Germany Multiculturalism and America

Something very serious happened this week – something that virtually went unnoticed due to the Chilean Minors and the Mid-term elections. This week the Chancellor of Germany announced that Multiculturalism has failed. Chancellor Merkel announced that immigrants are holding back the German Economy. This signals the resurgence of a German National Identity and a change in direction from the EU’s purpose of becoming a unified and homogenized Europe.

This problem of German immigration began shortly after WW II when Germany was short of workers so they created a guest worker program – if this Guest Worker Program sounds familiar to Americans it is. The idea of course was to import workers on a temporary basis with the unspoken idea that when no longer needed they would return to their countries of origin. To some extent it worked because those guest workers from other European countries did return to their home countries but not so those workers who came from Turkey and other Muslim countries. More importantly these “guest workers” brought in their families and quickly became a multi-generational population. But the Germans did not want these immigrants to become part of Germany and certainly in the common European view of nationality they could never become German. To be German you had to be descended from Germans for generations which is true of all European countries – assimilation is counter culture in Europe.

The Germans decided to address this problem with a policy called “multiculturalism”. Which meant these immigrants were encouraged to maintain their customs, religion and language, but were expected to pledge loyalty to the State. This created a large and growing group of non-Germans in the middle of Germany who did not assimilate, did not speak the language, and were not expected to because they weren’t German. This meant that this population of immigrants did not see themselves as German and saw their country of origin as “home”. This meant that they had no concern over the fate of Germany but were concerned about the politics and fate of their home countries Muslim countries. There was no loyalty to Germany and given that the home countries were Islamic and Islam was at war with the West, these immigrants represent a significant threat to national security. The stark reality is that Multiculturalism did not work and Germany is now faced with a significant threat to the German Culture and to the State itself. This admission of failure by Germany will have significant repercussions throughout Europe but there are parallels to be drawn with the American immigration issue.

America is the land of immigrants and until the advent of Multiculturalism assimilation has been the norm. People came to this country in order to be American and there was a process in place to do that. You were expected to learn the history, the government structure, and most of all to learn the language. After a period of time you took a test and became a citizen. You were an American and the American Flag was your flag and your loyalty was to America. But that is no longer true today. Sometime after WW II the liberals – known as progressives – slowly took control and America became the evil Empire. Multiculturalism was the wave of the future and for America to expect any immigrant to shed their language, values, or culture – much less their loyalties was viewed as “imperialistic” and wrong at its core.

Then came the “guest workers” the “bracero’s from Mexico and Latin America. These were the “migrant farm workers” who were here temporarily – but of course not all went back to Mexico at the end of the picking season. That trickle became a flood and many employers took advantage of the situation because these workers were cheap labor. Then the “progressives” insisted that English is not our national language because we are a nation of immigrants and multiculturalism by definition said they could and should keep their own language. As night follows day this meant that the school systems no longer had to teach in English but could teach in some other language and at the very least offer native language instruction for English.

The end result of this policy of multiculturalism is a huge population of illegal Mexican immigrants who don’t speak English, don’t intend to learn English, whose loyalty is to Mexico, whose flag is the Mexican flag, and who demand – and receive all of the benefits of a being a citizen without being a citizen. This multicultural policy is divisive and is tearing Germany apart. This failure to assimilate is partially Germany’s fault for failing to develop a policy for assimilation, but in America there is a policy and process for assimilation, it just isn’t being followed. Multiculturalism has destroyed the American Melting Pot and it threatens to rip America apart just as it is tearing Germany and Europe apart.

Germany is abandoning Multiculturalism as self protection and the time has long past in this country for us to abandon multiculturalism. Schools should teach English, ballots should be in English, and the idea that everything should multilingual should be abandoned. If we fail to reassert our culture and be true to our history we will soon find ourselves a victim of history and the America we grew up with will be gone with the wind.

NeoCons

I have been fascinated for some time about the use of the term “NeoCon” to describe just about anyone with whom the liberal establishment disagrees. This term is used a pejorative adjective apparently because anyone who dares to think that the wild excesses of the Obama Administration are just that – excesses or that George Bush and his supporters are anything other than jingoistic war criminals are by definition “NeoCons” and thus without any intelligence or opinion worthy of expression.



Well it seems that the term NeoCon or Neoconservative goes back a long way – to 1950’s. Ironically it was originally used to describe those liberals who felt that the Liberals had gone too far left and were disagreed – thus they were moving to the right. Now understand these were not real conservatives – these were just liberals who had come to the conclusion that the welfare programs so cherished by their leftist colleagues had failed. But these “NeoCons” were people who had supported the socialist programs of the 1940’s—the New Deal, Trade Unions, and my personal favorite “Trotskyism” So the Neoconservatives were not real conservatives in the sense that they believed in capitalism, personal responsibility, low taxes, or the people. OH no—these were people who wallowed in the belief that they were the anointed intellectuals who knew how the rest of us should live but came to the conclusion that the left had moved to far left even for them but they remained the bedrock of the Democratic Party. The irony of that seems to escape most of the media today.



These neoconservatives supported the liberal causes like civil rights, integration, and most of the liberal causes and thinking of the post world war period but eventually came to think that the excesses like the black panthers, Weathermen, and other extreme left wing groups were too extreme and began to move to the right – meaning back to the mainstream Democratic thought but by the 1970’s it was too little too late. The extreme left had captured the Democratic Party which continued to support the far left Marxist inspired agenda. So these liberals came to the conclusion that the anti-American, anti-business, counterculture supported by the reformed Democratic Party was too extreme for them. They believed in America and they believed that if America intended to fight in Viet Nam they should fight to win but that the Democratic Party, the Peace Activists, and the Johnson Great Society were not positive things for America. They became the “Silent Majority” which still believed in the Democratic Party Ideals but not the Reformed Democratic Party.



