Someone sent me a copy of the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4gOS8aoFk
It tells how blind we all have been to not have recognized that we could just run our industries and transportation with salt water. "Incredible," was the comment of the fellow who sent it. This is what I sent back:
What's incredible is that the other engineers expressed amazement about any of this. There are a lot of water-dissociation schemes right now: you take water, increase its electrical conductivity with salt or other admixture, and run electric current through it. This splits it into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which are then recombined by combustion, which creates heat.
The problem is that the electrical energy necessary to split up the water always exceeds the heat energy you get out of the process: that radio-frequency generator is plugged into the wall, and the power it used wasn't free. The salt water itself is not a fuel.
They've been selling bogus 'fuel cell' schemes that uses current from a car's battery to dissociate water that's placed in an under-hood tank. The gases are fed to the car's air cleaner, where they increase the power of the engine. But the purveyors of these things forget that the electric current has to come from the car's generator, whose resultant additional burden loads down the engine and decreases fuel mileage.
Some of the more militant free-energy websites claim that there are methods of pulsing current through the water, and these reduce the amount of power needed to dissociate the water. They do not, which is just as well; we benefit considerably because water is as stable as it is.
What I didn't add was that the cancer cure mentioned here is about as dubious as the rest of the claims. What bothers me is that the happy crew did this all with a straight face, which indicates that they probably believe that they've accomplished something. Notice that there was no data, no measurements, no description of the apparatus, and that trick with the fluorescent light bulb is done daily at every science museum with a home-built Tesla coil. I can do it with the spark coil I got at AutoZone, and what's more it has no relationship to the deal with the hydrogen fuel.
This is an example of how pseudoscience is spread by clueless TV news producers. I once proposed to teach some basic technology to the journalism school at Ohio University. The department chairman there laughed at me, and his students probably believe this stuff.
M Kinsler
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Advice about college admissions
I had to write an article about the famous and attractive ladies of the Eroica Trio, who play classical music, and there wasn't much new to say about them except to observe that in March they'd they'd begun a blog, and it had all of two postings in it for the entire year. I should take a lesson already; one per month is sort of sparse.
This morning I was wasting time on Yahoo Answers and got an interesting one for some poor Asian kid who I think is about ready to slay himself at age fifteen. Here's the exchange:
i'm a sophomore in high school with a relative high sat score (2020) and a high gpa(4.0) in a rigourous course (IB). I actually moved from seattle to orange county area several months ago during my sophomore year. It was because of my dad's job. However, I was able to adjust quite well and get another 4.0 at the end of the second semeste at this new school. Will the college notice that? How much would that have impact on my college entrance by showing that i can adapt at new environments well? Another thing is that my parents are quite poor(make less than 3500 a month) and i'm going to this normal public school surrounded by multiple magnet schools that have sent kids to ivy schools. I couldn't transfer to those magnet schools because they didn't accept any nor did i know anything about them before I moved in. How would going to a relatively decent public school, rather than a fancy private school or a magnet school affect my college admission? do i have a higher chance if im asian?
To which I replied:
Let's see. You're in the tenth grade, meaning that you're what, fifteen? What you ought to be worrying about is being fifteen, which involves a great deal more than what some college admissions committee is going to think of you in three years.
It sounds very much as if you're being primed to attend an Ivy League school, or have otherwise placed some very high expectations on yourself. This is fine unless you devote your life to worrying about it, and there's a tone to your well-written question that indicates that this may indeed be the case.
College admissions decisions are based on any number of things, not all of them entirely rational. A school like Yale can easily take the best of every class, and they generally do. But beyond that, they'll look at where you live, what sorts of interests you seem to have, your family, and try to judge your particular talents in an effort to ensure that you'll benefit from the school and that the school will benefit from you. In any school, the students learn as much from their peers as from their professors, and so it's helpful to have a diverse group.
I'll tell you something: one thing that scares the hell out of any selective college is the kid who pins their rejection letter to his shirt just before he hangs himself. The school you went to is just not that big of a deal in the US, or at least it shouldn't be. Asian nations have a really swell tradition of subjecting their kids to The Big Exam of Life, and if you flunk it you'll be painting manholes for the rest of your life. We don't work that way here, though a lot of Asian parents don't believe that.
