Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, September 28, 2023, and National Strawberry Cream Pie Day, celebrating an excellent pie that is rarely seen.  You can see one below, though it is too light on the strawberries and too heavy on the cream. It looks more like cheesecake than a cream pie.

It’s also National Drink Beer Day, National Good Neighbor Day, World Maritime Day,Freedom from Hunger Day, International Day for Universal Access to Information, and World Rabies Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the September 28 Wikipedia page.

Wine of the Day:  I had only one meat meal in three weeks in Israel, so last night I treated myself to a honking T-bone steak along with rice and green beans. I chose a hearty red to go with it, and a rather pricey one: a $40 Bordeaux from 7 years ago. Here it is:

This wine, which is 70% Merlot with the rest Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc (a classic Bordeaux mixture, though heavy on merlot), tells you why a great Bordeaux can outstrip a great Cabernet. It’s gutsy but full of notes of berries, plums, cherries, and earth: complexity to spare, which you don’t find in a good Cab.  But it’s clear that I drank it too young: it needs another 5-10 years, I think, as it’s still a bit tannic. It also had a bit of sediment, but not much, and a mature Bordeaux should have more.  Here’s a rating by Jeb Dunnuck, who gave it a 93/100:

The deep purple-colored 2016 Château Grand-Pontet is a blend of 70% Merlot and the balance Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. It offers a pretty, lifted bouquet of black cherries, plums, violets, damp earth, and bay leaf. This gives way to a medium to full-bodied, ripe, nicely concentrated wine that has beautiful purity of fruit, rock solid mid-palate depth, moderate tannins, and a great finish. Drink this ripe, powerful 2016 over the coming 15+ years.

Some of the best Bordeaux, like Chateau Petrus, are mostly merlot, and this wine shows that the grape can make for a powerful wine. 2016 was a very good year for Bordeaux, and I was prescient enough to shell out for a fair few bottles. I know now not to touch them for five years or more (if I live!).

Da Nooz:

*Did anybody watch the Republican Presidential debate last night? Neither did I.

*When midnight chimes on Sunday, and if Congress hasn’t taken action, there will be a shutdown of the U.S. government. The NYT prognosticates that a brief shutdown is tolerable, but a longer one might cause a recession. 

A brief shutdown would be unlikely to slow the economy significantly or push it into recession, economists on Wall Street and inside the Biden administration have concluded. That assessment is based in part on the evidence from prior episodes where Congress stopped funding many government operations.

But a prolonged shutdown could hurt growth and potentially President Biden’s re-election prospects. It would join a series of other factors that are expected to weigh on the economy in the final months of this year, including high interest rates, the restart of federal student loan payments next month and a potentially lengthy United Automobile Workers strike.

A halt to federal government business would not just dent growth. It would further dampen the mood of consumers, whose confidence slumped in September for the second straight month amid rising gas prices. In the month that previous shutdowns began, the Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence slid by an average of seven points, Goldman Sachs economists noted recently, although much of that decline reversed in the month after a reopening.

Gregory Daco, the chief economist at EY-Parthenon, said a government shutdown would not be a “game changer in terms of the trajectory of the economy.” But, he added, “the fear is that, if it combines with other headwinds, it could become a significant drag on economic activity.”

Note how they slip in whether or not it would hurt Biden early in the article. But don’t we already know that a prolonged recession would do that? At any rate, shutdowns usually haven’t lasted long and we have a year before the next election, so I’m not worried about Biden. What’s more worrisome are all those government workers who won’t get paid and have to deal with food, mortgages, and other expenses.

*And, according to the WaPo, the odds that there will be a government shutdown have increased since the House GOP leaders rejected the Democratic Senate’s spending bill. Both Houses have to agree on one version of a bill before it can pass. And the Senate bill, which passed that chamber, is bipartisan!

A federal government shutdown looked increasingly likely as House Republicans indicated Wednesday they would not consider a bipartisan Senate plan to fund the government past the weekend deadline.

