Thoughts on immigration and refugees

Kuwait has travel ban for 5 Muslim countries. "In July 2016, Kuwait had foiled thee terror plots planned by the ISIS. Several pre-emptive raids inside and outside Kuwait ended in the arrests of militants which the interior ministry had said belonged to “Daesh”. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for ISIS. In July 2015, the Gulf country, home to several US military bases, suffered its first ever ISIS-claimed attack, when a blast targeting a Shia mosque killed 27 people and injured over 200."

 No one outside the Obama administration and the Trump administration, not the judges trying to second guess nor the demonstrators, know why those 7 countries were put on the Homeland Security list in 2015. It's not about Islam, or another 43 countries would be on the list. It would seem prudent to wait. That is, unless you voted for Clinton and just hate Trump.

 I see a lot of "we are all immigrants" signs on FaceBook especially from those who just weeks ago under Obama were saying "we" stole the land and enslaved Africans. But there were always rules. My immigrant ancestors had to swear allegiance to King George II of Britain before selling everything or their labor to pay for the journey, and then there was no help from the colonial government of Pennsylvania only from whomever purchased their labor or others of their faith.
 

Michael Smith had a thought of merit: "It seems to me that Trump has set up a situation where the people who oppose this Executive Order are going to have to explain in court why this condition is unconstitutional now and it wasn’t unconstitutional in 2015 when Obama signed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 in to law. It will also have to be explained to the American people why constitutional rights are extended to non-citizens. I think the challenges may well have the effect of unveiling the true political bias of our judiciary and the feckless nature of our legislature. Trump is making good use of Alinsky's Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Veruschka and me

I saw Veruschka (popular model from 1960s, referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world) on a rerun of Dick Cavett last night. So today I looked her up. She's now 77, a few months older than I. Looks like the rest of us who were never models except she's still 6'4" and I'm still 5'5". I think the most recent photo was about 4 years old, but she didn't appear to have any botox or facial remodeling like Nancy Pelosi, nor was she wearing make-up. She says it's more important to be loving and have a lively mind.

Dear shrinking and aging Democrats

 The wall was voted on years ago, maybe 11 or so, and your team voted for it. It's about 1/3 built. Stop blaming Trump for 16 years of inaction on illegal immigration by Bush and Obama. Your team also voted to go to war during the Bush years, and expanded it through an imperial presidency during the Obama years--no president was at war longer than Obama. This is the mess you left President Trump. Let's see if he can turn your poop into fertilizer.

KURT SCHLICHTER, Townhall, Feb. 2: "So this leads us to the next Democrat lemmingfest as your dwindling contingent in the Senate prepares to go full Thelma and Louise over Judge Gorsuch. Or should I say, Soon-to-be-Justice Gorsuch, because thanks to Harry Reid, your filibuster has been filibusted. He’s getting confirmed no matter what you do. Plus, he’s a great guy who presents well and who normal people will look at and say, “Hmmm. He seems nice.” But please, don’t let something like the fact you have no chance of success and a huge chance that you will make yourself look like complete idiots deter you from your kamikaze crusade to cater to Team Soros. I want you to oppose Soon-to-be-Justice Gorsuch. Loudly. Proudly. Tone deafly. Tell yourself that, “Well, the GOP won the Senate after doing nothing but obstructing Obama, so it’s gotta work for us, too!” Just skip over how the GOP was obstructing stuff that normal people hate, while you geniuses will be obstructing stuff loved by everyone who doesn’t live within walking distance of a feminist bookstore that serves cruelty-free intersectional chai lattes. And pay no attention to the looming 2018 elections where you have 25 seats at stake. It’s all gonna work out fine! Please. Keep doing what you are doing. And we’ll keep luxuriating in that warm bath tub, which we will top off with Chuck Schumer’s tears."

300,000 Californians have moved to Texas to get away from the nonsense we hear at the Globes and Academy, so when the half time preachers get too loud for Super Bowl 51, hit the mute button. That's not what football should be about. I've never figured out what it IS about, but I know it ISN'T having an overpaid, over rated singer tell me what to believe. If Lady GaGa gets all political on us, I expect a quick approval of Gorsuch. Some blondes really are dumb, even if it comes from a bottle.

