OMG Immigration police seen detaining people denied asylum

Deporting illegal aliens

U.S. Customs Enforcement and Immigration officers are caught by the local Phoenix affiliate of ABC News, ABC15, in the act of DOING THEIR JOB! Just look at what is going on in downtown Phoenix today.

This is a Breaking News report. According to the ABC15 live action reporter,

Our crews at the scene on Wednesday morning saw agents waiting outside and detaining people as they exited the building. ABC15 spoke with a few of the people who were being placed in vans, who said they initially came to the courthouse for asylum cases, which they say were then dismissed.

Is case dismissed a good outcome? 

The reporter asked questions of two women being assisted to their seats in one of the white vans. Through the assistance of a Spanish interpreter, both said that they had gone to court for hearings of their request for asylum cases; the immigration judge had "dismissed" both cases. One woman was from Venezuela, another from Mexico. 

Asylum hearings are not like civil lawsuits or non-immigration related criminal charges!  Dismissal of a lawsuit or criminal indictment would be a GOOD thing for a defendant. Dismissal of a request for asylum would NOT be a good thing for an asylum seeker. If dismissal were the outcome of these immigration court hearings, then arrest and deportation would follow. 

ABC15 doesn't seem to realize this, as they "reached out to officials to find out why people were being detained or arrested".

Asylum as shortcut to migration

The consequences of illegal entry (i.e. deportation) are held in abeyance if one claims to be seeking asylum in the U.S. Until the presidential administrations of Obama or maybe, G.W. Bush, this sort of asylum seeking was rare, and mostly sought by citizens of Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War. 

As of 2018, an estimated 11 million illegal aliens resided in the U.S. including the Obama-declared DACA aka Dreamers. Between 10 and 20 million asylum seekers joined them during the four years of Joe Biden's presidency. Be aware that the entire U.S. population is about 330 million men, women, and children. 

11 + 15 = 26 million illegal non-citizens residing in our country means that 7.9% of the people in our country lack legal status.

Not-so-developing story

ICE's response should surprise no one:

"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is executing its mission of identifying and removing criminal aliens and others who have violated our nation’s immigration laws. All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality... The agency publicly announces operational results when appropriate."

Illegal entry to the U.S. is a criminal act, yet ABC15 news didn't consider the ICE statement to be helpful in shedding light on the situation. 

Trailer Park Hillbillionaires

For the love of God, PLEASE listen with volume on!

Elon plays a mean banjo. Count how many different versions of the stars-and-bars Zuckerberg wears on his t-shirts!

And yes, this video was created by generative AI but reddit didn't provide any additional details. 

The Trailer Park Hillbillionaires
by u/johnpershing in aivideo

How many hillbillionaires can YOU count?

I'm unsure if the one standing at a distance, toward the end, is Warren Buffet or not. I thought Bill Gates with the jar of bugs is hilarious.

Plane malfunction illusion: Rolling shutter effect

Chris wanted to take a photo while on an airplane flight. The aircraft was a Bombardier Q400. Chris didn't have a camera with him, only his Apple iPhone 3GS. The scanning order of his iPhone sensor combined with the light refracted from the airplane window caused a distinctive "detaching blades" phenomenon in the photo. Rotating the camera warps the blades in different directions.

Edit: Unfortunately for me, Chris is no longer sharing his photos online, but I have found others. Keep reading!

Bombardier Q400 digression

Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr

There have been some serious safety concerns with the Bombardier Dash Q400 Turboprop. Persistent problems with faulty landing gear received plenty of media coverage. Also, landing gear failure is highly noticeable to passengers! Some of the worry is depicted by The Cranky Flyer in the little drawing.

Although there have been no passenger injuries, thanks to pilot skill, multiple instances of left or right wheels failing to extend fully (or at all!) upon landing have occurred in Canada, the United States, and France. Those are the markets for Bombardier's small-to-medium sized commercial and business aircraft.

