The Odious Chinese Nachos Story

I’m not a picky eater. My father was a big advocate of “Eat what they set before you”, and my mother likes to try different recipes, mostly Southern Living Magazine’s fried salad/fried watermelon offerings. Good stuff.

When I cook, recipes are nothing but points of departure – a suggestion on how the other person once did it. If you’ve never run short on ingredients and hollowed out a Pop-Tart and used the crust in place of bread crumbs, you have no business calling yourself a cook.

But creativity has limits….

One of my China trips was supposed to last only 3 weeks (typically I’m gone for 5). Problems had erupted, solutions were rejected, and the bosses asked me to stay for another week. I failed in that week’s missions, so they asked me to stay yet another week.

After week four in the land of Mandarin Chinese, I was ready to speak some English. I can usually entertain myself with the contents of my head (one of the many, many advantages of an old-school Liberal Arts education) but I found myself bothering Texas co-workers on Skype more than necessary, and called home too many times at odd hours only to learn that the grass was still growing and that no dachshunds had died.

I started lurking in the lobby of the Xiamen Princess Hotel, hoping to catch other manufacturing exiles who could talk football, food, politics or even American Idol. After several nights of reading downstairs, advertising my availability like a Shanghai harbor whore, I saw someone going through the buffet line, a guy that looked like an American. He had on a John Deere Tractor T-shirt!

I ran over and introduced myself. (I may have offered to buy him a drink, given him my phone number, my room number, and told him how fit and manly he looked in his John Deer T-shirt.) He sensed my desperation level, and asked if I wanted to hang out with him and a buddy the next night. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name (Jason?), but he turned out to be from Memphis, Tennessee, and he and I had actually deer hunted on the same land in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. His family had a successful business manufacturing high-end dresses in a factory two hours from Xiamen.

One night later, I met Jason and his friend Jeremy (?) in the lobby. We were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant. Let me be clear: we were going to go to Xiamen, China’s first Mexican restaurant.

I’m an optimist. Having already experienced Cleveland, Mississippi’s first Chinese restaurant, Jackson, Mississippi’s first Thai restaurant, and Merigold, Mississippi’s first ever restaurant, I didn’t think things could go too wrong in Xiamen’s first Mexican restaurant.

Jeremy, who was somewhat fluent in Mandarin, explained the sign over the front door – “Xiamen’s House Of Mexico”. The place had a ragged tourist-trap sombrero hung on one wall, and a map of Texas and Mexico painted on another. (Chinese people generally don’t know the shape of Mexico, but everyone knows the shape of Texas, and perhaps the Lone Star State was included as a point of reference. You are about to eat food from the little country south of the nation of Texas. Canadian singer/songwriter Fred Eaglsmith likes to talk about how proud Texas is of its shape. We’ll put that shape on anything.) If not for the mariachi hat and the Texican wall map, the place could’ve been any other noodle shop.

Well, except for the menu….

Veteran China travelers often collect examples of bad “Chinglish”. The menus at this place were in Spanese. Or Chinish. Whatever you call it when you cross Manchu Wok with Taco Bell. After we ordered our beers, Jeremy determined that the menu item “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family” was probably nachos. You can’t go wrong with nachos.

Here’s how they went wrong with nachos:

These restauranteurs had never seen, smelled, tasted, eaten, chewed or shat Mexican food in their lives.

My theory was that everything on the menu was created from photographs, with no other guidance.

Let’s start at the bottom of the “Chips Beef Medley Layer Family”, shall we? Where god-fearing Mexicans would put some corn tortilla chips as a foundation, Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had a layer of rice chips. Not a problem. They don’t grow much corn in China. When in Rome, etc., etc., etc.

Most nachos continue upward with a layer of sliced and spiced chicken or beef. The Chips Beef Medley Layer Family nachos got by with a thin layer of shaved pork. I’ve never seen this stuff outside of Asia, but it’s pretty good. Take some pig meat and repeatedly run it across a cheese grater for a couple of years. It has a good taste with almost no texture. Dust it on the rice chips of your Chips Beef Medley Layer Family, shortly before adding your….cheese.

Asians (stereotype alert!) generally don’t like cheese or dairy. They think that cheese tastes and smells like baby vomit, which, when you come to think of it….it does. That’s why one cheese is as good as another to them. Take some leftover Limburger and Munster, or any combo that smells worse, throw them in your Crock Pot and melt it until it can be smelled throughout the Middle Kingdom, from Beijing to Hong Kong. Apply liberally to the pulverized pork, and you have the stinky middle child of your Medley Layer Family in place.

I know for a fact that the Master Chef at Xiamen’s House Of Mexico had never been exposed to salsa. Or Picante, Pico De Gallo, Ranchero, Guacamole, Chimichurri Sauce, Habaneros, or Chipotle. This guy had never even seen a bottle of Wal-Mart’s Old El Paso Picante Sauce from New Jersey. So he improvised. The upper stuff in his nacho photos was red. Tomatoes are red. He needed red stuff.  So he took a large can of Campbell’s Tomato Paste and put three thick slices of it on top of the Limburgermunster cheese. We could still see the ring marks from the Campbell’s can.

Remember my Chinese stereotype, the one where they don’t like cheese or dairy? The chef's photo of nachos probably showed a dollop of sour cream on top of the Chips Beef Medley Layer Family. Native Chinese can’t imagine eating sour cream.

What to do, what to do?

Instead of sour cream, they topped off the rice chips, the shaved pork, the Dr. Scholl’s Shoe Insert Cheese, and the slices of tomato paste with…. A big ol’ scoop of Kool Whip.

I’ve probably spent six months in China, and have had only four or five bad meals. Of the bad meals, this was the one I enjoyed the most. Jason, Jeremy and I didn’t act like The Ugly Americans. We were polite. We used the rice chips to dig out the shredded pork. We drank. We bonded. We drank some more. 

Having learned our lesson, we decided to stop experimenting with Asian/Mexican Fusion Food. We vowed to eat the next night where the Chinese eat, to experience what the locals were eating. The next night, we ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The New York Times gets a clue

Here's a drawing of a very small fraction of a sliver of a percentage of the people who have "disappeared" in Mexico's fight against the drug cartels. 

It's from The New York Holy Times.  Hit the link.  Please read it if you get a chance. 

