Congressman Troy E. Nehls undertook the seismic effort to publish a book about border security along with US policy and politics. The stuff in these pages is a red-hot issue right now. Nehls has unique insights from his perch within Congress.
Mr. Nehls hits on the unique concept of using a metaphor concerning a time machine between two points in American history–1890 and 2024. Using economic analysis, he shows how the modern era would happily pay people their wages from 1890 as the cost is far less. The people in 1890 would be content, as the wages in 2024 are far greater than those in 1890. Time, inflation, opportunity costs, and myriads of other factors are involved in a typical economic discussion while here these concepts are turned on their head to show the logic of a market that is free from the constraints of time. The logical conclusion to this chain of reasoning is that these time-travelers become hardened to their actual time since they are jumping around so often and are therefore out of tune with the issues in their own respective places. They begin to see themselves as a part of a community of time-traveling economic hitmen in a sense, and not so much as people who live in 2024 or those who live in 1890.
Mr. Nehls uses this analogy to escape from contemporary discussions about the Mexico border where polarising racial narratives make it impossible to logically discuss the issues without some fervent accusation of someone coming from a place of discrimination as opposed to math. This does a great job of removing the pathos from the topic so that one can simply focus factually on how the argument would advance with America compared to itself only at different times.
The book shows us that Mexico has traditionally worked in tandem with Big Agricultural businesses to cause what Nehls terms “pushes and pulls” that are coincidental to harvest times and labor needs. These pushes and pulls left Mexicans poor enough that they could never settle in the US in the 30’s and 40’s, but rich enough to want to come. At the same time, the presence of these Mexican immigrants is enough to drive wages down for those who are American citizens thus allowing agricultural businesses to continue making large sums of cash while keeping wages depressed. A push is defined as a reason to want to leave where one is, whereas a pull is defined as a reason that is an incentive to go somewhere else.
Also indicated here are how the drug cartels use a similar kind of logic to not only ferry drugs across the border, but to traffic human beings for labor, sex, or whatever else it is that cartels desire.
All of these issues, Nehls points out, are historically backed by Democrats since they require a dependent population either through government benefits or quickly expedited citizenship to gain needed votes to stay in office. The tactic, it seems, is to give people just enough incentive to want to come here from places like Latin America, but never enough that they can stand on their own feet and vote in some way the Democratic party might not like.
The cartels (and others) have learned to use the loopholes of laws concerning children coming with their families to the US to create a kind of rent-a-child circular business where kids are brought to the US and then returned to Mexico for big money. The kids have special laws when they are with their families (or assumed families) that make it harder for the people crossing the border to be deported. Cartels use this to their advantage.
Other connections are made between the World Economic Forum, the Davos economic group in Switzerland, and the World Economic Forum who all work together with liberal Democrats who are trying to produce a world without borders or nations in order, one concludes, to begin a kind of New World Order (Reich?) with themselves at the top. Nehls argues that COVID was part of this effort. The other issue that they wish to use is Global Climate Change.
Nehls quotes statistics to prove that crime goes up with more immigration, although one is reminded that there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics” as Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. Even without the statistics, though, it is not hard to comprehend that a country that allows people in from places that have tremendous social problems is going to likely suffer some magnification of those problems as those people become more numerous within a country.
Nehls’s main thesis is that all of these dirty tricks are being used to ultimately destroy the United States as a place that holds Constitutionally derived freedoms and liberties so that a small handful of rich globalists no longer have to worry about America opposing their intrigues. He also is not shy to say that the 2020 election was stolen by these same people using a tactic where large cities are targeted to change voting demographics while allowing the rest of the state to remain more Republican.
To finish the time-traveling analogy, these rich elitists are in a club no one else is in, and their allegiance is to no one other than their bank accounts. They want to eliminate the middle class and create a scenario where there are two classes of people–the very rich and the very poor. Guess which one they wish to remain?
The final chapters of the book deal with all the reforms that Donald Trump implemented, and argue that these policies were effective in patching the dam. Indeed, there are many, many restrictions Trump put into place that many will, no doubt, not be aware of. Discouragingly, most of these policies were removed by the current Biden administration, since, the book argues, they did not win the election, and they are going to need their bag of dirty tricks again for the next election. The book documents each of these policies, and why they were there, and it does show that Trump’s administration was tough on immigration and the border. After all, nothing says border security quite like building a big wall between one country and another. China did this long ago, and the wall still stands today.
