Sunday, 12 May 2013
The greatest worry lately in the world of US aggression was that the UN spokesman noted that there was no evidence that the Syrian Government was using chemical weapons upon its own people, but that rather the Syrian opposition, supported by the US, had been using this form of horror-warfare. This official UN report, and the astute official responsible for it, were denounced quickly, and then the news just went along as usual. After all, if it was the Syrian opposition, supported by the USA who were responsible for using chemical weapons, then where did the Syrian Opposition get them from? A good question that is not allowed to be asked. A good question that is not allowed. We must keep it as though :These guys are the good guys, those guys are the bad guys, and we have proof that the good guys are being destroyed by the bad guys unfairly, so we must give weapons to the good guys...as it was in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Iran and now in Syria. We can destroy Syria if the government are the bad guys, so we will fabricate it so they are, even though the 'good guys' are using horrific poisons on their own people. The truth doesn't matter. The profit matters.
Now that it is May, the annual April US war-games on the border with North Korea have finished, and the nuclear bomb-packing US stealth bombers have moved away, and so the North Koreans have put their ICBMs away (and they do have them, and have had them for years, and everyone knows), so the level of risk for a big war has gone down again, as it does, every year in May. Every year.
The next spike re 'total war' will be when the US sells more offensive weapons to Taiwan as it does annually. Then China will become cranky again.
The predictability of the US' annual destabilisations of North Asia, and in the South China Sea, is yawningly obvious.
The purpose: Destabilisation to maintain US influence, where otherwise there is no need for US presence at all; and to totally stop the resolution of all issues at the local level... to stop agreements, to stop unity in Asia, to stop compromise and reason, to stop peace from being assured.
Why? Because it's good for American business, the world's biggest Arms dealers; and that's all. That is the morality of it. To divide, so as to create markets for weapons that otherwise would not be necessary at all.
What does Australia do? We kowtow to this US vision of omnipotence as policeman, and give over sovereign Australian land and logistics to the American military, so they can keep destabilising our major trading partners, and our real friends.
Asia will work out what is best for Asia as time goes by. Australia is in the area, but we are not Asia at all. Why? Because we have no interest or investment in peace at all, but rather the opposite. Asia knows this.
The next spike re 'total war' will be when the US sells more offensive weapons to Taiwan as it does annually. Then China will become cranky again.
The predictability of the US' annual destabilisations of North Asia, and in the South China Sea, is yawningly obvious.
The purpose: Destabilisation to maintain US influence, where otherwise there is no need for US presence at all; and to totally stop the resolution of all issues at the local level... to stop agreements, to stop unity in Asia, to stop compromise and reason, to stop peace from being assured.
Why? Because it's good for American business, the world's biggest Arms dealers; and that's all. That is the morality of it. To divide, so as to create markets for weapons that otherwise would not be necessary at all.
What does Australia do? We kowtow to this US vision of omnipotence as policeman, and give over sovereign Australian land and logistics to the American military, so they can keep destabilising our major trading partners, and our real friends.
Asia will work out what is best for Asia as time goes by. Australia is in the area, but we are not Asia at all. Why? Because we have no interest or investment in peace at all, but rather the opposite. Asia knows this.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Interesting Article: Working in Australia with a different sounding name
You are applying for a job and you work hard on your resume. You type in your qualifications and experience. And of course your name. Maybe you do not give a second thought to this. After all, what s in a name when you are applying for a job? Surely, it is only your degrees and experience that matter, not your name or ethnicity. If two job applicants have exactly the same resume, they should have an equal probability of being selected for a job interview, shouldn't they?
To investigate this, my colleagues - Andrew Leigh, Elena Varganova - and I carried out a large-scale field experiment in Australia. Our goal was to see if there is any labour market discrimination against ethnic minorities.
With one in four residents born overseas, Australia is often regarded as something of a poster child for its ability to absorb new migrants into its social and economic fabric. Skilled migrants are selected through a points system, which gives preference to applicants with high qualifications and workers in high-demand occupations.
Australia's points-based immigration policy has not only been much admired, but has also been adopted by other countries, including New Zealand and the UK. And in Australia, we give everyone a fair go, don't we?
