Many young Adult Mexican-Americans call themselves "Mexican"

The Pew Hispanic Center has released the results of its 2009 survey of Latinos aged 16-25.

As recently as 1940, Latinos represented only 1/2% of Americans. Now they're the largest minority, at over 15%--mostly from illegal immigration and subsequent amnesties, along with our Constitution granting automatic citizenship to children of illegals.

Some highlights of this year's Pew survey:

2/3 were born here (of parents who came mainly in the wave immigration starting in 1965).

40% of native born Latinos say they know one or more gangbangers (possibly including themselves).

52% call themselves "Mexican" or "Guatemalan"--wherever they or their parents came from--rather than "American" or "Mexican-American" or "Hispanic" or "Latino." Even third-generation youths are split on this, with just 50% calling themselves "American."

52% say they speak English not very well--or not at all (the survey was conducted in English and in Spanish).

17% dropped out of high school
(vs. 9% of blacks, 6% of whites, 4% of Asians).

23% live in poverty
(vs. 28% of blacks, 13% of whites, 8% of Asians).

"Young Hispanic females have the highest rates of teen parenthood of any major racial or ethnic group in the country." 26% of females have had children by age 19
(vs. 22% of blacks, 11% of whites, and 6% of Asians).
"On average, Hispanic females are projected to have just over 3 children in their lifetime."
(vs. 2.2 for blacks and 1.9 for whites).

"Latinos make up about 18% of all youths in the U.S. ages 16 to 25.
However, their share is far higher in a number of states.
They make up
51% of all youths in New Mexico,
42% in California,
40% in Texas,
36% in Arizona,
31% in Nevada,
24% in Florida, and
24% in Colorado."

(California's education statistics are in the tank, largely due to the enormous impact of these educationally indifferent youths.)

68% are Mexican in origin; 42% or more of their parents are high school dropouts (vs. about 1/4 for other Latino youth).

About 3% were incarcerated in 2008
(vs. 7% of blacks and 1% of whites).

Around 17% are illegal aliens.

50% of male Latino youths believe the man should have the final say in family matters (vs. 24% of the females).

49% to 71% believe abortion should be illegal, depending on whether they're mainly Engiish speakers or Spanish speakers.


To be sure Mexico has its share of doctors, engineers, legitimate business owners and the like--but they're not moving here. Instead we're getting--as this poll demonstrates--Mexico's least educated laborers, doing work American laborers won't do--for starvation wages, that is. And we're getting them because Mexico's population has quintupled since 1940. The Mexican government, faced with fifty million more people than it needs, figured out--correctly--that we're so stupid we'd be glad to serve as their relief valve.

Mexico's government encourages people to come here by hook or by crook, distributes comic books showing them how to do it, and supports their efforts through a network of consulates. And tells them they're not illegal immigrants because the Southwest is actually part of Mexico that we stole from them, so they're just taking back what's rightfully theirs.

I'd love to have Mexican doctors and engineers immigrate here. But we don't need any more peasants--from anywhere. Look at the unemployment rates for American unskilled laborers. I believe it's pushing 20%--one out of five. How can anyone with a conscience promote taking in more unskilled laborers when we can't employ our own unskilled laborers?

Danish climate change conference useless

The upcoming climate change summit in Denmark will talk about fossil fuel use, carbon taxes and suchlike. Woo hoo. What won't be discussed is overpopulationm, the root cause of global warming. If the human race had stabilized at 1900 population levels, we wouldn't be talking about global warming.

But neither liberals nor conservatives have the courage the face up to acknowledging this, because the solutions go against our instincts.

And we always follow our instincts. Evolution deniers claim that there's no "missing link" because we thinking humans and lower creatures. Well, just walk down a city street and look around. Missing links abound. They're the ones who deny the reality of anything that might inconvenience them.

It's not a clash of civilizations

For there to be a clash of civilizations, there have to be at least two civilizations. There aren't. We have a civilization. They have a tribe. The difference is that civilizations live by principles. Tribes live by loyalty. A civilization can criticize its own people. I can shout "Obama sucks" or "Christ was a jerk" from the rooftops and nothing will happen to me (outside the deep South that is).

But if I shout "Muhammed was a clown" in the Middle East I'll be killed--probably on the spot.

The Taliban bombed a women's market in Peshawar, Pakistan, murdering 114 poor women and children. And many if not most Pakistanis--even middle class ones--blamed it on the Jews, or the Indians, or the Americans, as part of a Western plot to destroy Pakistan in particular and Islam in general. They refuse to believe that a fellow Muslim could be so evil. And until they do, they're a tribe fighting our civilization.


