Tucker Carlson recently opined that Russia presents no danger to America’s election integrity, but Mexico absolutely does threaten through meddling with the opinions of its immigrants who reside here and may even be citizens of this country.
If anything, Carlson understates the case.
It’s been clear for a long time that Mexico is a genuine enemy of the United States. Its politicians may smile and pretend to get along, but they work to encourage Mexican immigrants’ loyal to the homeland and keep those remittances coming — $33.7 billion in 2018, nearly all of which comes from Mexicans of varying legality working in the US.
In 1997, Presidente Ernesto Zedillo proclaimed to the National Council of La Raza in Chicago, “I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders.”
Does that sound like a friendly neighbor or is it someone who sees his emigrants as shock troops? The current presidente, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), though less outspoken is just as likely to hold radical views of all sorts since he admits to supporting socialism.
Tucker Carlson has noticed how unfriendly Mexicans can be, and we citizens should pay attention.
TUCKER CARLSON: If you watched Robert Mueller speak this morning at 11:00, you heard him echo the view of official Washington that Russia had a major effect on the 2016 election.
Well, as we’ve noted before, that is an absurd claim. There’s zero evidence that it’s true, none that Robert Mueller himself has presented.
But if you’re looking for countries that really do influence American politics, there are quite a few. Anyone who lives in D.C. can tell you that, Russia does not make the list. Mexico definitely does.
At the beginning of the past presidential election cycle, for example, Mexico began what Bloomberg News described as an unprecedented effort to get American citizenship for its permanent residents living here in the U.S. The point was obvious, of course, to make them voters, so they could vote to defeat Donald Trump.
Russia never even considered election hacking that bold. Mexico did. And there’s more, Marcelo Ebrard is Mexico’s current Foreign Minister. From 2006 to 2012, he was the mayor of Mexico City. He is a very famous man in that country.
But between those two jobs, he was here in the U.S. What was he doing? He was working on behalf of the Democratic Party. He urged Latino voters in Spanish to turn out to vote for Hillary Clinton. He then compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler; subtlety not being one of his strong suits.
Imagine if the Russians did something like that? Put a friend of Vladimir Putin, say the former mayor of Moscow into the U.S. to spend the entire election cycle recording pro-Trump ads. How would that work? Well, it’s unthinkable. You’d probably be arrested.
And yet, a top Mexican politician did exactly that and nobody cared. Why? Because it helped Hillary Clinton. This kind of thing has gone on for years here and anyone who lives in D.C. again can tell you, it goes on even today.
Here’s another example, Juan Hernandez. He has appeared as a guest on this show more than once. He led President Vicente Fox’s Office for Mexicans Abroad. How did he describe his job? This way, quote, “I want to get the third generation, the seventh generation in the U.S. I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’ ”
Hernandez argued that Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are always quote, “going to keep one foot in Mexico and will never fully assimilate.” This isn’t just an idle hope on Mexico’s part, they’re working to make it come true. The Mexican government understands that if immigrants to the U.S. start speaking English, they will assimilate much more quickly into American culture, and they don’t want that.
The Mexican government now says it will spend $150 million on a campaign to help convince Mexicans living here in our country to keep speaking Spanish. Haven’t heard about that on CNN? Huh. Well, there’s more.
Mexico has helped its citizens to break our Federal laws. It’s done that for years. The Mexican government published a pamphlet advising migrants on how to sneak into our country. The Mexican consulate in San Francisco distributed its 10 Golden Rules for the immigrants in the U.S. That paper instructed illegal aliens on how to avoid arrest and deportation.
The Mexican government has paid lawyers to clog our courts in deportation cases. We could go on and on and on. The point is, that’s what it looks like when a hostile foreign power interferes in your democracy. They don’t buy Facebook ads that nobody sees, why would they? They try to change the demographics of your country. That works.
A major reason why Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world ($132B in 2018) was his early adoption of robots in his warehouses — see my 2016 article Amazon Robotics in The Social Contract for background.
Below, the Kiva robots of Amazon scoot under the appropriate rack of merchandise and bring it to a human packer for shipment.
Therefore it’s not surprising that knock-off machines have been designed to fill the desire of business owners to run their warehouses as cheaply as possible. One is from the GreyOrange company of Asia:
Keep in mind that whenever robots become less expensive than workers, the humans will be replaced. So it makes no sense to continue importing low-skilled foreigners via immigration when it has become clear that the future will be operated by smart machines. In fact. . .
Automation makes immigration obsolete.
Here’s a story about the knock-off warehouse robots:
Padmanabhan Raman, chief production manager, shows off charging station at Project Verte in McDonough, Georgia, on May 2.
ATLANTA — Tephnee Usher stands in a McDonough, Georgia, warehouse, separated from the stored goods by a black chain-link fence, and waits for robots to deliver the goods to her.
Human workers are confined to opposite edges of this 17-acre roofed space: delivery bays and shipping bays about a football field apart. The vast concrete area between them belongs to 225 electric powered, eerily silent robotic Butlers that perform tasks people used to do.
