Nation-Building

August 19th, op-ed in the New York Times by seven soldiers of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne serving in Iraq:

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

September 12th: NYT reports that two of those soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation.

September 26: from the broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: There's a lot more than that that they don't understand. They can't even -- if -- the next guy that calls here, I'm gonna ask him: Why should we pull -- what is the imperative for pulling out? What's in it for the United States to pull out? They can't -- I don't think they have an answer for that other than, "Well, we just gotta bring the troops home."

CALLER 2: Yeah, and, you know what --

LIMBAUGH: "Save the -- keep the troops safe" or whatever. I -- it's not possible, intellectually, to follow these people.

CALLER 2: No, it's not, and what's really funny is, they never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.

LIMBAUGH: The phony soldiers.

CALLER 2: The phony soldiers. If you talk to a real soldier, they are proud to serve. They want to be over in Iraq. They understand their sacrifice, and they're willing to sacrifice for their country.

audio of Limbaugh's comments here.

Labels: Iraq, Republicans

Continue reading/discuss phony soldiers: a timeline ...

Today is the 50th anniversary of Little Rock. Above is the famous photo by Will Counts (above), the caption to which reads:

Elizabeth Eckford, followed and taunted by an angry crowd after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School, September 4, 1957. The girl in the light dress behind her is Hazel Bryan. Will Counts/Arkansas History Commission.

Vanity Fair has an indepth article on the lives of those two women, which makes for a fascinating tale of racism and redemption in its own right. And yet, the story doesn't quite have a happy ending:

Central High School looks as imposing as ever, but over the past 50 years, its innards have changed unimaginably: the school is now more than half black. It's all misleading, of course, because Central is really two different schools, separate and unequal, under one roof. The blacks go to different classes, sit on separate sides of the cafeteria, have different, and far lower, levels of performance and expectations.

There's a long way to go before the Cosby Show/Different World reality becomes mainstream.

Labels: Racism

Continue reading/discuss Little Rock ...

I knew nothing - absolutely nothing - about this story until I listened to this report on NPR.

So a bunch of black ruffians beat a white kid nearly to death? No, actually the victim had superficial injuries and went to a party later that evening.

The black students were unprovoked and this was out of the blue? No, actually it was the culmination of a year of racial tension that began when white students hung nooses on a tree to intimdate black students.

HUNG. NOOSES. FROM. TREES.

And loony lefty liberals are making a false analogy to the days of Jim Crow? No,

The first to go to court was Mychal Bell, the team's star running and defensive back. Bell's court-appointed lawyer refused to mount any defense at all, instead resting his case immediately after two days of government presentation. An all-white jury found Bell guilty.

A talented athlete, Bell had a real shot at a Division I football scholarship. He now faces up to 22 years in prison. The other five black students await trial on attempted murder charges.

Why is Jena important? Why make such a big deal out of it? The New York Times piece on Jena says it all:

"I think a lot of people recognize that the criminal justice system grinds down people of color every day," said J. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights group based in Montgomery, Ala. "Oftentimes, it's nameless, it's faceless. We know the story in a generic way but not specifically. People see Jena as the tip of the iceberg and ask, 'What lies beneath?' "

I think in the case of Jena, it's pretty obvious. And anyone who says otherwise is either willfully underinformed, or simply in denial.

Labels: Racism

Continue reading/discuss Jena 6: persecution, not prosecution ...

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame discusses this economic analysis of the Surge in Iraq by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, calling it "thorough and thoughtful." Overall the analysis is neither uniformly negative nor positive, instead apolitical and dispassionate. One particularly interesting part is a discussion of the financial bond markets, which Levitt summarizes:

The most interesting part of Greenstone’s paper is his analysis of the pricing of Iraqi government debt. The Iraq government has issued bonds in the past. These entitle the owner of the bond to a stream of payments over a set period of time, but only if the government does not default on the loan. If Iraq completely implodes, it is highly unlikely that these bonds will be paid off. How much someone would pay for the rights to that stream of payments depends on their estimate of the probability that Iraq will implode.

