Plus, state universities prefer the full tuition that [...]]]>
Plus, state universities prefer the full tuition that foreigners pay rather than the lower amounts paid by residents: in 2016 it was reported that the University of California lowered standards for more lucrative out-of-staters including non-Americans. In the fall 2018 enrollment, only 76 percent were California residents.
Interestingly, foreign students are seen by some as a wonderful affirmation of America’s educational excellence, but their presence has no value at all for US students. The university elites like to talk about the benefits of diversity, but they never mention its financial advantage from foreign students to the institution.
Below, the UC Berkeley campus where diversity is believed to be a strength. The school also has a program of support for illegal alien students — California taxpayer dollars at work.
Furthermore, as the CIS panel points out, there are larger dangers to the nation when the university money grubbers admit even America’s worst enemies from around the world. As Dan Cadman mentions in his presentation, students can get into convenient positions to steal secrets and strategies for the dear homeland. It’s crazy to make it so easy for our enemies to steal America’s important knowledge.
President Trump complains about Red China’s theft of intellectual property, and he has fought back with higher tariffs. But it would be more effective for him to end foreign student visas from China and some other places like Iran and North Korea (!).
Here’s Dan Cadman’s discussion of the national security risks associated with crazy liberal acceptance of foreign students:
]]>DAN CADMAN: The United States, by virtue of its technological prowess, by virtue of its openness, has always been a beacon to people coming to study. And that brings with it a great deal of good for the United States. There is no doubt that when people come to the U.S. and study here for a significant period of time, a matter of years, they get to know something about our society, our culture. Hopefully, that translates into a positive sense of the U.S. and its peoples. And that bodes well particularly when those individuals go back and become in their own countries leaders, political influence makers. But by the same token, because of the size of the nonimmigrant population in the United States at any one time, it poses unique questions and problems of control.
Foreign students are nonimmigrants; that is to say, temporary visitors. But unlike other temporary nonimmigrants, who may be admitted for 90 days or six months, in point of fact, when a foreign student or a research scholar is admitted to the United States they’re admitted for the duration of their status, which is to say for a period of years until their studies conclude, which might be at the undergraduate or at the graduate and postgraduate levels. What that translates to is that an individual may be here anywhere four, six, or eight years and be operating in, for U.S. society, the most open of environments, which is to say institutions of higher learning.
This can be a good thing, but the reality for government security officers is that it creates, as Mao Zedong once said, a sea in which fishes can swim. And although Mao was speaking about guerrillas among the people, it’s equally true that foreign student and exchange scholar populations, by virtue of their size, their diversity, and the openness of the campus environments, act as a perfect place in which people who are engaged in espionage or people who are of malintent can conceal themselves without any real serious possibility that they’re going to be detected, at least not until in the fullness of time. There are just too many people for government officers and government intelligence agents and counterintelligence agents and law enforcement to keep up with. And that basically is the sum and substance of the problem, or at least one dimension of the problem.
The other dimension is that over the course of the past few decades, because of the cost of higher education particularly for people who are paying at the highest levels, which international students are, it becomes very lucrative for universities to fill their campuses with people whose governments are often paying the cost of their tuition and the cost of them living in the United States for that period of time. And the consequence of that is that it has the de facto effect of over the course of time squeezing native-born citizens out of a lot of positions. And this is particularly of concern where STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – subjects are concerned.
It is leading, in a sense, to an atrophying of U.S. native-born graduates in those studies. And the consequence is for industry and government afterward, including the Defense Department, the Energy Department, there is a dearth of people who they can bring on who are in a position to pass government security checks because those aren’t going to be available to foreigners. And this has caused a great deal of concern over the course of some number of years.
Touching on the concerns about espionage, it’s significant that every FBI director going back several decades, when they speak about national security concerns, has addressed the unique problems that they confront with the foreign student population. And that is because they acknowledge that functionally it’s beyond their capacity to monitor and control the number of people who come into the United States to study every year.
