Rebane's Ruminations

Breaking Bread – ‘2nd Amendment and Gun Control’ (updated 10may13)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 May 2013.  I have included an extensive addendum to memorialize the structure of the current gun control debate in our country’s widening ideological schism, and to illustrate key factors in the asymmetric understanding and approach taken by the Left and Right when they meet in a public forum such as was provided by the 1may13 edition of ‘Breaking Bread’ on NCTV.  To view this and past episodes go here and search archives with 'Breaking Bread'.]

Last month our community television station NCTV launched Breaking Bread, a new independently produced program airing monthly and available online.  Breaking Bread is an hour-long program featuring discussions of national issues and current events.  At the start I want to emphasize that the program’s objective is to present and clarify the different perspectives in our socio-political landscape from which people view the issues that “alter and illuminate our times”. 

The program will feature co-hosts and guests who as a group will represent a diversity of views and seek to make them understood.  And where possible, we will also try to reach some consensus.  Therefore Breaking Bread is not intended as a debate but an open, unformatted, and unrehearsed get together wherein the participants offer their own views on the topics discussed.

The program debuted on 5 April during which its five co-hosts were introduced discussing ‘Language and Labels’.  You can access the inaugural edition on NCTV’s website at nevadacountytv.org or from this commentary’s transcript posted on my website.  The same will be true for all subsequent editions of the program – after all, this is the 21st century.

We recorded the second edition of Breaking Bread, titled ‘The 2nd Amendment and Gun Control’, on 1 May, last Wednesday.  The program was co-hosted by Paul Emery, KVMR news director, and me, George Rebane, introduced as “a conservetarian blogger and commentator with a lot of birthdays and, some say, a contentious ideology.”

Joining as guests were Nevada County’s Sheriff Keith Royal, Mr Norm Sauer, a retired lawyer who lectures on constitutional affairs, along with Mr and Mrs Nick and Amanda Wilcox who tragically lost their daughter Laura to gun violence.  They are prominent gun control advocates and supporters of the Brady Bill.

In framing the discussion that followed, I reminded viewers that people of the Left, who advocate for stronger gun controls or even confiscation, approach gun ownership from an episodic or topical point of view.  Their stated objective is to reduce gun violence, or more specifically, gun deaths.  And the statistics they cite, along with descriptions of horrific episodes of murder and mayhem, are designed to grossly simplify the issue, and get the listener to focus on events that everyone wants to prevent, and wishes that had never happened.  Liberal academics have identified this common and effective tack of public debate as ‘issues activism’, basically a bottom up approach that the Left uses to induce the desired public opinion.

The Right approaches gun ownership top down through the 2nd Amendment, arguing the intent and writings of the Founders in their drafting of our Constitution.  They see the real purpose of grassroots gun ownership as necessary to keep government from going rogue, and if it does, then as a last resort, to launch a successful revolution.  This, after all, was the explicit intention left to us in the legacy of our country’s early years.  While the Right does admit to the need for some regulation in who gets to own what armaments, it points to history that records tyrannical governments killing their own citizens in the hundreds of millions during the 20th century - all as a matter of intended policy, and not related to wars or combat.  Such killing by governments is called democide, which took over 260M lives during the 20th century.

So, of gun violence one must ask, ‘Would you sacrifice ten lives to save 10M lives?’  Yes, of course.  Or ‘Would you sacrifice 10M lives to save ten lives?’  Of course not.  But for such a trade-off the correct answer for each of us lies somewhere in between, and in the realworld the numbers are never known for certain, but must be estimated using probabilities.  For those who don’t understand the role of probabilities in assessing realworld uncertainties, as is required in making public policies, then any reasoned discussion of such policies will be inaccessible to them.  Instead, we will hear from them nothing but their emotional outpourings on the matter.  But then, reasonable discussion has never been a necessary prelude to legislation or regulation.

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

Addendum:  The Asymmetry of Information and Tactics in the Gun Control Debate

With this addendum I want to reflect on the experience from taping the second edition of Breaking Bread (BB2) covered in the above transcript of 3may13 KVMR commentary.  The experience of that telecast both confirmed and expanded on the asymmetry of information and tactics used by the Left and Right in today’s gun control debate.