Engine stalls in very cold weather, due to ice, is another issue with the Q400. Both the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canadian air safety regulators launched formal inquiries.

Despite the appearance of Jason's photo below, there have never been any problems with Q400 propellers blades detaching and falling off while in flight!

Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr

Decline of Web 2.0

As I wrote in a prior post, about an 1870s cartographic depiction of America as a young hog, I wish the University of Michigan Map Library blog hadn't been discontinued. It isn't surprising, as Web 2.0, i.e. user contributed web content, has been in decline for years. It's difficult to believe that Technorati, once the authority for blog activity, tracked millions of blogs at one time.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?

Technorati sounded great! It was a blog search engine that was superior to Google's Blog Search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general: A new blog created every second: In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. Blog count was doubling every five months! Maybe.

Look familiar?

This was the Technorati landing page

Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was an awful lot of Internet hype.

Make America Porcine Again

Years ago, I found a post on the University of Michigan's Map Library blog. I consider it evergreen, as it is about two of my favorite things: Piggies and cartography!  Now seems like a good time to write about it. After all, maps were the safest way to travel during the COVID19 pandemic. Old maps even allow one to travel in time, with sufficient imagination.

In lieu of the Map Library blog, I turned to Big Think's Strange Maps. I located this excellent post, National Porcineographic: Portrait of America as a Young Hog.

Helping humans by helping pigs

William E. Baker was a 19th century tailor. He made his fortune thanks to a strategic alliance with what became the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. (It was later acquired by Singer Sewing Machines.) Baker's philanthropy was extensive, but centered on his Hygienic Farming and Sanitary Cookery initiative. He wanted to improve human health by helping pigs.

Unvirtuous circle: Boston was a cesspool

New England rapidly industrialized, and the population grew along with it. An ecosystem evolved but it was of a distinctly pragmatic sort. The City of Boston instituted a garbage pick-up service but then disposed of the garbage anywhere and everywhere possible. Typical locations for garbage dumping were on the outskirts of the city or in neighboring communities. It was NOT environmentally friendly! Town and nearby country dwellers developed a recycling response: They fed the garbage to pigs.

W.E. Baker believed that this practice was the cause of much disease, in both swine and the people who consumed unwholesome pork. In 1875, he introduced a 'Sanitary Piggery' in rural Massachusetts. It was the cornerstone of Baker's contribution to the pure food movement.

"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."

He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.

The world’s finest example of porcineography

The Porcineograph 

Haiku spam and double digit sigma events

Haiku Schmaiku

Howdy Ma'am,
Just spam, I am.
Five syllables short

-- Bloggerel Doggerel blog, 2007

Verse is courtesy of The Climateer, who doesn't write about climate too often, thankfully! He has a great blog description which is perpetually relevant: "In war, everything not censored is a lie."

The Climateer DOES write about investment bankers who blame statistics for their poor trading decisions... or possibly, outright deceptive practices. There was a lot of that going on in 2008. I finally hoisted some posts about double-digit standard deviations from my bookmarks and read them.

25 Sigma Event Very Unlucky

From Climateer Investor and others along the way, it seems like a 25 sigma event is impossible. "How unlucky is 25 sigma?" (2011): When Goldman Sachs was Really, Really Unlucky: 

"One of the more memorable moments of last summer’s credit crunch came when the CFO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, announced in August that Goldman’s flagship GEO hedge fund had lost 27% of its value since the start of the year."

As Mr. Viniar explained, “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row.” 

April was the month of mathematics

April 2020 was the scheduled date for the most recent Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. It is a biannual event, i.e. held once every two years. Sadly, it was uniquely ill-timed to coincide with the arrival of the full-force of the COVID-19 global pandemic. A lot of recurring events have fallen by the wayside. 

Tea for 8 by S. Goldstine

Possibly even worse is the fact that I see no mention of

any activities for 2022. I noticed this while browsing through the pages of the online Mathematical Imagery SIG (special interest group) of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). I encourage readers to visit! Included here are two scaled-down examples that I liked. 