And by way of example, every year from 2013 to 2017 there were more than 2 million admissions per year of nonimmigrant students and exchange scholars. Now, it’s important for me to point out that an admission is not the same as a human being because, obviously, a human being could leave temporarily – say on vacation or to go visit family – and then come back. But even if you were to assume that each individual departed and came back at least once, that still means at any point in time a population of foreign students and scholars in the United States exceeding 1 million, and that’s on the low side.
It is without doubt a problem for U.S. security and counterintelligence officers to keep track. And it’s not just the number, but the diversity of the places that these individuals come from because, surprisingly, many of them come from places that are either actively hostile to the United States or are in fierce global competition with the United States for predominance, whether that’s militarily or in trade or technology.
By way of example, the International Institute for Education says that during the 2017-2018 academic year there were 363,341 Chinese students enrolled. And that’s just students; that’s not the exchange scholars. And that probably didn’t include vocational students who may be attending things like pilot school or even maritime schools of various kinds. There were almost 13,000 Iranian students here, 7.5 thousand Pakistani students, 5.5 thousand Russian students, 44,000-plus Saudi Arabian students. There were more than 10,000 Turkish students. There were even 726 Syrian students. And those are just touching the surface. In addition, you have students from Afghanistan, from Cuba, from North Korea.
And an interesting thing when you look at the Department of Homeland Security’s Statistical Yearbook, when you look for the numbers some of them are categorized as “D.” And when you look at “D,” that means “data is withheld to limit disclosure.” Why would the Department of Homeland Security exhibit an interest in withholding information about North Koreans studying in the United States? I find that curious in the extreme – and disturbing, frankly.
You have more than 18,000 Venezuelan students here, and probably a good number of those are opposed to the Maduro regime. But then a good number of them will also be advocates of the Maduro regime because one constant about governments that are particularly authoritarian or are particularly focused on what they want is that they find it in their own interests to seed the foreign student population with people who are sympathetic with their aims.
And a good example, although not the only example of that, is China, because China is very focused on where it wants to go, what it wants to achieve, where it wants to be with its global dominance. And for the Chinese government, espionage is, you might say, a family affair. Everything is geared toward accruing technological advantage. And if that means they can short-circuit the time and money on research by stealing secrets, whether that’s in the defense and military sector or in the trade secrets sector, they’re going to do it.
And not all of the people who come here by any means, of course, engage in espionage, but some do. And not all of them are government security or intelligence officers. Some of them are spies of opportunity. They are inculcated into the idea that it is patriotic for them, if given the chance, to take advantage of things that are open to them. And they are encouraged when the opportunity arises to fit themselves into niches where they’re going to have the opportunity to see those secrets that they can pass back home. And if even only one in 10 or one in a hundred people are doing this, when you have hundreds of thousands of people studying inevitably you’re going to accrue very large benefit from that.
And while I’ve talked about China, even more aggressive in that regard is Iran. And Iran, it would less likely be spies of opportunity. Iran is going to be salting its foreign student population, after it’s thoroughly vetted them, to make sure that their beliefs and interests coincide with that of the theocracy of the Islamic Republic. That is where I think the difficulty lies.
It’s compounded by the fact that in recent years, in truth, the Department of Homeland Security and even its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, walked away from any kind of meaningful enforcement and control of the student population or of the university systems that host these individuals. In theory, the federal government holds in its hand the ability to withhold or withdraw from an institution of learning the right to host foreign students. In practice, that almost never happens. And David will speak to that I’m sure, can speak to that very effectively. But the point is that unless and until something is done, this unfettered situation that we find ourselves in will remain, and that’s untenable.
Often the Times promotes hispanics as being superior to crass, meanie Americans who built the country that the world is invading by the thousands daily.
But on Saturday, the [...]]]>
Often the Times promotes hispanics as being superior to crass, meanie Americans who built the country that the world is invading by the thousands daily.
But on Saturday, the Tribe of the Day was Sikh who, according to the Times, are “transforming” the US trucking industry. Say, did American truckers ask to be replaced by foreigners and have their business transformed?
Below, immigrants now drive on the “Punjabi American highway” according to the LA Times.
The paper even included a video online with a kid for extra emotional effect.
For a little history, American truckers have been celebrated in music and film for decades. In 1978, Sam Peckinpah directed the popular film Convoy, starring Kris Kristopherson, back when long-haul truckers were in the news for using CB radios.