If a Statist organization as fundamentally dense as The New York Times can figure out that we need to end the Drug War, and the cartels' monopolies, and end the violence, and reduce the spending, and release the prisoners, and let people consume what they want to consume....

Can our politicians be too far behind? 

Keep up the good fight, freedom-fighters !!!   Everyone else, as long as you support Washington D.C. and Austin Texas Prohibitionists, these people have died for your sins. 

Occam's Razor and Operation Fast And Furious

Here's the philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor:

Occam's razor is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the best one. If you are in Texas and hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. 

Let's apply that principle to the magnificent abortion known as Operation Fast And Furious, where the people responsible for the Post Office, VA Hospitals and the DMV decided to let a bunch of guns "walk" across the Mexican border.  Just to see where they would go.....  

Here's Mickey Kaus of The Daily Caller:

The fuss over the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scandal must be mystifying to voters who don’t know why Second Amendment types think the seemingly insane operation was launched–namely to establish a predicate for gun control here in the U.S..** Powerline bloggers debate the issue here & here. Don’t wait for the MSM to fill you in on this crucial bit of undernews. …

What I don’t understand is why, according to both Powerliners, the “gun control” theory requires the administration to have wanted to “increase bloodshed in Mexico”? Why increase? It requires more paranoia than even I’m able to muster to think that the Holder Justice department’s goal was to produce more violence and death (in order to grab headlines, etc.). Why isn’t there a far more plausible and mundane possible purpose: The administration wanted to document that the guns used in Mexican drug gang crimes–including violent crimes–came from the U.S.. There might be more crimes, there might be fewer. There could be less bloodshed, there could be increased bloodshed–but that wasn’t the point. The point was that gun controllers could argue that X% of the guns, or X number of guns, found at crime scenes were sourced from this country–whatever the overall level of crime. That would establish the factual basis for gun control the same way the Dartmouth studies and Atul Gawande’s articles allegedly established a factual basis for Obamacare. Entirely plausible, and not criminally evil! Just amazingly stupid. …

P.S.: I’m not sure Second Amendment enthusiasts should argue that letting lots of guns “walk” across the border will inevitably “increase bloodshed” or “promote violence.” Isn’t that the gun-controllers’ argument–that More Guns = More Violence in some kind of rigid equation?…

Guns don’t kill Mexican gang war victims. Mexican gangsters kill Mexican gang war victims. …

Go here for your very own Operation Fast And Furious T-shirt !!!

Don't be so nosy

This editorial actually ran on the CNN website yesterday. 
Swear to God, they published it. 
It's about the "Fast And Furious" debacle, the one where the government sent thousands of guns across the Rio Grande to prove that American guns were crossing the Rio Grande.  Then a couple of Federal Agents got shot with them. 

I didn't edit any of this.  Here's the kicker:

By allowing guns to infiltrate Mexico's drug cartel, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies. As for the innocent people who lost their lives? Collateral damage. That's the uncomfortable backstory to this scandal. And there are likely other operations like it in our nation's history that we don't even have a clue about.

And maybe it's better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie "A Few Good Men," many of us won't be able to handle the truth.

Yes.  Yes.  Yes. 
Go back to watching "Dancing With The Stars".  Take some happy pills.  Don't be "so nosy". 

You probably couldn't handle the truth: We're trying to continue the War On Drugs, maintain the Drug Lords' monopoly, plus prove that you really shouldn't be allowed to keep those pistols in your house. 

Don't be so nosy. 

Nothing to see here.  Move along, people, move along. 

Adrian Murray on Immigration

My friend Adrian Murray....

Tea Party Patriot....

9-12 leader....

and great, great guy....,

keeps knocking them out of the park, but only on Facebook.  That's why I can't just link to his stuff. 

Here he goes with something on immigration:

Line up a dozen Republican politicians seeking public office, ask them what their answer is to the 12 million or more illegal immigrants in America and in remarkable display of political courage, they’ll dodge the question. The answer is usually something along the lines of: “We can’t address that issue until we fix the border. Once the border is fixed/sealed/guarded/mined/booby-trapped we can work on solutions to those already here.” You may even be treated to the phrase, “Path to citizenship.”

We’ve been hearing this for fifty years. Likely, we’ll hear it for another fifty. Like so many issues, if we didn’t have an illegal immigrant problem, politicians would have to invent one. (This piece is not meant to unfairly single out Republicans. It’s just that the Democrats would gladly apologize to Gaia and hand the country back to the Seminoles and the Apaches, so there’s just no point in dragging their ideas into the mix.)

Fortunately for most of us, our ancestors came to America long before numbskulls ruled the roost. Can you imagine what it would have been like 100 or 150 years ago if the solutions to immigration being talked about now were official policy then? For much of America’s first century the borders were wide open. No one had identification or passports or had to undergo retina scans and full body cavity searches to get into the country. They either walked across the border or down a gangplank. Voila. New Americans.

But what if, when the great waves of migration began from Europe in the 19th century, the existing American population, descendant mainly from English and German stock, had the same mentality we have today? Would calls have gone out to seal the ports to protect American sovereignty? Would politicians demand that a navy be built to intercept passenger ships on the high seas and turn them back to their country of origin? Would candidates for office run on platforms of rounding up the new arrivals and shipping them back to Europe? “Just look at them, these wretches who inhabit the filthy tenements of Manhattan, with their strange languages and even stranger customs. They won’t even assimilate, choosing instead to stay with their own kind creating their own communities like Chinatown, Greek Town, Little Italy. Look at them: there are Poles and Slavs and Gypsies and Italians and Jews. Jews! They’re not even Christians, for the love of Pete. And have you seen what the filthy Irish have done to Boston? Completely overrun it they have, with their pale little redheaded children and their Catholic priests and nuns. But we can’t deal with the ones that are here until we find a way to seal off the Atlantic coast.”

Ah, to transport 21st century politicians back to 1880. And leave them there.

Of course, we do not have to guess what our forebears did in regards to new immigrants to America. It’s part of America’s history. To put it succinctly, they welcomed them. They embraced them. They made them citizens. By 1892 the waves of immigrants grew so intense the federal government opened Ellis Island in New York to process the new arrivals. Over the next 62 years, some 12 million new Americans passed through its doors and went on to build the greatest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.

So what’s the problem today?

