Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations - 28dec2009

George Rebane

- Obama gets an 'A' from me
- Nigerian bomber underlines the government employee
- Washington’s double taxation of investment gains

Never mind the fruitless foreign policy escapades and stimulus packages that have not stimulated.  Candidate Obama promised one and all a “fundamental transformation” of the country into European type redistributionist socialism.  Many people didn’t pay attention or thought he was joking – he was not.  When Obama gets this healthcare bill on his desk, no matter how mollified it may appear, he will become the most effective American president since Reagan, and maybe even more effective when it comes to implementing his political ideology.  This will earn him an ‘A’ in my book.  And if he succeeds making Cap and Tax (aka Waxman-Markey) into the law of the land, I believe that he will become, hands down, the most effective president in our history.  We will then become such an economical and geo-political basket case, that there will be nothing left for us to do but sue the international community to launch a global order and accept us as a charter member.  Total success.

That government is the employer of last resort has been a longstanding theme in these posts.  This was again verified when Mr Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried unsuccessfully to blow his balls off along with the left wing of the Northwest airliner in which he was a passenger.  Now can you imagine the Homeland Security and TSA workers who already had the guy on a watchlist, persona non grata in Great Britain, and were in receipt of the fact that in Amsterdam he had bought a one-way ticket for cash and checked no baggage.  Since 9/11 data on all passengers departing for the US is transmitted to our people before the plane takes off.  But that is only effective if there is someone with the appropriate skill set to read and react to such information.  Apparently the TSA gives ‘equal opportunity employer’ a new level of meaning.

Not to worry, the SEIU will guarantee that these people will do a much better job administering nationalized healthcare and enforcing the new CO2 regulations.  In the interval the TSA is placing another layer of loonie-tunes strictures on the rest of us in the vain hope to convince everyone that they are on the job.

Today’s WSJ highlights the poor performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last decade when inflation is taken into account (here).  Now, as students of economics, we all know that inflation is a monetary phenomenon in the hands of those who control the supply of our fiat money.  And we also know that inflation is a purposive tax on dollar-based assets.  The bottom line here is that we are not supposed to notice that we are taxed once by inflation, that reduces the real gains of our investments, and then taxed again on the nominal (not real) profits as we attempt to dig ourselves out of the current slump.  Cynical is no longer the appropriate word for it.

Congressional Crapola

George Rebane

Some people maintain that it is only the ignorant, mostly minority populated congressional districts that send similarly endowed idiots to represent them in Congress.  A poster child for this thesis is the notorious Maxine Waters who recently and inadvertently blurted out the Democrats’ intent to socialize the country (video here).  I contend that this one-sided view is in error.  Here is an example from C-SPAN of the sleazebag John Murtha serving as speaker pro-tempore during a session of the House of Representatives.  Murtha comes from a mainly white district in Pennsylvania.  Idiots and sleazebags are voted in by constituencies of all races and intellectual acumens.  Their common denominator is simply hopeful greed that makes voters think they will be getting the something for nothing that their candidates promise.

And here we all thought that Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb) was standing on principle while holding out his vote on Harry Reid’s version of Obamacare.  (Well, not all of us.)  The honorable senator finally sailed into friendly waters under a federal guarantee to fund Nebraska’s Medicaid programs at more favorable rates.  Reid has been at this tit for tat payola game with a number of equally honorable senators who know how to play ‘The Price is Right’.

More Taxes = More Democracy.  Under various guises, this is the mantra that most liberal members of Congress have been reciting to us for decades.  Now they may have a new leg to stand on.  Two French researchers (guess of what political hue) have run some numbers and conclude (here) that countries with higher tax rates are more democratic.  The astute reader immediately recalls that most tyrannies are named ‘Democratic Republic’ of this or that, and all claim very high voter turnouts to support their single party/ideology systems.  The authors of the study are very careful not to confuse democracy with individual liberty, and neither should we.

Finally, we note that Al Gore beat out the late Irena Sendler for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.  Al Gore gave a slide show on the growing hokum of anthropogenic global warming.  Ninety-eight year-old Irena Sendler (pictured) was also nominated.  She saved thousands of Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto until caught.  I would like to think that fifty years from now both will still be remembered for what they respectively did to and for humanity.  In this Christmas season, get inspired and google Irena Sendler.  (Hat tip to RR reader.)

