Why Hillary?

The AZ Republic's Phil Boas in his Sunday quip (5/31) seems to be arguing that Hillary Clinton should be president because of her gender.   Hope beyond hope, I'd like a candidate with a long and distinguished record of serving the country, e.g., a Colin Powell.   Mrs. Clinton's long record consists primarily of being the victim in America's longest running, raunchy political soap opera.   In the Senate she voted to invade Iraq.  Her tenure as Secretary of State was marred by feckless U.S. intervention in the debacle once known as the Arab Spring.  Her State Department legacy includes Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and wife of neocon historian Robert Kagan.  Ms. Nuland is famous for handing our cookies to demonstrators who overthrew the Ukrainian government and saying "Fuck the EU" when asked about having the European Union mediate Ukraine's problems.

Quo vadis, Dwight D. Eisenhower?

Immigration: What's the Right Number

Immigration: what's the right number?   Something I've never seen or heard in our discussion of immigration is what's the right number.   There is a limit to the number of immigrants U.S. infrastructure can sustain, e.g., educations and health care.  Some level of immigration is good for the U.S. economy, but it also has contributed to our problem of "inequality."   The U.S. Congress has set the annual allowance for immigration at about 1,000,000 (although the mechanism for figuring this is so complicated who knows what the real number is).  Good or bad for the economy, the allowance set by the U.S. Congress is very generous compared to the rest of the world, especially considering that the U.S. does not limit immigration to highly skilled and educated, employable people as many other countries do. 

Nevertheless, without even proposing a change to the immigration allowances set by Congress, "immigration" activists demand that people  who have circumvented the U.S. immigration system be given legal status and allowed to remain in the country.  Anyone who disagrees is committing a crime against humanity, even though what the activists propose is a 1,000 percent increase to the allowance set by the U.S. Congress.   This is not a rational basis for compromise: it's just pawn shop bartering. 

 

What we need from immigration activists is a proposal on what the right annual immigration number is for the U.S.   For example, if 1,000,000 a year immigrants is the right number, then we'd close the door to all other immigration for ten years to accommodate the 10,000,000 undocumented immigrants believed to be in the U.S. today.  

 

Give us a reasonable solution and number, and tell us how states like Arizona and New Mexico would be compensated for the unequal impact on their health care, education and law enforcement infrastructure, if you want to make a deal.

Why Johnny and Jose Can't Read

Why can't Johnny and Jose read?   It is very true that our teachers are the Few, the Proud and the Underpaid, the fearless Marines of education holding out against overwhelming odds.   There is another problem, though.   Our education establishment stubbornly, pigheadedly, insists on treating English as cultural legacy, not as a communication technology.   Too much time is devoted to the usage of "like and as" and to ancient Anglo-Saxon literature like Pride and Prejudice and Beowulf.   Picture some poor immigrant kid from Sudan trying to make sense out of Pride and Prejudice, a story about rich English people who don't work, or a kid from Sonora trying to comprehend Beowulf, which isn't even written in an English language that anyone uses anymore, for heaven's sake.  The leftwing ethnic studies crowd hasn't  provided a solution, either: they've just provided an alternative biased cultural lesson.   Stop treating English as cultural legacy and a political cause,  and start treating it as a communication technology we all need to learn to use.

Why I Cancelled My Times Subscription

Didactic journalism.  There are too many sententious morality lessons in The Times, often where the author or a new friend is the hero.  Too often the morality lessons lapse into outright falsehood to spice things up.  The last straw was Michael Powell's story about leaving the glitz of Super Bowl Phoenix for the unspoiled high school basketball of the Navajo reservation: the Navajo kids, though small, play fast with unmatched intensity and for the pure joy of the game.   This is a dubious opinion since there are plenty of big, six-foot Navajo basketball players, and the other white, brown and black youngsters playing basketball in Arizona are extremely fast and intense, if not joyful.

Where Mr. Powell egregiously went astray was when he claimed that the Navajo teams do well until they go down to the Valley to play the Christian schools, which recruit giant players with holy fervor.  The problem with this is that the Navajo schools don't, in fact, play the Valley Christian schools, and recruiting is illegal in Arizona high school basketball.   It might happen but it's the "big time", big-enrollment high schools that play in Division 1 and Division II that might be guilty.   The Navajo schools are small schools that play in Division III.  This year in the state tournament Navajo competitor Chinle High School lost to Palo Verde Magnet, a public school from the poverty stricken Tucson Unified School District.  The Division III state championship was won by Snowflake, a small public high school not far from the Navajo reservation. 

As far as purity goes, it's worth noting that the state final game was played at the Gila River Arena, home of the Arizona Coyotes hockey team, sponsored by the Gila River Casinos -- a group of gambling casinos controlled by the Gila River Indian Community.  The Navajo operate four casinos on their reservation, but have yet to acquire naming rights for a major Arizona sports venue.

All of the above and the fact that David Pogue the best tech writer in the business doesn't work there anymore.