The face of unauthorised immigration in the US today (april 2006) (A paper for Catholic Social Thought)

(Unauthorised is a synonymn for illegal or undocumented)

I researched[1] the profiles of unauthorized immigrants and decided to normalize the numbers to the size of a class of 30 as proxy unauthorized immigrants.

If we represented the unauthorized immigrants in the US today, then there would be 24 additional class rooms that help comprise the face of America. A year ago there would have been two people less in this classroom. 20 of us would have been here for less than 10 years, 12 for less than 5. Aside from us, there are two other classrooms full of foreign-born Americans, one has 31 naturalized citizens, and the other has 28 permanent residents. 17 of us would have come from Mexico, 7 of us from Central and South America, (most of those from Central America), 4 of us from Asia, two of us from Europe, and one of us from Africa (or elsewhere).

Between 2000-2005, four Mexicans, one Asian and one Central American would have come here. 15 of us would be adult males, 10 adult females, and five of us would be children. 8 of our (the people in this room) children would be in another room, because they are American citizens by birth.

20 of us would be workers. 1 in Farming and related fields, 2 in Transportation and Material Moving, 2 in Sales and Administrative support, 2 in Management, Business and Professional areas, 3 in Production, Installation and Repair, 4 in Construction and Extractive, and 6 in Service Occupations. Aside from those jobs taken by unauthorized immigrants, there are only three other farming jobs, about 29 other service jobs, 25 other construction jobs, 30 other production jobs and 26 other transportation jobs (a disproportionate amount of immigrants are in these fields). And in total, aside from unauthorized workers, there are 388 other jobs, or 13 other classrooms.

This should give you all a better idea of what the face of unauthorized immigrants looks like, and how they relate to our economic structure.

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[1] http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html

Catholic Worker (a paper for Catholic Social Thought)

(this is drawn from http://www.catholicworker.org )

The Catholic Worker is a liberal Catholic movement started by Dorothy day and Peter Maurin in 1933. Committed to being a prophetic voice in a world turned away from human rights, it calls out injustice in economics, labor, politics, morals and the arms race. And it advocates personalism, a decentralized society, and a “green revolution”. It practices nonviolence, works of mercy, manual labor, and voluntary poverty.

It’s prophetic voice is aimed against the focus on wealth, production, “acquisition… material interests, and… respectability and mediocrity” and turned towards a radical acknowledgement of the human person as central to all human activities. Specifically a few areas they speak out against are unjust interest rates, war-related technology, alienation of workers from their products (inability to purchase their own products and complex production that makes a person only part of the process of production), ineffective and nonresponsive bureaucracy, over-control and regulation of life by government, classism, racism, sexism, conflict caused by the striving for wealth of capitalism, “spiritual destitution”, the arms race especially as an injury to the poor by taking resources that should be used for their benefit.

It’s advocacy is focused on the common good of society (meaning individuals and the whole) “in the service of God”. It focuses on the “freedom and dignity of each person”, taking personal action to address problems instead of playing the blame game, it encourages grass roots projects that are maintainable by small groups (thus distributing production, and remarrying production and the producers), reordering society so that money no longer becomes an end but returns to a means of exchange, relearning the meanings of labor and our relation to the earth, self-sufficiency, “associations of mutality”, and positive cooperation recognizing everyone’s dignity in resolution of conflict.

Its practices are focused on reflecting Christ’s, and “personal and social transformation”. They stand for nonviolence and life and against oppression, for self sacrifice, and prayer, fasting “and noncooperation with evil” (through civil disobedience, protest). Their works of mercy derive from the gospel, the constant teaching of the Church, and the radical concepts of the greatest saints, Basil, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and others. The center of which is that we are stewards of our gifts, and they are meant to satisfy the needs of the world, if we do not use them for such, we steal from those in need. Their idea of manual labor attempts to redignify it, and in a sense proclaim an incarnate theology, where the whole person is most dignified when working, and addressed, the body, mind and soul. And this work coupled with prayer is a gift to give to God. The voluntary poverty increases “knowledge [of] and belief in love.” A radical giving of self to the full disposal of God’s grace, and placing their own boats on the tides of the poor.

Despite this seeming unity of ideals, Catholic worker is very diverse. It is composed of over 185 different communities located in rural and urban areas. Each community is independent of the others, and no licensing is required to be called a “Catholic Worker”. Communities vary in purpose from hospitality to “resistance” (to injustices). And each is subject to the needs and dispositions of whatever community forms it, or maintains it.