In 1974, Johnny Cash wrote and recorded “All I Do Is Drive,” a song dedicated to hard-working truckers:
Plus, America certainly doesn’t need to import diverse truck drivers when self-driving vehicles are high on industry’s to-do list of automation. Driverless big rigs have been tested on highways for the last couple years, and recently the state of Florida approved a plan where more advanced vehicles could be on the road next year. The Starsky company intends to have remote drivers logging on to computers in an office environment to handle its trucks during the first and last miles of their trips by the end of 2020.
But the Times prefers its diversity fairy tale rather than facing America’s automated future.
]]>Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway, Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2019
It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico.
Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.
The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.
Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.
“This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).
There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States. California has 138,000, the second-most after Texas. Nearly half of those in California are immigrants, most from Mexico or Central America. But as drivers age toward retirement — the average American trucker is 55 — and a shortage grows, Sikh immigrants and their kids are increasingly taking up the job.
Estimates of the number of Sikh truckers vary. In California alone, tens of thousands of truckers trace their heritage to India. The state is home to half of the Sikhs in the U.S. — members of a monotheistic faith with origins in 15th century India whose followers are best recognized by the uncut hair and turbans many men wear. At Sikh temples in Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside, the majority of worshipers are truck drivers and their families.
Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.
“You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”
Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs. But many, with names like Jay Bros (in Overton, Neb.) and Antelope Truck Stop Pronghorn (in Burns, Wyo.) are anonymous dots on a map unless you’re one of the many Sikhs who have memorized them as a road map to America.
The best-known are along Interstate 40, which stretches from Barstow to North Carolina. The road, much of it alongside Historic Route 66, forms the backbone of the Sikh trucking world. (Continues)
Below, the Los Angeles Times gave its census story front-page coverage on Monday, picturing [...]]]>
Below, the Los Angeles Times gave its census story front-page coverage on Monday, picturing Mayans who may speak indigenous languages such as Yucatec, Zapotec and K’iche’ and often speak Spanish as a second language.
Breitbart’s report on the legal and historic background to the issue noted that “the census started asking about citizenship in 1820 in the early years of the republic, and kept doing so as recently as 1950.” So there is plenty of precedent, and anyway it’s long past time to know who lives in this country.
Some California illegals say they will avoid the census, a decision that could cost the state big time — Sacramento got over $100 billion in federal funds in 2016, and every resident not counted means the state loses $2,000 annually in funding.
In addition, a serious undercount could cause California to lose a seat or two in the House of Representatives — wouldn’t that be a shame?
On the other hand, fewer federal dollars means Governor Newsom will probably demand a tax increase from employed Californians to pay for all the expensive welfare that poor unskilled illegal aliens require.
]]>A census undercount could cost California billions — and L.A. is famously hard to track, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2019
When it comes to the U.S. census, residents of Los Angeles County are notoriously difficult to track down.
The county, officials say, will be the nation’s hardest to tally because of its high concentrations of renters and homeless people, as well as immigrant communities that may not participate, because of language barriers or because they fear reprisal from the federal government — especially if a citizenship question is added to the form.
Many believe that appears likely. Last week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready to uphold the Trump administration’s plan to add the question. The court’s decision is expected in June.
Already, census workers, community organizations and local politicians have started outreach efforts to ensure an accurate tally in next year’s count. At stake nationally are nearly $800 billion in federal tax dollars, political redistricting and the reapportionment of seats that each state is allocated in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In Los Angeles, home to the largest hard-to-count population in the nation, ensuring participation is particularly important.
“We could stand to lose anywhere from one to two congressional seats, and that primarily impacts areas like southeast Los Angeles and the South Central area, where African American and Latino communities live,” said county Supervisor Hilda Solis, whose district includes some of the hardest-to-count areas.
State government leaders could spend more than $150 million through next year to help verify addresses and expand outreach efforts, according to California’s census office.
[. . .]
“The biggest hurdle we have is for people to feel the data they will give the census will not come back in some way to hurt them,” said Arturo Vargas, chief executive of NALEO Educational Fund. “So we have been pushing that the information you give on the census is confidential.”
