The End is Near!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assimilate

"assimilate (third-person singular simple present assimilates, present participle assimilating, simple past and past participle assimilated)

1. (transitive) To incorporate nutrients into the body, especially after digestion. quotations ▼

   Food is assimilated and converted into organic tissue.

2. (transitive) To incorporate or absorb (knowledge) into the mind. quotations ▼

   The teacher paused in her lecture to allow the students to assimilate what she had said.

3. (transitive) To absorb (a person or people) into a community or culture.

   The aliens in the science-fiction film wanted to assimilate human beings into their own race.

4. (transitive) To compare to something similar. (Can we add an example for this sense?)
5. (transitive) To bring to a likeness or to conformity; to cause a resemblance between. quotations ▼

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Sir M. Hale to this entry?)

6. (intransitive) To become similar.
7. (intransitive) To be incorporated or absorbed into something."

As is often the case when people argue about definitions, Uncle Ken and I are both correct.  I am using definition 3, and I think that Uncle Ken is using definition 7.  As it happens, my assertion that assimilation is a two way street works for both of them.  Whether Culture A assimilates Culture B, or Culture B assimilates into Culture A, the result is the same.  Culture B is diminished but not extinguished, it is incorporated into Culture A, and Culture A will never be quite the same again.
I agree that words like "conflict" and "survivors" are not appropriate here because we are dealing with refugees rather than invaders.  Nevertheless, when one culture crowds in on another culture, there is usually a period of upheaval that ends, maybe centuries later, when the two cultures assimilate each other.  It's not the end of the world, but it can be downright inconvenient for those who are experiencing it.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The following is copied from the link that Uncle Ken provided in his last post:

"A more recent example is Argentina, which defaulted on its debt in late 2001 on $132 billion in loans. The amount represented one-seventh of all the money borrowed by the third world at the time. After a period of uncertainty, the country opted to devalue its currency and was eventually able to recover with GDP growth of around 90% over the nine-year since."

This seems to confirm what I said about Argentina doing fine.  Or course, they weren't doing fine right after they defaulted, but they're doing okay now.  I thought the rest of the article tended to confirm what I said about sovereign default, except for the "restructuring" part, which is not germane to my argument.  My point is that, while it's not much fun, sovereign default is not the end of the world.  According to the article, lots of countries have defaulted in the past, some of them multiple times, and they're still functioning today.  In the case of the US, and I believe most of the countries of the modern world, the national debt is an important tool for managing the ups and downs of the economic cycle.  When they think the economy needs a boost, they buy government debt from private brokers with money that they create out of nothing.  When they think the economy is running too hot, they take money out of circulation by selling government debt.  The total debt will never be payed off, it is periodically refinanced by issuing more bonds.  I know it shouldn't work, but it does, as long as there are plenty of buyers for those new bonds.

The reason the asylum seekers turn themselves in after crossing the border illegally is that they know they will be fed and cared for, and then released on the US side.  Legal immigrants, on the other hand, have to wait on the Mexican side at their own expense for their applications to be processed.  Good behavior is being punished and bad behavior is being rewarded.  Anybody who has trained a dog or a kid will tell you that's not the way to do it.

"So how about if a guy is on trial for a bank robbery he says he didn't commit says he doesn't think bank robbing is illegal and if the chance came to rob one came up he might very well do it?  I think you all know who I am referring to." - I think that you are probably referring to Trump, but I am unfamiliar with the particular case in point.  If you want me to comment on it, you will have to give me more information than that.

Speaking of the end of the world, there are signs that it might indeed be upon us.  A little over thirteen years ago, the date was "6-6-6", which is the Sign of the Beast.  Since then, there have been wars and rumors of wars.  Now the Obama Nation has come and gone, and the Trump is sounding loudly throughout the land.  Coincidence? I think not!  The good news is that we don't have to worry about the climate heating up anymore.  Well, at least some of us don't.