The Theory of Relativity and other essays by Albert Einstein

The Theory of Relativity and other essays by Albert Einstein is a compilation of 7 of his essays spanning the years from 1936-1950 and covering his largest contributions to both the practical science and its philosophical interpretation. I will attempt to give a survey of his essays glossing over the more philosophical points and focusing on the physical theories.

1. The Theory of Relativity (1949)

The Theory of Relativity is the “consistent physical interpretation” of motion, space and time. The term relativity derives from its idea that all motion is relative motion, and motion is never in regards to an absolute space like the ether. Though Newtonian mechanics assumes an absolute space, Einstein argues that this is natural, since the earth provides a reference point and that relativistic effects aren’t observed easily at speeds that we normally deal with.

In classical geometry and physics, there is the notion that everything can be measured or located on a 3 or 4 dimensional graph of x,y,z or x,y,z,t. And that such a graph with an origin 0,0,0,0 accurately describes reality. Thus things that occurs with the same time coordinate are simultaneous. But special relativity removes this idea of simultaneity in favor of a measurable definition. For special relativity, the time of an event x relative to me is the time it takes for light to reach me from the event minus the travel time of the light. From this “coincidence” of the light reaching me I can describe which events are simultaneous, through a physical measure. But since the speed of light is always constant (L-Principle) events simultaneous to me, will not be simultaneous to another observer unless they are equidistant between the events as well.

Distance between four dimensional events are described by the Lorentz transform: ds²=dx²+dy²+dz²-cdt² The General Theory of Relativity uses this equation to help describe the “field” which warps time and space about masses. The General theory also describes any inertial frame as equivalent to an accelerated frame. According to Einstein the General Theory is incomplete, as it does not yet describe the “total field”, though he expected the General Theory to be the stepping stone for the final theory.

2. E = MC² (1946)

In this essay, Einstein simply describes the historical development of E=mc². Using a pendulum as the basis for the equivalence of Potential and Kinetic Energy, he attains the equation: mgh=.5mv². But experience shows that the pendulum will stop, due to friction. So what happens? Heat is given off, which was discovered as proportional to the energy radiated. So energy is always conserved, which lead to other areas adopting conservation laws (Einstein cites chemical, electromagnetic, and “all fields”.)

He then continues to explain how mass conservation gets tied into the conservation of energy. He explains that previously this conservation was unnoticed due to the fact that adding an amount of energy that we normally experience to any object would not be able to over come the denominator c² in the equation m=E/c². The amount of energy would have to be enormous or the original mass would have to be comparable to its increase… thus very small. This is why only with atomic physics we begin to see the equivalence.

3. Physics and Reality (1936)

General Consideration Concerning the Method of Science

Einstein argues that due to the radical upheavals in physics today, physicists have to be philosophers, since they alone know the problems intimately. He then does some basic philosophy in the nature of sense experience and his belief that the world is intelligible (he supports this claim with the fact that our theories do actually predict outcomes) amongst other philosophical excursions.

Mechanics and the Attempt to Base all Physics Upon It

Einstein next delves into understanding the concepts of space, body and time. Two properties that we assign to “body” are an existence independent of time and observation. From the concept of body, space arises as a body of a special type. This special type of body is formed from notions of position. Which is best described as a type of contact with space. Time appeared objective, from everyday experience, as things that were seen as occurring simultaneously were assumed to have occurred simultaneously, despite their distance from the observer and the time required for the travel of light.

Einstein considers these understandings (or misunderstandings) of nature to have been fortunate for the development of mechanics. This lead to the concepts of material points, law of inertia, law of motion, and laws of force.

The Field Concept

Einstein traces the development from Newton’s particle view of E&M to Maxwell’s field view. Which is incomplete due to singularities reached from the total differential equations used to solve the field. From this Einstein argues that “the whole theory must be based solely on partial differential equations and their singularity-free solutions.”

The Theory of Relativity

Maxwell’s theory with Lorentz transforms were so successful that the question of an absolute space came back into question. The question was: is speed of light constant in all frames? If it wasn’t constant, then there is a preferred frame of reference, which would be absolute space (possibly in the form of an ether). If it was constant, then there wouldn’t be an absolute space. From this and experimental knowledge, the invariance of the speed of light was raised to the level of a principle (the “Light Principle” or “Light Postulate”, LP for short). This principle led to the Lorentz transforms being applied to a metric in 4-d space in the form of: ds²=dx₁²+dx₂²+dx₃²-dx₄². Where x_1-3 are spatial coordinates and x₄ is time. This application of the LP led to the denial of an absolute time. Also, another postulate had to be declared to account for the equivalency of different inertial and accelerated frames (Principle of Relativity, or PR).