E-commerce, growing at 15 percent a year, is driving a second boom in Georgia’s robust warehousing and logistics industry, which employs about 118,000 packers and material handlers across the state. Companies setting up ready-to-ship warehouses here last year included Target’s furniture line, Wayfair home furnishings and Dynacraft bikes and scooters. Amazon has four “fulfillment” centers scattered from Braselton to Macon.
It’s clear the industry is changing. What’s less clear is how much that will translate into a jobs boom or bust as automation and artificial intelligence increasingly take over the work.
The robot-powered warehouse in McDonough just south of Atlanta will begin operations in June after test runs. It belongs to Verte, a Sandy Springs, Georgia, start-up aiming to compete with Amazon. Verte targets mom-and-pop to midsize sellers, offering to help them track, keep inventory, sell and move their goods ranging from shoes to cosmetics from manufacturer to home.
The low-slung Butlers are manufactured by GreyOrange in Alpharetta, Georgia, the American headquarters of the Singapore company. It can retrofit any warehouse with a flat floor into a roboticized one that can endlessly reconfigure its movable shelves for maximum efficiency. Products that arrive at one door can be stocked and on their way to buyers in as little as two hours, touched by human hands only two or three times.
The Butlers at the McDonough warehouse look like giant Roombas, the disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaners. They glide among 6,000 refrigerator-size shelving units lined up in rows 85 deep between the delivery and shipping bays. They roll precisely under a unit holding an item someone has ordered, jack it up with enough electric power to lift more than 3,000 pounds, and move it to the waiting Usher, a human picker.
Usher then grabs the item out of one of its bins, scans it and hands it to team members who pack it and label it for shipping to a customer’s home.
The warehouse is cutting edge when it comes to automation. But it isn’t alone. E-commerce giant Amazon is adding highly roboticized warehouses across the nation similar to Verte’s. The closest one to Georgia is in Jacksonville, Florida, which uses movable shelving units and scooter-like robots that look like GreyOrange’s.
Repetitive work, like warehouse jobs, is widely predicted to be among those more vulnerable to disappearing thanks to robots and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, new jobs are created through the industry’s growth and adoption of technology.
Programmers and robot mechanics are now on staffs, but they typically take more education or skills. There is unsettled debate about whether continuing technological and social changes will create as many jobs as those shorn off.
“I think there’s definitely going to be fewer workers in warehouses, but warehouses are also experiencing labor shortages,” said Nancey Green Leigh, a Georgia Tech professor who studies robots and works with a National Science Foundation grant.
Packing goods for shipping is often tedious work at low pay, which has led to employee turnover and unfilled jobs. With the unemployment rate below 4 percent, there also are fewer available workers. Indeed.com lists more than 6,000 warehouse jobs in Georgia, the bulk of them paying $25,000 a year or less.
“On the one hand, we can be concerned about the job loss, but on the other hand, many of the jobs are not great jobs,” said Green Leigh.
Georgia long has been a logistics and warehousing center.
Atlanta has the sixth-most warehousing space among metro areas, with 683 million square feet. It is home to companies such as UPS and Manhattan Associates and has major operations for big global logistics providers such as XPO.
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is a cargo hub and Savannah is the fourth-busiest U.S. container port in the U.S., connecting Georgia businesses to the world. The state boasts excellent rail and interstate access.
Verte, backed by $45 million in venture capital, is hoping to leapfrog larger and older competitors with the help of GreyOrange’s robots. GreyOrange, also a startup, has received more than $170 million in venture capital.
“Anybody who built five or 10 years ago was too early,” said Verte founder Julian Kahlon, in reference to fast-changing technology.
Kahlon added that he wanted to build a warehouse capable of doing Black Friday business volumes every day, to keep up with the explosion in demand as consumers increasingly opt to have goods shipped directly to their homes.
Low-skilled warehouse work is not well paid, the average job paying about $13 an hour, according to the Georgia Department of Labor. And the work can be arduous. Before mobile delivery robots, pickers could walk up to 12 miles a day finding and moving items, said Green Leigh, the Georgia Tech professor.
But the drive for efficiency means companies also are searching for additional ways to replace humans with robots. Both Amazon and GreyOrange say they have built and are perfecting picking robots — the same job that Usher is currently doing at Verte’s McDonough warehouse.
Amazon also has a test delivery program in Washington state, where a wheeled robot traveling on sidewalks is delivering packages to doorsteps, and has made investments in self-driving vehicles, including shipping trucks. (Continues)
Is the immigration sob story genre making a comeback? As I pointed out in my 2002 article, The Style Guide To Writing A Sensitive Immigrant Story, emotions are foremost, showing the humanity of foreigners who are illegally present in this country, because liberal ideology is not interested in such details.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post responded with another kind of family story, where Mexican grandparents visited offspring stuck in America by their unlawful immigration status. (Wait, isn’t Mexico prosperous these days with its #15 GDP ranking?)
The State Department set up the travel deal, revealing itself as one of the many anti-Trump, anti-sovereignty centers in Washington.
