[PJ] The nation watched with disgust Friday night as rioters took to the streets of Minneapolis, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles as well as the usual suspects in Oakland and Portland over the killing of George Floyd while in police custody. Nothing says grief-stricken like boosting some free s*it and burning buildings. Watching with the rest of the nation was Rob O’Neill, the retired Navy SEAL who helped send Osama bin Laden to paradise to collect his 72 raisins (not a typo).
And O’Neill was disgusted along with most of the rest of America.
O’Neill’s Twitter time-line that started last evening and lasted until Saturday morning was a Rorschach test for the country. If you agreed with what he was saying you too were wondering what looting had to do with redeeming the death and honoring the memory of George Floyd.
Friday evening O’Neill noted what many people did across America. Where were the liberal scolds demanding rioters keep socially distanced?
#2
^ Agreed, and I'm uncomfortable with the idea of Celebrity Commandos. The relatives and neighbors who raised me included a fair sprinkling of Marines who had served in the Pacific, and I couldn't get a word out of them.
Posted by: Matt ||
05/31/2020 12:53 Comments ||
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#3
I've often wondered what would happen if all the young men thinking of joining or re-upping took a long, sober look at what they'd actually be defending.
Is tranny-grooming-party/riot/immivasion/Deep State America really worth it?
#4
We need to keep in mind that the rioters and looters are a small minority. No matter how much the media hyped up and focuses exclusively on them and the mayors allow them to pillage and burn.
#7
The protestors want better cops. After watching how the politicians and rioters threat the police do you think you will be getting better applicants tomorrow?
[BabylonBee] An enlightened, freethinking NPC on a lightly modded Minecraft server announced Monday that he denies the existence of Notch and the team at Mojang, explaining that he doesn’t see any evidence of design in the clearly designed game world around him.
"My current working theory is that this digital landscape spontaneously created itself around 20 billion years ago, with no input from any kind of magic game designer in the sky," he told a gathering of villagers in a coffee shop. "The evidence of order and tightly designed game mechanisms are merely random, chaotic patterns. Your lives are all meaningless."
When other NPCs disagreed, pointing out that the carefully coded game design was powerful evidence that a higher intelligence named Notch created in 2009, the anti-designer activist was ready with an answer.
"If this ’Notch’ is real, why doesn’t he just reveal himself? The idea of a ’creator’ is simply wishful thinking for weak-minded people who can’t come to terms with the fact that we are alone on this server," he added. "If we could just abandon the shackles of that Dark Ages way of thinking, just think how much progress we could make."
At publishing time, the anti-designer NPC had begun calling anyone who confronted him with the clear evidence of design all around him as a "science denier."
[The American Mind] The shotgun blast reverberated across the parking garage of Bank of America’s Concord Technology Center in the Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek, California.
In the front seat of a pickup truck sat the lifeless body of Kevin Flanagan beside a 12-gauge Remington. Behind him were boxes of his personal effects from his office at Bank of America, where the programmer had worked for nearly a decade.
In the months leading up to his 2003 suicide, Bank of America had forced Flanagan and his colleagues to train their foreign replacements before laying them off. These transplants entered the United States on the H-1B worker visa. After months of the humiliation of having to train his replacement, a broken Flanagan climbed into his truck and shot himself in the head the day Bank of America let him go. "Kevin losing his job with Bank of America was the defining event in his decision to end his life," said Tom Flanagan, his father.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman characterized the H-1B visa as a government subsidy program the year before. Socialism for the rich. But bad press and picket lines in parking lots fell on deaf ears.
Vivek Paul, then vice chairman and president of Wipro Technologies, told reporters he felt confident, despite Flanagan’s suicide, that his business would outlast the outcry. "We know how this movie ends," he sniffed. "If a decade ago we discovered that manufacturing can be done anywhere, in this decade we are learning that knowledge can be learned anywhere."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
05/31/2020 00:00 ||
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#1
The H-1B program need to end and be seriously overhauled. Companies that hire H-1B to replace American workers, need to be fined ten time the worker's salary, plus the board of directors need to be fined at least 25% of their income as well.
