-Time delivery has reduced this quite a bit, but still, there’s a ton of money sitting in a small space, there.

                  1. When the current expensive strips came on the market, old reliable TesTape ($9 for 3-4 months worth) magically disappeared from the shelves.

                     (And TesTape had other uses, such as quick-and-dirty ovulation testing in livestock, which the new strips aren’t cost-effective for.)

                     1. That’s another scam – the pharmacy my daughter works for is associated with a major HMO. And for many years, test strips were handed out on-demand to HMO members.

                        But the system is computerized – they noticed that one patient was getting a 3-month supply of test strips every couple of weeks. And doing the same with every one of the HMO’s pharmacy locations within a 50 mile radius.

                        It turned out that he had a nice little business going selling the excess online. These days, they track quantities much more closely, and red-flag patients who routinely exceed normal consumption levels.

                  2. $200 for a month’s supply of test strips? There are much cheaper test strips out there. It means changing machines but the savings are worth it.

                     1. From my admittedly casual observations, the strip readers follow the same rule as printers: the device is cheap, the real profit is in the supplies.

                        1. While that is probably true, a month’s supply for my wife and I cost about 1/4 that, total. Unless a doctor says “Use this machine,” it pays to see how much the strips run before you buy a glucometer. We have seen higher prices. Much higher.

                     2. I dunno, this was the guy in front of me. I was standing there wondering if he would pass out if he saw the bill I knew I was going to have a couple weeks later, if he wasn’t going to be able to pony up $23. I spent all last year building up my HSA so I would be able to pay for prescriptions until I hit my deductible.

                  3. I would imagine the Police have especially short response times for alarms at such places

                     They do.

               2. I happened to be in line at Ye Drugge Shoppe when the computer flagged a prescription. The individual had gotten two other identical ‘scrips filled in [other city], same doc. The Boss Druggist started making phone calls.

            2. On the other hand, when several days’ worth of medicine that needs to be refrigerated gets accidentally destroyed because you’re keeping it in the cooler on your camping trip and the zip-loc bag your had it in gets let go down into the water at the bottom of the cooler by your inattentive son, you’re pretty much screwed on getting replacements, especially for the ones that are on the controlled substances lists.

               1. Note: Zip-loc Slide Lock bags are NOT particularly water-tight.

               2. Some years ago I was shorted on medication. According to their records, they have given me the prescribed amount, but according to my count of the bottle they didn’t. Wasn’t a controlled substance, but ended up halving tablets to make it to my next refill.

               3. For future reference, don’t fill your cooler with ice—freeze several water bottles instead. They keep the ice melt contained and then you have drinking water too.

                  1. it’s a nice thought, but it wouldn’t have lasted long enough. This was for a full week in summer heat. We went through about 60 lbs of ice that week.

                     Next time, I am taking a fully water-proof container.

                     1. The gallon jugs– Crystal Geyser one gallons– can be frozen without breaking.

                        They also make very good “what if the power goes out” options for chest freezers, which are also your best bet for freezing them rock solid.

                        1. Well, yes, I understand that gallon jugs can be frozen, even if you need to remove a cup and a half before doing so to prevent the expansion from rupturing the container, if they are NOT the ones you mention, and that they would thus last longer. However, at most, those would have lasted three days, and I see no way I could have frozen more, to last the rest of the trip.

                           1. The dang cooler has to be opened THAT MUCH? Gadzooks.

                              ******

                              For those reading along at home– there’s one down stairs right now that’s been frozen solid about a dozen times– that’s why the specific brand matters, because the ones that…well, I guess they’re designed to crumple down easily, they CAN freeze and not pop.

                              My folks have tested most of these out because they keep emergency “what if we crash 200 miles from anyone” kits in all vehicles.

                              Also, progresso soup cans with the easy-open lids can freeze solid without popping. And the “touch of honey” type peanut butter won’t separate when it freezes.

                           2. Perhaps you have some sort of super-insulated coolers, but mine won’t keep that much heat transfer from happening even if they are not opened at all, when the daytime temps are in the mid-to-high 90s and no shade.

                           3. Ah, the no shade part would kill it fast.

                              Is it possible to get some of that…argh, don’t know the technical term for it, it’s basically silver colored bubble wrap with an extra layer of silver plastic on each side, used for insulating windows or other things where you need to cut to size? It works for making your own shade very well….
                              I’ll see if I can find the stuff.

                           4. Stuff like this:
                              https://www.amazon.com/Reflectix-ST16025-Staple-Insulation-Inch/dp/B000BQSYRO

                           5. That would probably work, but if I can get it done, I’m planning on building a couple of boxes to hide the coolers in with an extra layer of the blue foam insulation inside, although possibly with a layer of that, as well.

                              It’s an SCA event, you see, and I want them to look like plain wooden boxes.

                           6. Wayne – we do SCA events a lot, too, some on the hot/dry side of Washington/Oregon. I’ve thought about doing cooler-in-a-box to hide our coolers, and create more bench seating in camp.
                              It might be wise to use period 6-board chest construction, to get the bottom up off the ground a little (conduction of heat from warm ground is probably a worse source of heat leakage than the air) AND put a piece of blue foam under the cooler for the same reason.

                           7. Sounds like a plan.

                        2. We generally re-purpose empty soft-drink bottles (or similar) for making ice bottles because, being designed to hold pressure, they’re a bit thicker/stronger than the average water bottle. Our freezer always has a nice assortment of them in sizes from 16oz to 1/2 gal ready-to-go for packing a cooler.

         4. I once had a part-time job delivering drugs for a commercial pharmacy. We ran deliveries at night, with vans loaded with narcotics…

            One of the drivers decided we needed nametags, so she printed up some nice full-color adhesive labels, about four inches in diameter, with an Ed Roth style logo and “Central Pharmacy Drug Runners” along with our names.

            Corporate nearly had a seizure when they found out… maybe a week later.

            We spent a lot of time twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the pharmacists. That’s when I noticed that while the security was very heavy, it was all directed at controlling things *leaving* the building. We’d take turns buying small stuffed animals and leaving them in odd locations where they wouldn’t be found for a while.

            They never did find out what was going on, and years later their security people would still freak out over it…

         5. I once saw a sign in a Pharmacy that said something about the place being a “drug-free workplace”. I’m 100% certain that it was put there in irony….

            1. “Irony” and its variations might be a good word for Susannah Ailene Martin’s rant list. Some might call it ironic that irony is so often misused, but I calls it sad.

      3. Would they use licensed sex worker in the counties where it’s legal in Nevada?

         BTW, there was a chemistry professor who, on the first day of class, asked you to state your major and where you were from. Aware of my “home town” reputation, he asked if I meant to say my major was pharmaceuticals.

      4. The Street Artist nonsense annoys me too. My opinion of the War On Drugs is sulfurous. As for Prostitutes, I would be delighted to see them treated as sex workers. As opposed to, say, pitiable victims with no agency of their own, which is what the current Human Trafficking witch hunt is all about. That, and the creeping dread on the part of a lot of Progressive women that they have made themselves so unpleasant that any rational man offered a choice between one of them and sex-for-hire will pay for it.

         1. “As opposed to, say, pitiable victims with no agency of their own, which is what the current Human Trafficking witch hunt is all about.”

            Er, no. Sorry, but the HT folks are about a lot more than sex trafficking (although that’s one of the ones the marketing focuses on, mostly because it’s really easy to get people worked up about it).

            1. Point me to a few sources, please? Because the stuff I’ve been watching has been chock full of predatory cops, anti-sex-trafficking activists (like Somaly Mam who turn out to be frauds, and unmitigated bush.

               1. The ones W works with do lots of good– not as flashy, and it gets mixed a lot because slavers don’t generally refrain from rape.

         2. As for Prostitutes, I would be delighted to see them treated as sex workers. As opposed to, say, pitiable victims with no agency of their own,

            They’re both. Simultaneously. Depends on whose ox you want to gore by referring to them.

         3. Human trafficking ought to be called slavery and be done with it. But that would cause too many people too much discomfort I guess.

            1. There’s one useful distinction in the phrase “human trafficking”, and it’s the word “trafficking”. It reminds people that this isn’t just a case of slavery in-place, but that the slaves are getting moved around, and it might be possible to intercept them en route and free them.

               Which is why the organizations fighting against it should start referring to it as “slave trafficking”. Keeps the useful term “trafficking” in there, but brings in the word “slaves” to remind everyone about what’s really going on.

               1. Calling it “human trafficking” means that you don’t have to prove every single person involved is unwilling– there’s a rather big issue with coyotes getting slavery merchandise when they’re bringing over paid human cargo, if the reward is worth the risk.

         4. If you’re going to pass a law against it, then enforce it. Or get rid of the law.

            “We’ll make prostitution illegal as a feelgood, but we’ll still allow it as long as it’s called sex work” only undercuts respect for the law.

            The law isn’t an ass, but the people who enact the laws often are…

   3. Unfortunately, both are *technically* correct. An “illegal immigrant” is an “illegal alien” who plans to stay indefinitely. Think “squatter” as opposed to “raider.” As our hostess’ representative has pointed out, “illegal” *should* have been the important word.

   4. As I understand the difference, “alien” is a general term for all foreigners in a country, while “immigrant” is someone who’s specifically coming in order to live in a new country long-term.

      While both can be illegal, I can see us having different policies to deal with the student who has overstayed his visa by a few months but has every intention of returning to his home eventually vs. the family that has shown every sign that they’re planting themselves here for the long haul and will never go back.

      1. For that matter, I’d want a different policy for the person who over-stayed his student visa by getting a productive job in the US.

         He’s illegal and obviously intends to stay in the US but overall is a good member of our society.

         So he deserves something more than being expelled from the US.

         1. We used to drain many of the best brains from most of the world by making it relatively easy for foreign students who managed to graduate, especially in STEM disciplines. But somewhere along the line, someone decided that this wasn’t “fair.” So now we expel the best and brightest who want to stay and accept less educated people via a lottery system.

         2. On the contrary, he should be returned to his home country so that he can be a good member of society there, and share the knowlegde and skills he learned here with his countrymen there.

            It’s not fair for the US to steal and keep the best and brightest members of foreign countries – members which those societies sorely need.

            … and quite frankly, the reason we let foreign students in is exactly this. If they aren’t going to enrich their own nations with the skills they’re taught here, there’s no point in letting them come here to learn them.

            1. My Dad had a book on this. I can’t recall the title off the top of my head, but the American Brain-Drain from Scotland was fairly severe, to look at one example. The positive rewards here were great (Carnegie, for ex.) but the result for Scotland was less positive.

            2. And I found the book! Yay for Amazon. http://amzn.to/2kmPrXA

               1. Although I would never imply the Scots are anything but brilliant, I think the brain-drain was even more pronounced than that. I think all of the waves of immigrants from Europe up until WWII and from Asia since then represent the best and the brightest voting with their feet.
                  Indeed the Scots were the earliest, and a lot of the ornery independent mindedness of our culture came from and was nurtured by Scots; however, after they made the country idea friendly, the brains from the rest of the world continued to drain our way.

                  1. I agree, it was just the clearest example off the top of my head. America has, almost from the beginning, been a place where the brightest, who were often Odds, could thrive.

                  2. I have a large number of ancestors who came here voluntarily, who are probably then of he best and brightest. At least smart enough to get away. A number who were exiled for political reasons. I believe that would include all my Scottish ancestors from Prince Edward Island. The English expelled a LOT of Scots. Some here, some to Australia. And a number who were transported because they were dumb enough to get caught. But they survived and reproduced, so they weren’t stupid if they survived and reproduced on a frontier full of hostiles.

            3. Actually, bringing them in as students for four years ought to be a good way to vet them for compatibility with our values and ability to get along culturally.

               But then, my husband had a student visa at one point. Student visa to temporary permanent resident to permanent resident to citizen. So I have a certain fondness for that avenue of entry.

               (So if you’re applying for permanent residency based on being married to a US Citizen, and you haven’t been married long enough, you become a temporary permanent resident and apply to change your status after enough time has elapsed. At the time we married, student visa holders were limited to working on campus, where they wouldn’t be paid more than minimum wage, so getting that status changed meant he could get an off-campus job.)

               1. It might, if colleges weren’t hotbeds of anti-American thought where everyone who doesn’t fit the category of “White citizen” is encouraged by the campus diversity officers to segregate themselves into cultural enclaves and never ever try to assimilate to the host culture.

   5. Exactly. “Illegal alien” is the right term. Most are not interested in citizenship or assimilation, just taking advantage of the benefits offered her that are not available in their original country.

      My wife is a legal immigrant. My Mom’s family immigrated legally between 1893 and 1912. My father’s family included people who came over with some money soon after the Mayflower and some who came to Georgia from Ireland in chains. It also includes indigenous people whose families were forcibly moved from Georgia to Oklahoma.

