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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
I also want to know how out of how many total apprehensions? 6 out of 100 is different from 6 out of 100,000.
(Along with some idea of what percentage of illegal crossers are apprehended, and some consideration of the possibility that a trained terrorist might be more successful than your average illegal border crosser at evading capture.)
There is also the matter of reporting accuracy to consider. A few years back they deployed a military drone that had been used to track Taliban crossing the Pakistani border. The first night, Border Patrol listed 6 attempts, 5 of whom were caught. The drone spotted 85 attempts.
When we toured the USS North Carolina, I noticed that all the doors were small.
I figured it was from 12 O’clock High.
Here are some visual examples:
The crew of the USS Ward posing next to a 4-inch gun (the one they sank a Japanese minisub with on Dec 7, 1941
(From US Flush-Deck Destroyers 1916–45: Caldwell, Wickes, and Clemson classes.)
Sailors of the USS Houston visiting the statue of Queen Victoria at Hong Kong, 1930s, (That iron fence is 5″ tall)
From The Cruiser Houston.
Sailors aboard the battleship Texas – one inside the barrel of a 14-inch gun.
(From Battleship Texas)
Ordinance men loading incendiary clusters in a B-29, 1945
(From Japan 1944–45: LeMay’s B-29 strategic bombing campaign.)
The Depression generation was scrawny.
Too many people seem to think “subject to the jurisdiction…” means they can get a traffic ticket, or something. That’s not what it intended.
But still, we’re at the point where the whole Constitution means only what the Supreme Court decides from moment to moment. With enough Hillary Clinton nominees etc, they could “decide” that the whole Constitution is just – to quote a Star Trek (TNG) episode – “a recipe for biscuits.”
In addition to vintage aircraft and illegal immigration, I’d like this thread to cover vaccination laws, climate change, and whether the Grateful Dead’s music was truly art or not.
The discussion so far is great but it’s just too narrow.
Start your own thread on those three issues. This one is too far down the past.
I was disappointed nobody mentioned my search tag.
OK. Now that I’ve READ it…that is a very good (and funny) search tag. Maybe I should start reading search tags. The tag makes me realize that the connection between the two seemingly disparate subjects was an essential part of the point of the article. Which is why you added it.
But I would never admit that a clever satirical comment of mine was off-target. It really has an element of insight to it which can be explained, somehow. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Estimating illegal crossings seems like a very tricky challenge and I have no idea how they do that. I think the point about the visa overstays, though, is that it won’t be solved by a wall because they’re already here.
I’m not.
If I’m traveling from Belgium, with my pregnant wife, and she delivers, that baby is an American? No. “Permanent domicile” seems to mean there’s room for interpretation. I’m just guessing but that’s probably something largely ignored for illegal aliens, though.
In Wong Kim Ark the Supreme Court held that, under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a man born within the United States to foreigners (in that case, Chinese citizens) who have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States and are carrying on business in the United States[3] and who were not employed in a diplomatic or other official capacity by a foreign power, was a citizen of the United States. More broadly, the court characterized the statement, All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States as “the broad and clear words of the Constitution”, ruling that Wong’s U.S. citizenship had been acquired by birth and had not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth.[27]
For numbers of US births to illegal aliens:
The policy stems from the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, stating “[a]ll 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,” and was meant to override the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that denied African Americans citizenship.[5] The application of birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants remains controversial among right-wing politicians.[6] The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that approximately 7.5% of all births in the U.S. (about 300,000 births per year) are to unauthorized immigrants.[7] The Pew Hispanic Center also estimates that there are 4.5 million children who were born to unauthorized immigrants that received citizenship via birth in the United States; while the Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are 4.1 million children. Both estimates exclude anyone eighteen and older who might have benefited.[7][8]
They all wanted to be models.
Me too. All the living spaces were shrunk-a-doodled.
It will if you deport them.
And not give them a new visa for overstaying on a prior visa. Thats the second leg of the tripod we need in border control.
A real wall.
Real visa monitoring and enforcement.
A functioning E Verify system with teeth.