Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy.

By Rodan

Polls show that most Americans think the False Messiah understands their problems more than either Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney. I, for the life of me, don’t get the benefit of the doubt this man is given. Clearly it has to do with him being Black and too many Americans don’t want to admit he’s a failure. This perception is not the reality.

At his Google town hall, the False Messiah is confronted by a woman whose husband is unemployed. Believing his own Obama Boom hype, he is stunned and taken aback. Obama said the economy was fine and that her husband should find a job. The women doesn’t back down and takes Obama to task for wanting to increase H1-B Visas. Obama then asks for her husband’s resume!

During his Google+ hangout Pres. Obama tells a woman that her husband shouldn’t be unemployed from the growth he has seen in the economy. Obama said he finds it “interesting” because he is getting “the word” that someone in her husband’s job field “should be able to find something right away.”

Obama offered to do something if she would just send him her husband’s resume.

The woman wants to know why Obama is extending visas for foreigners when there is tons of demand for American jobs by Americans.

“I don’t know what your husband’s speciality [is], but I can tell you that there is a huge demand around the country for engineers,” Obama told the woman.

“I understand that,” she responded. “But how am — given the list that you’re getting, I mean we’re not getting that. You said in the State of the Union address for business leaders to ask what can they do to bring jobs back to America.

There is demand for engineers in America. Its just businesses don’t want American engineers, they want cheap foreign labor. Does this sound familiar (Illegal immigration)? This has been very detrimental to the US economy. With declining wages and foreigners getting preferences, Americans are not interested in the Engineering field. There’s no longer an economic reward to justify the high costs assorted with attaining that degree. The H1-B visa program needs to stop. If someone wants to immigrate here, cool. I do think educated foreigners (Non Islamic) should be given a speeded up process, but to bring in people specifically for certain jobs has been a disaster in the IT field. Unlike farm work, these are jobs Americans would love to do.

This incident shows the delusion Obama lives in. Clearly, his own administration thinks the economy is doing fine. That woman is a patriot for hitting The False Messiah with a dose of reality. The job market sucks, no matter how much the Regime lies.

Update: Carolina Girl expressed my feelings on this matter.

Well said!

Why It’s Bad Business to Hire the Long-Term Unemployed

The Obama administration has overseen the utterly preventable destruction of human capital that is arguably unprecedented in human history — and it’s their fault.

March 15, 2011 – by Tom Blumer

Those greedy employers are up to their nefarious tricks again. They’re even being overt about it.

If you’re unemployed, many of them won’t hire you. They won’t even talk to you. They don’t want you to waste your time, or theirs, filling out a job application, or submitting your resume. How absolutely awful of them.

Wrong. The “unemployed need not apply” phenomenon is an all too predictable and awful result of over two years of horribly misguided economic policy.

First, let’s acknowledge that employers are mostly acting rationally.

Especially in this economy, perhaps until recently — and that’s a big maybe — the main focus of many, if not most businesses, has been to figure out how to stay in business. In an environment where a serious hiring mistake may mean the difference between keeping the doors open or closing them, employers looking for help cannot afford to take unwarranted risks. Before they go into the hiring market, they ask themselves if the old reliables in their current crew can handle the increased workload caused by staff departures. They may also consider whether some or all of the tasks involved can be outsourced, automated, or even eliminated.

If they reluctantly conclude that they must hire someone new, company managers will go through their own internal networks of relatives, friends, and acquaintances to see if they can find someone — employed or unemployed, but largely prescreened — who is up to doing the work. They may also look at the possibility of proactively recruiting people who have impressed them in their business interactions while currently working at customers, suppliers, or competitors.

When the avenues just described come up empty, employers will let the general job market know that they are looking. It is there where the bias in favor of people who are currently employed comes out, and for several valid reasons.

If a person is already working somewhere else, they’re demonstrating that on a daily basis, not in the recent or sometimes distant past, their work habits and output are more than likely satisfactory to someone else. There’s at least a decent chance that this person has kept his or her skills sharp, and has kept up with technological and market developments in the industry. The effort involved in training such a person in their new job will often be fairly minimal. There will also be a lower likelihood that the person will flunk a background check, credit check, or their drug test.

With the unemployed, especially the long-term unemployed, the situation completely flips. Work habits and attitudes, even if once great, become suspect. Skills may have eroded. On the job training efforts are more likely to be substantial, take longer to stick, and are more likely to fail. The chances that the new person will steal because of financial hardship, has gotten into legal trouble while unemployed, or has fallen into substance abuse are all greater.