      There’s no excuse for “taking cuts in line” without asking first. Americans love actual immigrants and do make room for them all the time.

      We take a long time to get angry; but like a famous TV character once said, “…don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

      1. We take a long time to get angry; but like a famous TV character once said, “…don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

         Yeah, it seems some don’t understand that a high activation energy does NOT mean a low yield. Nothing..(warning).. nothing..(Warning!)… nothing…(WARNING!)… nothing… nothing left. “Wha? WAAHHH!” “We gave you warnings!”

         1. The longer pressure builds, the bigger the boom (assuming equivalent strength of container and input.)

         2. …and if they don’t remember that TV show they can always watch the new Doctor Who episodes to see what happens when The Doctor has had quite enough of the MotW’s bs and deals with them.

      2. It’s interesting how the The Associated Press Stylebook liked to play with terms. Amazingly enough, the 2015 edition allows illegal immigration but balks at calling someone an illegal alien, insisting that the term illegal should be applied to an action, not a person. But they permit living in a country illegally.

   6. Yes – when feeling nitpicky, I’ll accommodate the “being a person isn’t illegal” folks by using “illegally resident alien”.

      1. I sometimes ask if they’d prefer “criminal alien” instead. No reason we can’t be accommodating, within reason.

         1. I believe the correct term for someone who has perpetrated an unlawful entry is “rapist.”

            Which, inverted, suggests some interesting possibilities for taking on the campus “Rape Undocumented Entrant Culture.

   7. When I REALLY want to be a curmudgeon, I’ll use an even older and much, much less term…… wetback……

      1. much much less PC term…..

      2. That takes me back. I don’t think I’ve heard that term in 30 years.

         1. I’ve heard it more recently, but that’s because I tend to watch Flower Drum Song whenever I notice it turning up on the telly.

            The mind staggers at how politically incorrect that film has become.

            1. Or Tom Lehrer: “…get back, to the land of the wetback…”

               1. For there is surely nothing more beautiful in this
                  World than the sight of a lone man facing singlehandedly
                  A half a ton of angry pot roast!)

                  1. I just wish to say at no time have I ever been roasted on pot. Now, I had many opportunities for such in the early 1980’s, but decided against such, which clearly has been for the best.

                     1. the one contact high I got only made me eat a ton more than my already prodigious normal amount (was a teen with a black hole gut)

      3. Don’t forget our friends to the north: Snowbacks!

6. It seems that law breaking can be contagious. It seems that many in the government, rather than going to the trouble of changing the law they don’t like, simply choose which they care to enforce. A growing number of communities have announced a policy of deliberate non-compliance to immigration laws. Now a state is considering doing so. There has been an administration that openly choose not hold those municipalities that failed to comply responsible.

   1. And this is the most dangerous thing. When I was taking Criminal law classes, we discussed a policeman’s discretion many times. It’s a good concept. However, if a law is going to be on the books, but openly flouted, never enforced, it needs to be taken off the books. Otherwise, why obey any laws?

      1. We saw what could happen when states refuse to follow federal laws, when Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957. Does anyone doubt that Trump would be unwilling to do the same?

         1. That came up a year or so ago, and I went off to the net to look it up. The story we got in Arkansas History class was very nearly the opposite; that the ANG enforced desegregation and defended the students against violent protesters. The Army wasn’t mentioned at all.

            That was (at least then) the official state-certified account of events. Not that textbooks don’t twist the truth to serve political ends, but this was less than twenty years after the event; some of the teachers at Central High were probably still there.

            On the other hand, how many parents bother to audit their children’s textbooks? For that matter, if my parents had done so, it wouldn’t have meant anything to them; my Dad was stationed in France when all that was going on, and likely had never even seen the national accounts, much less local ones.

            1. A half truth, and it spun. Of course the ANG ensured the ruling of Brown vs Board of Education was carried out – after Eisenhower nationalized them. All they have to do is spin that, and “just happen” to omit the roll of the 101st Airborne, and you have truth presented to give an inaccurate picture of what went down. Unfortunately, this is standard, from news stories to history books.

      2. There is a protection in our system for unjust laws, it is ‘Jury Nullification’. It is why it took so many ‘trials’ to get a jury to convict Kevorkian of assisted suicide. A jury of your peers can decide that they are going to ignore a law, just this one time, in this specific case. What Michigan did is disgraceful, I would call it ‘jury lottery’; keep trying the man for the same thing until you manage to get a jury to agree.
         Personally, I blame Jimmy Carter and his nationwide 55 mph speed limit as the start of the breakdown of ignoring laws. Then, of course, there is the EPA where a bucket of rain water is considered a ‘fugitive waste stream’. My Father recently had a property value assessment, that I successfully convinced the county bureaucrats that their appraisal was off and had the value reduced to 30%. My rationale was that 75% of the property was wetlands and not develop-able.

         1. Question: Were there successive hung juries before Kevorkian’s conviction? If so, I think the way some states look at is is that a hung jury is neither a conviction or acquittal, and they have to hold trials until a jury makes a decision one way or the other.

            BTW, “double nickels” dates to the Nixon administration. And for ignoring the law, there’s always been moonshining.

            1. No; my understanding is that Michigan passed the ‘Stop Dr Kevorkian Act’ and he assisted a suicide. They arrested him, the jury returned not guilty. He then assisted in another suicide. They arrested him, the jury returned not guilty. Rinse and repeat until you get a jury that returns a guilty.

               1. That’s… Given my (admittedly limited) understanding of the law, this should not have been possible due to double jeopardy.

                  1. I think it would only be double jeopardy if they tried him again for the same incident.

                     1. That’s true.

                        1. Yes, each trial was based on his assisting another different person.

                     2. Also, there’s nothing to stop him from being sued civilly over the same incident.

                  2. Each trial was for a different assisted suicide so double-jeopardy doesn’t come into play.

                     Double-jeopardy would apply if he was put on trial several times for the same assisted suicide.

                     1. “When a jury has been given an adequate opportunity to deliberate and is unable to reach a verdict, a retrial takes place at the discretion of the prosecution. The subsequent trial does not constitute a violation of the constitutional prohibition of Double Jeopardy.”
                        Legal Dictionary

                        In the event of a hung jury the accused has neither been convicted nor vindicated.

                  3. Double jeopardy is a funny beast. For example, it isn’t double jeopardy to try the same set of facts in two different courts, as in federal vs state (think Rodney King), or criminal vs civil. Which is why most self-defense statutes of late have included explicit provisions that if a homicide is justified by self-defense it confers lawsuit immunity too.

               2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kevorkian/chronology.html

                  He basically kept getting more and more euthanasias for them to charge him with– and the activist judges supporting him didn’t help, either.

                  1. “Okay, I’ve been arrested for committing a crime… but I wasn’t convicted. Boy, was I lucky. What shall I do next?
                     I know! I’ll go commit the same crime on a different person! Brilliant!”

                     1. He was a freaking serial killer who managed to twig on targets that enough people would support him killing that he could get away with it– but the thrill of the kill was partly because of risk, so he had to keep getting stupider and stupider.

         2. With Kevorkian, quite a bit of the blame lay on him as well. He wasn’t content to accept the acquittal and quietly go about what he had been doing; he considered it an invitation to keep pushing the envelop.

            The DA who eventually “got” Kevorkian had been elected on the platform that he was specifically NOT going to waste the taxpayers’ money prosecuting Kevorkian again, and there’s every reason to believe that he meant that–until Kevorkian did something so blatant (killing someone on TV) that even a prosecutor who didn’t want to get involved couldn’t ignore it.

            1. As I recall, the lawyer defending Kevorkian’s many murders was as sorry an example of Lawyerus Granadstandius as ever plead before a jury.

            2. Goes back to Cedar’s point: A law is a law, needs to be obeyed until changed. Both Dr. K and other people thought his work was useful, but not enough to make it legal.
               If a law authorizing assisted suicide had been passed, THEN we could see if it had sufficient practical protections against undue influence and other abuses. Without a law authorizing it, his actions were … illegal.

               1. Ah, but I believe that there was no law against self-suicide therefore asking someone to help in the setup wasn’t actually suicide. He mainly gave them the method. The patient themselves pushed the button. Kind of like criminalizing guns because people use them to suicide (not, of course, that the Vile-Progs wouldn’t love to do that). Michigan then crafted a law specifically for Kevorkian and what he was doing; they might as well have placed his Social Security number into the law (of course, they did not because FDR *promised* that SSNs would *never* be used for identification).
                  I don’t question that some people have moral problems with suicide and assisted-suicide; what I have questions and concerns about is a State crafting a law to make one person a criminal. It is crap like this that causes the “ignore the law” mentality to get a toehold. And now this practice is legal in 6 states.

                  1. Not always. The case where Kevorkian was finally convicted, was not an assisted suicide but one where he actually killed the subject.

                     It’s not good to have the state specifically targeting any individual, but I must admit that I have less of a problem with it being Kevorkian than anyone else. Everything that has come to light about him makes it pretty clear that he didn’t kill because he believed in the right-to-die and personal autonomy; he got into the right-to-die movement because he was a ghoul who enjoyed death.

                  2. Why wouldn’t it be the same as an accessory to murder? If someone provides a weapon to someone who you know will use it to commit murder, and know who the victim will be, and do not contact authorities, doesn’t that make him an accessory? By that reasoning, someone who provides a suicide machine to someone he knows will use it to kill himself, and then aids him in the act, wouldn’t that make him just as much an accessory as someone who knowingly provides a weapon for murder, but doesn’t use it himself?

                  3. People do not typically pass laws against acts they cannot conceive occurring nor which they see no means of enforcement. How would you prosecute anybody for successfully committing suicide? Many states have, however, do have laws against attempted suicide which would seem to cover Kevorkian’s efforts. Presumably it wouldn’t matter that the suicide was successful, Kevorkian would be prosecutable for assisting the attempt.

               2. If a law authorizing assisted suicide had been passed, THEN we could see if it had sufficient practical protections against undue influence and other abuses.

                  No such thing as sufficient practical precautions. Supposedly the Dutch have all sorts of protections against involuntary euthanasia. But just recently there was a publicized case where family members had to hold some one down so the “doctor” could inject the drugs to kill her; she was fighting to stay alive.

                  1. Which is why neither my wife or I will ever have a DNR entered in our medical records. In fact, I pointedly had my doctor enter “Use all lifesaving measure possible” when asked.

                     1. Same here.

                     2. Ever since my first Drivers’ License I have had the organ donor box checked, but I’ve advised Spouse and Offspring that is no longer my inclination and will uncheck the box when next the license is renewed.

                        Mind, at this late stage I find it unlikely anybody would accept any of my organs anyway.

                        Which isn’t to say I demand resuscitation, merely I no longer trust the Veterinarians staffing our hospitals.

                        1. I always had the owner donor box checked until this last renewal. I’m married, my husband knows my intentions, and we don’t trust the medical system. He can make the call if that should ever happen.

                           (I can’t give blood, mind you, because of where he comes from, but I can donate whole organs, in one of those mind-boggling paradoxes of modern medicine.)

                        2. this

                        3. Sometimes I wonder if I never check the organ donation part of my TXDL because I saw Monty Python’s “Live Organ Donation” sketch at a young age.

                           Maybe I was prescient since it seems some people are using their work as a guidebook and not comedy.

                        4. I did as well… until I wound up in the ER after being deliberately run over by a crackhead in a Buick.

                           About the fifth “donorcycle” comment, I decided I’d take all my organs to Hell with me. When I got mobile enough to make it down to the DMV, I had my license changed.

                           The medical profession shoots itself in the foot once again…

                           1. Trust is a hard thing to maintain, and easy to lose. Not one of Kipling’s copybook headings, but something a lot of people should’ve been taught.

                           2. The only reason they ask is because they want to save lives, yours not included.

                  2. I’m guessing that from a legal standpoint, “sufficient” would mean “well enough written that abuse of this law happens rarely”. But yeah, “where there’s a will, there’s a … relative.”

            3. Yep. Most of these social bugaboos that get complained about (bathrooms, cakes, etc) come about when the decision is made to press the envelope. Bathrooms used to simply be dadt for people and at least personally a matter of as long as trying. Then it becomes a ‘thou shalt’ and any pretense of bilateral pretending (I won’t be obvious and they won’t care) disappears.

               1. As I’ve said before I have a lot of friends who are, for lack of a better term, non-gender conforming from everyday genderf**ks to those actively seeking androgyny to people in medical care and transitioning/ed.

                  Until the Dems decided to make bathrooms an issue in Charlotte I never heard one worry about using the bathroom. Now it is a constant worry. Great way to f**k over people who you are “helping”.