Renters are especially difficult to track, particularly in dwellings with non-family members. If the apartment has more people than a landlord allows, they may refuse to answer any questions.
“I’m not that worried about Beverly Hills or Palos Verdes Estates,” Vargas said.
On a recent Friday night, Policarpo Chaj crowded into a small Westlake office and cast his gaze on the projection ahead. He listened as a female census worker explained the importance of participating in the decennial count.
“It’s about fair representation,” the census worker said in Spanish.
Chaj and other Mayan community members had gathered to learn more about ensuring that Latinos fill out the form — and do so correctly.
A census coordinator told the group which questions would be included in the survey and assured them that it is illegal for any Census Bureau employee to disclose information that identifies a person or business.
“Credit card companies ask you for more information,” she joked.
Chaj, director of Maya Vision, said he understood the importance of his community being counted. But he noted that the Latino community is diverse and needs nuanced outreach. He suggested that the Census Bureau provide information in Mayan languages spoken in Mexico and Central America, such as Yucatec, Zapotec and K’iche’. Many in his community feel more comfortable speaking an indigenous language, he said, and speak Spanish as a second language.
A potential citizenship question also has put many immigrants and their families on edge, Chaj said.
“People worry that la migra will get them,” he said. “They say, ‘If that’s the case, then forget it. I would rather be invisible.’”
Sara Mijares, founder of the Mundo Maya Foundation, said including the citizenship question only would make Los Angeles harder to count.
“It’s going to affect not only undocumented immigrants, but American children of undocumented people who will not be counted,” she said.
Other areas of California with large minority populations, including parts of Orange and Riverside counties — as well as rural pockets of the state with hard-to-track addresses or limited internet access — will also prove difficult to count.
For every Californian missed by the census, L.A. County officials say, the state loses about $2,000 a year in federal program funding. California received some $115 billion through federal spending programs in fiscal year 2016, according to George Washington University — money that was guided by 2010 census data.
“For a family of five, that’s $100,000 that doesn’t come to the community” in 10 years, Mijares said. “But someone in that family has needs, from anything like using the parks at night to clinics that provide low-income services.”
Some grass-roots organizations have expressed concern that the communities they represent will disappear from the census count because they will be afraid to participate, lest the government use the information to track or deport them.
A report released Friday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles chapter found that many local Muslims were struck by the “invasiveness” of the questions on the census, including the proposed citizenship question. About 500,000 Muslims live in Southern California, according to CAIR. (Continues)
Higher education has certainly changed in recent decades, in part because it is more desired and valuable than before, making the competition increasingly intense. Plus, there [...]]]>
Higher education has certainly changed in recent decades, in part because it is more desired and valuable than before, making the competition increasingly intense. Plus, there are many thousands of foreigners who pursue US educations as a useful doorway to residence, and they are appealing to college administrators because they pay full tuition.
Alan Dershowitz, a long-time professor at Harvard, recently discussed how things have changed on campus in light of the scandal:
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Look, at bottom, you know the fault for this lies in the fact that we’ve abolished grades at universities in many parts of the country. Nobody fails anymore. If we went back to the situation that occurred when I started teaching at Harvard, almost 60 years ago, this couldn’t work because these students would fail out. It didn’t pay for them to get into college because they wouldn’t make it through if they didn’t have the academic resources to make it.
But today, nobody fails. Today nobody gets bad grades. Nobody even gets Cs. In many universities they have abolished grades, so there is no way of testing whether they are qualified or competent. Once they get into college, they just sail through because of the way universities have decided to treat their students. I think we will see this as the tip of a very, very deep iceberg. I don’t believe there should be special slots for athletes. Colleges are not supposed to be about athletes. Athletics are supposed to be collateral. Today, kids who aren’t qualified or are minimally qualified get in because they are a good quarterback or a good soccer player. That’s the beginning of the problem. This involves overt cheating on the SATs. Bribery crosses the line. Once the investigation unfolds, we will see that there is more to this besides the really bad guys at one end of the spectrum. It’s a continuum.
