Border Bubbles

Tucker Carlson arrived in Moscow on February 1 and was spotted attending the Bolshoi Theater in the capital, according to Russian outlet Mash. This was big news.

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

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A recent article in Politico on why the Davos ultrarich seem so mundane. Conclusion: That may be the real lesson of Davos: Everyone is winging it, experts and schlubs alike, muddling through with at best fragmentary understandings of a fast-moving world and its inscrutable future.

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Border Bubbles

David Frum, a self-acknowledged smart guy from The Atlantic, was interviewed by Zakaria about illegal immigration.

He argued that, historically, illegals wanted to sneak in and work so, at the time, increasing border police was appropriate. Now these illegals want to encounter officials so they can be processed under asylum laws. That would require less police and more bureaucratic processing, so the current so-called Biden administration laws suggestions is reasonable.

This is consistent and self-contained but it accepts as a given that these people are here to be processed and that we should accommodate them. Why?

The answer is that barriers to entry, physical barriers to crossing into the country-- the basic way all other nations protect their borders-- cannot be talked about or even considered. Why? Because barriers--and particularly the "wall"--have been branded by Trump and Trump can never be allowed to be right.

First things first.