You write well, and your letter indicates that you can reason in a fairly sophisticated manner. It's fine to be a serious kid, and it sounds like you are. But you are far too young to be worrying about the opinions of anyone besides your friends, your close relatives, your current teachers, and yourself.
Just do your schoolwork, take part in whichever activities interest you _without_ concern with how they might look on an admissions form, and take time to do nothing, especially in the summer. Do things like swim, or hanging out trying to look tough with your friends. Climb trees: you're still young enough for that. Get a dumb job collecting shopping carts at the grocery store. Read books that don't have a lot to do with achievement and don't claim to be teaching you something. If you are female, you should be dancing and learning silly techniques of hairdressing with your friends.
When the time comes to fill out college admissions forms, you'll just fill them out and send 'em in. Ivy League schools will usually arrange for one of their local alumni to interview you, and one thing the school does not want to see is some kid who has memorized the entire works of Isaac Newton for the occasion and is likely to explode within the next ten minutes: this is not who they need in their freshman class.
Some success in life depends on school and contacts, but much more of it is dependent on character, some particular talent you might have, and a fair proportion of luck, and you must learn to be philosophical about all three.
----------------
I was saner than my father was when it came to going off to college. He was terrified of the whole procedure, having been well-trained himself by being snatched off the street at age sixteen by the University of Chicago for their weird 1930's 'great books' program. He left my sister pretty much alone to choose Ohio State. But he made me apply to Harvard, which I didn't care about, Yale, which I cared less about, and McGill University, which I'd never heard of. There was the US Naval Academy, too, and some weird British outfit where you wound up being an officer in the Royal Navy when you were done; just the thing every kid from Cleveland Heights longs for.
I went to Ohio State.
M Kinsler
This morning I was wasting time on Yahoo Answers and got an interesting one for some poor Asian kid who I think is about ready to slay himself at age fifteen. Here's the exchange:
i'm a sophomore in high school with a relative high sat score (2020) and a high gpa(4.0) in a rigourous course (IB). I actually moved from seattle to orange county area several months ago during my sophomore year. It was because of my dad's job. However, I was able to adjust quite well and get another 4.0 at the end of the second semeste at this new school. Will the college notice that? How much would that have impact on my college entrance by showing that i can adapt at new environments well? Another thing is that my parents are quite poor(make less than 3500 a month) and i'm going to this normal public school surrounded by multiple magnet schools that have sent kids to ivy schools. I couldn't transfer to those magnet schools because they didn't accept any nor did i know anything about them before I moved in. How would going to a relatively decent public school, rather than a fancy private school or a magnet school affect my college admission? do i have a higher chance if im asian?
To which I replied:
Let's see. You're in the tenth grade, meaning that you're what, fifteen? What you ought to be worrying about is being fifteen, which involves a great deal more than what some college admissions committee is going to think of you in three years.
It sounds very much as if you're being primed to attend an Ivy League school, or have otherwise placed some very high expectations on yourself. This is fine unless you devote your life to worrying about it, and there's a tone to your well-written question that indicates that this may indeed be the case.
College admissions decisions are based on any number of things, not all of them entirely rational. A school like Yale can easily take the best of every class, and they generally do. But beyond that, they'll look at where you live, what sorts of interests you seem to have, your family, and try to judge your particular talents in an effort to ensure that you'll benefit from the school and that the school will benefit from you. In any school, the students learn as much from their peers as from their professors, and so it's helpful to have a diverse group.
I'll tell you something: one thing that scares the hell out of any selective college is the kid who pins their rejection letter to his shirt just before he hangs himself. The school you went to is just not that big of a deal in the US, or at least it shouldn't be. Asian nations have a really swell tradition of subjecting their kids to The Big Exam of Life, and if you flunk it you'll be painting manholes for the rest of your life. We don't work that way here, though a lot of Asian parents don't believe that.
You write well, and your letter indicates that you can reason in a fairly sophisticated manner. It's fine to be a serious kid, and it sounds like you are. But you are far too young to be worrying about the opinions of anyone besides your friends, your close relatives, your current teachers, and yourself.
Just do your schoolwork, take part in whichever activities interest you _without_ concern with how they might look on an admissions form, and take time to do nothing, especially in the summer. Do things like swim, or hanging out trying to look tough with your friends. Climb trees: you're still young enough for that. Get a dumb job collecting shopping carts at the grocery store. Read books that don't have a lot to do with achievement and don't claim to be teaching you something. If you are female, you should be dancing and learning silly techniques of hairdressing with your friends.
