Spring 2021 Starts Now –According to our server’s clock it is now 5:37 a.m., EDT, March 20, which means the vernal equinox just happened and Spring 2021 has begun.
Equinox is Latin for “equal night.” Days and nights are approximately equal everywhere and the Sun rises and sets due east and west, explains The Old Farmers Almanac. At the equinoxes, the tilt of Earth relative to the Sun is zero, which means that Earth’s axis neither points toward nor away from the Sun.
Vernal comes from the Latin vernalis which means spring.
A tragedy occurred outside of Holtville, California, when a northbound big rig rammed into the driver’s side of an SUV that pulled out in front of the semi-truck, killing 13 people. This tragic event morphed into the surreal when we learned that the SUV was packed with 25 people who had been smuggled into the United States.
That’s right, 24 passengers and a driver packed like sardines in a vehicle designed to hold eight adults at maximum. Perhaps the driver who hailed from Mexicali, Mexico, was distracted when he pulled out in front of the semi making its way down Route 115. Anyone who has been in a Ford Expedition has to be thinking to themselves, HOW? How do you get 25 people into a vehicle like that?
Well, you start with ruthless, morally shipwrecked cartels that make steep profits trafficking humans across the border. Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies recently wrote that cartels expect to make $2,500 per individual smuggled from Mexico. When we do the math, that SUV had a human cargo valued around $60,000.
To give an example of just how revolting this incident is, one has to go back to the American slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to History.com, slave ships could be either “tight pack” or “loose pack.” A tight pack could hold more slaves than the loose pack, because the amount of space allocated to each slave was considerably less, but more slaves would die on route to the Americas. It would appear the cartels these days have chosen the tight pack model.
Next, you have to look at the people making the journey to enter the U.S. illegally. Coming from Mexico, they have to fork over the $2,500 and be willing to place their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. How many other deprivations do they suffer along the way, and what motivates them to do so?
The motivation is to rush to the border and be physically present in the U.S. while the Biden administration plays musical chairs with immigration policy. Will the Biden administration win sweeping amnesties for illegal aliens, or will it fail to deliver on its promises? Many people are betting on the former and are engaged in a desperate and dangerous run to bust through the border in an attempt to claim a chair when the music stops.
Since Jan. 20, Americans have become more apprehensive of the Biden administration’s plans to make sweeping changes to immigration. The majority of Americans are in fact becoming more restrictionist as opposed to expansionist in their views.
The Rasmussen Immigration Index for the week of Feb. 14 – 18, 2021, fell to 86.0, and it’s fallen by nearly 15 points since the week before the November election. This shows voters want tighter immigration control from President Biden’s administration. Right now, the Immigration Index is the lowest since it began in December 2019.
The administration is playing with dynamite, and has pinned itself in a corner that leaves two ways out. They can either abolish the border or enforce our immigration mandates to the fullest extent of the law. To do anything less is to invite more tragedy the likes of which we saw last week.
It is not just traffickers who profit off this immoral trade. There are a dozen industries that profit from cheap, compliant and easy to abuse labor. When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were roughly 750 meat packing plants across the country. My mother worked the front counter of a local one called Lustig’s. The work and pay were good.
Today, 80 percent of our beef products come from three companies. The work and pay are bad. These huge factory meat processors rely on a steady stream of illegal aliens. Their business model would not work without them, and only when compelled to do so by ICE raids are they inclined to pay more, offer benefits and improve work conditions to attract a native workforce.
Neoliberal technocrats also are culpable in this and other tragedies stemming from the trafficking of illegal aliens. These are the toadies that carry the water for the oligarchs who seek to maximize profit via the unbridled movement of people and capital across international borders. They despise the concept of the nation state with its quaint and, in their minds, antiquated concepts of societal norms and democracy. They filter and shape the news and commentary to fit their deranged world views. And in this way, they are most culpable in all of this.
Kevin Lynn is the executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform. Contact him at klynn@pfirdc.org.
Ugly ones included William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 3-19-21
Sp go rkn xy gsxdob, dro czbsxq gyevn xyd lo cy zvokckxd; sp go nsn xyd cywodswoc dkcdo yp knfobcsdi, zbyczobsdi gyevn xyd lo cy govmywo.
Kxxo Lbkncdbood
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
Karl Marx
Ugly ones included William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 3-19-21
CDC Created Covid-19 For Profit? — Donna E sent this fascinating video by David Martin regarding patents and the Coronavirus.
Yes, patents have been issued involving coronavirus, a naturally occurring disease.
Martin says the development of Covid-19 was started for profit by people connected with the Center for Disease Control then was moved to Wuhan, China when good guys in government became uncomfortable with the direction it was taking.
Maybe Covid-19 should be called the CDC Flu.
Martin calls out Tony Fauci, Ralph Baric and many others.
The daily Southwest border updates are generating nationwide concern except in Washington, DC, where indifference reigns. The latest Department of Homeland Security report showed that in February more than 100,000 people were either apprehended by, or surrendered to, federal immigration officials on the U.S.-Mexico border. Those totals, a 14-year high, include about 9,460 unaccompanied minors and more than 19,240 family units which reflect 62 percent and 38 percent increases, respectively, when compared to January’s statistics.
Nonetheless, President Biden, his DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorkas, and his Press Secretary Jen Psaki refuse to even hint that the administration’s lax border policies need immediate reining in. For his part, Biden has not spoken officially about what his administration calls a border challenge. But Psaki refused to call the border rush a crisis, instead labeling it “an enormous challenge.” Mayorkas, when asked a similar question about whether the border events represented a crisis, answered with a flat out “no.”
