The mass COVID infection situation in China is pretty alarming, and it will have an increasing impact in the coming weeks to months:
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To be honest, I’m pretty tired of “experts” warning of just about anything. So much truth has been consciously buried while politically-correct BS promulgated. What I see is WuFlu being more and more benign and still held as some great “ISSUE”. No one tests for Flu A&B, yet those are killers of about the same prevalence as WuFlu.
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I had dinner with Robert Davi and Michael Savage in a Beverly Hills Italian restaurant some years ago pre-COVID. He is a very talented man and I thought his Hunter movie was good.
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I think there is a virus in the program.
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Jeremy Clarkson gets his biennial Godwin-Warhol experience:
Archive of his piece:
https://archive.ph/2022.12.17-142555/https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20782114/harry-meghan-netflix-series-truth/amp/
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Guderian is rolling over in his grave:
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Actually, based upon his account in Panzer Leader, I suspect his reaction would be more “Been there; done that.” He goes on at great length about how his requests for large numbers of battle-proven armour were rejected in favour of “innovative” new designs made by the cronies of the top Nazi officials, which would rapidly break and could not be repaired due to lack of spare parts in the logistics chain and incompatibility among the many different models that had been delivered.
Some things never change.
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Add to this the fact that years ago Germany had some 2300 Leopard tanks, and now has a mere 40 or so.
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“We demand that every student receives a final course grade of A as well as the removal of I/Z grades for the Fall 2022 semester.” The letter also went on to demand that “Attendance shall have no bearing on course grade.” (According to the New School’s website, an “I” grade is a “temporary incomplete” and a “Z” grade is an “unofficial withdrawal.”)
The students are also demanding the resignation of New School president Dwight McBride as well as the provost and vice president. They want the West Village townhouse occupied by the president to “be treated as a communal property of The New School and used for purposes determined by the non-administrative TNS community,” the demand letter says.
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How much worse is it going to get in Europe?
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Perhaps I should file this under “Not (Yet) Crazy Years”.
Legend has it that when, late in his life, a reporter asked Albert Einstein what he would do if he heard the end of the world was coming, he replied, “I would move back to Switzerland. Everything happens much later there.” Switzerland did not grant women the right to vote in federal elections until 1971, and only in 1990 did women have the right to vote in all Swiss cantons.
Anyway, on 2022-12-21 the Swiss Federal Council (the seven-member executive branch of the Swiss Confederation government, among whom the presidency rotates on a yearly basis) issued a communiqué on “Third sex in civil status: the Federal Council considers that the conditions are not met” (Google Translate English translation of official French text). The official statement was issued in:
The statement begins (all quotes as as rendered by Google Translate, with small edits by me, in [italics], to clarify), bold in original:
Bern, 21.12.2022 - The principle of gender binary remains deeply rooted in Swiss society. This is the observation drawn up by the Federal Council in a report in response to two postulates, which it adopted during its meeting of December 21, 2022. The social conditions necessary for the establishment of a third sex or the abandonment mention of sex in the civil status register are not met for the time being. Departing from the principle of binarity would also require numerous adaptations of the Constitution and of federal and cantonal laws.
In Switzerland, people are registered from birth in the civil status register as “man” or “woman”. It is forbidden not to fill in the gender and it is not possible to choose another gender category, in particular because this indication has many legal consequences. Abandoning the principle of gender binarity would imply making numerous adaptations to federal and cantonal legislation.
The Federal Constitution [would have to] be amended because in the field of military service and alternative civilian service in particular, it does not contain rules concerning persons without mention of sex or registered under a sex other than man or woman.
The statement concludes,
On the basis of these explanations, the Federal Council concludes that the societal consequences of a new model have not been sufficiently discussed and that the social conditions necessary for the abandonment of the mention of sex or the introduction of a third sex in the civil register are not met today. The Ethics Commission in the field of human medicine shares this position in its 2020 report. It notes that the current regulations and practices are not satisfactory, but believes that the social conditions must first be met before consider abandoning the principle of gender binarity.
In its report of the announcement, “Switzerland rejects idea of a third-gender option in official records”, Euronews notes:
In 2018, the German government approved a third-gender option for official records, allowing people to be registered as “diverse”. The law already allowed for gender to be left blank.
In doing so, Germany complied with a ruling the previous year from the country’s highest court, which decided that people must be allowed to be entered in records as neither male nor female.
