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.”

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?’

Conspiracy Theories by the Dozen, Oh My! (updated 21may12)

George Rebane

[Correction: This is the submitted form of my column that appeared belatedly in the print edition of the 25may12 Union.  I was informed of the delay due to a rush of political columns and articles on the new marijuana ordnance.]

In this election year all the weird stuff we’ve been hearing about seems to be coming at us more loudly and from every direction.  Each piece by itself sounds like a purposed effort to drive America deeper into a place that most of us don’t want it to go; each piece sounds like the revelation of another quiet conspiracy at work.  And when you gather all the pieces together, they don’t look like separate pieces at all, but to many they appear to fit into one big concerted effort from somewhere by some people who are working together.

And what makes it even more curious is that the individual pieces have been promoted by people from all political parties – most certainly including Republicans and Democrats.  So we can’t just point our finger at one side and blame the whole thing on them.

We start with the International Democrat Union (idu.org) founded in 1983 by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Republican Party National Committee’s John Allen, and joined by VPOTUS George HW Bush.  It is a self-declared union of ‘centre and centre right’ parties with high sounding principles that include abiding by the anti-constitutional UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and calls for unspecified obligations between nations.  Who knows what the IDU does, but it meets every four years near the Republican Convention.

Then we have the notorious UN Agenda21 initiative to which President GHW Bush signed us up (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml).  Reading its tenets and principles calls for a one world in which human activity is restricted to a fraction of the earth’s land surface, and everyone belongs to a wholesome, sustainable, inclusive, happy society of peacefully like-minded and sensitive people.  The progressive principles of this future UN-dominated world are being implemented through something called the ICLEI Global (iclei.org) which organizes “local governments for sustainability” and already has over 550 US cities as members.

Next we come to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 with its draconian Title X, Subtitle D.  There its anti-terrorism provisions give the President powers to do all kinds of spooky and unconstitutional things like constructing a gulag of stalags in the US for forcibly interning thousands of US citizens when the need arises.

Prelude to an American Spring?

George Rebane

Last night after supper I spent several hours with a Nevada County high school teacher talking about the state of education here and across the country.  He told of how top students, some of them brilliant, appear directionless with no focus or fire to go and do some definite thing with their lives.  No desire to be the next whatever that would benefit society, or even make themselves wealthy.

The college bound seem to care only about getting good grades, and therefore take the softer subjects.  Even their counselors understand that motivation and advise them to take this easier course vs that one so their GPA will be maximized.  This motivation extends to students who demonstrate abilities to master STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) courses and enter productive STEM careers.  Many (most?) who enter college as STEM majors quickly change direction into something like sociology, psychology, or English after their freshman encounter with a first real math class.

Talking to them about a future with family, house, kids, … makes no dent.  The focus of the best of them is limited to getting into a better school and then looking around to discover how to graduate with the least work.  Telling them about the prospects of finding a job or what different jobs pay also makes little impact.  ‘$35K a year’s OK, I can live on that’ too often is their depth of planning ahead.  The dismal numbers on local college graduates coming back to live with their parents is replicated across the country.

Agenda21 – drones overhead, black boxes in cars, …

George Rebane

Unmanned surveillance aircraft come in a range of sizes that fit in the palm of your hand to big ones the size of airliners.  The 21apr12 WSJ reports that the smaller ones are being snapped up by stateside governmental agencies ranging from federal bureaus to local police.  Their manifold uses should be obvious to the intelligent reader.  Having been introduced and ‘perfected’ in overseas military operations, this war surplus technology is now finding many cost-saving, capability expanding jobs for those who seek to monitor and control our every move – ‘Look Mommy, there’s a little helicopter outside my window!’  The lightly read will, of course, rejoice that it is all for our collective benefit.