We all remember what happened when an obscure Danish newspaper published a group of cartoons depicting/satirizing Islam/Muhammed, of which the one shown here is about as harsh as it gets (Danish imams poured gasoline on the fire when they went to the Middle East armed with the Danish cartoons--plus some far worse ones they cooked up themselves and added to the Danish ones).

There were violent riots throughout Muslim countries. Millions took to the streets. People died in the riots. The cartoonists and their publishers had to go into hiding after getting credible death threats in Denmark.

On the other hand, after the October bombing of that women's market? Nada. If a drone kills three civilians and a Taliban general, there are demonstrations and pop songs written against America.

Pakistani pop music is full of denuciations and videos that are anti-American, anti-drone, anti-India, anti-Mossad. Not one word mentioning the Taliban. Of course anyone who did so would be murdered by the Taliban.

So our drone attacks are met with fury over American interference in Pakistani sovereignty, while the Talibans' murdering civilians and, for example, destroying 200 girls' schools are all blamed on outsiders--us, Jews, India.

So yes, the drone attacks make Pakistanis furious. I'd rather they didn't. But as long as we target them carefully, they may represent our best option among a bunch of options that are all bad, but among which we must choose.

Last note on this: frequently the criticisms of what we do there take the form of pointing out that whatever choice has been made will have terrible consequences.

The problem is that every single option we have--including precipitous withdrawl--has terrible consequences. So such criticisms are shallow and unproductive. The question is always, which terrible consequence is the least terrible.

But that's rarely asked.

If you want to read someone who doesn't agree with Obama about Middle East policy, yet who isn't a ranting idiot, check out NYTimes centrist columnist Tom Friedman. A debate between him and the president would be far more illuminating than the potshots the Republican leadership keeps taking.

Eminent domain

Our founders incorporated the idea of eminent domain so we could build roads and dams and the like. It required the few to sacrifice for the many.

But rich people quickly figured out that the easiest way to make money was to suborn government and bamboozle taxpayers.

Now, eminent domain often requires the many to sacrifice for the few.

Thus, as David Cay Johnston (Pulitzer Prize for reporting) points out in "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and stick you with the bill)", President Bush made his personal fortune through raising taxes in Arlington, Texas to pay for a sports stadium that never made a profit for the city's taxpayers, after stealing 200 acres of private property from property owners through eminent domain ("stealing" though giving the property owners pennies on the dollar for their land), enabling Bush to make nearly $18 million at taxpayer expense, which he paid lower taxes on than a secretary does on her wages.

The Republicans keep claiming they're against such misuses of eminent domain. That's what they say in public. But in private, across the country, they've got their hands in taxpayers' pockets, rummaging around for personal profit.

And BTW taxpayer-subsidized sports stadiums NEVER pay off for the taxpayers--the subsidies just serve to enrich the sports teams' billionaire owners. And often local Democrats (on city councils) are only too eager to get in on the bonanza.

Read Johnston's book and you'll see the gory details.

Republicans are like 3 year old boys ___Democrats are like 10 year old girls

The Republican leadership encourages Republicans to think and act like three year old boys. Three year olds, above all else, want to do what they want to do--and they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do.

That is, to paraphrase a text on anarchism I read in college, a child sees freedom as "freedom from (authority)," while an adult sees freedom as "freedom to (accomplish your goals)."

In promoting blind resentment and distrust of government, Republican leaders commonly say stuff like "I don't want some bureacrat in Washington telling me what to do." The odd thing is that this directly contradicts the conservative's respect for authority. They accomplish this sleight of brain by describing the authority as illegitimate if it's elected by Democrats. Authority is only to be respected if it's Republican. This represents the abandonment of conservative principles in exchange for raw tribalism. It's also anarchistic. And if you've ever worked in a church's nursery for 2-3 year old kids, as I have, you're also recognize it as the behavior of--as I said--three year old boys.

The motive is simple. The Republicans' main campaign donors are billionaires who have no need of government services, and who want to spend their money on themselves instead of paying taxes that will fund government services. But they can't win with campaign slogans like "Billions for Billionaires, diddly squat for thee," so instead they cultivate distrust of all government.

Then Republican rank and file will gladly vote to strip away every protection individuals have against being exploited by powerful billionaires with squadrons of lawyers--all in the name of an autonomy only a billionaire has without those protections. It's a neat trick.


