Elon Musk trillionaire: Are you cerebrating or jealous?

Elon Musk trillionaire: Are you cerebrating or jealous?

Celebration:

If more trillionaires emerge because AI, robots, clean energy, genetic editing, and space access become vastly cheaper and more capable, everyone gains.

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the Google founders all started companies that sell an economically valuable product. Apple gave us the one device. Amazon built the everything store. Google became the internet’s front door. And as wealthy as those businesses made their founders, we assuredly made out even better. We always do when an entrepreneur builds a business around an innovative technology or a cheaper way to make something people want. Nobel laureate economist William Nordhaus actually ran the math, finding that innovators captured barely 2 percent of the value their inventions threw off across half a century, leaving the other 98 percent to the rest of us. …

In putting together his various companies, Musk has walked a long and rocky road, flirting with bankruptcy more than once and displaying near-supernatural engineering and managerial talents. (As I’ve written before, the largely untold story is how he managed to put together such huge teams of super talented people. I mean, Boeing can’t do that.)

Musk is a once-in-a-millennium piece of human capital, and he’s chosen to use his abilities for good. He should be praised and admired.

Creating millionaires:

SpaceX’s IPO created 4,400 millionaires, according to the New York Times. Critics like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have created one each — themselves. ..

These aren’t VCs. They’re SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.

Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn’t even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.

Trevor Hise’s parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that’s $13.5 million. He’s 37 and semiretired. His words: “The magnitude of this has been ridiculous.”

Jealousy:

 

Gavin Newsom tweets his rage. The FT compares him to a James Bond villain. The Globe and Mail publishes a guide to hating him. All that on the same day. …

Look closely at who’s panicking: it’s never the engineers, the craftsmen, the entrepreneurs, the caregivers, the farmers. It’s the politicians, the editorialists, the bureaucrats, the professional activists.

In short, all those whose job consists of commenting on, taxing, or redistributing the value created by others. Their terror isn’t moral. It’s existential. Consciously or unconsciously, they know one thing they can’t admit to anyone, not even themselves: their public action creates absolutely no net value.

Their entire status rests on a comfortable lie, that of the bureaucratic socialist: “wealth exists by magic, the problem is just to distribute it, and it takes people like us to do it.”

That lie held up as long as wealth creation remained abstract. But Elon is a living counter-example on a planetary scale. A thousand billion dollars created out of nothing, under everyone’s eyes, in real time. Every Starship launch is a public refutation of their worldview. It’s unbearable. Hence the rage. …

What really terrifies them: in the world Elon is building, status is no longer obtained through posturing, degrees, or platforms. It’s obtained by creating something. They’ll have to learn a trade. Develop skills. Produce.

Why jealousy is wrong:

The argument that Elon should be spending his money on “feeding the hungry” is stupid in a country where the federal government spends multi-trillions a year on just that, with dubious results.

It also betrays either a notion, or a lie, based on Musk having a Scrooge McDuck style Money Bin with a trillion dollars in it. In fact, of course, he owns assets that are busy producing useful things, not cash just lying around somewhere going to waste. Most of the people pretending otherwise know better, but hope their listeners don’t. The rest are just imponderably stupid.

People denounce Elon, and many other billionaires, for “greed.” But most self-made billionaires — which is 70% of all billionaires in America — weren’t operating from greed, so much as the desire to build something. That’s certainly true in spades for Elon Musk. Money for him is a tool.

Elon’s critics envy not just his wealth, but his significance. He is doing great things, and they are not, and they really, really need to feel significant. But they aren’t, and it just kills them. The attacks are about trying to assuage that narcissistic wound more than anything.

Back after Apollo 11, Norman Mailer wrote that Apollo was the revenge of the “squares.” The hippies, with their tie-dye and their music and their psychotropic drugs were trying to bring something into being that humans had never achieved. But in fact it was those squares in their short-sleeve dress shirts and skinny ties, with their crewcuts and slide rules, who actually went and did it. It was unforgivable, and the hippies turned their considerable cultural power toward killing it and making it uncool, and they almost succeeded.

