Number of unaccompanied minors, age 17 or lower, apprehended during or after border crossings, fiscal year 2017:
Trump aside, what exactly is the plan here?
Hat tip goes to @BaldingsWorld.
July 2017
Posted: June 30, 2018 Filed under: America, America Since 1945 Leave a commentThat was a good month of posts on Helytimes, if you’re one of those folks who likes poking around in the archives.
Bob Marley, John Adams, Bert Hölldobler, Deke Slayton, Amban, Ansel Adams.
Also feel I did fine work in July 2014.
Merrick Garland
Posted: June 28, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
The optics were never exactly right with this guy.
(Found this picture screensaved, and can’t even find where it’s from. Google thinks it’s the generic picture for “tuxedo.”)
Borders Part 2
Posted: June 24, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Wonder Trail Leave a comment
“Villa bandits who raided Columbus, New Mexico, caught by American soldiers in the mountains of Mexico and held, in camp near Namiquipa, April 27, 1916.” from NARA
Lots of INTENSE feedback about post yesterday on borders.
I’m just reporting reality as I perceive it.
Since Pershing went after Pancho Villa, it’s been clear that along one thousand nine hundred and blahblah miles of desert, even the fiercest efforts of government are gonna, at best, disappear into the dust.
from the Mexican Border Service photo collection.
And they had Patton!
(How ’bout this by the way:
Pershing was permitted to bring into New Mexico 527 Chinese refugees who had assisted him during the expedition, despite the ban on Chinese immigration at that time under the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese refugees, known as “Pershing’s Chinese”, were allowed to remain in the U.S. if they worked under the supervision of the military as cooks and servants on bases. In 1921, Congress passed Public Resolution 29, which allowed them to remain in the country permanently under the conditions of the 1892 Geary Act. Most of them settled in San Antonio, Texas.
).
What kind of conservative believes that the federal government can put a wall here and stop people from moving across it?
close up of this 2012 NASA composite image
Does declaring an new federal attempt to impose “no tolerance” enforcement seem more tyrantish or freedomish to you?
Does the fear of brown people from south of our border, like the fear of psychotically violent black people, have something to say about our own guilty conscience? There isn’t a country from Mexico to Chile that hasn’t been severely screwed by the USA.
Look, I’m no expert. My book about Mexico, Central and South America was the work of an enthusiastic amateur, not a serious scholar!
From where I sit, in Los Angeles, California, USA, I can understand the traditional politician approach of talking any way you want to get elected and then not going anywhere near actually doing anything about the border.
The current president got elected by sticking his fork in this electrical socket. I’m not seeing how it ends? Best case he declares victory and moves on.
Borders
Posted: June 22, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics 1 Comment
Feel like I am the only person in the world who accepts the reality that borders are over.
This isn’t a political position or something I’m advocating for. It’s an observation of fact.
Hard to say when we can date it, exactly. The first time we could see Earth from space? Maybe Malcolm McLean‘s pioneering of the shipping container. Stuff, an unstoppable amount of stuff, and money, and information, and people flow and move across borders in a way that is way beyond the ability of any state or government to stop.
The idea of a wall stopping this seems about as futile as Xerxes ordering his guys to whip the sea as punishment.
UAC there standing for unaccompanied children. That’s from the US Customs and Border Patrol website.
Tyler Cowen reports:
U.S.A. fact of the day
“What exactly is the plan here?” is the question for sure.
How much force and violence would be needed to stop this? Who would direct that? Do the guys in charge seem like they could handle that?
How many trans-border families already exist, and what to do about that?
I have no answers, only a feeling that statements like “if you don’t have a border you don’t have a country” or something are not in touch with reality.
We already don’t have a border. Without massive government expenditures, force and violence that would sicken any liberal or conservative, we never will again.
What’re we gonna do now?
RIP Stanley Cavell
Posted: June 20, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, film, writing 1 Comment
Here is an obituary of the Harvard philosopher, who has left this Earth. To be honest with you, most of Cavell’s work is over my head. Much of it seems to deal with the ultimate breakdown of language and the difficulty of meaning anything.
Cavell wrote the epigraph for my favorite book:
and at some point, somebody (Etan?) recommended I check out:
which meant a lot to me.
This book is a study of seven screwball comedies:
The Lady Eve
It Happened One Night
Bringing Up Baby
The Philadelphia Story
His Girl Friday
Adam’s Rib
The Awful Truth
These Cavell calls comedies of remarriage. They’re stories (mostly) where the main characters have a history, and the plots involve the tangles as they struggle, fight, and reconnect.
