Category Archives: Kids

NEW COLUMN: Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You

Business, Donald Trump, Kids, Labor, Outsourcing

NEW COLUMN is “Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You.” It’s now on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

“The U.S. government discriminates ‘against genius’ and ‘brilliance’ with its immigration system,” asserted President Trump, as he rolled out Jared Kushner’s immigration plan.

The president has insisted that “companies are moving offices to other countries because our immigration rules prevent them from retaining highly skilled and even … totally brilliant people.”

While it’s true that U.S. immigration policy selects for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—it’s incorrect to say that it doesn’t “create a clear path for top talent.”

Kibitzing about a shortage of talent-based immigration visas is just Mr. Kushner channeling the business and tech lobby’s interests.

No doubt, Big Business wants the “good” old days back. They currently operate in a labor market. They don’t like that, because, in a labor market, firms compete for workers and wages are bid up. Companies don’t like a labor market. They prefer that workers compete for jobs and wages not rise.

Multinationals, moreover, are stateless corporations. They are “global beasts with vast balance-sheets” and no particular affinity for American labor. But it’s not only about the Benjamins (to borrow from a U.S. congresswoman who, too, dislikes Americans).

The “men” who run multinationals are true believers. They are social justice warriors first; businessmen second. Tech traitors like the FAANG—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google—are certainly radical leftists, who believe in replacing American labor as a creed and as a principle to live by.

Back to the talent-shortage myth. The 2017 IEEE-USA Employment Survey, which appears to be the latest from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has some “bad news.” “The nearly two-thirds of U.S. IEEE members who reported being unemployed at some point during 2016, had not been re-employed by mid-April of 2017.” Hopefully, the updated report will be more upbeat.

Still, there is unemployment in the ranks of American electrical engineers. Yet for years, consumers of the H-1B visa (multinationals) have insisted they were bringing in the best and the brightest because America had too few, if any at all. Not true. The H-1B visa brings in ordinary workers to displace ordinary Americans, the kind the IEEE tracks.

Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is a huge high-tech hoax, not a special visa for highly skilled individuals? It goes mostly to average workers. “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting.

Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.

While visa advocates—economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s adviser, is one—perpetuate the tall tale that the H-1B visa provides a steady supply of talent; visa opponents, for their part, like to cry croc about exploitation and slave-labor. I guess they think that misplaced compassion adds force to their arguments.

H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages. From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that these (average) men and women are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages for all. Which is just the way billionaire businessmen like it.

More significantly, and as this column has attempted to inform, since 2008, there is a visa category reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. It doesn’t displace ordinary Americans.

It’s the O-1 visa.  There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. …

… READ THE REST. “Visas for ‘The Brilliant’ Is Kushner Code For Replacing You” is now on WND.COM, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

NEW COLUMN: The TV Tarts’ Reign Of Terror, Part 1

English, Feminism, Gender, Kids, Literature, Media, Propaganda, Sex, The Establishment

NEW COLUMN IS “The TV Tarts’ Reign Of Terror, Part 1.” (Yes, there’s more to come.) It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review. All columns are archived on ilanamercer.com, under Weekly Column.

An excerpt:

The particular CNN segment I was watching concerned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. It was meant to help terminate the controversial anchor’s career.

I recognized the sourpuss, dressed in marigold yellow, who was presiding over the seek-and-destroy mission, targeting the ultra-conservative Mr. Carlson.

She was no other than Poppy Harlow.

It transpires that years back, Carlson had routinely called into a Howard-Stern-like shock-jock radio show and made naughty comments, some about women. Women were “extremely primitive,” he had quipped.

To watch the countless, indistinguishable, ruthless, atavistic women empaneled on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News—one cannot but agree as to the nature and caliber of the women privileged and elevated in our democracy, and by mass society, in general.

They’re certainly not women with the intellect and wit of a Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864-1945). Would that women like Mrs. Asquith were permitted to put lesser “ladies” like CNN’s Ms. Harlow in their proper place.