The Post’s front-page story featured a colorful photo of a Mexican granny, emphasizing diverse family values:
The Post story was reprinted in Stripes.com (a US military website, hmm) so click freely if you are not a paid-up Post subscriber:
Elderly Mexicans visiting their undocumented children in US with State Department approval, Washington Post, May 25, 2019
CHERAN, Mexico — María Dominga Romero León bent over a small black suitcase and packed her things, one by one: a folder of photographs, a half-finished blouse, a bag of wooden toys for the grandchildren she’d never met.
She sighed.
“They’re probably used to America by now,” she said.
Romero León, 68, hadn’t seen her daughter Guillermina in so long that she was starting to lose track of the years. Had it been 15 or 20? She wasn’t sure. What she knew was that Guillermina was an undocumented immigrant in a place called Germantown in Illinois with three children of her own. Two were U.S. citizens; one was a beneficiary of the federal program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Romero León knew that U.S. immigration laws made it impossible for her daughter to come back to Cheran without jeopardizing the life she had built in the United States, because she didn’t have papers to move back and forth across the border.
That’s why Romero León was packing her bags. She had never been on an airplane, or been to an airport, or seen an escalator - she’d never left her home state of Michoacan. But now she was getting ready to fly to America.
The U.S. government - the same government from which Romero León’s daughter was hiding - had surprised her with a tourist visa.
Officials in Michoacan call them Palomas Mensajeras (Messenger Pigeons.) They are parents and grandparents in Mexico who have not seen their undocumented children in the United States for years, even decades.
Since 2017, officials here have been working with the U.S. State Department to reunite those families for three-week visits in cities and towns across the United States.
For many here, it is an unlikely American olive branch amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it has been welcomed by immigrant families grappling with a crisis that has rippled across both countries: The elderly parents of the estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are dying alone in Mexico while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border.
Romero León’s husband died of complications from diabetes a year ago. During his final days, she held a phone to his ear so their children could speak to him from the United States. Three of the couple’s six children were undocumented immigrants living across the border.
“It was hard for him,” Romero León said, “to be sick, to be dying so far away from them.
“I thought, ‘Will it be the same for me?’ ”
Still, when she learned that she would be joining 21 other elderly residents from around Cheran on a flight to Chicago, she found it hard to understand. Why had the United States granted her a visa? Was it a trick to apprehend her daughter?
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “Are they going to use this to arrest them?”
___
The U.S. government hasn’t specifically endorsed the program, a State Department spokesman said in a statement. But officials last year began designating special interview days at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City for elderly visa applicants who “frequently travel in groups to the United States for a variety of reasons including tourism, cultural programs, and to visit friends and family such as U.S. citizen grandchildren.”
The spokesman made no mention of the generation between the Mexican grandparents and the American grandchildren. But in practice, the Palomas Mensajeras program is exclusively for elderly Michoacanos who live in Mexico and have undocumented children in the United States.
Trump - of the border wall proposal, family separations and the national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border - has taken a different approach toward the undocumented. “Please do not make yourselves too comfortable,” he tweeted this month, “you will be leaving soon!”
The State Department spokesman declined to answer questions about why the United States is facilitating reunions between Mexicans and their undocumented children. (Continues)
Tucker’s discussion with Mark Morgan about what can be done regarding border anarchy was brief but packed with a lot of information. Morgan is realistic enough about open-borders Democrats to understand the current House of Representatives is unlikely to pass the legislation needed to update our very inadequate immigration laws. So he has some stand-alone strategies in mind that he can implement without Congress.
Morgan sounds determined to make a difference, but the numbers are daunting. The Washington Post reported recently that in the last seven months “Nearly 169,000 youths have surrendered at the southern border.” In March and April, the total number per month exceeded 100,000.
These days, kids are a guaranteed ticket to the freebies in the USA, so some adults just rent if they don’t have one of their own.
Plus, a top necessity for the Border Patrol is to return to its job of sovereignty enforcement rather than social work toward invaders. When the Laura Ingraham show visited the border in early May, it was clear that the Border Patrol’s absurdly kind treatment toward lawbreaking foreigners actually incentivized the invasive behavior. Why would any sane person wait years in line to immigrate to the United States in the current permissive environment?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, if Washington finally decides to fix the country’s immigration problem, Mark Morgan will be at the very heart of that. You’ve known from this show. He has been a frequent guest. We’ve been happy to have him every time he’s been on. And he is now the President’s new pick to run ICE.
Mark Morgan joins us tonight for his first interview since starting the job. Mr. Morgan, thank you very much. First of all, congratulations on the new job.
ICE DIRECTOR MARK MORGAN: Thank you.
CARLSON: And thanks for joining us. What are your priorities?
MORGAN: Well, first and foremost, I think anyone in this position is to make sure that I’m going to be a relentless advocate for the men and women of ICE to get the tools necessary to do their job.
And part of what that means also is getting out here doing what I’m doing right now to educate the American people exactly what the hardworking men and women of ICE do every day, to safeguard the security of this country and enforce the rule of law, and also working with Congress.
