Rebane's Ruminations

Pipe Dream – Candidates’ Full Disclosure Act

George Rebane

Chatting around the dining table the other night, we reviewed all the laws that require sellers to fully disclose to the buyer the condition and relevant history of what is being sold.  Such full disclosure provisions as apply to real estate, cars, firearm purchases, medicines, and so on.

But when it comes to politicians who will not only affect our lives, but the future course of a state, or region, or even the whole country (world?), we are pretty much encouraged to buy a pig in a poke.  In vetting candidates for office, we rely on a hide-and-go-seek game between the candidate and the press, or the ‘political operatives’ of their opponents.  For all too many good reasons, today people think very little of journalism and journalists.  According to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, two out of three people think press reporting is “often inaccurate”; four out of five believe the press “tends to favor one side” and is “often influenced by powerful people and organizations”.

So here we go again, voting for some smooth talking, slicked down Sam or Sally, and later we happen to find out that s/he has been fighting clinical depression for years, has a law degree from an online diploma mill, ran two businesses into the ground, smokes pot regularly, or mysteriously lost a spouse whose remains have never been found.  You get my drift.

Wouldn’t it be better if there were a Candidates’ Full Disclosure of Material Facts law that requires each candidate to fill out an appropriately revealing questionnaire, and publish its answers online?  The questionnaire would also ask if there were any other material factors or incidents in the candidate’s past that would bear on a decision by a reasonable voter to reject the candidate.  The law would stipulate that knowingly providing false, incomplete, and/or inaccurate information constitutes perjury, and its subsequent discovery would be prima facie sufficient cause to start impeachment proceedings against the office holder.

Would such full disclosure laws on the books of the several states and in the US Code result in our becoming better informed voters while getting a better slate of candidates, and consequently a better set of politicians in office?  Or would there be collateral effects that outweigh any benefits, advising us to just suck it in and be satisfied with being led by sleazebags and morons?

Ruminations – 16may13 (updated 18may13)

George Rebane

The flowering Obamagate scandals are simply “controversies” as National Propaganda Radio spent a great deal of time this morning assuring its audience.  Nothing special here, the President always comes out to the formally prepared East Room in the evenings to remark on little kerfuffles or differences of opinion.  Everyone go back to sleep.

Pioneer aviator Lyman Gilmore was celebrated yesterday at the school of his name.  There was a big ceremony for students and speakers to recognize Nevada County’s contribution to early aviation.  The event included an organized overflight by a large group of local aviators, some of  them with national reputations.  The flight was comprised of 18 private aircraft led by Jim Booth in his now familiar yellow AT-6 warbird followed in close formation by three members of the Ryder Flight.  Getting all those airplanes in the air, oriented and lined up, and then back on the ground on a very windy day was a grand feat of organization and heads up piloting by all participants – H/T to our own Bob Hobert (Ryder Flight leader and RR reader, who also sent me the pic) for organizing and getting everyone briefed and debriefed.  I was happy to be invited by Jim to again fly in the rear seat of the T-6.

“Untruth” versus lie.  The media, led by Fox News, seems to have some problem with those terms.  Even the conservative Dr Charles Krauthammer (around our house known as ‘The Bonze’), their most noble of nationally syndicated commentators, dripping with gravitas, can’t bring himself to call a lie a lie – well, he did once last night.  On the air politicians aren’t lying, they’re telling “untruths”.  For us with simpler minds, an untruth is any statement that is not true independent of the intent behind its utterance – misreading a clock and then falsely reporting the time is an untruth.  A lie is a known untruth told with intent to deceive.  Most politicians are inveterate liars, it’s part of the job requirements – let’s call a spade a spade when their lies are obvious to the whole country.