A most interesting piece, speaking of China, the book also advances, is that the Fentanyl overdoses and other drug issues in the United States appertain to China getting revenge on the US for the 1800s and the generation of an opioid addiction that both Britain and the US enabled by shipping a lot of poppy that direction. Shipping the Fentanyl to the border into the US is China’s revenge, although the ultimate aim is to restore China to its former 1700s glory by those who lead it. How they intend to do this using communism is beyond the scope of this book, but would make an interesting read on its own.
While many progressive Democrats would not be interested in reading this book as the stance it outlines flies directly in the face of what that platform holds there are enough facts here to make the read worthwhile. There are many, many pieces of the picture delineated that cannot be denied as factual and historical. The statistics are the weakest part since COVID and subsequent events make most statistics suspect at best. (Who is funding them, who did the study, why did they do it, etc.) Of course, when a fact is obvious enough, one requires no statistics. It does not take a genius to see that if you allow the wrong kinds of people into your country for the wrong reasons, your country is going to have serious internal issues. Nehls makes the case it does. Everyone owes it to themselves to see if they agree with him.
Author’s Note: Bombardier Books, the publisher, made a digital review copy available. You can check out their site here: Bombardier Books Thanks!
A book about Zen does not need to say much in order to say more than a person can handle. A book about physics often must say much more, although the essence of the equations and ideas once firmly grasped, should not take long to explain. The Dancing Wu Li Masters tries to do both and ultimately fails at doing each task in certain respects.
In fairness, this book is now old. The first printing was back in 1979. The explanations are repeated in more modern books, so this tells the reader that this one was instrumental in informing future authors on the topic of how best to approach the subject. Zukav does, at times, have a gift for explaining complicated topics with ease. At others, he belabors the narrative and drops in how similar certain facets of Quantum Mechanics are to an acid trip. To be sure, Quantum Mechanics is strange. However, it may be that everyone who studies the field finds themselves on a kind of intellectual acid trip. This is because Quantum Mechanics from a mystical standpoint, has the curious sensation of having your own perceptions stare back at you in a jumbled way. Not too surprisingly, this lends itself to a kind of nihilism that Zukav attempts to marry off to Eastern Taoism through the means of a Tai Chi master who is called Al Huang.
The problem with Al Huang’s Tai Chi way is that it all seems relative to man as opposed to being relative to the way itself. Indeed, one of the steps in the indicated mystical system is a way called “My Way”, which, a cursory reading in any Buddhist text will tell you should not last much beyond the first hour of day one in any serious Buddhist pursuit of enlightenment. There is only “The Way” which is a critical difference that this text equivocates. This, as will be seen, proves dangerous.
The cover art is reminiscent of the Isle of Man’s many-footed flag emblem called the “Triskeles”. After reading through the entirety of the book, one wonders if the objective was not simply to devise a way to worship man and his cleverness. Indeed, there is a lot of cleverness in the book. The central favored explanation, for instance, Quantum Mechanics centers on the Copenhagen interpretation which suggests one must be preset if a tree should fall in the woods or else nothing at all might happen. This is the purely statistical understanding of QM, however. Bohm and others put forth theories that do not make guest appearances here. One of these is called the “Pilot Wave” theory. These are not widely adopted, but they can explain many facets of Quantum theory just as well if not better than the Copenhagen one. Now, there are even some physical models in a Bohm-style that show how the double slit experiment might work without having to rely on many assumptions the Copenhagen interpretation requires.
The Buddhism/Taoism/Tai Chi failure is in the idea that all matter is ultimately empty and is simply dancing. Standard Buddhism suggests one should empty one’s mind of all forms–and this part is the critical part–of all things OTHER THAN those things which exist in the Buddha mind. This is a key distinction and many Buddhist texts discuss aspects of various wrathful and peaceful deities and a kind of Buddhist apocalypse to come. Far from suggesting these are “empty dances” one rather instead gets the impression that if one does not have the Buddha-mind at this point, one will burn up with the rest of creation. There is a definitive aim that this book misunderstands or misapplies. Yes, physical things change their form, but the forms they assume, as Plato indicated, mean something, somewhere. Enlightenment is the road to understanding, hopefully, what that means. It is not, “Oh well, things come and go, kids!”
By the time the reader gets to the part of imaginary particles the entire work starts to feel like an imaginary intellectual ivory tower. While it is true virtual particles exist in theory, there is something distinctly cynical about assuming they exist for the purpose of theory while suggesting everything is an illusion. By the time one is done reading the book, one feels as though one would have done better to have read nothing at all. It is only salvageable as an experience by disagreeing with the core tenets the book presents that anything of value can be derived. This might be called “The Way of Annihilation of Falsehoods”. It is peculiar since this is the only book that this strategy must be employed without a doubt to derive the benefit of meaning.
