Citizenship

Open Thread

Mark Noonan35 Comments

Let us modify the 14th:

All persons born to two American citizens, native born or two persons naturalized in the United States according to law are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Persons born to one American citizen are citizens of the United States if they have been continuously resident within the United States for at least ten years prior to their eighteenth birthday and take an oath affirming their loyalty and renouncing all foreign ties. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, nor shall any State provide any aid whatsoever to non-citizens. Violation of a oath made in any capacity shall result in permanent disenfranchisement and is not subject to the pardon power.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective number of adult citizens. No legislative district shall be valid if it is drawn for the purposes of securing a partisan political victory nor shall any district be based upon race, ethnic, gender or religious grounds. If any district is challenged on grounds of validity, seven adult citizens of that district shall be randomly chosen via lottery to gather and rule on the validity of the district. A majority is required for ruling on the district validity. The House of Representatives shall be required to expel members from invalid legislative districts; any Representative or Senator who disagrees with said expulsion shall also be expelled. Any person expelled from Congress is by that act permanently disenfranchised and may never hold any office of profit or trust in the United States or the several States.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in actions which violated that oath.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred due to fraudulent activity; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Make your own additions or subtractions as you like: but it is clear that if we are to be a serious nation with a future, we’re going to have to start spelling things out. We can’t rely on honesty and good will – too many of our fellow citizens are idiots and crooks. We can’t leave things open to interpretation because the liars will simply interpret them to support lies.

I saw a picture of that Islamist massacre of Christians in Nigeria over Palm Sunday and it is going to stick with me forever – quite horrific. Don’t search for such pictures. This poor kid had his face sliced in half.

But we do need to think about it – these savages hacked the Christians to pieces. Think about the physical effort and time that takes. The perpetrators would have been covered in gore after they were done. Yes, they are still humans and thus endowed with the rights of same – but they are also unreasonable, inhuman savages. We can’t negotiate with such people – they don’t have grievances which we can ameliorate…they have a vision of themselves as eternal brute masters over slaves. There is no half way point between what they want and what any decent person deserves.

In Iran, this is what we’re fighting – the same sort of people. Yes, they are in error. Yes, they are capable of repentance. Yes, if they do repent then they can be welcomed with open arms into the community of people. But first they must be stopped – and that will require violence. You can’t disabuse people of such deep seated evil by careful reasoning…if they were open to careful reasoning, they never would have got to the point where they chop people up. I hope that Trump arms the Christians and provides them support via our Navy and Air Force.

Apparently for Season 3 of Rings of Power, one of the heroes is an orc. It is like they are deliberately going out of their way to be insulting.

Orcs were creatures of Morgoth in Tolkien’s universe. It is never made clear whether they were something made out of whole cloth by Morgoth or captive elves which he ruined. Suffice it to say, the orcs were made in mockery of elves. Entirely evil and entirely enslaved to Morgoth and, later, to Morgoth’s emissary, Sauron. Clever enough to make weapons and do other basic things, they were usually lazy, greedy and cowardly. Unless they had a Dark Lord to impose his will, they wandered in small bands, killing and stealing what they could. Orcs aren’t born – they are spawned. This does imply some sort of female of the species, but orcs are incapable of love or devotion. So, no, an orc can’t be friends with an elf, even as some sort of temporary alliance. That the writers of Rings of Power are doing this means they want to change the entire meaning of Tolkien’s work – and IMO, this was started with the first series for the Lord of the Rings. There were two major parts totally excluded from the movies: Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire. Part of this was time constraints but I believe that most of it was because the people who made the movie failed to understand why Bombadil was in it and why the Shire had to be scoured. Most important, though, was the excising of the Scouring.

Tolkien, himself, said it was an integral part of the story and envisioned from the start. That is, the hobbits after their arduous adventures, would have to return home and set the Shire to rights. Clean out the bad elements – a sort of low-key version of what Aragorn was doing in Gondor. That is, in any people, bad elements slip in and start to erode the good things and if they aren’t called out and expelled from time to time, it just gets worse. The hobbits had grown lazy and overly tolerant…they just wanted to be left alone and thought it was their right to be left alone. But all the while, enemies were gathering…enemies which could have been easily kept out by a bit of vigilance, but laziness allowed them in, causing death and destruction. By not having it in the movies, we are left with the sense that nothing was ever wrong with the hobbits. Nothing needed to be cured, nobody needed to stand guard. It left a hole in the tale…and that hole is now being driven through by people who not only don’t understand Tolkien’s world, but hate it.

