When Neurosis Becomes Policy

Rhodah and I, obviously, have not had our honeymoon yet. She applied for visas a while back, and we have not heard any news. Meanwhile, the nations of Europe appear to be playing a game of visa roulette. One border opens, and another one closes. European nations have to make double-sure coronavirus doesn’t arrive within their borders! Thank goodness that has never happened.

For a while (if I understand things correctly), Greece was open to us. We found out while we were in Egypt. Before we could do anything about it, the door snapped shut. Then Sweden and Spain opened up. We applied. Now the web says they’re closed.

The people in Zambia who process Swedish and Spanish visas say they haven’t heard anything, but you can’t put a lot of faith in what you hear from Africa. The rest of the world isn’t knocking itself out to fill Africa with current information.

I have read that a valid visa is not a guarantee that a person will be allowed into a country. I don’t know what to make of that. If Rhodah applies for a visa before a border closes and receives the visa afterward, does it mean the visa is no good? Would her visa be “grandfathered” in? You can’t really spend 5 figures on tickets and hotels and show up at a border, just hoping they’ll see things your way.

Imagine being turned away in a situation like ours. You’ve spent somewhere in the neighborhood of a full day traveling, and they tell you to get lost. You would have to sit in an airport, using your phone to buy new tickets at whatever prices were offered. You would have to wait for the planes to take off. Then you would have a day or so of travel in front of you, with no sleep and no bathing.

Clearly, we would need some kind of assurance before taking off, but if the information on the web is right, we won’t get it. In fact, it indicates she won’t get Swedish or Spanish visas at all.

Out of our three choices, the only reasonably desirable country we are confident we can enter as a couple is Iceland, which is not a place either of us is excited about. It’s either that, Mexico, or one of a long list of dreary Muslim countries.

There is very good news, however. France just opened to Zambians. That’s a good honeymoon country.

As I’ve said before, we have been hoping to parlay a Swedish, Spanish, or Icelandic visa into a Swiss visa. The Swiss want Rhodah to go to South Africa, at great expense and at some personal risk, to get a visa, but they may relent if she has a pre-existing visa from another country in the Schengen area. Sweden, Spain, and Iceland fit that description.

The Swedish embassy in Zambia is handling our existing applications, and they say they are also doing France.

To sum up, Iceland looks like a lock, France can be done if we are willing to wait, and Switzerland, our number one choice after hermetically-sealed Israel, is also a possibility.

I do not particularly want to go to France. Places like Israel, Switzerland, Greece, Austria, and Italy are better. France is okay, though. France has alps, like Switzerland, so it would make losing Switzerland less painful. We don’t actually have to go to Paris like everyone else. We can go to an alpy area, squint, and pretend we’re in Lucerne. The food will be better than Swiss food, and my creaky French will be plus utile than it would have been in Switzerland.

It’s funny, but I have little interest in the UK and Ireland, even though I speak the language and most of my ancestors came from these places. In my mind, English-speaking countries offer bad food, second-rate scenery, resentful service, disappointing art, street crime, and negative attitudes toward Americans. Maybe I’m mistaken, but this is the impression I have gathered from the news, the Internet, and personal conversations. The British are gross these days. Americans used to see them as witty and civil, but now they can’t seem to get a sentence out without saying something filthy, and they appear to be angry all the time.

The UK’s tallest mountain is something like 3000 feet high. It doesn’t have a Mediterranean or a Rhine. The architecture is tacky. There isn’t much Renaissance stuff. The food is a bummer. The people seem unhappy. We could get mugged, in a country with no Second Amendment. It’s just not inviting.

The problem with UK anger and violence is not new. Many years ago, when I lived on a kibbutz, there was tension between the gentile volunteers and the kibbutzniks. Why? Because some British morons had a disagreement with the volunteer liaison, and one of them beat him with a soccer shoe. While I was there, a Scottish volunteer told me he was afraid to be outdoors in Edinburgh at night. For some years, the gun-deprived British have been using kitchen knives on each other, and knife attacks are so common, they’re trying to ban pointed blades.

When your citizens are so childish they can’t be trusted with sharp tools that are used safely in places like Pakistan and Somalia, it may well be time to put razor wire around your country and tell everyone else to stay away. In the rest of the world, blunt scissors are only for very small children. It’s strange to see similar items being forced on a nation’s adults. Can it be that after centuries of brewing and drinking, the British still can’t handle beer?

The UK has outdoor cameras everywhere now, which is another implicit comment on the maturity of the populace.

I have no interest in pubs or drinking. I don’t care for the theater. I don’t know what I’d do in London, after seeing the few tourist attractions every American sees by his third day.

Britain has a rich (past) culture, but I can take that in here, through books.

As for my UK ancestors, they were poor and oppressed, they didn’t leave the British Isles on good terms, some were slaves of the British in America, and when they and their revolutionary compatriots got free, the British came after them and burned their capital. The British weren’t really allies of America until the 20th century, and even then, America always picked up the checks. We owe the French a lot more. They helped us throw the British out. The British would never have given us a statue representing liberty. Our Statue of Liberty is really a monument to British military weakness and the humbling of a cruel empire that did things like shooting crowds of Indian protestors, starving the Irish, and forcing China to import drugs.

I don’t want to say the British Empire was all bad. In 1790, they changed their laws so it was no longer legal to burn female traitors alive, and during the next couple of decades, they stopped executing people for minor thefts.

America hasn’t always been great to England, either. We let them help us design atomic bombs, and once we had the know-how, we classified it and refused to give it to them. We did something similar with supersonic flight.

Then we stole The Office. I would have let them keep that.

I like the British in spite of the deterioration of their culture, but the things I hear about the tourist experience do not make me eager to visit. Not when there are so many places I would put higher on my list.