It could be that Zukav did not understand the Tai Chi fellow. It could be the Tai Chi fellow did not understand Zukav. It might even possibly be that the understanding of the field was, at the point this book was made, immature. However, one feels even with all that Zukav would still have tried to place man squarely in the middle of the universe like some kind of God regardless. While the entirety of QM screams “Get over yourselves, there’s too much going on here” Zukav seems to yell back, “I know better because it’s all an illusion because of this Tai Chi guy over here!” Never mind that it is misapplied. Never mind the entire discussions on symbols and mathematics not necessarily corresponding to models. (What are models if they cannot be discussed?) Never mind other overlapping Eastern philosophy that suggests that these theories are only being half-applied. The point to be made–the book is bad. It is bad the same way a lot of old kung fu movies are bad. One cannot exactly follow the plot, but one feels like one should finish the movie since they are “this far in”. It is bad because it fails to yoke together its intended subject domains. It is bad because it picks and chooses the points that prove its case, but ignores things that flatly contradict it. It is ultimately bad because it offers a teaching that is patently false as far as the mysticism it claims to represent goes.
For all that, there are some diamonds in here, but the reader’s hands have to get far too bloody in the digging for them. It is better to pass on this one and find something else from an actual wisdom teacher.
William Boyd read all of the former James Bond narratives chronologically, reportedly, to write Solo–his own James Bond novel set in the year of 1969. A cursory perusal of the sales of the book seems to suggest that though the publicity and hype were high around it, the sales did not meet the expectation. It is difficult to know precisely why this is as the book is a solid entry into the Bond universe. Perhaps the readership of Bond is now sophisticated enough within the spy universe to want a kind of Jason-Bourne-superhuman-version instead of a novel that plausibly is more akin to being the genuine article. You are not going to find Bond leaping tall buildings here or surviving incredible wounds and somehow climbing a moving train while expertly jumping up an excavator bucket to the next car. No, this book is more ‘back to the roots’ of being a spy.
As the title implies, Bond is called into a kerfuffle in a tiny region of Africa that concerns the discovery and potential of crude oil reserves. Unfortunately, this discovery has set long-simmering power differentials into motion and the region where the oil field is reputed to be is right in the middle of the conflict. Through the auspices of M, Bond is dispatched to stop this conflict before it escalates further. He does this in the guise of a journalist even though once he arrives almost everyone who is anyone suspects him to be a spy. He arrives with a partner who is a type of CEO of a major company, who has several secrets of her own.
After understanding the political dynamic, Bond makes his move and discovers a way to upset the balance of the political and military forces involved. The fallout does not go as expected, and further complications arise that put Bond on a course back toward England and ultimately toward the status the book title indicates–that is going Solo. Eponymously, going solo means breaking off from the auspices of the agencies of M and Q Branch, and going on one’s own mission by one’s own impetus. The difficulties Bond faces concern, in no small way, a lack of resources that those connections typically supply. Bond will simply have to work around these problems, and it does create an interesting twist to the typical Bond methodology of having gadgets and everything one needs supplied by the British government.
By the end of the novel, we discover, not surprisingly that not everything is as it seems, and the greed that runs the world plays one hand off of another in myriad ways all aimed ultimately and who will, or in some cases who will not, control the freshly found crude in Africa. A weaker character does appear within this narrative who has a ‘weeping eye’ which is reminiscent of Casino Royale. This was easily the most aggravating part of the novel if only because one finds this literary touch as unoriginal and therefore recycled. Everything else, however, is quite good in terms of plot development and believability and we can forgive Boyd for indulgences such as having Bond make his own salad dressing. (Hey, it’s his chance to add something to the mythology of the Bond universe!)
It is possible this book simply came out at the ‘wrong time’ when the palates of Bond fans wanted something else other than a hearkening back to believable spy narratives. Boyd says that he thought Bond should be an excessive alcoholic, and while he certainly drinks often in this book, he certainly is not approaching the levels of alcohol imbibed by the likes of Jackson Lamb in the series Slow Horses. Evidently, these and other issues were enough to make the estate of Ian Fleming take notice and cause a dispute to arise about how Boyd went about the portrayal. Too many cooks in the proverbial spy novel kitchen might make for some sour salad. Just so you are not left wanting, though, here is Bond’s salad vinegarette, which, in all fairness, he also took pains to make during Moonraker:
James Bond’s Salad Dressing in the book Solo: Mix five parts of red-wine vinegar with one part extra-virgin olive oil. The vinegar overload is essential. Add a halved clove of garlic, half a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a good grind of black pepper and a teaspoon of white granulated sugar. Mix well, remove the garlic and dress the salad.
Perhaps future novels will feature James Bond becoming a genuine ‘foodie’.!
