Undocumented immigrants have a lower crime rate than US citizens

Today we celebrate the event in which undocumented immigrants arrived in this land and were welcomed and fed by the native peoples. We all know what the immigrants did next. 

 

I am grateful that today's undocumented immigrants act with more respect toward folks already here than those who arrived 400 years ago.

The only Republican ideology is nihilism

The idiocy of one puppet attacking another is too absurd to bother commenting on itself.

But the nuclear war against efforts to overcome COVID and finally bring our society back to something approaching normal is a perfect illustration of the destructiveness of the Trumpism. They were lying when they said #AllLivesMatter.

 

It is a further illustration is that their only concern is to sabotage these efforts to undermine the recovery and harm Democrats chances of retaining Congress in 2022. Their governors are working quite effectively to this end.

To put their own jobs ahead of the greater good is not entirely new in politics. But to do so on a literally life or death matter that is harming their own base far more than the opposition's shows that their approach is not only vile and inhumane but stupid and self-defeating.

It's no surprise that the three or four vaguely reasonable Republican governors out there want nothing to do with the national death cult (who, of course, wants to cancel them for the disobedience).

The former Republican Party's only ideology is nihilism. They have literally nothing offer except rage. They can't even bring themselves to denounce violence or threats of violence. Even as their own supporters die in the meantime.

Conservatives are better than liberals at organizing

A few days ago, I read an article expressing surprise that school boards became a major battleground in 2021. The author, as they say, must be new here. School boards have been an integral part of the right-wing culture wars for nearly half a century, back when they were railing against the "homosexual agenda" with their extremist demands about gay not being beaten up or outright lynched. It's no surprise that the current rage at school board meetings is neither grassroots nor spontaneous.

 

Conservatives have always had much better organization at the local levels, though, as the article points out, this hardly means the efforts are grassroots. Liberals have tended to focus almost exclusively on the "sexier" national and state issues. Conservatives thus win by default in the areas that most directly affect people's daily lives.

Remembering 9/11

20 years ago tomorrow, a terrorist attack in the United States country was the worst single crime against humanity of the new century.

Up until that point.

For a brief moment, Americans were one people, in shock, in grief, but together. The cruel attacks united us in a way that hasn't been seen since.

This hasn't been seen since because of what happened next.

The unity was cynically exploited by politicians and their sponsors to engage in an avalanche of inhumanity.

Two destructive wars that cost billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, both American and foreign. 

State-sponsored kidnapping. 

State-sponsored torture. 

Inciting bigotry against honest, hard-working Americans. 

So much pain inflicted.

In our name.

And worse still, encouraging "allies" to join in.

We are not safer because of this avalanche of inhumanity. 

And we are certainly not more united because of this avalanche of inhumanity.

The internal unraveling of America succeeded more spectacularly than the 9/11 terrorists could possibly have imagined. The mass murder was done by foreigners but the subsequent disintegration was entirely self-inflicted.

Bigotry always does as much damage those holding such views as it does to the objects of the hatred. This is true of individuals. And as the last two decades have shown, it is also true of societies.

Fires are only extinguished when they are deprived of the oxygen they need to survive. The fire of  division is nourished by the oxygen of bigotry. It's long past time to starve that fire.

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

-From South Pacific, Rodgers & Hammerstein

Worker shortage or rational labor choices

Last night, I was in an obviously short-staffed chain restaurant and overheard another customer bitching about it and the "lazy people who won't work" because [horror] he had to wait a few extra minutes for his check. 

 

We're living in the middle of a (again worsening) deadly pandemic where people act like wearing a mask for a few minutes is worse than Nazi tyranny. Or "child abuse." 

 

Restaurant worker is a job many of whom are directly facing these jerk customers (restaurant diners always seem to find ANY reason to be obnoxious). It is a job for which the "sub-minimum wage" was invented. And it is a job that almost never offers health insurance.

In the middle of a deadly, worsening pandemic, choosing not to accept such working conditions strikes me not as lazy but as entirely rational.

