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Topics - Universe Prince

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166
3DHS / Homeland Security plans new rules to clamp down on illegal immigration
« on: August 09, 2007, 05:25:08 AM »
From NPR:

      The Bush administration is about to clamp down further on the hiring of illegal immigrants. It's expected within days to announce new rules that would effectively require employers to fire workers if they use phony Social Security numbers. But employee and business groups fear the change could also hurt many legal workers.      

   [...]

      But the Bush administration says it needs the new authority to reduce illegal immigration, especially now that Congress has failed to enact more sweeping reform.

A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department says that the change will help the government go after some of the millions of illegal immigrants now working in the United States and those who employ them.		      

   [...]

      Avendano notes the case of one legal U.S. resident in North Carolina whose name ended up on a "no-match" list.

"The employer told her to fix it. She tried. She actually did fix it. She came back with the correction from Social Security and the employer said, 'Oh this isn't good enough for me. You're fired.' There's nothing to prevent that."

Homeland Security officials say that's clearly not their intent. In fact, they delayed implementing the new rules ? which were first proposed last year ? hoping for congressional passage of a bill that would not only tighten enforcement, but expand temporary job opportunities for immigrants. But that didn't happen. And now they say, they plan to more aggressively enforce the existing law.		      

Whole article at the other end of this link.

Personally, I think this will result in illegal immigrants driven further into crime like forged documents, and into the hands of less scrupulous employers, and essentially into a black market for labor. And some legal immigrants getting shafted because of mistakes, wary employers, and possibly even abuse of the rules. I am sure, however, this news will be greeted warmly by many as a sign of the government doing something about stopping the offensive employment of illegal immigrants.

167
3DHS / Presidential Race Candidate Search Trends
« on: August 09, 2007, 02:16:22 AM »
I haven't tried attaching images before, but hopefully either you'll see the images or links to them. Both are screen-grabs of Google Trends search results pages. One shows search trends for Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, John Edwards and (why not) Mike Gravel. The other shows search trends for Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thomson, John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have no idea if the graphs indicate anything significant, but it seemed as good as anything else for trying out the attachment feature of this site. And it seemed as good excuse as any to plug Ron Paul again.



168
3DHS / punctuation at 3DHS
« on: August 02, 2007, 12:01:05 AM »
Is there anything that can be done about this site's weird conversion of various punctuation marks and letter accents into question marks? To read posts with that problem and to have to convert to improper punctuation just to keep the question marks from appearing is all really quite annoying. This site did not used to have this problem as I recall. And I know it's not just my browser because pretty much all other websites display punctuation and letter accents properly.

169
3DHS / Racism in 2007
« on: July 27, 2007, 06:18:18 PM »
If you watched the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, you might remember that Ian Johnson is the running back who scored the winning points for Boise State and later proposed to his cheerleader girlfriend, Chrissy Popadics, on national television. 40 years after Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Ian Johnson, who is black, and Chrissy Popadics, who is white, have had to hire security for their wedding because of death threats received.

Why does this happen? I confess I don't get it. Yeah, I know it's racism and some people are assholes, but, really, why threaten these two people? What could possibly be gained? But more than that, why does anyone even care anymore that someone with dark skin might marry someone with light skin? What kind of moron objects to that?

170
3DHS / The F.B.I. ordered to pay $101,750,000
« on: July 27, 2007, 05:42:23 PM »
Apparently the FBI deliberately framed four men--Joe Salvati, Peter Limone, Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo--for murder to protect witnesses who supposedly were FBI sources in efforts against the Mafia. And now, finally, those men each get a part of $101,750,000 (the amount should be 4 times that, imo) that U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner has ordered the FBI to pay to the wrongfully convicted men. Or rather two of the men get a part of the money, the other two parts have to go to family members because Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo died in jail.

This is a prime example of what happens when law enforcement decides that catching the bad guys is their goal rather than the only legitimate goal for law enforcement, protecting people's rights.

For more on the too long overdue vindication of these men, check out the AP story and the Boston Herald story.

And people wonder why I don't trust the government to not abuse the "Patriot Act".

