90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Rules For Thee, Not for Ski: Austrian Slopes For Elites Avoid Lockdown Restrictions

Austrian ski slopes have been allowed to remain open while the rest of the country languishes under a 20-day lockdown.

While Austria has entered into another national lockdown, forcing bars, restaurants, cinemas, pubs, gyms, and all non-essential shops to shut, ski resorts within the country will be allowed to continue welcoming elites to their slopes.

Austrians have largely been confined to their homes since Monday, and are only allowed to leave to buy food and to exercise under the 20-day lockdown.

According to a report by The Telegraph, skiing is considered a recreational outdoor exercise, and as such slopes have been allowed to remain open.

Ski lifts and cablecars have also been permitted to keep operating, as they have been defined as essential services. Austrian authorities have cited safety reasons for the decision, saying that the lifts are needed in order to prevent skiers from getting stuck on top of mountains.

While slopes have managed to dodge the lockdown order, there have been new restrictions put in place that resorts will be legally forced to abide by.

Only those who are vaccinated will be permitted to use the slopes, as well as the lifts, with unvaccinated to be refused access, which is perhaps unsurprising considering the government’s announcement vaccination will become mandatory from February 1st. Those who refuse the jab will be facing possible fines and even imprisonment.

Enthusiast publication PlanetSKI reported that passengers will be required to wear FFP2 masks on both cable cars and gondolas.

The slopes will also not be open for tourists, with hotels across the country shutting down during the latest lockdown. Bars and restaurants attached to resorts will also remain closed.

The move comes around 20 months after an investigation was launched over possible negligence at an Austrian ski resort in the town of Ischgl. It was believed that the ski resort may have been one of the first epicentres of the Chinese coronavirus in Europe, with it being theorized that the UK’s first case originated from...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #77

Black Feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali Raises The Alarm Over Importing Muslim Migrants To The West

Due to Muslim migration and the failures of assimilation, European women are facing threats of rape like never before, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains in 'Prey.'

As Americans worked around the clock to evacuate soldiers, diplomats, and allies earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Afghans rushed to flee their war-torn country. Some drove to the nearest land borders in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran. The lucky ones found refuge in a handful of Western countries, while other countries strengthened border security measures to prevent any immigration whatsoever.

It is at this inauspicious moment that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights,” is remarkably prescient. Ali is an immigrant success story. Surviving the suffocating pieties of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East and Africa, Ali sought sanctuary in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, Europe was not the safe harbour she envisioned. Her collaboration with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to document the mistreatment of Islamic women led to the documentarian’s assassination at the hands of a radicalized Dutch Moroccan Muslim. Ali fled to America, renounced her Islamic faith, and went into hiding with around-the-clock bodyguards.

These distressing firsthand experiences frame Ali’s discussion of Islam throughout her book. “As an immigrant and former asylum seeker of Somali origin, I am for immigration. I have no objection to people packing up their possessions and leaving their homes to try to improve their circumstances. I completely understand why they would wish to do so because I did it myself,” Ali acknowledges.

However, “My concern is with the attitudes some bring with them, with the behaviors that these attitudes generate in a minority of migrants, and with the seeming inability of Western countries to understand how to cope with the resulting problems.”

Unlike the usual suspects who dismiss the latest conservative “white-replacement fearmongering” about Afghani refugees, “Prey” is an earnest and thoughtful investigation of the challenges multiculturalism poses to sexual equality. Ali argues that European women’s rights have been eroded in recent decades largely due to Muslim migration and the failures of cultural assimilation.

The statistics she marshals are staggering. Although predominantly Muslim asylum seekers make up less than 1 percent of Austrians, in 2017 they represented 11 percent of the accused in all reported rapes and sexual harassment cases.

Similar arithmetic is found in Denmark, where “non-Western” immigrants and their descendants accounted for roughly 40 percent of rapes and 25-33 percent of groping convictions despite comprising approximately 10 percent of the population. Swedish public television aired a documentary on sex crimes based on...

..And Will Never Be Known By The Incurious...

Dutch town gets segregated bus line against migrants

The Dutch town of Ter Apel now has a segregated bus line to protect Dutch passengers against aggressive asylum seekers. The town houses the largest asylum centre in the country.

There will be a new, direct bus connection between Ter Apel and Zwolle station. In this way authorities hope to separate the nuisance-causing asylum seekers from an asylum center in Ter Apel from Dutch passengers in Emmen. Evidently, segregation is the only way to avoid the nuisance caused by migrants.

The hope is that the direct bus connection will prevent people in Emmen from having to deal with petty crime and assault while Ter Apel asylum seekers can still travel with a regular connection.

In addition, the municipality of Emmen, together with Vluchtelingenwerk, wants to see what can be done to return asylum seekers who have been deported from Ter Apel to their country of origin.

This is probably also the reason why the mayor has indicated that they would take “extra measures” together with the police and enforcers to solve the problem. For example, the municipality intends to use area bans “for the biggest rioters”, reported De Telegraaf.

The harsh reality is that nuisance-causing asylum seekers will not be facing any...

The Chinese Communist Party should have been called out years ago. Hopefully, moving the Olympics to a safer and more deserving country, or seriously boycotting them, would be only the first of many actions designed to hold China accountable. Pictured: An ice hockey test event match on November 12, 2021 in Beijing, China, held in preparation for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

[T]he world should long ago have confronted the evil system that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built and continues to develop. China has... built artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarized them after promising not to. China has also threatened Japan, Australia, the Philippines and the US; it recently has attacked India, illegally seized Hong Kong, enslaved Uyghurs and, by repeatedly lying about the human-to-human transmissibility of its Wuhan COVID-19 virus, caused the death worldwide of more than five million people, not to mention economic devastation.
The Communist Chinese have "disappeared" many high-profile Chinese, including the physician Dr. Ai Fen, the movie star Zhao Wei, and now, possibly the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai... What about all of those acts of aggression should not force the world finally to confront China?
To the public, it seems as if their leaders are more willing to threaten their own citizens than they are to confront the Chinese Communists.
The CCP should have been called out years ago. Hopefully moving the Olympics to a safer and more deserving country, or seriously boycotting them, would be only the first of many actions designed to hold China accountable. We should also hold our own leaders accountable for their actions, or as is too often the case, inaction.

"It is now time," Gordon Chang recently wrote, "for the world to face the reality of the Communist Party of China and the horrific system it has constructed."

Now? Both Chang and I are in strong agreement that the world should long ago have confronted the evil system that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has built and continues to develop. China has ignored its trade agreements with the WTO, failed to disclose crucial information about its businesses on stock exchanges as other businesses do, has built artificial islands in the South China Sea and militarized them after promising not to. China has also threatened Japan, Australia, the Philippines and the US; it recently has attacked India, illegally seized...