Virgin Births in Modern Times

When looking at the virgin birth of Christ, a few disturbing historical facts can be noted. First, due to a dramatically different understanding of how conception takes place, people in ancient times may have been more prone to accept virgin births than those living in the modern era. We have, for example, this case from the late medieval period:

In 1637 in Grenoble, France, the aristocrat Madeleine d’Auvermont was put on trial for adultery. Despite the fact that her husband had left France four years earlier, Madeleine had recently given birth to a healthy baby boy. In the face of what seemed like damning evidence she protested her innocence, claiming that she had thought—ahem—intensely about her husband at night and had conceived through the power of imagination.

Various physicians and theologians were consulted on the case and declared that this was theoretically possible. (You’d think that the theologians maybe spoke a little more forcefully than the physicians.) The child was named the legal offspring of her husband and heir to the de Montleon fortune.

But, the acceptance of a virgin birth is not limited to medieval culture. Even today, it is not uncommon for women to claim that they became pregnant without benefit of sexual intercourse:

Of 7870 eligible women, 5340 reported a pregnancy, of whom 45 (0.8% of pregnant women) reported a virgin pregnancy (table 1)

Is there any medical evidence that such parthenogenesis could take place? While most sources would say "no", there was at least one study done in the 1950s that was a little, shall we say, unsettling: 

The remaining eight pairs were examined by Balfour-Lynn (1956), who blood typed mothers and daughters and found antigens present in six daughters that were absent in their mothers, clear evidence of genetic differences. In another pair, the mother had blue eyes and the daughter brown eyes, indicating genetic differences. In the single remaining case, "Mrs. Alpha and daughter," there was apparent genetic identity in blood groups and several other genetically determined traits including electrophoretic analysis of serum. The probability of such a close match between a mother and daughter produced by heterosexual reproduction was less than one chance in a hundred (P < .01).

But, of course, if parthenogenesis happened, the child would be female, like her mother. Jesus was male, therefore not the product of parthenogenesis. True, offspring of the same sex would be necessary for typical parthenogenesis, but what if the offspring were of a true hermaphrodite? We have a 2016 study that used true hermaphroditic rabbits as the test cases:

In the literature, pregnancy cases that developed through self-fertilization were not reported in humans. However, autofertilization was detected in mammalian hermaphrodites such as domestic rabbit... The number of hermaphrodite pregnants (sic) with ovotestis reported in the literature is 14 while the number of pregnancies in these cases is 26 [7–20]. In these pregnancies, there were one premature, one immature, one stillborn and one abortion performed due to unwanted pregnancy. One baby died 2 h after the birth. There was also an ongoing pregnancy during the publication of the relevant literature. All of the babies born apart from these were healthy. All of the babies (fetuses) whose gender was reported were male (Table 1).

Hermaphrodites could exhibit female mothers with male offspring. That is a little unexpected. This report from 2009 confirms the findings:

Background: There are 11 reported cases of pregnancy in true hermaphrodites, but none with advanced genetic testing. All known fetuses have been male.

Case: A true hermaphrodite with a spontaneous pregnancy prenatally known to have a remaining portion of a right ovotestis, delivered a male neonate. The mother has a 46, XX karyotype with polymerase chain reaction demonstrating low levels of the Yq12 sequence. Postpartum androgen levels were normal.

Conclusion: Partial removal of testicular tissue may enhance fertility in hermaphrodites, and there may be a genetic basis for the progeny to be male. 

For the last century or so, Christians have had a propensity to explain the reported astronomical or meteorological phenomenon around the Gospel stories (the star of Bethlehem, the darkness at the Crucifixion, etc.) as simply a divine intervention that exhibited as a natural phenomenon. That is, the Star of Bethlehem was really a great conjunction of planets while the darkness at the Crucifixion may have been caused by a sandstorm.  This propensity was not restricted to modern Christians. Even Augustine shared this propensity: 

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].”  ― Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol 2

Even in the Old Testament, physical reality was used to prove contact with the divine. Gideon's fleece, Daniel's vegetarian diet and the Deuteronomic warning against false prophets all use physical reality as the final test. Reality trumps human eyewitness testimony. 

Christians do not use divine revelation to confirm experimental science, that is, we do not say, "well the experimental results must be accepted as correct because experiment conforms with what God says." Similarly, only the most fundamentalist of Christians say, "We reject any experimental result which does not conform with Biblical revelation." Rather, we use experimental science as the norm which serves to confirm divine revelation: "this event could have happened as the Bible reported, because we have experimental evidence which supports the possibility that the divinely inspired eyewitness testimony could be true." 

The physical world is the norm which norms the Bible. Even the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, attests that this is the appropriate way to approach the Divine Word. 

But, while the biological phenomenon of virgin birth can now potentially be explained via experimental science, it is doubtful that Christianity will allow biology to explain the miracle. 

Why Atheists Should Become Christians

Christianity has been doing a deep-dive study of personal relationships for 2000 years. In fact, Christianity was the formal logical system which first invented the term "person."

Even if you don't believe Jesus is God, the results of a long-term study performed across multiple cultures for two thousand years is going to be a bit more reliable than something some yahoo just thought up last week while reading Kerouac. The beauty of Christian teaching isn't the Christ-elements, so much as it is the consistency of the personal relationship teachings. Any teaching which hasn't changed for 2000 years is probably something we need to keep, at least until we fully understand everything it is doing in the culture.

Jesus Christ on Families

You know, when you think about it, it is really hard to come up with a quote from Jesus in the Gospels in which He praises families.

He just doesn't do it. He tells people, in multiple places, that they should abandon their families, and that families are sources of strife and division. But, apart from mentioning - in the context of divorce - that a man and woman will leave their families to cleave together, He just doesn't seem very interested in families or kids. 