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Margot Asquith shot back, “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”

Naturally, you’d have to have a facility with the English language to know what a “harlot” is.

You’d certainly need an education, as opposed to a degree, to recognize the next character referenced.

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.

If parents saw to it that kids got an education, not merely a degree, the brats would know who Madam Defarge was.

But our uneducated ignoramuses no longer seek out the greatest literature ever. This is because the best books were penned by the pale, patriarchal penile people. Given this self-inflicted ignorance, few younger readers will know this most loathsome of literary icons, from “A Tale Of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.

Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner, who sat knitting, as she watched the en masse public beheadings of innocent aristocrats (17,000 of them) in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution, whose symbol ought to be the guillotine. (Another 10,000 perished in prison sans due process.)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shrieked in vengeance on TV when a sentencing Judge, T. S. Ellis III, dared to cite Paul Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life.”

Manafort, formerly a Trump campaign adviser, will be jailed for seven-and-a-half years for non-violent “crimes” excavated by Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller, and committed against that most wicked of government departments, the Internal Revenue Service. That a broken, frail, wheelchair-bound man might not die in jail enraged the wicked, pitiless witches of the networks.

Cheered on by our contemporary Madame Defarges, Manafort’s next sentencing Judge, an angry female, failed to limit her ambit to the application of the law, namely to sentencing. Instead, she lectured the defendant for a demeanor that displeased her, and for an inadequate display of contrition. Judge Amy Berman Jackson subjected a visibly broken Mr. Manafort to a vicious tongue-lashing. …

… READ THE REST.  NEW COLUMN IS “The TV Tarts’ Reign Of Terror, Part 1.” It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

NEW COLUMN: Covington Kid: Hated For The Color Of His Skin

Christianity, Free Speech, Gender, Kids, Racism, Republicans, THE ELITES, The Establishment, The Zeitgeist

NEW COLUMN is “Covington Kid: Hated For The Color Of His Skin.” It’s on WND, the Unz Review and on Townhall.com.

WHEN A CATHOLIC BISHOP, Roger Joseph Foys, saw a Catholic boy with a beatific smile, standing athwart an agitated, Amerindian elder and smiling in that pacifist, sweetly Christian way—he and the Diocese of Covington simply had to condemned the kid. Who else? What choice did a man of the cloth have?

The same absurdity typified the reaction of the lickspittle liberal mayor of Covington, Joe Meyer. “Appalling,” he called Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, the boy implicated in that “daring” standoff, on the National Mall, in D.C.

Had not philosophical giants like Cardi B (once a stripper, now a rapper, always illiterate) and Alyssa Milano (illiterate starlet) shown us the way?

Indeed. “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood” was Milano’s catechism. She went on to implicate “white boys’ lack of empathy [toward] the peoples of the world [in] the destruction of humanity.” (Only 12 years to go, predicts Comrade Ocasio-Cortez.)

The camera pans out to reveal Milano’s empathy oozing non-white men, also on the scene. These big and burly bullies are the Black Hebrew Israelites. Imagine what they’d have done to young boys like Nick Sandmann and his friends, if the steps of the Lincoln Memorial were not teaming with spectators and stakeholders.

But since the Memorial was swarming with demonstrators—some for the life of the unborn and others for the rights of the indigenous—the Black Hebrew Israelites stuck to hate-filled speech: “Child-molesting incest babies, future school-shooters, dirty, racist crackers,” hollered Alissa Milano’s home-team.

“The biggest terrorist on the face of the earth is the pale-faced man, woman and child.” The “Black Hebrew” hate group was speaking to the young, fragile-looking, pale patriarchy.

Hard on the heels of the “Black Hebrews” came actress Cher: “No one is safe in Trump’s America unless’ they’re white or wearing a MAGA hat.”