Elon Musk Created a Space Program. Democrats Want to Seize It

Elon Musk Created a Space Program. Democrats Want to Seize It. By Daniel Greenfield at Front Page.

The record numbers for the SpaceX IPO led to a massive freakout with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and every one of their minions posting hysterical messages demanding that the government immediately confiscate all that wealth because ‘trillionaires’ shouldn’t exist. …

Proposals to tax stock value aren’t even normative taxation, they’re simply government confiscation and nationalization….

SpaceX is now a viable space program backed by trillions. It can take the next step into the new frontier that the government that Sanders, Warren, Khanna and the other socialists uphold has failed to do.

Barack Obama had dismantled what was left of our space program to feed money to his backers and assorted grifters promising electric cars and solar panels. What was left of it was turned over to the Russians and we hitched rides on their Soyuz tin cans. We haven’t had anything resembling a space program now in nearly two decades. …

But even before Obama, our space program hit a dead end when the revolutionary men of the Air Force were shoved aside for NASA which after some early successes ossified into a progressive bureaucracy with no interest beyond getting government grants to conduct pointless studies. The Carter Administration and the space Space Shuttle, despite the hype, marked the end of any kind of real space progression.

NASA with the space shuttle was little more than a placeholder. NASA without the shuttle was there to push global warming.

The US Government lost its technical and adventuring mojo decades ago, as it became taken over by progressive arts graduates.

Elon Musk’s companies now do what the US Government would once have done — electric cars, satellite communication, space travel, going to Mars, etc. Elon Musk has emerged as the alternate government in the US — all without taxation!

Elon Musk trillionaire: Leftism is the enemy of humanity

Elon Musk trillionaire: Leftism is the enemy of humanity. By Robby Starbuck.

The immediate attacks by leftists on @elonmusk should make one thing crystal clear to everyone watching: Leftism is the enemy of humanity.

It’s an extinctionist movement that hates excellence and, when carried to its inevitable conclusion, would kill off our species.

Watch the ragtag socialist/commie crew of AOC, Bernie Sanders, Platner, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, etc. long enough and you’ll see it clearly. They resent excellence. They’re suspicious of ambition. They demonize our best builders and capital allocators.

If you’re somehow on the fence because you’ve been led to believe that it’s immoral for someone to have a trillion dollars, consider this: They create precisely nothing of value themselves. They’re the professional version of the worthless critic we all know in our own lives.

No innovations. No companies. No major breakthroughs. No employees, aside from staff we’re forced to fund with our tax dollars.

On the other hand, Elon has created over 150,000 high-paying jobs at his companies. That doesn’t count contractors, suppliers or their employees. …

What’s important here?

He’s created tens of thousands of millionaires. His companies changed the car game forever, revolutionized internet access, gave us true free speech online again, helped the blind see, gave autonomy back to disabled people, changed the financial world and will make humanity a spacefaring civilization, which could ultimately save humanity if Earth faces an extinction-level event.

The question they want you asking is whether he has too much money. The question I want you asking is this: What kind of society do you want to live in?

One that celebrates excellence, advances humanity and makes the impossible possible? Or one laden with resentment, where we all need Daddy Government to provide the same shitty but equal standard of barely living for everyone, while choking innovation to death until there are no more rich people left to fund the welfare they promise?

Government or private enterprise?

Elon doesn’t use his wealth to shower himself in abundance. He invests it in advancing humanity.

If we gave the same amount of money to the government, they wouldn’t accomplish half as much as he has. How do I know? Because we’ve already given them trillions for decades. What did we get?

  • Bloated agencies.
  • Failed programs.
  • Generational fraud.
  • Wars.
  • Armies of consultants.
  • DEI.
  • Perpetual wokeness.

A society worth a damn celebrates its best capital allocators. Elon is the best in the business at turning dollars into more dollars by putting them to work in the right places and driving innovation. This uplifts humanity both now and later.