It is my hope that eventually the slop they’re doing now will eventually be forgotten and in later years, truer adaptations will be made.


Open Thread

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Mike Fragoso gets it:

That is all “muh precious norms!” is about – simply trying to hamstring the GOP with rules the Democrats will ignore if they get into the majority. And the Never Trump guys are all on board with this – because they are now paid by the Democrats and their audience is almost exclusively Democrats. This particular bit is in relation to calls for the GOP Senate to ease rules so that Trump’s nominees can get confirmed – we are in September here and the Executive Branch still isn’t fully staffed with Trump’s people…meaning Deep State holdovers are still in charge of various things and are diligently working to undermine Trump. And that is why the Democrats and RINOs want to slow-walk the process…

Someone started calling them “paperwork Americans” and I think that is spot on – that is, people who do have all the documents for being Americans, but ain’t all that American. You know what I’m talking about: foreign born or born to foreigners people who are up there on the public stage calling America an evil nation. Sorry, not seeing a lot of connection here. Not a lot of love, that is.

No sane nation would allow inside it those who hate it. It is just literal lunacy. Heck, even the barbarians the Romans imported towards the end at least wanted to partake in the Roman world – we’ve got people who want to torch the whole project. They aren’t just dissenting. Not just pointing out this or that flaw or injustice we need to fix – they hate the whole thing and want it gone, replaced with something else. They are quite open about it – some saying that their purpose in the USA is to defend their foreign homeland. We do need to start working on a complete reform of citizenship in the USA, including Constitutional Amendments. My basics are:

  1. Only natural born citizens can hold office in the USA – elective or appointed: from dog catcher to President.
  2. Only those born to an American citizen in US territory or connected to a diplomatic or military foreign posting are natural born citizens.
  3. No more than 100,000 immigrants may arrive in any calendar year. They must be 18 to 30 years old, physically fit, unmarried, no children, fluent in English, not related to any foreign government official and have at least $10,000 on them when they arrive.
  4. A review of everyone naturalized over the past 25 years with careful attention paid to all documents, the slightest flaw in which results in denaturalization and deportation.
  5. Concentrations of foreign born are to be broken up – that is, if a city has within it 10% or more of people originating in one foreign nation, half of them must move elsewhere or back to their country of origin. No more take-overs of American cities by foreigners.

Pete Hegseth is working to have the Confederate Memorial returned to Arlington – there was a short moment when I was thinking it was ok to move Confederate memorials but it so quickly became a first step in removing all American memorials that I switched sides on the issue. And now the thought really kicks in: sure post-Civil War a lot of ex-Confederates erected the shameful Jim Crow system…but a memorial to Confederate soldiers isn’t a memorial to Jim Crow, even if some of them were erected by proponents of Jim Crow. The bottom line is that the major Confederate memorials – like that at Arlington – were erected with the cooperation and blessing of Grand Army of the Republic veterans. The war was over, enemies had forgiven each other…as they aged out and erected their last memorials to each other, their memories of the war were fond…remembering how young and brave they all were, not how much they hated each other at the time. They left us their memorials – North and South – as expressions of love…and we should leave them alone. We weren’t involved. They aren’t ours to judge…merely to learn from.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan5 Comments

DOJ has opened a Grand Jury for the Russiagate affair. We’ll see how far we can take this – but at the very least the process is the punishment.

But in my view, everyone involved – including Hillary and Obama – are in deep legal jeopardy. And if we start to get indictments rolling in then if I were Trump I’d call both of them and say they can get pardons in return for full, public confessions of what they did.

It looked like Rep. Ramirez (D-IL) said in Mexico City that she’s a proud Guatemalan before American. I guarantee you that if a foreigner moved to Guatemala and somehow managed to get elected to office – almost impossible as most nations simply won’t elect foreign-born people to office – then if that person said they were prouder to be foreign than Guatemalan, they’d be forced out of office in minutes…and probably arrested into the bargain.

The United States is not a mere Free Trade Zone. We are a nation. We are a people. We are welcoming, but if you come here, become American or get out. It is ok to be proud of where you’re from – or where your family is from. But if you want to live in America, then America must come first. It is not a big ask: it is mere basic decency.