                  1. Yep. Put something in front of people’s face and it will be noticed. Sometimes flying under radar works better.

                     1. Oddly, the only complaints I ever hear were women at ManRay (goth/industrial/gay/alternative club in Cambridge sadly now condos) on Fridays.

                        Women leaving the bathrooms sometimes complained the trannies took up too much time at the mirrors and often looked better than the women anyway.

                        Good times…probably the best times of my life and I didn’t even notice.

                     2. Back when I used to get stuck training newbies I was wont to advise them, “You can get away with almost anything, so long as you’re discreet; if you aren’t discreet even the privileges we’re currently allowed will be forbidden.”

               2. It victimizes the vulnerable and enables freaking predators, too.

                  1. Yep. The fear is not the one trying to fit in. It’s the one that doesn’t even bother and has no intention to. A rough road in that it is there to be used if needed

                     1. I see a strong parallel with certain immigrants.

         3. heh – beating them at their own game?

7. “Who would you rather have living in your home? The respectful hardworking immigrant who has proven their intent and ability to contribute to our society? Or the illicit duplicitous one who flouts all the rules and destroys from within?”

   My naturally argumentative side immediately went to the thought that maybe this is a false dichotomy; that there are people perfectly willing and able to contribute to a society who are simply so desperate to escape their current suffering that they cannot afford the time required by the legal process, or have been disqualified from it by some idiotic bureaucratic technicality of precisely the kind anyone who has ever dealt with the DMV should be familiar with. And cheesy exploitative tactic that it is, the fact remains that ruthlessly enforcing deportation policies does mean children may be forced out of the only homes they have ever known for no reason they can understand, which is very hard to think of as a good or necessary thing.

   But the practical side of me, and the side which has gotten increasingly cynical over the years, chimed back with the acid observation that however virtuous one’s justification for lawbreaking, the inevitable effect of rewarding it is much more lawbreaking by those much less virtuous. And even that could be tolerated, if the people advocating for that choice were the ones paying the price of it; for the most part, however, they aren’t, which greatly undermines my sympathy for their tactics.

   This is part of the problem with the sentimentalization of politics: when you’re browbeaten for “permitting/producing atrocity” no matter where you draw the line, it tends to discourage attempts to draw a line at all, which tends to produce its own atrocities.

8. I found your problem. “Words have meanings.”

   Not anymore. To the Left, words do -not- have meanings, because that would require Reality to be “real”. External reality is inconvenient to a Leftist. Therefore it does not exist.

   Instead, words mean what Leftists say they mean, Lewis Carrol style.

   Also, if a Leftist decides your use of a word is bad, that word can KILL people!

   http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2017/02/we-need-to-talk-about-judith-timson-i.html

   So because now you’re a Threat To People’s Lives!!! and a mean horrible person too, people like Crapestros Cameltoe (who’s ridiculous blog I will mercifully not link to) contend that you should be beaten in the streets. Vile666 of course I do not peruse, no doubt they are the same or worse. Grog Hullblender in high dudgeon, I can do without it.

   No word from Mr. Cameltoe regarding last night’s weenie roast at UC Berkley, where the Forces of Righteousness and Free Speech rioted because some fag was giving a talk there. About free speech, as it happens.

   So no, words do not have meanings, we are all Nazis, and we must all be killed. Glad I could clear up the confusion for you.

   1. I suspect that the issues of gaming the meaning of words is just a wee bit younger than language itself.

      1. This is the Post Modern weaponized version. I saw video of some cute blonde girl getting pepper sprayed in the eyes for wearing a Trump hat last night. This word game is the enabling step that allows the assault.

         Just so we’re all clear on what we’re dealing with.

         1. Bunny trail warning!

            I first noticed the actor Michael Moriarty in his brilliant performance in the mini-series Holocaust. He played Eric Dorf, a Nazi SS officer with an ability to use words to create labels that were technically correct but hid their full meaning.

            1. Hmmmm … my first notice of Michael Moriarity was as Henry Wiggems (the Tom Seaver-like pitcher) in the excellent Bang the Drum Slowly, playing opposite Robert DeNiro and more than holding his own. Had I been told then that one of the two would end up being deemed the greatest actor of his generation I’d have put my money on Moriarity.

               Alas, he became openly conservative (and – gasp! – anti-abortion) and had to flee Hollywood to Canada, from where he was (when last I saw) writing a weekly column to Enter Stage Right, a Canadian webzine of conservative political commentary (enterstageright[DOT]com).

               MICHAEL MORIARTY, who starred in such classic films as Who’ll Stop the Rain and Pale Rider, exiled himself to Canada in 1995, following a nasty confrontation with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. Moriarty was invited along with network television executives and producers to hear Reno’s views on censorship of TV violence. Law and Order, one of the least violent shows on television, was cited as a major offender. Incensed by Reno’s campaign to “forcibly end violence on television and trample on rights of free expression as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution,” Moriarty quit the series and left the U.S. in protest. He has been a landed immigrant in Canada ever since. Why the fateful encounter with Reno led to a radical (and seemingly overnight) transformation of Moriarty’s political views from soft liberal to hard-core conservative remains unexplained to this day. The onetime Manhattan über-liberal’s sudden shift to “gun-toting” arch-conservatism proved to be too much to fathom for his socialite wife Anne Hamilton Martin, and their seemingly ideal marriage ended after almost 20 years.
               [SNIP]
               “In early 1994, I quit Law and Order and announced my departure in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety,” Moriarty told Cinema Retro. “My employers, the mainstream press and even Wikipedia like to say that it was (executive producer) Dick Wolf who fired me and not the other way ‘round. People say: ‘Oh, well, no one fires Dick Wolf!’ Well, I did. At any rate, I had become an American dissident. I left for Canada not too long after that.”
               http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/6032-WHATEVER-HAPPENED-TO-MICHAEL-MORIARTY.html

               I can well imagine an encounter with Ms Reno turning one conservative.

               There goes Peter Cottontail, hoppin’ down the bunny trail …

               1. Hell, I can imagine an encounter with that evil twunt turning one into a rabid werewolf.

                  *shudder*

                  1. Any encounter with her would turn any semi-rational person into a gun clinger in a heart beat.

         2. It’s the same exact thing as when the Democrats intimidated Republican voters after the Civil War. The 19th Century Democrats have Camilia; the 21st Century Berkley. It’s just another verse of the same, tired, song.

         3. this is why this only happens in leftoid strongholds,
            how many return shots would such an attack precipitate in a ‘burb of Ft. Worth? It would be a very short grand jury

   2. Kleepto threep breezwhiel thromp grump e blort vlat.

      1. Oh! My virgin ears!

         1. Vlort, dulrar.

            1. ‘Klaatu barada nikto.’

               1. Klaatu bought a rad necktie.

                  1. It was gort-geous.

                     1. Eep Snörpish Now?

         2. Oh! My virgin ears!

            First time aural sex?

   3. If you’re of a certain age, weren’t conservatarian in your youth, and at all self-aware, I think it must be sad to see people rioting to stop free speech at the place where the Free Speech Movement was born. It certainly is for me, despite the fact that I realize that when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid.

      1. Been my feeling recently with the ALCLU. Once upon a time they pushed for equal rights, or at least found an acorn once in a while. Today on all.of these riots they are on the side of the rioter.

         1. Organizations, particularly political organizations, tend to become more extreme over the years — if only because it is the extremists who always show up for the meetings.

            People engaging in fascism to prevent fascism does tickle my appreciation of absurdity. Their chants of “This is what Democracy looks like” serves as a reminder of why the United States was established as a republic, not a democracy.

            1. Ya. The fun of ‘protests can certainly be used to drive out others’ is my current headache. Protest and counterprotest are one thing. Barring use of public facilities is another but many don’t see that way

               1. They are often counter-productive in motivating the public, but they are excellent in getting your base all “wee-wee’d up.” They can also provoke excess response by the authorities (especially if friendly news coverage/video editing presents only the response, not the provocation*) to seem to be over-reacting, thus “legitimizing”** the protest.

                  Welcome to the Age of the Coercive Protest
                  Last spring, while sitting in the parking lot of a Home Depot, I made a calculation that most parents of very small babies make: feed my baby in the parking lot or hurry home and do it there. With an eighteen-month-old child also in the car, I decided on the latter, so that she wasn’t also stuck waiting in the parking lot for her new brother to nurse. I figured the trip would only take seven minutes (according to my GPS); instead, it took well over an hour.

                  As I pulled onto the main road, a Black Lives Matter protest took over the entire roadway, stopping every car in its path. We waited for their protest to pass, and as I did I noticed that the air conditioning in my car was broken. I usually drive with the windows slightly open and hadn’t noticed so far, but soon, the temperature in the car became stifling, which only added to my son’s distress, as he sat strapped in the back seat hungry and, eventually, crying so hard he was choking on reflux. As any mother can tell you, there is absolutely nothing worse than hearing your baby cry and not being able to do a darn thing about it. As I watched his face turn colors of the rainbow from screaming, I saw the twenty-something protesters meandering down the median, and I won’t lie and say my impulse wasn’t to run them over. Fortunately for those who decided shutting down the roadway would bring positive publicity to their cause, police officers, the target of the protest, were there to protect them, lest I (and the many other annoyed drivers I saw on the road) might have been tempted to hit the gas.

                  We later learned my son’s reflux was due to several food allergies, and I shudder to think what might have happened had we run into an actual emergency that day on the highway, as there was no way for an ambulance to reach us trapped in a sea of cars.

                  I thought of this incident as I watched protesters shut down other transportation hubs this week—this time, it was airports, in order to signal their anger at President Donald Trump’s new executive order targeting citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries.
                  [END EXCERPT]

                  *Chicago ’68: when the news ignores the bag of poop thrown at the cop but shows the “news worthy” footage of the cop cracking a protester’s skull.

                  **Legitimate would seem a likely word for examination of augered meaning.

                  1. “…when the news ignores the bag of poop thrown at the cop …” – makes an argument for the cops having their own reporters and big news dumps after an event.
                     Sure, it’d be treated as propaganda, but a fair number of people would say “it’s probably spun, but it musta happened or they couldn’t have videoed it”.
                     Who knows, maybe some commercial news media would get tired of getting scooped and start telling a broader story.

                     1. I think the police in places that are large enough to generate these kinds of riots are missing a bet when they don’t have balloon-based (powered drones can’t carry enough fuel) camera platforms with GOOD telescopic lenses, so they can watch the action from far enough away that it would take some serous effort to take them down.

                        1. Given the current anti-police sentiments being stoked up at the behest of the prior (yay!) administration, documentation of events such as large-scale protests ought be a critical portion of police planning. It would certainly make presentation of the AAR more entertaining.

      2. …despite the fact that I realize that when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid.

         There are things I miss about youth, stupid is not one of them.

9. MiniTru has decided that the correct NewSpeak phrase shall be “New American.” Older terms a chance as “undocumented immigrant”, “illegal immigrant”, and “illegal alien” are no longer to be used. Pejoratve terms such as “foreign invaders” and “wetbacks” are hereby stricken from the record. Users of these and similar doubleplus ungood terms are subject to radical reeducation. MiniTru has spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done.

   1. They ought be careful, lest another group decide upon a ‘new’ word for them. A word, like, say, ‘target’. This would be a thing not good.

      1. Or, perhaps, a thing very good. At the very least, indelible paintballs come to mind (wouldn’t hurt to add a strong, unpleasant odor to said paintballs — use your imagination here).

         1. Having been a paintball player for many years, I should let you know that the ‘;balls’ have a bad habit of breaking in the paintball marker.
            It’s not a big deal when you can easily wash out the water soluble mess, but a more indelible ink, accompanied with a stench formula, would be deleterious to the operators.
            Otherwise, it’s a good idea.

            1. So, a thin coating to hold them together (although it would raise the cost) would be useful?

            2. I have no direct experience, but I thought they solved that problem under the various less-lethal grants and initiatives to develop the various law-enforcement (pepper-ball and tear-gas-ball) launchers for crowd control – though I note that the cops on the line for crowd control are always masked up, so maybe not.

               1. Hasn’t the military been working on some crowd dispersal options? I somewhat recall one that induced vomiting, and certainly spraying with something carrying a highly distinctive odor seems tenable.

                  1. “Sergeant! Release the skunks!”

                     1. In A Small Colonial War by Robert Frezza he had the troops break up a riot (they did give them a chance to assemble peaceably for a protest, but the crowd started throwing rocks and such) using skunk oil, or something like it. Said it would bond to their skin and last a few days.

                        If something like that were possible today… yeah, I’m sure the usual suspects would screech but they do it anyway.

                        1. I liked that book a lot; it has made it through several culling cycles.

                           Frezza dropped out of sight about the time the Midlist Cleansing started ramping up in the mid ’90s. I looked for him on the web a while back, but didn’t find anything likely, not even an obituary.

