January 29, 2017

At the January Café...

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... you can talk about anything you want.

And please remember to consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal when you have some on-line shopping you need to do.

42 comments:

Todd Roberson said...

Just watched some reruns of Bewitched last night for the first time in decades.

Elizabeth Montgomery. I forgot how cute she was.

That Darrin was one lucky account executive.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Ah, the bleak mid-winter. But in my part of the world we're less than a month away from the first signs of spring.

cf said...

Thank you, Ann, for continuing the open window of your cafes. They are ca comfort and relief to me, an opportunity to say anything, like fresh air, new thought. And usually so beautifully illustrated like this one.

What I would have to share tonight is too full of grief and dark truths that must be reviewed at some point soon, but I cannot bear to break the golden reverie tonight.

So, I am glad there will continue to be opportunities to bring anything to the cafe. I will weigh one down another night perhaps, but not this one. ahhh, sunday evening, peace to all.


Ignorance is Bliss said...

I'm trying to decide if the picture is blue with black, or white with gold...

Lucien said...

It appears that the country of Mexico acts as if it has some legitimate interest in having people cross into a neighboring country (USA) illegally; and in opposing the actions taken by that neighboring country to enforce its immigration laws and expel those who enter it illegally.

Can someone explain what rationale Mexico articulates to support its claim to such a legitimate interest?

Are there other countries that claim similar interests in frustrating the immigration policies of their neighbors?

Kathryn51 said...

I'm watching reruns of Perry Mason. In honor of Barbara Hale. On the Hallmark Channel.

I'm exhausted by FB - hysteria taking up too much room and I miss posts re: family, children, vacations. At least I spotted reminder re: Nephew's BD.

Thanks for café post, Professor.

Trumpit said...

Why should Mexico bear the cost of a border wall if it is situated on U.S. territory?

Sometimes, when a fence/wall is the dividing line between two neighbors both will agree to pay for repairs or for a new wall. Cat's can climb or circumvent most walls; dogs are not so agile. Dogs might be able to dig underneath a wall to escape. Birds can fly over a wall.

Insisting Mexico pay for a U.S. wall is a bizarre idea and an affront to Mexico.
Why should Mexico pay for it?

The Berlin wall was built to keep East Germans from fleeing to West Germany. It was very effective at that. My mother brought home a chunk of the wall with graffiti when she traveled to Germany around the time the wall came down. I don't know what happened to that souvenir.

CWJ said...

I am so tired of the daily troll, and those who engage him/her. The blog is still good, but the comments sections have slid into predictability.

Oh, by the way, bite me trumpit. Try having a thought of your own someday.

See, even I will rise to the bait. Sad.

roesch/voltaire said...

Took a break from the news etc and saw Dog's Purpose tonight-- charming to a dog lover like myself. Peta is off on this one I think.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

National Affairs: Out Country Split Apart

Please note especially the discussion of "niceness."

Earnest Prole said...

Elizabeth Montgomery: Yummy.

Sydney said...

Lovely photo. I've had it with Facebook, too. Very little happiness there anymore. I should probably start posting happy stuff to try to make up for it, but I am too busy working so I just read mostly, and it is depressing. Will we ever return to normal?

JML said...

We've just started watching 'Grantchester' on Amazon. No Elizabeth Montgomery but a decent plot.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Trumpit has been outed as a conservative Moby. I recommend that instead of getting angry we play with him. Maybe we can get to Laslo territory.

cf, God bless you, I don't know what you face, but believe that you are not alone.

rcocean said...

"Elizabeth Montgomery. I forgot how cute she was."

Especially in the first couple years in B&W.

YoungHegelian said...

@Lucien,

Can someone explain what rationale Mexico articulates to support its claim to such a legitimate interest?

Yes, the desperation that comes from knowing your country will fall apart if the cash stream from El Norte is severed. Remember, we're not just talking about legal cash remittances (which since 2015 have been Mexico's largest source of foreign income), but we're also talking about the illegal drug money flows getting affected.