When the time comes to fill out college admissions forms, you'll just fill them out and send 'em in. Ivy League schools will usually arrange for one of their local alumni to interview you, and one thing the school does not want to see is some kid who has memorized the entire works of Isaac Newton for the occasion and is likely to explode within the next ten minutes: this is not who they need in their freshman class.
Some success in life depends on school and contacts, but much more of it is dependent on character, some particular talent you might have, and a fair proportion of luck, and you must learn to be philosophical about all three.
----------------
I was saner than my father was when it came to going off to college. He was terrified of the whole procedure, having been well-trained himself by being snatched off the street at age sixteen by the University of Chicago for their weird 1930's 'great books' program. He left my sister pretty much alone to choose Ohio State. But he made me apply to Harvard, which I didn't care about, Yale, which I cared less about, and McGill University, which I'd never heard of. There was the US Naval Academy, too, and some weird British outfit where you wound up being an officer in the Royal Navy when you were done; just the thing every kid from Cleveland Heights longs for.
I went to Ohio State.
M Kinsler
Sunday, May 27, 2007
I'm back
I suppose if I'm serious about this thing I oughta add to it now and again. It's been six weeks or so.
I am beginning to think that I can write better political articles than the stuff I've been reading lately. Much of it is so mean-spirited that it's more destructive to its readers and their spirits than anything, and it's unnecessary.
I suppose that I have a different perspective on politics from many people because I've had the opportunity to see politicians as human beings. My friend Marilyn, with whom I hung out with, co-habitated, saw, and generally stayed near for perhaps six years back in the 1970's was involved in local politics in Connecticut. I lived in New Haven, and it so happened that she had a good many young friends who were attending Yale Law School, and who were very involved in local and national politics. Marilyn worked in Joe Lieberman's campaign for state representative, which was chaired by his Yale Law classmate Bill Clinton. I believe that I would have met both him and Hillary before they were married at some point, but who'd have remembered either one in that context. Our friend Rosa diLauro (it's de or di, I forget which) was close to the New Haven mayoral campaign of one Frank Logue, who was interested in Rosa. But Rosa was more interested in Stan Greenberg, whom she later married; we were at a party at their house once. Stan was Bill Clinton's pollster, and Rosa has been a Congresswoman from that district for years now. I've met one mayor or city councilman or another, and talked with them, as well as many candidates for offices from justice of the peace to President of the US.
And thus I cannot abide politician jokes. They work hard--very hard--and they believe in their own ideals, and in the power of government to do good. Yes, there are crooks, but I haven't met any yet. The job of politicians is to get us to live together in peace and prosperity without killing each other, and this is a tall order in many contexts, and they really try their best to do it.
I can't even be discouraged about George W. Bush, perhaps the least-likely President we've ever had. I always recall his surprise at winning, almost without effort, the Republican primaries in 1999. "There's still plenty of time for me to screw this up," he said. Now, that's human.
George W. Bush would have been okay as a President had he not plumb run out of luck. It wasn't his fault that two of our greatest national disasters occurred on his watch. It was his fault that he took bad advice on both of them. After Sept 11, 2001, it was his job as President to make sure that nobody did anything rash, and that's precisely what we went ahead and did. The invasion of Afghanistan was ill-advised, and of course Iraq was even less so, for we were unprepared for either and too angry to think straight. What we should have done was precisely nothing for a couple of years--it would have been very, very tough, but in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered much--except to tighten up our intelligence-gathering apparatus to foil future attacks. None of the shoe-searching and harrassment of librarians has done us a bit of good; we'd have been far better off to rely on the good will of our people and our neighbors.
Hurricane Katrina was also nobody's fault, and as tempting as it was to think otherwise, I rather doubt that it was the philosophy of the Republican Party that caused the general bungling of the relief effort. Just as we had no experience in the collapse of hundred-story buildings in 2001, we had no experience in the destruction and total evacuation of cities. I do hope they do a good job of rebuilding the levies, but part of the tradition of the city of New Orleans--indeed, part of its charm--seems to somehow involve municipal corruption, and I believe that this was the main the poorly-constructed levies weren't properly shored up.