Surprise! Copenhagen ends with a deal

George Rebane

Well, it was touch and go there for almost two weeks and that prepared us for the cliff hanger.  The legions of naifs around the world wondered how it would all end.  Of course, it ended with a “meaningful agreement” precisely as scripted.  RR readers should be issuing a collective yawn tinged with a bit of relief that the light from one end of the tunnel seems to have slowed a bit.  WSJ’s full story of this theatrical production is here.

 

Lest we relax too much, the Brits’ Daily Telegraph concludes its report on Copenhagen with –

If there were not $45trillion of Western citizens’ money at stake, this would be the funniest moment in world history. What a bunch of buffoons. Not since Neville Chamberlain tugged a Claridge’s luncheon bill from his pocket and flourished it on the steps of the aircraft that brought him back from Munich has a worthless scrap of paper been so audaciously hyped. There was one good moment at Copenhagen, though: some seriously professional truncheon work by Danish Plod on the smellies. Otherwise, this event is strictly for Hans Christian Andersen.

Now our attention should focus on the cascade of evidence about the politicized ‘science’, aka Climategate, that the globalists are firmly ignoring.  (Russ Steele of NC Media Watch reports regularly on that.)  My suggestion is that we all now start following the money.  Al Gore’s outlandish take should be high on your list to scrutinize, followed by the late great capitalistic corporations hoping to cash in big after government mangles the markets along with their pesky competition.  Recall that companies too big to fail will always tout and reach for the government crutch.

2010 may be the real watershed year for our Republic, there is not a dull day on the horizon.  Hope everyone is ready to fast draw their electeds' phone numbers and email addresses as the need arises.

Remember, when the Sky Was Falling

George Rebane

Today memories hearken back to last February when the new Obama administration was screaming that $787,000,000,000 was required for all the "shovel ready" jobs in order to save the economy.  The American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009 had to be passed immediately if not sooner to accomplish salvation.  Well about 12% of it has been dribbled out over the course of the year, demonstrating once again the verity of the 'Word from Washington'.  But some knew then that the ARRA money had to be put in place during the months when job losses were high, else the people would see a natural recovery take hold and the economy improve even faster without the burden of an extra three-quarters of a trillion dollar deficit added to the national debt.  And he pulled it off with nary a whiffle from the sheeple.  Now the election war chest is ready to go for 2010. 

Lights At Both Ends of the Tunnel

George Rebane

Have you ever felt that you were in a tunnel with lights approaching from both ends?  That is how it seems that our country is situated with Obamacare rushing in from one end and Cap n’Tax (aka Waxman-Markey) coming from the other.  Both are powered by the biggest government frauds launched in modern times.  The endgame is total control of the economy and those it serves.

The Copenhagen climate change charade is drawing to a predictable conclusion of high drama at the eleventh hour.  Preceded by days of communist and socialist demonstrations in the streets – green is the new red - things are proceeding according to the script.  As Lord Monckton revealed some time ago, the haggard negotiators will emerge with “wan smiles” on their faces just as the world’s leaders arrive to celebrate the new consensus.

Actually, the Copenhagen agreement will be just a political showpiece that allows the countries’ bigwigs to posture in front of the cameras for home consumption.  The real agreement will be signed sometime in the coming year with TBD publicity depending on how well the AGW hysteria can be maintained on the various home fronts.

Anthropogenic global warming has now received the required shot in the shorts to send everything about earth’s temperature data and predictions back to the drawing board.  The latest Climategate revelation by the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis is that the East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit used only 25% of the Eurasian temperature data, all appropriately cherry-picked and tampered with to support the politically prescribed global warming result.

Such revelations would blow the lid off of any true scientific enterprise, and make the participants retrench and re-examine their work.  Instead, the Copenhagen conference is proceeding toward a new world order in its hermetically sealed, the-debate-is-over bubble.  What Climategate?

Meanwhile back at the ranch (aka the Capitol), the rats are having a bit of problem in pulling together all the various promises and lies of Obamacare into something that can first get 60 votes in the Senate, and then survive the House-Senate joint committee to produce the hernia pack that Obama can sign in front of the choir shouting ‘O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!’.  Perhaps at that time our President will show us where he has been keeping the “stash” of cash to pay for it all.