On the ground Big Brother is being aided by one of his Big Sisters – Sen Barbara Boxer, D-CA.  This unabashed socialist has introduced SB1831, aka MAP-21, to require that digital recorders (‘black boxes’) be installed “in all new passenger motor vehicles” starting in 2015.  The recorded data is supposed to belong to the vehicle’s owner, except that there are so many exceptions in which it must be surrendered to the authorities.  In short, it’s the state sticking another monitoring probe between our cheeks (see Sec 31406).

In any case, you won’t be surprised that Majority Leader Sen Harry Reed (D-NV) is right in there supporting our Barbara on this legislative hernia pack.  And they have a lot of plans for these little technology innovations that entail the lawful and fully taxed future use of what used to be your car.  California will lead again.

More Milestones on our Downward Spiral

George Rebane

This week has seen a lot of dilapidation in our ship of state.  For openers, Peggy Noonan takes an overarching survey of events that reflects on our national character.  From other perspectives we see what it is to be on a careening progressive luge as this administration more fully reveals itself, and what it can accomplish after getting the hang of it during the last three years.  A minimally hopeful sign is that more than a few Democrats are beginning to shake their heads at the excesses of socialist thought.

After all the information sharing between our intelligence services ordained by 9/11, we now hear that the FBI has pulled out of that little daisy chain, and has gone back to its insular ways of doing business.  It seems they weren’t getting that much from other agencies, and their stuff was leaking out.  A correlative to this is that the US seems to have shut down its pursuit of Russian spies on these shores, in spite of professional estimates (including from defectors) that Russia today has more spies in the US than it did during the Cold War, and has declared America to be its number one intelligence target.  The last prosecution of a Russian spy (Robert Hanssen) was in 2001, which case indicated that there was at least one more mole left in the fabric of the DOD.

In the meantime, the Transportation Safety Administration is starting to implement its VIPR program of checkpoints on US highways (google ‘VIPR checkpoints’ for a snootful).  The first ones were being tested in Florida to gauge public reaction to them.  It is, of course, all done for our own safety and to check the terrorist threat.  The counterpart of the policy is a further achievement of Agenda21 goals and objectives.  The checkpoints will spread from commercial transport vehicles to private automobiles in no time.  And, as everything else responding to the terrorist threat, these will remain a permanent fixture of our constantly expanding state that continues to grow 20% faster than our private sector economy.

A couple of years back we were on a bus from Alexandria to Cairo, and shook our heads sadly at what the Egyptians had to live with as we passed checkpoint after checkpoint manned by tough looking guys sporting AK-47s and more sinister stuff.  It can’t happen in America.

Back at the ranch, it seems that harbingers of the Great Divide are already in full swing.  Nationally known demographer and “Truman Democrat” Joel Kotkin writes and extensive peace on ‘The Great California Exodus’ and “what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State” (to loud denials from the loyal looney left).  It used to be only the mobile ‘rich’ who packed their bags and their companies to head to points east (I was going to say more about this, but Russ Steele beat me to it on NC2012).

Adding to the whole picture of our country’s ongoing and growing cross migrations is a report by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore about what impact the states’ income and corporate tax policies have had on states’ revenues and GDPs.  This is in addition to the Mercatus Center report we brought home from their Scottsdale conference last month.

But I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when reading that Elizabeth Warren, running for Congress in Massachusetts, has had at least one epiphany, maybe two.  The border line communist and "liberal heroine", recently on Team Obama, now acknowledges that 1) when you tax something more, you get less of it, and 2) real wealth and jobs are actually created by entrepreneurial private sector companies.  In fact she, along with a growing cohort of Democrats, are daily finding more and more things not to like about the impact this administration’s biggest lie, Obamacare, and faux pas on stopping the Keystone pipeline.  Even Barney Frank (gasp!) has climbed on this wagon.

So that’s a little update on how we are quietly becoming a progressive police state with daily more criminalized behaviors on the books, ever increasing taxes, frantic migrations of people seeking freedom, and a growing government that continues to add bureaus and (monitoring/enforcement) functions employing thousands to sop up the unemployable and increase its cohort of supporters on autopilot.  And then there are the rest of us.