If those two cash flows get dramatically reduced at the same time, Mexico implodes a la Venezuela.

Jupiter said...

Lucien said...

"Can someone explain what rationale Mexico articulates to support its claim to such a legitimate interest?"

I think Mexican politicians are rather careful not to articulate the rationale, which is that we stole it from them and one way or another they hope to get it back.

In any case, at this point they probably feel that they have a prescriptive easement. Property rights that are not asserted and defended cease to exist. That is a principle of both Mexican and American law.

harkin said...

cf - hang in there.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

Lovely photo, Althouse. When was it taken? There's very little snow in Shorewood. We were supposed to have gotten hit last week, but thank goodness, we only got a light dusting.

Mark said...

Why should Mexico bear the cost of a border wall if it is situated on U.S. territory?

The argument can certainly be made that since the Mexican government and the Mexican people have encouraged, aided and abetted people in violating U.S. law by unlawfully crossing the border and entering the U.S. and also transferring ill-gotten financial gains from unlawful employment to Mexico, then as a matter of restitution and unjust enrichment, Mexico should in justice remedy the harm it has caused by paying for border enforcement.

Pianoman said...

@Kathryn51 -- totally agree with you. FB has been mostly off-limits to me since October.

The shrieking hysteria hasn't stopped. Not sure if it's *worse* ...

Sammy Finkelman said...

Patterico had a post in 2014 when that Wsshington Post study came out:

http://patterico.com/2014/10/24/wapo-publishes-scientific-evidence-of-voter-fraud-on-a-massive-scale-as-previously-predicted-by-this-here-very-blog/

The New York Times has not clearly what was wrong wth it, although the conclusions are absurd. The missing datum is how the sample was

Also if people were alerted to the fact that non-citizen voting was illegal

On Saturday they had some other figures, which leads me to a wild eyed guess of about 12,000 non-citizen votes in 2012. The Secretary of State of Ohio said there were 40 plus in two electon years, mostly foreign students swept up in voter registation drives at college campuses.

That would be maybe 20 each year. Assuming that 30 took place for each one detected, that would be 600 total.

Since Ohio has about 5% of the U.S. population. multiply 600 by 20 and that gives you 12,000.

They tried to make the claim thst the true incidence was zero on Friday.

Clyde said...

Cold here in Florida, by our standards. High yesterday only got up into the low 60s, and it's down in the 40s this morning. Brrrrrr! When I got off work yesterday at 3 p.m., it was 59 degrees locally, which was the same temperature as Denver! That's just not right in January!

Clyde said...

Then: Young Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Montgomery and Barbara Eden. Now: Lena Dunham and her ilk. Sad!

urbane legend said...

Elizabeth Montgomery. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

Robert Cook said...

"It appears that the country of Mexico acts as if it has some legitimate interest in having people cross into a neighboring country (USA) illegally; and in opposing the actions taken by that neighboring country to enforce its immigration laws and expel those who enter it illegally."

Why? Because they won't agree to being forced to pay for Trump's wall? Good for them for telling him to go Trump himself. Trumpit's comment is exactly right.

Robert Cook said...
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Robert Cook said...
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Quayle said...

"Why should Mexico pay for the wall?"

One other theory is that Mexico remains impoverished (and thus their citizens flock to the U.S. for a better life) because of their pervasive corruption, one result of which is the unpredictability of their administrative and judiciary systems.

One of the key factors which heretofore has made the U.S. so wealthy is the voluntary adherence to law, and the efficiency and predictability (relatively) of our judiciary

(In my work I travel to Monterrey. Despite these wonderful new shopping malls popping up all over Monterrey - and the amount of money that has been infused into Mexico's border cities by the relocated factories is amazing - they still have to have perches and security guards constantly watching every parking lot, I note.)

It is their unwillingness or inability to do the hard job to root out corruption which keeps them needing to come to the U.S. for a leg up.

