There are, indeed, elite people in the world. People who have been specially gifted with certain talents. A talent for being a surgeon; a talent for being a plumber; a talent for pure intellectual inquiry, etc, etc, etc. But here’s the price of being an elite: service. That is what our elites are missing…and have been missing ever since the Enlightenment came along. Then it was that our elites started thinking not in terms of service, but in terms of ruling…of telling us how to live, because they knew better than the yokels how it should be done. It should be noted that the elites who lead the way in this were those who usually lacked practical knowledge…you know, how to build a bridge or manage a water system. This is not to say that we never had busybodies prior to about 1750, nor to say that everyone with a liberal arts degree since then has been an annoyance. But the rule holds true: prior to about 1750, those who had more thought they owed service; since then, they feel a right to rule.
The duty of the elite is to serve the needs of the yokels as defined by the yokels. Anything other than that would either be worthless, or tyrannical. You want to be elite? Fine – then your whole task in life is service. After all, the first shall be last…
Blogs For Victory 
Excellent idea!
Calling it the El Chapo Memorial Wall works for me.
I got into a bit of a debate with liberals over the wall issue on Facebook…they simply will not understand the reason for it. They don’t get that the wall, itself, may be partially symbolic, but what it symbolizes is the requirement of border security: that no matter how many people we decide to allow in, we have to know who they are and what their business is. Right now, we’ve got liberals using the immigration issue to race-bait; Corporatists using it for cheap labor; anti-foreigners for attacking foreigners…but what we need is to secure the border and then figure out what to do with those already here…but we can’t get from here to there until the border is secured, because the American people simply won’t buy the notion that we’ll do amnesty now and border security later. At the end of the day, the only guy in DC really trying to do something – for both the United States and the immigrants – is Donald Trump.
I like what Hugh Hewitt said about border control: “A fence is the visible manifestation of an invisible commitment to sovereignty”
To find fault with this is to state that we, as a nation, are not sovereign, have no right to make our own laws, and are merely a different color on a map.
As for the wall, I don’t think a solid wall is necessary or even desirable. I have never understood the dedication to a WALL. A fence can be just as much a deterrent, go up much more quickly, cost far less, and get the job done. There are a lot of ways to make a fence a strong deterrent, most of which would probably have the Left peeing down their legs in distress, but they range from electrifying it to rigging any of various elements to be discharged when the fence is approached—-odors, tear gas, etc. Two fences, with a no-man’s land in between filled with pressure sensors, topped with razor wire, seemed to work pretty well for the USSR in Finland.
I like what Hugh Hewitt said about border control: “A fence is the visible manifestation of an invisible commitment to sovereignty”
To find fault with this is to state that we, as a nation, are not sovereign, have no right to make our own laws, and are merely a different color on a map.
Hugh’s statement as well as your reaction are worth archiving.
A fence is rarely a deterrent for those able and motivated. I’ve a friend who works part time in a security measure for those who repair sections of fence that already exists on the Arizona / Mexican border. I found it surprising just how determined some are to move people, drugs or other goods into the US. For example, under the cover of darkness, they’ll saw thru the lower portion of the vertical pipe, then putty and paint it so it looks intact. Then, their work is done in preparation for quick action to gain entry at a later date. The repair crews spend significant resources finding and fixing the fences. The security forces protecting the maintenance crews sit atop pickups with heavy arms. There is often visible personnel south of the border with heavy arms as well. Guess they’re not too happy to see their hard work at rendering the fence, a false deterrent.
That’s why just a fence will never be enough. It has to be accompanied by various sensors and deterrents. Electricity is great, and while it can be circumvented just the break in the current sets off an alarm if it is set up properly. “Under cover of darkness” is a clue—have the area lit up. Just as the old home alarm systems had sensors on the windows that set off an alarm if the window was hit hard or broken, it might be possible to have sensors that alert when a steel post is being sawed, or if a connection is broken. The best system, which did seem to work pretty well for the USSR, was a double fence system with a raked sand surface between the two fences (to show footprints) and rigged with pressure sensors under the sand, and patrolled by dogs and jeeps. We have the technology now to do a much better job of patrolling, and there are other things that could be done as well. Indelible dyes visible only under certain lights on fencing, posts, on the sand, etc would identify people who messed with the fence or crossed the sand. I wonder about a very tall fence angled outward—toward Mexico—at about a 40 degree angle, with infrared beams shooting down from the top, think of a triangle with one side the earth, one side the fence, and one side the beams—-the only way to get close enough to the base of the fence would be to break the beam and set off an alarm. Put the fence far enough on our side that the bottom of the pyramid would be equipped with sensors, too. To get to the lower part of the fence there would be two levels of sensors, under the ground and shooting down from the top of the fence.
They would have to try to throw something over the top of the fence and then climb up, to get over, which is hard to do with the bottom of the rope or ladder swinging, and as I am a crusty old broad I would have that alarm send a jolt of electricity through that fence one time, the next time it would set off a big spray of pepper gel, and so on. Have nighttime drones spray all sorts of nasty stuff along the fence onto whoever happens to be there when it happens. Being unpredictable makes it harder to plan ahead, and making it very very unpleasant—just short of lethal—-makes it less attractive. As time goes on, as illegals are deported and people get tired of having their faces full of pepper spray and their clothes ruined by dyes and having the snot shocked out of them and being bombarded at random from the sky with skunk juice and so on, border crossings will diminish.
When I found a tunnel—-and here there is no tongue in cheek—-I would either flood it with gas or blow it up or first one and then the other. In the tunnel when the bad thing happens? Maybe your buddies won’t be so eager to go into the next one. We have technology that can find old cadavers buried for years—surely we can find tunnels using seismic testing or something. They do seismic testing around here looking for oil deposits—-I’ll bet a good deep ground-shaking would be pretty scary if you were in a tunnel.
But we have to stop rewarding crossings. I have heard the comment that we are a birdfeeder nation—when you set up a bird feeder, you get birds, and when you set up reward systems for illegals you get people who will take risks to come here.
I think the people who do the kinds of things you describe are not just the poor peasants “looking for a better life”. They are the coyotes and/or the drug smugglers, and I have no sympathy for them.
There is often visible personnel south of the border with heavy arms as well.
We also need to have the backbone to make the statement, and then stick to it, that anyone shooting across the border from Mexico may very well experience some mortar fire or other retaliation. Period. The Mexican government should be given a choice—-either accept that we will consider this kind of thing a declaration of war, and deal with it as such, country against country, or accept our response without making a fuss as an acceptable response to being shot at. That would go for the other things I have read about, like army vehicles driving into the river to provide cover for people being forced back. We’ve gotten pretty good at targeting bad guys with drones, and if someone is pointing “heavy arms” at our border control people, in our country, on our side of the border, then they need to know there might be some serious consequences.
They do this because they can, because we do not have the will to deal with it.
I thought Billy was supposed to be the smart Baldwin.
Have you seen the exchange between Matt and Billy? It’s priceless!
Sorry—I was thinking of Stephen Baldwin. I knew there was one who is a decent human being, just got the names mixed up.
I’ll say this for Billy—it takes a certain kind of genius to make Alec look smart by comparison.