Democrats, meanwhile, want you to think like a 10 year old girl--you know, the kind who brings a stray pregnant cat home and has no comprehension of how many more cats America has than it needs or can care for. All heart, no brain. Thus we have to cater to the needs of anyone who is or has ever been discriminated against by anyone anywhere, while excusing any bad thing that comes along as a consequence of all this catering to special interest groups.

Thus we're supposed to welcome people who respond to Mexico's population explosion (from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000) by moving here illegally. Never mind world overpopulation. Never mind Mexico's responsibilities to its own citizens. Never mind our responsibilities to America's own unskilled laborers. Never mind the huge demographic shift being foisted upon us by this mass migration. Never mind the huge negative on schools and hospitals and social services organizations in general. 10 year old girls don't care or understand about such things. They only see a poor little Mexican kid with big eyes like the paintings sold in tourist areas next to the seascapes and clowns. A poor little "person of color," who is therefore saintly, just as a "person without color" is some kind of beast oppressing the former group.

In other words, nevermind consequence.

So we get the party of 3 year old boys vying with the party of 10 year old girls.

Great. Just great.

It's the tribalism, stupid...

In a recent Gallup poll, 59% of Pakistanis said the US is the biggest threat to Pakistan--only 11% said it was the Taliban. A majority of Pakistanis--and this includes the middle class there, not just uneducated poor people--blame the recent spate of bombings there on outside forces--Mossad, India, the CIA, the West's "War Against Islam" etc.

This confirms my growing belief that a majority of humans in developed countries and even more in poor ones are primarily tribal in their orientation. Tribalism excuses everything anyone on your side does and ascribes only evil motives to anything the "other tribe" does, and always blames one's own culture's troubles on "outside forces."

In the South at the dawn of racial integration in the 1960s and 70s, White Southerners usually blamed the Blacks' struggle for equality on "outside agitators."

And today Republicans blame America's ills all on foreigners--mainly Democrats, who they regard as not actually Americans, abetted by the United Nations and international banks etc.

Partisan Democrats aren't much better, never acknowledging any legitimacy to conservative thinking even when it's correct, as with illegal immigration.

It's tribalism that blinds people to reform efforts, and to the idea of using principles rather than tribe as your central philosophy.

Justice for all--if they have the scratch

For many years, middle class Americans have been vaguely aware of how poor, uneducated people get railroaded by the legal system, with overburdened public defenders mainly there to propose plea bargains because prosecutors routinely amp up the charges to terrify defendants--it's a well-oiled conviction machine.

What the middle class has not faced is the fact that if they are accused of a serious crime, whether they're guilty or not, it will take their life savings--including selling their house--to mount a competent legal defense.

They tell themselves "It can't happen to me." And mainly it doesn't. But no one makes movies about this, do they? It's an invisible Sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads.

But people should realize this, because if you ever get a traffic ticket and choose to fight it you'll get a lesson in how the courts have become convction machines. Again, guilty or not, it's nearly impossible to get a traffic commissioner to find you not guilty. And if you choose to appeal your conviction you'll wind up spending $10K to fight a $400 ticket, because nothing short of that will work at the appeals level.

Our system now provides all the justice money can buy. A fortune won't get you off necessarily. But it will get you a competent defense. Otherwise you can kiss your assets goodbye.

Think about that the next time your local DA brags about how "tough on crime" he or she is.

How much is that pundit in the window?

We view Congress and elected offices in general as seats of great power. Even if you have serious beefs with Congress...still, a visit to the chambers is going to affect you. You'll feel a bit of awe.

Thus it's hard for the average American--Democrat and Republican--to understand how America's richest 1/2 of 1% see Congress.

They see it the way we might look at a pet shop.

They go there to buy Congressmen, then take them home and train them. And like any good pet owner, they rarely beat their pets. They learn the tricks needed to discipline and control them. And of course sometimes a pet becomes intransigent--it might even attack its owner. Such pets must be dealt with, of course.

Meanwhile, most pets, like a good German Shepherd or Siamese cat, say, try to maintain their dignity while keeping their pet perks coming. It's quite a trick but the best pets learn how to do it.

And of course while you may come to feel a lot of affection for your pets, and they may feel quite at home around you, you never forget that they are not your equals. They're your treasured pets, nothing more, nothing less.

Then, once the Masters of the Universe have mastered the art of acquiring and training CongressPets, they use the same tricks on voting blocks and pundits. Make Mexican Americans think they'll be lost without your guidance--and that they can't trust anyone but you and your peeps. Make Fundamentalists think that God will smite our nation for its pornography and ho-mo-sex-uality (except for yours, of course, which is to be forgiven, since you're my peeps) unless you put your trust in me, who looks and talks just like you (except in my private life).

