I see no reason not to continue paying those contractors. Just move them all to the southern border.

People that break the law to come here show me they are OK with that, and are more likely to break other laws when they are here.  Plus, we have NO way of knowing who they are.  Why is the Left OK with letting in people we know nothing about, and could be criminals, terrorists, drug dealers, gang members, or just people that want to take free stuff from our system.

Why is this OK to Leftists?  Why is it OK for American citizens to be put AT MORE RISK due to un-vetted illegal aliens that come here? 

Again, NO OTHER COUNTRY ALLOWS THIS.

It's okay with leftists because they overwhelmingly vote Democrat. I think that's the core of it, nothing more. Immigration has become a tool for the left to turn this country into a socialist state. Before the Democrat party became a vehicle for the Bolsheviks, immigration wasn't such a contentious issue. You come in, you naturalize and then you belong to one party or the other, both major parties were still basically pro-American. My mother's family came in the late 1800s and early 1900s and were working class rust belt Democrats but were also strongly rooted in conservative values, very religious, very loyal to this country and its Constitution.

The Democrat Party today is nothing like that.

I gathered that you didn't know illegal immigration rates had been declining. That's all.

Oh. I knew it but not the exact figures.

Just FYI: you're NOT a libertarian if you subscribe to punishment disproportionate or even prior to a crime.

The most dangerous person on the planet is a utopian idealist, libertarianism included. As a libertarian idealist - if I were one - I would believe individuals are best qualified to decide what is best for themselves, and in aggregate the best thing for a community as a whole is for each individual to selfishly pursue what is best for himself. The American free market has pretty much proved this to be true. This includes allowing individuals to emigrate and to move freely about.

The real world however has already been mucked up and not by libertarian policy. If you can wave a magic wand and eliminate the socialism that infects our country then I'd be more likely to agree with open borders. But the reality we have is illegal influx combined with internal economic ruination (socialism) is destroying the nation as surely as barbarian invasions plus internal corruption destroyed the Roman Empire. There's no stopping it, but I'd like to delay it as long as we can. At least until I'm dead then you can do what you want, I don't care.

It is rather odd to see you invoke the Berlin Wall on one hand, meant to keep people from freedom on pain of death, then propose the U.S. kill anyone crossing the Mexican Wall for freedom. You realize, BTW, that every one of the people who managed to cross the Berlin Wall to the West became temporary (and potentially permanent) indigents sucking resources from taxpayers. So following your logic, not only the Russians but U.S. soldiers should have been gunning them down. Ugh.

BIG DIFFERENCE, keeping people in vs keeping them out. I only used the Berlin Wall as an example of no physical barrier being perfect. You are putting words in my mouth about comparing the two wrt the rest of it. Artificially dividing a culturally unified Germany because of the psychotic paranoia of Communism, as opposed to defending a national border is apples and oranges. Good Lord.

Um, they always have and always will self-select, unless you are proposing the government begin kidnapping "high-value" foreigners. I think North Korea has tried that. The U.S. doesn't (yet) run a socialist planned economy so I'd rather the U.S. not continue down that path by selecting immigrants with skills somebody thinks are important.

Wow, there you go putting words into my mouth again. In what way have I ever suggested kidnapping people or advocated a socialist planned economy? Quite the opposite.

Quality of people matters. I realize it's not politically correct to admit that people vary in ability, intelligence, work ethic, and all around morality, but that doesn't change reality. There is nothing wrong with setting a minimum bar for several of these parameters. At the very least, we need to deny entry to gang members and criminals. Illegal entry does not even do that. After that we can argue over who to let in. Years ago I applied to immigrate to Australia. The package they sent me made it clear, you had to be a degreed professional to be considered. Why is it okay for Australia or any other country in the world to accept only quality people but not us? Try moving to Japan. You not only need to be able to support yourself from the get go, you need to have good character, prove yourself loyal and renounce citizenship in any other country. Why the hell is it okay for everyone but us to set standards?

