Inishturk, an island off the main coast of Ireland, has now joined Canada in officially accepting Americans requesting political asylum from a Donald Trump presidency.
The island has been experiencing a population decline in recent years, and they decided to try to reach out to Americans seeking to flee our current political dystopia by offering a new place to live if the idea of Donald Trump and the Republicans following his lead are just too much.
Mary Heanue, Inishturk’s development officer, was quoted as saying:
I’ve heard there are quite a few people in America looking to move to Ireland and other countries if Donald Trump becomes president. I’d like them to know that we’d love to see them consider moving over here.
Our big concern is employment and trying to encourage families to move over here because the population is declining. The island featured on an Irish TV documentary last year which gave us great publicity and a good few extra bookings. But we ended up having a terrible summer and a lot of people canceled.
They’d be given a huge welcome and they’d find this is a fantastic place to live and to bring up children. Their kids would probably get the best education anywhere in the country too, because the teacher to pupil ratio is nearly one-on-one.
Although winters can be hard and it’s the kind of life that wouldn’t necessarily suit everyone, they’d find it very peaceful here and they’d soon find out there’s nowhere as nice in the world on a summer’s day than here.”
The website IrishCentral.com also got in on the action recently, by publishing their own guide on moving to Ireland in case Donald Trump is elected.
The website describes the details, and realities, of moving to Ireland. It isn’t particularly cheap and the financial restrictions on it might preclude some people from being able to take advantage of it.
However, there are some big things on the plus side. The gun laws are restrictive and you won’t see wannabe cowboys carrying handguns openly in Ireland – a huge plus. They have strong social welfare and services, plus did I mention universal heathcare? Not exactly a terrible idea… They also do take some well-placed digs at our Republican problem, by making a few short jabs at the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump in particular, by stressing that you request an absentee ballot so you can still vote against Donald Trump for a nice middle finger from across the pond.
More than likely, Trump will not get elected. However, it never hurts to have a backup plan, especially if you don’t fit into one of the new state-approved ethnic groups (whites only) that will be one of the features of a possible Donald in the White House.
Featured image via Coastal Boating
Christian is from a small town, surrounded by other small towns, in Pennsylvania. He nearly slipped into the conservative K-hole after high school, but was redeemed by Liberal politics and 8 years of Bush. After spending far too long working for corporate America, he has settled back into life as an unapologetic progressive and general caller-out of conservative fallacy and nonsense.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Making good on one of his key campaign promises, President Obama signed an executive order on Tuesday relocating the United States Congress to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The President seemed to relish signing the order, calling the relocation a “win-win for America,” and indicating that Congress could be moved to its new headquarters “immediately.”
“We don’t envision doing any renovations to the facility down there,” he said. “It is ready to house Congress right now.”
The President did not specify what the current U.S. Capitol building would be used for in the future, but he hinted that it could be the setting for historic reënactments in the manner of Colonial Williamsburg.
“I think it could be fascinating to school groups,” he said. “It could really take them back to the olden days when it was a real, functioning place.”
Minutes after the President signed the order, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) called it “an outrage” and “grounds for impeachment,” but Obama appeared to take such howls of protest in stride.
“If Congress believes that this executive order is illegal, they can take it up with the Supreme Court,” he said. “Oh wait—we don’t have a Supreme Court.”
GET NEWS SATIRE FROM THE BOROWITZ REPORT DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX.
I CAN’T CLAIM this is a neutral review of Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore’s latest movie. Beyond the fact that I worked for Moore for six years, including on his previous documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, I may literally owe my life to the high-quality, zero-deductible health insurance he provides employees.
What I’ve lost in objectivity, I’ve gained in knowledge of Moore’s career. I even know his darkest, most closely guarded secret: the original name of the 1970s alternative newspaper he started in Flint, Michigan. So I can say this for sure: Where to Invade Next is the most profoundly subversive thing he’s ever done. It’s so sneaky that you may not even notice exactly what it’s subverting.
On its surface, Where to Invade Next seems to be a cheerful travelogue as Moore enjoys an extended vacation, “invading” a passel of European countries plus Tunisia to steal their best ideas and bring them back home to America. For instance, French public schools have chefs who serve students hour-long, multi-course lunches on china, featuring dishes like scallops in curry sauce. I haven’t laughed harder at any movie this year than when the French 8-year-olds stare in perplexed horror at photos of American school lunches.
It’s all so upbeat in such an un-Michael Moore way that he considered calling it Mike’s Happy Movie. Certainly it’s the only time I’ve walked out of one of his documentaries and said, “Wow, everything is fantastic!” But what made me feel this way is the secret message hidden in Where to Invade Next — and if you see it, you’ll feel that way too.
Moore’s biggest foe ever
To understand what I’m talking about, look at the trajectory of Moore’s major films, and how he consistently became more ambitious. With every movie he’s raised the stakes, each time aiming at a bigger institution and its claims that it knows best and is totally serious and in control anddefinitely nobody should laugh at it. Here’s the progression:
- Roger & Me in 1989 was an attack on General Motors when it was the largest corporation on earth, and suggested that GM’s decision to brutalize its workers, customers, and hometown might not be the greatest long-term strategy. (You’ve probably noticed this turned out to be true.)
