Rebane's Ruminations

An American Tale

George Rebane

 

E Pluribus Union

[This editorial appears today (14 November 2009) in The Union’s print and online opinion sections (here). This is the submitted version. gjr]

George Rebane

The case has been made that public sector unions (PSUs) are bankrupting governments across the land.  Moreover, they are a “bad deal for taxpayers and representative government”.  Failure to cure the current recession has focused many organizations, mostly on the right, to re-examine the history and data from the last several decades of PSU growth to confirm such conclusions.

Problems compound when PSUs are given monopoly power to supply government workers at any level, from federal down to counties and cities.  Representative government is often compromised - “elected officials undermine their duty to taxpayers, … this puts unions in a privileged position to extract political goods in the form of high pay and benefits that are much higher than anything comparable in the private sector.”

To contend such conclusions one must explain away the widely available research on comparable pay.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, over time, public sector vs comparable private sector average salaries have climbed into the 1.5X to 2X range.  And the private sector cannot touch the pension and added healthcare benefits of the government workers’ total compensation package.

Salaries and benefits are the largest component of government budgets.  And when a public sector union (PSU) is involved, the employee compensation negotiations disappear from taxpayer view.  This blackout is required by laws carefully put in place by PSU supported politicians.  In the aftermath of their successes, the PSUs are not bashful about their involvement.  Recently, the Service Employees International Union bragged that it had spent over $50 million to elect President Obama, $27 million of which came out of its PAC, and it expected great things in return.

Obamacare - any way you slice it (updated)

George Rebane

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay. - Milton Friedman

The von Mises Institute is a leading source of Austrian school perspectives on economics and public policy, and an oft quoted source on RR.  It just published ‘Obamacare is a Devastating Tax on the Working Class’ which should give even the diehard progressive pause on some of the most regressive effects of this foray into socialized medicine.  It will hit hardest those workers who are at the margin, and those seeking to gain the first step on the economic ladder.  The arguments are clear and accessible.  The gargantuan cost of this misguided piece of social engineering will be of historic proportions; our kids and grandchildren may yet piss on our graves.

Given the recent announcement that the government's measure of unemployment has hit 10.2 percent, and given that the official House version of Obama's healthcare plan, HR 3962, has now passed, a close examination of the effects of "Obamacare" on the labor market is important. It will be no surprise to readers of this site to learn that the Democrats' bill will seriously harm precisely those poor and uninsured citizens it is ostensibly designed to help. The harm will come by compounding mass unemployment and depriving these citizens of consumption choices.

The article is not long and definitely worth a read, especially if you voted for Obama.  Hat tip to a RR reader for the heads up on this piece.  [update] And more thanks to another RR reader for sending the following addition.

Econ 101

George Rebane

Ruminations - 11nov2009 (updated 12nov09)

George Rebane

Veterans/Armistice Day.  This morning I rushed down to the Grass Valley Veterans Building to partake of the scheduled ceremonies that annually observe our debt to the armed forces of America.  Given the involvement of our armed forces and current events, the observance was not well attended – many seats on the floor were empty, and the bleachers were sparsely occupied.  Our Congressman Tom McClintock gave a quick speech before having to rush off to another engagement – these are busy times for politicians.  His good and proper remarks were entirely backward looking – there was no mention of the current global battle with Islam, no outrage at Ft Hood, no rallying of our citizens to resist and preserve.  The rear view mirror contains such clear and comforting reflections.

The Ft Hood massacre by one of our homegrown Islamic terrorists was similarly observed at a massive memorial service yesterday.  The murdered GIs were remembered as if they had died in a bus accident on the way to catch a plane to their mid-east deployments.  The President’s reference to the murderer’s “twisted logic” was a brief sop to the fact that this had not been a bus accident.  But then he totally misinformed his audience on the peaceful nature of all religions.  Army Chief of Staff, General Casey, got up and recited the next verse of his longstanding ode ‘Let’s Not Irritate the Muslims’.  Islam is a mighty belief system that informs and motivates the lives of over 1.6 billion or about a fourth of the world’s people and many of its cultures.  Yet somehow it is still difficult for us to get past the notion that our war is only about shooting some ragheads flitting among the rocks in Afghanistan.  This is the leadership under which our troops must fight and sacrifice.

EPA is still trying to gag Dr. Alan Carlin, one of its own scientists whose March 2009 report (5.12MB pdf) “questioned whether EPA should simply defer to United Nations’ assertions that carbon dioxide emissions are causing a global warming crisis that threatens human health and the environment.”  The good doctor is finally starting to speak out about his censorship and the so-called science that has now been swallowed worldwide.  In his words, “The business of science is being skeptical, and if you’re not skeptical, you’re probably not doing science. … It’s my view that the EPA needs to go through the scientific arguments themselves and not rely on what others outside the EPA have said.”

[12nov09 update]  Here is another recent report on scientists whose arguments contradicting man-made global warming are being ignored and/or attacked by the one-worlders.