But none of this involves evil, or at least not much evil. Just what is wrong with evaluating a difficult situation and coming to the conclusion that it isn't the Devil at work, but simply jobs that are very large and misfortunes that happen to be overwhelming, and that everyone is actually trying to do his best? This isn't the case at all times--the current mess at the Justice Department shows a thorough lack of leadership on several levels--but I certainly believe that everyone is trying hard to solve problems of terror, immigration, health care, and most other challenges to the general health and safety of the populace.
I am a bit puzzled by the sudden attention to immigration. Insofar as I've been able to observe, nobody seems to be overrun by immigrants around these parts (I can't blame the immigrants; there aren't many jobs here in Lancaster) and I have heard of no diminution of the general welfare because of their presence. On the East Coast, we've had immigrants from everywhere for hundreds of years, and the fact that you have to know several languages to do business on every block hasn't stalled commerce to any great degree. Nor have I ever noticed any difference in behavior between legal and illegal immigrants.
I am beginning to think that I can write better political articles than the stuff I've been reading lately. Much of it is so mean-spirited that it's more destructive to its readers and their spirits than anything, and it's unnecessary.
I suppose that I have a different perspective on politics from many people because I've had the opportunity to see politicians as human beings. My friend Marilyn, with whom I hung out with, co-habitated, saw, and generally stayed near for perhaps six years back in the 1970's was involved in local politics in Connecticut. I lived in New Haven, and it so happened that she had a good many young friends who were attending Yale Law School, and who were very involved in local and national politics. Marilyn worked in Joe Lieberman's campaign for state representative, which was chaired by his Yale Law classmate Bill Clinton. I believe that I would have met both him and Hillary before they were married at some point, but who'd have remembered either one in that context. Our friend Rosa diLauro (it's de or di, I forget which) was close to the New Haven mayoral campaign of one Frank Logue, who was interested in Rosa. But Rosa was more interested in Stan Greenberg, whom she later married; we were at a party at their house once. Stan was Bill Clinton's pollster, and Rosa has been a Congresswoman from that district for years now. I've met one mayor or city councilman or another, and talked with them, as well as many candidates for offices from justice of the peace to President of the US.
And thus I cannot abide politician jokes. They work hard--very hard--and they believe in their own ideals, and in the power of government to do good. Yes, there are crooks, but I haven't met any yet. The job of politicians is to get us to live together in peace and prosperity without killing each other, and this is a tall order in many contexts, and they really try their best to do it.
I can't even be discouraged about George W. Bush, perhaps the least-likely President we've ever had. I always recall his surprise at winning, almost without effort, the Republican primaries in 1999. "There's still plenty of time for me to screw this up," he said. Now, that's human.
George W. Bush would have been okay as a President had he not plumb run out of luck. It wasn't his fault that two of our greatest national disasters occurred on his watch. It was his fault that he took bad advice on both of them. After Sept 11, 2001, it was his job as President to make sure that nobody did anything rash, and that's precisely what we went ahead and did. The invasion of Afghanistan was ill-advised, and of course Iraq was even less so, for we were unprepared for either and too angry to think straight. What we should have done was precisely nothing for a couple of years--it would have been very, very tough, but in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered much--except to tighten up our intelligence-gathering apparatus to foil future attacks. None of the shoe-searching and harrassment of librarians has done us a bit of good; we'd have been far better off to rely on the good will of our people and our neighbors.
Hurricane Katrina was also nobody's fault, and as tempting as it was to think otherwise, I rather doubt that it was the philosophy of the Republican Party that caused the general bungling of the relief effort. Just as we had no experience in the collapse of hundred-story buildings in 2001, we had no experience in the destruction and total evacuation of cities. I do hope they do a good job of rebuilding the levies, but part of the tradition of the city of New Orleans--indeed, part of its charm--seems to somehow involve municipal corruption, and I believe that this was the main the poorly-constructed levies weren't properly shored up.
But none of this involves evil, or at least not much evil. Just what is wrong with evaluating a difficult situation and coming to the conclusion that it isn't the Devil at work, but simply jobs that are very large and misfortunes that happen to be overwhelming, and that everyone is actually trying to do his best? This isn't the case at all times--the current mess at the Justice Department shows a thorough lack of leadership on several levels--but I certainly believe that everyone is trying hard to solve problems of terror, immigration, health care, and most other challenges to the general health and safety of the populace.
