* I’ve noticed that married white men with children are unconcerned with immigration and demographic change.
Unmarried white men with no children are the most concerned with immigration.
What’s up with that?
* More time on their hands.
* It could be that these men are so busy with their jobs and their families that they have minimal to no time to even consider the demographic changes taking place in our country.
* The first group is comprised of winners. The second group is compromised of losers. No great mystery.
* The Idaho ranchers should try to connect the dots a bit on immigration. The problem isn’t that these Latin American indentured servants are fleeing. The problem is that there is such a large Latin American community in this nation, due to our broken enforcement system, that these indentured servants can easily walk away from the shepherding gig and blend into the greater Latino culture that unfortunately exists in the USA.
This is why there was that story a few years back where that Israeli manpower firm was bringing in Thai workers to work on American farms. The Thais would be easier to keep on the farm because, unlike Mexicans, there is not a large community of Thais or Thai speakers. So the Thais would have a much harder time stepping out than Mexicans and other Spanish speakers.
Ironically the Syrian shepherd would be what the Idaho ranchers really desire. They have to forget about Latin Americans. It is just too easy for Latinos to blend into the larger Latino community. The Syrian might be more controllable unless and until the Feds bring in a million or so Syrians.
* There are all sorts of externalities associated with bringing in new workers, particularly low skill workers.
So the problem comes down to the usual issue with privatizing profits and socializing losses. Their fellow citizens end up dealing with all the externalities and don’t get any benefit.
* Before Caesar Chavez and his UFW got it abolished, American farmers had the Bracero Program. Farmers could tell a Mexican labor contractor they needed workers to harvest their crop. The Mexican contractor would be given temporary work visas and bring the workers to the farm. The Mexican labor contractor managed the workers and, since the work was temporary and moved from farm to farm, the workers did not bring their families. At the end of the season the workers were bused back to Mexico with their earnings and everyone benefited.
Chavez grasped that seasonal agricultural work would never pay enough to raise a family on unless his union could control the supply of farm labor. Keeping Mexican farm labor from doing this work was critical to his unionization efforts. In the event he did end the Bracero Program but got an even worse situation. The permanent relocation of hundreds of thousands of Mexican farm workers to California that undermined his unionization efforts and left farm workers impoverished.
* What always kind of troubled me about Brokeback Mountain was how lame and PC the response of the stand-up comedians were.
It seems that stand-ups missed a great opportunity to point out the entire premise of movie was simply ridiculous and in that in all likelihood in reality the rancher played by Randy Quad would have been just thrilled at the chance to hire two obviously gay cowboys to look after his flock. At least they would be screwing each other and not the sheep for a change.
One could imagine the sheep rancher stroking his chin as he looked up from the latest Village People album thinking out load, “If only I could find a couple of cowboys like this here fella”.
You see come round up time as the sheep are being loaded on to trucks to be taken to the slaughter house, the Randy Quad character could be proud that having employed the gay cowboys, he at least would be spared the spectacle of lambs bleating passionately as they are being betrayed and torn away from their former lovers.
Instead in the movie, we have the rancher, Joe Aguirre played by Quad, being ambivalent about hiring what he suspected in the first place were two gays.
Joe Aguirre: You pair of deuces lookin’ for work, I suggest you get your scrawny asses in here pronto.
Joe Aguirre: You boys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin’ paid to leave the dogs babysittin’ the sheep while you stem the rose.
The comedic parody could have had Joe Aguirre handing the “gay caballeros” a couple of tubes of lube with the suggestion that as long as the both of them keep their eyes on the sheep at all times everything would be alright with him.
The “suggestion” might have include pointing to a wall diagram of exactly what he had in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_position#Penetrating_from_behind
I think only Artie Lange actually came remotely close to pointing out how laughable the plot of BBM was.
* According to the garbage historian Stephen Ambrose, Lewis and Clark were the only members of their expedition that never needed to be treated for VD. There are advantages to shrinking one’s circle of compassion.
* Mall riots: In South Africa this sort of thing is given the pithier euphemism – ‘affirmative shopping’.
* With the internet, why do shopping malls still exist? Given your measurements, a computer program can…
Because women.
We can see the obvious engineering solution because as the ones who actually work for a living, efficiency matters to us. But a computer model showing the fit doesn’t “feel” the same. Women want to try things on in person, browse by touching, etc. I know it sounds insane, but it’s how they are.
* If Obama had a son, he’d be “shopping” in Louisville.
* And do you know why it’s called ‘boxing day’?
It’s got nothing to do with pugilism or the sport of ‘boxing’ – as I naively thought when I was a 7 year old. I held a fantasy then about ‘charity boxing matches’ being held as a weird festive celebration on the 26th in times past.
No. Apparently it dates right back to medieval England, and the tradition of a ‘Christmas box. Now, a Christmas box referred originally to a gift of a small sum of money – in coins of course – given to a trusted tradesman, roundsman, servant etc who diligently served a good middle class household all year long, by way of ‘thank you’.
The tradition persisted right well into the 20th century. As a boy, in the 1970s, I well remember the ‘dustmen’ – or garbage collectors as you would call them in the States, knocking on every door in the street and more or less demanding their ‘Christmas box’ ie a small gratuity. Rumor always had it that non-payers would have garbage ‘accidently’ strewn across their front yard for the entirety of the following year.
Because of this, local councils, the ultimate employers of dustmen banned the practice, threatening dustmen who participated in the practice with dire punishment.
* “Swept up.” I like that one. Teens/youths/juveniles are forever being swept up and caught in situations where bullets begin to fly, gunfire erupts and looting/violence breaks out. Is this the fault of “bad malls”?
Then again, much agency does a 70ish IQ black kid really have? I’ve avoided individuals among large groups of whites, but I always avoid entire group of blacks.
And how the hell would Percocet be conducive to rioting?
