Regardless of however many miles of wall Biden has committed to building—obviously only a ploy to show that he cares about the border so the MSM can sell that to the Dems more older, centrist voters—never ever believe that liberals/Leftists care about securing the border or that they wouldn't fling it open even wider if they could get away with it.
Their voter base defines itself first and foremost by always being the opposite of Trump, so once he said illegal immigrants could be dangerous they could only respond: not only are they NOT dangerous, they're beautiful angels—no one is illegal! love wins!—who we should be welcoming with tears and flowers (then free room and board for life).
And then we come to the Social Justice True Believers who are so much of the Democratic brain trust, donor base and party organization: for them the border is an arbitrary racist colonial imposition that Justice demands we erase and there is no greater emotional and spiritual thrill they can experience than performing the role of White Savior and helping the poor and brown evade the white-supremacist border agents. Just like in their televised fantasies, Justice and the Right Side of History™ demand that all Europeans and European creations are replaced or co-opted by brown faces, to atone for the sins of our ancestors.
The Biden open-borders policy just may be the most socially destructive political action in recent memory, and no matter how much the ugly consequences pile up, the left side of the aisle is nowhere close to reassessing it.
"used to having their way with our octogenarian-in-chief, the nation’s utopians are pulling their dyed-blue hairs out."
Well, technically, many of the hairs are green, red, pink, or all of the above. Then, there's the nose rings. The big girls really do start resembling heifers.
In the well-done TV series "The Last of Us" where the population of the world gets infected by a networked alien mitochondrial fungus (the episode with Nick Offerman is terrific), there is a terrifying scene from a high window where a big population of infected zombies all twitched at like a wave at the same time. The image was to convey how they were all a programmed collective that would think and act as one.
I was also recently thinking about the topic of mastery. That Malcom Gladwell point about investing 10,000 hours in some discipline and mastering it. But beyond that, there is the institutional mastery that builds on itself after the initial founding inventions. For example, car manufacturers today are nothing like Ford when the Model-T came off the line. Institutional mastery has the benefit in progress... greater features, greater quality and greater value. At least that is the thinking when we consider the principles of the free market.
However institutional mastery has some significant downside risks. One is that the practitioners become so effective in their current state that they forget the founding basis of invention. They forget their actual mission. Another is that institutional mastery supports bureaucratic blocking and greater barriers to competitive alternatives. Once acquiring mastery, the master naturally wants to leverage their top-position and shifts to defense using several tactics. One of those tactics is to welcome the growing technical complexity of the institutional business and hording access and information required for others to participate.
The Internet was supposed to help us here as the US and other western countries had progressed to a point where everyone needed a college education, government certification and to know someone already inside the institution to assist with career participation. But the masters took the Internet too.
Media mastery. Madison Avenue mastery. Political Party and campaign mastery. They are all so far above the line now that they dominate everything and have figured out how to connect into the brains of the zombie voters to make them all twitch at the same time.
But there are still hard working independents outside of the institutions and breaking some holes in their walls. Substack is an example (waiting to be consumed by the masters too). But some of this is breaking the networked mitochondrial connections and allowing more zombie voters to wake up.
That is why the Biden administration has decided to build the wall. Not for any reason other than their mastery of the narrative injecting "no border problems" into the heads of the zombie voters so they all twitch in unison to claim Trump is a lying racist to imply that we have an illegal immigration problem... has lost its power to convince simply due to the numbers of illegals that have flooded here over the last 3 years.
I sort of don’t believe that our culture will be diffused with values that will destroy our identity. I meet a lot of Latinos who are conservative and deeply inspired by this country. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. The only people I personally know who hate us (Americans) are the white, professional class progressives living around me. They must have a classifiable hysteria you would find in the DSM.
"I sort of don’t believe that our culture will be diffused with values that will destroy our identity."
I don't believe that either.
I am appalled, though, at the breathtaking lawlessness of the Democrats. President Biden has sworn to see that the laws are faithfully executed, and is openly defying them (just as the Soros D.A.s are doing to local criminal laws). And that is also the meaning of "sanctuary" as that term is used by Democrats today: defiance of the law. And yet we are constantly told by them that no one is above the law. The people running our government have no respect for our government, or for Americans who want to respect it.
If we could find a way to get to them, separate ourselves, tell them conservative values are for real Americans, for real men and their moms, for real Christians, I think we could grab them. I just don't know how to get that message to the people running the country. I mean, if they aren't going back, we need a strategy.
One more fixed election by these lying, cheating thieves means there won't be anyone alive 40 years from now who remembers what it was like to be truly free.
Maybe I'm being histrionic...or just maybe history is our guide here?
There are difficult to quantify costs of the open border, but they can be quantified despite the difficulty. In one county in Arizona, there is a single hospital between the border and Tucson. Federal regulations require hospitals that accept Medicare (practically every hospital in the country) to treat all who present themselves. Several months ago the hospital was on the verge of bankruptcy because of the overload of illegal aliens. They consumed all the services and paid none of the costs.