And the pundits will get in line too, of course. It's just a matter of figuring out the carrots and the sticks appropriate to the particular person.

Not everyone's for sale, to be sure. But they tend to get ground down by the river of money flowing around them. To make small, unimportant compromises at first...

The next time you see a Congressman spouting off on TV, think of how the powerful people you never see see him. Or her.

I'm not saying this to say it's hopeless. Just to help you see others' perspectives. And the magnitude of the task reformers face, both in and out of government.

Now there's a good boy. Here's a chew toy. Sit!

Lou Dobbs Show et morte--progressive victory?

The Leftosphere is gloating over Lou Dobbs' ejection from CNN. By their accounts he's a "nativist" who hates all foreigners and all immigration, and everything he says is "hate speech." Particularly pleased are organizations aimed at extracting special favors for Mexican citizens living in America illegally, along with all others with Latin ancestry--as long as those others support these special interest groups.

But the Devil is not as black as he is painted, as they say. Dobbs opposes illegal immigration--not all immigration. He opposes flooding the country with unskilled laborers who drag down the wages of American unskilled laborers. He has wandered off the deep end on other topics, such as playing footsie with the birthers for a while. But most of what the Leftosphere says about him is exactly as distorted and demonizing as what they accuse him of being.

Physician, heal theyself.

Dobbs probably did need to leave CNN--IF CNN places itself as the neutral "news station of record" placed at the equipoise between MSNBC and FOX.

But that's another falsehood, because CNN has other hosts--notably Rick Sanchez--who ceaselessly editorialize on behalf of Mexican citizens living here illegally.

So if CNN gets its pro-illegal activists to knock it off or gets rid of them, then Dobbs should also have exited.

Otherwise CNN has simply caved in to special interest groups.

Do drones help or hinder the war on terror? Do we need a national conversation on drones?

The left is up in arms (so to speak) over drones--particularly armed ones. They say drones set back the war on terror, alienating the people we're trying to protect with indiscriminate killing.

Certainly the jihadis are up in arms (not so to speak) over drones--and their propaganda machine is in full cry trying to stop them, since drones are killing the leaders who normally stay out of harm's way as they send their forces into battle.

Note that I'm talking about "forces" and "battle." But I'm not talking about war. Because there is no such thing as a "war on terror"--that's a nonsense term coined by propagandists. Wars are conducted against states. But here our enemy is a loose confederacy of non-state actors, some with state support, some not, all working under the aegis of militant Islam. Their goal is an Islamist empire run by them. Their enemy is, among others, evey living American citizen.

We can't fight this amorphous non-organization with armies, except in special cases. Nor are local police departments equipped to deal with such international groups.

So we're waging a new something--call it a quasiwar, perhaps. And that requires new tools, including what many tag as "drones." The military prefers "UAVs" (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Drones were radio-controlled aircraft used as targest in figher pilot training mainl

The need for public debate isn't so much for UAV technology pro and con as to educate our public about the nature of this quasiwar, which 8 years of Bush did little to illuminate.
What's really needed regarding UAVs is a vastly better propaganda effort to show Muslims how many innocents Islamofascists expressly target. It's not collateral damage for them, as innoncents killed are for us. Innocents are the target for them. That's a crucial difference, and we need to do a vastly better job of talking about that.

Is Major Hasan responsible for his actions? Are we?

The Major Hasan case once again raises a fundamental conflict between liberals and conservatives.

It's an article of faith for conservatives that we are and must be completely responsible for our actions. This total responsibility apparently kicks in at the moment of our 18th birthday.

But it's an article of faith for liberals that we're depraved on account of we're deprived (as Stephen Sondheim neatly summarized this debate in "Officer Krupke" from West Side Story).

Who's right?

Neither. But I'm right. The bottom line is: people do what they do for many reasons, including outside influences, moral reasoning, brain chemistry, etc. We can get into endless arguments about degrees of culpability in crimes because of this--but we don't need to--IF we reorient the criminal justice system around public safety instead of its current orientation around punishment.

Anyone with life experience should realize that some people are truly unable to control themselves--as is the case with those afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome. I've heard that at least 20% of prison inmates are mentally ill. I'm guessing it's even higher.

Or take someone whose brain chemistry is intact but whose single mother was, say, a meth addict, and this someone has never heard a kind word or felt a gentle touch in his 18 years of life. He isn't compassionate because our society has failed to give him any personal experience of it in his life.

