Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations - 31may12

George Rebane

As a continuous lament on these pages, the country’s lack of technical talent is now reaching new lows.  We hear that “On college campuses these days, the top nerds are getting a taste of what it's like to be star jocks.  Companies big and small are going on school campuses to hire undergraduate tech majors, offering outstanding compensation packages and stock (more here).  Meanwhile tens of thousands of PhDs holding degrees in latino studies and women’s public policy are on the dole, with more arriving daily.  All of this is lost on the country’s liberal contingent.

Sex selective abortions are giving those feminists who understand things a bit of a problem.  There’s a bill in the House that would prohibit such abortions done for the sole purpose of getting a kid with specified outside plumbing.  It turns out that minority women are in the overwhelming majority who request such government sponsored genocide services.  Since such killings are the most basic form of gender bias, what’s a dyed-in-wool leftwing feminist to do?  Opposing the bill would be blatant hypocrisy, yet supporting it would deny the federal dole to clinics that do this kind of thing.  And it didn’t help that someone made a video of a woman having a very understanding interview with a worker in one of those abortion clinics.

The descendants of Lenin’s “useful idiots” are still parroting the denial of government worker pensions as the main cause of fiscal failures of local jurisdictions in America.  Now we hear that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has finally seen the brick wall after having gone splat against it in Chicago.  As the WSJ reports, in Illinois “Many teachers don't pay a penny toward pensions but can retire at age 60 with an annuity equal to 65% of their final salary plus a 3% annual compounded cost-of-living increase. The state's pension bill, which has quadrupled in five years, consumes all $7 billion of additional revenue from last year's income and corporate tax hikes. Even so, the pension funds are projected to go bust in a decade.”  So now that he has executive responsibility, the former Obama chief of staff is singing a different song titled “Illinois pensions are breaking my city.”

Voting for Sue McGuire and Doug LaMalfa

George Rebane

In next Tuesday’s primary I am voting for Sue McGuire for Nevada County’s District #1 supervisor, and State Senator Doug LaMalfa to become our new representative in Congress.

Sue McGuire has all of the qualifications to become our new supervisor.  I won’t belabor them; you can see them on her website.  She has also come to our home for an extended meeting with us and our neighbors, and we have talked with her numerous times at community meetings.  In this interval we have gotten to know her, and I endorse Sue because she will be a capable, professional, and prudent voice on the Board who is ideologically the closest to my own beliefs about governance.

But, given those necessary qualifications, perhaps the prime reason I am voting for Sue is that she will be a new face at the Rood Center, a person with no established ties or ‘accounts’ with county staff, the other electeds, and relationships with the various special interest government associations, leagues, commissions, committees, and NGOs that dot California’s public policy landscape.  Today more than ever, for me that has become the necessary add-on in choosing whom to support for public office.

A Look at GDP

George Rebane

Gross Domestic Product is constantly in the news.  It is the definitive measure of a country’s annual production of goods and services.  GDP is calculated in several different ways, all are supposed to be compatible.  The most often used and useful way is called the Expenditure Method that relates to the different kinds of spending that go on in an economy.  In this post I will lay down a little background on GDP that will serve as a ready reference when we talk about things economical during this election year, and keep an eye on the indicators that tell us about the world in Depression2.

As shown in the above figure, the expenditure method defines GDP as the sum of consumer spending (C), private investments (I), government spending (G), and the net of exports (X) minus imports (M), which is also known as the ‘current account’ of the country’s foreign trade.

The first thing to notice is that government spending (G), which itself generates no wealth, contributes to GDP.  This is the notorious Keynesian spigot that is supposed to be opened wide during economic hard times to flood the economy with cash and stimulate spending.  The problem comes when we examine the source of G.  It all derives from three sources that can at best only hide the pain temporarily when the spigot is opened, and then after a while the whole thing simply ceases to function.  (Actually, many of the President’s constituents believe that there is fourth and more mysterious yet just as reliable source called ‘Obama’s Stash’)

G is made up of mainly taxes of several kinds and collected under various guises, and labeled so as to hide their true sum.  But all taxes come out of the wealth creating private sector, with the possible exception of autocratic governments selling their nationalized natural resources to other countries.  When taxes don’t generate enough ‘revenues’ (love their use of business terms like ‘revenues’ and ‘investment’), then an alternative source is to borrow from lenders (foreign and domestic) to make up the shortfall.