I am a bit puzzled by the sudden attention to immigration. Insofar as I've been able to observe, nobody seems to be overrun by immigrants around these parts (I can't blame the immigrants; there aren't many jobs here in Lancaster) and I have heard of no diminution of the general welfare because of their presence. On the East Coast, we've had immigrants from everywhere for hundreds of years, and the fact that you have to know several languages to do business on every block hasn't stalled commerce to any great degree. Nor have I ever noticed any difference in behavior between legal and illegal immigrants.
Saturday, April 7, 2007
The Worse Part of Valor
A funny thing happened on the way to the checkout register...
My wife is a big Mark Martin fan. For those of you who aren't steeped in the Southern tradition that is North American Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR, Mark Martin is a rather likeable, down to Earth race car driver who was sponsored by Valvoline for quite a few years. Several years ago his contract was up, whereupon he got picked up by Pfizer, the makers of Viagra.
So now my wife gets to wear an Officially Licensed(tm) NASCAR(tm) Viagra(tm)(c)(r) sweatshirt($$$) with a big number 6 emblazoned upon it, which is the number painted on Mark Martin's Nextel Cup neé Winston Cup race car.
Well, my wife - adorned with the aforementioned shirt - and I were standing in line at the local K-Mart one fine day. A few twenty-something good-ol' boys got in line behind us. One brave young lad, who apparently hadn't yet learned that discretion is the better part of valor, decided to poke a bit of fun at Mark Martin's new sponsor at my wife's expense.
Now, have you ever seen a car wreck? Listening to this poor guy ramble on was like watching a car head for a brick wall at 100 MPH, but in slow motion. You know the driver is dead meat, you know it'll be over quickly, and you know there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
After listening quietly to several good natured jabs, my wife turned around to face the overconfident font of humor and said, rather loudly I pridefully add, "So, what do you have against erections, anyway?"
It took another 5 minutes in line to get to the checkout clerk, 5 minutes that were filled with total silence from Mister Adventure astern.
His pals sure had a good belly laugh, though.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
What about the Jews?
This is a post from Yahoo Answers, which I've been fooling with instead of working on my column. The kids who ask these things are generally quite young, and many live in English-speaking nations quite different from ours, e.g. Malaysia. Thus I try to be reasonably respectful when giving answers. Reasonably.
How do people know when someone is a Jew?
They have black Jews, like Sammy Davis Jr. and white Jews.I see people on movies and TV and they say they are Jews.Like the movie Independence Day and the guy puts on the little hat. He looks like anyone on the street I mean how do people know? Every where on here it talks about Jews this and that. They just look like regular white people to me.
This is what I answered:
=============================================
Yep. We're clever that way.
Maybe two thousand years ago, the Jews were a nation, like Denmark. They lived in Judea. No problem.
Then, for the same reasons that make people generally crazy over there, they decided to revolt against the Romans, who were generally in charge of the countryside at that time. They had a good deal from the Romans, who let them choose their own king and not serve in the Army, provided they rendered unto Caesar.
But lust for revolution ran hot, and the local equivalent of the Hezbollah thought that Jesus would be their leader, which he flatly refused to be, his kingdom being of another world. So they framed him on whatever charges they could come up with and turned him over to the Romans. The New Testament elucidates on this matter further.
Fifty years later, the Hezbollah raised another army against the Romans, who'd finally had enough. They wiped out the army, tore down the Temple, and threw everyone out. Some Judeans went north and became the Ashkenzi, some went south and to Spain and became the Sephardi, and they found their way into most every nation, keeping up the old religion, now somewhat reformed by events. Because we were no longer a nation with its own land, we stopped sacrificing animals and having high priests and money-changers. The desire to get back to Palestine became something of a cult within the religion: my grandfather was buried with a sack of earth from Jerusalem as a pillow, a ritual performed so that it could be said that his head now rested upon the Holy Land.
But there's never been much evidence that the Jews were any sort of a racial group. The people in that part of the world are often swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, but there are blondes and redheads among them. Except for having blue eyes, I'd make a pretty good Arab, hooked nose and all, but my grandparents looked like they were Swedish.
I've really never been able to figure out why the hell everyone is so sore at us for being Jews. Not accepting the divinity of Jesus is one thing, but the Moslems are sore at us too, and for what isn't at all apparent.