The Four-Color Theorem works for any map on a plane or a sphere, i.e. four colors are sufficient to color every neighboring region with a different color. For other shapes, say this toroidal tea set, eight colors were necessary. 

Polar coordinates
by D.A. Lakew 

The shape on the left is a group of super-imposed polar surfaces. There is much more, along with detailed explanations, equations, etc. 

 You will also find pleasing drawing such as those I shared in my Cornucopia of Mathematics post, dating back to the turn of the century, uh, this century. Although I didn't hot link to the images (well, maybe one), and gave full credit to the source, a 2003 academic event at a university in New England, I noticed a few months later that the source web pages had gone 404 error not found.

On the origins of Mathematics Awareness Month

As any blog reader of mine knows, I strive to find surprising information. The origin of AMS's Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month can be traced back to none other than... Ronald Reagan?  

Bard of the Deep State: Brookings not to merge with Heritage

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the central bank of central banks. Think Tank Watch is similar to BIS, except it is for think tanks. Both are meta organizations although only BIS has global gravitas. Also, I suspect that Think Tank Watch lacks any governance role for think tanks, unlike the mild governance authority of BIS over central banks.

Think Tank Watch's editor-in-chief seems rather pleased with himself. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in good work.

One of Harvard’s best think tank sources: Think Tank Watch. #thinktankshttps://t.co/7mwFAnKm8H

— Think Tank Watch (@ThinkTankWatch) March 24, 2021

Think Tank Watch saw something and said something

Brookings Institute to merge with the Heritage Foundation:

Think Tank Watch has learned that the center-left Brookings Institution is in the late stages of a merger deal with the conservative Heritage Foundation to form a new think tank behemoth called "Brookitage."

The news comes via unnamed sources. Is there any other way to get information in Washington D.C. than 'unnamed sources'? Of course not!

Making policy not shaping or influencing

"We cannot afford to be just a liberal think tank in today's polarized political atmosphere," said a senior level Brookings official. "Bringing the most well-known liberal think tank together with the most well-known conservative think tank would send a huge message to Capitol Hill. Things need to change."

It is unusual for think tanks to take such an active political role. Also, think tanks tend to be hothouses of similar ideologies. Brookings and Heritage are not similar, so merging will no doubt be uncomfortable for all involved. Also, Heritage is likely none too happy with that portmanteau of a name, Brookitage.

Why hasn't the growth rate of real potential US GDP recovered?

Missionary Work Among Savages blog, also known as 2slugbait, wrote about whether President Reagan's 1981 tax cuts performed as advertised. I think his motivation was to determine if a similar supply-side approach could have been a better alternative to the fiscal stimulus measures implemented by Federal Reserve governor Bernanke, immediately following the 2008-2010 financial collapse. 

In other words, would a Reagan-type tax cut in 2008 have driven a stronger recovery than we experienced with Obama? The recovery during Obama's second term in office was one of the most anemic in U.S. history.

Supply-side economics maybe not so great?

2slugbaits demonstrates empirically why supply-side economics was only mildly effective. Specifically, neither of the following worked quite as well as Arthur Laffer forecasted:

1. cutting the top marginal tax rate to encourage greater labor effort 
2. supply-side structured tax cuts to encourage more personal savings 

Skepticism about David Stockman and Laffer's economic policy recommendations during the Reagan Administration is only mildly interesting to me. 

The sort of tax cuts that include middle- and lower-income wage earners, not solely high net worth "job creators" 😕😡 CAN provide a modicum of supply-side stimulus! That was apparent from 2017 to March 2020.

Something else is much more interesting to me: The long-term decline in real potential U.S. GDP.

Gold Star of Texas

The state capitol building in Austin, Texas (21 October 2008)

Cupola of the state capitol at Austin

Photograph by TedLandphair via Picasa