How’s the UK doing now that has been properly governed by the pro-Hamas Labour Party for half a year? On track for success?
The last 20 years or so don’t seem to have gone well for the Brits. “Young women are starting to leave men behind” (Financial Times, September 2024) was supposed to be a feel-good story about equity (defined as “victimhood group does better than oppressor group”), but mostly the data seem to show that young people of all gender IDs earn less today than they did in the 2000s (after adjusting for the inflation that the government says doesn’t exist):
Maybe it is better in immigrant-rich London than in the left-behind Brexit parts of the UK? The Financial Times data nerd says that Londoners have gotten rich… Londoners who are landlords. Most of the urban hamsters spin on their wheels: “Londoners’ higher salaries relative to the rest of the country are ~entirely consumed by higher housing costs. 15% higher household incomes become ~0% higher after mortgage, rent etc”
All of that leads to something that I think is often under-appreciated outside of the capital:
Londoners’ higher salaries relative to the rest of the country are ~entirely consumed by higher housing costs.
Low-skill immigrants make a country rich. The UK has been at record levels of low-skill immigration for about 20 years. Now that the correct party is in power, is the UK rich or getting rich?
Based on Twitter and the BBC, folks in the UK are upset about “rape gangs”/”grooming gangs” in which Muslim men had sex with a lot of girls from the UK’s legacy population (“white”).
I’m surprised that people are surprised. The UK is an Islamic nation (as mentioned by hours spent in religious observance). How was an Islamic nation supposed to work without traditional Islamic cultural practices, such as (1) a ban on alcohol, (2) women and girls being fully covered (hijab and/or burqa), (3) women and girls carefully monitored by family members, etc.?
Here’s a 2023 BBC article that specifically mentions the un-Islamic availability of alcohol as an enabling factor:
It showed how the gang, comprising men of mostly Pakistani and Afghan heritage, plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs and passed them around for sex.
Roughly 20 percent of Syrians now live in Europe (Politico), about 4.5 million people plus their descendants. They were entitled to EU residence based on a fear of persecution by the Assad regime, which has now been replaced by the other side (“another side”?). Will there now be a refugee swap? Everyone who was targeted by Assad can now safely return to Syria. Everything who was on Assad’s side will need to seek asylum in the European welfare system. When does the swap happen?
Ten men, mostly Syrian refugees, have been found guilty over the gang rape of a woman outside a German nightclub.
The 2018 attack in the city of Freiburg fuelled anti-foreigner sentiment, with protests by the far right.
The lead defendant was sentenced to five and a half years for the attack – which lasted for more than two hours – while seven others received sentences of up to four years.
The victim, who was 18 at the time, had her drink spiked before being attacked in bushes outside the venue.
Eight of the men on trial were refugees from Syria, while the other three came from Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany.
The Germany-wide statistics on sexual violence were also sobering. An internal study by the German federal law enforcement agency, leaked to a Zurich newspaper, revealed that asylum-seekers have committed some 7,000 sexual assaults (ranging from groping to gang-rape ) between 2015 and 2023. Although they make up only 2.5 per cent of the population, asylum-seekers made up 13.1 per cent of all sexual-assault suspects in 2021.
Same question about the U.S., though on a smaller scale. We have at least 100,000 Syrians and their children who were granted the right to live in the U.S. because of a fear of persecution by the Assad regime. Do they now go back to Syria so that their places in the U.S. can be taken by Assad loyalists? We are informed that the U.S. does not have unlimited capacity for hosting refugees. If so, shouldn’t all of our refugees be those who are actually at risk in their home nations?
We are informed that low-skill migrants make the native-born richer and that, therefore, a country’s borders should be mostly open (albeit never described as “open borders” because that is hate speech/conspiracy theory). We also informed that Europeans don’t want to be rich… ”Europe Grasps for Ways to Stop the Migrant Surge” (WSJ):
The biggest swing in sentiment has been in Germany, long a proponent of generous policies toward refugees. Pressure has been building in recent years as the nation absorbed millions of immigrants, weighing on the welfare system and municipal services. Migration was a key theme in Sunday’s closely watched regional election in Brandenburg, where the governing Social Democrats narrowly beat the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
Last week, the coalition government in Berlin reintroduced limited border checks to all neighboring countries, after a knife attack in late August by a failed asylum seeker killed three people in the city of Solingen during a festival to celebrate its 650th anniversary. The attacker was a 26-year-old Syrian with links to Islamic State who had evaded deportation for more than a year after losing his asylum case.
