jgo Resume	jgo Reading Room
jgo Econ Data	jgo Econ News Bits
jgo's Links	jgo's Glancing Encounters with the Movie Biz
jgo's Work in Progress
Kermit's home page
Bottom

updated: 2019-03-14
 

"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?" --- Herbert Spencer 1884 _The New Toryism_

 
 

2013 January

U	M	T	W	R	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

 

"If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well." --- J. Gresham Machen

 
 
 

captain William Scott's flag for the Republic of Texas.

2013-01-01

2013-01-01
Burton Speakman _Youngstown OH Vindicator_
production workers' suit against union moves forward
"Mark Dragomier et al. v. International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace & Agricultural Implement Workers of America, Local 1112...   The suit contends GM first violated the collective-bargaining agreement when it extended the workers' temporary status, which began in 2006, without proper approval.   The 28 employees were then terminated in 2007 April, and rehired seven months later as permanent employees with seniority, according to the law-suit.   In 2008 June, they were forced to recategorize as temporary employees or be terminated immediately, all while taking pay cuts of more than 40%.   One of the plaintiffs, Mark Dragomier, along with a number of employees that remains under dispute, requested that Ben Strickland, union shop chairman, file a grievance on their behalf.   Strickland, according to the law-suit, declined to file the grievance."

2013-01-01
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
Emancipation Day at Andersonville

2013-01-01
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
revolution against unconstitutional tyrannical government

2013-01-01
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
being grateful for products and services that make my life better

2013-01-01
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
Krugman's Keynesian "trickle-down" economics: Washington DC as an experiment

2013-01-01 (5773 Tebet 19)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
So far it's a very unhappy new year
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-02

2013-01-02
Willis Eschenbach
the cost in human energy
"But energy price increases such as carbon taxes don't even have that relief.   They hit harder the further you go down the economic ladder, all the way down to rock bottom, hitting the very poorest the hardest of all."

2013-01-02
Benny Peiser
Russia rejects expired Kyoto Protocol
Lawson won bet; new extension or successor deal

2013-01-02
Alex de Marban
Alaska slipping into another ice age

2013-01-02
Anthony Watts
climate responds to short-term and long-term changes in solar activity

2013-01-02
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
very scary times

2013-01-02
Anthony Watts
fuel tax increasing air pollution in Greece

2013-01-02
David Sherfinski _Washington DC Times_
replacing abdicated former speaker Boehner is not a mutiny

2013-01-02
Eric Golub _Washington DC Times_
new year, same old worthless, oath-breaking politicians
"President Barack Obama and a lap-dog Congress passed terrible legislation that makes America the illegitimate child of spendaholic parents California and Greece.   Those loving Detroit as a model of fiscal sanity will love the new spendasaurus."

2013-01-02
Kenneth Rapoza _Forbes_
more Indians came to USA in 2012
"A steady increase in [low-skilled] workers from India [were] shipped out to the United States in 2012, according to the the U.S. Embassy New Delhi.   Based on the number of H-1B visas, used for individuals to work legally in any industry in the U.S.A., more Indian nationals found employment in the U.S.A. than they did in 2011.   H-1B acceptances rose 15% to around 130K visas.   The U.S. State Department's annual report for fiscal year 2011 showed that worldwide (not just the 5 visa issuing posts in India), around 120K H category visas were issued to Indian nationals [out of 129,134 new H-1B visas and 312,082 H visas issued via US consular offices].   This number includes both workers and their dependent children and spouses.   The H-1B program is used largely by Indian IT companies hiring from abroad.   [Many] Americans within the industry have argued that companies like Infosys have actually used the visa program illegally as a means to under-cut wages.   [Business executives] have been concerned in recent months over stricter [though still extremely weak] rules for issuing H category visas in an effort to hire locally.   Over the last 12 months, India-based IT firms have seen their stock values erode.   Infosys is down 17.03% while competitor Wipro (WIT) is down 12.26%.   Their multi-national peers are doing much better by comparison.   Accenture is up 27% over the last 12 months and Cognizant is up 16.3%."

2013-01-02
Amity Shlaes _Forbes_
VAT, the little big tax -- history's warning

2013-01-02
John Stossel _Town Hall_
no regulation?   no problem

2013-01-02
Bob Barr _Town Hall_
domestic spying expansion bill sailed through corrupt congress
"Neither Congress nor the White House has proved itself capable of reaching a decision on how to begin trimming the $16.5T national debt with which these 2 institutions have saddled the American [tax-victims].   They even have been unable to come up with a reasonable measure to avoid the so-called 'fiscal cliff' they themselves constructed months ago.   Yet, when it comes to expanding the power of the government to spy on American citizens without warrants, both the House and the Senate last week fairly tripped over themselves in a rush to pass legislation doing just that; with President Obama almost gleefully waiting to sign the bill...   Harry Reid led the fight for surveillance..."

2013-01-02 (5773 Tebet 20)
Mark Clayton _Jewish World Review_
where do politicias stand on cyber security?

2013-01-02 (5773 Tebet 20)
Kathleen Hennessey & David Lauter _Jewish World Review_
fiscal cliff: US citizens lost... again

2013-01-02 (5773 Tebet 20)
Larry Gordon _Jewish World Review_
New university admissions applications becoming more stupid all the time

2013-01-02 (5773 Tebet 20)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
Why the 2nd amendment
Front Page magazine
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-03

2013-01-03 05:30PDT (08:30EDT) (12:30GMT) (14:30 Jerusalem)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
DoL home page
DoL OPA press releases
historical data
DoL regulations
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 495,588 in the week ending December 29, an increase of 40,459 from the previous week.   There were 540,057 initial claims in the comparable week in 2011.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.6% during the week ending December 22, a increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,293,218, an increase of 43,722 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 3.0% and the volume was 3,779,025.   The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending December 15 was 5,402,987, a decrease of 68,727 from the previous week.   There were 7,223,309 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2011.   Extended Benefits were only available in New York during the week ending December 15...   States reported 2,065,706 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending December 15, a decrease of 30,537 from the prior week.   There were 2,932,561 persons claiming EUC in the comparable week in 2011.   EUC weekly claims include first, second, third, and fourth tier activity.   [Note that the population used for calculating the "insured unemployment rate" (the divisor) changes roughly quarterly:
to 132,623,886 beginning 2007-10-06;
to 133,010,953 beginning 2008-01-05;
to 133,382,559 beginning 2008-04-05;
to 133,690,617 beginning 2008-07-05;
to 133,902,387 beginning 2008-10-04;
to 133,886,830 beginning 2009-01-03;
to 133,683,433 beginning 2009-04-04;
to 133,078,480 beginning 2009-07-04;
to 133,823,421 beginning 2009-10-03;
to 131,823,421 beginning 2009-10-17;
to 130,128,328 beginning 2010-01-02;
to 128,298,468 beginning 2010-04-03;
to 126,763,245 beginning 2010-07-03;
to 125,845,577 beginning 2010-09-25;
to 125,560,066 beginning 2011-01-15;
to 125,572,661 beginning 2011-04-02;
to 125,807,389 beginning 2011-07-02;
to 126,188,733 beginning 2011-10-01;
to 126,579,970 beginning 2012-01-01;
to 127,048,587 beginning 2012-04-07;
to 127,495,952 beginning 2012-07-14;
to 128,066,082 beginning 2012-10-06;
to 128,613,913 beginning 2013-01-05.]
EUC (Excel)
EB
graphs
more graphs

2013-01-03
Gary Wickert _PJ Media_
US government needs 12-step program to end spending addiction

2013-01-03
John Rosenberg _PJ Media_
Why can't US gun regs be more like Switzerland... or Texas?
"Switzerland requires all males between the ages of 20 and 30 with few exceptions to possess a government-issued rifle capable of automatic fire (the Sig 550) and/or the Sig 220 semi-automatic handgun for officers.   'Although there is more per capita firepower in Switzerland than any place in the world', Stephen Halbrook has observed, 'it is one of the safest places to be'."

2013-01-03
Anthony Watts
no statistically significant sign of human-caused global warming

2013-01-03
_Washington DC Times_
oath-breaker Joe BiteMe swears in 113th congress

2013-01-03
Willis Eschenbach
cause and effect

2013-01-03
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
banning high-capacity magazines will not save lives

2013-01-03
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
Do GOP's young-guns have the will and ability to reform the party?

2013-01-03
Roger L. Simon _PJ Medi_
Leftism: "Forget it, Jake.   It's ChinaTown."
"Leftism has devolved into a kind of scam run not only on others but also on the self.   Leftists are brilliant at convincing themselves of their own altruism and then broadcasting it to the public, thus providing cover for the most conventionally greedy and selfish behaviors.   We see that in our society all the time: the quondam Marxists of Hollywood, the media, and the academy blathering on about economic equality while living lives the Medici could not have dreamed of.   Part of this construct is a 'prevent game', a public persona and system erected so privilege cannot be questioned or under-mined.   A nomenklatura more successful and sophisticated than anything ever conceived in the Soviet Union.   The result of this is a highly stratified society.   As is well known but scarcely reported, blacks and Latinos have actually done worse under Obama than other groups.   Normally, that would be unconscionable, considering the rhetoric.   But as we know, it's all about the rhetoric.   Reality is unimportant -- an inconvenience."

2013-01-03
_CBS DC_
FBI data say hammers and clubs kill more people than rifles or shot-guns
Joe Newby: Examiner
Raven Clabough: New American
"In 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle but 496 murders committed with hammers and clubs. There were 356 murders in which a shot-gun was the deadly weapon of choice... According to Reuters, the FBI recorded 2.78M background checks during the month, surpassing the mark set in November of 2.01M checks -- about a 39% rise. The latest monthly figure was up 49% over December 2011, when the FBI performed a then-record 1.86M checks."

2013-01-03
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
wealth transfers are not a "free lunch"; they destroy wealth

2013-01-03 (5773 Tebet 21)
Nat Hentoff _Jewish World Review_
oath-breakker Sotomayor's blow to religious liberty

2013-01-03 (5773 Tebet 21)
Scott Powers _Jewish World Review_
NASA is quietly holding a going-out-of-business sale
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-04

2013-01-04
David Archibald
solar neutrons and the 1970s cooling period

2013-01-04
Carly Harrington _Knoxville TN News Sentinel_
family-owned aluminum foundry adapts to survive

2013-01-04
Bob Fowler _Knoxville TN News Sentinel_
South Korean auto parts firm expanding, hiring in Clinton, TN

2013-01-04
Leif Svalgaard
counting and measuring sun-spots

2013-01-04
Willis Eschenbach
beche de mer

2013-01-04
Jack Dunphy _PJ Media_
crime reports down in Los Angeles; local paper baffled
"'other likely factors include strict sentencing laws that, until recently, increased the number of people in prison; demographic shifts; and sociological influences.'...   In Los Angeles, as in the country generally, blacks commit more crimes per capita than Latinos, who commit more crimes than whites.   Thus, in those parts of Los Angeles where Latinos have supplanted blacks, crime has gone down accordingly...   In 2010, I attended a meeting where LAPD chief Charlie Beck estimated the number of illegal aliens in the city at 600K.   He recently put the figure at 750K, or roughly 19% of the city's population.   With this in mind, it doesn't require a great leap of logic to conclude that some significant number of crimes in the city go unreported.   But one crime that seldom goes unreported is murder, and in this category the numbers are easily verifiable.   Los Angeles set a record for murders back in 1992, when a staggering 1,092 people came to a violent end on the city's streets.   As of December 15 of this year, the figure was 289, roughly equal to the number of murders recorded in South L.A.'s 77th Street and Southeast Divisions in 1992.   And though the level of violence in South Los Angeles is nowhere near what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, there is some cause for alarm even among the otherwise encouraging news.   In 77th Street Division this year, there had been 50 homicides as of December 15, a 79% increase from the same period a year ago.   When crime in L.A. exploded in the 1980s, the explosion began in South Los Angeles and radiated outward.   Whether these numbers in 77th Street Division signal a similarly ominous trend remains to be seen.   The total number of homicides for the city is up only slightly this year, but it's worth noting that 11 of the city's 21 patrol divisions have seen increases.   Even as the number of homicides has increased in many parts of the city, overall serious crime has declined -- or increased only slightly -- in most of those 21 patrol divisions.   The notable exception has been Hollenbeck Division, on the city's east side, where Part I (i.e. serious) crime is up 19% from a year ago.   Residents of that area will not find encouragement in the way the LAPD has chosen to respond to this.   Many in the department, myself among them, would attribute the greater part of this increase in crime to the disruptions thrust upon that station's rank-and-file cops by a commanding officer who, to put it as mildly as I can, is lacking in many fundamental qualities of leadership.   Yet, for reasons perhaps explained here, she has continued to advance up the promotional ladder."

2013-01-04
Robert Spencer _PJ Media_
a sub-way murder and the violent Islamic industry

2013-01-04
Tom Howard _Billings MT Gazette_
oil extraction equipment manufacturer reducing staff
"Bay Ltd., a multinational construction, fabrication and maintenance contractor, purchased the former Holland loader manufacturing plant in west Billings in 2008 with plans to manufacture the massive steel modules, which are trucked to the Canadian oil sands.   The recession of 2008 slowed the company's plans in Billings.   But Bay Ltd. began hiring workers as business picked up late in 2011 and early 2012.   Bay Ltd.'s Billings presence eclipsed 200 workers last summer as the company worked to fill an order for 29 large steel structures used in the development of the Canadian oil sands.   In a June meeting with local officals, Bay Ltd. President Ken Luhan said the company would continue to go after new business after the order for the 29 modules was completed."

2013-01-04
Beryl Lieff Benderly _AAAS Science_
bordering on confusion: the only consensus is that the current system is "broken"
"This elite and visible unanimity, however, belied the tangle of issues revealed earlier in the day during the smaller, non-televised meeting where scholars from economics, political science, law, and public policy examined the likely difficulties of devising immigration policies that help the economy without harming immigrants or people who are already in the country.   Day-time speakers also considered the difficult job market facing many STEM workers, another issue that the 3 evening panelists' statements ignored...   University of Texas, Austin, political scientist Gary Freeman placed the politics of skilled immigration into the category that political scientists term 'client' politics, in which the benefits of particular governmental actions accrue to a small number of groups or individuals while the costs diffuse more widely over people who may not even realize that they are being harmed...   Many of the early-career scientists working in academe, for example, fail to distinguish between organizations that employ scientists in real jobs paying salaries commensurate with their skills and programs that 'train' more scientists at low pay, adding to the supply of job-seekers while doing nothing to create real jobs...   Jennifer Hunt, a labor economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.   'When the companies say they can't hire anyone, they mean that they can't hire anyone at the wage they want to pay.', she continued.   The current American system imposes 'no labor market tests' on the immigration of foreign workers, and in the IT industry, 'age discrimination is an open secret.', Hira added.   Employers 'don't have to look for Americans [and] can and do replace Americans.   No shortage is necessary.', and employers can 'pay below-market wages legally'...   Other experts propound a market-based approach that would require employers who claim shortages to buy rights to employ foreign workers at the going wage.   This would protect the home-grown work-force by making immigrant employees more expensive than comparable Americans, said economist Madeline Zavodny of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA.   And because it makes employers pay a premium to fill a job, it also tests whether shortages actually exist, she added.   All of these approaches beg another crucial question, speakers noted: how to define 'high skills'..."

2013-01-04
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
class war
"historically the American middle class has arisen precisely because capital development has allowed for people to participate in larger-scale wealth creation, benefiting themselves and their families.   Krugman, unfortunately, does not recognize the role of real productivity in creating wealth..."