Employers who are avoiding the unemployed are merely saying, “We only have so much time and energy to put into a job search, and we can’t afford to make a business mistake. So we’re going to avoid considering the unemployed to reduce the chances of making such a mistake.”

Read the rest, if you can stand it.

Thus we have a “jobless recovery” – if it can be called a recovery at all.

I am indeed one of the many who are “too old to retire, and too young to retire.” I am a lifelong IT professional. For many months, I have been working as a cashier, part-time, at minimum wage. I cannot earn enough to live on, and I continue to look for something better. Despite the canned spiel given during the hiring process, the cashier position is a dead-end job; there is no realistic prospect of promotions or pay raises. Even so, it is literally the ONLY job offer that I have received in over three years of diligent searching, and I accepted it instantly.

My story, and that of so many others, is here: Who are the 99ers?

What our government has done to us, by deliberately destroying one sector of the economy after another, is truly evil.

As Francis W. Porretto pointed out,

Excellently well put, and terribly depressing for anyone currently on the short end of the economic stick.

Another way of phrasing this would be: Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a sinking tide lowers all boats…and the lowest of those boats will get beached as a result.

It is much worse than that. Not only are the lowest of those boats doomed, but also a goodly number of the other boats that have run up on heretofore unseen rocks and shoals.

It will hit many of us who did everything that we were supposed to do: living frugally, investing prudently, upgrading our skills, avoiding dissolute living habits, you name it. The only thing that we did wrong was to grow older at a desperately inopportune time.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Update:

I refuse to blame the long-term unemployed for their plight by assuming that they refused to take poorly-paying jobs before their unemployment ran out. (See Who are the 99ers?).

For the record, I DID accept the ONLY job offer I have received since February 2008, and I accepted it BEFORE the unemployment benefits ran out. Because it is only part-time and it only pays minimum wage, I actually was legally eligible to collect part of my unemployment benefit until the 99 weeks ran out. They simply told me to report exactly what I earned each week, which I did.

Oh, and by the way, I recently applied for another job for which I would have been eminently qualified. But they turned me down on account of the fact that I have not been working in the IT field since February, 2008.

No, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with my work ethic. I show up when scheduled (and also show up when called in on short notice). I follow instructions, I am honest, I am diligent about providing good customer service, I cooperate well with others – what’s not to like? But apparently everybody thinks I have forgotten the skills I spent 30 years in acquiring. They are mistaken, but I have no means of proving that.

This video is a real shocker:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Unemployment Benefits: The 99ers

Vast numbers of Americans who were laid off back in 2008 still cannot find jobs. There simply are nowhere near enough jobs to go around.

Despite what was said in the news about extending unemployment benefits for another “thirteen months,” this was a lie. There was no extension of benefits for those who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and who still cannot find work, or are working at part-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on.

You don’t have to be a wastrel to end up in that predicament. Many of these people are older, educated professionals who did all the right things: finished college and professional school, worked diligently, kept their skills up to date, saved for their retirement. Now they are cashing in their IRAs and their 401Ks just to survive, selling their homes at huge losses, moving in with strangers, going to soup kitchens, picking through garbage for items to recycle.

Per the video, “No one is expecting Congress to vote another extension of unemployment checks, given our historic budget deficits.”

House adjourns with no mention of tier 5 unemployment extension for 99ers

December 23rd, 2010 8:58 am ET.

The House of Representatives yesterday evening passed a motion to adjourn the 111th Congress with no mention of H.R. 6556, the bill that would have provided unemployment benefits for the 99ers. The bill was sponsored by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA).

In an eloquent eulogy for tier 5, Michael Colliss laid into Lee, writing on the website All247News, “This latest disappointment to the 99ers was little more then an effort by a relatively unknown Congresswoman to get publicity. The 99ers have suffered – and are continuing to suffer – enough. This was a totally unnecessary, and in the opinion of this writer, basically cruel and insensitive effort by a person who did not care who she hurt to gain headlines. Considering the sad, unnecessary turmoil created by Congressman Barbara Lee of California, many unemployment advocates as well as 99ers are probably asking themselves, ‘With ‘friends’ like these who needs enemies?’”

Michael Colliss worked for 21 years as a staff member in Congress. He is now retired and works as a volunteer advocate for the 99ers.

