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Hole Theory
B-17G 43-38172 of the 8th AF 398th BG 601st BS which was damaged on a bombing mission over Cologne, Germany, on 15 October 1944 (Only the bombardier was killed.)
The B-17 was one helluva of an airplane. Like the old Timex ad used to say, it could take a lickin’ and keep right on tickin’.
Engineers and aviation buffs to this day marvel at how much damage a Flying Fortress could take and still fly back to their home bases in Britain. During the war Boeing dispatched designers to look at these damaged wonders and make them even better. To do that though it took some counter-intuitive thinking.
If you look at a shot up airplane you might come to the conclusion that the areas that took the most damage were the areas that needed the most reinforcement. But just the opposite is true.
Because they were examining planes that actually made it back, the damage observed was actually the least vulnerable area of the aircraft. You could make these areas look like swiss cheese and the damned things would still fly. It was the undamaged areas that were the most vulnerable. Hit the planes there and they didn’t come back. It was the unobservable damage that meant everything.
(NBCNews.com)
Today, NBC News ran with an “exclusive” that they claim bolsters their case that President Trump’s statements about terrorists sneaking across our unsecured southern border is simply not true. Only six people that were detained by the Customs and Border Patrol in the first half of 2018 had their names show up in the nation’s terrorist database, says reporter Julia Ainsley.
All well and good. But like the holes in the B-17s, the problem isn’t in what you can observe, it’s in what you can’t observe. The terrorists we do catch at the southern border aren’t the problem, it’s the ones that slipped in unobserved.
9/11 wasn’t caused by what we knew, it was caused by what we didn’t know. And we’re still looking at the wrong holes and coming to the wrong conclusions.
Published in Immigration
Corvair Monza, more flights than I can count, including one especially daring one in sub-zero temperatures where we kept the windows closed most of the way to the high school, except that my sister, who was especially sensitive to carbon monoxide and was driving, would poke her head out occasionally for oxygen.
Also have 0.3 hours logged flying a Cessna 150 (the number of hours may have been inflated greatly over years of story-telling, but the Cessna was definitely at least a 150), drove a green Pinto with a clean sheet for fuel-tank explosions, and racked up .017 International Master Points in bridge. (My brother-in-law and I accidentally bid a slam at Wash U. bridge club duplicate match, and it turned out to be cold if you took four finesses, which was the one bridge move I knew.)
Also, was cleaning out a cupboard yesterday and found a tiny commemorative baseball bat indicating I was Assistant Practice Coach for my son’s baseball team. (Would have been even more impressive if they left off “Assistant”, or at least “Practice”. I wonder now if they were making fun of me.)
I didn’t know there were that many jockeys in the world.
That’s something that needs to be fixed.
Perhaps but I don’t see the Constitution being amended to do so any time soon. Until it is…
Never found the seat cushion. Heh.
That’s the legalistic trick. Anchor babies. Dissimulates the amplitude and impact of the wave. I broke the law, but my children are in possession, so I get to stay and raise them in the manner I know how. The question is : Why live here illegally when it can be done legally ?
If George Romney was born in Mexico but has US citizenship, and Ted Cruz is born in Canada gets the same, why are kids born to Mexican citizens Americans?
Back when I was in Jersey City, one Saturday morning I started hearing planes go by that were not usual selection of high altitude passenger jets and low flying helicopters. Then I heard one that made me look up and say, “what the hell, that’s a B-17”. (The sound was burned into my brain by repeated viewings of Memphis Belle.) Went to the window and sure enough, a B-17 was coming down the Hudson, at about a thousand feet, a bombing run over the river. About every ten minutes for an hour, it would come back through, as part of a cycle of six or seven classic planes.
Quite likely, it was one of the planes from the links above.
Because the 14th Amendment says so.
We can dream.
Me too.
Or…Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer. Well worth the time to read.
Are you sure about that?
Certain.
Look at the photos of US soldiers, sailors, airman, and marines back in WWII. They were all skinny. I really notice it putting together photos for my books.
We don’t know visa overstays either. We have no way of knowing who is here or where.
We don’t even know visa overstays because we don’t have any system in place to track them. That would be another part of the puzzle for border security. Along with a wall and a functional E verify system.
Can’t have that.
But their illegal border crossing parents aren’t. And those kids shouldn’t be.
“(N)o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
That’s why the amendment refers to people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.” For generations, African-Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren’t citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a civil war to end.
The 14th Amendment fixed that.
The amendment didn’t even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.
Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It’s easy to miss — the law is titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”) Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?
Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.
I think we can get a good idea of visa overstays, certainly more so than trying to guess how many people are illegally entering over the border. Mainly, it’s because we do know how many visas are issued. We also know what would happen if everyone left at the visa expiration date. You then work back from there and estimate how many people are actually just staying. I’m sure DHS has some technique they use for calculating that.
Color me highly skeptical that the new talking point that 90% of illegals are visa overstays is accurate. Until the last few months that number was always stated as 40%-45%.
And yet the amendment does not state “All persons previously held in servitude are to be citizens of the United States and of the state in wherein they reside…”. Instead it reads, “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.” There is no mention of previous servitude (as there is in the 15th Amendment) just an acknowledgement some classes of people (children of diplomats representing foreign powers and those of sovereign Indian nations) are not subject to US jurisdiction by previous agreement or tradition.
And the debate on the issue at the time makes it crystal clear that those who sneak in the country illegally are not subject to the full jurisdiction of he United States. They can’t vote (legally), be called for jury duty, be drafted or any of innumerable other similar realities.
As there was no law making it illegal to enter the country at the time, how could the debate on the matter be clear on it?
Read it.
If overstays are the bulk of the problem, what is the solution? Seems to me a wall is the low hanging fruit. Pick that first.
Read what?
I am surprised that no one has quoted Donald Rumsfeld’s famous lines which the media berated him for):
Once they enter, we may have no idea where they went or where they are staying—they could have gone elsewhere than what they indicated on their visa application. However, we should be have some idea about who is overstaying and who is not—at least about these who left by air (or sea). To get on an international flight one has to have his passport scanned. I do not know where exactly this information is going, but I cannot imagine that it is not shared with the relevant government agencies.
Until some time ago, every visa entrant to the US, whether by air, sea, or land, was issued a paper copy of a form I-94 (Arrival/Departure Form). These had to be returned to CPB upon departure from the country. I think that presently only the arrivals by land get the paper forms. Those who arrived by air or sea get an electronic form. This is how, I think, the scanned passport information is used to mark the departure on the electronic I-94s.
So, again, we may not know exactly where they are after they enter, but we should have pretty good idea how many have overstayed.
I heard the B-17 in the introductory lecture of an operations research course I took eons ago. They were just inventing operations research at the time in order to fight the war more efficiently and looking at the B-17 in that way was part of the process. Of course, in the story it was a general standing up in front of a group of officers and a young 2nd lieutenant coming up with the line of we should be looking at where the plane wasn’t hit.