171
3DHS / Your Government at Work
« on: July 25, 2007, 12:17:59 AM »
From the DesMoinesRegister.com:

      A report by the Government Accountability Office says USDA paid $1.1 billion in subsidies to 172,801 dead people between 1999 through 2005. Forty percent of that money went to people who had been for at least three years, the report found.

Nineteen percent went to individuals who had been dead for at least seven years.

In a case involving an Illinois farm, USDA made $400,000 in payments from 1999 through 2005 in the name of someone who died in 1995, the report said.		      

Whole thing at the other end of this link.

172
3DHS / The YouTube Interview: Ron Paul
« on: July 18, 2007, 09:59:19 PM »
If you have about 10 minutes to spare, head on over to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGGOiv7sA4w and check out Ron Paul answering questions about a variety of issues.

173
3DHS / Happy Independence Day!
« on: July 04, 2007, 09:00:47 AM »
Happy Independence Day

to all you Americans out there.

All day long I get to celebrate people fighting against an oppressive government and for the ideals of liberty and human rights, and you can't stop me! Ha ha ha ha ha!





Yeah, I know, tomorrow, it's back to business as usual, but still...

I'm thinking some Sam Adams beer, various sorts just for fun, and eventually some sort of red meat (properly cooked of course, and with some rosemary, mmmmm) with maybe some potatoes on the side.

What about the rest of you folks? What have you planned?

174
3DHS / "Michael Moore's Shticko"
« on: June 22, 2007, 05:48:15 PM »
I can't do this article justice with excerpts. I invite you to go read the whole thing. But here are a couple of excerpts just to whet your appetite:

      Sicko also introduces us to Diane, whose brain tumor operation was initially denied by Horizon BlueCross because it didn't consider her condition "life threatening." She eventually received treatment, but "not without battling the insurance companies," Moore says.

Jack Szmyt found himself in a similar situation. After waiting two months for his initial diagnosis—he too had a brain tumor—Szmyt was told that it would be another month until doctors could start the necessary treatment. Rather than wait in a queue, he borrowed $30,000 from a friend, and flew to a private clinic in Germany. Had he not sought private treatment abroad, his German doctor said, he would likely have died. When contacted by the media, his insurer, again the Swedish government, said it didn't consider the assigned waiting period "unreasonable."

Such examples suggest that Moore's depiction of European-style medicine as an easy panacea for America's problems is rather more complicated than presented. Massive queues and cash shortages have plagued all of the systems profiled—and celebrated—in Sicko. In the case of Cuba, whose system Moore also praises, this includes shortage of basic medical materials and medicine. And the credulous audience member is none the wiser.		      

   [...]

      After the critical reaction to his previous films, Moore opts for elision over outright falsehood. So when he marvels that a doctor working in the [United Kingdom's National Health Service] owns an Audi and "million dollar home," it is hardly in his interest to point out, as The Independent did in January, that "soaring salary levels of doctors are worsening the NHS cash crisis." And while bitterly lamenting the U.S. system of "wage slavery"—American students, Moore says, are saddled with debt and, thus, "won't cause [employers] any trouble"—he ignores a recent report from the British Medical Association suggesting that, by their fifth year of medical school, British students "have accumulated an average debt of" $39,000.

It is these sections, where Moore uncritically praises institutions with which many locals have ever-declining levels of faith (only 4% of Britons surveyed think the system "has enough money and the money is spent well"), that will likely alienate his non-ideological foreign fans. It is one thing to nod one's head in agreement with the Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11—likely a mere reinforcement of previously held views for most Europeans—but it is quite another for a Briton to watch Moore tell viewers that English pharmacies don't sell milk and laundry detergent, when there is a Boots—the British version of CVS—just around the corner. 		      

The whole article can be found at Reason Online.

175
3DHS / Trade as a Humanitarian Force
« on: June 14, 2007, 09:32:32 PM »
According to Gabor Steingart:

      With each purchase of a product from the Far East, the consumer delivers a blow to the domestic social cartel and its terms of sale. Shoppers compare a product's price and service, but they don't consider the price and service of the nation that produces the item. Thus consumers across the Western world become executors of globalization. In the world war for wealth, they are the most important combat troops for the aggressor states. Though they carry no weapons, they still destroy domestic production with their cold-hearted purchasing decisions. Nowadays, almost everything money can buy can be produced without the extra ingredient that we call the welfare state.      