The 112th Congress begins on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011. It is unlikely to pass legislation providing unemployment benefits for the 99ers. When asked about the future of the 99ers earlier this week, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said that the President intends to focus on job creation.

Read the rest.

I know only too well what the President means when he “intends to focus on job creation.” This means pork-barrel jobs for the TSA gropers, for the new food-inspection Nazis, for unneeded school administrators, and for all of the bureaucrats who are putting a stranglehold on private enterprise. There will be jobs for the SEIU and for other unions that have contributed to the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

This is how Obama’s “job creation” has worked out thus far:

Hot Air: Chart of the … year

(h/t: Iron Fist)

posted at 11:36 am on December 7, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

Quite a few people have had the same reaction to this chart from Business Insider and Calculated Risk as John Derbyshire at The Corner, which is to offer a res ipsa loquitur rather than clutter it with commentary. But there is more to be said about the ramifications of this chart:

But calling it the Chart of the Day seems too limiting. I’d call this the Chart of the Year, for a couple of reasons. It demonstrates the folly of the Obama administration’s insistence that we have been experiencing a recovery and any sort of significant growth in job creation. After hitting the nadir of job losses relative to our peak inter-recession employment, we have essentially flatlined for far longer than any other post-recession period. Nothing in the data shows a hint that we will soon break out of that pattern either, and Ben Bernanke says we’ll probably go four to five more years on this same trajectory.

Read the rest.

But that’s not all, folks. The Obama Administration has been creating jobs, all right – but not for Americans! The jobs are in other countries, in various industries that are profiting from US subsidies, sometimes through the costly stimulus program that was touted as a means of stemming American unemployment.

Our Tax Dollars ‘Saved or Created’ Jobs – OVERSEAS!

Our economy is a mess – millions of Americans are out of work and those who do have jobs are finding it increasingly difficult to afford the ever rising costs of living. With this in mind, it might make sense for the Obama administration to direct some of our tax dollars towards job creation, but what doesn’t make sense is the fact that millions of our dollars are being used by the Obama administration to create jobs in foreign countries!

Democrats are working very hard pushing the ‘green’ meme and fighting tirelessly to divert money to China for wind turbines – which if made here instead could help put Americans back to work.’
[...]
Not to be outdone by his former rival & current underling, good ole Barry spent $22 MILLION dollars to train high tech workers in Sri Lanka! Jobs that, again, I’m sure many AMERICANS would have loved an opportunity to be trained for and to get. There was a lot of coverage of this in the right-blogosphere, and virtually none in the MSM (try not to look so surprised), here’s what Ed Morrissey had to say about it at Hot Air:

Obama WH spends $22 million to train workers …
August 4, 2010 by Ed Morrissey
As I noted earlier, Democrats plan to punish businesses that locate higher-paying manufacturing jobs overseas with higher taxes. What will they do with a White House that will spend $22 million to train programmers in Java — and English — in Asia? The program from USAID will train 3,000 programmers to compete for business in the high-tech sector…

Much more here.

H-1b: Importing foreigners to displace American tech workers

As if all that were not enough, the H-1b visa program remains in effect. This program imports foreign workers to work at high-tech jobs where there is supposedly a shortage of American workers. The program was a fraud from the get-go, and it still is. Never has there been a shortage of American workers in the IT and engineering fields. Instead, the H-1b workers are being imported as contractors, at lower wages than what American workers would be paid, despite the laws that supposedly prevent that. Because most of the H-1b workers lack understanding of the American business environment, not to mention English-language communication skills, the quality of their work falls far short of that of the experienced American workers whom they have displaced. But too many CEOs and CIOs who want to cut corners to improve their short-term results make use of these H-1b workers in droves.

I am one of the 99ers.

At the age of 57, I am one of those who are considered “too old to rehire, and too young to retire.”

If Barack Hussein Obama has his way, there will never be a job at a living wage for the likes of me.

Having been laid off from an IT job early in 2008, I am one of those who have no more unemployment benefits. I am currently working as a part-time retail clerk, at minimum wage. To put it bluntly, I am a diligent and reliable worker with a clean record and a cooperative attitude, and I am exceedingly frugal, but it is flat-out impossible to survive on what I earn. I have requested more hours, but business has been much too slow.

Unless my situation drastically improves after the beginning of 2011, I am seriously considering emigration.

