Rebane's Ruminations

Obama now ‘The Divider’

George Rebane

The Great Divide (and search RR) has been a subject of interest and debate among readers.  Our friends from the Left honor me with accusations of being a lone rogue in shining a light on the path that appears to be tearing the country apart.  Unfortunately as thinkers and commentators across the country have pointed out, the notion of such a division, the Great Divide, is an enterprise shared by people of many political and ideological colorations.

A recent piece on this is from Peggy Noonan – ‘The Divider vs the Thinker’ – that appeared in the 29oct11 WSJ.  In it she compares and contrasts President Barack Obama’s current efforts with those of Representative Paul Ryan.  What caught my eye in her analysis was the similarity of concepts that she highlights with those in RR.  Her overarching introduction immediately gets to the heart of the matter –

People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there's a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.

The glue of which she speaks was the “shared knowledge” of our past, especially that there was something “providential” about our beginnings.   Overwhelmingly, we had “a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations — liberty, equality — and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved.”

From whatever future awaits us, she opines that we will look back at this as the “Great Coming Apart” during which we suffered stresses and strains where “half the country isn’t speaking to the other half”, quoting a moderate Democrat.

Lucy Pearl at Seven Months

George Rebane

Just so that everyone understands that the ideas debated on RR are not without consequence, I want to remind everyone that I have six grandchildren and one great-grandchild - Lucy Pearl, the little darlin that you see below.  What we talk about in these pages is important, and doubly so for her and her parents.  I don't do this just to pound my pud.  It is part of the legacy that all who contribute here leave for whatever search engines may excavate these thoughts tomorrow or generations from now.  In these times, this is what we thought and said.  It's good to reflect on that because you also, dear reader, have to consider your own arrows into the future.  To the extent that your contributions mold and express your worldview, our chatter is not idle.

 

Ruminations - 26oct2011 (29oct2011 update)

George Rebane

•    New Army rifle, a truly fearsome weapon
•    Obama uses FDR’s re-election model
•    Local left concerned about govt regs on food

Army’s new “rifle” is game changer - The Army has released the specs on its new XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System (love that name) that is really a shoulder-fired 25mm cannon that fires a laser-ranged projectile.   The shell explodes at a preset distance from its discharge, and this preset distance can be quickly and accurately set by the trooper using the built-in laser sight.  So if you’re a bad guy and take cover behind a berm or corner of a building (the defilade), you’re dead meat.  The trooper just puts the laser dot on the near edge of the defilade, adds a yard or two with his trigger finger, points it above the berm or by the building’s corner and fires.  The shell goes just beyond the defilade and explodes like a grenade.  Next case please.  (H/T to reader)

Readers know that I always look at these new military and law enforcement sensor and weapon systems with the additional perspective of the 2nd Amendment within the concept of par force.  Governments using the XM25 will have little trouble putting down armed uprisings of people using conventional arms.  That is why future technology augmented autocracies will be very stable.

Obama uses FDR’s re-election model.  In 1936, at the depth of Depression1, FDR blamed the country’s sad state of affairs on capitalism and corporate interests instead of the grim array of socialist fodder that he had served up since being elected in 1932.  By 1937 his attacks on business were regular fare.  Today Obama has taken that page from our first socialist president and improved upon it with the Occupy Wall Street movement that he and his launched earlier this year.  (more here)  As I have noted before, these demonstrations are now becoming the Obama riots of 2011/12.  Russ Steele on Nevada County 2012 is keeping close track of the progress of this strategic diversion movement of the so-called 99%.

FDA overreach.  Last week I had another lunch with Nevada City Councilwoman (and former mayor) Reinette Senum.  We met to again discuss her project to launch the Sierra Land Collaborative wherein high-tech and vertical farming methods can be used locally to yield produce for local consumption.  The farms would be staffed by returning veterans and selected homeless people as part of their rehabilitation.   Part of the conversation involved a lament on how the feds are now imposing draconian rules and regs on what kinds of foodstuffs (e.g. raw milk) can be sold by one person to another.  We agreed that bloated governments can turn around to bite even those who promote their growth.  In the meantime Reinette is off to study and support the OWS movement in NYC - we look forward to her report.

[27oct2011 update]  A reader sent this 1948 cartoon that was released into the season when Americans finally began to see socialism and communism for what they are, and the US changed course markedly from its pre-war track and the road then taken by many European countries led by Great Britain.  History students will remember 1948 as the year Winston Churchill announced that "an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent" of Europe heralded by the Berlin blockade and airlift.

[29oct2011 update]  Only people rabidly intent on making California a template for a police state would consider the topics discussed in this CARB related hearing of the California Senate.  However, these idiots are dead serious in the deliberations about their plans for California drivers.  And it all comes to you courtesy of the Left.

‘Streetcar’ in Nevada City

George Rebane

Last Saturday night we went to dinner with friends, and then on to the evening presentation of Tennessee Williams’ classic ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ being performed at the Nevada Theater.