Since the pandemic ended, governments across the continent have struggled to cope with rising numbers of asylum seekers and are grasping for ways to stem the flow, from curbing taxpayer-funded benefits to asylum seekers to striking deals with non-EU countries to temporarily or permanently house would-be refugees.
Last year, a near-record 1.14 million people filed asylum claims in Europe, the highest number since the height of the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, when more than a million Syrians fleeing that country’s civil war entered the bloc.
For nearly everything else that has value in this world there is some kind of market. There is “a bid”, in other words, as the Wall Streeters say. Why hasn’t the U.S. bid to take all of the migrants that Europeans don’t want? We are told that migrants are precious. Why aren’t we offering, for example, to pay Germany $100,000 per migrant and also to pay each migrant $100,000 as a “welcome to America bonus” (on top of the means-tested public housing, means-tested health insurance, SNAP/EBT (“food stamps”), and Obamaphone to which migrants will be entitled)? And if we did offer $200,000 (total) per migrant, wouldn’t we expect to face competition from other countries that seek to be enriched?
Separately, here’s a Reuters story on a beachhead in Africa that Spain continues to hold (why?). My favorite line is “Moroccan nationals detained during the crossings are immediately sent back to Morocco unless they are underage or seeking asylum, [Cristina Perez, the Spanish government’s representative in Ceuta] said.” Unless the migrants are remarkably unintelligent, why wouldn’t they all claim to fall into one of these categories? Like the U.S. system, the European immigration system seems to be premised on the assumption that humans never lie.
Europe must increase public investment by nearly $900 billion a year in sectors like technology and defense, according to a long-awaited report published Monday in response to growing anxieties about the continent’s economy lagging behind that of the United States and China.
Mr. Draghi said that the European Union needed additional annual investment of up to 800 billion euros ($884 billion) to meet the objectives he laid out in his report. That is equivalent to about 4.5 percent of the European Union’s gross domestic product last year. By comparison, investment under the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1951 was equivalent to about 1.5 percent of Europe’s economic output.
Conditions that contributed to the continent’s prosperity have changed substantially since the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Cheap Russian gas is no longer available, and energy prices have soared. Those prices have come off their peak, but European companies still pay two to three times more for electricity than U.S. companies, the report found.
We are informed that low-skill migrants make developed countries rich. Europe has welcomed nearly 50 million non-European migrants (source through 2020).
Why does Europe need more government spending, as a percentage of GDP, to become rich if it was already enriched by low-skill migrants?
German business model was based on:
1. Cheap energy from Russia
2. Cheap subcontractors in Eastern Europe
3. Steadily growing exports to China
All three are gone by now, but German politicians and unions are still mentally stuck in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
“Our giant welfare state” (Washington Post, 2014), in which we learn that only the French spend a larger percentage of their GDP on government hand-outs
Heritage Foundation on Germany, finding that it spends 50 percent of GDP on government (higher than the U.S., but the U.S. percentage is distorted because we don’t include nominally “private” spending on health care (which is so regulated and mandated by the government that I think it should be included))
Santiago de Compostela is the holiest Christian site in Europe, being the supposed burial place of St. James, and pilgrims have been walking there for more than 1,000 years. Suppose that a pilgrim spends a weeks or months walking from France or Portugal to this sacred site, what does the committed Christian find on entering the old city? An official rainbow crosswalk and streets covered in sacred Rainbow Flags:
Here’s a different crosswalk in which we can see the directional sign for the Camino and a Rainbow-enhanced crosswalk in the same frame (multiple pilgrimage routes enter the city at different points):
Suppose that the tired pilgrim wants to rest in a park and be fresh before transitioning (so to speak) over this sacred pavement?
The rested pilgrim will walk past a Queers for Palestine display after entering the city:
The Praza do Obradoiro, adjacent to the Cathedral, is the traditional gathering place for pilgrims. It has been decorated with two Joe Biden-style official trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags (the “True Flag”?):
What if the pilgrim wants some ideas from the city’s official tourist office, a few steps from the Cathedral?
