The Clever Hopes Expire
We are still in the good timeline though.
A police officer arrests the Magdeburg Christmas market terrorist.
The Clever Hopes Expire
In the days after 9/11, a number of Americans shared the W.H. Auden poem "September 1, 1939" via email. Most likely, the last two lines of the first stanza resonated with them [emphasis mine]:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
The literal smell of death was something that lingered in lower Manhattan after 9/11, as Donald Trump said in his famous debate exchange with Ted Cruz.
But the lines in that stanza that always resonated with me were,
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
They resonated again on Friday, as cable news toggled between the atrocity at the Christmas market in Germany, and the budget fight in Congress.
Clever hopes of the low dishonest decades of neoliberal consensus, from unrestrained immigration to unrestrained deficit spending, are expiring.
Germany Got At Least One Highly Skilled Immigrant
One grim irony of the Magdeburg atrocity is that its perpetrator (do you need to append "alleged" in Germany too?) was a highly-skilled immigrant, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia. As statistical geneticist Jonatan Pallesen has noted, immigrants from the Mideast and Africa cost European countries more than €500,000 each over their lifetimes.
That's because most are unskilled, and earn so little that they consume more in government resources than they pay in taxes, even during their peak earning years. In Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, Germany finally got a highly-skilled immigrant from the Mideast, one favorably profiled by the BBC several years ago.
But of course that highly-skilled immigrant came with a catch: he eventually attacked the citizens of his host country.
Not The First Time This Has Happened
An Arab immigrant psychiatrist who becomes a terrorist may seem like a unique, niche sort of character, but Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen isn't the first, if you count second generation immigrants. Maj. Nidal Hassan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist whose parents were Palestinian immigrants, is currently on death row at Fort Leavenworth for murdering 13 of his fellow servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009.
Hope For The Future
A light at the end of the tunnel here is that the Magdeburg massacre may finally put the kaibosh on the mass immigration scam. Elon Musk, who has praised skilled immigration in the past, had already expressed support for Germany's immigration restrictionist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party before the massacre; perhaps he will now rethink his enthusiasm for skilled immigration from incompatible cultures.
If so, Musk may exert his influence on mass immigration in a similar way as he is exerting his influence on deficit spending. As Box CEO Aaron Levie suggested recently, governments may be underestimating Elon, particularly his ability to shine a spotlight on problematic policies.
We Are Still In The Good Timeline
With Trump heading back to the White House and Elon Musk unshackled, a positive future seems possible again, as Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen shared on X.
On Friday, we placed a bet on part of that future happening.
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