Tag: Stupid people

Brain Drain

Immigration

I read SOTI that the number of South African Afrikaans farmers resettled in the U.S. has now exceeded 117,000 — I think that the number is the total (i.e. including family members) and not just the men — but whatever, it’s a lot.

Let’s just remind ourselves that what we’ve gained is a bunch of people who are pretty much experts in their field — dry weather farming — and arrive here not only with that, but with a proven work ethic and most importantly, a profound sense of gratitude that they and their families have left behind a truly sick society which openly calls for their murder just because of their race, and their success.  (It doesn’t matter how these calls are phrased or how the intentions are masked, the net outcome is murder.  It’s still “Kill the Boer!” any way you cut it.)

As to what’s going to happen to the farms they left behind… well, just look a few hundred miles over the Limpopo River into Zimbabwe to see what’s happened there;  and anyone who thinks the outcome will be any different is deluding themselves.

Call it an agricultural brain drain, if you will.

Now let’s look at a brain drain of different dimension:  quantum computing.  Here’s the story:

Caught between climate regulation and catastrophic energy-policy decisions, a growing number of high-tech companies in the EU are packing up and leaving. Through stock-market deals, two top quantum-computing companies, IQM and Pasqal, are gradually moving toward the United States. The bleeding of the European economy is now being accepted with remarkable resignation.

Not a week goes by without another disaster report from the economy. In the first half of the year, the German economy recorded a record number of insolvencies — the highest insolvency figures since 2013. Thousands of industrial jobs are being eliminated as a result, and the economy continues to bleed. A political course correction toward strengthening the economic foundation still appears impossible. And this is only the beginning: the stranglehold of expensive climate policy, the restriction of fossil-fuel energy supplies, and rising regulatory costs are acting like an accelerant on the businesses of the euro economy. Those who can leave, do.

What is happening in Germany is being repeated elsewhere: in Finland, for example, where the company IQM is taking the leap onto the U.S. stock market. IQM specializes in superconducting quantum computers and develops the quantum processors required for them. The systems are being developed for research, high-performance computing, and industrial applications. The company merged with Real Asset Acquisition Corp., a kind of American shell company, and in early July moved to the Nasdaq under the ticker IQMX with a valuation of around $1.8 billion. This is not a classic sale of the company to the Americans — the existing owners received no cash payment but remained invested in the company. However, this changes little about the outcome: capital, market power, and an increasing share of control over the company’s strategy will, in the future, be rooted in the United States — American patents, American knowledge of future technologies, made in Europe.

A look at France shows a similar development. This is where Pasqal is based, a spin-off of the Institut d’Optique, founded in 2019. While global players such as IBM and Google rely on superconducting circuits, Pasqal found a different approach: the highly specialized team traps individual rubidium atoms with focused laser beams — so-called optical tweezers — inside vacuum chambers and arranges them in precise 2D and 3D lattices. With this principle, the company’s researchers appear to have succeeded in avoiding the production errors that have plagued other qubit technologies so far. The discovered method makes it considerably easier to scale the technology to ever larger numbers of qubits. Knowledge is power, especially in high technology. Given its complexity, the company’s innovation is probably only fully understandable to a few specialists.

In the case of Pasqal, the acquisition of the company by the shell company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 28 paved the way for its know-how to cross the Atlantic. The company is currently valued at around $2 billion — but this is likely to be only a snapshot; its potential is enormous. With its patents, research results, and academic substance, Europe is losing its intellectual foundation — all the more serious because the continent is energy-poor, politically cornered, and steering aimlessly through uncertain waters. Europe is simply no longer attractive enough for cutting-edge research, top-tier capital, and top talent.

Now as to why quantum computing is such a critical industry, read the rest of the article.

But while the quantum computing companies’ managers and owners are not personally being threatened with death, the threat to their companies themselves by the European mindset, laws and regulations is no less dire.

Of course they’ll move to where it’s safer and technology is not treated as a dirty word — and that place is not Switzerland, Germany, Cuba, Russia, Singapore or China (to name but some).