If the prez doesn't think it's illegal then it must be legal

As I said most of Beagles's recent posts have been garden variety news types of stuff I have already read in the papers, magazines, internet, radio, tv, so I am already aware of the information.  If it is something that is unusual or has some direct bearing on what Beagles is talking about, I will read it, otherwise I won't. 

An asylum seeker is somebody who wants to leave his country so therefore they are all immigrants.  But there are also immigrants who are trying to sneak into the country, whereas asylum seekers give themselves up the minute they cross the border.  They are two different groups and mixing them up clouds the issue.

Assimilation is a one way street.  If you mean something else you have to use another word.

There is concern in some circles that Hispanic lumps are currently being added faster than the pot can melt them

This sounds like Trump saying many people have said or very smart lawyers have told me,  .Myself I am not that concerned,  Beagles is not worried about global warming because he lives in the swamp where it does not effect him.  So far salsa has not made an appearance in the relatively cosmopolitan Cheboygan, so I don't see why he is worried about trouble at the border. 

Some progress was made on global warming under Obama.  Much of that has been reversed by Trump, we are now headed the other way.

I have to admit that I was shocked to hear that Argentina defaulted, but apparently this sort of thing happens all the time,  It doesn't however mean that the nation rids itself of its debt, it just restructures its debt, generally by lowering the payments and extending the length of the payments as this link explains,  https://www.thebalance.com/what-happens-when-a-country-defaults-1978981  I also don't think Argentina is doing fine,  Is Beagles implying that we shouldn't worry about the debt because we can just refuse to pay it and everything will be fine?


So how about if a guy is on trial for a bank robbery he says he didn't commit says he doesn't think bank robbing is illegal and if the chance came to rob one came up he might very well do it?  I think you all know who I am referring to.

Words and Numbers

When I post a link to an article with little or no explanation it's usually because it pertains to a subject that we have been discussing lately.  My purpose is not to back up a particular statement that I have made, it's to shed some light on the subject in general.  We can discuss the article, pros and cons, if all three of us has read it, but we can't reasonably discuss something that one or more of us has not read.  A lot of guys might selectively quote brief statements out of context that support their position, but I don't usually do that.  Okay, sometimes I do that with old sayings, but that's not what I'm doing when I post a link to a complete article.

Immigration is when people travel from one country to another with no intention of ever going back.   Technically, you have to emigrate from one country before you can immigrate to another, but people who do that are commonly just called immigrants.  Asylum can either be a temporary or a permanent thing, but most of the asylum seekers these days are really immigrants who are just using the asylum law as a way to get into the country.  There is an annual quota for regular immigrants, but asylum seekers are not counted in that quota.  There may be a separate quota for them, but I'm not sure about that.

Assimilation is a two way street, but the larger group is usually thought of as assimilating the smaller group.  Remember the Borg on Star Trek?  They always said "You will be assimilated", not "You will assimilate us,"  Technically, both groups were assimilating each other, but the Borg, believing themselves to be the dominant group, didn't look at it that way.  I think that's why they have annual immigration quotas, to insure that we assimilate the immigrants instead of the other way around.  The term "melting pot" implies that diverse people mutually assimilate each other, resulting in an alloy that is hopefully stronger than any of its single elements.  New populations that are not yet assimilated are referred to as "lumps in the meting pot".

There is concern in some circles that Hispanic lumps are currently being added faster than the pot can melt them, which will make for a poor alloy that is not properly blended.  The numbers lately have been running in excess of a hundred thousand a month, but those are just the illegals that are being apprehend and subsequently released on our side of the border.  There are also around ten thousand legal asylum seekers who are waiting on the Mexican side for their cases to come up.  Add that to the untold millions of Hispanics, both legal and illegal, who are already here, and you can see why some people are concerned.