The Senate on Tuesday advanced a bill to continue funding the government at current levels into mid-November, which would also provision some of the billions of dollars President Biden seeks for U.S. aide to Ukraine and for natural disaster relief. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) swiftly rejected that idea, telling his conference in a closed-door meeting Wednesday that he would not put the Senate bill on the floor in its current form.

In other private meetings this week, McCarthy began to float the idea of taking the Senate’s short-term bill, stripping it of provisions the House GOP opposes, then tacking on a House-passed border security bill and sending it back to the Senate. Separately, McCarthy and his allies have continued to encourage their colleagues to pass a 30-day short-term spending bill Friday, which would include border security, in a signal of defiance to the Senate. Exactly what that bill would include remained up in the air Wednesday afternoon.

The different tactics nearly guarantee a government shutdown, unless lawmakers can force some other long-shot solution. The two chambers working in opposition to one another probably won’t have enough time to pass a stopgap spending bill — called a continuing resolution, or CR — before the current funding laws expire at 12:01 a.m. Sunday.

The GOP is really, really hot on immigration reform as something that the Democrats have to accept to avert a shutdown, but I don’t really know what the GOP wants in that area. Ceiling Cat knows that we need immigration reform, and we know the Democrats won’t touch it with a ten-foot poll (they seem to prefer open borders to any restrictions), but it should be considered rather than used as a lever to prevent a shutdown. At any rate, my own prediction is yes, we’ll have a shutdown, but it won’t last long.

And polls show, contrary to my expectations, that it’ll hurt the Democrats and Biden more than the Republicans. That’s a bit curious, but remember that the party in power is always blamed for economic downturns.

*I have two pieces from The Free Press today, the first being “Inside Iran’s influence operation” This operation, reported by former WSJ writer Jay Solomon, is apparently a “scoop.”

In the spring of 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues—particularly its nuclear program—by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers. They called it the Iran Experts Initiative.

The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semafor and Iran International. The officials, working under the moderate president Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: at least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.

The documents offer deep and unprecedented new insights into the thinking and inner workings of Iran’s Foreign Ministry at a crucial time in the nuclear diplomacy—even as Tehran’s portrayal of events is questioned, if not flatly denied, by others involved in the IEI. They show how Iran was capable of the kind of influence operations that the U.S. and its allies in the region often conduct.

Now this story begins a while back, during the Obama administration, but the mindset that it created—that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are peaceful ones, and the country has no ambitions to build a bomb—persist in the Biden admnistration. This is one of the Democrats’ blind spots, but you don’t have to be an expert to see where Iran is heading. Israel knows what’s going on, and if we’re ever to prevent Iran from getting a bomb, it will be Israel that does the job.  Their possession of nuclear weapons isn’t a particular danger to the U.S. but it sure is to Israel!

*Finally, yesterday I wrote about Coleman Hughes’s claim that the TED organization had deliberately hidden his talk on “colorblind” solutions to inequality, probably because those solutions contravene “progressive” ideological demands that we not only see color, but make it the main factor in how we deal with individuals and groups.

So in fairness I highlight two responses to Hughes’s article, both in The Free Press: “Adam Grant and Chris Anderson respond to Coleman Hughes.”

Adam Grant is a social scientist who argues that a body of literature contradicts Hughes’s claim that colorblind initiatives are the best way to reduce inequality. From his response:

As a social scientist, I form my opinions based on credible evidence. My concerns about Hughes’s talk weren’t fueled by the argument he made, but by my perception that his conclusion was inconsistent with the best available data.

In early May, I was asked by TED to offer a confidential assessment of his talk. I responded with a summary of a meta-analysis of research on diversity ideologies, spanning 167 independent samples and 296 effect sizes. It appears that Hughes never received my full commentary—or my reply explaining why the results pose a major challenge to Hughes’s talk. Here are the three points that I made:

(1) The meta-analysis distinguishes between three forms of color blindness (what the authors call “identity-blind” approaches). All three are either ineffective or counterproductive on key outcomes:

a. Ignoring differences (“color blindness”) is associated with reduced stereotypes and prejudice. . . but fails to protect against discrimination. From the authors: “discrimination may be most problematic in organizations where color blindness prevails.”

b. Minimizing differences (“assimilation”) is problematic across the board—it exacerbates discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes.

c. Meritocracy predicts lower discrimination but fails to shield against prejudice and stereotypes.