Watch his remarks in the video below, with the quote starting at 2:50 in:
Professor Dershowitz is certainly correct in his observations, but there’s more to the picture — another aspect of university devolution is the institutional glorification of diversity as a top value. For example, I reported in 2012 about the Division of Equity & Inclusion at UC Berkeley which then had a budget of $17 million and a staff of 150.
Below, the University of Southern California is a featured player in the admissions scandal, where members of the coaching staff have been indicted for receiving bribes. USC does exhibit a liberal profligacy, such as spending $100 million on diversity in 2016.
The value given to individual academic excellence that many of us recall from education in the previous century is missing from today’s student experience, and has been replaced by values that foster a social design in accord with leftist models of idealized diversity and regimentation. Colleges apparently see their purpose as remolding young people into cogs in an obedient liberal society.
]]>
Meanwhile, it is human nature for people to prefer the company of others who speak their language, share their values and understand their jokes.
Tucker Carlson discussed the topic of diversity recently with Heritage Foundation scholar David Azzerad:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Elections in this country used to be based on issues, or that was the common agreement anyway. But what would happen to a country in which power is allocated on the basis of qualities you couldn’t control? Things you were born with. Your skin color, your gender, your genetics. That would be called identity politics.
The Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad has been studying this question, and he joins us tonight with the answer. David, thank you very much for coming on. So what happens to a country that is run with identity politics?
DAVID AZERRAD: In the short term, it kind of works because the majority group doesn’t play along with it, and kind of keeps quiet and does the public self-flagellation to atone for the sins of the father.
But in the long run, it’s untenable. How much longer until whites say, “Why don’t we get to have an identity?” And the day that happens, then you get some form of Yugoslavia or Rwanda, you get Balkanization and you get ethnic tribalism, groups fighting against one another.
So it’s tenable in the short term. I just don’t see how you can still have a country in the long run with identity politics. And the great paradox is, it may well create namely white nationalism, what they claim to oppose today.
CARLSON: What if there’s any question, and I think that’s really something to fear, just to be really clear because of the results. So have you ever seen — so Stacey Abrams, but it’s not — I don’t mean to pick on Stacey Abrams, she represents much larger group of people who tell us the same thing, which is, “This works. We must embrace it.”
The question is, does it work? Have you — you studied this question extensively, you’re a scholar. Is there a country in which this way of looking at the world has produced a stable nation?
AZERRAD: I mean, you hit on it in your previous remarks. Diversity is not a strength in politics. I mean, a strength in politics is unity. I mean, if you want to have a strong united country, you want the citizens to be united. Now, we’ll have a free country. You don’t want everyone to be the same. You need to make an allowance for pluralism.
But it is not good to promote division. I am fine having hyphenated Americans, what bothers me is if you emphasize the part that comes before the American part. I think you can recognize hyphenated Americans. But you emphasize the commonalities, the shared history, the shared devotion to Republican principals, the love the country, and if there is one thing that identity politics is very strong on is making you hate your country, making you despise your past, making you hate your fellow countrymen.
CARLSON: Last question, if you and I hate each other over qualities we were born with and can’t change, how is our division ever reconciled? How do we fix the problem between us?
AZERRAD: I don’t think it can be. That’s why I prefer the left we used to have in America, and Bernie Sanders is kind of the last gasp of it that looked at class divisions, and you still get pretty contentious politics with class divisions. But there is upward and downward mobility. You can’t immediately tell which class you belong to. You can still have a country with progressive class-based politics. You cannot have a country with identity politics, and I should add, open borders.
CARLSON: David Azerrad, very smart analysis. Thank you for that.
DOBBS: Three thousand front companies we know of, Chinese front companies, trying to [...]]]>
DOBBS: Three thousand front companies we know of, Chinese front companies, trying to steal American industrial secrets, in addition to the effort to steal U.S. technology.
Now, what I find particularly galling about this is that the president of the United States and neither the House speaker nor the leader of the Senate, is addressing this issue publicly. And everyone knows it’s going on. We’re reporting it on this broadcast.
It’s incredible.
On Wednesday, Lou Dobbs was still the diligent watchdog, reporting the news that 10 Chinese spies have been charged with hacking US companies trying to steal jet engine technology. “It’s only now that we’re beginning to take action against them,” he observed.