I wouldn't say that nothing is being done about climate change.  Windmills and solar panels have been sprouting up all over the country like mushrooms for years.  I understand that Europe is ahead of us in that effort, but I think that Asia and Africa are way behind, waiting for us to give them the money to do it.  Last I heard, the carbon tax was languishing in committee, which is a good place for it.  Truth be known, it wouldn't hurt me a bit.  With 88 acres of prime swamp land and a population of two, Beaglesonia is surely sucking more carbon out of the air than it is putting in, so they should be paying us.  Lots of luck on that one!

The National Debt we will always have with us. It's the way they try to control the economy but, of course, the economy often has a mind of its own.  The worst thing that can happen would be if people quit loaning the government money, in which case, they would go into default and start all over again.  Argentina did that a few years ago and, last I heard, they were doing fine.

buying toasters together

Beagles is correct that there is a difference in tone between the two statements, but as far as import there is not so much.

If Beagles expects me to read his links he will have to preface them with how what they say backs up a particular statement he has made, but I am not going to read a whole article blind and guess what Beagles wants me to take away from it.  From the text of the links, I get the impression that they are garden variety news links from msn, and though I don't use that feed, I do read a variety of garden variety news links and I assume that the msn links are saying the same thing I read in mine.

And I do agree with Beagles that it is a problem, that is that the number of asylum seekers is overwhelming the people who are supposed to deal with them, though one wonders why the simple expedient of hiring more judges has not been done.  Beagles seems to mix immigration with asylum seekers which makes it hard to discuss, when is he talking about one, when is he talking about the other, they are not the same thing.  Nothing is being done about global warming or the national debt and I see both as far greater threats to the nation, so I don't get too worked up about this one.

Assimilation refers to the newcomers becoming like old-timers, not vice versa.  Survivors is an odd word to use.  it applies to people who live after a good many are killed.  It hardly applies to assimilation. I'm not sure if we have a word that refers directly to the effect the newcomers have on the old-timers, but I believe we used to call it the melting pot.  It's generally seen as a pretty cool thing, without the krauts we wouldn't have Christmas trees.  I don't know why Beagles is so against it.  I like salsa.


Beagles makes an interesting point about the mixed-race couples in tv commercials.  You see it happening but you don't see much in the media about it.  It's not a government mandate, but it's something businesses and advertising companies have taken up on their own,  When I first saw them there would be a person of one race talking and then a person of another race and of the opposite sex would appear and I wondered at first what are they doing there, and then there was some kind of show of affection and I realized wow, they are a couple.  What's kind of cool is they don't make some sort of statement about how there should be racial equality, they just agree to buy a toaster or car insurance like nothing special is going on here. 

It's great.

Mass Migrations

"I don't think he knew what he was talking about, and maybe he still doesn't.  

I don't see a lot of daylight between the former statement and the following:

 you have a stable genius, pardon me very stable genius running the country who loves raising the roof over this, and a senate majority that slobbers over each other to kiss his feet." 

I suppose I'm biased, but I think that a disinterested third party might say that the first statement expresses reasonable doubt, while the second one expresses bitter, sarcastic exaggeration. 

I have provided numerous links to my references on this issue, but Uncle Ken either refuses to read them or dismisses them as Trumpist propaganda.  While Trump may have a certain amount of control over the US Senate, I don't think he has taken over the major news media outlets, at least not yet.  Okay, there's FOX, but they were like that before Trump came along.

History is full of mass migrations that forever changed the nature of the populations into which they migrated.  The Huns, the Mongols, the Goths, and the Vikings immediately come to mind, but those were warrior cultures.  The current mass migrants are refugees, not warriors, so it's not exactly the same thing.  The first example that comes to my mind is the refugees from the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s.  Then there's the Irish Potato Famine refugees that flooded into the US during the 19th Century.  Our own ancestors were refugees from the poverty and war of Europe, mostly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The whole US westward expansion from sea to shinning sea also qualifies as one of the largest mass migrations in history.  Then there's the movement of Blacks and Appalachians from the rural South to the urban North during our own lifetimes, although I understand that tide is currently ebbing back to its place of origin.  I don't know what rate of migration it takes to qualify as a mass migration, but I would be surprised if a hundred thousand a month wasn't in the ball park.

