Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations - 26apr13 (updated)

George Rebane

Lady Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, I keep coming back to it.  The occasion was one of those rare opportunities to recognize a giant in the pantheon of modern world leaders, and nations sent their most distinguished there to honor her achievements for her country and for demonstrating to the world the art of the possible.  President Obama had the good sense to send former Secs State Kissinger, Shultz, and Baker, instead of selecting some subset from the current diplomatic dwarves that form the leading echelons of his own administration.  Kudos to the President.

In the aftermath of the Boston bombing, Bostonians celebrated their police cadres' service to the city – perhaps too prematurely.  Upon reflection, of which there is a lot going on now, in the 26apr13 WSJ Dr Judith Miller of the Manhattan Institute draws a distinction between what the NYPD has been doing since 9/11 and the dropped balls of Boston’s finest (and, of course, the feds).  In essence, the city fathers and mothers of Boston – the birthplace of 9/11 – decided not to do anything serious about tracking domestic jihadists.  Therefore, the contribution of their constabulary was strictly reactionary wherein, as from a Keystone Cops movie, we saw combat armed cadres trundle hither and yon while shutting down an entire city.  After all is said and done, it was the private citizens who fingered the terrorists, Muslim jihadists that weren’t even on the Boston PD’s radar before they set off the tragic explosions.  The police action ended with an entire platoon of Boston’s finest heroically pouring automatic rifle fire into a boat in which the surviving terrorist was already bleeding to death.

Helicopter Ben of the Fed is looking to raise interest rates because he has to.  No matter his promise to keep them low until our hoaky unemployment rate drops below 6.5%, or at least until 2015.   He is quietly checking with the big banks as to how/whether they might survive if their lending portfolios would suddenly be ‘marked to market’, and consequently plummet as interest rates took off.  Right now QE3 at $80B+ per month of Treasurys buying is keeping rates low.  That new money is actually not doing the economy much good (witness today’s disappointing 2.5% GDP growth update) since banks don’t want to lend the stuff at current low rates while anticipating the return of sanity when the markets actually start setting interest rates again.  Have seatbelts handy.

Econuts and divers sorts of animal activists are the leading phalanx of 21st  century luddites.  Two recent reports of their insanities highlight the cadre of terrorists that uniquely derive from the far Left.  One report – ‘Animal-rights activists launch a rodent rescue and set back research that might help cure Alzheimer's or autism’ – details of how these western moral equivalents of ragheads trashed years of research at the University of Milan, research that was heading to broadly benefit humankind.   Another reports on how American econuts have isolated King Cove, a remote Alaskan town, from its medical life line with the fiat-emplaced Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.  The administration's wildlife idiots will not even allow a gravel road through the ‘refuge’ (already laced with such roads) on which an ambulance or EMT vehicle can be used in medical emergencies.  The result, “A dozen residents have died attempting to reach medical attention since the preserve's creation.”  Details here of yet another chapter from the record of our fundamental transformation to socialism.

[update]  RL 'Bob' Crabb's cartoon in the 27apr13 issue of The Union draws our attention once again to the scumbags in Sacramento.

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.

Gold plummets, but then why … ?

George Rebane

Has everyone been watching the goings on in gold and other precious metals lately?  Today the price of one ounce plummeted another 9.4%, making the price drop of that barbaric relic in the last few trading days to be the biggest in thirty years.  Astute observers tell us that Big Money (central banks, institutions, ...) even margined retail investors have been selling to deleverage and clear their books.  Cyprus is held up as a sovereign nation poster child in this mad rush to divest.

So you’d think that with everyone acting like the gold rush is over and economic normalcy is returning in the world, that you could waltz into your local gold dealer (hereabouts JH Mint) and walk out with a bag full of the yellow stuff on the cheap.  Not a chance, the shelves are bare and the prices quoted for uncertain future delivery are marked up by 14% or more.  In other words, the retail dealers have effectively not lowered their prices at all, just increased their margins.  JH Mint, along with other dealers across the land, were literally cleaned out last Friday when their establishements looked like the land office in 1893 Oklahoma.

Then why can’t I buy gold on the cheap today?  The simple reason is that Big Money is manipulating the price drop.  Ben and his ilk need to depress prices so that after a little time has passed (days, weeks?), all the big players can buy back in on the cheap.  In the meantime, none of the big guys want to let the physical stuff get into the retail buyers’ hands and boost the price prematurely.  Retail buyers are the people who look at the world and where they live, and ask (as 321gold.com reports) –

“Did gold fall off the cliff because the dollar index ripped higher? NO! Did Uncle Ben Bernanke say they were stopping the $85 billion + QE immediately? NO! Has physical gold become more abundant than any time in the recent past? NO! Are the world's central banks stopping their counterfeiting operations by devaluing their currency by stopping the printing presses? NO! It's quite the opposite,  Japan, U.S., and the EU are increasing the money supply.”