                           Granted his last book came out at the dawn of the Web Era, but it’s unusual for an author to vanish without even a ripple on the net.

                        2. It’d be great, but they’d never do it because of the potential for long-term eye damage, which they wouldn’t want with non-lethal forms of crowd dispersion.

                           1. Pity. Since I suspect that sort of stench would make even anarchists unable to assemble for a few days.

                  2. Certain frequencies of sound are rumored to cause incontinence. Then again, another is rumored to kill chickens due to it being a resonate frequency of their skull cavity.

                  3. The problem is that if you zap someone with chemical deterrents, pepper spray, rubber bullets, infra- or super-sonics, etc., some percentage of the population might die of it. Even criminals and rioters can have a weak heart, not-quite-popped aneurysm, or fatal allergies.

                     Regardless of intent, US law moves the action from “use of force” to “lethal force,” which opens up a warp speed trip down the rabbit hole when you have a dead body lying on the ground.

                     Even the police, who operate under their own laws nowadays, may be held accountable for such things.

                     1. That’s simply addressed. Require a physical and doctor’s note confirming your health is sufficiently robust to participate in a riot.

                        It’s an idea just stupid enough we might be able to get it enacted.

               2. Kratman has suggested at least once that the masks are a defense against reporters and such,

         2. Considering their current activities, we definitely want to mark them so they can be found and prosecuted, even if such tracking occurs at our leisure.

            I’m thinkin’ a helicopter, a long hose, and an industrial paint sprayer would work great.

10. c4c

11. “Other nations have even stricter immigration laws. Don’t believe me? Look up what it takes to emigrate to Canada, or Australia.”

    Or for that matter, Mexico. One of the great hypocrisies of the immigration debate is how Mexico expects us to take in as many of their citizens as wish to come with no strings attached while at the same time beating, jailing, and deporting anyone who crosses their border illegally.

    There was some discussion of this in the “wall” debate. One side was pointing out that it was important to let Mexico keep their national pride and not try to humiliate them. The other side was pointing out that the relationship between the two countries with regards to immigration has gotten so distorted that trying to restore a bit of balance is inevitably going to be seen as humiliation.

    1. One thing to consider with Mexico. The central government at present is not really in control of their own states on the northern border. They have fallen under the influence of criminal cartels who take full advantage of our porous border. We have been slowly ceding a strip of our own southern border to the control of these criminals. I would think that both countries would do well to see that the border under proper control.

       BTW: Mexico and the US have both announced that the AP report that Trump threatened to send in our troops is ‘false news.’ Unfortunately the original story from a Mexican journalist who claims to have confidential sources who provided him with a transcript of a private phone conversation between Presidents Trump and Nieto on Friday is still gaining headway.

       1. The central government is not really in control of it’s own states. It’s just less control of the states on the northern border.

          Less publicized by equally true is that the Chinese central government has little control over some of it’s provinces. But, they have nukes… so let’s hope they don’t completely disintegrate.

          1. Like Taiwan?

    2. Trump’s wall plan was never something I found particularly believable.

       If Mexico’s government has no moral imperative to respect the border for our sake, we have no moral imperative to respect the border for their sake.

       Build a barrier and make Mexico suffer for it.

       Depopulate the southern side of the border. Destroy roads, fuel, power, dwellings, and wells. Poison water, poison animals, poison vegetation.

       1. Let’s stop just before poisoning water. Now, denaturing (embittering agents are quite potent deterrents) is another matter.

          1. That’s a bit more decent than my inclinations.

             Have I mentioned lately my gratitude for all y’all, the American voters, balancing me out, and not leaving policy entirely up to my instinct?

             1. It’s a matter of threshold. I have said that some things do require a measured response… and the megaton is a valid unit of measure. So… maybe I’m not so good with that moderation thing.

                1. I did once upon a time wonder if tactical trenching nukes would best be tested on parts of that border…

                   1. You could reinstate “Operation Ploughshare”.

                      What could go wrong?

                      1. That’d be a real blast. But I think the political fallout might be problematic.

                         1. Well, we nuked the hell out of Nevada, and our own people live there… over *nine hundred* bombs were set off there. You could see the mushroom clouds from Las Vegas.

                            1. Yeah, but I have relatives, mostly in Utah and Arizona, who aren’t too happy about those bombs set off in Nevada….

                   2. I once told someone that the SDI laser research was using missile defense as cover, but it would really be a near constant beam and deployed as curtain across our southern border.

                      1. Large reflector at the Gulf, Beam generator in the Pacific, and fire up a trench. Bridge on each side of the trench
                         “Everything north of this line is now ours. Good Day.”
                         [aside] (boy is my drinking getting me some creative spelling thankyou spellcheck)

          2. Let’s stop just before poisoning water.

             Yeah, “Chihuahua delenda est” is a bit much.

             1. Especially as there’s a good bit of evidence that the “witch” in the Biblical “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” may well have referred to folks who poisoned wells.

                1. Well, the word usually translated “witch” has nothing to do with poisoning but has every thing to do with “using harmful magic”.

                   People who have studied the ancient Middle East have found “curse tablets”.

                   IE Invocations of gods/demons to harm other people.

                   1. The word used in Greek translation does mean poisoner as well. Because, after all, if the little old crone in the cottage hands you some powder to put in your uncle’s soup and hasten your inheritance, she is exploiting the occult (hidden) properties of arsenic.

                      There was a woman denounced to the Viennese Inquisition as a witch. She had discovered that a certain vinegar, used to kill insects, could also kill people, and at least three people had died because of her selling it. The Inquisition drew the distinction, but her denouncers did not.

                      1. I’m referring to the Hebrew word not the Greek word.

                      2. My understanding of why “thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live” is so is because the poisoner tries to hide their act of murder and so escape the consequences.
                         In several ancient / Biblical times civilizations, you would not necessarily be executed for a murder, but if you were not found justified, you WOULD have to pay weir-gild / support to the family / survivors of your victim. (IMO) it was the attempt to evade the laws as practiced that put the poisoner outside of the society. cf: concept of “outlawry” where one who acts outside the law (criminally) is also outside the protection of the law.
                         JPDev

             2. Also Durango.

                Draw a line from around Tepic to Aldama. Aldama looks like 150-200 miles south of the Texas border. That’s far enough, since I’m doing back of the envelope and do not have real world experience to calibrate against.

                Denuded of roads and fuel, that distance will take longer to cross. Denuded of vegetation and wildlife, human infiltrators will be more obvious on IR.

                I’ve not yet calculated the number of people that live in that area, who would need to be killed.

       2. I was in West Berlin. I know what an effective wall looks like. Minefields and automated machine guns have come a long way since then.

          Build a watch tower every 500 meters. Staff with 3 young armed men (4 shifts, that’s 24 guards per kilometer, plus an NCO per kilometer, plus an officer for every 5 kilometers, is 126 men for every 5 kilometers stretch) from newly created garrison infantry companies. Rate personnel on effectiveness of stopping border crossers, punishments for allowing repeated successful crossings. Publish the number of heads collected by each company as an informal competition.

          Watch the number of attempted crossings drop drastically.

          No, I am not a nice person. Merely effective. I am polite enough to label both sides of the death strip with bilingual ‘Danger, keep out, lethal force authorized’ signage.

          1. At the rate Canada is going, we may have to build walls on both of our borders. That would be a lot of employment opportunities for someone.

             1. Unnecessary. Canada we could absorb without too much effort, if it came to it (for one thing, we could give Quebec to France). Mexico…not so much.

                1. Do you want to cause a war with France? 😛

                   1. Oh come on. Trump would totally go for being the first president to wage a war where the loser has to take the territory under dispute.

                2. France would never be stupid enough to take Quebec.

                   1. *Considers Mr. Simon’s statement. Considers bainleus, Calais “refugee” camp, government statements about Islam, government response to people who point out that Islamists are serious about wanting to kill people* Not certain about France, but the French central government might be interested, depending on the shipping cost.

                      1. That was funny… 😉

                      2. Ah, but Quebec is not Muslim, and the Quebecois are generally too feckless to kill anybody even if they wanted to. This seriously diminishes Quebec’s value to the French government.

                3. God in our dreams. As others have said though, France wouldn’t take Quebec. It’s been…discussed…

                4. we could give Mexico to france, then they’d surrender
                   again.

          2. I gather our congresscritters have been conferring with Israel on their wall, which costs a third less than what we’ve built thus far, is cheaper to staff and maintain and has proven remarkably effective.

             Also, proposals to levy a tax on remittances to Mexico (I would also consider a lien on Social Security payments to the Mexican government paid on earnings of their people working in the US) seem a very effective way of “paying for” such a wall.

             1. 20% tariff on goods made in Mexico has been floated. OTOH, they could also require all able-bodied illegals to work two weeks on the wall before deportation.

                1. *Strikes out deportation and writes ‘digging their own grave’*

                2. My notion involves making illegals earn their way back in, if they’re truly determined to become Americans. A year working on the wall for first offense, five years for second offense; Sheriff-Joe style room and board but no pay; your womenfolk can staff the kitchen. Feel free to ‘escape’ southward anytime, but lose your work credit. English is the official language of the camps; learn it fast.

                   And running the wall is a good use for otherwise-idle military. Hold your war games along the wall, and make it a scary place.

       3. One possible solution that I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, and which has *some* merit, is to annex Mexico and send our troops in for real to clean out the cartels. I have mixed feelings about this idea, but can see how it could possibly work, especially since our cultures are already so mixed. (The area where I live, southern Oregon very close to Northern California, has a high population of Mexican and Central American farm workers, some of whom speak little to no English. No idea how many are here legally.) If we HAVE to have immigrants (legal, please) I’d much rather they were Hispanic instead of Muslims trying to supercede (sp.?) our laws with sharia law.

          1. Announce that as the plan, do obvious preparation for it, and watch Mexico build the barrier.

             1. good point, sir Ox
                Elijah Craig now goner. To bed I head.
                Good night y’all.

                1. I shall have to sometime sample Elijah Craig’s product(s). Right now, though, I am in the company of the centaur… Rémy Martin.

                   1. My bottle wasn’t as good as it is supposed to be. It had an odd sting to it when drank straight or over rocks, so I had to hide in ginger ale.
                      Made very odd dreams too. Worse, the dreams were of work!. I was very unrested this 4 am.
                      On to finishing the 1910 Rye. then the Jameson, then the Glens (Fiddich and Levit)

                      1. Odd dreams.. oh, odd work dreams. yeah, that’s narsty.

          2. I’d go one further: Since we have so many Mexican citizens here in the US already, why not ask the question of the various Mexican states “Why don’t you guys just accept reality, recognize that your federal government in Mexico City is dominated by oligarchs not acting in your interest, and join the huge chunk of your citizenry as de facto Americans?”. Offer reasonable terms for the transition from Mexican statehood to American, and then watch heads explode in both Mexican and Canadian federal government.

             I mean, hell… So many Mexicans apparently want to be American citizens, why don’t we just take America to them, instead? It would be cheaper, and a lot more cost-effective, in the end…

             I’m thinking that the ensuing panic that would induce in the Mexican government would do more to get the illegal immigration problem under control than anything overt that we could do. And, the reaction would be priceless… “Well, gee… Since so many Mexicans are here in the US, why don’t we just make their home states in Mexico American…?”.

             The Schadenfreude would be absolutely delicious. I bet they’d have the border patrolled by the Mexican Army with shoot-to-kill orders so quickly that your head would spin, and they’d start begging to run involuntary repatriation programs on our territory.

          3. Our resident Undead Imperator has been silent of late, but in his absence I’ll note that the long term impact on the Roman Republic of annexing that pesky neighboring region known as Gaul was not especially positive.

             I can’t imagine a bigger mess than having to “govern” what’s south of the border under our current system. And talk about a demographic shift – All those new voters would push the existing near balance right out the window. The new combined USA would be quite a different country, with the high likelihood that we’d actually become the imperial power we are always accused of being.

             Nope, better to wall that mess out than to try and govern it.

             1. You miss the elegance of the solution I’m proposing; I doubt we’d ever have to actually follow through on the offer. Merely making it, however?

                Fear of God, put into the hearts of the oligarchs who own Mexico. I’m not talking conquest, here, I’m suggesting we make the offer to the Mexican states, and observe. The conditions for becoming a US state would naturally mean they’d need to clean up their acts, and if they were serious about doing so, doesn’t that sort of solve the problem?

                I’m thinking more along the lines of “Persuade Mexico that solving the illegal immigration problem is in their interest…”. Obviously, a few sticks would need to be employed, along with the carrots.