Also see:

• Help the NObama Sticky Note Campaign Go Viral!
• 99er unemployment benefits legislation, H.R. 6556, passage unlikely
• For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again
• Shadow Government Statistics: Alternate Unemployment Charts
• 1,000 camp out 3 nights for job application
• Obama Boom leads to a loss of 131,000 jobs in July
• Here Are 13 Signs That We’re Actually In A Depression Right Now
• 20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans
• Obama’s Stimulus Money Spent Overseas, Jobs in China (h/t: Rancher)
• Stimulus money going to El Salvador shows Democrats care about our money, not about us
• Special Report: Is America the Sick Man of the Globe? (h/t: Rodan)

Update:

I refuse to blame the long-term unemployed for their plight by assuming that they refused to take poorly-paying jobs before their unemployment ran out.

For the record, I DID accept the ONLY job offer I have received since February 2008, and I accepted it BEFORE the unemployment benefits ran out. Because it is only part-time and it only pays minimum wage, I actually was legally eligible to collect part of my unemployment benefit until the 99 weeks ran out. They simply told me to report exactly what I earned each week, which I did.

Oh, and by the way, I recently applied for another job for which I would have been eminently qualified. But they turned me down on account of the fact that I have not been working in the IT field since February, 2008. (See Why Employers Avoid Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed).

No, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with my work ethic. I show up when scheduled (and also show up when called in on short notice). I follow instructions, I am honest, I am diligent about providing good customer service. I have some sales skills. I cooperate well with others – what’s not to like? But apparently everybody thinks I have forgotten the skills I spent 30 years in acquiring. They are mistaken, but I have no means of proving that.

Ironically, the particular job I was applying for is one that would have required outstanding communication skills – WHICH I HAVE – and which I have further honed in my current retail clerk job!

Despite the fact that an H-1b visa worker would be exceedingly unlikely to measure up in that regard, I think it is extremely likely that an H-1b worker was given that job, simply because an H-1b worker would be much likelier to be able to claim recent experience in this particular area of the IT field. It would be far easier for a foreign worker to fabricate such recent IT experience in his home country, simply because it is very difficult for a US employer to verify references in a foreign country.

Acknowledging that human fallibility is inevitable

Since the collapse of the IT marketplace in the US has made it impossible for me to find work in my field, I have been working as a retail clerk. Anybody who thinks that running a cash register is an easy job has never tried it. It has been a humbling experience in that it is so easy to make mistakes – entering or scanning codes incorrectly, misreading the display, forgetting to apply a discount that the customer is entitled to have, neglecting to ask for the customer’s loyalty account number, errors in counting change, dropping something on the floor, tearing a plastic bag, or just plain hitting the wrong key.

One time I happened to mention human fallibility in that regard, and the customer replied, “If it weren’t for human fallibility, I’d be out of business.” Well, there’s certainly no chance of that happening!

Of course, it turned out that the customer was a Protestant minister. Even though human fallibility will never go away, and human individuals and organizations will always err, it is always possible to move toward good. It is the pastor’s job to lead people to do so.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that I learned while growing up in a society rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that we live in a fallen world. Human error, failure, and outright evil are part of the human condition, and we must deal with that. I am not suggesting that anyone has to like or condone evil in the world – only that we all must acknowledge that evil in the world is a fact. No person and no institution can ever be perfect. Expecting otherwise leads to bitterness and delusion, and eventually to disaster. Moreover, condemning and abandoning the good simply because it can never be perfect is just plain wrong.

This is the very lesson that liberals reject.

Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”

(h/t: Philip_Daniel)

By Evan Sayet

…I assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I’m here to propose to you that it’s not “just about” every issue; it’s quite literally every issue. And it’s not just wrong; it’s as wrong as wrong can be; it’s 180 degrees from right; it is diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.

What I discovered is that this is not an accident. This is part of a philosophy that now dominates the whole of Western Europe and the Democratic Party today. I, like some others, call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, and he will not only side with Saddam Hussein; he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, and he will plagia­rize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels – as did our former President Jimmy Carter – to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny democracy of Israel.

It’s not just foreign policy; it’s every policy. Given the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity–and believe me, I know this from my hometown of Hollywood–they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity as if it’s cool: like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you’ve had sex with your best friend’s mother while you’re still a child. Conversely, NARAL, a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group, will hold a fund-raiser called “‘F’ Abstinence.” (And it’s not just “F.” It’s the entire word, because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.)