Both bills individually, and more so together, have the ability to sink America as the world’s leading economic power.  And if such an event can be brought about within yet another ‘not-to-be-wasted crisis’, so much the better.  The proclaimed promise to "fundamentally transform" the country will then be assured.

After WW2 the Socialist Party of America folded its tent; the reason was evident from a 1944 speech given by their perennial presidential candidate Norman Thomas (1962 photo) who said -

The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism.  But, under the name of “liberalism”, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.

I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party.  The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.

Ruminations - 15dec2009

George Rebane

• Truthout.com reports on military resistance group March Forward!
• 'Whole Foods Republicans' is not a strategy 
• Heritage updates on climate change and Copenhagen 
• Climategate catches Al Gore lying about polar ice melt
• CRU temperature datasets and programs were “botched”
• Why don’t socialists and leftwingers like those labels?

The hard left blog Truthout.com reports (here) on the formation and activities of March Forward!.  MF is a disgruntled veterans group that asks all active duty military to join and protest the mid-east conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  MF considers them illegal military adventures and urges military personnel to refuse their mid-east assignments.  Such groups have arisen during most of America’s conflicts.  But wholesale mutiny seems to me to be a desperate stratagem to apply at this point in our war against militant Islam.

Another positive collateral effect of Climategate is that climate scientists are beginning to speak up when their work is publicly misrepresented by political types.  As reported by the online London Times, yesterday in Copenhagen Al Gore got his tender part in the wringer when he resumed his lying about climate change data, this time overstating the receding of the arctic ice cap (more here).  Dr Wieslav Maslowski, the scientist whose work was the basis for Big Al’s monologue, quickly came forward and stated that he had no idea how such conclusions could be drawn from the data he gave Gore.  Things continue to unravel on man-made global warming.

The Toronto Sun end runs our MSM with the detailed report of how the CRU’s temperature dataset archives’ management and the subsequent software for estimating historical temperatures were “botched”.  And this from one of their own software engineers charged with trying to come up with the politically correct temperature record.  It is an ongoing joke how the know-nothing MSM and the White House continue to spin all this as inconsequential.  I guess they have given up on the tack that ‘botched’ is just normal jargon which scientists use to report progress and success to one another.

For a complete update on what’s really happening at the big climate change conference in Copenhagen, please visit the Heritage Foundation’s site here.  The big Kahunas of the developed world will converge there in a day or two for the purpose of signing something that looks like a consensus.  Right now it appears they will not be able to cobble anything together that is too damaging to the world and its economies.  The poor countries are miffed (aka pissed) that they won’t be getting the expected big bucks from the rich countries to reduce their CO2 emissions or stuff in Swiss bank accounts.  Am I the only one who doesn’t understand what is the basis for the so-called “negotiations” with the poor countries – what will/can they do if they don’t get the money they want.  And how does it matter?

Whole Foods Republicans? In the 14dec09 WSJ, Michael Petrilli of Stanford’s Hoover Institution exhorts that Republicans need “to enlist voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics”.  RR readers know that most of the time I think that the sharp minds from Hoover, Heritage, and Cato do give the appearance of walking on water.  But Dr. Petrilli definitely got his socks wet when writing this piece.  To regain and hold the national pulpit, the GOP needs to come up with a real strategy for putting under-educated and un-educable people to work in fulfilling, quality of life sustaining jobs (example here).  Merely repainting the elephant to look more like a donkey sounds like a difficult and unsustainable bamboozle to me.

Finally, why don’t socialists and leftwingers like those labels?  From the comment threads on this and other blogs across the country, socialists and leftwingers consider being so identified equivalent to being called a bad name, instead of just labeling their ideological bent.  My fellow ideologues and I don’t mind being labeled conservatives, libertarians, free marketers, rightwingers, and such – we bear those appellations proudly.  Is it that in their heart of hearts our left-leaners know collectivism has a sorry history in its application, and that they would rather slip in their current new and improved version of it before we notice its pedigree?

Ruminations - 13dec2009

George Rebane

• North Korea's currency confiscation
• ebooks and your gizmo count
• Associated Press verdict on Climategate
• Federal employees' pay explodes during recession 
• 'That's What We Do, We're Americans' 

Last week the dear thugs ruling North Korea pulled a sudden currency exchange issuing new won for the old.  But there was a catch, you could only turn in old won to the tune of $180, the rest was literally confiscated by the government.  This, of course, wiped out the savings of untold families and reinforced the shadow or black market economy that keeps things from a wholesale uprising (here).  Britain intends to test this same path.  U.K. Treasury chief Alistair Darling announced his intention to confiscate 50% of all bankers’ bonuses above about $40K.

