No Big Deal

I see that we’re still not allowed to visit Canuckistan until June, but that’s okay.  Montreal is only worth visiting for the three weeks of summer in July anyway.

Here’s a recent pic of same:

I am going to be taking New Wife up there soon.  She’s never been to Canada, and I love Montreal — other than the fact that it’s in Canuckistan, I could live there quite easily.

 

If I may digress for a moment — and I believe I can — there are quite a few places in the world similar to Montreal, where I could easily live but for the fact that the countries in which they’re located are completely fucked up.

The first example is Wiltshire, England, home to Mr. Free Market, The Englishman and a couple of other Bad Influences:

Of course, there’s meine schönes Wien:

…and Paris — the Paris I knew back in the early 2000s, not the refugee-infested shithole it’s since become:

Ditto London:

All these places, and so many others, captivated me utterly when I was there and I remember thinking at the time, “I could live here.”

Then I’d come back home, and realize that I loved my freedom more.

And our TV is better.

Don’t get me started on guns…

…none of which I’d be allowed to own in any of the above European cities.

So Montreal can wait.

The Way Forward

As any fule kno, Insty has put together many excellent posts during his long and storied reign as the King Of The Internet.  This one is not only one of his best, but almost certainly the most timely.

The title is excellent:

FASTER, PLEASE: Unleash the entrepreneurs America needs to build a post-coronavirus economy.

The first link is good, but it’s the second link that sets the post apart from the pack, because it points to history as a way to move forward.  Please read this Reason article (it’s long, but oh-so worth it), and I hope that our various gummint “leaders” read it too.  (I’m not too sanguine about that, though.)

Basically, the “German Non-Miracle” is of particular interest to me because in my major of Modern European History we spent almost an entire semester studying just the period 1945-1990 in West Germany.  What made the course extraordinary was that my lecturer at UNT, the peerless Dr. Alfred Mierzejewski, was not only an economic  historian, but the author of the biography of the man behind West Germany’s recovery, Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard.  (His other two works on the German railway system from 1920 until 1945 are, despite their dry titles, probably the most thought-provoking history books I’ve ever read.  They are to the history of that period as a study of the economic implications of the  Internet would be to our era.)

Needless to say, I devoured the course and read the biography (it wasn’t a set work, although it should have been), and my only wish was that it had been longer.

And for those who are Too Damn Busy to read anything longer than a few lines, here’s the executive summary of the lesson for our modern-day governments as we try to pull ourselves out of the morass of the Chinkvirus-ravaged economy:

Quod Desiderata Est

That’s Latin for “things to be desired”.

A couple years ago the locals on Spain’s Balearic Islands (Majorca, Ibiza etc.) staged massive demonstrations against the crowds of (mostly British) tourists who invaded the islands each year and partied ’til they puked, literally.

Well, thanks to the Chinkvirus, the islands have gone from this:

to this:

I guess all those erstwhile Balearic protesters are now seeing the wisdom of that old question:  “Suppose you got exactly what you wanted…”

That’s More Like It

When even the normally-docile Germans start rioting against the lockdown nonsense, you know things are getting out of hand:

Today saw a demonstration involving hundreds of people, and chants of “Wir sind das Volk!” [“We are the people!”] and “Freiheit!” [“Freedom!”] could be heard.
Law enforcement attended the scene to disband crowds, with officers reportedly having to detain people and deploy pepper spray.
Pictures showed lines of police with riot shields clashing with angry-looking protesters as well as people being dragged away in handcuffs.

If the Kraut cops need some reinforcements, we could always send them the dreaded Meal Team Six from Ector County:

Those old boys could use the exercise.

No Business Sense

Here’s a situation which left me scratching my head:

The managing director of a plant wholesaler said his firm has lost more than £2.5million-worth of business in the last three months after garden centres were forced to close as part of the coronavirus lockdown.  Adrian Marskell, who runs The Bransford Webbs Plant Company in Worcester, in the West Midlands, has had to begin throwing away around 100,000 flowering plants which cannot be sold.  Shocking photos show mountains of de-potted plants waiting to be composted, with others sitting in colourful rows, all destined to be thrown away.

I would have done something a little different.

Why not load up the plants in the back of a truck, then drive around all the residential streets in Worcester, depositing two or three plants at a time in front of houses, with a note attached:

“Rather than toss all these lovely plants in the skip, we’d rather they found a good home in your garden instead.  Please accept them with our compliments, and we hope to see you all when the lockdown comes to an end.”
— Bransford Webbs Plant Company

And come tax filing time, I’d write off the cost of the plants as an advertising expense.

No doubt, this being Britishland, there’s some law against doing all that.

Racial Preferences

My first job as a teenager was as a computer operator at a large corporation, part of an expansion of the IT department’s mainframe system.  There was one other White male operator, and an Indian guy was the department supervisor.   As more operators were hired, all were Indians (coincidentally, all from the supervisor’s home city in India).

Within six months, I and the other White operator had been replaced by two Indians.

Several years ago, I knew a highly-respected senior executive at a huge multinational corporation who once attended a meeting with the IT department.  This having happened when globalism was all the rage, it will come as no surprise that almost all the people in the meeting were Indian men — and not one of them second-generation American, either:  all were recent immigrants.

Anyway, as the meeting went on, the language increasingly turned into Hindi — this in a company which insisted on English as its global language in all correspondence and conversation — and when my friend insisted that everyone speak English, the atmosphere turned hostile.  “But we understand each other better in our native language!” was the protest, whereupon my friend, not known for her tact, said, “Then you should have stayed in India, where everyone understands your home language.  Unfortunately for you, we’re in America, this is an American company, and our corporate language is English.”

Half an hour after the meeting’s conclusion, she was summoned to H.R., officially reprimanded for “cultural insensitivity”, and told to watch herself in future.

So she filed a formal complaint against H.R. for not enforcing corporate policy and (deliciously) adding that one of the men had referred to her as a “stupid bitch” during the meeting — unfortunately for him, one of the few Hindi expressions she understood — and she filed a complaint against him for sexual harassment.  He was “reassigned” to another division a week later, and the H.R. flunky was also officially reprimanded, by Legal this time.

It didn’t matter, though;  over time, the entire IT department became staffed by Indians, all H-1B visa holders.

It is a little-known fact of corporate life — not just here in the U.S., but in Britain as well, that unless checked, Indians will always hire other Indians, and if they can, they’ll displace non-Indians in order to do so.

And this is why I understand exactly what is going on in this little situation:

An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.

U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.

Lovely, isn’t it?

I hope that this open secret gets whacked, and fast — and if it does, at least one good thing will have emerged from the Chinkvirus pandemic, as the massive job losses we’ve sustained have brought practices such as these to everyone’s attention.

And don’t let anyone get sidetracked into thinking that this comes from racial animus against Indians — because it’s the exact opposite:  Indians are discriminating against Whites, and as much as they might claim that this is all in the service of the great god “Cost-Cutting”, they’re lying.  It’s a way to get Indians hired, and a way to get tech expertise back to India.  (If you think I’m exaggerating, please prove me wrong by showing me the statistics proving that a large majority of Indian H-1Bs do not return to India, and go on to become U.S. citizens.  Good luck with that.)  It’s absolutely no different from the ChiComs infiltrating U.S. universities and taking expertise out of the country and back to China.

I hope that Wipro gets sued out of existence.