So the question becomes: Why? How do they think they’re making a better world? The first thing that comes into your mind when trying to under­stand, as I’ve so desperately tried to understand, is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. But we have a problem with that, don’t we? We all know too many people who fit this category but who aren’t evil: many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives.

If they’re not evil, then the next place your mind goes is that they must just be incredibly stupid. They don’t mean to always side with evil, the failed and wrong; they just don’t know what they’re doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can’t say Bill Maher (my old boss) is a stupid man. You can’t say Ward Churchill is a stupid man. You can’t say all these academics are stupid people. Frankly, if it were just stupidity, they’d be right more often. What’s the expression? “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” or “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.”
[...]
What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with–none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government–have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they’re convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, pov­erty, crime, and injustice must be found–can only be found–in the attempt to be right.

If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency–all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.
[...]
What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn’t right and to prove that wrong isn’t wrong. You see this in John Lennon’s song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries.” Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there’s nothing left to kill or die for…

I always despised that song, and wondered why anybody would willingly pay to listen to such tripe. I would even go so far as to say that the mad utopian delusion that John Lennon espoused in that song led to his death. Because Lennon denied the inevitability of human evil, he saw no need to take the security precautions appropriate to a world-famous public figure.

Indoctrination against discernment

The reason people listen to tripe such as “Imagine” is that, even back in the 1960s and 1970s, America’s youth had already been exposed to a great deal of leftist indoctrination. Otherwise, they would have voted with their wallets by refraining from purchasing that recording. Sayet explains how this indoctrination works:

What happens is, they [i.e., youth] are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.

There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”

I’ll give you an example. At the airports, in order not to discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to pretend we don’t know things we do know, and we have to pretend that the next person who is likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grand­mother as those four 27-year-old imams newly arrived from Syria screaming “Allahu Akbar!” just before they board the plane. In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.

The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options–as in “she’s a discriminating shopper”–is the essence of rational thought; thus, the whole of Western Europe and today’s Democratic Party, dominated as it is by this philosophy, rejects rational thought as a hate crime.

How the “cult of indiscriminateness” promotes evil over good

Later in the article, Sayet explains how this ideological corruption translates into real life. Modern liberals, and the many institutions that they control, indoctrinate and bully the public into supporting policies that reward failure and punish success.

Indiscriminateness of thought invariably leads the Modern Liberal to side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Because in a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, your expectation is that all behavior should lead to equally good outcomes. When, in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes, you and I know why–because we think. We know why communities that promote teenage promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence: Teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Teenage abstinence is a better behavior.

…But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment–must not make that judgment–that would be discriminating. They have no explanation. Therefore, the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success, simply by its existence, is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence–no other evidence needed, just the fact that it has failed–is enough proof to them that failure has been victimized.

So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite’s blueprint for utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success, out of a sense of justice… [emphasis mine]

Why modern liberals mindlessly support the jihadis

Siding with evil against good inevitably leads to siding with the jihadis. Hence the tranzi-progressive/jihadi convergence:

Take an issue in the news and think like a Modern Liberal, and you will see how, once you’ve been indoctrinated into this mindset, there is no other choice. Remember, I said it was inevitable. Once you belong to this cult of indiscriminateness, there is no other conclusion you can come to than that good is evil and that evil is the victim of good.

We all know it’s official policy at the Leftist media outlets to never call Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hezbol­lah, Hamas, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, or any of the other Islamic fascist terrorist groups around the world “terrorists,” and you know why. In fact, it’s even in official memos to reporters ordering them not to use the appropriate word. That reason is that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Who are we to employ critical, rational judgment?”

But, as a very minimum standard, can’t we at least agree that in order to be called a “freedom fighter,” you have to be fighting for freedom? We know what Osama bin Laden is fighting for; he’s told us. It’s not freedom; it’s an oppressive theocracy in which women are covered from head to toe and beaten if their ankles become exposed, and unless we all change to his religion, we are considered the offspring of pigs and monkeys to be decapitated. People like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore will call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter because being indiscriminate quite literally leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off. That’s how sick this mentality is.

Much more here. Read it all.

Desperate Unemployed Software Engineer Attacks IRS Office Building

By now, many readers will have heard the news story about pilot Joseph Stack having crashed a small plane into the IRS office building in Austin Texas (for details, see Fox News, Pilot Crashes Into Texas Building in Apparent Anti-IRS Suicide.)

