Rebane's Ruminations

Agenda21 – The Beat Grows Stronger (updated 25may13)

More than two out of three Americans think that "government is out of control and threatening our basic liberties."  Fox News poll reported on 21 May 2013.

George Rebane

Last night we attended the Agenda21 talk at the Grass Valley Veterans Center given by anti-Agenda21 activist and author Rosa Koire.  Her talk was sponsored by our local CABPRO and was attended by about two hundred people who arrived from places as far as Reno and the bay area.  Ms Koire is a self-described liberal Democrat and ‘married’ lesbian who also happens to be an excellent and animated speaker, especially about Agenda21, a topic about which she is very well informed and quite passionate.  (We also bought her recent book Behind the Green Mask: UN Agenda 21.)

RR readers are familiar with my Agenda21 views, they are a matter of record and available in the ‘Agenda21’ section of this website.  Ms Koire emphasized that Agenda21 is a non-partisan issue. She went on to summarize the UN’s Agenda21 Sustainable Development initiative as “the action plan to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, all energy, and all human beings in the world. INVENTORY AND CONTROL”

In short, Agenda21 (first formulated in 1987) is the blueprint for the stage-wise achievement of a unified global government that rules the world within one standardized set of laws, regulations, and codes that will spread social justice uniformly over all lands and peoples.  The project is not a conspiracy or some ‘tin hat’ mythology, but an open initiative that in 1992 was signed on to by 179 world leaders that included President George HW Bush.

The fundamental thesis underlying this plan is that humanity’s current mode of living on the planet – lifestyles, modes of commerce, capitalism, property ownership, energy consumption, regions of habitation, etc – are unsustainable and must be drastically altered during the 21st century.

Living in Obamastan – what’s not to like?

George Rebane

What was foretold has come to pass, he has delivered with a vengeance and a promise of more to come.

1.    Benghazi – ineptness, tragedy, cover-up, lies, demonstration of weakness, …
2.    Syria – inattention, ineptness, tragedy, loss of prestige and confidence, …
3.    Obamacare – national healthcare and economic disaster, ultimate partisanship, ineptness, uncertainty, lies about implementation, effect, costs, …
4.    Iran – ineptness, uncertain ally to mid-east friends, meaningless ‘red lines’, invitation to war, Islam’s war on west promoted, …
5.    Iraq – inept withdrawal, total loss of influence, waste of sacrifices made, bolster Iran
6.    Afghanistan – confusion, withdrawal guaranteed to leave region unstable, wasted sacrifices, Taliban will triumph, …
7.    North Africa – Al Qaida expands and triumphant, no clear policy, leading from behind in the wrong direction, relinquishing an entire continent, …
8.    IRS politicized – responsive weapon to target opposition groups, institutions, and individuals, agency radicalized, cover-up, lies, …
9.    EPA – rogue agency, congressional bypass, executive hammer, economic brake, fear in the land, uncertainty, disastrous impediments to a beneficient national energy policy, …
10.    Immigration reform – borders remain porous, amnesty, Democrat voter fast track, Reconquista, …
11.     US Economy – on permanent slow track, regulatory hell, uncertainty, inept/perfidious economic policy, systemic unemployment growth, constructive nationalization of business and industry, …
12.    American culture – in last stages of destruction, war on Christianity and European heritage, massive loss of freedoms, replaced by growing mass of government regulations, education system propagandized, class warfare ignited, …
13.    Fundamental Transformation of America – Agenda 21 provisions adopted while denied, military being castrated, intelligence/security apparatus remains stovepiped and compromised to combat homeland terror, government arming to combat Americans, goal to become a compliant peer member of the new global order, progress to mediocrity is on track.

This list is incomplete.

‘In Defense of Carbon Dioxide’ (updated 14apr13)

George Rebane

That is the title of a short but extremely important column by Professors Harrison Schmitt and William Happer that appeared in the 9may13 WSJ.  Readers know that I am a longtime skeptic of the ongoing climate change hysteria (especially the AGW part), and for technical reasons believe that results from data diddling and climate modeling have been at best questionable to incompetent science, or at worst blatently formulated to achieve political ends.

Schmitt and Happer present a science side of the CO2 phantasmagoria that IMHO has not received anywhere near the consideration it should have in the ongoing debate on the global insanity and local trans-hysteria (witness California’s AB32) that is going on.  The piece starts –

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn't the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a "pollutant" in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants.

The whole article, from which the graphic was filched, can be read here.  Such information will make little impact on the lay reader whose beliefs about AGW are already well calcified.  But they should be an eye-opener for the serious intelligent reader still seeking direction on whether or not to support the steady “carbon footprint” diet that we are fed daily.

To keep up on the overall developments in the climate change forum please visit Russ Steele’s ‘The Next Grand Minimum’ and Anthony Watts’ ‘Watts Up With That’.