So bienvenue (and however you say that in Finnish), folks.  Europe’s loss is our gain, and they have nobody to blame except themselves.  Ditto for those racist assholes in South Africa.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Frank Ryan, talking about the Great Blue City Experiment©:

“We will have privatized the freedom to choose while socializing the consequences of the choice.”

Then he talks about the conditions that create said consequences.  Read it all.

Me?  I say:  Screw that “tough love” nonsense.  Let the people who voted for the politicians live with the consequences of their folly, with absolutely no hope of any kind of rescue or bailout.

Let Them Sink©.

Stay In Your Lane

Big Brother, Government Thugs, Rights

Here’s a little suggestion to the folks at ICE:  keep deporting the illegals (a Good Thing, that we voted for), and don’t get too big for your fucking boots (which we didn’t).

Is that a little opaque?  This may clear it up:

A federal court on Tuesday ordered the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop violating the First Amendment by threatening a Rochester man over a January email in which he criticized the then-director of ICE.

Details, you want?

In January, federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis ICU nurse, during a tense encounter. Outraged, Streever wrote a stern email to Lyons, entitled “What’s next” and calling the official a “monstrous human being” who will “go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” a reference to the infamous Nazi official.

He never heard back. Then, five months later, Streever was in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter when his home’s front-door camera picked up the presence of two ICE agents on his porch. The Nest video shows the agents, arriving late in the afternoon on a sunny Tuesday, walking past children’s toys as they climb the steps and repeatedly ring the doorbell. But nobody was home yet. Soon, though, Streever’s wife, an Episcopal priest, still wearing her clergy collar, arrived to find the agents still present.

One of them handed her a “WARNING NOTICE” directed to Streever that claimed, “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” for sending his email to the ICE director. The notice insisted that he should “promptly … discontinue” his “behavior,” threatened criminal prosecution, and warned that the notice will be “taken into consideration” if he “continue[s] to be involved” in “criminal activities.”

Streever’s wife told the agents he was out of the country and would return to Rochester that Friday — but federal agents did not wait. While Streever and his daughter slept off some jet lag at a New York City hotel before the last leg of the trip back to Rochester, a federal agent showed up at the front desk looking for him. He left a clerk a business card to give to Streever, whom the clerk called to inform that an agent had been by. Also that night, two agents repeatedly called Streever’s phone, leaving anonymous voicemails identifying themselves only as “Homeland Security Investigations.”

If agents showing up at his home wasn’t unsettling enough, the hotel visit greatly alarmed Streever. His wife hadn’t told authorities where he was staying. Homeland Security found him anyway.

On their train ride home, Streever informed his daughter about the possibility that federal agents might confront him. The girl broke down in tears, worried about her father’s safety. Streever then resolved to fight this abuse of power.

Here’s the thing.  I may not agree with the Streever guy’s verbiage in his email, and I certainly don’t think his email was warranted, given the facts of that silly bitch’s abrupt termination in Minnesota.

But the last time I looked, calling anyone a Nazi — even one as bad as Heydrich — is not a “criminal activity” —  and ICE didn’t even attempt to defend their decision to call the slur criminal, although they did use it as a pretext to deliver their little warnings, the bastards.

In case this is still unclear, here’s the executive summary.

There is a huge divide between threatening someone’s life and calling someone a Nazi.  Had Streever done the first to the ICE Director in his email, I’d be happy to see him carted off in an orange jumpsuit and chains.  But just calling the guy a Nazi?  Forget about it.  That falls under the pesky First Amendment’s protection.

As for ICE:  stick to the deportations, step away from the fucking Nazi behavior — the threatening bullshit, I mean — and we’ll all be happy.

Otherwise, O ye of the ICE Persuasion, you risk losing the support of the people who are otherwise cheering you on.

People like me.  And you can’t afford that.

Only For Me, Not For You

Gummint, Law and Order, Rights

Ah don’ theenk so, amigo:

Fresno County officials are pushing to let prosecutors carry concealed firearms after a shocking daylight stabbing of a senior deputy district attorney last week.

Supervisor Garry Bredefeld is working with Sheriff John Zanoni and DA Lisa Smittcamp on an ordinance allowing them to be armed on county property.

