Get Ready for a Lot More of These Arguments
Wars have some obvious negative consequences, but some are not so obvious. A Chinese woman is seeking asylum in the U.S. to escape a bad marriage. The immigration judge sensibly told her to go take a hike. A panel of idiots (the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York) decided she should get asylum. The Bush Administration is appealing (yes, it's situations like these when I remember why I voted for Bush), arguing that we can't be offering asylum to every woman in the world finding herself facing an arranged, abusive marriage. Her attorney's reply?
But back to the asylum case. The whole concept of asylum should be done away with. Asylum is another unforseen consequence of war - in this case, the Cold War. Granting asylum to escapees from communist countries was good PR back in the day because it embarrassed those countries, particularly since they used to actively prevent their citizens from leaving. But liberals complained about a double standard, so we braodened it to include asylum from any oppressive regime. Nowadays, most countries are more than happy to shed themselves of the losers who end up on our shores seeking asylum. In this particular case, the husband-to-be is pissed because he wasted $2,500 bucks on a no-show bride, but I'm sure China couldn't care less what happens to her. So can we just drop the whole asylum thing? I'm sure President Obama will make it his highest priority.
"We went over to Iraq to try to bring democracy to people, and we can't even offer a woman being sold into slavery asylum?"That's going to be the formula for the next however-many years. Everything, no matter how stupid, will be justified on the basis of it not being as stupid as invading Iraq. Worried about the budget and would like to cut back on spending? Here's Dean Baker suggesting that $50 billion over 5 years is chump change:
In compartive terms, it is less than what the United States spends in 3 weeks on the war in Iraq.So nothing can ever cost too much ever again, because we wasted so much money on Iraq.
But back to the asylum case. The whole concept of asylum should be done away with. Asylum is another unforseen consequence of war - in this case, the Cold War. Granting asylum to escapees from communist countries was good PR back in the day because it embarrassed those countries, particularly since they used to actively prevent their citizens from leaving. But liberals complained about a double standard, so we braodened it to include asylum from any oppressive regime. Nowadays, most countries are more than happy to shed themselves of the losers who end up on our shores seeking asylum. In this particular case, the husband-to-be is pissed because he wasted $2,500 bucks on a no-show bride, but I'm sure China couldn't care less what happens to her. So can we just drop the whole asylum thing? I'm sure President Obama will make it his highest priority.
posted by ziel | 3/23/2007 11:54:00 PM
1 Comments:
Self replicating machines making copies of themselves??? Har, har, I manage a maintenace dept. in a fully automated factory. The only thing machines can make adequately is more work for humans. Machines break, then they break some more, then they completely fail. If you have a machine making copies of itself then soon it will make broken copies of itself, that is if it doesn't break before that.
And I guess the idea is to make "solar cells" to harness the sun's energy. Solar cells are easy to make IF you have the selenium which is a rare element that cannot be gotten just anywhere. You don't make a solar cell you mine the ingredients for one.
I have no idea how this idea is supposed to work but I'll wager that cars will run on water before this ever happens. And BTW capturing energy by solar cells in outer space is a really dumb idea unless you are in outer space and in that case you've expended a whole lot of fossil fuels just to get there, i.e. there are no solar rockets.
Plan on burning coal for another couple of centuries unless the environmental loonies die off and we can build lots of nuclear plants. Sorry that's the way it works.
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