On the Mike Gallagher show this morning (he had a guest host) I heard a campaign worker for Trump who went door to door for him in blue collar neighborhoods say he thinks Colin Kaepernick put Trump in the White House. Probably hyperbole, but Kaepernick is REALLY unpopular. He's the football player adopted as an infant by white parents who gave him every advantage, and  has now decided he's a black nationalist and loves a Muslim girl.

A tribute to a great dad--our nephew Dan

 
This is a tribute to his father, written by our great nephew Caleb (on the right, back).  Others are Jake on the left (Jacob), Dan (son-in-law), and Joshua.

 "I couldn't ask for a better father. He has never been and still to this day isn't my "friend". He is a dad and he lets it be known. My father wasn't the sensitive type. He didn't come ask about your day or make you feel perfect. He did raise me, come home everyday, be faithful to my mother and we all knew the rules. He may be a hard man but I wouldn't change it. At the end of the day he would go to war for me as I would for him. I am glad i wasn't spoon fed. At least, I knew real life and not that movie fairy tale."

Of course, the Dan we know is a hugger and kidder.  He and Joan have visited us the last two summers at the Lake and came for our 50th wedding anniversary--twice! They are super special people with always more love to share.

Being sick is very boring

Most aren't old enough to remember scarlet fever, or pneumonia in the pre-penicillin days, and maybe you still have your appendix. I had all three--oh, and infected tonsils, so that's four. But that's pretty much it for 77 years and I still have all my permanent teeth and never a broken bone despite having owned a horse.  But adding up the days those 4 put me to bed in a dark room and stuck in the house doesn't equal my shingles siege of January 2017.  Today I drove the car for the first time since Jan. 6. Yesterday I walked outside a bit.  It came back for a second round and I'm back on acyclovir and still using a steroid for my eye.  As pain goes, it's nothing like cancer, heart attack or stroke.  It's about a 2 on a scale of 10, manageable with Gabapentin and Tylenol. But I'm a whiner and so bored with this.

We only have antenna TV in the guest room, so I've been watching reruns 40 years old.  My goodness, I can't believe how women were depicted in the 1970s. Laugh-In was probably the worst.  So why should we trust Hollywood celebrities in the 21st century to tell us what to think? Like Madonna and Lady GaGa?

For days after I stopped throwing up I could eat nothing but Campbell's Chicken Noodle, the old fashioned kind.  Then fried egg sandwiches with cheese sounded good, reminding me of one of the few things my Dad knew how to cook.  Then Key Lime Pie sounded pretty good.  But in general, eating hasn't been very healthy.

The Left vs. Gorsuch

I'm  challenging the middle schoolers who write for the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Huffington Post  and Daily Kos to read a few of Judge Gorsuch's decisions before deciding he's a fascist. Let them bask in simple and easy to understand English and to take in the flavor of making decisions on the basis of law and not opinion. Particularly, read the case about the 13 year old boy arrested for fake burps and disrupting the class. I think the juveniles writing for our major news sources would want a Judge Gorsuch on their team. I'm assisting with a link, because if you try on your own to find this information you'll get 30 - 40 referrals to New York Times and Washington Post, because of the algorithms of Google.

 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9892606330454881926&q=14-2066&hl=en&as_sdt=4,106,120

List of decisions of the 10th circuit.

Someone named Souza commented

At the Washington Post, it's difficult to find an article that isn't anti-Trump.  But sometimes there is wisdom in the comments. I thought this one had merit to respond to another commenter at "The Democrats are babbling," by Ed Rogers on February 1.

I think calling Trump names like "raging child" disqualifies you as "thoughtful" or "reasonable". Trump is wrong on much, but minimizing his success is not reasonable and thoughtful. He dismantled the republican establishment and crushed the Clinton machine. He was systematic and effective. So what everyone should do is stop responding with craziness when he intentionally does things to make you crazy. He wins when he plays you like a broken toy.

Become analytical and unbiased...if you can. There is nothing outrageous, illegal or immoral about suspending immigration from countries raging in war and terrorism or that express a hatred for American ideals. Other dem presidents have taken similar actions and it was reasonable then to...don't go crying and screaming in the streets with nonsensical signs. Instead recognize that what is unreasonable about the Trump suspension of immigration is that there was no notice and it affected green card holders with a right to be in the USA. Focus on the real issue not the fake one that seems to get the most attention. Lots of people think Garland should have gotten a vote...ok...life's not fair and if the table had been turned the dems would have done the same thing...now stop bashing a reasonable pick for the Scalia seat...and brace for the RBG seat fight...that is where the dems must bow their back....crying about this seat and becoming irrational could cause a rule change that will lose any chance to defend the RBG seat.