It's special pleading to claim illegal immigrants indigents cause "harm" in that way and treat them differently from legal immigrant or natively born indigents. They're all indigents, meaning they are all consuming taxpayer money. Killing all illegals because some may become indigents but sparing all other indigents is morally obscene.  If you have a problem with indigents, look to the operation of social services as the origin, not one particular subset of indigents.

I don't advocate killing someone because they might become indigent.  Don't try to change what I said. Once inside our borders, I don't advocate executing them just because they snuck in. I advocate defending our borders, with deadly force if necessary. If nothing else stops them, shoot to stop them.  It's the same as most personal self defense law. And it is natural law. Humans group together and then defend their territory.

I bolded the word illegal which you said, then in the same sentence you claim they should not be treated differently from legal immigrants or native citizens. A priori, the illegal is illegal.  What is so hard to understand about this?  They have already committed a crime, and therefore should be treated differently.

The cause of those illegals is an artificially low quota of 675,000 immigrants (excluding close family members already citizens) compared to a demand and need of an order of magnitude or larger (as clear in the government document I posted earlier.)

I agree with you there should not be an artificial quota.

Also, illegals may steal SS numbers, but unless they steal the name and ID, they pay SS withholdings but will never claim retirement. You've identified a form of fraud that actually helps SS retirees by withholding from non-legit SS payees who will be unable to collect SS.

That's a good one. I won't hold my breath after I retire waiting for my extra money they helpfully sent in for me. It's FRAUD. If they use a real number, somebody might indeed collect, someone who did not actually do the work.

I am opposed to the entire Social Security scheme, and like I said before, if I were an idealist it would not exist to be defrauded. But we have what we have.  If we need workers, and we do, they need to be brought into the legal system. To continue to allow them to enter illegally and defraud not only SS but welfare, unemployment, etc. is wrong and needs to be stopped by whatever means necessary.

Lastly, effectively no vetting (relative to today) and no quotas were employed during greatest period of growth of the U.S. frontier. Many immigrants weren't even literate, yet managed to carve a civilization out of a wilderness. I don't know when your ancestors arrived in the U.S., but mine had no particular skills.

Good Lord. You cannot compare different eras. We have what we have today, no new frontiers, no factories hungry for workers. We have a dying nation (despite the current economic Trump bump) we are a stagnant socialist nation barely behind Europe's dying socialist nations, thanks to all the utopian idealists on the left. We have to deal with the mess they made. We cannot afford to bring in more parasites. Close the borders, and vet contributors or we will only die faster.

You'd ruin the economy - please don't build that time machine (unless you can reverse things once you see how awful they turn out.) And how'd you get to be king and not a queen?

To me "man" can mean "person" and "king" can mean a gender neutral ruler. I'm not into PC.  I don't use the term "chairwoman" or "mailperson" and the like. Nonsense.

A house is not analogous to a country for any useful purpose.

Let's take a specific example: If an illegal immigrant crosses the border via public lands (some of the border land is (or was) privately owned, the rest public) and via public roads checks into a hotel or stays with friends at their house, my house isn't affected. Nor is your house. No harm is caused to anyone. But you'd want to see them killed "just in case" they might use taxpayer resources. Ugh.

NO!  Not "just in case".  They have ALREADY committed a crime, by attempting to enter our country illegally. What is so hard to grasp about this?

It is a matter of legal paperwork to make the borders between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada like those between U.S. states (I believe that was Ronald Reagan's dream back around 1979.)

OK.

BTW, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" by Frederick Jackson Turner http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22994, written in 1893 proposes that the character of the nation was forged by the expanding frontier. He has a lot of insights into the way past migrations changed the culture of the U.S. Worth a read IMHO, at least the first chapter. The Gutenberg book is technically a compilation of his papers, only the first of which needs to be read to get his thesis.

I might check it out if I have time.