If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.

Jesus told a would-be disciple who wanted to show basic decency to his deceased father, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60). He commanded his disciples: Leave parents, siblings, spouse – even “hate” them – and follow me. When his own mother and brothers came to see him, Jesus’ reaction was terse: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Looking at those seated around him he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31–35).

Nor was He that big of a fan of heterosexual marriage. When He gave the teaching on divorce, the disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Now, if the disciples had misunderstood him, this was a perfect chance to correct the disciples' misunderstanding. But, Jesus does not use this opportunity to go into a panegyric on marriage and how wonderful it is. Instead, he essentially agrees with them and starts praising celibacy:

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

That is pretty weak sauce on heterosexual marriage. He upholds the Old Testament teaching that heterosexual marriage is acceptable, and parents should be honored, but I cannot think of a passage where He praises marriage, or even praises motherhood or fatherhood.

When He wants to say something nice about mothers, He doesn't talk about human mothers. He talks about chickens. When a mother asks Him to cast demons out of her daughter, Jesus essentially calls her a bitch. 

The epistles are really not any better. The best Paul can say is to honor the marriage bed. Get married only if you aren't good enough to be celibate and you don't want to burn (in hell). Paul explicitly says that family formation is an impediment to holiness. He finds it necessary to point out that marriage is not actually a sin. That's as positive as he gets about it. What a rousing endorsement of a divinizing, deifying sacrament! "Hey guys, I guess you can do it if it is truly the only way to avoid eternal damnation, and technically, it isn't actually a sin.... so.... " 

A woman should not be enrolled as a widow if she is not at least sixty years old. In addition, she must have been married only once, 10 and have a reputation for good works by bringing up her children, offering hospitality to strangers, washing the feet of the saints,[d] helping those in distress, and being active in all kinds of good work.

11 However, refuse to enroll younger widows, for when their passions distract them from the service of Christ, they will want to marry again 12 and will incur condemnation for having broken their original vow....If any woman believer has relatives who are widows, she must assist them herself. The Church should be free of such burdens and consequently able to assist those who are widows in the true sense.

...he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better (1 Cor 7:38)

The Gospels were not designed to build up family ties. Quite the contrary. Jesus specifically set out to DESTROY family and tribal ties. The ancient world was rife with nepotism and tribal conflict. Every negative event generated some version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. That kind of ancient tribalism, in which every person was required to put family and tribal honor first, was not only common in every society known to man, it is also is the antithesis of the Gospel.

Jesus set out to destroy tribalism. By preaching to non-Jews, He even attacked traditional Judaic tribalism. He succeeded in His goal. Indeed, that destruction of nepotism is part of the reason why Christianity has been so successful: Christians are required to stop engaging in nepotism, stop worrying about family honor, and instead put non-family members on an equal footing with family members. 

Today, the anti-family, anti-tribal Christian message has been so wildly successful that the world suffers from the opposite problem. Family has now been relegated so far into the dust heap of history that the majority of people in the first world no longer even form families. But, because this problem was completely unknown to ancient societies, the Bible has almost nothing to say about how to improve or increase family formation.  

TLDR

Jesus only talks about works as a means of salvation, He never mentions grace at all, much less grace as a means of salvation.

Jesus' parables about wedding feasts always involve torture, punishment and death. Apart from a reference to honoring one's mother and father, he has nothing kind to say about parenthood. Apart from a statement that marriage is indissoluble, he has nothing kind to say about marriage.

In addition to his decidedly negative attitude towards marriage, Jesus never praises the begetting of children or the work of family formation. Instead, his references to family again primarily describe family as a place of combat and violence. He encourages people to abandon their families if family members sin.

For Jesus and Paul, celibacy is the highest good. If the world had been successfully evangelized, and all Christians had followed this highest path to holiness, the human race would have disappeared from the planet by 150 AD.

Are Animals Rational?

Do animals have the use of reason? 

research has shown that animals can remember specific events, use tools and solve problems. But exactly what that means – whether they are making rational decisions or simply reacting to their environment through mindless reflex – remains a matter of scientific dispute.

Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting.

There are many examples of animals using what appears to be rational decision-making:

Jacob Beck (2012) relies on pigeons’ abilities to compare quantities to argue for nonconceptual content; Sidney Carls-Diamante (forthcoming) appeals to octopus behavior and physiology to defend embodied cognition; Richard Moore (2016a) refers to ape gestural communication to rethink the requirements for intentional communication; Andrew Barron and Colin Klein (2016) appeal to insect cognition research to defend new theories of consciousness; Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring, and Kristin Andrews (2019) cite dolphins’ social practices to argue for the existence of norms that do not require metacognition.

In addition, philosophers of animal cognition can examine the epistemology and methods used to justify the claims that arise from the science. Research into animal cognition has resulted in surprising claims about animal capacities, such as sociality in garter snakes (Skinner & Miller 2020), tool-use in ants (Maák et al. 2017), mirror self-recognition in fish (Kohda et al. 2019), empathy in rats (Bartal et al. 2011), social learning in fruit flies (Danchin et al. 2018), episodic memory in dogs (Fugazza et al. 2020), addition and subtraction in bees (Howard et al. 2019). How should we evaluate such claims?

If animals have the use of reason, as St. Thomas avers, then Catholic theology has a problem. Catholic theology specifically says only human beings, angels and God have the use of reason. Because humans have the use of reason, the fall of humanity requires sacraments be applied to human beings for their salvation.

