Rebane's Ruminations

Ideologies and Governance – a structured look

Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be labeled as "extremists".

George Rebane

Hereabouts and in more distinguished forums the governance debate continues as to which types belong to the Left or the Right.  The confusion from the Left’s academics seems to be with monarchy and fascism, and that stems from their use of the wrong set of coordinates that can productively frame the discussion.  In the minds of some pundits, the attributes of a given governance type are totally absent.  But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below.
Without stopping to quibble about the specifics of what constitutes the ‘center’ or ‘moderate’, the single dimensional spectrum above does have some curious bookends.  The leftmost one ends in ‘communism/totalitarianism’, which state of affairs is reached after passing through a region where anarchism rules.  And the rightmost ends in ‘fascism/monarchy’ after also passing through anarchism.  The better read student here will immediately point out that the Left’s anarchism is not the same as that of the Right’s.  This is indeed correct, and I’ll have more to say about that below.  However, in this fractured view, regardless of each having traversed the swamp of anarchy, both sides terminate in totalitarian forms of governance under the absolute control of a great leader.

A more accurate, useful, and historically exercised representation of ideologies and their supportive types of governance is given in the figure below (click to enlarge).  Here we use a representation common in the system sciences wherein one significant dimension/attribute is isolated as being perpendicular (orthogonal) to a plane that contains all the other dimensions/attributes.

For the discussion of ideologies and their supportive forms of governance, the dominant dimension shown in the figure is the level of government control of the land and the affairs of its people.  This ranges from a 100%, suffered under the absolute rule of a totalitarian dictator, to 0%, wherein anarchy is the order of the day and there are no visible institutions of state.  In the figure the variation in this level of control is shown by the thick red line in the plane (dimension) perpendicular to the field (multiple dimensions) of the types of government control, hence governance.

Understanding this framework immediately clarifies the debate over what labeled ideology belongs where.  I have shown the various collectivistic labels distributed on generalized trajectories of governance as they proceed leftward (orange lines) in the direction of greater government control of wealth creation/distribution, property ownership, class memberships, and behaviors (liberties) permitted to the individual.

The Status of America's K-12 Public Education

George Rebane

Education is the key to a strong democracy, economic competitiveness and a world-class standard of living. In recent decades, however, America has lost its place as a global leader in educational attainment in ways that will lead to a decline in living standards for millions of our children and the loss of trillions of dollars of economic growth.
 
So starts ‘For Each and Every Child – a Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence’ authored by a distinguished panel of mostly very progressive professionals empaneled by the Dept of Education as the federal Equity and Excellence Commission.  From their efforts we (re)learn that

-    American students are well below world student performance averages for developed countries (before 1965 we used to be in the top tier in education).
-    27 developed countries do better than America in global rankings
-    Only one in five American students perform at or above world average.
-    Mostly Asian and white kids rank average, but combining all students – predominantly with black and Hispanics – we fall below average.
-    The performance levels of our students has been “roughly flat” for the last 40 years despite the enormous increase in education spending
-    In poorly performing schools there is a preponderance of “weakly trained teachers”.
-    Funds for education are allocated differently in different school districts because in the poorer zip codes there are more students who have ‘special needs’.
-    But even well off zip codes don’t fare too well – e.g. Palo Alto students perform at the 67% world level.
-    To fix the problem we require to put in place programs that yield an “equity” in student performance so that zip code does not determine students’ academic rank.

All of this is really not news, and has been discussed (revealed to some) on these pages for years.  The real purpose of the commission and its report appears to be to launch a new initiative for increased federal control of funding for K-12 public schools.  While at this time not asking for money directly, the injection of performance “equity” is the key for the forced conclusion.  Equity quietly introduces a measurable figure of merit for directing additional funds and/or redistributing existing federal education funding from, say, Palo Alto to Oakland.  Of course, equity can be achieved in several ways – the salutary method is to raise all kids to an appropriate distribution of higher level performance, the other is to find that equitable performance distribution closer to what now the blacks and Hispanics are able to deliver.  Higher or lower, the correct goal in the transformed America seems to be equitable homogeneity.