(2) To make the case for an identity-blind approach, you would need evidence that one or more of these approaches has greater efficacy than a multicultural approach that acknowledges differences. Unfortunately for Hughes’s thesis, the meta-analysis shows the opposite. As the authors conclude, “multiculturalism is more consistently associated with improved intergroup relations than any identity-blind ideology.”

(3) The most rigorous evidence in the meta-analysis—from randomized, controlled experiments—demonstrates the many ways in which color blindness can backfire in schools, workplaces, and courtrooms. As a team of experts summarized in a review of the research, “Shutting our eyes to the complexities of race does not make them disappear, but does make it harder to see that color blindness often creates more problems than it solves.”

I can’t judge the data, but Grant’s beef is that he wanted Hughes to engage with someone working on that data, and that didn’t happen (there was an online “debate” with Jamelle Bouie.

Chris Anderson is the head of TED and here’s a bit of his response to Hughes:

First thing to say is that Hughes’s piece is a reasonably accurate description of what happened. In a nutshell, we invited him to TED to give a talk we knew would be controversial. But the talk ended up causing more upset than we foresaw. So there was pressure from some on our team not to post it. We overrode that.

But nonetheless the talk has had fewer views than others on the platform and Coleman is understandably upset by this. Some additional context. First of all, personally, I’m a fan of Coleman. He’s off-the-charts smart. And he’s a crystal clear communicator. I love his podcast, even when he brings on guests I disagree with. I was excited he agreed to come to TED.

His talk was received with huge enthusiasm by many in the audience. But many others heard it as a dangerous undermining of the fight for progress in race relations.

So yes, there was controversy. When people on your own team feel like their identity is being attacked, it’s right to take pause.

And we concluded that some of the essential issues raised by Coleman’s talk needed wider discussion, hence the decision to supplement the talk with a debate. And in the end, despite internal and external pushback, we did indeed post the talk.

Yeah, but only after Hughes pressured them with an email. They should never have even hesitated to post the talk.

It’s interesting to have a look at the readers’ comments on this post, which are pro-Hughes.  Here’s one:

While I give more weight to Grant’s critique, as it involves conflicting data, TED knew about that before Hughes’s talk, and allowed him to go ahead anyway.  I expect Coleman will respond, so we’ll have to wait and see. As for Anderson’s beef, I don’t give it much weight, as I don’t think Hughes’s talk “dangerously undermines race relations.” It just gives another viewpoint that can be weighed and discussed. Let’s stay tuned and see how Hughes answers these critiques, for I’m sure he will.

*Are two empty canvases represented as “art” worth $70,000. Maybe in money-crazed and art-wonky America, but not in Denmark.

 A Danish artist who was given a pile of cash by a museum in northern Denmark to create a piece for its exhibition on labor conditions two years ago submitted two empty canvases — titled “Take the Money and Run.” The exhibit caused a stir.

A Danish court ruled last week that Jens Haaning has to repay 492,549 kroner ($69,894 ) to Kunsten Museum in Aalborg for having violated his contract. His lawyer, Peter Schønning, said Wednesday that the contemporary artist is appealing the ruling and declined further comment.

The museum had commissioned Haaning in 2021 to recreate two of his earlier pieces featuring bank notes attached to canvases representing the average annual wage in Denmark and Austria.

Instead, he submitted two empty canvases for the exhibition, entitled “Work It Out,” said the artwork represented his current work situation and kept the money.

Along with giving him the money in euro and kroner banknotes for the art pieces, the museum also paid him 25,000 kroner ($3,900) for his labor in creating the artwork.

In its Sept. 18 ruling, the District Court of Copenhagen also decided that Haaning can keep 40,000 kroner ($5,676) from the original amount given to him by the museum, which should constitute an artist’s fee because the exhibition, held from Sept. 24, 2021 to Jan. 16, 2022, went ahead with the empty frames.

