Elephants and Jackasses...

We wanted Japanese electronics more than we wanted German cars?

 

They did things to people that the darkest imagination of our minds couldn’t think up in its most impulsive and infuriated moments. They re-wrote the book on horrific experiments. Another thing that isn’t often mentioned in the west in western history classes is the atrocities committed by the Japanese.

…and why they can’t fly that badass-looking rising sun flag anymore..

 

You might want to Google the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's current (since 1954) naval ensign.

 

Yeah, because German cars suck ass.

Also, a lot of "Japanese electronics" were developed with the theft of US intellectual property.

My dad (who lived through WW2) absolutely hated the Japs.

 

I do not Google things involving Japan. I will continue to blindly assume that it is a nation made up of sumo wrestlers and karate-men.

 

My grandfather fought the Japanese during World War II. Whenever someone pulled a tricky or surprise move during one of the family poker games he would call it a “Jap move”

 

One thing that keeps bugging me about the Trump verdict reaction is the disregard of the jury.

The jury is democracy in action. They can piss and moan about the judge, DA, prosecution, etc all they want. That can be as politically motivated as anything. But the jury: they have no skin in the political game, if anything they stand substantial risk should they be doxxed. They weren't playing politics and I'm thinking statistically the most likely scenario is a hung jury, right? These are people who had to review facts, accepted that Trump's version of reality was false and voted accordingly.

All the people calling Trump fascist names are giddily overlooking this fact: the jury wasn't playing politics. The jury did their job, reviewed the evidence and unanimously found him guilty 34 fucking times.

This strikes me as a much more important fact than all the nonsense about the other players in the case.

No argument that this case was politically motivated, they made it about the fucking election. The jury could have sent the message back saying "Nope, fuck that. This isn't right." The jury could have seen through the political machinations and said "no, we do not thing it's worth making a former US president a felon." A single juror could have shot this down with a single "nope" and yet didn't.

Trump will sling mud at anyone he can safely name, but the thing that I keep going back to is the jury. They decided against him because he couldn't warp the facts, couldn't cajole or attack them and he couldn't accuse them of being party to some grand scheme: they are 12 randos off the street who did their job. If he got another trial and it was another 12 rando's, the likelihood that it'd be the same outcome is high enough to avoid attacking them.

I'd like to think I'd go into that experience, check my ego and bias at the door and reach an objective decision. I highly doubt it, based on what I saw firsthand during the pandemic response. So, maybe the 12 people pulled had an axe to grind, and they ground it. In which case...is that justice? If you're objectively so shitty that 12 random people pulled off the street would vote guilty regardless of evidence? Knowing they'd likely experience a nightmare if they were doxxed, and that their actions my render the whole thing moot via mistrial?

The thing I circle back to is Trump's circus is intent on ignoring and disregarding the will of the people in favor of a bunch of loud, falsely aggrieved and easily manipulated assholes. The rest of us consider putting our fate in the hands of 12 fellow American strangers fair and just enough. He thinks he's above it, that those 12 people should never have had that ability, their vote on the evidence doesn't matter and that is telling in and of itself.

 

At the risk of being reductive, this is how fascism works. The jury is not part of the in-group, and therefore they are not legitimate, and cannot exercise legitimate authority over the in-group. This is why none of the criticism from the Trump camp is about the jury's decision, but about it's identity. It's a "blue state" jury, or a "New York" jury. They don't believe the jury got it wrong, they believe the jury should not be allowed to render judgement in the first place.

 

Pro Publica with a new one: https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-criminal-cases-witnesses-financial-benefits

 

Not getting a mob boss on tape isn't exactly exonerating.

 

OJ was guilty and the jury acquitted him. Trump could have gotten the same outcome, and it would have been immune from the political games that got this trial started in the first place.

That's my point: the jury isn't a political actor. If anything, they are biased against conviction.

The propublica stuff makes it look bad, but nothing that could stick. I love the idea of a work environment where if you refuse to voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement you get a raise and a bonus. Everything's fine, why?

 

As some of you have no doubt heard, Biden just signed and executive order about the border:

https://elpasomatters.org/2024/06/04/biden-executive-order-migrants-asylum-undocumented-immigrants/

Question: Why is he barely doing this now*? He has had 3 1/2 years to do something, all while his administration denied that there was ever any crisis at the border.

Why did they ignore the problem for so long?

I've heard plenty of theories about Democrats trying to build up a new population of voters, about this being a quiet government plot to increase labor and tax revenue for our cooling economy, and and even that it is ACTUALLY a plot by Republicans to impose fascism (really, that's one I've heard).

What do you smart people think?

*I DO NOT want to hear about the recent border bill that the Republicans tanked. Like I said, the Biden administration has had YEARS to do something about this.

 

Biden doing this via executive order because Congress didn't put an actual bill on his desk to sign is the short answer.

The other part of that is that the same Congress vowed to fight anything he did, including at the SC level. So if he did this two years ago, it set up a court battle over. Now, with 5 months to go, there's just no time for them to fight it. It's generally an overreach of power for the president to set immigration policy, so the EO has a time limit.

The problem also had Trump policy all over it, including the Covid-era restrictions. They let those expire and then still saw a steady stream of asylum seekers. There is a need to solve a problem once the previous fix lapsed, and to evaluate how bad it is in the interim. 2500 a week is still a huge number, but it wasn't a wild guess as to what the cut off would be.

Also also, this is the window between an impeachment attempt on Sec. Mayorkas, and the quietest the DeSantis/Abott camps have been in months.

Also also also, this will show a dent in the numbers before the coyotes figure out how to game this system.

Lastly, the US has more immigrants than just about anywhere (15% of the total US population, 50m in the US, next is Germany with 18m,https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country ). The main sources of immigrants (Mexico, India, China, Pakistan) are no longer Democrat by default: there's significant overlap between the political agenda of Christian fundamentalists and Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists. Fun math is how many immigrants come from countries where homosexuality is illegal, for example, and the new wave of GOP wedge issues, specifically dealing with education (CRT, trans kids in sports, etc.) cut across those lines very effectively. The Latino democratic voting bloc is eroding (abortion was a big issue for them, they aren't too keen on the gay stuff, etc.). So he has no political capital to lose with them.

The influx of immigrants is why the US isn't declining in population like most 1st world nations are in terms of birth rate, and those are the stats the conspiracy theorists run with (ignoring why immigrants from European countries don't come here, but Latin American folks do). By cutting off asylum seekers at border crossings, he can get back to the quota system for different countries and our immigrant influx will be a bit more diverse. He has to make the inundation of asylum seekers a State Department problem (address the flow at the source, not the border), and that's kind of impossible if you can't turn folks away in significant numbers.

There's some math to this being a dial for population growth since the birth rate won't be spiking any time soon. Texas officials believed that the federal government was trying to flood Texas with Latin Democratic voters and fought it for what...50 years now? That never happened, but it did shift away from the remesa labor force sending $ home to asylum seekers, and that is a different set of economic circumstances. Biden's team probably wanted to see if we got more labor after the pandemic and if the unfriendly Trump administration policies changes anyone's mind. They didn't, so the door gets shut after 2500.

I hate our immigration policy, and I am glad this is getting something done, even if 2500 people seeking asylum is still a fuck ton. I go back to climate refugees being a thing now and the folks who try and come here because their homes are no longer tenable will only increase.

Also the security risk is skyrocketing. You have immigrants from all over the world pouring in through the asylum loophole, not just the Latin American folks, per a briefing we got from CBP a few months ago.

 

Some dude in Texas is a master troll.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/1d9okdb/no_caption_necessary/#lightbox