With the release of this report a select group of its authors are making the media rounds.  Today’s NPR Morning Edition featured three of them (podcast here).  The report itself has some good insights, but when taken overall, there is nothing there that stands out from the same ol’ same ol’ of the last 40 years since we were ushered into the Great Society.  What caught my attention beyond (re)introducing ‘equity’ into K-12, is the commission’s recommendation for “regionalization”.  Upon closer reading, that seems to be another federal assault to remove control over matters of education from local school jurisdictions.  The report concludes with - 

The commission’s report provides a five-part framework of tightly interrelated recommendations to guide policymaking:
• Equitable School Finance systems so that a child’s critical opportunities are not a function of his or her zip code;
• Teachers, Principals and Curricula effective enough to provide children with the opportunity to thrive in a changing world;
• Early Childhood Education with an academic focus, to narrow the disparities in readiness when kids reach kindergarten;
• Mitigating Poverty’s Effects with broad access not only to early childhood education, but also to a range of support services necessary to promote student success and family engagement in school; effective measures to improve outcomes for student groups especially likely to be left behind—including English-language learners, children in Indian country or isolated rural areas, children with special education needs, and those involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems; and
• Accountability and Governance reforms to make clearer who is responsible for what, attach consequences to performance, and ensure that national commitments to equity and excellence are reflected in results on the ground, not just in speeches during campaigns.

All this is heavy stuff, and promises little profit.  To lighten your day, take a look at this video 'Romancing the Wind' of a truly uplifting hobby that invites virtuosity (be sure to have your speakers on).

When laws become lawless

George Rebane

Last Tuesday night almost 300 Nevada County residents gathered to hear a report from our Congressman Doug LaMalfa, and a presentation by Stewart Rhodes of Oathkeepers in the Grass Valley Veterans Hall presented by CABPRO.  The very stark presentation by Mr Rhodes was on the progress of government overreach and focused much on defense of the Second Amendment.  The message for Americans at the grassroots level was to resist all state efforts to actually or constructively confiscate our firearms.

I don’t want to do a rehash of what has been covered so much on RR during the almost seven years it has served as forum for the Left and Right to debate the most crucial questions that face our Republic in this new century.  But leaving the Vets Hall on a cold and blustery night again brought to mind a question that has puzzled me for some years – how should a liberal state deport itself toward its citizens when a goodly portion of them feel strongly that its government is in the process of destroying the nation?

Armen Alchian on Property Rights

George Rebane

Man reaches his fullest potential when he lives in a society whose organization is based on the seminal structure of rights – security in your person, individual liberty, private property - embodied in the Bastiat Triangle.  The exceptionalism of America was launched on such a structure of rights.

Perhaps the link most difficult to appreciate in that triangle of rights is between liberty and private property.  UCLA economist Armen Alchian (1914-2013) was celebrated by his fellow economists, and recently died before having been awarded his well-deserved Nobel (Nobelist von Hayek was one of his many supporters for this award).  He was considered a member of the ‘Chicago School’ of economics, and wrote extensively on the role of economics in providing humans a fulfilling life.  He penned a piece on property rights for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (D.R. Henderson, 2008) from which the following excerpt is taken -

One of the most fundamental requirements of a capitalist economic system—and one of the most misunderstood concepts—is a strong system of property rights. For decades social critics in the United States and throughout the Western world have complained that "property" rights too often take precedence over "human" rights, with the result that people are treated unequally and have unequal opportunities. Inequality exists in any society. But the purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage. Property rights are human rights.

The definition, allocation, and protection of property rights comprise one of the most complex and difficult sets of issues that any society has to resolve, but one that must be resolved in some fashion. For the most part, social critics of "property" rights do not want to abolish those rights. Rather, they want to transfer them from private ownership to government ownership. . . .
Any restraint on private property rights shifts the balance of power from impersonal attributes toward personal attributes and toward behavior that political authorities approve. That is a fundamental reason for preference of a system of strong private property rights: private property rights protect individual liberty.

