Spanish police have claimed that migrant women are travelling to Spain on tourist visas with their children and then abandoning them in the country, telling them to register as unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in a bid to get into the country later through family reunification.
The trend came to light after the arrest of a Moroccan woman, who was charged with child abandonment after her son went to Spanish authorities claiming to be an unaccompanied foreign minor (MENA), a report from the newspaper La Razon states.
Following a rapid investigation into the child’s case, Spanish agents were able to track down the Moroccan woman before she fled the country, and arrested her at an airport. Two others were also detained and made to give statements regarding their possible collaboration with the woman.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Migrant Women Abandon Children in Spain in Family Reunification Scheme
In its annual report on terrorism, Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, has revealed that radical Islamist terrorism for the third consecutive year remained the top security threat across the bloc in 2022, as the vast majority of individuals arrested for terrorism-related offenses were motivated by a jihadist ideology.
Europol’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2023 (TE-SAT), a yearly “situational overview presenting figures and developments within the terrorism landscape in the EU,” was presented in the Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday, June 14th, and revealed that of the 380 people arrested across all 27 member states last year on suspicion of terror-related offenses, 266 people, or 70% of those arrested, were arrested for jihadist offenses.
The report states that, among the 266 people arrested for jihadist-related terror offenses, the most common charges were membership in terrorist organizations, production or dissemination of propaganda, planning and preparing an attack, and terrorist financing. The number of arrests in this category has risen for the past three consecutive years, with 254 arrests recorded in 2020, 260 in 2021, and 266 in 2022.
Wherever you go, Whatever you do, A Muslim waits there To try to kill you.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Europol: Vast Majority of Terrorist Crimes Motivated by Jihadism
The funny thing about conspiracy theories is they are a fairly good measure of both social trust and trust in civic institutions. In societies with low trust and corrupt government, people tend to assume things are not as they seem. In high trust societies, people tend to accept things at face value. They also tend to accept what is told to them by the authorities, rather than assume they are lying.
Before the Russian revolution, conspiracy theories were common. Of course, lots of people were conspiring to topple the system, but people assumed that the system itself was not as it was presented. Of course, the Great Fear was a period in the French Revolution where rumors and conspiracy theories about the aristocracy ran wild, ultimately leading the storming of the Bastille.
We seem to be entering a similar phase. People are more likely to believe a rumor about Biden taking bribes than to believe anything he says. For a growing portion of the public, it is assumed that everything that comes from the regime is a lie. The use of the word “regime” is a huge change. It is a word that implies rule by men rather than rule by a system of laws, customs, and institutions.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Grand Conspiracy
California began a soft secession when it banned cooperation with immigration authorities. Since then other states run by Democrats, including Colorado, Illinois and New Jersey, have declared war on ICE. The movement to make it impossible for ICE, an arm of the federal government, to operate in Democrat states has largely been successful.
Some Republican states, like Tennessee, Texas and Florida, have responded by ordering law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. And while this is important in limiting the spread of illegal aliens in their states, it may also be time for them to consider their own forms of soft secession.
Democrat states targeted ICE, Republican states could single out other arms of the federal government that are ideologically alien and hostile to conservative areas for a policy of non-cooperation. Obvious examples are the Department of Education, the EPA and the IRS.
Called ‘nullification’, this was one of the primary rights claimed by the states that eventually became the Confederacy. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.
It’s becoming the lowest of pejoratives. For the Left, if you compare the way conservative politicians are treated to progressive ones, you’re rationalizing. You’re making excuses.
If you use your brain the way thinking people do, you’re not really thinking.
You are a cowardly MAGA-hack who is throwing up a smokescreen to camouflage the unique, sui generis evil that is — all together now — Donald Trump.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Proud Defense of Whataboutism — Comparing Trump to Other Cases Is the Practice of Law
Trump would burn America before facing justice (Financial Times) The Financial Times is the Wall Street Journal of the UK … if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of MotherJones.
One of the criticisms of the public company model is that the managers tend to think in the short term rather than long term. This was a popular critique of American business in the 1980’s when Japan was on the rise. The Japanese magically thought long term, which allowed them to benefit from long term investments in industry. Sinophiles made similar arguments about China as she rose economically. The Chinese think long term, it was said, while America thinks short term.
Up until Trump came to town and started making bad noises about China, those same Sinophiles made this point about democracy. The democratic West, they said, was hobbled by the short-term thinking that arises from regular elections, while China avoids this problem through one party rule. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was fond of making this point. China’s system was winning because the Chinese were not thinking from one election to the next.