Rosa Koire will present an update on Agenda21, and how this UN inititiative has been making progress ‘Behind the Green Mask’.  Here’s the info –

When:  Tuesday May 21, 2013, 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Where: Grass Valley Veterans Hall, 225 S. Auburn Street, Grass Valley
Admission: $20 at the door; $15 in advance
Advance tickets: BriarPatch Co-op, online at www.cabpro.net (special events tab) or by calling CABPRO (530) 478-1331

Those of us a bit paranoid about government training guns on its own citizens (aka us), should keep their eye peeled on the first steps that our military has now taken in this direction.  Obama’s Pentagon has “unilaterally” granted itself powers to aid local law enforcement agencies to curb “civil disturbances” by changing some wording in the US Code covering ‘Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies’ (more here).

[update]  New  speech codes will be sweeping the nation starting with the college campuses and the revision of what consists of sexually harrassing speech.  This will not stop with either the campuses or sexual harrassment.  All the while our astute progressives are protesting, 'What new regulations? there're no more new regulations.  And let's talk about Bush instead.'  Obama's fundamental transformation is on a roll.  (more here).

[18may13 update]  Well, it looks like it's CYA time in embassy land, at least in the mid-eastern part of the world.  Now that everyone's attention is on the Benghazi debacle, tragedy, and cover-up, no ambassador in that part of the world is going to be left behind in alerting the mother temple (aka Foggy Bottom) that threats to their embassies and consulates are increasing.  (more here)  For sure Kerry is not going to hang on to Hillary's hand as he helps Obama throw her under the bus.  So we are sure to see some visible muscle deployed closer to where the action is anticipated.  And playing his cards right, maybe ol' John can emerge out of all this as the new, improved, and heroic hopeful for 2016.  Crazier things have happened.

Living in Obamastan – what’s not to like?

George Rebane

What was foretold has come to pass, he has delivered with a vengeance and a promise of more to come.

1.    Benghazi – ineptness, tragedy, cover-up, lies, demonstration of weakness, …
2.    Syria – inattention, ineptness, tragedy, loss of prestige and confidence, …
3.    Obamacare – national healthcare and economic disaster, ultimate partisanship, ineptness, uncertainty, lies about implementation, effect, costs, …
4.    Iran – ineptness, uncertain ally to mid-east friends, meaningless ‘red lines’, invitation to war, Islam’s war on west promoted, …
5.    Iraq – inept withdrawal, total loss of influence, waste of sacrifices made, bolster Iran
6.    Afghanistan – confusion, withdrawal guaranteed to leave region unstable, wasted sacrifices, Taliban will triumph, …
7.    North Africa – Al Qaida expands and triumphant, no clear policy, leading from behind in the wrong direction, relinquishing an entire continent, …
8.    IRS politicized – responsive weapon to target opposition groups, institutions, and individuals, agency radicalized, cover-up, lies, …
9.    EPA – rogue agency, congressional bypass, executive hammer, economic brake, fear in the land, uncertainty, disastrous impediments to a beneficient national energy policy, …
10.    Immigration reform – borders remain porous, amnesty, Democrat voter fast track, Reconquista, …
11.     US Economy – on permanent slow track, regulatory hell, uncertainty, inept/perfidious economic policy, systemic unemployment growth, constructive nationalization of business and industry, …
12.    American culture – in last stages of destruction, war on Christianity and European heritage, massive loss of freedoms, replaced by growing mass of government regulations, education system propagandized, class warfare ignited, …
13.    Fundamental Transformation of America – Agenda 21 provisions adopted while denied, military being castrated, intelligence/security apparatus remains stovepiped and compromised to combat homeland terror, government arming to combat Americans, goal to become a compliant peer member of the new global order, progress to mediocrity is on track.

This list is incomplete.

‘In Defense of Carbon Dioxide’ (updated 14apr13)

George Rebane

That is the title of a short but extremely important column by Professors Harrison Schmitt and William Happer that appeared in the 9may13 WSJ.  Readers know that I am a longtime skeptic of the ongoing climate change hysteria (especially the AGW part), and for technical reasons believe that results from data diddling and climate modeling have been at best questionable to incompetent science, or at worst blatently formulated to achieve political ends.

Schmitt and Happer present a science side of the CO2 phantasmagoria that IMHO has not received anywhere near the consideration it should have in the ongoing debate on the global insanity and local trans-hysteria (witness California’s AB32) that is going on.  The piece starts –

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn't the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a "pollutant" in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.