But here’s the problem with that, Tucker. Congress has clearly showed its inability to do what they know they need to do to fix this crisis. And I’ve been on here many times and saying they could do several things within the legal framework. They could fix this in 15 minutes.
So although I’m going to continue to work tirelessly with Congress to try to get them to do their job, I don’t have hope that they’re going to. So we need to continue to come up with innovative ideas within the legal framework where we can to stop this problem.
CARLSON: Well, they’ve completely politicized your agency completely.
MORGAN: Absolutely.
CARLSON: We’re moving into the heat of an election season. A number of the candidates have called for getting rid of ICE completely, have compared you to the Nazis.
MORGAN: Absolutely.
CARLSON: Really over the top stuff. So given your expectation that they’re not going to help at all, what can you do?
MORGAN: So I’ll give you an example right now. So ICE actually have three major components that the American people and unfortunately, I think a lot of Congress don’t even realize. So they have the ERO side. That’s the Enforcement Removal Operations that deports people.
They also have an incredible team of lawyers. That’s an integral part of the overall immigration process that’s absolutely needed. And then the last part of ICE is HSI — Homeland Security Investigations.
And I’ll give you an example. So those three major components make up ICE.
HSI, for example, what we’ve done is we’ve taken about 150, highly trained, experienced, HSI agents, and we push them towards the border. And what they’re doing is they’re looking at child exploitation. They’re looking at those individuals who are grabbing — renting the kid, right, and we called this, Tucker. We knew this was going to happen, and it is.
They are renting kids. They’re paying to rent somebody’s kid and then fake themselves as a family, and right now between — and we’ve infused the DNA testing that we’ve talked about in the past, so between their investigative skills and the DNA testing right now in the pilot program, they’re finding 25 percent of the so-called families come across — absolutely fake and fraudulent. Continue reading this article
Leave it the New York Times to insult Americans on Memorial Day by featuring an enormous sob story of an illegal alien family being transported through America to their destination. By comparison, other liberal papers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times front-paged patriotic stories of remembrance suitable to the occasion.
And yes, foreign kiddies are arriving by the thousands, who will strain local schools with their inability to speak English, health concerns and needs for special treatment. Local communities will be forced to either raise taxes or cut services to citizen students.
Who knew open borders now include transport unblocked by the US government into the interior? This is not how I imagined the Trump Presidency.
The Times story was reprinted elsewhere, linked below:
1,600 miles, 85 hours: A migrant family takes a Greyhound across America, by Miriam Jordan, New York Times, May 27, 2019
DALLAS — By the time it pulled into Dallas, the bus from Arizona was two hours and 47 minutes late. It had left Phoenix overbooked, turned away passengers with tickets in Tucson, rolled through El Paso at 2am and finally disgorged its human cargo — a busload of exhausted migrants, mostly from Central America — shortly before dusk the next day.
A sign in the Greyhound bus terminal listed the ongoing routes that were already facing delayed departures: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Atlanta, Brownsville. All of them would be late; most of them were full. Those who had missed their connections would need to wait in line, an agent announced, as the disembarking passengers — many of them with no food, no money and no possessions beyond what was in their slim backpacks — listened in stunned silence.
“My God, we are going to have to spend two nights here,” Zuleima Lopez, recently arrived from Guatemala with her husband and three children, murmured as she surveyed the ragged tableau inside the terminal. Refuse had long before overfilled the available trash bins, and a rank odour wafted out from the restrooms. Mothers, fathers and children huddled together on scraps of cardboard, atop tattered blankets and splayed jackets. Feverish babies with runny noses fussed in their mothers’ arms.
At one end of the station, several passengers jostled for $7.50 meal vouchers — 19 cents less than the cheapest cheeseburger combo — until, halfway through the line, the agent announced that there were no more vouchers.
A Greyhound road trip across the country has long been a hallmark of the American experience, a “leave the driving to us” way for those who couldn’t afford airfare or a car to come home from college, start new jobs, get to the coast, leave problematic situations behind.
But along the border and deep into parts of the nation’s interior, the Greyhound buses plying the interstate highway system have become an essential element in an extraordinary new migration.
Entering the country at a rate of more than 5,000 each day, new arrivals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are departing border towns by the busload. While President Donald Trump has made a point of threatening to send migrants from the border to inland sanctuary cities that oppose his immigration policies, it is an empty threat: Migrants are already travelling by the thousands every day to cities across the country — to Atlanta, Chattanooga, Orlando, Richmond, as well as to sanctuary cities, like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.
After an initial 72 hours or so at Customs and Border Protection processing centres along the border, the vast majority of those entering the country now are released to nonprofit respite centres, where they are fed and clothed. From there, they are booked on Greyhound buses to destinations where they may have friends, family or the hope of a job. They pay top dollar, often $250 to $300 each, usually advanced by family members in the United States.
Long lines and bedraggled migrant travellers have become fixtures at bus stations across the Southwest — and a source of substantial new revenue for Greyhound, a company that had been struggling for footing in an era of cheap airfares and stiff competition on shorter-haul routes from companies like Megabus.
