Private Mars Rocket II

I've noticed in several Facebook posts that whenever I say anything disparaging about the current budget crisis, I am immediately accused of being in favor of illegal immigration.

I'm not. I'm in favor of effective solutions. Currently, most places where walls would be effective at stopping or slowing illegal immigration already have some kind of wall or fence. For the record, if there's some place that a wall would help and we don't have one, let's put one in. But running walls through the middle of the Arizona desert won't do any good. Walls merely slow people down. Without aggressive monitoring, alarms and law enforcement response, a wall is a waste of money.

But the debate doesn't seem to be about that. In one Facebook discussion, when I said going after people who hire illegal immigrants would be more effective, the other person said, "so because there are other means that work too, we just shouldn’t even try?" In another Facebook discussion, I didn't bring up the wall - I merely pointed out that Trump was at one time for taxing the rich.

It seems to be that for Trump and his supporters, the wall has become some sort of emotional talisman. In their minds, the wall in and of itself is the most important thing. It could be equipped with ladders every twenty feet and we could fire the entire Border Patrol, but a wall must be built. It's not a rational argument, it's an emotional one.

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on," said Winston Churchill. Today's lie is that Sharia police are legally patrolling the streets of Germany.

Here's the truth. In September 2014, five German mooks (admittedly radical Islamists) put on red hi-vis vests with the English words "Sharia Police" on them and walked the streets of Wuppertal, a town in Germany. They made sure to get photographed doing so, and their "police activity" consisted of telling people to not go to bars.

Nobody over the age of five thought these mooks were police (the German police wear yellow hi-vis with the word "Polizei" on them, for starters) and they didn't try to arrest anybody. They were, in fact, arrested by the real police and charged. A lower court ruled in their favor but an appeals court ordered them tried. While all the legal wrangling was going on, our mooks were patrolling their gardens and living rooms.

It was, in short, a photo-op, staged to create a propaganda overreaction in English-speaking countries. It worked, thanks to the same pants-wetters running to vote for Donald Trump.

We live in a fact-free world. What I mean by that is people feel free to ignore inconvenient facts and/or free to substitute what they want to be true for what is.

For example, 2014 was the warmest year on record. 2015 is on track to be warmer than 2015, AKA, the new warmest year on record. Yet, in our fact-free world, people can tell me with a straight face that global warming has "paused." I do not think that word "pause" means what they think it means.

Yesterday, two mopes shot up a holiday party of government employees at a developmental center. If said mopes had been white Christians, we would be told that they are "individual nuts" and nothing can be done. Since they're not, we're being told "ISIS is coming to eat you alive!" and, even though the man was born in the USA, we need to prevent Syrian refugees from entering the country.

The fact that the USA has a murder rate five times that of most industrialized countries is ignored, as is the fact that social misfits will gravitate towards any of a number of radical movements. This later fact is true whether we're talking Europeans in Europe or Americans in America. (Even crazy people have a reason for why they do what they do.)

I could go on, but I'll leave with this thought - facts are like gravity. Gravity doesn't care if you believe in it or not.