Worth Another Look

 

Edward N. Luttwak wrote The Endangered American Dream in 1993.

 It's both disturbing and strangely amusing to see his analysis of the American Border Patrol at that time. He notes that as of 1990, the Border Patrol only had 3,857 agents on duty. That included those at the Mexican border, the Canadian border, and Alaska.

In contrast, he noted that Italy had 53,000 border guards plus the Carabinieri and the police for passport control.

He also noted: But preemptive declarations of impotence that disregard perfectly available remedies have become something of an American habit. When gangs were rampaging in Los Angeles in their regular everyday fashion even before the spectacular May 1992 riots, the city authorities reacted by asking for sociological studies of the gangs. Actually it is the city authorities themselves that are sociologically much more interesting and definitely worth studying: with a population  of 3.5 million, the city had a grand total of 8,381 police officers (yes, eight thousand three hundred eighty-one), a ratio of 2.3 per 1,000 inhabitants. That would be just about enough for, say, quietly industrious Nagoya in law-abiding Japan. By contrast, the Italian countrywide ratio is 4.2 - though even crime-ridden Italy is a paradise of tranquility as compared to Los Angeles. The Border Patrol, or rather the lack of it on the Mexican border, is exactly the same category: self-inflicted impotence, rationalized as an inherent impossibility.

Beware of the Utopians

“Objective evidence was cast aside because it was too inconvenient. The very idea of reason and rationality was dismissed. All these ideologies — multiculturalism, lifestyle choice, deep green environmentalism, moral relativism — were utopian. They promised perfection. Anyone who brought facts against them wasn’t just wrong… they were evil.”

- Melanie Phillips

Powerful

 

Does not exactly show an invincible Russian army. 

Time to check out the following book:

Creative Circling

I tend to start my essays with A and then go to M and then perhaps back to C and D and then forward to U and V because, the entire time, I am circling the subject and trying to find the best way to find its core, so to speak, and that is the trick.

It is a way of learning by doing. So much of the time is spent determining the real topic.

How can I do that unless I write about it?

[Photo by hayleigh b at Unsplash]

Nimrod

 

A Must Read

 At Cultural Offering.

Are you in the house or on the porch?

Love the Balance

 From todays' New York Times coverage of the French elections:

The party held on to its traditional strongholds along the Mediterranean coast and in the north of France and won a significant number of small cities in the far north and far south. But that would not be enough to triumph in a presidential election, said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, a left-leaning think tank based in Paris.

Back By Popular Demand

 

Erasing Cesar Chavez

Vanessa Mares is raising the question of whether the rapid erasure of Cesar Chavez is wise.

I would feel much better if more time was devoted for study and scrutiny and, yes, for hearing counterarguments.

Remember when people supported the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue by noting that it would be moved and not destroyed?

It was later melted down.

I wonder if many of those who oppose the historical symbols want to remove them all. 

There will soon be, no doubt, a similar move against Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are statues to be reserved for saints?

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by Brad Weaver at Unsplash]