- Bowling for Columbine’s target in 2002 was even larger than GM: It wasn’t just about America’s constant gun massacres, but our omnipresent culture of fear that makes us hostile to any possible solutions.
- Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 aimed higher again: It was about the reality that the president of the United States might be illegitimate, definitely had no idea what he was doing, and everyone was terrified to point any of this out.
- In 2007 Sicko critiqued something even more important than the presidency: healthcare, America’s biggest, cruelest industry.
- Finally, in 2009, Moore reached what seemed like the logical summit of his career with Capitalism: A Love Story, pointing out that our entire economic system seems to be broken.
So where could anyone go from there? Once you’ve done capitalism, it’s hard to imagine there’s any larger nemesis. But as Where to Invade Next demonstrates, there is.
America’s real ideology
About halfway through Where to Invade Next, Moore visits an island prison in Norway that houses inmates who’ve committed violent crimes but are being rewarded for good behavior. It looks less like Oz and more like a frugal resort, with prisoners in regular clothes doing wheelies on bikes, fishing, and sunbathing.
In the prison’s kitchen, Moore talks to Trond, a convicted murderer with a huge tattoo on his face. Looking past him, Moore says: “Uh, I can’t help but notice that behind you are a whole bunch of very sharp knives.” And in fact there are a dozen of them, including a gigantic cleaver.
There also appear to be zero guards. Trond explains how many guards are at the prison on weekends: four. That’s for a prison population of 115. Plus, he says, the guards generally all stay in another building, leaving the prisoners to supervise themselves.
For most Americans, including me, this looks completely insane. But the prison warden, sitting at a park bench with birds chirping in the background, explains: “I don’t understand why you think this is a strange idea. … The main idea is just to take away their freedom. That’s the only punishment we are giving them. We are trying to help them back to society.”
The Norwegian philosophy is to create a normal environment with as few external controls as possible so that when prisoners get out, they know how to control themselves. It works so well that Norway has one of the world’s lowest murder rates, and its recidivism rate is about 20 percent, two to three times lower than in the U.S. (Moore also visits a standard Norwegian maximum security prison that’s less spa-like but totally free of the brutality and spiritual darkness of U.S. prisons.)
Moore’s visit to Portugal is also about its prison system, or rather its lack of one comparable to the U.S., thanks to its total decriminalization of drugs in 2001. Dr. Nuno Capaz, the Portuguese minister of health, classifies himself as a drug user: “Mostly alcohol, internet, a lot of coffee, some sugar.” When Moore points out that drug abuse may bring a lot of sadness to someone’s marriage, Capaz responds, “So? So does Facebook. Are we going to illegalize it?” The results in Portugal have been just as counterintuitive for Americans as Norway’s results, with drug use actually falling now that you can’t get arrested for it.
By the end of Where to Invade Next — after seeing working-class Italians with two months paid vacation, Finnish schools with no homework and the world’s best test scores, Slovenians going to college for free, and women seizing unprecedented power in Tunisia and Iceland — you may realize that the entire movie is about how other countries have dismantled the prisons in which Americans live: prison-like schools and workplaces, debtor’s prisons in order to pay for college, prisons of social roles for women, and the mental prison of refusing to face our own history.
You’ll also perceive clearly why we’ve built these prisons. It’s because the core ideology of the United States isn’t capitalism, or American exceptionalism, but something even deeper: People are bad. People are so bad that they have to be constantly controlled and threatened with punishment, and if they get a moment of freedom they’ll go crazy and ruin everything.
The secret message of Where to Invade Next is that America’s had it wrong all along about human beings. You and I aren’t bad. All the people around us aren’t bad. It’s okay to get high, or get sick, or for teenagers to spend every waking moment trying to figure out how to bonk each other. If regular people get control over their own lives, they’ll use it wisely rather than burning the country down in a festival of mindless debauchery.
Where to Invade Next is all the more powerful because it doesn’t tell you this, it simply shows you. It’s not speculation about how human nature will be transformed after the revolution so we’ll all be happy to share our ration of grass soup with The People. It’s all happening right now, with imperfect human beings just like us.
The movie ends with Moore visiting the remnants of the Berlin Wall, and remembering how he’d been there in 1989 and joined with all the Germans chiseling away at it. When he was growing up during the Cold War, he says, the one certain thing was that “This wall would never come down. Built to stand forever. Impenetrable.” But less than 30 years later it was gone. What America’s President of Documentaries is saying now is: Tear down these walls. We will be much better off without them.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Bernie Sanders exposes the reality of US Politics. We think it was his level of honesty and transparency that made this speech go viral. Read more: http://bit.ly/1P1GXQh
December 26, 2015 § Leave a comment
by Charles Davis
The problem I have with Seymour Hersh’s latest thinly and anonymously sourced conspiracy theory about Syria is not that I find it implausible that the U.S. government would conspire to preserve the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad — by, in part, passing it intelligence on “jihadists” through a third party — but that we already know this is the case and need not rely on the word of a chatty “former adviser” to the Pentagon who happens to be friends with a famous journalist.