Do we need more government?

If you need someone to demonize as a way to make yourself feel better, then demonize the leftist politicians who do nothing but criticize the most productive, exceptional people in society. These people don’t want you to be successful.

They want you to be the cattle they herd. They want you dependent. They want you weak. They want your livelihood dependent on their hand filling your hand with scraps after they’ve robbed someone else’s.

The sooner everyone understands that, the better. Eventually, you’ll be the one they rob. Or they’ll simply run out of people to rob.

Humanity’s future:

And worse, humanity will stop advancing. Eventually, we won’t even merely survive. Why? Because a cataclysm on Earth isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

We’re in an invisible race against time to push humanity into becoming a spacefaring civilization that can save itself before that day comes. Leftism would guarantee our deaths.

The only path for humanity to survive and thrive is to innovate and for us to celebrate and support the creators, builders and innovators who make that possible.

Anyone selling you the lie that those people are the enemy, IS YOUR ACTUAL MORTAL ENEMY.

That’s why leftism must be defeated and the woke mind virus must die.

AI is getting dumber already

AI is getting dumber already. By Nav Toor.

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the “tails of the distribution.” The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. “Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment.” …

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

The tails die first. …

Generation 1: the full distribution. Every rare idea. Every unusual perspective.
Generation 5: the edges are gone. Only the middle remains.
Generation 9: a single narrow spike. One voice. One style. One version of reality.

The weird, creative, unexpected parts of human writing are the first things Model Collapse erases. …

No model is immune. Model Collapse is not a bug in one system. It is a property of all systems that train on their own output.

Commenters:

By the way, humans have been doing the same thing for centuries. It’s called groupthink. …

Ironically, your post has the same rhythmic writing style as all the other AI posts on my feed. …

This is a typical AI language. You posted a thread about how dumb AI is getting, being trained by itself while using AI to write about it. Cannot get anymore ironic. Are you a dumb bot? …

The early Internet was wild. Crazy collectives on oddballs on USENET, MUDS, etc. On the early web, you could go down rabbit holes browsing everywhere. Lots was porn, but niche hobbies were everywhere.

Google changed everything. Their link centric algorithm changed everything. For years the Pre-Google Internet provided the link popularity that mattered, but a few generations of content later and the commercial spammed out Internet arrived. BBSes lost to well linked and crawlable sites. And that is what AI was trained on. … The knowledge graph keeps getting bigger and stupider.

When you had to learn HTML by hand to build web pages they were geeky and knowledgeable. They were niche, but knowledgable. … Each model gets dumber over time. Each new model is getting better at some raw technical skills, but dumber.

Alexandra Marshall:

Two young men sitting next to me discussing how they no longer read articles. They skim the AI summary.

So not only are major outlets using AI to write articles. The information AI scrapes for these articles is AI-generated. And then ‘humans’ are only reading the AI summary of the AI slop from AI data.

Do you have any idea how quickly information degrades in this situation? This is a f-ing nightmare for humanity.

UK Government funded ISIS, Russia, criminal gangs, Chinese military, etc. with over Four BILLION pounds per year, 2015 – 2021

UK Government funded ISIS, Russia, criminal gangs, Chinese military, etc. with over Four BILLION pounds per year, 2015 – 2021. By Sophie Church in The Daily Mail.

Britain gave more than £28billion in taxpayer cash to its enemies over six years, a leaked government dossier revealed last night.

Terrorists such as the Islamic State in Syria group, hostile states including Russia and criminal gangs received the vast sum from foreign aid, Covid relief loans and the benefits system, which an expert said was an ‘ATM for terrorists’.

Cabinet Office security officials commissioned the report in 2023 after it emerged that Covid loan schemes had been subject to widespread fraud. …

The report, which has been leaked to The Telegraph, revealed that Britain helped companies linked to the Chinese military pursue their own research between 2015 and 2021.