Currently owned by the British transport conglomerate FirstGroup, Greyhound filed for bankruptcy twice in the 1990s. More recently, the company introduced Bolt Bus express service, Wi-Fi access and other innovations, but falling fuel prices and the convenience of car and air travel continued to limit its ability to attract well-heeled customers.
Then came the crisis on the southwest border.
The Greyhound station in Dallas, the company’s headquarters, has been transformed by default into a temporary migrant shelter.
A similar scene has been playing out in cities across the Southwest. In McAllen, hundreds of migrants pack the station daily, lining up to board buses. In El Paso, hundreds at once have shown up at the terminal without warning, trying to find their way. In Phoenix, a swell in drop-offs by immigration authorities led Greyhound to restrict station access to those holding tickets, exposing families left outside to the rain.
Zuleima Lopez and her family had ridden a bus much of the way from Guatemala through Mexico, crossing into the United States with the help of a smuggler, but nothing prepared them for this new journey they would take through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee on a large, crowded bus. (Continues)
PragerU’s Memorial Day video focuses on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies gambled big to take back Europe from the Nazis.
Peter Caddick-Adams presents a brief review of how close a thing the invasion was, how easily it could have been a disaster if the many deceptions had failed to make the Germans think Calais was the target rather than Normandy.
But even with the remembered heroism, it’s hard to see the Greatest Generation passing away with the years. The coming D-Day will be the 75th anniversary, and fewer than 500,000 WWII veterans are alive today out of more than 16 million who served.
Below, Dick Winters (1918 - 2011) is remembered for leading an assault that took out a battery of German guns that threatened the Normandy invasion.
Fortunately, the invasion succeeded and Europe was saved from German fascists. (Only now, the continent is threatened by muslim fascists who were invited by Chancellor Merkel — also noticed by PragerU with its video of Douglas Murray’s remarks.)
But back to today’s video and its transcript:
There were 36,525 days in the twentieth century. Of these, none was more consequential than June 6th, 1944. D-Day: the Allied invasion of Normandy in Nazi-occupied France. It did not end World War II, but without it, the Nazi war machine would not and could not have been defeated.
We, of course, know the good guys – America, England and its allies – won. But in 1944, there was no certainty of success. In fact, there was just as much doubt as confidence. Winston Churchill’s senior advisor, Field Marshal Brooke, wrote in his diary, “I am very uneasy about the whole operation. It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.”
Brooke’s fears were entirely reasonable.
First there were tens of thousands of men and millions of tons of material and supplies that had to be moved one hundred miles across one of roughest bodies of water in the world – the English Channel. And it had to be kept secret. If the Germans knew where and when the allies were landing, they could mass forces against them and turn the beaches of northern France into killing fields.
To prevent this, the Allies took every possible precaution. Their air forces destroyed bridges, roads and railways that might be used by the Germans to rush troops to the invasion site. Everyone knew the attack was coming; the key was to keep the Germans guessing.
Fake radio chatter was broadcast to suggest the beaches near Calais would be the landing point. Double agents leaked fake details of units forming in South East England. And movie set designers built phony tanks, planes and ships to support the ruse of an army preparing to cross near Dover for the benefit of German reconnaissance pilots and spies.
The Germans swallowed it all. But the Nazis were not the only enemy the Allied forces faced. Mother Nature was just as threatening.
The 23,000 paratroopers and glider-borne infantry jumping into Normandy needed moderate winds to be effective. The twelve thousand Allied aircraft needed clear skies. The invasion fleet of six thousand vessels needed calm seas. And there had to be a low tide to expose Nazi obstacles and mines. When high winds and rain began pummeling the Channel, Allied supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower postponed the invasion date of June 5th by twenty-four hours. That might not sound like a significant delay, but it was. All forces were concentrated and ready to go. All the plans, all the deceptions, could be exposed at any moment. Then came a new forecast. The weather appeared to be breaking. There might be a 12-hour window of opportunity.
Eisenhower gave the order: We go. Immediately, the greatest invasion fleet ever assembled set sail. On board were over 130,000 young soldiers.
Consider for a moment who these soldiers were. The average age of the American GI was 21. Most had never seen combat or even been fifty miles from their hometown. As they sailed toward the French shoreline, Eisenhower wrote a press release in case of catastrophe. D-Day was an all-or-nothing affair. A new invasion strategy would take months, if not years, to devise.
The initial battle reports were seriously troubling. At Omaha Beach, overlooked by cliffs honeycombed with trenches, cannon and machine-guns, the Americans took heavy losses. “I might have killed hundreds that morning,” reflected German soldier Hein Severloh, manning one of the bunkers. The rough surf also took its toll. Dr. Harold Baumgarten, with the U.S Army’s 116th Infantry, remembered, “Some of the fellows were pulled under by their wet combat jackets and heavy equipment. We couldn’t help; they just drowned.” Further along, Army Rangers also took heavy casualties as they scaled the cliffs under intense gunfire. However, by mid-day – with US naval support – the Germans, low on supplies and ammunition, began to fold. Nazi reinforcements, including hundreds of tanks, which might have made all the difference, were not ordered to Normandy until the afternoon. Before the Germans could mount an effective counter-attack, the Allies had secured all five landing beaches.