Of course, the real reason Japan and China rose from the ashes to challenge American industry is that connected people in the United States saw a profit in helping these countries at the expense of America. They flung open the gates, so to speak, on deindustrialization of America, which led to the shifting of manufacturing to low-cost places like Japan and then Korea and China. It turns out that both China and Japan were the beneficiaries of short-term thinking.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Death of the Hired Man Society
The law required companies that used the same machinery to produce sesame-containing foods and non-sesame-containing foods to thoroughly (and expensively) clean the machines between the two. Instead, the companies quite rationally added sesame (not enough to taste) to their non-sesame foods so that they would save the expense.
A California state senator told a gathered crowd of parents at the California Senate Judicial Committee to flee the state on June 13 during a hearing on a bill which would put parents who don’t affirm their child’s “gender transition” in danger of child abuse charges.
Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, is the lone Republican on California’s Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has served in the California Legislature for 11 years. He was also the lone voice warning against language in AB 957, which a Democratic senator had amended on June 5 to rewrite the California Family Code to list “gender affirmation” alongside a child’s need for “health, safety, and welfare.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on State Senator Tells Parents to Flee His Own State Amid Bill That Would Take Kids Away From Non-’Affirming’ Parents
The beautiful Siwa Oasis in the far western deserts of Egypt is a remarkable place, for multiple reasons. It’s probably been inhabited, continuously, for 12,000 years. Alexander the Great came here to consult the already renowned Oracle of Amun-Ra in 332 BC (some say he is buried here, as he loved Siwa so much). You can swim in Roman cisterns fed by one of the 300 natural springs — which also nourish thousands of date palms and olive groves. The locals have their own Berber language — Siwi — spoken nowhere else on earth.
But there’s one facet of Siwa’s history which is less talked about. Within living memory, they had black slaves here, generally fetched from further south in Africa, and trafficked along Saharan routes trodden by Muslim pilgrims, ultimately heading for Mecca.
As I read about this nugget of history, last week — sitting on the stunningly silent, mud-brick balcony of Adrere Amellal, a hotel which overlooks the oasis — it jarred quite hard with a news story I’d read an hour previously. Namely, that politicians in California are proposing to pay reparations to black Californians who can prove they descend from slaves. The sums being discussed are not trivial. The official task force has decided that entitled individuals should each get up to $1.2 million; others say this is nowhere near enough, and every individual should get $200 million — that is not a typo.
Islam has no problem with slavery. Never did. Saudi Arabia had black slaves into the 1960s.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Why Do We Ignore Islamic Slavery?
Last week we passed along the stunning news that two of the largest hotels in San Francisco have decided to walk away from their investment entirely, defaulting on $725 million in debt on the properties. Today the Wall Street Journal follows up with some comparisons with other cities. Short version: hotel traffic in other major cities has recovered, while hotel traffic in San Francisco has not….
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on This Week in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
He was exactly right in saying so in that Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Too bad Roberts didn’t follow his own admonition in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting decision released last week by the Supreme Court.
The fact of the matter is that we aren’t immune: Right now, today, each and every one of us is caught up in a cargo cult of some variety, going through pointless motions that we’ve been told (or that we’ve told ourselves) will lead to desirable outcomes. This occurs in business, in finance, in romance, and even in science… but one of its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine
Prime Minister Kristersson promised reforms that could see violent offenders given heftier prison sentences and a policy that could ban them from certain districts and municipalities.
Kristersson also mentioned that “more people must learn the language,” hinting at the fact many of those involved in gun crime and criminal gangs are from migrant backgrounds, something only recently admitted by Swedish police and others in the Swedish establishment.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Swedish PM Promises Reform After Mass Shooting
Georgia GOP elects election deniers to key posts (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) In the Narrative media, ‘election denier’ is someone who suspects that Democrats might possibly cheat in an election.
One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.
Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.
In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Reality of Model Dependent Reality
Threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons and communist Chinese conventional air and missile fires, South Korea has decided to spend serious money on an old but often spurned military concept: the arsenal ship.
The concept is simple. Take a very large but comparatively inexpensive civilian commercial ship. Oil supertankers and huge container carriers fit the profile perfectly — they’re inexpensive when compared to navy warships.
Now pack the ship with vertical launchers and several hundred long- and mid-range missiles capable of destroying enemy shore targets and perhaps enemy surface ships. Add short-range air and missile defense weapons and presto, enormous sea mobile firepower bang for the buck, or in South Korea’s case, bang for their wons.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on On Point: South Korea Bets Arsenal Ships Will Give North Korea and China Second Thoughts
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ended segregation in public schools, many jurisdictions in the south engaged in what they openly called “massive resistance” to the Court’s decree, and enforcing the decision required both legislation and many follow-up lawsuits at every level of the federal judiciary for many years after.
It appears colleges and universities are already preparing their own “massive resistance” to a prospective Supreme Court finding later this month striking down race-conscious admissions (fingers crossed after the inexplicable VRA ruling last week).
