Travel: 60 is the new 80

 

I just watched a horrifying video about 'traveling in the Golden Years'.   Well, maybe 'horrifying' is an exaggeration, but the presenter lays out a strong case for traveling-while-young.   He says that — in travel terms — '60 is the new 80'.   The video URL is https://youtu.be/xoewiDwNuTQ.

I responded in the comment section:

I'm 82 and my wife is 79.   Everything you said tracks 100% with my experience. — Our first real European vacation was in 2001.   I was 58, I did the itinerary myself, made all my reservations via the enbryonic internet, and had a fabulous (correct word) experience.   Repeated the exercise several times, but by 2014, I was noticeably slowing at age 70.   I had always wanted to clinb to the top of Bruneleschi's dome in Florence and couldn't do it in 2015 — made it halfway before throwing in the towel.   Now we're traveling much more sedately, dammit.

As I watched, I found myself nodding and muttering "yes, that's right" at several points.   He talks about the three factors that affect the travel experience: time, money, and health.   When you're young, you have health and time but not money; you're building wealth.   In middle age, you have health and money, but not time; the job is eating most or all of it.   By the so-called 'Golden Years', you now have time and money, but the critical problem is health; bones are old and brittle, muscle mass is slowly ebbing away, and your lungs don't oxygenate like they did when you were 30.

Norene and I made our first trip to Europe in 1996, in our early 50s.   We went to Sweden before heading to London for Mensa's 50th anniversary gathering, and topped it off with a jaunt to Scotland.   Along the way, we went to Paris via Eurostar.   I tell people that I took my wife to Paris for her 50th birthday; it was August 21st, 1996.

For the next half-dozen years, we collected passport stamps from Austria and Germany (2002), Scandinavia (2003), France again (2005), and Hungary and Czechia (2006).   In 2008, we led a 'tour' — four friends — to Paris and environs, and did the National Parks of the American Southwest in 2009.   By then, we were in our sixties.   Travel was becoming strenuous, but not intolerable.

Events conspired to force 'staycations' on us for the next few years, at which point we decided to try river cruising, doing the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel with Viking (2014), a very enjoyable trip, all things considered.

In 2015, we traveled with a group of eight to Italy, starting with a repositioning cruise (16 days), followed by five days of limo-touring using Rome as our forward operating base.   When the other six flew back home, Norene and I hopped a train to Venice and joined a two-week Rick Steves tour of Northern Italy ending back in Rome on the final day.   That trip was a killer, mostly because the tour buses that got us from town to town usually couldn't get into town close to our lodging.   We had to hump our luggage from where the bus dropped us, along cobble-stoned streets and up and down staircases, to get to our rooms.   Thankfully, this only had to be done every other day.   Even so, it was exhausting, and we were very thankful when younger folk on the tour offered physical assistance.   When we arrived home after five weeks on the road, we needed a vacation to recuperate from our vacation.

We did another repositioning cruise in 2018 — again with friends — to Spain and Portugal, then nothing (because medical expenses chew up your RMD pretty fast) until 2024 (Ireland bus tour) and 2025 (Seine river cruise).

We're itching to get back to France for one last hurrah, and that might happen next year.   If it doesn't, it may mean that our travelin' days are over.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

 

Thoughts for St Patrick's Day

 

Catherine Connoly, President of Ireland, yesterday opined that immigrants are as welcome in Ireland as was immigrant St. Patrick.

There's a difference, however between St. Patrick and the 3rd world immigrants now flooding into the Emerald Isle.   St. Patrick came to save Ireland.   Those 3rd-world immigrants mean to destroy Ireland.

Primarily Muslim, but not insignificantly from other parts of the developing world, these recent immigrants come not because they value Irish culture, but rather because they see the generosity of the Irish people as an opportunity to permanently embed their culture within the existing Irish culture — fully expecting that by doing so, they will make their own culture dominant with the fullness of time.

In particular, Islam requires of its adherents that they have no higher loyalty.   That is, they may not be so loyal to their 'adopted' country that their loyalty to Islam takes second place.   The reason for that is that Islam is not focused on the eternal;   it is a temporal ideology that seeks world-wide domination of the temporal (as opposed to the eternal) space.

The Irish, alas, seem thoroughly infected with 'suicidal empathy'.   Their concern for their fellow man persists even when their fellow man declines to reciprocate and, in fact, has concern only for their own long-term goal of an Islamic Ireland.

St. Patrick weeps.

 

Posted Without Comment

 

Regarding Islam

 

Conventional Wisdom

 

Milton Friedman once opined that "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon."  He hadn't seen an 'edge case', but we have.  It's analogous to Einstein's revelation that, at speeds approaching c, mass increases and time contracts.  Within limits, Newtonian physics works fine;  beyond those limits, it's a different universe entirely.

