Programming note: Please join Steyn tomorrow, New Year's Eve, for some special Hogmanay programming.
~From our "Nothing works anymore" files, Air Canada flight 2259 lands at Halifax:
🚨#BREAKING: Watch Wild footage as a Air Canada flight lands with a broken landing gear resulting in the wing scraping the runway causing a fire⁰
📌#Halifax | #CanadaWatch as Air Canada Flight 2259 made a dramatic landing at the Halifax sanfield international airport in Nova... pic.twitter.com/IStX6JHGTo
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) December 29, 2024
Per the airline, it "experienced a suspected landing gear issue". The good news is that for once it wasn't Boeing; it was de Havilland, which used to be owned by Boeing but has since been sold to Bombardier.
Oh, here's another - and this time it is Boeing.
~As you'll have noticed, the world's most uniquely unique peaceful transition of power turned suddenly violent over Christmas with various of America's super-brainy Indians beating up on each other: Nikki Haley, the Boeing board's token Sikh, lit up Hindu monotheist Vivek Ramaswamy's tweet like Air Canada overhead baggage in objection to Vivek's remarks on US "mediocrity". The offending Ramaswamy tweet was in response to MAGA objections to Trump's appointment of Madras techie and open-borders fanatic Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor. This was a very 2025 brouhaha: while you knuckle-draggers down in flyover country were arguing about sub-minimum-wage Hispanics turning down the sheets at Motel Six, the Hindu billionaires have been busy taking over the country.
Is everyone in this all-American punch-up an Indian? Well, no, eventually a South African weighed in. The Boers don't like the Hindus, do they? I think I got that from Gandhi. Ah, but in this case Elon agrees with Sriram and Vivek.
A couple of very general observations:
1) The MAGA base intuits that H1B visas are a racket. Why wouldn't they be? Everything else the federal government touches is - from presidential pardons to West Point to Jan 6 justice. America is the third largest nation on earth - a third-of-a-billion people, officially (rather more in actual reality). Why does it need to hire entry-level workers from the first and second largest nations? Yes, yes, too many Americans graduate in non-binary studies rather than any serious academic discipline but simply because you've bollocksed up your entire education system is no reason to (as my former National Review colleague John Derbyshire puts it) "import an overclass".
The MAGA objections to mass immigration (ie, not just illegal immigration) are primarily cultural. They didn't like it eight years ago when Trump would add to his wall-building promises the line about "and that wall will have a big beautiful door", and he should have got that by now. Besides, to address the counter-argument more seriously than it merits, a nation of a third-of-a-billion that "needs" to import entry-level accountants is so structurally dysfunctional that no amount of immigration can save it. How about entry-level lawyers? Do we need more of those?
As an aside to that, for all you Constitution fetishists, I'm increasingly sceptical that a Constitution designed for an homogeneous population of two-and-a-half million people can be applied to a third-of-a-billion with a cratering fertility rate of 1.6. The only two more populous nations - China and India - are both more or less conventional ethnostates. Which is a great advantage. America is the only large-scale polity founded on a proposition - that, simply by setting foot on US soil, one becomes American. Immigration on the present transformative scale will nullify the Constitution. So the Dance of the Constitution Fetishists will get even sadder.
The Constitution is increasingly for judges rather than citizens. May be time to import more Supreme Court justices.
2) Besides, H1B is what the government calls, correctly, a "nonimmigrant" visa. One of Rupert Murdoch's minions offered me an H1B thirty years ago. I looked up the terms and declined to sign on to indentured servitude. You're not importing "the best and brightest". You're assisting well-connected corporations in advantaging themselves at the cost of the citizenry among whom they nominally live.
3) Have you noticed that almost everyone involved in this spat is a billionaire? Today's rich are not just rich in the old Scott Fitzgerald they-are-different sense. They approximate more to the condition articulated by Lord Palmerston in his observation that England had no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests. For a billionaire, friends and enemies come and go, but, like any medium-sized nation-state, he has his interests.
