Birthright Citizenship

 

The current hot-button domestic issue is something called 'Birthright Citizenship'.  It is the doctrine that anyone born in the United States (with a few exceptions) is automatically a citizen of the United States.  The argument centers around children of illegal aliens: a pregnant woman crosses the border illegally, births her child, and then demands to stay because her child is a citizen and she can't leave her child, can she?  The child is called 'an anchor baby'.

The problem arises because the 14th amendment says (right up front):

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

This is pretty plain-spoken and can be misinterpreted only in the presence of a serious Jones to do so.  Those who wish to misinterpret it will explain, slowly and carefully so you catch all the words, that this was phrased this way in order to enfranchise slaves who had previously not been considered 'persons' and that no one had anticipated people coming here just so their offspring could be natural-born citizens.

That position is probably correct, but the wording of the 14th amendment sits there staring back at us.  That may have been what they meant, but that's not what they wrote.  They wrote "all persons" and "subject to the jurisdiction" and "are citizens".  If this ever goes before SCOTUS and they rule that anchor babies are not really citizens, they will be 'legislating from the bench', something the GOP hates when Democrats do it, and the Democrats hate when the GOP does it.

Further, the whole debate dances around the real issue, carefully ignoring it — because if we can ignore it long enough, no one will notice that it's there — we hope.  The real issue is that we have turned the United States into a stereotypical welfare state.  Can't afford food?  Yes, you can have food stamps.  Can't afford rent?  Yes, you can have an AFDC supplement.  Don't worry about school; it's free.  Arrested and can't afford an attorney to defend you in court?  Miranda!

The people worrying about 'anchor babies' and 'illegal aliens' are really worried that somebody will arrive on our doorstep and demand a piece of cake that should justly be reserved for Real Americans™.  They will deny it, of course, but it has to be true.  We are in a job-surplus position at the moment — too many jobs and not enough people to fill them — so if Real Americans™ were worried them Messicans were going to take our jobs...  which jobs?  The ones there aren't enough workers to fill?  The only thing 'adding more workers' to the mix would do is bump the GDP up a notch or two.  Horrors!

We don't have 'an illegal alien problem'.  We have 'a welfare state problem'.  Fix the 'welfare state problem', and the illegal alien problem will evaporate like dew on a Summer morning.

 

Arab Culture and Other Myths

 

Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post reporter critical of the Saudi regime. strolls into his local Saudi embassy and is never seen again.  Turkey claims that he was killed by strangulation seconds after entering the building, dismembered, and the body parts spirited away, although how they might know this is anybody's guess.

Two sisters, Saudis, go missing in Virginia and are only found when their lifeless bodies, bound back-to-back waist and ankles with duct tape, wash up on the shores of the Hudson River.  They had applied to the United States for political asylum.  The cause of death is unknown, but a preliminary autopsy reveals that they were alive when they went into the water.  'Drowning' is not, apparently, within the coroner's vocabulary.  Their family has been ordered by the Saudi government to return home immediately.

In Pakistan, a Christian woman must have said something she shouldn't have.  She was arrested for blasphemy, a capital offense there, tried, and convicted.  This week, an appeals court overturned her death sentence and now one of Pakistan's political parties is calling for the death of the judges who deprived them of the joy of seeing her head lopped off by a scimitar.

President Trump, Mike Pompeo, and scores of others are trying to make nice with the Saudis for reasons that are not at all clear.  It may have something to do with the $1.3 billion they're planning to spend at Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, and a clutch of other military equipment suppliers.  The American people may be starting to notice that we're supplying one of the most murderous regimes on Earth with equipment they may one day turn on their former friends (us), just as they are now doing in Syria.

There are two kinds of Muslim.  The first kind wants to kill all the unbelievers.  The second kind wants somebody else to kill all the unbelievers.

Selling these people things they can kill with is an absolutely insane foreign policy.

 

Representation Without Taxation

 

One of the issues over which we Americans fought our Revolutionary War was "taxation without representation".  We were being taxed by the Crown (King George III) and denied the ability to choose our own representatives in Parliament.  There were other issues, of course, but that was one of the biggies that could get those unruly colonists to rise up in revolt.

Our Constitution is written to, among other things, guarantee that every taxed American is represented — mostly.  The Territory of Puerto Rico, for example, has no representative in Congress, and therefore Puerto Ricans do not have to pay income taxes to the federal government.  They have their own local government and pay local taxes to support that.  The same is generally true of Guam and other territories:  if you can't vote for a Congressional representative, you don't get taxed.  (This is not 100% true 100% of the time, but it's 'close enough for government work'.)

There is, however, another side to that coin.  Some people pay no taxes but still get to vote.  They have 'representation without taxation'.  It may turn out that your income is so small and your tax credits and authorized deductions are large enough that your 'taxable income' is zero and your tax is also zero.  People in this situation are incentivized to vote a certain way because the result of their vote will cost them nothing — there's no penalty for voting this way as opposed to that way.

This may explain why our country is in the condition it's in.  When the number of tax filers who actually pay no tax crosses a certain threshold, the controls that would normally act to correct fiscal irresponsibility disappear.  If you know you won't be taxed for that new road, there's no reason for you to vote against it, is there?

The same sort of analysis applies to those who receive stipends from the government.  'Social Security' is a fine example.  For people who are retired and whose income consists of pensions and social security payments, it is very likely that the 'tax due' line on one's 1040 will be smaller than the total received from taxes paid by others, even if that number is not zero.  That is, there are two categories of 'tax filers': those who pay taxes, and those who consume taxes.

Without the ability to put the brakes on out-of-control spending, bankruptcy looms.  It's inevitable.  It may be that our next revolution will be fueled by the issue of 'representation without taxation'.  At some point in the future, one's W-2s and 1099s that report the core of one's income may show income in two categories: income derived from taxes, and income not derived from taxes.  It will make for an interesting new world when, as must eventually happen, the franchise is restricted to those whose tax contribution exceeds their tax consumption.