Scattershots and Asteroids

George Rebane

In my scratch file for blog topics, items on the flood of government lies are overflowing.  I was going to do an update post on the most egregious ones.  There are so many –
-    The new $9 minimum wage is going to boost the economy.  If so, why stop at $9?  Instead it will compete for the biggest job killer for the poor and minorities.  But then, Obama is making that a tough competition with all of his job killers lined up.
-    Obamacare’s expenses will kick deficits into overdrive; there is not ONE part of its advertised benefits that is turning out to be true.
-    Gun violence is growing in the land, and guns need to be confiscated - if not actually, then constructively (q.v.).  Federal crime statistics show that both violent crime and crime involving guns have both dropped over an astounding 50% in the last 20 years.  The fawning lamestream is predictably silent.
-    SecTreas nominee Jacob Lew is competing with SecDef nominee Hagel as to which is the dumbest and least informed for the job.  Lew’s $1M bonus from Citi, while it was on its ass and a ward of the state, was outrageous in itself.  But its immediate deposit in a Cayman Islands account drew crickets from the lamestream that was busy pillorying Romney for putting his own money into the same accounts.
-    Meanwhile Team Obama is occupied handpicking sequester cuts so that it would most impact ordinary Americans and then blame the Repubs.  Totally out of consideration are the legions of government double-dummies who work on the reams of new federal regulations and their enforcement to make sure that our economy remains crippled into the indefinite future.   In one of his biggest current lies, Obama publicly denies that it was he who introduced the sequester provision into last year’s budget negotiations.
-    And on and on and on.

So instead of the ongoing government lies, prevarications, and deceptions, let’s consider something much more pleasant – end of life on earth as we know it.

This past week we had two rocks from who knows where catch our attention.  Well, one (named 2012-DA12, about 150 ft diameter) was predicted and caught our attention by whizzing by within the orbit of our geo-synchronous satellites (about 22K miles), and the other put about 1,100 central Asian Russians into emergency rooms with various injuries.  That last rock arrived unannounced at 33K mph, from a radically different radiant (below) than the flyby, and exploded with an energy release that they are still trying to calculate as they figure out the damage done to buildings in the Chelyabinsk region.

All this brought to mind the 1908 Tunguska asteroid(?) explosion that leveled trees in a 20 mile radius of uninhabited Siberian forests, and is reckoned to have had a yield of 17 megatons of TNT (or about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb).  It is safe to say that almost all humans within at least 20 miles of such an airburst would have been killed.  And, of course, no one knew it was coming, which opens an important topic area in itself.

For more on why we’re not spending enough resources looking out for the next Tunguska, or the Chelyabinsk surprise, or the DA12, see Russ Steele’s post here.  Here in the following I want to play with a little data that will allow us to calculate some odds of imminent death and destruction.  BTW, this is a good exit point for those readers who don’t do numbers.

Conservatives – How We Fool Ourselves

A rose by any other name ... .  W. Shakespeare

George Rebane

Polls on Americans’ ideological preferences have long reported a more or less 40% conservatives, 40% moderates, 20% liberals mix.  From this conservatives conclude that we remain a conservative, or at least a center-right nation.  Given how volatile public preferences are, I’m not so sure any more.  I’d like to see some convincing evidence of it in the voting booths across the land.  There should be more Republican victories, landslides, etc, and the libertarians should be making greater headway on the national political stage.

Gallup’s efforts at measuring political preferences (here) are summarized in the nearby figure.  But the problem with their ideological categories is that ‘moderate’ means different things to a voting Democrat than to an Independent or Republican.  This is even evident on these pages where out-and-out socialists declare themselves to be middle roaders and moderates.  Understanding such self-labeling biases explains away the election results.

A preferable, but more expensive, approach is to have respondents state preferences about ideological tenets, and from that determine their membership in one of Gallup’s five categories.  This is important not only for understanding a more accurate political breakdown of the country, but also to prevent conservative feel-good analyses like this one from the Capitol Research Center – a conservative ‘think tank’ and media watchdog.

Nevertheless, CRC is correct in its characterization of the lamestream’s performance in biased journalism, as it reports that “the media’s most insidious power is the power to ignore.”  Devoting air time and column inches to their favorite liberal agendas has been well documented.  Googling ‘liberal bias in media’ will give you a snootful for both sides of the argument.  I just want to leave you with the notion that there is no convincing evidence that conservatives and conservative ideals are gaining in these days of our country’s fundamental transformation.

Progressive Radio – the Dangerfield of the airwaves

George Rebane

Peter Collins on truthout.com (my favorite socialist cum communist website) laments about progressive talk radio not getting any traction over the years.  In ‘An Insider's View of the Progressive Talk Radio Devolution’ talk show host Collins goes through a litany of liberal radio’s travails during recent years, and concludes –

As someone who took substantial personal risk in syndication and station ownership, I can tell you that progressive talk has not panned out as a viable business. Clinton's 1996 deregulation of broadcasting and the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 didn't help. I do think the FCC should require some balance of viewpoints on the stations it regulates, through the license renewal process, but there is simply no interest on the part of Obama and his appointees in regulatory reform - even as the president is pilloried by right-wing radio on a daily basis. Air America's parade of management blunders produced the downward spiral that brought us to this tipping point for progressive talk radio, and most station owners, rightly or wrongly, see that failure as an indication that audiences won't support liberal talk radio.

