Monday, November 28, 2016

If you think Americans Can't Compete Now, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet


H1b visas are the vehicles by which Silicon Valley obtains the workers they need to create products and services for the Internet. We don't know for sure whether Trump will drastically cut them back or not. But the reality is that if he does, there won't be Americans to replace these foreign workers.

The white people who put Trump into office certainly can't replace these foreign workers and neither can their children. The teachers unions have done their best to dumb down K-12 in America. People can graduate from high school without being able to do algebra. Then they can go to a university that is unexceptional where they can fulfill their math requirement by taking an advertising class. (this is not a joke. I can send you there.)

America has done its best to destroy its school system. Our universities, with their grade inflation, never test their students to see if they can compete with these foreign visa holders. People have decided it's better not to know how useless the skills are that these students have.  This way they can blindly complain that they're being left out of America's future.

What passes for higher education in America is what used to constitute a high school education 40 years ago. If you haven't been a teacher, you have no idea how bad things are.

On this planet the students who test best go to school  in the Shanghai school district. They are better than any students in the world. And if you're looking for students to compete against them, you should look at Singapore and Korea. Americans don't even rank among the top 10 in any discipline tested.

The new administration will be getting rid of any national standards for education in America in the name of state's rights (a perennial  Republican weapon to prevent our country from aspiring to produce world-class students)

30 years from now there will be more angry white people. These people never think they should demand hard work and studious effort from their school districts and their children. The quality of the high school football team is their most important concern. In 30 years we will be creating even less than we do now. There are only so many jobs that require an ability to use a forklift and box cutters. The boxes will all be covered with Hanzi (Chinese characters) anyway.


Thursday, November 17, 2016

The greatest heroes in American history


The greatest example of the dysfunctionality of discrimination was seen in how Japanese-Americans were treated during the Second World War. Earl Warren, Governor of California, sent the Japanese in California to prison camps in deserted pockets of the Western US. At first the Hawaiians (Hawaii was not yet a state) talked about putting Hawaiians of Japanese ancestry into such camps.

Instead they allowed men of Japanese ancestry to form the 442nd regimental combat team (also called the 442 infantry Regiment).. These men went to Europe with a force close to 4000 men. In battle after battle they showed themselves to be the bravest group of American soldiers in history.

Because of the horrific battle conditions in which they fought,  the original 4000 had to be replaced 2.5 times. The members of that unit eventually  involved 14,000 men, who earned a total of 9486 purple hearts.

The unit had eight presidential citations (with five of them earned in one month). This group, which was known as the Nisei Regiment, had among them 21 recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, our nation's highest decoration.

Their bravery is hard to believe. I remember seeing Sen. Daniel  Inouye from Hawaii who only had half an arm because of his service in this Regiment. As I watched the Watergate hearings, I listened  to how Nixon's men tried to get support for their embattled chief. One of the conspirators said of the pronunciation  of Sen. Inouye  name, "ain't no way" he would ever be compromised.