And so, having nearly been wiped out several times, we've learned how to fight, and established our own fortress-state, unpleasant as its foreign and domestic policies might be. Apparently we're pretty good survivors, so you'll just have to learn to live with us.
We write pretty good comedy shows and write lots of songs, and we're good doctors, bankers and lawyers. I must apologize for the ugly synagogues and Marc Chagall, though; I'm afraid that we took the deal about graven images much too seriously. But we won't do anything to Jesus or your kids except teach them evolution. Really.
Source:
When I was three I asked my mother why we didn't have a Christmas tree.
M Kinsler
How do people know when someone is a Jew?
They have black Jews, like Sammy Davis Jr. and white Jews.I see people on movies and TV and they say they are Jews.Like the movie Independence Day and the guy puts on the little hat. He looks like anyone on the street I mean how do people know? Every where on here it talks about Jews this and that. They just look like regular white people to me.
This is what I answered:
=============================================
Yep. We're clever that way.
Maybe two thousand years ago, the Jews were a nation, like Denmark. They lived in Judea. No problem.
Then, for the same reasons that make people generally crazy over there, they decided to revolt against the Romans, who were generally in charge of the countryside at that time. They had a good deal from the Romans, who let them choose their own king and not serve in the Army, provided they rendered unto Caesar.
But lust for revolution ran hot, and the local equivalent of the Hezbollah thought that Jesus would be their leader, which he flatly refused to be, his kingdom being of another world. So they framed him on whatever charges they could come up with and turned him over to the Romans. The New Testament elucidates on this matter further.
Fifty years later, the Hezbollah raised another army against the Romans, who'd finally had enough. They wiped out the army, tore down the Temple, and threw everyone out. Some Judeans went north and became the Ashkenzi, some went south and to Spain and became the Sephardi, and they found their way into most every nation, keeping up the old religion, now somewhat reformed by events. Because we were no longer a nation with its own land, we stopped sacrificing animals and having high priests and money-changers. The desire to get back to Palestine became something of a cult within the religion: my grandfather was buried with a sack of earth from Jerusalem as a pillow, a ritual performed so that it could be said that his head now rested upon the Holy Land.
But there's never been much evidence that the Jews were any sort of a racial group. The people in that part of the world are often swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, but there are blondes and redheads among them. Except for having blue eyes, I'd make a pretty good Arab, hooked nose and all, but my grandparents looked like they were Swedish.
I've really never been able to figure out why the hell everyone is so sore at us for being Jews. Not accepting the divinity of Jesus is one thing, but the Moslems are sore at us too, and for what isn't at all apparent.
And so, having nearly been wiped out several times, we've learned how to fight, and established our own fortress-state, unpleasant as its foreign and domestic policies might be. Apparently we're pretty good survivors, so you'll just have to learn to live with us.
We write pretty good comedy shows and write lots of songs, and we're good doctors, bankers and lawyers. I must apologize for the ugly synagogues and Marc Chagall, though; I'm afraid that we took the deal about graven images much too seriously. But we won't do anything to Jesus or your kids except teach them evolution. Really.
Source:
When I was three I asked my mother why we didn't have a Christmas tree.
M Kinsler
Monday, April 2, 2007
Is our nation in peril from immigration?
A fellow I know who reads a lot about national affairs sent me an article about immigration featuring a speech given by a fellow named Victor Hansen Davis and Dick Lamm, the governor of Colorado at the time. I really don't wish to quote it, because it's pretty violent and distasteful in some subtle ways, so I'll see if I can find a URL for it...
Well, I suppose that it was a widely-circulated article, because here it is on Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp
And here was my considered opinion about it:
I'd be lots more impressed if we, as a nation, hadn't heard precisely the same dire warnings about every thirty to fifty years throughout our history.
The first group that threatened our national stability and identity came from a nation whose major traits, we were told, were alcoholism, starvation, and fist-fighting. We were told that their families were huge, they were willing to live on utterly nothing, and they were, to a man, woman and ragged child, pledged to a foreign church whose rituals were purposely kept mysterious. They took over major Eastern cities, New York and Boston, with their corrupt politics, and found their way into organized crime as easily as they did boxing, their other principal talent.
