Illegal Alien Threatens NYC's Central Park

The Phantom has learned an illegal alien has taken roost in New York's Central Park, just blocks from Trump Tower.  If Mr. Trump decides to shoot someone on 5th Avenue to demonstrate just how much he is loved, this alien may well be his first target.

Immigration and Naturalization officers have been stymied by fuzzy minded liberals from the Upper West Side, who have thwarted their attempts to arrest and deport this interloper.

Mandarin without papers

Crowds have formed.
Apparently, newspapers and TV stations have swarmed.
Has Central Park become a "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens?

The President has not commented, presumably because the arrival of this illegal was not part of a caravan, although it is by no means the only one of its homeland to violate borders with impunity.

Build the Wall!

The problem for the President is the presence of this particular alien belies his argument about THE WALL, which he claims will bring border security, as similar walls have always done for thousands of years.

This alien simply flies right over Trumpian walls.
It's beautiful, too, and one can only imagine the Central Park birders, who went so gaga over the Red Tailed Hawk, now that this luminary has arrived.

And how Mr. Trump will react when he discovers aliens can not only fly over The Wall, but can tunnel under it?

Tunnel digging alien

Red Tails still hunt from the skies above New York, but the Phantom has heard no reports of Red Tails picking off the Mandarin ducks. (There are several. Once you allow them in, family members follow, and pretty soon you have a changing complexion of parts of the city.) New Hampshire, which is soon to vote on making the Red Tails its official state raptor, may offer a solution: If the Red Tails decamp for the Granite State, New Hampshire has the potential to become a sanctuary state for Red Tails. For New Hampshire, the Red Tails are like immigrants from Norway and Sweden. Remember,  Mr. Trump, has called for more immigrants from these white bread countries. The Trumpling is not against all immigration. He simply wants immigrants to look more like him.

New Hampshire state raptor

The Phantom will not tell the Big Sissy about other possible interlopers, who can simply fly over his wall. If he freaks out over caravans of women and children, imagine how he'll react once he gets a load of these bats:

Trump to mobilize Space Command to shoot down big bats!

According to Trumplings, it all begins when immigrants are allowed to get their feet (or talons) in the door. 
The wrong sort of immigrants.
Consider the case of the sloth:
There is the sloth, who looks like this:

And then, there is the paler  sloth:

Now, the one has a  darker complexion, and of the two, who do you think Mr. Trump would object to? Well, duh. 

The Phantom thought these two sloths were different species, two toed being brown and three toed being white, but no:

As for the avian population, one can only imagine what the Central Park pigeons think about these Mandarin ducks. First it was the Red Tails, who make MS13 look like girl scouts when it comes to threatening life and limb. Now the Mandarins, who attract adoring crowds, and they don't even speak English. 

When the sloths arrive, you can bet the raccoons will be massing at rallies, bellowing: Build THE WALL!

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Finally got around to reading the Sunday NYT 12/9/18 from which I have learned:

1/ A STUDENTS
From a Wharton professor: "A" students are often not as successful as "B" students who go into the real world with the mindset they have something to prove.
This was something my brother observed years ago as he assessed talent among the students he had to judge. I noticed the same thing. Not to say the kid who never got a "B" throughout high school, got into Harvard or Princeton was not bright. But there are all sorts of modes of "bright." 

When my younger son's girlfriend took command of him in college she forbid him from getting too interested or enthralled in any particular assignment: You've done the work to get your "A" now move on. Leave that stuff you find so fascinating behind. You're not here to fall in love with gene splicing; you're here to get your "A."
Before she arrived on the scene, he was struggling to get "B's." After, he got nothing but "A's." She became valedictorian.  He went on to medical school where he fell in love with "big vessels"--he really loved anatomy, vascular diseases and became a vascular surgeon. She went off to Yale and got a PhD in something and hasn't been heard from since. The A student who won the game; the B student who loved a particular subject. 

For the most part, Harvard, Yale and Princeton grads go on to become middle managers, semi rich and undistinguished. They are worker ants, the drone bees. The movers and shakers are the kids with something to prove. 

The professor notes the almost complete lack of correlation between grade point averages in subsequent success in the work place.

It must mean something neither Gates nor Zuckerberg stayed long at Harvard. 
Now, there are only one or two of these types, even at Harvard, so for most students staying with the faculty, getting the merit badges works out. But still.

There are plenty brilliant scientists and scholars on the Harvard faculty, but if you had to choose between universities and the business world to power innovation and progress in your nation, for its economy, for its science and technology, for its art and vigor, you'd probably be smart to pick the business community.

2/THE CASE AGAINST MERITOCRACY
 From Ross Douthat I learned American "meritocracy" has replaced American aristocracy. Privilege based on birthright and family money has given way to a "meritocratic elite" which from Douthat's perspective is too bad, because it is a driven by an "ambition untempered by self-sacrifice," a group which wants to move fast and break things and which gave us the crash of 2008. Like the aristocrats of the 20th century, they feel entitled to their privilege and wealth and advantages, but they do not know who or what they are. 
This is what is wrong with so much of American journalistic punditry: It is unconnected to the real world. It is a dreamworld, the way the Douthat's of the world think things ought to be. Mostly, it's like so many of the big numbers cited on the internet or in polls or studies--either completely made up or the product of garbage in, garbage out.