Answer that question by asking another one: Since the great migration today is by land from the south rather than by sea from the east, where is the Ellis Island of the southern border? Are these people welcome or not?

Wrap your mind around that for a while and you’ll see that we do not have a serious immigration policy in this country. We have a political football which both sides like to kick back and forth because it allows them to play their political bases like human yoyos. The problem will never get resolved until we cultivate politicians with some spine.

There’s a certain word that begins with “A” which no politician would dare propose concerning the millions of undocumented immigrants already here, even though it is precisely the same prescription used by our forebears who, when faced with a similar issue, used their heads and did what was right, not what was politically expedient.

They welcomed the new arrivals and created the means for them to become citizens.
 
(Go here to get a copy of Adrian's book "Common Ground America", and check out the political program he's trying to establish.  He's also got some good ideas about spreading the Texas holiday "Juneteenth" to the rest of the nation.)
 
For better or worse, Obama has almost made illegal immigration a non-issue.  Keeping illegal immigrants out of the United States is now about as difficult as keeping illegal immigrants out of North Korea.   
 

Operation Fast And Furious

I can't believe I haven't written anything on "Operation Fast And Furious" yet. 
There's been too much insane competition for subject matter.  That's my only excuse. 

Here's the story as I understand it.....

The Obama administration wanted to prove that American guns were going across our border with Mexico.  They wanted to show that it was guns, rather than our insane Prohibition laws, that were causing the violence along the border. 

As usual, the crowdsourced explanation from Wikipedia is the best one:

The ATF gunwalking scandal came to national attention in the United States in 2011 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ran a series of “gunwalking” sting operations between 2006 and 2011.  This was done under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the U.S. “Gunwalking” or “letting guns walk” was a tactic whereby the ATF knowingly allowed thousands of guns to be bought by suspected arms traffickers ("gunrunners") working through straw purchasers on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.

The stated goal of allowing these purchases was to continue to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher−level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels, in theory leading to their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels.  The tactic was questioned during the operations by a number of people, including ATF field agents and cooperating licensed gun dealers.  Operation Fast and Furious, by far the largest "gunwalking" probe, led to the sale of over 2,000 firearms, of which fewer than 700 were recovered as of October 20, 2011 (2011 -10-20).  A number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted; however, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high−level cartel figures have been arrested. 

Firearms "walked" by the ATF have been found at violent crime scenes on both sides of the US−Mexico border, and have been found at the crime scenes involving deaths of many Mexicans and at least one US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The “gunwalking” operations became public in the aftermath of Agent Terry's murder.  As a result, dissident ATF agents came forward to Congress.  As investigations have continued, the operations have become increasingly controversial in both countries, and diplomatic relations have been damaged as a result.

These weapons have been found at more than 170 crime scenes in Mexico.  Another of our Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Jaime Zapata was murdered with one of the guns.  Eric Holder has been trotted in front of Congress to lie about what emails he did and didn't receive about the operation. 
Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, is in a little trouble because of this mess, but not at the level you would expect.  The White House is circling the wagons, and is putting on the Full-Nixon. 

Let me repeat what happened here....

There are two explanations for the violence in Mexico - 1) American Prohibition Laws, or 2) American Guns Crossing The Border. 

In an effort to sway public opinion, the ATF purchased a bunch of guns and knowingly sold them to the reps of Mexican Drug Lords. 

In an effort to sway public opinion, the ATF purchased a bunch of guns and knowingly sold them to the reps of Mexican Drug Lords.


In an effort to sway public opinion, the ATF purchased a bunch of guns and knowingly sold them to the reps of Mexican Drug Lords.


I know that a lot of people love Barack Obama, and he's thrown a lot of taxpayer money to his supporters (more than any other president) and he makes good speeches that make Statists nod along with a warm damp glow of contentment.  There's a competing school of thought that claims he's the dumbest human to ever step foot in the Oval Office, much less work there. 

Here's CNN's Anderson Cooper on the anguish of the Zapata family. They're not letting Holder or Obama off the hook, no matter who was programming The Teleprompter during the operation:



The solution to this mess? Stop voting for Fascists.
I don't speak for every Libertarian running for office in 2012, but I don't think we'll ever, ever, ever purchase guns, sell them to the reps of Mexican Drug Lords, WATCH as they cross the border, and then lose track of them.
We will never, ever do that.
Hell, the slowest students in a Special Ed class would never, ever do that. 

Pics came from here and here. 

Gary Johnson on ending Prohibition

Our border with Mexico is looking like our border with Canada during the alcohol Prohibition Era.

No one travels across the border without fear, the bodies are piling up (40,000 Mexicans drug war deaths in the last five years), politicians are offered daily corruption opportunities, gangsters are making fortunes, and despite fences, naval patrols,  and indignant speeches about "sealing the border", the border still leaks like, well, something that leaks a lot. 

Alcohol prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933. 

I'm writing this post at the Barnes and Noble near Northeast Mall in Fort Worth.  I looked for the companion volume to the recent Ken Burns TV series on Prohibition, but couldn't find it. 

Instead, I found this one: "Prohibition - Thirteen years that changed America". 

I'm not going to quote from it, or try to summarize the book.  Just look at the cover, from top left to bottom right. 

You have a picture of a vice officer taking an axe to a keg of beer, a picture of Al Capone, a girl with a leg flask in a speakeasy, a prohibition protest sign, a beer advertisement, and a group of well-to-do folks either violating the prohibition laws or celebrating their end.  

Just from the cover, one gets the impression that alcohol prohibition was a disaster. 

The other title I found was "The Lawless Decade: Bullets, Broads and Bathtub Gin"

Famed bootlegger/gangster Al Capone is not on the front cover of this one.  His picture is only on the back cover. 
I won't summarize this book, or try to pull some quotes from it.  But Paul Sann has written a book on the Prohibition Era called "The Lawless Decade". 

We legalized alcohol and the violence slowly ended.  Here's John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the failed experiment:

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

Here's a brief excerpt from an interview with Gary Johnson, potential Libertarian candidate for President of the U.S.

Interviewer: Your many opponents believe that legalization would exacerbate the problem. First, they say more people would do drugs if they were legal.