The bond data, unlike the other sources he examines, tell a clear story: the financial markets say the surge is not working. Since the surge started, the market’s estimate of the likelihood of default by the Iraqi government has increased by 40 percent.

This is akin to the way that political analysts use the Iowa Political Futures Market and Intrade for political prognostications. I think Milton Friedman would be proud :)

The more important part of the analysis however is the use of economics for rational policy analysis. As Levitt notes,

This paper shows how good economic analysis can contribute in a fundamental way to public policy. Anyone who reads Greenstone’s article will recognize that it is careful and thorough. It is even-handed and apolitical. It combines state-of-the-art data analysis techniques with economic logic (e.g., using market prices to draw conclusions about how things are going).

However, Levitt notes that there isn't much incentive for good economists to trouble themselves with getting their feet dirty in the political sphere. As a result, most economic analysis of politics tends to be done by less skilled economists or economists on the payroll of special interests, which biases the public debate. The blogsphere, of course, is changing this dynamic, as Levitt's own blog demonstrates.

Labels: policy

Continue reading/discuss An economist reviews the Surge ...

The grand experiment that was TimesSelect has ended; tonight the reign of terror ends and tomorrow we the citizens will storm the Bastille, liberating the punditry therein.

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.
[...]
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

It is particularly gratifying to see that the archives are open from 1987 onwards. That will be a tremendous asset to the public, bloggers especially.

The usual assumption would be that TimesSelect was a drag on revenue, but it actually seems to have been a financial success. The real reason for tearing down the pay wall was because open access provided an opportunity for more growth, an acknowledgement of the fact that significantly more traffic arrived at The Times via search engines than via the NYT website directly:

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

At any rate, as an experiment it certainly was valuable, because many other publications will certainly see the Times's decision and reassess their own strategies.

This will definitely make Kevin Drum happy.

Continue reading/discuss Mr. Editor, Tear This Pay Wall Down ...

1. PLEASE BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE EMOTIONS THAT THE THOUGHT OF YOUR OWN DEATH AROUSES IN YOU.
2. JOT DOWN, AS SPECIFICALLY AS YOU CAN, WHAT YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN TO YOU AS YOU PHYSICALLY DIE AND ONCE YOU ARE PHYSICALLY DEAD.

These two questions are part of one kind of psychological experiment* designed to measure the difference in subsequent behavior between people confronted with thinking about their own death, and those not so confronted. Using methods like these, psychology researchers are zeroing in on a truth that is still not well enough, or widely enough, understood about events like 9/11: they really do change everything -- that is, they really do change the way people, in the aggregate, think about everything.

Mortality salience
In "Death Grip: How political psychology explains Bush's ghastly success," John Judis of The New Republic provides an overview of this research, called variously "mortality salience theory" or "terror management theory." Judis recalls going door to door in West Virginia in the June and then just before the 2004 election, and being struck by how skeptical voter attitudes towards Bush had reversed and solidified into Bush support. In contrast to "rational choice theory" which presupposes, well, rational choice, Judis explains that

[t]here is, however, one group of scholars -- members of the relatively new field of political psychology -- who are trying to explain voter preferences that can't be easily quantified ... the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called "terror management theory." Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions -- from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

(Links added.) Judis goes on to explain how the three researchers were influenced by the work of Ernest Becker, whose final book, "The Denial of Death," won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Based on Judis' explanation -- but without having read Becker's book -- I'd venture to say the fear of death is a subsurface foundation of Maslow's "hierarchy of needs."

Judis describes remarkable and apparently widely reproduced results indicating that people recently confronted with thoughts of their own death or death in general are more likely to
-- take a negative view of essays critical of the United States (American respondents),
-- take a negative view of essays by "outsiders" (such as Jews, in a survey of Christians, or Turks, in a survey of Germans)
-- favor a "charismatic" leader telling them they were not ordinary, but part of a special nation

Moreover, the effects remained when the respondents were unconscious of what was going on -- and they were readily extended to the effects of reminders of 9/11. Similar to how subliminal exposure to the word "death" caused respondents to complete "coff-" as "coffin" rather than "coffee", subliminal exposure to the phrases "9/11" and "WTC" did so as well.