The whole article, from which the graphic was filched, can be read here.  Such information will make little impact on the lay reader whose beliefs about AGW are already well calcified.  But they should be an eye-opener for the serious intelligent reader still seeking direction on whether or not to support the steady “carbon footprint” diet that we are fed daily.

To keep up on the overall developments in the climate change forum please visit Russ Steele’s ‘The Next Grand Minimum’ and Anthony Watts’ ‘Watts Up With That’.

[14apr13 update]  Reasonable people who made a case before t₀ that Observable #1 may have been the cause of Observable #2, would reexamine their premises, let alone their conclusions, at some point after t₀.  The rest will be unfazed by the observed data.

 

Breaking Bread – ‘2nd Amendment and Gun Control’ (updated 10may13)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 May 2013.  I have included an extensive addendum to memorialize the structure of the current gun control debate in our country’s widening ideological schism, and to illustrate key factors in the asymmetric understanding and approach taken by the Left and Right when they meet in a public forum such as was provided by the 1may13 edition of ‘Breaking Bread’ on NCTV.  To view this and past episodes go here and search archives with 'Breaking Bread'.]

Last month our community television station NCTV launched Breaking Bread, a new independently produced program airing monthly and available online.  Breaking Bread is an hour-long program featuring discussions of national issues and current events.  At the start I want to emphasize that the program’s objective is to present and clarify the different perspectives in our socio-political landscape from which people view the issues that “alter and illuminate our times”. 

The program will feature co-hosts and guests who as a group will represent a diversity of views and seek to make them understood.  And where possible, we will also try to reach some consensus.  Therefore Breaking Bread is not intended as a debate but an open, unformatted, and unrehearsed get together wherein the participants offer their own views on the topics discussed.

The program debuted on 5 April during which its five co-hosts were introduced discussing ‘Language and Labels’.  You can access the inaugural edition on NCTV’s website at nevadacountytv.org or from this commentary’s transcript posted on my website.  The same will be true for all subsequent editions of the program – after all, this is the 21st century.

We recorded the second edition of Breaking Bread, titled ‘The 2nd Amendment and Gun Control’, on 1 May, last Wednesday.  The program was co-hosted by Paul Emery, KVMR news director, and me, George Rebane, introduced as “a conservetarian blogger and commentator with a lot of birthdays and, some say, a contentious ideology.”

Joining as guests were Nevada County’s Sheriff Keith Royal, Mr Norm Sauer, a retired lawyer who lectures on constitutional affairs, along with Mr and Mrs Nick and Amanda Wilcox who tragically lost their daughter Laura to gun violence.  They are prominent gun control advocates and supporters of the Brady Bill.

In framing the discussion that followed, I reminded viewers that people of the Left, who advocate for stronger gun controls or even confiscation, approach gun ownership from an episodic or topical point of view.  Their stated objective is to reduce gun violence, or more specifically, gun deaths.  And the statistics they cite, along with descriptions of horrific episodes of murder and mayhem, are designed to grossly simplify the issue, and get the listener to focus on events that everyone wants to prevent, and wishes that had never happened.  Liberal academics have identified this common and effective tack of public debate as ‘issues activism’, basically a bottom up approach that the Left uses to induce the desired public opinion.

The Right approaches gun ownership top down through the 2nd Amendment, arguing the intent and writings of the Founders in their drafting of our Constitution.  They see the real purpose of grassroots gun ownership as necessary to keep government from going rogue, and if it does, then as a last resort, to launch a successful revolution.  This, after all, was the explicit intention left to us in the legacy of our country’s early years.  While the Right does admit to the need for some regulation in who gets to own what armaments, it points to history that records tyrannical governments killing their own citizens in the hundreds of millions during the 20th century - all as a matter of intended policy, and not related to wars or combat.  Such killing by governments is called democide, which took over 260M lives during the 20th century.