2013-01-04
Rachel Hirshfeld _Arutz Sheva Israel National News_/_Agence France Presse_
millennium-old Jewish papers uncovered in Afghanistan
France 24
Straits Times
Toronto Ontario Canada Star
"Ben-Shammai said the collection is rich with documents, some in Arabic and some in Hebrew script in the Judaeo-Persian dialect, which was prevalent at the time, and also in Hebrew and Arabic.   In addition to being the first ever documentation of the religious, cultural and commercial life of the Jewish community in a central location on the trade route between China and the West, it also contains yet unseen commentary by 10th century commentator Saadia Gaon on the book of Isaiah.   'Until now, we had no documents testifying to the presence of Jews', in this part of the Persian cultural domain, Ben-Shammai said, according to AFP."

2013-01-04
R' Berel Wein _Torah.org_
The Makings of a Jewish Leader
"All of Jewish history, in fact all of human history, is nothing more than a collection of ironies, seeming coincidences and unexpected choices and events.   All human history is truly a province of God's inscrutable will...   great leaders may emerge from strange places and backgrounds...   Background, yichus, [lineage/]family pedigree, education and previous experience are all certainly to be taken into account when choosing a mate, an employee, a leader and anyone to whom great responsibilities are to be assigned.   But one should always be prepared for the unexpected..."

2013-01-04
Shlomo Katz_Torah.org_
A Time of Reflection
"sometimes, just by looking at a person, we can sense what traits are contained within his soul, as we read (Yeshayah 3:9), 'Their brazen countenance testifies against them.', and (Kohelet 8:1), 'A man's wisdom lights up his face.'" --- _Derech Chaim/The Way of Life_ "Introduction"
"a person should not become excited when he sees that he is attaining wisdom without being a person who chooses and seeks only truth.   Truth does not come from wisdom, and it [wisdom without truth] may be to a person's detriment, for HaShem reveals truth only to those who seek truth. In this regard, I cited the verses [in this week's parashah -- Exodus/Shemos/שְׁמוֹת/Shemuth/Names 4:22-23], 'So said HaShem, My firstborn son is Israel...   Behold, I shall kill your first-born son.'   Pharaoh was warned about the last plague first because it was the worst.   HaShem is above all in His power and no one can escape His Hand except through repentance.   Even great and harsh events cannot bring a person to truth and repentance unless he on a level where he is fit to repent...   The same is true of wisdom; if a person is not ready to recognize truth, wisdom will not help him attain truth..." --- R' Yechezkel Levenstein (1939) 5699 BeShalach, Monday night at Mir yeshiva, Poland

2013-01-04
R' Pinchas Winston _Torah.org_
Passing God's Tests
"if God tests you by placing you in spiritually challenging situations, we are told, not only can we pass the test, but God will even help us to pass it if we turn to Him for assistance.   A Divinely orchestrated spiritual test is designed to allow a person to pass, if he makes a reasonable effort to succeed...   what we define as passing a test and what God calls passing a test is not always the same thing."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-05
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-06

2013-01-06
Sean Barron _Youngstown OH Vindicator_
Boy Scouts find their ways at annual Klondike Derby

2013-01-06
Christopher Monckton
the logical case against climate panic

2013-01-06
Anthony Watts
does NOAA NCDC keep 2 sets of climate books for the USA?
"At issue is the difference between temperature data claims in the NCDC State of the Climate reports issued monthly and at year-end and the official NCDC climate data-base made available to the public...   In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there's a difference.   Some are quite significant.   In most cases, the data-base value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report.   Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over 2 years of reporting to the press and to the public...   the technology gap tends to favor more of a certain kind of station, such as airports, over other traditional stations.   NCDC knows this, and reported about it."

2013-01-06
Faine Greenwood _Global Post_
Yet another study concludes pay is more closely correlated with handsomeness than productivity?
"attractive men make as much as $32,150 a year more than their less foxy brothers...   Melbourne University researchers Andrew Leigh and Jeff Borland found that men with looks rated 'above-average' commanded an average salary of $81,750, as opposed to men rated as below average, who made a relatively measly $49,600, wrote the Sydney Morning Herald...   Study co-author Andrew Leigh, a former economist with Australian National University, said the effect is especially evident when it comes to political candidates...   The research reflects other international surveys on the same topic, which have found that both height and attractive features pay off for men in the work place.   Recent University of Texas research, reported in Business Insider, found that unusually attractive people earn 3% to 4% more than their plainer counterparts, and are more likely to get hired and receive promotions."

2013-01-06
Ed Driscoll _PJ Media_
scientists discover unbreakable 90-year-old moebius strip
"the idiot child that is Western civ continues rampaging through her room, tearing everything that made it comfortable and useful and a good place, and throwing it out the window."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-07

2013-01-07
Zach Benoit _Billings MT Gazette_
US nursing students do charity work in third world

2013-01-07
David Archibald
the potential impact of volcanic over-printing of the Eddy Minimum

2013-01-07
Roger Kimball _PJ Media_
government extortion vs. liberty

2013-01-07
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
"booms" and "trickle-down" spending
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-08

2013-01-08
Donna la Framboise
more UN IPCC AR5: the secret Santa leak

2013-01-08
Thomas E. Brewton
leftist attacks on widespread arms ownership and leftist hedonism

2013-01-08
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
The hipster facade: the hypocrisy of the hippie-dippie 1960s left
"America has always been a country of self-invention. Yet there used to be some correlation between the life that one lived and the life that one professed.   It was hard to be a phony in the grimy reality of the coal mine, the steel mill, the south 40 acres, or atop a girder over Manhattan."
Bryan Preston: PJ Media: Kerry & Hegel products of 1960s hippie-dippie VietNam war opposition generation

2013-01-08
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
leftists ramping up opposition to Keystone XL pipe-line, fracking... anything to impair USA energy supplies

2013-01-08
Barry Rubin _PJ Media_
Noxious nominations: the 4 horsemen of the American foreign policy apocalypse

2013-01-08
Rich Baehr _PJ Media_
Rahm Emanuel is out of excuses for Chicago's high murder rate

2013-01-08
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
Would you meet your killer half-way?

2013-01-08
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
moral obligation fraud

2013-01-08 (5773 Tebet 26)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
the role of "educators"
"Today, I see our own educators playing a similar role in creating a mindset that under-mines American society.   Schools were once thought of as places where a society's knowledge and experience were passed on to the younger generation.   But, about a hundred years ago, professor John Dewey of Columbia University came up with a very different conception of education -- one that has spread through American schools of education, and even influenced education in countries over-seas.   John Dewey saw the role of the teacher, not as a transmitter of a society's culture to the young, but as an agent of change -- someone strategically placed, with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society...   This misuse of schools to undermine one's own society is not something confined to the United States or even to our own time.   It is common in Western countries for educators, the media and the intelligentsia in general, to single out Western civilization for special condemnation for sins that have been common to the human race, in all parts of the world, for thousands of years.   Meanwhile, all sorts of fictitious virtues are attributed to non-Western societies, and their worst crimes are often passed over in silence...   In France between the two World Wars, the teachers' union decided that schools should replace patriotism with internationalism and pacifism.   Books that told the story of the heroic defense of French soldiers against the German invaders at Verdun in 1916, despite suffering massive casualties, were replaced by books that spoke impartially about the suffering of all soldiers -- both French and German -- at Verdun.   Germany invaded France again in 1940, and this time the world was shocked when the French surrendered after just 6 weeks of fighting -- especially since military experts expected France to win.   But 2 decades of undermining French patriotism and morale had done their work.   American schools today are similarly undermining American society as one unworthy of defending, either domestically or internationally.   If there were nuclear attacks on American cities, how long would it take for us to surrender, even if we had nuclear superiority -- but were not as willing to die as our enemies were?"
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-09

2013-01-09
Anthony Watts
solar activity was down in December
NASA: "tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate"

2013-01-09
Anthony Watts
"good IT fairy" follows the "secret Santa" of UN IPCC AR5 leaks

2013-01-09
Jed Graham _Investor's Business Daily_
Socialist Insecurity Abomination is a big deficit driver
"The Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next decade [Socialist Insecurity's] annual cash deficit will rise by nearly $100G, reaching $155G a year.   The cost of servicing the extra public debt tied to cashing in $1T worth of [Socialist Insecurity's] intragovernmental IOUs over the 10 years would add $40G to the deficit in 2022 alone, an IBD analysis finds.   Overall, [Socialist Insecurity] would account for nearly $200G in annual deficits or nearly 20% of the $1T-plus deficit that would occur under current policies, including fiscal-cliff tax hikes."

2013-01-09
_Investor's Business Daily_
"gun-control" extremists attack law-abiding citizens

2013-01-09
Paul Sperry _Investor's Business Daily_
Egyptian press confirms Washington DC is infiltrated by violence-prone Islamics
"The respected Egyptian magazine Rose al-Youssef has identified at least 6 Brotherhood-tied agents of influence who have worked into positions inside the [Obummer regime].   The weekly publication, founded in 1925, said the operatives have turned the White House 'from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood', an Egyptian-based jihadist movement that supports Hamas and al-Qaida.   President Obama backed the Brotherhood's take-over of Egypt and has courted its front groups in America.   Secret Service records show their representatives making hundreds of visits to the White House since 2009."
Investigative Project: CAIR-Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood links
Discover the Networks: Muslim Brotherhood (MB)

2013-01-09
Christina Rexrode _San Jose CA Mercury News_/_AP_
Morgan Stanley to dump 1,600: is age discrimination involved?
"focus on senior ranks...   In December, Citigroup said it would cut 11K...   Morgan Stanley...As of Sept. 30, the bank had about 57,700 jobs, down about 7% from the roughly 62,200 it had the year before."

2013-01-09
Alec Rawls
"Constant emission commitment", "consensus" vs. reality

2013-01-09
Faine Greenwood _Global Post_
congress-critters less popular than root canals, NFL replacement referees, head lice, colonoscopies, carnies, traffic jams, cockroaches, France, Genghis Khan, used-car salesmen and Brussel sprouts
"the 112th Congress holds a remarkably horrid 9% approval rating from the general public...   On the bright side, pollsters did find that Congress had more fans than: John Edwards (in a landslide), the Kardashians, lobbyists, North Korea, the ebola virus, Lindsay Lohan (a real nail-biter), Fidel Castro, playground bullies (also close), meth labs (paging Walter White!), communism (ironically enough), and gonorrhea..."

2013-01-09
Douglas A. McIntyre & Michael B. Sauter _24/7 Wall Street_
10 most-hated companies in the USA

2013-01-09
Don Bauder _San Diego CA Reader_
scientists and engineers dislike H-1B visa; bosses gloat
"American engineers, scientists, and mathematicians can convincingly show that they are not in short supply, as corporations claim.   But increasingly, politicians are siding with big business, which wants the government to loosen restrictions on the H-1B visa program, by which low- to mid-level technologists come to the United States each year from foreign countries...   employers complain that there is a shortage of skilled workers...   [some employers] mentioned that they must recruit at [only] 50 college campuses in the United States to find 100 STEM employees...   The partnership claims that 76% of all voters favor reform of the skilled worker visa laws, including 87% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 68% of Tea Party supporters.   [Of course, some believe reform would have to involve increasing the numbers of visas while many others believe reform would have to involve significantly decreasing the numbers of visas.]...   Nelson, for example, points out that under the law, H-1B workers are supposed to be paid a prevailing wage.   But 'the definition of ''prevailing wage is so loop-hole-laden'' that the H-1Bs' pay is at least 20% [below] that of comparable Americans 'and it may be closer to 50%.', he says...   'The under-payment of H-1Bs is well-established fact, not rumor, anecdote or ideology.', says the web-site of professor Norman Matloff, who teaches computer science at the University of California at Davis.   Such low wages bring down the overall salary level for American engineers and computer specialists, permitting companies to pile up profits, claiming there is a labor shortage.   'There is no tech labor shortage.', says Matloff, and 'no [poll or] study, other than those sponsored by the industry, has ever shown a shortage.'   Says Matloff, 'The world's 'best and brightest should be welcomed, but only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are in that league.'"

2013-01-09
Bob Barr _Town Hall_
Chicago's power-mad flaming radical leftist god-fadduh Rahm goes after private arms

2013-01-09
John Stossel _Town Hall_
a man's home is his government subsidy
"HUD wants to spend millions more to renew Section 8 housing vouchers that help poor people pay rent.   The Section 8 program ballooned during the 1990s to 'solve' a previous government failure: crime-ridden public housing.   Rent vouchers allow the feds to disperse tenants from failed projects into private residencies.   There, poor people would learn good habits from middle-class people.   It was a reasonable idea.   But, as always, there were unintended consequences.   'On paper, Section 8 seems like it should be successful.', says Donald Gobin, a Section 8 landlord in New Hampshire.   'But unless tenants have some unusual fire in their belly, the program hinders upward mobility.'"

2013-01-09
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
a barbarous inflation
"Austrians believe that value is subjective and depends upon what individuals are willing to give up in order to obtain something.   Now, we do believe that laws of economics are immutable because they are based upon human action...   the Law of Marginal Utility, the Law of Scarcity, and Opportunity Cost...   Austrians have favored gold as money...because over time gold supplies are not easily manipulated, which means governments find it harder to debase the money that people are holding."

2013-01-09 (5773 Tebet 27)
John Rosemond _Jewish World Review_
Children need courage, not braggadocio
"the research finds that high self-esteem is associated with fear of failure.   The child who has been praised indiscriminately by parents and teachers -- which has been the unfortunate lot of many kids over the past 40 or so years -- may tend to shy away from an unfamiliar challenge.   On the other hand, he may overestimate his abilities and often end up failing, which is why the research also finds that people with high self-esteem are especially prone to depression...   Courage, on the other hand, is the willingness to take on a task even if one knows he or she may not succeed.   It is the willingness to fight the good fight even when the odds are stacked against you."

2013-01-09 (5773 Tebet 27)
Nat Hentoff _Jewish World Review_
more of our doctors are losing independence and personal responsibility

2013-01-09 (5773 Tebet 27)
_Jewish World Review_
Muslim mathematician convicted of beating her son to death for not memorizing the Koran
"Sara Ege, a 33-year-old mathematics graduate from India..."