Under such a system, Congressmen will vote, but only when they're at work.  They can all stay home on Election Day because their salary is all derived (it damned well better be) from taxes; they are 'tax consumers'.  Policemen and firemen will not vote, along with FBI agents and (uh-oh...) soldiers, although volunteer firemen will vote because they actually have income producing jobs beyond volunteering.  Public school teachers won't vote, but private school teachers will.  The kid who delivers sandwiches from Quizno's will get to vote, but the clerk at DMV who issued his driver's license won't.  It's very likely that SS recipients will no longer vote unless the income from their 401Ks is so large that the tax on the proceeds exceeds their SS checks — in which case they probably don't care, either.

But as long as our electoral system allows people to vote who do not actually 'pay the bill', we will see the wrong kind of politicians elected over and over and over.  It's a recipe for disaster that is just now becoming clear.

 

Around The World In 79 Days

 

Norene and I are toying with the idea of a trans-Pacific cruise next year, Seattle to Australia/New Zealand.  If we go, we will cross both the Equator and the International Date Line and this got me to thinking — always a dangerous situation.

In Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days, the plot twist hinges on the fact that Phileas Fogg travels eastward from London.  As a result, each day's sunset is a little earlier than yesterday's.  In the days before time zones, local time was established by local noon, and it was customary for travelers to set their timepieces to that local standard.  When in Rome...

Because each of Fogg's 'days' was shorter than the canonical 24-hours, he actually arrives back in London a full day ahead of his deadline — but doesn't realize it because he has seen 80 sunsets (in 79 days), although, realistically, when he got to San Francisco, he must certainly have wondered why Thursday's newspaper was being published on Friday...

(Aside: the phenomenon is said to have been discovered by the 17th-century Norwegian explorer, Andersrag, who named it after himself: the Alex Andersrag Time Band...)

In the modern world, we accept that crossing the International Date Line west-to-east involves crossing into yesterday, and crossing east-to-west into tomorrow.  Why should this be so?  Let's perform a little thought-experiment:

We start with two observers in London at 8am on a Tuesday, both with clocks set to GMT and we send both on a high-speed trip (able to cross vast distances in the wink of an eye), one westward to American Samoa, and the other eastward to Tonga.  They are instructed to change their clocks backward or forward as appropriate for the time zone they're currently in.  The one traveling eastward to Tonga will constantly set the clock forward from 8am to 9am to 10am until arriving at Tonga 12 time zones later at 8pm Tuesday.  The other travels west to American Samoa inching his clock backward to 7am and 6am until arriving in American Samoa 11 time zones earlier at 9pm Monday.  At this point, the two observers are a (reasonably) short flight from each other and their clocks say different days.  One of them must be wrong, right?  No, they're both right.

They're both right because neither has crossed the date line.  If the observer in American Samoa travels to meet his partner at Tonga, he will be forced (by convention) to adjust his clock from 'Monday' to 'Tuesday'.  If the observer at Tonga travels to American Samoa, he will be forced to adjust his clock from 'Tuesday' to 'Monday'.  This is what Phileas Fogg didn't realize: at some point during the trip, convention says he stepped across the line from Tuesday into Monday.  Of course, we all know how that worked out: he realizes his error just in time to complete the trip according to the wager he made 80 days prior.

(If we go on that cruise, we will 'lose' a day just after leaving American Samoa — then gain it back and lose it again as the ship weaves back and forth across the line — and not get it back until we return to the U.S. at the end of the cruise.)

 

Buying Testimony

 

It is nominally against the law to offer anything of value to another in exchange for testimony at trial.  I cannot offer you money, no matter how small an amount, to get you either to testify or not to testify or (especially) to testify in a particular way — notice how I skillfully avoided the word 'perjury'.

Yet, prosecutors do this all the time without penalty as when a criminal is offered leniency in sentencing in exchange for one criminal testifying against another.  There's even a name for the process.  It's called 'rolling'.

It is said that one knows one is living in a police state when the government may do with impunity that which the citizen cannot.

In fact, we're seeing this happen in real-time as Robert Mueller bags Paul Manafort for tax evasion and offers an easy sentence if he'll only testify against Donald Trump so Mueller can get a conviction for election tampering or 'collusion with the Russians' — or something.

 

The (longed-for) 28th Amendment

 

There's a chunk of text making the rounds — has made the rounds, in fact, for quite some time — calling for a 28th amendment.  The (proposed, longed-for) 28th amendment would say

Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to Senators and Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.

or some variation thereto.

I think I may have started this a long time ago.  At least, I have a text file dated 11/11/2000 at 9:40a that reads

The 28th Amendment

Restoring Sanity to The Law

1. Congress may not exempt itself or its agents from compliance, in whole or in part, with any Federal law or regulation, nor allow regulations which do so, nor shall it encourage state or local jurisdictions to exempt it from compliance with their laws.

2. Any existing Federal law or regulation which exempts Congress from compliance with its provisions, in whole or in part, is hereby rescinded in its entirety.

There's a big difference between the two.  Did you notice?  The one I wrote 17 years ago undoes all the historical damage caused in its absence by automatically revoking all laws currently in existence that violate it.  Leaving that part out is really very 'conservative':  it freezes the current situation in place.  I suppose that makes my version 'regressive' although I personally think of it as 'progress'.

There are many now calling for a con-con, a constitutional convention, to remedy what they see as myriad ills plaguing our nation.  I truly believe most of those ills would evaporate if we were merely to prohibit past, present, and future acts of discrimination by our Congress.

What do you think?

—==+++==—

Update:

While browsing through some old material, I came across an essay I wrote for 'Adverse Reactions', my (quasi-)regular column in Tampa Bay Mensa's newsletter, The Tampa Bay Sounding, and it seems to have been written even earlier than November 2000; probably July 2000.  It was about campaign finance reform and it was called The Big Lie.  That essay was the impetus for the original suggestion.

 

Life after IBM

 

Those of us who remember IBM in the good old days (™, ® U.S.Pat.Off.) will shed the occasional virtual tear for the old girl, knowing full well that her glory days are gone forever.  There will never be an IBM like the one we knew.  For the benefit and illumination of those who never had the experience, we tell our tales.  Some of them reflect well on IBM;  others...  not so much.