The big secret is that no one can allow interest rates to increase on sovereign debts across the globe.  That interest rates will have to increase in any case at some future time makes no nevermind to today’s big players, they already have their portfolios appropriately stuffed with what the little guy cannot buy on the cheap today.  And all of them are betting that they individually will be out of the public eye and ire before the crapola hits the fan when interest rates skyrocket after no one believes in the brand new funny money being used today to buy sovereign treasuries in the industrialized world.  And when interest rates do rise, then the dominoes will start crashing as every country’s debt service to GDP ratio sky rockets.  And gold will again be in short supply as its price goes to the moon.

In the interval, please fasten your seatbelts.

Ruminations - 9apr13 (updated 10apr13)

George Rebane

California 2013 Job Killer Legislation.  The state’s chamber of commerce released a list of bills that would continue California’s economic misery as the Democrats pander to the dimwit cohort of their constituency.  All of these pile on to the mother of idiotic job killer laws already on the books and wreaking havoc –  the perniciously named the California Global Warming Solutions Act aka AB32.  H/T to reader for the heads up.

Detroit neighborhoods are hiring their own gunslingers for protection that the city can no longer provide.  The good news is that so far these extra-curricular security people are off-duty policemen, the bad news is that the precedence has been set and the word is out – if you want safe neighborhoods, provide for it out of your own pockets.  I wonder if residents will be able to deduct a commensurate amount from their local taxes that went for police services.  Signs of a new future upon us.

Scumbag litigation has arrived.  The 8apr13 WSJ reports that “A new generation of investors is plunging into "litigation finance," putting up millions of dollars to fund lawsuits in hopes of collecting when verdicts come down. Established financiers are expanding into new areas, including loans to law firms, and finding clients among the biggest American companies.”  Now there’s a way to redistribute wealth for those crafty capitalists who can think of no way to create new wealth – ‘if you can’t make it, take it’.  The Left ought to have a field day with this until their first union pension fund gets in on the take.

The Navy is installing ray guns on combat vessels.  The first ship with such a ‘directed energy’ weapon (aka steel cutting laser) will be deployed to mid-east waters next year.  It is reported (here) that their initial use may be against Iranian drones and fast boats that harass our naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.  More powerful stuff that can take down fast-flying combat aircraft and cut through inches of steel are on their way.  For carrier task groups worrying about incoming missiles, the Son of Star Wars will be a welcome upgrade for own ship defense systems.

[10apr13 update]  Bill Whittle of PJ Media give a memorable staged speech to Congress on the Constitution and gun control (see video).  One can only wish a real President would say these words to Congress.

The Iron Lady 87, RIP (addended)

George Rebane

Lady Margaret Thatcher was a world leader who warmed the cockles of my own and many a heart.  With Ronald Reagan she was instrumental in bringing the USSR down to a soft landing.  She also created enormous and beneficial change for Great Britain that had been on a dreadful socialist slide to oblivion since the end of WW2.  But to accomplish all that she had to literally start at her country’s nadir.  A tribute to her in the 8apr13 WSJ starts with –

In that dreary winter of 1979, the piles of uncollected trash in London's Finsbury Park seemed to stretch for miles. The garbagemen were on strike. So too, at one time or another, were hospital workers, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, railwaymen. Also gravediggers: In Liverpool, corpses had to be warehoused as they awaited burial—yet another long queue that socialist Britain had arranged for its patient masses.

This was the "Winter of Discontent," when Great Britain came about as close to economic collapse as at nearly any point in its peacetime history, and it was the country Margaret Thatcher inherited when, on May 3, she defeated the Labour government of James Callaghan to become Prime Minister—the first woman in the office and 49th in a line that includes some of the greatest figures of Western civilization: Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, the Duke of Wellington, William Pitt the Younger.

Thank you Lady Margaret and may you rest in peace.

[Addendum]  One of the greatest living historians, Paul Johnson, notes that 'Not since Catherine the Great has there been a woman of such consequence."  His essay on Lady Margaret includes a more comprehensive perspective on her accomplishment, especially how she managed to push through policies that cured her country of what was then known as the 'English disease' - rampant socialism and "over-weening trade-union power" - and its impact on a once great country.