2013-01-09 (5773 Tebet 27)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
dishonest "educators"
"Cheating orders came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers...   Atlanta's not alone.   There have been investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Washington [DC]...   for at least 15 years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence Mumford, who's now under indictment, between $1.5K and $3K to send someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher certification in 40 states.   Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the University of Arkansas, said, '(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or scores.' &bsp; She added, 'The test is far too undemanding for a prospective teacher...   The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable teachers.'...   According to a study titled 'Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by Race/Ethnicity Group' (2011 March), the percentages of blacks who passed the Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41%, 44% and 37%, respectively.   For white test takers, the respective percentages were 82%, 80% and 78%.   This test-taking fraud is merely the tip of a much larger iceberg.   It highlights the educational fraud being perpetrated on blacks during their K-12 education.   Four or 5 years of college -- even majoring in education, an undemanding subject -- cannot make up for those 13 years of rotten education.   Then they're given a college degree that is fraudulent, seeing as some have difficulty passing a test that shouldn't be challenging to even a 12th-grader.   Here's my question: If they manage to get through the mockery of teacher certification, at what schools do you think they will teach?"
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-10

2013-01-10 05:30PDT (08:30EDT) (12:30GMT) (14:30 Jerusalem)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
DoL home page
DoL OPA press releases
historical data
DoL regulations
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 552,043 in the week ending January 5, an increase of 61,944 from the previous week.   There were 646,219 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9% during the week ending December 29, an increase of 0.3 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,659,813, an increase of 375,371 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 3.3% and the volume was 4,161,063.   The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending December 22 was 5,356,271, a decrease of 51,335 from the previous week.   There were 7,333,322 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2012.   Extended Benefits were not available in any state during the week ending December 22...   States reported 1,991,454 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending December 22, a decrease of 74,252 from the prior week.   There were 2,926,676 persons claiming EUC in the comparable week in 2012.   EUC weekly claims include first, second, third, and fourth tier activity.   [Note that the population used for calculating the "insured unemployment rate" (the divisor) changes roughly quarterly:
to 132,623,886 beginning 2007-10-06;
to 133,010,953 beginning 2008-01-05;
to 133,382,559 beginning 2008-04-05;
to 133,690,617 beginning 2008-07-05;
to 133,902,387 beginning 2008-10-04;
to 133,886,830 beginning 2009-01-03;
to 133,683,433 beginning 2009-04-04;
to 133,078,480 beginning 2009-07-04;
to 133,823,421 beginning 2009-10-03;
to 131,823,421 beginning 2009-10-17;
to 130,128,328 beginning 2010-01-02;
to 128,298,468 beginning 2010-04-03;
to 126,763,245 beginning 2010-07-03;
to 125,845,577 beginning 2010-09-25;
to 125,560,066 beginning 2011-01-15;
to 125,572,661 beginning 2011-04-02;
to 125,807,389 beginning 2011-07-02;
to 126,188,733 beginning 2011-10-01;
to 126,579,970 beginning 2012-01-01;
to 127,048,587 beginning 2012-04-07;
to 127,495,952 beginning 2012-07-14;
to 128,066,082 beginning 2012-10-06;
to 128,613,913 beginning 2013-01-05.]
EUC (Excel)
EB
graphs
more graphs

2013-01-10
_Fox_/_Dow Jones_
Tata Steel produced record 2.3M tons in October-December quarter
"India's third-largest domestic steel producer said in a statement that crude steel output rose 16.7% to 2.1M tons, while sales grew 19% to about 1.9M tons."

2013-01-10
Jason Noble _Des Moines IA Register_
Iowa DoT advocates of adhering to federal immigration law are under attack by illegal aliens
"The Iowa Department of Transportation's interpretation of [a corrupt, unconstitutional Obummer regime] action allowing some [illegal] immigrants to...remain in the U.S. [simply by refusing to prosecute or carry out the deportation process] came under [hateful, mean-spirited] and bipartisan criticism during a hearing at the Capitol on Wednesday."

2013-01-10
Howard Nemerov _PJ Media_
rifle ban proposals have little to do with defending against homicides (with graphs and tables)
"The following graphs resulted from collating data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, and Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms. Between 1991 and 2011, civilian rifle ownership increased from an estimated 74M to 112M (51% growth). During that same period, the number of rifle homicide victims declined 57%..."

2013-01-10
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
Who is worse: Algore or Bernie Madoff?
"Whatever else he is, Gore is arguably a business genius when it comes to generating massive amounts of income from dubious enterprises and, unlike Bernie Madoff, getting away with it."

2013-01-10
Bob Tisdale
jiggered "extreme weather" stats in the NOAA NCDC report on climate

2013-01-10
Andrea Coombes _MarketWatch_
more Socialist Insecurity Abomination scamming to be expected in 2013
"Adopting chained CPI would reduce about 20% of [Socialist Insecurity's] long-term shortfall. That's because it cuts [Socialist Inecurity] benefits by providing a lower annual cost-of-living adjustment. With chained CPI, inflation grows about 0.3 percentage points less per year than the current inflation measure. (Put simply, unlike the current price index, chained CPI assumes that consumers react to rising prices by shifting their spending; they buy similar goods that are cheaper.)   A move to chained CPI represents a small hit to benefits in the short term, but as COLAs add up over time, the effect of the benefit cut grows. Some proposals suggest that, to reduce that hit on the nation's elderly, people who've received benefits for 15 or 20 years get a benefit increase if the chained CPI is adopted. Also, a move to chained CPI could affect an array of government provisions currently linked to the CPI, including the tax code's annual inflation adjustments. In other words, it's a tax hike, too."

2013-01-10
_Knoxville TN News-Sentinel_
Dayton, OH tops happiest workers in USA list
Roger Harris
contact Roger Harris
Career Bliss
"Dayton, OH; Knoxville, TN; Honolulu, HI; Memphis, TN; Pittsburgh, PA..."

2013-01-10
Debbie Chestnut _Cumberland PA Sentinel_
"His Hands" ministry in Carlisle helps people restore transportation
His Hands auto repair ministry

2013-01-10
Horst-Joachim Lu¨decke, Rainer Link, & Friedrich-Karl Ewert
analysis of 2249 surface temperature records

2013-01-10
Andrea Koncz & Kevin Gray _NACE_
starting offers up 3.4% for new grads
press releases
grump grump grump. They keep changing their categories with almost every press release, making the numbers in one year not comparable to those in another year...jgo

2013-01-10 (5773 Tebet 28)
Victor Davis Hanson _Jewish World Review_
When did the pols start calling big deficits good?
"As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits.   In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8T less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: 'Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally.   Leadership means that the buck stops here.'   In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush's continued Keynesian borrowing: 'The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children...so that we now have over $9T of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30K for every man, woman and child.   That's irresponsible.   It's unpatriotic.'   Strong words.   But so worried was Obama about the debt that just 2 weeks after he took office, he promised still more: 'And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office...   I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay.'   In his first term, Obama has added more than $5T to the national debt, borrowing more in four years than the 'irresponsible' and 'unpatriotic' Bush did in 8.   In fact, Obama is on schedule to add more total debt by the end of his two terms than all prior presidents combined."

2013-01-10 (5773 Tebet 28)
Paul Greenberg _Jewish World Review_
Hold the applause
"the politicos stood back, admired their shoddy work, and hailed it as some kind of great victory...   at last, a way had been found to make 'millionaires and billionaires' begin to pay 'their fair share'.   Unless, that is, the millionaires and billionaires happen to be among those whose tax breaks were carefully protected in the small print of this midnight raid on the U.S. Treasury and the credulity of the American public.   Millionaires and billionaires like those who own NASCAR race-tracks, rail-roads, foreign subsidiaries of American corporations, or businesses located on Indian reservations or in a favored part of New York.   Or the billionaires and millionaires who are Hollywood moguls, or own plants in American Samoa (Starkist Tuna) or distilleries in Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands (Bacardi).   Or if those millionaires and billionaires have a stake in various 'green' industries like plug-in motorcycles, wind power or celluloid biofuels, whatever those are.   Or if said billionaires and millionaires have invested in enterprises like [notorious US worker displacers] General Electric and Siemens, which also got their share of tax breaks in this something-for-everybody bill...   There is always a touch of irony to the names politicians assign their sneakiest proposals, but the official title of this deal rushed through Congress at the midnight hour is more ironic than most: The American Taxpayer Relief Act, which turns out to relieve some well-heeled [tax-victims] most of all."

2013-01-10 (5773 Tebet 28)
Larry Elder _Jewish World Review_
the food stamp economy

2013-01-10 (5773 Tebet 28)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
guns and freedom
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty.   It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linch-pin of resistance to tyranny...   As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is.   Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us.   A natural right is an area of individual human behavior -- like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy -- immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don't need the government's permission."

2013-01-10 (5773 Tebet 28)
Ann Coulter _Jewish World Review_
doing the research the NYTimes refuses to do
"There is an academic, peer-reviewed, long-term study of the effect of various public policies on public, multiple shootings in all 50 states over a 20-year period performed by renowned economists at the University of Chicago and Yale, William Landes and John Lott.   It concluded that the only policy to reduce the incidence of, and casualties from, mass shootings are concealed-carry laws.   The Times will never mention this study...   Here's a tip: High-crime areas are often bristling with bullet-proof glass, heavy-duty locks, gated windows and armed guards.   The bullet-proof glass doesn't cause the crime; it's a response to crime...   (In any event, the Lott-Landes study didn't recommend armed guards, but armed citizens.)...   Rebecca Peters, a George Soros-funded, Australian anti-gun activist so extreme that she had to resign from the International Action Network on Small Arms so as not to discredit the U.N.-recognized organization -- which isn't easy to further discredit...   Needless to say, the effect of Australia's gun ban has been extensively researched by Australian academics.   As numerous studies have shown: After the gun ban, gun homicides in Australia did not decline any more than they were expected to without a gun ban.   Thus, for example, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, the homicide rate has been in steady decline from 1969 to the present, with only one marked uptick in 1998-99 -- right after the gun ban was enacted...   the number of accidental firearms deaths sky-rocketed after Australia's 1997 gun ban, although the law included stringent gun training requirements...   Australian academics have already examined the mass murder rate by firearm by comparing Australia to a control country: New Zealand.   (Do they teach 'control groups' at Harvard?)   New Zealand is strikingly similar to Australia.   Both are isolated island nations, demographically and socio-economically similar.   Their mass murder rate before Australia's gun ban was nearly identical: From 1980 to 1996, Australia's mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100K people and New Zealand's was 0.0050 incidents per 100K people.   The principal difference is that, post-1997, New Zealand remained armed to the teeth -- including with guns that were suddenly banned in Australia.   While it's true that Australia has had no more mass shootings since its gun ban, neither has New Zealand, despite continuing to be massively armed."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-11

2013-01-11
Tom Blumer _PJ Media_
media say "don't believe your lying eyes"
"Associated Press stories on the economy and the fiscal cliff during the previous week tell us that we're in for 4 more years of having the so-called 'essential global news network' and the rest of the establishment press tell us that we aren't really seeing what we can see right in front of us.   Meanwhile, their headlines and the stories they choose to ignore demonstrate a dogged determination to keep those who don't follow the news closely from seeing what they don't want them to see.   The AP's headline writers and Christopher Rugaber already had their minds made up about what last Friday's Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] would mean even before it was released."

2013-01-11
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
Race-, Class-, Gender-Studies crowd out American history at universities
"The study found that U.S. history courses at both universities strongly emphasize race, class, and gender (RCG) in reading requirements.   Fully 78% of faculty members at UT emphasize race, class, and gender, while 50% of faculty members at Texas A&M do the same.   Likewise, 78% of UT professors have special research interests in RCG, while 64% at A&M do too."
NAS report "Recasting History" (pdf)"

2013-01-11
Anthony Watts & Tom Nelson
barking madness at the NYTimes

2013-01-11
Mary Pickett _Billings MT Gazette_
"Downton Abbey" is close to Wyoming rancher's heart
"Highclere Castle, the architectural star of the period drama, is owned by Big Horn, WY, rancher Paul Wallop's first cousin, the Earl of Carnarvon.   The links between the Canyon Ranch that Paul Wallop now runs and the English country estate began 123 years ago.   Wallop's great-grand-father, Oliver Henry Wallop, was the son of the Earl of Portsmouth, a British peer.   Oliver Wallop was one of many 'remittance men', younger sons of British families who wouldn't inherit a title or land, moving to Montana and Wyoming in the 1800s.   The men were subsidized by payments, or remittances, from home..."

2013-01-11
Rusty Weiss _Freedom Works_
"journalists" being trained in how to promote ObummerDoesn'tCare
"Back in 2010, an agreement between a [pro-ObummerDoesn'tCare] foundation and a society of business journalists had been questioned as a 'cosy propaganda arrangement'.   This arrangement has recently continued through sponsorship funding and training efforts that will provide journalists with 'specialized education in health care reporting'.   In the summer of 2010, the Commonwealth Fund, a self-described 'progressive' [i.e. extreme leftist] organization, announced a $15K grant being awarded to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW).   It was the third such grant awarded to the SABEW since 2007, but the first to have the express purpose of providing 'a series of education programs focusing on aspects of the nations new health-care [perversion] law'.   The organization has a history of reporting only favorable accounts of the [ObummerDoesn'tCare] legislation..."

2013-01-11
Tom Lutey _Billings MT Gazette_
Politics in 2013 sticky for sugar beet farmers

2013-01-11
Shlomo Katz _Torah.org_
Shabbat: Source of Faith
"I shall take you out *from under the burdens of Egypt*, refers to a type of oppression that imposed a special burden...   This also includes forcing people to perform tasks for which they were over-qualified, for there is nothing more frustrating for a highly-skilled person than to have to perform menial tasks that do not utilize his skills and training.   I shall rescue you *from their service* refers to the frustration of having to use ones skills solely for the benefit of another nation (their service) and not in the service of one's own people.   I shall redeem you is addressed to those of Bnei Yisrael who were bothered more by the attempts to subjugate their spirits rather than by physical oppression.   For them, it was irrelevant whether the servitude was back-breaking or not, since any form of subjugation to a foreign power was unacceptable."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-12
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-13

2013-01-13
Jan H. Kennedy _Canton OH Reporter_
Obummer admin continues to double-down on failed policies
"The unemployment numbers continue to drop in Ohio and the oil and gas boom has created jobs for a lot of workers in the last year, but many remain unemployed and don't have skills for the jobs that are available.   Stark State College, with the help of an H-1B Technical Skills Training Grant from the federal Department of Labor (through the Ohio Board of Regents and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services), is offering technical training assistance.   The goal is to raise information technology skills of the unemployed and under-employed.   Courses will focus on specific non-credit programs leading to industry certifications, including web technologies, systems support, network security and virtualization.   Stark State also will pattern courses with input from local businesses that need specific skills.   The grant is for two years, and renewable for up to 4 years.   Individuals who want more information on the program, and corporate clients looking for recruiting help in identifying skilled employees, can call Chad Henderson at 330-494-6170, ext. 5310."

2013-01-13
Anthony Watts
record low temperatures on west coast

2013-01-13
Chris Horner
court-ordered FOIA compliance from EPA is due on Monday

2013-01-13
Clayton E. Cramer _PJ Media_
public, media ignore most murders
"In 2011, there were just under 14K murders in the U.S.A.; all the mass murders combined each year are less than 1% of that. Why do they get so much attention?"
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-14

2013-01-14
Kartikay Mehrotra & Anoop Agrawal _Bloomberg_
Tata bodyshop's profits up 15%, sales up 22%, net income up 23%
KFMB CBS

2013-01-14
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
the future of Civil War history entails...

2013-01-14
Jonathan Feldman _Information Week_/_UBM_
How to scare off your best computer wranglers
"Most of the high performers I work with seek 3 things in their work: mastery of their craft, as much autonomy as they need and a purpose...   When that's the case, when a company's most talented and committed employees aren't treated as well as customers, they quietly move on and rarely get replaced by people of an equal caliber."

2013-01-14
Anthony Watts
diatoms and "red cells" may have been found in meteorite which came down in Sri Lanka in December

2013-01-14
Jimmy Settle & Chris Smith _Knoxville TN News Sentinel_
Hemlock Semiconductor dumping 300-400 Clarksville employees: Cites over-supply of polysilicone, trade conflicts with Red China
Clarksville TN Leaf-Chronicle

2013-01-14
Willis Eschenbach
solar co-generation and bureaucratic price-setting

2013-01-14
Brian McNicoll
first set of EPA e-mail messages released under FOIA court order prove they've "gone bunker"
"Problems begin with the cover letter, which states not the promised (to the court) first delivery of 'approximately 3K' but 'more than 2,100 e-mails received or sent' by Jackson, on what EPA insists is her one non-public account...   [only] two-thirds of the...agency's commitment [for this first batch]...   Instructively, in EPA's view, tempting Congress, the court and public opinion risks less fall-out than revealing 'Richard Windsor's' correspondence."

2013-01-14
Andrew Klavan _PJ Media_
What we think about when we are talking about armaments

2013-01-14
Bryan Preston _PJ Media_
Are Chicago's high murder rates connected to its policies of sanctuary for illegal aliens?

