Eventually, even the New York Times figures it out.

It would be difficult, at this point, to express my disgust with the New York Times, but I’m going to try.

I should preface this yet again. I am a political independent. As I have said in the early incarnation of this blog, most conventional political issues don’t interest me. My primary interests are philosophical, and all revolve around the fight to uphold standards of objective truth and ethics in the post-modern world. The fact that this has made me a “default conservative” is something that I’m willing and able to fully explain another time, but this post will do for now.

Let me get to the point. This week, the New York Times, to my knowledge for the very first time, realized the obvious: that the European social welfare model is failing.

This really should never have been a political argument; it's simply a mathematic and demographic reality. Why on earth the folks at the "Paper of Record" couldn’t notice this before they spent months cheer-leading Obamacare, I don’t really know (actually, I do really know, they are more loyal to their utopian fantasies than they are to reality).

Now, suddenly, the NYT runs an article titled “Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits”. I quote:

“With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes.”

Well, I guess no one can sleepwalk forever. And yet even that statement is wishful thinking. Let’s put the emphasis on the “no longer afford” half of that quote, because the prospects for "austerity”, and “significant changes”, aren't very good. Merely the suggestion has already caused mass riots in Greece, and even the crowd-murder of three bank employees.

Greece is only the vanguard, because as even the New York Times admits in this article, this is not a Greek problem, it’s a European one; and with American political elites now hellbent on Europeanizing America, it is our problem too. This situation isn't going away. Let me go back to my credit theme from earlier posts. Do you want to make a long term bet on an aging society that will soon have a 1 to 1 ratio between workers and retirees? Do you want to buy their government bonds? And if you are from the ambitious half of European society that still has a work ethic, do you want to pay the taxes that support this situation?

Incidentally, this says volumes to me about which side, in our great bipolar political debates, I should believe. Conservatives have been saying this was going to happen for the past half-century and longer. For all that time, political liberals have called them stupid, heartless, and greedy for saying so.

Now finally the (pallorous) Gray Lady admits the same problem. Well, they say so in the news section at least, their editorialists still ignore the elephant in the room. And that elephant retired early with no children and wants a taxpayer funded pension.

Here’s an idea: since it was the conservatives who said all this in the first place, perhaps you just should have believed them. And perhaps you should start now.* And maybe, just maybe, what was truly stupid, greedy, and heartless, was your having thought that you could relax and let the labor of immigrants and someone else's 1.3 children support you for the non-working half your life.

-AzA

* notice that I said "conservatives", not Republicans. When it comes to economics, the Republicans have pretty much been just the party that spent the same deficits on different things. That doesn't change this fact that the bad economic theories all originated on the left!

Chinese Migrant School

These are some more pictures that have been sitting around for a while. A few months ago, the family did some volunteering at a migrant school. These are kids of migrant workers from around China, who are here in the wealthy east mostly as construction workers. The school wasn't purpose built for them. As I understood it, it was supposed to be a regular school (and may yet be). It was far too nice of a facility to have been built for migrant workers, despite the fact that it was shabby, and freezing cold.

We were there to just do some basic little English activities. Some of these kids were pretty sharp.


I made sure to get a good clear photo of the girl in the center of the photo on the right. One thing that a lot of people don't know about China is how much ethnic variety there really is. The culturally, politically, and numerically dominant group are the Han Chinese. 90% of the population is Han (although considering that many of the ethnic minorities are either exempt from, or ignore, the one-child policy, it is interesting to speculate how long that will last).

In any case, I don't know if these kids are Han or not. They did speak Mandarin, but just about everyone speaks it as at least a secondary dialect, and I certainly don't understand enough to distinguish accents (or ask kids detailed questions about their backgrounds).

My point all that goes back to the fact that there is a lot of variety in China. The stereotypical Chinese "look" is not at all universal. It is a very common experience for me to see people in the street who, for all the world, look exactly like the Latino and American Indian students I have had over the years. I thought the that girl in the middle was a good example of that. If I were to see her in a different context, I might have assumed she was Mexican.

Finally, a photo I took from a window of the school's front gate. Note the reception dish mounted on top of a chair on the roof. Scenes like this keep my earlier comment about being in "wealthy" China a little bit in perspective, no?

Are you threatening me?

Okay, I've already explained that I am conflicted/ambivalent/skeptical of Arizona's new immigration law. But this is just too funny. Following the lead of San Francisco, the city of Los Angeles has announced that they will be boycotting the State of Arizona.

Bankrupt cities in a bankrupt state are threatening not to do business with us. Considering that half the time they can't even pay their own state employees, I find that threat hard to take seriously.

Go ahead, Los Angeles. I think we can live without your IOUs.

- AzA

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain)

This was never intended to become purely a political blog, I'm just leaving the family stuff out of it these days. Look me up on facebook for those photos.

These are some photos from a recent outing to Huangshan. Yellow mountain, as it is called in English, is probably the most famous mountain range in China, and it is very significant in the Chinese psyche. If it looks familiar to you, it is because a great deal of traditional Chinese art was painted here. Even now, you will find lots of artists along the trails, using traditional materials.

The hiking isn't terribly natural. All the paths are paved with handrails. That isn't to say that it is easy. It is about 6000 feet in elevation, and virtually every path is stairs. Some are quite steep. Me and the boy hiked a good 15 miles or so over two days.