   [...]

      The question here is not about what's wrong or right. What is important at this juncture is simply the realization that the global labor market, as we have invented it up to now, has created a unified sovereign territory for goods producers. The demand for labor now moves from one land to another, and naturally prefers those states with the lowest possible supplementary social costs.

Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.		      

Compare that to this from Frank Chodorov:

      The perimeter of Society is not fixed by political frontiers but by the radius of its commercial contacts. All people who trade with one another are by that very act brought into community.

The point is emphasized by the strategy of war. The objective of a general staff is to destroy the marketplace mechanisms of the enemy; the destruction of his army is only incidental to that purpose. The army could well enough be left intact if his internal means of communication were destroyed, his ports of entry immobilized, so that specialized production, which depends on trade, could no longer be carried on; the people, reduced to primitive existence, thus lose the will to war and sue for peace. That is the general pattern of all wars. The more highly integrated the economy the stronger will be the nation in war, simply because of its ability to produce an abundance of both military implements and economic goods; on the other hand, if its ability to produce is destroyed, if the flow of goods is interrupted, the more susceptible to defeat it is, because its people, unaccustomed as they are to primitive conditions, are the more easily discouraged. There is no point to the argument as to whether "guns" or "butter" is more important in the prosecution of war.

It follows that any interference with the operation of the marketplace, however done, is analogous to an act of war. A tariff is such an act. When we are "protected" against Argentine beef, the effect (as intended) is to make beef harder to get, and that is exactly what an invading army would do. Since the duty does not diminish our desire for beef, we are compelled by the diminished supply to put out more labor to satisfy that desire; our range of possibilities is foreshortened, for we are faced with the choice of getting along with less beef or abstaining from the enjoyment of some other "good." The absence of a plenitude of meat from the marketplace lowers the purchasing power of our labor. We are poorer, even as is a nation whose ports have been blockaded.

Moreover, since every buyer is a seller, and vice versa, the prohibition against their beef makes it difficult for Argentineans to buy our automobiles, and this expression of our skills is constricted. The effect of a tariff is to drive a potential buyer out of the marketplace. The argument that "protection" provides jobs is patently fallacious. It is the consumer who gives the worker a job, and the consumer who is prevented from consuming might as well be dead, as far as providing productive employment is concerned.

Incidentally, is it jobs we want, or is it beef? Our instinct is to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor. We labor only because we want; the opportunity to produce is not a boon, it is a necessity. Neither the domestic nor the foreign producer "dumps" anything into our laps. There is a price on everything we want and the price is always the weariness of toil. Whatever causes us to put out more toil to acquire a given amount or kind of satisfactions is undesirable, for it conflicts with our natural urge for a more abundant life. Such is a tariff, an embargo, an import quota or the modern device of raising the price of foreign goods by arbitrarily lowering the value of our money. Any restriction of trade, internal or external, does violence to a man's primordial drive to improve his circumstances.		      

When Mr. Steingart says "capitalism is going back to its roots," I can in good conscience reply, "I certainly hope so." If we wish to exert change on other cultures that are poor and in need of ideas about human dignity and worker's (i.e. human) rights, then we need not to stop buying their products but to continue and perhaps expand our trade with those people. Capitalism, at its roots, is humanitarian in nature. Capitalism, trade, creates cooperation between people and diminishes sectarian barriers between people of differing classes, cultures and countries. If we have established domestic welfare policies that suffer from trade with other countries, that is our problem, not that of people who live in those other countries. To punish them for our mistake is neither humane nor in our best interests, and it suggests a severe misunderstanding of the situation. I would suggest to Mr. Steingart that the social "triumph" of the welfare state needs to fade so as to make way for the social triumph of trade. Getting humans to cooperate peacefully is always going to be better than creating a way of life that separates people and make enemies of outsiders.

Or to put it another way, make money not war.

176
3DHS / Rock
« on: June 14, 2007, 05:01:52 PM »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZdAB4V_j8&mode=related&search=

That is either an exceedingly brilliant campaign video, or the dumbest. Click on the link and go watch it. What do you think?

