I love it when Pres. Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers.

Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday. The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.

In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said.

"Why do we need more Haitians?" Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. "Take them out." 

In November, the Trump administration rescinded deportation protection granted to nearly 60,000 Haitians after the 2010 earthquake and told them to return home by July 2019.

Lawmakers were taken aback by the comments, according to people familiar with their reactions. Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) had proposed cutting the visa lottery program by 50 percent and then prioritizing countries already in the system, a White House official said. 

A White House spokesman defended Trump's position on immigration without directly addressing his remarks. White House officials did not dispute the account. 

[200,000 Salvadorans may be forced to leave the U.S. as Trump ends immigration protection]

"Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people," spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement issued after The Washington Post first reported Trump's remarks. ". . . Like other nations that have merit-based immigration, President Trump is fighting for permanent solutions that make our country stronger by welcoming those who can contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation."

Trump built his candidacy and presidency around hard stances on immigration, vowing to build a wall along the Mexican border and cut legal immigration by half, among other positions. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have increased immigration raids, including dozens this week at convenience stores across the country. 

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A running list of countries Trump has insulted

President Trump referred to African nations and Haiti as "shithole" countries on Jan. 11. Here are other nations he has insulted. (Melissa Macaya/The Washington Post)

Trump's comments Thursday also put further scrutiny on his long-standing tendency to make racially charged remarks — including attacks on protesting black athletes and his claim that there were fine people "on both sides" after neo-Nazis rioted in Charlottesville, Va. Trump falsely claimed for years that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and took out advertisements calling for the death penalty for members of the Central Park Five — four black youths and a Hispanic youth who were accused of a brutal rape in New York and later exonerated.

The president's remarks were quickly met with scorn from Demo­crats and some Republicans and could throw another wrench into bipartisan discussions on immigration, which had shown promise in recent days, according to legislators.

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) said the comments "will shake the confidence that people have" in the ongoing immigration policy talks.

 "Democrats and Republicans in the Senate made a proposal. The answer is this racist outburst of the president. How can you take him seriously?" Gutiérrez said. "They [Republicans] don't believe in immigration — it's always been about people of color and keeping them out of this country."

Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said on Twitter that Trump's remarks "are further proof that his Make America Great Again Agenda is really a Make America White Again agenda."

Some Republicans also raised objections. Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), whose family is from Haiti, said in a statement that Trump's remarks were "unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation's values. This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation."

"My grandmother used to say, 'Digame con quién caminas, y te diré quién eres.' 'Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are,' " said Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), who represents most of Harlem and is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. "If he's walking around with white supremacists and supporting them, this kind of talk doesn't surprise me."

The New York Times also reported last year that Trump said immigrants from Haiti have AIDS. The White House denied that report.

[White House: No deal yet on immigration]

In a statement condemning Thursday's remarks by Trump, Haiti's ambassador to the United States, Paul G. Altidor, said that "the president was either misinformed or miseducated about Haiti and its people." He said the Haitian Embassy was inundated with emails from Americans apologizing for what the president said.

Democrats were quick to note that Trump employs Haitians at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and that he praised Haitian Americans during a roundtable in Miami in September.

"Whether you vote for me or don't vote for me, I really want to be your greatest champion, and I will be your champion," Trump said at the roundtable. 

Alix Desulme, a city council member in North Miami, home to thousands of Haitian Americans, said the president's latest remarks were "disgusting." 

 "Oh, my God. Oh, my God Jesus," Desulme said. "I don't know how much worse it can get."

"This is very alarming. We know he's not presidential, but this is a low," he said. "It's disheartening that someone who is the leader of the free world would use such demeaning language to talk about other folks, referring to folks of color."

Trump's critics also said racially incendiary language could damage relationships with foreign allies. 

For many of Trump's supporters, however, the comments may not prove to be particularly damaging. Trump came under fire from conservatives this week for seeming to suggest that he would be open to a comprehensive immigration reform deal without money for a border wall, before he quickly backtracked.

"He's trying to win me back," conservative author Ann Coulter, who has called for harsh limits on immigration, wrote on Twitter. 