Red China seems not to have changed that much at the core.
One very open doorway for stealing US knowledge is through the universities:
Chinese military researchers exploit western universities, FT.com, October 28, 2018
Study shows US and UK scientists aiding high-tech progress for People’s Liberation Army
China has sent thousands of scientists affiliated with its armed forces to western universities — especially in countries that share intelligence with the US — and is building a web of research collaboration that could boost Beijing’s military technology development.
About 2,500 researchers from Chinese military universities spent time at foreign universities — led by the US and UK — over the past decade, and many hid their military affiliations, according to a new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think-tank partly funded by Australia’s department of defence. (Cont.)
A CNN article about the Chinese military infiltration remarked that these activities are described as “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China.”
]]>But liberals insist that America is improved [...]]]>
But liberals insist that America is improved by the presence of jihad-pursuing muzlims and misogynous Mexicans. Many psychology realists beg to differ.
Diversity ideology is so strong among elites that they import historic enemies as immigrants; e.g. muslims in Norway burn the flag of the nation that admitted them, shown below.
The relevant segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight started with Democrat luminaries Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton all pledging allegiance to diversity as our strength, but Tucker responded with important questions — starting with a destabilizing level of immigration — that require serious answers from elite Washington:
SPARE AUDIO FILE:
How has our current immigration system made America more stable and more prosperous? In your answer, please explain what happened to the state of California — it used to be called the Golden State, had a thriving middle class, had the country’s best schools. Now the schools in California are a complete disaster, the middle class is vanishing and the nation’s largest mass of impoverished people remains behind to serve a tiny pool of tech oligarchs. How exactly did that happen?
Next, how precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific, as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better your neighbors or your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.
And if diversity is our strength, why is to okay for the rest of us to surrender one of our central rights — freedom of speech — to just a handful of tech monopolies? And by the way, if your ideas are so obviously true, why does anyone who questions them need to be shamed, silenced and fired? How about this question — after spending two centuries overcoming our country’s painful history of racial discrimination and hatred, why is it once again acceptable, even encouraged, to attack people on the basis of their skin color? And by the way, since we are asking, if it’s now possible to change your sex, is it possible to change your race too? If not, tell us why and be specific.
More challenges to bad liberal ideas and performance follow, but this discussion is about diversity which really needs to be dethroned, and Tucker Carlson is quite good at asking the right questions.
]]>It’s also advantageous that she has multiple diversity going for her: she’s a black-Indian woman with an immigrant mother. In the increasingly [...]]]>
It’s also advantageous that she has multiple diversity going for her: she’s a black-Indian woman with an immigrant mother. In the increasingly tribal world of politics, Kamala can run separate ads targeting those several groups, appealing to their issues rather than American issues of law and safety. Perish the thought of patriotism: Democrats disapprove of American values.
A recent article from The Hill is too polite to mention her casting-couch start in politics: she was a 29-year-old deputy district attorney when she caught the eye of powerful California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a man 30 years her senior. Their affair was political as well as sexual: he promoted her career, getting her started on her political ascension.
Speaker Willie Brown awarded girlfriend Kamala a high paying patronage position at the California Medical Assistance Commission that met only once a month.
The Hill sticks to the political, pointing out that Kamala has staked out leftward positions.
]]>Kamala Harris positions herself for White House run, The Hill, February 26, 2018
Sen. Kamala Harris is increasingly positioning herself for a what is expected to be a crowded Democratic primary for the White House in 2020.
The former California attorney general, who is just at the beginning of her second year in the Senate, is taking positions that could endear herself with the Democratic base while allowing her to stand out from a group of Democrats who might seek the progressive mantle.
Harris voted against a Senate immigration bill backed by centrists from both parties earlier this month, waiting until the last minute to break with other liberals such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who both backed the measure.
She argued that while the bill would provide a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants who entered the country illegally, she could not support it in good conscience because of the inclusion of money for President Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border.
“While this bill would put Dreamers on a pathway toward citizenship, the appropriation of $25 billion for a border wall is a waste of taxpayer money,” she said. “A wall will not secure our border and I remain concerned those billions of dollars may also be used to implement this Administration’s anti-immigrant agenda — one that targets California and its residents.”