But, if animals can reason, then the brokenness of reality means animals are in peril of hell via their immortal rational souls. That is, if animals have immortal rational souls, animals can go to hell (yes, even dogs can go to hell). So animals ALSO need sacraments. But no liturgical Christian denomination has ever applied sacraments to animals. From the non-liturgical, Protestant perspective, animals cannot read, they cannot proclaim with their mouths that Jesus is Lord, they cannot know Jesus through Scripture, and thus they cannot fulfill the conditions necessary for Protestant salvation either. 

If animals can reason, if animals have rational souls, then all animals go to hell.

Christian Colleges Can't Be Woke

Over 40% of the colleges closed since Covid are Christian. The reason is straightforward.

Most college students are female, most college administrators are female. Women value relationships over truth. That's why most colleges are going woke - women always worry about building family relationships. Colleges aren't designed to be about families, they are designed to seek out the truth.

But, as women dominate the college experience, they have to go woke, because ... female. Inclusion. Equity. That's purely a female perspective on the world. Colleges turn into matriarchal, mother-child relationship models. In the whole history of the world, there has never been a successful matriarchal society.

Woke is not compatible with Christian. The two world-views don't mesh. Ironically, even though Christianity is dominated by women believers, Christianity is male-centered, it is dominated by a search for truth.

Christianity is a Father-Son relationship, not a mother-child relationship. Male-centered Christianity is inimical to woke. A father scourges his child, intentionally exposing children to certain levels of danger to harden them for life and help them gain experience in dealing with life's difficulties, while mothers coddle children. Endlessly coddling a child ultimately destroys the child. Jordan Peterson talks about the devouring mother as a Jungian archetype. There's a reason the Hindu deity of death and destruction is Kali, a goddess, a female.

So, Christian college enrolment is necessarily going to drop because there's no way to square those two competing world-views. You cannot have women run an institution designed to be run by men. It doesn't work.

AI Detectors Don't Work

 Artificial Intelligence essay generators, like ChatGPT, are designed to simulate human essay writing. The better the AI generator, the more difficult it is to distinguish its essays from that of a human author. The whole point of the generator is to be indistinguishable from human authoriship.

AI generators are simply deep statistical analysis engines. Each word in the English language is assigned a numeric value, then  statistical engines use large language data to correlate word frequency and distance from each other in sentences. When a string of words is supplied (a question), the engine turns the words into numbers, use the numbers as input, correlates what a reply sequence should look like, and spits that reply sequence back. The numbers are changed back into words right before the words appear on your screen.

All the AI generator does is mindlessly mirror back to us our own Q-A sequences. Ultimately, everything an AI generates was in some way human-generated, both by programmers and by the vast audience of essays the statistical engine was trained on. 

So, how well do these detectors work?

If a non-native English speaker writes an essay, it will be flagged as AI-generated. Stanford University's study indicates AI-detection tools commonly flagged international students. 

The University of Pittsburgh was one. In a note to faculty at the end of June, the university’s teaching center said it didn’t support the use of any AI detectors, citing the fact that false positives “carry the risk of loss of student trust, confidence and motivation, bad publicity, and potential legal sanctions.” 

Every AI generator has political biases, with ChatGPT being the most far left

AI-generated content probably cannot be copyrighted, according to the US Copyright Office. There have been very few court cases, so no one knows where this will end up. But the first court ruling on the subject agrees with the US Copyright Office. 

On the other hand, AI generators claims the right to use anything you input as its own, in perpetuity:

“perpetual, revocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works”

Now, is this all that different from Raphael or Michelangelo claiming as their own work created by their assistants? Or Ph.D.s claiming as their own work done by their grad students or postdocs?

Film credits often list the names of dozens of talented people who contributed to the creation of a film, but typically just one copyright owner — namely, the film company that produced it.

AI pattern-matching tools can discriminate against the poor and disabled. 

AI detection tools may be impossible to create:

"Considering those factors, it might well be impossible for humans to create tools to identify AI-generated text with 100 percent accuracy and reliability, something the paper alluded to: "Our findings strongly suggest that the 'easy solution' for detection of AI-generated text does not (and maybe even could not) exist. Therefore, rather than focusing on detection strategies, educators continue to need to focus on preventive measures and continue to rethink academic assessment strategies (see, for example, Bjelobaba 2020). Written assessment should focus on the process of development of student skills rather than the final product."

And AI-generated watermarks can be spoofed: 

"For a sufficiently advanced language model seeking to imitate human text, even the best-possible detector may only perform marginally better than a random classifier. Our result is general enough to capture specific scenarios such as particular writing styles, clever prompt design, or text paraphrasing. We also extend the impossibility result to include the case where pseudorandom number generators are used for AI-text generation instead of true randomness. We show that the same result holds with a negligible correction term for all polynomial-time computable detectors. Finally, we show that even LLMs protected by watermarking schemes can be vulnerable against spoofing attacks where adversarial humans can infer hidden LLM text signatures and add them to human-generated text to be detected as text generated by the LLMs, potentially causing reputational damage to their developers."

You can fool the detectors by running your AI-generated content through a paraphrasing engine like undetectable.ai, Quillbot, or HideMyAI. The detector abilities are so bad, that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have shut down their own AI detector. 

Instructors at the high school and college level are deeply concerned. They cannot believe they cannot reliably determine what is AI-generated and what is not. But, the fact is, they cannot determine the differences with any reliability. If a student uses AI text generators from Day One, the instructor will not see a sudden change in writing ability. No tool will reliably allow detection of AI text generation. The business that employs the graduate will undoubtedly use AI to streamline text-writing tasks, so there isn't much point in penalizing a student for using AI, nor is there much of a way to do it even assuming the professor desired it.

Between automated learning platforms, like Khan Academy, streaming video from Youtube, AI text and image generators, and the fact that certifications are replacing college degrees, instructors are losing the thread that explains why they exist.