Conservatives’ Use of ‘Nanny State’

'The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings ...', L Carroll

George Rebane

Conservatives continue their idiotic practice of characterizing the encroaching leviathan of big government as the ‘nanny state’.  There is nothing nannyish about such a state, it is simply a government on its way to autocracy, in this case a collectivist autocracy.  To characterize such a government as a warm, competent, caring, and loving nanny who always has the best interest of her kiddies in mind is a brutal lie that continues to misinform the already woefully misinformed in the land.  Take a look at the picture of Mary Bloomberg Poppins on the cover of the formerly astute National Review.

A more accurate picture that needs to be conveyed for an increasingly authoritarian government is shown nearby, and even that is still off the mark.  I consider that the use of proper labels is extremely important because labels always invoke a collateral image with all of its semantics in the mind of the reader.  The Left must be smiling from ear-to-ear every time they see the Right lambast the leviathan as a caring nanny.

Illegal, or worse, undocumented immigrant is another equally important label that is misused in the place of the correct ‘illegal alien’.  An undocumented immigrant invokes images of the hordes of poor from Europe lugging their suitcases and boxes tied with rope standing in line at Ellis Island – the perfect picture of ‘the wretched refuse of their teeming shores yearning to breathe free.’  The problem is that these people were on Ellis Island because they followed our immigration laws which made them party to a two-party contract on the way to citizenship.  Illegal aliens violated those same laws, and now seek special dispensation to side step them altogether and remain here under the most favorable terms, terms which are constantly misrepresented by the Left at every turn in the immigration reform debate.

Such is the propaganda of our public discourse – by being the first to mis/name the baby you are halfway home.

Ruminations - 30apr13 (edited)

George Rebane

New York is airing a series of hilarious ads claiming that it is now the best place in the nation to start a new business or find a home for an existing one.  And the basis for the hilarity?  Why, New York’s low taxes for such businesses coming to the Empire State.  Now you have to recall, especially if you are of our Left brethren or cistern, that a liberal tenet of economics is that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  Liberal economists from Krugman on down have made that case.  Aghast, upon learning of this fractured belief, I even posted on it in The Liberal Mind section.  But here we are, with Gov Andrew Cuomo himself all smiles, telling business execs and entrepreneurs that special low taxes, low tax rates, and even tax holidays await them when they re/locate in New York, aka the penultimate high tax state in the Union.  Somebody give the good governor the DNC’s phone number.

Benghazi is baaaack!  Fox News broke the story that there are at least four whistle blowing insiders and survivors of last September’s jihadist attack on our Benghazi consulate in Lybia.  They want to testify in front of Congress on some of the “Who cares …!!” stories that the White House and State Department told America earlier this year.  These four and others say they have been warned of very short career prospects should they come out with anything that materially contradicts the official Benghazi narrative that long ago received a quiet burial in the lamestream.

Nevertheless, now all lawyered up, these whistleblowers are seeking security clearances for their counsel so they can be shown the classified evidence for the new claims – e.g. that help was available but denied.  When Fox asked President Obama this morning about supporting the country’s knowing about the new developments, without blinking the President said that he had not heard anything about the matter, “but I’ll find out.”  Now can you imagine that the President’s morning brief – you know, the one a Secret Service agent hands him while still in his skivvies – omitted a heads up on what the nation was told on Fox the day before, and what was sure to be asked of him during his news conference later that morning?  (BTW, Benghazi was in the first question.)  As long contended here, the man is a consummate liar and/or employs the most incompetent staff 1600 Pennsylvania has ever seen.

Speaking of Obamacare, as more reports come out on who wants exemption from it (correct answer: unions, Congress, corporations), the lies told about that legislation are now so obvious that even prominent Democrats are denouncing the possibility or benefits of its implementation.  They are still looking for one single thing it will do as advertized.  It is safe to say that everyone today is looking for how to put a bullet into Obamacare without damaging their careers.  You should have heard the pained discussion about it on National Propaganda Radio this morning.  And the lamestream has put its best crickets on the story.

