Last night for the first time in months I got a good night’s sleep. The regular drill around here is that I go to bed sometime between 9:30 and 10:00pm, sometime in the middle of night Tally starts barking, either my wife or I will come downstairs to tend to her (Tally doesn’t climb stairs much anymore), and this may be repeated several times in the course of a night. Obviously, that’s not particularly conducive to restful slumber.

Under the best of circumstances it takes me a while to settle into sleep and I’m a very light sleeper. I usually startle awake at Tally’s first bark. If I come down and tend to her, sometimes I’m able to return to sleep immediately but other times I need to go through my entire end-of-day drill which may take an hour or more before I’m able to get to sleep again.

But last night for whatever reason Tally didn’t wake up and start barking, Kara didn’t demand to get up and be fed at 4:00am, and I was able to sleep right through from 9:30pm to 5:30am. I brought Smidge down with me to let her out to eliminate and feed her. Tally was still breathing which was good. I then pottied and fed the other dogs, one by one, and got some breakfast myself a little after 6:00am before walking the dogs.

You just don’t what a luxury a restful night’s sleep is.

There’s a fascinating post over at ZeroHedge on how a lot of housing recovery here has been a result of Chinese oligarchs looking for somewhere to stash the money they’ve looted from the Chinese people:

This means that far from indicating a recovery, as the recent surge in the high end of the US housing segment had long been touted, all the relentless move higher in ultraluxury properties prices was simply a recycling of China’s hot money, which unlike in the US, never made its way into the Chinese stock market (explaining why the Shanghai Composite has barely budged in years) and merely ended up in US real estate. If anything, this is simply another confirmation of the epic capital misallocation, and the complete lack of “trickle down” resulting from failed global central banking policies.

So now that the “who” has been answered, just one question remained: “how?”

How did millions of Chinese “buyers” manage to get tens of billions of yuan or dollars out of the mainland – a country which as is well-known has strict capital controls when it comes to individual and corporate offshore outflows? Under Chinese law, citizens are allowed take only the equivalent of US$50,000 out of the country each year: hardly enough to buy a storage closet in any of New York City’s Central Park West duplexes.

Today we learn the answer and it has to do with officially sanctioned “money laundering” services by not one but two of China’s largest banks: Bank of China and also Citic.

I’m not sure how much credence to place in this. On the one hand, I’ve heard any number of anecdotal claims that most of the houses, particularly expensive house, that are being purchased are being purchased with cash, many by foreign buyers. On the other hand the $92 billion spent by foreign buyers over the period in question is a tiny fraction of the $1.2 trillion in housing purchases over the period.

My hipshot reaction is that this phenomenon is true but it’s a lot more significant to the Chinese than it is to us. That may vary by market. A lot of these purchases are concentrated in a few markets and although purchases by foreigners may be just 7% of the total over the entire U. S. they may comprise a much, much more significant part of the total in specific markets.

Writing at the Daily Beast, Dmitri Mehlhorn explain why progressives shouldn’t support public sector unions any more:

By 2012, public-sector workers had union membership rates more than five times higher than rates among private-sector workers.

Essentially, the public-sector unions sucked up all the oxygen. Talented labor organizers opted to work with government workers: their members were relatively prosperous and well connected, so they were easy and lucrative to organize. As explained in Jake Rosenfeld’s book What Unions No Longer Do from earlier this year, this shift to public-sector unions meant that unions no longer fought primarily for the working poor. Instead, much of their muscle was devoted to improving the status of middle-class professionals.

The unionization of the public sector did not merely weaken private-sector unions; it directly harmed the well-being of the working poor. To see why, consider who pays the price of benefits and work rules collectively bargained by public unions. In 2000, when I lived in Los Angeles, the city’s bus drivers went on strike for 32 days. At that time, the average bus driver was making roughly $50,000 a year. While perhaps not generous, that was far more than the average bus rider, who earned just $15,000 a year.

Basically, today’s unionized public sector worker is a lot less like Norma Rae and a lot more like Babbitt. As I said during the Chicago teachers’ strike last year, the question is not whether teachers deserve a raise. The question is how someone earning $15,000 a year will pay for the raises of someone earning $70,000 a year.