Here’s the funny part, which shows you how intellectually vapid the term art is (though not in Denmark):

Haaning has denied having committed a crime and insists he did produce a work of art.

You be the judge; here’s one of Haaning’s “artworks”, with the caption by the AP:

An empty picture frame by Danish artist Jens Haaning titled “Take the Money andRun”, hangs at the Kunsten museum in Aalborg, on Sept. 28, 2021. Haaning, commissioned by the museum in northern Denmark to create a piece for its exhibition on labor conditions two years ago submitted two empty canvases. The exhibit caused a stir. A Danish court ruled last week that Jens Haaning has to repay 492,549 kroner ($69,894 ) to Kunsten Museum in Aalborg for the work. His lawyer, Peter Schønning, said Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023, that the contemporary artist is appealing the ruling and declined further comment. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is wondering:

Hili: Who invented the wheel?
A: I was wondering about it as well.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Hili: Kto wymyślił koło?
Ja: Też się nad tym zastanawiałem.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
And there here is a picture of baby Kulka on a cat ladder newly installed by Paulina and Mariusz! Now she can easily get to the second floor where she lives.

*******************

From reader David, who took this picture in London. Look at one of the works of art in the gallery to the right:

From Facebook. Translation of the German: “They’re all the same, no?”

From The Absurd Sign Project 2.0.  Au contraire!

From Masih; restroom surveillance cameras in Iran? What are they looking for, and who’s looking? Sound up:

From Ricky Gervais (a young one); a scene in which he must euthanize his dog. I’m not sure where it comes from, but the scene is heartbreaking:

From Jez: What a considerate staff!

Try this on your cat! (Note: don’t use your own toothbrush. . .)

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a woman murdered (for that’s what it was) at 36:

Tweets from Professor Cobb.  First, Stravinsky’s cats (artists and musicians tend to favor cats over dogs, a theory that is mine):

WHAT IS THIS?

Why ducks in trees?  She doesn’t realize that many ducks nest in trees, including the wood duck.

28 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. At some level, I have to express that Coleman’s talk might have been completely stupid and provably so, so I’d move on with things. This sort of thing happens because :

    “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever wrought.”

    -Immanuel Kant
    Translated from Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, ca. 1784
    Proposition 6.

    https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

    … So good! We have the first step – and I look forward to Mr. Grant, and Mr. Anderson applying their analytics to all sorts of other talks and speakers in the “Technology Entertainment and Design” catalog. Then, the audience will understand the “context” that is missing from every talk, the missing “community commentary” to “give the full picture”, of every talk. The results could even be posted below the talk as “Context”, or maybe even “Subtext”, to prepare the audience before they commit to anything – so there are no surprises – and to avoid any material that might fail to capture the complete truth of the matter.

    Reply

    1. Greg Mayer asked me to post this, which contradicts you. I have no idea who’s right:

      The Ricky Gervais clip is from Afterlife. It’s a flashback, so they’ve used makeup to make him look younger.

      Reply

      2. It’s definitely from Derek (which I have never seen). My evidence is:

        – Ricky’s Tweet has the hashtag #Derek.

        – It’s series 2 episode 5 judging by the description and user reviews on IMDB.

        – Kerry Godliman played Hannah the care home manager according to the cast list.

        Reply

    3. Yeah, and I thought “SEND NUDES” what does that even mean? Especially when cute cats create the subliminal message. Very odd.

      Reply

  4. On this day:
    365 – Roman usurper Procopius bribes two legions passing by Constantinople, and proclaims himself emperor.

    1542 – Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo of Portugal arrives at what is now San Diego, California. He is the first European in California.

    1787 – The Congress of the Confederation votes to send the newly written United States Constitution to the state legislatures for approval.

    1871 – The Brazilian Parliament passes a law that frees all children thereafter born to slaves, and all government-owned slaves.

    1889 – The General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a metre.

    1912 – Corporal Frank S. Scott of the United States Army becomes the first enlisted man to die in an airplane crash.