Much of the misappropriated funds went to criminal gangs, including human traffickers claiming housing benefits and disability allowances. …

The report was compiled by reviewing government grants between 2015 and 2021, consulting academics and think-tanks, and using open-source reporting on foreign aid fraud.

Professor Nicholas Ryder, a former adviser to the Commons home affairs committee and an expert on terrorism funding, said the findings were ‘staggering’, adding: ‘The link between fraud and terrorist financing is very clear.’

Richard Spencer at PJ Media:

The news is as appalling, infuriating, sick-making, inexcusable, and earth-shaking, but one thing it isn’t is surprising. The revelation that one of the chief financiers of the principal forces arrayed against Britain and the West in general is the British government is all too much in keeping with the suicidal leftism we have seen from that government (whether the Tories or Labour are in power) for years now. …

If the British government had really given 28 billion pounds to its enemies, it would have forked over the dough to Tommy Robinson. But instead, the learned solons in London gave the money to their friends. You know, like ISIS. …

Is it really all that shocking that the British government would be handing over taxpayer money to ISIS? This wasn’t just appeasement on the order of “We’ll pay you not to hurt us.” It was an act of self-abnegation of an inferior toward a superior. The British government is filled top to bottom today with people who have grown up on the idea that the native culture is rotten.

Why shouldn’t they hand over the money British citizens have earned to people who are not tainted with Britishness?

I’ll bet USAID did it bigger and better. Btw, have you noticed that right-wingers are doing better in elections all over the world, especially in South America, ever since USAID funding was cut?

The US government really has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world

The US government really has been secretly funding 120 dangerous biolabs around the world.

Tulsi Gabbard, US Director of National Intelligence:

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine. …

Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America.

Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight.

 

Joanne Nova:

The conspiracy nuts were right again.

The US funding that helped create the Wuhan Flu was not a one-off. It was just the tip of a clandestine industry spread across the world.

The next world war may be a Bioweapon War, and it may have already started. …

There was very little visibility or oversight on these labs and with some in war-zones, or hostile nations, there was always the dark possibility of losing control of the labs.

And so it is that the bad-man Trump-Hitler was the President who asked his officials to provide the evidence to the world, and to stop the US government funding of gain-of-function experiments. Past Presidents would just call you a conspiracy nut.

We are on the cusp with AI of a kind of mutually assured destruction by bioweapons. It is one of the major reasons we cannot afford to lose the AI race. The winner may be able to develop the world’s most deadly weapon, and if they (or renegades among them) arrogantly believed they had a “cure” or a vaccine that protected themselves — they might be prepared to use it. That’s part of the reason we need to discuss the failure rates and problems with vaccines instead of suppressing it. We need the worlds psychopaths and military forces to understand the risks. …

The wanton disregard, and foolish arrogance of the Deep State is something to behold.

Commenters:

Twitter banned me in 2022 for posting this image. It was labeled as misinformation that is now confirmed as truthful. Thank you, Tulsi!

 

In 2022 Jen Psaki was asked about claims that we were operating biolabs in Ukraine. She denied the existence of “bioweapons” programs and then called the whole thing Russian disinformation.

The threat from bioweapons, particularly those designed by AI, needs to be taken seriously. But it’s obviously foolish to deliberately experiment in insecure labs with viruses made more dangerous by gain-of-function. Covid happened that way, for instance. The upsurge in cancers and other failures of our immune systems since covid began still hasn’t received official attention, just obfuscation and silence.

The modern left went off the rails, blinded by power and money

The modern left went off the rails, blinded by power and money. By Stu Cvrk at American Greatness.

An interesting article outlines how the left has systematically torn up the political principles of the US and the West, in Obama’s attempt to “fundamentally transform” America. While each item is perhaps not damning in itself, the totality reveals a dark, unprincipled quest for power and money.

Some excerpts:

“Equity means equal outcomes for everyone—except admission to their children’s schools.” The loudest advocates for dismantling merit-based admissions send their own children to highly selective private schools and elite magnet or selective-enrollment programs, insulating their families from the policies they impose on everyone else.

