Tag: Foreigners

This Means WAR!

Africa

…or maybe it might have, decades ago:

Britain could face a tea shortage in a row over land that was seized from native people in colonial-era Kenya.
A Kenyan governor is demanding £15billion of reparations for land that was ‘stolen’ in the 1930s and has warned of Zimbabwe-style farm grabs if Britain does not pay up.

You could do  all sorts of bad things to Brits… but take away their tea?  How would the island nation function?

Of course, in the good old days when faced with a sticky situation like this, the BritGov would simply have sent a gunboat over to Kenya, and either threatened to or actually shelled a seaport or two, and the Fuzzies would have capitulated, toot sweet.

Nowadays the BritGov has better things to do, like blocking the will of the people to leave the EU;  so the long-suffering Brits, deprived of their beloved tea. will just shrug and go to Costa, Starbucks or Caffè Nero instead.

Sic transit gustatum et bibendum.

Afterthought:  Needless to say, had the “settlers” not taken the land and farmed it, the land wouldn’t look like this:

…but instead like this:

…Kenyans being so good at farming, and all.

Damn

Drive Time

So here was the news:

Volkswagen announced in January 2019 that it planned to invest $800 million in its Chattanooga plant and bring 1,000 jobs with the expansion.

 

But:

Chattanooga will be the first manufacturing facility in North America that will produce vehicles using VW’s modular electric toolkit chassis, or MEB.  The first Volkswagen electric vehicle will roll out in 2022.

Oh, that’s just great.

That’s all we need…

Next thing, VW will announce that they’re replacing the Tiguan with Electro-Bugs, whereupon:

Just sayin’…

No Kidding

Disaster, Weather

I know, we all have a good chuckle at stuff like this:

And then there’s this, which pushes the needle even past Code Red (click to embiggen):

I know, I make fun of our Oz friends a lot on these here pages, but this is no laughing matter:

About 100,000 homes in the Sydney area are said to be at risk, with 31,500 of those being in the city’s North Shore. Residents have been warned to take action before it’s too late.
‘Under these conditions, some fires may start and spread so quickly there is little time for a warning, so do not wait and see,’ the Rural Fire Service said on Monday.
‘There are simply not enough fire trucks for every house. If you call for help, you may not get it. Do not expect a firetruck. Do not expect a knock on the door. Do not expect a phone call. Your safest option will always be to leave early.’

Sheesh.

Looks like everything’s more dangerous Down Under:  snakes, spiders, sharks, Train Smash Women — and now, fires.

Good luck, me old cobbers.  Holding thumbs on this side of the water…

Enough Already

Bad News, Business

Oh, happy happy joy joy.

JPMorgan Weighs Shifting Thousands of Jobs Out of New York Area

If the transplantees don’t want to leave their extended families in Noo Yawk, you folks at JPMorgan can just move them a little further down the BoWash corridor — like, say, to Baltimore.  Should feel quite at home there, what with a Democrat government and all, and it’s only a short train ride back up the coast.

I think I can safely speak for all of us Texans down here in the DFW Metroplex:  we’re full of New Yorkers.

Instead of infesting filling the rest of America with your liberal asshole cosmopolitan employees, why not open up a new office in Los Angeles?  Gawd knows, they need an infusion of business in the Golden Shower State, and the transplanted Noo Yawkers will be quite at home with things like sky-high taxes, sky-high real estate prices, onerous licensing fees and feral anti-gun laws.  And the climate is better in SoCal than it is here.  Also, in Texas we have scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders, scary-looking pickup trucks and sometimes, all of them combined:

  

Let’s not even talk about assault rifles, which can be bought just like candy, by grade-school kids at any corner-store 7-11:

The pastrami is lousy, and the bagels are made by Sarah Lee.  There was a vegan store around here someplace (Austin, maybe?) but it closed because they wouldn’t serve chicken-fried okra.  And people here think that “lox” is what y’all put on a truck’s toolbox.

And speaking of that kinda thing:  Ted Nugent has a ranch just south of here.


(As an aside, we Texans actually think ol’ Ted’s kinda soft when it comes to guns — I mean, he’s even on the board of the NRA, that bunch of compromising pussies.)

One last thought:  if you do send people down here, they’re gonna see an awful lot of these:

…all filled like this:

And when your folks converse with the locals, Question #3 will invariably be:  “And where do y’all go to church?”

Better have an answer.

Just sayin’.

Capital Flight

Business, Marxists, Politics

I haven’t spoken at all about the situation in Hong Kong before, mostly because there wasn’t much to be said:  (somewhat) free colony opposes colonial power’s aggression, mayhem ensues.

Several people have wondered why the ChiComs haven’t sent in the tanks, à la Tienanmen Square, to crush the waves of protests, but the answer is simple:  Hong Kong provides a means whereby the ChiCom government can move money around the world without provoking too much notice because currency movement in Hong Kong is completely unregulated.  Crush the protests, make Hong Kong just another province (like, say, Jiangxi or Shandong) and that flexibility disappears.

It is, however, a two-edged sword.  What has transpired since the protests began is that capital (money owned by individuals, that is) has been pouring out of Hong Kong and flooding into Singapore — to name just one such destination — thence on to parts unknown.  Which means that if Beijing does finally send the tanks into Hong Kong, they’re likely to find, like Old Mother Hubbard, that the cupboard is bare.  And the flow of  money is truly a deluge:  if you study how many major corporations have been purchased by Chinese-sourced money over the past few months, you’d be amazed.  Even better is that by and large, the corporations being thus purchased are characterized by their cash flow operations — in other words, the Chinese billionaires, canny businessmen that they are, are not just parking their money under an offshore mattress, they’re putting that cash to work and generating a revenue stream.

The ChiComs may not only be running out of other people’s money — they may soon be running out of their own.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of totalitarians.

By the way, you may have noticed that the above is somewhat short of details;  that’s because if I say more, I could jeopardize my several sources who are not only well placed in the area, but who do a ton of business there too and are close to said wealthy people.  One can never be too careful when dealing with Commie bastards.

And Back We Go Again

Two-Minute Hate

It’s not often that I agree with the doings of the foul European Union bureaucrats, but I see that they’ve just voted to do away with daylight savings time.  And as we’re coming up to the day (next Sunday morning) where we set the clocks back to Standard Time (where they bloody should be), I gaze across the Atlantic with something approaching envy — or rather, I will next year when DST becomes a thing here again.

Of course, this being Euroland, some people are going to be inconvenienced:

If member states give it the go ahead, EU countries will no longer put their clocks back in autumn and forward in spring.  But this would mean a time zone difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the province still adhering to Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time.

As if the Irish need a way to cock their lives up any further… in discussing the matter with Mr. Free Market during our regular Sunday night drunken phone call, his suggestion is to let the Micks have one time zone (either one, no matter), after pouring a boatload of guns and munitions into the hands of the Northern Irish DUP, and let them all fight it out among themselves, while the rest of Britain sits aside in (to coin a phrase) splendid isolation.

If they’re going to fight about a version of Christianity, they may as well fight over an artificial timekeeping system, too.