Archive for January 2009

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Too many boomers and babies in this equation

Yes, population is the core problem that, unless confronted and dealt with, will render all solutions to all other problems irrelevant. Population is the one variable in an economic equation that impacts, aggravates, irritates and accelerates all other problems. Imagine you’re on a call with the Oval Office:

“Listen to me,” the frustrated U.S. president says on the phone in “Boomsday:” “I got a collapsing economy. I’m fighting four wars — and looks like another is on the way.” Agitated. “I got melting ice caps on both poles. Florida just lost another two feet of waterfront. Hundred square miles of Mississippi just went under.” Faster. “I got a drought in the West the Interior Department says is going to make Colorado and Wyoming into another dust bowl.” Breathless. “Pakistan and India are going at each other like a couple of wet cats. The CIA’s telling me Israel’s preparing to launch nuclear weapons.” He’s shaking. “I don’t have time to take on a one-legged senator who says the solution to Social Security is for us to kill ourselves at age 70. The way I’m feeling now, I may shoot myself. And I may not wait until I’m 70.”

Yes, you heard right. He’s reacting to a proposal made by Cassandra Devine, a character in “Boomsday.” She’s a young, hot PR hustler running a “must read” blog. She resents the fact that her generation is getting stuck with the tax bill to pay Social Security benefits for retiring boomers. At first, her proposal was just a wake-up call, a shocker to get attention, to get Washington to deal with a hot-button issue politicians refuse to face. Her plan: Reduce population by encouraging suicides for aging boomers.
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Recently Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to pursue a vigorous policy of diversity and métissage. Concretely, this means giving preference to minorities in job hiring and prosecuting those who do not comply. In other words, affirmative action as a government policy from which none are exempt.

In his message Sarkozy insisted that the French people must change, that there will be dire consequences if they don’t, and that not to intermarry racially is bad for the survival of the country. Thus he amalgamated the concepts of preference for minorities in job hiring with that of the need for the French to intermarry racially.

These are two separate things. But in the mind of Sarkozy they go together. Last December he chose a highly successful Algerian-born businessman, known as an impassioned advocate of diversity, Yazid Sabeg, to be his “high commissioner on diversity and equal opportunity”, and to implement these government orders.

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When Arthur London was pulled screaming from his car in the middle of a Prague street it was broad daylight. That year, 1951, he had been the Czech undersecretary of foreign affairs for less than two years. But Party credentials could not save him. London was taken, blindfolded, to the infamous Ruzyn prison on the outskirts of the city, near the airport. There he was tortured, over and over again, until he confessed to collaboration with the enemy. He had never confessed before, not to the Vichy counter-insurgency troops, nor to the Gestapo at Mauthausen concentration camp. The Nazis, he wrote, were “child’s play” compared to the Communists.

Indeed, while London’s “child’s play” metaphor isn’t intended to diminish in any way the horror of Nazi atrocities, on a purely mathematical level it may be appropriate. Whereas the Holocaust claimed 10 million lives over the course of roughly five years, Communist states caused the deaths of over 100 million during the course of decades. And yet the “Western awareness of repression in Communist states remains very limited,” especially when compared to the Holocaust. In the introduction to his anthology From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, Paul Hollander attempts to explain why.
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If I had to choose a single image that, for me, represents Britain today, it would not be a phone box or a postbox. It wouldn’t even be a double-decker bus. It would be a simple briefcase. A battered red one, the one the chancellor of the exchequer likes to brandish triumphantly in front of the television cameras when he leaves his residence at Number 11, Downing Street every budget day. It sums up, all by itself, the way this country now thinks.

The key words, the only words that really matter in Britain, are money, business, interest rates, profit, consumer spending, “good for the economy”. I still do not understand why it is impossible, in this country, to talk about someone without mentioning their salary, the cost of their car, the value of their house. Even if you’re talking about health, about a humanitarian act, it’s in the context of cost. You have forgotten, it seems to me, that what matters is who you are and what you do. Not how much you cost.

In Britain, now, it seems all political thought works this way. In the battle against global warming, Gordon Brown professes to see an opportunity to save the world. But really it’s about developing new business opportunities. Money is the answer to everything: it is used to reward smokers who successfully give up, and to resocialise the most hardened criminals by paying them, in prison, to re-engage with a semblance of a social life.
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Washington: An influential senator has asked US companies to make efforts to fire foreign workers first while making lay-offs during the current economic downturn - a move that could affect thousands of Indian professionals.

In a letter to Microsoft, which employs thousands of people through the H-1B visa programme, a majority of them Indians, Senator Chuck Grassley urged the IT giant to make efforts to retain qualified American workers during its recently announced lay-offs.

Noting that last year, Microsoft had advocated for more H-1B visas in the US Congress, he said the purpose of the H-1B programme for professionals in “specialty occupation” is to help companies hire foreign guest workers on a temporary basis when there is not a sufficient qualified American workforce to meet those needs, he said.