These two together the LP and PR are compatible with Maxwell’s equations, but not with classical mechanics. This is due to the action at a distance and “absolute instantaneousness” of classical concepts and with the contradictory field idea of Relativity. General relativity takes the 4-d metric and moves it to a “general (Reimannian) metric of Bane ds²=g_uvdx_udx_v (summed over u and v)” This results from an incorporation of gravitation into the theory.

Quantum Theory and the Fundamentals of Physics

Classical physics failed as the speed of light failed to be infinite, and instead finite, it also failed as the size of particles failed to be zero, and instead finite (values determined by Plank’s constant). He again states the Probability interpretation of Quantum Mechanics(QM), and then states EPR’s argument for the incompleteness of QM.

Relative Theory and Corpuscles

Einstein tries to show that using partial differential equations, one can come to a complete field for bodies (especially corpuscles) without singularities.

Summary

Einstein makes the claim that the truth of a theory should be judged on criteria of usefulness of the theory’s theorems via observed sense data. He also argues for intuition and a priori theories that can then correlate to sense experience to create more a priori theories. A chain that gets “harder and longer”. He also briefly summarizes the whole paper.

4. The Fundamentals of Theoretical Physics (1940)

Einstein defines physics as “that group of natural sciences which base their concepts on measurements. And whose concepts and propositions lend themselves to mathematical formulation.” Part of physics is the search for the foundations of all physics; the unified theory of those natural sciences. Unlike the foundations of buildings, these foundations are the ones most weathered by new insights.

Newton was the first to strive for a unified theory (according to Einstein). Though E&M, and light were not very well accounted for in his theory. The wave nature of light and E&M are what slowly eroded Newtonian physics, by leading to field theories that challenged action at a distance theories as ad hoc. Theories that eventually equated light and E&M thanks to Maxwell, et al. From this came Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics; two theories that seemed to have widened the gap in the search for unity of theories.

Using Lorentz transforms and shifts in frames of reference, Special Relativity unified Maxwell’s equations and unified mass, energy and E&M. General Relativity applied field theory to gravitation. But its greatest weaknesses are that gravity and electromagnetic theories are separated, and that it fails to describe quantum phenomena.

Quantum physics begins with the discovery of quanta by Max Plank as he was trying to solve the UV catastrophe. This idea of quanta was quickly applied to atomic phenomena especially absorption and emission spectra. From this derived Schrodinger’s wave mechanics and Born’s probabilistic interpretation which showed Schrodinger’s waves were probability waves that described the likelihood of finding a system in a particular location or state. This and other aspects of Quantum Mechanics leads to the denial of any “rigorously deterministic structure of nature”. Though Einstein still holds hope for the ability to represent reality without probability.

5. The Common Language of Science (1941)

Is a foray into the understanding of language, and the dominance of Science. Science is understood as striving for simplicity, “clarity and acuteness” of meaning that permits symbols and meanings to be manipulated transnationally. This leads to a superiority that given a goal can show itself, without a goal it is solely a useless tool.

6. The Laws of Science and the Laws of Ethics (1950)

Is a brief paper that discusses his thoughts on the laws of ethics. Stating ethics’ premises are ultimately based on logical arbitrariness, but also psychological and genetic reality. He then comments on their worthiness as a field of endeavor and their truth for humanity.

7. An Elementary Derivation of the Equivalence of Mass and Energy (1946)

Is exactly that. It utilizes the law of conservation of momentum, a radiation expression, and a “well known expression of for the aberration of light”.

These essays together show the broad genius of Einstein and together show his understanding of science and its impact upon life.

Skunks. (A nature writting for Creative Non Fiction)

Disclaimer… the following must be read in a Leesiana accent.

Skunks. Black, white, brown. They’s problems. And no it aint theys smell. Theys illegals. They take the jobs of nice, homebred and American, dogs and cats. Thinkin we want them as pets. We don’t want them as pets, we could do just fine without them. It’s rampant propaganda. I says we join those 30 other states that have taken this problem head on and do the only sensible restriction we could. NO IMMIGRATION.