To most Americans, Elon was largely unknown until he started weighing in on and then buying social media; Vivek was entirely unknown until he ran for president; Sriram is still unknown. But they are far above not just the schlubs who lost their jobs to cheaper H1B types but also to the more famous political class whose poll numbers in Iowa so obsess the hamster-wheel media but which are increasingly irrelevant to anything that matters. Among Sriram Krishnan's minor claims to "fame" is that he's the guy who introduced Boris Johnson (remember him?) to Elon Musk - and you can bet that was after desperate wheedling and pleading from the Shagger, not because Elon had any desire for dating tips.
This is not a healthy development in world affairs.
4) Vivek Ramaswamy's sweeping paean to American "mediocrity" as manifested by everything from prom queens to sitcoms was probably ill-advised but it was certainly entirely sincere - and would be widely shared by his fellow members of the Hindu overclass. The Indian tycoon (and David Cameron advisor) Ratan Tata, who died in October, is best remembered in the UK for his 2011 Vivek-like attack on the natives' "work ethic". As Sir Ratan marvelled after buying Jaguar-Land Rover:
I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won't, at 5 o'clock, say, 'Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.'
Friday, from 3.30pm, you can't find anybody in the office.
That may well be true, as Vivek's musings re Urkel and football jocks may be true. On the other hand, as a rather precocious lad, I observed to my mum that, five years after the Gambia's independence, nothing seemed to work as well as it did under colonial rule. True, conceded my mother, then added: "But in the end people want to be themselves, as themselves. At least it's their chaos."
~Does any of the above matter? Compared to his H1B intervention ("Take a big step back and F**K YOURSELF in the face") Elon Musk's more substantive pronouncement was his foray into German politics:
Only the AfD can save Germany https://t.co/Afu0ea1Fvt
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024
Mr Musk has now expanded on the above in a piece for Die Welt, which you can read in English here. The decision by a German newspaper to publish such a column has itself provoked a furor, especially on the pearl-clutching right. The question, for those of us who've been in this game a long time, is whether there is still a Germany to "save":
Germany is gone.
Half of Germany's next generation is immigrants.
"In Germany, 42% of people under age 15 were either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent"
This is how quickly mass migration can wipe out a nation. pic.twitter.com/C1KFKKOXdQ
— Daniel Greenfield - "Hang Together or Separately" (@Sultanknish) December 27, 2024
Poor old Adolf, always banging on about "Lebensraum". As I said - here it comes - twenty years ago, no people has ever been less in need of Lebensraum.
~David Rivkin died on Friday and was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as "the Constitution's stalwart defender". On that note, see above. My connection to him is that, way back in 2012, he was my original lawyer on the Mann vs Steyn case. Back then, he represented all four defendants, although after the first conference call I concluded that the parties' interests were not sufficiently similar and separated myself. However, in that breezy way that has become so familiar to me from bigshot attorneys, he delivered himself of a line that gets funnier every time I recall it. At one point on the call, he said, "The only thing you have to decide is: Do you want to win fast or do you want to win slow?"
I took the question seriously enough to say I wanted to win fast. So I'm grateful we're now in merely our thirteenth year of litigation, because had I checked the slow box we'd now be in our twenty-seventh year.
~We had a very busy Christmas at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's annual presentation of Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols: the scripture stays the same, but the music changes each year with special live performances, including this year old Steyn Show friends such as Randy and Tal Bachman, Patsy Gallant and Peter Noone with Herman's Hermits. It sounds just as good on the eve of Hogmanay. Come the morning Mark presented his traditional Christmas cornucopia, and Boxing Day brought a Café Continental St Stephen's Day Special. Steyn's Saturday music show contemplated New Year on the Danube, and his Sunday Song of the Week remembered an old friend lost in 2024.
If you were too busy passing yourself off as Hindu in your job application, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for Hogmanay, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
