Tag: Foreigners

A Feature, Not A Bug

Diplomacy, Foreign Affairs, Wars & Other Fun Games

I hadn’t considered this, in the wake of the little Izzy / Muzzie disturbances.  Fortunately, some Big Brains have:

Israeli air and drone strikes during the early hours of June 13th crippled Iran — and severely set back Tehran’s regional ambitions. The Israel Defense Forces hit nuclear weapons development facilities and ballistic missile sites, and killed senior military officers, including Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the armed forces chief of staff, and Major General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iranian media announced the death of Ali Shamkhani, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top adviser.

Tehran said that Israel’s action was a “declaration of war.” This war is continuing, and Iran has struck back with ballistic missile and drone attacks.

Narratives will change as the fighting continues, but one conclusion is already evident: China, Iran’s long-time backer, is a victim of the fighting. That is a quick reversal of fortunes. Only last year, the Chinese looked ascendant in the region.

“China is closely following Israel’s attacks on Iran and is deeply concerned about the potential grave consequences of the operations,” the Chinese foreign ministry stated on X a few hours after the initial attacks. “China opposes actions that violate Iran’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity, and opposes moves that escalate tensions or enlarge conflicts.”

“China stands ready to play a constructive role in helping ease the situation,” it added.

Beijing may stand ready, but, apart from the Iranian regime itself, the region is not looking for Chinese assistance.

Yeah;  what the CCP may have forgotten is that nobody in that area — not just the Izzies — likes the idea of a nuked-up Iran, for the same reason one fears a drugged-up ghetto choirboy with a hand grenade.

“There were some very, very relieved people in the Gulf as the sun rose this morning…. The Saudis know that China had armed their enemy Iran with nukes and lesser weapons and fully backed the Houthis, who have been waging war on the Kingdom for years.” — Jonathan Bass, Chief Executive Officer, Argent LNG, to Gatestone Institute, June 13, 2025.

Put more bluntly:  “Oh noes we deplore all this warry bomb-bomb stuff!”  while thinking “Thank fuck for the Izzies.”

So much for that, then.

Smart Move

Culture, Health, Immigration

To many people, this little move would be astonishing, nay even incredible:

France will ban smoking in all outdoor spaces frequented by children, including beaches, parks and bus stops, the country’s health minister said.

The restrictions will involve creating a perimeter outside schools where members of the public will not be able to smoke a cigarette.

“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Catherine Vautrin, the health minister, said in an interview with the Ouest-France newspaper.

The freedom to smoke “stops where children’s right to breathe clean air starts”, she said.

The ban on smoking outdoors will come into force on July 1.

As one of many who has had to endure the clouds of smoke from the Gitanes/Gauloises that form a permanent fixture of any French establishment, I first asked myself:  The French?  Of all people, the French?

It’s like asking them to have only one kind of cheese, or banning wine.  C’est incroyable!

But they’re sneaky, the Frogs, as any old doughboy or G.I. will tell you.  Note this little wrinkle:

Café terraces will be excluded from the ban.

So that lifestyle choice — essentially, involving most of the places outside the home where Frogs would be found smoking — can carry on as before.

It’s the “outdoor spaces frequented by children” that’s the kicker.

If anyone loves them a good strong cigarette more than the French, it’s the… Arabs.  And where there are Arabs, you’ll always find hordes of screaming ill-behaved… children.

If you put those two facts together:  I think that this smoking ban is a subversive move to get Arabs to leave France in disgust.

Tit For Tat

Foreign Affairs, Trumpism

Seems as though there’s a fair amount of angst and anguish about Trump’s BBB proviso that (loosely explained) says:  “If you tax us, we’re gonna tax you right back.”

In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Bessent said the legislation includes new tools to retaliate against countries that impose what he called “unfair foreign taxes” on American firms — including digital services taxes and top-up levies under the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework.