2013-01-14
Andrea Coombes _MarketWatch_
10 tips for "boomers" to become entrepreneurs
"Only about half of new companies make it past their 5th year, according to the BLS...   Of new entrepreneurs in 2011: 21% were aged 55 to 64, up from 14% in 1996; 28% were aged 45 to 54, up from 24%; 22% were aged 35-44, down from 27%; 29% were aged 20 to 34, down from 35%."

2013-01-14
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
Japan steps in it

2013-01-14 (5773 Shebet 03)
George Friedman _Jewish World Review_
now, US colleges and universities need affirmative action for non-leftist professors
"At the 8 Ivy League schools, for example, a whopping 96% of faculty and staff who made campaign donations gave to President Obama's re-election bid.   At Columbia University, 650 employees wrote checks for the Obama campaign, while only 21 made donations to Mitt Romney.   And at Brown, 129 faculty members gave to Mr. Obama, and just one staff member -- that's right, a single individual -- donated to Mr. Romney...   At the University of Wisconsin, only 4.5% of faculty and staff donations since 2011 have gone to Republicans.   At the University of Connecticut, just 3% of campaign donations went to the GOP."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-15

2013-01-15
Chris Horner
Obummer regime's EPA doubles-down on failed "Richard Windsor" e-mail stone-walling
"In EPA's first production of Lisa Jackson's secondary or 'alias' e-mail account traffic in what is now known as the 'Richard Windsor' FOIA law-suit, EPA has apparently decided to not search Richard Windsor account(s)."

2013-01-15
Luke Bolar & David Vitter
senator David Vitter calls content of first installment EPA FOIA release "fishy"
"'The EPA needs to honor the [recidivist oath-breaking] president's pledge of transparency and release these documents without redaction of the Administrator's e-mail address -- a big first step toward removing the blanket of secrecy in this agency.'...   Among the most important of questions is whether EPA made a material misrepresentation to Congress when it responded to House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chairman Ralph Hall on 2012 December 12.   In this response to Congress, the EPA Associate Administrator cited a long-standing practice for Agency Administrators to use 2 e-mail accounts, 1 for public use and 1 for 'everyday, working e-mail[s]'.   Evidence of EPA precedent for multiple e-mail accounts is defined in a 2008 memo to the National Archives and Records Administration, which explained that 'secondary e-mail accounts are configured so the account holder's name appears in the sent by field'.   However, if this were the case, then there would be no need to redact the e-mail address as EPA routinely releases e-mails that contain 'Lisa P. Jackson' in the 'to' or 'sent' fields and it would not be considered to be 'personal information'."

2013-01-15
Rick Moran _PJ Media_
Are leftists crazy, evil, or just irresponsible?
"reality is not the way many of us would describe life in Washington, DC."

2013-01-15
Michael Walsh _PJ Media_
local and state opposition to unconstitutional federal government activities

2013-01-15
Ashley Herzog _Town Hall_
has USA become an idiocracy?
"As Mark Bauerlein revealed in his aptly named book _The Dumbest Generation_, less than 10% of young people attend plays, ballets, or musical performances, only 23% visited a museum in the last year, and a record low number of us read for fun."

2013-01-15
Neal Boortz _Town Hall_
pres. Obummer's "disarm the victims" movement

2013-01-15
Michael Lombardi _Profit Confidential_
Why execs will cut jobs at an accelerated rate in 2013

2013-01-15 (5773 Shebet 04)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
Leftism versus Blacks
Town Hall
"San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its [leftism].   But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city's total population has grown.   Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city.   The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by [leftists].   [Leftists] try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws.   Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.   The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the [leftists'] expansion of the welfare state.   Most black children grew up in homes with 2 parents during all that time but most grow up with only 1 parent today...   [leftists] take positions that make them look good and feel good -- and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake...   'gun control' laws do not in fact reduce crimes committed with guns.   Cities with some of the tightest gun control laws in the nation have murder rates far above the national average.   In the middle of the 20th century, New York had far more restrictive gun control laws than London, but London had far less gun crime.   Yet gun crimes in London skyrocketed after severe gun control laws were imposed over the next several decades...   within walking distance of the Supreme Court [is] an all-black high school that had scored higher than two-thirds of the city's white high schools taking the same test -- way back in 1899!   But who cares about facts, when you are on a [leftist] crusade that makes you feel morally superior?"
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-16

2013-01-16
Peter H. Milliken _Youngstown OH Vindicator_
Charity kills, sentenced to 7 years in prison

2013-01-16
"weaver"
STEM kiss of death

2013-01-16
Mark Thornton _Ludwig von Mises Institute_
Where the inflation is

2013-01-16
Benny Peiser
new British meteorology office botch

2013-01-16
_Town Hall_/_AP_
USA defense leaders warn congress-critters of "hollow force"

2013-01-16
Katie Pavlich _Town Hall_
pres. Obummer's hoplophobic orders are "wrong-headed"

2013-01-16
Ken Blackwell _Town Hall_
pres. Obummer's diktat: displacing Jews
"Jews have lived among us from the time they first arrived on these shores.   A small Jewish community came to New Amsterdam (New York) in 1654, then under Dutch rule.   There has never been a time in American life as an independent nation when Jews have not been a part of our people."

2013-01-16
Bob Barr _Town Hall_
mayor Bloomberg, M.D.

2013-01-16
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
second term reckonings
"[Obummer] either has misread his re-election as a mandate (e.g., Republicans maintained control of the House and the majority of state governorships and legislatures; [Obummer], unlike most second-term presidents, received fewer votes than in 2008), or he believes that his [extreme leftist] legacy lies in ramming through change by any means necessary to obtain results that are neither possible through legislative compromise nor supported by majorities of the American people."

2013-01-16 (5773 Shebet 05)
George Friedman _Jewish World Review_
avoiding wars that never end

2013-01-16 (5773 Shebet 05)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
Are guns the problem?
Town Hall
Biloxi AL Sun Herald
"When I attended primary and secondary school -- during the 1940s and 1950s -- one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today.   Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws.   My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements.   People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped.   Dr. John Lott, author of _More Guns, Less Crime_, reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.   They carried their rifles to school on the subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved their rifles after school for target practice.   Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school and sometimes storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on school grounds.   Often a youngster's 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle [or shot-gun], given to him by his father...   According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828K non-fatal criminal incidents in schools.   There were 470K thefts and 359K violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious.   In the same year, 145,100 public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were threatened...   For well over a half-century, the nation's [leftists] -- along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts -- have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values...   Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society...   FBI crime statistics show that more people are murdered by clubs and hammers than rifles and shot-guns."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-17

2013-01-17 05:30PDT (08:30EDT) (12:30GMT) (14:30 Jerusalem)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
DoL home page
DoL OPA press releases
historical data
DoL regulations
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 555,708 in the week ending January 12, an increase of 2,360 from the previous week.   There were 525,422 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0% during the week ending January 5, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,850,441, an increase of 170,067 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 3.2% and the volume was 4,109,127.   The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending December 29 was 5,821,966, an increase of 465,547 from the previous week.   There were 7,826,846 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2011.   Extended Benefits were not available in any state during the week ending December 29...   States reported 2,059,438 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending December 29, an increase of 67,984 from the prior week.   There were 3,026,855 persons claiming EUC in the comparable week in 2011.   EUC weekly claims include first, second, third, and fourth tier activity.   [Note that the population used for calculating the "insured unemployment rate" (the divisor) changes roughly quarterly:
to 132,623,886 beginning 2007-10-06;
to 133,010,953 beginning 2008-01-05;
to 133,382,559 beginning 2008-04-05;
to 133,690,617 beginning 2008-07-05;
to 133,902,387 beginning 2008-10-04;
to 133,886,830 beginning 2009-01-03;
to 133,683,433 beginning 2009-04-04;
to 133,078,480 beginning 2009-07-04;
to 133,823,421 beginning 2009-10-03;
to 131,823,421 beginning 2009-10-17;
to 130,128,328 beginning 2010-01-02;
to 128,298,468 beginning 2010-04-03;
to 126,763,245 beginning 2010-07-03;
to 125,845,577 beginning 2010-09-25;
to 125,560,066 beginning 2011-01-15;
to 125,572,661 beginning 2011-04-02;
to 125,807,389 beginning 2011-07-02;
to 126,188,733 beginning 2011-10-01;
to 126,579,970 beginning 2012-01-01;
to 127,048,587 beginning 2012-04-07;
to 127,495,952 beginning 2012-07-14;
to 128,066,082 beginning 2012-10-06;
to 128,613,913 beginning 2013-01-05.]
EUC (Excel)
EB
graphs
more graphs

2013-01-17
Dhanya Ann Thoppil _Fox_/_Dow Jones_
HCL Technologies profit up 68%, Anant Gupta named CEO
"Chief Executive Vineet Nayar will continue as vice chairman...   market leader Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and #2 Infosys Ltd."

2013-01-17
Kara Kenney _RTV abc Indianapolis IN_
law-suit claims Indianapolis bodyshop abused guest-workers from India and Philippines
"The law-suit, filed by former Access Therapies worker Rituraj Singh Panwar, also lists manager Ramon Villegas and affiliates RN Staff Inc., Rehability Care as defendants.   According to its web-site, Access Therapies provides health care staffing to hospitals, schools and other facilities using H-1B visa sponsorships to hire workers from India, the Philippines and other foreign countries."

2013-01-17
Stephen Magagnini & Phillip Reese _Sacramento CA Bee_
2.5 times as many Asians coming to CA as from Latin America
Hispanic Business
Lake Tahoe News
"In 2001, 42% of immigrants coming to California were from Latin America, primarily Mexico, while 37% were from Asia.   In 2011, 57% of new immigrants were from Asia, and just 22 percent were from Latin America, census data show.   California's new faces were on display at a swearing-in ceremony at the Sacramento Convention Center on Wednesday.   Of the 774 area residents who took the oath of citizenship, about 450 were born in Asia, compared with roughly 160 who were born in Latin America, according to the U.S. Citizenship and and Immigration Services.   They included 119 people from Mexico, 100 from India, 94 from the Philippines, 63 from Vietnam, 35 from Ukraine, 33 from the People's Republic of China and 29 from Laos...   While 74% of recent arrivals from India have at least bachelor's degrees, 59% of Mexican immigrants have less than a high school degree...   A substantial number of newcomers are sponsored by California businesses that help [cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics] obtain H-1B visas and other types of work authorization, he said...   there are now more than 1,500 students and scholars from [Red China] and Taiwan at UC Davis...   Overall, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the number of new immigrants coming to California went up slightly between 2010 and 2011, from 257,359 to 277,304.   The Sacramento area also saw a slight boost in legal immigrants, from 8,047 to 9,469, federal immigration officials said.   But the number of new immigrants coming to California from Latin America annually has plummeted 65% since 2001, going from roughly 147K to 60K in 2011, Johnson said.   The drop began in earnest around 2007, when California's economy began to falter ahead of the lengthy recession.   Since 2006, the number of Latin American immigrants arriving each year in California has dropped by about 70K.   Meanwhile, the number of Asian immigrants coming to California has grown, particularly from [Red China] and Taiwan.   In 2001, about 129K immigrants came to California from Asia; by 2011, that number had risen to 160K.   Immigrants coming each year from [Red China] and Taiwan grew 45% over the last decade, going from 25K to about 38K.   The biggest jump occurred from 2010 to 2011, when 10K more Chinese came to California than during the previous year.   The number of Koreans coming here each year has also grown sharply, going from about 13K in 2001 to 17K in 2011."

2013-01-17
Thomas E. Brewton
rotten fruits of leftist indoctrination

2013-01-17
Kelvin Kemm
the carbon trading money tree

2013-01-17
Victor Davis Hanson _Town Hall_
the war twixt the amendments
Jewish World Review

2013-01-17
Michael Reagan _Town Hall_
Once again, pres. Obummer turns his back on rational solutions

2013-01-17
Patrick Thibodeau _ComputerWorld_/_IDG_
Marco Rubio wants more H-1Bs... and visas of every kind

2013-01-17
J.R. Raphael _CIO_/_IDG_
What these key phrases in IT job ads really mean

2013-01-17 (5773 Shebet 06)
judge Andrew P. Napolitano _Jewish World Review_
arms and the government
"When the Founders created the American republic, they did so by inducing constitutional conventions in each of the original 13 states to ratify the new Constitution.   The idea they presented, and the thesis accepted by those ratifying conventions, was that the states are sovereign; they derive their powers from the people who live there.   The purpose of the Constitution was to create a federal government of limited powers -- powers that had been delegated to it by the states...   the states delegated only 16 unique, discrete powers to the new federal government, and all of those powers concern nationhood.   The Constitution authorizes the feds to regulate in areas of national defense, foreign affairs, keeping interstate commerce regular, establishing a post office, protecting patents and artistic creations, and keeping the nation free.   The areas of health, safety, welfare and morality were not delegated to the feds and were retained by the States."

2013-01-17 (5773 Shebet 06)
_ShadowStats.com_
GAAP-based U.S. government budget deficit
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-18

2013-01-18
Michelle Malkin _Town Hall_
Anti-American Asians don't speak for me
"Both men have raked in big bucks from Western fans while trashing the very freedoms and cultures that made them super-stars."

2013-01-18
Mark Davis _Town Hall_
the surprising gift of Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty"
"When it comes to Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty', there are 2 kinds of people -- those who have seen it and those who should... those who grasp that enhanced interrogations save lives, and those who do not...   It is a rare film that tells a story matter-of-factly with room for an audience to feel the way it wishes."

2013-01-18
David Spady _Town Hall_
more government-employed scientists get fired for telling the truth

2013-01-18
John Ransom _Town Hall_
pres. Obummer's psycho employment phobia
"'A spokesman for the agency said the drop may reflect the difficulty the government has in adjusting the data after the holidays when seasonal workers are let go.'...   And I bet you wanted jobless figure to reflect actual joblessness.   Ha! Fat chance."

2013-01-18
Oliver North _Town Hall_
Arms
"Official Washington has the collective attention span of a fruit fly.   This condition is exacerbated by the [Obummer regime's] proclivity for declaring selective events and issues to be crises that require immediate action...   few in the so-called main-stream media have any idea what they are talking about...   My first SHOT Show, in 1992, was as the manufacturer of specialty armor and ballistic protective equipment for law enforcement and our military.   This year, I came to represent the Military and Veterans' Affairs Committee of the National Rifle Association.   Freedom Alliance sent our outreach coordinator to explore additional outdoor activities to help America's military heroes recover from the wounds of war...   There are more than 90K trade and professional associations in the U.S.A., and nearly all of them have gatherings with ample opportunities for fruitful conversations among like-minded people seeking solutions to common challenges.   The nearly 36K people attending this year's SHOT Show are no different."

2013-01-18
Suzanne Fields _Town Hall_
bursting the university bubble
"'Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them.'...   'The college presidents with their $1M-plus salaries and bloated administrative staffs, the whole system of tenure has turned out to be as much a recipe for intellectual conformity as it is a fiscal nightmare.', observes the New Criterion...   In the decade after 2001, the number of administrators grew 50 times faster than the number of instructors, according to the U.S. Department of Education.   A decline in the hours spent in teaching by tenured professors coincides with sharply increasing tuition fees to pay for luxury dorms, dining halls and gyms that have little to do with actual learning..."

2013-01-18
Diana West _Town Hall_
pres. Obummer abuses children as pawns in yet another power grab

2013-01-18
Mike Shedlock _Town Hall_
Socialist Insecurity cliff in sight

2013-01-18
Mike Shedlock _Town Hall_
NRA is more popular than Hollyweird

2013-01-18
Paul Homewood
Hansen's NASA GISS -- cooling the past and warming the present

2013-01-18
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
keep fracking, America!

2013-01-18
Fallon Forbush _PJ Media_
no improvements in agriculture bill

2013-01-18
Clayton E. Cramer _PJ Media_
Do sales of firearms at gun shows actually result in initiations of force?

