From the heated Slashdot.org thread on Bill Gates’ latest lies before the US Senate about H-1b Visa limits:

When job reqs get that specific, it means that there [is] already someone with exactly the same qualifications working for them, most likely an H1B and or someone with F1-practical-training waiting to become H1B. These adverts are crafted to reduce or reject other applicants, not to select any.

Good news, everyone! The Department of Labor has addressed this, and employers no longer need to pretend that they tried to hire someone that was already in the US.

The Department of Labor has published it’s strategic 5 Year Plan.

Under Performance Goal 2H, “Address worker shortages through the Foreign Labor Certification Program”, we find:

H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.

Isn’t that special? I could bring in a new hire H1-B at what DOL thinks are the prevailing wages for Engineers, a whole 40K/year in Silicon Valley (Level 1 Engineer, DOL stats!), and I can use them to displace overpriced US college grads. Pretty slick. Of course the displaced workers can be retrained to something more appropriate.

Repeat after me:

“Do you want fries with that?”

To: Liam Byrne, Minister of State, Immigration

Date 7th March, 2007

My dear Liam,

Another bloody awful day, don’t you think?  As if I hadn’t had enough of them already!

Under the circumstances, then, I thought it best not to text you with this question: Which one of your brilliant minions dreamt up this garbage?  For God’s sake, Liam:-

Labour will get tough on illegal immigrants - by sending them text messages begging them to go home.

Under desperate plans to clear a backlog of 600,000 cases, their driving licences could also be cancelled.

This was just giving Davis an open goal - which, needless to say, he did not miss:-

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: “This is a serious admission of defeat. John Reid is effectively giving up on trying to deport the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in this country, preferring instead to spam them with text messages.

“As for removing driving licences, does he really believe that a person who is prepared to live in a country illegally is that concerned about having the correct qualifications to drive in that country?

“Yet again we see another pathetic attempt to grab a headline rather than address a problem.

“Instead of spin and bluster from ministers, the public deserve effective action.”

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By necessity, I’ve coined the neologism “heterosity” as a counter to the subversion of the definition of “diversity” so that we may discuss “novel local diversity” as contrasted with the ecological diversity emerging from the slow process of natural selection.  The terms used by vectorists (promoters of heterosity) to describe the features of heterosity include “rich”, “vibrant”, “inclusive”, “tolerant” and, of course, that travesty of linguistics “diverse”.

And, as I’ve described before there are many, quite predictably, negative consequences observed in heterose systems, not the least of which is the evolution of virulence over mutualism in ecological relations.  These phenomena are so critical to understanding why “extremist” positions are not only understandable, but necessary, that they deserve their own neologisms: vectorism cum parasity.

In terms of laboratory experiments regarding high complexity social ecologies, it seems there has been a virtual collapse of empiricism since the early 1960s when John B. Calhoun, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, conducted the last of his experiments letting rodents reproduce within confined spaces under varying conditions—ultimately showing that populations can not only stabilize at uncomfortable levels with on-going social pathology—but that populations can, seemingly mysteriously (if one ignores the potential of parasity in such environs) collapse to their utter extermination!  Nowadays it is easy to imagine proposals for such research being tabled for political reasons at odds with stated explanations.  Most probably the stated explanations for tabling such research proposals have to do with the ethics of NIMH imposing such suffering on animals, despite the fact that civilization is already imposing such suffering on billions of humans without any vigorous, experimentally validated, testing of beliefs that such conditions are “humane”.  The myth of the HBO series “Sex In the City”—where pushing-middle-aged women in female-saturated New York City face the dilemma of choosing between the marriage proposals from wealthy handsome business executives and wealthy handsome famous artists—is virtually a religious dogma enforced by the State and any laboratory work testing it is simply and “mysteriously” absent.

However, there was a 1987 paper titled “The Rat Populations of NIMH: Density, Reproduction, and the Neocortex” by one James L. Hill describing the experimental comparison between brain damaged rats and rats subjected to “social complexity” (you know… rich, vibrant, etc. environments).  It was found that the cognitive function of the rats subjected to such social complexity declined to the level of the brain damaged rats (specifically, pin-headed or micrencephalic rats).

Against such forces, there may be little one can do to reform civilization, which may help explain the inexorable dumbing down of our population.