His appeal to government diktat to limit the success of conservative radio is indicative of the overall disease that afflicts liberals’ desire to muzzle the right with the power of the government’s gun.  (It appears that the wind is blowing the other way, cf ‘Fairness Doctrine, RIP’.)  But nowhere in his recounting does the light ever go on to illuminate the real problem with liberal radio.  He and other progressive pinheads believe “that audiences won’t support liberal talk radio.”  Sure they do; but the problem is that those audiences are tiny, and correctly reflect the intellectual demographic of our nation’s Left.

To enjoy talk radio beyond the 17 slogans that drive liberal thought on the evening's sitcoms and lamestream news, you have to have a working ideology, one that is constantly weighed against the daily happenings across the nation that impact the operations of governance.  You can't promote a leftwing dialectic against the realities of the day's news, it doesn't work.  Even people with limited abilities start giggling after being subjected to that kind of 'rationale'.

Therefore, such large audiences have never existed on the Left.  Look at the idiots who represent them (I know, the Repubs have had a few notable lumps there too lately), all of whom convince their know-nothing constituencies of a few simple class warfare messages, and that about puts a bow on their participation in the national dialogue.  Collins et al don’t have a clue here, or are in understandably deep denial of that reality.

But Collins is one of their heavy thinkers, and he’s not satisfied with the Left’s victories at the polls.  Well he should be.  And there’re more of those voters on the way with new Dem 'voter rights' bills that promise to sweep the streets clean of all the residuals who can still make their mark (optional at that) on an instant registration form – no address required, thank you very much.  What would Collins say to these 2x4s with faces painted on them?  most certainly nothing that will satisfy a keen intellect that’s been honed over the years to communicate complex collectivist rationale for bigger government and a more even distribution of wealth across America.

My advice to Collins is to rejoice in the Dems having finally forged a compliant (and growing?) flock of voters that can override any assault which conservative talk radio could ever hope to marshal.  The power of “stash” is beyond intellectual debate - as long as the government checks keep coming, all is well.

The Liberal Mind – Topical trumps Synoptic

George Rebane

The ongoing debates on current issues such as budget, deficits, gun control, healthcare, climate change, immigration reform, … highlight one of the most robust aspects of how Left and Right thinking are fundamentally different.  As witnessed by RR’s Liberal Mind category, this is a long abiding subject of interest to me, and apparently becoming so to others inhabiting the polar regions of our ideological globe.  There is something fundamental and basic to how both sides present and argue their positions on the issues.  And since RR readers fervently debate these issues, I want to introduce a couple of new terms from the technical field that, perhaps, best capture the meaning of the different approaches.

A pair of arcane terms in science and technology that have yet to follow ‘feedback’, ‘bandwidth’, ‘in the loop’, ‘cloud’, … into the common lexicon are ‘synoptic’ and ‘topical’.  Dictionaries often define synoptic as “affording or taking a general view of the principal parts of a subject”.  In science and technology synoptic denotes notions that refer to an area in the large, be it the entire history or time window of a process, the overall design of a large-scale system, the complex inter-relationships of this with all of those, or a stream/collection of data in a database.  A synoptical argument captures the large scale of the subject that may even include objectives and measures of utility.  Something synoptic is of encompassing scope.

The other end of the semantic notion of scope is topical which denotes anything of limited scope.  Again, the more common definition of topical is that “pertaining to or dealing with matters of current or local interest.”  But in the broader context I’m discussing here, things topical are limited in time and space, they are arguments, notions, appeals to the here and now, or entail some specific example(s) of a larger scheme, examples that need not be at all representative of the whole.  This last point is very important in the understanding of the proper meaning of topical.  Specific examples/incidents are sometimes also called anecdotal, and therefore a topical description of something subsumes the semantic of anecdotal examples, occasions, happenings, samples, etc.

With this understanding, I now can make a more powerful proposition regarding how the Left and the Right contend on issues in the public arena.  The Left overwhelmingly presents its support and/or promotion of ideals and issues in distinctly topical frameworks.  Whether it is healthcare or gun control, we are regaled with stories of a specific individual who is denied a critical medical procedure, or have eleven bullets pumped into their little body.

