Free Republic

On June 12, Brandon Webber shot a man five times at point-blank range and stole his car. When U.S. Marshals attempted to arrest him in Memphis, Webber rammed their car and was fatally shot after he fled. This outcome seems to be the downside of the disconnectedness, from school and from paid employment, that he experienced. By all accounts he was a responsible, positive individual while in high school. Typical of those who knew him then was his tenth-grade history teacher, Mary McIntosh, who continued to work with him until he graduated. “He was an excellent student,” she recalled. “For...

America needs more High Tech Engineers to boost production and lower unemployment Paul Owen, discusses America’s forgotten immigration problem: our need for high tech engineers. According to Owen, so much focus has been put the visible waves of immigrant and cheap factory laborers that we’ve forgotten about the invisible undertow in the form of a ‘brain drain’ that continues to erode America’s leading edge in technology. Paul Owen asks, “30 million illegal unskilled immigrants or 300,000 high tech scientists and engineers: Why is it so difficult to decide? We have two immigration problems. The first is the illegal unskilled immigrants...

"I told you so" Total nonfarm payroll employment grew by 431,000 in May, reflecting the hiring of 411,000 temporary employees to work on Census 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Private-sector employment changed little (+41,000). Non-Farm Payrolls So much for the "strong" (+200,000) private sector job growth that everyone was expecting. The futures reaction was instantaneous and violent - southbound. There has never been a so-called "V-shaped" recovery where we only managed to add 40,000 jobs. Oh, and of that "+40,000" about five times as many were fictional jobs created by the "birth-death" model in the establishment...

The unemployment rate may top 10 percent, but there is an opening at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a Deadhead. The library is advertising for an archivist to handle the library’s Grateful Dead collection. A master’s degree in archives management is required, as is “expert knowledge in the history of and scholarship of contemporary popular music, or American vernacular culture, preferably the history and influence of the Grateful Dead.”