President Donald Trump's Department of Labor has released an updated set of rules to protect the wages of American graduates from the damage done by CEOs' use of H-1B visa workers.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia said in a January 12 statement:

"The U.S. Department of Labor is taking these steps to strengthen wage protections, address abuses in visa programs, and protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper foreign labor. These changes help ensure that these important foreign worker programs function as Congress intended, while securing American workers' opportunities for stable, good-paying jobs."

The wage rules cover the H-1B program, which allows CEOs to keep roughly 900,000 foreign, mid-skilled, contract workers in the United States. The H-1B program also keeps roughly 150,000 spouses in white-collar jobs, and it helps attract roughly 300,000 foreign workers into white-collar jobs via the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.

The labor department rules set the wage floors for the imported H-1B workers, and so hinder companies from hiring cheaper foreign workers instead of American graduates. The rule says:

A primary purpose of the restrictions on immigration created by the INA, both numerical and otherwise, is "to preserve jobs for American workers." Safeguards for American labor, and the Department's role in administering them, have been a foundational element of the statutory scheme since the INA was enacted in 1952.

Lawsuits from business groups blocked a prior version of the rule.

French data privacy watchdog CNIL condemned the Interior Ministry for the unlawful use of drones to oversee demonstrations and make sure people were respecting the COVID-19 lockdown.

In a decision made public on Thursday, the authority stressed that the use of such tools by the police nationwide broke the law in the absence of any regulatory framework. In a statement, the interior ministry said it acknowledged the CNIL's decision, and would respect its terms.

The CNIL started investigating the use of camera drones by law enforcement last May. It found the ministry had not used mechanisms to blur the faces of people filmed by the drones in demonstrations or walking in the streets during lockdown. This was a breach of French data privacy rules, the CNIL said, as such individuals could be easily identified in the filmed images, which were then stored by the police.

The interior ministry has since told the CNIL that blurring systems were put in place, but the authority said they could be turned off. "This mechanism does not necessarily prevent the identification of individuals as long as the services of the ministry of the interior are able to deactivate blurring," the authority said.

At no point has the public been properly informed about the use of camera drones by the police, the CNIL said, adding it had reminded the interior ministry it should obey the law.

Fifteen years ago the world was introduced to the research of Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski in his seminal work Political Ponerology. In it, he outlined the danger of pathological revolutionary movements, the poisonous influence of psychopaths in positions of power, and the real origins of totalitarianism - as well as why relatively normal people are left woefully vulnerable to pathological thinking and psychological 'infection'. When the book was first published the "forever war on terror" Neocons were at the forefront in the United States, and the world is still reeling from their atrocious foreign policy, not to mention the Patriot Act. But times sure have changed since then, and with them, the rise of far-left pathologies whose scope and influence is nearly universal in Western society.

On Christmas Day of 2020, James Lindsay of "the grievance studies affair" fame published an important article on his website New Discourses: 'Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism.' Lindsay, a mathematician by training, is also an expert on the nonsense that is Critical Social Justice Theory (i.e. Wokeness). There's no one better to expose Woke ideology for what it actually is: psychopathic. So this week on MindMatters we discuss a range of topics stemming from Lindsay's article: Critical Race Theory, cancel culture, and the pipe dreams of revolution-induced utopia we're witnessing now in the West. Meet the new psychopathic fervors - same as the old ones. Using concepts from Ponerology like paralogic and paramorality, and Pieper's idea of pseudo-realities, Lindsay provides an indispensable account of what's really going on, peeling back the mask of the in-your-face thought virus threatening to sicken and destroy everything it touches.


Running Time: 01:24:51

Download: MP3 — 77.7 MB

Soon, your car will not only track you in real time - and make sure you're paid-up on your insurance and have all your "papers" in order - it will also sell you. Digital license plates - approved for use in California, Arizona and most recently, Michigan - will replace the old metal plate that you controlled with an LCD screen connected to a computer that's connected (via WiFi) to you-know-who.

And controlled by you-know-who.

The screen can be configured to show more than just your number, Number 6.

It can also show "targeted messaging" - ads, in straightforward English, which these shysters avoid using like Dracula avoids daylight - which you'll advertise as you drive. You become a free billboard as well as a leashed serf, always under the watchful eye of the government and corporations that "partner" together to mulct you and keep track of you.

Let the driver behind you know all about the latest deals on Amazon!

Your payoff? A "DMV approved" banner selected by you . . . from a menu of politically correct messages.

"Wear a mask," for instance.

You won't be allowed to run unapproved messages.

Like every other digital shackle, the digital plate is marketed - cue the usual insipid strumming guitar background Muzak - as a great convenience. Why, you'll never have to deal with renewing your registration in person or via the mail again! Because the connected plate is connected to your bank account and the DMV will automatically extract whatever it says you owe them - and not just for registration, at least in principle and for that reason the practice is likely.

The social media platform Parler is arguing in its case against Amazon that the tech giant forced Parler off line because President Trump was poised to joined after being banned from Twitter.

Parler attorney David Groesbeck argued Thursday in court that the conservative-lean learning site would have been a logical place for the president to go since he was unable to access his Twitter account, according to Politico.

Twitter suspended, then permanently banned Trump from posting after the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol Building.

In the aftermath, Amazon Web Services' decided to stop hosting Parler, which resulted in the suit.

Finally!

In October Project Veritas released a bombshell undercover video of a Texas "Republican" consultant violating both Texas and federal laws.

Raquel Rodriguez, a consultant for GOP House candidate Mauro Garza was caught on camera coercing and bribing voters into voting Democrat.

Rodriguez is seen on camera taking the ballot from the voter and helping her fill it out.

We wear masks, goggles, plastic gowns and gloves when we see our residents, and clean everything continuously, but in the last week 18 patients and staff have been infected. It's worse than in March/April, when we had no masks.

I have often wished that we had another Planet Earth, sitting just next to this one. Everything on this cloned planet would be the same, so we could do randomised controlled trials where we changed something here, but not there, to see what happens. You could, of course, also do it the other way around.

Then we would have a chance of knowing if an initiative really worked, or not, and we would have some proper evidence to support major interventions. I first thought this about mass cancer screening programmes. They have almost all been introduced, for everyone, at the same time.

Following Trump's Twitter ban, Polish government wants to protect posts that do not break nation's laws.

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there.

"Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship."

Social media platform Parler, which has gone dark after being cut off by major service providers that accused the app of failing to police violent content, may never get back online, said its CEO John Matze.

As a procession of business vendors severed ties with the two-year-old site following the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, Matze said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday that he does not know when or if it will return.

"It could be never," he said. "We don't know yet."

Fliers and hashtags promoting the pro-Trump rally circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the days and weeks beforehand.

In the days leading up to last week's march on the Capitol, supporters of President Trump promoted it extensively on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram and used the services to organize bus trips to Washington. More than 100,000 users posted hashtags affiliated with the movement prompted by baseless claims of election fraud, including #StopTheSteal and #FightForTrump.

The details, emerging from researchers who have combed the service in recent days, shed new light on how Facebook services were used to bring attention to and boost attendance at the rally, which turned violent when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol while Congress was in session. The attack resulted in the death of a Capitol Police officer and four other people.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.