But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t hesitate to call the growing border chaos a crisis. Abbott has a better perspective on the border influx than White House operatives, and the governor formed Operation Lone Star to deploy personnel from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard to the border to secure the area. Abbott said Operation Lone Star’s goal is to “deny Mexican cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas.”
While the White House border rhetoric has focused almost exclusively on what it describes as the need for a humanitarian response to migration, it’s ignored the undeniable connection between open borders and human smuggling. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) is the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs top Republican who has overseen three separate committee investigations that date back over several administrations.
Portman’s 2016 investigation, “Protecting Unaccompanied Alien Children from Trafficking and Other Abuses,” uncovered that the Department of Health and Human Services failed to adequately vet or to conduct in-depth background checks on the Ohio adults to whom it released minor children. The adults turned out to be human smugglers. The 2018 report, “Oversight of the Care of Unaccompanied Minor Children,” came to similarly shocking and dangerous conclusions. HHS and DHS didn’t make the recommended post-2016 changes to trafficking crimes and to tracking whether released aliens report for their designated immigration court dates.
Biden appears either under-informed or indifferent to the growing human trafficking trade that his administration encourages. After ending the Remain in Mexico policy, the latest federal government’s inducement for more unaccompanied children to rush the border is that HHS will pay for minors in its custody to be flown to their sponsor or family member’s home, often illegal immigrants, when, as is invariably the case, the receiving adult cannot pay. Furthermore, Biden’s DHS submitted a notice to the Federal Registerto withdraw an existing proposed rule that would require the receiving immigrant to sponsor and care for an arriving migrant once s/he becomes a lawful permanent resident.
While Biden and those close to him debate semantics, last week DHS reached its breaking point, and begged ICE deportation officers to travel to the border ASAP to help with what the agency called “security operations” for the illegal immigrant children and families that have overwhelmed a swamped Border Patrol. Michael Meade, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, pleaded for “immediate action.” Volunteers would include civilians with medical or legal experience as well as drivers and food servers.
Officials on the scene won’t speculate on when the emergency request for increased border assistance might be called off. The Biden administration is in full denial, and the president refuses to travel to the border to evaluate conditions. As the surge with its associated criminal and COVID risks intensifies daily, an educated guess is that the existing calamitous circumstances will remain unchanged well into the peak summer months.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.
Orson Welles
Impress our girlfriends William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 3-18-21
America presents: A Fractured Fairy Tale – “The Push-a-Button Generation” or “What Do The Boomers To Us To Gen Z All Have In Common.
Today we can push a button and have it all: streaming music, streaming video, climate control, food heated in seconds, literally anything imaginable delivered to our front door.
During our nation’s founding there was no button to push to heat the dwelling or cook food. Ben Franklin passed up a fortune by giving away his Franklin Stove design.
During the Civil War there was no button to push to administer pain medicines to the wounded. Men were held down, limbs sawed off to prevent infection.
During the Westward expansion there was no button to push for GPS. Families left the relative comfort of those days for uncertain journeys with nothing but Faith to guide them.
During the World Wars there were no buttons to push, no drones to fly. Combat was hand to hand and very brutal. But our Every Man beat their Super Man and delivered the world from tyranny. Peace and Prosperity were the fruits of our Greatest Generation’s struggles, sacrifices and blood shed.
But soon we had buttons. Buttons on the television, the car radio, the microwave oven. Buttons to heat our homes, to wash our clothes. Soon after we began to lose our way. Things became too easy.
We can press a button today and bring the entire globe to our fingertips yet many people have never experienced such isolation, such disconnect from their fellow humans, from their own humanity.
So we seek out more buttons and frantically push them hoping to feel something or to fill some perceived void. We push a button and gamble away a life savings rather than become entrepreneurs. We push a button and invite all kinds of depravity into our homes rather than seek out meaningful relationships. We push a button to escape into a virtual world “farming” or “building” while allowing our food supply to be genetically modified and our jobs to be outsourced.
The United States is at a cross roads in 2021. Will we continue to demand instant gratification (that inevitably led to so called cancel culture and will lead to much, much worse if left unchecked) or will we with temperance, master technology and regain our own humanity in the process.
This is our moment in history. Will you define the moment or let the moment define you. You still have a choice, for now. Choose wisely.
Great Gaels of Ireland William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 3-17-21
Qn bpmzm pilv’b jmmv ewumv em’l abqtt jm aycibbqvo qv i kidm mibqvo zie umib, jmkicam em uilm kqdqtqhibqwv qv wzlmz bw quxzmaa wcz oqztnzqmvla.
Wzawv Emttma
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit puzzle: The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad. For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
G.K. Chesterton
Great Gaels of Ireland William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 3-17-21
Jim Garrison Prediction From 1967 — This is the next to last quote from Jim Garrison’s 1967 interview with Playboy Magazine regarding his investigation into the John Kennedy assassination while district attorney of New Orleans. Read it and weep.
Over the years, I guess I’ve developed a somewhat conservative attitude — in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right — particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the state and the individual’s own responsibilities to humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he’s not a digit in regard to the state and he’s not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society.
I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I’ve always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers.
I’m concerned about all of this because it isn’t a German phenomenon; it’s a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man. What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state.
Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act.
I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