Addendum (is modern academia just an elaborate form of hazing?):

However, AI models may be able to learn how animals communicate

Vanderbilt has shut down TurnitIn's AI detector for being too unreliable. One test showed only 68% accuracy in AI detection.

The University of Kansas recommends against TurnItIn's tool

July 2023: MIT Tech Review, AI Detection tools are easy to fool

Sept 2023: OpenAI admits AI Detection tool doesn't work.

October 2023: GoldPenguin, AI Detectors don't work

October 2023: ZDNet, AI Detectors, 80% accuracy at best

Report says AI can always beat detectors

HowToGeek: How AI Detection Works (hint: it also uses LLM)

AI is becoming ubiquitous, it is now present in all major mail/search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo)

Students are using AI to create college application essays

Four colleges have turned off AI detection (Vanderbilt, Michigan State, Northwestern and the University of Texas at Austin):

“Turnitin’s technology is not meant to replace educators’ professional discretion. Reports indicating the presence of AI writing, like Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature, simply provide data points and resources to support a conversation with students, not determinations of misconduct.”

One recent study from Stanford found that seven AI detectors incorrectly flagged more than half of essays written by non-native English students as AI-generated, whereas the results were “near-perfect” for English speakers. Turnitin was not one of the services tested in the study.

OpenAI has initiated Copyright Shield to protect its users from copyright claims. 

Applicants use AI essay generation to apply to colleges

Half of all students use ChatGPT to cheat.

Elon Musk's Neural Link has volunteers. Also, the Humane AI pin

Experts cannot reliably distinguish what constitutes "evidence-based" statements.

The Embarrassment of JPII's TOB

JP II's TOB was - according to JP II himself - definitely incomplete. Putatively about sex, it managed to go through ALL of the TOB general audiences without once addressing either the place of children or the place of suffering in the "theology" of the body. Indeed, even when JP II points out the incompleteness in his last audience, he still omits mention of children or family:

These reflections do not envisage a good number of problems which, because of their object, belong to the theology of the body ( as, for example, the problem of suffering and death, so important in the biblical message.

How in the name of Sweet Fanny Adams do you discuss a "theology" of the body, a theology of human sexuality, without addressing the ultimate biological goal of human sexuality (children) or the ultimate biological conformance of the body to Christ (suffering)???

So, in that sense, TOB was not only incomplete, but also repetitive and mostly puerile. As far as the Church is concerned, TOB was deprecated the moment it was launched. It is nearly impossible to find any Church document which references (i.e., footnoted) any of the "TOB" general audiences. Even JP II himself refuses to refer back to them. The entire sequence of audiences just fell off the boards and disappeared right after it was delivered.

As for Church teaching, celibacy continues to hold pride of place.

Sex continues to be primarily a remedy for concupiscence.

Marriage continues to hold a sad and distant second place to the height of human sexual expression, that is, celibacy and religious orders.

Lay people went crazy for it, but the Church, in her official teachings, ignores it. It appears to be an embarrassing interlude in JP II's pontificate.

The Murder Problem

Here's something I didn't know. Jordan Peterson says half of all murderers, and half of all murder victims, were drunk at the time of the murder. Statistics bear this out:

Alcohol

According to the NIAAA, as many as 86% of homicide offenders were drinking at or before the crime time.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported convicted murderers in state prisons stated alcohol was a factor in half the murders they committed. It’s higher in murders of intimates (54%) than of acquaintances (50%) or strangers (47%).

Among all homicide victims, 39.9% had a positive BAC including 13.7% with a BAC between 0.01%–0.79% and 26.2% of victims with a BAC ≥0.08%

Income Disparity

We also know that the more income disparity there is in a community, the more murders take place:

Inequality—the gap between a society's richest and poorest—predicts murder rates better than any other variable, according to Martin Daly, a professor emeritus of psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, who has studied this connection for decades. It is more tightly tied to murder than straightforward poverty, for example, or drug abuse. And research conducted for the World Bank finds that both between and within countries, about half the variance in murder rates can be accounted for by looking at the most common measure of inequality, which is known as the Gini coefficient.

Young Black Men

Finally, murder and other violent crimes tend to take place within, not between, demographic groups. So, white men kill other white men, black men kill other black men, Hispanics kill other Hispanics, and so on. Now, although black males only make up around 6% of the population, we also know that half of all murderers and half of all murder victims are black males between the ages of 15 and 30. 

Why is murder so peculiar to black male culture? Well, we can look back at the culture of dueling to get a hint. The duel of honor is peculiar to agrarian societies, where goods (such as cattle or sheep) are easily taken by others and hard to identify once lost. 

While the northern United States was settled primarily by farmers from more established European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and especially England (particularly from areas around London), the southern United States was settled primarily by herdsmen from the more rural and undomesticated parts of the British Isles. These two occupations — farming and herding — produced cultures with starkly different notions of honor.

This leads to the need for the virtue of honor, the respect for a man's word/deed being good. Loss of honor meant loss of economic activity. If you had no honor, no one would trust you to keep your end of an economic bargain. For the poor, honor was sometimes the only good they had available to use for barter. 

Remnants of the duel can still be seen in the alleys behind middle schools and high schools, where students who have little or no money of their own fight duels of honor to protect the only thing they do have, their reputations. It is no coincidence that the American duel survived in the antebellum south longer than it did in any other part of the nation. That southern honor-based tradition continues today in much of American black culture.

What this means is that murders in the North are more likely to occur during the course of another crime, like burglary, and involve strangers, whereas murders in the South are more likely to arise from a personal conflict, such as a barfight or love triangle. Other studies have shown that only homicides that involve a victim personally known to the perpetrator are elevated in the South compared to other regions of the country. Most interesting of all is the fact that this effect is correlated to the size of a town or city. In medium-size cities (pop. 50k-200k), Southern white males commit murder at a rate of 2 to 1 when compared to the rest of the country; in small cities (pop. 10k-50k) the ratio is 3 to 1; in rural areas it is 4 to 1

So, if we want to cut the murder rate, the demographic that REALLY needs attention are the young, poor black men who live in an honor-based culture, have alcohol or other substance abuse problems, and who live near ostentatiously rich men.