However, I think that Mr. Mehlhorn is wasting his pixels. These positions aren’t governed by ideology or even by reason but by practicality, nostalgia, and the force of habit.

They are practical in the sense that an enormous amount of Democratic political funding comes from public sector unions. Just take a gander at the list of top political donors. #2 and #3 on that list are AFSCME and the NEA. They are nostalgia in the sense that today’s union workers, immigrants, farmers, and so on aren’t the union workers, immigrants, and farmers of a century ago. Circumstances have changed but ideologies and the political positions they give rise to have not changed accordingly.

Finally, I wish I had some way of quantifying how large a proportion of people vote the way they do simply out of habit. They vote Democratic because their parents and grandparents voted Democratic. They can’t imagine voting any other way because the other guys are evil.

The “Bloody Code” is the phrase used to describe England’s extreme list of capital crimes, crimes that carried the death penalty, that prevailed from 1688 (after the Glorious Revolution) to 1815, when a great moderation of English law took place. Under the Code an enormous roster of crimes, more than 200, carried the death penalty. What did they include?

Theft of goods valued at more than 12 pence (grand larceny)
Being in the company of gypsies for a month
Malicious maiming of cattle
Damaging Westminster Bridge
Highway robbery
Burglary
Impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner
Strong evidence of malice in children 7 to 14 years old (for young teenagers that’s probably all of them)
Stealing from a shipwreck
Poaching
Begging without a license (if you were a soldier or sailor)
Writing a threatening letter
Destroying turnpike roads
Stealing from a rabbit warren
Pickpocketing
Being out at night with a blackened face
Stealing letters
Stealing horses or sheep
Arson
Returning from transportation
Sacrilege

in addition to homicide, manslaughter, rape, treason, and other offences we might think of as capital crimes today. A broadly administered death penalty was thought of as a deterrent, i.e. not for stealing horses but so that horses would not be stolen, as it was put.

The Bloody Code had a major effect on the American Colonies and later on Australia. Judges frequently offered transportation, i.e. being sent to one of the overseas colonies and indentured as a servant for a term of years, as an alternative to execution, by some accounts at a rate of 10:1. That resulted in the transportation of many convicts to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. It is not true that Georgia was founded by convicts. That experiment failed and most of those transported to George in that early period died. It was later re-started by free men who were able to make a go of it.

The odds are very high that, if you can trace your ancestry back to Virginia, the Carolinas, or Georgia in the 18th or earlier, your ancestor had been convicted of a crime, possibly a capital crime, and transported.

When the American colonies became unavailable for the purpose, transportation of convicts to Australia replaced them. The first convict ship arrived in Australia in 1788, just 18 years after James Cook found it.

See here.

The present Congress is the 113th Congress. When the next, 114th Congress takes office on January 3, 2015 it will be the fourth Congress of Prsident Obama’s term of office. what is it likely to bring? If history is any gauge, not much.

Once in office, what did these fourth congresses actually do? What was the legislative product? The first thing to say is that there is no instance of a president pressing and winning a domestic program after a second midterm. It is a zero. Hope and change are yesterday’s stories.

They have, however, responded to crises:

But now for the teeth-rattlers — the crisis legislation. Nothing has been more significant. What with Hitler on the march, history would look far different absent the huge U.S. defense buildup, the lifting of the Neutrality Act’s arms embargo and the peacetime draft voted in 1940 (L). Those were the legislative preoccupations of FDR and everybody else in that year. Also, the economy would look different absent the TARP bailout and associated measures in 2008 (Bush).

These crisis measures of 1940 and 2008 are a reminder that history can rise up and bite.

Other legislation has required strenuous lobbying, arm-twisting, persuasion, and cajoling on the part of the president. What in President Obama’s background and experience would lead you to believe that he is willing, able, or likely to do such a thing?

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week.