(Continues)
Americans object to animal cruelty, but often don’t understand how [...]]]>
Americans object to animal cruelty, but often don’t understand how unusual we are in that respect among world cultures — see Diversity Is Strength! It`s Also… Cruelty To Animals, 2006.
Below, from the 2009 AP report Miami area on edge over horse slaughters, animal cruelty investigator Richard Couto comforts a colt, whose mother was butchered at a Miami stable.
It’s very painful for a family to see the body of their beloved pet cruelly stripped of its flesh, sometimes while the animal was alive.
Cubans, Mexicans and other hispanics like to eat horse meat, and seem not to mind if it is procured illegally and with brutality. Santeria is a Caribbean form of witchcraft that includes animal sacrifice as a norm, although chickens apparently are more common victims.
This cruelty against horses is some of the diversity we are supposed to celebrate.
]]>Horses Found Slaughtered Near Northwest Miami-Dade Farm, NBC Miami, January 10 2018
Officials from one animal rights group released details about a disturbing discovery of horses found slaughtered at one Northwest Miami-Dade farm Wednesday.
Animal Recovery Mission said they found numerous animals dead at the farm located at 17900 NW 129th Avenue. One ARM member, investigator Rachel Taylor, said the animals were found in several stages of decomposition – with Miami-Dade Police saying they found remains dating back as far as two months.
Taylor said the group was notified about a horse dead in the area early Wednesday morning and found several different locations where bodies were found.
“They weren’t slaughtered here because we didn’t see any blood and they’re all in bags, so they’re probably being slaughtered somewhere in this area and then dumped here,” Taylor said.
Miami-Dade Police said the remains of possibly two horses date back about one or two months. Bones and other remains including at least 10 other horse skulls were also found in the area but were not recent, police said.
The animals were found stripped of their meat for likely human consumption, according to Taylor, as well as for religious rituals associated with Santeria.
(Continues)
What’s really scandalous is that the growth of foreign students is substantially higher at public universities — those are the institutions supported by residents’ taxes.\:
California has been one of the [...]]]>
What’s really scandalous is that the growth of foreign students is substantially higher at public universities — those are the institutions supported by residents’ taxes.\:
California has been one of the worst offenders of opening wide its university doors to foreign students who conveniently pay full freight, unlike the state kids that the institution is supposed to serve. In 2016, the state auditor found that the universities lowered standards for non-residents so they could be admitted and pay maximum tuition. Such policies show up in changing demographics, like at the very desirable UC Berkeley, state residents made up only 67.6 percent of the admitted class in 2016 — meaning a whopping 32.4 percent of the admitted freshmen a year ago were not Californians.
The chart below is a couple years old, but it shows the trend of fewer state residents being served by their university.
Here’s the Pew memo:
]]>New foreign student enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities doubled since Great Recession, Pew Research, November 20, 2017
Nearly 364,000 foreign students with F-1 visas were newly enrolled at a U.S. college or university in 2016, double the number at the outset of the Great Recession, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained through a public records request.
From 2008 to 2016, the number of new foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities increased 104% – far outpacing overall college enrollment growth, which was 3.4% during the same period, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The increase was most pronounced at public colleges and universities, which faced budget cuts during the Great Recession and began to rely more heavily on tuition from foreign students.
In the years immediately preceding the Great Recession, growth in the number of new foreign students was more modest, increasing by 20% from 2004 to 2007, but still outpaced overall U.S. enrollment, which rose 7.2% over the same period.
Below are some key facts about foreign students studying in the United States. You can also explore the demographic characteristics of international students who pursued associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from 2004 to 2016 with our new foreign student fact sheet.
About this analysis
Since the Great Recession, the number of new foreign students enrolled at public colleges and universities has grown faster than at private schools. Enrollments among new foreign students at public higher education institutions grew 107% from 2008 (100,956 students) to 2016 (209,217 students). By comparison, private schools experienced a 98% increase in new foreign students, with enrollment growing from 72,953 in 2008 to 144,697 in 2016.
During this time, overall enrollment declined by less than 1% at public schools and increased 22% at private schools.
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