The Inevitable Media Reaction

Whenever anything like this happens, the same kinds of articles tend to appear in the media and on blogs. There are the articles that, often with a self-righteous tone, wax eloquent about the horrific nature of the act, the despicable character of the attacker, and (often) the pristine innocence of the victims. Given that the victims in this event were IRS employees, little has been said about them in the media.

Then there are those other articles that sympathize with the attacker’s motives, ideology, or political stance, but condemn the attacker’s use of violence. Here again, I haven’t seen much of that this time around. Joseph Stack’s manifesto encompassed such a mixed bag of grievances, accusations, and quotations that it is impossible to tell where in the political spectrum he was coming from. I suspect that he himself had no clear idea.

Finally, there are articles calling out for more and more government legislation, regulation, or law enforcement to prevent any similar incidents from occuring in the future. In this instance, there were acknowledgements that it is all but impossible to prevent this type of suicide attack, but no amount of reasoning or common sense ever seems to stop the flood of demands for draconian repressive measures.

The “Powers That Be” Knew Something Like This Was Bound To Happen

No matter where you live in the world, you know that the worldwide economy has been bad for over two years, and there is no improvement in sight. The rot started in the US, largely due to actions on the part of the US government and various corrupt oligarchs, such as George Soros. The collapse and supposed “bailout” were engineered by various corrupt politicians and financiers to take money out of our pockets and put it into their own. Everything done by the US Congress and the Obama administration has served only to deepen the depression. From here, the economic rot has spread worldwide; two notable examples are Iceland and Greece.

Then there’s the issue of the U.S. economy having been hollowed out by outsourcing, offshoring, and the H-1b visa program. This has had a particularly devastating effect on the American middle class in general, and the American IT worker in particular.

Even with the real unemployment rate in many areas of the US matching or exceeding that of the 1930s Great Depression, it is truly scandalous that the H-1b program remains in effect. This insures that any effort on the part of American IT workers to get jobs, or to retrain themselves for future jobs in the industry, are doomed to come to naught.

The H-1b program never had anything to do with aiding the competitiveness of US firms in global markets; that ship sailed away years ago. Instead, the H-1b program is simply a testimony to the power of multinational technology megabusinesses to deceive, corrupt, and intimidate US elected officials. (Please see IT Business Edge: AFL-CIO Report Takes Critical Look at H-1B Visa Program for more on this issue.)

How is this relevant to the story? The attacker, Joseph Stack, was an unemployed IT worker who was also bedeviled by a long battle with the IRS and, apparently, ensuing difficulties with his home life. I would like to point out that the overwhelming majority of people faced with such situations never “go postal” or resort to any form of violence. But the US government has enough statistics and historical data at its disposal to know that, whenever a large group of people is pushed too far into desperation, a tiny percentage of them will go over the edge.

Let me make it clear that I am NOT claiming that anybody connected with the US government knew ahead of time that this particular individual, Joseph Stack, would do what he did. I said no such thing, nor did I mean to imply it. But I do intend to say that the US government knew that it was only a matter of time before someone whose life had been destroyed by government policies would commit a high-profile violent act.

The “Powers That Be” Could Have Prevented It Without Repressive Measures

The US Congress and the Obama administration could cut unemployment significantly just by eliminating the H-1b program, but they do not. Part of the reason why H-1b remains in effect is simply because the Obama administration not only is thoroughly corrupt, but also is engaged in a covert war to disempower, plunder, and eventually eliminate most of the US middle class. In other words, the Obama administration is not going to do anything to help out a segment of the population that does not provide the Democrat party with significant political or financial support.

But that’s not the only reason. Whenever anyone who is not part of the administration’s political support base reacts to oppression by becoming violent, this violent act provides those in power with a convenient excuse both to discredit their political opponents and to increase government control by cracking down on everybody by any means available.

If Violence Is Not The Answer, What Is?

Supposed “democratic election” or no, recent polls in the US have made it clear that neither the Obama administration nor the US Congress enjoy the consent of the governed, in any sense of the word. The US economy remains in free fall with no recovery in sight, and with the levels of debt and irresponsible spending being what they are, little possibility of recovery in the lifetime of anybody old enough to read this blog. Glenn Beck proclaimed that we don’t need a revolution; we’ve already had one. He is correct that we don’t need a “revolution” in that sense, but incorrect that we have already had one. The American Revolution in 1776 was not really a revolution in the usual sense, but a war of secession. What we need now is not revolution, but secession, and not just one secession, but perhaps fifty of them. And if enough people understand what they want, secession need not involve bloodshed.