Outlining a potential bipartisan deal, the lawmakers discussed restoring protections for countries that have been removed from the temporary protected status (TPS) program while committing $1.5 billion for a border wall and making changes to the visa lottery system. Lawmakers mentioned that members of the Congressional Black Caucus had requested that some African countries be included in a deal, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

The exchange was "salty" on all sides, this person said, with the president growing profane and animated while discussing immigrants from other countries. "It did not go well," this person said. 

The administration announced this week that it was removing TPS status for citizens of El Salvador. Haitians were added to the TPS program because of a strong earthquake that devastated Haiti eight years ago.

Trump had seemed amenable to a deal earlier in the day during phone calls with lawmakers, aides said, but shifted his position in the meeting and did not seem interested in the bipartisan compromise.

The scene played out hurriedly in the morning. Graham and Durbin thought they would be meeting with Trump alone and were surprised to find immigration hard-liners such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) at the meeting. White House and Capitol Hill aides say Stephen Miller, the president's top immigration official, was concerned there could be a deal proposed that was too liberal and made sure conservative lawmakers were present.

After the meeting, Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs, said the White House was nowhere near a bipartisan agreement on immigration. 

"We still think we can get there," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the daily White House news briefing.

Even Little Girls Can be Cultural Marxists

Five teen girls want to join the Boy Scouts. Transsexuals want to serve openly in the military. Boys in dresses want to pee in the girl’s room. Men are now marrying each other. Those who oppose any of these are called haters and bigots.

According to former Breitbart editor Michael Walsh, all of this goes by a common name, cultural Marxism, the subject of his new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.
Walsh talked exclusively to Breitbart News about the five girls who want to join the Boy Scouts and how cultural Marxism is part of it.
“The annihilation of sex distinctions in the name of ‘equality’ or ‘fairness’ is the logical outgrown of the anti-Western and anti-Christian policies advocated by members of the Frankfurt School and its acolytes and heirs.”

Walsh, who is a novelist and screenwriter, says it is difficult for the common man to object to these new and even revolutionary ideas because “The culturally Marxist notions of ‘tolerance’ and ‘fairness’ have been drilled into American heads since the end of World War II and in particular since the late 1960s.”
“In their wake came a whole host of relativistic ills, including the notion that men and women were essentially biologically the same, and that therefore there was no meaningful distinction between them.  The young girls who want to become Boy Scouts are reaping what their parents have sown, and think they are doing the Lord’s work in the process.”
Walsh points to Herbert Marcuse, one of the Frankfurt School, who was deeply influential on college campuses in the 1960s. Marcuse advocated what he called “repressive tolerance” regarding tradition. He advocated “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion…”
Walsh tells Breitbart News that the shaming of certain kinds of speech is precisely what happens to those who oppose girls joining the Boy Scouts, boys peeing in the girl’s bathroom, gays in the military, and much else.

Are they cultural Marxists, those five girls who want to join the Boy Scouts? Walsh would say not consciously so, but it is the air the girls have breathed.

Apollo 11 UFOs

Buzz Aldrin, an accomplished pilot and academic best known as the second human being ever to set foot on another celestial body, is popular in a number of circles. His participation in the history making Apollo 11 mission earned him a place in America’s heart, and his appearances in movies like “Transformers” and on TV shows like “30 Rock” have helped keep his name fresh in the minds of those of us who can’t help but look up at the moon on clear evenings and revel in the idea that Americans like us once walked around on that thing. In 2005, however, Aldrin became the most popular guy in a slightly different demographic, when he admitted on a Science Channel documentary called “First on the Moon: The Untold Story” that he and Neil Armstrong had seen a UFO during their historic trip.
While Aldrin wasn’t the only astronaut to claim to have seen something unusual through the windows of an American space ship, he was certainly the highest profile. To many, having a name like Buzz Aldrin, not only the second man to walk on the moon, but an MIT educated PhD recipient in Astronautics, gave the concept of aliens visiting earth a level of credibility it had never had before. Although the scientific consensus today is that alien life is extremely likely in the great expanses of the universe, it wasn’t that long ago that even mentioning such a thing was enough to get you laughed out of a serious scientific conversation.
Of course, acknowledging that alien life likely exists somewhere isn’t the same as claiming it’s already visiting earth – as Aldrin seemed to claim in the 2005 segment.
In the years since, Aldrin has repeatedly gone on record to claim that his statements about what he saw during his Apollo 11 flight were taken out of context, and that, while what he saw was technically unidentifiable, it was certainly not alien in origin. Finally, while participating in an “AMA” (short for Ask Me Anything) on the popular website Reddit, Aldrin took the opportunity to clear the air regarding his stance on extraterrestrial life, and what he and fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong actually saw through the port holes of their capsule… much to the disappointment of UFO enthusiasts everywhere.
In his own words, Aldrin explained to the thousands of Reddit users that logged on to ask him questions that the “UFO” he saw was most likely one of the panels that came off of the ship as they extracted the lander that would ultimately take them to the surface of the moon. Here’s Buzz’s full account:
On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world – it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don’t know. So technically, the definition could be ‘unidentified.’”
As far as Aldrin is concerned, there was no mystery at all, but – he clarified – just because aliens didn’t visit Earth in 1969, doesn’t mean there aren’t any aliens out there, in the distant reaches of space.
We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn’t, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country’s television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information. It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That’s what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today.
But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away.”