How to hack a presidential election
In a key 2004 experiment, Rutgers students were subjected to mortality reminders, and then compared to a control group for their likelihood to vote for Bush. The control group favored Kerry by four to one -- while those reminded of death favored Bush by two to one. Judis:

This strongly suggested that Bush's popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden's video on October 29, and the Bush campaign's reiteration of the terror threat... were integral to Bush's victory.

It certainly didn't hurt.

What remains unclear from Judis' article is why not everyone responded the same way to 9/11, or to reminders about it. Of course, not everyone in the classic "mortality salience" experiments reacted the same way either; maybe it's some uncharted psychological predisposition, maybe it's a difference in what happened to them the morning of the experiment.

Likewise, maybe Americans with an actively hostile stance towards Bush at the time of 9/11, or thereafter, were "immunized" from the "mortality salience" effect Pyszczynski et al describe. Or maybe the "mortality salience" effect was enhanced for people with deeper empathies for the victims, higher exposure to TV broadcasts about the attacks, or being part of a crowd or a group co-experiencing the attacks or their aftermath. Looking overseas, maybe repeat exposure to mortality reminders dulls the effect -- after all, the IRA or the Red Army Fraction terror campaigns in the U.K. and Germany didn't result in the same kind of "ghastly successes" that Bush, Rove, and Cheney celebrated.

But maybe that's also because the peoples involved still remember far worse than a band of criminals on a terror spree -- and because their political systems made it harder for a 'commander in chief' to exploit fear the way our current rulers have.

"Nobody jumped."

Falling man, 9/11. Richard Drew, AP.

Similarly, certain elements of the American reaction to the deaths of 9/11 hint at a particular American vulnerability. The national allergic reaction to the "Falling Man" photo is Exhibit A. Under guise of outrage, concern for privacy, and the welfare of children reading newspapers, to name a few, that photo -- arguably the Tomb of the Unknown 9/11 Victim -- was "airbrushed from history," as the Falling Man documentary film by Henry Singer and Richard Numeroff put it.**

The need to deny that people in extremis had to choose one nightmarish death over another was widespread, as writer Tom Junod found when he set out to investigate who the iconic falling man was:

I talked to the coroner's office in New York; I asked them for a count of how many people jumped that day. And what the woman from the coroner's office said was 'Nobody jumped that day. They were blown out, they were forced out... we don't say that they jumped. Nobody jumped.'

That just made me feel that there was just something going on that was not familiar American territory about dealing with tragedy. There were just things about that day you weren't supposed to say, you weren't supposed to see, you weren't supposed to talk about."

Fear itself
We are frequently reminded that the next terror attack is a matter of "when, not if." We should see such reminders for what they are: the self-serving comments of those who need American citizens to remain in a defensive crouch, dreading the next blow, applauding whatever is done to ward it off.

It's prudent to identify threats and reduce or eliminate them; it's prudent to calmly and quietly prepare for what may come, so attacks are thwarted and those that aren't are survived by as many as possible. But it's also prudent to steel ourselves for what happens after an attack: anger, grief, and fear -- and the exploitation of that anger, grief and fear, then or later, by whatever unlikely figures (Dubya, Rudy, etc.) happened to be on hand to simulate leadership in our hours of need.

Because if Pyszczynski et al are right, it's not just the Roves, the Bushs and the Cheneys I'll need to be on my guard against -- I'll need to keep a close eye on myself as well. It's not that there's nothing to fear but fear itself -- it's that fear, particularly the fear of death, preys on us in ways that predictably distort and damage the way we live.


[Crossposted from "newsrack blog"]


=====
* From the "Research Materials" section of the Terror Management Theory site maintained by TMT researcher Jamie Arndt (University of Missouri).
** Tellingly, the US debut of the film is only today, on the Discovery Channel; it's already been seen in Britain and Britain, in March and September of last year.

NOTES: I first wrote about Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon in August, 2004: "Fear works. What works better?" A documentary -- "Flight From Death: A Quest for Immortality" -- has been made about the issues raised by their work and that of Ernest Becker; judging by the trailer on YouTube, it looks extraordinary. A more recent post of mine -- "The Illuminated Crowd" -- is also an attempt at discussing the political psychology of 9/11, in reaction to a remarkable sculpture of the same name in Montreal, and the famous work "Crowds and Power" by Elias Canetti.