The H-1B program may have started out with good intentions, but it's been so badly abused that it might as well be shut down completely.
In the future, if companies want to hire foreign worker, they need to post an annual bail of at least two to three times the American worker salary, to be paid to any laid off workers. Make it too costly to simply replace American workers.
/rant and yes I have strong feelings and options on this subject. It's shows how corrupt our congress critters are (both parties.)
#4
Seeking, I agree with you, especially about the opinions and emotions.
I spent 30+ years in IT and saw the very beginning of this back in the '80s. DEC tried to pull off outsourcing to India back then, but, the communications just couldn't handle it.
There were basically two species, Indians and Eastern Euros. Cultural differences were enlightening especially when they were supposed to work together.
Several of the big companies that I consulted at went TU due to lack of managerial ability to manage IT costs and performance. PG&E and Kodak are 2 examples.
#5
The latest trend is to simply hire people in India and have them work in India.
They've been trying it for 40 years. Time difference, cultural and managerial style. If the Indians were that good they would have cornered the market by now. That is why they want to import them here. Then hold their visas over them like overseers.
#9
As I've learned in over 36 years in data, the farther away the operations are from the data, the worse the result --Warthog
Management, too. Managing by "metrics" the Robert McNamara Way™. People code models with no idea whatsoever about the reality they are trying to predict -- and Management uses it because it is "scientific".
#10
Well, it can be a useful skill if you want to start your own business, but yes, the H1-B makes it way harder to get work at established companies for Americans.
Which also has negative effects on networking and building up a native talent base.
We've seen the results of an overreliance on China for pharma; you'd think American companies might figure out that a similar dynamic could play out with coding.
But that underestimates the power of shortsighted greed.
#12
If they are important and needed enough to grant them immigration status, then give them a green card, and allow them to negotiate salary on an even playing field, instead of them requireing an indentured servitude contract in which the hiring company sponsor status allows the company to underpay and underbenefit them compared to similar citizen engineers/etc.
Its the control the corporations are handed that allow them to treat the H1B like serfs, which drops the market out from under fair competition by Americans
Posted by: Marilyn Tojo7566 ||
05/31/2020 23:35 Comments ||
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[CamelotPortfolios] · Lufthansa’s rescue is entirely government-funded, while United Airlines has received government AND private market support.
· Arguably, European markets are underperforming in the recovery due to overregulation.
· European regulators are beginning to recognize the problem.
· MiFID II to be relaxed by ... even more regulation.
Lufthansa’s billion Euro government rescue stands in sharp contrast to the free market approach taken by U.S. airlines in raising the capital necessary to bridge the corona-lockdown. It also explains why the recovery of European stock markets lags the U.S. by substantial margins, illustrating what is going wrong in the Eurozone.
On April 20, United Airlines raised $1 billion in equity in the financial markets. The capital raise occurred at a 5% discount to the already depressed stock price. But despite the bleak state of the industry, with 90% of the fleet grounded, United was able to raise a 10-figure amount in equity. As early as March other airlines had raised billions of dollars of capital in debt, both through asset-backed securitizations and unsecured or convertible debt offerings [ii]. However, United’s April raise was the first attempt to raise equity capital. The dilution suffered by shareholders was about 15%, a relatively modest amount in light of the circumstances. Separately, United had received $6 billion of government loans, with which it issued warrants to the government that diluted shareholders by about 7%. [i]
In contrast, Lufthansa made plans to access capital markets but abandoned them in April. The planned capital increase of $2.6 billion of equity and convertible bonds would have diluted shareholders by approximately 36%, yet still would have been insufficient in the eyes of some analysts to see the company through the epidemic [ii]. The anticipated $9.7 billion rescue package of debt and equity would be entirely government-funded. Dilution appears at first sight less severe than what the original private market raise would have resulted in and will only be 25% if all conversion options are exercised. However, the real strings attached to the financing come from the influence that the government plans to exercise over the company: two board seats will be filled by government representatives. [iii] But the convertibility of the debt into up to 25% of the equity is what the government may be really after, because a 25% holder has, under most European corporate laws, the ability to block strategic transactions. Even though it is unlikely that Lufthansa will be the subject of a hostile takeover, this sets a precedent for more government influence over industry, a potential power grab that has featured prominently in political discussions for some time. As an aside, a similar ownership structure has been in place at Volkswagen for decades, where it seems to do little harm to the company, although it may not do much good anyway because the presence of State representatives did not prevent the emissions fraud scandal.
