An Immigrant On Immigration

Two recent events, that coincidentally occurred on the same day, set me to thinking.  Yes, I see you roll your eyes at the prospect, but bear with me, dear reader.

This past Tuesday was both my 56th anniversary on this planet, and the same day I received (at long last) my permanent residency in Indonesia.

In the Indonesian tradition, the personal celebrating a birthday is obliged to feed everyone, so I created a feast of rare and exotic delights: burritos with all the trimmings.  My family is finally coming to appreciate odoriferous and unusual spices called chilli powder and cumin.  Rather than being happy, I am rather upset since in the past I was able to have double portions, given that no one else would touch the stuff.  This last round, I was only able to salvage two burritos and was forced to drown my sorrows in chocolate cake.

I mention this only in passing to that the reader can appreciate that some things we take for granted in our everyday world can become rare gems when we are far removed from them.  It's also amusing when Asians assume that Westerners don't eat rice and stand agog when I bring out a steaming bowl of paella as part of my ethnic feast.

All that aside, it was the permanent residency that really had me thinking.  I've been here for 10 years now, and in that time, I've made 10 annual pilgrimages to the immigration office to renew my long-stay visa.  This onerous duty has cost me many hours and somewhere in the range of about $8,000 over the decade.

When I arrived here, there were no social service nets, no free dwellings, no food stamps.  I had only what I brought and could manage to acquire once in country.  I worked incredibly long hours building a network, establishing myself, and saving my money.  The result is that I now have a family, some property and a couple of growing businesses.  More, in fact, than I ever had in my native country.

Perhaps it was the motivation of having no safety net, perhaps it was a much lower cost of entry.  Whatever the reason, I can say with some pride that my wife and I earned everything we have, and it gives me some ownership in my adopted home.

When I look at the US and EU, with their horrific immigration problems, I scratch my head in amazement.  The policies applied toward immigrants are probably some of the most abusive and hurtful ever conceived, and will ultimately do far more harm than the well-intentioned but deeply misguided folks can possibly know.  These policies will also prove to be ultimately destructive to the societies that adopt them.

If you are a believer in social safety nets, then you are probably staring at the screen wondering what kind of heartless crank would write such a thing, but hang in there.

When I arrived in Indonesia, I had a single suitcase and $1,000.  That's it.  I knew four people here, and that helped a little, but not much.  I didn't know the language and the culture was about as foreign as anything I have ever encountered in my travels.

My first purchase was a translating dictionary and I immediately began learning the language.  Within three months, I could negotiate a meal and buy necessities at the local store.  Keep in mind that I was not in Jakarta or other big, cosmopolitan city.  I was in Balikpapan in Borneo where no one spoke English - at all.

I cam with several plans of attack to make money.  By the end of the first year, I had burned through all of them and was fully improvising as I went.  Within six months, I was able to rent a furnished apartment and pay my bills by literallly teaching English door-to-door for cash.  At the end of the first year, I hired a live-in maid to cook and clean while I worked 15-18 hours a day.

No welfare checks, no food stamps, no freebies.  Just wits and work.

When the Western countries import people, which is what they are truly doing, and hand them pretty much everything for free, what incentive is there to become productive?  What's worse, when the free ride ends, as all politically motivated programs do, these people will be cast aside, never having learned the language or culture, having no local support network and having no way to return to whence they came.  In effect, the current feel-good immigration policies are a huge humanitarian disaster waiting to happen.

Most of the thousands of immigrants were lured with hand-outs, much the way one might lure a wild dog or cat in an effort to tame them.  These people have been shoveled into ghettos where they are able to use their native language and are never forced to learn the lingua franca of their adopted lands.  Most of them have little or no contact with the local inhabitants and do not have jobs - nor do they need one - since everything is handed to them on a platter.

What happens to these people when the rug is pulled out from under them?  When the political tide turns and the will to completely support thousands of people is gone, and they are thousands of miles from anything they know, how will these people survive?  They have no local contacts, don't speak the language, have developed no skills, don't know how to pay bills and taxes, and are fully and completely unable to support themselves and their families?

Oh sure, a few enterprising individuals will adapt, even thrive, but they will be the exceptions.  The vast majority will have nothing to survive on and nothing to pay passage home again.  They will become either a new slave class, or more likely, a despised and forgotten mass of humanity left to rot.