[14apr13 update]  Reasonable people who made a case before t₀ that Observable #1 may have been the cause of Observable #2, would reexamine their premises, let alone their conclusions, at some point after t₀.  The rest will be unfazed by the observed data.

 

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.

Boston and pan-Islamism – some early ruminations

George Rebane

The end of round one in Boston’s latest experience with pan-Islamic jihad brings to mind several observations before round two gets under way.  My working name for round two is ‘Positioning for political justice’.  But here I’d like to put down some thoughts about two aspects – the larger frame of the Boston bombings, and the mighty law enforcement response visible on Boston’s streets.

In our public square many (most?) of us are still hesitant to connect the dots from such acts of terror to what, hopefully, is finally starting to be labeled a part and parcel of a global pan-Islamic jihad.  Some politically correct and evidence resistant pilgrims in public office continue to view incidents like Maj Hassan’s Ft Hood killing spree as “workplace violence” or some other equally inane appellation.  Others, including members of Congress (e.g. Reps Louie Gohmert, Peter King), are beginning to call for added surveillance of our Islamic organizations to match what has already been going on in keeping an eye on the so-called ‘rightwing extremist organizations’ that now include tea parties and veterans associations.

Many students of history and current events know that Islam is not unified unto itself.  Its 1.3B adherents come from many cultures all over Asia and Africa.  After the prophet’s death, Islam quickly devolved into many sects, each considering the other apostate and launching murderous attacks on the other.  About the only thing they all agreed on was that anyone not accepting their version of the prophet’s message deserved death, and that Islam was to rule the world by the sword and the Quran.  Once Muslims left Mecca and conquered Medina, Islam no longer pretended to be a religion of peace, save in their practice of taqiyya.

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.

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.

Madness of the Green and Tort Kinds

"... there is no weakness without its admirer, so be not discomfited because your ways displease some, for they will not fail to be pleasing to others; nor let their approval of them make you vain, for still others will condemn them."  Gracian #101

George Rebane

Britain’s biggest coal fired power plant is being forced by EU green standards and British government fines to convert to burning wood chips.  But that’s just the beginning of what Idiots International is foisting on the Brits.  The wood for the chips will come from the US where 4,600 square miles have been designated to be logged for this power plant.  There the trees will have to be chipped and shipped thousands of miles across an ocean into special storage facilities built to house the ‘biomass’ until used.  And the gory story goes on, a story which should not be read after a big meal while standing on a good carpet.

Next we move to Alabama where its Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a plaintiff suing the original manufacturer of a drug that has been off patent for years, and then taken by said plaintiff under a secondary manufacturer’s label.  The secondary manufacturer is by law required to print verbatim the original manufacturer’s FDA vetted information on the drug, information which the plaintiff claims was misleading to the point of causing him harm.  The broad application of such “innovator liability” will have a devastating effect on America’s ability to remain the leader in bringing new and innovative products and services to market.  Again, a barf bad at the ready is recommended before reading this piece.

Exit question:  These examples of our achieved state of obvious social madness have their champions claiming convoluted contortions of social justice being served.  Who are these constituencies, and what kind of ideologies could be used to support such government diktats?

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.

Productivity – A new perspective

George Rebane

[This piece continues the RR series on the US economy and the factors taking it into new regions - unknown unknowns - during these pre-Singularity years.  As usual, the frail and the young should be spared from these deliberations.]

Productivity of a nation’s workforce is an important metric in understanding its prospects for growth and its ability to compete globally.  The bottom line metric of workforce productivity has been to divide gross national product (GDP) by the number of workers involved in producing it.  But puzzling on it a bit reveals that there’s more to the story.  After all, we are talking about a nation’s ability to output product at some level of unit cost – note that I did not say ‘unit of labor cost’.

Since the GDP of a country includes government spending, and since a big part of what government spends is in transfer payments that don’t directly support production (see figure in endnote), shouldn’t that somehow enter the productivity calculation?  Also, workforce members not participating, due to a number of reasons, are still sustained by the economy (to a large part by transfer payments), should they not be factored in since they remain as a ballast or deadweight in their unemployed condition?

In short, if we were to compute a true productivity index for a nation in the units of productive GDP per each member of the workforce, whether employed or not, then we should compensate that index for these factors since they affect both growth and global competitiveness.  My effort to do that required searching for a lot of data that could be used commensurately.  The result is shown as the ‘Available Workforce Compensated Productivity Index’ (AWCPI) which uses the workforce as consisting of the total of employed and unemployed for any given year.  The GDP is compensated by subtracting out that year’s direct transfer payments, but leaving in any multiplier effect from such payments – i.e. a consumer spending his unemployment check on household expenses, entertainment, etc.