Johnson: Kids who have been surveyed say it's easier to get illegal drugs than beer. The evidence shows that more people won't do drugs if they're legal. Holland, where marijuana is decriminalized and controlled, has 60% of the drug use--both hard drugs and marijuana--the US has. They have a quarter the crime rate, a quarter the homicide rate, a quarter the violent crime rate and a tenth the incarceration rate. It suggests that more people don't do drugs because they're legal. But let's just say that the number of users would go up: I still would say it was worthwhile. Look at the trade-off.


Interviewer: What trade-off?


Johnson: Half of all crime is drug-related. Half. Half of what we spend--on law enforcement, on the courts, on prisons--is drug-related. If we legalized drugs, we would destroy the environment that allows and even encourages all those crimes.

*********

These moments make me question the wisdom of teaching history. 
Have we ever learned anything from it? 

Michele Leonhart and Barack Obama - Babykillers?

From The Washington Post, "Mexican Drug Cartels Now Targeting And Killing Children":

The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.

[...]
Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, capturing victims whose murders might not have been related to drugs or organized crime. In 2009, the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings.

From Michele Leonhart, head of the DEA:

U.S. and Mexican officials say the grotesque violence is a symptom the cartels have been wounded by police and soldiers. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.

No, you bureaucratic twit, they're attacking children.  Civilians, old people, journalists, cops, judges and children. 

Here's a pic of Michele Leonhart:

Here she is with Attorney General Eric "Gunwalker" Holder:

I couldn't find a pic of Leonhart with The Teleprompter Jesus anywhere on the internet.  He's probably keeping his distance since war criminals generally avoid hanging out in the same place. 

So here's a pic of Michele Leonhart's thugs raiding a house to see if the owners have any plants inside:

Finally, here's The Toker In Chief himself.  This is an excerpt from his memoir "Dreams From My Father":


"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though - Mickey, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that. Said he could do it blindfolded, but he was shaking like a faulty engine when he said it...

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed; the final fatal role of the would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind. Something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.

"I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in a white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids... You just might be bored or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection.

"And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. That's how it seemed to me then, anyway."

He then relates the story of Pablo, who didn't have "his driver's licence that day [when] a cop with nothing better to do check[ed] the trunk of his car... One day [my mother] marched into my room wanting to know the details of Pablo's arrest. I told her not to worry, I wouldn't do anything that stupid.

"'Don't you think you're being a little casual about your future?' she said. 'One of your friends just got arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping..."

"I didn't want to hear about this..."

Speaking of things that Obama doesn't want to hear about, there were 800,000 marijuana arrests in the U.S. last year. 

The Obama/Leonhart War On Drugs killed 40,000 Mexicans in the last 4 years.
 
Obama has more black men living in cages than the Confederacy did. 

There are only two people running for president who favor ending this disastrous war: Gary Johnson and Ron Paul. 

This stoner favors business as usual.
 

First Mexican truck to enter U.S. interior sometime soon. I hope.

From The San Diego News, via a link from Radley Balko:

SAN DIEGO -- The first Mexican carrier is set to roll into the U.S. interior within days, but American trucking union leaders and two California congressmen haven't given up on stopping the cross-border trucking program that had been stalled for years by safety concerns and political wrangling.

The stall has had little to do with safety concerns.  It is about the political wrangling and protecting the constituents of some politicians that they've bought at auction prices. 

U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Bob Filner said they'll take a bipartisan stand at the border Wednesday in San Diego to voice concerns about the bilateral pilot project that will allow approved Mexican trucks to come deep into the United States. Hunter is a San Diego-area Republican, while Filner is a Democrat whose district includes California's border with Mexico.

They will join Teamsters union President James Hoffa and Todd Spencer, the owner-operator of the Independent Drivers Association, in a last-ditch effort to block Mexican trucks from being granted full access to U.S. highways.

The trucks are crossing a river, a river that has symbolic meaning because of a war we had with Mexico.  This river became known as a "boundary". 
Boundary (noun) (bound*a*ry) 1. In the geographic sense, an arbritrary listing of lines of latitude and longitude to be filled in on maps with different colors.  2.  In the political sense, the far edges of your cage.

Allowing Mexican trucking companies to deliver the goods rather than transfer them onto U.S. haulers at the border will put American jobs and highway safety at risk, the union leaders say.

Horseshit.  According to Marc Levinson, author of "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" the ancestors of these same union parasites once tried to unload and reload each shipping container as it entered U.S. "boundaries".  They didn't understand that the entire point of the shipping container was to load the thing at Point A and not have the load touched by thieving little Jimmy Hoffa hands until it was unloaded by the customer at Point B.  The unions insisted that they had a right to "strip and stuff" every shipping container, even if the load was going to be placed right back in the same shipping container.
All Jimmy Hoffa wants is to get his hands on the load.   

Washington on Friday approved the first Mexican trucking company, Transportes Olympic, nearly two decades after the hotly contested provision of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement set off lawsuits and a costly trade dispute between the neighboring countries.

If I want to hire Transportes Olympic to haul a load from Juarez to Fort Worth, it really isn't Jimmy Hoffa's business.  It is the U.S. government's business, unfortunately.  They own the roads.  But they've also established that it is illegal to discriminate against people for racial reasons, and that's the only angle these clowns have to fight with. 

Transportes Olympic employees were busy Wednesday finishing the preparations for its historic, maiden trip.

The long-haul truck will cross the border Friday at Laredo, Texas, and head about 450 miles north to Garland, Texas, to deliver industrial equipment, said Guillermo Perez, the transport manager at the firm in the industrial Monterrey suburb of Apodaca, about two hours south of Laredo.

The company was also the first approved under the 2009 pilot program before President Barack Obama's administration cancelled it. Mexico retaliated by placing tariffs on 99 agricultural products worth more than $2 billion annually.

As well the should have.  It's called NAFTA.  It is a free-trade agreement, kinda.  We've been in violation of the law for about 20 years. 

Mexico cut the tariffs in half this summer after Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon approved an inspection and monitoring program for the companies that had been approved in 2009. The Mexican government has vowed to lift the rest once the truck heads out of the border zone Friday.

"We're really excited," Perez said in a telephone interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. "Now we can provide door-to-door service so it's about a 15 percent savings for companies."

Eliminating and lowering idiotic trade barriers like this one helps you to afford the computer on which you're reading this rant.  It's how you got the clothes that I hope you are now wearing. 

Opponents say the fight isn't over.

Hunter has co-authored a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., that would require the pilot program to be ceased in three years and Congress to vote on the issue again.