Of course, die hard conspiracy theorists have already begun littering the internet with stories about how the Reptillian Illuminati must have gotten to the famed astronaut and forced him to change his story – but their claims can pretty safely be thought of as the internet equivalent of homeless people shouting into a drain pipe. Aldrin himself attests that the crew of Apollo 11 did not see a flying saucer following them through space, and as far as this writer is concerned, unless one of those conspiracy theorists turns out to be Neil Armstrong (may he rest in peace) or Michael Collins, this is one space mystery we can comfortably say has been solved.

its all about reputation

here is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations of the information with which we are faced.
We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the “information age,” we are moving towards the “reputation age,” in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated, and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know.
[Photo: hwanchul/iStock]
Let me give some examples of this paradox. If you are asked why you believe that big changes in the climate are occurring and can dramatically harm future life on Earth, the most reasonable answer you’re likely to provide is that you trust the reputation of the sources of information to which you usually turn for acquiring information about the state of the planet. In the best-case scenario, you trust the reputation of scientific research and believe that peer-review is a reasonable way of sifting out “truths” from false hypotheses and complete “bullshit” about nature. In the average-case scenario, you trust newspapers, magazines or TV channels that endorse a political view which supports scientific research to summarize its findings for you. In this latter case, you are twice-removed from the sources: you trust other people’s trust in reputable science.
Or, take an even more uncontroversial truth that I have discussed at length elsewhere: one of the most notorious conspiracy theories is that no man stepped on the Moon in 1969, and that the entire Apollo program (including six landings on the Moon between 1969 and 1972) was a staged fake. The initiator of this conspiracy theory was Bill Kaysing, who worked in publications at the Rocketdyne company–where Apollo’s Saturn V rocket engines were built. At his own expense, Kaysing published the book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s $30 Billion Swindle (1976). After publication, a movement of skeptics grew and started to collect evidence about the alleged hoax.
[Photo: hwanchul/iStock]
According to the Flat Earth Society, one of the groups that still denies the facts, the Moon landings were staged by Hollywood with the support of Walt Disney and under the artistic direction of Stanley Kubrick. Most of the ‘proofs’ they advance are based on a seemingly accurate analysis of the pictures of the various landings. The shadows’ angles are inconsistent with the light, the United States flag blows even if there is no wind on the Moon, the tracks of the steps are too precise and well-preserved for a soil in which there is no moisture. Also, is it not suspicious that a programme that involved more than 400,000 people for six years was shut down abruptly? And so on.
The great majority of the people we would consider reasonable and accountable (myself included) will dismiss these claims by laughing at the very absurdity of the hypothesis (although there have been serious and documented responses by NASA against these allegations). Yet, if I ask myself on what evidentiary basis I believe that there has been a Moon landing, I must admit that my evidence is quite poor, and that I have never invested a second trying to debunk the counter-evidence accumulated by these conspiracy theorists. What I personally know about the facts mixes confused childhood memories, black-and-white television news, and deference to what my parents told me about the landing in subsequent years. Still, the wholly secondhand and personally uncorroborated quality of this evidence does not make me hesitate about the truth of my beliefs on the matter.
My reasons for believing that the Moon landing took place go far beyond the evidence I can gather and double-check about the event itself. In those years, we trusted a democracy such as the U.S. to have a justified reputation for sincerity. Without an evaluative judgment about the reliability of a certain source of information, that information is, for all practical purposes, useless.
The paradigm shift from the age of information to the age of reputation must be taken into account when we try to defend ourselves from “fake news” and other misinformation and disinformation techniques that are proliferating through contemporary societies. What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is not spotting and confirming the veracity of the news. Rather, she should be competent at reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that leant it credibility.
[Photo: hwanchul/iStock]
Whenever we are at the point of accepting or rejecting new information, we should ask ourselves: Where does it come from? Does the source have a good reputation? Who are the authorities who believe it? What are my reasons for deferring to these authorities? Such questions will help us to get a better grip on reality than trying to check directly the reliability of the information at issue. In a hyper-specialized system of the production of knowledge, it makes no sense to try to investigate on our own, for example, the possible correlation between vaccines and autism. It would be a waste of time, and probably our conclusions would not be accurate. In the reputation age, our critical appraisals should be directed not at the content of information but rather at the social network of relations that has shaped that content and given it a certain deserved or undeserved ‘rank’ in our system of knowledge.
These new competencies constitute a sort of second-order epistemology. They prepare us to question and assess the reputation of an information source, something that philosophers and teachers should be crafting for future generations.