The real problem for Hersh and others like him these days is that ever since the Arab Spring came to Syria in 2011 they have cast in terms of conspiracy, abandoning class analysis to suggest it was, from the start, or damn near close it, a U.S-Israeli plot to effect regime change, not the predictable and indeed predicted result of authoritarian neoliberalism, poverty and the closing off of any means for Syrians to achieve meaningful reform through politics or pacifism.
Reality has not been kind to this narrative. When the U.S. began bombing Syria in September 2014, it came not for the Assad regime but for the Islamic State, al-Nusra and even a couple factions associated with the Free Syrian Army. “Before the international coalition struck a couple of military targets of Daesh inside Syrian territory, Secretary [of State John] Kerry asked me to deliver a message to the Syrians,” recalls Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim Jafari. “I agreed to deliver this message to Syrians.”
After the bombing began, the Council on Foreign Relations’ president emeritus, Leslie Gelb, while advocating an open alliance with the Syrian dictator, noted that “Assad seems to be turning off his air-defense system when U.S. aircraft attack his territory.” Of course he was: He was informed of the strikes ahead of time and those strikes were targeting those who weren’t him, furthering his long-stated desire to be part of a U.S.-led war on terror, again.
The Obama administration’s train-and-equip program for rebels was explicitly directed at the Islamic State. “You should not shoot a bullet against the regime,” one commander recalls being told. When the program inevitably failed, rebels unwilling to serve the United States’ ISIS-only policy, the Obama administration redirected its money to Syria’s Kurdish militias, who enjoy an uneasy truce with the Assad regime.
Rather than concede that President Obama was more swayed by Washington’s stability-minded “realists” than the neoconservatives of George W. Bush’s first term, Hersh — who claimed the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks were “false flags” designed to spur intervention — is required to embrace conspiracy, while the more sophisticated embrace dull revisionism. If the U.S. isn’t set on regime change now, it goes, that’s only because it recognizes what the Islamophobic left and right have been saying for the last four years: that every Syrian outside the Assad regime and its base is a jihadist, or a potential one.
In fact, according to Hersh, this belated realization only came after patriots at the Pentagon bravely decided to undermine the policy of the elected president of the United States and to funnel intelligence to the Assad regime, staving off its collapse. That such a subversion of democracy is now welcome, from a journalist of the left, speaks to the strange times in which we now live.
Thankfully, I suppose, no such subversion was ever required. Contra the dumbed down regime change narrative, the U.S. would have much preferred a stable Assad remaining in power for many years to come when the uprising against him broke out nearly five years ago. “There’s a different leader in Syria now,” said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in May 2011, after hundreds of Syrians had been killed in the previous weeks by that leader’s security forces. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”
In August 2012, after the death toll had reached the thousands, President Obama was forced to lay out his famous “red line” — which, in fact, was a message to the Syrian government that conventional slaughter was fine, but don’t make it any harder for the imperialist, humanitarian West to look the other way than it already is.
Here’s something: When the Assad regime tested that red line and in fact crossed it, Obama, unlike as in Libya, went to Congress for authorization to carry out strikes he clearly did not want to carry out — and then eagerly agreed with Russia to accept a deal proposed by Israel to save the Assad regime from even the threat of a few bombings instead.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not publicly claim credit for that deal, a former adviser told The New York Times, for fear “somebody will say it’s an Israeli idea, Israeli conspiracy, maybe it’s a reason to stop it.”
Neither Hersh nor any Assadist “anti-imperialists” have been interested in noting this Israeli conspiracy, not-so-oddly enough: It undermines the narrative they’ve sunk too many years into defending. The realization one has been defending an Israeli-preferred fascist responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 people… but from the left? Yikes.
U.S. officials may, if pressed — and not wrongly — see Assad the man as a liability when it comes to preserving that U.S./Israeli-friendy “stability,” but their actions have, for years, belied whatever humanitarian rhetoric they still shamelessly mutter. Their actions, in fact, show their agreement with what the RAND Institute found to be the Washington consensus back in 2013: Collapse of the Assad regime is “perceived to be the worst possible outcome for U.S. strategic interests.”
There’s no need for the Pentagon to go around a president who pursues the same “stability”-focused, jihadist-obsessed policy they desire (and which much of the left has now embraced). And you don’t need a convoluted conspiracy theory to explain U.S. policy in Syria, but as it dawns on discredited journalists and pro-war “antiwar” idiots on the world’s social media that their views, in fact, are shared by every major imperialist power, expect a good deal more of it. Admitting error is far too much to ask from those who long ago doubled down on apologism for mass murder.
band annie's Weblog 