Pandejos and the law of unintended consequences

Most of the readership will be familiar with the fact that California has a large population of "indocumentados" - immigrants of less-than-legal status, mostly from Central America, who supply a lot of the farming, factory and other close-or-below minimum wage labour. This has, historically, been encouraged by virtually every Californian politician in high office.

So you've brought in a large population of people who aren't that fluent with the language, actively avoid authority - police, INS, DMV etc. - and you've specifically told them that the rules, such as immigration law, don't apply to them. And now, there's a pandemic, and you want them to follow government-mandated rules on their business and personal lives.

How, dear reader, would you expect this to turn out?

Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times is in despair at the behaviour of the pandejos - a portmanteau of "pandemic" and the Hispanic pejorative "pendejo":

The earnestness and importance of the [COVID] messages don't matter: Everywhere I turn, my neighbors ignore the suggestions with gusto. Down the street are tents on front yards packed with people attending a birthday party. Over there is a taco truck where people chow down shoulder to shoulder, despite signs stating that all orders are to-go. Off in all directions, I hear music: live mariachi, conjunto norteño outfits, brass bands, and DJs, echoing from blocks away. Sometimes I can even catch the sermon of a Pentecostal minister who never bothered closing his storefront church to indoor service.

The combination of Gustavo's Puritan indignity at this behaviour, and his previous cheering-on of Latino extra-legal immigration (e.g. his relentless opposition to Proposition 187, is enough to make one wish for stronger bladder muscles. Gustavo has inadvertently cheered on a wipe-out of his favoured community's abuelos and abuelas:

In Los Angeles County, the Department of Health estimates that daily COVID-19 deaths among Latinos went from about 3.5 per 100,000 people in early November to 28 per 100,000 in January—an increase of almost 800 percent. In Ventura County, two zip codes in the city of Oxnard account for around 30 percent of all COVID-19 cases—and these spots just so happen to correspond with where farmworkers live and pick. In Orange County, Latinos make up 34 percent of the population but 44 percent of all cases and about 39 percent of deaths.

Why does California continue to have a high COVID infection and death rate? Because it imported a large underclass who never had to pay mind to government diktats, who live in crowded conditions that happily spread the virus, and who (though generally young and healthy) have brought in grandparents with diet-related comorbidities who are prime targets for COVID.

"Dude, you're screwed!" - an appreciation

One of the great features about American cable TV used to be that there were so many channels, and so few shows worth watching, that you'd be forced to channel-surf until you came across something vaguely appealing on a channel that you'd likely never visit deliberately. Thus, new shows entered the American consciousness.

Now Netflix is near-ubiquitous... the same thing is happening there. It's astonishing how big the Netflix catalogue is, but less astonishing how much of it is crap. Still, there are some gems buried in the ordure, and I stumbled across one of them with a most unpreprosessing title: "Dude, You're Screwed!"

The premise of the show is simple but brilliant. There are 5-6 hosts of the show, all with a background in wilderness survival. In each episode, one host is "abducted" and dumped in the middle of the wilderness, with no idea where they are, given a survival kit with items of varying helpfulness - a giant teddy bear and a Viking shield, in one case - and have 100 hours to find "civilization" which might be a main road, houses, or just stumbling across other people. For the viewer's benefit, a suitably well-equipped cameraman accompanies the victim but cannot help them in any way. Presumably they would intervene if things went very pear-shaped, but you get the idea.

Is is staged? At least some of the takedown-and-transport parts are; if you were a Costa Rican immigration official, would you let a party into your country with one member flex-cuffed and with a bag over his head? but I think most of it is real. The victim might know what country they're in, but not where they are or where to go. But I think this misses the point, in any case. This show is fascinating in how you get an up-and-close look at wilderness environments, and how they try very hard to kill you.

Some of my favourite episodes were Iceland (Jake), Tanzania (Matt), Namibia (Jake again) and Utah (John). In all of these you get a really good look at wilderness you'd probably never see, and its peculiar wrinkles. Of all of them, the Namibian desert / Skeleton Coast was probably the best. Jake - a former Navy SEAL - fights his way through the desert only to end up on the shore where there's still nothing to eat or drink, a whole bunch of dead wildlife testifying to the hostility of the land, and the only plants are poisonous. The legendary SEAL determination shows - in the closing hours, despite being dehydrated, starved and vomiting, he's still doggedly hiking down the coast looking for civilization. Had the others not intervened, he'd have certainly died - but even then I'm still not entirely sure it would have stopped him.