There we saw a wonderful production of the dark drama that moved Marlon Brandon from its theater production and gave him his film start (1951) after the play finished its Broadway run.  And today we can see a well cast and directed (John Diederick) version of the Pulitzer Prize winner right here in our own town.  The production itself is first rate from the sets, to the sound & lighting, to the delivery itself.  The second act, after the intermission, had us on the edge of our seats as Blanche begins to come apart.

Our own Paul Emery adds ‘Streetcar’ to his growing list of magnificent theatrical productions.  The man wears many hats in our community, and he wears them all well.  So pick up the phone and call (530)478-1974 for information and tickets.  This theater event will end on 5 November; not much time left.

(Yes, this is the same Paul Emery with whom we lock horns in the comment streams of these pages.)

Administrivia - Comment posting problems (updated)

George Rebane

I've received emails from readers that comments don't post reliably or disappear after they are posted.  Am working on this with TypePad.  Please keep the faith since I don't know when they will get the problem fixed.  Thank you.

[update]  The problem seems to have been fixed.

'Employers, unemployment is your fault'

George Rebane

In the 24oct11 WSJ, Wharton School academic Peter Cappelli posits that employers are putting too much blame on schools for not turning out educated workers who can do the available jobs (here).  Employers should instead take in the unqualified, and educate them in the skills needed as, he claims, they did in the old days.  This is another example of an inexperienced liberal academic spouting wisdom from his ivory tower.  As a worker in and manager of businesses over the last half century, I assure you that the world he imagines did not exist.  The limited OJT (on the job training) programs implemented then were possible because the minimum wage and hiring/firing situation was much more fluid and conducive to dealing with young promising workers – if they didn’t work out, they were shown the door with no chance of recourse.

And his claim that you didn’t have to know the job when hired is simply bovine scat.  Then as now, rapid productivity was the name of the game industry wide; things you were taught were only company-specific practices.  With some high school drafting under my belt, at 19 while Eisenhower was still President, I was hired as an entry level draftsman by Genge Corporation and sent to a big aerospace company in Glendale.  We were put on drafting boards located in trailers with no A/C, given small engineering rework tasks to draw up, and watched like a hawk.  If you didn’t cut it, you were out by noon.  Next case please.  (Fortunately I made it and quickly became a senior design draftsman to pay for my undergraduate schooling.)

The same happened when I walked into my first job as an electronics engineer while still completing my BS.  I was shown my desk, my bench space in the circuit design lab, and given the specifications for a device that had yet to be invented, let alone designed and built.  My job was simply to do it.  Period.  (Four months later I delivered the first synchro-to-digital converter.)

In both cases, you learned on your own time anything needed that you didn’t already know.  That’s why God invented midnight oil.  And I want to emphasize that my experience was nothing special or extraordinary.  Over the years my peers and I shared our war stories, and they were all the same.  And it never stopped – twenty years later I was hired to turn around an electronics manufacturing company with a unionized factory ready to go on strike.  As an established systems scientist I had never run a complex hardware (educational electronics) company.  The choice again was ‘learn or burn’.  In short, at all levels, from snot-nosed draftsman to corporate CEO, we all had to lay down a thick track of rubber when our wheels hit the pavement, else it was the door.

Today we have the ‘self-esteem’ generation still entering the workforce with degrees in gender studies, environmental assessment, and the like.  Alongside these aspirants, apologists like Professor Peter Cappelli, who admits to no private sector business experience, study the employment situation and conclude that corporations fighting for survival during a humungus recession (proceeding to depression) should hire and train as permanent employees the unqualified applicants whom the law no longer allows the employer to properly vet, who must be paid an unseemly and unearned minimum wage, and who cannot be easily discharged.  The government has made hiring and employment an expensive minefield of regulations and risk.  It is no wonder to any but the progressive mind that today businesses are hiring slowly if at all, and taking the extra time to employ only the best people they can find.

Right and Left – Right? Wrong!

George Rebane

The one dimensional political spectrum is of great rhetorical convenience, but absolutely worthless when it comes to correctly summarizing the attributes of ideology that the so-called ‘Right’ is supposed hold dear (more here).  The light-minded view is that we start somewhere at the far Left where altruistic collectivism rules the roost under the various labels of communism, socialism, progressivism, and (latter day) liberalism – all various flavors of association that celebrate ‘the people’ over ‘the person’.

Continuing ‘rightward’, we migrate through a region of ideology inhabited by the ‘moderates’ or ‘the center’, or even the ‘undecideds’ whose ideological make-up is a wavering unknown.  From here we keep going until we start getting tinges of ‘the Right’, and press on until we finally arrive at the ‘far Right’.  When this expanse is outlined, using these or other similar words, one gets a lot of nods from people all of whom think they know the next level of definition.