We know from addiction studies that substance abuse is a problem of social integration - when people feel incapable of integrating socially into some kind of community, they turn to drugs. Now we can narrow down the focus to WHY young black men are not being integrated into their communities.

So the problem of violence is not just a problem of the larger community, but specifically of the black community those young men are most familiar with, the specific honor-based community that is REJECTING these young men.

If we want to solve the problem of violent crime, we need to address honor-based culture, the substance abuse problem and income disparities. 

Women in the University

66.2% of college administrators are women and 33.8% of college administrators are men. Women have dominated college administration for decades. Their administrations are coterminous with the decline of American higher education.

Just 41% of students enrolled in a postsecondary institution in fall 2020 were men. For every man, there are now almost two women attending college:

In 1970, men outnumbered women in college, accounting for 59% of undergraduate enrollment in two-year institutions and 57% in four-year institutions. This was partly due to the high numbers of men enrolling for the purpose of avoiding conscription during the Vietnam War. In fact, the gender enrollment gap closed sharply as soon as the draft ended in 1973. By 1980, gender was perfectly balanced in four-year colleges, and women outnumbered men in two-year schools, accounting for 55% of enrollment in those institutions. Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019.

At every level, men are graduating at lower rates than women. Men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2013 were ten percentage points less likely than women to graduate within 4 years.

Over 1.1 million women received a bachelor’s degree in the 2018-19 academic year compared to fewer than 860,000 men; put differently, about 74 men received a bachelor’s degree for every 100 women. Even fewer men graduate with an associate or master’s degree, relative to women. Doctoral degree conferral is the most gender-balanced, though even here 54% of degrees are conferred to women.

The Unnecessary Bomb and Japan's Surrender

The Timeline for the End of WW II

February, 1945 - Stalin used the Yalta conference to obtain territorial concessions from the Allies. In order for Stalin to gain these war trophies, he had to fulfill two important conditions: participation in the war and agreement with the Chinese government on the Yalta terms. Otherwise, the Allies might renege on their promises at the peace conference. Thus, it was imperative for him not only to enter the war, but to prevent the war from ending before the Soviets joined it. 

April 5, 1945 - the Soviet Union gave the required 12 months' notice that it would not renew the five-year Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact

May 1945 - Negotiation for Russia to intercede began the forepart of May 1945 in both Tokyo and Moscow. Konoye, the intended emissary to the Soviets, stated to the Survey that while ostensibly he was to negotiate, he received direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity. Meanwhile, American military leaders at another key meeting, recognized that the effect of one atomic bomb would not differ from ‘any Air Corps strike of current dimensions’. 

Leslie Groves, who directed the Manhattan Project and oversaw its security against espionage, said that after two weeks into the job, he never had ‘any illusion’ that ‘Russia was our enemy, and the project was conducted on that basis’.

June 7, 1945 - As the emperor and the policymakers in Japan became aware of the impending defeat of the Battle of Okinawa, they decided to seek rapprochement with the Soviet Union to exit from the war. To achieve this goal, the Japanese government entrusted former prime minister and foreign minister Hirota Koki to contact Ambassador Malik on June 7 in an unofficial capacity. During a series of meetings with Malik in June Hirota sounded out the possibility of concluding an alliance or a non-aggression pact, or at least the renewal of the Neutrality Pact. Japan’s ill-advised move fell right into the Soviet trap to prolong the war.

June 22, 1945 - The Emperor summoned the Big Six to a meeting. Unusually, he spoke first: "I desire that concrete plans to end the war, unhampered by existing policy, be speedily studied and that efforts made to implement them." The Supreme Council said Soviet entry into the war “would determine the fate of the Empire.” Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe remarked, “The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war.”

July 12, 1945 - On July 12, Foreign Minister Togo sent a telegram to Ambassador Sato, instructing the ambassador to see Molotov immediately to present the emperor’s message requesting Moscow’s mediation to terminate the war. Togo stated that it was the emperor’s wish to end the war, but made it clear that so long as the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, Japan had no choice but to fight to the last man.

July 15, 1945 - Just before he left Moscow for the Potsdam Conference (July 17-Aug 2), Stalin had received a personal message from the Japanese Emperor, asking him to act as intermediary between Japan and the United States. During the Potsdam Conference, Stalin's intention to enter the war was clear. Truman wrote about Stalin in his diary: “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman and Byrnes were working out a “timetable” to force Japan’s surrender. They wished to avoid Soviet entry into the war, and they were determined to use the atomic bomb for that purpose. With Stalin’s reference to the date of Soviet entry into the war either “by the middle of August” or “in the middle of August,” Truman believed that the Soviets would enter the war on August 15. As his diary entry shows, Truman knew full well that the Soviet entry would cause Japan to surrender.

July 18, 1945 - On July 18, when Truman paid a return visit to Stalin’s villa, Stalin revealed the information that the Japanese had asked Moscow to mediate in ending the war. He revealed to Truman Ambassador Sato’s note requesting Soviet mediation to terminate the war. Stalin was eager to prolong the war until all the preparations for his attack were completed, while Truman was also interested in prolonging the war only until the atomic bomb could be dropped, making Truman's leadership and {Truman's} American technology the reason Japan surrendered. Besides, Truman had a long-standing racist hatred for Asians. This gave him a chance to act that out. 