Among other reactions to Judis's article so far: Kim Sbarcea ("Thinking Shift") notes that Giuliani is ringing the changes on death reminders; Alan Bock sees something perverse in seemingly celebrating events like 9/11 or Katrina, rather than simply commemorating them. After having written a five part series in 2006 on fear and environmentalism, David Roberts ("Gristmill") uses Judis' article to argue that "fear of death leads to authoritarianism, not sustainability"; many comments followed. (Via Ken Stokes of "SusHI"). Via her blog, Rachel Maddow discussed it on her Air America radio show on 8/31. Turns out there were a lot more reactions to the accessible online version of "Death Grip," including Avedon Carol and (via her) Kevin Maroney.

Continue reading/discuss 9/11, the salience of mortality, and the future of American democracy ...

Hi, I'm Thomas Nephew. Earlier this summer, Aziz was kind enough to invite me to join this blog as an occasional contributor. It's an honor; I've admired Aziz's writing at "unmedia," "City of Brass" and here for a long time; I find my own first mention of him back in September, 2002 at my blog, "newsrack," with many more thereafter.

Not that we necessarily agree on everything. For one thing, I favor impeachment of Bush and Cheney on a number of grounds, including principally the fraudulent case for the Iraq war (which I reluctantly came to support once upon a time), torture, and the warrantless electronic surveillance. I also favor a rapid timetable for withdrawal from Iraq -- I think our presence is doing Iraqis no good, and harms our soldiers , our society, and our interests.

I make no claims to particular wisdom ("that's obvious enough," many will snort) or deep political consistency over the years. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but one who's increasingly disenchanted with that party of late. I'm a sometime peace and nuclear freeze activist, but one who supported the first Gulf War, Bosnia/Kosovo, and (to my everlasting regret) this Iraq war at one time. Issues that motivate me include concerns about genocide, nuclear proliferation, the proper balance between public and private spheres, and climate change -- but more and more it's simply the adherence to the rule of law, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (admittedly, as I see them) that is my deepest concern.

I know Aziz shares those concerns, and I know that we agree on the fundamentals: a commitment to reasoned, fair discourse, to tolerance, and to the ideals of the Constitution. I think we both share a faith that the United States is a vibrant, strong culture where the best ideas can prevail -- including, principally, the idea of freedom itself. Sometimes we have to work at that harder than I wish we did.

The following item is a crosspost from my own blog, "newsrack blog." I think it bears on Aziz's 9/11 comments a little, at least I hope it does -- it's kind of about the next 9/12, if there is one. Please excuse its length, I tend to be a long form writer, but I'll try not to overdo that. Also please excuse the crosspost; I'll try to add original material here, too, as I learn how to write stuff that fits this blog.

Continue reading/discuss Allow me to introduce myself ...

Tim Johnson has a great detailed photo of the fabled Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. Probably the best shot I've seen yet, better than the one on the Wikipedia page for certain.

Labels: DPRK

Continue reading/discuss Ryugyong Hotel ...

It's six years since 9-11. Everyone has their own stories about what they were doing that day when time stopped and a nation turned to CNN. It was a day that truly changed the world, like a catalyst. It is time now to accept the new world we have and stop worrying about why it is so. That also means letting go of 9-11 to some extent. What about 9-12? What world do we want to create?

From the beginning, 9-11 has been politicized by the Bush Administration and the Republican Party. It's become a substitute for debate, a massive black hole on the horizon of our political discourse.



Contrast this with the soaring rhetoric by President Bush to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks:

"Some speak of an age of terror...But this country will define our times...As long as the United States of America is determined and strong, this will not be an age of terror; this will be an age of liberty, here and across the world."

But what is the actual legacy of 9-11 thinking? An increase in worldwide terror (via CAP):

A study conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) since the Iraq invasion. When Iraq and Afghanistan, which together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities, were excluded, there was still a 35 percent per year increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks.