The New Pope and Christianity’s Challenge

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 15 March 2013.]

Cardinal of Argentina and Jesuit, Jorge Bergoglio, was elected Pope last Wednesday, the first from the Western Hemisphere to hold the Holy Office of Catholicism.  He chose to be known as Pope Francis (the First), a name that fits his reputation and humble demeanor.  His major tasks will be to straighten out the Vatican bureaucracy, also known as the Roman Curia, the standing of the Catholic priesthood, and halt the decline of Christianity in Europe and North America.

While the proportion of the world’s Christians has remained fairly constant over the last century, its center of gravity has overwhelmingly shifted from the north to south.  The Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life reports –

“This apparent stability, however, masks a momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole.”

And even these statistics mask the actual declines in people who regularly attend church or even confess to believing in God.  Protestant Northern Europe has become a Christian wasteland, and in North America secular humanism is making great strides in attracting both young and old away from the faith of their fathers.

Today in America the state is actively and selectively proscribing Christianity and purging its presence from public life.  The ruling progressive mentality is dominant and has prescribed that we be sensitive to all religions in our midst save Christianity.  When the perceived sensibilities of people of other faiths are somehow disrespected, there is an uproar in the media with America’s secular humanists lending their weight to restore those aggrieved.  The only exception is the sound of crickets when a Christian or Christianity is disparaged or mocked.

Today Christians in America are a mobile bunch with over 50% having changed their religious affiliation at least once.  And the churn continues as the overall numbers decline.  To me that reflects an attitude that shopping religions is rapidly becoming the norm because people more and more are dissatisfied with what they learn or don’t learn during their encounter with this or that denomination.

As a Protestant Christian, I have seen that branch of the faith change markedly over my lifetime.  Churches no longer feel that their theology, with its message of salvation and how to live, is sufficient to contain the faithful.  Something different is required today if the pews are to be filled on Sunday.  The overwhelming solution has been to adopt a new ‘contemporary’ style of service that concentrates on entertainment and expunges the wonders of Christian cosmology and theology from its sermons.  ‘Sunday school light’ is the new liturgy in which a progressive ‘liberation theology’ focuses on current social issues during many Protestant and Catholic worship services.

The consequence is that altars have become rock band stages, the sacraments have been silenced, and an all-inclusive Christianity is the order of the day.  The parishioner soon asks himself ‘is that all that there is?’, if so, then let’s go find a place that has a better band, cooler songs, and more skits to entertain us.  If the church seeks first to be a social services club washed of irrelevant theology, then finding the best club is the order of the day.  The Pew Forum describes it as “a very competitive religious marketplace.”  And today that marketplace is more and more filled with Comfort Christians who cannot conceive of contending for what used to be their faith.

On an even bigger scale, respected scientists tell us (here) that the world is rapidly becoming an arena of clashing civilizations, each of which hew to one of the world’s great religious traditions.  It is into that arena that the humble and evangelical Pope Francis now takes the Throne of St Peter as the de facto leader of Christians of all hues.

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

Circus Maximus vs Sequester Minimus (Addended)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 March 2013.]

It’s hard to think good thoughts about what is going on in Washington and the competency of our government.  We seem to have entered into an endless sequence of crises, questionable appointments, and scandals which literally have no end – they now stretch into the future as far as the eye can see, and then there are still more out there waiting that we can’t see.  As a political junkie even I am overwhelmed.

We just concluded cabinet appointments that made it not because of the candidates’ sterling resumes – they are arguably awful - but simply because of party loyalty.  The guy for Secretary of Defense was at a loss to explain anything that was relevant to his office, and the Secretary of the Treasury candidate told the Senate that he didn’t really know what he did in private practice, why he got those big million dollar bonuses, and what experience recommends him for the job.  Nevertheless, these two are now the worthies one of whom will maintain our national security in the face of shrinking defense budgets, and the other one will be in charge of keeping China lending us money they will never see repaid.

And the borrowing will go on forever because we will never bring our federal budget under control – all budgets and obligations call for every aspect of spending to increase indefinitely.  Washington’s claim of reducing spending is a very big fairy tale told repeatedly to a very large population of faithful morons.  The rule to spending cuts is simple – publicly plan to spend at some arbitrary and prodigious rate, then with much breast beating reduce the planned outlays to their usual budget busting levels, and then credit the difference to your having reduced spending – the sheeple will never know.  Meanwhile, the actual dollar amounts of spending just keep roaring upward year after year.