“Defund the police—but keep my security detail.” …

“Follow the science—unless the science is inconvenient.” The same coalition that demands deference to scientific consensus on the climate refuses to acknowledge biological sex in medicine, opposes nuclear energy despite its carbon-free output, and spent two years dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as racist misinformation — a conclusion most scientists now consider credible.

“Borders are immoral—except around Martha’s Vineyard.” …

“We must protect democracy — by criminalizing the opposition candidate.” …

“Billionaires are the enemy—now let’s hear from our billionaire donors.” … The Left’s billionaires are enlightened; the Right’s are existential threats. …

“No one is above the law—unless you are in our administration.” Selective prosecution is the theme: a two-tiered justice system that indicts a former president on faux documents charges while closing a parallel case against a sitting president’s son and declining to charge a sitting president himself, with standards applied by prosecutors who publicly donate to the Democrat Party, is not equal justice — it is the law as a partisan instrument.

“It’s not about black and white; it’s about green.” The Left frames every policy dispute as a racial justice issue, but the real engine driving progressive politics is money — donor class cash, NGO funding, and government grants that keep the activist machinery running. Race is the Democrats’ go-to rhetorical weapon; wealth redistribution and institutional power are the actual prize.

“Hierarchy justifies hypocrisy.” Victor Davis Hanson’s razor: the progressive elite exempts itself from every rule it imposes on others. Private jets for climate summits. Gated communities for open-borders advocates. Elite private schools for the champions of public education. The higher one sits in the leftist hierarchy, the more license one has to ignore the ideology. …

“34 percent of registered Democrats believed the assassination attempt was staged.” Offered as evidence that media-driven conspiratorial thinking is not a monopoly of the Right. If roughly a third of one party’s own voters distrust a documented, publicly witnessed event, it suggests the Left’s media ecosystem has become as insular and reality-distorting as anything it accuses conservatives of inhabiting.

“A failure to deal with multiculturalism ideology is the issue more important than all others.” From this viewpoint, identity-group multiculturalism — the ideological version, not the simple demographic fact of diversity — is the solvent dissolving the common civic identity that the Constitution requires. When group grievance, as relentlessly pushed by the Democrat Party, supersedes individual rights and shared national purpose, constitutional self-governance becomes ungovernable.

“The silo effect of multiculturalism has driven wedges between people who should be accepting our Constitution.” The argument is that multicultural identity politics deliberately fragments the citizenry into competing, mutually suspicious tribes, each demanding group-specific rights rather than equal individual rights under a shared constitutional framework. …

“Leniency to the guilty leads to cruelty to the innocent.” The policy logic of criminal justice conservatism in a single sentence. Democrat policies of catch-and-release prosecution, bail reform, and prosecutorial nullification do not reduce suffering — they transfer it from the criminal class to law-abiding citizens, who disproportionately tend to be lower-income and minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods: the very people the lenient policies claim to protect.

Conclusions:

The theme connecting every item on this list is the abuse of asymmetry.

  • Asymmetric justice — one standard for allies, another for enemies.
  • Asymmetric speech — protected protest for the favored, prosecutable rhetoric for the disfavored.
  • Asymmetric sacrifice — open borders for the interior, bused migrants away from the coastline.
  • Asymmetric science — settled consensus when it empowers, negotiable data when it inconveniences.

This is not the behavior of a movement confident in the justice of its principles. It is the behavior of a movement that has quietly stopped believing its own arguments and is now operating purely on the logic of power retention. This is the essence of fascism!

The constitutional conservative response to all of this is not, at its core, a counter-ideology.

  • It is a demand for consistency.
  • Apply the law equally.
  • Subject every truth claim — including scientific ones — to open scrutiny and democratic deliberation.
  • Judge citizens as individuals, not as representatives of racial or ethnic collectives.
  • Enforce the borders that give national sovereignty its meaning.
  • Hold the powerful to the same standards as the powerless.