What makes the show for me, though, is the interplay between the core characters: the aforementioned SEAL Jake, Green Beret Terry, wilderness survival and atlatl master Matt, and UK military SERE instructor John. They're all very different personalities but bounce off each other well in cameraderie, perspectives, and the balance between wanting to make the situation challenging while being concerned for the victim's well-being. Jake's a balls-out "beat this in the fastest time" guy, Terry is more cerebral, Matt just seems to like making things out of trees, and John is a phlegmatic Mancunian whose early priority seems to be to find something to make a hot cup of tea. There are other hosts, but these four really stand out for me.

You can probably find this on Netflix, or maybe Discovery Channel on cable. It might also be titled "Survive That!". Go take a look, you'll enjoy it. Also, stay the heck away from the Namib.

Trump won yesterday

No really, he did. Hear me out.

I'm not talking about the November 2020 election; I have no idea who actually won that. I will note that, if Joe Biden was confident that he won fairly, then he'd have motivation to ask a reputable organization to conduct a thorough investigation into the election's conduct and vindicate his win. But no, I'm talking about the effect of the Trump 2017-2021 presidency.

President Donald Trump managed to drive the media, Big Tech, Democratic party and sundry establishment members so mad with everything he did in those four years, that they abandoned any pretence at fairness and yesterday went on a concerted witch hunt to shut him off mainstream social media and choke off other social media that let him and his supporters communicate. The Democrats are trying to pass articles of impeachment and invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from the presidency before January 20th. The Capitol invasion was just the excuse - they've been talking about this for months, but only in the closing days of the presidency did they have the "courage" to do it.

[Side note for those who didn't take US high school civics: the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution talks about the US President being relieved of their role, voluntarily - and maybe temporarily, e.g. while undergoing medical treatment, or forcibly. The reason that it's being talked about now, with less than 2 weeks to go, is apparently (because I can't see this clearly in the text) it would prevent Trump from running for President again in 2024. It is interesting to note the the Democrats still think that Trump would be a material asset to the Republicans in 4 years time. If they really thought he was a loon and a loser, wouldn't they cheer him on for a re-run? Perhaps they remember Hilary Clinton cheering him on in the 2016 primaries, and are once bitten, twice shy.]

My personal opinion is that this was a Pyrrhic victory;

• the Dem/BigTech/DCSwamp has demonstrated to the world that they are still terrified of Trump;
• 70 million people voted for Trump in the most recent election, despite a 4 year coordinated campaign against him by the media (all but Fox), Establishment (Russia hoax and impeachment), Never Trump "Republicans", and recently Big Tech (Twitter and Facebook steadily increasing interference in his comms and with his supporters);
• he has provoked the Democrats to exhibit their gun-grabbing credentials to the point that there were more background checks for firearm purchases in the first 9 months of 2020 than in any previous year, and guns and ammunition are in unprecentended short supply despite manufacturers ramping up additional plants to meet demand. I hypothesize that most of these gun and ammo buyers don't vote Democrat - and with 8M+ new firearm owners in 2020, that's a big fraction of the election base who have been 'radicalized';
• the COVID crisis has demonstrated that Democratic leadership is completely happy to trash small business for no good reason, while fully funding their teaching and other union block to stay at home and "phone it in" at full pay rates, while governors and Senators get their hair done, eat at expensive restaurants, and generally display hypocrisy to an astounding degree.

Knowing a numbner of engineers and marketing folks at Twitter and YouTube, they are to a man non-gendered-person staunch left wing advocates, and the depth of their loathing for Trump is hard to over-state. I don't know Jack Dorsey or Susan Woiciki personally, but it would not astonish me if they had a similar attitude.

The Trump base will not go away because of the past week's changes. They're only going to get squeezed - and when you squeeze something hard enough, the internal pressure builds up until there is a "bang". JFK said those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. If the hotheads in the Democrat administration prevail, I fear that the "bang" is going to echo around the world.

I enjoy the "Monster Hunter" books of unreformed conservative author Larry Correia, but he knows a lot about guns and the gun-owning community, and his words from 2017's blog post "A handy guide for liberals who are suddenly interested in gun ownership" really resonate right now:

There is a saying that has long been common in my half of the country. There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty, soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. You can debate, vote, and go to court in order to get things changed. You only go ammo box when those other things no longer work, because once you do, there is no going back.

God willing, America never gets to that point, because if we ever go to war with ourselves again, then it will be a blood bath the like of which the world has never seen.

If the jury box doesn't defend the rights of 70M+ Americans, there's only one box left.