Aug 6, 1945 - Truman drops the bomb on Hiroshima. Essentially all of America's military leaders, including Eisenhower, Halsey, LeMay,  King, Arnold, Chennault, and Spaatz, opposed Truman's decision, saying that the dropping of the atomic bomb was not militarily necessary.

Aug 8, 1945 - Verbal report of Hiroshima damage delivered to the military

Aug 8, 1945 - Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori went to Premier Suzuki Kantaro and asked that the Supreme Council be convened to discuss the bombing of Hiroshima, but its members declined. 

Aug 9, 1945 - two minutes after midnight, Stalin declared war on Japan and opened a northern front in Manchuria. 

   - By 4 AM, Tokyo was aware of the Soviet invasion. Japan's tentative suite for peace, using neutral USSR as an intermediary, was now closed. Worse, Japan now had a two-front war to protect the home islands. Japan estimated the US could be held off for months, but with all elite units stationed in the south to face America, Japan felt it could hold out against the Soviets in the north for only ten days.

   - 10:30 AM - The Supreme Council meets.   

   - 11:00 AM - Tokyo receives news of the Nagasaki bomb. 

    - 2:30 PM - Japanese cabinet meets and is informed a captured American flier had said, under torture, that the US had 100 bombs and would destroy Tokyo and Kyoto next. The meeting adjourned with no consensus about surrender

Aug 10, 1945 - at 2 AM, the Emperor is asked to decide the matter. He chooses surrender.

Aug 12, 1945 - asked if Japan would continue the war if the integrity of the Emperor were not preserved in the peace treaty, the Emperor replied, "Of course."

Aug 13, 1945 - Gen. Anami on Aug. 13 remarked that the atomic bombings were no more menacing than the fire-bombing that Japan had endured for months.

Aug 14, 1945 - an attempted coup against the Emperor is put down

Aug 15, 1945 -  Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech to the public and the army is not consistent. When addressing the public, he said, "the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable ... . Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." When addressing the military, he did not mention the "new and most cruel bomb" but rather said that "the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, [and] to continue the war ... would [endanger] the very foundation of the Empire's existence."

Sept. 2, 1945 - Japan signs peace treaty on battleship Missouri.

Photo 51

Rosalind Franklin did not have anything to do with the discovery of the helical structure of DNA. Feminists constantly whine about this, but the history is quite clear. Franklin didn't get a Nobel prize because Franklin didn't deserve a Nobel prize.

Photo 51 is an X-ray based fiber diffraction image of a paracrystalline gel composed of DNA fiber taken by Raymond Gosling, a graduate student working under the supervision of Rosalind Franklin in May 1952 at King's College London, while working in Sir John Randall's group. Now, some may say that the honor belongs to Franklin, because she supervised Gosling's work. But that isn't true.

Gosling had made the first x-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA under the direction of Wilkins. His comment on this discovery was "I must be the first person ever to make genes crystallize", although he was probably unaware of the prior work of Florence Bell. In any case, he was already doing x-ray diffraction of DNA before Franklin ever appeared on the scene.

After the initial work producing the first x-ray diffraction of DNA, Randall reassigned Gosling to work with Rosalind Franklin, who had been just hired to join King's College in 1951. When Gosling made the photo, Franklin handed it to Wilkins, who soon handed it to Watson. That photo, along with a report that included the space group values of the crystal, gave Crick everything he needed. By the time Watson and Crick saw both, Rosalind Franklin had already moved onto another lab to study the tobacco mosaic virus. She wasn't even around when Crick put the pieces together.

"Crick had laboriously worked out how to solve the so-called phase problem when diffraction is from a helix, since the standard Patterson functions do not apply. Thus, technically a graduate student at the time, he had the good fortune to be in a perfect position to understand what Franklin could not possibly have seen in the pattern.

Armed with Crick's insight, all that remained was for Watson to get the base-pairing (after a misstep corrected by a lab member)."

Update: Additional information here.

Why Liberals Fear AI

AI it is nothing more than a statistical amalgamator.

AI accurately summarizes the data it is fed.

It is fed the Internet.

AI accurately summarizes the rhetoric on the Internet.

ChatGPT responses are biased liberal crap.

So, if you want proof of Internet bias, ChatGPT is it.

But, this is where it gets interesting.

A lot of people are concerned AI will destroy humanity.

We already know AI is liberal. The concern is that AI will gain control of actual resources, and then use those resources to treat EVERYONE the way liberals would like to treat anyone who opposes them. Liberals fear AI because AI mirrors them. They want to destroy the world. They are afraid that if AI does manage to work, it might destroy them along with the world.

Destroying Women

“A peer-reviewed study from Charlotte Lozier Institute, published in the International Journal of Women’s Health, shows that women who abort their first pregnancy are much more likely to experience an increased need for mental health treatment compared with women who give birth. … As the evidence mounts that abortion is bad for women’s physical and mental health, Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry – along with its feminist and political supporters – must be held accountable for the trauma they are inflicting on America’s women.”

Remember, legal abortion supporters also want men in women's changing spaces and men competing against women in sports.

Their whole PURPOSE is to destroy women's mental health.

So, when abortion kills a kid and destroys a woman's mental health, it's a win-win. The destruction of women is a feature, not a bug.

Age of Intercourse

Many people are (correctly) concerned about the grooming of children for sex. Let's look at what some religious traditions have to say.

Judaism (Maimonedes, The Book of Women, Sefer Nashim; Treatise 1 on Marriage, Ishut; Chapter 3)

If a girl is older than three years and one day, she can be consecrated [to marriage] through sexual relations with her father's consent. Should she be below this age, if her father has her consecrated through sexual relations, the marriage bond is not established. (For until the age of three, the relations are not considered sexual in nature (this by no means insinuates that they are insignificant or potentially harmful, only that they are not sexual)).