Another classy creature, one Cassandra Fairbanks—she poses as a comedic writer for “Saturday Night Live”—promised sexual favors to “anyone who manages to punch that MAGA kid in the face.”

CNN’s resident philosopher, Reza Aslan, wanted to know if anyone had “ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s [sic].” (His own, perhaps?)

Never original, South African expat Trevor Noah, a privileged celebrity who took “The Daily Show” from funny to facile, riffed on the same theme: “Everyone ‘wants to punch that kid.”

Some regret for joining a mob that went after minors was expressed by the producer of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “Let’s focus on shitty adults turning out shitty kids,” was his sage suggestion.

The boors of National Review checked Ana Navarro’s Twitter feed and hastened to match her gratuitous hatred for the Covington kids. The gaseous Navarro is a CNN Republican identity-politics activist, a hand-me-down from one of John McCain’s failed campaigns.

On the “Today” show, inquisitor Savannah Guthrie  peered down at Nick Sandmann, a mere slip of a boy, with studied contempt. In her grave, vocal-fry tones she inquired: “Do you feel like [cringe phrase] you owe anybody an apology? Do you see your own faults?”

Does this lily-white lady not know any young boys like Nick?

Poor child, so full of hope and faith. With his big blue eyes and rosy cheeks, Nick Sandmann imagined he was safe, so long as he did the right thing. But then Sandmann discovered he was hated for something he couldn’t right: the color of his skin. And while formative figures around him will hide this fact—for his sake, let us hope young Mr. Sandmann remains hip to it.  …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Covington Kid: Hated For The Color Of His Skin.” It’s on WND, the Unz Review and Townhall.com.

UPDATED (4/28): Grad Inflation: American Kids Are Dumbest In Developed World, Yet Graduation Rates Keep Rising

Affirmative Action, America, Culture, Education, Kids

American school kids, in aggregate, are the dumbest in the developed world, yet their high-school graduation rates keep rising. Looks puffed-up. The Economist explains how grad inflation is carried out:

…. Nationally, high-school graduation rates have increased at a steady clip even while other measures of learning and achievement—international exams, state-mandated standardised tests, college-admissions test scores—have been flat or even slightly negative. That could be because children are doing better, or because schools are lowering standards.

An ever-present element in these stories is the reliance on online credit-recovery classes. These are remedial courses delivered via computer that students can take if they fail a class, rather than attending summer school or being forced to repeat a grade. Jeremy Noonan, a former science teacher in Douglas County, Georgia, was assigned to supervise a credit-recovery course in 2016. Mr Noonan says a colleague told him that his responsibility was to manage the course so that students received an average grade of 80 or higher, which would enable them to graduate even if they failed the end-of-term exams.

The computer programme doing the teaching allowed students to retake exams they failed, with many of the same questions. “I realised right away it was all about manipulating the system,” he says. “Most teachers just gave the students the answers without bothering to explain the course content,” says Ayde Davis, a former public-school teacher in Del Rio, Texas, who reported violations to the state education agency. “Students could finish their courses at accelerated rates, the administration was happy, and credit-recovery teachers who co-operated were feted.”

Students completed exams at unreasonably fast speeds—one finished a physics exam in four minutes and earned an 80% score, according to records she saved. In the 2015-16 school year, 144 credits were given for recovery courses completed in less than ten hours, Ms Davis’s documents show. According to the makers of credit-recovery software, each course has between 60 and 75 hours of instruction.

It is not possible to know how many credit-recovery programmes are being used as diploma mills. But these courses are now widespread. The Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, estimates that 69% of all high schools in America use them. Some high schools have more than half of their students enrolled in credit-recovery programmes. They are especially popular in urban high schools attended by poor and minority students—in other words, precisely the places where graduation rates have risen fastest.

READ: “Grad inflation: The rise in American high-school graduation rates looks puffed-up. Online credit-recovery classes have been implicated in many school scandals.”

UPDATE (4/28):

And folks think their kids are so smart for flicking through mindless content.

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