Or put another way, why don't we have a border problem with Canada? Why aren't the Canadians flocking over the the U.S.? Why isn't their labor rate so much lower than the U.S.?

Bad Lieutenant said...

Robert, this is a yes or no question.

Is the United States entitled to control entry and exit of foreigners to its territory?

Bob Ellison said...

I miss my son. I'm lucky to have three other sons that mitigate the sense of loss.

We've been playing a game with our Amazon Alexa. It's in our dining room, and as dinner goes and then wanes, we call out to Alexa. "Alexa, play 'Witchi Tai To' by Brewer and Shipley." (That one is a little challenging, because Alexa pronounces "To" like the number 2.) We go around the table, with each person commanded to think up the next song in time to queue it up.

I need a better name for it. We call it "the Alexa game". There's a group-DJ aspect to it, and arguments abound. I can't stand the House Martins, for example, which my sister called up the other day. Maybe she wouldn't want me calling up Three Dog Night. It's fun to argue about music.

Bob Ellison said...

BTW, my son is not dead; he's just off at college. Don't want anyone to fear the worst.

MaxedOutMama said...

cf - peace and strength to you in the midst of whatever is troubling you.

Bob Ellison said...

My youngest son, who has Down Syndrome, was using his Kindle Fire, his favorite toy, at the dinner table the other day. He sometimes needs help looking things up. He said, with imperfect pronunciation, "Lion Sleeps Tonight". I said sure, buddy, I'll get that on your tablet. He said no, and pointed at Alexa. He was joining the Alexa game. Great selection!

Humperdink said...

Just watched Sean Spicer on Morning Rino this morning. Surrounded by six (6) commie-pinko lefties (aka Friends of Chuck), Spicer more than held his own. I was yugely impressed.

David Begley said...

Humperdinck

NYT guy was unglued. He didn't even try to hide his bias.

Humperdink said...

David Begley

To me, Jeremy Peters (NYT) always comes off as a snot-nosed little child. Gravitas (ha) is not one of his attributes.

Humperdink said...

I was amused at Chuck Scheemer's (D-NY) tears yesterday. The thought of all the lost voters was apparently too much for him.

As an aside, I would suggest he switch to bifocals. The glasses at the end of his snout is just not attractive.

Robert Cook said...

"Is the United States entitled to control entry and exit of foreigners to its territory?"

Every country has the right to control ingress and egress across its borders. Every country is likewise obliged to pay for whatever solutions it implements to exert such control. Mexico has no obligation to pay for in whole or part a wall between our borders that we have decided to build.

Michael K said...

One of the key factors which heretofore has made the U.S. so wealthy is the voluntary adherence to law, and the efficiency and predictability (relatively) of our judiciary

There is a whole theory of "High Trust and Low Trust Societies."

We are transitioning from high trust to low trust. The reasons are interesting and include uncontrolled immigration from a very corrupt society (Mexico).

Jupiter said...

Robert Cook said...

"Mexico has no obligation to pay for in whole or part a wall between our borders that we have decided to build."

Trump has not suggested, to my knowledge, that Mexico has an obligation to pay for a wall. He has merely suggested that he has or will find a way to make them do so. I don't think he is counting on getting an order from the World Court.

"Good for them for telling him to go Trump himself."

I note that we have finally found a government whose actions -- or perhaps whose inactions -- meet with Cookie's approval.

Jupiter said...

Quayle said...

"Or put another way, why don't we have a border problem with Canada? Why aren't the Canadians flocking over the the U.S.? Why isn't their labor rate so much lower than the U.S.?"

Because the French, Dutch and British immigrants who occupied North America wanted the land, and largely wiped out the indigenous inhabitants, while the Spanish who occupied Mexico wanted gold, and were content to let the indigenes stick around and do the hard work. The result is that you have very different genetic profiles in North and South. You can learn more about the origins and nature of that difference in a book called A Farewell To Alms.

And yes, that's racism, straight up with the hair on. Evolution is racist. That's why you don't believe in evolution, right?