These are not radical propositions. They are the operating premises of the American Founding, tested across two and a half centuries and still the most durable framework for self-governance ever devised.

New report shows renewables are a drag on Australian productivity

New report shows renewables are a drag on Australian productivity. By Joanne Nova.

For some reason the pursuit of global teenage-girly weather-control has meant Australian workers are less productive. Who could have guessed that attempts to stop storms, floods and droughts in a hundred years would not make us richer today? I mean, apart from everyone?

In the last 25 years we’ve spent 126% more on capital costs but only improved output by 14%.

Now even the Productivity Commission is warning that renewable green investment is holding back the nation.

Australian productivity was rising until it suddenly fell off a cliff around May 2022 (see the graph below). Coincidentally this was the moment the moment the Albanese Labor Party first got elected and went gangbusters with renewable energy. It seemed to be worthy of an annotated arrow, so I added that in…

 

 

Matthew Cranston in The Australian:

Australia’s falling productivity levels have been driven down by the replacement of coal-fired power plants with billions of dollars in renewable energy projects, the Productivity Commission has declared, as it warns governments to make only the most efficient, cost-effective investments.

After Energy Minister Chris Bowen made a push alongside the UN’s top climate official this week for further investment in renewable energy, Productivity Commission deputy chair Alex Robson released a study showing that such investment had “contributed to a productivity decline” and Australians were working harder for less …

Estimates have placed the government’s annual spending commitments to climate and renewable energy at more than $9bn a year.

So wasting all that money on renewables (including the Snowy Hydro debacle — we could have built four nuclear power plants for the cost of that white elephant) and blowing up coal power stations has made us poorer!? Incredible.

I could have explained to them the errors in the climate models that meant the whole exercise is a waste of time, but our ruling class was determined to go electric and virtuous. Have you noticed that the climate predictions have not come true? Or that the official IPCC climate data showed it’s been warming since 1650, until they rewrote history in 2000? Or that it’s not warming nearly as fast as the models say it should, despite all the finagling with dodgy thermometers?

It’s not just immigration that lowers our productivity.

Swiss referendum on immigration

Swiss referendum on immigration. By Tom Fairless in the WSJ.

With its valleys filling up, some here are pushing to replace natural barriers with something even more unyielding: a population cap.

Disgruntled by rising living costs and disillusioned by unfulfilled economic and social promises, the Swiss are at the vanguard of industrialized countries questioning the benefits of immigration, even the high-skilled workers many vie to attract. On Sunday, they will vote in a referendum to put a hard ceiling on the country’s population.

Since 2000, the number of foreign-born residents has jumped from around one in five to one in three — the second-highest level among rich countries next to tiny Luxembourg [and about the same as Australia], and compared with one in six in the U.S. That represents an enormous demographic shift …

The “No to a 10 million Switzerland!” proposal from the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, aims to limit the permanent-resident population, which includes both foreign nationals and Swiss citizens, to below 10 million until 2050, from a current 9.1 million.

The vote, open to citizens 18 and older, is expected to be close. …

If passed, the initiative would force the federal government to restrict family reunifications for resident immigrants and new asylum claims the moment the population hits 9.5 million. If it touches the 10 million ceiling, Bern would be constitutionally required to tear up its free-movement agreement with the European Union, risking access to a market that absorbs over half of Swiss exports….

The economic reasons for mass immigration have turned out to be false throughout the West:

For years, Western politicians pitched immigration as a cure-all — or at least a necessary evil — for the ills of aging societies. It would fix labor shortages, underfunded pension systems and lackluster productivity growth, they said.

But a historic influx of foreigners across the West, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, doesn’t appear to have solved those economic problems. In some cases, it might even have made them worse: raising demand, and therefore prices, for things like housing and adding pressure on social services like healthcare. …

Governments like Canada’s “pushed the idea of immigration to solve problems, and it just didn’t do anything,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Immigration can provide an economic boost if migrants are more highly skilled than the general population, Skuterud said. But if their skills broadly match the population, it will likely have little impact on productivity or labor shortages.

