So the “Department of Homeland Security” -what a creepy title – has woken up to the Chicken Processing situation:

Pilgrim’s Pride: Homeland Security Took 400 Wrkrs Into Custody CNNMoney.com April16 2006

Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. (PPC) confirmed the Department of Homeland Security took 400 employees into custody at five processing facilities across the South….Officials from the Customs Enforcement division took into custody employees at plants in Batesville, Ark.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Live Oak, Fla.; Morefield, W.Va.; and Mt. Pleasant, Texas.
Pilgrim’s Pride said it had terminated all employees who were arrested and would terminate employees found to have engaged in similar misconduct.

Charming to see how Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s largest chicken supplier, stands by its employees in time of need.

But of course the company has the fine moral example set by one of their outside directors, Linda Chavez – no doubt there to sanctify treasonable employment practices.

One of the oddities of Obama’s remarks about how Pennsylvania’s bitter small town losers are taking refuge in conservative religion is how factually off base it is. The heartland of the flourishing conservative Protestantism in the U.S. is not the declining Rust Belt but the relatively fast-growing South.

What’s distinctive about the Rust Belt religiously is what a sizable fraction voters, especially non-urbanites, are Catholics, whether Roman or Orthodox (as in the movie “The Deer Hunter,” which, by the way, showed that back when the heavy industry towns of Pennsylvania were booming in the 1960s, guys still liked guns). Judging from enrollment at Catholic schools, which has been steadily declining despite the huge influx from Mexico, Catholicism is not succeeding at present at being a refuge for either the economic losers or winners.

For example, in the 2004 election, in which economically-declining Pennsylvania voted for Kerry while economically-growing Georgia voted for Bush, 35% of Pennsylvania voters were Catholics versus only 10% of Georgia voters. Only 13% of Pennsylvania voters identified themselves as white conservative Protestants vs. 26% of Georgia voters.

From the perspective of Obama and his San Francisco supporters, the problem with Pennsylvania and Ohio is not religion, but that, due to high union membership, there are still a lot of white blue collar guys who vote in the Democratic primaries. In contrast, Obama could sweep the South Carolina Democratic primary because, due to low unionization, almost all the white blue collar guys vote in the GOP primary.

Going to Mexico is dangerous business: the State Department says so. Check out the official word on what’s going on right next door:

Recent Mexican army and police force conflicts with heavily-armed narcotics cartels have escalated to levels equivalent to military small-unit combat and have included use of machine guns and fragmentation grenades. Confrontations have taken place in numerous towns and cities in northern Mexico, including Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California, and Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua. The situation in northern Mexico remains very fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements there cannot be predicted.

Armed robberies and carjackings, apparently unconnected to the narcotics-related violence, have increased in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. Dozens of U.S. citizens were kidnapped and/or murdered in Tijuana in 2007. Public shootouts have occurred during daylight hours near shopping areas.[Mexico Travel Alert--April 14, 2008]

Here’s a relevant chunk of news ripped from the headlines: Mexican town caught in crossfire of drug cartels, [By James C. McKinley Jr., International Herald-Tribune, April 15, 2008]

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico: One sign of the desperation to end organized crime in this border town is that the good guy on the police recruitment posters is not a clean-cut youth in smart police caps, but a menacing-looking soldier wearing a black mask and a helmet and carrying a heavy machine gun. [...]

A turf war between drug cartels has claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year, more than twice the number of homicides for the same period last year. Several mass graves, hiding a total of 36 bodies, have been discovered in the backyards of two houses belonging to drug dealers.

At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up every morning, at a rate of almost 12 a week. The mayor and the governor of Ciudad Juárez asked the federal government to intervene

In Third World (Africa, Asia, Bangladesh) the World Health Organization does good work telling the locals that they save lives and prevent disease by washing their hands. It’s part of the work of agencies like the Division of Healthy Environments and Sustainable Development .

Immigrants from those areas are sometimes a danger to public health–to repeat myself:

Third World immigrants don’t understand the germ theory of disease, and may refuse to believe it even if we teach it to them.

Well, now this problem has broken out in Canada, of all previously-believed-to-be-clean places, where the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has decided [PDF] that, as matter of human rights law, that employees aren’t endangering anyone’s health by not washing their hands.

The decision involved a woman who had immigrated to Canada, gone to work at McDonalds, and was still working there twenty years later when she developed some horrible skin condition that prevented her from washing her hands.McDonald’s tried to accommodate her, but there are few jobs in a restaurant for someone who can’t be trusted to touch the food.

What gets me is that the tribunal argued that:

there was no evidence of:

• the relationship between food contamination and hand-washing;
• the risk to the public if Ms. Datt’s hand-washing was limited

It looks like the World Health Organization has new worlds to conquer.

Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek:

The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued. East Asian societies exalt the larger society: behavior is constrained by social roles, conformity is prized, outsiders shunned. “The individualist-collectivist split is one of the most powerful differences among cultures,” says [Richard] Nisbett [author of The Geography of Thought]. But the reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes. Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation.

(more…)

I’m surprised to see Lisa Schiffren on NRO objecting to Obama’s gaffe about “bitter” Pennsylvanians by saying that it’s “fairly shocking that Candidate Hope and Change thinks these people are rubes — unlike the much better paid, if not more productive denizens of Hyde Park, Cambridge, or a random prep school in Hawaii.”

is this the same Establishment Conservative Lisa Schiffren [Send her mail]who attacked Mike Huckabee in 2007 with a post that Ross Douthat said might as well have been called “Go Back to Dogpatch, You Stupid Hillbilly!”?

.Huckabee had suggested that if the Constitution was opposed to God’s law, on what he saw as basic issues of right and wrong, maybe it was the Constitution that was wrong. and should be changed. Ms. Schiffren went ballistic. Check what Daniel Larison had to say about Ms.Schiffren’s attitude at that time