Every time one culture rapidly moves in on another culture, there is a certain amount of conflict, sometimes it's physically violent, and other times it involves discrimination and exclusion.  All of us who grew up in Chicago should be familiar with that, but I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age.  I think we all know what assimilation means as well, it's when the conflict dies down to the point that we start marrying each others sisters.  The Blacks and Whites still have a way to go with that one but, if the commercials I've been seeing on TV lately are any indication, the tide is beginning to turn.

Social Media Part One

 I don't think he knew what he was talking about, and maybe he still doesn't.  

I don't see a lot of daylight between the former statement and the following:

 you have a stable genius, pardon me very stable genius running the country who loves raising the roof over this, and a senate majority that slobbers over each other to kiss his feet. 

except maybe for the addition of the Senate majority who are basically irrelevant to anything anyway.

Historically, mass migrations like this usually end up with the survivors assimilating each other after a period of conflict. 

What does this mean?  How can survivors (or anybody?)  assimilate each other?  What sort of conflict?  Whatever is Beagles talking about?

See we have had this discussion before which chiefly consists of Beagles hysterically thinking somehow they are going to take over the country, and proposing a bunch of crackpot schemes where it is left up to me to correct his mistaken facts and basically do all the research, and I'm not going to do that anymore.


I have been a member of an improv group for about five years now, we have had a couple leaders in that time, but there is also a rough democracy,  The improvers are consulted for their opinions and sometimes they give them without being consulted, and this wastes a lot of time.  What one person says inspires someone else to say something, which inspires still another, and so on and so on, and meanwhile the boards lay before us untrodden.  I come to improv to trod them and not to listen to a bunch of yak yak.

I got to thinking we need to have some other sort of forum, one where people can discuss their ideas without taking up board time.  Well of course The Institute is the gold standard for forums, but I didn't see my fellow improvers as likely to write multi paragraphed posts, so I thought maybe I could interest them with something that encourages shorter responses and is pretty easy to use and I thought why not Facebook?

A multi paragraph post on the subject will follow but it will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

We're Doomed

Trump did not cause the current immigration crisis, it was going on before he took office.  It has gotten worse during his administration, but I don't think that's his fault.  He promised to fix it, but I don't think he knew what he was talking about, and maybe he still doesn't.  Nevertheless, if Trump resigned tomorrow, the problem would not go away.  What we need is a total overhaul of the immigration laws, and even that might be too little too late.  The ICE people and the Border Patrol people do not make the laws, it's their job to enforce the laws as they are currently written.  I think they are doing the best they can with what they've got to work with, but it's like trying to bail out the Titanic with a ten quart pail.  Historically, mass migrations like this usually end up with the survivors assimilating each other after a period of conflict.  Like I said before, it's not going to be pretty.

For most of our lifetimes, this country has been exporting jobs and importing people.  Although it's not a magic bullet, it might help if we bring the jobs to where the people are.  Stop all imports from Latin America and put the Latin American immigrants to work producing the same products that they did in their home countries.  We'll have to pay them more, but the labor costs should be offset by the reduced shipping expenses and the fact that they will be spending their paychecks here and recirculating the money back into the local economy.  If present trends continue, it won't be long before there is nobody left in Latin America to make this stuff for us anyway.  The only things we need from Latin America that can't be produced here are coffee and bananas, but our genetic engineers should be able to do something about that.  If they can make meat out of yeast, they ought to be able to make coffee and bananas out of something or other.

I'm sorry to say that Uncle Ken's Christmas lighting campaign is probably doomed as well.  The board seems to be giving him the old run around, nobody wants to help him, and he refuses to read any documents that might contain a loophole in his favor.  I wish it were not so but, as my grandmother used to say, "Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."