177
3DHS / Cuba
« on: June 06, 2007, 05:23:34 PM »
Excerpts from "A Cuban death rehearsal" by Bella Thomas:

      I returned to Havana this April, after an absence of several years. I went to see friends and to see whether, as is often claimed, change really was afoot. I came away with the opposite impression. Those who must see Cuba before it "all gets washed away" by the Americans need not worry. The current impasse will outlast Fidel, and may outlast Raúl for a few years—to the great cost of the Cuban people, and the architecture and resources of this remarkable island.

Between 1996 and 1999, I lived periodically in Havana with a gay Spanish diplomat, a close friend who had once, maybe not entirely jokingly, suggested that we marry but maintain our separate ménages. I was too square for that, but when he was posted to Cuba I went to stay with him. Cuba was reputedly not an easy place for homosexuals. I was interested in the country, and I could write about it.		      

   [...]

      In fact, the regime seems to act with zeal to ensure that the embargo continues. When it looks as if the US government might consider ending it, some heavy-handed Cuban act ensues that the status quo prevails. In 1996, when Clinton was keen to initiate rapprochement, the regime shot down two US planes manned by members of a Cuban exile group rescuing those escaping the island on rafts. When, in 2003, an influential cross-party lobby in the US seemed set to dismantle the embargo, the Cuban government promptly incarcerated 75 prisoners of conscience and executed three men who hijacked a tugboat with a view to getting to Miami.      

   [...]

      This does not mean that those still in Cuba are acquiescent or happy. They are far poorer than their eastern European counterparts were in 1989: the average wage, at $20 a month, can barely feed a single person for a couple of weeks. You cannot spend any length of time in Havana without noticing the lack of food for the majority of Cubans. The mother of a friend, an old lady who lived in one tiny rotting room in a former brothel with her son, gets by selling matchboxes to her neighbours, having stolen them from the factory where she worked. Another acquaintance keeps pigs on her balcony and sells pork to a few locals. The luckier ones sell cigars or taxi rides to foreigners. An elite work in hotels.

When the Soviets pulled out, the government reluctantly turned to tourism to stave off bankruptcy. The business started in enclaves in a few prescribed zones, on the basis that foreign influences might be quarantined. But tourists were always going to be drawn to the city centres. And the presence of tourists has inevitably revealed to Cubans the depths of their poverty and repression. Tourism has enriched some Cubans and given others decent jobs, but it has also undermined the status of those in less lucrative but better qualified professions.

Healthcare and education are supposed to be the redeeming graces of the regime, but this is questionable. There are a large number of doctors, but, according to most Cubans I know, many have left the country and the health system is in a ragged state—apart from those hospitals reserved for foreigners—and people often have to pay a bribe to get treated. Michael Moore, the American film director, who has recently been praising the system should take note of the real life stories beneath the statistics. I went into a couple of hospitals for locals on my latest visit. In the first, my friend told me not to say a word in case my accent was noticed, as foreigners are not allowed in these places. I was appalled by the hygiene and amazed at the antiquity of the building and some of the equipment. I was told that the vast majority of Cuban hospitals, apart from two in Havana, were built before the revolution. Which revolution, I wondered; this one seemed to date from the 1900s.		      

   [...]

      In their call for the US to keep its "hands off Cuba," western supporters of the Cuban regime seem to miss the irony that this, unfortunately, is precisely what the US is doing. Were the US to relax its embargo, the result would be a tidal wave of US capital, which the regime would be unlikely to survive. Many Cubans would grow richer and more demanding, and would no longer accept playing second fiddle to the tourists.      

Whole article at Prospect Magazine.

178
3DHS / on immigration and the rule of law
« on: June 01, 2007, 06:57:46 AM »
I've heard and read a lot of talk about the rule of law in relation to the subject of immigration. Generally the argument goes along the lines of illegal immigrants are disregarding the rule of law and granting them amnesty or doing anything at all that might make their situation easier is to flout the rule of law. And I am sure if you agree with closed borders and/or tight immigration control then that argument seems perfectly reasonable.

As one who does not agree, I have an objection to that argument. It is an objection that is bound to get me in trouble for what will seem like an unfair comparison, but I frankly do not know how else to make my point.

When people had civil rights sit-ins and marches and all those things that sent people to jail for breaking various laws during the civil rights struggle, that was disrespecting the law. And most people accept that now because most people agree that those protesters were protesting laws that were wrong. And most people look back now on run-away slaves and the Underground Railroad as doing the right thing because most people agree that laws allowing slavery were unjust.