EUROPE’S FEAR OF FINANCIAL MARKETS
The different approach to survival amidst today’s travel slump may be a direct function of the difference in development of financial markets on the two continents.
Europe’s financial markets have been underdeveloped. Capital was provided mostly by banks. In the U.S., however, financial markets have been more vibrant. Regulations in the wake of the financial crisis have only exacerbated the discrepancy.
Under the guise of stabilizing the economy, European regulations have sought to stifle markets. U.S. regulators have created bureaucratic burdens but arguably not enough to kill off markets to the same extent as the EU. Sure, as a result of Dodd-Frank overregulation, liquidity in high yield markets has been challenging for a couple of years -- even before the Covid-19 crisis. The rules born out of the 2008 financial crisis may also be responsible for the repo debacle that has roiled funding markets since last September. And while the current administration would like to relax these tight rules, it may actually be the banks themselves that want to keep them as barriers to entry against foreign competition.
But all these problems are minor compared to the anti-market activism of EU regulators. Now that private enterprise needs capital, there aren’t many markets to turn to in Europe. Government support may be the only option....
INVESTMENT CONCLUSIONS
In our view, it is too early to invest in airlines as distressed investments. The outcomes are too binary to make financial commitments at this time. If the economic reopening is successful, then the airlines may well have sufficient funds to emerge from the crisis. However, if prognosticators of a second wave turn out to be correct, then we would not want to own any airline-related security that was purchased at current price levels. Should that scenario play out, then we would want to invest along the lines of the 2003 airline bankruptcies when the most successful investments were arguably in airplane lease securitizations, where investors were backed with good assets, yet the securities traded at substantial discounts to the value of the assets because the issuing airlines were in bankruptcy.
[Babylon Bee] CNN executives were baffled by a large crowd outside their offices and in their lobby Friday, not having seen an audience that size in many years.
Execs quickly added the hundreds of people outside their offices to their audience numbers, more than doubling their ratings for the day.
"Woohoo! It's happening!" said the station's founder, Bob CNN. "Brian! Anderson! Come quick! We're finally drawing crowds! Years of hard work finally paying off!"
Peering out the window, Brian Stelter muttered, "No social distancing or masks though. But we'll take what we can get at this point."
Mr. CNN then walked through the lobby handing out fliers inviting the protesters back to watch CNN's failing weekend shows Saturday and Sunday. "This is where it all turns around for us."
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/31/2020 00:00 ||
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#3
Ya'all come, help us with our long over-do remodel of the CNN entrance and lobby. We'll cover the deductible, the insurance will cover the rest. Coffee and doughnuts for the cops.
[Kunsler Blog] What "the Resistance" really fears more than anything is General Michael Flynn’s mouth. He’s been under a judicial gag order since his case went before Judge Emmet Sullivan’s federal district court. Understandably, Gen. Flynn wasn’t eager to complicate his unjust plight with a contempt citation. Judge Sullivan’s recent shenanigans have one object: to keep that gag order in force as long as possible. The moment Judge Sullivan confirms the DOJ’s move to dismiss the charges, as he is duty-bound to do, General Flynn will be free to offer his views to the public. That might be inconvenient in an election season.
I’m sure he has a lot to say. Gen. Flynn was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for two years (2012 — 2014) under Barack Obama, and he knows a ton about every crooked operation Mr. Obama presided over, including the Benghazi fiasco, the Ukraine regime change op, and especially Mr. Obama’s hijacking of the NSA supercomputer surveillance database known as "the Hammer," which was set up originally to track terrorists and then used by DNI James Clapper and CIA chief John Brennan to spy on Americans, most particularly Mr. Obama’s political adversaries. It’s rumored that Mr. Obama took the database with him when he left the White House, and it is said to contain great gouts of usefully damning information about just about everyone in government, including senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices.