We Remember - 28 May 2012

George Rebane

Today we remember and honor the military service men and women who died for us, and those who have yet to come home.  We sent them into harm’s way to keep harm away from us and our loved ones.  They went willingly again and again to do the work of war with the belief, and sometimes only hope, that their country was behind them.  (continued)

Dear Reader, that was the opening to my last year's Memorial Day post.  Since I can't improve on it, I will simply recall your attention to those sentiments which are even more appropriate today.

TechTest2012 Survivors Breakfast

George Rebane

Last Friday (25may12) the annual ‘Survivors Breakfast’ was again held at Tofanelli’s.  The event has become a tradition to celebrate the young people who took the year’s test and those who received the top scores on the SESF sponsored merit scholarship exam.  TT2012 top three scorers (in no particular order) were Ben Martin, Parker Scanlon, and Dominic Castro-Wehr pictured below.

This year included was Joe Fenner (pictured above), the top scorer of TechTestJr2012, and his parents.  TTJr was inaugurated this year for the county’s 8th graders in response to requests from local middle schools.  Students starting 9th grade make a very serious choice to take the science-math track in high school or not.  That choice greatly determines their ability to study STEM subjects in colleges and embark on STEM careers.

After a hearty breakfast, the students each told us of their plans for next year.  The juniors, who took the test for practice, all promised to study much harder for TT2013 when they will be going for the money.  The breakfast always ends with everyone getting their coveted Survivor’s T-shirt, and then a big picture taking session.  Pictured below are the juniors (left) and seniors.

More pictures and information is available on the SESF website here.

The Rotten Roots of Socialism

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary aired on 25 May 2012.]

The world is in a turmoil that most people equate to something that has to do with finances.  In addition to the reports from Europe about Greece, and Spain, and Italy, and on-and-off austerity programs, we are already numb with news of the European disease that has also spread to our shores.  For those who still try to bury their heads in the sand, there’s more, and here I’ll try to connect a few dots.

The latest news about the joys of socialism comes from the Northern Marianas, way out in the Pacific.  Home to about 53,000 people, these islands are a United States territory populated by American citizens.  And looking at the mainland years ago, their government employees saw a good thing – lavish public service employee union negotiated pension funds – and so they set up one of their own.  Well, cutting to the chase, their pension fund is broke and last month filed for bankruptcy.

The Liberal Mind – Profits vs Jobs

        'Tax rates have no effect on the behavior of the taxed.' - deeply held liberal tenet

George Rebane

This week President Obama made another extremely important statement that reveals his understanding of how the world works.  At a campaign stop he took Romney's credentials to task, doubting that anyone who has focused on business ventures like reorganizing companies for the purpose of making a profit is suited to be President of the United States.  The better recommendation for such a candidate would be to have focused on creating jobs.  On hearing this I could not help but go slack-jawed.

To be sure, it is a tragedy to have such ignorance (or perfidy?) resident in the chief executive of a putatively capitalistic country, but the portents of making such a statement to the electorate should be our real concern.  Obama spoke those words knowing that a large fraction of voters would agree with him simply because of his position, abetted by their inability to understand the basics of economics beyond their own spending habits.  In other words, the man knowingly pandered to the complacantly ignorant.

The correct message should have been that in free markets all businesses are created to make a profit, and when successful, such enterprises also create jobs.  No business is started for the purpose of creating jobs.  You have to be successfully shielded from reality or just plain dumb not to know that labor – i.e. a job – is an element of cost that makes any product or service more expensive to the customer, makes the business less competitive, reduces profits and the ability to grow, and jeopardizes the survival of the company.  In short, a successful business does its best when it minimizes the jobs needed to function profitably, and thereby best guarantees that the jobs it does provide will be the most secure.

It is only the collectivist state with its twisted ideology that sets up organizations, which employ cadres of inept and inefficient workers to impede the increase of wealth and the quality of life for the most people.  And the collectivist state does this without regard to the unsustainability of the entire scheme, counting on increasing the wholesale level of equally applied misery to mask any alternative approach to creating and distributing wealth.  This is what our President has been successfully selling, and through his cadres, successfully imposing on the country.

Part and parcel of such a downward spiral is the notion of a nation, up to its eyeballs in debt, spending its way to economic recovery and wealth.  The Greeks are now demanding to spend more, instead of tightening their belts from profligate borrowing and spending.  The French just voted in a socialist who promises to put their country on the same road.  Spain and Portugal are ready to sign on.

This entire approach was recently given a mind-boggling justification by Hannes Swoboda, a member of the European Parliament and president of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in that ‘august body’.  In his ‘Europe Can Spend Its Way to Growth’ (21may12 WSJ) he advances some economic prescriptions for the EU that have yet to work on this third planet from the sun – nevertheless, member countries are exhorted to throw themselves into the breech one more time.