STSS

In the mid-70s, somebody, perhaps Roy Turnbull, the manager of the Endicott Suggestions Department, got the idea that the process of logging suggestions in, routing them, tracking them, and awarding the ingenious and lucky suggesters should become more automated.  'Suggestions' was a corporate function although the individual Suggestions Departments were administered locally by the plants that housed them, or FE (Field Engineering) for the non-plant employees.  As a result, it was Armonk that mandated the Suggestions Tracking and Statistical System (STSS) and FEHQ Information Systems (White Plains) that got the task of building it.  It was unclear for a long time why FEHQ management named me, the new kid on the block with only 4 years experience, as lead programmer for FE's first IMS DB/DC application consisting, finally, of 9 HISAM clusters, 40+ MID/MODs, and 27 PL/I application programs.

Dave Boyd, an analyst with many years experience in systems design, was lead analyst and he produced a brilliant design that has stood the test of time.  He also demanded that STSS's code be rigidly structured and peer-reviewed.  By the end of 1978, the entire system had been running in parallel-test-mode for 6 months and the team felt comfortable with calling it 'done'.  The team dispersed and I set to work collecting and categorizing the fragments of documentation that we had generated over the past few years.  The first submission was rejected as 'incomplete' and I spent a month building the missing parts.  Then it was rejected for a different reason and another month went by.  Then another rejection.  And another.  I asked my manager for political help to overcome the nit-picking from Production that was denying STSS final approval.  He politely declined.

In May of '79, I was directed to demo STSS at the FE Awards Conference in Miami.  I thought then it might be a ploy to get me where I could be given a surprise award for what I considered a great achievement.  It wasn't;  it was just a work assignment.  My appraisal in June was disappointing, the raise following was insulting, and an expected promotion to Staff Programmer did not appear, nor did the one thing that might have kept me happy enough to grin and bear it: a transfer to Tampa.  I considered it 'the handwriting on the wall'.  I updated my resume, soon had a job offer, handed in my resignation, and left to do some contract programming, eventually winding up in Houston.

After I left IBM, all hell seems to have broken loose.  Endicott complained to Corporate that their beautiful, fully-functional system wasn't yet in production.  Corporate told FE to solve that problem pronto and — voila! — it was suddenly accepted for production.  When Armonk finally saw it in operation, they mandated it for all Suggestions Departments world-wide, and Dave Boyd got to tour Europe (the parts with IBM plants, anyway) installing it here, there, and everywhere.

It turns out that FE management didn't like the idea of bean-counters in Armonk deciding what projects FE's programmers would work on, so they handed STSS to someone they thought would probably screw it up.  They wanted STSS to fail but never bothered to tell me, so I made that bumblebee fly.

P.s.:  when we loaded the tracking database with historical data, the oldest suggestion we could find was from September of 1929, so all the code in STSS understood that a year smaller than '29' was, perforce, 2000-something.  STSS was the first Y2K-compliant application in IBM's history.  In 1978.

1984

Houston had been riding on this huge bubble of oil, and the housing market was on fire.  When the bubble burst, oil companies started laying people off and the housing market collapsed.  Preferring to set my own course, I had started looking elsewhere.  One recruiter asked if he might send my papers to IBM-Clear Lake and I agreed.  A week later I had an interview, but when I got to IBM that day, nobody seemed to know who I was or why I was there.  They had me (re)fill out the 6-page IBM application, then spun me through the canonical four interviews before sending me on my way.  Two weeks later, I received a letter:  'thank you for spending time with us, etc., etc., unfortunately...'.  The letter was dated the day of my interviews, but it was mailed much later.  I assumed they had finally seen my historical personnel jacket and realized their error.

A former colleague at IBM happened to be talking to me in 1984 and casually asked: "How's the job?"  I admitted that I was looking and he offered that IBM-Tampa might be interested in my skillset.  I recited the above tale and suggested that if Tampa were still interested in me after reviewing my jacket, they could call.  On December 4th as I was sitting down to dinner, my phone rang.  Whatever had happened at IBM-Clear Lake remains unexplained.  One thing led to another, and by year-end, I was an IBMer once again.  I often suspected that institutional-IBM later came to regret it.

I had been 'over the wall' and had discovered that there is breathable air there.  There was life outside IBM!  Further, I also knew that IBM was not The Emerald City whence originated all the really good ideas.  My presence contaminated innumerable otherwise-faithful IBMers.  By the time I pre-retired in 1992, there were managers in Tampa who wanted to see me dead.  Not 'gone';  dead.  It goes without saying that I never made it past 'Staff Programmer'.

Life on the outside

For two dozen years, contracts have kept bread on the table, put kids through college, paid the mortgage (off), and sent us on European vacations.  As much as we might miss the familiarity of the IBM we once knew, we realize that the nature of modern employment is such that no company can ever again hope to have a workforce that thinks of itself as 'family' and expects to work for the same company for an entire career.  The pace of life is itself enough to prohibit that, and the ability to seek out more optimal situations with ease means that job hunting is no longer reserved for times when 'the handwriting is on the wall'.

 

Print-On-Demand

 

In the old days, an author had to rely on traditional publishers to see their book made available to the public.  An author would submit a manuscript to several publishers in hopes that one, at least, would find it attractive enough to spend money editing, proof-reading, typesetting, and printing in order to produce the first edition.  This cost could be several thousand dollars.  The publisher would typically call for a first print run of 10,000 copies as a bare minimum, and it would be the publisher's task to get them sold as a way to recoup the initial cost that sometimes included an advance-on-royalties made to the author.  As a result, publishers were very picky about which books they would publish.  Aspiring authors from that era all had tales of 'papering their walls with rejection letters'.

Within the past half-century or so, 'vanity presses' have appeared on the scene.  These are businesses that will publish your work for a fee — sometimes an exorbitant fee.  As a rule, they care not whether your work is good or bad because you are paying the up-front costs and handling the job of selling your work.  In the early days of vanity presses, a contract might deliver 1,000 copies of the first edition — usually the only edition — and what the author did with them was the author's business — literally.

