In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

After I posted yesterday, it dawned on me that I hadn't mentioned a major country that sends workers here via H1B or other, similar preferential programs, China. This is partly because the media discussions haven't mentioned it, either. But one thing this limits in the discussion is the extent to which the foreign workers' poor English limits their effectiveness. Workers from India are less of a problem, because the British colonial background made English a highly useful second language for the whole country that otherwise had different regional languages. As a result, a dialect called South Asian English is fully recognized, and it's understood fairly well by speakers of US English. This doesn't completely eliminate the problem, though, because, due to the US background, English is also commonly spoken in the Philippines, and while Filipino English is understandable to speakers of US English, South Asian English and Filipino English are less mutually intelli...

As I said yesterday, the people writing aboput H1B visas have never worked in tech, and they're getting basic things wrong. They start, for example, with this assumption : The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher. These occupations often include fields like IT, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. But this glosses over important distinctions. In medicine, I'm assuming they want MDs or PhDs. In engineering or mathematics, they might want BSEEs, MS, or PhDs. But IT is a very different field. The people who work directly on the keyboard, programmers, operators, system engineers, webmasters, network specialists, program librarians, and the llke, often don't have any type of four-year or even two-year degree. So I keep asking the question, why do we claim to be scouring the world for the best and the brightest when the US-born ...

The current discussion of H1B visas gets everything wrong. Musk and Ramaswamy see the problem from Mahogany Row. The writers who cover it arem't tech workers, they're writers, in fact, bad ones. I spent a career in tech. Here's an example of what everyone gets wrong : For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.'' Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work. Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San F...

This year, we've been in and out of Ferdinand Lundberg's world of finpolity as outlined in his 1968 book The Rich and the Super-Rich , and which I summarized in this post . It turns out that, although Prescott Bush's wealth can be traced to his wife's father, George Herbert Walker. who was presidenr of the Harriman family investment bank, W A Harriman & Co, and Prescott himself became a managing partner of its successor, Brown Brothers Harriman, and was closely associated with Edward Harriman's sons, W Averell and E Roland, Prescott himself is never mentioned as a finpol in The Rich and the Super-Rich . This was almost certainly by design. According to Britannica , At least some portion of the Greenwich Bushes’ financial stability came by way of the largesse of the Walkers, who were ostentatious in their demonstrations of wealth, whereas Bush counseled his offspring to play down their wealth and instead advocated public service as a sort of nob...

Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy , the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post : The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha. The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of de...

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002 : When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president. Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests. I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on, Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a c...

Lindy Li is a puzzle. She's been highly visible in the press since the election, characterized as a Prominent Democratic National Committee powerhouse fundraiser who has turned on the party following Harris's November loss, spilling what purport to be insider secrets. I'm not sure about this at all. Matt Margolis echoes the received line at PJ Media : Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline. The reference to "what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala" carries a link to another Margolis story at PJ Media : In a candid interview w...

There's been a real effort to spin the outcome of the continuing resolution dispute as a loss for Trump and the Republicans. But as I noted yesterday, there's a big dog that diodn't bark, and it still hasn't: had Trump felt he lost, we would have seen bombastic posts against Speaker Johnson and other RINO Republicans, either from Trump himself or Elon Musk. Insead, we now have Trump simply moving on and threatening to retake the Panama Canal. Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal calls it The Week the GOP’s High Hopes Collided With Reality : House Speaker Mike Johnson had spent weeks negotiating with Democrats, carefully cobbling together the compromises it would take to secure a majority vote in the narrowly divided chamber. It was a delicate construction, a house of cards, that had already begun to teeter when Elon Musk emerged Wednesday to stomp all over it. By Friday, the government was spiraling toward a shutdown after a series of failed and aborted votes...

I went to bed last night assuming the alt aggregators would provide a full update of the events surrounding the potential government shutdown, but of course they didn't. Only one or two mentioned that the Senate passed the new House Plan C version and sent it on to Biden for signature, which appears to be a formality, the main issue being getting Joe in shape to do much of anything. But where did things stand when I went to bed? As of noon yesterday, Leader Schumer was claiming he wasn't on board with anything : Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addressed the looming government shutdown on Friday and urged House Republicans to return to the initial deal negotiated by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “If Republicans do not work with Democrats in a bipartisan way, very soon, the government will shut down at midnight. It’s time to go back to the original agreement we had just a few days ago. It’s time for that,” Schumer said, referring to the c...