However, the programme is not intended to replace qualified American workers, Grassley said asking questions of both American and foreign based companies about their use of the H-1B visa programme. A majority of the 60,000 professionals given H-1B visa every year hail from India.
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Google has dominated the world of Internet searching for a while now. It has become so ubiquitous that it is no longer just the name of a search engine, but a full-fledged verb in its own right; when was the last time someone asked you to “Yahoo” a term, or, better yet, to “Rushmore Drive” it?

Though most of us are probably unfamiliar with web sites such as Rushmore Drive – a black-centric search engine started in April of 2008 – such identity-specific searching is slowly carving its own niche in the wide world of the world wide web, and looking to challenge Google’s hegemony.

According to Kevin McFall, representative for Rushmore Drive and Vice President of products for its parent company, Black Web Enterprises, Rushmore Drive provides search results that are more relevant to the black community by blending mainstream searching with a heavier weighting on historically black-selected URLs. The web site also includes a black-centric job-search engine, as well as a social networking application.

Dr. Vivek Venkatesh, assistant professor of educational technology at Concordia University, whose work focuses on the shift from algorithm-based searches to more humanized forms of information gathering on the web, sees the development of identity-specific web searching as a natural course for Internet searching to take.

“I think it’s a natural progression or an evolutionary progression of how people are reacting to the growth of the Internet,” Venkatesh said.
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With America having ruined its finances through excessive debt, the new administration is urging more hair of the dog that bit us: borrowing another $820 billion or so for “fiscal stimulus”.

Of course, in all the infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ bill, there’s no mention of beefing up or speeding up one massive infrastructure project already underway: the lagging border fence.

The rationalizations for the stimulus keep changing. Obama’s latest featured money pit—wind and solar energy!—being a desperate throwback to last summer when gasoline prices were twice as high.

Sure, none of it makes much sense. But for Obama, politically, it’s a no-lose proposition. Either the economy gets better and he takes credit; or the economy flatlines and he demands more fiscal defibrillation.

In either case, he gets to give huge sums of other people’s money to the politically well-positioned. The taxpayers will eventually have to pay for all the new borrowing, but most of the bill will likely come due after the 2012 election.

Our economic problem, though, is more severe than a temporary downturn. We now know that our purported wealth as of July 1, 2007 was illusory, based on a mountain of leverage teetering on the unquestioned assumption that some drywallers in Palmdale would actually pay off their half-million dollar mortgages.

From 2001 onward, there was no real economic growth in America, just pseudo-growth ginned up by home equity withdrawals. Our trade balance, for example, averaged over 5 percent of GDP throughout Bush’s second term.
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(The following report is based on documents obtained by the 14,000-member National Association of Chiefs of Police.)

“The faster we get them [illegal alien gangbangers] locked up, the faster illegal immigrants replace them,” said a Los Angeles police officer.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested nearly 2,000 gang members and gang associates in the Los Angeles area in 2008 as part of the agency’s ongoing national anti-gang effort known as Operation Community Shield, according to a report submitted to the National Association of Chiefs of Police.

Of the 1,970 gang members taken into custody here by ICE in the last year, more than 850 were prosecuted criminally on state or federal charges, ranging from re-entry after deportation to weapons violations. The remaining targets were foreign national gang members who were arrested on administrative immigration violations and placed in deportation proceedings. The statistics include ICE gang arrests in seven Southland counties - Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

ICE attributes the agency’s rising local gang arrests to several factors, among them the expanded screening of criminal aliens incarcerated in area jails and ICE’s increased cooperative efforts with local law enforcement agencies to attack and dismantle transnational streets gangs.
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NDIANAPOLIS — As unemployment in Indiana has climbed past 7 percent, state lawmakers have renewed last year’s failed efforts to crack down on businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

If a company is cited three times for employing illegal immigrants, it could lose its business license to operate in Indiana, under three similar bills introduced this year.

Supporters of the legislation say those penalties would keep businesses from employing illegal immigrants at below-market wages, and would dry up opportunities for illegal immigrants.

“You’ve got to take the economic incentive of hiring illegal immigrants off the table in order to deal with the issue,” said Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, a key backer of the three strikes legislation.

The three bills would require businesses to use a federal system called E-Verify to check the legal status of potential employees. Any company that does use the free electronic system would be immune from prosecution because that counts as a good-faith effort to hire legal workers, Delph said.
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FIRE believes that many American public and private colleges and universities are overstepping their bounds and disregarding the U.S. Constitution when it comes to freedom of speech for students. In fact, they believe that many college administrators are censoring controversial and politically incorrect speech.

WorldNetDaily quotes a part of FIRE’s letter to President Obama: ”Failing to educate an entire generation about our constitutional ideals of liberty-and, still worse, actually teaching students that they have a duty to censor opinions with which they disagree-means that it will not be long before these illiberal attitudes result in severe consequences for our Republic.”

FIRE has published a detailed study and discovered that 77 percent of public colleges and universities have speech codes that are unconstitutional. The study can be found on Spotlight on Speech Codes 2009: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses.
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