    1919 – Race riots begin in Omaha, Nebraska.

    1924 – The first aerial circumnavigation is completed by a team from the US Army.

    1928 – Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin.

    1939 – World War II: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agree on a division of Poland.

    1939 – World War II: The siege of Warsaw comes to an end.

    1951 – CBS makes the first color televisions available for sale to the general public, but the product is discontinued less than a month later. [Well, it was never going to catch on…]

    1975 – The Spaghetti House siege, in which nine people are taken hostage, takes place in London.

    1994 – The cruise ferry MS Estonia sinks in the Baltic Sea, killing 852 people.

    1995 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat sign the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

    2008 – Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid-fuel ground-launched vehicle to put a payload into orbit by the RatSat mission.

    2014 – The 2014 Hong Kong protests begin in response to restrictive political reforms imposed by the NPC in Beijing.

    2016 – The 2016 South Australian blackout occurs, lasting up to three days in some areas.

    Births:
    551 BC – Confucius, Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. (d. 479 BC).

    1836 – Thomas Crapper, English plumber, invented the ballcock (d. 1910).

    1841 – Georges Clemenceau, French journalist, physician, and politician, 85th Prime Minister of France (d. 1929).

    1852 – Isis Pogson, British astronomer and meteorologist (d. 1945). [One of the first women to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Her earlier nomination had been denied because the Society’s royal charter only referred to its fellows as “he” – that wouldn’t be a problem today…]

    1856 – Kate Douglas Wiggin, American author and educator (d. 1923).

    1890 – Florence Violet McKenzie, Australian electrical engineer (d. 1982).

    1893 – Hilda Geiringer, Austrian mathematician (d. 1973).

    1900 – Isabel Pell, American socialite, fought as part of the French Resistance during WWII (d. 1951).

    1901 – William S. Paley, American broadcaster, founded CBS (d. 1990).

    1901 – Ed Sullivan, American television host (d. 1974).

    1909 – Al Capp, American author and illustrator (d. 1979).

    1914 – Maria Franziska von Trapp, Austrian-American refugee and singer (d. 2014).

    1915 – Ethel Rosenberg, American spy (d. 1953).

    1916 – Peter Finch, English-Australian actor (d. 1977).

    1918 – Arnold Stang, American actor (d. 2009). [The voice of Top Cat.]

    1934 – Brigitte Bardot, French actress. [I’ve just realised that she is older than my mother.]

    1938 – Ben E. King, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2015).

    1946 – Tom Bower, English journalist and author.

    1947 – Jon Snow, English journalist and academic.

    1947 – Rhonda Hughes, American mathematician and academic.

    1952 – Sylvia Kristel, Dutch model and actress (d. 2012).

    1952 – Andy Ward, English drummer.

    1954 – George Lynch, American guitarist and songwriter.

    1960 – Jennifer Rush, American singer-songwriter.

    As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
    I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left:
    1891 – Herman Melville, American author and poet (b. 1819).

    1893 – Annie Feray Mutrie, British painter (b. 1826).

    1895 – Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist (b. 1822).

    1914 – Richard Warren Sears, American businessman, co-founded Sears (b. 1863).

    1953 – Edwin Hubble, American astronomer and scholar (b. 1889).

    1956 – William Boeing, American businessman, founded the Boeing Company (b. 1881).

    1964 – Harpo Marx, American comedian, actor, and singer (b. 1888).

    1966 – André Breton, French author and poet (b. 1896).

    1970 – John Dos Passos, American novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright (b. 1896).

    1970 – Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian colonel and politician, 2nd President of Egypt (b. 1918).

    1978 – Pope John Paul I (b. 1912). [His sudden death led to various conspiracy theories.]

    1989 – Ferdinand Marcos, Filipino lawyer and politician, 10th President of the Philippines (b. 1917).

    1991 – Miles Davis, American trumpet player, composer, and bandleader (b. 1926).

    2000 – Pierre Trudeau, Canadian journalist, lawyer, and politician, 15th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1919).

    2003 – Elia Kazan, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1909).