Two greats take their leave

George Rebane

Contemplate your god or oblivion, for it will reveal that you will never experience mortality, and at least in that sense you are indeed immortal.

Concert pianist Van Cliburn is dead at 78.  Cliburn won world fame in 1958 by taking first prize at the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the height of the cold war, a competition designed to highlight Soviet culture and musical talent.  And he did it playing nothing less than Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1 (more here).  This was also a time when I was starting to mess around with the piano at idle moments.  I was blown away by his interpretation, one that has since become a world standard. 

After Jo Ann and I started dating, his artistry remained a part of our lives for years afterward.  We were both classical music fans and shared a habit with many other UCLA couples of going up into the Bel-Air heights during evenings now and then to enjoy the city panorama.  The radio was tuned to KFAC, the LA classical music station, and as we settled in at 8pm the Gas Company Concert came on with the triumphant opening phrases of Tchaikovsky’s Number 1 – talk about motivational music.  Two hours later the program’s end was again announced, this time by the concerto’s second movement, the languid refrain from its Adagio – it was time to start getting things together to go down the hill and back into the real world.

And so it went during our undergraduate years as Sputniks launched, Camelot came to Washington, and Cuba and Berlin vied for the touchpoint for WW3.  Throughout it all Van Cliburn played his masterful rendition every weekday night for Los Angeles audiences that also included some young couples on local mountain tops in cars with foggy windows.  Thanks for the memories Van – RIP.

And yesterday we also buried Leo.  Leo was a cat to behold, given to us by friends as a frisky little ball of black fur nineteen years ago.  We lived on Saddle Peak Rd in the Santa Monica Mountains.  This was wild country where on the roads or in your driveway you could see pumas, bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, owls, eagles, hawks, deer, …, and rattlesnakes galore.  We always took in cats and had lost over 30 of them to local predators (mostly coyotes and owls) by the time Leo arrived.  Cats were our first line of defense against rattlers, territorial critters that eat the same things that cats do.  The idea was to limit their food supply to keep their population down (in ten years we reduced the annual rattler kill rate from seven to one), but the kitties paid a price for our living in God’s country by also becoming part of the food chain.

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?

Ruminations - 19feb13

George Rebane

TV weathercasters will soon need AGW certification if they want to talk about climate change on the air, according to a new initiative started by a South Carolina meteorologist.  On National Propaganda Radio this morning was a segment on climate change lamenting that it’s not getting much traction in the public mind lately.  The piece made clear that there was only science behind promoting the ‘reality’ of AGW, and just “disgruntled” troglodytes who refuse to accept truth.  Nowhere was there a hint that the debate is not over, or that there were any material weaknesses in the popularized AGW case (here).

So, to bring the public around to a more compliant stance on AGW, there is work afoot for broadcast weathercasters to get certified on climate change before they can talk about it on their weather forecasts.  Of course, certification will require that you swallow Team Gore’s version of the UN’s IPCC reports hook, line, and sinker.  As for the public, we recall the song from South Pacific, “… they must be carefully taught.”

Public debate, as often reflected in the blogs, seldom leads one away from heat to light.  In the 19feb13 WSJ’s section on healthcare you can see blaring examples of dysfunctional discussions.  For example, “Should all women over 40 get annual mammograms?” is answered YES with “catching cancer early improves odds of beating it”, and NO with “the benefits are small but the costs can be great.”  Now there’s a case of apples and oranges that is oh so common in the public round.  The winner of such debates will be determined by hyperbole, emotion, and repetition.  And some idiot legislator will then introduce a bill to get government involved at great cost to most, with resulting benefits to the fewest.

No one, it seems, can gather their wits and ask ‘what objective are we trying to achieve with mammograms?’  A quantifiable answer to that would definitely refine the responses and expose the charlatans in the ensuing discussion.  But that kind of process makes it much harder to manage the sheeple.  (For more, google ‘Principled Negotiation’ or here on RR.)

Tonight at the Grass Valley Veterans Center is the Oathkeepers presentation given by co-founder Stewart Rhodes that I reported on last Friday.

Administrivia – I’m now in the heat of finalizing the test and solution versions of TechTest2013 that always requires a lot of equations and figures (see past tests here).  The test will be given at NUHS on 23 March 2013.   Until this effort is put to bed, I may be a bit tardy in my usually pithy comment responses, and also infrequent in new postings of the high quality RR readers have come to expect ;-)