Johnny picks up Jenny for their date and they head to the town carnival. After some popcorn and carnival games, Johnny asks her what she’d like to do next. “I wanna get weighed” says Jenny.

Off to the scale they go.

After a few more games and food, Johnny again asks what she’d like to do next. “I wanna get weighed!” says Jenny a little more emphatically.

Off to the scale they go again.

This happens a third and a fourth time that evening.

Slightly frustrated, Johnny drops Jenny off back at her house.

Jenny walls in the door and her mother asks “how was your date”?

“WOWSIE”! Screams Jenny

Took me a second to get this but, hahaha!

Bill Clinton has been a private citizen for 17 years, and his wife couldn't get elected dog catcher now.  But you guys just can't give it up.  I guess you need your boogeymen to distract you from the utter incompetence of your precious leader.

?  How is Trump incompetent? I and most the rest of middle class are going to save a couple thousand this year in taxes thanks to him. The unemployment rate is at record lows thanks to him. We have a chance to finally corral NK thanks to him, we are finally not letting China get away with unfair trade that was hurting our economy, we have opened up the energy industry and made the U.S. an energy exporter again, investors are bring money back home from overseas, wages are finally rising again, black new business ownership is up 400% just this year, welfare rolls are at historic lows, ISIS is gone, he's rolling out plans to cut foreign aid, he's cutting regulations left and right, I could go on and on.

Even if you disagree whether it's good to do all the above you can't say he's incompetent.

They hate any state that isn't controlled by one or more Metro Areas (city and burbs) which are now overwelmingly Democrat.  So, the coasts, and states like IL, MN, etc, they like.  Others, not at all. 

I have said this before.  Our divide is largely Metro/Non-Metro in this country.  We are losing the battle as more people are urbanizing, and either are Democrat, or become Democrat.  These metro areas control every state in which they have the population to do so, and more often than not, they do.

The urban/Dem areas are the new aristocracy, totally disconnected from the workers and farmers that feed their asses, and deliver energy and goods across the country to their asses, and they are completely contemptuous and snobby in their disdain for the "inferior" lowly classes: rural, hillbilly, redneck, mouth breathing, knuckle dragging, gun loving, religion clinging low brow uneducated unsophisticated lesser forms of human.

More and more insulated and the young ones coming up now, attending urban universities are totally and completely devoid of any understanding of the entire 50% of the country that does not follow lockstep to the unified leftist monochrome that is now academia.

I guess my thinking is if women may not be succeeding in some fields it is far more likely to be a matter of socialization than biology.

....There is biological reason that women can't do math and physics.  There is nothing about having two X chromosomes, or having the bloodstream diffused with estrogen (fun fact, estrogen and testosterone differ by exactly one methyl group).  .....
 

(I think you meant there is no biological reason.....)

I think there is something about gender that makes an innate biological difference in interests.  From birth, boys have different interests than girls.  Our closest primate relatives show the exact same thing. In chimpanzees and in monkeys and baboons, male babies and youth spend much more time rough housing with their friends than do females, and young females have intense interest in newborn babies, and constantly try to "borrow" them from their mothers, whereas the male young show far less to even no interest in babies.

If you accept evolution, and you accept that in the tree of life homo sapiens is very, very closely related to other primates, you cannot ignore the similarities with human children, where girls prefer dolls and boys prefer trucks and trains and toy guns. It is very hard to argue that the monkeys and apes are "socializing" their babies to prefer roughhousing or play auntie to younger babies. Likewise, studies with human babies have pretty much conclusively shown that gender differences exist from birth.

So yes, I think there is a biological reason women are less likely to prefer math and physics, but I agree with you that there is no biological reason women can't do math and physics.  They can.  Likewise in monkeys and apes, the female NHP youth do engage in rough house play, just not nearly to the extent the males do, and the males are capable of carrying and caring for babies, they just don't go seeking it the way females do.

Saying that all women think the same way and want the same things is insipidly stupid.