There are some people who live mostly in the coffee houses of the upper West Side of New York City, or the green pastures of Harvard yard who can, somehow, see the truth occasionally.  Reading Daniel Patrick Moynihan's memos to Richard Nixon is a trip, not just to the past but to the present and future. He is utterly dispassionate and he notes:
1/ The welfare system of the 1970's, well meaning as it was, was utterly destructive of the very people it sought to help. It was based on providing services which corrupted those in the service industry and injured those receiving the services and provoked profound resentment among the working class Whites who saw their taxes supporting undeserving poor.
2/ The basic lesion in American society was unemployment among Black males, especially men who might otherwise be heads of households, but the African American family had collapsed, leaving working mothers trying to raise children alone, with absent fathers.

All of this was dynamite at the time and Moynihan was reviled as a racist. Somehow, from his White world, his offices in government and academia, he managed to understand what was happening in the inner city ghettos and he tried to speak truth to power.

Even in the era of Trump, it turns out, there is such a thing as truth, and reading Moynihan today is a bracing tonic.

Someday, maybe some college will gather together  Jill Lepore, Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, Bill Gates, and other actual truth seekers and seers and lock them in a dormitory, make them eat meals together and talk about what they know and what they'd like to know and we might actually make some progress.

The Real War on Christmas

Some years ago Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and various other right wing luminaries decided they were outraged by the liberal penchant for inclusivity which had reached the point where people were cautioned against saying, "Merry Christmas" but rather "Happy Holidays," for fear of offending people who were Jewish or Muslim and did not celebrate Christmas.
 
Pretty soon, Blacks were told they ought to be celebrating Kwanza or some such holiday nobody had ever heard of, and few American Blacks had any interest in.


And all this, the Righteous Fox brethren were broadcasting as "The War Against Christmas!"

The Phantom hates the idea he might have to agree with Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly on anything, but he had found the whole practice of avoiding "Merry Christmas" as fundamentally stupid.


Has any Jew ever been harmed to be wished a Merry Christmas? Most American Jews have learned, growing up in America, to simply say, "Thank you" and move on.
Or, more often they say, "And Merry Christmas to you."
It's a harmless interpersonal ritual, like "Have a nice day."  
It does not violate the Constitution. It does not denigrate the Jewish or Muslim religion to recognize there is such a holiday as Christmas.


It does not violate anyone to be addressed as if they were Christian, when, in fact, they are not.
In fact, as any reader of Phlip Roth will know, many American Jews have aspired to assimilate so completely nobody even knows or guesses they are Jewish at all. They are, in fact, only too happy to be wished a Merry Christmas as a sign of acceptance, something which some more zealous Jews have decried as "the next holocaust," i.e., assimilation in which Jews simply disappear, melting into the background of a Christian society.
The thing is, America is no longer simply a white, Christian society. It is in fact a diverse, secular society, fundamentally indifferent to Christmas beyond the gluttonous orgy of gifting and gift receiving of that most wonderful (bountiful) time of the year.

The Phantom would bet atheists do not caterwaul in dismay if someone says, "Merry Christmas."

But looking at the interminable Christmas ads on TV, as he runs on the treadmill every morning, the Phantom is really revolted. They are worse even than the ads for food which glisten in saturated fats. The Christmas ads glisten in saturated fats of the soul.

Children are shown, tucked into warm beds in fuzzy pajamas, dreaming of toys; mothers dream of diamond necklaces; fathers dream of pick up trucks with ribbons tied round their flat beds.

The whole "holiday season" is about the piling on of "stuff," the purchase of affection with gift wrapped items.


The Phantom is aware there can be a certain pleasure buying gifts for others, trying to craft a gift to a person, showing how well you know someone.


And the Phantom is well aware that he has reached that pleasant, comfortable station in life where he has enough "things," more than enough stuff and presents simply add more to an already overstuffed closet.

When he was less financially comfortable "things" and the products of mass production were far more exciting.


But still, the Phantom can only imagine how Jesus would react to Christmas as he would see it on TV and in the malls with all the background Christmas music being piped in to stoke sales.

The whole idea of a rapacious, consumer society is just so unappetizing.
Jesus is reported to have said it is difficult for a rich man to get into Heaven.
Must be a reason for that, and the pursuit of money and gifts purchased with money must make that all the more difficult.
Reportedly, Jesus told a story about the Good Samaritan, who finds a man lying in the dust along a roadway, naked, beaten, and he freely gives this man clothes and nurses him back to health. Now there is a spirit of giving. But this was done to restore someone who had all this taken from him, to get him back on his feet, not to pile on gifts to someone already swimming in material things.

The Phantom does not know Jesus in any way whatsoever, but he has read about him and he can only surmise, Jesus would observe what America has done with Christmas and he would puke.