                I think the mere suggestion that perhaps Chihuahua or Oxaca might want to think about joining the US federal system vice the current kleptocracy in Mexico City might have some salutary effects for all concerned.

                1. We have US cities that need to clean up their act, and they generally won’t without active sanctions. And while some factions in Puerto Rico have been jonesing for PR to become a state for decades, their act appears to be nothing close to clean even gievn they currently operate under US law.

                   I am dubious as to the ability of the northern Mexican states, given the deep corruption and absence of any form of responsible governance, to clean up much if at all without an army of occupation and a US appointed administrator to supply the brooms, and I don’t think we want to go there.

                   1. Meanwhile, the entire populations of those states (plus any other Mexicans who wanted to sneak through at the opportune moment) would become legal U.S. residents, with no more respect for the rule of law than their present masters have inculcated in them. That’s a losing proposition.

                   2. But then, if they are unable to clean up their acts, they would be unable to become American States….

                      One requirement would be for them to recognize the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. I’m not sure how well that would go over, though, for either the Mexican central government, or for the State trying to become an American State…

                      (This one reform, if pursued to its fullest, will likely be the single biggest reform that would address the corruption of the government and the lawlessness of drug lords….possibly to the point where the State in question might not want to become an American one after all…)

                2. Elegance is all very well and good, but if you make threats, you have to be prepared to follow through, just in case your threatenee decides to call, instead of fold.

          4. I had the exact same thought. If we gotta have ’em, I’ll take Mexicans. And if our own people continue breeding below replacement rate, Mexicans may be our only hope of breeding enough children to avoid the slide into Muslim-majority demographics.

             And I really, really like these annexation plans. Would solve a host of problems for both countries. We shoulda never given northern Mexico back after the war.

             1. Fortunately, the birthrate issue is a self-correcting problem, and would self-correct before we came even close to a Muslim majority.

          5. We did essentially the same thing in Afghanistan. And in Tripoli before that.

             “If you won’t clean up your mess, we will come in and do it for you.”

    3. One of the dirty little secrets of the whole immigration mess is that US funds earned here and sent home to villages in Mexico amount to more cash than Mexico makes from their international oil revenues. Many billions of dollars. This infusion of funds is a critical essential element of the Mexican economy. And that doesn’t even address the vast amount of drug money flowing in that same direction.

       1. Mexico’s biggest export is its citizens.

          1. and its biggest import is the money they make

       2. AND it provides a safety valve to prevent a revolution against the corrupt Mexican government. Build a tight wall, and the Mexican government would fall inside two years.

    4. Canada? I believe they expect you to be gainfully employed. Then there is: http://www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/?p=4110
       Note the third example, a man with HIV positive partner plans to move to Canada. Doesn’t know that Canada requires a HIV test, and expects the results to be negative.
       Mexico? Check out their southern border: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3385694/Mexico-moves-lock-border-wall-government-tries-stem-flow-migrants-heading-north-tightening-porous-southern-border.html
       Do as I say, not as I do?
       Australia? They have solved the problem of ‘anchor babies’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Centre
       If you don’t get to Australian soil, it kind of defeats the purpose of illegally traveling there to drop the baby on foreign soil.

       My biggest complaint with these countries with strict immigration laws is that I was really hoping Rosie, Whoopi and Babs were going to do as they promised and leave the USA.

    5. Forgive if we end up with two copies:
       Wordpress delenda est.
       Your comment is awaiting moderation.
       Canada? I believe they expect you to be gainfully employed. Then there is: http:-slash-slash-www.desertsun.co.uk/blog/?p=4110
       Note the third example, a man with HIV positive partner plans to move to Canada. Doesn’t know that Canada requires a HIV test, and expects the results to be negative.
       Mexico? Check out their southern border: http:-slash-slash-www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3385694/Mexico-moves-lock-border-wall-government-tries-stem-flow-migrants-heading-north-tightening-porous-southern-border.html
       Do as I say, not as I do?
       Australia? They have solved the problem of ‘anchor babies’: https:-slash-slash-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Centre
       If you don’t get to Australian soil, it kind of defeats the purpose of illegally traveling there to drop the baby on foreign soil.

       My biggest complaint with these countries with strict immigration laws is that I was really hoping Rosie, Whoopi and Babs were going to do as they promised and leave the USA.

       1. The HIV results may in fact be negative. Canada has a different definition of AIDS resulting in about 1/3 of Americans with AIDS being cured by the act of crossing the border. (I believe that this comes from “Rockets, Redheads and Revolution” by Hogan)

       2. “My biggest complaint with these countries with strict immigration laws is that I was really hoping Rosie, Whoopi and Babs were going to do as they promised and leave the USA.”

          Celebrities always disappoint on that front. Their promises are worth nothing. If Trump couldn’t get them to do it, no one will.

          I didn’t expect anything from the Rosie/Whoopi/Babs crowd, but I’ll admit that I was kind of hopeful about that 25% of the federal workforce threatening to quit if Trump won. Alas, it seems are bureaucrats have no more honor than our entertainers.

          1. …, but I’ll admit that I was kind of hopeful about that 25% of the federal workforce threatening to quit if Trump won. Alas, it seems are bureaucrats have no more honor than our entertainers.

             Is there honor among bureaucrats?

             1. Perhaps the bureaucrats didn’t qualify for Canadian immigration – no useful skills or source of income, etc.

12. c4c

13. Several thoughts;

    The Liberal Progressives who drive this “Drop the Illegal from ‘Illegal Immigrant'” nonsense don’t actually seem to want to change the immigration laws; they just want to choose when to enforce them on a whim by whim basis. I can only conclude that the thought of a large population of people without any actual legal rights excites them. (*spit*)

    I’ve read some accounts of American Expats in Mexico. (check out Fred Reed. I don’t always agree with him politically, but he can write and has an interesting POV). The Impression I gat is that the government of Mexico is so inept AND corrupt that the actual Mexicans view it as an obstacle to be worked around where necessary and otherwise ignored. They don’t expect to obey the law because in their experience the law is unreasonable, corrupt, and stupid. I’m not saying we should excuse their illegal behavior because of this, but it makes it more understandable and less threatening, at least to me.

    What I want to see is a shift on the law, so that we no longer have a large population living in a legal limbo, because such a population will tend to become a hiding place for worse things. I’m not Libertarian enough to want open borders; we are at war, have been at war (with the Jihadis) most of my adult life (born 1961), and will probably be at war for the rest of my time. Open borders and ‘at war’ don’t mix well. I don’t insist on throwing every illegal out. I just want to give the illegals a way and a reason to go a few steps back and do it right. If Trump can actually throw them out and keep them out, fine. That would work, too. IF. But the Mexican border is 1945 miles long and the cost of effectively patrolling it strikes me as something we won’t pay for long. A cheaper way would be to come op with some, not too onerous method of getting documented, with some pretty clear benefits. so that the Mexican transients have a reason to call the cops when they see something possibly injurious to the host country.

    The people in this that I really despise aren’t the illegals, but the Progressives.

    1. Aha! I see the problem. “Open borders and war don’t mix” so their solution to war is to open the border. Uh… wait, ain’t that called ‘surrender’ by the sane?

       1. Or it is converting a potential border war to a potential civil war. Don’t get me wrong, border wars can suck, but civil wars can really suck.

       2. The Porgies don’t want open borders. They LIKE having a population of people with no legal rights that they can bully. Oh, they’d be outraged if you confronted them with it, but I have the creepy feeling that a lot of them spend more time than is healthy googling “latina” and “bondage”.

          The Open Border advocates are the Libertarians, at least the bunch over at REASON magazine. How they reconcile that position with the reality of international Jihad is something they’ve never managed to explain to my satisfaction. But I’m not a Libertarian, I’m a Crank.

          1. My problem with libertarians is that ultimately, what they propose is a workable system; however, at least 75% of the people in this country will have to be shot dead before you can start.

             1. My problem with Libertarians is that their ideal system presumes that people make sensible economic choices, and I’m not aware of any evidence for this. My problem with statists is that, while they clearly understand that left to themselves people will make irrational economic decisions, they somehow believe that political leaders and government functionaries are not people for the purposes of that understanding.

                1. My problem with libertarians is that they seem unreasonable optimists on far too many areas of public choice. My problem with Libertarians is that few of them seem to be libertarian.

                   1. Yes, I mean, real libertarians have a convention? Cspschofield; not my problem, If 50% of the remaining 25% not shot make unrealistic economic choices, it is their problem not mine. Statists may understand that people make irrational decisions, but I fail to see why they expect the people that make rational decisions to pay/support those that do not.

                      1. My problem with the Statists is that they believe that making somebody a government functionary magically transforms him into a rational being, suited to make decisions for others. At least when people make irrational decisions unforced by government buttinskiism, their fate is their fault. If they have been pished into it by Policy, then their fate is partly MY fault, for not preventing the government that supposedly seves me from pushing them around.

                         It’s like my revulsion at the entire Child Protection Services idea. I am a sovereign citizen. If some idiot harms his own child, that’s a tragedy, but if a Child is harmed by CPS it was done (in some part) IN MY NAME.

          2. I’ve also considered for a long time that certain people (and not all on the Prog side) like the idea of having an effective underclass who can be used and/or abused pretty much at whim, because they won’t go complain. Once they get their hooks into them, threats of going to the authorities to have them deported are all the control normally needed to get them to keep quiet.

          3. The Porgies…

             What about the Besses?

             1. #BanBessy
                

    2. That actually makes it more threatening, because of the cultural element of lawlessness. And it justifies rhetoric about Mexicans being criminals.

       1. The point is that it isn’t the Mexicans that are criminal, so much, as their government. And they expect OUR government to be just as criminal, and so have as little to do with it as possible. Not sure I blame them.

          My experience with Hispanics in my area (Philadelphia) has been almost totally positive. That may not hold elsewhere. The tales of Mexican Drug Cartels and Human Trafficking Rings I take with huge grains of salt. The entire Human Trafficking hysteria is the old White Slavery hysteria with the serial numbers filed off; it was bushwa in the late Victorian era, it was bushwa in the 1920’s, and I strongly suspect that it is bush now. And the War On Drugs has been generating not-too-believable campfire stories about Auber-powerful international crime cartels for as long as I’ve been alive, and I believe them precisely as much as I believe REEFER MADNESS, and for about the same reasons.

          That said, I would prefer to see the immigration laws enforced, if only because I believe it will be enough of an expense and a hassle that it might cause some serious reexamination of the laws in question.

          1. for Auber-powerful please read Uber-powerful. I despise technology with an opinion.

          2. Human Trafficking Rings I take with huge grains of salt
             ———————

             They exist. A friend of my parents’ used to work for INS (and then DHS, when DHS took control of the INS; iirc, he’s since retired). He was involved in a few raids to shut down those kinds of rings. I don’t know the details, though, because he didn’t like to talk about those specific targets.

             1. I keep looking into it and I keep running into bullshit and blather. The basic assumption is that no woman could possibly choose to sell sex. Why not? And if you proceed from that assumption, then every sex-for-pay enterprise you self-righteously close down turns out to be part of a horrible sex-save ring. And if you decline to let the Prostitutes you ‘rescued’ out of the facilities you placed them in until they sign on to your narrative, you even get ‘testimony’. And never mind if they recant later, that’s ‘false consciousness’.

                This is exactly that same pattern that ran through the White Slavery panics of the late Victorian era and the 1920’s. It was driven by insecure White Upper-Middle Class women who were afraid of the competition then, and I strongly suspect it is now.

                1. Ohio has a lot of human trafficking. The usual pattern is that girls or young men are offered jobs in the US, and then find that their passports are taken away and they are not getting paid. There was a Somali guy who actually enslaved all his young relatives as janitors or something; he kept going over and getting more nephews and cousins. Weird, weird stuff.

                   There have also been a lot of Chinese restaurants throughout the US that turned out to be keeping their illegal immigrant waiters and cooks enslaved, complete with slave quarters to which the workers were bussed every night. Since they spoke a very obscure Chinese language, it was very hard for them to ask for help.

                   So yeah, there are also a lot of mobile brothels at truckstops and girls who can’t speak English, but that is the tip of the iceberg.

                2. Covenant House gets girls who have been forced into it. As in, one ran into the place in subzero temperatures (plus wind chill) with no coat on, and no shoes either, because the pimp had (mistakenly) thought she would not run away in such weather without them.

                   The Covenant House van has bullet holes in it from pimps trying to protect the merchandise.

                3. I have no idea where you’re starting from. And you’re overlooking an important point. Yes, women can choose to sell sex. But they generally choose to do so on *their* terms. That means not on the terms of someone who smuggled them into the country, and keeps them from “quitting” via a combination of violence, the threat of violence, and “warnings” about what will supposedly happen if the authorities find out.

