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Thursday, June 21, 2018

Be still my bleeding heart

Illegal immigration is such a hot topic that I'm beginning to suspect that it is a distraction and not much of a threat to the US in any meaningful way.  All the focus is on the southern border and immigrants from Mexico and Central America, which makes sense, I suppose, because those folks can simply walk in but I am sympathetic to the plight of those desperate people.  We forget that prior to 1848 most of the southwest US was Mexico and maybe some of those Mexicans got screwed out of land after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  And more than a couple of Central American countries got all screwed up because of US business interests and US government interference; the term banana republic did not spring out of thin air.  If the US has been responsible for the poor conditions that create so many refugees then the US should show a little more compassion.

All the blathering about enforcing the regulations and following the rule of law is a bunch of hogwash.  The White House seems awfully selective in which laws it chooses to enforce.  Emoluments, anyone?  The threat to the American labor force is completely phony.  The jobs that illegal immigrants take are at the bottom of the food chain, the lowest of the low.  All the high paying jobs are taken by the legal immigrants, with our government's blessing.  I wonder if that hospital in Petoskey has any doctors from India or nurses from the Philippines.  I agree that immigration should be regulated and documented but we don't have to be heartless assholes about it. We have plenty of room and maybe those illegals could figure our what to do with Detroit if given the chance.

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The wacky Saudis are at it again, and I hope they don't give Trump any ideas to build a canal instead of a wall.  Qatar is being cut off from the Arabian Peninsula and will be an island if the Saudi plan is fulfilled.  It's pretty clever, though, digging a canal a mile or so south of the border, wide enough for the big ships.  And what, you ask, will be on the strip of Saudi land adjacent to Qatar?  A military base, of course, and a facility for nuclear waste.

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Like many Bible thumpers, Jeff Sessions likes to cherry pick verses that suit him but the Bible is full of contradictory rules.  I don't know exactly what St. Paul wrote but if we are to follow the law in all cases then the German citizenry had an obligation to follow Hitler in all of his psychotic glory, didn't they?  Sessions is delusional if he thinks that all laws are good laws and I'm sure unwavering fealty is part of the deal; we know who else demands such loyalty.

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It's been a while since I've posted anything about AI so here's a little update.  An IBM computer won a debate against a human, but it lost one, too.  The fact that computers can verbally debate humans is mind boggling; the  voice was female and reminded me of the voice of the HAL 9000 in it's speech cadence.  Creepy, I know, but our runaway future started quite a while ago.

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You can't accuse the Japanese of not making long term plans.  Their government recently approved a 70-year plan for the scrapping of a nuclear reprocessing plant.  No wonder nothing gets done in Washington; nobody plans for anything beyond the next election cycle, or so it seems to me.

Since Trump seems incapable of any original ideas I wonder what he would be doing if he didn't have Steve Bannon whispering in his ear or Stephen Miller writing his speeches.  Get rid of those guys, give the Cheeto an extra scoop of ice cream and I think the situation would improve dramatically.  Well, at least until he finds suitable replacements; isn't Sean Hannity on speed dial?

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