Side note: I want us to enact into law a new definition of Native: in my view, if three of your four grandparents were born in the USA, then you are a Native American. No more of this “settler” stuff – I am not a settler. The most recent part of my bloodline got here in the late 19th century, the oldest part in the early 17th. I have no loyalty to any foreign nation – I don’t care about them. My only nation is the United States. I know no other as home. I am Native.

Texas Democrats fled the State to avoid a quorum that would vote on redistricting. This is the merest political stunt and it won’t work – the new districts will become law…and very likely other Red States are now more willing to redistrict, and do it very hard. The Democrats tell the MSM that the Resistance is working and so Democrats keep doing Resistance stuff because the MSM says its working. But it ain’t. People don’t like political stunts.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

This will be a bit for Amazona to chew on!

Team Trump is asserting that they will be working to end “birthright citizenship”. This is the concept that if you are born in American territory, you are American. The argument in favor of this is the wording of the 14th Amendment which goes: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. This is held to mean that in 1868, an Amendment to ensure that black Americans who had been cruelly denied their rights as citizens applies to Juanita in Chiapas who boards a bus for Juarez, crosses illegally into El Paso and has a kid.

Yeah, no. Don’t think so. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact. I’m a strict constructionist…original intent and all that. There was no intent to make “anchor babies” a thing. It wasn’t even in mind as the Amendment was proposed, passed and ratified. There was no court case on it – we don’t have, for instance, a court case from 1880 where a person illegally in the USA is arguing their American-born child is American. It wasn’t even a concept until about 40 years ago. This is mostly because travel used to be far more difficult and pregnant women wouldn’t often travel as their condition wasn’t conducive to arduous travel. But when you can now fly cheaply many thousands of miles in a few hours…here we go.

To hold that the 14th means we must allow “anchor babies” is as stupid as saying that a law legalizing interracial marriage means two boys can get married. Sure, this is basically what Obergefell held…but that was one of the most monumentally stupid decisions the Court has ever rendered. This has nothing to do with the merits of same sex marriage – maybe it is something we should do? But to apply laws written without the subject in mind is just asinine. Anchor babies and SSM were new subjects that no law, prior to them being brought up, covered. In the case of SSM, the Court should have ruled: sort it out via the political process. Because no law of the USA prior to the concept of SSM covered SSM – and this includes, of course, the Constitution of the USA which, being silent on the matter, leaves its resolution to the States, or the people. So, too, “anchor babies” – no law of the USA covers it, so any laws about it will have to be made on the fly and if you really want “anchor babies” to be American citizens because of the plot of dirt they were born on, amend the Constitution…don’t try to bootstrap it on to something never intended for it.

Assad’s regime in Syria has collapsed and the usual collection of Neo-Con warmongers and Liberal idiots is cheering. We pray for the people there and hope that we get a miracle…but what we’re likely to get is a massacre.

Good to keep in mind that Syria isn’t a country. It is a geographic expression. The people who reside in the borders of Syria are very different groups, some of whom hate each other with a passion. Assad is Alawite and his faction has dominated Syria since the early 1970s…as a sort of 3 million person Alawite Empire lording it over the other 22 million people there…though the Christians and Druze of Syria have tended to favor Alawite rule as it is far less oppressive than other Muslim rule (Alawites are a bit of a bizarre Muslim sect held by many Muslims to be heretical…some even consider them idolators). The Alawites were long heavily suppressed by other Muslims (especially the Turks during the Ottoman Empire) but when the French took over Syria in 1918, they tended to favor the Alawites and so, post-French rule, the Alawites were best positioned to take over.

As you can see just in that short paragraph, this isn’t going to be a cut and dried thing. The rebels are not fighting for a free Syria where are all afforded equal rights – they just want to be in charge. The only possible saving grace here is that the rebels are a coalition and maybe none of them are strong enough to totally dominate…that might provide some wiggle room to avoid disaster. But there is a massive danger that this is going to degenerate into tribal score-settling and that means Alawites, Christians and Druze are in for a very bad time.