'Conventional wisdom' holds that tariffs cause inflation.  The mechanism is that tariffs are a tax paid to the government of the importer and which raise the price of imported goods to the consumer.  This doesn't cause inflation per se because the government is being funded via the tax, but it provides cover for domestic producers to raise prices.  Thus, things appear to be getting more expensive, but the inflation is merely 'apparent'.  The extra money that the consumer is paying is being funnelled straight back into the consumer economy, but in a different place.  Producers are subsidized by the tariff, and this creates an incentive to produce.

What happens if the foreign seller considers "the opportunity to sell within your market" to be too valuable to risk losing it?  The answer is that the foreign seller will 'eat' the tariff to keep the price to the importer low.  In that case, the ultimate consumer doesn't see prices of either domestic or imported products rise, and there is no apparent inflation.

For the longest time, my wife, an ardent big-government fan, would point to Europe:  "They have universal healthcare; they have 6-month paid maternity leave; they start work at 9am, not 7am, and they take 2-hour lunches, and pack it in at 4pm; they have ..."  and I never had an answer as to why we didn't have the same 'advantages' as Europeans.

Now I have an answer.  After WW-II, the U.S. instituted 'The Marshall Plan', a device meant to get European economies back on their feet after the unspeakable destruction of the war.  One feature of the plan was that we, the U.S., agreed to eat the tariffs Europe imposed on goods imported from the States, and that European governments could fund themselves with — essentially — a huge monetary gift amounting to Billions of dollars each year — for 80 years.  At the same time, we minimally tariffed European imports, just enough to cover the cost of customs inspections.

Along comes Trump whose economics education was imparted in conference rooms where contracts and architectural drawings littered the main table.  He understands 'leverage' perhaps better than any Chief Executive this country has ever had.  He sees The Marshall Plan and realizes his country is getting a very poor deal, not because of any trade imbalance, but because of a huge tariff-imbalance.  In an ideal world, a world in which 'free trade' actually exists, there would be no tariffs, or they would be small enough to be considered economically insignificant.  Alas, that is not the world we live in.

It is said that nothing squeals louder or longer than the brakes on The Gravy Train.

Every European government (with a few exceptions) hate Trump, and they hate him for one reason:  he has not simply applied the brakes to the gravy train, he's derailed it.  Suddenly, the billions of dollars that funded zero-carbon industrial policy, 6-month paid maternity leave, and universal health care has dried up, not over the course of decades, but over the course of months.  European governments have taken a huge economic 'hit' and they're feeling the pinch.  Not only are their tariff revenues shrinking, but their industries are now disadvantaged by U.S. tariffs on their products, and Americans are now feeling pressure to avoid those high-priced imports.  Their annual tariff benefit, that previously could be injected into their consumer side, has largely disappeared.

The same thing is happening with pharmaceuticals.  Trump has insisted that the American consumer get the best deal on imported pharma.  Where previously a pharma manufacturer could low-ball the price to (say) India and make up the difference by charging Americans the highest prices across all markets because "they're rich; they can afford it", now if India is getting it for seven cents a dose, so will we.  Where will pharma make up the difference now?  The short answer is that everyone is going to be paying $1.45 per dose.  We're not going to be treated better than anyone else;  we're going to be treated the same as everyone else.  We're getting Most Favored Nation prices... because we are, in economic terms, the most valued nation.  We have the most valuable consumer economy anywhere.  Producers cannot afford to lose access to the American market.  Europe can't, and Canada can't.  Mexico has already figured that out and they are frantically working at making a deal with us.

And this is where the Newtonian tariff rules come smack up against Einsteinian tariff rules:  If a foreign producer loses access to the U.S. consumer, the economic consequences could be fatal, and they know it.  They cannot afford the hit to the P&L that accompanies it, so they now absorb the tariff; they do not force the importer to write that check; they write the check for the importer, and they move lots of product through Customs.

Trump, realizing the importance of the American consumer, has leveraged our eagerness to consume into an economic boom-time.  The Dow-Jones Index crossed 50,000 this week.  It was 41,700-something on Election Day 2024.  That's an almost-20-percent jump in 14 months of Trump.  He has, not to put too fine a point on it, rewritten the rules, and established a new 'conventional wisdom'.

Now watch the Democrats fuck it up.

 

Have You Met Amelia?