Absolutely. But we are talking about averages, and tendencies in large groups. There is significant overlap. There can be a statistical likelihood that any one individual fits the norm, but you cannot state conclusively about any one individual.

You can't say all women think the same way any more than all men do, or all blacks think the same way or want the same thing. But you cannot ignore majority behavior either. To me it is equally wrong to force an individual to comply with that majority behavior, as it is to try to force them away from it from a misguided notion that they "should" be more "equal" to the other gender. Both are wrong.

This is hugely important to us.  The pilot population has been decreasing for decades.  If we're to stem this tide some out of the box thinking may be required.  Half the population is 6% of pilots, despite the fact that many have the wherewithal and I bet would make better pilots than lots of the men.  There isn't some biological impressive keeping women out of the cockpit, its how they're treated by society.

There is biological reason that women can't do math and physics.  There is nothing about having two X chromosomes, or having the bloodstream diffused with estrogen (fun fact, estrogen and testosterone differ by exactly one methyl group).  It is something about how they're treated by their fellow humans, and if we can figure out what that is we might have a big new group of potential pilots.

The problem with tendencies in large groups with a bell curve distribution is that when something requires a high score on a certain parameter, you will get much more meaningful differences at either ends of the distribution. Let's say interest in math and physics is on bell curve. There is a curve for men and there is a curve for women and all the individuals are represented somewhere on those curves, but the mean for men is higher than the mean for women.

Then lets say you have an occupation that does not require any particular outstanding strength in math or physics. The number of individuals that would be able to do that occupation is very large, of both men and women, because in the average range of the ability the bell curve peaks for each are nearby and the proportional difference between them is small.

But let's say there's an occupation requiring a high degree of interest and knowledge of math and physics. If you pick a cutoff below which the individual is unable to perform, now look at the tails of the two bell curves and you will see proportionately many more individuals in the curve that is shifted more to the right, in this case, males.

This is why males are disproportionately represented in certain fields requiring a high interest in STEM or a high level of motivation to succeed (overly represented as CEOs). It might not be discrimination against women AT ALL.  It might just be that the abilities to perform are along bell curves that are different for males and females in a biologically innate way.

This does not mean men are worth more than women. On other scales women are superior. Women score higher than men in nurturing, and in intuition, and in certain communication skills, and in some kinds of judgment. Women are more likely to pick up on subtle signs of illness in others. Women are better at reading emotions on faces.  Women see the world more holistically, men see it more in terms of linear logic. (Incidentally I believe this is resulting in large numbers of primary care female doctors moving toward a more integrated approach to the patient, and I think it's a very good thing, because male doctors have too long viewed us as sets of unrelated systems ie: GI, neuro, cardiac, etc., all having little to do with each other, which is turning out to be a disaster, while men are still fantastic at fixing linear isolated problems like surgically removing a brain tumor.)

It's not good or bad but it is biologically innate, I believe, because innate gender differences exist through other species and there is no reason to believe humans are exempt.

But to your question about pilots.  I believe you are correct that looking to engage more females to want to be pilots is a possible solution. I think the biggest problem is that we are no longer producing enough young!  The population is aging and we in the first world are barely at replacement reproduction, under it in fact in many places. It has become a crisis in Japan for example.

If you accept the notion, as I do, that being a pilot requires a certain level of interest in STEM plus a certain level of intelligence plus a certain level of health, there is a limit to the proportion of the population pool that can be pilots. As you go out to the right on the STEM bell curve, you'll have a larger portion of your pool male.  On the health curve possibly the female pool will be larger. Intelligence is fairly even between the genders but there may be a slight edge of males on the top and bottom ends.

Any one individual may vary from the averages of his/her gender, so there will be females interested in math and physics but there will be fewer of them. The challenge is to make sure the ones that do, have the opportunity to follow their interest. The challenge is not to try to create unnatural interest in STEM in females who otherwise aren't.