So, of gun violence one must ask, ‘Would you sacrifice ten lives to save 10M lives?’  Yes, of course.  Or ‘Would you sacrifice 10M lives to save ten lives?’  Of course not.  But for such a trade-off the correct answer for each of us lies somewhere in between, and in the realworld the numbers are never known for certain, but must be estimated using probabilities.  For those who don’t understand the role of probabilities in assessing realworld uncertainties, as is required in making public policies, then any reasoned discussion of such policies will be inaccessible to them.  Instead, we will hear from them nothing but their emotional outpourings on the matter.  But then, reasonable discussion has never been a necessary prelude to legislation or regulation.

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However these views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Addendum:  The Asymmetry of Information and Tactics in the Gun Control Debate

With this addendum I want to reflect on the experience from taping the second edition of Breaking Bread (BB2) covered in the above transcript of 3may13 KVMR commentary.  The experience of that telecast both confirmed and expanded on the asymmetry of information and tactics used by the Left and Right in today’s gun control debate.

US Murder Rate History [Addended] (updated 27apr13)

 

George Rebane

In doing some research for the upcoming Breaking Bread episode on the Second Amendment, I found this clear summary of America’s murder rate.  It is compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center using FBI statistics. These numbers and the trend overwhelm the infrequent episodic mass killings that have occurred over the last years.

Guns account for approximately 75% of the means used to murder people in America according to factcheck.org (I thought it would have been higher).  The rate of guns used for murder has been going down for the last twenty years, while gun ownership has been steadily rising.  In 2007 Americans owned about 89 guns for every 100 people.  And other gun violence numbers also going down are ‘gun aggravated assault’ and ‘gun robberies’ which in 2011 were the lowest since 2004.  All this goes to illustrate and highlight the bogus nature of the recently failed gun control bill in Congress, and the misleading arguments used by the nation's gun control crowd even before the Second Amendment considerations are included.
 

[Addendum]  Apropos to the ongoing gun control debate, the following is a verbatim extract from one of several such emails that are circulating among conservatives, and fueling the polarization of Americans.  I post the email in its entirety to let our liberal readers understand what also fuels the emotions of the Right; emotions that go beyond the more reasoned and measured arguments usually made by conservatives in defense of the Second Amendment, and the private ownership of arms and the concealed carry of guns.  The Brunswick, Georgia mother most certainly could have used one, and should have had one to protect herself and her baby.  The murder is reported by CNN here, and the Crime Library site gives some background here on the alleged killer’s family.

Teach them to code (addended)

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 April 2013.]

OK, those of you out there in radio land who want to help a young person find an awesomely interesting and well-paying career, pay close attention to what follows.  The jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM areas, going unfilled number in the millions, and are growing at a rate three times that of non-STEM jobs according to the Dept of Commerce.

Our ability to fill those American jobs continues to sag because our teachers lack the skills to teach and motivate students to enter STEM fields.  We have to remember that it is the STEM fields that provide the country’s major sources of wealth and ability to remain competitive in global markets.  And by any and every measure applied, today we simply are not cutting it.  When a STEM job is created in the United States, it has a shelf life that measures in the months and not years.  If it doesn’t get filled by an American, it gets filled by a foreign national, or worse, it goes overseas.

The fundamental skill that enables rapid progress in a STEM curriculum and in the STEM job markets is the ability to program a computer, to write computer code, or simply to code in one or more of the popular programming languages.  Computers can do nothing without executing some piece of code, and today computers do everything in our society.  Put it all together, it’s not hard.

We need to encourage more pre-teens to start writing code for fun and profit.  And it is fun to see what you have conceived, typed into a text editor, and then executed to perform some interesting task or graphic display that before was just the result of a mysterious process that followed the click of a mouse.  Coding requires learning to reason and think logically, and to conceive of processes in our minds that don’t yet exist – in short, coding requires creativity on steroids.

The easiest and most practical stepping stone to writing your first code is learning the basics of using a spreadsheet program.  Why the spreadsheet?