Since the computer revolution the entire face of publishing has undergone a sea change.  Word processing has made it possible for very many people who would not otherwise have gone to the effort to produce a text and to have it published by either a vanity press or a new arrival on the scene, the independent publisher.

Both 'vanities' and 'indies' are able to print-on-demand (as are the traditional publishing houses), and this has reduced the cost of getting a book to market so substantially that the number of published works has exploded due to the drastic lessening of the financial risk.  The same thing happened when Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in the 1500s.

"Print-on-demand" means that a largely-computerized publisher has the ability to access the formatted text of a book along with its cover, among other things.  When a buyer orders a copy of the book, a transaction is sent electronically to the printer that causes the production of a fully-formed book.  The inside text (usually black-ink-on-white-paper) is printed on one printer, the cover (usually color and on a heavier stock) on another, and the shipping label on a third.  At the end of the production line, automated binding equipment gathers the pages, wraps them in the cover, slips the finished product into a shipping box, and affixes the shipping label.  The completed package is handed over to the local postal service or an overnight shipper and is in the hands of the buyer in a few days.

The era of having 10,000 copies of a book printed and held in storage pending the arrival of orders from retailers or wholesalers has largely ended.  Only ink, paper, and cardboard shipping boxes are kept in inventory and can be reordered as needed.  When a retailer such as Barnes & Noble decides they want 200 copies of a work in stock, the only difference in the processing is that only a single shipping label is printed.

Ingram, headquartered in La Vergne TN, is probably the world's largest printer-on-demand and can have a book printed — right now — in any of several countries on several continents.  They are not alone.

As a result, any aspiring author who wishes to put in the effort can become a published author for what would have been considered 'peanuts' in an earlier age.  Amazon, for instance, will convert your Microsoft Word document or Adobe PDF to a Kindle-formatted version free.  You just have to agree to sell it via Amazon.

 

Sippenhaftung

 

In old Germanic law (pre-Roman) there was a concept known as "Sippenhaftung", 'kin responsibility'.  Certain crimes were serious enough that the criminal's family or clan was considered to be as responsible for the crime as was the actual criminal.  It even survives today in (especially) classrooms where, as one example, one student's misbehavior can cause the class outing to be cancelled.  In operation, it effectively outsources law enforcement by giving people an incentive to enforce proper behavior among their family.

We generally shy away from such collective punishment because it offends our modern sense of justice, but there may be situations where Sippenhaftung is actually the only way to prevent certain crimes.  I refer, of course, to 'terrorism'.  Terrorists often commit their acts of terror fully expecting that they themselves will not survive to be arrested, tried, convicted, and punished.  Especially if their families applaud their deaths as some act of religious faith or political protest, the terrorists know that they will be honored in their deaths.  Our reaction to such things is to shake our heads in disbelief.  What if our reaction were something else?

What if our reaction to a terrorist incident is to immediately deport the parents, siblings, spouse and offspring of an identfied terrorist, whether those deportees were citizens or not?  What if our reaction is to order them gone in 10 days or 'wanted dead or alive'?

I have the feeling families would be much more likely to report a relative as soon as they are suspected of plotting terror rather than face the possibility of having to uproot the entire family and flee for their lives.  Terrorists themselves might become less enthralled with the whole notion because a family they (presumably) love would be put in danger — would, in fact, become the lawful targets of terrorism-in-return.

Further, it may be that some deportees may not be able to find a country that will take them in at all.  A mere one or two such families could spell the end of terrorist acts in our lifetime as potential terrorists contemplate making their families homeless, stateless refugees.

 

Kriegspiel

 

Reflecting on something I heard about Hillsborough County (Tampa, FL, mostly) diverting kids from after-school mischief via a chess club, I remembered a chess variation from my own youth called 'Kriegspiel'.  Kriegspiel is a German word meaning "war game", and it's unlike any other form of chess you've ever seen.

Whereas ordinary chess (and even Wizard's chess) is played by two players, one board, and one set of pieces, Kriegspiel needs three boards, two sets of pieces, and a referee.

The players sit with their backs to the center board (which has a full set of pieces), each with a board containing only the pieces of their own color.  As each player makes a move, the referee replicates that move on the center board.  Usually the referee merely announces "white/black has moved".  Occasionally, this is followed by "capturing" or "giving check".  Sometimes the referee announces "illegal move" because that move cannot be made on the center board, as when an attempted move passes through an occupied square or moving the piece exposes a check.

When a player captures an opposing piece, that piece is removed from the opponent's board.  "White has moved, capturing."  White knows that a capture has taken place but not which piece.  Black knows which piece was captured, but not which piece did the deed or where it came from.  Should I recapture?  Is it worth risking that Knight since it might also be immediately recaptured?

As with standard chess, the game ends when checkmate or stalemate occurs, but with Kriegspiel the game also ends when any player leaves their board or sees the center board.  Of course, the audience, if there is one, must be silent for fairness.  No groans or laughs may be allowed to give away bad moves or good.

Some referees will be more specific with their comments, e.g.: "Black has moved giving check on the long diagonal".  Such announcements may be made for a lower-ranked player but not her higher-ranked opponent.  That's local custom and agreed before the match.

While it sounds terribly odd, most games of Kriegspiel are hilarious to watch, and it's a real chore for the audience not to give away valuable information.  The games are also fairly educational because we often do not understand how much value information has until we don't have it.  Because of this, it's a good idea to have someone transcribing the game so that it can be re-played for the essentially-in-the-dark participants after the game concludes.

Try it; you'll like it.

 

Israel

 

I'm not expounding; I'm just 'noodling'...

There's a lot of talk about how Jewish Democrats are going to deal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who just won the Dem primary in NY's 14th CD.  The problem with AO-C is that she's anti-Israel and Jewish Dems are now faced with a dilemma: support the Dem nominee or support Israel.  It got me to thinking.

Before the 20th century, the part of the world we now call 'Israel' was dominated by the Ottoman Empire.  In WW-I, the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lost, and had all their territory seized by the victors.  Had the Ottomans sided with Britain and France, there probably wouldn't be an 'Israel' and I wouldn't be noodling about it, but that's not how it played out.  For a long time, 'Palestine' was Britain's to govern if not own, and after WW-II, displaced Jewish populations demanded and got a 'homeland' carved out of the British Mandate.