"There's absolutely no upside to the program," said Joe Kasper, a spokesman for Hunter's office.

Yes there is an upside, you flak-catching hack.  If I want to hire these people to haul a load, then I get to have my way. 
That's always an upside. 
Plus, I won't have to hire Hoffa goons.  (Remember Jimmy Hoffa?  The guy who said "let's take out those sons-of-bitches", in reference to The Tea Party?)  
And I get to save money, which means that in the long run, you get to save money.

 "It's a good example of foreign interests overtaking American interests, at the expense of jobs, security and safety. The program was a bad idea when it was created under NAFTA and it's a bad idea now. It should be stopped right away."

At the expense of jobs?  If it's about saving jobs or creating more jobs, let's just mandate that loads can only cross The Rio Grande on wheelbarrows and that they can only move up Interstate 35 on hand carts pulled by the less fortunate of our society. 
If it's about security, let's end the idiotic drug war.  Safety will increase 100-fold on both sides of the river that we  currently use as a boundary, just like safety increased when we ended our alcohol war with Canada at the end of Prohibition. 
If it's about safety, take a look at one of the trucks that Transportes Olympic will use on these loads and then compare them to the rigs that haul the U.S. Mail.  Case dismissed.  There will be no comparison. 

Criminal activity has been a problem for years even within the U.S. government's strictest trusted carrier programs. Drug trafficking organizations have smuggled tons of drugs inside trucks driven by approved truckers coming from inspected and certified facilities inside Mexico.

And they do this because there is a fortune to be made in doing so.  End the monopolies that we've granted to the Mexican Drug Lords and their U.S. Enablers, and the smuggling will end.  No one ever got rich by smuggling coals into Newcastle.  Or by smuggling more bullshit into a political protectionist argument. 

"The beneficiaries of opening borders will be few and the casualties will be plenty," Spencer told The Associated Press on Wednesday. His organization represents small independent trucking businesses.

He doesn't represent all of the small independent trucking businesses, as the article implies.  He doesn't represent mine.  (I'm the General Manager of one.)
Trade runs both ways.  The outfit that I work for sells stuff in the U.S., and we sell stuff outside of Jimmy Hoffa's boundaries.  We also purchase stuff from overseas and sell it inside the Hoffa enclosure in which most of you folks live.  I don't need Hoffa and his Washington puppets in the way.  
Anything is good as long as it helps weaken the cage so jealously guarded by  U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Bob Filner and union boss Jimmy Hoffa.   

Proponents say especially strict safeguards are in place: The U.S. government is paying for electronic monitoring devices to be installed in all Mexican trucks used in the program.

Mexican trucking companies had to fill out an application, pay a fee and then submit the names of any drivers who will participate so they can undergo national security and criminal background checks by the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security.

Inspectors will check out the trucks for safety violations, verify the drivers' qualifications and administer oral English-proficiency exams.

The program's long delay has cost companies in both countries millions and hurt bilateral relations, proponents say.

"We certainly hoped that it cannot be stopped," said James Clark, director of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce's Mexico Business Center. "The U.S. has been in violation of the NAFTA agreement ever since the beginning of the trucking issue. Mexican trucks have every right to come into the U.S. under NAFTA as long as the trucks are fully inspected to U.S. standards and the drivers speak English."

About 70 percent of goods from the $4 billion trade between the two nations is transported by land to its destinations according to the Mexican government.

And all of that stuff is currently being unloaded at the border and reloaded onto another trailer.  That's a total waste. 
End of rant. 
Thanks for listening. 

God's comments on Rick Perry

This is what happens when the government decides to get tough on the Mexican onion-pickers who are taking American jobs

Are you irritated by people who were born outside of the lines of latitude and longitude that you think of as your own? 
If someone was born on the oppositite side of an insignificant river from you, do you support laws to keep them from working on "your" side of the river? 
Do you want to get tough on our nation's onion-pickers, blueberry harvesters (and my forklift drivers) because their mothers birthed them in places that maps paint in a different color from your place? 
Do you want to keep Mexicans from doing jobs that you personally would try to avoid? 
In short, are you an asshole? 

I believe that the governor of Georgia can answer "yes" to all of these questions.

 
Here's Jay Bookman:

After enactment of House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
The resulting manpower shortage has forced state farmers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal was forced to order a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

Well, if the Massey-Ferguson, Case, Kubota and Ford tractor dealers ever convince some government bureaucrat to outlaw John Deere tractors, we're going to have a tractor shortage.  If the bureaucrat is surprised by the "unexpected" shortage, you shouldn't be surprised - they generally have the density of cinderblocks.

(Go here for a glorious compilation of headlines using the word "unexpected" bureaucratic misunderstandings of cause and effect.)

So what solution did Governor Deal propose for those having to deal with his crisis? 

“The agriculture industry is the number one economic engine in Georgia and it is my sincere hope to find viable and law-abiding solutions to the current problem our farmers face,” Deal said in announcing the findings. In the meantime, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia.

I propose that Governor Deal try out a few of those 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers in his own workforce, and let us all know how that works out for him.  1,500 of them were probably locked up because of his anti-marijuana laws.  Trying to solve the farmers' labor problem with the victims of his Drug War problem is nothing but a recipe for another problem. 
If you're going to harvest crops like onions and blueberries, you have to be in incredibly good shape. 

Governor Deal would probably get better result by putting the ex-cons to work in the Georgia Department Of Motor Vehicles or the Georgia Highway Patrol.  Ex-cons, at least the ones who work for me, are usually very polite. 
Here's where Jay Bookman goes off the rails:

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

Bookman is deeply and profoundly wrong.  That's not a bug, it's a feature. 

New York legalized gay'n'lesbian marriage yesterday.  Because of its Southern Baptist infestation, Georgia is unlikely to do so anytime soon.  New York companies wanting to hire talented workers who just happen to be born gay or lesbian now have an advantage over Georgia companies.  The solution is for Georgia to get rid of its handicaps, not inflict similar disadvantages over New York. 

Texas doesn't have immigration laws as "tough" as those in Georgia.  Texans wanting to hire talented Canadians or Albanians now have an advantage over their Georgia counterparts.
 
Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, seems to be mentally stable.  Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, doesn't.  Indiana now has that advantage over Texas. 