But--and it's a huge but--even if you believe that no one is responsible for their bad behavior--that it's society's fault, or bad genes, or rotten parents--that doesn't mean we can tolerate letting dangerous people run around loose.

The question should always be: is this person or organization dangerous to the rest of us? If so, they must be made safe for the rest of us. That could mean prison, or a mental institution, or a halfway house, or supervised probation, or something else. But as long as someone's a danger we must act.

So, for example, a habitual drunk driver with scads of DUIs is a candidate for doing whatever is needed to keep them from driving--even if that means putting them in a low-security jail of some sort. The same goes for street people with no visible means of support and a string of very expensive (for us) trips to the ER for alcohol poisoning or ODs.

If anything, I'd advocate taking a lot of people off the street who are now running around loose--but letting loose a lot of people who are no danger to us.

Doesn't that make sense? Many police departments are called departments of public safety. I advocate taking that seriously. And sidestepping the useless wrangling lefties and righties constantly carry on.

As for Major Hasan--he's already been show to fit the profile of a mass shooter--a loser in his personal life, unable to form/hold relationships with women, physically unprepossessing (i.e. kind of chunky and short), showing signs of disordered thinking and religious obsessions that worried his peers greatly. Whoever assigned him to go to Iraq with this sort of background should be cashiered, by the way. I bet the person who did it was just trying to get Hasan out of his/her own jurisdiction.

But Hasan, regardless of whether he's insane or a terrorist, will never see freedom again--surely there's no disagreement on that front. And while I oppose the death penalty if there's the slightest doubt, there's isn't a smidgen in this case. He did it. And even if he's insane, he deserves to die, because it's immoral to force jailers to risk their lives around him.

Note that for an insane person he planned and executed his attack very effectively. To kill that many people--most of them trained soldiers--in such a short period of time took careful planning and execution that was both quick and methodical. And quite capable. That's not the kind of insane that I saw when I lived in Berkeley.

So from a public safety viewpoint I believe you can justify the death penalty in cases like this, even if you leave retribution/vengeance out of the equation.

The most fundamental problem with politics today

Some say the trouble with politics is that it has been corrupted by moneyed interests. Others that the other side has gotten too powerful through lies and deception--the right says this about the left, the left about the right.

But there's a deeper problem: society has gotten more complex than at any time in the past, as have the issues facing us--and this complexity is too much for the average human mind. Over half the human race isn't up to the task.

This is nobody's fault. Intelligence is expensive, metabolically speaking. You learn this if you get scuba diver training. Your body pumps an incredible volume of blood through your head in order to feed all those brain cells. Every animal's metabolism represents a compromise between effectiveness and efficiency--that is, we're only as smart as we needed to be 50,000 years ago--otherwise, extra smarts would have added too much need for high protein food.

So...how smart did we need to be? Smarter than other animals. We had that. And in our recent evolution (over the last million years or so) our ancestors got quite a bit smarter. Then we stopped getting smarter, a long time before we developed agriculture and the rest of civilization.

We reached a balance point between what it took to feed our brains and what our brains could do for us.

At that point we were smart enough to become masters of our primitive world--to know what to eat, what to not eat, what the threats were, what the opportunities were...how to make our way through that world.

The problem is that that world doesn't much resemble this one. It wasn't simple, to be sure. Look at what Kalahari Bushmen living traditionally had to know--such as how to find water in a desertlike landscape. But it was an environment someone with an IQ of 100 could master.

Ours isn't.

So there's over half the population, in over their heads. Not so bad when things are going well, as they were in the 50s (if you were white at least). But as things have gotten progressively worse for this group over the last 30 years or more, this group has dimly realized that rising tides didn't lift their boats.

They want hope. They want answers they can understand. They want revenge on whoever did this to them. They want to feel something besides helpless and futureless.

And--especially in times of stress--they want leaders who look like them and talk like them.

This opens the door to demagogues. They make people feel like they do understand the situation, and that they can do something about it.

So what do you say? That they're incapable of understanding the situation, and they're helpless? That dog's not gonna hunt.

So we're stuck. Maybe Slipknot is right..."All hope is gone."

Fort Hood mass murder

I keep thinking about something Osama Bin Ladin said a decade ago: that Christianity is a religion of life, while Islam is a religion of death, and that this fact made us weak and them strong.

So here's an American Major and a psychiatrist--and an Islamist. He was willing to die, to be sure. And to murder as many people as he could before going to his fate.