2013-01-18
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
Georgia on my mind... and a different sort of southern unionist

2013-01-18
Andria Cheng _MarketWatch_
"Made in USA" gains in luxury brand fashions
"Brooks Brothers, which makes 70% of its suits in a Massachusetts factory, 100% of its ties in New York and 15% of its shirts in North Carolina, is also looking at increasing the manufacturing of its men's shoes and accessories in the U.S.A., he told MarketWatch.   The company's web-site has a section that touts only Made in America products."

2013-01-18
Heather M. Whitney _Chronicle of Higher Education_
How much math proficiency is really needed to get a degree in STEM fields?
"Elaine and Nancy asked faculty what minimum SAT math score would be an indicator of sufficient math readiness for an under-graduate to succeed in a STEM major.   The answer in 1997: 650."
Wisconsin center for education research: persistence in STEM fields

2013-01-18
Ruth Mantell _MarketWatch_
UMich consumer sentiment index fell from 72.9 in late December to 71.3 in early January
Christian Science Monitor (with graph)
FX Street
Fox
St. Louis Fed

2013-01-18
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
dwindling truth
"the Tech Bubble popped in 2000 and a recession followed in 2001.   Krugman writes: 'It's true that right now we have a large federal budget deficit.   But that deficit is mainly the result of a depressed economy...'   However, he wants us to assume that the reason we had deficits in 2001 and 2002 was that Congress lowered the top income tax rate from 39.6% to 35%...in 2003."

2013-01-18 (5773 Shebet 07)
Clifford D. May _Jewish World Review_
Osama bin Laden and the 2 Nazirs
"Nazir is dead.   Actually, both Nazirs are dead.   Earlier this month, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban and al-Qaeda commander, was killed by an American drone strike in South Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan.   Also recently killed: Abu Nazir, the fictional al-Qaeda terrorist in the suspenseful Showtime series 'Homeland'.   I suspect more Americans know about Abu Nazir than Mullah Nazir.   It also seems possible that more Americans are forming their understanding of the global conflict now under-way based on television dramas and movies than on newspaper dispatches and the talking heads who quarrel over the air-waves.   This may explain, at least in part, why senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain last month sent a letter to Sony Pictures expressing their anger over 'Zero Dark Thirty', the feature film loosely based on the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden...   some intelligence did come 'from detainees subjected to enhanced [questioning] techniques'.   Former CIA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey have both said the same.   Actually, Mukasey has gone further, saying that 2001-09-11 master-mind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 'broke like a dam' thanks to water-boarding, and provided a 'torrent of information'..."

2013-01-18 (5773 Shebet 07)
Jeff Berwick _Activist Post_
economic out-look: federal government debt under government "accounting" & GAAP; federal government deficits; neo-Keynesian whackadoodle Paul Krugman; Socialist Insecurity Abomination
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-19

2013-01-19
Anthony Watts
Berkeley earth sruface temperature project finally got a paper through peer review at a new journal

2013-01-19
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
How a picture and an antique beer bottle led to interesting ancestral connections... part 1

2013-01-19
J. Scott Armstrong
after 5 years, Algore seems to be losing 10-year warming bet

2013-01-19
Bob Owens _PJ Media_
the so-called "assault weapons" on my rifle range
"Several times in previous articles for PJ Media I've mentioned in passing that I am a volunteer with the Project Appleseed.   A project of the Revolutionary War Veterans Association, 'Appleseed' is a unique blend of heritage and marksmanship education you won't find anywhere else...   my current status as an instructor in training...   While the students and instructors come in all shapes, sizes, and ages, there is quite a bit more uniformity among the rifles students and instructors choose to bring...   The empty rifle grounded at the bottom right is an AR-15 or a similar firearm.   The first shooter in frame is using a semi-automatic .22LR training rifle (probably a Mossberg 715T), which is also apparently the same rifle used by the next shooter in line.   The next man, in the red shirt, is firing a Ruger 10/22 with a scope, and while the photo gets a little grainy after that, it appears that the next shooters in line are also shooting Ruger 10/22s.   This is very typical at an Appleseed...   the simple fact of the matter is that most shooters prefer semi-automatic, detachable magazine rifles, and for good reason.   Self-loading, semi-automatic rifles allow shooters to focus on marksmanship...   Women like this instructor firing a scoped version of a semi-automatic M1 Garand battle rifle in the prone position tend to be excellent shooters.   When not distracted by the machinations of working a bolt-action, pumping a pump-action, or working a lever, shooters can focus on the far more important tasks of establishing a natural point of aim and and precisely following the six steps of firing a shot.   In order to accurately, repeatedly fire shots into a tight group, a shooter has to align the front and rear sights, bring the aligned sights onto the target, find her respiratory pause, focus the eyes on the front sight while focusing the mind on the the target, squeeze the trigger, and follow through.   This young shooter is firing a Marlin 795, a .22LR semi-automatic rifle growing in popularity at Appleseed, from a standing position.   According to the language in gun bills in Illinois, New York, and Washington, DC, this is an 'assault weapon'...   Ruger 10/22s are the most dominant .22LR rifle on the firing line, used with either 10-round or 25-round Ruger factory magazines.   Marlin 795s (like the one pictured above) are growing in popularity due to their accuracy and relatively low cost.   Mossberg 702s, another semi-automatic with a detachable magazine, are also very popular...   For generations of servicemen that have used M-16s and M-4s issued to them since the 1960s, the familiar ergonomics of a rifle visually similar to the one 'Uncle Sam' taught them to shoot was familiar and comforting.   For those who've never served, the small-caliber, low-recoil, relatively weak cartridge is pleasant to shoot...   Stanley McChrystal [is] being serially, intentionally dishonest.   The 55-62 grain .223 caliber bullets common to the rifle are used to hunt groundhogs, coyotes, and other small game, nothing larger.   The round was adopted by the military because the ammunition was far lighter and easier to carry than modern deer cartridges, with roughly half the power and range due to their modular nature.   However, parts of an AR-15 can be switched out to hunt any game animal in North America, from squirrels to bears...   M1 Garands and M1A Springfields are particularly popular among the instructor cadre and students at our location, and we see a considerable number of Sig Sauers, WASR-10s, SKSs, and similar rifles..."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-20

2013-01-20
Anthony Watts
NOAA examination of weather station siting reports that night-time temperatures are higher near ORNL

2013-01-20
Vic Forbes
Australia's "alien" environment fuels fire-storms
"'a raging fire came out of the National Park straight for us'.   There is only one way to limit fire damage -- reduce the fuel available.   Fuel load can be reduced in three ways -- by grazing animals, by planned small 'cool' fires, or by mechanical reduction with slashers, mulchers or dozers...   The green bureaucracies and politicians are clearly mis-managing their huge land-bank.   Aborigines and graziers did a far better job."

2013-01-20
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
How a picture and an antique beer bottle led to interesting ancestral connections... conclusion

2013-01-20
Per Strandberg
AI multi-variate analysis shows tidal forcing is a major factor in El Nino southern oscillation forcing
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-21

2013-01-21
Anthony Watts
weather station siting bias is an old problem

2013-01-21
Bob Tisdale
NOAA's definitions and data contradict their SOTC claims regarding 2012 and La Nina

2013-01-21
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
our grand old fantasies about violent and extremist Islam

2013-01-21
Ricki Hollander _PJ Media_
study indicts NYTimes for distorting coverage of Middle East

2013-01-21
Anthony Watts
fools rush in at 2nd Obummer immaculation

2013-01-21
"just the facts"
London mayor Boris Johnson: "It's snowing and it really feels like the start of a mini ice age"
London Telegraph

2013-01-21
Thomas E. Brewton
continuing inflation
"Government itself, through deficit financing and creation of fiat money, is the guilty party when the overall purchasing power of the dollar falls."

2013-01-21
Kevin Glass _Town Hall_
excessive federal government debt problem began 4 (or 10) decades ago (with graph)

2013-01-21
Michael Shermer _Scientific American_
Leftists' war against science

2013-01-21
Arlene Wohlgemuth, John Davidson & Mario Loyola _Texas Public Policy Foundation_
Protecting the States from ObummerDoesn'tCare

2013-01-21
Dan Berrett _Chronicle of Higher Education_
GRE scores as a talent indicator

2013-01-21
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
the big shill; political operatives masquerading as economists
"It is no secret that Krugman worships Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, holding it to an almost mystical standard.   That FDR's New Deal attempted to organize the entire U.S. economy into a series of cartels, destroyed agricultural products despite widespread hunger (the destruction financed by a tax on agricultural products), criminalized the kosher killing of chickens, and unleashed petty bureaucrats to burden entrepreneurs with useless rules is utterly irrelevant to Krugman.   In fact, he wants us to believe that the New Deal -- which actually kept unemployment higher than it would have been had FDR just stuck to engaging in his adulterous liaisons -- in essence created an economic miracle...   The New Deal, from its inception, openly attempted to throw sand in the wheels of production and, thus, result in less wealth in the form of goods and services.   Destruction of crops destroyed wealth; creating and maintaining cartels destroyed wealth."

2013-01-21 (5773 Shebet 10)
Eryn Brown _Jewish World Review_
if your genome is public, so are you
"Scouring information available to anyone with an Internet connection, a team of genetic sleuths deduced the names of dozens of supposedly anonymous people who had their DNA analyzed for scientific and medical research.   The snooping feat, which took advantage of genealogy web-sites that let people compare their DNA to search for relatives, was in full compliance with federal privacy regulations.   Experts said it underscored a stark reality about genetic privacy in the age of social media: Don't count on it...   Whitehead Institute geneticist Yaniv Erlich and his team, who described their work Thursday in the [AAAS] journal _Science_..."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-22

2013-01-22
John Ransom _Town Hall_
surviving the government super-storm

2013-01-22
Frank Shyong _San Jose CA Mercury News_/_Los Angeles CA Times_
Blockbuster to close another 300 stores in USA
"The closures will result in the loss of about 3K jobs and leave the company with about 500 stores in the nation, said John Hall, a spokesman for parent company Dish Network in Englewood, CO...   Dish, a nationwide satellite pay-TV provider, acquired Blockbuster and about 1,700 stores in a 2011 bankruptcy sale.   It hoped to use the company's brand name and on-line streaming service to compete against the likes of Netflix and Redbox...   Dish itself has been hurting.   The company lost 19K subscribers and reported $158M in red ink for the [2012] third quarter."

2013-01-22
Michael Youssef _Town Hall_
going over the moral cliff
"In my book, When the Crosses are Gone, I warn that when a culture abandons thinking and logic in favor of feelings and emotions, it is doomed to destruction.   Although emotions are a very important part of the human psyche, when they control every aspect of life, morality becomes a victim.   Today, there is widespread agreement that morality in America is deteriorating with breathtaking speed."

2013-01-22
Michael Ledeen _PJ Media_
food, fascism, and Obummer
"Back in the 1920s and early 1930s, before German National Socialism became the archetypal fascist doctrine, Mussolini's call for a new kind of national economy intrigued many serious thinkers and leaders, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt...   There are many varieties of fascism, but the principal elements are: A single party dictatorship, headed by a charismatic leader;   A politics of enthusiasm, involving the masses in ritual public celebration, and direct exchanges between the leader and his followers en masse;   Hyper-nationalism, or, in the Nazi case, racism, based on the claim that the nation or race is unique, superior, and entitled to play a major role in world affairs;   The aforementioned 'corporate state' in which 'private property' is legitimate, but the state dictates its 'proper' use."

2013-01-22
J. Christian Adams _PJ Media_
Daniel Freeman and the Obummer DoJ's attack on honest elections

2013-01-22
Walter Hudson _PJ Media_
the distinction between sin and crime

2013-01-22 (5773 Shebet 11)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
"gun control laws" do not reduce crime
Town Hall
"The central issue boils down to the question: What are the facts?   Yet there are many zealots who seem utterly unconcerned about facts or about their own lack of knowledge of facts...   Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting -- even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun.   This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so polarizing.   Anyone who faces three home invaders, jeopardizing himself or his family, might find 30 bullets barely adequate.   After all, not every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates.     You can get killed by a wounded man.   These plain life-and-death realities have been ignored for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal.   As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired.   I have seen people miss a stationary target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-23

2013-01-23
Austin Bay _Town Hall_
al-Qaida franchises continue terror war on the world
"Detroit, New York and Portland, OR, certainly aren't over-seas, yet militant Islamist-inspired terrorists tried (and fortunately failed) to bomb all 3 -- Detroit on 2009 Christmas, New York's Times Square in 2010 May and Portland in 2010 November.   Obama still cannot call major Nidal Hasan's terrorist attack at Fort Hood, Texas, (2009 November) a terrorist act.   Hasan, however, had been in contact with militant Islamic cleric and al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, who at the time was holed up in Yemen with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).   Hasan praised Awlaki as a source of inspiration...   Events in Mali and Algeria, however, demonstrate that the fragment al-Qaidas (plural) of 2013 can still conduct spectacular massacres and attract global attention.   Like AQAP in Yemen, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is an al-Qaida regional orchestrator."

2013-01-23
Bob Barr _Town Hall_
meet generation N

2013-01-23
Neal Boortz _Town Hall_
golfer Phil Mickelson is not the one who needs to apologize

2013-01-23
John Stossel _Town Hall_
Shopping around for a better life

2013-01-23
Armstrong Williams _Town Hall_
civil right to bear arms

2013-01-23
Ed Morrissey _Hot Air_
Hey, let's try something different and produce a federal government budget

2013-01-23
Mary Katharine Ham _Hot Air_
FOIA suits up 28%
"'A comparison between the last 2 years of president [Shhrub's] second term and the last 2 years of president [Obummer's] first term shows FOIA law-suits jumped by 28%, TRAC reports.'"

2013-01-23
"AllahPundit" _Hot Air_
Rand Paul to Hillary Clinton: Let's face it; you should have been fired over Benghazi

2013-01-23
Ed Morrissey _Hot Air_
Defense Dept. bracing for 30% reduction in base operations

2013-01-23
Anthony Watts
20 former NASA scientists conclude there is no imminent threat from man-made CO₂

2013-01-23
Robrt Spencer _PJ Media_
Algerian jihadists wanted to "teach the Americans what Islam is"

2013-01-23
Anthony Watts
since 2000, electricity prices have risen 61% in Germany

2013-01-23
Phyllis Schlafly _Town Hall_
"free" trade cheats Americans
"America now has 23M people who want a full-time job but can't find one.   Obama doesn't think American citizens or businessmen create jobs.   His 'Jobs Czar', Jeffrey Immelt, recently said on a television interview referring to [Red China], where he has outsourced General Electric's light bulb plants, 'state-run Communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works'...   [Red China] protects and subsidizes its home industries and products, forces foreign-owned plants to give [Red China] their patents and trade secrets, cheats us with shoddy and dangerous exports, manipulates its currency to keep it artificially low, operates a large network of technology spies in the United States and pays slave-labor wages to its workers."

2013-01-23
Mike Shedlock _Town Hall_
an answer to rising costs of employing?
"What if companies, small or large, did not have to worry about [ObummerDoesn'tCare]?   What if they did not have to worry, about training, sick-leave disruptions and weather-related disruptions?   What if companies only had to pay $3.00 per hour, rivaling wages in [Red China]?...   Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist and artificial-intelligence expert who left MIT to build a $22K humanoid robot that can easily be programmed to do simple jobs that have never been automated before.   Brooks's company, Rethink Robotics, says the robot will spark a 'renaissance' in American manufacturing by helping small companies compete against low-wage off-shore labor.   Baxter will do that by accelerating a trend of factory efficiency that's eliminated more jobs in the U.S.A. than over-seas competition has.   Of the approximately 5.8M manufacturing jobs the U.S.A. lost between 2000 and 2010, according to McKinsey Global Institute, two-thirds were lost because of higher productivity and only 20% moved to places like [Red China], Mexico, or Thailand.   The ultimate goal is for robots like Baxter to take over more complex tasks, such as fitting together parts on an electronics assembly line."