Finally, the Tea Party Patriots and related organizations are forming up to launch the “Citizen Power Campaign” to gather 1.1 million California signatures for a November 2010 initiative to stop public sector unions in their onslaught on the democratic process.  I guess the important thing to note from the gitgo is that it is not a y’all come ‘people power’ campaign.  This highly discriminatory enterprise attempts to distinguish between the interests of American citizens and those who got here through a hole in the fence.  Over the next twelve months, pay particular attention to the groups rising in opposition.  More here.

Ft Hood and Counting

George Rebane

Senator Lieberman will now start holding hearings on whether Major ‘Allahu Akbar!’ Hasan is a terrorist.  It is for me a great sadness, perhaps above all others, to watch western culture, my culture in its writhing death throes.  In our jaundiced teaching that all the world's cultures are of equal worth, we daily sacrifice more of the one that has given and continues to give mankind its most abundant blessings.

Consider this, after all these years Homeland Security has yet to issue a report on Muslims in the military.  General Casey, the current Army Chief of Staff, has restated that he is most concerned about discrimination against Muslims.  The prime reason Hasan was not outed is that his colleagues and their superiors admitted that their motive for burying the abundant reports about Hasan’s radicalization was political correctness – they were also afraid of being accused of discrimination.  So thirteen people died, and many more lives were permanently derailed.  (Russ Steele of NC Media Watch has more on this.)

Hasan is a man who unabashedly evangelized the Islamic cause and worldview. He attended a radicalized mosque and handed out business cards with “SOA(SWT)” printed under his name.  SOA stands for ‘Soldier of Allah’, and SWT is the traditional Arab homage ‘Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala’ (Glory to Him, the Exalted) inserted by the faithful after every mention/writing of Allah or Muhammad.  And we are now worried if his killing spree was perhaps spawned by some “secondary stress syndrome”.  I hope Joe Lieberman can quickly lay that crap to rest so that the current “rush to whitewash” inside the Beltway can be short-circuited.  There should be some real bad stuff coming out of all this.

Michelle Malkin, nationally syndicated columnist, has made the point that “political correctness is the handmaiden of terror.”  Think about it, the more they attempt to paint Hasan as just an ordinary American Muslim, the more firmly they drive home the logical conclusion that such acts of terror by your friendly neighborhood Muslim are completely undetectable, and therefore unpredictable.  Your only choice is to suck it up and stand by for the next one, or … .

An alternative way forward is for the self-proclaimed, America-loving Muslim communities to stand up all over this land and unequivocally tell everyone that not only do they abhor the Hasans in their midst, but that they will not tolerate them, and demonstrate this by outing the ones currently in training, plotting, and scheming.  In short, remove Mao Tse-tung’s ‘friendly sea’ in which all successful indigenous terrorists must swim.  If the Muslim community continues their shameful silence, the alternative will not be a pretty America.

And sooner than later in a large American city, someone with a suitcase shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ will spawn a mushroom cloud.  Only then there will be no one to report what that Muslim said before he hit the pickle.

HR 3962 from two universes

George Rebane

There is no middle ground anymore.  The House version of Obamacare passed last night on a party line vote while we were at a local charity event.  My faithful iPhone, with a realtime AP feed application, gave its familiar ‘hot off the press’ audio signal as we were preparing to eat, and I read the short summary to our table.  There was no celebration in Mudville last night.

But to see how differently nationalized healthcare and its impact on our republic is viewed, take a peek at these two perspectives.  (Exercise for the careful reader – identify the elements, if any, of common ground between the right and left views.)

The socialists see no fiscal impact, abridgements of freedoms, reduced healthcare services, and massive government encroachment in the country’s economy.  They celebrate the much publicized attributes of the Peter/Paul Principle, and look forward to another successful victory in their ongoing class warfare.  Happy times are here again.

• from Truthout
• from Daily Kos

The dastardly free-market capitalists (aka conservatives) fully embrace Obama’s promise that this will be one of the mainstays of his promised “fundamental transformation of the country.”  You can peruse their views of our future here.

• From Heritage Foundation
• From the House Republican Conference

And never the twain shall meet.

Reverend Bayes and the Muslim

George Rebane

The Ft Hood shootings have left me shocked, saddened, and dismayed.  But perhaps not in the way most of the country is reacting to this terrible news tonight from Texas.  What is now known is that Major Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, methodically opened fire with two handguns in a troop processing hall where he killed twelve soldiers and wounded 31 more before being shot himself.  He will survive.

It took some hours for the Army and media to reveal that the Major was a Muslim, during which hours the man’s name was known but not revealed.  Then it came to light that the killer (I don’t have to use any of this ‘alleged’ stuff to belabor the known and verified) was born and raised here in an American Muslim family.  He was commissioned through the Virginia Tech ROTC program and seemed to all outside observers to be flying hot, true, and normal in the progress of his Army career.   Normal, that is, until he began to voice Islamic sentiments to his colleagues about American foreign policy and military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And then he decided to sacrifice himself as the assassin of unsuspecting innocents he had sworn to defend with his life.