Perhaps the Christian pilgrim is tired and needs refreshment? It will be served by someone in a sacred outfit:
Pilgrims can dine with an overhead canopy of Rainbow Flags:
If they have money left over, they can buy souvenirs:
Can the pilgrim prepare for the rigors of Rainbow Flag worship while on the road? Absolutely! If the pilgrim happens to walk through Celanova, Spain, for example, he/she/ze/they will find that the former monastery is now a town hall and that a Rainbow Flag is larger and higher than any of the government flags (tough to see because it had been rolled up by the wind, but it is in the upper right corner):
There were rainbow flags in Ourense as well, but Pontevedra, Spain has gone a little farther with its town hall:
The transition from traditional Christian to Queers for Palestine is encapsulated neatly in Pontevedra in which pro-Palestinian graffiti is adjacent to a ruined monastery:
Based on the above, is it fair to conclude that the inevitable End Stage of European Christianity is Rainbow Flagism and/or Queers for Palestine? Spaniards were willing to fight for centuries to make the Iberian peninsula completely Christian. Now Spain is covered in the sacred symbols of Rainbow Flagism and is on track for a conversion to Islam via immigration demographics.
For readers who ask “Didn’t you take pictures of anything other than rainbow flags in Santiago de Compostela?” here are some photos inside the Cathedral (get there 45 minutes prior to a mass if you want a seat, even though there are at least four masses per day; no need to dress up because the masses accommodate pilgrims who might have arrived dusty):
Here’s the apparently-never-used front entrance:
Don’t skip the Cathedral Museum because it gives you the chance to look over the main square where the pilgrims gather underneath the Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flags. Try not to show up on a Sunday afternoon/Monday morning as I did because most of the museums are closed all day Monday and may close early on Sunday. I had especially wanted to go to the pilgrimage museum, but will have to some that for another Pride.
Here’s an image taken from a balcony that is accessible only from the Cathedral Museum:
Does it make sense to do the pilgrimage? I’m not sure if modern pilgrims have mental space to reflect the way that pilgrims did 1000, 500, or even 50 years ago. Why not? The smartphone. If you’re getting emails about bills, projects at your house, things happening at work, etc., you’re not in the same mental place as a Christian pilgrim was in the pre-smartphone era. One group that I met seemed to have combined some of the best of the old and new worlds. They signed up for a tour with Active Adventures and eight of them were guided and shuttled over a monthlong pilgrimage route in a little more than a week, starting in Bilbao. When the (French) Camino was an interesting and peaceful footpath they walked (8-10 miles per day). When the Camino coincided with a boring/busy road, they hopped a shuttle bus.
We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:
Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!
Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?
Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:
this got talked about a lot when I worked on google maps.
I would personally love this feature, and it’s technically feasible.
here’s why I fought it loudly every time it came up
(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)
WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.
Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):
(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)
I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.
France, the second largest economy in the EU, has voted for central planning and to maximize low-skill immigration (the glass ceiling for female leaders that Marine Le Pen hoped to shatter was apparently made from Florida-style hurricane laminates). That’s the right of voters in a democracy (maybe we’ll see the same thing here in November), but it seems confusing that France can be part of the same political entity, with a lot of share policy, as the eastern European nations whose citizens prefer a market economy and to exclude low-skill immigrants (short of a cataclysmic war, the biggest imaginable transformational force for any country).
How can a Eurocrat in Brussels set a policy that will be accepted by both Estonia and France, for example?
From the Iranians: “During the victory rally of the left coalition in the French parliamentary elections’ second round on Sunday evening, supporters of the left coalition and social democrats held more Palestinian flags than French flags.”
As a Muslim nation (as measured by number of hours devoted to religious observance) and one with a highly centralized and powerful government, maybe France would fit better into the Arab League? Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was in the Arab League and implemented an Arab-Islamic Socialism.
RN had been tipped to achieve a majority after winning the first round of voting on 30 June, and scientists feared that this could spell cuts for research budgets, restrictions on immigration and the introduction of broad climate scepticism into France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly.