Sorry, but fuck you.  If the ordinary people living in your county can’t carry concealed guns to protect themselves, then nor can you.

Newsflash (for the elites):  ordinary people are just as likely to be victims of violent crime as you are, and depriving them of their Constitutional right to self defense, as so often happens in California, is bad enough — so you don’t get to benefit from some “exception” that you might carve out for yourselves.

“Our prosecutors come to work every day committed to pursuing justice, standing up for victims and protecting our community. They should be able to do that work without fear of violence.”

No more than anyone else who gets stabbed just because he was standing outside a convenience store minding his own business, when some mook decides it was time for a little impromptu knife action.

And yeah, I get it that because of their occupation, prosecutors are sometimes likely to become stabbees (as was the case recently)… and I don’t care, especially as California prosecutors are pretty much feral themselves when it comes to, for example, charging some hapless guy with murder just because he whacked a violent criminal in his own living room.

Follow the laws you support, assholes — and you don’t get any special treatment.  If you find that you have to change them, change them for everybody, or not at all, and live with the consequences, just like we do.

Lickspittle

Asshole Cops, Government Thugs, Gummint, Surveillance Society

In this specific case, the above insult is directed at that girlyman Rich Lowry at National Review.  (Back in the Buckley Days, I actually had a subscription to the Dead Tree National Review for many years.  Now?  I’d drink old motor oil first.)

Basically, Lowry is fawning all over the foul Flock company and their little snooping cameras, signing their praises to the heavens because:

There’s a reason, though, that police departments so rapidly adopted the cameras — they are an extremely useful investigative tool.

I bet they are.  How much so?

The cameras routinely aid in the identification and apprehension of the perpetrators of serious crimes and the location of missing persons.

According to the Jacksonville, Fla., sheriff’s office, the cameras since 2024 have “helped solve 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, 6 forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings, and 172 missing-persons cases.”

That’s over two and a half years, which, compared to the crime stats of said area, is not so great a proportion — and let’s not kid ourselves, we’ll never know how many of those would have been solved anyway, without the “assistance” of Flock..

Here’s the thing.  Unlike Lowry, I’m not interested in the entire country surrendering their privacy just to help the fucking police solve a few crimes, any more than I support universal gun confiscation to help the police (I know, it wouldn’t, but it’s the principle I’m arguing here).

You can make an argument for any kind of totalitarian abrogation of rights for the same reason — the old “security vs. freedom” argument we’ve heard so often before.

And finally, we all know that this wholesale collection of individuals’ private information is going to be abused.

“Really, Kim?”

Newsflash:  it’s already being abused.  From Lowry’s selfsame article:

According to The Washington Post, “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes.”

I know that’s not a large number:  but it’s a lot greater than zero (which is what it should be).

Lowry’s idiocy continues:

But license plate readers aren’t the only offender.  There are all sorts of other surveillance cameras, many of them privately owned and operated, that the police access during investigations.

We let our mobile phones and various apps track us all day long.

And something like 60 million households have Ring or other security cameras that record what’s happening on their property, and often in the immediate surroundings.

Good grief:  this idiot can’t even tell the difference between private security activity and State steamrolling.  Just because we (voluntarily) do it for ourselves, does not justify the Gummint doing it to us all, without our consent.  And the final insult:

The only reliable way to ensure that you aren’t being recorded is to stay inside — and draw the curtains.

Fuck you, you supercilious, condescending little turd. Do you even know what you’re saying?

It’s bad enough when the Commies want to fuck us all over;  but to have a nominally “conservative” commentator spew nonsense like this?

Somebody reserve Lowry a seat on the next Air Pinochet flight.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From NYfC, some politician:

“Most of what we saw were crimes of poverty-people who are stealing things like toothpaste, people who were stealing things like, you know, soap. And that means if you’re stealing those things, you need them.”

Justifying crime on the basis of need.  Were this not on the Planet Manhattan, I’d think we were all going bats.

Random thought:  think this asshole would say differently if someone broke into her house and stole her $10,000 Persian carpet because they “needed” some floor covering?

#RhetoricalQuestion