Okay, so let's drop the sarcasm and look at reality: there is no living person in the US who is 112 years old or older. Most people do not live to be much older than 100, regardless of circumstance, and the typical life expectancy for an average person is still the biblical "threescore and ten". These 4,000 centegenarians are fraudulent users of social security numbers which do not belong to them, and by definition they are criminals of one stripe or another.
Karl Denninger asks a perfectly reasonable question: why are these numbers not flagged "used and invalid" when the person dies and they stop sending checks? Why are they allowed to function in every other way except for the purpose of retirement checks? There are a billion possible social security numbers; it's not like we have to re-use them.
Except, as Denninger notes, that this way it is possible for the numbers to be used by illegal aliens.
The government wants illegal immigration to take place. They don't want to stop it. If they did, they would be trying to stop it. Example: the government really doesn't want private ownership of firearms, but has not (so far) been able to prevent it. So the BATFE(eieio) says, "We're going to ban the ammunition which is most commonly used in the rifles that government least wants people to own, Because Crime And Murder."
It is fortunate that they must still ask the people for permission. Absent the Second Amendment, they wouldn't have to.
...but in many places government needs not heed the public. Environmental regulation, for example, is a place where public input is utterly disregarded. Education is another. And immigration.
The only concession made to the immigration question is the GOP's lame attempt to cover its ass--said attempt being insulting in its transparency, since the cover story can probably fool a toddler or the average Democrat voter--and otherwise no one is even trying to limit the influx of illegals. No one wants to stop illegal immigration, though they have different reasons for it.
Democrats like it because they want to turn as many states into Democrat strongholds as possible. They know that immigrants will tend to vote Democrat, and they know that immigrants will tend to stay in the border states like California and Texas--large electoral count states which, if they get a lock on them, will guarantee them Presidential victories ad nauseum. (This is also why they want an imperial President when it's their guy: if they get a lock on the Presidency, they can get their way without pesky voting.) Also, it keeps wages down, and big business donates heavily to Democrats.
Republicans like it because it keeps wages down, and big business also donates heavily to Republicans. (Some Republicans think that conservative elements of immigrant culture makes them naturals for joining the GOP, but those Republicans are idiots who don't understand demographics.) GOP also thinks that more workers equals more tax revenue, but this thinking is also faulty because illegals don't pay taxes like legals and citizens do. Finally, there is an element in the GOP leadership's thinking that if they pander to hispanics, they will naturally turn to the Republican party the same way blacks turned Democrat after Johnson's efforts in the 1960s. This is also in error.
So we have a situation where the government is uninterested in enforcing the laws that are on the books, but it's politically impossible simply to strike them down. Anyone who votes to eliminate immigration restrictions is going to lose his next election, because the people are not so stupid as to uncritically swallow the horseshit spewed by both wings of the Government Party. That's why we're getting "executive amnesty": Obama's not facing another election, and the only thing Congress has to do to get the amnesty they want is disagree enough, in public, to let it happen...all the while meeting after hours for cigars and brandy and having a congenial laugh over how easy it is to get rich while doing effectively nothing on the taxpayer's dime.
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"Of the 102 million working-age Americans without work today, only 8.7 million are counted by the BLS as unemployed. Out of all working-age Americans, over 92 million are without jobs and are not counted by the BLS as unemployed." Why? I'll tell you why: because if the reality were reported, there would be a lot of bankers and politicians hanging from lampposts. That's why.
The truth is, under Obama, the rich have gotten much richer while the poor have gotten poorer. 23% unemployment reported as 5.5%, a GDP figure that's pure fiction, inflation that's not counted as inflation--all kinds of funny numbers being promulgated let people pretend that the economy is not in the shitter, but the people on the bottom who are actually in the job market know what's going on. The problem is, many of them aren't being told the facts, and they just listen to what the talking heads on ABC NBC CBS NYT say and accept it as fact, and figure, "Well, I guess it's just me."
Well, it's not just you. It's everybody. 44% of employable adults in the US have full-time jobs. The median income is under $30,000 a year and the median net worth is barely $45,000. Health insurance has seen double-digit percentage price increases every year since 2010 and the price of food has risen 10% or more while wages have remained stagnant. A gallon of gas costs 40% less than it did a year ago, but no one has any extra money because everything else has gone up--and at that, the price of gasoline has nothing whatsoever to do with anything our government has done, because given their druthers our leaders would just as soon have it be $5 a gallon. (Our sitting President campaigned on the price of electricity "necessarily skyrocket[ing]", for fuck's sake.) Meanwhile, the population of the country has increased by fourteen million since 2007 and there has been no net expansion of the number of jobs. We are actually losing ground.
I don't know what else to say about this.
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It's Saturday and I had to attend a stupid and useless meeting at the store today, from 7:30-9:30. I'm tired and irritated.
On my way to work today I was again struck with the stupidity which is solipsism. I'm all alone in a world of my creation? I'd like to think that if that were the case, I'd at least generate a better world to live in. WTF.
Solipsism is why I categorically reject philosophy as useless dreck. I'm sure that there are plenty of useful bits in philosophy, but 90% of everything is crap, and it seems to me that the entire discipline of philosophy has been constructed around making it a herculean task to find those useful nuggets in the vast ocean of useless navel-gazing horseshit. I don't have that kind of time.
The only philosophy I need is "God loves you, and Jesus died to save you." That's more than enough for me.