Lest there be any confusion, 'Palestine' is derived from 'Philistine', but it has never been a nation with a distinct government, a distinct culture, or a distinct language, at least since the Philistines got overrun.  It has been, at most, an administrative district, a convenient shorthand to designate a particular geographic region.

The first Jewish settlers arrived while the Ottomans were still in charge.  When they got there, the area was barely fit for raising goats, and had been in that condition for millennia.  Today, Israel is a productive greenspace that is in stark contrast to the millions of square miles of wasteland that surround it.  Having seen what the Jews did with their patch of desert, the envious 'Palestinians' want it back.  They didn't do anything but raise goats on it for 2,000 years, but now it's their homeland.

Don't get me wrong: I don't support the U.S. giving Israel millions of dollars per day, but I think the Israelis have established ownership via sweat-equity.  What the Israelis did the Palestinians could have done... but didn't.  There are vast uninhabited tracts of land indistinguishable from pre-Israeli Palestine within a day's journey from Israel.  Any nearby country could acquire a huge population of formerly-Palestinian homesteaders for free and have them improve that country's economy.  That is not an acceptable solution, because Israel would still exist.  The only acceptable solution is one that eliminates Israel.  Besides, those formerly-Palestinian homesteaders would likely be as useless on their new land as they were on the old.

The fact that other nearby nations could (for almost no cost) solve 'the Palestinian problem' — and don't — invites speculation that they don't actually want that problem solved.

Yes, there should be a two-state solution for Palestine.  The other 'state' should be east of Jordan.  Any nation in the local group that isn't interested in having Palestinian settlers on their desert needs to STFU — permanently.

Jewish Dems still have a problem in AO-C, and they're going to have a come-to-Jesus (sorry...) moment in the very near future.

Okay, I was expounding.

 

Justice Anthony Kennedy

 

Once upon a time, the New York Daily News was a reliably conservative outlet, the NY Daily Mirror was considered 'liberal', and the NY Post was a daily version of The Enquirer.  Somewhere along the way, the Mirror folded, the Daily News went hard left, and the Post became conservative.  I wasn't living there at the time so I didn't pay attention and can't tell you 'when' or 'why'.

The Post yesterday printed a story, "The real meaning of Democrats’ Supreme Court panic", about the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy noting:

This is why Democrats celebrate obviously superlegal decisions like Roe v. Wade: There is no right to abortion in the Constitution, but they would prefer not to battle that issue out at the electoral level.  The Supreme Court allows them to hand down their policy from the mountaintop without having to subject those policies to public scrutiny...  And that means that any reversal of such policy by a Supreme Court that actually reads the Constitution as it was written is a threat to Democratic hegemony.

(They're correct, but for the wrong reason.)

Also once upon a time, Justice Antonin Scalia remarked (possibly in commentary on Roe v Wade) that he couldn't find a right to privacy in the Constitution.  It appears that Scalia hadn't read the Constitution as far as the Ninth Amendment.  It's possible Scalia wouldn't have said that had he a better appreciation for the 9th.  If he also appreciated the 10th, he might have voted to kick Roe back to the state where it originated.

For the benefit of those who aren't able to recite the Constitution verbatim, I quote it here for you (commatosis in the original):

AMENDMENT IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In modern American English, this means "just because we only listed a few rights here doesn't mean that's an exhaustive list. We just didn't want to waste the ink and parchment on something any idiot could figure out."  That is: there is a right to privacy in the Constitution, right there in the 9th; there is a right to travel freely, a right to smoke marijuana, a right to marry whomsoever you please, right there in the 9th; there are all sorts of rights in the Constitution, right there in the 9th.

And the 10th:

AMENDMENT X:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In modern English:  "if we didn't give some particular power to Congress, Congress doesn't have that power; it's a 'state thing' or a 'person thing', but it's not a 'Congress thing'".

An originalist Justice who "actually reads the Constitution as it was written" is exactly what we need.  In fact, we need eight of them since only Clarence Thomas currently fits the description.  More originalists?  Yes, please, and hurry!  A mere half-dozen originalists would already have struck down the National Firearms Act, NAFTA, NDAA, the War Powers Act, and hundreds of similar Congressional and Executive usurpations.

As to Roe v Wade, this clearly is a topic within the purview of the 10th amendment.  It should never have been heard at the Supreme Court.  Alas, Robert Bork said exactly that in his confirmation hearings and paid a dear price for having too much knowledge of the Constitution, too much honesty, and too much naïveté.

As to Kennedy being a 'swing vote', Democrat angst over his imminent departure is misplaced.  Kennedy voted with the majority in Janus, NIFLA v Becerra, Trump v Hawaii, Ohio v AMEX, and dozens of other cases that cause Democratic wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Why are they so upset at him retiring?  Do they think his replacement will be worse?  No, they fear his replacement will be an originalist.

 

Are We Headed For Another Civil War?

 

Some years back, I wrote a book, 'Tipping Point', that laid out a possible scenario in which The United States suffered a second civil war.  I deliberately made it very 'not pretty' with atrocities being committed by both sides, because civil wars are like that — recall Sherman's March To The Sea that needlessly destroyed civilian croplands and, in the fullness of time, the civilians who relied upon them.  'Tipping Point' hypothesized an assault on the Second Amendment, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, as the casus belli, but near the end of the book I had one of the characters recall that "...guns were merely a convenient symbol...".  That is, I think, important to keep in mind going forward.  If we are lurching toward a second civil war, it may not be 'guns' that gets us there.

Little more than a year ago, a group of Republican congressmen was ambushed while playing softball — by a disgruntled supporter of Bernie Sanders.  Many of the comments attached to news reports of the incident expressed disappointment that so few deaths resulted.  Within the month, two officials of the Trump administration have been the targets of mobs demanding they not be served at public restaurants.  Within the week, a Democrat congresswoman, Maxine Waters, has publicly issued a call for more of the same.  Whether you call them 'Democrats' or 'the left' or 'progressives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), there is one segment of society that seems to be actively soliciting our next civil war, and their targets, whether you call them 'Republicans' or 'the right' or 'conservatives' (all of which are marginally inaccurate), are meekly suffering the slings and arrows.

Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that the FBI and the Department of Justice have, together, badly perverted what's left of our system of justice, and Congress seems reluctant to actually throw somebody into prison, perhaps because they fear turnabout should the next election place them in an exposed position.  This is not a good situation to be in.  This is not a safe place from which to watch somebody else get involved in a civil war.

One hundred million (maybe 120 million) Americans own 350 million (or more) guns and 200 billion rounds of ammunition.  If you look at the map showing electoral districts won by Trump and Clinton in the last Presidential election, it's a startling sight: the blue (Clinton) districts are all relatively tiny (high population density; big cities and metro areas; serious electoral clout) while the red (Trump) districts define the vast bulk of the country's land area (low population density; rural areas; thin electoral power).  It goes without saying, I suppose, that almost all of those guns and gun-owners are in red districts.  What in heaven's name are those Democrats thinking?  They're deliberately trying to anger a population that's better-armed than any WW-II maquis unit, possibly under the assumption that they're so law-abiding they would never turn violent.  What if they're wrong?

If there is another civil war, this one between the Reds and the Blues, the outcome is easy to predict:

1. the Reds are going win.  It's not even theoretically possible for small enclaved cities to overwhelm the heartland, but it is possible for the heartland to cut the cities off from food, water, and electricity.  Game over.
2. the heartland is going to want to secede.  They'll cut the blue districts loose because conquering them is counter-productive.
3. Blue America will turn into a third-world country.  Red America will strictly control its border with Blue America.  There will not be an 'illegal immigrant problem'.
4. Within a few years at most, those blue areas will bid to be annexed simply because the government model they use is unsustainable without inexpensive supplies coming in from red areas.  The blue model requires the red model far more than the red requires the blue.

In short, what the Democrats are doing is so severely against their self-interest it's fair to wonder whether they have thought this problem through to its logical conclusion.  This might be an opportune time for them to correct that lest they accidentally turn 'Tipping Point' from 'fiction' to 'documentary'.

 

Just call 9-1-1.

 

Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow Pollack who was killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has filed suit against former deputy Scot Peterson for failing to do his duty, presumably his duty to protect Meadow Pollack from getting killed.  The lawyer for Peterson is seeking a dismissal on the grounds that Peterson had no duty to any individual person, only a duty to the community at large.  Mr. Pollack is going to lose this one.  It is a 'matter of settled law' that the police do not have a duty to protect any particular person.

This complaint-and-rebuttal presents a serious problem for those who say we don't need our guns because we can always call 9-1-1 and the police will send help.  It's an even more serious problem for those who argue that teachers shouldn't be armed because the school has an SRO or two.  If the police have no duty to protect, the presence of SROs at the school is irrelevant;  they can ignore the screams and the shots with impunity.  The only people with motivation to confront the shooter are those who are themselves in peril, i.e.: teachers, and if they're going to confront a shooter, they had better be equipped to do so, i.e.: armed.

When the scene shifts to 'college', another dynamic complicates the issue.  College students may be adults and may have concealed weapon permits and, in case of a shooting incident, may similarly be motivated to confront the shooter except that most college campuses are 'gun-free zones' (victim disarmament zones) where they may not be armed and are therefore at a severe disadvantage in that situation.  Again, police may respond when called or they may not.

What to do...  What to do...

 

How To End The Collusionpalooza Circus

 

Well, Trump has been President for over a year, now, and Robert Mueller has been investigating alleged collusion with various Russians for longer than that, and so far all he has is a handful of 1001 indictments (making a materially false statement to a federal investigator, the charge that sent Martha Stewart up the river).  To make matters worse, one of the indictees has decided to slug it out in court, and they are demanding 'discovery', the process where the accused gets to review all the evidence the prosecutor(s) have indicating wrongdoing, and they are demanding a speedy trial as guaranteed to them by the Constitution.  Mueller and his team are resisting, claiming that it just might be possible that this indictee may not have been served properly.  They reallyreally don't want anyone peeking under their skirts.  The judge, by the way, laughed Mueller out of court on the entirely reasonable grounds that if they weren't ready to go to trial, they shouldn't have issued an indictment.  Just this alone might put an end to Mueller's fishing trip, but if not...

Congress is at war with the FBI, it seems.  They issue subpoenas for files that will tell them whether Andrew McCabe or James Comey (or both) committed perjury, and the FBI stonewalls on grounds of 'national security'.  One might think that President Trump might want to let Congress do some digging inside an organization that, very probably, is conspiring against him and his administration.  I think I would.  And here's how President Clarke would get that to happen:

I would have a U.S. Marshal called to the Oval Office in stand-by mode.  I would summon Rod Rosenstein to the OO for a quick conference where I would ask him how long it would take to comply with those Congressional subpoenas, and then order him to do so.  If Rosenstein refused, I would have the Marshal arrest him on the spot for obstruction of justice, seize his phone, confiscate his passport, and hustle him off to a secure lock-up, then repeat the exercise going down the chain of command.  If Rosenstein accepted the order, I would place him on 'unpaid status' until compliance was achieved as a way of ensuring compliance happens with all deliberate speed.

I would also have Robert Mueller's passport picked up, along with John Brennan's, James Comey's, and Andrew McCabe's.  Just as a precaution.

How long do you think Collusionpalooza would continue after that?

 

Save The Children

 

We've all seen those ads on TV urging us to call right now to pledge just pennies-a-day to save abandoned animals, wounded warriors, children with cancer, abused women, and a seemingly endless array of others, each more deserving of our charity than the last.  The one that strikes me as most inappropriate is the ad (you almost certainly have seen it) showing emaciated African or South American children living in squalor and badly needing a meal or even just a simple glass of milk.  You can save this child with a donation of only nineteen cents a day.  How can anyone be so cruel as to withhold such a pittance?