Giving states the ability to try things out and experiment with different policies is a good thing.  When voters see that their policies have unintended consequences, they can change those policies. But without a "control group" in another state, they can't see the differences. 

Bookman gets back on track in his last few paragraphs.  His last sentence is brilliant:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.


In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

Ok, that's all for today.  I have a crew of 30 bad-assed Mexicans to keep busy.  They are great, great people.  Georgia's loss is my gain. 

The picture of the Mexican migrant workers stealing American cucumber-picking jobs came from here.   The map showing the arbitrary lines and coastal borders where immigrants aren't welcome came from here.   The "No Deal" pic came from this Facebook page.   My boss who wants me to work on this beautiful Saturday morning came from Juarez Mexico. 

A Libertarian walks into a bar....

Does it surprise anyone to learn that a libertarian can go into a bar, knock back a few, and then find himself in some political arguments? 

Yes, strangely enough, it happens.  And I have a new strategy for winning.  Winning these disagreements before they even become a disagreement.  WINNING at the Sheen level.  It's not about converting the person you're arguing with, but trying to convert other people who hear your conversation. 

I call it "evangelism through misunderstanding".  You intentionally misunderstand someone's statement, and flip it around to the libertarian position on the topic. 

- A bartender says "I support a woman's right to choose".  Most people who make this statement say it with a level of conviction and righteousness that implies you are a misogynistic oaf if you dare think differently. 

Turn to the bartender and say "You're damn right a woman has a right to choose.  Look at the sorry schools here in zip code _ _ _ _ _.  A woman should have a right to choose which school her kids attend.  It shouldn't be based on the zip code where she happened to buy a house.  Her kids shouldn't be a slave to a system dominated by the teacher's unions.  Give her a choice, and the schools will either improve or go under.  And anybody who disagrees with me hates women." 

If the bartender tries to steer the conversation back to abortion, the intended topic, act as if the fate of one- ounce blots of protoplasm is irrelevant.  Take it back to our lack of choice in numerous government programs.  "Seriously, dude, why don't we have a choice in schools?  You mean, you support the right to choose in abortion, but not schools?  Why?"   

Here's another one, probably my favorite.  The guy down at the end of the bar says "We need to cut out all of this foreign aid." 

Lift your glass or bottle upward, and begin your rant. 

"Precisely.  Exactly," you say.  "We've got 60,000 troops in Germany, and the f-ing Krauts don't pay us a dime for them.  We should bring every one of them back to the house.  30,000 in South Korea, and they're costing us a fortune.  We don't charge the Koreans a thing for defense.  25,000 soldiers and sailors and marines in Japan.  My taxes don't cover the expense of even one single soldier, and we've got 25,000 people defending Japan fergodssakes.  You'd think they could provide for their own defense, but no.  Barack Obama has to defend his empire."
"Now if someplace is having a famine or an earthquake or a typhoon, yeah.  We should help them out.  But that cost is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we're spending on our overseas empire." 

If your victim tries to get back to the relatively small amount that we send to places in dire need of relief, divide the dollar amount in question by $125,000.00 (that's the approximate amount we spend per soldier/sailor) and take the conversation back to our "Free For Everyone Who Asks" military services.  Chances are, the dollar amount we're spending on real aid is less than the amount we still spend defending England from Hitler.  (We have 6,000 people stationed in England.  I swear to God, we do.) 

Here's another one.  My friend Mike Coyne got me thinking along this track.  I've used this twice, and it's loads of fun....
If some loudmouth is holding court at the bar or the next table, and lamenting the number of illegals who are coming into the U.S. and taking American jobs, you should agree with him that it's a low-down dirty shame.  Tell him that you've got friends who lost computer programming jobs to foreigners from Toronto.  You know someone who lost an accounting position to an immigrant from Quebec.  The head of your company's software department is from Serbia. 
Without fail (for me in Texas, anyway) your new acquaintance will make it clear that he was talking about Mexicans.  Illegal Mexicans.  He'll say we should put up a fence with guards and dogs, all along the border. 
Look surprised. 
Say "Oh, I misunderstood you.  Hey, if one of those poor Mexican bastards can swim the Rio Grande and do your job?  You're already screwed."
Go back to your seat and don't say another word to him.  Can you imagine how little there would be in the Social Security fund if illegal Mexicans weren't paying into the system? 

Remember, we're libertarians.  We'd rather be right than popular. 

"Fixed fortifications are a monument to man's stupidity" - General George S. Patton

Here's a video of two girls climbing the four million dollar per mile U.S./Mexico border fence.
The important thing about this massive piece of pork? 

1) The contractors who lobbied for it got paid.
2) Politicians came up with a piece of Performance Art to show that they were doing something. 
3) The fence looks impressive without actually stopping the flow of illegals, who help fuel our economy, and drugs, which help fuel the prison/counselor/police lobby. 

If seen in the context described above, this monument is more beautiful than Mount Rushmore. 


Hit the "tortilla curtain" label below to read an old post about how much this thing costs per foot. 

The Gore Effect

We now have a new concept in the blogosphere:
The Gore Effect. 
The Gore Effect is named after Saint Albert, The Goracle of Music City, Tennessee.  Whenever Al Gore, Global Warmists, or other large groups of rent-seekers gather to speak about the need to give them lots of money to save the world, God gets angry, and proves that She Is Not Mocked.

It immediately gets colder than a well-diggers rear. Colder than the aluminum toilet seats at Ice Station Zebra.  Cold enough to freeze....
Well, you get the idea. 

Hence the term.  The Gore Effect.  Whenever they meet in an exotic locale to discuss warming, it gets cold.  When Cap'n'Trade bills come before Congress, the city is shut down by snow.  I will be tracking examples until this entire, ridiculous, Chicken Little episode is laid to rest. 

Here's the latest example, from the U.N.'s Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. 

The irony: As negotiators from nearly 200 countries met in Cancun to strategize ways to keep the planet from getting hotter, the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F.   Climate-change skeptics are gleefully calling Cancun's weather the latest example of the "Gore Effect" — a plunge in temperature they say occurs wherever former Vice President Al Gore, now a Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist, makes a speech about the climate.

(That's a picture of a climate conference attendee dressed as a Polar Bear on the beach in Cancun.  He's probably the only one in the city who was warm.  Sorry for the digression.)

Although Gore is not scheduled to speak in Cancun, "it could be that the Gore Effect has announced his secret arrival," jokes former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer.



