We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Byron York quotes a conversation on immigration between John McCain and a college student named David—a conversation that gets to the heart of what promises to be an interesting immigration debate within the Republican Party over the next few months:

“I’m just curious as to how any politician in America can support any sort of reward for illegal immigrants other than straight deportation,” David said, “considering the fact that there are legal immigrants out there who have waited years and years just to obtain green cards…They’ve waited patiently in line only to see illegal immigrants come and then basically get rewarded for not obeying the law.”

“Your position is correct,” McCain said. “But the reason why most Americans want border security is that they want to cut off the flow of people coming to this country illegally, and then address the issue of the need for a temporary worker program.”

. . .

McCain continued: “Now, on the disposition of people who have come here illegally. Anyone who has come here recently, within X number of years, I agree with you. What about the 80 year-old grandmother who has been here literally all her life, whose son or grandson is fighting in Iraq? I’m not interested in calling them up and telling them we’re deporting their grandmother. She can pass the naturalization, she can take the test, she can do all the things necessary to become a good citizen.”

“And the other thing is, the reason why I mentioned that, is you’ll have to explain to me how you round up 12 million people. There’s not 12 million pairs of handcuffs in America. So we’ve got to secure the borders to stop the flow of people coming into this country illegally, and then devise a temporary worker program that works so that people come to work and then go back to the country they came from. If they want to become citizens, they go through the normal application process for a green card, etc., but that’s separate from a temporary worker program. And then you’re going to have to address the issue of the 12 million people who are here illegally…”

As he finished, McCain invited David to ask a follow-up question. “I agree that it’s impossible to round up 12 million immigrants and that the logistics of dealing with all that is virtually impossible,” David said. “The issue with the grandmother is just that it’s still pushing the philosophy that if you break the law, well, [that’s OK]. My family emigrated here and they had to wait in line…So I just don’t see it — ”

“I understand that,” McCain said. “You don’t have to worry about additional people coming, if you secure the borders. You see my point? You cut off the flow. There’s no job for them cause you set up a temporary worker program. You seal the borders so they can’t get in. Then those people can be judged as I said before.”

“I think our different thesis here is you believe they’ll keep coming illegally. I think our obligation is to stop it, because you’re never going to address the issue as long as people keep coming here illegally. You see my point?”

No, David said. “I’m not worried people in the future, because I believe that we can seal the border. I’m worried about people who have broken the law. I want to see them punished.”

“As I said, they cannot be rewarded for breaking the law,” McCain answered. “But if you’re prepared to send an 80 year-old grandmother who’s been here 70 years back to some country, then frankly you’re not quite as compassionate as maybe I am. I want to stop the flow of illegals into this country, but you have to look at the additional situations, in my view.”

It’s a good conversation, and that’s as deep as it’s likely to get in the upcoming primary season.  I think that David is naive in thinking that the borders will be sealed anytime soon.  Our open-borders policy did not come about by accident.  Our borders have been open—and remain open—because some enormous businesses find it to be very profitable.

My question for McCain is: Which of your big campaign donors are you prepared to slap with enormous fines for profiting from large numbers of illegal immigrants?  The immigration debate is warped because it focuses on the immigrants.  The immigrants, as the open-borders lobby loves to point out, are just poor people hoping for better lives.  Were I in their situation, I would probably do the same.

The people to punish are the employers.  They’re luring in the illegal immigrants.  They know full well which of their employees are in this country legally.  And I think that their political clout ensures that the immigration laws go unenforced.  So until a presidential candidate state clearly that he is prepared to tighten and enforce the laws against those employers, this talk of closing the border is just a fairy tale.

Riots in the fall is becoming something of a tradition in Paris.  The emphasis this year seems to be on shotguns and injuring police officers.  Setting fire to cars, which was so fashionable in previous riots, has apparently become passe, though they did burn a police station.  Current estimates of injured police officers run around 70-80.
Some background: A generation ago, France imported massive numbers of low-skilled laborers from North Africa.  The children of those immigrants are now young adults.  They were not integrated into French society, and their unemployment rate is very high.  Around Paris, these young adults live in a series of massive bleak housing projects that ring the city.  A large percentage of them are effectively wards of the state, living entirely on generous welfare programs that leave these second-generation immigrants fed but directionless.

Socialist dogma declares that wealth-transfer payments can ensure tranquility, but human nature disagrees.  These young adults, particularly the young men, want something more than to be fed and coddled like overgrown infants.  They want meaning in their lives.  They want purpose.  And many of them found that purpose in hostility towards the government that infantilizes them.

The banlieues (suburbs) in which they live have become so lawless that they are effectively not under the control of the French government.  In some of these neighborhoods, police cannot patrol there effectively, even in force.
And now they riot.  This is, I believe, the third year of the riots, though the first year they may have also held an extra round in the spring.  This year, as I said, the goal seems to be injuring or killing as many police officers as possible, and the weapons of choice seem to be shotguns and maybe rifles.