In unrelated news, I saw something very odd today. CNN is being harder on Joe Biden than Fox.

Afghanistan is lost, which was to be expected. No one with any brains thought we could help these people. Their culture is too corrupt. They won’t do what they should do, so all other countries can do is occupy them temporarily and restrain them. Our failure as nation-builders was inevitable, as was our exit. What may not have been inevitable were the ignominious collapse of the nation under Biden, as well as our failure to rescue Afghans who put their families in danger by cooperating with us.

I could have told you we would give up in 2005, as could most intelligent people, yet Biden behaves as though the Taliban’s victory was a sudden surprise. He had 9 months to plan, if you count the days beginning with his inauguration. If you include his stint as vice president and Trump’s term, which should be included, given Biden’s standing under Obama and his hopes of becoming president, he has had close to 13 years to write himself a little note: “Plan for the end in Afghanistan.” He didn’t do it.

It’s not that hard to move people out of an occupied country. We ran Afghanistan. Americans weren’t scurrying around behind rocks. We could have driven people to Kabul and put them on planes instead of abandoning them to torture, prison, and murder.

Today, Drudge has linked to a site showing a photo of two tiny specks beneath an airborne C-17. They are Afghans, plummeting to the ground after grabbing the airplane in a desperate effort to escape Kabul. You have to wonder what they did to help us, and what other Muslims have threatened to do do them, to make them so afraid of reprisals.

In June of this year, Biden said, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”

I’ll post the famous Saigon photo, followed by a now-famous Kabul photo. This is fair use of cropped, low-resolution photos for purposes of comment.

You can decide for yourself whether Biden was wrong, and whether he should have done something to prevent this.

The weirdest thing about this is seeing a number of articles on CNN’s site, criticizing Biden. How can that be? Ordinarily, they lick his feet and ignore his long history as a perennial also-ran laughingstock. Generally, it’s as though Inspector Clouseau became the president of France and people determined to justify their votes started building him pyramids. Why the sudden honesty?

Surely they’re not preparing the ground for a Harris coup. We are told that leftists are panicked by the prospect of a Harris presidency because the public can’t stand her. Is that untrue? Or is it that CNN is so addled by Marxist fervor, its pundits seriously believe Harris will be an improvement?

I know one thing for certain: CNN’s coverage is not motivated by journalistic integrity. That’s why I am searching for other explanations.

We should get used to spectacles like this. Biden is running on fumes, so he will continue to lack to plan for predictable crises. He lacks the capacity to plan. Planning requires concentration and a working memory. These are the two main things dementia destroys.

Without a leader, his team will bicker and trip over each other while working on personal CYA strategies and cultivating private-sector contacts so they’ll get cushy jobs when Biden leaves no later than January of 2025. A team needs one man to define a coherent plan and force everyone to stick to it.

Another weird thing about Afghanistan: I actually agree with Biden’s assessment. He says we should pull out if Afghans can’t or won’t fight for themselves. That’s absolutely true. But if that was how he felt, why didn’t he provide a way to save Afghans who fought alongside of us?

This morning, I realized Saigon and Kabul remind me of the rapture. The rapture will come when God realizes the people of Earth are no longer worth trying to help. Like Vietnam, Somalia, and Afghanistan, we are proving the cost of leaving God’s precious pearls down here is not worth the return.

Fortunately, unlike Biden’s Kabul blowout, the rapture will be peaceful and orderly, because the leader who planned it isn’t demented. He has been preparing his embedded collaborators for years. When the rapture comes, we will be ready to get out.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been watching tours of graveyards full of famous people. The saddest thing about it was seeing how people who are almost certainly in hell are literally worshiped by their fans. Michael Jackson still gets more flowers in a week than most people get at their funerals.

I saw graves belonging to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and various rock and roll degenerates who died young. I saw Hugh Hefner’s resting place, which, like more than one showbiz grave, was adorned with lip prints. People kissed it.

I saw the grave of Isadora Duncan, the dancer. It was adorned with adoring notes. I thought, “She must have been a lesbian and a Marxist.” I looked at Wikipedia. Yep. She had sex with women, and she was a communist. Why else would the godless world love her so much?

The grave tours made me realize how sad it is that people who belong to God try to become rich and admired in this world. Satan runs most things, and he decides who gets the huge monuments adorned with flowers, photos, and stuffed animals. When we’re young, we are not told this, so many of us waste years being blackballed and torpedoed while children of darkness with less ability take our prizes.

I can name a few people whose decorated graves I saw.

Jimi Hendrix. Drug addict who washed out of the army and died at age 27 from injecting too much heroin and inhaling his own vomit.

Janis Joplin. Drug addict who died from a heroin overdose at age 27.

Amy Winehouse. Alcoholic who died from alcohol poisoning at age 27.

Jim Morrison. Drug addict who died from a heroin overdose at age 27.

Hugh Hefner. A pimp who made pornography mainstream in the US.

John Belushi. An actor who specialized in lowbrow comedy and poisoned a whole generation of young people with his role in Animal House. Died at 33 from a combination of heroin and cocaine, administered by a famous rock groupie who was not his wife.

Michael Jackson. A famous singer and pedophile who died young, alone, single, and without fathering children, from an overdose of a drug intended to make him sleepy.

Voltaire. Entombed in the Pantheon in Paris, Voltaire was a gifted humorist who distinguished himself during his era by calling Christianity “the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He promulgated a number of debunked myths about Christianity in an effort to destroy it.

One of Satan’s best jokes is having his children decorate and idolize the grave of a person who is below it, in hell, crying, screaming, and shaking.

The world is so perverse; we love evil and hate good. No wonder God is giving up on this place.

I guess I have rambled enough for one day. Hope Rhodah and I make it to Europe while Christians are still allowed to have passports.