The financial impact is enormous. About half of a hospital's employees are low-skilled and not qualified for other employment. Professional staff has a different issue. Nurses often have no other place to work and thus are lost to the healthcare workforce as they transition to other work. The impact on cancer and chronic kidney disease patients is catastrophic. We learned that during the three years waiting for the two-week "bending the curve" at the outset of the pandemic. As surgical support staff leave, surgeons follow them out the door, and the lifeblood of a hospital - elective surgery - dries up.
Using UK National Health Service numbers on the value of a human life, the added mortality quickly raises costs to the economy by billions of dollars. I would say that the rippling effect on the economy of destroying rural hospitals is at least as great as the $80K/illegal immigrant.
Such a great post!! Every sentence somehow cut to the point without coming off like a pale screed, I'm so happy to see a writer with your skills applying them to my 2nd biggest worry for the America I love and my daughters will inherit. I'm not usually this melodramatic but I recently drove from Sacramento to LA and was robbed three times, long story. Actually short story, I was robbed three times... and 90% certain of their immigration status. Quick fact: over the years not one single person I've asked has known how many legal immigrants the US takes in every year.... The answer is 1.2 million counting the half who are naturalized. That number is high enough to weaken calls of "xenophobia" on anybody not wanting a few million additional illegal immigrants as well. Or even 50 extra, like Martha's Vineyard types.
I think what we see here is a net-positive, the "open-borders" people had their beliefs downgraded from a luxury belief to having to face the consequences of their policies at least to a certain extent. It's unfortunate that the situation has to deteriorate as much at first, however it might lead to a new consensus on immigration and to a lessening of the impact of the radical fringe on the centrist in the democrat party. Here in Europe unfortunately most conservatives used to be so scared of being called racists and heartless they let the same situation go on for far too long - while still being smeared as racists by their opponents. Not having a completely bipolar political system is a help in some European countries. Perhaps at some point conservatives as a whole will stop bending over backwards to appease people who are playing a dishonest game and weaponizing people's empathy.
I for one say, welcome back to reality Democrats, nice to have you back.
Fantastic, Brad, thank you. For an entrepreneur such as myself, I need ALL the help I can get in order to have a shot at being of any articulate influence here, behind the blue curtain.
Regardless of however many miles of wall Biden has committed to building—obviously only a ploy to show that he cares about the border so the MSM can sell that to the Dems more older, centrist voters—never ever believe that liberals/Leftists care about securing the border or that they wouldn't fling it open even wider if they could get away with it.
Their voter base defines itself first and foremost by always being the opposite of Trump, so once he said illegal immigrants could be dangerous they could only respond: not only are they NOT dangerous, they're beautiful angels—no one is illegal! love wins!—who we should be welcoming with tears and flowers (then free room and board for life).
And then we come to the Social Justice True Believers who are so much of the Democratic brain trust, donor base and party organization: for them the border is an arbitrary racist colonial imposition that Justice demands we erase and there is no greater emotional and spiritual thrill they can experience than performing the role of White Savior and helping the poor and brown evade the white-supremacist border agents. Just like in their televised fantasies, Justice and the Right Side of History™ demand that all Europeans and European creations are replaced or co-opted by brown faces, to atone for the sins of our ancestors.
The Biden open-borders policy just may be the most socially destructive political action in recent memory, and no matter how much the ugly consequences pile up, the left side of the aisle is nowhere close to reassessing it.
Spark of divinity:
https://youtu.be/1fFZ_DjuwRU?si=VZjyGVx-uZJtQvGJ
lol
"used to having their way with our octogenarian-in-chief, the nation’s utopians are pulling their dyed-blue hairs out."
Well, technically, many of the hairs are green, red, pink, or all of the above. Then, there's the nose rings. The big girls really do start resembling heifers.
In the well-done TV series "The Last of Us" where the population of the world gets infected by a networked alien mitochondrial fungus (the episode with Nick Offerman is terrific), there is a terrifying scene from a high window where a big population of infected zombies all twitched at like a wave at the same time. The image was to convey how they were all a programmed collective that would think and act as one.
I was also recently thinking about the topic of mastery. That Malcom Gladwell point about investing 10,000 hours in some discipline and mastering it. But beyond that, there is the institutional mastery that builds on itself after the initial founding inventions. For example, car manufacturers today are nothing like Ford when the Model-T came off the line. Institutional mastery has the benefit in progress... greater features, greater quality and greater value. At least that is the thinking when we consider the principles of the free market.
However institutional mastery has some significant downside risks. One is that the practitioners become so effective in their current state that they forget the founding basis of invention. They forget their actual mission. Another is that institutional mastery supports bureaucratic blocking and greater barriers to competitive alternatives. Once acquiring mastery, the master naturally wants to leverage their top-position and shifts to defense using several tactics. One of those tactics is to welcome the growing technical complexity of the institutional business and hording access and information required for others to participate.
The Internet was supposed to help us here as the US and other western countries had progressed to a point where everyone needed a college education, government certification and to know someone already inside the institution to assist with career participation. But the masters took the Internet too.
Media mastery. Madison Avenue mastery. Political Party and campaign mastery. They are all so far above the line now that they dominate everything and have figured out how to connect into the brains of the zombie voters to make them all twitch at the same time.
But there are still hard working independents outside of the institutions and breaking some holes in their walls. Substack is an example (waiting to be consumed by the masters too). But some of this is breaking the networked mitochondrial connections and allowing more zombie voters to wake up.
That is why the Biden administration has decided to build the wall. Not for any reason other than their mastery of the narrative injecting "no border problems" into the heads of the zombie voters so they all twitch in unison to claim Trump is a lying racist to imply that we have an illegal immigration problem... has lost its power to convince simply due to the numbers of illegals that have flooded here over the last 3 years.
Bravo. Solid gold post.
I sort of don’t believe that our culture will be diffused with values that will destroy our identity. I meet a lot of Latinos who are conservative and deeply inspired by this country. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part. The only people I personally know who hate us (Americans) are the white, professional class progressives living around me. They must have a classifiable hysteria you would find in the DSM.
"I sort of don’t believe that our culture will be diffused with values that will destroy our identity."
I don't believe that either.
I am appalled, though, at the breathtaking lawlessness of the Democrats. President Biden has sworn to see that the laws are faithfully executed, and is openly defying them (just as the Soros D.A.s are doing to local criminal laws). And that is also the meaning of "sanctuary" as that term is used by Democrats today: defiance of the law. And yet we are constantly told by them that no one is above the law. The people running our government have no respect for our government, or for Americans who want to respect it.
If we could find a way to get to them, separate ourselves, tell them conservative values are for real Americans, for real men and their moms, for real Christians, I think we could grab them. I just don't know how to get that message to the people running the country. I mean, if they aren't going back, we need a strategy.
4 more years is the same thing as 40 more years.
One more fixed election by these lying, cheating thieves means there won't be anyone alive 40 years from now who remembers what it was like to be truly free.
Maybe I'm being histrionic...or just maybe history is our guide here?
You are not being histrionic, just willing to look at reality. Too many prefer to look away.
Look what they've done to this country in 3 years!
Ain't gonna lie; it'll be hard to not check out if these totalitarians get 4 more years.
Feels like we're at a tipping point. I never thought I'd live to see us sink this low.
Brad,
There are difficult to quantify costs of the open border, but they can be quantified despite the difficulty. In one county in Arizona, there is a single hospital between the border and Tucson. Federal regulations require hospitals that accept Medicare (practically every hospital in the country) to treat all who present themselves. Several months ago the hospital was on the verge of bankruptcy because of the overload of illegal aliens. They consumed all the services and paid none of the costs.
The financial impact is enormous. About half of a hospital's employees are low-skilled and not qualified for other employment. Professional staff has a different issue. Nurses often have no other place to work and thus are lost to the healthcare workforce as they transition to other work. The impact on cancer and chronic kidney disease patients is catastrophic. We learned that during the three years waiting for the two-week "bending the curve" at the outset of the pandemic. As surgical support staff leave, surgeons follow them out the door, and the lifeblood of a hospital - elective surgery - dries up.
Using UK National Health Service numbers on the value of a human life, the added mortality quickly raises costs to the economy by billions of dollars. I would say that the rippling effect on the economy of destroying rural hospitals is at least as great as the $80K/illegal immigrant.
Such a great post!! Every sentence somehow cut to the point without coming off like a pale screed, I'm so happy to see a writer with your skills applying them to my 2nd biggest worry for the America I love and my daughters will inherit. I'm not usually this melodramatic but I recently drove from Sacramento to LA and was robbed three times, long story. Actually short story, I was robbed three times... and 90% certain of their immigration status. Quick fact: over the years not one single person I've asked has known how many legal immigrants the US takes in every year.... The answer is 1.2 million counting the half who are naturalized. That number is high enough to weaken calls of "xenophobia" on anybody not wanting a few million additional illegal immigrants as well. Or even 50 extra, like Martha's Vineyard types.
I think what we see here is a net-positive, the "open-borders" people had their beliefs downgraded from a luxury belief to having to face the consequences of their policies at least to a certain extent. It's unfortunate that the situation has to deteriorate as much at first, however it might lead to a new consensus on immigration and to a lessening of the impact of the radical fringe on the centrist in the democrat party. Here in Europe unfortunately most conservatives used to be so scared of being called racists and heartless they let the same situation go on for far too long - while still being smeared as racists by their opponents. Not having a completely bipolar political system is a help in some European countries. Perhaps at some point conservatives as a whole will stop bending over backwards to appease people who are playing a dishonest game and weaponizing people's empathy.
I for one say, welcome back to reality Democrats, nice to have you back.
Lots of leftist political pathologies seem to circle back to Obama's 'fundamental transformation' do they not?
Fantastic, Brad, thank you. For an entrepreneur such as myself, I need ALL the help I can get in order to have a shot at being of any articulate influence here, behind the blue curtain.
We all need to make ourselves an inspiration to them, I think. You would be surprised how many Latinos share our foundational values.
Yes to all of this.