It’s hard to get details on these riots, because the mainstream press has worked hard to suppress and confuse the story.  In previous riots, the press would refer to the rioters only as “youths”, completely ignoring the story’s complex racial and religious angles.  It was really funny for the first two years, but now it’s just a cliche, and some press outlets are conceding that many of the rioters may be of Arab and North African descent.

The story behind these riots is complicated, and the media’s ideological blinders don’t help in understanding it.  The story is partly about religious, racial, and cultural differences between the French majority and this minority.  It may also be a grim lesson about how importing large numbers of poor unskilled laborers may provide some short-term economic benefits to big business, but it also carries serious long-term costs that we all must pay.

Finally, this story may be about the beginning of the end of Socialism.  It has long been predicted that Socialism would collapse like a Ponzi scheme, where some generation must eventually decide that it is unwilling to pay exorbitant taxes to the older generations in exchange for the promise that younger generations will pay even more.  Mathematically, every Ponzi scheme must eventually run out of victims, because at its heart the scheme produces nothing of value; it just moves money around to placate the existing victims while hoping that new victims will come along to put new money into the system.

But these riots suggest that Socialism may fall long before the economic collapse.  What seems even more dangerous is absence of genuine culture that socialism demands.  A core belief of Socialism is that our minds are blank slates onto which our environments can write anything at all.  A related belief is that intellectuals leading the government are smart enough to write on that slate in such a way as to bring about nationwide peace and harmony.

These riots, along with many other stories coming out of Europe, demonstrate that both beliefs are false.  The slate is not blank, and more importantly the intellectuals aren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were.  Political Correctness is the best they could do for a culture substitute, and it has proven woefully inadequate.  It does not satisfy man’s need for meaning.

That is why Paris burns tonight.  That is why Britain’s youth are joining terrorist cells faster than its government can staff its anti-terrorism forces.  That is why a primitive version of a primitive religion is sweeping through the minds of Europe’s youth, easily overpowering government platitudes about tolerance and diversity.

A war rages in Europe between the cultural void that is Political Correctness and the primal human instincts that seek to replace it with something better, even if that something is violent Islam, or simply violence for its own sake.  It’s a war between fools, because either ideology would destroy Europe as we know it.  Socialism would bankrupt it, while the rioters would burn it down.  The Socialists have wealth and infrastructure, while the rioters have youth and demography.  Personally, I suspect that both sides will win—Europe will go bankrupt as it burns down—until some third ideology sweeps them both away.  And that third ideology is likely to be nationalism.

From The Telegraph:

A British man who moved to New Zealand has been told by officials that his wife is too fat to join him.

Richie Trezise, 35, a rugby-playing Welshman, lost weight to gain entry to New Zealand after initially being rejected for being overweight and a potential burden on the health care system.

His wife, Rowan, 33, a photographer, has been battling for months to shed the pounds so they can be reunited and live Down Under but has so far been unable to overcome New Zealand’s weight regulations.

Mr Trezise, who moved to Auckland in September after shedding two inches from his waist on a crash diet, said that if his wife was not allowed to come out by Christmas they would abandon the idea of emigrating.

His employer-backed skills visa was initially rejected by immigration officials when they discovered that his body mass index, or BMI, was 42, making him morbidly obese under New Zealand regulations.

BMI measures a person’s weight in relation to their height. Anything over 25 is regarded as overweight, and 30 or above is obese.

Mr Trezise, a submarine cable specialist and a former soldier, said: “My doctor laughed at me. He said he’d never seen anything more ridiculous in his whole life. He said not every overweight person is unhealthy or unfit.

I’m torn on this story.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful that some countries are willing to enforce their immigration laws.On the other hand, Mr. Trezise’s doctor is correct: BMI is ridiculous as a measure of obesity, health, or just about anything else.  It’s simply weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters.  Here’s a simple BMI calculator that’ll handle the metric conversion.

To illustrate the complete silliness of BMI, consider that the average pro football player in the NFL is obese according to the BMI.  They’re not merely overweight; they’re classed as obese.

The BMI also classifies as obese all six of the USA Olympic Team wrestlers in the 120kg class, in freestyle and Greco-Roman.  I’m a pretty big guy myself, as you may have inferred, but I’m sure that any of those six could slam me into unconsciousness without breaking a sweat.  So if anybody out there wants to defend BMI as a rational way to identify the obese, I suggest that they be the ones to go break the bad news to the NFL players and the Olympic wrestling team.

From The Daily Mail:

Meet the women who won’t have babies - because they’re not eco friendly

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.

But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.

Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.

Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.

He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.

. . .

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

These people are so intellectually fragile, I pity them. Just a few simple questions, taken seriously, would shatter their primitive little religion. And I don’t mean factual questions about whether the Earth is really in danger or whether those dangers are caused by mankind. You can’t think clearly about a religion without accepting its premises, arguendo.
So assuming that the planet is in dire peril and it’s all our fault, in this religion is the goal to actually save the planet, or is the goal to practice personal virtue by refusing to participate in its destruction? Those are very different goals that would dictate very different courses of action.