Every Commons ends in Tragedy

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."  Winston Churchill

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular bi-weekly KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 13 April 2012.]

Years ago when our kids were in early grade school, mom would bake a big batch of delicious chocolate chip cookies every Sunday evening for the kids’ lunches in the coming week.  The cookies went into a big cookie jar that lived on the white-tiled kitchen counter.  The Monday lunches always got their full complement of cookies and so did the Tuesday lunches.  But mysteriously by Tuesday evening the cookie jar was empty.  Well, it wasn’t a mystery at all, each kid took every opportunity to reach in the jar and grab a few when going through the kitchen.

What to do to make the cookies last the whole week?  I had just finished reading an essay by a college professor named Garrett Hardin titled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, and the solution came like a flash.  It turns out that we had made the cookie jar into a commons, and as the good professor made clear, all commons are destroyed by their consumers.  All we had to do was to divide up the cookies into bags with each kid’s name on it, and each could do what they wanted with their own stash.  Miraculously the cookies lasted the whole week as each managed their own supply – they even used the cookies to barter for things like trading chores.  The main thing was that on Sunday nights the cookies immediately had owners who managed them through the week to their own benefit.

Dr Hardin was a renowned social scientist whose ideas were variously embraced and vilified by both the right and the left.  He formalized the idea of a commons as a commonly held and consumed resource like the pasture land of a village in which the local inhabitants would let their milk cows graze (think of the Boston commons).  The bad part of a commons is that the incremental cost of consuming an increased share of the commons is not paid by that consumer.

Hardin told the story of a commons that had a carrying capacity of ten cows, each one belonging to a different family.  Soon one of them decided to get a little extra income by introducing another cow.  So now eleven cows ate the grass and each one got a little less but that didn’t matter in the scheme of things – yet.  Soon another family saw the benefit of an extra cow and added theirs.  This was rapidly picked up by the other families, and twenty skinnier cows were eating less grass and giving less milk.  It didn’t take long for the third cows to be added in the attempt to make up for the poor milk production.  And you can see, that before long, the commons was bare of grass, the cows didn’t give milk and had to be sold or slaughtered, and everyone lost.

But while the game went on, if you decided to be a good citizen and not add another cow, you immediately got penalized.  That is what Hardin was trying to tell people, altruistic behavior doesn’t work in sustaining a commons, especially when it is consumed at near its carrying capacity.  And so the commons are eventually destroyed.  And again we have the problem of what to do.

The obvious answer is to police the commons.  Put in place a bureaucracy with regulatory and policing powers that sets and enforces the standards.  This is how we have come to deal with commons such as our air, publicly owned lands, rivers, and also social services.   The problem with the consumption policing is that it is expensive and its expense becomes unaffordable over time.  And it is very often totally ineffective, sometimes even accelerating the destruction of the commons.  Here we all know which commons we are talking about – think of Medicare and Medicaid, think of the various welfare programs which compel school dropouts and unemployment, think of public service employee pension agreements.

These are all commons that have broken their cost-to-consumer feedback mechanisms as taught by Hardin.  Voters and politicians each consume these government commons for their own purposes.  And each one takes a bit more benefit for himself without having to bear the cost of that increment, and thereby leaves the commons more depleted for the next round of consumers, until finally it becomes untenable to maintain, and it is destroyed.

Socialism is a form of governance based on an entire society unsustainably consuming from diverse commons set up to provide every possible benefit from cradle to grave.  But somehow it always leads to a tragic end when that personal responsibility link is replaced with the expectation of altruism or the police.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Socialism’s trail of tears, long time coming

George Rebane

A reader sent me this little blast from the past, published in the year I first set foot on these shores.  The ode below was composed as it became clear that the nation’s flirtation with communism in the Great Depression had not been fully purged by Truman’s partial efforts to sunset some of the more egregious New Deal programs after WW2.