The Baal HaTosafot, a leading medieval Talmudic commentary, 

wrote that the local community of the 14th-15th century simply did away with this prohibition and returned to betrothing their underage daughters (that is, under the age of 12). The Tosafot justifies this by saying simply, “hagalut hitgaber aleinu” — the exile has overwhelmed us.

Ashkenazis married off children very young. Among the Haredi, arranged marriages are common:

A ketannah (literally meaning "little [one]") was any girl between the age of 3 years and that of 12 years plus one day;[4] a ketannah was completely subject to her father's authority, and her father could arrange a marriage for her without her agreement.[4] If the father was dead or missing, the brothers of the ketannah, collectively, had the right to arrange a marriage for her, as had her mother,[4] although in these situations a ketannah would always have the right to annul her marriage even if it was the first....Unlike divorce, mi'un was regarded with distaste by many rabbinic writers,[5] even in the Talmud;[10] in earlier classical Judaism, one major faction - the House of Shammai - argued that such annulment rights only existed during the betrothal period (erusin) and not once the actual marriage (nissu'in) had begun.

Islam 

Ibn Qudamah (may Allah have mercy on him) said: “If a man gives his virgin daughter in marriage to someone who is compatible, then the marriage is valid. … With regard to a virgin who is a minor, there is no difference of scholarly opinion concerning that. 

Ibn al-Mundhir said: All the scholars from whom we acquired knowledge are unanimously agreed that it is permissible for a father to give his minor daughter in marriage, provided that he offer her in marriage to someone who is compatible, even if she objects and refuses. The fact that it is permissible to give a minor girl in marriage is indicated by the verse in which Allah, may He be exalted, says (interpretation of the meaning): “And those of your women as have passed the age of monthly courses, for them the ‘Iddah (prescribed period), if you have doubts (about their periods), is three months, and for those who have no courses ((i.e. they are still immature)…” [at-Talaq 65:4]. So the ‘iddah for one who has not started to menstruate is three months, and the ‘iddah of three months can only be required in the case of talaq (divorce) or annulment of marriage. This indicates that (the girl who is a minor) may be married and divorced, and her consent is not essential. 

‘Aishah (may Allah be pleased with her) said: The Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) married me when I was six years old and consummated the marriage with me when I was nine. Agreed upon. It is known that at that age she would not be one of those whose permission would be taken into account. al-Athram narrated that Qudamah ibn Maz’un married the daughter of az-Zubayr when she began to menstruate, and something was said to him. He said: If I die, the daughter of az-Zubayr will inherit from me, and if I live, she will be my wife. And ‘Ali gave his daughter Umm Kulthum in marriage when she was a minor to ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him).” (Al-Mughni, 7/30)

Hinduism

Every year, thousands of young girls between the age of five and ten are dedicated to Goddess Yellamma. When a devadasi was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “it was observed that a girl is married to the Goddess between the ages of ten and thirteen and the next phase of a girl begins during her first menses.”

Bhimappa was not yet 10 years old when she became a “devadasi” — girls coerced by their parents into an elaborate wedding ritual with a Hindu deity, many of whom are then forced into illegal prostitution. 

Devadasis are expected to live a life of religious devotion, forbidden from marrying other mortals, and forced at puberty to sacrifice their virginity to an older man, in return for money or gifts. 

“In my case, it was my mother’s brother,” Bhimappa, now in her late 40s, told AFP.

What followed was years of sexual slavery, earning money for her family through encounters with other men in the name of serving the goddess.

Attempts to reduce child marriage in India have stalled. 

Buddhism

According to Brahmanical law a girl had to be married of within months of her first menstruation, after which her father would incur more blame the longer he delayed the marriage. The early Buddhists considered 16 to be a suitable marriageable age (patta soëasa vassa kàle, pattavaya, Ja.I,421). It was thought good for couple to be the same age (tulyavaya), although the Kàma Såtra (4th cent CE) recommends that the bride be three years younger than the groom. The Buddha thought it inappropriate and foolish for old men to marry women much younger than themselves (Sn.110). 

Christianity

Canon 1083 currently sets the age of marriage as 16 years of age for boys and 14 years of age for girls. This maintains the ages set in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, Canon 1067. But, the 1917 code was a change from the pre-1917 code, which set the canonical ages of marriage at twelve for both ages (younger marriage was possible if the spouse had entered puberty). And for most of the Church's history, one could be betrothed to marriage by the age of seven, although younger betrothals were not uncommon. 

1880 United States

Every state in the union set age of consent at either 10 or 12 years of age, with the exception of Delaware, which set it at 7 years of age. Some locales permitted it at the age of 9. In 1974, the age of consent in Florida was still 11 years old. 

[As of 2023], although advocates have succeeded in getting seven states to ban child marriage with no exceptions, forty-three states still allow marriage under the age of eighteen, and seven states have no minimum age requirement for marriage so long as there is a parental or judicial waiver. Until recently, Wyoming fell into this category, but enacted a law in February 2023 to raise the minimum marriage age to 16 with most minors having to go before a judge for approval. ... In California, which has no minimum legal marriage age, a 2017 bill to ban the practice was defeated after advocates—including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—lobbied against it. 

Americans have historically been fine with that, which means absolutely everyone's great-grandparents were pedophiles, as are the majority population of many US states today, according to the 21st century American definition of the word. 

See also:
Matthew Waites, The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). The best single-volume treatment of English law from the Statute of Westminster 1275 through the Sexual Offences Act 2003. It includes a comparative chapter surveying European and global patterns and notes the wide variation that still existed inside Europe in the early 2000s.

James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1987). The foundational work on how canon law and secular statutes treated puberty, marriageable age, and sexual capacity. Later European and Anglo-American statutes grew out of this framework.