As I watched one of these ads, I had to wonder why, with all the foreign aid money we splash across the globe, none of it seems to get to these starving youngsters.  Where is all that foreign aid money going?

It helps to understand, first, that we don't do 'foreign aid' today the way we used to do it, say, a hundred years ago.

A hunded years ago, Mrs. Jenkins' 5th grade class would adopt Armenian refugees or Chinese orphans or the victims of the war in West Wheresoever.  At the beginning of the term, all the children would receive a small cardboard coin bank.  During the year, they would put spare change into the box until the day finally arrived to pool all the contents.  On that day, usually with great fanfare and ceremony, the children would pop the box-ends and pour the contents into a fishbowl or pickle jar, sometimes as part of a field trip to the local bank.  The coins would be counted and sorted, perhaps by the semi-magical machine the bank used that collected the coins sorted and ready to be slipped into coin sleeves.  The bank manager would then announce that the class had collected $37.89 and the coins would be converted to a check payable to, most likely, The American Red Cross.  There would be a representative from the intended charity ready to accept the check and to give a short speech congratulating the children for their generosity toward those less fortunate.

The $252,319.23 collected from several thousand schoolrooms across the country would then be used to buy wheat, rice, potatoes, milk, tea, flour, salt, goats, and water pumps for villages where such things were not simply nice-to-have, but vital for survival.  The people who got those things knew that American schoolchildren and American charities had made it possible for them to see another Spring.  Everybody loved us and thought we were, as Alexis deTocqueville once suggested, the most uniformly generous people on Earth.

Foreign aid today is an entirely different story.

Today, the government taxes everyone to support the General Fund that covers all the government functions we have come to expect and including foreign aid.  Foreign governments (not the people) get vouchers good for purchases from American companies.  Foreign governments don't want wheat and rice; they just have to redistribute stuff like that and it's a big pain in the butt to do that.  They'd rather have the money.  But if we just give them money, there's no guarantee they won't spend it in places we disapprove of, so we give them vouchers that can only be redeemed on purchases from American companies.  The American companies can turn the vouchers in to the Treasury Department for real cash.  That way, the money stays here where it belongs.

Alas, the companies that usually redeem those vouchers are generally in the business of supplying guns, tanks, warships, and warplanes, and the ammunition all those things use.  Very little, if any, of that 'foreign aid' actually gets to the people who need milk, tea, coffee, scrambled eggs, toast, cereal, or a new water pump for the village.

Most of it, in fact, goes toward bombing, maiming, and killing the people who need food and water and clothing for themselves and their families.

And everybody hates us.

And that's why your nineteen cents a day is so badly needed.

 

The Wrong Path To School Safety

 

Following the St. Valentine's Day Massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, there has been the easily-predictable wave of calls for even more civilian disarmament, but this time it's different.  Those calling for more stringent gun control are the students of MSDHS in concert with schools all across the country.  Florida has passed a law that, among other things, raises the minimum age for buying a long gun to 21; federal law sets the minimum age at 18 for long guns and 21 for handguns.  Unspoken by the mainstream media is that the student protests, including rented buses for getting their voices to Tallahassee and Washington DC, are being funded by deep-pocket anti-gun organizations like Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety among others.

Naturally, politicians of all stripes are paying rapt attention to these teenagers.  They're not old enough to exercise most of their rights, but they're clearly old enough to have opinions on everybody else's rights.  It's not a surprise that Democrat politicians have jumped on the "Throw Lots Of Money At The Problem" bandwagon, but the GOP (you know, the ones the NRA buys with their campaign contributions) seems to have signed on as well.  Heck, even Governor Scott is happy to squirt a half billion of somebody else's dollars at it if it seems like it will pick up a few extra votes for Senator Scott when he's term-limited out of the Governor's mansion.

Why not the — to the gun-rights proponents — more sensible tactic of allowing properly-trained teachers to carry on the job?  This suggestion is always answered by a litany of strawman arguments:  teachers aren't supposed to be cops;  the majority of teachers don't want any more guns in their classrooms;  if you make me carry a gun, I'll quit;  what happens when a teacher accidentally shoots a student?;  and on and on...

Most of those arguments are based on pure fantasy or pure fatalism.

Teachers aren't supposed to be cops.  And nobody wants them to be, least of all the teachers themselves.  That said, a recent survey suggests that 1-in-5 teachers would, if they were legally permitted, bring their own firearm with them.  Did you catch that?  Their own firearm.  No additional expense to an already overbloated school budget for "supplying guns to teachers".  Those teachers already have firearms with which they are conversant, and with which they train — probably more often than the deputies who will be called to respond to the next school shooting.

And there will be a 'next one'.  Nothing that has been proposed so far will prevent another school shooting.  The best you can hope for is to minimize the damage.  Oddly, having teachers ready to respond immediately to a shooting may be the best option:  in the 14 states that now permit armed teachers, there have been no (0) school shootings since that policy went into effect.

The majority of teachers don't want...  What if a majority of teachers didn't want a School Resource Officer present, either?  Would you consider that something we should all pay attention to, or would you say "don't be stupid!"?  Why should a bloc of teachers who are of one mind endanger the safety of the entire school?

Oh, you think keeping teachers disarmed enhances the safety of the school?  If we look at "concealed carriers" as a class (and, yes, any teacher who goes armed would have to have a concealed carry license) and compare them against "law enforcement officers" as a class, we find something very odd:  licensed concealed carriers are more law-abiding than are the police — they even return their library books on time — and when they have to shoot, it is the police who are 5.5 times more likely to shoot an innocent bystander.  You're worried about the teachers?  Worry about your SROs!

If you make me carry a gun, I'll quit.  Nobody will make anybody carry a gun (and you know it).  Those teachers who volunteer and who demonstrate proficiency will be the only ones (legally) carrying, and since it's concealed, neither other teachers nor the students will know who is or who isn't.

What happens when a teacher unintentionally shoots a student?  It's silly to suggest that no teacher will ever unintentionally shoot a student who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing.  It is going to happen.  That unlucky student is more likely to be shot by the SRO (see above), and if that 'bad shoot' happens in conjunction with a real school-shooting event, it's fair to wonder about the odds of dying in a school without armed teachers.

