Opinions, art, debate
… is everywhere. Please listen to this stunningly bad performance of the national anthem:
I understand she was trying to be original but what a disaster. We have student singers perform the anthem at the convocation each year, and they all do a better job than this apparently famous performer.
Totally. A prostitute “of color” with a face tattoo, subservient Russian patsies, and a Teamster boss screeching about corporate greed.
This reminded me of an old joke. A young dude writes in his diary:
“Monday. Masturbated with the left hand. Extraordinary.
Tuesday. Masturbated with the right hand. A lot less impressive than the left hand.
Wednesday. Had sex with a woman. A pale semblance of the right hand.”
Today I made soup and folded a small amount of laundry. That must mean I’m getting better, right?
I’m measuring my recovery in household tasks.
N, by the way, bought such an extraordinary quantity of sosiski (hot dogs) that he must think I won’t be on my feet until December.
OK, I apologize. I’m in physical pain and I don’t do painkillers, so I’m irritable.
The way this works now is this. People show up at the border by the hundred thousands. They do it because there’s no alternative. They can’t apply from their homes and without disrupting their lives. That option doesn’t exist for almost anybody. Did you know that? Did you know that our system is set up to force people who want to immigrate to quit their jobs, sell their property, leave their children (or take them on a very perilous journey)? We actually engineer the situation with those detention camps, etc because we have not created an alternative. We spill crocodile’s tears about it when this could be solved tomorrow with great ease. This makes me so angry. When I emigrated to Canada, nobody forced me to schlep across continents and sit in a detention camp for weeks. The process was long, yes, but while it took place, I was living in my home, making money at my job, and not being molested and exploited by human traffickers. This is what I want for migrants into America. And for wanting that, I’m routinely excoriated as an immigrant hater. It’s extraordinary.
OK, moving on. Currently, migrants arrive at the border. There are so many of them that nobody can do anything beyond shipping them around the country and assigning them a court date sometime in the distant future that they are supposed to attend and start the process of demonstrating that they are eligible for immigration. Most of them never show up for that court date. Many don’t even understand what it means because they don’t speak the language in which they are informed about the court date.
Now please reread the preceding paragraph and tell me when exactly the vetting of these migrants for criminal antecedents is supposed to happen. How do we find out that a migrant is a Colombian Ted Bundy or a Guatemalan MS-13 gangster? Exactly, we don’t. In the process that I propose (and which has existed in other countries for decades), the vetting of criminal records happens while the applicant lives at home. This means that he has zero opportunities to commit crimes in the country where he wants to emigrate. Doesn’t it make sense to find out if one is a criminal before letting them in?
There are no wars going on in Central America right now. There are no totalitarian regimes. The crime rates have been dropping dramatically. There’s literally nothing going on that necessitates the removal of over a million people a year from their countries and their urgent transportation to the US. So why are we dragging these people over by the million so that they can sleep on the floor of Logan Airport, etc when they could be sleeping in their beds at home? My only explanation is that watching these spectacles of abjection makes us feel good.
Even a few years ago, I would have been against this girl. But now I’m thinking, who else will oppose the practice of letting naked men into girl’s locker rooms?
The Florida prosecution of Trump has been dismissed:
This was the most perilous of all 4 Trump cases.
There’s something that the Afghan withdrawal, the Secret Service actions last week and this prosecution share. They were done in a bumbling, incompetent way. Leaving aside Trump, this is bad for all of us because people in charge of government services seem utterly incapable.
Small-city life in America is very sweet. I called my periodontist to cancel my appointment because I’m not ambulatory, and it’s not a receptionist who picks up but the doctor himself. We chat about the family and the injury, crack some jokes, everything is very homey and nice.
I can’t enter a store (well, now I physically can’t enter anything but I mean normally) without giving a report on where Klara is and why I’m not bringing her with me and what she likes to do these days.
My niece bought a swimsuit but it still has a security tag on it. Nobody at the store made a hassle. “Do you have the receipt? No? That’s fine, too. Here you go, sorry for the inconvenience.” People are calm and unhurried. Everything is 7 minutes away, so why hurry?
I don’t want to bore everybody to death because people have heard this from me a million times, so I’ll answer briefly.
This is not a question of who but of how. I strongly believe that no immigration applications from people in the country illegally should be processed. In addition, I believe that no immigration applications should be processed at the border. People should apply for immigration through the embassies and consulates in their own countries. This way, people won’t have to cross countries and borders in horrific conditions, putting themselves at the mercy of traffickers and gangsters.
The process is broken. It puts migrants into terrible situations. It devastates the countries through which they march. It creates a permanent underclass in the US and destroys the economies and the communities that these migrants leave. The process must be fixed. This can be done cheaply and easily but absolutely no politician in the US is proposing to fix it.
If you stop trying to operate with primitive, screamy labels for a change, you might notice that my position is enormously more humane and respectful than the horror that currently exists and that you seem to support.
Yes, it’s a good article. Here is the link. I particularly agree with this:
The irony of Donald Trump’s first four years in power were that they seemed anticlimactic. I know this might sound preposterous given the nervous breakdown that the media had between 2016 and 2020. But what substantial lasting changes were achieved? The Trump peace plan seemed weighty at the time but, well — so much for that. The border wall remained unfinished. Operation Warp Speed is the kind of thing that Trump’s supporters are liable to recall with horror. Trump’s ability to conjure up, or simply find himself in, iconic moments never seemed to be translated into major change.
This is very true. Trump is best at being himself. He’s great at grand symbolic gestures. But those gestures don’t do much for me. There was still no wall, nothing remotely similar to the endlessly promised deportations, no executive orders on immigration or anchor babies, no barriers to the BLM, no action against transification. Some positive action on Ukraine and Israel, OK, great but as we saw later, it was light-years away from being decisive. And it was like that in everything. A timid, vacillating administration that never even attempted to live up to the grandiosity of its rhetoric.
In short, Trump promises a lot of great things and won’t do any of them. Biden promises a lot of bad things and will do all of them.
On the positive side, being bedridden is making me miss the current heatwave.
On an even more positive side, since I can’t cook, the cooking falls to the aunt, which made Klara find out that she likes all sorts of meat. She never agreed to take any meat from my hands but now she’s discovering herself as a carnivore.
On the negative side, I have started to read a 700-page novel that Juan Manuel de Prada published in 2007 and immediately discovered that he published a new 800-page novel a few weeks ago. I am now hopelessly conflicted.
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