Keep watching this blog for more about secession.

Here we go again, this time with the “Pentagon Shooter”

Michelle Malkin has the story here: About the Pentagon shooter – Update: Stop playing games, MSM. John Patrick Bedell was a registered Democrat

What a tragic irony!

In case you haven’t heard, Satyam was the fourth-largest IT outsourcing company in India, with 55,000 employees (or so they claimed). The CEO, Ramalinga Raju, recently resigned after admitting massive financial fraud. As of this writing, the company is almost out of cash.

Here we go again…

Satyam has done business with companies and governments in over 60 countries, including the U.S. This scandal appears to be even larger in scope than the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal of late 2001. Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is facing close scrutiny over having signed off on Satyam’s audits.

Obviously, the much-touted Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle did nothing to prevent the recent collapse of the U.S. real estate, stock market, and financial sector. The take-home lesson is that once any corporation becomes multinational in scope, and politically well-connected, no laws, no regulations, no bureaucratic restructuring can possibly keep it honest if its management chooses to do otherwise.

Another reason why outsourcing is wrong

Outsourcing and offshoring are always and everywhere the enemies of accountability. The further away one’s trading partners are located, the harder it is to comprehend what they are up to, and that will never change.

Why corporate cheating is contagious

Whenever one major company in an industry has been “cooking the books” to promote or exaggerate its own success, what effect do you suppose that has? Think about it! Every other executive, every other company in that industry will be pressured to match or exceed the cheater’s inflated results, by fair means or foul, or face the wrath of board members and stockholders.

Some news links and other sources:

• Business Standard: Regulators, government tighten noose around Satyam
• Business Standard: Government supersedes Satyam board
• Wikipedia: Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
• NYT: Satyam Chief Admits Huge Fraud
• IHT: India hears calls for Satyam bailout
• IHT: Auditor in cross hairs over fraud at Satyam
• The Australian: Police arrest Satyam founder, Government sacks board
• Information Week Blog: Satyam And Its 8-Year Ban from World Bank
• Bloomberg.com: Satyam U.S. Investors File Actions Alleging Fraud (Update2)
• TheDeal.com: Enron went bankrupt, but what of Satyam’s future?

Perhaps some of this would be funny if it were not so sad.

Note: The screen capture was taken by 1389AD from www.satyam.com, shortly after the announcement. The pixelated area was blurred in the original.

Another organization that should be defending our interests becomes corrupt…

The IEEE, an organization that should be defending the interests of professional engineering workers, has betrayed its constituency and has sold out to the “body shops” that are importing de facto indentured servants to the US.

From the 10/14/07 Sunday Overnight Open thread on Little Green Footballs:

re: #14 itellu3times

IEEE-USA is writing a letter to Congress that USA citizens should no longer have preference over green-card holders in getting US jobs.

[Link: sign the document TODAY!

I have signed this, and you should too!

It is time to end the irredeemably corrupt H-1b visa program once and for all. There is NO shortage of American IT and engineering workers who are qualified and are ready, willing, and able to do good work!

The H-1b program supposedly has restrictions to prevent the displacement of American workers, but those restrictions are flouted across the board. Vast numbers of foreign workers, primarily (though not exclusively) from India and Islamic countries, and often with severely limited English-language communication skills, are being imported to the U.S. to work at lower wages and to displace older and more qualified American professionals. These foreign workers are de facto indentured servants.

The upshot is that it has become all but impossible for qualified, hard-working, reputable, and experienced U.S. citizens to find any permanent employment in the IT and engineering fields. Established professionals who once held what seemed to be secure jobs are now traveling around the country to do contract work for a few months at a time. They seldom, if ever, are offered regular, full-time employment with benefits.

Consequences for homeland security – and our future

We are outsourcing the expertise that we need to defend our country. Do we really want key portions of the US technical and communications infrastructure to be in the hands of foreigners whose loyalties are elsewhere? (See Engineer indicted on spying for China.

No wonder American college students are no longer interested in studying these subjects – the jobs simply don’t exist!