2013-01-23
Anthony Watts
warmist hysterics at GRIST demonstrate their ignorance

2013-01-23
Paul Homewood
review of global temperatures in 2012

2013-01-23
_Treasure Coast FL Palm_
students honored for perfect FCAT scores

2013-01-23
Anthony Watts
history is not malleable
"1. What is the CONUS average temperature for July 1936 today?   2. What was it a year ago?   3. What was it ten years ago? Twenty years ago?   4. What was it in late 1936, when all the data had been first compiled?   We already know the answers to questions 1 and 2 from my posting here, and they are 76.43℉ and 77.4℉ respectively, so Zeke really only needs to answer questions 3 and 4."

2013-01-23
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
madame secretary Clinton, you let the Benghazi consulate become a death trap

2013-01-23
Stephen Ezell _Innovation Files_
India should reduce its protectionism
"Most recently, on 2013 January 21, one news report indicated that India was preparing to exclude foreign information and communications technology (ICT) vendors from participating in the country's $4G national optical fiber network project that will bring high-speed Internet connections to rural areas throughout India.   This follows the Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology's 2012 February announcement announcement of a preferential market access mandate for electronic goods (the PMA Mandate), which if implemented, would require a large percentage of high-tech goods sold in India to be manufactured there.   A specified share of each product's market -- anywhere from 30% to possibly even 100% -- would have to be filled by India-based manufacturers, with the local content share for each product rising over time.   One of the goals of the PMA Mandate would be to have 80% of the computers and electronics sold in India be manufactured domestically by 2020.   This requirement already is being applied to public procurements, but now, and more troubling, it's clear India intends to have the mandate spill into private sector procurements as well.   When applied to the private sector, India's PMA violates Article III of the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, whose provisions are incorporated into World Trade Organization (WTO) rules), which prohibits a member nation from discriminating against foreign competitors by forcing them into 'buy local' contracts with domestic suppliers for purposes of private sector procurements.   It's also poised to violate the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM), which prohibits WTO members from granting incentives based on the use of local content.   Clearly, the PMA is outside the bounds of the globally established norms of international trade...   In 2011, $18.5G of imports from the 129 GSP-beneficiary countries entered the [United States of America] duty-free, saving the exporting countries $700M in import duties.   India was the top developing country GSP-beneficiary in 2011, with $3.7G in imports entering the United States duty free... While clearly a measure that impacts only about ten percent of India's exports to the United States ($3.7G out of the $35.9G in 2012) is minimal, such an action would signal to India the seriousness with which the United States regards the proposed PMA rules..."

2013-01-23 (5773 Shebet 12)
Howard laFranchi _Jewish World Review_
Why elections may not warm relationship between Obummer and Netanyahu

2013-01-23 (5773 Shebet 12)
Warren Richey _Jewish World Review_
Supreme Court refuses cert in case of non-government robbers who attacked church-goers

2013-01-23 (5773 Shebet 12)
Lionel Beehner _Jewish World Review_
What's in a name?

2013-01-23 (5773 Shebet 12)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
Obummer's war on academic standards part 1 of 3: the Communist Corpse
Town Hall

2013-01-23 (5773 Shebet 12)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
experts aren't deities
Town Hall
"The bottom line is that the fact that a person has academic degrees, honors and status is no reason for us to abandon our tools of critical thinking."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-24

2013-01-24 05:30PDT (08:30EDT) (12:30GMT) (14:30 Jerusalem)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
DoL home page
DoL OPA press releases
historical data
DoL regulations
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 436,766 in the week ending January 19, a decrease of 119,944 from the previous week.   There were 416,880 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9% during the week ending January 12, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,690,615, a decrease of 177,080 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 3.2% and the volume was 4,069,651.   The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending January 5 was 5,659,760, a decrease of 214,076 from the previous week.   There were 7,670,108 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2012.   Extended Benefits were not available in any state during the week ending January 5...   States reported 1,693,797 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending January 5, a decrease of 365,641 from the prior week.   There were 2,922,533 persons claiming EUC in the comparable week in 2012.   EUC weekly claims include first, second, third, and fourth tier activity.   [Note that the population used for calculating the "insured unemployment rate" (the divisor) changes roughly quarterly:
to 132,623,886 beginning 2007-10-06;
to 133,010,953 beginning 2008-01-05;
to 133,382,559 beginning 2008-04-05;
to 133,690,617 beginning 2008-07-05;
to 133,902,387 beginning 2008-10-04;
to 133,886,830 beginning 2009-01-03;
to 133,683,433 beginning 2009-04-04;
to 133,078,480 beginning 2009-07-04;
to 133,823,421 beginning 2009-10-03;
to 131,823,421 beginning 2009-10-17;
to 130,128,328 beginning 2010-01-02;
to 128,298,468 beginning 2010-04-03;
to 126,763,245 beginning 2010-07-03;
to 125,845,577 beginning 2010-09-25;
to 125,560,066 beginning 2011-01-15;
to 125,572,661 beginning 2011-04-02;
to 125,807,389 beginning 2011-07-02;
to 126,188,733 beginning 2011-10-01;
to 126,579,970 beginning 2012-01-01;
to 127,048,587 beginning 2012-04-07;
to 127,495,952 beginning 2012-07-14;
to 128,066,082 beginning 2012-10-06;
to 128,613,913 beginning 2013-01-05.]
EUC (Excel)
EB
graphs
more graphs

2013-01-24
Anthony Watts
ice cores show that Greenland was warmer in previous inter-glacial periods

2013-01-24
Anthony Watts & Burt Rutan
human CO₂ emissions vs. global temperatures (graph)

2013-01-24
Anthony Watts
up to 233G barrels of oil discovered in southern Australia

2013-01-24
David Middleton
How green was my bankruptcy, graft and corruption?
"Siemens will generate an 18% return on a project that will have a negative return on investment (-9%)...all at the [tax-victims'] expense!...   The [tax-victims] paid 27% of Siemens' construction costs.   The actual cost was $5.13 per Watt, $5.1M per MW.   A natural gas-fired plant costs $700K to $900K per MW.   Since the [tax-victims] footed 27% of the up-front costs, Siemens can generate about an 18% annual return selling the electricity to the Army for $0.08/kWh...   the 4.1 MW solar PV array covers 42 acres.   That's a generating density of 0.11 MW per acre.   Natural gas-fired plants generate more than 6 MW per acre."

2013-01-24
Anthony Watts
belief that the world is warming or cooling tracks with local weather

2013-01-24
Mike McDaniel _PJ Media_
"less lethal": good intentions, bad/dangerous results

2013-01-24
Michelle Fields _PJ Media_/_Next Generation_
federal government debt is unfair to following generations

2013-01-24
Robert Moore _Cenantua_
examples of compromised unconditional southern unionism

2013-01-24
Frank Lemke
finally, a climate forecast model that seems to work

2013-01-24
_Hispanic Business_
Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicators
MarketWatch
NASDAQ
UPI

2013-01-24
Sue Olp _Billings MT Gazette_
Crow tribe signed 1.4G to coal deal with Cloud Peak Energy

2013-01-24
Jeff Selingo _Chronicle of Higher Education_
What is academia's purpose?   What should it produce?
"The problem is, there is no traditional learner anymore.   What's more, we no longer even have a common definition of 'higher education'.   The lack of consensus about what the higher-education system in the United States should be producing is largely to blame for the pressures facing colleges and universities today, from lagging financial support to proving their value to students and parents...   The lack of consensus, which dates back several decades now, has resulted in a lack of public support for higher education, especially public colleges and universities...   Despite all the talk about how today's traditional student is yesterday's non-traditional student, we still have a financial-aid and regulatory system built on a one-size-fits-all model, with 15-week semesters and credit based on time spent in a classroom seat.   As a result, it is difficult for institutions to consider new ways of serving the diverse needs of today's students...   competency-based degrees...   Officials at all 3 institutions believe a program based on what a student knows rather than seat time is the only way to begin clearing the log-jam of time-pressed adults who need a post-secondary education.   Building the programs, however, has required those officials to work alongside their accreditors and the Education Department to get around a myriad of rules.   Those rules, of course, are designed to protect students and attach integrity to a college degree.   But surely we can build a system that is both flexible and accountable."

2013-01-24
Anthony Watts
sea level "adjustments" vs. reality
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-25

2013-01-25
Patrick Thibodeau _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
delusional corrupt senators seek H-1B cap that starts at 115K and increases: Millions of unemployed/under-employed US STEM workers seek H-1B cap that starts at 10K and drops until full employment is achieved
ComputerWorld
"A bipartisan group of senators is planning to introduce a bill that not only hikes the H-1B cap, but allows it to rise automatically with demand to a maximum of 300K visas annually.   This 20-page bill, called the Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 or the 'I-Squared Act of 2013', is being developed by senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Chris Coons (D-DE)...   The bill has not been introduced, but that may happen next week...   The H-1B provisions of in this draft proposal are almost certain to face opposition from senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), both of whom are on the Senate immigration subcommittee with Hatch, where immigration bills are vetted...   The H-1B cap increase provisions will be very controversial for many reasons.   The visa is seen as a tool by offshore companies to replace U.S. workers.   Some critics see it as instrumental in age discrimination with an impact on wages."

2013-01-25
Andria Cheng _MarketWatch_
Hasbro's disappointing holiday sales sends toy-makers' stock prices sliding

2013-01-25
Bob Fowler _Knoxville TN News Sentinel_
Carbon Fiber Technology Center in Horizon Center Business Park of Oak Ridge is cranking up production
"Rolls of raw material used to make the synthetic fiber began moving through furnaces heated to 3,560 degrees Fahrenheit in the Carbon Fiber Technology Center in Horizon Center Business Park.   While commissioning of the state-of-the-art research facility is still under way, Wednesday's test run was an important milestone, Director Lee B. McGetrick said...   A standard tow of 24K tiny fibers bunched together can support 1,800 pounds -- a typical football team's offensive line [or one of the modern age's cheap, cramped, flimsy, privacy-free 'intelligent transportation' devices]...   The $34.7M Carbon Fiber Technology Center was built and equipped through a grant from the [Porkulus bill]...   The process usually begins with a costly petroleum-based acrylic that's intensely heated, burning away everything but the carbon.   With that pricey raw material, even low-grade carbon fiber costs between $15 and $20 a pound, McGetrick said.   Scientists at ORNL have come up with cheaper precursors: plant-based lignin, a waste product from pulp and paper processing, and a plastic called polyolefin...   During its 5- to 10-year life span, the Oak Ridge facility will run 5 days a week, 24 hours a day, making some 250 tons of carbon fiber annually."

2013-01-25
Jonathan Mattise _Treasure Coast FL Palm_
representative Allen West gave $500K left-over campaign funds to charities
George Bennett: Palm Beach FL Post
Adam C. Smith & Marc Caputo: Tampa Bay FL Times
Todd Beamon: Newx Max
Luke Rosiak: Washington DC Times
"the Allen West Foundation and American Legacy Guardians...   A news release from the Allen West Foundation on Thursday said the organization has been established as a nonprofit under federal regulations.   'Further details as to the mission and activities of the Foundation will be released in the coming weeks.', the release stated.   Hickford said additional info also will be available on American Legacy Guardians, a 501(c)(4) organization, in the next few weeks."

2013-01-25
David Solway _PJ Media_
Understanding the educationism mess
"This conviction, and the double purpose of such excellence -- knowledge of the subject to be learned and knowledge of the soul that digests the subject (thus relating the academic subject to the psychological subject) -- has today been almost entirely forgotten or deliberately abandoned.   The culture's memory bank has been junked and students enter on their careers -- such as may still be found in our diminished world -- with only a small float in their cerebral registers, living on a reduced intellectual budget.   Their connection with the legitimate culture, that is, with the memorial scope and vista of our history as a civilization, has been rudely and peremptorily aborted, and replaced by an instrumental modality of instruction that is grievously lacking in substance... Teachers are trained to emphasize method, to prepare 'instructional designs', to focus on 'techniques' of transmission, to valorize process instead of matter, to generate 'lesson plans' rather than lessons..."

2013-01-25
Beny Peiser
UK may withdraw from EU over insane environmental regulations

2013-01-25
Jack Martin _Immigration Reform_
the population ponzi scheme

2013-01-25
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
deficit hawk down, financial delusion up

2013-01-25
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
gang of 8 plan to instroduce most extremely bad foreign tech worker bill
 
Several senators plan to introduce the most extreme foreign tech worker bill I've ever seen, if the report in the Hill is accurate.
 
It contains provisions that are tantamount to removing the general H-1B cap, and that explicitly remove the cap for those having a STEM master's degree or higher from a U.S. university.   It also would institute more expansive green card programs.
 
As with most such bills, it would impose employer fees to remedy the alleged STEM worker shortage, by spending more to get kids interested in STEM.   This comes on the heels of Texas Instruments admitting that there is no engineering shortage at the bachelor's level, plus the Urban Institute study showing we graduate enough students in STEM -- then why try to get more kids interested in STEM? -- and the NIH commission that found that a glut of foreign students is discouraging American students from STEM careers.
 
Hard to say whether this bill is a hint of what is really by the powers that be, but it certainly is the most expansive proposal I've seen, by far.   If the desire were to make sure Americans don't have STEM careers, this bill would be the perfect vehicle for it.
 
Norm
---30---

2013-01-25 (5773 Shebet 14)
Michelle Malkin _Jewish World Review_
Obummer's war on academic standards part 2 of 3: Reading, writing and deconstruction

2013-01-25
R' Berel Wein _Torah.org_
Seeing the Hand of God
"A dependent society that is accustomed only to super-natural intervention will find it difficult to suddenly change and become self-reliant and independent.   From this vantage point of practical living, the rabbis of the Talmud constantly reminded us not to rely solely on miracles...   There are those who refuse to see the hand of God, so to speak, in these remarkable events.   And there are those who refuse to see that positive human effort and initiative were necessary to bring this wonder about.   But the truth is that both factors were and are present in the events of Jewish life today and will continue to be so in our immediate future as well."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-26

2013-01-26
Lorna Thackeray _Billings MT Gazette_
2,145 year old pictographs falling from sand-stone cave's walls
"A small bone disc with a turtle effigy was found in Pictograph Cave in the 1930s and may be associated with the painting, she said.   Pictograph Cave has been part of the Montana park system since 1969.   In 1964, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.   Last summer, 51K visitors came to the site.   This week, one of its few winter visitors was a mountain lion that left a trail of massive paw prints in the snow."