Frequentists vs Bayesians

George Rebane

One would think that the excellent summary of the decades old debate between the two schools of probabilists would be settled by the following cartoon, but I won't hold my breath - old 'science' dies hard.  (H/T to correspondent)  For more on Bayesian analysis and decision making, search RR with 'Bayes'.

Footnote: This is hilarious for the techie reader, but I will addend an explanation if any one else is  interested.

 

Ruminations – 13apr13

George Rebane

A socialist believes that human nature can be legislated.

IEEE reports that ‘Robots are not killing jobs’ in an interview with Dr Henrik Christensen, Director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech.  His argument to support the proposition is to invoke the same ol’ same ol’ – technology, including robotics, is just going through the classic creative destruction, destroying some jobs while making new ones.  To bring along the recently arrived on the planet, he cites the example of the displaced typing pool employees who had the opportunity to become administrative assistants for executives.  What the good professor, and the many who have not thought much about the problem, fall prey to is the fact that the new jobs, if any, always require a bit more between the ears than the bygone jobs did.  And that makes a good fraction of any new jobs inaccessible to the laid off workers.  I illustrated this problem fully in ‘edX meets the workforce’.  From reading the interview you can tell that even Dr Christensen is not completely comfortable with his thesis.

Obama’s $100M BRAIN initiative is poorly conceived and will wind up pissing away the tax dollars poured into it.  This is the (my rephrased) position taken by Dr Don Stein, a Distinguished Professor In the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Emory University.  His argument is clear and persuasive; Obama’s BRAIN program seeks to follow in the footsteps of the Apollo Moon Landing and the Human Genome Programs, both of which had clear objectives and means of measuring progress along the way.  BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) has none of these, and is typical of the way this administration has cobbled together policy, legislation, and national initiatives.  Please read ‘The BRAIN Map Initiative Needs Rethinking’ (also picked up by Kurzweil).

Finally, we have another excellent dissertation on my favorite communist website, truthout.com (consider all hot buttons pushed).  Dr Gar Alperovitz, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland who knows not the definitions of system and systemic, writes the extensive, easy to read, and passionate (and scary) ‘The Question of Socialism (and Beyond!) Is About to Open Up in These United States’.  Among the sobering tidbits (H-bombs?) that decorate and bolster his case are –

Leading polling organizations have found converging results among younger Americans. Two recent Rasmussen surveys, for instance, discovered that Americans younger than 30 are almost equally divided as to whether capitalism or socialism is preferable. Another Pew survey found those aged 18 to 29 have a more favorable reaction to the term "socialism" by a margin of 49 to 43 percent.

Who says teachers’ unions and progressive profs have not been doing their job?  Our young have been carefully taught, and I’m afraid we have seen nothing yet.  Republicans, call your office.

More complex than ‘Illegal Immigrants’

George Rebane

An illegal alien by any other name ...

For years I have advised against labeling all illegal inhabitants in America as ‘illegal immigrants’.  In any reasonable discussion of the illegal alien and illegal entrant problems, this catch-all label will cause confusion.  Now this is coming to pass as we attempt to get real about passing what is (again erroneously) called immigration reform.  To clarify the issue, years ago I outlined a more accurate picture (here) of the various flavors and derivations of US inhabitants, both legal and illegal.

Today, as Congress tries to get to the nitty gritty of actually writing something into law, people are running into problems along the road that the simple tag ‘illegal immigrants’ enticed them to travel.  It looks like 40% of the current 11M US illegals entered the country legally, and only 60% crawled over/under a border fence.  My graphic of the situation allows clear delineation of this discovery that you can read more about in the 6apr13 WSJ’s ‘Many Here Illegally Overstayed Their Visas’.  The article outlines the problem of attempting to legislate when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about – a craft, nevertheless, that Congress perfected many moons ago.

In the above figure of US inhabitants, the reported percentages are circled.  Note that the actual ‘illegal immigrants’ are circled in green, and no one yet knows how many of those there are in the country.  So it appears that we will now have to slice and dice the illegals much more carefully, and give each cohort an informative name if anyone is to make sense of the next sausage that will be stuffed in Washington.  Political correctness comes with many costs.