First and foremost, he recommends compelled borrowing by states and businesses for the purpose of job creation.  This, of course, requires some mysterious compelling of lenders, since prospects for profits that assure a payback are neither apparent nor a necessity.  He then appeals to la-la-land accounting to dictate that such debts “should not be integrated in calculations of structural deficits and hence be punished because (somehow) investment in growth generates income and taxes, and therefore revenues for the state.”

To achieve this new level of unsustainable indebtedness, Swoboda argues that “European institutions should enact legislation that requires all members to make public investments in growth and employement.”  A staple of economic activity in this direction is to re-ignite the efforts that “would finally lead us onto the path toward a seriously environment-friendly economy.”  This in the face of the disastrous recent history that EU countries have experienced in their pell-mell charge into green industries, an experience which subsequently caused everyone to beat a hasty retreat in order to save their national fiscs.

How will all this be accomplished?  Swoboda’s sure-fire approach spells out that “these additional investments need to be financed, one way or another.”  (No kidding, you can’t make this stuff up.)  And just to make sure that capital has every impediment to moving into its most productive use, he prescribes a new “financial transaction tax".   On top of that, the EU would establish additional regulations to “fight against tax evasion” which then would “channel additional funds into national treasuries.”

To put a nice bow on it, we can now all do a little anticipatory happy dance because “once growth takes off, tax revenues will start flowing.  Tax policy that favors lower-income classes and better regulation of financital markets would (then) already be fostering growth.”  Now, do you see how easy all that would be?  And do you finally understand why Team Obama wants to take us down that same road once “after (his) re-election (he) will have more flexibility”?

The Liberal Mind – Asymmetric 'Cacooning' (updated 25may12)

George Rebane

For some years in these pages I have written about the apparent ignorance of the liberal voices about what’s going on and how things work.  Quite often I, and other conservative bloggers, have been taken to task by our left-leaning readers accusing us of ‘introducing’ some outlandish new notion.  But more often than not, the notion is neither new nor outlandish in the greater scheme of things.  It only appeared so to the more narrowly exposed readers.

I have argued that a contributing factor to these one-sided expressions of outrage is that liberals in the aggregate are disposed to seek out news and information from liberal outlets.  These include the usual lamestream outlets and, of course, the Hollywood led entertainment industry.  Sources which the conservatives cannot help but also frequent, if for nothing else then curiosity as to what the other side is talking about.

National commentator Michael Barone on polipundit.com has noticed that same phenomenon and writes about it here (H/T to Russ Steele for link).  Barone cites the notion of ‘cacooning’ introduced by journalist Bill Bishop in his recent (2009) The Big Sort.  Bishop observes that professionals and idea shapers on both sides migrate to enclaves that best match their views – e.g. San Francisco area and Dallas-FtWorth.  But where liberals in such areas can totally immerse themselves in like-mindedness, conservatives find that impossible to do because of the pervasive left tilt of the national media, academia, the arts, and, of course, Hollywood et al.

The conservatives are bathed in both lights wherever they may live, and therefore benefit from a broader understanding of the beliefs and notions held by the American public.  One indicator of this is the types of fruitless debates that go on between the two sides, where one side wants to examine, say, the impact of a proposed idea of governance while the other side is simply outraged that someone would ‘introduce’ or even consider such an idea.

Some years back Alan Abramowitz and Bishop, while working on his book, wrote a piece, 'The Myth of the Middle', in the Washington Post describing the findings of a study and poll that confirmed what many of us were witnessing daily in the national dialogue.  Again, somehow much of the left (most certainly our local locally focused brethren) missed the report of this revelation.  The article concluded -

For the past three decades, the major parties and the electorate have grown more divided -- in what they think, where they live and how they vote. It may be comforting to believe our problems could be solved if only those vile politicians in Washington would learn to get along. The source of the country's division, however, is nestled much closer to home.

This, of course, contributes to and confirms the overall polarization of the country, and has induced many conservatives to begin exploring the notion of a Great Divide (q.v.).

[25may12 update]  This evening we finished an historic week in the annals of defending the First Amendment and religious freedom.  Over 22 churches and institutions (including the liberal Notre Dame University) have filed suit against the administration regarding Obamacare’s revealed strictures on what is a church and who must deliver abortion services.  This is a big story, and promises to have a material effect on this election as it heads toward SCOTUS, where the justices already have that travesty under their microscope.