2013-01-26
F.I.R.S.T. LEGO League (FLL) in Illinois State Tournament (pictures)
Future City Competition Chicago Regional Finals (pictures)
abc WLS announcement
"What both these events share in common is the disinterest of the media of the positive accomplishments of American students.   I didn't see any press at these events!"
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-27

2013-01-27
_Topeka KS Capital Journal_
Hanover Heights (KCKS) follows Knoxville TN in getting 1G/s telecomm
"About a dozen start-ups have launched in the first neighborhood to get...1 giga-bit per second (1Gb/s) service.   Leading economic indicators such as employment growth haven't budged.   There is a frothy excitement, but even city officials who dub the region Silicon Prairie admit it will be difficult to measure how the new network will lead to economic progress other than a general sense of activity...   EyeVerify, a security software firm, was in a part of the city where AT&T was the only Internet service provider, offering a maximum of 5Mb/s speeds for $80 a month...   Nearby on this former industrial strip in Hanover Heights, a dozen other start-ups have taken refuge in Craftsman-style homes...call themselves Kansas City Start-Up Village.   There is a 'Home for Hackers', donated by a local resident who lets entrepreneurs live and work there for free.   Investors are showing greater interest, too.   A micro-finance investment firm called Justine Petersen opened an office in the city last year with hopes of investing more in the burgeoning tech community.   The St. Louis-based company is looking at creating another Home for Hackers...   Such opportunities have attracted start-up hopefuls such as Payne, who moved from her home in Denver last month to live in the first hacker home.   Building her CyberJammer software requires massive amounts of band-width, she said.   In order for a drummer in Germany to play with a guitarist in Brazil, there can be no delay from slow Internet speeds.   Here, Payne is betting the software she develops with her 1Gb/s connections will become the go-to place for musicians, though all will need similar Internet speeds for it to work.   She shares the bare-bones 3-bed-room home with Budidharma, a recent high school graduate who is trying to create software for servers running multi-player video games.   In his small bed-room with bunk beds covered in race car bed-sheets and a desk with 2 monitors and a server, Nick pulls all-nighters coding and working with massive video files.   Anywhere else, he said, getting the band-width needed for his firm LeetNode would be too expensive...   Telecom operator Ericsson said in 2011 that doubling broadband speeds increases gross domestic product by 0.3%.   The Federal Communications Commission has said areas that got broadband for the first time experienced a creation of 2.6 jobs for every one job lost...   project motivated Time Warner Cable to bid for a contract to wire a new city-sponsored start-up incubator in the old Union Station of Kansas City, MO, with 1Gb/s speeds...   has drawn fresh attention to the problem of higher cable bills, poor customer service and low speeds in many parts of the nation, local officials say."

2013-01-27
Chris Horner
FOIA law-suit filed against EPA over questionable financial and influence relationships

2013-01-27
Willis Eschenbach
lord Sterm's mathematical malapropisms
"If I said to you, 'Which would you prefer, $1K now, or $1K next year?', I doubt you'd have much trouble noticing that money next year is not worth the same as money today.   How about $1K either next year or in 10 years?   You'd greatly prefer next year.   That is the future value of money.   It is always worth less than money today.   It gets discounted a bit, a few percent, for each year into the future.   An iron-clad guarantee of $1K in 100 years is worth almost nothing today."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-28

2013-01-28
Allen West
Next Generation data card

2013-01-28
Rob Rogers _Billings MT Gazette_
school admins claim substitute teachers are in short supply... at current compensation levels and current barriers to entry
"Part of the reason could be neighboring Billings School District 2.   On average, SD2 -- which has around 1,200 teachers -- uses 85 to 120 substitutes on a given day...   Many times, substitutes are filling in for classes of students they've never met and they're trying to follow lesson plans created by someone else.   Then there's the students.   A group of fourth-graders that knows it has a substitute teacher for the day will behave in ways it wouldn't dare with a regular teacher...   SD2, along with the smaller surrounding districts, pay $70 a day.   In fact, many of the smaller districts raised their rates to $70 a day in the hopes of being just a little more competitive...   Laurent pointed out that its more expensive for his district to advertise for a substitute than it is to hire one for the day."

2013-01-28
Matt Ridley
a luke-warmer's 10 tests

2013-01-28
Roger L. Simon _PJ Media_
switching sides
"here are 5 words that should make you smile: You don't live in California...   One of the most interesting aspects of political change is that most of us who have experienced it don’t feel as if we have changed.   We still see ourselves as the same person, live in the same skin.   To us, it is the world that has changed -- at least for the most part. As an illustration, a significant number of people changed their views of global affairs immediately after 2001 September 11.   Our country was attacked by an ideology that was misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant and that sought world domination -- in short was the enemy of all classically liberal society since the Enlightenment."

2013-01-28
Patrick Thibodeau _CIO_/_IDG_
senator Dick Durbin to propose H-1B restrictions
ComputerWorld
"...senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA)...   The pair has offered bills in previous Congressional sessions that include a so-called 50/50 provision that would limit the number of visas available to a company to [a humongously excessive] half of its work-force.   Indian [bodyshopping and off-shoring] firms are especially concerned about a 50/50-like provision in an immigration bill [because typically over 90% of their employees in the USA are not US citizens]...   Questions about prevailing wage levels, preference for U.S. workers in hiring, and limits on the number of any H-1B visas a company may use as well as the overall cap number would be critical issues in any immigration bill...   senator Marco Rubio, who is part of the Schumer-led bipartisan group on immigration [perversion], is one of the senators behind an effort to raise the H-1B cap to a minimum of 115K [when it should be lowered from a defacto 130K to 1K].   Under an escalator clause, the cap could reach 300K [when, instead, there should be a de-escalator clause reducing the numbers of visas from 1K to 100 in times when unemployment rates of the affected occupations exceed full employment levels and/or when labor force participation rates are driven below full employment levels, i.e. more US citizens are forced involuntarily out of field]."

2013-01-28
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
the devil is throughout the bipartisan reprehensible immigration law perversion proposals

2013-01-28
Martin Kidson _Missoulian_/_Billings MT Gazette_
BitterRoot River Valley ranch sees resurgence in demand for bison meat
"'We're seeing the supply-and-demand thing right now.', Westre said.   'There's not enough bison for the demand of the people.   They're getting more health conscious.   They want to eat local and they want to know where the animals are grown.'...   He urged caution, saying the animals love the pellets and can, as a result, get a little unruly at feeding time.   The calves froliced close to their mothers.   The bulls postured and defended their space, especially Diesel, a 2K-pound giant with a black head and hooked horns.   'That's Dozer over there.', Westre said, pointing out the kinder of the 2 bulls...   Eight years ago, that market crashed.   A bison once valued at $4K fell to $800.   Now, Westre said, the ranch is harvesting bulls for $3,300 and prices are rising...   Bison calve alone and they do it in May, he said, unlike cattle that calve in February...   'We don't vaccinate them; we just deworm them.', he said."

2013-01-28
Marsha Branch _Treasure Coast FL Palm_
Indian River State College to offer $10K STEM degrees
"Indian River State College will address a shortage of math and science teachers on the Treasure Coast by offering relevant bachelor's degree programs that cost $10K or less, president Ed Massey said Monday.   The new tuition is part of governor Rick Scott's $10K challenge for Florida colleges to provide more affordable higher education, especially in high-demand areas of study.   A 4-year degree program at IRSC typically costs $13,255, which already makes it the state's most affordable and the nation's fifth most affordable, according to the U.S. Department of Education...   Monday's announcement brings to 23 the number of Florida colleges that have accepted Scott's challenge, issued in November."

2013-01-28
Allie Bidwell _Chronicle of Higher Education_
millions of unversity grads hold jobs that do not "require" a degree
John Leo: Minding the Campus
"The study, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says that nearly half of all American college graduates in 2010—some three years after the recession began—were under-employed, holding relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.   According to a report on the study, 'Why Are Recent College Graduates Under-employed? University Enrollments and Labor Market Realities', out of 41.7M working college graduates in 2010, 48% -- more than 20M people -- held jobs that required less than a bachelor's degree.   37% held jobs that required no more than a high-school diploma.   The report's authors -- Richard Vedder, Jonathan Robe, and Christopher Denhart -- used employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] to calculate that the number of college graduates is growing at a rate disproportionate to the number of jobs requiring a college degree...   only 1% of taxi drivers in 1970 were college graduates, but by 2010 more than 15% were...   one study based on data from the Current Population Survey [CPS] calculated that the percentage of under-employed college graduates rose from 10.8% in 1967 to 17.5% in 1990."
Why Are Recent College Graduates Under-Employed?: University Enrollments and Labor-Market Realities
"many the fastest-growing occupations of the future, according to BLS projections, are areas like biomedical engineering (the STEM disciplines) and other 'highly skilled' occupations.   Yet that assertion is, at the minimum, exaggerated...   the number of bio-medical engineers in 2011 was 16,590, so a 62% increase means roughly 10K new jobs, a relatively small number.   By contrast, a mere 21.3% increase in the projected number of construction laborers means 212,400 new jobs -- 21 times as many new jobs as in bio-medical engineering.   It is instructive to examine the 30 jobs with the largest projected growth in numbers from 2010 to 2020 (see Table 3).   The most noticeable characteristic for our purposes relates to educational training.   Of the 30 jobs, only seven are positions requiring any postsecondary education whatsoever, and only four require a bachelor's degree or more.   Indeed, more positions (10) require, in the BLS estimation, less than a high-school education, than require any form of post-secondary training...   One possibility is low-cost degrees heavily utilizing on-line learning and incorporating a good deal of massive open on-line courses (MOOCs) available for minimal-to-no cost to the student.   Organizations such as Udacity, Coursera, edX, StraighterLine, and the Saylor Foundation would see exponential enrollment growth in their courses, and ways would be devised, possibly despite accrediting agency opposition, to package these courses into degrees or some alternative form of certification.   Another possibility is that someone -- ACT, SAT, Underwriters Laboratories, some foundation or state government -- might come up with a standardized American College Equivalence Test (ACET) that correlates well with the intellectual and knowledge attributes of actual college graduates, offering a non-degree way of demonstrating competency.   In the first scenario, the very high-quality, expensive selective admission schools would probably survive—most are well endowed, in any case.   The former blanket use of a college degree per se as a screening device would become less frequent...   In one sense, we have an 'under-employment' problem; College graduates are underemployed, performing jobs which require vastly less educational tools than they possess.   The flip side of that, though, is that we have an 'over-investment' problem: We are churning out far more college graduates than required by labor-market imperatives.   The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing more slowly than the supply of those holding such degrees...   Credential inflation is pervasive.   And, as Hernstein and Murray noted nearly 2 decades ago, one by-product of this phenomenon is a dumbing down of the college curriculum; as they put it 'credentialism...is part of the problem, not the solution'."
Center for College Affordability and Productivity

2013-01-28
Bob Violino _InfoWorld_/_IDG_
all-out cyber-war is being waged against the USA

2013-01-28
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
in reality, producers make and governments take, but in delusional Krugmanland governments produce and producers take

2013-01-28
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
vague bill
 
As many of you know, today a bipartisan group of 8 senators announced that they have drawn up a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes provisions regarding high-skilled immigration.   The group gave the press an "outline" of the proposal, and it is extremely short on details.
 
Matt O'Brien of the San Jose CA Mercury News asked me about my thoughts on the matter, which I gave him.   You can read his article (possibly at a different URL for those of you who read this tomorrow).
 
I spent quite a lot of time explaining to Matt that we don't have a tech labor shortage, and that instead, the H-1B and employer-sponsored green card programs have been causing surpluses that have been resulting in an Internal Brain Drain [Brain Waste], in which we are losing our own best and brightest.
 
However, Matt also asked me about the bill recently announced by Hatch, Rubio and others.   I characterized this as the most extreme, most one-sidedly pro-industry bill I'd ever seen on this topic.   I blurted out, "This is the best bill the industry could buy.", and then said jokingly, "Hey, there's your quote!"   He laughed, but I knew that in fact it WAS his quote, and sure enough, it is in Matt's article.   :-)
 
I do stand by what I said.   Many of you will recall public statements in the past made by former senator Bennett of Utah and former representative Davis of Virginia, in which they explicitly said that much of the impetus for these bills comes from the tech industry's campaign contributions.
 
Matt asked me about the vague statement in the 8-senator bill that employers would only be able to "hire immigrants if it can be demonstrated that they were unsuccessful in recruiting an American to fill an open position and the hiring of an immigrant will not displace American workers."   My answer was that I was skeptical.
 
Under current law, there is no American recruitment requirement in hiring H-1Bs, but there is one for green cards.   I told Matt that I suspect there was a misunderstanding somewhere, and that the senators mistakenly thought that H-1B already has an American recruitment requirement.   (Rob Sanchez used to have a collection of letters from senators to constituents, in which they showed exactly this misunderstanding.)
 
I did say that I would welcome such a requirement if it were added to H-1B, even though the corresponding green card requirement is already riddled with loop-holes.   But I would add the following point:
 
The outline given to the press says something about giving green cards to foreign STEM students at U.S. universities "upon graduation", an immediate action implementing the "staple a green card to their diplomas" notion.
 
That is almost certainly false, if other similar bills are any guide.   Instead of getting a green card, I believe the bill would only give the students a "coupon" for a future green card.   What the bill will likely set up is A NEW KIND OF H-1B VISA.   The new visa would lead to a green card eventually, but the period of de facto indentured servitude would still be lengthy.
 
As I've said, this "hand-cuffed" nature of the foreign workers is, to many employers, even more attractive than the cheap-labor aspect.   (And thus the foreign job applicant would be more attractive to the employer than similarly-qualified Americans.)   For that reason, I don't believe the industry lobbyists would go along with a genuine "staple a green card to their diplomas" bill.   But the bill will probably be pitched as such, hiding the fact that its real purpose is a back-door increase in the H-1B cap.
 
Norm
---30---

2013-01-28
_UMich_
UMich consumer sentiment index up from 69.9 in late December to 75.0 in late January (with graph)
Federal Reserve Board St. Louis
Federal Reserve Board St. Louis

2013-01-28
Martin Conry & Richard Rothstein _EPI_
What international tests show about USA student performance

2013-01-28
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
nice web log by John Cassidy at the New Yorker
 
Nice blog by John Cassidy at the New Yorker.
 
He's still in the dark, like most members of the press on foreign tech worker issues, but I must say he shows remarkable insight.
 
He asks, for instance, whether legislation on high-skilled immigration should cover ALL fields in STEM.   Unfortunately, though, he seems to think that the computer field is deserving, a misguided view.   Even more unfortunately, he treats math and statistics as "undeserving" -- a view I don't take kindly to, as someone with a PhD in math who is a former statistics professor.   :-)
 
But Cassidy does see that there would be people negatively impacted by the bill, e.g. in wage erosion, and that the bill would be abused.
 
And Cassidy also understands that there is a different between "foreign worker" and "foreign born".   Lots of foreign born are naturalized U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
 
Norm
H-1B has nothing to do with "high-skilled immigration"...jgo
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-29

2013-01-29
Victor Davis Hanson _PJ Media_
California at twilight
"Salinas, in Monterey county where the murder rate is the highest in the state, just -- at least I think the news story is not a prank -- named its new middle school after Tiburcio Vasquez.   A convicted murderer.   He was the legendary 19th-century robber and murderer who was hanged for his crimes...   So Much Taxation, So Little in Return."

2013-01-29
Luke Bolar & Becca Watkins
senator Vitter and representative Issa have discovered more suspicious EPA e-mail accounts

2013-01-29
Anthony Watts
from Elsevier & NASA, new satellite data tool, but access is forbidden

2013-01-29
Ruth Mantell _MarketWatch_
Conference Board: consumer confidence down
Martin Crutsinger: San Jose CA Mercury News/AP
Hispanic Business/UPI
KPIC Roseburg OR
Detroit MI Free Press/Gannett
Philadelphia PA Inquirer/AP
Patrice Hill: Washington DC Times
"Consumer confidence fell...from an upwardly revised 66.7 in December...to 58.6 in January...   expectations fell from 68.1 in December to 59.5 in January...   present situation dropped from 64.6 in December to 57.3 in January...   The percentage of respondents indicating jobs were 'plentiful', fell from 10.8% to 8.6% while those indicating jobs were 'hard to get' rose from 36.1% to 37.7%, the Conference Board said."

