Rebane's Ruminations

We Remember - 28 May 2012

George Rebane

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

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

The Rotten Roots of Socialism

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruminations - 21may12 (updated)

George Rebane

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

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

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

Illegal Aliens + IRS = Tax Fraud

George Rebane

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

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

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

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

The Real Liberal Man

George Rebane

Social futurist(?!) Sara Robinson tells us the real meaning of Mother’s Day, and comes up with quite an analysis of men from both sides of the political spectrum.  Her ‘How the Ayn Rand-Loving Right Is Like a Bunch of Teen Boys Gone Crazy’ is a worthy sample of what sites like AlterNet.com and truthout.com are telling their own kind.  Again, it’s worth a read for our more conservative and libertarian readers to get a measure of the chasm, and also some perspective on the criticism from our more liberal readers clucking their tongues for merely being identified as collectivists or socialists or liberal or leftwing – all labels apparently of a pejorative nature when uttered in mixed company, and in the light of day.  H/T to a reader who definitely does not identify with the right, and yet is a bit embarrassed at the extremes her brethren and cistern (or is it sistern?) dish out.

An apology for all occasions

George Rebane

[In my long working career I was privileged and very lucky to have worked with and under some truly remarkable and very smart people.  One of these was an older systems engineer extraordinaire and a complete gentleman by the name of Skip Case.  I was technically his peer, but I never considered myself as such.  In a number of different ways Skip taught all of us who worked with him.  Those who also bothered to learn, benefitted from his wisdom.

Skip died a few years back, a little before I started RR, and was then only occasionally posting on the SESF website.  When I heard the news, it hit me that over the decades I and several others had been profitably using a phrase that he taught us years ago.  To remember Skip, I wrote the following vignette and posted it on the SESF website.  My most recent use of the phrase in a comment recalled the vignette, and I retrieved it to share with RR readers.  You may also find it useful some day, especially in the heated discussions of complex issues we cover here.]

Skip Case RIP

George Rebane – 21 May 2007

The conference room was crowded with the company’s elite engineering talent and top management for a very important system design review meeting.  The decision taken today would impact the company’s standing and future role as the nation’s leading nuclear submarine combat systems developer and manufacturer.  In 1968 as a young hotshot engineer I was privileged to be included in that tense gathering of greats in a very secretive industry critical to the country’s well-being, yet almost completely and purposefully unknown to the outside world. On board every operational fleet ballistic missile and attack submarine of our Navy, our company’s systems were the ones that would likely fire the opening salvos of WW3.

One of the company’s senior project engineers had just completed a presentation of an important design concept on which the effectiveness of the new system would hinge.  He was a man in his late forties of small yet lithe stature and thinning neatly combed hair.  What especially distinguished Skip’s presence was his gaze – he had the most focused and level gaze which when turned on you established an intellectual connection that would bind like a taught rope.  Using the fewest words needed, Skip always spoke precisely and with a calm urgency that made the listener want to lean forward in his chair so as not to miss a single pearl.

Engineering, as a demanding technical profession, is often a ruthless forum in which mistakes and errors are pounced upon by peers for ego gratification, reputation enhancement, and generally counting coup.  Such critiques are most often spontaneous but sometimes, especially when corporate management will be present, they are planned ambushes of great sophistication.  That morning a mid-level division manager with a short career as a practicing engineer rose to deliver a withering critique of the just concluded presentation.  It was obviously a long-planned critique that had still been in deep rehearsal while Skip was talking. And it was apparent to us all that he had not understood the very essence of the design approach.  As he concluded with a knowing glance to the company’s chief technical officer (Chief Engineer in those days), all eyes turned to Skip.

Remaining seated with hands folded, Skip fixed his attacker in that signature gaze and, with incredible calm and no hint of sarcasm, said,
 
“I’m sorry, I didn’t say it well enough for you to understand.”
 
… and paused.  As the semantic impact of this simple sentence settled in our minds most of us were astounded.  I remember scrambling to record those words in my notebook and I wasn’t alone. The managerial upstart was dumbfounded, he didn’t know on whom those contrite words put blame or shame.  He wanted to strike back, but no obvious target had been presented.  While his would-be nemesis was so consternated, Skip proceeded to quickly correct the man’s error and the meeting went on to a productive conclusion.

In his wisdom Skip Case settled a potentially contentious and divisive situation with a sentence that allowed everyone to draw their own distinct yet proper meaning of the occasion depending on their position and perspective.  All of us left the room with those words in mind.  I was fortunate to count Skip as one of my mentors and to sit at his knee during those early years.  And since that time I also have learned to apologize when I could not say it well enough for my respondent to understand – but still not as well as Skip.

‘Me Generation’ looks for work

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that was broadcast on 11 May 2012.]

It’s graduation season during a particularly intense election year while the economy is stuck in the mud, and technological advances still come pouring out the research universities and private industry.  Our educational system at all levels puts 4.3 million young people out into what you might think is America’s workforce.  A good fraction of these youth have not completed their education – they are either high school dropouts or leave college before earning some recognized certificate of completion.