Salaries for librarians

I received an e-mail newsletter/update from the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences.  Lots of news about minority recruitment.  I wonder about that.  Librarianship (the old name) requires a master's degree.  With school teachers earning anywhere from $56-$60 an hour, much more than librarians, why recruit minorities?  It's possible that median salaries are listed under some other titles.  Another website listed slightly higher salaries--about $35,000, but nothing that would pay off college debt.

So I sent the school a note:

"I was reviewing “iSchool at Illinois” and what has obviously been a very successful recruitment of minority and male students. I found the microaggression workshop a bit off-putting, but then that's my age--graduate MLS in 1966. From what I've seen of them they are anti-white, anti-male and divisive. So I checked a website for salaries and see a library researcher is $27,848 annually, same as a linen room attendant and $2,000 less than a parking lot attendant/valet. There was no listing for "librarian." Do you have any current salary figures that would make recruitment of men and minorities a worthwhile effort?"

 

 

Meltdowns of the left--where to start?

There are approximately 50 predominately Muslim countries, and the restriction (put in place by Obama) is for seven who harbor terrorists. The American left/Democrats went apoplectic even though it's shorter than Obama's "bans" and is temporary. Do they want to go on record as blocking all Muslim countries? Obama sent back Cuban refugees his final week--to a Communist country. Not a peep from the left.  And oh how they wept that the temporary attorney general decided to follow her own religion and defied her boss and the law and was fired. I guess judges are not members of unions.  This could be a step to a political career--not that she wasn't political already.  

Then the students are rioting in UC Berkeley--a gay, conservative was on campus to give a speech, and if you remember the 60s, it's sort of like that. Maybe grandpa had told them stories of the good old days.  Burning and trashing buildings and pepper spraying anyone who looked like a Trump supporter. Looks like the DeVos nomination might end in a tie in which case Mike Pence gets to cast the deciding vote. Meanwhile, they are busy trashing Gorsuch as the SCOTUS pick--and he's the one to replace a conservative.  They'd better save their big guns for the next choice, which might be to replace a liberal. If you ever thought opposition to Trump was about him being a fool, a fascist and sexist, then just look at what they are doing to Gorsuch, the closest to Jesus I've ever seen in politics. He's an "originalist" and believes judges should keep their personal politics off the bench.  Oh, horror for wise Latinas! 

And media--our third opposition party. They are horrified at Spicer and Bannon making changes in how they filter and chop and drop the news.  For 16 years we've had to put up with 8 years of anti-Bush, then 8 years of anything goes for Obama.  Now there's a new sheriff in town, and he hasn't even locked them up.  But he is adding to the select pool at the press conferences, and CNN and broadcast are now being called out like Obama demeaned Fox News for years. The media completely fail in its research and analysis during the campaign. Think about your own job/career. If your company, agency or library had misled millions of people for months, would it still be respected? Would the CEO, or even you, still have a job?

Gender dysphoria

Which president has done more evil?

What did President Obama do for women and minorities that would make them burn their cities and march angrily in the streets of Washington? Do they think it will be worse with a President Trump? Obama's first term he said he believed in marriage--needed that to get elected while the unelected bureaucrats were working in the back offices on regulations to change thousands of years of history. In his second term he came out for sexually mutilating and drugging confused children with the help of their parents. He took support from Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion mill in the country. He didn't mind that probably 1/3 of the millennial generation and maybe 1/2 of Gen-x were aborted, many in very painful chemical and surgical procedures. Yet still they march against Trump who has done none of that evil. 

"Who would these people be if they had been allowed to simply exist? I can’t stop thinking about it. My generation — Generation X — is the smallest on the face of the Earth today. The Baby Boomers and Millenials are twice our size.

Between 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court required every state to legalize abortion, and 1985, the debated tail end of Generation X, the abortion rate wavered between 20 and 30 percent. The end result is 29 million fewer" http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/community/joco-913/joco-opinion/article37977546.html

The most famous accident that escaped abortion of the late boomer generation was Barack Obama, born in 1961 in Hawaii before abortion was legal (although a woman of means with connections could always get one--and his white grandmother was a bank vice president) to a teen-ager and a married foreign student father. And how did he show his gratitude for escaping the death that took millions?

http://www.jenx67.com/2015/08/pro-life-generation.html 

http://liveactionnews.org/we-all-have-a-choice-to-make-on-abortio 

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/community/joco-913/joco-opinion/article37977546.html#storylink=cpy

How did I get on these lists?

 

I get about four offers a day to review a book the marketer will send me. For all I know these marketers are all the same person, just using different names--Diane, Kathy, Louise, etc. Some titles are no brainers--fantasy, or murder mysteries, or an extremely obscure soldier of the Civil War. Easy to say No. I don't take those, and once made the mistake of accepting a bio of a guy who had been on the bachelor TV program.  I've been turning everything down (I've been sick), plus I have about twelve inches of books waiting for me to open them. But today's offer looked good. It was about Justice Scalia. How timely. But as I read through the summary, I see the author was going to club the reader (and Scalia) with liberal blather, fake news, and real bias. Not surprising when I took a second look at the publisher. So I responded to the poor woman who probably makes about $5/hr doing this from her home office. 

"Thanks for the offer—this looked good until I saw that [author] thinks Scalia’s philosophy was “flawed.” Nope and No. Norma"

Currently on my table, some opened, read part through, just waiting for me to stop reading my gift books from Mother's Day and Christmas.

"Navigating the road of infertility," by Chrissie Lee Kahan and Aaron Michael Kahan. King Kahan Publishing, c2016  This is really pretty good for a privately published book, and Mrs. Kahan is a school principal who is a good writer. Although it's about their struggles with infertility, it's mainly about their challenges with the foster care system.  They were willing to adopt an older child, even with learning problems, and ran into huge road blocks. The insensitivity of the "system" especially for the needs of the child surprised me, and yet didn't.  I used to chat with an adoption lawyer at Panera's and heard some real horror stories.

"Caught in the Revolution; Petrograd, Russia, 1917--a world on the edge," by Helenn Rappoport, St. Martin's Press, NY: 2016.  I was a Russian major in college so I also had a lot of Russian and Soviet history. Many of my professors had survived WWII and were children during WWI.  In 2006 we visited St. Petersburg (Petrograd, Leningrad).  This is so meticulously researched it's enough to make a librarian cry.  Due for book sales this month, February 2017.

"Continental ambitions; Roman Catholics in North America," by Kevin Starr. Ignatius Press, 2016.  I was ambitious to even accept this HUGE compilation (639 p.) about an era of history and religion of which I know nothing.  Not only am I a Lutheran (church history started 500 years ago for Lutherans), but it seems to begin in the middle of a thought, "Resistance grows against the genocide and enslavement of indigenous people." That's in 1511--before Martin Luther's 95 theses.  I'm in deep water here. So there is a lot of Spanish history and I think we studies some of this in 6th grade and in my college Spanish classes.  I've gone on the internet to review some of Starr's other titles, and he's impressive--State Librarian for California and professor of history at the University of Southern California.  This is a quality book--even has color plates.

Iran fights back against Trump

Some history on the National Security Council, by Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee writes in his e-mail today about the apoplectic media reaction to the NSC:

"After Trump announced his reshaping of the National Security Council, something that every President does, the media went ballistic, until Press Secretary Sean Spicer showed them a virtually identical Obama-era presidential memo on the NSC that they hadn’t criticized at all. Part of the outrage centered on Trump not including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Director of National Intelligence in the formal NSC group, but Spicer said that's just to give them leeway to skip meetings that don't pertain to their fields. The media also blasted Trump for not including the CIA, even though they haven't been included since the DNI position was created in 2005. There was also much foaming at the mouth over Trump's including political strategist Steve Bannon, just as Obama had included David Axelrod. Critics pointed out that Bush didn’t include Karl Rove in NSC meetings. But at Instapundit, historian Austin Bay noted that Bush had military experience and Rove didn’t, while Bannon has military experience and Trump doesn’t, which would make Bannon’s advice more valuable."

But that's too logical--and based on history.  

And NPR nitpicking at the make-up. Notice the verbs. http://www.npr.org/2017/01/30/512489785/fact-check-spin-aside-trumps-national-security-council-has-a-very-big-change

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/30/white-house-defends-national-security-reorganization-steve-bannon/97242792/

These people REALLY hate Steve Bannon!