What the book really gets it is: what is revealed about us or our society when we look at what we find pleasing and appropriate in romantic comedies? Why do we root for Cary Grant instead of Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story for instance?
It’s fun to watch these movies and read this book. 
It’s dense for sure. I read it before the Age of Phones, not sure how I’d fair today. But I still think about insights from it.
At one point Cavell says (in a parenthetical!):
I do not wish, in trying for a moment to resist, or scrutinize, the power of Spencer Tracy’s playfulness, to deny that I sometimes feel Katherine Hepburn to lack a certain humor about herself, to count the till a little too often. But then I think of how often I have cast the world I want to live in as one in which my capacities for playfulness and for seriousness are not used against one another, so against me. I am the lady they always want to saw in half.
Cool phrase.
RIP to a real one!
Things I learned reading The Economist this week
Posted: June 18, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, world Leave a comment
- If you invest $100,000 in the island nation of Saint Lucia, they’ll make you a citizen.
- South Africa has an unemployment rate of 26%.
- Bernard Henri-Levy has been performing a one-man show about Brexit at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea.
Michelle Wolf, Peter Schweitzer, and DC/media as pro wrestling
Posted: June 14, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
Michelle Wolf says that in this Vulture profile by Amy Larocca.
A very similar complaint voiced by Clinton Cash author Peter Schweitzer in the Devil’s Bargain book about Trump and Bannon:
Wild
Posted: June 11, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Wild interview of Christian Lorentzen and Seymour Hersh in NY Mag.
Conan on Hans Gruber
Posted: June 4, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
from this Vulture interview
facepalm
Posted: June 3, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, food, Wonder Trail 6 Comments
the article that set me off was:
which caused my eyes to roll out of my head. I was just in Portland, and the food was awesome! It’s a “foodie paradise” because it’s in the Willamette Valley, on the Columbia River, near the North Pacific Ocean, one of the most bountiful regions on planet Earth, plus it’s prosperous and full of creative and interesting and diverse people.
Seemed hysterical to me to claim it had been ruined.
you’re telling me this place is ruined?
When I first heard the headline version of the story of the Portland Taco Cart Willamette Week Interview Fiasco, I thought “well that’s silly, how far are we taking this idea of cultural appropriation? of course you can make tacos.” But when I heard the details it was like oh ok that’s not very cool.
There was good discussion of it on “Good Food” with Evan Kleiman.
Following which I drove around for an hour or so doing my errands and thinking about it. Sometime later it comes up, shot my Twitter mouth off and RIP my mentions.
Twitter user put my response to McArdle better than I could:
Also gave me more to think about. I myself took advantage of the easygoing legal rules on map copying in my book, and used Google Maps as the basis for my hand-drawn maps. It felt fine, although I was surprised nobody protects cartographers.
Because there’s no legal protection for Mexican ladies making burritos who are trying to keep their recipe secret, that’s why it made people so mad. Kinda think Connelly and Wingus crossed the line, but whatever, maybe they just made an unfortunate remark in an interview. They don’t deserve death threats for heaven’s sake. Let’s wish them well and hope they make some cool new kind of burrito in the future that everyone can eat joyfully and without compunction.
Like Austin Kleon points out, there’s stealing and stealing.
The virus
Posted: May 31, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
from the wikipedia page for virus
There are names I could write here of people you’re probably heard of who are professional trolls. They say things which are designed to offend and provoke and irritate and outrage. Then those things (and the person’s name) are spread by people outraged and irritated and provoked and offended.
The Twitter-era disease of spreading bad stuff in order to roast/be outraged by it. It’s like a virus that spreads every time you complain you are sick.
This is not really a profound or insightful observation. But every day I see smart people who I like filling my Twitter timeline or my Internet with sickness and poison in their effort to combat sickness and poison.
Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. (Feels like even discussing this could form part of the problem). The President himself is one of these characters, which makes this problem almost too baffling to contemplate.
There are many lesser demons however where I don’t understand why I’m constantly being exposed to their bad takes, even if it’s in the context of making fun of them or “destroying” them.
It seems like an Internet specific problem. I don’t feel like people used to seek out unusually dumb editorials just to light them up. Maybe they did. Harder, though. The free instant worldwide publishing era was bound to have diseases as well as benefits.
Cable news is a whole other category of this, one big sewer of this disease, far as I can tell.
An unhealthy sitch! I don’t know what the solution is, except some self-discipline to ignore and keep moving.