Yet we seemed to survive the influx of Irish, though there are still Irish in organized crime--even Irish street gangs in Boston continue to flourish. Of course, they also became civil servants, teachers, engineers, builders, and the Kennedys.
That was in the 1840's. The Chinese who came to work on railroads a bit later simply terrified the Western states. They, too, had an unrestricted birthrate, and it was useless to try to understand the language and culture. The Chinese, of course, brought in drugs, particularly opium, and prostitutes. Their gangs, the Tongs, were utterly ruthless, favoring beheadings as a method of enforcement. Most Chinese preferred to live apart from the rest of the nation, and you'll find precisely this situation in many of the old Chinatowns in the big cities.
Yet we've survived them, too. Their major threat is to our school grading curves: every bright kid seems to be Chinese these days.
The Jews came in from Russia and Poland from 1890 to 1930. They were neither Christian nor English-speakers, which put them at about the level of the Chinese in terms of desirability. Their vaunted financial cleverness didn't help their poverty, and they were carriers of tuberculosis in every big city in the East. Their social problems--illegitimacy, crime, and domestic violence--were bad enough to foster the development of the first settlement houses in New York and Chicago. And yet they became our lawyers, physicians, scientists, and the entire entertainment industry.
Christian Poles flooded into the Midwest by the millions, along with Hungarians, various Slavs, and Lithuanians, pushing the locals right out of the auto and steel industries. Then the Italians, with their Mafia connections that went back through the centuries, their large families, and their tribal loyalty to family and church and little else, essentially emptied out the southern (i.e., poverty-stricken) half of their ancient peninsula. Enough of them came to New Orleans that there were riots, and the Little Italies that formed in every other city were not places of peace and prosperity--after which they moved out to turn into industry managers, artists, college professors, judges, and ordinary citizens with better-than-average recipe collections. (I'm married to one.)
We've survived all of these, and now they've apparently been included under the category of 'Americans,' the sort of Americans who Victor Hansen Davis tells us should be terrified of Mexican immigrants.
Prof Davis may be brilliant, but he has not a clue where the wealth of the United States came from. It was brought here by the immigrants, who worked three jobs each, took over neighborhoods that nobody else wanted, took over businesses that nobody else wanted, and made enough money to embarrass themselves for a generation or so, after which they became old money and began to endow colleges. Because we are who we are, we attract the ambitious kids from every nation, the ones that they should be desperately trying to hang on to.
The economy, economists will be the first to tell you, is infinitely elastic: more people generate more jobs. While it is true that the nation's natural resources are certainly finite, that is something we all must deal with, regardless of nationality.
I read something once that I rather liked, and which I'll try to paraphrase, from James Michener. There are two nations separated by a river. On one side of the river, the farmland is well-supplied with water, and the soil is better. There's a bit of a 'weather line' along the river, and so it rains better on one side. Cattle like it better. Natural resources of all sorts are more abundant in that favored area as well.
The river is the Rio Grande, as it runs through Texas. And the favored side, the one favored by nature in every way, is the southern one. It's in his novel "Texas."
None of this is to say that it's easy to assimilate immigrants. But it's something that we do very well, and it's always been to our benefit.
The problem with racism (not racial hatred, but nationalism based on genetics) is that it doesn't work. It works with seagulls, whose identity as seagulls is never in question, and they never marry outside of their race, or get interested in non-seagull music, or journey to nations where there aren't any seagulls. But it doesn't work with people and never did. The 'races' are about as permanent as that of the ancient Greeks [extolled in the article as the most successful of nations], who disappeared without a trace not long after their days of glory.
The ancient Romans understood this, and had surprisingly wise procedures in place that granted citizenship to all of its conquered territories. The Ottoman Empire did much the same, as did the British Empire. All were quite successful, none were race-based, at least not to the extent that Prof Davis (what was =his= family name changed from?) would recommend. The Nazis thought otherwise, but it was an experiment that was doomed to failure if for no other reason than the Aryans he favored thought Hitler was a nutcase.
M Kinsler
Well, I suppose that it was a widely-circulated article, because here it is on Snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp
And here was my considered opinion about it:
I'd be lots more impressed if we, as a nation, hadn't heard precisely the same dire warnings about every thirty to fifty years throughout our history.