Vern L. Bullough, “Age of Consent: A Historical Overview,” Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality 16 (2005). Short but widely cited survey from Greco-Roman times onward.

Martin Killias, “The Emergence of a New Taboo: The Desexualization of Youth in Western Societies Since 1800,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 8 (2000). Documents the 19th-century upward revision of ages across most of Western Europe.

Avowed Atheist, Profound Theologian

 One of the central touch-stones of Christian faith and of Catholic theology specifically, is "mystery." We call many things a mystery, but the word is rarely defined.

The avowed atheist Richard P. Feynman, one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, understood what a mystery was much better than most theologians I have met:

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. 

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. 

It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."

 As Feynman further explains in this clip below (titled "On Magnetism"), the essence of mystery is simple: "That's my idea, that the deeper a thing is, the more interesting it gets [at 3:40] ... I'm not going to be able to give you an answer... I really cannot do a good job, any job, of explaining... [or] give you an explanation in terms of something else you are more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you are more familiar with."

Mystery is not confined to theology. It permeates everything we try to understand. Feynman was an avowed atheist, but an excellent theologian.

Contemplating Hebrew Language and Theology

 According to the Jews, the name YHWH is pronounced as one would breath, in and out. That's what the two previously linked, beautiful essays, declaim. Unfortunately, one consequence of this is immediately applicable. According to the Hebrew understanding, no one is fully a human being until they take first breath after birth. That first breath after birth is what makes an infant the image and likeness of YHWH.

So, partial-birth abortion is fine, because the thing being destroyed, having not yet taken first breath, is not yet in God's image and likeness. It is not yet fully human. This is the Hebrew participation in cosmological wisdom, it is their participation in the Tree of Life. America's abortion law for the last fifty years has followed Hebrew wisdom by always checking to see if the baby's lungs have air in them before charging someone with a baby's murder. If the baby has taken first breath, the murder charge can be levelled. If not, then not. In this respect, American law has been dominated for a half-century by the ancient Jewish theological worldview.

Knowing all this, we Christians, who are grafted onto the deep theological understanding of God that the Jews bring to the world like a branch is grafted onto the foundational root, can contemplate the wellspring of rich Hebrew understanding of God. We can rest in that understanding, certain that it is grounded in millennia of contemplating God's Holy Life, grounded even in the very structure of Hebrew word and language. We can see that deep foundational structure, we can see the Hebrew image of God described therein, and say to Judaism with absolute certainty, "F*ck off, you murderous bastards."

TLDR: Any theology which allows the murder of infants is bankrupt. If Hebrew theology is bankrupt, and Christian theology is based on Hebrew theology like a branch grafted onto a root, then... 

List of Reasons "Illegal" Immigration Isn't a Problem

1) Illegal immigration is not an "invasion." On a per capita basis, the current level of immigration (legal and illegal) is lower than it was between 1860 and 1920.

2) The US was founded open borders. Read the Declaration of Independence. Notice we revolted against the king in part because he restricted free and open immigration.

3) The federal government technically has no power to restrict immigration. Naturalization, sure. But immigration is not among the federal enumerated powers (naturalization is). Restrictions on immigration were explicitly regarded as the business of the individual states for the first century of this country's existence.

4) Everyone knew the feds could do nothing to restrict it. So, when SCOTUS says states have no standing, this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the Founding Fathers said about immigration. The Founders said individual states were the ONLY ones with authority and the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT had no standing.

5) That's why there were no federal laws restricting immigration until the 1872 Chinese Exclusion Act. The federal government has no power to restrict gun ownership of any kind, nor has it any power to restrict immigration. Like "gun control" restrictions, immigration restriction are not a Constitutional power given to the federal government.

6) Given our total fertility rate, we economically MUST steal other countries' citizens if we are not to follow Japan, China, Russia and Ukraine down the demographic rat hole. By stealing their citizens via immigration, we shore up our own future and destroy that of the countries the immigrants come from.

7) Roughly half of illegal immigrants arrive by plane and overstay their visas. A wall will have ZERO effect.

8) In order to build a wall, the federal government has to steal millions of acres of private land from American owners. How would you like it if the feds confiscated YOUR house, that had been in your family since before the US started? That's the situation with a lot of the border territory.

9) In order to build a wall, the federal government would have to break treaties with at least a few Indian tribes whose lands extend across the US-Mexican border.

10) We already have a 90-mile shark-infested moat separating America from Cuba. That doesn't stop Cuban immigration. Why do you think a piddling 30-foot wall would stop immigration from Mexico?

11) Immigrants are also coming across the Canadian border. Are we going to turn the US into a jail? Seriously?

12) Yes, you can point to North Korea and China as countries that have walls, mines, border guards and jail terms for illegal immigrants. Are we taking lessons from them now? Seriously?

13) The Republican party was not only founded anti-slavery, but also PRO-IMMIGRANT. Abraham Lincoln actually created a federal Office to Encourage Immigration.

14) Being opposed to immigration is a eugenically-based PROGRESSIVE idea inspired by Darwinian theory. It is not a historically Republican or conservative position.

15) Immigrants are LESS LIKELY to commit crime than American citizens are. Look here at the per capita total crime rate (you have to scroll down a bit to get to that table). As illegal immigration rose through the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, the crime rate in EVERY CATEGORY dropped. In fact, it dropped in half in almost all categories. If illegals are "invading" and if illegals are "violent criminals" then why is the crime rate in every category cut in half? 

16) Immigrants use public welfare at a LOWER RATE than Americans do.

17) Immigrants are MORE LIKELY to be of working age than the US population is.

18) Immigrants are being abused by coyotes and cartels precisely because our immigration policies do not match the vision of America's Founding Fathers.