“The U.S. tax system will stand next to what is called Pillar Two, and other countries are welcome to relinquish their fiscal and tax sovereignty to other nations,” Bessent said. “The United States will not. So this bill will allow us to prevent our corporate revenues from being drained into foreign treasuries—and that is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”

At the heart of the plan is a new measure that would impose escalating surtaxes on income earned in the U.S. by companies, individuals, and even governments from nations that target American firms with extraterritorial taxes. The same countries could also face higher withholding taxes on U.S. investments and tougher rules under the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT). Sovereign wealth funds and central banks from those countries would lose long-standing exemptions and become subject to U.S. tax on their holdings.

The provision — found in Section 899 of the bill — is designed to pressure foreign governments to roll back taxes that the administration views as discriminatory and coercive. It would start with a five-percentage-point surtax and escalate annually to a maximum of twenty points above the standard U.S. tax rate unless the targeted country reverses its policy.

And the rightness of this approach can be gauged from the level of opposition from Global Capitalist Bastards Inc.:

Multinational firms, foreign banks, and global trade associations are mounting an aggressive campaign to weaken or eliminate the provision, arguing it could lead to retaliatory measures and complicate international investment.

Yeah, my heart bleeds for all those fat corporations and insanely-wealthy fucks whose international investments will become complicated.  This is aimed at the foreign governments who think that  theft   fleecing   taxation of foreign investment is okay if they do it, but not if we do it.

I know that a lot of what Trump does is just positioning — i.e. laying the battlefield for future negotiation — but this is one initiative where I hope he digs in and goes all the way.  Why should we support foreign governments’ enrichment programs at our own expense when we can’t do exactly the same to them?  Make no mistake:  these assholes are making billions of dollars out of this.

And lastly, anytime I see the words “OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) global minimum tax framework” involved in an argument, I want to reach for my AK.  No greater argument against globalization can be raised than when their principles are involved.

Feel free to bring lofty economics arguments to this post, because I will really enjoy shooting them down in flames.

One Small Detail

Immigration, Terrorism

I see that ICE is doing the right thing and deporting the entire family of the Boulder Bomber (who is, lest we forget, an illegal alien).  This is a Good Thing.

The wife and children of Egyptian illegal alien Mohamad Soliman, the terrorist who firebombed Americans peacefully walking on the street in downtown Boulder Sunday, have been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and will be deported soon. The family is being processed for expedited removal, which allows rapid deportation without a hearing before an immigration court/judge.

I just hope that on the way out, the State Department remembers to revoke any U.S. citizenship that may have resulted from in-country births.  (Note:  this is one good reason why Trump is attempting to end the “citizenship-by-birth” boondoggle, which hardly exists outside the U.S. anyway.)

There Goes The Neighborhood

Africa, Immigration

Argh, now we’ve done it:

A U.S. Department of State official told the outlet on Friday that the Trump administration is hoping to take in many more than the small group of 59 Afrikaners that arrived in Washington, DC, last month.

“We won’t be talking about dozens of arrivals, but hundreds and perhaps thousands,” the official said. While they did not specify an exact time frame, the official added that “we’ll start to massively scale this up” towards the “second half of summer.” 

Referring to a backlog of more than 50,000 applications for refugee status from Afrikaners, who frequently face political and racial violence in their home country, the official added that this number will “continue to rise.”

I can guarantee one thing:  these particular transplants will allow themselves to be quickly absorbed into our society.  Very soon, their kids will be speaking with American accents and will be indistinguishable from native-born Murkins.  (In the case of one of my Seffrican buddies, his two preteen daughters were speaking with full American accents within a year of their arrival.)

Kim’s Law of Groups states that in any population numbering more than a dozen, the chances are that ten percent will turn out to be assholes.  For some reason, I think the chances of these Dutchies becoming criminals will be rather less than that.

Anyway, it’s a whole bunch of conservative, God-fearing folks with very traditional family values, a profound knowledge of dry-weather farming, and a strong work ethic.

We could do a lot worse.

Background Story

Africa, Marxists, Third World

If any of you are at all interested in post-apartheid South Africa, then watch Rob Hersov explain it all.  He’s absolutely, positively correct in all his observations, and his brief summary of South Africa’s history is 100% likewise.

And by the way, he has a classic definition of all the elements of “genocide”:

…of which South Africa has seven happening as we speak.

What a disaster.