I can almost hear the knee-jerks and the angry protests already. But the immigrants are not slaves! But there is nothing racist about opposing immigration! Calm down. I'm not making direct comparisons. I'm just pointing out some of the more obvious situations where breaking the law has become considered not only the right thing to do but also something brave. Yes, I know the immigration situation is not something we can correlate to slavery or civil rights, and I'm not trying to do so.

Prohibition was the law of the land once. It was an amendment to the Constitution no less. And it was repealed. Did repealing it "reward" those who wanted to break the law? Or was it a necessary correction for a bad law?

The argument that we cannot repeal our immigration laws or do something that results in an easier time for immigrants who entered the country illegally because it flouts the rule or law or rewards law breakers, well, it seems a like a very shallow argument to me. Yes, I know, we can't go around rewarding thieves and rapists for breaking the law. But we're not talking about thieves or rapists. Being for repealing immigration laws or helping immigrants currently here illegally does not mean being for the break down of the rule of law. It does not mean the next step is giving murderers and burglars a free pass.

The point here is not to compare the immigration situation to slavery or to say that anti-immigration folks are racists. The point is that unjust laws can be opposed and changed without a disregard for the rule of law.

Supporting open borders isn't about flouting the rule of law or desiring chaos. I think (and hope) I don't need to make the argument that the rule of law is no good if the laws are not just. That argument has been made by people smarter and more eloquent than I am. Yes, we can change the laws without disregarding the rule of law. Yes, we can do something the benefits people unjustly burdened by a bad law without creating anarchy. Yes, people can argue for freer immigration and still be arguing for what they believe is right both toward our laws and our societal order.

So I'm just not buying the argument that legal changes which grant "amnesty" to illegal immigrants or make immigration easier disregard or flout the rule of law. And I don't buy that such changes reward lawbreakers. To remove punishment for something people should be free to do in the first place is not a reward.

179
3DHS / Open markets need open borders
« on: May 31, 2007, 05:54:20 PM »
Excerpted from "Open Markets, Closed Borders: Immigration reformers miss the point. Again." by Kerry Howley:
      As the U.S. decides how many immigrants to let slip through its barricades, historical contingencies should give some perspective to those who would throw up walls and slam doors. Pritchett lays out the humanitarian stakes of debate in his latest book, Let Their People Come, where he argues for a poverty-alleviation strategy that prioritizes mobility and a vision of free enterprise that embraces free movement. The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”      

   [...]

      One place to start thinking about labor market liberalization might be with the demand our economy has already demonstrated. At present, 500,000 undocumented immigrants come into the country annually, finding employment at above native rates. The Labor Department projects that the economy will create 400,000 or more low-skilled service sector jobs every year, while the number of Americans without a high school education continues to fall.

How will the immigration bill meet this challenge? The 790-page bill as amended creates a guest worker program for 200,000 workers, a number the Cato Institute’s Dan Griswold calls “woefully inadequate.” The trade-off for is not insubstantial; the bill’s provisions include a stretch of wall, 105 surveillance towers, 18,000 more border agents, and billions of dollars. Most disturbingly, the bill includes the Electronic Employment Verification System, which would require that every single worker, American or otherwise, seek the Department of Homeland Security’s permission to work legally.

A guest worker program could be a step forward, in that cleaving immigration from public services and permanence addresses the incompatibility of open borders and a welfare state. And even a small step forward could be enormously beneficial. As Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, explains on his blog, “since trade barriers for labor services are so much steeper in today's world economy than barriers in goods, even a small amount of liberalization in this area promises huge income gains in aggregate.” The question is whether a trickle of visas is worth an onslaught of enforcement, the billions spent to support distortions in the labor market.		      

Whole article at Reason Online.

180
3DHS / Short interview with Ron Paul
« on: May 25, 2007, 07:22:49 PM »
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/120402.html

David All and Jerome Armstrong of the YouTube channel DomeNation interviewed Ron Paul just after his speech at the National Press Club, which provided Rudy Giuliani with some reading suggestions. The link above will take you to the Reason Hit & Run page with the YouTube video.

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