    2010 – Arthur Penn, American director and producer (b. 1922). [The anniversary of his birth was yesterday.]

    2016 – Shimon Peres, Polish-Israeli statesman and politician, 9th President of Israel (b. 1923).

    2022 – Coolio, American rapper (b. 1963).

    Reply

  5. About how a government shutdown will hurt Biden more. I recall during the Clinton administration a similar thing happened, and because the shutdown was orchestrated by Republicans it made Clinton more popular, not less popular. So I don’t understand how this would be different this time.

    Reply

    1. It won’t. It’s obvious for anyone not watching Faux News that the House GOP is solely responsible if a shutdown happens. It’s actually Trump’s shutdown as he’s instructing the MAGAs to do it. My theory (which I’m borrowing) is MAGA Republicans WANT a shutdown and WANT a recession because they think if they hurt the economy it will hurt Biden. That’s why I think once the shutdown happens, they’ll keep the government shut for as long as it takes to tank the economy, betting that Biden and the Dems will take the fall. I don’t understand their reasoning, but they’re nihilists, so it’s par for the course for the MAGA mind. It doesn’t help that they’re emboldened by the fact that major news outlets won’t blame them if a recession happens. They’ll say “it’s because Biden wouldn’t cave to their reasonable demands.” The fact that the Senate passed a bipartisan bill (76 Senators iirc) that the House rejected is really all anyone needs to know when considering whose being an honest broker here.

      Reply

  6. Regarding the ‘My Artwork is Terrible and I Am a Very Bad Person’ poster. This may not be the po-faced, self-flagellating postmodernism you think it is. The artist is David Shrigley and, while not to everyone’s taste, he produces some witty stuff and doesn’t take himself too seriously.

    Reply

    1. I recall visiting the Tate in London some years ago. There was an exhibit in a room
      with all-white walls with the floor covered in dirt. A truly profound experience.

      Reply

  7. Regarding the notion that Coleman Hughes might not be entirely right, today I coincidentally discovered and read this article that points out the likelihood that “colorblind solutions” may very well result in more racial discrimination, not less:

    https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2023/will-harvard-ruling-make-discrimination-admissions-worse

    They propose that once racial preferences are eliminated, other extant preferences will become more influential, and that these favor whites. Mentioned as other preferences are legacy (i.e. offspring of alumni), athletic, and “offspring of faculty.”

    It’s a noteworthy article, coming as it does from a libertarian think tank, where one surely would have expected nothing but cheer about the supreme court ruling striking down racial preferences.

    Reply

  8. People who are interested in what’s really going on at the southern boarder might want to read Rep. Connolly’s analysis. The GOP’s propagandizing seems to be working on misinformed democrats as well. I know this runs rather long, but sometimes it takes a lot of words to counter a maelstrom of sound bites like the constant drum beat of “OMG, open boarders!”

    Myth vs. Truth: Dissecting the Republican narrative about the border
    By Rep. Gerry Connolly

    Republicans are clamoring over themselves to blame President Joe Biden for any and every challenge facing America. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the issue of immigration and border security.

    If you listen to my Republican colleagues, you’d believe Joe Biden single-handedly broke our immigration system and refuses to fix it. They keep this lie alive by perpetuating a series of myths about Democrats and the border.

    It’s time to correct the record.

    MYTH: The Biden administration has implemented an “open border” policy that has created chaos at our border with Mexico.

    TRUTH: President Biden inherited an immigration system in tatters. The Trump administration cut off legal pathways to citizenship, leaving would-be migrants with fewer lawful methods of entering the country. They cut funding to Central American countries in 2019 as they splurged on an ineffective, costly wall.

    It was the Trump administration that tightened sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, exacerbating the macroeconomic crises that have led hundreds of thousands to flee and arrive at the southern border. When they pulled the rug out from various, essential assistance programs, they made the problem worse.
    But our immigration system has been broken for many decades — long before Joe Biden or Donald Trump took the oath of office. Time and again, Democrats have proposed solutions to fix the immigration system in a reasonable, humane way. And time and again, Republicans have opposed these efforts at every turn.

