Heh

The headline says it all: NASCAR's Kyle Busch pulled over for reckless driving.

Bonus irony:

Tuesday, Busch again appeared at the Richmond raceway for the Virginia kickoff of "Focus on Driving," Sprint Nextel's attentive driving education program.

Star Trek Technology

Where was this when I was in college?

Synthehol is a science-fictional substitute for alcohol that appears on the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series. It allows drinkers to experience all of the enjoyable, intoxicating effects of alcohol without unpleasant side-effects like hangovers.

Professor David Nutt, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Bristol in the UK, believes that there is no scientific reason why it cannot be created now.

Now, if they can only get that transporter stuff working, we'll be all set.

Against the Wall

Should we build a fence/wall along the Mexican border to prevent people from crossing into the United States without the proper papers? A lot of people say "yes". Unsurprisingly, Charles Krauthammer is one of them, and he puts an interesting twist on the notion: immigrant rights groups need to support a wall in order to show they are serious about creating a national consensus on immigration policy.

It has become a new mantra of the right that you need to support the most extreme conservative ideas in order to be taken "seriously". We saw that attitude regarding the war in Iraq, and guess what — the "serious" people were dead wrong. I suspect that their "serious" approach to immigration policy will be discredited as well, hopefully without it actually being implemented.

But let's take the idea "seriously" for a moment. The first question that needs to be asked is, will a fence work? Probably not:

"People will seek other ways to come into the country," said Maria Echaveste, an immigration expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank in Washington, D.C. "I suspect more use of water, more use of fraudulent documents, more use of criminal smuggling.

"So long as there are jobs and there is a demand for labor and we are not serious about cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers, people will seek to come in," Echaveste said.

But perhaps we need to ask a better question: would a fence at least be cost-beneficial? Again, probably not. According to Jason Ackelson of the American Immigration Law Foundation:

Short of constructing a wall along the country’s entire southern and northern frontiers, it is unlikely these measures will do anything to substantially reduce the flows of undocumented immigrants into the United States. Even if such a wall were built — which would itself be a counterproductive development — it would do nothing to deal with the fact that up to half of the undocumented immigrants in the United States came legally and simply have overstayed the conditions of their admittance. Furthermore, the cost of such a fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, if based roughly on the cost of the California fence ($4.64 million/mile), would be outrageous — about $9 billion, which is approximately $2.5 billion more than CBP’s total budget in FY 2005. Building a comparable fence along the northern border with Canada would add about $14.5 billion to the tab, for a total of $23.5 billion, or roughly 60 percent of the FY 2005 budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, of which CBP is one division. Ironically, another obvious shortcoming of the border fence was illustrated just as the debate on this issue made the national press: Mexican authorities located an incomplete tunnel underneath the fence.

Even if a good argument could be made that building a fence would reduce unauthorized border crossings, it seems clear that it ignores the reality of the current US-Mexico relationship. A fence presupposes that you can cleanly separate the two countries, but that's no longer the case. Many families already live on both sides of the border, and economic ties will only grow stronger. Any policy that doesn't recognize this integration is doomed to failure. So if we're going to get "serious", let's make sure we're talking about ideas that are feasible and effective. Building a wall is neither.