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In Austria, a federal court ruled in 2018 that authorities must allow people to be entered in official records as something other than male or female if they so wish.
However, it found no need to change the country’s existing law since it didn’t specify explicitly that people’s gender must be male or female.
In Belgium, the government of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced plans to introduce a non-gender identifier “X” to the country’s identification documents, following a 2019 court decision saying that non-binary people should have the option to have their IDs reflect their identity.
However, this was replaced by a draft law — meant to come into effect in 2022 — striking the mention of gender from all documents altogether.
In May 2018, a Dutch court decided that not allowing a non-binary designation in people’s documents constituted a “violation of private life, self-determination and personal autonomy” after Leonne Zeegers, who was born as an intersex person, sued the state, opening the door to other Dutch residents to apply for the same option.
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Switzerland seems lovely, although probably unfeasible for a young person of modest (but not destitute) means. My outlook on the United States has become so bleak, I am starting to consider alternatives.
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Unlike the US, Switzerland actually controls its borders - seriously and effectively. US citizens find it difficult to obtain residency permits (although Switzerland is not part of the EU, they are obliged to allow EU citizens residency due to the Schengen treaty, so they limit all others) and you generally can’t get that either without a work permit . Even if one wants to retire there, last I heard, you had to bring around $2 million to guarantee you will never become dependent on the state.
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The challenge is to find an alternative which does not have serious problems of its own. Europe is obviously a lost cause. Russia & China are out for different reasons. South American countries are all fairly unstable.
If one has skills which would be valued in the United Arab Emirates, that might be one of the best alternatives today. But the summers are hot, and if things go south between the Arabs and Iranians, things could become very hot indeed.
Since the Rest of the World does not look much better, perhaps the alternative is to stay & fight?
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Actually, the Swiss border is very porous. Due to Switzerland’s being in the Schengen area, many border crossings are unpatrolled and you can just walk or drive in. If you do get stopped, waving an EU or other passport that doesn’t require a visa will get you waved through. The same applies at airports. Prior to the post-2001 hysteria, I would often present my passport, which would be handed back to me without its having been opened. Now they scan the page with the machine-readable code—takes about 10 seconds.
What Switzerland does, and very efficiently, and should be a lesson to any other country serious about controlling who lives there, is make it not only difficult, but well nigh impossible, to live here without being a legal resident. While tourists, travelers on business, students, and other visitors can come and go pretty much at will, almost everything you’d need to do to live here on a long-term basis requires you to present an identity card that shows you’re entitled to live here on either a temporary or permanent basis. These include things such as:
- Renting or buying a residence
- Obtaining a driving licence
- Obtaining number plaques for a vehicle
- Opening a bank or postal account (and almost every employer pays salaries only by direct deposit to such an account)
- Accepting employment (which requires the employer to file a tax document with the residence status of the employee)
- Obtaining health insurance (which is required, and proof of which must be provided to the commune of residence)
…and this is an abbreviated list of the number of times and places you’re asked for «une piece d’identité». This happens even when you go to pick up a package at the post office unless the clerk knows you.
If you want to live and work in Switzerland, by far the easiest way is to find employment with a company, either Swiss or a Swiss subsidiary of a company in your home country, which will sponsor you to work at their facility in Switzerland. This may not be as difficult as it sounds. Many U.S. companies have operations in Switzerland because it is an advantageous place to site a European headquarters and seek people with expertise in their operations to take jobs there. Depending on where they’re located (as with everything in Switzerland “it varies from canton to canton”), it may be easy for them to obtain work permits for people with expertise in their products (or the technologies they use) which are not available in their canton (work permits are a matter for the canton, not the confederation). Back when we were spinning up the Autodesk European Software Centre in Neuchâtel and wanted to bring in people from California or European offices, we often turned around work permits on a same day basis. That was 1991 and things have changed, but generally if your employer wants to make it happen, they can.
When you arrive in Switzerland, you will have a “B Permit”, which is equivalent to a U.S. H1-B visa. This is tied to your employer and the canton that issued it, and you must reside in that canton and, if you change employers, find another which will sponsor your permit. After five years (for EU, EFTA, U.S., and Canadian citizens) or ten years for others, you can upgrade this to a “C Permit”, which is like a U.S. “green card”. This allows you essentially all the rights and privileges of a citizen apart from voting in federal elections and serving in the army. You can move to any canton and change employers at will or become self-employed or retire.
For more details, see David Hampshire’s Living and Working in Switzerland, the Kindle edition of which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
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