Nobody wants to deal with the possibility that Islam is more likely to produce Major Hassans than are other world views. This thought doesn't conflict with the likelihood that the average Muslim isn't murderous. I'm just asking whether Islam produces a statistically significantly higher percentage of terrorist/murderers than other world views.

And if so, what can we do about it? Every Islamic terrorist stands on the shoulders of Islamist thought leaders. We have to go after them, and do so in Islamic terms--that's the trick, I suspect. Instead of talking about how Islam is bad, we have to talk about how Islamists are bad Muslims.

We have to attack the underlying beliefs directly. Calling murderers like Hassan cowards or nut cases or solitary actors is both ridiculous and counterproductive. He wasn't a coward--given his beliefs, he was actually quite brave. Studies of terrorist murderers have indicated that they aren't insane in the sense that, say, a paranoid schizophrenic or a manic depressive is insane. And he didn't act alone. He was brought to this state of mind by legions of effective propagandists. I bet if you look at the websites he frequented and possibly the individuals he talked to at his local mosque, you'll find the ideological support for his murders.

Hassan was a Muslim terrorist, trying to achieve social change through murder. I'm sure that's how he saw himself (except for the "terrorist" label of course). Our challenge is to get other Muslims to view him as a bad Muslim.

Population is SO over

To those who believe we can magically feed any number of people, I'll just say

"Hope clouds observation."

The fact that must be faced squarely is that the indigenous populations of the advanced nations are not growing much if at all, while those in the third world are exploding, along with many first generation immigrant populations in America and Europe.

If you look at a chart of population growth over the last few centuries, you'll see that the human population remained stable for centuries, then exploded after around 1900, with the advent of modern medicine; but in the advanced world the advance of women's rights and effective contraception kept the lid on population explosion. Not so in the countries where women have few if no rights--especially those dominated by religions that make women second-class citezens or simply chattel.

Environmentalists considered overpopulation to be a key issue until the 1970s, when they joined with religious conservatives in opposing any limits to population. That's when most environmentalists became enemies of the environment, and of our planet's future, and of future generations, sacrificing them to short-sighted sentimentality.

How these people think the human population can keep expanding infinitely is beyond me. It just shows how little science education the average liberal arts college graduate gets.

Who are district attorneys protecting?

Prosecutorial misconduct is like a mugging that goes on for 10 years. When the Innocence Project was started by a Northwestern U. professor and his student reporters, every district attorney's office fought them tooth and nail to prevent convicts from getting DNA tests--even when the convict was willing to pay for it. And despite the hard-core obstructionism by one out of five of these prosecutors, the Innocence Project has gotten 244 prisoners off death row and long sentences. No one knows how many more have been railroaded by DAs and cops looking for convictions uber alles--the Innocence Project can only work for a few, and those are limited to the ones for whom DNA evidence is available, mostly.

I'm all for the death penalty if a heinous murderer's guilt is unambiguous. But it has to be rock solid--even eye witnesses have proven to be remarkably fallible. And innumerable DAs and cops have proven to be more interested in convictions than in justice.

I bring this up now because the Cook County (Chicago) DA's office has finally done something different about an Innocence Project case.

It's going after the student reporters.

The NYTimes reports it here:

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25innocence.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all)

Making DA and county sheriff offices elective is inherently corrupting, and nonsense like this illustrates how low they can go.

Clash of civilizations?

The American right has been demonizing Islam for years. But there is an element of truth in their rants. The latest came from the New York Times' newish conservative columnist Ross Douthat. Here's my response:

Normally as a centrist Democrat and a devout--so to speak--empiricist, I oppose nearly everything Douthat says.

But I've traveled a fair amount in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, and I've witnessed the truth of what he says here.

Muslims say "Islam" means submission, and that that means "submission to Allah." And in my wife's and my travels the many Muslims we've encountered personally have lived up to that modest ideal.

But this religion's theological establishment is another matter. Every Mosque in Indonesia--even when it's in majority-Christian or majority-Hindu regions--blares out its calls to prayer and other exhortations hourly from early in the morning to late at night, and does so using PA systems Metallica could use for stadium concerts. The Hindus and Christians subjected to this racket grind their teeth, and they've told us so in no uncertain terms.

An additional irony is that not one Indonesian out of a thousand can understand what's being hollered out through those giant loudspeakers. It's not only in Arabic, a language virtually unrelated to Bahasa Indonesia, but it's an archaic Arabic few Arabs understand either. The interpretation is left up to the local imams, many trained and financed by the rigid fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam, paid for with our petrodollars funneled through Saudi Arabia.