The 9-11 mindset has failed. And it's done incalculable damage to our own rule of law and the Constitution - a fact made all the more bitter by Osama bin Laden's latest video on the even of Ramadan exhorting Americans to give up democracy to save ourselves. Osama is really just an observer as we destroy ourselves.

There's an incisive article in the International Herald Tribune that also speaks to the damage that our refusal as a nation to tear our gaze from 9-11 has caused - a false conviction of ourselves as perpetual victims:

In the "benchmark" assessments on debate this week, Washington's question is whether the "feckless" and "corrupt" Iraqis are any longer worthy of the virtuous presence of American forces. The war-prolongers say yes, the out-now people say no - but most accept the moral divide between good Americans and bad Iraqis.

This calibration is partly a result of the universal impulse to regard individual U.S. soldiers as innocents. It is hard to conclude that United States policies are bad if the people carrying them out are only good. Indeed, as Thomas Friedman said last week of American troops he observed in a field hospital, "We don't deserve such good people."

But then, repeating what has become a Friedman trope, he added pointedly, "Neither do Iraqis if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids." Notice Friedman's move: children are a lesser value to Iraqis, unlike Americans, even as we ship our children off to that blood-drenched hospital.

The real purpose of such punditry, like this week's focus on imagined terms of a U.S. exit someday over actual effects of the U.S. occupation this day, is American self-exoneration.

Why do they hate us? Perhaps an answer is embedded in this visceral insistence on innocence as the defining note of the American character.

For the sake of clarity it bears repeating: 9-11 was six years ago. America's war in Iraq, for all the good it has achieved in deposing a cruel dictator, has also done massive injury, for which we do bear responsibility and yes, blame. We did not act in evil intent, but we must accept the moral burden of responsibility for our actions, good and bad. We are no longer innocent victims but active participants.

We need a fresh outlook that takes the present situation into account as the facts on the ground, and free ourselves of all concerns about why we are where we are. It's time to lay 9-11 to rest and focus on 9-12.

Labels: 9-11, VSP

Continue reading/discuss 9-12 ...

So says Rudy Giuliani, on the Glenn Beck radio show:

GIULIANI: Glenn, it's not a crime. I know that's very hard for people to understand, but it's not a federal crime.

GLENN: It's a misdemeanor but if you've been nailed, it is a crime. If you've been nailed, ship back and come back, it is a crime.

GIULIANI: Glenn, being an illegal immigrant, the 400,000 were not prosecuted for crimes by the federal government, nor could they be. I was U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York. So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it's not a criminal proceeding. It's a civil proceeding.

GLENN: Is it --

GIULIANI: One of the things that congress wanted to do a year ago is to make it a crime, which indicates that it isn't.

GLENN: Should it be?

GIULIANI: Should it be? No, it shouldn't be because the government wouldn't be able to prosecute it. We couldn't prosecute 12 million people. We have only 2 million people in jail right now for all the crimes that are committed in the country, 2.5 million. If you were to make it a crime, you would have to take the resources of the criminal justice system and increase it by about 6. In other words, you'd have to take all the 800,000 police, and who knows how many police we would have to have.

and also Tom Tancredo, in an Op-Ed for USA Today:

Right now, illegal presence in the USA is not a crime; it is a civil infraction. The House Judiciary Committee voted to make it a felony but then was counseled that millions of new felons could clog our courts.

Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., wrote an amendment to his own bill asking that the penalty be reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor; 191 Democrats and a few Republicans voted to keep the felony penalty in the hope that it would be a poison pill to defeat the measure.

Several have disagreed with the assertion based on USC, Title 8, Section 1325, which states:

Any alien who
(1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or
(2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or
(3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

However, there is an important clarification to this, namely that illegal presence is not a crime, only illegal entry. There was a superb discussion (for once) about this at RedState, which included the following comment:

The Law by AndrewHyman (#11)

People who immigrate legally but then overstay the term of valid legal visas are unlawfully present. That does not make them criminals.

However, people who immigrate illegally (e.g. by sneaking across from Canada or Mexico without any kind of visa or other authorization) are criminals under 8 USC 1325.