It seems like I've been ruminating over the past year about an ongoing unspoken constitutional crisis, for instance, here , the day after the June 27 debate debacle, where I compared the apparent coverup of Biden's decline to the final months of FDR's presidency: Roosevelt could pass away at any time after the 1945 inaugural and have Truman succeed him, although had he passed away before that date, his successor would have been Henry Wallace. As it happened, the country got lucky. The problem right now is that if Joe Biden leaves the presidency for any reason before next January 20, his successor is Kamala Harris. So right now, it looks as if congressional leadership got together and cobbled up a business-as-usual continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. They assumed that the congressional uniparty could be stampeded into passing it at the last minute to avvoid said shutdown, Biden as lame duck president would sign it, and the boodle would proceed unin...

The video above shows that at least some much-needed humor is coming into the public conversation about the New Jersey drones. It makes one point, although not necessarily the most important one, that politicians are exploiting the panic, and in fact stirring up more of it, in order to get support for new intrusive legislation that has nothing to do with any perceived problem. At 0:42: Nobody knows where these things are from! I mean, it's all over the news! You know how all through Covid and all the lies about Trump, you were telling me the news is nothing but propaganda? Yeah. And now you're believing the news? More serious, and a little more to the point, is the video below from commentator and podcaster Bill Whittle. It starts with a reference I've already made, to the October 30, 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of H G Wells's War of the Worlds , that is "infamous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening aud...

My view has been that Nancy Pelosi ran the Democrat Party, which means that she also ran the country during the Obama and Biden administrations. Whether she can keep it up after her fall and hip replacement in Europe is a question -- and Trump may have views on that as well. However, it sounds as though she's unwilling to acknowledge the passage of time. According to the New York Post , Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was donning “very high” heels when she broke her hip in a nasty fall on marble steps at a World War II battlefield site in Luxembourg last Friday — then ostensibly powered through the pain to pose for a group photo. . .. Pelosi is in her 19th term in the House of Representatives. Despite passing the leadership baton onto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries over two years ago, she still has pronounced influence within the party. The San Francisco Democrat is widely speculated to have played a key role in fomenting the pressure campaign against President ...

The FBI is coming closer to saying it , but it's still talking around the point: The FBI on Monday delivered a warning to the public: don’t shoot guns or point lasers at mysterious drones in the sky. Pilots of manned aircraft are increasingly being hit in the eyes with lasers because people on the ground think they see a drone, according to the FBI’s field office in Newark, New Jersey. The FBI is also concerned that people might shoot a gun at a manned aircraft after mistaking it for a drone. Notice that the clumsily worded release mentions "manned aircraft", but it doesn't use a much clearer phrase, "commercial airliner", which is what the vast majority of these sightings are. Over the past few days, I've noted that the most-cited videos portray what Megyn Kelly breathlessly reported are going from dusk to around 11:00 at night, they say. Look at this. Another eyewitness told the New York Times the drones show up one aft...

Back when Megyn Kelly was being eased out at Fox with a consolation book deal, having failed at her assignment to bring Trump down, Sundance at Conservative Treehouse began calling her MeAgain. It looks like those days are back. At 1:20 in the video above, she embeds footage of a supposed New Jersey "drone", which is clearly a commercial jet. If nothing else, the roar of the engines gives it away. The Jerseyite comments, It looks likea a [redacted] triangle. They look like a traiangle. Er, that's because of the swept wings the jet's lights are mounted on. In a later sequence, another Jerseyite says, It looks like a spaceship, right? Like, that doesn't look like a drone, right? . . . It's like a small plane, it really is! It's like a small plane. These are all drones in the sky. Well, somebody better get on the case if all these drones are disguising themselves as planes! Megyn adds, All these are going from dusk to arou...

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this. Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings. The video I've linked at the top of this p...