The reaction: ClimateGate was "bad enough," says Duncan Davidson in Wall Street Pit, but Cancun's weather is particularly "inconvenient" for global-warming alarmists. It's a reminder that global temperatures have "flatlined" despite rising carbon dioxide levels, "which is decidedly chilling against the concept of hampering economic growth to limit Co2 emissions." Grow up, says Tony Juniper in The Independent. "Sure, it's cold outside," but "the trend data show that the world is warming, that the climate is changing, and that the release of greenhouse gases is the cause." The longer we use every cold snap as an excuse to put off reducing emissions, "the bigger the risk we run. Tick tock, tick tock."

Yeah.  The bigger risk you run is.... not getting any money.  Grow up.  Read your thermometer.  Everyone else can.  Get a real job, and the longer you delay the sillier you're going to look.  Tick tock, tick tock.
 
The picture of the idjit in a Polar Bear suit came from here. 
The blue-balled monkey picture was sent to me by a Star-Telegram photographer after the cold spell in Florida this past winter.

U.N. Climate Change panel travels to Cancun Freakin' Mexico. While the U.K. freezes.

While the U.K. is struggling with its earliest widespread snowfall since 1993, the U.N.'s Climate Alarmist panel is meeting in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss further rationing of goods and services. 
Apparently, they've never heard of using Skype for conference calls. 
Lord have mercy, it looks like everybody is having a good time !!!

Food For The Machine

I have an acquaintance named James who just got sent to jail for four months.

James and I have a mutual friend named Judy, who called me yesterday, absolutely frantic. James had already gone to be an Involuntary Guest Of The State, he had no way to prepay four months’ rent on his small garage apartment, and unless Judy could find a way to get the rest of his possessions to a storage facility, everything James owned would either be dumped out on the curb or sold for back-payment of rent.
I was able to help Judy get the remainder of James’s furniture moved to a 10’x10’ storage space that she and another friend had rented. Had those two ladies not been willing to do this, James would have been released from prison owning absolutely nothing.

Think about that for a minute….starting over with a criminal record, and owning nothing. Then think of having to face a plague of counselors, probation officers, parole officers and other leeches, all with their hands in your pockets, trying to collect their Oversight Fees, payments for counseling sessions, payments for drug tests, and other legal rip-offs.

James will probably spend the rest of his life as food for this vile machine, ensuring that some Civil Service lifer is able to collect a good pension at the age of 50.

So what did James do to deserve such treatment?

Did he injure someone with his vehicle, the way Ted Kennedy did, and then leave his victim to drown?
Did he try and fail to blow up some buildings, like Bill Ayers?
Or did he drug and rape a 13-year old, like Roman Polanski?

James didn’t do anything to harm anyone else, the way those three guys did. He's only guilty of doing something that our last three presidents have done.

James was pulled over because of his license plate or inspection sticker was expired. The cops used that as an excuse to rip his car open from bumper to bumper. They finally found an ounce of marijuana and hauled James to jail.
Unlike presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, or contenders like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Sarah Palin, all of whom have smoked weed, James is in jail.
Unlike Barack Obama, who did cocaine as a teenager, James is in jail.

Chances are, you have voted for at least two of the politicians listed above. Why is it that you don’t hold drug use against presidential candidates and will support them in their efforts to be Leaders Of The Free World, but if a night-shift welder is caught with 4 joints’ worth of marijuana, you believe he should go to prison and then have to spend years explaining himself to, and being monitored by, government munchkins?

We have a higher percentage and a higher raw number of prisoners than any other country on earth. We are devastating the male African-American population for the sole purpose of “saving and creating jobs” in the counseling, drug-testing, prison-building and law enforcement industries.

Mexican drug lords are destroying their country - all for the right to be monopoly drug suppliers for the United States. The parallels between 2010 and our failed 1920's alcohol prohibition experiment are too obvious for even the most dense politician to ignore. Al Capone and a plethora of other gangsters grew wealthy supplying something that everyone wanted. Grandmothers started making their own bathtub gin. Lawlessness erupted around the border – but in this case, it was our border with Canada!

In places where we legalized alcohol, the bootlegger violence stopped. Alcohol usage didn’t skyrocket, it merely moved out into the open again, and there was no sudden increase in alcoholism.

There are only two politicians of note who are willing to go on record stating that they favor marijuana legalization – Republican Ron Paul (TX) and Democrat Jim Webb (VA).
The other politicians no longer have ignorance as an excuse. They aren’t misguided or misinformed, and they aren’t looking out For The Children®.

They are evil.

What's so bad about living and working in Mexico?

I'm working in Arizona for the next couple of weeks. 
There are some great folks out here. Unfortunately, some of them aren't legal. 
(The more I think about it, calling someone an illegal is kinda like the old days when we used to call some children illegitimate.) 

Arizona has decided to enforce the laws that are already on the books at the Federal level. 

This has pissed off the Statists, since they generally rely on Hispanic votes. 
This has motivated the Republicans, since they generally favor Law'n'Order, unless it's the laws that the ACLU supports. 
Most all of which frustrates the libertarians, who generally favor clogging the Rio Grande with copies of the tax code, import/export documents, Nancy Pelosi's autobiography, and let everyone who wants to do so walk into Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas on dry paper.  

Here's CNN on Obama and Arizona governor Jan Brewer's recent sit-down about immigration:

President Barack Obama emerged Thursday from a meeting with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer proclaiming limited progress on the immigration issue that divides them, but sticking to his opposition to her state's controversial immigration bill.

Here's the rub:  Say that someone is arrested in Virginia or Maryland.  The person has no identification.  Fingerprints reveal that the arrestee is here illegally from, say, Lichtenstein.  Should the Virginia or Maryland authorities deport the person, as the existing laws say they should, or should they release him?  Is there anything more to it than this? 

"I've told Governor Brewer that we've already put more resources into border security than we ever have," Obama told CNN's Larry King in an interview to air at 9 p.m. Thursday.

"Resources" is one of those words that makes my bullshit detector go off.  (Another is "persons" used in place of the perfectly good word "people".)  In spite of the resources, people are still coming across by the thousands.  Daily. 

"We have got more border guards in Arizona than we ever have. We just made decisions to put in additional National Guards. But without comprehensive immigration reform -- that is Congress' responsibility -- we are not going to solve this problem and that's what we have to do."