Here are immigrant Scientists learning French back in 2018 (arabnews.com):
Why do they need to learn French if English is the international language of Science? “‘At least half of Paris crime is committed by foreigners,” said Macron (Le Monde), but it is unclear if he meant PhD biologists were perpetrating crime or PhD chemists.
Loyal readers may remember my proposal to Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (apply coronalogic to other situations in which human lives are at risk)
Maybe European readers can tell us if this is the month when Europeans begin to follow the Science. Back in 2022, Autoweek said “Anti-Speeding Tech Is Now Mandatory In European Union” and would apply to all new cars sold starting in July 2024:
The peasants still have some freedom, according to the article, but that could be fixed with an over-the-air software update:
The speed control function goes one step further by cutting power input from the pedal once the speed limit is reached. It’s important to note that drivers can override all four of these systems, either by acknowledging the audible or vibrating warnings or by pushing harder on the accelerator in the case of the haptic feedback or speed control function.
The same over-the-air update could impose my dream 35 mph (55 kph) limit and “save lives like a Fauci” (TM).
Separately, the speed nanny has supposedly already been in new-design cars in Europe for a year or two. Is there already statistical evidence that the hoped-for reductions in accidents/deaths have occurred? (Might be a little challenging to tease out of the data because newer cars in general might not have the same propensity to get into accidents compared to older cars (as with guns, it isn’t the driver who should be blamed, but the car).) If not, should we be skeptical about this new tech? A dramatic effect was predicted and shouldn’t be difficult to find if the prediction was true. (Though another confounder is that traffic gets worse in Europe every year and it is tough to be involved in a serious accident when you’re crawling along at 5 mph, working your way in between migrants’ tents and all of the pro-Hamas demonstrators.)
Our personal experience with the AI speed overlord wasn’t promising. Our almost-new rented Mercedes E 300de, which reliably started for two entire days (compare to 25 years for Toyota and Honda minivans), was consistently wrong when it came to determining a reasonable speed. When merging into traffic on the highway, for example, it would decide that a former limit of 50 or 60 kph applied and would issue frantic warnings about our 80-90 kph speed as we joined 120 kph traffic. It wasn’t smart enough to use front and rear cameras to see that the car was keeping up with traffic. When on scary narrow roads in little villages, the speed overlord would suggest blasting through at 90 kph. Most of the time, but not all of the time, the speed overlord’s displayed speed limit would be consistent with what Google Maps was showing. The audio warnings could be disabled by pressing and holding a mute button the steering wheel and we nearly always had to do that. The 10-year-old said “Let me get into the front seat so that I can give ‘Hey, Mercedes’ a piece of my mind.”
The British voted for Brexit and Conservative rule so that they wouldn’t be replaced by low-skill migrants. Rather than say “Sorry, asylum is no longer available in the UK,” the government that they elected presided over record-high immigration, but no longer of skilled carpenters from Poland and math wizards from Hungary (Wikipedia says “Net migration into the UK during 2022 is reported to have reached a record high of 764,000”).
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the handful of non-immigrant voters left in the UK booted the Conservatives out. (Note that Labour won 34 percent of the vote, which means they’re far less popular among Brits than Hamas is among Palestinians. (BBC: “The latest survey in June said that almost two-thirds of Gazan respondents were satisfied with Hamas – a rise of 12 points from December – and suggested that just around half would still prefer Hamas to run Gaza after the war ends, over any other option.”))
But what will the Labour Party do? Could Labour conceivably further expand low-skill immigration? Britain is already an Islamic country if we measure by the number of hours devoted to religious activity. How about taxes? Britain offers low taxation for those who start and run companies (see Move to the UK if you’re an entrepreneur? (10 percent capital gains tax)). Will Labour raise those rates? The UK is kind of a basket case economically (maybe a year of coronapanic lockdowns and restrictions wasn’t such a great public health idea, given that wealth and longevity are correlated?). Can an underperforming economy like the UK’s be squeezed to send more tax revenue to Labour’s wise central planners in London?
In the UNESCO World Heritage town of Guimarães, Portugal we found that popular enthusiasm for seizing the means of production was still alive in Europe:
But how could the means of production be seized in the UK when the country hardly produces anything anymore?