And when we look at our graduates – those who can boast a high school diploma, an AA degree, or a baccalaureate sheepskin – we discover that they are proudly educated in skills few can understand and employers cannot use.  The result is that an alarming fraction of these people cannot qualify for the fewer jobs that this economy is producing.  What’s more, they will not qualify for the kinds of jobs that a future job market will demand when the economy finally begins to recover.

Most academics and writers who have studied this alarming shift in skills demographics continue to blame it on what and how our youngsters are taught in their schools.  First, teaching has long been devalued by policies which attract the lower tiers of college graduates into the profession.  And for years now the curriculum of essential skills has been watered down and in some cases eliminated altogether.

I’m, of course, talking about subjects that motivate and prepare students to take science, technology, engineering, and math, the so-called STEM subjects, in high school and college.  For example, the latest and greatest federal program called ‘Race to the Top’ is redefining the top in its Common Core curriculum standards by calling for a delay from the 8th to the 9th grade in starting to teach algebra.  That removes 20% of the available math schedule for high schoolers.

Apparently the little darlins are no longer ready to start algebra in the 8th grade because of what they didn’t learn in the previous seven years.  And that brings me to what the kids have actually been taught during those years, and will continue to learn until they walk out of school into the chill wind of the real world.  Today’s young people belong to something that the psychologists and demographers have labeled the 'Me Generation'.

Ruminations - 8may12

George Rebane

Happy VE Day!  On 8 May 1945 the Rebanes were in Liederberg - a small German farming village that just a few days ago was firmly brought under the control of Patton’s Third Army (more here) - and ready to be carted off to Augsburg and four years of internment in post-war displaced persons camps.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the battle for Okinawa was raging with Marine and Army divisions locked in a no-quarter-given combat with Japanese forces that had only one mission, die as slowly as possible while killing as many Americans as possible.  Okinawa was bigger than D-Day, but in America people were too busy celebrating Hitler’s downfall to notice.  That August the world would again change.

Newly elected Hollande promised to tax France to growth and balanced budgets.  And the French believed him.  Now nothing like that will happen, but what the hell, the French could frolic in the streets for a couple of days before they double down on their loudly proclaimed misery.  The French government's spending already accounts for more than 50% of the country’s GDP and it doesn’t generate any wealth.  All it is capable of doing is buying votes with tribute exacted from its private sector whose top marginal tax rates are now going to go above 70%.  The same silly people there as here believe that someone will actually risk their euros to build/expand businesses from which, if successful, the government will leave them 30 cents of every euro they earn.

Some writers view this latest installment of socialist failure in Europe as a golden opportunity for America (here).  They argue that America will be the only place left in the world for entrepreneurial and investment opportunity.  To me it seems that not everyone is paying attention to what Team Obama has accomplished, and what more they have in store for us should they win in November.  America’s crosshairs are focused squarely on being able to replicate the European toilet economy.  And some independents on this side of the Pond still ask, ‘why would we do that?’

The answer is that the socialist on both shores see none of this going on in Europe.  The EU and its subsequent eurozone are instead seen as triumphs in governance.  Happy dancing in the streets as national healthcare systems go broke, retirement ages are lowered (Hollande will return France to 60 from 62), endless vacations at every turn, can’t-get-fired jobs, minimum wages pushed above $20/hr, austerity measures reversed (no more spending cuts), … what’s there not to like?

No one there or here remembers nor has been taught that when governments have taken over the means of creating the country’s wealth, they have created the sorriest places for human existence on earth.  It has always started with taxing the bejeesus out of ‘the rich’, until everyone who earned a private paycheck found themselves suddenly designated as ‘the rich’.

This is also graduation season and our colleges are in the process of disgorging another million or so of young people (the entire US education system releases 4.3M onto the economy each year).  They are of the 'Me Generation', and the great part of them will land in the job market without marketable skills, and dumber than the proverbial 2x4 with a face painted on it.  Bret Stephens in the 8may12 WSJ writes the Class of 2012 a sobering letter; it begins –

Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.

‘… to shift the burden of hardship to the rich …’

George Rebane

That promise is resounding worldwide as socialist/communist politicians promise to ease the long overdue payments for profligate government spending in countries facing financial ruin.  Today France elected Francois Hollande to be its new president.  How did Hollande beat Sarkozy?  by promising to shift the burden of hardship, naturally.

The rich are already paying more than the lion’s share, and could not supply the spending spigots if their earnings were confiscated in toto.  But none of this matters while the other half pays nothing into those tills, and still demands more.  No one among the sheeple is aware of the greater problem that has nothing to do with ‘the rich’ who are prominently dangled to fill their attention spans.

The same thing is happening in Greece, and soon in Spain, Italy, Portugal, …, and, of course, the United States which is already in the lead bringing such policies to the fore with messianic force.  In California, we have been ahead of that curve for years, and show no inclination to let slip our position of leadership.

How have you prepared for this future?