The first group that threatened our national stability and identity came from a nation whose major traits, we were told, were alcoholism, starvation, and fist-fighting. We were told that their families were huge, they were willing to live on utterly nothing, and they were, to a man, woman and ragged child, pledged to a foreign church whose rituals were purposely kept mysterious. They took over major Eastern cities, New York and Boston, with their corrupt politics, and found their way into organized crime as easily as they did boxing, their other principal talent.
Yet we seemed to survive the influx of Irish, though there are still Irish in organized crime--even Irish street gangs in Boston continue to flourish. Of course, they also became civil servants, teachers, engineers, builders, and the Kennedys.
That was in the 1840's. The Chinese who came to work on railroads a bit later simply terrified the Western states. They, too, had an unrestricted birthrate, and it was useless to try to understand the language and culture. The Chinese, of course, brought in drugs, particularly opium, and prostitutes. Their gangs, the Tongs, were utterly ruthless, favoring beheadings as a method of enforcement. Most Chinese preferred to live apart from the rest of the nation, and you'll find precisely this situation in many of the old Chinatowns in the big cities.
Yet we've survived them, too. Their major threat is to our school grading curves: every bright kid seems to be Chinese these days.
The Jews came in from Russia and Poland from 1890 to 1930. They were neither Christian nor English-speakers, which put them at about the level of the Chinese in terms of desirability. Their vaunted financial cleverness didn't help their poverty, and they were carriers of tuberculosis in every big city in the East. Their social problems--illegitimacy, crime, and domestic violence--were bad enough to foster the development of the first settlement houses in New York and Chicago. And yet they became our lawyers, physicians, scientists, and the entire entertainment industry.
Christian Poles flooded into the Midwest by the millions, along with Hungarians, various Slavs, and Lithuanians, pushing the locals right out of the auto and steel industries. Then the Italians, with their Mafia connections that went back through the centuries, their large families, and their tribal loyalty to family and church and little else, essentially emptied out the southern (i.e., poverty-stricken) half of their ancient peninsula. Enough of them came to New Orleans that there were riots, and the Little Italies that formed in every other city were not places of peace and prosperity--after which they moved out to turn into industry managers, artists, college professors, judges, and ordinary citizens with better-than-average recipe collections. (I'm married to one.)
We've survived all of these, and now they've apparently been included under the category of 'Americans,' the sort of Americans who Victor Hansen Davis tells us should be terrified of Mexican immigrants.
Prof Davis may be brilliant, but he has not a clue where the wealth of the United States came from. It was brought here by the immigrants, who worked three jobs each, took over neighborhoods that nobody else wanted, took over businesses that nobody else wanted, and made enough money to embarrass themselves for a generation or so, after which they became old money and began to endow colleges. Because we are who we are, we attract the ambitious kids from every nation, the ones that they should be desperately trying to hang on to.
The economy, economists will be the first to tell you, is infinitely elastic: more people generate more jobs. While it is true that the nation's natural resources are certainly finite, that is something we all must deal with, regardless of nationality.
I read something once that I rather liked, and which I'll try to paraphrase, from James Michener. There are two nations separated by a river. On one side of the river, the farmland is well-supplied with water, and the soil is better. There's a bit of a 'weather line' along the river, and so it rains better on one side. Cattle like it better. Natural resources of all sorts are more abundant in that favored area as well.
The river is the Rio Grande, as it runs through Texas. And the favored side, the one favored by nature in every way, is the southern one. It's in his novel "Texas."
None of this is to say that it's easy to assimilate immigrants. But it's something that we do very well, and it's always been to our benefit.
The problem with racism (not racial hatred, but nationalism based on genetics) is that it doesn't work. It works with seagulls, whose identity as seagulls is never in question, and they never marry outside of their race, or get interested in non-seagull music, or journey to nations where there aren't any seagulls. But it doesn't work with people and never did. The 'races' are about as permanent as that of the ancient Greeks [extolled in the article as the most successful of nations], who disappeared without a trace not long after their days of glory.
The ancient Romans understood this, and had surprisingly wise procedures in place that granted citizenship to all of its conquered territories. The Ottoman Empire did much the same, as did the British Empire. All were quite successful, none were race-based, at least not to the extent that Prof Davis (what was =his= family name changed from?) would recommend. The Nazis thought otherwise, but it was an experiment that was doomed to failure if for no other reason than the Aryans he favored thought Hitler was a nutcase.
M Kinsler
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)