Tag: Foreigners

Right Idea

Crime, Immigration

I see that the famously-tolerant Swedes are coming to their senses about this immigration business:

Sweden’s government on Tuesday said it would put forward a bill introducing a requirement for migrants to adhere to an ‘honest living’ or face deportation.

The country’s centre-right government, supported by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, came into power in 2022 and vowed to get tough on immigration.  They are now trying to rapidly push through a slew of reforms in various areas ahead of legislative elections in September.

The new requirement would make it easier to withdraw residence permits for migrants.

Speaking at a press conference, Migration Minister Johan Forssell told reporters: ‘Following laws and rules is a given, but it must also be a given that we do our best to live responsibly and not harm our country.  If, for example, you ignore paying your debts, if you don’t comply with decisions from Swedish authorities, if you cheat the benefits system, if you cheat your way to a Swedish residence permit… then you do not have the right to be here,’ Forssell said.

Other examples the government cited as examples included working without paying taxes or not paying fines.

That all sounds perfectly reasonable to me.  Immigrate (lawfully) by all means, but once you’re here, act like an actual citizen and not like some criminal scrote, or face getting tossed out.

Loath as I may be to suggest that we learn any policy from the Scandis, this would be an exemplary one for us to implement as well.  I don’t know the specifics of their policy, but it should be made that said repatriation and loss of residence status would include the entire family of the deportee, including any children born Over Here.

Shutdown

Advice, Drive Time

As Longtime Readers know, I’m not shy to take the occasional swipe at Oz and the Strylians.  This, however, is not good:

We are fifteen days into the Iran–US war. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow stretch of water through which 20% of the world’s oil and gas normally flows, is effectively closed. Tankers have been hit. Insurers have pulled coverage. Commercial shipping has ground to a standstill for over a week. Brent crude closed Friday at US$103 per barrel, up from $70 before the war, having already spiked to $119.50 during the week. Iran’s military spokesperson has warned oil could reach $200.

Australia imports over 90% of its refined petrol, diesel and jet fuel, almost all of it processed in Asian refineries that are now hoarding output for their own populations. China has banned refined fuel exports. Thailand has suspended petroleum exports. Singapore and South Korean refineries are operating under force majeure. The International Energy Agency has just announced the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history — 400 million barrels across 32 nations.

When the world’s energy watchdog fires its biggest gun, you don’t need a PhD to know the situation is serious.

I hope my Oz Readers (both of them) will take this warning to heart, if they haven’t already.

It’s no longer a joke.

Welcome Change

Elections

As anyone who’s read this website for any length of time should know, I love the country of Chile.  In fact, of all the Third World countries I’ve ever been to or even lived in, Chile ranks #1, by miles.  I love its people, its scenery, its way of life, the women are among the sexiest I’ve ever seen and the climate is wonderful;  so despite the language difficulty, if someone were to say:  “You have to go and live in Chile”, my response would be:  “Gimme the ticket.”  I’d learn Spanish just to go and live there.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but in case I haven’t, here goes.

You will recall that at one point, our family traveled extensively around the world (either on vacation or on business), and over three years we visited nearly two dozen countries, several repeatedly.  We knew that the travels were going to end at some point (for all sorts of reasons) so at the end of what turned out to be our final trip, we polled our three kids with the following question:

“Assuming that you could afford to live there (had a job, etc.), which are the top three countries you’d choose to live in?”

The answers were as follows:

Daughter:  1. Tokyo, 2. Paris
Son&Heir:  1. London 2. Heidelberg (Germany)
#2 Son:  1. Tokyo 2. London

All three picked Chile — specifically, Viña Del Mar — as their third choice.

My only reservation about Chile — it was one of my top choices, too — was that I got the feeling that it was just one revolution from becoming Communist.  And incidentally, that fear was also prevalent among many of the native Chileans I met on our trip there.

Which makes the most recent political news from Chile all the more exciting:

In December, former congressman José Antonio Kast found himself in a runoff against the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara. Thankfully, Kast won in a decisive victory with nearly 60% of the vote.

But the people of Chile are ecstatic. The country has more or less been taken over by socialists and leftists for decades, and its most recent president, 40-year-old Gabriel Boric, may have been the most hardcore — and least popular — of all.

So, let me warn you that as you peruse the fake news media today that you’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how Kast is “far-right” or “ultra-conservative” or a big fan of the country’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. First of all, Kast has praised Pinochet’s economic reforms — he was a big capitalist, free market kind of guy who saved the country from full-on Communism — but Kast has also condemned him for his human rights abuses and all the bad stuff he did. It’s not like he has posters of him hanging on his office walls. Sheesh.

Second, Kast has been called “Chile’s Trump,” and that right there is enough to make the MSM lose its collective mind.

Kast campaigned on being tough on crime and restoring law and order to the South American nation. That includes deploying the military to cities with high crimes, strengthening the country’s borders, mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, putting the interests of native Chileans first, and getting tough with cartels and terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua.

Sounds like Chile, at last, is in the right [sic] hands, even though it seems unlikely that ChilePres Kast is going to revive Air Pinochet, which is rather sad.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what it costs to fly to Chile… wait, less than $900 return?  Whoa.

Oh, and one last story.

When we arrived in Santiago and checked into our hotel (Four Points Sheraton), we got a call from the kids’ room:  “We’re hungry;  can we get room service?”

Well, a week prior to that we’d been in Zurich, where room service required a credit check.  So with great trepidation I scanned the Four Points’ room service menu, converted the CLP$ (peso) into USD$, and said:

“You can order everything off the menu.”
“You mean anything?”
“No, I mean everything.”