As taught by many economists and political philosophers of the classical liberal persuasion and Austrian schools (Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Friedman, …), socialism is a cancer of democracy.  Any trace that is left, inevitably begins throwing out shoots and growing again.  There is little hope of eradicating it, only assiduously nipping it in the bud before it begins its inevitable road to metastasizing the body politic.

And we have not nipped it in the bud.  Instead our public schools have now graduated two successive generations of citizens who are either collectivists or don’t know the difference between collectivism and a freshly painted corral post.  But we cannot claim to have not been warned, and are now arrived at the end of the long road which for both ourselves and the Europeans is turning into a trail of tears.

Ruminations - 20mar12

George Rebane

A regular correspondent reminds us that the drumbeat for Agenda21's one-size government suits everyone is continuing apace.  The formerly prestigious, now leftwing Scientific American, laments that none of its prescriptions from green energy, through gun confiscation, to man-made global warming can be implemented without the much stronger arm of a much bigger brother.  In its ‘Effective World Government is needed to stave off Climate Catastrophe’, it counsels again -

Unfortunately, far more is needed. To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

As reported in recent posts, President Obama and his minions high, low, and local are there to help.

New Executive Order – Autocracy in the wings?

George Rebane

President Obama signed a new EO a couple of days ago that describes what powers the executive branch will assume during a self-declared national emergency.  The 16mar12 EO references and updates previous EOs that have been in force to handle similar extreme situations in the land, but there are some items in this one that make my neck hairs tingle.  Maybe it’s just because I’ve lived under the tender mercies of two all-encompassing and benevolent states run by Uncle Joe and Der Adolph.

When I finished reading the EO it was clear that the general provisions for such an EO are needed in times of a national emergency such as a war, massive natural disaster, or wholesale terrorist attack.  During times like these it is important that available material, service, and security/defense resources come under co-ordinated central control for the duration.

But the 16mar12 EO requires no such massive emergency to have its provisions kick in.  Instead, the Secretary of Homeland Security is empowered to declare one by simple fiat.  Once invoked, the EO becomes the autocratic law of the land for an indefinite period, and with no provisions for or requirement to seek the advice and consent of Congress.  Nowhere is Congress required for implementation of these prescriptions which effectively allow the takeover of the country by the executive branch for as long as the President deems fit.

The EO also provides for a new 'Praetorian Guard' surrounding the President that effectively isolates his cabinet from bringing their problems and conflicts to his resolution.  They must communicate such problems, sure to arise in profusion, through intermediaries empowered to summarily resolve them.  Additionally, provision is made to implement a new legion of czars who can be assigned across the land to carry out ad hoc provisions of the EO as they are needed.  In short, a whole new scheme of governance is enable by this EO that totally bypasses what is provided in the Constitution.

The new EO is not that long, and I recommend that you read it (here) In addition to the above, please note that in the guts of it the President isolates himself from his Cabinet whose contending members must come to him only through his new Praetorian Guard.  And also note, that the contemplated ‘emergencies’ may last for years during which Congress is advised only through annual reports.  This looks like the basis for running the country under a new kind of command authority that is effectively a form of martial law under civilian control, in short, a means of establishing autocracy over the land.

This EO has every appearance of being the basis for the promised fundamental transformation under the guise of an update and extension of previous provisions to handle more normative national emergencies.

I would be more comfortable if Congress would raise its hackles and demand a review of the EO's invocation provisions, the breadth of its implementation, and its exclusion of Congress from any ongoing role in governance once the EO is invoked.  (A correspondent has already questioned the evolution of this body into the new “Candyass Congress”.)

The lamestream media’s silence on the matter is understandable.  However, Fox News’ reticence to critically analyze the impact of this EO seems to fit in with the recent withdrawal from its traditional aggressive coverage of the portents of big government growing bigger.  It’s almost as if the feds had some dirty pictures of Rupert Murdoch with which they could shut down his US operations.