          3. I invite you to come to L.A. and ‘experience hispanics’ here.

             1. I grant your different experience. Philly is different. For one thing, only an obviously and bizarrely deranged activist could sell the idea that Philly once belonged to Mexico. For another, PA is an open carry state, so the non-liberal populace tends to be armed.

          4. So as a Yankee you are an expert about what happens in the Southwest in striking distance of the border. Particularly to those illegals who haven’t gotten far into the US, and would never dare report anything to any sort of law enforcement statistical collection.

             1. And that several of the municipalities in that direction have twisted and warped and done backflips with their statistics in order to conceal the origin of a portion of their crime rate.

             2. Especially since that agreement that lets Mexican trucks and truckers drive straight through to Canada, illegals can show up in Washington state as quick as they do in Northern Cali. Has to be a demand for the area, of course, and it’s a lot more notable to the uninvolved with the “migrant workers” than with, oh, cartel members.

    3. Combine a couple of ideas: Needing a clear benefit, greater than the cost, of transitioning from illegal to legal; and needing a way to pay for the wall. So – do the remittance tax, but make it hugely less expensive for legal citizens.
       To make it fair to existing legal immigrants, require the transitioners to “pay their dues”, i.e. turn themselves in, confess to Misdemeanor Illegal Entry, accept a fine that’s significantly more than the cost of having gone through naturalization process, and pay it off. THEN (maybe after a delay for having jumped the line) do the language/history/law, etc. parts of naturalization, become citizens, which qualifies them for the reduced tax.
       Yeah, I know a “path to citizenship” offends a lot of people, but really – don’t we do much the same for other criminal offenders: pay their dues, whether fines/jail/both, and when you’re done, you’re done?

       1. That’s because those criminal offenders are, at the end of the day, our people and we are responsible for them in a social contract-ish kind of way.

          The criminal invaders are not our people, we don’t have a social contract with them, and they are the responsibility of someone else.

14. What’s the name for the category that I’m in in my current country of residence in SE Asia? I have no intention of becoming a citizen (and they wouldn’t let me become a citizen either), but I’m following all the relevant laws otherwise. I got a visa*, I went to the appropriate government office and handed in the paperwork that my employer filled out (I filled out a bit of it, but it was mostly my employer that did the rest) to get permission to work legally in this country. Since I don’t intend to become a citizen, but I do plan to live here long-term and work (legally), I’m not an immigrant, I’m a ______. What’s the term for this? I don’t actually know.

    * Which actually says “Non-immigrant visa, category W” on it — W is the category of “permitted to work in this country”.

    1. “Legal alien”? “Foreign worker”? “Resident alien”?

       1. I like resident alien. How about ‘documented worker’?

    2. Robin, you could try “Properly-documented, legal guest-worker welcome in the country they are helping support”, (I’ve done this in North America, Europe, and Asia) as opposed to “Foreign invader here to steal tax dollars, vote against the GOP, and get paid to commit multiple felonies” * (something I’ve avoided as outside the USA, an American is already wearing a target).

       *(Hint: look up the Federal and State statutes for Social Security Fraud, Document Fraud, Driving Without A License, Driving Without Proof Of Insurance, Income Tax Evasion, Unlawful Flight To Avoid Prosecution, Identity Theft, Conspiracy to Violate Immigration Laws, et cetera, ad nauseum)

       Hmmm. Maybe I need more coffee… 😉

    3. I’ve heard folks in your situation in Europe referred to as guest workers.

    4. In this country “Permanent Resident Alien” is the term I think would be applied. Many of the rights and protections of a citizen, but not all. And it IS a status that can be revoked resulting in deportation if the appropriate criteria are met. (It’s been a loooooooong time since I glanced at them so… *places bucket of salt*)

    5. Legal Resident Alien.

    6. Expatriate, I believe.

       1. Haven’t looked it up, but I have always thought of an expatriate as someone who *can’t,* or *won’t,* go back.

          1. Expatriate, as I have seen it, is just someone who is living long-term out of the country. But that’s a term that refers back to their home country, rather than being a term for the country in which the expat is currently residing.

          2. Expatriate can, technically, be long or short term, working, non-working, retired… you’re just “ex” = outside your “patria” = homeland. In practice, it’s generally applied to long-term outside the country folks who aren’t just visiting, whether they’re working or not. (That is, someone who’s been outside a while, even if they’re only in one particular foreign country for a few months at a time… but not to people who are trying to become citizens of a new country.

    7. I believe your official UN international catagorization is “Imperialist Occupier.”

    8. Robin, “resident alien” was the legal term, last time I looked (1998). The other is “permanent resident,” meaning that you retain a different citizenship, but you pay taxes to the country where you reside and you don’t have to renew your visa constantly.

    9. The term usually applied is expatriate. There are a lot of them.

15. America is not a lifeboat, where we limit passengers to keep it afloat. A lifeboat implies rescue and we go down, who’s going to rescue us?

    America is an ark. When the next Dark Ages comes, who do we want on board with us?

16. If everybody ignores the law, is the act still ‘illegal’ or is it just unfashionable? Try driving 55 mph somewhere . . . .

17. Confucius, The Analects, 13, excerpt from:

    Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”

    The Master replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names.” “So! indeed!” said Tsze-lu. “You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?”

    The Master said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.

    “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

    “When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.

    “Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”

    Summarized? You must use language as a tool, and be precise in your words, or face the prospect of failure in your thinking, in your actions, and in your accomplishments.

    For too long, we here in this country have ceded the use of language to the “not-so-bright, self-acclaimed “Brights””, and they have brought us nothing but failure as they attempt to obfuscate the true meanings of things in the language. This has led, deliberately in my belief, to a series of failures in discussion and then action.

    A crucial thing, the rectification of names.

    1. I always thought we had ceded the use to Lawyers. Compare and contrast; the Constitution and The Affordable Care Act.
       The first requirement for a citizenry that obeys laws is to have laws that the citizenry can understand. We left that era long ago.

       1. And, thus, the need for rectification.

          And, simplification–My thoughts are that a law not written in terms understandable to someone down at the boundary between the bottom third of the intelligence scale and the higher two ought not be a law in the first place. Same-same with regulations. If it requires a law degree to parse the meaning of something, then the law itself is ipso facto both specious and illegitimate.

18. Words having meaning is why I started the Silly Word Series on my blog. I really need to do a new one…. Suggestions?

    1. I do not know about silly words as such. I do like some lesser used words, like ‘quarrel’ to mean ‘diamond shaped window’ and I do have a fondness for the claim that my/someone’s “sesquipedalian tendencies culminate in a lexicon antithetical to the vernacular.”

       Perhaps right now an overused word, ‘chaos’… which seems to not actually mean chaos, but “Wah! We don’t like that!”

       1. It’s about words that have had their meanings twisted. Like, I’ve done Awesome and Tolerance. Things like that. Chaos is a good one.

          1. Gay? That’s a word that has had it’s original meaning completely twisted. Although it may be too much of a political hot potato.

             1. Consider the Flintstones theme song, which was slightly amusing for that even back in the early-mid 1970’s. I half expect to hear a creatively edited version next time I encounter the thing.

                1. And now you know why Fred and Barney were such good friends.

                2. Deck the halls: “Now we don our gay apparel”.

                   1. There is considerable question whether this may be the origin of this usage of the term:

                      (From Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby.)

                      There were rumours about Grant and his roommate Randolph Scott, but in Hollywood you weren’t anybody unless there were rumours about you.

                      1. I believe the usual derivation is from the French slang phrase “gaie en la cuisse,” which originally described a slutty woman and later meant a slutty man. This meaning of “gay” showed up in the UK somewhere in between the late Victorian and the Roaring Twenties.

                3. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the Yuletide gay…”

                   “I feel pretty, oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and gay…”

             2. Along those lines, though it isn’t precisely a word, is the phrase “confirmed bachelor.” It can’t be used in its original meaning of, “man who isn’t married and whom everyone currently accepts will never be married.” It must be used as a euphemism for “homosexual.”

                (And yes, I’m well aware that many of the original “confirmed bachelors” were homosexual, but not all of them were. There were many reasons a man might choose not to marry, and it’s kind of ironic that in this age of 32 genders and 70 sexual orientations that we can only think of one.)

                1. In my family I know that most of the confirmed bachelors were regular visitors to houses of ill repute. From their own words.

             3. Hey, I did tolerance, remember?

             4. A historical ‘how did gay come to mean homosexual’ would be interesting to me.

                1. Also, ‘fag/faggot’. One meaning of fag is a British term for a cigarette. And of course, a faggot is a bundle of kindling.

                   1. faggots of wood was how I first encountered the term. Imagine how extremely puzzled I was to be told it was rude to say the word.

                      1. Many years ago, I was shocked to hear some people use the term “bitch” while referring to my family’s female beagle. 😉

                         Oh, in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle some of the talking dogs are annoyed when the Arab-like character refers to himself as “just a dog”.

                         The character apologies and explains that he was not talking about the “Noble” Talking Dogs of Narnia.

                         One of the older Dogs accepts his apology and comments that sometimes Dogs refer to their Pups as “Boys”.

                         Then another Dog says “If they’re really bad, we call them “Girls””.

                         The older Dog says “Watch your language, there’s Quality present”. 😀 😀 😀 😀

                         1. I honestly didn’t think of ‘bitch’ as anything but the female dog description. My dad had the presence of mind to warn me not to use the word outside of our family because most folk would be rather upset to hear it coming out of a child’s mouth. “Bad woman” was how it was told to me then.

                            Being a child, I thought it silly that a bitch = bad woman.

                            1. I was just a kid then but I believe that I heard “bitch” used mostly as meaning “bad person”.

                               I may have known that a female dog was a bitch but it wasn’t how I most often heard the term used.

          2. Two of MY pet peeves are “Natural” (twisted to mean ‘good’) and “Organic” (twisted to mean God alone knows what, but certainly not ‘carbon based’).

             1. Don’t forget ‘sustainable’, or carbon-free-sugar.

                1. And somewhere in there is the observable fact that “Alternative Energy” is any form of energy generation that is in no danger whatsoever of being a practical part of society’s energy budget.

                   1. Alternative energy for an alternative reality.

                   2. Wasn’t there “appropriate technology” which meant “I’m against most technology but that’s something I like”? 😉

                      1. Actually, my experience has been that “appropriate Technology” means, “I’m against this one kind of technology, because the booboisie like it and it’s common, useful, and cheap. We ought to use this OTHER technology that was never very popular, only marginally useful, and expensive as hell, because it marks me as one of the In The Know.”

                         1. When I’ve seen ‘appropriate technology’ lately is as a synonym for ‘technology that anyone can maintain/build without needing the favor of the local warlord to import parts from abroad.’

                            1. This is closer to the definition I’ve encountered where the solution matches the actual problem rather than an imagined one. Or “Let’s use the useful rather than the ‘kewl’.”

                         2. Ah, like incandescent light bulbs are inappropriate technology, even though you mainly burn them in the winter, when the 80% going to heat warms your home, your dog kennel, your chicken incubator, your ez-bake oven?

                            1. Keeping the well/pump house just warm enough to not freeze… and if there’s a window (or crack) you can do inspection remotely to see that it’s working without having to out into the weather to check up close.

                               And what other light would work at all in regular oven? LED’s don’t like it hot, and that’s one place I really do not want fluorescent.

                            2. I replaced the fluorescent tubes in my barn with LED tubes…. and made the discovery that those LED tubes get HOT — enough to raise the temperature in my barn by about 10 degrees. And it’s a big barn.

                               Have since come across small LED bulbs that get as hot as incandescent. Check the display at Ace Hardware… lot of heat difference between types.

                            3. Hah. Those “energy saving” 13w flourescent bulbs get hot enough for the ceramic bases to darken.

                               About 25% of the time, their failure mode seems to be “magic smoke comes out.” Quite a lot of excitement for 13 watts…

                      2. I have no problem with “appropriate technology” as used by the Amish and other contra-faddish groups who restrict themselves to using only such technology as they can sustain.

                         But most people using that phrase would run screaming from the lifestyle the Amish accept.

                         1. Or, for that matter, any kind of hard work.

                            1. For most of them you could dispense with the modifier “hard.”

                               
                               A reminder for all old-timers.

                2. What in the…What is “Carbon-free-sugar”?

                   1. That would be in reference to an image from a post a few days ago, of a package of granulated sugar that had something to the effect of “certified carbon-free” printed on it.

                      The sugar itself contains carbon, because, you know *sugar*, but it’s a certification that the company selling the sugar used processes that don’t have a carbon footprint. Doesn’t make the label any less absurd, of course.

                      1. I shall have to keep a sugar bowl full of certified carbon-free sugar on my table, in case any lunatics wish to visit for coffee.

                         The bowl shall, of course, contain water.