This is the weekly roundup from Majority Report. 

PS: If you have an contributor code, don’t forget to contribute stories!  (See the form at the bottom of the Majority Report page.)

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On February 28th Karlmagnus, in response to a question about major business managers on PF’s Calcium Imaging thread, ventured the opinion that:-

... since the system is about to collapse, the intellectual outlook of management may be very different at Dow 5000 to what it was at Dow 12000.  No point trying to change their thinking at the top of the bubble; large numbers of the current mob (particularly the investment bankers) will be behind bars by 2012, only peripherally because of their ideas on globalisastion.  Just as 1935’s CEO was a very different animal from 1928’s, so too will 2014’s be very different from today’s.

Requests for elaboration went unanswered.  But evidently, KM had already been at work on this because today the following piece appeared at Prudent Bear.

GW

This is what it will look like

It’s impossible to tell when the world’s stock markets will finally wake up from their easy-money induced stupor, but one thing is clear: when they do so the initial break will look like last Tuesday. A modest event of no apparent global significance will cause a stock market drop that cascades around the world, producing severe declines in other markets. Last Tuesday’s break may or may not have started the climacteric sell-off, but that sell-off cannot be long delayed.

More interesting than the unanswerable question of when precisely a crash will occur is that of which sectors will be worst affected, which relatively unscathed. Current market thinking appears to be that since the crash originated in China, that market is due for a significant downturn, and that emerging markets in general are overpriced and due for a fall. That view fails to reflect an intelligent appraisal of where the true economic vulnerabilities are.

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Soren has, as he promised, interviewed Constantin von Hoffmeister, and the file is uploaded to the Radio page.

The original announcement of the interview was received with protest from some MR regulars.  But the interview itself is a considerable success and, I think, cautions against too hasty a judgement.  I recommend it.  File size 42.4 MB.  Run time 1 hr 1 min 49 secs.

Just to keep you in the picture, the next show is likely to be Fraser II, conducted by James Bowery.  After that Geoff Beck is back.  Sort of.  I will be interviewing him.  But, happily, he will do the editing.

This CSPAN video of Thomas P.M. Barnett before to the National Defense University (warning: requires bittorrent) shows one of the best thought leaders of globalization in one of his best presentations.  Here is the key quote from that presentation:

“This extension of our networks is how we extend our transparency and our security.  Not stopping things at our border.  Everybody’s information network is only as secure as every other network it connects to.  It’s about extending networks.  Not firewalling them.”

Is it just me or did he just contradict himself there?  I mean, I know its only central to his whole paradigm so a contradiction there isn’t very important… but really… I just can’t seem to get myself past such details.  Maybe if I got therapy for OCD…

If he had said something about increasing the ISO standard of intrusion used for each nation already in the network as the network expands, so that the probability failure (1-(p**N) where p is probability of non-failure of a given node and N is number of nodes) is held to some reasonably low constant then he might not be self-contradictory.  But then he would be subject to a simple reductio ad absurdum:

If we follow his maxim of “extend, don’t firewall, the networks” and add “simply increase the standard level of Big Brother intrusion” you get to the point that you do away with the “firewall” between sewage and fresh water (assuming you can remove the smell so the “market value” of the sewage water is high enough to make it profitable).  Of course the level of intrusion here ends up being killing off everyone so there aren’t any intestines harboring bacteria, but who needs humans anyway?  Of course you can be “reasonable” and not kill off all the humans, leaving the details of how to prevent pathogens from spreading through the population to the, uh, rational humans (who processed their own food and water) left after the plague wipes out the rest.

The cunning, effort and sheer bloody manipulativeness that is required to post at majorityrights.com goes sadly unrecognised.  So here, for your edification and enlightenment, are two examples of the kind of thing that has sometimes to be done (it never works, of course, but it is done):-

The first is a letter written to the Schools Minister and Labour MP for Dorset South, Jim Knight.  The writer is one “John Standing” of Brighton, E.Sussex - a man indeed of some standing in the life sciences (though I wouldn’t be too sure about that).  He was moved to protest to Mr Knight by a BBC News article about the nature of the black male.  Well, it’s not about the nature of the black male, that’s the problem.  It’s about white racism:-

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