I talked about this a few days ago – about how we live in the land of make-believe. And a price will now be extracted for the world pretending that Syria was a country…rather than several countries that want nothing to do with each other and so, upon independence, what should have done was to break it up into its ethnic components, including population transfers to avoid having oppressed minorities. Had the real world been lived in then what we call Syria today would be at least 5 nations including 1 Christian and 1 Druze and nobody would have been dying all this time. Side note: there is an even money chance that American intel people fostered this Assad collapse just to toss a problem for Trump to deal with.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan14 Comments

So they had a whole bunch of “Pride” parades this past weekend and the usual suspects among the Democrats were out there with their social media posts holding up a “Pride” flag and saying how happy they were to attend. But this year things went a bit different – given that Twitter, especially, isn’t as subjected to censorship as it used to be, when people posted the other photographs from “Pride”, it got into a lot of places…so many places that the Left went nuts. Not over the naked guys flashing their dangly bits in front of kids…no; they were mad that we noticed naked guys (and enormously fat, old and ugly guys, into the bargain) were waving the short arm.

Of course, we’ve known this all along – and, indeed, a few old degenerates showing off their privates is actually fairly tame for a “Pride” parade. The actual sex acts are a bit more grotesque. I’m sure that was posted as well but I’ve a fairly decent “follow” count on Twitter and so none of that got Tweeted into my time line.

It did get me thinking that a lot of the real freaks at these things aren’t so much gay as, well, freaks. Sure, they talk up the gay aspect of it, but they’re mostly about the freakiness. What “Pride” really means to this type is the ability to engage in their perverted kink without censure. I’m very firm on this because none of the gay guys I know and have known – including some really good looking guys – ever felt the urge to whip it out in public.

But, that aside, the Left had a meltdown about it. And rightly so – most people simply do not know what is going on. What they’ve seen of “Pride” is highly sanitized by the MSM. Just as what most of them have seen of transgenderism is some nice, soft spoken person who isn’t threatening…the six foot two weirdo in a pink miniskirt is a bit more off-putting and so not shown (yes, I’ve really seen this; the Left likes to think nobody on the Right gets around – but, for instance, I’ve been the only white guy at a Mexican bar and the only white guy at a black house party. Heck, I once hitched a ride at 2 am from a gangbanger. I like people; I get along with them. I’m not afraid of people, not even the weird ones. I can shift in an instant from biker bar to classical music concert). A lot more of this stuff gets out – if people actually see it – then the game is up for the Left. The way they get what they want is slow, incremental change until the Far Left is implemented – the guy with the fake breasts and three foot dildo strapped around his waist kinda kills that plan.

Both Trump and DeSantis are campaigning on ending birthright citizenship – it has become the price of entry into the GOP field. Oh, sure; some of the candidates will reject it, but anyone who wants a serious shot at the nomination will embrace it.

And it has to be done. I’m of the position that birthright citizenship does not cover persons born to non-citizens and certainly not those born to non-citizens illegally in the country. I know the arguments saying the 14th says anyone born in the USA, but one has to place things in their historic context, and that is precisely what the Left – and part of the Right – refuses to do; to them, it is a “living document”. Except for this one thing. They are only literalists in this tiny area – which happens to be the area where GOP moneybags and Marxist Democrats agree on the outcome. In the time it was enacted, what was intended by the 14th was a complete shutdown of any ex-Confederate attempt to refuse citizenship to any freed slave or their descendants. It was ratified in direct response to Southern States attempts to write their citizenship laws in a manner with de-facto excluded black Americans from citizenship.

Now, this won’t be easy! And eventually it may take an Amendment. But we start with what we can: in this case, Trump and DeSantis promising Executive Orders. This will naturally generate lawsuits. That is good. It gets the issue into the public square and it will force Democrats to take what is bound to be the unpopular opinion: just get across the border and your kid is as American as apple pie! Most Americans probably don’t even realize this is an issue…it isn’t something the MSM talks about. Just by getting it into the debate, we gain the advantage…and a fight over this means other things like border walls and strict deportation for adult illegals will become easier.

The MSM is busy trying to downplay the Hunter Biden scandal – seriously saying it is all about a father’s desire to help his addict son. Yeah, sure…every addict son gets $10 million from foreign entities funneled through a raft of offshore shell companies. They’re caught and they know it – but there’s also nothing anyone can really do about it. Its all Federal and Pudding Brain’s people simply won’t allow anything to happen.