                         1. Gasp! You would serve DHMO to innocent lunatics?

                            1. Yes… and then I would tell them what I had done, and convert them to the URGENT CAUSE!!1eleventy! of banning it.

                               Of course, it makes me no never mind; the coffee was already contaminated.

                            2. That stuff will dissolve more things than any other chemical!

                      2. Carbon footprint: What you trail after having trod in graphite.

             2. On “Organic”: I saw a cartoon once about the introduction of silicon-based food. People tried to protest this but unfortunately lacked the vocabulary.

                On “Natural”: I swear that if I see one more of those Panera “we’re all natural and so smug about it you want to throw up” commercials, I’m going to end up throwing the remote through the TV.

                1. I enjoy eating at Panera, though I’m not particularly impressed by their “Clean Food” claims.

                   OTOH, I still don’t think Aldi’s claim of “No Certified Artifical Colors” means what they think it does.

                   1. What, you don’t think Aldi uses only un-certified artificial colors?

                2. Pity about that. I kinda like Panera, as a change from burgers, but I haven’t seen any ads because I basically stopped watching TV (as opposed to video) thirty years ago.

                   My rant about ‘Natural’ includes the observation that for social apes like humans ‘Natural’ involves plotting to overthrow and kill the Alpha Male, murder all his young offspring, and then rape his women.

                   Or, to put it another way; no one without inhibitions is fit for polite society. Please develop some.

                3. I’m just contrary enough to mutter “where’s the IN-organic food” in the grocery store produce section…loudly enough to be overheard.

                   1. Mine is “You wanna impress me? Show me an inorganic banana.”

                   2. By the spices. It’s called salt.

                      1. One day we are going to see ‘organic salt’, take photos, and laugh like a crazy thing.

                         1. Gluten free salt… Do you want pictures?

                            1. WHAT. Yes please! XD

                            2. I recall seeing packages of candy corn with colorful banners printed upon it declaring it to be ‘Fat Free!’ when fat was the dietary bug-a-boo du jour.

                            3. The ramen I have in my pantry proudly declares it contains no trans fats. In the same little star bubble in small print is an asterisk with “see nutrition label for sodium content”. Makes me chuckle every time I look at it.

                            4. I’ve seen gluten-free floor cleaner, proudly labelled as such!

                            5. Its not just a floor cleaner, its a food topping!

                            6. My first consideration was, “I’m not sure I’ve any gluten-free floors that need regular cleaning.”

                               I mean, sure, the garage floor is gluten-free, but sweeping seems sufficient for it.

                         2. https://www.seasalt.com/salt-101/organic-salt/

                            1. well that happened even faster than I expected it to.

                            2. When I read your comment, I remembered that I had already seen such. I couldn’t find a good label image that said, “Gluten Free”, though.

                            3. I think my husband found ‘sugar free sugar’ or ‘less sugar’ sugar once. Photo, not the actual item.

                      2. Exactly, only one I can think of. NOT in the produce section where all the signs are.

                4. How about the “real food” used to mean “this is rabbit food, bread where half the grains are identifiable, and lumpy everything” commercials?

                   1. There was a fad among the churches of my youth to go on a diet where two meals of every three consisted of the bread the prophet Ezekiel ate on his fast. Because the recipe is IN THE BIBLE and obviously this means THIS IS WHAT GOD WANTS HIS PEOPLE TO EAT.

                      I still have flashbacks. My mother gave up on making me eat it after I went through 2/3 of a jar of honey trying to choke a piece down.

                      1. Ezekiel was directed to bake and eat that bread as an example of the horrors of siege food shortages. That’s why it was supposed to be cooked on a dung fire, instead of using wood.

                         Same reason God directed Ezekiel to make a diorama of Jerusalem and play strategic wargames with miniatures….

                         1. Yeah, and I remember the part where Ezekiel begged off using human waste to make his fire.

                            And lying on your side for a year.

                            And he was preaching to the *exiles*–telling them that they were going to be there for awhile and that they were not the worst of the children of Israel nor did they get it the worse.

                         2. I pointed out to my mother that it was on a “fast” which was supposed to be an ORDEAL. Sadly, I was not of an age where she appreciated my reasoned argument… 😀

                      2. ….

                         You know, I like the little fads of “bible grain bread” and all– it’s rather good bread where the hook is that it contains 9 Biblical grains or something– but you make me really, really glad that I grew up Catholic.

                         1. Oh, it could be so much worse. I *could* tell you all about the annual Wall of Prophecy and being forced to sit through bad Revelation-based movies.

                            Not “Left Behind”.

                            Worse than “Left Behind”.

                            Really.

                            Not lying.

                            1. ….the depths of quality that can be freed when someone is doing it For A Good Cause is one of the few things that shows both Communism and various Christian sub-groups are created by the same species…..

                            2. Ah, Left Behind. I may have gotten in trouble for writing alternate scenarios for that movie, while I was supposed to be watching it. Something about my brain going “C’mon, we can do better than this!”

                               …little did I know that’s how fanfiction get started…

                      3. They sell it in certain stores under the name Ezekiel Bread, as it happens. It’s… obnoxious. (I tried it when I was on a medically-necessary low-carb diet. I then avoided it entirely in favor of things with proper bread texture.)

                         1. Yes. I was grocery shopping with my husband, who does not share my…unique…childhood, and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a loaf. “They BAKE that? On PURPOSE? And want MONEY?”

                5. I showed a friend a carbon fiber composite speaker cabinet once.

                   “But that’s only plywood!”

                   “What do you think ‘carbon fiber composite’ means?”

                   1. I’m guessing… something that looks like the hood of a very expensive hypercar.

             3. My pet peeve is “attitude.” Somehow the binary meaning has been lost; enough that if you say “good attitude” people look at you funny.

                1. “Temper” is much the same.

                2. “You have a bad attitude.”
                   “What, am I listing?”

             4. Oooh. Natural is a good one. I could do some good rants on that.

                1. Please. I’ve done organic in the past, I’d love to see your take on it too.

                2. “Natural”
                   “Like mercury, lead and asbestos!”

                   1. Don’t forget arsenic.

                      1. And old lace.

                         1. And botulinum.

                            1. Sadly, not funny… I’ve had actual flamewars with people I know, and who have to face me, about how it should be illegal to offer filtered or highly heated honey.

                               I am on the side that if you gotta, label it pasteurized and filtered honey, but it’s honey.

                               They think natural is better.

                               … kids who can still live on milk are vulnerable to botulism poisoning from honey that hasn’t been processed very carefully, and if you’re allergic to a plant that they bee got to, you can have a reaction to the honey she made….

                         2. In elderberry wine?

          3. It’s about words that have had their meanings twisted.

             I think my favorite is “literally”, which is now its own antonym.

             1. People using literally wrong is one of my biggest grammatical pet peeves.

                1. And yet, it’s supposedly been a relatively common usage for well over a hundred years.

                   1. Grrrrr.

    2. In C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, there’s a point when Jill “made love to everybody.” It’s amazing how meanings can get twisted.

       1. Oh, that’s unfortunate.

          1. Yes, indeed. The last couple of times I read the book, that phrase was particularly jarring.

       2. Somewhere fairly early in The Hobbit we are told that heights (IIRC) make Bilbo turn “a little queer.”

          1. IIRC, Merry and Pippin briefly mention f****ts when having their conversation with Aragorn and the others in the wreckage of Isengard.

             1. The meaning of the word where it means “small burnable pieces of wood” is still valid in England, IIRC.

                1. As I have heard the derivation explained, the usage stemmed from a time when “real men” smoked cigars and cigarettes were derided as “f*****s” with the implicit suggestion that those who preferred them to the more manly cigar were lesser men.

                   As a cigar more clearly approximates the male appendage, this was obviously projection of the deriders own suppressed desires.

                   1. I’ve only seen cigarettes referred to by the shorter f*g. Whenever I see the full word used, it’s always associated with sticks of wooden tinder.

             2. Yeah, but they were talking of burning them, so LotR is clearly homophobic and inciting homophobia. (This in spite of the clear subtext of a suppressed homosexual relationship between Frodo and Sam.)

       3. I imagine Puddleglum was quite taken aback…

       4. Might be the difference between American and British slang. Dimly recall a 19th Century song where the term “make love” was clearly a euphemism for sex.

          1. No, “make love” was a synonym for flirting and sweet talk in both countries, for quite a long time.

             Heck, conversation is used as a euphemism for sex. What word hasn’ t been used as a euphemism for sex?

             1. This was an odd song I don’t know if I can even find. The gist was that it was written for a woman singer to croon about the Man in the Moon. The “racy” part was when the clouds covered the sky, she would make love to the Man in the Moon.

                Sorry, can’t remember more. At the time I assumed it wasn’t a song for polite company, but can’t offer anymore info.

                1. The song is “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” (1892).

                   Actually, the idea is that if you want to really flirt with your sweetheart, you have to go beyond the observation of the town gossips. So if you go up to the moon in a balloon, everybody in Earth will be able to watch you. But if you wait to go hold hands until a cloud in Earth atmosphere covers up the moon from their view, you can actually talk to the Man and maybe kiss him! In public, even!

                   Your actual innuendo is the part of the song where the Man promises to stay in the house all night, once they get married, and that they will quickly have a girl baby at that time.

                   1. It does say here that the song was used in a 1941 film, at which time people might have taken it differently.

                      1. Oh, and “love’s telephone” was probably a party line, so you can see how thoroughly observed that people in love could be.

                      2. Aha. It was sung by Jane Russell and with only the first verse. So yeah, that would imply something different. Ahem.

                         The Ukuladies recorded the whole song, which worries a bit about whether the Man has another girl.

                   2. Ah. Thanks.

             2. Confirmed; in ’85 or ’86 my sweet little old landlady (she was a 94 or 95 and had been renting out rooms since the ’40s) used “making love” in the same sense that Edgar Rice Burroughs did in A Princess of Mars—courting or sweet talking (and tying up the telephone).

19. At least two more confounding issues.

    The ‘demographics will give us a permanent majority’ folks apparently incorporate that thinking into their policies on immigration from such as Mexico.

    Others want to illegally avoid employment costs caused by labor regulations, and find in illegal aliens the perfect co-conspirators.

    1. The heavier the burdens the government places on companies regarding hiring the more motive they have to circumvent it with the use of black market labor.

20. C4c

21. That is what the illegals slinking in under the cover of darkness flout. It’s not an easy process.

    I have concluded the whole “citizen of the world” stitch and being unable to differentiate between legal and illegal immigration are related.

    If you do not value your status as a US citizen why should you care how hard it is to get. Something worthless should not command a great price and to most of our “better” US citizenship is worth nothing at best.

22. This is my basic issue with legalized pot in CO (and elsewhere). It can’t be legalized because it’s still ILLEGAL at the federal level. It makes me a little crazy that the feds have decided not to prosecute it. What happened to upholding the law? If one law is ignored by fiat, what other laws can be ignored by fiat?

    The punch line to this (if you will) is that I support making pot legal, controlled and taxed but it has to be legal on all levels.

    1. I would have thought after the 18th amendment that the country would have learned their lesson. Of course, I now have to sign my name to get a box of Sudafed, because trucks of psuedoepridrine cross the Mexican border.

    2. The Feds have decided not to prosecute it (except where they have) because the one thing they REALLY don’t want is a court case that opens the whole “why do we have Federal Laws about drugs again?” question. I have scant use for street drugs (smoked some pot in my 20’s, but not since) but the whole War On Drugs is statist myrmidon hogwash. It accomplishes nothing worth a fraction of what it costs us in terms of government buttinskiism and lost civil rights. Asset forfeiture (AKA the return of the Sheriff of Nottingham) can be traced to the Drug War. The militarization of the Police, which leads directly to SWAT raids on American Legion poker games and flashing grenades thrown into occupied cribs, can be traced to the drug war.

       Is the legalization of pot being done right? No. It’s being over regulated and micromanaged by people who imagine that being elected to public office makes them some sort of experts on drug biochemistry. Legalization should be along the lines of “it grows everywhere in this country from Alaska to the Rio Grand. if you aren’t careful you find it growing on the lawn of your police headquarters. Fine. It is hereby regulated to the same degree as dandelions.”

       1. “Just don’t burn it out of your lawn.”?

       2. …if you aren’t careful you find it growing on the lawn of your police headquarters.

          Have the protests or such reached that level of action and thought?

       3. When the druggies get themselves killed doing stupid suicidal things, whose problem does it become? Brown, Gray, MacDonald, and Martin indicate that the ramifications can be quite broad. Legalization will not mitigate that, because laws have nothing to do with physical effects on decision making. To offset the extent to which legalization would exacerbate that, it would have to be accompanied by a limitation of liabilities in cases where drugs are found. Which is incentive to plant drugs in situations where cops want that limitation of liabilities. You almost might as well outright legalize the murder of druggies.