This situation also reminds us how much the service economy is based on paying people crap wages with no benefits and them taking it precisely because they don't have a choice.

Afghanistan: another failure of "nation building"

The US spent 20 years, around $1 trillion (closer to $2 trillion if you count long-term costs like treatment for soldiers), over 2300 American soldier lives - to say nothing of time, money and lives spent by European and other countries - trying to build Afghanistan into a viable state. 

 By many accounts, the Afghan army was staffed by decent men who were not given the tools to succeed by their corrupt political non-leaders. 

All that money, time and lives and the country is heading back to square one with the barbarians back in control. It's a tragic day for the people of Afghanistan, who’ve seen many tragic decades. 

No one seriously believes another few months or years would've made much of a difference in that regard.
 

Can we Americans please finally admit that imperialism and nation-building is something that can no longer work in the modern world (ignoring whether it was ever morally justified)? Let's stop starting wars that we are incapable - that no one is capable - of finishing. In the end, the only people who will have benefited from the last 20 years is "defense" contractor stockholders.

Why critical race theory is necessary

In case you're wondering why there's a push for critical race theory (which critics tend to know almost nothing about), take a look at this piece about a Fox "News" pundit equating the genocide of Native Americans and the forcible seizure of their lands with responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Since this land was "settled" (conquered) by Europeans, white supremacy is the dominant mindset. As we can see above, this fact is present, not just past.

It's worth noting that conservatives' rejection of the legitimacy of our elections began when a black president was a elected, pause when a white supremacist president was elected and resumed when a vice-president of color was elected.

White supremacy requires insisting that America is perfect... other than perhaps the fact that it allows liberals.

The Founding Fathers of this nation knew very well this was not so. The Constitution they wrote tried to form not a perfect union but a "more perfect" one. That's why they provided for an amendment process.

Serious adults know that you cannot improve unless you recognize your flaws. It's time many Americans became less like insecure little children and more like serious adults. It's the only one to move this country forward. It's always the only way to move forward.

 

 

Update: I was not surprised to learn that the hysteria over Critical Race Theory was carefully manufactured and well-funded by elites seeking to divide us. 

The fetishization of globalization and its consequences

I heard a show on the radio yesterday talking about the anxiety young people are facing. It discussed the disconnect in this regard between young people and older folks, because the former have a better grasp of the precarity of our national and global situations. And they are going to live longer with its consequences.

The speaker cited the toilet paper panic of last year and postulated about what might happen if the next panic is directed not a hygienic product but food.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the increasing effects of the climate crisis, is showing the importance of growing and making more things locally and the risks of not doing so.

There's long been a fantasy that specialization combined with a robust global supply chain would solve all the world's problems. This fantasy is dependent on a global harmony that is very atypical from a historical perspective.

To be clear, this is not an anti-globalization post. Globalization is essential to many of the positive aspects of how we live today. Fewer barriers to trade are generally - not always, anti-competitive practices undermine its benefits - better than more.

But there has to be a better balance between the local and the macro, to hedge against risks in both.

Being entirely dependent on the rest of the world is a major risk when that connection is severed, such as during a global pandemic. We've seen the effects of this already.

Only 12% of world's computer chips are manufactured in the US, compared to 37% three decades ago. And that's caused major production problems for US-based auto and electronics companies.

Canada, which has no domestic COVID-vaccine manufacturers, has fully innoculated only 19% of its citizens, compared to 45% in the US.

Even in my local area of upstate New York, many tourist-based businesses have been dependent on summer workers from Eastern Europe, already a risk in a country often run by an immigrant-bashing party. Their absence during the border closure is causing major staffing issues.

Being overly dependent on a global supply chain has led to an astonishing lack of resilience in many sectors of the economy.

One thing individuals can do is to buy as much of their food from local sources as possible. This will help ensure those local producers remain an option when a panic-induced shortage or further global supply chain disruption hits the food sector.