Churchill had expected twenty thousand to be killed on D-Day. Fortunately, heavy though they were, the losses were much lower. Of the 156,000 Allied personnel who hit the beaches that day, ten thousand became casualties. Of these, five thousand were killed.
No one died in vain.
Their sacrifice meant an end to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Another year of bitter fighting lay ahead, but D-Day – June 6, 1944, was a pivotal step on the road to forever removing the Nazi tyranny from Europe and the world.
Automation designers have a two-fer human job killer on the drawing boards — a combo self-driving van equipped with a separate robot that can deliver customers’ order mail-order boxes right to the door. The robot hops out of the van, grabs the package and carries it to the delivery point, even managing several stairs.
Navigating complicated steps is a problem little mentioned in these cheerful tech reports, as if America were a flat suburb designed for shopping carts. The latest creation manages a few steps well enough but nothing like what millions of homes have before reaching the front door. Most people want their packages left as close to the door as possible, not left on a lower landing.
So delivery jobs for humans are safe for a few more years, but the plans are clear to eliminate expensive workers as soon as possible.
Below, the creepy headless robot called “Digit” can carry 40 pounds.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a posting for the category Delivery Truck Drivers and Driver/Sales Workers that shows an average wage of $14.66/hour and the number of jobs counted in 2016 was 1,421,400. The median annual wage for light truck or delivery services drivers was $32,810 in May 2018, which seems decent for an occupation that requires only a high school education, a driver’s license and a few weeks of on-the-job training.
The tech industry aims to reduce that employer cost considerably. Of course, America won’t need any low-skilled immigrants to deliver packages in a few years when this and similar automation is deployed.
● The robot known as Digit, designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright and can carry packages weighing up to 40 pounds.
● Ford and Agility Robotics are still researching exactly how Digit would work with the autonomous vehicles.
It’s not fast and may be years from visiting your neighborhood, but a walking robot is part of Ford’s vision for how its autonomous vehicles will someday deliver packages and goods.
The robot known as Digit and designed and built by Agility Robotics, walks upright on two legs, goes up and down stairs and can carry packages weighing 40 pounds.
So why is Ford interested in a walking robot?
Digit may be how Ford solves one of the biggest issues confronting the self-driving vehicles it’s developing for companies like Domino’s Pizza and the food delivery firm Postmates: how to get deliveries from cars to the front door?
“As we’ve learned in our pilot programs, it’s not always convenient for people to leave their homes for packages or for businesses to run their own delivery services,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technology officer, said in a post on Medium.
“If we can free people up to focus less on the logistics of making deliveries, they can turn their time and efforts to things that really need their attention.”
Ford envisions a future where Digit is part of an autonomous vehicle that could be delivering pizzas, packages or other items.
Designed to fold up when not deployed, Digit could be programmed to carry deliveries from the autonomous vehicle to the front door or exact location of the final destination. (Continues)
Poor Murrieta, California. There is a Border Patrol station located there to keep an eye on the I-15 highway heading north through Utah and Montana, so the community tends to come up in government minds when they want to relocate a gaggle of illegal aliens who continue to accumulate.
TUCKER CARLSON: Bob Kowell is a resident of Murrieta, California, where an unknown number of illegal migrants recently were brought for processing. Where are they now? Well, that’s open to question. Mr. Kowell joins us live tonight. Bob, thanks very much for coming on.
BOB KOWELL: We love you, Tucker.
CARLSON: Thanks. And we’re glad to have someone from California running the front lines of all of this, giving us an account of what is happening. So people who are in the country illegally were brought to your town. Where are they? What happened to them? What do you know?
KOWELL: They were flown in from El Paso Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon and brought up by bus from Brownsville Airport in San Diego near the border to Murrieta, which is about 60 miles north. That’s my town. And they’re for processing there. And the processing takes 24, 48, 72 hours. We don’t know exactly, but they’re there with one toilet basically.
They have, I understand, from the sources that I have that there’s tuberculosis, there is scabies and other things that are right now in our community. These people go through processing. I’m sure they’re great, some of them are great people. But then they get, I understand, a bus voucher and they go down to there — I was told that they are taken to the local Temecula Mall, which is a neighboring town and they can take a bus anywhere.
We suggest that they go to a sanctuary city like Los Angeles, like Cher’s home, or San Francisco or Portland and not Murrieta and Temecula. We are a sanctuary city for the rest of America —
CARLSON: So I am sorry, Bob, can I stop you there? Just for our viewers who are now Googling your town in Temecula, who aren’t from California, they’re discovering that you’re nowhere near the border. You’re nowhere near Mexico. Continue reading this article
Voters continue to believe the U.S. immigration system is broken and still tend to favor shifting to the skills-based system that President Trump is proposing.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 55% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with Senator Lindsey Graham’s assessment last week that “we have a perfect storm brewing at the border because of a series of broken and outdated laws related to asylum and children.”