And it's having effect. More and more Indonesian Muslims are being moved rightward, with women taking the veil, so to speak, and even small children being forced to wear stifling, swaddling garments in the hot, humid tropical climate of Indonesia.

We just got back from Bali, and one thing that struck us was a new mosque built on a hillock overlooking a revered Hindu temple set by a lake in Bali's mountains. The symbolism was obvious and inescapable--the mosque was next to the temple grounds and it hung over the Hindu temple complex. The large botanical gardens nearby, where Balinese in love like to go and, if they're daring, even hold hands, is dominated by the calls to prayer blaring out from the adjacent mosque. And Bali is at least 90% Hindu--though Javanase Muslims are pouring across the channel, buying land, building Mosques, and Islamifying more and more of the island. Bali's Hindu majority is complaining to the authorities in Jakarta urgently--to no avail so far.
And this is just a microcosm of the way Islamic officialdom imposes its "new world order" everywhere it can.

Sure, Christians have church bells, and I've heard plenty. But they aren't a fraction of the acoustic dominance the mosques establish wherever they can get away with it.

America hasn't had much problems with Islam within our country because we've gotten the most educated Muslim immigrants, and they're a majority almost nowhere here in communities, except possibly for Detroit--where I hear the Mosque PA systems are doing their very loud thing now.

Islam has plenty of moderates--probably a large majority of their religious community. But they don't control the mosques, by and large, and many don't dare speak up, since Islamists control the moderates through threats, intimidation, and, across the Arab world...murder. Not to mention places like the Netherlands and Denmark and England and Spain, which have all witnessed these things as well. The Islamists stridently insist--very much like Christian fundamentalists--that only they are true Muslims, and you have to knuckle under to their 7th century worldview if you want to be a good Muslim.

And the intimidation has worked, and not just in the mideast and Indonesia. When the Danish cartoons came out, only one large American newspaper dared publish them (the Philadelphia Inquirer). Every other one, including the New York Times, chickened out. And the cartoons were incredibly mild by Western standards.

I don't want to see us pitting ourselves against Islam per se--but we have to stop submitting to it in ways large and small. Visit Bali--a wonderful place to visit, by the way--and you'll see what I mean.

We have to somehow start supporting Muslim moderates. Of course if and when we do the Islamists will call anyone who agrees with us Western stooges. So it will be a very, very tough propaganda war. And of course Bush did so much during his reign to make this job as difficult as possible.

It will take the most astute statesmanship to change the minds of Muslims, a majority of whom, even the moderates, believe the West is out to get them.

But we can't just sit there, silenced by our own liberal convictions (and even American right wingers are liberals by Islamist stndards). They're playing for keeps, and it's time we acknowledge that.

Water supply issues mask a deeper problem

The NYTimes yesterday published an editorial calling for reform of water supply/ pollution legislation and vigorous enforcement of existing laws. I wrote this response:

Everything the NYTimes editorial board recommends in this article is true, I believe. Yet this editorial has a fundamental problem. It doesn't examine the cause of our overuse of our water supplies.

That cause is overpopulation--the issue the American left abandoned decades ago, for fear of being called racist--and because neither liberals nor conservatives, for the most part, have the integrity to face our real problems, because they'd rather not face the solutions required.

Look at an article in this very issue of the Times, titled \"Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow,\" stating that currently world population is slated to grow to 9.1B people in 40 years, which in turn will require increasing \"food production 50% in 2030 and 70% in 2050\"--with a communsurate increase in water supplies. And while the perceived overpopulation growth is in the third world, America uses vastly more natural resources than the equivalent number of third world people and land.

The world population was only 1 billion in 1900. Then it took off. Glassy eyed optimists claim that we can feed more people. OK. How many more? Do you honestly think the Earth has infinite growth possibilities for water and food supplies? We're going to tap out everything, technology notwithstanding, sooner or later. And then what? As that article states, today over a billion people suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition.

And students of war predict that future wars may be fought over water more than anything else--especially where the water moves across national boundaries. We led the charge by destroying Mexico's once-fertile Colorado delta farmlands when we built Hoover Dam--and now that land has been poisoned by salt water intrusion into the water table.

In this country, overpumping is destroying our porous aquifers, as is happening worldwide. Those are underground rock formations that store water. When we overpump these formations the rock settles and it can't store water any more. Then it just runs off into the ocean, and the wells run dry.

So--want to solve our water problems? Start by not letting anyone else into this country, then expel anyone who isn't here with our permission, then follow Communist China's lead by mandating one-child families, then provide free contraception and abortion to anyone, no questions asked.