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes! – The Noisy Room – ACORN for Illegal Aliens – Meet the Southwest Key Programs
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes –Joshuapundit–#HillaryLies – Why Her Outrageous Speaking Fees Don’t ‘Go To Charity’
• Third place with 2 votes – The Right Planet – Wahabis, ISIS, the King of Clubs and Qatar’s Role in Terrorism
• Fourth place with 1 1/3 votes – Bookworm Room – Hobby Lobby: Trying to get DemProgs to understand what it means
• Fifth place *t* with 1 vote – GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – The New Caliphate: Tease Or Threat?
• Fifth place *t* with 1 vote – The Independent Sentinel – Obama’s Fundamental Transformation Via Smoke And Mirrors
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – Ask Marion – Costco Caught Again… Removing D’Souza’s ‘America’ From Shelves
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Glittering Eye –The Breeding Ground
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Razor – Illegal Immigrants Are Not Dogs
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – Simply Jews – BBC finally gets it
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – VA Right! – Is the Group “Patriots for Economic Freedom” Scamming Dave Brat Supporters? You be the judge.

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! – Kevin D. Williamson – Born on the Fifth of July submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place with 2 votes – Daniel Hannan – The Forgotten Flag of the American Revolution and What It Means submitted by Watcher
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –Ted McAllister/Library of Law & Liberty–What a Providentially Bad President Can Do for America submitted by Bookworm Room
• Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Victor Davis Hanson/NRO –Our Roost, Obama’s Chickens submitted by Ask Marion
• Fourth place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Derek Hunter/Right Wing News –The Petulant President submitted by Nice Deb
• Fifth place *t* with 1 vote –The Volokh Conspiracy/WAPO – The Supreme Court’s secular Jewish cabal’s war on religious freedom? submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
• Fifth place *t* with 1 vote –War Is Boring – China Thinks It Can Defeat America in Battle submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Gatestone Institute –ISIS Already In Gaza submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Sixth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Charles C. W. Cooke/National Review –The Civil War of 1776 submitted by The Noisy Room
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote –Israel Hayom – Radical Islam: Raging unabate submitted by The Right Planet
• Seventh place *t* with 1/3 vote – California Political Review – Berkeley Requires Marijuana Dispensaries To Provide Free Weed For Low-Income Patients submitted by VA Right!

The announcement post at the Watcher’s site is here.

Yesterday when I was at the bank I engaged the young teller in conversation (as I do) and used the word “kvetch”. In response to his puzzled look, I said “It’s a Yiddish word. It means ‘complain’ or ‘whine’.”

If you don’t already know it, Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazic Jews, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a dialect of German with a lot of borrowed Hebrew, Slavic, and Romanian words and constructions. The corresponding language of Sephardic Jews, the Jews of Southern Europe and North Africa, is Ladino, a dialect of Spanish.

Many prominent movie actors, e.g. Paul Muni and John Garfield, got their start in the Yiddish theater. Not long ago on CBS’s Sunday Morning they had a feature on Fyvush Finkel (look him up). Fyvush was a juvenile star in the Yiddish theater.

Carl Reiner has said that the formula for his comedy is “Talk British. Think Yiddish.”

American English has borrowed all sorts of Yiddish words. Food items like matzoh or kishkeh or blintz. Coarse words like shmuck or putz. Notably, chutzpah. Like pornography it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it. It refers to a particular kind of brazen assertiveness but it’s a lot easier to say “chutzpah”.

After we left the tough neighborhood of my childhood, in the more upscale neighborhood of my teens a number of my neighbors were native speakers of Yiddish. When you combine that with my dad’s large number of Jewish friends, many of whom were native speakers of Yiddish, I can’t remember a time when my spoken language wasn’t peppered with Yiddish words.

Yiddish was dealt a one-two punch in the 1930s and 40s. First, millions of Ashkenazic Jews were murdered by the Nazis. That cut the heart out of Ashkenazic Jewry. Second, the founding of the state of Israel breathed life into the synthetic language Modern Hebrew.

Now Yiddish is dying as its few native speakers pass away. I couldn’t recommend Leo Rosten’s delightful The Joys of Yiddish more highly. It’s full of stories and jokes. You’ll learn the difference between a shlemiel and a shlemazel. You’ll learn what a shnorrer is and why Groucho Marx is funny.

That’s my mitzvah for the day. Enjoy.