Tucker Carlson recently presented some observations about “merit” as a value in immigration after the Democrats had the predictable reaction of squawking “Racist!” at the president for common sense. Rep. Maxine Waters reflexively described the Trump immigration policy as “very racist” last week for requiring knowledge of English among newbies.
Some noticed that the Trump plan contained no overall reduction of immigrant numbers — something strongly indicated by the anemic wage growth among US workers. NumbersUSA released a video on May 6 expressing the worker viewpoint:
Heres’s Tucker on the argument for merit-based immigration:
TUCKER CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” This week, the Trump administration revealed its proposal to overhaul America’s immigration system. The proposal would not by itself build the often promised wall on our southern border, nor would it cut current levels of immigration despite the fact that most Americans would like to see that happen.
The one big thing the administration’s proposal would do is give priority to immigrants who might actually help America — skilled workers with English proficiency. It’s hard to see an argument against a system like that — there isn’t really an argument against that system.
For years, Democrats have argued that immigrants make vital additions to our economy. They’re smarter than we are, they’re harder working, they do better in school. They found more companies.
Well, the President has decided to take Democrats at their word; he says he wants all of those good things that immigrants bring. Watch:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We want immigrants coming in, we cherish the open door that we want to create for our country. But a big proportion of those immigrants must come in through merit and skill.
CARLSON: Well, much of the world would move here if they could — hundreds and hundreds of millions of people. So why wouldn’t we pick the absolute best immigrants with skills in English who would fit in better here, their kids would do better in school, they’d be more likely to contribute to social programs instead of draining them.
So are Democrats rejoicing in this change? Of course not. They’re outraged. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke for the party when she declared that really merit is a bad word because everybody has merit:
REP. NANCY PELOSI: I want to just say something about the word that they use, “merit.” It is really a condescending word. Are they saying family is without merit? Are they saying most of the people who have ever come to the United States in the history of our country are without merit, because they don’t have an engineering degree?
Certainly, we want to attract the best to our country and that includes many people from many parts of society.
CARLSON: What a shame we can’t staff the Democratic Caucus in the Congress using the same criteria the Speaker would like to fill our country. “We want to attract the best for many parts of the world,” she says. But of course by that, Pelosi doesn’t mean what she says. She means just the opposite because what exactly is best about immigrants who have criminal records or middle school education, or no ability to hold a job? Continue reading this article
On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times front-paged an article with the headline “Concerns are raised over dam’s flood risk.” The structure in question is located in southern suburban California, and the dam’s failure could endanger numerous communities, including Anaheim and Disneyland.
Should Mickey Mouse grab Minnie and run, as California now experiences a rare May rainy spell?
I shouldn’t joke. Dam failures are serious situations, like the near-disaster at Oroville in February 2017 when 188,000 local residents were forced to flee for their lives at the orders of the government. Luckily, the rains slacked off and the dam held.
No thanks to Sacramento. According to a study from the American Society of Civil Engineers ranking the states in 2017 for infrastructure spending, California ranked dead last.
Apparently newish California Governor Gavin Newsom has different spending priorities apart from public safety — like expanding taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens from kids (now costing $360 million yearly) to young adult aliens, estimated at additional $260 million.
Newsom does want to prepare for climate change, so perhaps he can be convinced that dam repair falls in that category.
The LA Times article was reprinted in the Watertown Daily Times, linked here:
Engineers up failure risk for dam protecting Disneyland, dozens of Southern California cities, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2019
LOS ANGELES — Federal engineers are raising alarms that a “significant flood event” could compromise the spillway of Southern California’s aging Prado Dam and potentially inundate dozens of Orange County communities from Disneyland to Newport Beach.
After conducting an assessment of the 78-year-old structure earlier this month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it was raising the dam’s risk category from “moderate” to “high urgency.”
“Our concern right now is about the concrete slab of the spillway and how well it will perform if water were to spill over the top of the dam,” said Lillian Doherty, the Army Corps’ division chief. “We will determine whether or not it is as reliable as it should be.”
Located beside the 91 Freeway on the border of Riverside and Orange counties, the dam impounds little to no water for much of the year. During periods of heavy rain, however, the structure is intended to collect water and prevent flooding along the Santa Ana River.
Doherty said her agency is working with a national team of experts to develop interim and permanent risk-reduction measures at the dam, as well as public outreach strategies to alert the estimated 1.4 million people who live and work in 29 communities downstream.
The sudden downgrade in the structure’s evaluation comes after major problems have been identified in other California dams.
In February 2017, a concrete spillway at the Oroville Dam disintegrated during heavy rains and triggered the evacuation of more than 180,000 people. The head of the California Water Resources Department, which operates the dam, was removed after an independent probe found the failure was the result of a lax safety culture.
That same year, the Corps of Engineers discovered that the 60-year-old Whittier Narrows Dam, about 40 miles to the west of Prado Dam, was structurally unsafe and posed a potentially catastrophic risk to more than 1 million people in working-class communities along the San Gabriel River floodplain.
In that case, engineers found that intense storms could trigger a premature opening of that dam’s massive spillway, swamping homes, schools, factories and roads from Pico Rivera to Long Beach. Engineers also found that the earthen structure could fail if water were to flow over its crest.
