Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Random Notes from a Crank

I finally got around to reading David Frum's fine article in The Atlantic. In the magazine, it's title is "How Much Immigration Is Too Much?" On the Interwebs it's titled "If Liberals Won't Enforce Borders, Fascists Will."

To me, Frum is on the mark about the US immigration policy being supported more by nostalgia and not asking hard questions. As he states, "But immigration needs to be thought of as a system, not a symbol [like a stupid wall]. And the system is not working. No intentional policy has led the U.S. to accept more low-wage, low-skill laborers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing." 

And as he gets to the close of the article, he offers this point: "More than any other area of government, U.S. immigration policy is driven by nostalgia--by ancestral memories of a world long gone. Give me your tired, your poor...

This is no way to think about the problems of today. These are new times, calling for new thinking." 

In another article in The Atlantic, this time in the May issue, a Professor of Linguistics describes how the language is changing in a way that is a bit odd. Check out "Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids." His analysis brought up some syntactical changes people have been making all the time.  

The last three times I've walked the dog the song below has played with my iPod on shuffle. It is one of my favorite Lucero tunes. However, I'm trying to understand what the universe is trying to tell me.




As I watched the White Sox-Cubs game tonight, I thought about the cities that have two baseball teams, and I asked my son which of the sets of teams he'd root for: 

  • New York: Yankees or Mets
  • Bay Area: As or Giants
My son went with the Yankees and Giants, and I went the Mets and As. 

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