Political will is a fickle thing and can change on a whim.  It is also completely without foresight, preferring instead to service instant gratification, rather than look far into the future of possible outcomes.  The ones who always suffer for this lack of vision are the pawns in the political games.

In an attempt to assuage some kind of guilt in the liberal mind, the policies have instead sentenced thousands to a life of misery, and very likely death.  It does no one any favors to hand them a free life, because at some point the one handing out the goodies will have a change of heart and resent the grasping hands of the recipient.

Take it from an immigrant - it is too late to fix the damage done, but it is not too late to stop the horror from growing.  It may seem in the short term that one is doing a great humanitarian service, but in the long term these policies will become a horror that takes decades or more to repair.  There is no benefit to any side in this horror.  The givers will eventually tire of giving, and the takers will have no means by which to survive when the tap runs dry.

Organic immigration - people like myself who choose to live elsewhere and are prepared mentally and physically to work for it - is a time-honored function of humanity.  It is a vital part of mixing and growing societies and civilizations.  The uprooting of masses to satisfy political whims, though, is a disaster in the making and will damage societies and civilizations, possibly beyond repair.

Now, if I remember correctly, there's still some chocolate cake buried at the bottom of the fridge.

Ex Occasione Vanitatis

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches us that "in chaos there is also opportunity."  Even objectively, one can only conclude that we live in a time of chaos, thus one must consider that there is also opportunity.

The West is quite obviously in the throes of a great upheaval, unlike anything the world has seen for at least a century, and in scale maybe several centuries.

To my admittedly addled mind, the world is still suffering under the major shift in global power that began in the late 1700s, and manifested itself in the various revolutions and wars of the past 300 years.

It is at heart a shift away from the millennia-old paradigm of gods and goblins running the Universe, and universe which is perfect in nature and operates according to ineffable rules.  It is a universe largely out of control of human hands and our collective Fate is at the whim of a god or gods who dangle Paradise and Damnation in front of us to solicit desired behaviors.

The replacement Universe is cold and random, though no less mystical.  It also created itself out of nothing, but it operates like balls on a billiard table, with particles bouncing around in a serendipitous dance, sometimes clinging, and at other times breaking apart.  Our Fate here is at the whim of so-called physical laws, but they are little different in nature from the stone tablets of the prior age, and instead of Paradise and Perdition, there is only the frozen wastes of nothing to which all things are headed.

It is here that the true chaos of the moment enters the fray.

Objectively, the two universes that are at war are actually the same mindset, but with different trappings.  The magical creation, the hardened laws...they are nothing more than recapitulations of each other.  The real change is fully apart from them and is of a far more fundamental nature, and the chaos comes from both of them fighting the true change in human understanding that is plowing through all of it.

The real change appears to be a return to something very old - rationalism.  Some might argue that Scientific Rationalism has been the rising star of history since the Enlightenment, but if true, then it was derailed by Einstein and his ilk in the early 20th century.

Instead of fact-based observation informing thought and theory, we have labored under a group of pseudo-priests who have used mathematical wizardry to invent a Universe full of phantom dark forces without any basis in reality, and certainly not observable with any instruments humans can devise.

True rationalism, dating back to Aristotle and Plato in Western philosophy, accepts only those things that can be proven by repeated experimentation and observation.  While this may seem logical to most thinking people, it is something that has virtually vanished from modern science.

Where we appear to have gotten derailed was when Big Business and Big Government joined in an unholy alliance (to borrow Peter Levenda's term) with Big Religion to maintain a system of control over the masses through the use of parlor tricks and mystical gobbledy-gook.

Continuing the ancient tradition of controlling the masses with incomprehensible nonsense combined with a few magic tricks has kept humanity enslaved to massive centralized power structures.  These power structures have done nothing but impoverish us, while offering almost nothing in return, other than the promise of some pie-in-the-sky future paradise if we just keep paying and waiting.

The real revolution that is growing underneath the veneer of pseudo-religious institutions is the mass realization that we really don't need these institutions, and that humanity has been held back by centuries because of mystical incantations of a privileged elite that thrives parasitically off the labor of the rest of us.