Tom Wolfe observation
Posted: May 18, 2018 Filed under: America, America Since 1945, writing Leave a comment
There are, of course, all sorts of gradations of status, of power, of wealth, influence and comfort, but it is impossible to break America down into classes in the old European sense. “But there is a … dividing line, and above that line are those who have bachelor degrees or better from a four-year college or university. Below that are the people who don’t. That line is becoming a gulf that grows wider and wider. “Like the rest of the West, we live in a highly bureaucratic world and it’s impossible today to advance to the heights of ambition without that bachelor’s degree, without being a part of what Vance Packard used to call ‘the diploma elite.'”
Had to go looking for the source of that one, it was in a 2005 Duke commencement speech. How about this?:
For the last four years, you have been trained to be the leaders of an extraordinary nation. There has never been anything like it. … It is the only country I know of in which immigrants with a totally different culture, a totally different language, can in one-half of a generation, if they have the numbers and a modicum of organization, take over politically a metropolis as large as, say, Miami.
As a Tom Wolfe (Ph.d) superfan, kind of disappointed by the tributes and obituaries. Most of them seemed pretty limp. Maybe because so many journalists were so in awe of him, they seemed to sputter on about the same stuff and barely touch on the vastness of Wolfe’s interests and insights.
Best one imo was Louis Menand. (Update: lol whoops hadn’t seen Friend of Helytimes’ Graeme Wood’s.)
Felt literary world scoffed at
but how many 74 year olds would take on a seven hundred page book about college, rap, hookup culture, basketball, and attempts to get in the head of (among others) a nineteen year old female virgin? A little crazy but I thought it was cool! Also came pretty close to predicting the Duke lacrosse scandal.
If you hunger for Wolfe at full Wolfeness might I recommend his 2006 Jefferson Lecture?:
According to Korean War lore, a Navy fighter pilot began shouting out over the combat radio network, “I’ve got a Mig at zero! A Mig at zero! I’ve got a Mig at zero!” A Mig at zero meant a Soviet supersonic fighter plane was squarely on his tail and could blow him out of the sky at any moment. Another voice, according to legend, broke in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.” Such “chatter,” such useless talk on the radio during combat, was forbidden. The term “aviator” was the final, exquisite touch of status sensitivity. Navy pilots always called themselves aviators. Marine and Air Force fliers were merely pilots. The reward for reaching the top of the ziggurat was not money, not power, not even military rank. The reward was status honor, the reputation of being a warrior with ultimate skill and courage–a word, by the way, strictly taboo among the pilots themselves. The same notion of status honor motivates virtually every police and fire fighting force in the world.
Wolfe wrote about what was amusing. Even in say crime or war he found the amusement. A serious writer who was also funny. Not enough of those.
Gotta see if I can find this somewhere:
Advances in Cormac studies
Posted: April 9, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Texas, writing Leave a comment
Morrow quotes McCarthy as saying that “even people who write well can’t write novels… They assume another sort of voice and a weird, affected kind of style. They think, ‘O now I’m writing a novel,’ and something happens. They write really good essays… but goddamn, the minute they start writing a novel they go crazy“
In early 2008 Texas State University announced they’d acquired Cormac McCarthy’s papers. The next year they made them available to scholars. Now two books based on rummaging around in these notes have appeared.
This one, by Michael Lynn Crews, explores the literary influences McCarthy drew on, which authors and books he had quotes from buried in his papers.
The quote about novelists going crazy is from a letter exchange McCarthy was having re: Ron Hanson’s novel Desperadoes, which McCarthy admired.
This one, by Daniel Robert King, takes more of a semi-biographical approach, tracing out what we can learn about McCarthy from his correspondence with agents and editors. A sample:
Bought these books because it gives confidence to observe that somebody whose writing sounds like it emerged pronounced from the cliffs like some kind of Texas Quran had to work and revise and toss stuff and chisel to get there.
From these books it is clear:
- McCarthy is a meticulous and patient rewriter
- it took decades for his work to gain any significant recognition
- he was helped with seeming love and care by editor Albert Erskine.
- he was patient, open, yet confident in editorial correspondence
These books are not necessary for the casual personal library, but if you enjoy gnawing on literary scraps, recommend them both. From King:
However, in this same letter, he acknowledges that “the truth is that the historical material is really – to me – little more than a framework upon which to hang a dramatic inquiry into the nature of destiny and history and the uses of reason and knowledge and the nature of evil and all these sorts of things which have plagued folks since there were folks.”
Mississippi Mound Trail
Posted: April 1, 2018 Filed under: America, America Since 1945, art Leave a comment
On one of the episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour Bob Dylan himself says that the actual highway 61 is boring now, nothing but ads for riverboat casinos. That may be true south of Vicksburg but north of the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum and the Catfish Row Art Park, I found the road compelling.