The common view from the lamestream media is that both extremes are autocratic and bad – on one end people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the other end with characters like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet.  This is a nonsensical view of the reality of the American Right under which people who call themselves conservatives, libertarians, free-marketers, and even conservetarians are lumped.  The nonsense is that if you fully applied the ideological tenets of these people, then you would return governance and society to what it was under the ‘Rightwing dictators’ listed above, or other knuckle-dragging versions of it.

This is utter bullcrap, for all the above rogue gallery and their lesser ilk were first and foremost collectivists who claimed to benefit “the people” (“der Volk”), and accomplish that through forging the person into a compliant ideal of the state.  The only difference these despots had was the advertized scope of their interests – national vs international.  This is the exact antithesis of the tenets that conservatives and libertarians hold dear, and are prepared to go to the ramparts to defend.

Singularity Debate – Paul Allen vs Ray Kurzweil

George Rebane

This year’s Singularity Summit again brought out leading thinkers and workers on the progress being made toward that momentous fin de siècle of human development and evolution.  The annual conference prompted Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder) and Mark Greaves to write a strong denial on the prospects of a near-term Singularity (here).  This was promptly rebutted by Ray Kurzweil in a fascinating essay on the pace of recent advances in various technologies (here).  In it he dismantles the Allen and Greaves arguments.  Both pieces appeared in the MIT Technology Review; these and their comment streams are worth a read.

We recall that we are now in the home stretch for the Singularity during which we would expect to see the kinds of reverberations that are going through the employment markets of the developed countries in which technology is being implemented most aggressively to replace human labor.  And that, of course, causes frequent re-evaluation of all current skill sets, and the obsoleting of entire fields of knowledge that used to be the basis for rewarding careers.  These considerations are ignored by our politicians of all stripes.

Oh Say Can You See the Difference Yet? (updated 24oct2011)

George Rebane

Now the smelly, pierced, and entrenched ‘Occupy people’ (as described by Andy Kessler and others) will not move from their rancid encampments in San Francisco, Oakland, and other places.  They dare the local authorities to remove them, and promise to resist when the attempt is made.  When questioned about their protests, all their slogans and signs, claiming to represent “the 99%” that wants to bring down the established order, arise from being more than disappointed (aka pissed) that no one respects their expensive degrees in art and minority studies enough to hire them, and that no one told them that that would be the case.

And so some of them have now learned to answer that they are against “predatory lenders”, and that “corporations are not people”, and “money is not speech”.  Their simple solution is to overturn the capitalistic underpinnings of the American economy that is seen as the source of all their problems.

In these crowds it’s hard to find one that can discuss corporate personhood and what benefits it provides a society, or what parts of it should be examined for possible revision.  No one can translate the collateral effects of restricting spending one’s money to communicate – since it costs to communicate, rules on monies used to communicate will slide us toward a police state where only certain communications will survive as state approved ‘free speech’.

Not one can define predatory lending – understanding the roles of lender and borrower and the guaranteeing of loans is beyond their ken.  They seem to conjure up images of a person innocently walking down the street who suddenly finds his pockets stuffed with unwanted money along with a draconian loan agreement to which his signature has been forged, and that person has no idea how it all came about.

And loonies on the left still tell us that the Occupy movement is just like the Tea Party movement.  One of these seeks to conserve, preserve, and restore the country by acting within the law and its established constitutional underpinnings.  The other wants to overturn the existing order and fundamentally transform the country by acting outside the law and bringing about change through revolution.

The Occupy movement has finally given the left a populist vehicle to voice and demonstrate their motives, means, and methods that differentiate them from those who seek to preserve America and continue its orderly and lawful evolution.  And these same occupiers claim to be in the mainstream.

[24oct2011 update]  Obama attempts to compare the Occupiers to the Tea Party movement in a lame and lying attempt to paint his demonstrators as just another expression of mainstream frustration with the world situation in general and the economy in particular.  The video 'Are the Occupiers like the Tea Party?' sheds some light on the explicit differences between the two movements.

Who are the Occupiers?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 October 2011.  Here I have provided some links to expand the recorded material, and added a recent Ramirez who always summarizes succinctly.]

The Occupy Wall Street crowd has taken its template from the street critics of Europe’s socialist countries, and its marching orders from a Team Obama that needs to soften up the country for next year’s re-election.  Some media mavens on the left are deliriously happy to report that now they also have their ‘tea party’ movement, but the attempts to compare the two don’t stand up to scrutiny – at least so far.

The ‘occupy’ name has been well chosen, for to occupy means to take possession and control of a space, place, or organization.  Occupiers are foreign to the normal or indigenous population of a place, and seek to replace the pre-occupation order of their target space, place or organization.  The people on the streets today most certainly admit that, although what they want to replace it with is still not nailed down.

Enough of these demonstrations have gone on to allow some early polling to take place.  Bill Schoen, former Bill Clinton pollster, reports “research (showing) clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.”  Moreover, he finds that “the protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies”, and that “the vast majority of them are employed.” (more here)