Numbers get a (confused) boost

George Rebane

The importance and magnitude of EVERY social problem lies in its numbers.  If you don't understand the numbers and how they relate, all you can do is emote about the problem.

RR has argued from the start that applying the tools of the systems sciences is critical to the solutions of all social problems (see end notes below).  For obvious reasons, also presented and discussed in these pages, the Left has been the major opponent of bringing analytics and numeracy to bear on social issues – this for the simple reason that it deflates their emotion based fuzzy rhetoric which they use to promote their collectivism.

Well, now we have no less than Bill Gates coming out in a major piece promoting quantitative “measurement” for solving worldwide problems ranging from high infant mortality to the classroom evaluation of teachers.  His proposals contain absolutely no new ideas, but what is important is that the world’s most famous billionaire and philanthropist is going public with 'new' notions the youngest of which is about fifty years old.

In his ‘My Plan to Fix The World’s Biggest Problems’ there is no plan presented, save the exhortation to start measuring and recording things to do with the problem that you’re trying to solve.

For reasons unknown, Gates does not make clear the difference between a utility function or figure of merit (FOM), that would serve as an objective or goal or to define ‘good’, and the measured attributes that go into the FOM.  Perhaps it’s because the piece was written for broad audiences who would be confused by such nuances.  However, regular RR readers should not suffer similarly.

A clarifying example might serve here.  Consider buying a car from the many models offered – which one to buy?  To keep it simple, the only attributes you consider important are its top speed and cost.  Somehow you have to trade off these contentious attributes since the faster cars cost more.  The tradeoff is performed in your formulation of the cars’ FOM which combines the numerical values of each car’s speed and cost.  Then you can collect the numbers for the cars, calculate their FOM values, and pick the one that for you yields the maximum utility.  (For you phormulaphiles, a typical FOM formulation here might be FOM = weight*(mph top speed) + (1 – weight)*(K$ cost), where weight is a number between 0 and 1 that reflects your speed/cost tradeoff.)

And here’s rub and the benefit – the adoption and expression of every FOM or utility function is completely subjective for whatever problem you’re solving.  The FOM captures your values, judgments, experience, likes/dislikes, and even constraints on what can be done.  And such explicit FOMs can do the same for a government, community, or a corporation (business has been using them for decades).  Gates is finally saying to America that we have to approach problems with systems thinking if we want to make progress.  Continuing with the Left’s approach of “issues activism” based on selected anecdotes and fuzzy emotionalism, while rejecting data and a common understanding of ‘good’, will not accomplish much, and has gotten us to where we are now.  (That last italicized bit I added because Bill Gates couldn’t.)

The belated call for such quantitative approaches is encouraging, even though it might turn out to be just more relieving yourself over the windward gunnel.  I hope not.  Read the article.

End Notes:  For a brief summary of RR postings related to reasoning and systems thinking, I have culled the following short list.  More can be found filed in RR’s ‘Science’ and ‘Science Snippets’ categories.

'Economic Development in Nevada County'
'Systems Science Rules (almost)!'
'Healthcare Utility Metric with Scriptural Underpinnings'
'A Thoughtful View of Climate Change'
'Why Reason Fails'

Climate Change – Another Asymmetric Dialogue

George Rebane

Bjorn Lomborg is an internationally recognized and much published environmentalist.  He even believes that AGW is a factor in climate change.  Recently he wrote an article that was critical of President Obama’s inaugural “three horsemen of the climate apocalypse” listed as the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms".  The astute reader knows that there have been no such increases in fires, droughts, and storms with which the Left likes to decorate its calls for greater government control of everything under the sun.

And Lomborg does a fine job of again summarizing the data on all this.  But that is not what I want to talk about.  The vagaries of the climate change data and its in/correct interpretations have been argued for years by qualified scientists and technically savvy bloggers (locally by Russ Steele and Anthony Watts).  What I want to reprise is how substantive reports on issues – here about the misinformation spewed by AGW True Believers – are treated in today’s polarized public debate.

Lomborg’s assertion concludes, “Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.”  As an AGW skeptic I wholeheartedly agree with that.  Unfortunately, fear-mongering is the only stock in trade that the Left has for making its collectivist policies palatable to the general public, even if it means outright misrepresentation of the record.   But more important, it is the asymmetry of how the debate is conducted that makes the fear-mongering stick.