If the goal is to actually save the planet, then non-reproduction is a strange goal because it would reduce the number of people who share the faith and are committed to saving the planet.

Or perhaps the idea is that these women, by proudly proclaiming their commitment to non-reproduction, will inspire millions of others to do the same. Perhaps they hope to spawn a worldwide non-reproduction movement. But that doesn’t fit with the story, nor with the movement at large. When environmental zealots gain influence, their priority is to impose their will via government, not to persuade and draw in new followers.

Adoption is another way for a religion to survive despite a ban on reproduction. The Shakers used this strategy with some success for over 200 years, but it was hardly enough to build a movement strong enough to save the planet. At their zenith the Shakers numbered only about 6000, and now there are fewer than a dozen. Besides, the environmental fanatics don’t seem particularly interested in adoption. The subject comes up once in the Daily Mail article as an acceptable possibility, but there’s no evidence that our sterile heroine actually plans to do it. In this environmental religion, adoption is apparently something you can do if you really feel like it, but it’s not a serious group-survival strategy.

So I don’t think that the real point of this radical environmental religion is to actually save the planet. The point is a sense of self-righteousness, a sense of being one of the special people. And that’s not a bad thing in itself. Nearly every religion provides its followers with the comfort that they are the chosen people with the special knowledge.

Where radical environmentalism falls down as a religion is that it has no cosmology. It doesn’t explain what the point of being good is. In Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, the point of being good is to please God, and maybe get some advantage during life or after death. But since radical environmentalism doesn’t posit a God or afterlife, who is there to be pleased by the righteousness of its worshipers? If you’re a super-extra-special-good environmental fanatic like NoImpactMan, then what does any of that misery and effort get you beyond the similar psychic satisfaction that a rank-and-file believer derives from sorting his trash and watching Al Gore’s movie?

I see two answers, two alternate cosmologies than can fuel these believers.

First, it could be socialism, and I mean ’socialism’ in a very specific sense. Conservatives usually gloss over that word as a shorthand for any ideology that tends to grow government, but it has a very specific meaning and history. The etymologically curious should ask: What’s the ’social’ in ’socialism’? The answer is that the theoretical point of socialism isn’t actually to grow government for its own sake, but to give government enough power to radically reshape every level of society according to modern scientific thinking to create heaven on earth. Once upon a time people took that idea very seriously, and the big communist revolutions struggled mightily at the cost of millions of lives trying to achieve it. But it failed, and no one who knows much history can seriously argue that trying just a little harder for a little longer might have somehow created a new man for a new era of socialistic paradise.

Socialism has had its run as a major unacknowledged world religion, from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. No one really believes it any more, but they still find some comfort in reciting the old hymns, which is why you still read and hear little throwaway comments about how ‘the people’ are on the verge of rising up in violent revolution if the government doesn’t bow to socialist demands, or how we live in a Dickensian world of cold-hearted wealthy elites and downtrodden starving peasants. It’s all socialist malarkey that hasn’t changed significantly since the 1920s, just like the story about how the world would be a much, much better place if only we weren’t such bad people for not adequately celebrating diversity, being multiculturally sensitive, recycling our trash, supporting the revolution more vigorously, staying terrified of the myriad impending disasters, or whatever the crisis or sin du jour is. When the leaders promise utopia and it doesn’t appear, the blame will always fall on the followers, never on the leaders and certainly never on the religion itself.

So socialism can’t be fueling them, even if its language slips into their speech from time to time. I think that the modern environmental fanatics are fueled by something much more primitive and elemental. While the theological core of socialism was a belief in utopia on earth, core of this new religion seems to be hatred of humanity, including self-hatred. It’s a death cult: They want to die, and they want everyone else to die with them.

Fortunately, they aren’t violent about it. They’re content with death by sterility and severe government regulation. But death is still the point. Whatever the question, the answer is always fewer babies and a lower standard of living. It’s the common thread running through every aspect of their agenda, and it’s awfully hard to ignore in a newspaper article glorifying self-extinction.  So let’s call them what they are, and talk plainly about what they’re really advocating.

‘Theft‘, ‘larceny‘ and ‘steal‘ all refer generically to wrongfully taking someone else’s property. The differences between those words are very subtle. I would say that ‘theft’ suggests that the actor steals regularly as a thief, while ’steal’ suggests that stealth may have been involved, and ‘larceny’ is most common in statutes and legal proceedings.

‘Burglary’ and ‘robbery’ are much more specific: A burglary is entering a building, especially a home, with intent to steal, while a robbery is theft by the use or threat of violence.

Finally, ‘embezzlement‘ and the more obscure ‘defalcation‘ are both thefts by someone entrusted with the stolen property.