"Can I purchase some prime oceanfront property too as an investment?"
You certainly can! I was having a look at some property there about three weeks ago. Absolutley stunning and very reasonably priced. Decided not to in the end as with current relations the way they are you never know how this is going to spin out. Dubai is probably the number two source at the moment for British investors seeking to protect themselves from the domestic property bubble by buying overseas (number one is Spain - we must own half their coast!)
Steep, if unacknowledged, downsides.
It allows the PRC, a.k.a. Red China, to dictate to search engines like Google just how it can operate within Chinese borders, and coerces Yahoo into furnishing information that will then be used to incarcerate and torture political dissidents.
It allows Rupert Murdoch to pressure Congress in relaxing rules against foreign ownership.
It's why you won't see many hard-hitting pieces of investigative journalism focusing on the depredations of the House of Saud on the FNC, or any critical pieces broadcast on the Star Network, another Murdoch media venture.
The idea that all of our problems will be solved if we just eliminate our borders, embrace unihibited free trade-presided over by decidedly undemocratic, multinational bureaucracies-and allow multinational corporate entities to decide what's best for us common proles, is just not going over as well as it once did.
People are starting to wake up and realize that perhaps we do have national interests, and should not become one huge EUrabia, complete with a universal religion-Islam, TROP-and one controlling world body, i.e. the feckless, spendthrift, anti-Western United Nations.
Britain emerged from World War II having presided over its finest moment.
It had defeated Nazi Germany and the Imperial Japanese army, in concert with its Anglo-American allies.
However, that apex also marked the moment when it entered inevitable decline, already having been sapped of an entire generation through two bloody wars, and tired of defending itself, it allowed in foreign (Muslim) workers who were Bengalis, and Pakistanis, and who-although good subjects in many respects-did not have children that assimilated to British culture, or who viewed themselves as Britons in any tangible way.
There is a reason why all of those stately, aesthetically pleasing Anglican churches have so rapidly been replaced with austere, unpalatable, Wahabbist mosques.
The truth is that people are concerned about this.
And no matter how many times the chest-thumping multiculturalists denounce people for expressing concern over their culture or their religion being trampled upon, it will not change the fact that most of these ordinary English and Scottish and Welsh people are not beer-swigging, "Islamophobic"-one of the more obnoxious, baffling neologisms I've come across recently-soccer hooligans, or Nick Griffin/Enoch Powell-loving bigots.
They are people who are earnestly and rightfully concerned that London has been transformed into Londonistan, and that they are now strangers in their own country.
I'm sure that there are many Americans who feel precisely the same way.