Below are some of that stairs that have been cut into and sunk into the cliffs. This section of the mountain is quite spectacular, but it is off of the main trail, away from the famous peaks. There were relatively few hikers here, which was nice. The main trails get quite full. It is said to be the ambition of all Chinese to climb Huangshan at least once. Even the emperors were expected to do so. That means a lot of people can be there at one time. I've been told that during the May 1st holiday, there can be over 250,000 people on the mountain at one time. That sounds excessive to me, if only because of the logistics of buses and hotels for that many people. Then again, this is China, and the Chinese know how to do big crowds right.

We were there the week before the big holiday. That meant only mostly big crowds, instead of unbelievably big crowds.





More miscellaneous pictures.




There are several hotels on the mountain like the one below. All of the supplies for them, and garbage from them, are carried up by porters. They clog the main trails and make it quite hard to get around sometimes. Some of them carry pretty incredible loads. It exerts an amazing peer pressure.... stopping on the trail makes one feel pretty pathetic when a guy with 20 gallons of cooking oil on a bamboo yoke is coming up behind you.

I don't know if the building materials were carried up or not. There are no roads. There was a construction site near one hotel that had a small bulldozer and hydraulic shovel at work. Maybe they brought those in by helicopter.

On the right, there is a billboard of Deng Xiaoping visiting Huangshan, looking quite sporty in his shorts. Like I said, every emperor was expected to climb the mountain, and that includes the Communist ones too.

Don't cry for me Arizona.

Well, I'm from Arizona. It's even in the name. Therefore, I suppose I'm practically obligated to have something to say about an Arizona issue so big that it has made world news (last week I even watched it on China's English language news program). So here it goes. It's in list form, because I'm not willing to invest the effort to turn it into an essay. Considering how much I'm contradicting myself, that would be especially hard, anyway.


1. All nations regulate and control immigration. To not do so is to literally abandon national sovereignty itself. In the entire world, perhaps only the United States is under public pressure not to regulate immigration, or even to enforce its own immigration laws.

2. It never would have come to this if the federal government showed any interest in enforcing its own laws.

3. Mexico has used the porous American border as a safety valve to avoid unrest, and even potential revolution, among its own citizens. It also props up its own economy with the huge inflow of cash that come from remittances to family members from Mexican workers in the U.S. Yet despite it’s insistence that America not enforce it’s own immigration laws, the Mexican government brutally patrols its own southern border with Guatemala.

4. Cesar Chavez, whose name is invoked by activists, openly opposed illegal immigration.

5. Radical immigrant groups are nationalists and separatists. The useless media hyperventilates every time someone in Texas says anything even mildly secessionist. However, the "La Raza" activist groups promote it explicitly. I have personally worked with these types of “immigration” activists. I can tell you that their antipathy for the United States is profound, that their desire for secession is literal, and that they are perfectly transparent about it whenever they think that you can’t understand Spanish (and sometimes you don't even need that, like the link above shows). Considering that several major elected officials in Arizona and other states have deep ties to them, their agenda should not be dismissed as irrelevant and “fringe”. It is a legitimate danger to the republic.

6. The pro-business Right conveniently forgets that they wanted, and gain by, the labor of immigrants in the first place. They suppose that they can have free flow of capital and resources without having a flow of labor as well. It is deeply naïve. They need to admit that the workers are being drawn to the U.S. by legitimate free market principles. Free market conservatives should be leading the charge to streamline and shorten the process for legal immigration.

7. Bitter and enraged men like Russell Pearce of the Arizona State Legislature (a chief sponsor of the current immigration bill) are constant reminders to me as to why I’ve never registered as a Republican.

8. Any elected official who calls for an economic boycott of his own state is a first-class idiot, and a betrayer of his constituents. He should be run out of town on a rail. Raul Grijalva, this means you.

9. Illegal immigration and illegal immigrants are closely correlated to crime, including violent gang crime. To pretend otherwise is a denial of reality.

10. Republicans seemed almost determined to alienate Mexican-Americans. If they had any sense, they would realize that Hispanics are natural allies in the support for traditional family values.

11. Democrats have sold their souls to identity politics. If they had any scruples, they would stop their tactics of electoral divide and conquer by trying to stir up division between groups of American citizens. They need to quit using immigration as a propaganda tool to paint valid concerns by American citizens as “racist”. And if they were more intellectually honest, they would push for immigration law to be changed, rather than just acquiesce on the law being ignored.

12. If Hispanic (and any other minority group) voters were wiser, they would realize that no political party will ever lift a finger for any voting bloc whose votes they can take for granted.

13. Asking for identification is not the same thing as racial profiling.

14. The two stupidest memes in the entire immigration debate are as follows: For the right, it is “Of course they are criminals, they are ‘illegal’ immigrants.” For the left, it is “Show me a twelve foot fence, and I will show you a thirteen foot ladder”.

The first is a circular argument, in which the speaker tries to distract through verbal sleight of hand from the actual question. Everyone knows that it is “illegal”.... the point under debate is whether or not that illegality is just. To reflexively turn back to the meaning of the word itself is semantic obfuscation.

As for the second, it is a lazy attempt to paint all immigration enforcement as futile. If the Left actually believed that government was so powerless, they would abandon all of their great grand schemes (of which they are so fond) to regulate every aspect of human behavior and opinion. They should just admit that they don’t want immigration law enforced and be done with it.

15. A great many Mexican-American citizens actually support strict immigration enforcement. It would be very hard for this new law to get the 70% support that it has without them.

16. Some of the very best students I ever had back in Arizona were illegal immigrants. There needs to be a much better and faster process for those that really do have something to contribute to our society to gain legal residency.