Barry, Barry, Barry....what part of the situation needs "reform"?  (That's another word that is starting to alarm me.  I've written elsewhere about icebergs being used as "Titanic reform".) 
Do we need to tighten up the existing policy of DON'T CROSS THE DAMN RIVER WITHOUT PAPERS?
Or do we need to let people come here to work and contribute to the economy by creating and consuming? 
Pick one.  Just saying reform reform reform reform isn't working. 

....Although I understand the frustration of the people of Arizona when it comes to the inflow of illegal immigrants (saith the Teleprompter), I don't think this is the right way to do it. I think this puts American citizens who look Hispanic, are Hispanic, potentially in an unfair situation."

More importantly, he said, "it also creates the prospects of 50 different laws in 50 different states when it comes to immigration."

(Note to the Teleprompter Programmer: Barry is supposed to be a constitutional law perfesser.  Do some reading on the 10th Amendment, or people are going to start questioning your typing skills.  50 different laws in 50 different states is what most of The Founders hoped for.  Well, 13 different laws in 13 different states.  You get the idea, I'm sure, even if Barry doesn't.  As long as the Feds don't distort the process, it's the best way to find out which policies are best.  Just think if every state had identical laws and policies, and they all had to match.....California's.)

So here are the big questions that no one is asking. 
The Teleprompter can say reform reform reform until it shorts a circuit.  The U.S. can continue building bigger and better useless fences.  The Republicans can hold rallies.  The Democrats can hold hands and march in solidarity with their oppressed brethren.  But is anyone, anyone at all, asking why the U.S. is so much better than Mexico?  Is anyone asking what's wrong with Mexico?  And if we know the answer, are we doing anything to ensure that we don't make the same mistakes as Mexico?

I don't think so. 

The Anti-Gun Bias Of The Person Who Programs Obama's Teleprompter

"This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States . . . more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border, so we have responsibilities in this as well."

- The person who runs Obama's teleprompter, April 16th, 2009

"In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced—and of those, 90 percent—5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover—were found to have come from the U.S.
But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.
In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S."

- William La Jeunesse and Maxim Lott, as quoted in Reason magazine.

"Hence La Jeunesse and Lott's conclusion that "only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S." Which sounds a lot less impressive than 90 percent."

- Jacob Sullum, as quoted in Reason magazine.

"The true number is somewhere in the middle. But wouldn't it be pleasant if our chowderheaded government could get out of the Prohibition/Bootlegger era and allow the violence to go away?"

- The Whited Sepulchre, after reading FactCheck.org

Jeffrey Miron: Legalize Drugs To Stop Violence In Mexico

This is the best editorial I've ever read about the need for drug legalization. It's by Jeffrey A. Miron, a senior economics lecturer at Harvard. I don't copy and past entire pieces very often (since I usually try to paraphrase things and pass them off as original thought) but this was too good to pass up. Here's Jeffrey Miron:

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Over the past two years, drug violence in Mexico has become a fixture of the daily news. Some of this violence pits drug cartels against one another; some involves confrontations between law enforcement and traffickers.
Recent estimates suggest thousands have lost their lives in this "war on drugs."
The U.S. and Mexican responses to this violence have been predictable: more troops and police, greater border controls and expanded enforcement of every kind. Escalation is the wrong response, however; drug prohibition is the cause of the violence.
Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground. This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead.

Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after.
Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it's permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.

The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs. Fortuitously, legalization is the right policy for a slew of other reasons.
Prohibition of drugs corrupts politicians and law enforcement by putting police, prosecutors, judges and politicians in the position to threaten the profits of an illicit trade. This is why bribery, threats and kidnapping are common for prohibited industries but rare otherwise. Mexico's recent history illustrates this dramatically.
Prohibition erodes protections against unreasonable search and seizure because neither party to a drug transaction has an incentive to report the activity to the police. Thus, enforcement requires intrusive tactics such as warrantless searches or undercover buys. The victimless nature of this so-called crime also encourages police to engage in racial profiling.

Prohibition has disastrous implications for national security. By eradicating coca plants in Colombia or poppy fields in Afghanistan, prohibition breeds resentment of the United States. By enriching those who produce and supply drugs, prohibition supports terrorists who sell protection services to drug traffickers.

Prohibition harms the public health. Patients suffering from cancer, glaucoma and other conditions cannot use marijuana under the laws of most states or the federal government despite abundant evidence of its efficacy. Terminally ill patients cannot always get adequate pain medication because doctors may fear prosecution by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Drug users face restrictions on clean syringes that cause them to share contaminated needles, thereby spreading HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases.
Prohibitions breed disrespect for the law because despite draconian penalties and extensive enforcement, huge numbers of people still violate prohibition. This means those who break the law, and those who do not, learn that obeying laws is for suckers.

Prohibition is a drain on the public purse. Federal, state and local governments spend roughly $44 billion per year to enforce drug prohibition. These same governments forego roughly $33 billion per year in tax revenue they could collect from legalized drugs, assuming these were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco. Under prohibition, these revenues accrue to traffickers as increased profits.


The right policy, therefore, is to legalize drugs while using regulation and taxation to dampen irresponsible behavior related to drug use, such as driving under the influence. This makes more sense than prohibition because it avoids creation of a black market. This approach also allows those who believe they benefit from drug use to do so, as long as they do not harm others.
Legalization is desirable for all drugs, not just marijuana. The health risks of marijuana are lower than those of many other drugs, but that is not the crucial issue. Much of the traffic from Mexico or Colombia is for cocaine, heroin and other drugs, while marijuana production is increasingly domestic. Legalizing only marijuana would therefore fail to achieve many benefits of broader legalization.


It is impossible to reconcile respect for individual liberty with drug prohibition. The U.S. has been at the forefront of this puritanical policy for almost a century, with disastrous consequences at home and abroad.


The U.S. repealed Prohibition of alcohol at the height of the Great Depression, in part because of increasing violence and in part because of diminishing tax revenues. Similar concerns apply today, and Attorney General Eric Holder's recent announcement that the Drug Enforcement Administration will not raid medical marijuana distributors in California suggests an openness in the Obama administration to rethinking current practice.
Perhaps history will repeat itself, and the U.S. will abandon one of its most disastrous policy experiments.

Pics from here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .