Indignant Desert Birds

The problem with illegal immigration, in my mind, is not that people are heading across the US border looking for a better life. Schoolhouse rock taught me that America is a greatmelting pot, and I try to believe everything childhood cartoons told me.

The problem with illegal immigration is that it opens up a whole lot of holes in our border. This is important, because there are people who want to bring things across the US border that aren’t huddled masses yearning to breath free. Rather, it’s terrorists with bad plots, and people carrying cocaine. Future Americans (or their parents) are desirable. The rest, not so much.

To back up a bit: There are people in the world for whom being a slave in America is preferable to whatever hell they’re leaving behind. There are, in fact, a whole lot of people like that. Given this, they will do whatever it takes to improve life for themselves and their children.

They will live the American dream if we want them to or not.

That’s not really the problem. The problem is that in figuring out how to get across our “sealed” border, they’re creating holes through which other people can slip. We need to separate the people we want from the people with nefarious purpose.

The solution seems rather simple, to me. Let’s throw the American borders open. Let’s not just crack them a little bit to students and those with work visas, but everyone. All someone would have to do, in my system, is A) have someone to support them when they get here and B) be able to pass a background check.

It seems to me that this keep the people most motivated to get here from using their skills and ingenuity to break our security. When that happens, it leaves the real bad guys having to do their own thinking. Makes our job a lot easier.

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Say you wake up one morning and discover a $100 bill in your pants pockets. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll start furiously searching your brain to discover what you might have been up to the night before. But, upon realizing that I’d done nothing illicit, I might head to my bank to deposit said money. And, having found that money, and done a bit of working out, I might treat myself to a nice breakfast. Let’s say it’s a really nice breakfast. Like $90 worth of good. And, just for fun’s sake: the Benjamin stuck in the bank brought my balance up from $0.

So then: In normal human terms: $0 + $100 – $90= $10. But in bank terms it’s -$22. Surely there must be a mistake. Nope. See a bank is going to do a day’s withdrawals _first_, and _then_ do that day’s deposits. So: $0 -$90= -$90. So the bank tacks on an overdraft fee. So your -$90 – $32 = -$122. Once they’ve hit you with that overdraft fee, they feel pretty comfortable adding your deposit into their system.

In 2009, overdraft fees account for $39 billion in banking revenue. Who gets that money?

These guys.

And who is paying that $37 billion? Here’s a hit: the rich have more in the bank than nothing. It’s damned near impossible to opt out of this system. Banks don’t give you the choice to _not_ let them “extend you the loan”. More than that: if you earn money, you’ll need a bank to cash that check. If you’re not a member of a bank, you’re going to get charged– if they do it at all.

Thirty Seven Billion Dollars. By way of contrast, the Federal government is spending $47 billion on extra unemployment benefits this year. Basically, if congress were to stop letting banks redistribute wealth from your pockets into their own, it would be almost as effective at propping up our economy as what congress is willing to do.

$37 billion in unasked for loans. And the banks are still unprofitable. Why do their senior managers still have jobs?

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It seems silly to me that America has to grant rights to new groups every time new groups are “discovered”, and demand those rights. If Aliens land tomorrow and ask to start the road to citizenship, they should be _covered_ by the US constitution. Therefore I suggest we add a bill to the US Constitution that would simplify matters. Below is my proposed text.

Amendment XXVIII, US Constitution:

Section 1. The rights, responsibilities or duties due citizens of the United States who are 18 years of age or older shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state.

Section 2. Nothing in this article shall be construed so as to amend previous articles of this document.

Section 3. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 1 sets out the age of citizenship. Section 2 says.. yes we can still put people in prison (covered in amendment 13), and yes, you still have to pay taxes (covered in article 16). Nor, for the record, would this amendment let 18 year olds run for president…

Other than a quibble about the age of majority, what would you do differently?

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It happens every time. I’ll be standing at Target needing toothpaste, wondering which to buy. Ideally, I’d want something that offered a great intersection of price and “tooth protection”. What “tooth protection” means, exactly, I’m not sure. I think we brush our teeth to prevent cavities, but I’m not really sure how that works. But I really don’t know what metrics to use to evaluate toothpaste, and there are so many options. I assume that if one were particularly good, or particularly bad, we’d know about it. So I assume they’re basically all the same and make my decision based on “which one tastes better”.

Thing is, everyone I’ve talked with about this does the same.

Now, take this confusion and multiply it by everything on your grocery list. Think of all the healthy eating fads America has seen come and go. Eat carbs, don’t eat carbs, drink wine, eat only grapefruit… These are the basic tools by which Americans transmit information about product choices. That’s a lot of information, and most of it is either bad or misinformed or half transmitted. But researching every item that goes into your grocery basket is time consuming and boring. The FDA would yank anything harmful from the shelves, so the hippocratic oath we make to ourselves won’t be violated.

I can’t even imagine researching the factory of every product I put into my body, and then suing if the company is lying about what they’re producing. It sounds like a boring sort of job I’m more than willing to pay someone else to do.

There is a political philosophy that holds life I’ve just described as the highest, freest, ideal. They have a child-like belief that the market’s ability to perfectly transmit information is so stupendous that simply by lifting all government oversight, producers wouldn’t dare lie to, cheat, or steal from their customers. After all– Firestone tires was destroyed after they (knowingly!) killed scores of people. They certainly didn’t change their name and move on.

Of course– of course!– government oversight isn’t perfect. Regulatory capture happens, sometimes government regulators simply aren’t up to doing their jobs, etc. That’s why we have other forms of protection, like the aforementioned lawsuits. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy I’ve ever heard of to agree with Hobbes that life is “Nasty, Brutish, and Short”, but then turn around and say that we should keep fighting anyway. Cooperation for mutual benefit is a sucker’s game.

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“you’ve been playing for 4 hours. You really should go outside and get some fresh air”. If I were 13, it would be my mom telling me this. Since I’m 31, it’s the game itself telling me that I need a small break. It’s not _really_ my intention of writing about the mechanics of this game, but instead to overthink it a little bit. What I’m saying is even if you hate games, stick around.

Er, right. The game. It’s called Dawn of Discovery. The player is given an island, a boat, a dock, a few tools, and told- basically- to create the biggest, baddest city they want to. The complication arises, as it usually does, because there’s not quite enough stuff to do everything you need. What’s a frustrating experience in real life is a fun challenge in the game world.

Since no one island has all the things it needs, the player must develop new islands, and must begin trade with those islands– and other players. This is the first major lesson the game offers: conflict doesn’t work nearly as well as cooperation. War is expensive, and trade is cheep. The game explicitly teaches the value of positive sum relationships. It’s an interesting and well deserved slap at neo-con thinking

There are two types of Islands “Occidental” and “Oriental”. As everyone who’s taken first year Latin knows, these words mean “West” and “East”. Thus we can expect to find these different types of Islands in the– you guessed it North and South. No idea why. I’m just going to point out this XKCD comic and leave it alone.

In order to develop Eastern Southern islands, a player needs to find the Sultan’s Visor’s island, receive permission from him, and then start shipping in massive amounts of raw materials. This provides a, probably unintended, lesson: people in the mid-east can’t do anything without the help of the white man. The game does a great job creating north-south interdependence, but it’s striking that “technical goods” (eg: tools, glass, clothes) flow north to south, but luxury goods (carpets, spices, quartz) flow south.

A point about all that: while it may seem somewhat offensive to modern players, this really is the way the “West” viewed and experienced the “East”. A weird, mystical land where luxury goods came from. It works very well as historical commentary.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my peasants need something…

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Oh gods. It’s been a while. The pipes are rusty, the fingers need limbering, and if I don’t write soon, I’m going to… stop being able to find a good metaphor.

Just watched V for Vendetta. Fun movie in the “Action packed never stops moving” sort of way. The thing I really don’t get is the veneration of Guy Fawkes. Let’s look at the record: man tried to blow up parliament as part of a pro-catholic movement. Alright, that doesn’t mean so much in America in 2009. After all, here and now it’s mostly the Baptists who are crazed terrorists and the “seculars” who try and put their heads down to ignore whatever it is they’re doing.

But in 1605 “Catholics” (Latin for “universal”) and Protestants (Latin for “nu-uh, you are so wrong about _something_”) were in a state of war. Not in the technical sense of “conflict between 2 or more state powers having more than 1000 causalities”, but in the more brutal sense that most of the European nations would be engaged in a bloody civil war that would set brother against sister until long after the Treaty of Westphalia sought to end cross border religious raids.

Except England. While it was technically a “protestant” nation, there was a great deal of informal toleration– roughly a Catholic equivalent for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in modern America. By century’s end England would replace this informal policy with a formal one. In the mean time there were known Catholics serving in the Parliament along side their Protestant brethren.

That’s the Parliament that Guy Fawkes wanted to destroy. That’s the _reason_ he wanted to destroy it. Guy Fawkes plotted to bring back the fire, bring back the bloody reign inter-sectional warfare that plagued England in the rule of “Bloody” Mary. The Gunpowder Treason and Plot that ought never be forgot? There’s a reason for this warning. Fawkes had a vision of the world on fire, and only accident prevented him from destroying the guarantor of English Liberty.

So, in 2008, when I see the Church of Scientology– a small and powerless cult– harassed and protested by people wearing Guy Fawkes masks, I being to wonder if this “anonymous” group that has forgotten it’s history, or is enacting a parody of it’s most shameful bits, hoping that we all will remember what life was before 1649 and Maryland’s act of Toleration. If it’s the later: well done internet people. Maybe it will be enough to push back against modern religious in-Tolerance.

If the former– if they really are donning the mask of a religious zealot to harass the world’s least-powerful religion– it’s a sad message that we’ve lost the lesson of the 5th of November…

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