Mississippi Fred McDowell was born of course in Rossville, Tennessee.
It was Dave [David L. Cohn] in God Shakes Creation who said, “The Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” He was always welcome at the Peabody; they were glad to see him – he stayed there whenever he was in Memphis – but they never even gave him a cup of coffee, and he thought it was rather amusing that they had so little appreciation of this publicity.
So says Uncle Shelby, of Greenville and Memphis:
Since we’d been to Memphis we steered towards Oxford Miss to visit Faulkner’s house:
On Highway 61 lots of blues type sites, Muddy Waters’ birthplace for instance:
marked by signs for the Mississippi Blues Trail. But many signs tell you you are also on the Mississippi Mound Trail.
Mounds make a thousand or more years ago by some lost culture, perhaps connected to the people who built Cahokia:
And where in the beginning the predecessors crept with their simple artifacts, and built the mounds and vanished, bequeathing only the mounds in which the succeeding recordable Muskhogean stock would leave the skulls of their warriors and chiefs and babies and slain bears, and the shards of pots, and hammer- and arrow-heads and now and then a heavy silver Spanish spur.
So says Faulkner in his essay Mississippi. In Sanctuary he says:
The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music- stores. Before these doors a throng stood all day, listening. The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically sung, blurred, emphasised by static or needle – disembodied voices blaring from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, and sad.
You can only listen to so much of that though; when I pulled over for Dunn Mounds I was listening to Maron interview Jennifer Lawrence.
The Raven map tells the story of the Delta. Another flooding bottomland is the Nile delta:
where they also kept slaves, and built mounds.
source: Ricardo Liberato on Wikipedia
great tour of the Blues Trail sites here on Wiki by Chillin662.
Pretty Clear-Eyed About Power
Posted: March 27, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!“
This anecdote had stuck in my mind from whenever I had first read it. Found it in a March 2017 New Republic piece about then-Senator and candidate Obama.
Hillary wrote her college thesis on Alinsky. Both the last two Democratic nominees for president found the same man in Chicago to study. (And think of how many Bushies were said to learn from Leo Strauss? And Milton Friedman! Chicago, dude).
How should the candidate approach his job?:
This is a tough, realistic worldview:
The Rules
-
“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
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“Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
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“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
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“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
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“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
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“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
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“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
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“Keep the pressure on.”
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“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
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“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
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“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside”
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“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
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“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Using the world enemy is a little dangerous for me, unless you have a Zen-like transcendent understanding of the meaning of enemy and the mutability of enemies.
That TNR piece by the way written Ryan Lizza.
Three Candidates
Posted: March 23, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
From an article about how Clarke’s been working on paid maternity leave for state employees in the Arkansas State House
My friend Clarke Tucker is running for Congress as a Democrat in Arkansas’ 2nd district. He’s just the kind of guy you want doing legislative work. A solid citizen.
In his gentle and careful yet warm manner Clarke reminds me of another Southern state legislator:
John Grisham.
Meanwhile, out in the desert and the Eastern Sierra, they’re trying to put Marge in charge.
Marge Doyle that is. I saw her speak on Sunday and was really impressed. Her passion to run stems from her frustration with current Congressman Paul Cook and his Republican party-line votes that would’ve hurt the health care people in the district depend on.
Had the chance to hear Marge give her message and came away real impressed. She came to her campaign through hard, slow work on health care issues in the district, and spoke of her belief in her ability to find solutions through common values.
Happened to meet Katie Hill when she turned up at a meeting of the SELAH (Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, Hollywood) Homeless Coalition.
She grew up in California’s 25th district, and seemed like just the person to knock off the distasteful Steve Knight and represent the people of Lancaster, Palmdale, Pearblossom, Acton, Santa Clarita, and the rest.
(oh and none of them are paying me or nothing. This is just my own Take!)
JAB Holdings
Posted: February 8, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
and soon:
and
are all controlled by JAB Holdings.
Owned by Germany’s Reimann family, 95% of JAB Holding belongs to four of the late Albert Reimann Jr.’s nine adopted children. They are descendants of chemist Ludwig Reimann, who, in 1828, joined with Johann Adam Benckiser (founder of the namesake chemical company).
Allegedly, the heirs take an oath never to discuss their business publicly?
Quincy
Posted: February 8, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, music Leave a comment
Devouring this Quincy Jones Vulture interview like everyone else on my feed. Graeme Wood has a good take:
There was also, as Icecubetray points out, an interview in GQ recently where QJ goes similarly wild:
Helytimes 