But the added news here for the record is that liberals looking to the lamestream for its news have again literally no idea that any of this is going on, let alone the scope of this exploding national debate.  To again demonstrate in which basket it has all of its eggs, the lamestream channels in toto devoted only 19 seconds(!) to reporting this story during the entire week that has passed – this according to people who track media coverage as was reported by Fox News.  Talk about asymmetry.  Exit question: Isn’t there at least one pissed progressive in the country who would stand up and demand that his news not be selectively censored?

Agenda21 on cat’s feet (updated 24may12)

George Rebane

I just returned from the Nevada County Board of Supervisors meeting at the Rood Center.  I went there to hear the report on establishing a 2005 county baseline for CO2 emissions presented by the Sierra Business Council with some mysterious connection to ICLEI.  (You can check the details on the county’s website.)  The report consisted of a bunch of pie charts showing metric tons of “CO2 equivalents” emitted by various county activities and sources.  The numbers came from plugging SBC collected county data into a computer model supplied by ICLEI.

The longer term purpose of this baseline data is to set CO2 targets, pass future regulations and ordinances, and establish monitoring and enforcement procedures to further constrain and dictate the behavior of county residents.

ICLEI stands for International Council for Environmental Initiatives.  It is the NGO charged with implementing UN’s Agenda 21 plan for constraining and controlling ALL human activity on earth as soon as possible.  ICLEI, headquartered in Germany, is the coordinating arm for the distributed infusion of ‘smart growth’, ‘sustainability’, ‘energy efficiency’, ‘climate change laws’, … at local levels throughout the world.  USA, signatory to Agenda 21, has more than 500 national chapters of which over 100 are in, where else, California.

The SBC presenters professed singular ignorance of any of this or even any depth of the work they had done.  To them ICLEI was the supplier of the computer model into which they stuck their local data, period.  Supervisor Ed Scofield called me to the mike to explain ICLEI, and then expressed his deep concerns about the encroachment of ICLEI’s infusion of Agenda 21.

Supervisor Nate Beason asked some excellent questions re the presented ‘metric tons’ and the source of the computer model used.  Supervisor Beason wanted the quoted numbers to be put into some context which would establish their significance.  The SBC people were not able to do that either.   The question still to be asked is ‘how was the computer model validated and by whom?’

Ruminations - 21may12 (updated)

George Rebane

President Obama’s background and biography is throwing people for another loop – at least those with their heads still exposed to the sun.  Who knows where the man was actually born?  Who knows what actually happened in South Chicago?  All we know is that the Washington establishment (both parties) and the lamestream don’t want to go there, no matter what is discovered under newly turned over rocks. 

And Obama’s ‘autobiographies’ will now have to be re-cataloged under fiction.  The disparities from truth are becoming so easy to document that a high school sophomore could do it for her term paper, if only her teacher would countenance such research.  PJMedia, Breitbart, and Drudge, along with some local blogs, have been having a field day on the new revelations about the background of our fearless leader.

Everyone with an ability to buy popcorn at a movie should now understand what a private equity firm like Bain does and did when Romney was there.  Especially revealing is the Left’s celebrated cause of telling the country that Romney and company bankrupted GST Steel and destroyed 750 secure long-lasting jobs; worse, sent them overseas to cheap steel makers.  ('Bain Capitalism 101')  Ol’ Joe can say it best of all from the Team Obama side.  Their lies are understandable, but the puzzle remains as to how well such lies work with the Left’s constituents.  A lot of these must be the parents of kids like those in Florida who flunked the state’s reading test. The answer’s gotta be in the double helix.

Knowledge Engines

George Rebane

Part of our rush toward Singularity involves the web becoming ‘smarter’.  In case you haven’t noticed, search engine technologies are rapidly evolving from providing ‘information’ to becoming so-called knowledge engines.  Wolfram Alpha was an early one into this functionality, and it is now being joined by Google’s Knowledge Graph Microsoft will soon upgrade its Bing to provide the same type of functionality.

My friend Dr Larry Press reports on Knowledge Graph here.  And this is a short video that gives you an idea of all this before you dive into the details.

As evident from my past posts on the topic, I’m looking forward to IBM offering its Watson technology on a broad basis to websites.  To do that though will require the installation of what I’d call server cities instead of server farms.  Today web related utilities already consume more than 5% of our electrical capacity.  With all of us starting to use Watson-derived knowledge engines will make the country’s lights dim.