Sound too harsh? Wait 'till you see what Mother Nature's preparing to do to us if we don't solve our problems ourselves. They'll make the draconian solutions I've proposed look like pattycake in the garden.

Archive time

My spouse and I are going scuba diving in Indonesia for a couple of weeks. While we're gone, you might want to poke around in my archives. I've focused on enduring issues and tried to provide enduring ways of handling yourself in verbal tussles when those issues are being discussed.

Scuba diving helps with all this, BTW. Divers who panic tend to die, but on the other hand if you don't die you'll get lots of practice in overcoming panic (for some reason there's always a little part of your brain screaming "I can't breathe water! Get out of here!" every second you're diving), so it helps one's mental discipline as long as you remember that it's not a safe thing to do and use a certain amount of caution.

But neither does it have to be wildly dangerous. It's like skiing--you can stick to the marine equivalent of bunny slopes and be pretty darn safe.

And our hobby has taken us to many exotic (for us) destinations, where, as divers, we interact with the locals to a depth (so to speak) not known by the folks under the beach umbrellas at the resorts.

This helps give me perspective when dealing with domestic political issues.

Fun Fact about Afghanistan

It has come out recently that around $200,000,000 of the Taliban's budget comes from American taxpayers. We spend around $1B/year on development projects. The Taliban skims off about 20% of that through protection rackets. The local Afghans who carry out those development projects build in an added 20% to their pricing to make the payoffs.

Nothing like paying people to kill you.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/090902/usaid-taliban-funding

Start immigration arguments with verifiable facts

Whether you favor or oppose illegal immigration, you must admit the truth of the following facts:

1. Mexico's population in 1940 was around 20 million.

2. Mexico's population in 2000 was over 100 million.

3. Mexico's population growth has not come from immigration to Mexico--it has come from Mexicans having many, many babies. Mexico's dominant religion is Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church fiercely opposes the use of any form of birth control device or drug, including condoms. Catholic social policy dominates Mexico.

4. America's Latino population in 1940 was 1/2 of 1%. Which means, among other things, that the American Southwest was not populated by Mexicans when the Americans arrived. It was populated by American Indians, such as Navaho, Hopi, Puelo, Plains Indians etc.--for whom the few Mexicans there were no more or less than foreign invaders.

5. America's Latino population today is over 14%--more than self-identified blacks at this point. Much of that huge increase stems from two previous amnesties, which at the time were presented as the last amnesty ever, because new enforcement provisions would prevent further illegal immigration. In each case what ensued was real amnesty coupled with fake enforcement. The last such amnesty was in 1986.

6. America is in the depths of its worst recession since the Great Depression.

7. Unemployment for American unskilled laborers is over 20%, and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment for Hispanics who are American citizens is 13%; for blacks, 15%; for teenagers, 26%. Most Mexican illegal immigrants are unskilled laborers. Liberal economist Paul Krugman states that large unskilled immigrant populations always drive down wages for unskilled labor--by around 5-25% today, depending on job and location.

8. Over the last decade Californians had a chance to vote on several initiative measures that sought to restrict government benefits to illegal aliens and make English California's official language. California has a substantial majority of Democrats (i.e. relative liberals). Yet these measures passed, and exit polls indicated that they had the support of around a quarter of Hispanic Americans as well as about 40% of Democrats.

Those are the facts, all of which can be verified independently. And they show that many assertions about illegal immigration are canards. Starting with the so-called American "job magnet."

Mexicans want to move to America because there are too many Mexicans. Mexicans weren't sneaking into America in 1950, despite a booming American economy, because there weren't yet too many Mexicans for Mexico's economy to accommodate. Few people want to leave their town, their country, their culture for a foreign one.

Of course now they don't have to. California has become Mexifornia. For example, the most-watched TV station in Los Angeles (American's second-largest city) only broadcasts in Spanish. Nearly all legal materials, signs, commercial customer support phone systems etc. are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many storefront signs are in Spanish only. You can live your whole life in Mexifornia without having to speak a word of English. And of course, by law, all ballots are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many radio and TV stations broadcast only in Spanish.
And from being a miniscule minority in California in 1940, Mexicans with American citizenship will be a majority of the state's population by 2050, as long as it continues to increase at the present rate.

Now it's one thing to welcome in thousands or even millions of people from one foreign country/culture. It's another for one of those foreign immigrant groups to become the majority in your state, making everyone else, combined, a minority.

That's the conquering of one country by another--a (mostly) unarmed invasion.

And it makes any American supporting this invasion...well, what do you call someone who works to help a foreign country conquer one's own country?