I’m not a fan of ebooks (Kindle, Nook, …) because they are crippled gizmos adding to our out-the-door gizmo count without providing any more functions that a new lightweight laptop (or even a netbook in a pinch) can deliver.  Web based magazines are now approaching the user friendliness of pulp magazines and allow you to do even more things like search, hyperlink, copy text/pictures, annotate, etc.  Take a look at the Winter 2009 edition of h+, the magazine that covers transhuman and Singularity subjects.  Clicking on the ‘view the digital edition’ link (here) takes you to an interactive magazine format (here) that I believe is the harbinger of things to come as the transition from print to electronic format continues.

(Gizmo count is the total number of different things and gizmos you have to load up with as you leave the house in the morning.  For me it comprises such things as pens, pad, iPhone, ear piece, Swiss Army pocket knife, keys, wallet, Casio Exlim camera, laptop, notebook, reading glasses, book(s), etc.  Anything I can do to lower my gizmo count gets my immediate attention.)

Associated Press just announced on its mobile net that it has had five reporters review a million words of Climategate emails, and rendered a verdict (here).  There is nothing there that compromises the science or conclusions of a global warming caused by humans.  That it contradicts the opinions of technical specialists not funded by pre-purposed governments, should not worry you as a layman on this issue.  Given the quality of the profession today, it is a relief that after “an exhaustive review” these five steel-trap like minds have settled the matter.

USA Today confirms (here) that federal employee pay has skyrocketed during the recession.  RR readers are not surprised.  That's not exacty true, some of our more liberal readership has vehemetly denied this little bamboozle for some months now.  Please fasten your seatbelts for the following -

• "When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000."
• "Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted."
• "The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available."
• "The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector."

And finally, this little slide show will choke you up a little.  'That's What We Do, We're Americans' 

Planning on a Miracle

George Rebane

[This editorial appears today (12 December 2009) in The Union’s print and online opinion sections (here).  This is the submitted version. gjr]

The news is good, we seem to have bottomed out of our Great Recession – job losses are decreasing, government is hiring, hundreds of thousands of mystery jobs have been “created or saved” by the various stimulus packages, our healthcare system is about to be fixed once and for all, and ‘cap and trade’ will add untold new green jobs.

But a few of us still shake our heads periodically as if to wake up from a bad dream.  Yet our neighbors seem happy and oblivious to the world we see.  It is as if they were living in the 21st century version of the Ozzie and Harriett 1950s, only now it’s American Idol and the various ‘reality’ shows that make up the daily circus.  The mood is definitely upbeat - this recession is like all others before it, and it’s about over.

The country seems to have reverted to an innocent youth.  Government has things in hand.  We’re looking forward to hope and change.  A mike recently stuck in the faces of some Detroit ladies reflects the public’s understanding.  ‘Where’s the money coming from?’, ‘From President Obama’; ‘Where does he get the money from?’, ‘I don’t know, he’s got a stash somewhere.  He’s the President!’  In the background you can hear the happy chanting, ‘O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!’  All is well.

But if we look behind the tightly drawn curtain, we see a different reality.  This reality is reshaping the very foundations of our Republic, preparing it for the promised “fundamental transformation”.  It’s the numbers mixed with a bit of history that tell the story.

Building Blocks of a Legacy

George Rebane

No matter how Obamacare and cap n’ tax turn out, this administration’s mark on American history will indelibly contain these dents or catastrophic gashes – time will tell how we fared.  Here are two succinct views.

Today’s Bookends of American Education

George Rebane

The stretch in approaches to educating our kids is vast, ranging from the pragmatic to the idiotic.  A RR reader from the northwest sent the following words and links to illustrate the point.

It is just amazing what $5000/year/kid can do without the interference of public schools and teachers unions (The Harlem Children’s Zone text here , video here).

Contrast that with the UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA UNDER FIRE FOR TASK FORCE'S DISCRIMINATION-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION PLAN – insanity.

To me, as an American, one of these programs is evil, stark and simple.