 

The socialist, Islamophilic British government, smarting from fresh criticism over arresting 12,000 of His Majesty's subjects for unlawful tweeting, launched a propaganda program aimed at British youth: 'Pathways', an online 'game' in which the main character, Charlie, is being subverted by a Goth chick, Amelia, (blue hair, black velvet choker, pink mini-dress, purple cardigan) into rejecting his new neighbors from third-world countries.   The game has students trying to help Charlie defend against the verbal assaults of the hateful poisonous far-right Islamophobic revanchist Amelia.

Oddly, reaction from the actual students to the program content seems to be that they consider Amelia's opinions and positions to be common-sensical.

Oops...

Overnight, content creators have materialized Amelia into a modern-day British equivalent to Joan of Arc, but the government can't burn this one.   To see what Babbage hath wrought, pop on over to YouTube and search for 'Amelia'.   Page after page of AI-generated videos of Amelia, appropriately costumed, delivering British patriotic anthems of ages past: 'Jerusalem', 'I vow to thee, my country', and more, pressing into service modern rock diatribes as well.   One video has Amelia confronting Keir Starmer: "How did we get all the way from Churchill to you, you git?"

This would be no story except for the fact that popular support for Amelia has gone into low Earth orbit.   'Off the charts' simply doesn't do it justice.   The British people, it now seems, have only been waiting for someone to give voice to their unspoken — and untweeted — thoughts.

Even better, there is now a Swedish version, Inga, and a German version, Maria, and there's said to be an Australian version, but I haven't seen it.   All over the Western world, Amelia has spread like an engineered virus.   Various governments are furiously trying to put the genie back in its lamp and failing, predictably.

If you had asked me three weeks ago what I thought of the UK, I would have told you that I was sure it was 'a lost cause' soon to be overwhelmed by third-world in-migration and becoming, itself, part of the third-world.   Now?   As Churchill once opined: "This is not the end.   It is not even 'the beginning of the end'.   But it may be the end of the beginning."

You go, Amelia!

 

The 'solution' to Greenland is simple.

 

President Trump wants the US to 'own' Greenland.   Denmark, its current 'owner', is opposed, as are many European countries.   The situation appears complicated; it's not.

Pragmatically, Denmark cannot defend Greenland from aggression.   It can barely defend itself.   At base, the same is true for many or most of the objecting European countries.   Should Russia or China make an aggressive move toward Greenland, only one nation could plausibly stand in their way: the United States.   When Trump boasts of this, he is — for all his boastfulness — telling the truth.

Greenlanders aren't interested in becoming our 51st state.   If such a proposal were posited, the issue would have to be put to the inhabitants of Greenland, who — if reports can be believed — would vote 'no' overwhelmingly.   The US wouldn't, as a matter of policy, provide for Greenlanders the sort of European-style benefits they currently enjoy, so there's that.   Denmark is currently shelling out $600M per year for Greenland 'maintenance, but gets approximately nothing from Greenland in return.   Why they wouldn't want to shed it is something of a mystery.

So, what is the simple solution?   Simply this:   Greenland needs to be an independent nation — not some nation's property — not 'owned' except by its own people.

Let Greenland make its own deal with whomever is interested in dealing for whatever terms they can negotiate.

I know someone who will give them a pretty lush payoff, and they won't have to become a state to get it.

 

Citizenship

 

A person not a citizen of the United States by birth or inheritance must obtain citizenship via naturalization.   The process for becoming a naturalized citizen involves an oath of allegiance:

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

A Muslim, whether practicing or not, must be presumed to be unable to "swear this oath" as that term of art is typically understood.   Why is this so?

Islam has as a basic tenet that there can be no other allegiances superior to Islam.   It is analogous to the First Commandment of Judeo-Christianity.   But the oath asserts that the person swearing the oath will "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic", and "bear true faith and allegiance to the same".   No Muslim can do this, since it (potentially) places Islam in an inferior position relative to the Constitution.

But many Muslims do swear this oath.   Have they committed perjury?   To non-Muslim eyes, the perjury is clear, but to Muslims (whose first and only duty is to Islam) the issue is not-so-clear.   The Koran, the 'holy book of Islam', carves out an escape clause: taqiyya.   Taqiyya, simply put, allows a Muslim to lie to an infidel (any non-Muslim) if doing so advances the cause of Islam.

Further, they cannot "take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion", since evasion is exactly the purpose of obtaining citizenship.   Obtaining U.S. citizenship is seen as a necessary first step toward the primary goal of Islam: establishing a world-wide caliphate governed by Sharia law.   Taqiyya is permissible.

Summarizing:   Muslims who take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States can only do so by resorting to taqiyya, an action that otherwise constitutes perjury and invalidates the oath ab initio.

No Muslim should be offered United States citizenship under any circumstances.   Muslims who have been granted citizenship via naturalization should be immediately de-naturalized.   Muslim citizens-by-inheritance should be considered national security risks.