 

Illegal Aliens + IRS = Tax Fraud

George Rebane

There are over two million illegal aliens in America, overwhelmingly from Mexico.  Now it turns out that an additional draw for such illegals has been the ability to blatantly defraud the American taxpayer with the help of our compliant IRS.  The entire scheme involves filing the 1040 tax return using an IRS-created ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) that was supposed to allow working illegals without an SSN to still pay taxes on their earned income.  (This stuff is hard to make up.)

Well, the damn thing backfired years ago when the illegals discovered this ‘loop hole’ (aka fraud) that allowed them to claim refunds for children supposedly living with them that were members of their larger families.  The refund is the Additional Child Tax Credit.  So tax returns with ITINs started being submitted by the hundreds of thousands and more, each with a list of kids on them who were nieces and nephews to pad the ACTC list on their 1040s.  Adding to this insult is that the kids don’t even live here, but are still back in Mexico.

The refunds are huge.  Individuals get back thousands of dollars apiece.  The total taxpayer bill comes to over $4.2B annually, year after year.  And no one at the IRS wants to fess up or talk about this fraud that has been known to them for years.  To show how dysfunctional our government is, even the US Treasury Department’s Inspector General has investigated and written reports about this abuse, and reported it to the IRS, all to no avail.  (more here)

None of the illegals feel bad about doing this because the ACTC is simply another commons added on top of the Great Commons of America which they already hold in contempt, and in which they live as fugitives from an inept and corrupt government headquartered in Washington DC.  (H/T to a correspondent.)

Placebos vs Big Pharma

George Rebane

A recent ’60 Minutes’ surprised me with a segment in which it was reported that placebos worked just as well as drugs like Prozac for fighting depression – well, almost as well.  Prozac did have a tiny edge in really severe cases of depression.  The research was done by Dr Irving Kirsch of Harvard, and it has reignited a firestorm of debate as to what real effect do many expensive big pharma concoctions have over sugar pills.

The power of the human brainbone to gin up alternative realities has been known for decades.  In the Greece of pre-Dorian invasions the gods regularly conversed with individuals and even attended public events such as weddings and other celebrations.  Everybody saw them and corroborated each other’s experiences.  In the middle ages and later, people actually saw witches fly on broomsticks, and believed such sightings to be as reliable as seeing clouds in the sky.  In the modern age anthropologists have discovered and studied a tribe in Papua-New Guinea whose known world has a boundary at a narrow river, the other side of which has always been invisible to the aboriginals.

Some psychologists have identified the responsible region of the brain for such hallucinations in the right hemisphere opposite Wernicke’s area (used in language processing).  In any event, most of us have heard some astounding stories and are aware of the power of placebos.  It all seems to revolve around the level of credibility (faith) we attribute to the sugar pills presented as medicine and administered by sincere and serious healthcare professionals.  And this effect seems to work in spades with anti-depressant medications.

But that wasn’t really what caught my attention in the TV segment.  The question that popped up was why did the FDA still allow Prozac et al to tout themselves as the clinically effective standard of care for depression.  The answer was that FDA’s approval procedures rate a drug effective, if it bests the performance of placebos in at least two properly conducted drug trials or studies.  It could fail to be better in, say, ten previous studies, but as soon as it racks up two victories over the placebo, it gets to go to market.

My instant reaction was ‘Wow! I didn’t know that.’  So if in a (double?) blind trial Prozac and a placebo are each given to two samples of 500 subjects suffering from depression, and Prozac is judged to effectively reduce symptoms in, say, 100 subjects, while the placebo equally reduces symptoms in only 98 subjects, then Prozac wins.  There was no requirement of statistical significance or any such technical niceties.  Two such victories, and the billions start rolling in.

The question then becomes, what kind of risk do big pharma companies take when bringing to market already developed, marginally performing medicines?

Message to Team Romney

George Rebane

Republican contender Romney is overlooking a key and compelling message to the voters.  He and his are just getting up to speed on, ‘Since Obama did not come close to meeting his first term promises of hope and change, and we are still in economic dire straits; what makes you think that Obama can deliver on the same promises during his second term?’

The real message that no one seems to be talking about in the pundit universe, and that has been totally absent in Romney’s copy is, ‘Since Obama did not come close to meeting his first term  promises of hope and change when his second term prospects still hung in balance; what makes you think that now in his second term he will keep those promises when he has no such requirement to deliver, and need let nothing stand in the way of implementing his twisted (aka ineffective, butt stupid, wrongheaded, socialist, …) ideology on America?’

Wordsmith it as you will, the logic of it is overwhelming, and this message should be heard from Republicans at all levels to the widest possible audiences until we vote on 6 November 2012.