These neoconservatives still believed – as many still do today – in Economic Liberalism but Social Conservatism. But they were unable to convince their colleagues in the Reformed Democratic Party that the party was out of touch with mainstream America. The result was the crushing defeat suffered by George McGovern – the “Peace Candidate” as the “silent majority” voted Nixon into the White House. Thus the extreme left that had usurped the Democratic Party was then much as it is today – deaf to any voice that disagrees with their socialist and Marxist agenda. An even greater irony is that many of the most hated NeoCons today – people like Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith were Democrats who supported Scoop Jackson as the Democratic Candidate for President. Even Ronald Reagan was initially a Democrat.



Admittedly some of these Neoconservatives did drift back to the core Democratic Party but not all. The reality is that the NeoCons still exerted influence but increasingly on the Republican Party as they leaned more toward military solutions as the way to enforce humanitarian improvements in countries like the Philippines and Chile bringing down Marcos and Pinochet. It was these NeoCons who influenced the foreign policies of both President Clinton and President Bush. They pushed hard for Human Rights and the need to bring democracy to the world and charged both Administrations of lacking “moral clarity” and more importantly a failure to act forcefully in America's interests. Thus these once far left liberals – the bedrock of the Democratic Party – have become in the eyes of their former ideologues -- apostate and worst of all “Republicans”. The reality seems to be that the true Republicans have been overshadowed by these NeoCons who now dominate the Republican Party.



Ironically it appears the Tea Party – which is made up of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents comes closer to the actual philosophies of the original Democratic and Republican Party’s than those party’s do today. How this will ultimately work out is to be determined but it seems that the Obama Administration moved the Democratic Party to the breaking point and whether it can survive without dramatic change is highly problematic. But the same goes for the Republican Party – they cannot continue allowing the Constitution to be twisted by the courts into some unrecognizable thing nor can they continue their tendency to serve lobbyists rather than the people.



So if you voted Republican and are called “NeoCon” there is a great probability that the person making the accusation has no clue what a NeoCon really is.

The Question of Photons

I have been intrigued by much of the research into laser weapons, photon weapons, and light in general. Perhaps the most intriguing question I have come across recently was the statement that photons have zero mass – which seems to invalidate the age old equation of F= MA because if M is zero than F is zero but more importantly Einstein’s equations were demonstrated when light was observed to bend in a strong gravitational field – thus photons have mass. But the response to this question was that photons have zero mass at rest but it has mass in motion. This of course means that the photon lies inert in some body but when that body has energy applied the photon escapes as light with mass. So now the question is how do you know that the source has inert photons? Just because they escape when energy is applied is not in and of itself evidence that the photon was in the source object but could just as easily have come from the energy source. But then this opens up another question and that is Newton’s law regarding the conservation of mass and energy. The photon must have existed somewhere prior to being observed but then if it has no mass but gains mass through motion then isn’t that a creation of mass or is it a conversion of energy to mass? If that is true then isn’t E=MC<2 either not true or is there a dimension to this as yet unobserved because that equation describes the force unleashed by this conversion which was the atomic bomb.

But the explanation of this also includes the statement that a photon gains mass through “momentum,” where the momentum is the product of the mass times the linear velocity (m=MV) but momentum has both magnitude and direction so it is a vector which complicates things somewhat but the essential question remains even when V approaches the speed of light although again this tends to complicate matters still further due to the law of conservation of momentum. However, Physicists have declared that while a photon at rest has zero mass it does have a non-zero momentum but this seems like a stretch given that momentum is based on velocity and a photon at rest cannot be in motion and if it is in motion then by definition it must have mass.

This leads me to some other questions for example we are told that when energy is applied to an atom the electrons surrounding become excited and jump to a higher ring but almost immediately they drop back losing energy as light. But if that lost energy shows as light (a photon) and that photon has mass where did that energy come from – the external source? Did the electron gain mass when it jumped from an inner ring to an outer one? If it didn’t and its mass did not change then did the energy absorbed by the electron convert to the photon mass? But how does that fit
with Einstein’s equation?

Although electrons are thought of as “particles” Quantum Theory increasingly leads to the conclusion that an electron is more like a force than a particle which leads to the conclusion that an electron’s mass is a product of its motion – in effect the momentum of the electron determines its mass and the momentum is determined by its velocity. But when you heat an object it may grow hot, distort, or suffer some change but the total mass doesn’t increase, but then mass is not truly weight but includes resistance to motion. Consequently a photon by definition is traveling at the speed of light and thus its mass must be infinite according to Einstein but doesn’t really just prove that a photon and thus our reality cannot go faster than a photon? On the other hand if you did exceed the speed of light doesn’t that just mean it would become invisible?

This brings us to the question of motion. Our entire universe is in motion from the galaxies to the atom. The atom is surrounded by electron rings which are in motion so it would be logical that if a photon resided within the atom it would have mass since it isn’t at rest because the atom and electrons are not at rest. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that the photon emitted by shift in electron energy is the result of the energy applied from some outside source exciting the electrons, but since that energy is converted to mass has the source of the energy been reduced in mass or energy?

If the excited electron never took on mass when moving to the higher state and never lost any mass when returning to its former energy level then where did the photon’s mass come from? It seems to me Physicists are trying to have it both ways. Light can be viewed as either a wave or a particle but if light is a wave it is in motion and thus must have mass. But if light is viewed as a particle it must have mass because it is in motion. In order for a photon to have a zero mass it must be at rest and in that case where does this at rest photon exist?