I don’t remember what anything cost, but it was about 20% of what the same thing would have cost in a U.S. hotel, and about 1% of what it cost us in Zurich.  (I’m not exaggerating.)

So yeah;  add “affordable” to your travel plans.

I am seriously considering this idea, funds permitting.

Note:  It appears that Chile no longer charges U.S. citizens an entry fee of $160 per person, nor does the U.S. do likewise for Chileans entering the U.S.  This was the only fly in the ointment on our trip there, and thankfully it is no more.

Food For Thought

Bureaucracy, Economics, Gummint, Marxists

Here are a few A.I. videos that I think are worthy of consideration, so if you care for the thesis — and you might, because it’s all very much focused on the economic scenario in various countries and not so much on politics (although the two are pretty much entangled, as you will see).

The first has to do with Canada;  the second with France; the third with the EU and the fourth with the U.K.

Finally, if you want to see yet another (but shorter and more superficial) article which (because it’s CNN) looks at the actions rather than the motivations behind the actions, there’s New Zealand.  And if you want to really chuckle, note that the fleeing New Zealanders are mostly heading for Australia — as the video calls it, “the new Argentina” (and to be clear, they’re referring to Peronist Argentina, not the Argentina of Milei).

Now the chilling bit.  If you distill all the events in the above, it will become clear that even with MAGA, with DOGE, and with all the Trumpism reorgs, the U.S. is heading down the same path.  The manifestations thereof are well known:  the citizens of ur-European soviets (New York, California and Illinois, etc.) fleeing their failed states for states that aren’t being run into the ground by their respective state governments.

And the spoiler:  all the above — all of it — can be ascribed to Marxism and the mindset it creates.

Ohhh We’re Fwightened

Manners, Muzzies, Terrorism

Here’s an interesting one:

German security officials have warned that the conflict between the United States, Israel and the Islamist regime in Iran could result in terror blowback across Europe.

Specifically:

The chairman of the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Control Committee (PKGr), which oversees Germany’s intelligence services, warned on Sunday in comments reported by Die Welt that “retaliatory measures” by pro-Iranian regime terrorists, including “sleeper cells in Europe”, could not be ruled out.

Perhaps if you hadn’t thrown your borders open to all and sundry, there wouldn’t now be any Islamic “sleeper cells” in Europe for you to be afwwwwaid of.  (Oh wait… stopping wholesale immigration would have been regarded as “rayyyycisssss” — or however you say that in Krautspeak.)

Well, your own EU governments lit the fire under the cauldron in which you were all playing so nicely together, so enjoy the burning.  You fucking incompetent and treasonous assholes.

At least one would hope that European “security forces” (ha!) will finally have a real bunch of terrorists to hunt down and control, instead of concentrating all their effort and budgets on the (non-existent) threats from “the Right” and “fascists”.  Yeah, don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Say hello to the real fascists, Euroweenies.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of statists.

Whatever

Politics, Third World, Wars & Other Fun Games

This whole Iranian adventure has been framed in terms of its being “regime change” for Iran, and I don’t care.

Frankly, I’m uneasy with the entire concept of “regime change” as a foreign policy goal, because if history has taught us anything — especially in the Middle East — it’s that most of these noble efforts are pretty much doomed to failure, because the entire premise is faulty.  Changing a regime is no guarantee that the next regime will be any better than the previous one.

Here’s the unalterable fact:  democratic capitalism, as a concept and guiding socio-political principle, doesn’t work outside the confines of Western civilization, and by “Western civilization” I mean pretty much the United States.  This is because Western civilization cannot coexist within a nation along with lunatic and highly-flawed political systems like Marxism and/or lunatic medieval social systems like Islam.

One only has to see how the UK, to use but one example, has been undermined by the baleful effects of both the above — Marxism as a home-grown poison (hello, Labour Party) and Islam as an imported poison (hello, untrammeled Muslim immigration).

And that’s within a nation which pretty much gave birth to democratic capitalism.  (They did, too;  we just perfected it.)  Now try to see how well democratic capitalism has worked in other countries which have never had that system as a bedrock principle — Iraq, Syria, Egypt, China, the whole of Africa etc. — and all you’ll find is a constant and comprehensive list of failures.  You can change regimes, by all means:  but the plain fact of the matter is that democratic capitalism is probably going to fail as the “new” regime will pretty much be just a (watered-down at best) copy of earlier regimes, none of which have espoused democratic capitalism.  They’ll be kleptocracies like all the African shitholes, or neo-Communist like Vietnam, or military juntas like [insert South American country of choice here].  (Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean junta, by the way, was very much the exception.)

So I’m simply regarding the destruction of the current Iranian Islamic regime as a side-benefit of the whole exercise.

What we should be stating, in no uncertain terms, is that any regime which exports terrorism or socio-political poisons like Islam or Marxism are on notice that the United States may, at our own discretion, pound these regimes back into rubble rather than allow them to subvert peace and prosperity — the two are very much linked — in the names of their respective ideologies.  “Regime change” is very much a subset of that goal, and not its primary purpose.  (SecWar Pete Hegseth, at least, has the right of it.)

That the United States should be hesitant, indeed resistant to the idea of allowing said poisons into our own country should most definitely be a guiding principle and not government policy.  The noble sentiment on the base of the Statue of Liberty should not only not be taken as government policy, but should also contain the codicil:

“And don’t try to change our country to be more like yours of origin because we’ll toss you out if you do.”

The essence of what I’m saying is that we should not be beguiled into changing our own regime from democratic capitalism into any flavor or subset of the above excrescences.

You may argue with me on any of the above, but you’d be wrong.