How do I chew and digest all this information in light of what I have learned, and what has been reported to us about the resurgence of radicalized militant Islam and its global objectives?  I must look at it through the only lens I have.  For good or ill, I am a child, student, and defender of western civilization.  It’s in my double helix.

I also spent my turn manning the ramparts of our country (First Lieutenant, Artillery, retired), and then more years designing its weapons of war.  This experience has made a lasting impression on me and others similarly blessed.  It served to grind my lens.

The Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702 - 1761) is best remembered for giving mankind the means to correctly incorporate new and uncertain observations/knowledge into an existing belief system.  Today the Bayes Theorem underpins everything from moon landings, GPS, medical technology, worldwide communications, financial investments, internet search, optimal emergency response strategies, genetic engineering, interpretation of data, diagnostics, automated reasoning (artificial intelligence), and more areas than can be enumerated here.  Without Bayes, we would not recognize our world.

Bayesian analysis also supports enquiries into such problems as ‘given the data from the Ft Hood shootings, how should we deal with Muslims in our military?’  Unfortunately, our culture has now weaned itself of both the will and wisdom to address defense of culture issues.  We cannot even formulate the question for a discussion in the public media.  It is simply out of the new bounds we have set for ourselves.

Consider this, Major Hasan had no other distinguishing attributes that may have predicted his killing spree, save that he was a discontent Muslim in an advanced 21st century culture, the very existence of which gives lie to most of Islam’s deepest teachings.

Islam is undoubtedly the world’s most powerful religion or belief system.  What other religion today can motivate so many of its adherents to willingly sacrifice themselves with utter finality in the practice of terror against anyone not sharing their specific beliefs?  What is your negotiating basis with someone whose reward is not of this world?  Christians don’t have a leg to stand on, and secular humanists – especially of the politically correct stripe – don’t even understand the problem.

So, here was an American military officer who had taken the most solemn and serious oath to defend his homeland against all enemies, and who appeared engaged in perfectly normal activities that fulfilled that oath.  And then, without warning, he violates that oath in the most terrible and egregious manner.  Is there any possible defense against the recurrence of this scenario?

Depending on what utility we assign to a successful defense, the Reverend Bayes would counsel that we can indeed defend ourselves, not with certainty, but close enough for government work.  But the parade of spread-eagled, white-haired grandmothers at our airport security checkpoints testifies that the good Reverend’s legacy is banished from such enquires, let alone applications, in today’s America.

Our politics will not allow us a reasonable defense.  But docking more freedoms and liberties of the whole, in order to defend against the few, is our government’s forte.  As the perfect trifecta - it addresses the problem, makes everyone aware that government is out there defending us, and quietly ratchets back freedoms that prepare us for the brave new world.  We never even think to look behind the curtain.

Obamacare - The Other Side

George Rebane

The White House, Congress, MSM, and the foreign press are touting the long awaited arrival of socialized healthcare in the United States.  The Pelosi bill is now on the floor of the House ready for a vote.  Pelosi Health Care Bill Summary is another view of this legislation by the House Republican Conference that summarizes the bill in 30 pages.  Before quietly capitulating, it’s at least worth perusing.  Hat tip to a RR reader for sending me this.

Got Vaccine (Yet)?

George Rebane

‘Don’t get sick’, that is how the liberals in Congress dismiss the conservative proposed alternatives to Obamacare.  But that same advice should be given to all of us trying to avoid the ongoing swine flu epidemic.  Getting vaccinated is a problem, because our country doesn’t have a timely supply of enough vaccine.  I discussed why this is so (here) but am still puzzled as to why no one wants to talk about the recent history of on-shore vaccine manufacturing.  It is a clear example of how government puts its own welfare, comfort, and security above and ahead of its citizens.  Always has, always will.

Instead, the diversionary news items fill the airwaves.  We are told of ‘old technologies’, ‘bad batches’, and ‘frustrated’ politicians.  The real problem is that bad laws and policies were made about the nation’s emergency healthcare.  After they were implemented, and when the mistakes became apparent, instead of making corrections, everyone got real quiet hoping that the problem would never come.  Well, the problem came and now it’s CYA time on the hustings.

What makes revelation of our inadequate vaccine manufacturing capacity so explosive is that its cost in American lives is completely computable.  Every passing week without a large-scale vaccination program underway increases the known mortality count.  And that count can be laid at the feet of identifiable agents and agencies.  Talk about fully functional death committees already in place and working.

 

Today in our own Nevada County, the Public Health Department tells us that supplies are “extremely limited”, but it has received a “small initial shipment” of the H1N1 vaccine.  It is dispensing this according to CDC guidelines with no one above 8th grade in the general population getting the vaccine (see figure).  Since the PHD has no knowledge of when additional or adequate supplies will be forthcoming, it simply does not talk about it.  So the question continues to go begging.

We are reminded that this is an example of the healthcare tragedy now hanging over us all as our government prepares to force Obamacare on the nation.  And even if you stay healthy, the economic ruin it will unleash on the land will make you sick.  But that’s another untold story.