]]> http://1389blog.com/2007/10/15/american-engineering-and-it-workers-are-being-sold-out-how-this-affects-you/feed/ 19 http://1389blog.com/2007/08/14/new-web-20-marketplace-free-for-48-hours/ http://1389blog.com/2007/08/14/new-web-20-marketplace-free-for-48-hours/#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:33:24 +0000 JennSierra http://1389blog.com/2007/08/14/new-web-20-marketplace-free-for-48-hours/

Mashable has a new Web 2.0 marketplace, and is offering free listings for 48 hours, starting this morning.

On this new site, you can, “Buy, Sell, and Trade everything Web 2.0…[including] Websites for Sale, Websites Wanted, Jobs Available, Jobs Wanted, Facebook Development Services, Software providers, Consulting, Events…and much more to come.”

For more information, click here.

To Start listing click on the image below.

]]> http://1389blog.com/2007/08/14/new-web-20-marketplace-free-for-48-hours/feed/ 0 http://1389blog.com/2007/08/05/1389-blog-now-has-five-scrolling-news-tickers/ http://1389blog.com/2007/08/05/1389-blog-now-has-five-scrolling-news-tickers/#comments Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:40:00 +0000 1389 http://1389blog.com/2007/08/02/1389-blog-now-has-scrolling-news-tickers/

Updated 8/17/07: Added News Feed Widgets page to this blog. This page contains scrollable news feeds, with a link to a site where you can get customizable news feed widgets for your own blog or website. Widgets are available in several formats, depending upon where you want to place them on the page.

1389 has added several scrolling news tickers to 1389 Blog – Anitjihadist Tech. The tickers are free; you can go to these websites and add the code to your own blog or website. To see how they actually work, look for them below:

News Widgets from Widgetbox:

Please be patient; they take a little while to finish loading!

Want Widgetbox widgets for yourself?

• To get any Widgetbox widget on this page:
  • Click on the Add Widget button under the widget.
  • Select Customize Widget from the pop-up menu.
  • Choose the frame dimensions and color that fit your blog or website.
  • Copy the code into a text or HTML widget box in your blog layout, or into any other place on your blog or website that accepts scripted code.
  • Save your layout.
• To select other free widgets, including music and playable web games:
  Click here to access Widgetbox!

NRA/ILA Widget:

http://www.nraila.org/XML/

Headlines

Serbianna News

News Tickers

Israel News Guide

ynet news

• Click here for more news feed widgets!

Other Widgets and News Sources:

To install the news ticker, copy the code from the website and paste it into an element in your webpage or blog sidebar that accepts scripted code.

For instance, if your blog uses WordPress and you have selected a widget-ready template, add the code to a text widget. If no text widget is present in your sidebar, add a new one; otherwise, you can add the code to an existing text widget. Click on the text widget to open it, and paste the ticker code at the desired location.

Be sure to save your changes!

• There’s even a widget for this blog!
  • News Feed Widget for 1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech
• Websites offering free auto-updating news tickers:
  • Gates of Vienna
  • Americans for Serbia
  • Jerusalem Post Headlines
  • Israel News Guide
  • FrogFeet news feed ticker (UK)
  • SNP Security News Portal (cybersecurity)
• More websites with free news widgets:
  • Breitbart Headlines
  • Serbianna Headlines

]]> http://1389blog.com/2007/08/05/1389-blog-now-has-five-scrolling-news-tickers/feed/ 1 http://1389blog.com/2007/04/22/what-this-blog-was-like-when-it-began/ http://1389blog.com/2007/04/22/what-this-blog-was-like-when-it-began/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:13:00 +0000 1389 http://1389blog.com/2007/04/22/what-this-blog-was-like-when-it-began/

1389 is my nom de guerre, and I am the editor of this blog. I am an IT professional, living in the in the U.S., with thirty years’ experience, mostly on IBM mainframes.

I am blogging my thoughts, impressions, and concerns, as well as tech tips and news, mostly from my mobile phone. The phone is a Sanyo SCP-7000, text-only at this time.

This blog will address some technical matters, along with anything else that seems interesting or useful.

There are frequent posts from other authors who have been invited to participate.

If you are wondering why this blog uses such a spare and simple design, it’s because it allows this blog’s website URL to be used from both a conventional browser and a mobile phone or PDA. That means you can navigate, read, and post comments on blog entries from your mobile device. It avoids the need to build a separate mobile interface. If the main blog page were to have graphics, scroll boxes, or other trimmings, it would require much more memory, and it might also require features that are not implemented on all mobile devices.

Technorati tags:
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About 1389 Blog
cellular
IBM mainframe
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More about 1389 on this blog.

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