          1. The law I’d like to see passed re: marijuana is that if you are pulled over for DUI and prove to have high levels of THC in your bloodstream (“high” would have to be well-defined by people more expert than me), you permanently forfeit your driver’s license. Why permanently? Because according to the doctors I’ve asked about it, long-term habitual marijuana use permanently reduces the number of neural connections in the brain, thereby ensuring that the user will always be somewhat stoned — certainly stoned enough to be incapable of driving safely, since his reaction times would be significantly slowed.

             Pass that law, and I’ll be quite happy to vote for the politicians who would pass a marijuana legalisation bill, because the MAJOR reason that heavy marijuana smokers would be dangerous to others (being pretty much permanently under the influence and unsafe to drive or operate heavy machinery any more) would have been mostly taken care of. Without that law, though, I’m still opposed to legalising the stuff, even with ALL the problems that its criminalisation has been causing so far.

             1. But then they would still be able to vote, work in hazardous environments, engage in political activism, and escalate conflicts to lethal violence.

       4. > why

          Because the DEA is ten thousand highly-paid Federal jobs, many of them “Law Enforcement”, and “asset seizure” makes them even more powerful.

          Marijuana is the low-hanging fruit of the drug enforcement world; they count raiding high school lockers the same as taking down heroin smugglers, so pot makes their numbers look good for the next appropriation cycle.

    3. At least some of the problem with pot legalization in Colorado has come from the “not quite legal, not quite illegal” distinction you mention. Pot business owners won’t be prosecuted for it, but they have a hard-to-impossible time taking advantage of the normal financial mechanisms that most businesses take for granted. So what happens when you have an all-cash business and can’t deposit the proceeds in a bank AND all this is general knowledge in the criminal underworld? Well, I haven’t seen too many details myself but I’ve heard the results are not too pretty…

       1. The entire Drug war has been, from the very beginning, shot through with ‘We gotta keep them goddamned (fill in the black with your favorite objectionable racial slur) in line’ racism, paternalistic nonsense, full employment for statist myrmidons bulls*t, and general Statist blather. No, the vast majority of Drugs aren’t good, and druggies tend to be sad, wasted people, but I have yet to see any evidence that any part of the War On Drugs helps.

       2. It’s not just marijuana vendors that are having those kinds of issues. The Obama administration apparently put pressure on banks with regards to a several industries that the Feds decided to stigmatize including guns and porn.

          The guns thing makes sense given the usual prog attitudes toward the Second Amendment. The move against the porn industry was a bit more puzzling to me.

          1. That last has to do with the faction fight between the “porn is empowering” feminists (Camille Paglia) and the “porn is exploitation” feminists (Andrea Dworkin).
             Government types are, generally speaking, more supportive of the latter than the former.

             1. Of course they are more supportive of the latter. Trying to suppress a thing requires hiring more bureaucrats. Ignoring it requires none.

             2. Porn is porn. I uderstand why many feminists feel demeaned by it. I get the same feeling when exposed to Rap, or some of the worse sorts of fat food, i don’t think that gives me the right to demand that thigs be banned.

                And, ultimately, the only way to protect the young women who are ‘exploited’ in Porn or Prostitution is to make both legal, so they can complain of their treatment without getting arrested.

                1. Side note: porn *is* legal, aside from child porn, and probably some of the more…omnisexual varieties.

                   1. Porn may be legal, but prostitution isn’t. And pretty much any porn film could probably be submitted into evidence as de facto proof of prostitution. (Did the porn actors accept money to make that film? Then they accepted money to have sex, which is prostitution. The prosection rests, Your Honor.)

                      So while I haven’t looked into the legalities in any detail, I’m pretty sure that porn would only be technically legal. (At least for the actors involved, which was the relevant subject).

                      1. The State tried to argue that in California.

                         It lost.

                         Note that the case didn’t go all the way to the US Supreme Court. So the precedent is controlling in California (and possibly the entire 9th Circuit, though I’m not sure about that), but not other parts of the US. That’s one of the reasons why so much porn is made in California. There’s a legal controlling authority in California that’s sympathetic to pornographers. There’s a chance, albeit a small one, that a pornographer in a different state could get taken to court on prostitution charges and lose.

                         That chance is pretty small, though, since none of the other states want to run the risk for a similar ruling to be the controlling authority in *their* state. So pornographers in other states keep their heads down, and the state pretends to not know that they exist.

                2. Legalization – necessary but not sufficient. A fair number of such women are under psychological control of their pimps and/or are runaways with not enough trust of authority to complain.

                   I suspect that if you’re going to normalize prostitution, you also have to require a regular regime of contact with others – perhaps community medics? – who in addition to physical health maintenance are trained to detect and break psychological bonds. Otherwise, you’re legalizing a kind of slavery.

                   From what I’ve read, the Swiss have an at least partial handle on this.

          2. “The move against the porn industry was a bit more puzzling to me.”

             The term is PR. Vileprogs fighting against the cardboard cutouts in their heads think “Hey, if we include a few high profile pornographers in the mix of those affected, those stupid hick Xtianists won’t care that we’re using it to take away their gun buying rights far more often.”

    4. hence the new line on the 4473 reminding people that pot is still illegal at a federal level

23. We live in a Post Modern world were words mean whatever you decide they mean, were ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ are artificial constructs used by the white patriarchy to oppress minorities, gays and women.

    1. “Stairway to Heaven” comes to mind.

24. Last Immigration change I heard was when they made it more EXPENSIVE to apply. The lovely Honduran lady I was chasing at the time got her application in just under the wire so she didn’t need to pay 5 or 10 times the amount (I forget what the exact change was). Yes, she played the game to make it slightly easier (was here visiting her mother when she had her daughter, baby-daddy did the cut and run when fiancé got preggers) but she was very hard working, saved enough to buy a very large house (so her mother didn’t need to have a separate place), went from cleaning crew to working for the airline. Was well on her way to the swearing in ceremony and is I’m sure a grand addition to our great nation.

25. Voting here:
    https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/149745-what-theme-should-we-read-for-our-march-book

    1. Tunnel in the Sky discussion
       spoiler free
       https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18456862-tunnel-in-the-sky—-february-2017—no-spoilers

       1. spoilers allowed:
          https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18456860-tunnel-in-the-sky—-february-2017—-spoilers-allowed

26. Suppose the squatter in your house washes the floors, mows the grass, and takes out the garbage. Suppose he leaves cash for part of the utility bills. Suppose he has two lovely children that need a place to live.

    He’s still a squatter.

    The U.S. needs to control immigration. That means removing all illegal aliens, however nice they play. Any hardships for their children are on them; they created the situation.

    Doing this will require considerable national willpower. But if we don’t, we are sending an invitation to hundreds of millions of people to force their way into the U.S.

    1. However, if you have twelve MILLION squatters in your (extensive) apartment blocks that you need to throw out, he’s not the first one you’ll deal with. In fact, he’s pretty much going to be last on your priority list. You only have the manpower to deal with so many squatters per day, and you’ll get far more benefit out of throwing out the drug dealers, etc., than you will from throwing out the guys who are actually putting in some effort to take care of the place they’re illegally occupying.

       And as long as you really ARE throwing out the drug dealers and the like, the fact that you’re taking a long time to get around to the nicer guys does create an incentive for the other squatters to at least pretend to clean up their act. So it’s not all bad to put the nice ones low on the to-be-thrown-out list.

       1. Of course, those squatters that keep their places neat & clean might be willing to help you deal with the “drug dealers” if they know that they are “low on your list”. 😉

          1. and, if they are working at keeping your place neat and clean, and especially if they help with the “drug dealers”, they may have earned your help in finding a place other than yours to move to.

27. Back in the Bush years, I remember hearing some leftie moan: “The Republicans are trying to make illegal immigration a crime!”

    At the time, I thought it was the dumbest thing I would ever hear.

    I know better now.

    1. Alway remember and never forget. The longer you know them, the dumber they get. Remember, this is a philosophy that needs the uneducated and criminal on their side in order to win.

    2. Stupidity is not conserved.

       1. We need Laws of Stupidity.

          1. I think they require Calculus. The density of stupidity clearly approaches infinity. The derivative of stupidity would be … The first derivative of Stupidity is aggressiveness, the second derivative of Stupidity is unfounded confidence …

             1. There appears to be no way to limits to stupidity.

          2. I believe Congress produces plenty of those every year.

28. As a naturalized citizen who has done everything by the book, I view all this fawning over illegal aliens as a slap in the face.
    Especially given that my sister in law is now on her upteenth year of patiently waiting for her turn to be reunited with the rest of the family. And every year my wife gets the same response when calling for the status update: “It will be another eight years.”

    Oh, they could just come and overstay their visitors visa. Or cross the border illegally from Mexico. Or Canada. Then they’d have cities and entire states welcoming them with open arms.
    Except they don’t want that. They cling to that archaic notion of respecting the laws of the people they want to join. Quaint, I know.

    Well, we don’t want the likes of them. Nope. Law abiding immigrants. Who needs them, when there are criminals to be had? It just doesn’t provide the same opportunity for virtue signaling.

29. That story right there is why I’m in Australia, and not the US. I did everything that was required of me and submitted all the documents – more than once- to the US department of immigration, and kept getting shafted because ‘illegals might get their amnesty and we have to prepare for the flood of papers we need to process. Sorry we lost yours, can you send them again?’ Waited several years as well; Bush was still President, just as a reference point. A number of American friends were frustrated by this, suggested that since abiding by the law was only proving to be a punishment, I should find a way to get over there illegally. (At the time, this was also possible! I had a multiple-entry tourist visa to the US.)

    I refused, because I don’t like the thought of ‘the first thing I’ll do for the place I’ll call my home, is break the law.’

    When the time came to migrate to Australia, my now husband and I did the same thing – crossed every t, dotted every I, provided tons of proof that the relationship was a genuine one, that he could support us (the children were still small then). It took less than two years; and the biggest factor was ‘We are keeping an Australian from having his family with him.’

    Maybe I got lucky. Actually, no, there’s no maybe about it. I’m lucky to be here. And illegals will remain a particular great dislike of mine.

    1. My brother married a very nice Filipina when he was stationed at Clark AFB. When he rotated back the State Department wouldn’t issue her a visa; he got the USAF and his Senator involved to clear that up. She’s a Permanent Resident now. (and works for a USAF contractor…)

       She already had a daughter when they got married, who enlisted in the US Army when she turned 18. She re-enlisted at 22, which apparently set off some kind of alarm with the Immigration people; she got a nastily-worded notice to report to a specific office in Louisiana for immediate departation as an illegal alien.

       Since she was in Baghdad in her third tour of Iraq, both she and her first segeant thought it was very funny…

       1. The purblind stupidity and bureaucratic apathy one hears about when dealing with ICE is awe-inspiring.

       2. Yeah… it really sounds like the folks at the Department of Immigration need a good winnowing through. Their priorities of putting the people who don’t want to earn their citizenship first reminds me of an observation I saw somewhere on the net that went something like:That the VA is staffed with people who hate the military.

    2. Then our loss is Australia’s gain.

30. It has been a long campaign to change national attitudes, involving all the usual suspects and a few more. This song was written by Woody Guthrie at a time when there were work passes for harvest workers.

    Unless you do something about those who employ illegal aliens they will keep coming. They find life better this side of the border, whatever the miseries may be involved.

    I find it deeply disturbed that people who ought to know better continue to make arguments in the name of compassion that only serve to keep people in the terrible conditions they decry.

    1. “I find it deeply disturbed that people who ought to know better continue to make arguments in the name of compassion …”

       You probably believe the Walrus more sympathetic than the Carpenter.

31. . . . (I)f you don’t like a law, you should change it. Petition, get elected, donate to a cause – however you want to chase that dream. But while the law is on the books, it must be adhered to.

    Even if those Laws are direct affronts to human decency? I’m not going to get into the various Prohibitions and their ancillary shenanigans; those have been touched on already. How about the Fugitive Slave Law?

    Or how about those Laws in some states that make you a felon for exercising your Constitutionally recognized and protected right to keep and bear arms? And yes. I did spend many hours working gun shows and haunting the halls of the state capitol to help bring ‘shall issue’ permitting to Minnesota as (as I stated in the concealed carry reform plank I moved to introduce to, and later remove from once the legislation passed, the platform of the Libertarian Party of MN) an interim measure until such time as ‘constitutional carry’ should be adopted. But on certain occasions before the law changed I did carry a concealed firearm about my person in direct violation of The Law. I was ready to pay my dues if I’d been apprehended because in my judgement the situation justified the action.

    1. That last sentence is the important one. You recognized that the law was the law, even if it was asinine.

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