Economic output per hour worked, a measure of productivity, has broadly stagnated since 2017 across countries that received the largest inflows, including Australia, Canada, Germany and the U.K., according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Social-welfare systems remain under pressure and labor shortages largely persist….

Mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme, [Thomas Matter, a wealthy banker and SVP lawmaker who helped initiate the referendum] said, because newcomers also need goods and services, including, eventually, caregivers.

He argued that immigration was like a sugar high for an economy: It lifts top-line growth, but has struggled to lift GDP per capita, the more important metric. …

The ruling class has ignored earlier explicit instructions from the voters:

Switzerland has been here before. Sunday’s referendum comes more than a decade after a 2014 vote to curb immigration narrowly passed, requiring the government to reintroduce quotas for foreigners moving to the country.

The initiative was never truly implemented, however. Parliament found a loophole as it sought to preserve economic ties with the EU. The SVP initiative is designed to ensure the government can’t slip out again. …

Cheap labor has sapped Europe’s productivity, and thus its economy and well-being:

The large number of EU immigrants has likely held down Swiss salaries and weighed on productivity growth, said Bertschi Group Executive Chairman Hans-Jörg Bertschi, whose logistics company has around 3,000 employees.

“The pressure to improve productivity in industries and the service sectors has disappeared,” he said.

So if the ruling class are so determined to persist with mass immigration, even after then economic reasons have proven false, what is their real reason? Perhaps it’s simply votes, so the left team can keep paying itself big salaries from taxpayer money. Also, some corporations love it for the cheap labor (isn’t that like union busting with scab labor?). Obviously there are next to no benefits for most of us, only costs.

Immigration post Belfast

Immigration post Belfast.

Censorship, by Peter Hague:

When the British government complain that social media inflamed the riots in Belfast, what they are actually saying is:

“If people know how badly we have betrayed the country, they will kick off”

It’s an accidental confession that their entire ideology has failed.

Commenter:

Given they have taken injunctions out to stop reporting on the Afghan mass immigration and refused FOI requests regarding Mass Migration because of “public backlash” they know full well it has failed.

Welfare generosity, by Megan Basham:

We’re seeing with the British and American public are people who have been incredibly generous for many decades. They HAVE welcomed many many foreigners.

And if you look at Ilhan Omar, you see how that generosity is so often repaid. With ingratitude, entitlement, and smears about systemically racist systems even as they leap to the front of the line in social programs and college admittance over native populations that happen to have white skin.

So no, they don’t want to welcome more foreigners in. People tend to feel less generous when their generosity is unappreciated.

 

Low trust, like the third world, by Wretchardthecat:

Europe might have to revert to low trust society rules as a price for open borders.

The dream of a Europe without internal frontiers is dying on the altar of multiculturalism. Just as drug store shelves have been locked down in inner cities to protect against a lawless few so too must the public life fall to lowest common denominator.

The general principle is so often overlooked:

Get use to it, they said, by Upstate Federalist.

And, again, the only argument from European leaders and media is “this is just your life now and you have to live with it and we will arrest you if you complain about it.”

GB Politics:

An Imam’s home was “fire-bombed” in the early hours of this morning in Bolton, England, as widespread unrest continues over attempted beheading by Sudanese migrant Hadi Alodi.

Reverso, by Right-wing Blackbird:

Firebombing is part and parcel of life in the big city and it’s important that the Muslim community doesn’t look back in anger. Backlash against peaceful Englishmen will not be tolerated.

Sir Keir Starmer:

The horrific attack in Belfast last night is sickening.

I have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.

My thoughts are first and foremost with the victim, and I thank the first responders, including members of the public who intervened.