The great fear of the central power bases is that we are waking up from our conditioning.  It shows in the increasing movement of people to be self-governing.  In their desperation, the control grid has revealed its myriad weaknesses and deceptions.  Increasingly, the masses are shunning the snake oil salesmen of the Establishment in favor of self-rule.

Who needs banks when you can save your cryptocoins on a tiny chip?  Who needs the protection racket called government when we can take care of ourselves?  Who needs universities when we can download our own libraries for free?  Who needs corporate media when we can create our own entertainment and watch it when we want?  Who needs gods when we are gods?

The more people realize how much power they truly have, the more these massive black holes of power and wealth will shrink.  The Gutenberg press brought cheap and available information to the masses, and the internet is that same trend on steroids.

In the chaos of the shift to individual empowerment, there are many opportunities for self-enrichment, both financially and internally.  As we seize more of our personal power back from the usurping elites, the ensuing chaos will present new and dazzling opportunities for those who are clear-minded and rational - not panicking at the swirl of history.

The true test of the new revolution will be whether those seizing the opportunities will be self-aware enough to help others join the fun, or whether they will simply replace the current elite with something darker and more devious.

Dagger Of The Mind

For the last century or so, we (the entire world) have been part of a massive, callous and tragic experiment that has failed miserably in every sense of the term.

A group of people tried to create the Universe in their own image.  They believed that there was no objective reality and that they could manifest whatever they undertook to project onto it.  They made each and every one of us a party and victim of their grand design.  They told themselves that if they could deceive the entire world, then their chosen reality would come to exist.

Didn't work.  And now we are all left holding the bag for it.

This group of people, call them what you will, but you will frequently hear them called "THEY," figured that if they could get everyone on Earth to believe fervently in something, that it would simply come to be.  The only problem with their experiment was that they themselves knew the truth, and that prevented the final take-over from occurring.

They thought that if they made their intended reality a part of every textbook, every classroom, every test, every recitation, every grant proposal, and every TeeVee documentary on the planet, then their version of reality would simply become...um, reality.

They propped up cultural images like Einstein.  They turned real science into a replacement religion.  They made every degree, diploma and certificate on the planet dependent on being able to regurgitate their Grand Design.

They pounded Black Holes, Dark Matter, light speed, Universal Constants, Higgs Bosons, clockwork galaxies, and empty space into our heads.  They created Global Warming mantras, asteroid threats, terrorism, and many other imminent threats from "out there" and "down here".  They attempted to control all information everywhere to create the Preferred Narrative that we all had to memorize by rote (gods forbid we should ever check the truth for ourselves).

The one fatal flaw was that the Deceivers could not make themselves believe the Deception.

They wanted to remain in power by being the only ones with Truth, while the rest of us struggled along under the Deception.  This was their undoing, since their knowledge of The Deception meant that they could never manifest the alternate reality they so desperately wanted to create.

In other words, they failed out of greed and lust for power.

And it is falling apart before our very eyes for one very simple reason - it is NOT Truth.

In every deception there is some fraction of the participants who know that they are deceiving everyone else.  Because of that one simple fact, all lies ultimately fail.  Truth prevails because at some level it is obvious to anyone who cares to look for it, and because those who are lying are constantly scrambling to keep up the Lie.  This makes holes appear in the Lie that are eventually exploited by those who genuinely seek the Truth, and finally the Lie is exposed and crumbles.

One major problem with the exposure of the Lie is that those who were duped desperately do not want to admit they were duped.  They get defensive, angry, even violent in their attempt to deny that they were dupes.  In fact, the reaction is equal in scale to the size of the Lie.  In our immediate case, the Lie was so massive, so pervasive, and so obviously false that the anger is building to an equal and opposite reaction.  Nearly every major problem on Earth at this moment can be classified as either the liars fighting desperately to maintain The Lie, or the dupes reacting very angrily at having been duped.

People do not take kindly to being awoken from a dream, especially one that felt as if it were real.  It will not end well, but it will end nonetheless.

Some will die from the shock, some because they cannot adjust.  Others will muddle through.  Still others will profit and thrive.  It is the way of humanity.  We have spent much of our history deceiving ourselves, and millions have died because of it.  The challenge is always to adjust.  In all cases, it is fear that kills.