    One might recall that in 2013, House Republicans thwarted comprehensive immigration reform after an agreement was reached in the Senate. Many of those same House Republicans who prevented that legislation from passing are now intent on blaming irregular migration, an issue our country has dealt with for over a century, solely on the Biden administration.

    There’s only one problem with their affinity for blaming Democrats — it doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny. In fact, between December 2022 and January 2023, the Biden-Harris administration halved the number of encounters at the border and reduced the number of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Haitian migrants by 97 percent.

    MYTH: The Biden administration has ignored the border and is refusing to commit proper resources to it.

    TRUTH: The idea that Democrats have ignored the situation at the border and refused to commit resources to solving it is another outright lie. In reality, the Biden-Harris administration and congressional Democrats have surged record levels of funding to the border.

    The FY23 government funding package that President Biden signed into law provided Border Patrol with $7.153 billion — a 17 percent increase from the year before. Additionally, the funding package provided $65 million for 300 new Border Patrol agents, $60 million for 125 new personnel at points of entry; and $230 million for technology like autonomous surveillance towers.

    House Republicans voted against this historic funding.

    MYTH: Biden’s “open border” policies allow undocumented immigrants to flood the country with deadly fentanyl.

    TRUTH: Republicans continue to blame vulnerable migrants fleeing violence, hunger, and natural disasters for illicit drug smuggling, but facts are stubborn things. Over 90 percent of fentanyl, and over 80 percent of total illegal narcotics, arrive at legal points of entry—not between them—and are smuggled largely by Americans—not undocumented migrants. In fact, migrants accounted for less than 9 percent of fentanyl trafficking convictions in FY 21, compared to more than 86 percent for American citizens.

    In December 2022, CBP seized 4,500 pounds of fentanyl, the largest amount ever recorded. Incredibly, just five of those 4,500 pounds were seized at the border by U.S. Border Patrol. Republicans are focused on 1 percent of the problem, 100 percent of the time.

    MYTH: Biden’s “open border” policies have allowed criminals and terrorists to pour over the southern border unchecked, contributing to a spike in crime in America.

    TRUTH: Study after study has shown that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Alternatives to Detention Program provides a strong example: The latest data from ICE released on Feb. 3, 2023, demonstrated 99.4 percent of immigrants monitored on ICE’s Alternatives to Detention Program attended their court hearings compared to the .6 percent which failed to attend their hearing.

    Not all undocumented immigrants are tracked through this program, but immigrants, when paroled into the United States, overwhelmingly are lawful individuals that attend their court hearings. An American Immigration Council report found that over the past 11 years, an overwhelming 83 percent of immigrants attended their immigration court hearings, and those who failed to appear in court often did not receive notice or faced hardship in getting to court.

    Republicans who assert the Biden administration is releasing countless dangerous migrants into the country are not only trafficking in xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment, but they are also peddling lies that are categorically false.

    The situation at the border demands serious policy solutions that provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients; address the root causes of migration like repression, political instability, violence, hunger, and lack of economic opportunity; and fix our own broken immigration system.

    Reply

  9. Grant says “Minimizing differences (‘assimilation’) is problematic across the board—it exacerbates discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes.”

    I find this confusing. Surely accentuating differences is what exacerbates discrimination, prejudice, and stereotypes, since all those based on perceptions of one group being different from the other. Minimizing differences, by insisting on a common humanity, is how we accept people from other cultures. Furthermore, assimilation has worked very well in the US; we’ve seen how immigrants from Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, etc. became Americans. The same thing is happening now with immigrants from Asia and central/south America. Assimilation provides a necessary form of national cohesion. Academics like Grant think they can do without it, but America is not a college town.

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  10. All those numbers on a door….isnt that pi? house address is 3.14….no one noticed?
    Steve Sondheim had two wonderful large dogs. “my wife is very plain” is a line from a Weird Al video about the Amish. Cats are a recent phenomenon. Older people always had dog especially people who were outdoors people and did sports, etc.

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