Commenters give Sir Keir an earful:

This should’ve been the turning point. But the system you support and are a part of is hellbent on inflicting daily African violence on British people. …

Bullshit liar …

Are you going to try to blame Elon for this too? He’s the one who’s “whipping up division”, right? Nothing to do with the barbaric savages you’ve let in your country. BlAmE eLoN. …

And of course the obligatory statement forced out of the victim’s family:

Patriots are doing it for themselves

Patriots are doing it for themselves.

Miranda Devine in The NY Post:

War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a great speech on D-Day in Normandy.

He told the Europeans they were committing civilizational suicide by allowing themselves to be “invaded” by unassimilable migrants.

It was the kind of warning you give to a friend who you see is making a terrible mistake. …

“When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

Naturally, he was pilloried by out-of-touch elitists on both sides of the Atlantic.

But Hegseth was absolutely right, and his weekend comments echo earlier, ever more forceful warnings from Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Europe’s greatest challenges are self-inflicted — existential civilizational decline caused by unprecedented mass migration and a coinciding loss of confidence in Western values, or what Vance calls “self-hatred.”

Two terrible murders currently dominating UK news effectively demonstrate the points being made by these American statesmen.

Brad Essex at Red State:

Nations that cannot control who enters their territory lose the ability to define and defend their own character. 

[The D-Day veterans] fought for concrete realities: secure homelands, accountable governments, and the right of free peoples to chart their own course.

Why has Britain become a safe haven for the world’s most violent men? Hugo Timms at spiked.

The real immigration ‘loophole’, ‘Achilles heel’ … is the fact that the British government first refuses to prevent illegal immigration, and then does nothing to remove illegal migrants once they have crossed the border. The financial cost of this failure is catastrophic — and its human cost incalculable.

Election after election, the British people have begged for a controlled immigration system — one in which they know who enters the country, and with clear rules over who stays and who doesn’t. Successive governments have promised this, only to fail more dismally than the last.

It is by far the biggest concern of voters, yet it is the one the authorities refuse to get a grip on. As Belfast has so tragically shown us — this is not only unsustainable, it is highly combustible, too.

Politicians only have themselves to blame for the Belfast riots. Michael Deacon at The Telegraph.

Sir Keir Starmer added: “The scenes in Belfast [on Tuesday night] were shocking and completely unacceptable.”

I’m sure every decent person shares these sentiments. We don’t want riots. But when are our politicians going to wake up and accept their share of the blame?

The uncomfortable truth is this. If, at election after election, for decade after decade, people keep voting for proper control of their country’s borders, and politicians keep ignoring or belittling them, it’s inevitable that some of those people will think: “Voting doesn’t work. And peaceful protest doesn’t seem to have much effect, either. So we need to find an alternative way to make politicians listen to us.” And that alternative, I’m afraid, is what we’ve seen in Belfast.

I don’t for a moment condone it. Obviously, I want rioting to be averted. But I’m afraid there’s only one way to achieve this — and that’s for politicians like Sir Keir to give the public what it so plainly wants. Because if they don’t, even the slowest-witted among them must now be able to see what will happen.

I fear, however, that they will once again merely resort to lecturing us about the dangers of “division”, and spend more time talking about the rioting than about the atrocity which triggered it. Anything but confront, or even acknowledge, the real source of the problem. …

For all our sakes, though, they urgently need to realise that while setting fire to buses may not be justified, the public’s anger is. We’re sick of having to live like this. We don’t want to live in a country where binmen are slashed to death while walking the dog.

We don’t want to live in a country where hotel workers are slaughtered with screwdrivers. And we don’t want to live in a country where innocent pedestrians run the risk of being beheaded in the street. Britain has quite enough problems as it is, without importing more of them. So, from now on, we would like our Government to put our safety first.

 

Lozzy B.

When people realise that there is no political option or solution then people naturally take matters into their own hands.

When 3rd world savages are stabbing little White native girls & are trying to behead White men in the middle of the street while the government mass imports more of these same people that display this same cultural behaviour then of course the people will do everything in their power to prevent more suffering, pain & violence against their people.

Populism arises when the ruling class fails. Rioting is next, then revolution.