Well, maybe not… To investigate if there is ethnic discrimination by employers, we conducted what is termed a correspondence discrimination study, in which fictitious individuals, identical in all respects apart from their ethnicity, apply for jobs.
After obtaining ethics approval from the Australian National University, my co-authors and I randomly submitted over 4,000 fictional applications for entry-level jobs. In terms of number of applications submitted, this was one of the biggest correspondence studies ever conducted. The large size of the study allowed us to look at a range of ethnic groups, where ethnicity was indicated only by the name of the job applicant. The names we used were from five broad ethnicities: Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle Eastern. We were interested in measuring call-back rates for interviews, and we focused on urban areas alone.
In all cases, we applied for entry-level jobs and submitted a resume indicating that the candidate attended high school in Australia. The findings were both startling and robust.
In particular, we found that ethnic minority candidates would need to apply for more jobs in order to receive the same number of invitations to interviews. Moreover, these differences vary systematically across ethnic groups. To get as many interviews as an Anglo applicant with an Anglo-sounding name, an Indigenous person must submit 35 percent more applications, a Chinese person must submit 68 percent more applications, an Italian person must submit 12 percent more applications and a Middle Eastern person 64 percent more applications.
This study has implications for the individual jobseeker as well as for policy.
For the individual, what is the advice? Consider Anglicising your name if you live and work in a country where Anglo names are in the majority. Or if you do not, consider changing it to match with the dominant group. This is the counsel given by some immigration lawyers. They sometimes also recommend that you do not put your country of birth on your application and only mention your language skills if they are relevant to the job you are applying for.
But can policymakers also do something? Yes, and here is one suggestion. Policymakers can implement anonymous job application procedures and can undertake - or commission - a field experiment to evaluate their effects. First, find a few companies or government departments. For these companies, set up two groups - the treatment group and the control. The control group might be all job applicants for the previous year and the treatment would be all the new applicants for the next year for whom anonymous job applications would be introduced. (Alternatively the control group might be half of all new applicants, and then introduce anonymous job applications for the other half.) Evaluations would consider whether or not this process is cumbersome, and evaluate its impact on ethnic and gender call-backs for the treatment group, compared with the control group.
Is this possible? Of course it is, and it has been done. In Germany, in November 2010, the Federal Anti-discrimination Agency initiated a field experiment along these lines, with anonymous job applications (no name, no photograph, no ethnicity or gender). The results showed that standardised anonymised application forms were associated with equal chances of applicants of different minorities receiving a job interview. This is just as you'd expect. Standardised anonymous application forms were also found to be easily implemented.
Can this be done this in other countries? Let us see what the policymakers and anti-discrimination agencies have to say.
Alison Booth is Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and an ANU Public Policy Fellow. She is also the author of A Distant Land, published in 2012.
To investigate this, my colleagues - Andrew Leigh, Elena Varganova - and I carried out a large-scale field experiment in Australia. Our goal was to see if there is any labour market discrimination against ethnic minorities.
With one in four residents born overseas, Australia is often regarded as something of a poster child for its ability to absorb new migrants into its social and economic fabric. Skilled migrants are selected through a points system, which gives preference to applicants with high qualifications and workers in high-demand occupations.
Australia's points-based immigration policy has not only been much admired, but has also been adopted by other countries, including New Zealand and the UK. And in Australia, we give everyone a fair go, don't we?
Well, maybe not… To investigate if there is ethnic discrimination by employers, we conducted what is termed a correspondence discrimination study, in which fictitious individuals, identical in all respects apart from their ethnicity, apply for jobs.
After obtaining ethics approval from the Australian National University, my co-authors and I randomly submitted over 4,000 fictional applications for entry-level jobs. In terms of number of applications submitted, this was one of the biggest correspondence studies ever conducted. The large size of the study allowed us to look at a range of ethnic groups, where ethnicity was indicated only by the name of the job applicant. The names we used were from five broad ethnicities: Anglo-Saxon, Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle Eastern. We were interested in measuring call-back rates for interviews, and we focused on urban areas alone.
