This made me expel some breakfast gin out of my nose:
German officials are being forced to convert refugee camps into the new network of Covid detention facilities, because all the really good camps are currently filled with tourists taking photos and Jews making documentaries. It’s a lesson that every oppressive regime needs to learn: Don’t turn your best concentration camps into museums; you never know when they might be needed again.
Arbeit macht Krankfrei, in other words.
Delicious.
Looks like New Wife just snuck in under the wire:
President Joe Biden has issued a travel ban on South Africa, stopping most immigration to the United States from the country, and reinstated bans on Europe and Brazil to slow the spread of the Chinese coronavirus.
My only question is: why stop at South Africa? When it comes to strange and wonderful diseases that can kill you faster than sharing a needle with Pete Buttigieg in a Turkish bath, the whole continent of Africa (along with China) is pretty much the world’s Petrie Dish Of Pox: West Nile virus, Wuhan virus, SARS and, speaking of Mayor Buttplug, AIDS — to name just a few off the top of my head.
Anyway, New Wife has her green card, but that hasn’t really made her feel much better. She has two grandchildren in Oz and soon, another one appearing in Seffrica — none of whom she’s had a chance to see other than through Zoom and suchlike. So she’s suffering from a severe case of Grandma Cuddle Deprivation (GCD), and all these travel bans and such are not doing her temper any favors.
Even worse, she barely drinks any booze so I can’t distract her with pints of champagne or Pimm’s No.1 (her favorite tipples on birthdays, anniversaries and high holy days only).
Frankly, unless all this Chinkvirus shit gets sorted in the near future… well, she doesn’t know how to use a gun (shuddup) and in any event, she’s one of the gentlest people in the entire world, so there’s unlikely to be any rough stuff as her GCD worsens.
I’m probably just going to need to buy her favorite chocolate by the metric tonne…
Here’s an interesting consequence of the Chinkvirus:
Denmark is set to introduce a government-sponsored coronavirus vaccine passport in coordination with airlines early this year, a national Danish broadcaster has revealed.
Now the idea of a “vaccination passport” has a whole bunch of people tied in knots, as it’s just one step away from the old “Papieren bitte” way to install restrictions, tracking and control on travel.
I’m not one of them. In the first place, proof of vaccination has always been a fact of life when traveling anywhere outside your home country; try visiting India or Africa without proof of smallpox/yellow fever/etc. etc. in your passport, and you’ll be turned away from the boarding area. (This, by the way, is as much to ensure that not only are you immune to catching the pox whilst Over There looking at strange temples etc., but that you don’t bring said pox back with you to an un-vaccinated home population.) The only reason one doesn’t need proof of vaccination when traveling from the U.S. to places like Britishland and Euroland is because said diseases are not only notionally extinct (except where, surprise surprise there are large numbers of illegal and un-vaccinated border-jumpers), but where children are routinely vaccinated in order to attend school and so on.
So I’m indifferent to the idea of a Chinkvirus vaccination passport as part of international travel — and for that matter, in terms of local travel and behavior as well — and especially because once inoculated, I wouldn’t have to wear a stupid and ineffective face-condom every time I wanted to go out of the house.
Of course, the conspiracy morons are going to insist that Gummint is going to use Pox Passports to track individuals’ movements and behaviors, and of course that is a valid concern. Just remember, though, that we’re talking about Government here: the morons who can’t find their own assholes with both hands, a map and a trail of crumbs.
I know that in movies, government agents always require just a few clicks on their (Apple — LOL) laptops to create all sorts of data reports at the drop of a hat — the risible Person Of Interest TV series being the apotheosis thereof. Longtime students of both government, database systems and the combination thereof know that this facility is very much part of the suspension of belief required to view any work of fiction these days.
Besides, I’m relying on the criminal marketplace to produce passable copies of said documents in sufficient numbers to make the entire thing untenable — just as fake driver’s licenses can and have been used to enable fraudulent voting.
It’s a non-issue, and we have bigger things to worry about.
The number of Los Angeles residents moving to Dallas and Houston declined in those years, but the number of Angelenos moving to Plano, Texas, tripled.
Or, rendered pictorially:
Yuck. The only Texans in favor of more Californians in the state are people about to sell their houses (and I already sold mine), or Democrat politicians.
TakiMag‘s weekly summary of the news is generally so-so, but the latest is superb. Here’s an example:
Last week, French authorities were left scratching their heads following the crowning of a new Miss France. It seems that the first runner-up, April Benayoum, is Jewish. And for some odd reason, when Benayoum, who holds the title of Miss Provence, mentioned during the telecast that her father is Israeli, French Twitter exploded with “hate tweets” directed at the 21-year-old beauty. A few choice examples (translated into English):
“Uncle Hitler, you forgot to exterminate Miss Provence.”
“She should not be Miss Provence; SHE’S A JEW!”
“Hitler forgot one.”
“Into the ovens with her!”
“Death to Miss Provence! Death to Israel!”This story has been widely covered by the French media, with everyone from the interior minister to the pageant winner speaking out to condemn the hateful tweets. Oddly missing from every news report is a tiny little detail regarding the offending Twitter accounts. Indeed, whereas some French politicians have tried to blame the anti-Jewish onslaught on the “far right,” one canny Twitterer made the following observation after reviewing the profiles of the “haters”:
“French far right tweeters do not have Arabic handles or North African surnames.”
Read the rest of it.
As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum. Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:
Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.
Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.
I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile: the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was: “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”
It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.
Interesting stuff.