2013-01-29
_Eur web_
NAACP: blacks are doing far worse under Obummer than under the Shrub

2013-01-29
Grant Gross _CIO_/_IDG_
new immigrant bill attacks highly-skilled US workers
Kyung M. Song: Seattle WA Times

2013-01-29 (5773 Shebet 18)
Ashley Luthern _Youngstown OH Vindicator_
marking 170th anniversary of president William McKinley's birth

2013-01-29 (5773 Shebet 18)
Heather Mac Donald _National Review_
the atrocious 8 gangsters immigration law perversion proposal

2013-01-29 (5773 Shebet 18)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
shouting louder
"Students of propaganda may admire the skill with which she misdirected people's attention.   But those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to think that the truth matters cannot applaud her success."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-30

2013-01-30
Jeff Harrington _Tampa Bay FL Times_
consumer confidence down in Florida
"Florida consumer confidence dipped one point to a reading of 75...   The telephone survey indicated mixed perceptions, with respondents less likely to say they feel better off than a year ago (down 3 points), but more optimistic their personal finances will be improve by this time next year (up 1 point)."

2013-01-30
Robert Carter
global climate, Occam's razor and the scientific method vs. feeelings and politics

2013-01-30
Tom Blumer _PJ Media_
Obummer's economy, the excuses continue

2013-01-30
Anthony Watts
VA Tech study shows "funding agencies may have awarded millions and possibly billions of dollars to scientists" for duplicate studies

2013-01-30
Anthony Watts
probability of drought in historical context

2013-01-30
Anthony Watts
enviro-fascist William Michael Connolley made over 12K edits to over 5,400 WikiPedia articles... mostly about "climate"
Klima-Faelscher Connolley: Der Mann, der unser Weltbild umschrieb

2013-01-30
Bridget Johnson _PJ Media_
having singed their hands on immigration perversion senators stick their heads in the middle of the firing range
"And the experts in the middle were hardly filler, either, as one attorney’s advocacy of the AR-15 as an ideal weapon for women sparked a firestorm of online debate.   'Young women are speaking out as to why AR-15 weapons are their weapon of choice.', said Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women's Forum.   'The guns are accurate.   They have good handling.   They're light.   They're easy for women to hold.   And most importantly, their appearance.   An assault weapon in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon.   And the peace of mind that a woman has as she's facing 3, 4, 5 violent attackers, intruders in her home with her children screaming in the background -- the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage when she's fighting hardened violent criminals.'"

2013-01-30 (5773 Shebet 19)
Thomas Sowell _Jewish World Review_
whose welfare?
"If there is ever a contest for the law with the most grossly misleading title, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 should be a prime candidate, because the last thing this Act protects is the welfare of Indian children."

2013-01-30 (5773 Shebet 19)
Walter E. Williams _Jewish World Review_
official government lies
"Earlier this year, president Barack Obama warned that [Socialist Insecurity] checks will be delayed if Congress fails to increase the government's borrowing authority by raising the debt ceiling.   However, there's an issue with this warning.   According to the 2012 [Socialist Insecurity] trustees report, assets in [Socialist Insecurity's] trust funds totaled $2.7T, and [Socialist Insecurity] expenditures totaled $773G.   Therefore, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit, [Socialist Insecurity] recipients are guaranteed their checks.   Just take the money from the $2.7T assets held in trust.   Which is the lie, [Socialist Insecurity] checks must be delayed if the debt ceiling is not raised or there's $2.7T in the [Socialist Insecurity] trust funds? The fact of the matter is that they are both lies.   The [Socialist Insecurity] trust funds contain nothing more than IOUs, bonds that have absolutely no market value.   In other words, they are worthless bookkeeping entries.   [Socialist Insecurity] is a pay-as-you-go system, meaning that the taxes paid by today's workers are immediately sent out as payment to today's retirees.   [Socialist Insecurity] is just another federal program funded out of general revenues...   In 2012, monthly federal tax revenue was about $200G.   Monthly Social Security expenditures were about $65G per month, and the monthly interest payment on our $16T national debt was about $30G.   The House could simply enact a bill prioritizing how federal tax revenues will be spent.   It could mandate that Social Security recipients and interest payments on the national debt be the first priorities and then send the measure to the Senate and the president for concurrence.   It might not be a matter of brains as to why the Republican House wouldn't enact such a measure; it likes spending just as the Democrats."
 
Proposed Bills 2013
 
 

2013-01-31

2013-01-31 05:30PDT (08:30EDT) (12:30GMT) (14:30 Jerusalem)
Scott Gibbons & Tony Sznoluch _DoL ETA_
un-employment insurance weekly claims report
DoL home page
DoL OPA press releases
historical data
DoL regulations
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 366,596 in the week ending January 26, a decrease of 70,429 from the previous week.   There were 422,287 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.   The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.8% during the week ending January 19, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate.   The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,656,964, a decrease of 54,066 from the preceding week.   A year earlier, the rate was 3.2% and the volume was 4,058,236.   The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending January 12 was 5,914,983, an increase of 255,501 from the previous week.   There were 7,655,224 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2012.   Extended Benefits were not available in any state during the week ending January 12...   States reported 2,112,559 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending January 12, an increase of 418,762 from the prior week.   There were 3,007,696 persons claiming EUC in the comparable week in 2012.   EUC weekly claims include first, second, third, and fourth tier activity.   [Note that the population used for calculating the "insured unemployment rate" (the divisor) changes roughly quarterly:
to 132,623,886 beginning 2007-10-06;
to 133,010,953 beginning 2008-01-05;
to 133,382,559 beginning 2008-04-05;
to 133,690,617 beginning 2008-07-05;
to 133,902,387 beginning 2008-10-04;
to 133,886,830 beginning 2009-01-03;
to 133,683,433 beginning 2009-04-04;
to 133,078,480 beginning 2009-07-04;
to 133,823,421 beginning 2009-10-03;
to 131,823,421 beginning 2009-10-17;
to 130,128,328 beginning 2010-01-02;
to 128,298,468 beginning 2010-04-03;
to 126,763,245 beginning 2010-07-03;
to 125,845,577 beginning 2010-09-25;
to 125,560,066 beginning 2011-01-15;
to 125,572,661 beginning 2011-04-02;
to 125,807,389 beginning 2011-07-02;
to 126,188,733 beginning 2011-10-01;
to 126,579,970 beginning 2012-01-01;
to 127,048,587 beginning 2012-04-07;
to 127,495,952 beginning 2012-07-14;
to 128,066,082 beginning 2012-10-06;
to 128,613,913 beginning 2013-01-05.]
EUC (Excel)
EB
graphs
more graphs

2013-01-31
Amber Hawkins _Alabama 13 MSFTNBC_
CGC: job cut announcements up 24% to 2
Francine Knowles: Chicago IL Sun Times
UPI
Nathalie Tadena: NASDAQ
CBS Miami
CNBC/Reuters
FL: 2,892 from 354 in December
IL: 1,488 from 247 in December and in 2012 January
NC: 825
SC: 815
retail: 12,426 (?or 6,676?)
financial: 8,578

2013-01-31
Patrick Thibodeau _ComputerWorld_/_IDG_
review of H-1B debate in light of recent proposals

2013-01-31
Lauren Rohr _U of IL Daily Illini_
U of IL college of engineering received $100M gift for faculty and student scholarships
"Chancellor Phyllis Wise. 'It's a really transformational gift that will have impact across the campus and beyond.'   Wise said funds from this gift, which is the largest gift given to any public university this academic year, will primarily support the growing areas of bio-engineering and [evil evil evil] 'Big Data', a field that focuses on computing and analyzing large data sets [for nefarious purposes].   The gift allows for the creation of the Grainger Engineering Breakthrough Initiative, which is 'intended to position the college for future growth and development', said Michael Bragg, interim dean of the College of Engineering.   Of the $100M, about $40M is allocated toward creating endowments for 35 additional chairs and professorships.   Bragg said these endowments will allow the college to retain its best faculty, as well as to attract the best professionals in the field...   Rob Rutenbar, head of the Computer Science department, said additional scholarship money will make the college 'more competitive when we go after top students who want to come here'.   A portion of the donation will also be used to seed research projects, particularly bio-engineering projects...   The Grainger Foundation, based in Lake Forest, IL...   William W. Grainger, who graduated from the College of Engineering in 1919..."

2013-01-31
Howard Nemerov _PJ Medi_
Joe BiteMe broadcasts his ignorance of defensive gun use
"Ron Borsch has served in SWAT, and is now lead trainer and Rangemaster for a regional police training academy.   Says Borsch: 'While there can be cross-over use among hand-guns, shot-guns, and rifles, each works better for a particular need.   Many law-abiding gun owners possess all 3 for that very reason.   For example: at further distances, there is no question that the rifle is the most accurate (and depending on caliber, more powerful).'...   The Department of Homeland Security considers enhanced variations of the modern sporting rifle to be 'suitable for personal defense'.   In their announcement of a 'Federal Business Opportunity' (bid request), 'Part I -- The Schedule, Section C -- Description/ Specification/ Statement of Work', they wrote: 'DHS and its components have a requirement for a 5.56x45mm NATO, select-fire firearm suitable for personal defense use in close quarters and/or when maximum concealment is required.'"

2013-01-31
Jack Dunphy _PJ Media_
the guns of Villaraigosa and his hypocrisy

2013-01-31
David Steinberg _PJ Media_
Damascus photos in NYTimes, Reuters, Atlantic are questionable

2013-01-31
Jessica Chasmar _Washington DC Times_
aliens in the USA are sending $120G back to their homes

2013-01-31
William L. Anderson _Krugman in Wonderland_
is the Fed hampering economic recovery?

2013-01-31
Norm Matloff _H-1B/ L-1/ Off-Shoring News-Letter_
ComputerWorld and InfoWorld articles
 
Two interesting articles came to my attention this evening, regarding the various recent proposals to expand the H-1B and/or EB-series green card programs.   There are a number of important points raised, which I'll address here.
 
Let's start with Pat Thibodeau's Computerworld piece.
 
The article contrasts the Hatch bill, will focuses on H-1B, with other proposals that center on green cards.   Thibodeau wrote:
 
***********************************************************************
 
The Senate proponents say the H-1B visas are needed to fill critical jobs and keep the U.S. competitive.   The visas give companies the ability to hire who they want.
 
Some law-makers, though, want to lessen the emphasis on temporary workers and instead focus on encouraging foreign graduates of U.S. universities to remain in the country.   These officials would offer permanent residency to foreign students that earn an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering and math, or the so-called STEM degrees.
 
***********************************************************************
 
On the surface, this is a good account of the original philosophy behind the "staple a green card to their diplomas" slogan, first put forth by IEEE-USA, and championed by, for instance, the Dallas Fed and indeed president Obama.   Mind you, I do not support this notion, as I believe it would be just as harmful as H-1B, for reasons I've explained before.   But my point here is that I believe the above is NOT the industry's motivation in supporting special STEM green cards.
 
Instead, as I said the other day and in the past, the real motivator for the industry is to get a back-door increase in the H-1B cap.   If a STEM green card program is enacted, you can bet that it won't be "staple a green card to their diplomas", meaning that green cards will NOT be immediately granted to the foreign graduates.   There will still be a delay of several years, because as I've explained before, the de facto indentured servant nature of the current green card process is highy attractive to employers; they want to hand-cuff their workers, and the green card process makes foreign workers captive.
 
Then why DO the employers support STEM green cards?   The reason is that the STEM green card program would set up a new visa category, separate from H-1B -- and thus would amount to an indirect increase in the H-1B cap.
 
AND...keep in mind that no cap has been mentioned in any of the proposals for STEM green cards, either the recent proposals or the older ones.   It's not in the Lofgren's IDEA bill introduced last year, for instance.
 
So, those who believe the "Gang of 8" bill [S744] will be less onerous than the Hatch proposal (whose provisions are tantamount to lifting the H-1B cap entirely), should rethink this whole mess.   No cap on STEM visas!
 
And couple that with the fact that many analysts believe that a STEM green card program would create its own demand.   You'll find a lot more programs like the one at Cal State East Bay, at which 90% of the enrollment at the computer science master's program is foreign.   (I believe this is common at most of the CSU campuses, but CSUEB is the only one whose MSCS foreign percentage I know.)
 
IOW, we're probably talking about truly large numbers of people.   I just took a look at CSUEB's list of master's programs, for example.
 
Easily half of those degrees would qualify as STEM.   (The T part of STEM alone opens doors very wide.)
 
Some of you will recall that some earlier proposals for STEM green cards were restricted to research universities, making it sound like perhaps 50 or 60 universities would be covered.   But as I reported at the time, sources tell me that "research universities" would include at least 200 and maybe as many as 300 schools.   CSUEB faculty definitely do some research, for instance, so that school would qualify.
 
Not to mention what I call "list creep".   Political pressure would mean the list of qualifying schools, and the list of qualifying fields, would expand over time.
 
It will be interesting to see what's in the Gang of 8's proposal when they introduce a formal bill, but judging from the myriad proposals made in the past for STEM green cards, I believe the above analyses will apply.
 
Thibodeau wrote,
 
*******************************************************************
 
MSFT says the typical pay for a new programmer or software engineer ranges from $100K to $120K.   "A person with an H-1B visa is not be treated differently than any other new hire.", a spokeswoman said.
 
*******************************************************************
 
MSFT has made this claim on several occasions, but it is simply not true.   The PERM green card data show that only 21% of the workers MSFT sponsored for green cards during 2006-2011 had salaries of at least $100K.   In fact, only 18% of MSFT's sponsored workers with software engineering titles were above the $100K mark.
 
Thibodeau notes that even Lofgren herself pointed out that the legally required prevaling wage is typically much lower than the true market wage for a worker.   Yet there has been nothing in any of the bills to fix this (except for the Durbin-Grassley bill, which has been languishing).
 
The other article is in Infoworld.
 
There is lots of interesting stuff here, not least of which is a link to an outstanding analysis by Stan Sorscher.
 
I highly recommend the Sorscher report, but I do have one bone to pick with it, concerning this passage:
 
*******************************************************************
 
During the Tech Boom in 1999, we did see a real labor shortage.   Employers offered signing bonuses, job applicants could negotiate, having multiple offers of employment and workplace perks were profiled in glowing newspaper accounts.   Nothing remotely like that is happening now.
 
*******************************************************************
 
I strongly disagree.   We in fact had very similar conditions then as now.   New computer science graduates -- YOUNG ones, mind you -- today enjoy an excellent job market, with mediocre students getting good jobs, many with multiple offers and so on.   BUT...the job market is far less welcoming for the people 10 or 15 years out of school.   It is also unwelcoming for new grad who were older, i.e. had worked in industry and then returned to school.   The same was true for older (age 35) workers in 1999, as some readers of this e-news-letter know only too well.
 
Indeed, Sorscher himself includes 2 excellent quotes regarding the age issue, one from 1996 and the other from 2012, illustrating my point: Things really are the same now as then.
 
There is one difference, though -- the industry lobbyists have gotten a lot slicker since 1999.   Back in 1999, coverage of the H-1B issue by any major news outlet, print or electronic, presented both sides of the story.   Not so today!   There has been a flurry of articles in the press on H-1B/green card proposals in the last week, and among the ones in main-stream outlets, the vast majority present only the industry side.   (Thibodeau, writing for a trade paper, has always written balanced, insightful pieces.)
 
This is not deliberate censorship.   Instead, it's the result of top-flight PR by the industry, whose goal has been to implant in the American conciousness the notion that the U.S.A. has a STEM labor shortage -- and indeed, that Americans are incapable of doing STEM.   Just look at the rhetoric, from both the industry lobbyists and the politicians -- we need H-1Bs for innovation, we need H-1Bs for tech entrepreneurship and so on, the implication being that we can't do that ourselves.
 
That glitch notwithstanding, read the Sorscher report, highly recommended.
 
Norm
---30---
 
Proposed Bills 13
 
 

 
Proposed Bills 2013

USA Over-Population Clock
World + USA Over-Population Clocks
Jimbo Wales's WikiPedia on World Over-Population