The Corps estimates it will cost roughly $600 million in federal funds to upgrade the Whittier Narrows facility, which has been reclassified as the agency’s highest priority nationally because of the risk of “very significant loss of life and economic impacts.”
Now, given concerns that Prado Dam poses a flood threat to much of Orange County, the agency is collaborating with Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, and several dozen municipalities, to develop emergency plans that could be implemented before repairs to the dams are completed.
Col. Aaron Barta said the retrofit operations on the spillways at both dams could begin as early as 2021. (Continues)
Bloomberg reports that farm robots are coming on strong, and that assessment makes perfect sense. The tasks of smart agricultural machines are generally simple and distinct, like weeding, plowing, spraying and picking: unlike self-driving cars, safety issues are minimal because human workers have disappeared from automated fields.
In addition, recent robots have become increasingly autonomous, meaning there’s more intelligence in the cab making judgements about actions to take regarding the crop.
Below, picker robots are making human workers disappear from the fields.
As low-skilled jobs disappear with the increase of automation, there will be even less demand for foreign labor like the illegal aliens now streaming across our open borders at the rate of 100,000 per month. It is crazy for Washington to continue to allow such anarchy now, that will look even more insane from the coming years when low-skilled labor will be as common as horse-drawn carriages.
The near-future of agriculture is within view, and it’s all about machines and technology. Automation makes immigration obsolete, and particularly so in the agricultural sector.
Robots Take the Wheel as Autonomous Farm Machines Hit Fields, Bloomberg, May 15, 2019
SwarmFarm robot spraying on a farm in Australia. Photographer: David Stringer/Bloomberg
Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.
The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland. And it’s all happening well before many analysts had predicted thanks to small startups in Canada and Australia.
While industry leaders Deere & Co. and CNH Industrial NV haven’t said when they’ll release similar offerings, Saskatchewan’s Dot Technology Corp. has already sold some so-called power platforms for fully mechanized spring planting. In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotics is leasing weed-killing robots that can also do tasks like mow and spread. The companies say their machines are smaller and smarter than the gigantic machinery they aim to replace.
Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was an early adopter as part of a pilot program for SwarmFarm last year. He used four robots, each about the size of a truck, to kill weeds.
In years past, Bradford had used a 120-foot wide, 16-ton spraying machine that “looks like a massive praying mantis.” It would blanket the field in chemicals, he said.
But the robots were more precise. They distinguished the dull brown color of the farm’s paddock from green foliage, and targeted chemicals directly at the weeds. It’s a task the farm does two to three times a year over 20,000 acres. With the robots, Bradford said he can save 80% of his chemical costs.
“The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,” said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years. Surrounding rivers run out to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s eastern cost, making the farm particularly sensitive over its use of chemicals, he said.
Costs savings have become especially crucial as a multi-year rout for prices depresses farm incomes and tightens margins. The Bloomberg Grains Spot Index is down more than 50% since its peak in 2012. Meanwhile, advances in seed technology, fertilizers and other crop inputs has led to soaring yields and oversupply. Producers are eager to find any edge possible at a time when the U.S.-China trade war is disrupting the usual flow of agriculture exports.
Farmers need to get to the next level of profitability and efficiency in farming, and “we’ve lost sight of that with engineering that doesn’t match the agronomy,” said SwarmFarm’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bate. “Robots flip that on its head. What’s driving adoption in agriculture is better farming systems and better ways to grow crops.” (Continues)
One suspects that Orban’s tough enforcement against illegal immigration is the real source of media disapproval. The press loves the fake generosity of open borders that harm only people far away from the nation’s elite newsrooms.
JUDY WOODRUFF: President Trump welcomed another controversial leader to the White House today. He is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.
Orban has roiled Europe with his populism, his restrictions on immigration, and anti-democratic moves in order to consolidate power in Hungary.
William Brangham has the story.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It was Viktor Orban’s first visit to the White House in 20 years, and he found a like-minded leader in President Trump.
DONALD TRUMP: Probably like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK. That’s OK. You have done a good job. And you have kept your country safe.
VIKTOR ORBAN: And I would like to express that we are proud to stand together with the United States on fighting against illegal migration, on terrorism, and to protect and help the Christian communities all around the world.
BRANGHAM: In the 1990s, when he visited President Clinton, Orban was seen by many as a democratic reformer, helping steer his country out of the Soviet era. He returned to power in 2010, but, this time, as a right-wing populist and nationalist.
ORBAN (through translator): European culture based on Christian values must be given primacy on the European continent. Europe’s borders must be protected against the invasion of migrants.
BRANGHAM: Where President Trump has called for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border…
TRUMP: We’re going to build a big beautiful wall.
BRANGHAM: … Orban actually closed Hungary’s southern border with barbed wire after mainly Syrian refugees surged by almost 450 percent in 2015.
ORBAN (through translator): The biggest danger of all is the immigrants in their millions who are threatening us from the south. That’s the truth. We built the fence. We defended the southern border. Continue reading this article
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