Gen. Flynn became an antagonist to Obama & Co. when he objected to the nuclear deal they were cooking up with Iran and when he spoke out against the CIA’s 2013 Timber Sycamore op to arm and give money to Isis terrorists opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Obama canned Gen. Flynn in 2014. What really sealed Gen. Flynn’s fate was when he started publicly complaining about the politicization of John Brennan’s CIA. The New York Times quoted him saying, "They’ve lost sight of who they actually work for. They work for the American people. They don’t work for the president of the United States. Frankly, it’s become a very political organization."
And a few months later, he jumped on Donald Trump’s campaign bandwagon. When he led the cheer "Lock her up" at the Republican convention, you can imagine how that gave the heebie-jeebies to a whole lot of other Deep State denizens besides She-Whose-Turn-Was-Foiled. And then, Lord have mercy, he was appointed to sit at Mr. Trump’s very elbow in the West Wing as National Security Advisor! Well, you can imagine the tremors that provoked. Gen. Flynn had declared his intention to completely reorganize, partially dismantle, and audit the intel community monster that had spread like a slime mold through the government. Mr. Brennan especially feared the audit part of the deal, since his agency regarded the billions of dollars that flowed in and out of it as just another one of its sacred secrets. Flynn had to be stopped.
So, John Brennan concocted the RussiaGate scam to put over the idea that General Flynn was an errand boy of Vladimir Putin —lock him up! — and for good measure, Mr. Trump probably was, too. Once they embarked on that grand misadventure, and enlisted the foolish James Comey and his FBI zealots to assist, the gang found themselves involved in a dangerous game of sedition, poorly thought out and executed desperately. And finally, by all that’s holy, the improbable Mr. Trump actually won the election, ensuring that he would be privy to every dark secret moldering in the vaults of the US government.
#1
Flynn's supposed expertise and knowledge is a bit hard to believe as
- he basically let the FBI entrap him
- he was sloppy in cutting paperwork ending his representation of foreign governments
- his comments in the conversation w the Russian ambassador show him talking in broken phrases rather than in complete thoughts (although perhaps this was intentional - if so remove that point)
Posted by: lord garth ||
05/31/2020 0:30 Comments ||
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#2
It’s rumored that Mr. Obama took the database with him when he left the White House, and it is said to contain great gouts of usefully damning information about just about everyone in government, including senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices.
[AmericanSpectator] Israeli defense officials have now confirmed that Paleostinian President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase.... is moving forward on years of empty threats and finally ending civilian and military cooperation with Israel. Such developments follow Israel’s repeated statements intending to apply illusory sovereignty to at least parts of Judea and Samaria.
If Abbas means it this time, this is a good thing for Israel. The Paleostinian Authority (PA) is a liability for Israel. While Israel provides the Paleostinians with coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
Continued on Page 49
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[BabylonBee] An enlightened, freethinking NPC on a lightly modded Minecraft server announced Monday that he denies the existence of Notch and the team at Mojang, explaining that he doesn’t see any evidence of design in the clearly designed game world around him.
The shotgun blast reverberated across the parking garage of Bank of America’s Concord Technology Center in the Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek, California.
[Babylon Bee] CNN executives were baffled by a large crowd outside their offices and in their lobby Friday, not having seen an audience that size in many years.
[Kunsler Blog] What "the Resistance" really fears more than anything is General Michael Flynn’s mouth. He’s been under a judicial gag order since his case went before Judge Emmet Sullivan’s federal district court. Understandably, Gen. Flynn wasn’t eager to complicate his unjust plight with a contempt citation. Judge Sullivan’s recent shenanigans have one object: to keep that gag order in force as long as possible. The moment Judge Sullivan confirms the DOJ’s move to dismiss the charges, as he is duty-bound to do, General Flynn will be free to offer his views to the public. That might be inconvenient in an election season.
