• Drug War,  Green Lantern Theory,  Immigration

    Well worth watching

    On a related note, everyone should check out the most recent BloggingHeads, which features a very interesting dialogue between James Pinkerton and Mickey Kaus. Very good bigthink about the future (and a lovely new term, technological determinism) and immigration.

    One quibble is that he reiterates the theory held by most people, which is that we could reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without much effort by building a wall. It’s similar to the thought that we could win the drug war if only we tried harder.

    The government can’t keep drugs out of prisons, and the Soviets had the biggest police state in history, and they had tremendous drug problems. It’s ridiculous to think while we can’t successfully ban inanimate objects, we can successfully ban animate ones.

    I imagine we’ll do what we’re doing with the drug war, which is spend a lot of money and civil liberties to create self-perpetuating interest groups (much like the classic bootleggers and Baptists unions of the prohibition era) and to deal with the actual problems as poorly as possible.

    For the record I think sanctions on employers is the most effective way of dealing with the total number of illegal immigrants (not that it will do that much) and the main thing we should be doing (if we insist on some collective action) is to rapidly Americanize the immigrants that are here. Put simply, we need to change the Mexicans living here into Americans of Hispanic descent and throw this whole notion of multiculturalism away (the illegal immigrants did).

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  • America,  Funny

    Alex Tabarrok has the line of the day

    In this post

    Brad just doesn’t know right-wing agitprop. My friends walked out, but I exited the theater, pumped my fist in the air and shouted, Wolverines! (That’s when I first knew I was a rather odd Canadian – perhaps this was destiny.)

    He would later (legally) immigrate to America and taste the sweet air of freedom.

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  • Iraq

    An undercovered story

    Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis
    U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.

    The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.

    I’ve noticed this from ABC’s This Week coverage as well, though they don’t give the numbers over time. It would be interesting to see a chart of democide in Iraq (I’m counting the insurgency as a prospective government for the purpose of this post); I would wager it’s roughly stable year to year. After so many decades of being a police state, Iraq contains a sizable number of people for whom killing is their only skill.

    And while we’re on the topic, check out the WikiPedia entry on Democide. It’s an informative read on mass murders by governments over time, going back to the Mongols.

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  • Tech

    Things I’ve learned today

    1. Batteries Plus will recycle old Uninteruptable Power Supplies
    2. To prevent the ever annoying image toolbar from appearing in Internet Explorer, just add <meta equiv=”imagetoolbar” content=”no”> to the head of the document.
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