In all cases, we applied for entry-level jobs and submitted a resume indicating that the candidate attended high school in Australia. The findings were both startling and robust.
| Consider Anglicising your name if you live and work in a country where Anglo names are in the majority. Or if you do not, consider changing it to match with the dominant group. |
In particular, we found that ethnic minority candidates would need to apply for more jobs in order to receive the same number of invitations to interviews. Moreover, these differences vary systematically across ethnic groups. To get as many interviews as an Anglo applicant with an Anglo-sounding name, an Indigenous person must submit 35 percent more applications, a Chinese person must submit 68 percent more applications, an Italian person must submit 12 percent more applications and a Middle Eastern person 64 percent more applications.
This study has implications for the individual jobseeker as well as for policy.
For the individual, what is the advice? Consider Anglicising your name if you live and work in a country where Anglo names are in the majority. Or if you do not, consider changing it to match with the dominant group. This is the counsel given by some immigration lawyers. They sometimes also recommend that you do not put your country of birth on your application and only mention your language skills if they are relevant to the job you are applying for.
But can policymakers also do something? Yes, and here is one suggestion. Policymakers can implement anonymous job application procedures and can undertake - or commission - a field experiment to evaluate their effects. First, find a few companies or government departments. For these companies, set up two groups - the treatment group and the control. The control group might be all job applicants for the previous year and the treatment would be all the new applicants for the next year for whom anonymous job applications would be introduced. (Alternatively the control group might be half of all new applicants, and then introduce anonymous job applications for the other half.) Evaluations would consider whether or not this process is cumbersome, and evaluate its impact on ethnic and gender call-backs for the treatment group, compared with the control group.
Is this possible? Of course it is, and it has been done. In Germany, in November 2010, the Federal Anti-discrimination Agency initiated a field experiment along these lines, with anonymous job applications (no name, no photograph, no ethnicity or gender). The results showed that standardised anonymised application forms were associated with equal chances of applicants of different minorities receiving a job interview. This is just as you'd expect. Standardised anonymous application forms were also found to be easily implemented.
Can this be done this in other countries? Let us see what the policymakers and anti-discrimination agencies have to say.
Alison Booth is Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and an ANU Public Policy Fellow. She is also the author of A Distant Land, published in 2012.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Sunday, 7 April 2013
Saturday, 6 April 2013
The New Government of China with Mr Xi as President and Chairman is a different government than that of Mr Hu and his social-engineering paradigm that has now departed.
Mr Xi is a much more savvy politician and his rise to leadership has unified the Chinese army in a way Mr Hu could never do.
China also pretty much has a brand new navy, brand new nuclear attack submarines - a lot of them -that still remain very difficult for the USA to locate at all due to an advanced naval 'sonar doppleganger' technology that the USA can't yet fathom China's main interests are stability on the Korean peninsula and protecting its own interests from attacks/incursions by the USA in strategic DPRK.
Mostly, China is interested in securing its sea lanes and Taiwan and the Daiyu islands, not in Korea, per se. China wants Asia to be free of American ongoing destabilisation.
Meanwhile Russia has a very big presence in the North of Asia and is ramping up its navy and airforce there to secure islands given to Japan, North of Korea, by the USA some years ago.
As for Korea, its territorial bordering and kinship neighbours are China and Russia and neither of these will tolerate any American presence in the north.
America feels it is dealing with the same Chinese government it was dealing with last year, but Mr Xi, well, he is not like the past at all.
Mr Xi is a much more savvy politician and his rise to leadership has unified the Chinese army in a way Mr Hu could never do.
China also pretty much has a brand new navy, brand new nuclear attack submarines - a lot of them -that still remain very difficult for the USA to locate at all due to an advanced naval 'sonar doppleganger' technology that the USA can't yet fathom China's main interests are stability on the Korean peninsula and protecting its own interests from attacks/incursions by the USA in strategic DPRK.
Mostly, China is interested in securing its sea lanes and Taiwan and the Daiyu islands, not in Korea, per se. China wants Asia to be free of American ongoing destabilisation.
Meanwhile Russia has a very big presence in the North of Asia and is ramping up its navy and airforce there to secure islands given to Japan, North of Korea, by the USA some years ago.
As for Korea, its territorial bordering and kinship neighbours are China and Russia and neither of these will tolerate any American presence in the north.
America feels it is dealing with the same Chinese government it was dealing with last year, but Mr Xi, well, he is not like the past at all.
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