If you have an open mind, you may by now be rethinking your objections to the notion of "teachers as first responders".  School shootings are like terrorist incidents:  they happen at random and without warning (that authorities pay attention to).  Because they are a diffuse phenomenon, any response, to be reasonably effective, must also be diffuse.  The remedy must be wide-spread to the point that at any moment and in any place you can say with confidence "we're prepared".

Sure, you can splash money all over the problem and get very, very close to an ideal solution.

Or you can treat your teachers as if they actually have a brain and let those who are willing provide the best solution.

For free.

 

Can we Prevent School Shootings?

 

All the talking heads, both media- and otherwise, are babbling on about how to prevent the next horrific school shooting, and I'm shaking my non-talking head over the plethora of non-solutions being offered:  ban assault weapons;  raise the age-to-purchase to 21 (someone even said '25');  better, more comprehensive background checks;  on-site mental health professionals to look for warning signs;  more SROs (School Resource Officers).  The list goes on and on.  I just want to ask one question.  Would any of these or even all of them together have prevented the last shooting?

My conclusion is that, no, not even all of these together could have prevented that event.  Each of them can be worked-around — where the system itself doesn't simply fail in its assigned task.  You can have all the SROs you want, but if they're all outside having a smoke break and decide they're not going to risk their lives just to save a bunch of teenagers...

No, it's not possible to prevent the next school shooting.  The best you can hope for is to mitigate the damage — ideally, down to zero — and there's only one way to do that:  there have to be people ready to answer the threat at the very moment it arises, at the very spot where it arises, and the more people who are ready, the better.  More SROs, you say?  At Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, the well-paid armed SROs cowered outside waiting for the gunfire to die down while the underpaid and unarmed teachers tried to shield their students from the carnage.  P.s.: it didn't work.

Now, nobody is suggesting teachers must be armed.  Neither you nor I want to see a teacher who is unfamiliar with firearms and who, in fact, doesn't want to be around guns nevertheless forced into such a supremely uncomfortable position.  But there are some teachers who (a) own guns, (b) are comfortable being armed, (c) would rather be able to defend themselves and their charges, and (d) wouldn't turn down a 'training and readiness stipend' if offered.  Did you say you don't believe there are that many teachers who would volunteer?  Certified firearms instructors across the country offer free or reduced rate classes specially designed for teachers and school staffers, and they report that thousands of them apply for the hundreds of slots available whenever they're offered.  They turn out for the classes even when they know there's no chance the school board is ever going to bend on the issue.  That is:  they're trained and ready and unable to put that training to use because they work in a gun-free zone of mandated defenselessness.  In case of another school shooting, all they'll be able to do is run and hide until they're found and killed.

Well, the last couple of shooters used rifles.  Are we going to pit trained teachers armed with pistols against untrained nutjobs armed with rifles? No, we're going to keep those teachers unarmed because they're going to die anyway, so what's the use?  That's the reasoning (if it can be called that) behind gun-free zones:  everyone is going to die;  let's not make it worse.

Ten states make it easy for properly-trained teachers to be armed on the job.  Do you recall the last time you read a headline screaming "Teacher Goes Berzerk; Kills Student For Texting In Class"?  No?  You can be sure that headline would be repeated on the front page of every newspaper in the country if it ever happened, so I think we can rest assured it hasn't.

So here's where we are:  of the several 'solutions' being proposed to halt the scourge of school shootings, the only one with an unblemished record of success is routinely rejected in favor of others whose only track record is failure after failure after failure.

And when the next school shooting happens at a school where every one of the reforms on the progressive wish-list has been implemented, we will be told "Aha!  We forgot to prohibit..." and a new item will be added to the wish-list.  What won't be added is 'allowing teachers to defend themselves'.

Makes sense to me...  not!

 

A Solution to Gerrymandering

 

Ask virtually anyone their opinion of 'gerrymandering' and you are virtually certain to get a negative response.  Gerrymandering, the practice of drawing political districts in order to make them predictably safe for one party or the other (only Republicans and Democrats get to draw district boundaries because no other parties ever have sufficient clout to draw district boundaries because they have been gerrymandered into obscurity) has been practiced since the early 19th century when political parties began to form, and has always been looked down upon — officially — by the general populace.  The result of gerrymandering is often a district whose boundaries appear to be more random than regular, sometimes including stretches that contain no actual voters.  It has always been seen as something of a political dirty trick, herding your opponent's voters into the corner while spreading your own voters strategically so as to win more districts, win more positions in the government, and win more power to install your policies.  I say 'officially' because few people complain that gerrymandering has given them more power than they deserve.

Nevertheless, principled people have long sought a way to prevent any party drawing district boundaries for nefarious purposes.  In 200 years, their efforts have been largely fruitless because any law that would effectively prevent gerymandering would, it was thought, be large, complicated, and difficult to administer if it could actually be passed by a legislature, something not at all certain.

That, at any rate, is the conventional wisdom.

I think I may have stumbled upon a solution, a rule that is simple, straight-forward, easy to understand, and (most importantly) easy to police.  It is a two-part rule:

1. it must be legally possible for any person to walk from any place within a district to any other place within the same district without leaving the district;
   
   
2. the distance from any point within the district to its center may not be more than 2.5 times the distance to the nearest district center not within the district.

Provision (a) prevents connecting two or more sections by routing it (e.g.) along an interstate highway or private rights-of-way because it's illegal to walk on them.  Provision (b) tends to make each voting district more circular than extended, 'extended' being the sign of a manufactured district.

'2.5' is arbitrary.  The closer you move it toward 1, the more circular the district would become.  Total circularity is obviously impossible; 2.5 seems a reasonable compromise, but if you think it should be 3.64, I can completely understand that; you couldn't convince me that 17 is equally reasonable.

What's left is a district that has no long, spindly alleys connecting two pieces of the same district, and that is compact enough such that, from wherever I am in that district, if the district center is five miles away, there isn't another district center closer than two miles.  I think that no one would complain (aloud, in public) were every district constructed to these specifications.

What am I missing?