Now I knows what you thinking. What’d the skunk ever do to us. It aint a matta of what they did or didn do. It a matter of morality. It aint about color, they just aint native. Sure, theys bes spoutin propaganda sayin they got 9 native species. But they’s weasels and nocturnal. That means theys shifty. Why can’t they work in the day? What they hidin. An look at what they eat. They ominvores, they eat anything. Thats Un-American!

And what kind of pet attacks with the wrong end? That just ain’t right, and well tween you an me, it almost seems… well, Indonesian or maybe Filipino. And we all know how unnatural their animals are. My guess is they doin some kinda genetic manipulation project designed to destroy American culture. By pollutin our pet stock. And that just aint natural.

So in conclusion, we need to kick ‘em out. Get rid of those illegals. It’s not they stink, nor they color, nor wha they did or didn do. Its morality. They propagandists, weasels, Indonesian or Filipino, but most of all, theys just unnatural.

Three page reflection on Ghandi the movie

The Movie Gandhi was very interesting. The story of his non-violence movement was incredibly well done. From South Africa to his death, it was filled with things that provoke thought. Though it does make him superhuman by the way every word from his mouth was profound, it does present his ideals in a way that contrasts against those so ready to go to violence.

I am not a pacifist, and in fact I believe it the duty of every man to protect the weak. It is the duty of every man to protect his family and sacrifice himself for their sake. This movie however, makes me wonder when I would be willing to use non-violence against an aggressor. Would it be only against an enemy as civilized as the British? Only against an enemy with a free press? Or are there other limits that I’ve not considered or that I’d be willing to go beyond. It is at first very clear to me that I would kill any many that is pursuing the death of my family. For my own life, however, it is not immediately evident what I would do. Initially, I would reserve the right to proportionality. Though I also see that I could be convinced that my life could be sacrificed for something greater, and perhaps a nonviolent movement where the aggressors are acting to kill/beat only me and compatriots and not my family (unless they are compatriots) is a case where I’d participate.

I find his method fascinating. But I also wonder how unique it is to India. Or must something completely different occur in other cultures/histories? In the United States, MLK was not seeking an independent nation, but was suing for equality. This is a victory for nonviolence, but its it the same victory as India? I tend to think not. India was a revolution against a civil occupier, the civil rights movement was a demand for equal rights from a government considered their own. They seem very similar, but I still see critical differences, the demand for native rule (because of civil rights and severe poverty) and the demand for equality in the government differ in an overthrow of sorts and a working in the system. Though I think both are appropriate actions, both were contingent on the situation, and I think they were both only possible because of the democratic civil society they both developed in.

In a situation such as China I think a nonviolent movement could be victorious if given a specific goal, and perhaps democracy is such a goal that could be achieved, but the details of the movement must come from the people and be inspired by their history, common culture, and their national strengths. In situations such as Sudan, Ruanda and other developing African nations, I have great doubt that a nonviolent movement could ever be successful. Factions seem too split, too aggressive, and seem to devalue their opponents as not human.

The commonness of Humanity seems a key to a successful civil nonviolent movement. In civil countries that consider citizens human (e.g., India, USA, and China) a civil movement could occur fruitfully. But in others where factions do not consider opponents human, a nonviolent movement can not readily make an impact on the psyche of the opponent. In those countries, a program of humanizing the opponents must occur first, then, once humanized, perhaps in a few situations non-violence could work. Though I still would suspect a civil society that follows the rule of law must be in place for nonviolence to really impact the national psyche.

I think testimony to this is the numerous pogroms throughout history. If nonviolence really worked all the time, would not the murder of innocent women and children turn a country against itself?

And if the response to this point is that they were not publicized then I would claim that in itself is the point. I claim that they were not publicized for two reasons, because of a call by the population in support of the pogrom or because of a government censorship program. In the first case, advertising would not work, and in the second, advertising can only occur in a limited and covert way. In both cases active defense of human life must occur, specifically for those who do not choose martyrdom. If a man chooses martyrdom for himself but his family does not (or the weak do not), then he is truly not living as Christ did for his Church. Christ laid his life down for his Bride, NOT for himself. In this case a man would be selfish, self-centered and unworthy of any praise, for he has failed in his role as husband, as male, and as the image of Christ. Though once a man has been denied means for retaliation, he must still seek to lay his life down for his family (and the weak) by any means possible, which very likely would be limited to nonviolence.

The movie Gandhi was very thought provoking about the nature and use of non-violence. And I think I now have a greater appreciation for the power, uses, and methods of nonviolence. Though I still remain not a pacifist, I can see clear examples where civil disobedience and nonviolence can be effective methods for change.