The distinction is important because for prosecution under Section 1325 there must be proof of illegal entry. However, many illegal immigrants have simply overstayed a legal visa.

Rudy's point about legal resources is also a critical one that far too many reflexively anti-immigration folks do the rule of law a grave disservice by brushing aside. In point of fact, legal resources are as subject to triage concerns as any other resource. If identifying the immigration entry method of 12 million laborers, and then initiating prosecution proceedings against the (presumably large) fraction of that 12 million under Section 1425, is a high priority for you then that's your right to advocate for. However, it will come with reduced prosecutions for almost every other federal crime, an increase in taxes at every level of government, or both. Keep in mind that the total number of federal prosecutions in the 12 largest districts combined is projected to be 61,000 this year. Also keep in mind that drug prosecutions are still projected to be 46% of the total, up from 41% last year.

And it bears mentioning that these 12 million people are doing essential labor, which non-immigrants simply will not do. Case in point: the fruit and vegetable harvests in North Carolina and California.

The farms that supply Nash Produce were among many across the state that couldn't find enough workers last fall, and farmers say the problem could escalate this year. Enforcement raids have increased the cost to immigrants of sneaking over the border and discouraged many illegal immigrants from coming.

Some worry that North Carolina will end up like California, where portions of last fall's crops rotted in the fields and ripe fruit fell from the trees because workers didn't come to pick them.

This year, contractors are predicting that labor will be tight again, said Joyner, president of a cooperative of about a dozen growers, which includes Leggett. He said his farmers are so worried that they refused to plant all the cucumbers he could have sold this year.
[...]
"Americans today don't want to sweat and get their hands dirty," said Doug Torn, who owns a wholesale nursery in Guilford County. "We have a choice. Do we want to import our food or do we want to import our labor?"

With the holiday season ahead, it's worth noting that Christmas trees also are subject to the same labor issues.

The bottom line is simply this: if you are against illegal immigrants on the basis of the rule of law, then that same rule of law demands that every single one of those 12 million immigrants get complete due process. And given that the vast majority of those 12 million people are doing essential and honest work that native born Americans won't do, it's a ludicrous waste of resources to do so. Even if 100% of all federal prosecutions today were devoted to this, it would still only amount to 0.5%. And even if we somehow were to manage to deport all 12 million, they would be here the very next day, given that we have no meaningful way to police and control all 1,952 miles of border between the United States and Mexico.

So what is the solution here? Well, that will be addressed more fully in my next post (and shaped in part by the debate here). But suffice to say for now as a hint that the present system is indeed unsustainable and harmful - but not for the reasons that the anti-immigration crowd thinks.

Labels: Immigration

Continue reading/discuss illegal immigration is not a crime ...

Watch this astounding video of the Arirang Mass Games in North Korea, which Tim Johnson calls "magnificent and chilling at the same time." It's a visual example of the "mass mind" atmosphere within the DPRK.



I am reminded of the fictional world of Camazotz, from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. The Jong Il dynasty is the disembodied brain IT, which enthralls the population into a synchronized hive, existing only for the purpose of being slaves, but slavery for its own sake (unlike the more modern, purpose-driven slavery).

Labels: DPRK

Continue reading/discuss North Korea is Camazotz ...

Tim Johnson, who writes for the China Rises blog at McClatchy, is blogging while on a visit to North Korea. It promises to be a surreal experience, and valuable as a peek behind the concrete curtain. For example, the airline infrastructure is something out of a 50's novel:

On landing in Pyongyang, I was amazed at the vehicle that brought the stairs to the plane. You can see it in the photo. Obviously, it was some contraption made in the Soviet era as well, and passed on to the fraternal North Koreans. It looks like a stretch El Camino mixed with some sort of old Cadillac. Anyway, it was those touches that made me think I had entered into some other-worldly theme park that ought to have a huge admission price.

He also notes that DPRK is environmentally pristine, which is unsurprising given that North Korea is utterly dark from space.

Johnson wonders if maybe DPRK will become the "Bhutan of East Asia." This strikes me as wildly optimistic.

Labels: DPRK

Continue reading/discuss juche do it ...