According to Frederick Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), “civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.” A civilized cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social “rank” of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field.

We're headed for 1938 all over again

oming out of the depth of the Great Depression, the late 1930s ushered in a time when the US seemed to be back on stable footing.
The New Deal, a massive stimulus plan from president Franklin D. Roosevelt, had spurred growth and dropped unemployment from startling highs.
Unfortunately, private investment was struggling and inflation remained on the low side. Psychologically scarred by the economic drop-off, people decided to pay down debt in their ledgers rather than go out and spend. Encouraged by the seemingly strong economy, the government began to back off the fiscal stimulus and tighten financial policy.
Sound familiar?
Well it should, says the Morgan Stanley global strategy team of Chetan Ahya, Elga Bartsch, and Jonathan Ashworth. In fact, the team said in a note to clients Wednesday that nearly the same situation that occurred in 1937-38 is currently happening in the US.
"The critical similarity between the 1930s and the 2008 cycle is that the financial shock and the relatively high levels of indebtedness changed the risk attitudes of the private sector and triggered them to repair their balance sheets," wrote Ahya, Bartsch, and Ashworth.

"During the deleveraging process, the private sector becomes risk-averse and shifts its attention towards restoring health to its balance sheets."
And how did this cautious, low demand attitude end in the early 20th century?
Disastrously, in fact, as the private investment couldn't replace public investment, inflation expectations plummeted and deflation rocked the economy into a double-dip recession. Unemployment rose again, and the economy went back to struggling.
"In 1936-37, the premature and sharp pace of tightening of policies led to a double-dip in the US economy, resulting in a relapse into recession and deflation in 1938," the Morgan Stanley team wrote.
"Similarly, in the current cycle, as growth recovered, policy-makers proceeded to tighten fiscal policy, which has contributed to a slowdown in growth in recent quarters."

Morgan Stanley

This same atmosphere is happening today as the federal government has tapered its support of the economy, and the Federal Reserve is beginning on a path of higher interest rates. This path forward so far, the team said, has shown all of the wobbles of the late 1930s.

"The sluggish private demand and weakening inflation expectations are signs that the repair process for the private sector's balance sheets is not yet complete," the note said. "If global growth stays weak for longer, the corporate sector will have to continuously adjust down its return expectations, leading to a negative feedback loop."
All is not lost for the people of today, according to the strategists. In fact, a few simple policy solutions could be implemented to avoid the mistakes of the past.
For one thing, the incredibly easy monetary policy that is currently in place should be boosted by fiscal stimulus. Thankfully, both presumptive presidential nominees have advocated such policies to help push the economy along.
"Activating fiscal policy, particularly at a time when the monetary policy stance is still accommodative, could lead to a virtuous cycle where the corporate sector takes up private investment, and sustains job creation and income growth," the strategists wrote.
To make sure that these policies have taken hold, the Morgan Stanley team said that inflation expectations have to recover. Currently, most forward-looking measures of inflation — from the University of Michigan's household survey to the five-year/five-year inflation expectation — are trending downward.

Even yesterday, Fed Chair Janet Yellen was asked about these perpetually low and falling expectations, and she said she was watching them closely.