Kilmar Abrego Floyd

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I was distracted for a few days, so imagine my surprise when I saw that the lead story was Maryland Senator Van Hollen sitting in a San Salvador restaurant with some deported MS-13 gangster.

That was not on my April bingo card.

The story is about an illegal immigrant resident in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to his native El Salvador.

The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) would like you to believe that this is the civil rights crusade of our time, the biggest crisis since George Floyd (more on that in a minute). They claim Abrego Garcia was simply a peaceful Maryland husband and father, wrongfully picked up and deported by an authoritarian Trump administration.

Think I got it wrong? Well, I did, because he “wasn’t picked up and deported (to his home country)” but rather:

“In an authoritarian regime, the opposition needs symbols and stories. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that symbol. His abduction in front of his autistic son and imprisonment in a foreign concentration camp is that story.”

You can read the rest of the piece if you want. I’m so old, I remember when Jonathan Last was a respectable writer.

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Past Forgetting

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So, Ed Driscoll at Instapundit is dedicated to posting Covid retrospectives along the nature of “On this Day Five Years Ago…” Some comments appended to his various posts over the last few weeks express exasperation with his apparent complete inability (or disinclination) when it comes to pithy summarization, and others express exasperation with remembering the Covidiocy day by day and blow by blow. For myself, I have a mouse with a scroll-wheel and can use it. As for the second category of comments – yes, we should not forget what Covid did to us.

Yes, we ought to remember every day, every jot and tittle of such state-sponsored torments piled upon us in the name of the Unparalleled Epidemic Danger From the Covid Plague (eleventy!!!), and the identities and employers of those individuals who either inflicted those torments on the public or cheered them on through media, both Established and Social. We ought to remember every detail of civic lockdowns demanded by governors and local officials getting in touch with their inner authoritarian or feeling obliged to respond to that manufactured panic – especially those who flouted the rules that they inflicted on everyone else. (Looking at you especially, Governor “Hair-gel” Newsome, frolicking with friends at the French Laundry.)

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“Service Industries”

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Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux, in today’s WSJ:

Yet workers aren’t eager to do that (work in manufacturing plants), and for the past 60 years Americans have educated their children to enable them to work in the services industries where wages are higher and opportunities greater.

I wonder what Gramm and Boudreaux visualize when they use the term “service industries.”  It is a very, very broad category, ranging from Uber Eats delivery drivers to shelf stockers at Home Depot to plumbers and handymen to trash collectors to warehouse workers at Amazon to local CPAs and high-level management consultants. Also rock bands, software development companies, and used-car salesmen.

True also of jobs in manufacturing, ranging from assembly worker to skilled machinist or toolmaker to shelf-stocker to dispatcher/expeditor to industrial engineer to PLC programmer to plant manager and VP of manufacturing.

Note that both the factory and the service business will employ janitors doing very similar work, and he will be categorized as a manufacturing or service employee accordingly…unless the job of ‘janitor’ is outsource to another firm, in which case he will fall under ‘services’.

Note also that the work of a distribution warehouse worker and the work of a stocker/picker in a factory will likely be very similar, despite the fact that the latter is considered ‘manufacturing’ and the former is considered ‘services.’  It would appear that Gramm and Boudreaux would regard the job of the warehouse worker as somehow higher-value and more in tune with technological progress.

Also, that part about Americans having educated their children to enable them to work in the services industries where wages are higher and opportunities greater…are they really unaware with the problems with so much American education over past decades, resulting in a lot of people who having limited written communication and even more limited basic math abilities? A lot of people are in dead-end service jobs specifically because of their lack of these skills, and indeed in many cases can function in those jobs at all only because of the computer-based deskilling that has been applied to the work.

Your thoughts?

Diverse Problems

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It seems the updated version of the “British Disease” has now (unsurprisingly) taken root in Canada.

In Montreal, an independent journalist was violently thrown to the ground and arrested by the police while documenting a pro-Hamas protest. To add insult to injury, the leading French language newspaper cheered the decision.

In the 1970s, the term “British Disease” referred to the economic stagnation and labor unrest in the contemporary UK.

Now I use the term in regard to an oppressive regime that intervenes in order to mediate among factions in an increasingly fractious society. This was predicted by Mark Steyn 20 years ago regarding the development of a separate and assertive Muslim identity within British society.

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