I’m finding it a bit hard to reconcile Peggy Noonan’s succinct description of the situation on our border with Mexico:

The latest border surge has been going on for at least two years. Children and others are coming because they believe that under the president’s leadership, if they get here they’ll get a pass to stay. (They’re probably right.) This was predictable. Two years ago Texas Gov. Rick Perry wrote the president that the number of unaccompanied children was spiking sharply. He warned that unless the government moves, other minors would attempt the journey and find themselves in “extremely dangerous situations.” The generally agreed-upon number of those who’ve come so far this year is 50,000. Now government estimates are rising to at least 90,000 by year’s end.

with the prescription of the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

The larger tragedy of this episode is that it has done enormous and needless damage to the cause of immigration reform. The Obama Administration’s incompetence has again undermined its own agenda. But once the misery of the children is past, no one should think that illegal immigration can be stopped by more enforcement alone, by more Border Patrol agents or more harassment of American business. The way to reduce illegal immigration is by providing more work visas to enter—and leave—the U.S. legally.

I recognize I’m not being fair to the WSJ’s editors. Their claim is that the kids are being sent here as stalking horses for their parents or, alternatively, to join their parents who are already here, presumably illegally. The reason I jump to the conclusion I do is that to date no one has produce any evidence that the majority of the unaccompanied minors making their way into the U. S. fit into either classification. If the WSJ’s editors have such evidence, they should present it.

The competing claim is that most of the kids coming here are fleeing violence in their own countries. If that’s the case more work visas will have no effect whatever on the large number of unaccompanied minors coming across the border.

I think that the editors of the WSJ are solving a different problem than the one fomenting the crisis at hand. From their point of view wages for unskilled or semi-skilled workers are just too high, darn it. Those workers need more competition to push wages down even farther.

Please stop quoting Emma Lazarus to me. Circumstances have changed over the course of a century. Unlike then now wages are falling for most workers, the cost of the social services being provided is orders of magnitude higher, and we really have no need for greater numbers of workers at any skill level.

When my wife’s grandfather came over here more than a century ago, he abandoned his country, his language, and his parents, breaking all ties to the Old Country. He committed to the United States. He learned English, spoke accent-free English, and served in the U. S. military. He became 110% American, a common phenomenon among the Ellis Island immigrants.

Today is the age of Skype and there’s practically no need for new immigrants to make any sort of commitment. They may or may not learn the language, they can talk to Mama every night, and even if they become American citizens they can retain their previous citizenship as well.

One of the reasons immigration reform stalled is that its supporters just haven’t adjusted their thinking to the circumstances of the modern world.

Contrary to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, I think the basic solution to our illegal immigration problem is greater economic growth in the countries of Central America. Their problems are corruption, bad government, lack of capitalization, and crime. Why not think about addressing those?

Update

BTW, the editors of the Washington Post agree with me. The law respecting unaccompanied minor immigrants should be changed:

Last week, Mr. Obama wrote to Congress saying he would seek to modify that law. Yet he made no such request Tuesday when he instead proposed some $3.7 billion in spending to add immigration judges and other personnel and to house, feed and care for the minors who have already crossed the border.

That seems unlikely to send the get-tough message Mr. Obama promised. The fact is that since he entered office, shortly after the 2008 law took effect, the number of undocumented youths deported or turned back at border posts has plummeted, according to government figures released to the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Obama has come under intense pressure from Democrats and immigration advocates to continue this leniency. They make their argument on humanitarian grounds. But there is nothing humanitarian in tacitly encouraging tens of thousands of children to risk their lives, often at the hands of cutthroat smugglers, to enter this country illegally.

If the president is serious about restoring order to the border and dissuading children and their families from a costly and life-threatening trip, he will add teeth to his policy by seeking the legal change he promised.

This morning there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on about the kids streaming across our southern border, apparently from Central America. There’s plenty of blame to go around and as usual I’m a lot more interested in what should be done than in assigning blame.

I have, well, issues with Victor Davis Hansen but I recommend you read his post on the crisis at the border at RealClearPolitics. Read the first nine paragraphs and then stop. IMO the balance is boilerplate complaints about liberals, Democrats, etc.

In it he asks a series of questions which I think are pretty important ones. He does some blaming, too: he blames those most proximally responsible for the crisis including authorities in Mexico and Central America, the kids’ parents, and, presumably, criminals in Central America.

I think it’s obvious we’ve got to do something for the kids but releasing them with a note that says they’ve got to return to appear before immigration court is as abandoning of responsibility as putting them on top of a railroad car headed for the States.