‘Pay for Delay’ – a capitalist quandary

George Rebane

Big pharma has been playing a very dubious game that doesn’t speak well of free markets, and free enterprise.  Over the years its lobbyists have convinced Congress to put in place some pretty dodgy laws that allow it to skirt the legal edges of what most people understand about anti-trust strictures in this country.  The name for the practice is ‘pay for delay’.

Here’s the short version.  As a big pharma’s patent on a very profitable drug approaches expiry, or another smaller pharma has cracked the code on how to circumvent the patent, the big and smaller company strike a deal to screw the consumer by keeping the price high and the market share of the big company intact.  We all know that as a drug ‘goes off patent’ other pharmas enter the market with knock-off generic versions of the drug at greatly reduced prices.  After all, they didn’t have to pay for developing the drug or the costs to build the market for it, therefore they have no recovery accounting to do in their financial planning.

So what happens?  Well, the big pharma company approaches the smaller company that is the presumed threat, and says ‘we’ll pay you $X under these terms to delay your entry into our drug’s market with your generic version, whaddya say?’  Of course the deal works the other way also with the smaller company approaching the big company saying, ‘We’re about to launch a generic version of your big blockbuster drug that will plummet your financials and share price into the mud.  We want $X under these terms to delay the introduction of our generic version, whaddya say?’

And what can we make of that? it’s clearly price collusion to the detriment of the consumer.  But the involved entities are private companies dealing with their very own intellectual properties.  Why should it be anyone else’s business regarding how they settle their affairs?

We all know the socialist/progressive echo chamber here – they don’t think much of private property to begin with – 'you developed it using public roads for transport and public police for security and …, therefore the damn thing already belongs mostly to the public'.  In short, “You didn’t build that!”  But let’s put this aside for a moment.

As a conservetarian and dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, I could cite chapter and verse from the Austrian school, and tell the Left to go pound sand.  But on second thought, if with what little social consciousness I’m allowed ;-) I consider the situation from the perspective of the (hang on now) capitalist collective, I might come up with a different response.  I do want anyone who develops a beneficial drug that helps millions to get one helluva reward, but do I want them to get it forever?  Maybe I do, since that will draw other competitors to develop better alternatives to get a piece of that pie themselves.

Or do I want someone to come in from the side (usually carrying a very large gun) and tell the pharma what the ‘fair reward’ will be for their risk, expense, and labors.  We kinda already do that with limiting the lifetime of patents – you gotta get it while you still got it.  I dunno, it’s a hard problem that SCOTUS is chewing on right now (more here).  Thoughts?

H/T to a RR reader for the heads up on this.

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.

Payday Loans Regulated

George Rebane

There has been a good deal of moralizing and high dudgeon about how those storefronts that make payday loans are ripping off poor people who are denied loans elsewhere.  It is claimed that the interest charged by these establishments is beyond usurious.  Now regulators are beginning to hyperventilate in a similar vein at banks (more here).

I have a very simple solution to this problem of people with no skin in the game making rules for those to whom fate(?) has consigned such a depressed lifestyle.  We start with the most acceptable presumptions that everyone should be able to borrow money in a free society that operates (more or less) free markets.  And everyone should be free to lend money at terms that they consider acceptable.

My simple solution is that all such regulators and legislators seeking to inhibit the poor from obtaining payday loans be required to remit a goodly portion (say, one third) of their investment portfolios into the capital asset pool(s) of payday lenders who will now lend under the newly prescribed, and presumably more favorable, terms that are deemed fair for that cohort of borrowers.  The regulators will then have skin in the game, and obtain a fair return for their lent dollars.  This will guarantee the most equitable terms to all concerned, and no further guidance or considerations of fairness would then be necessary in the evaluation of the new regulations.

(Hmmm..., does this approach have wider applications in the making of sausages?)

CTA on ‘cultural competency’ – a peek into the pus

George Rebane

Our society is covered with plenty of boils and pimples from our attempts to do the ‘right thing’ with all the political correctness we can muster.  A correspondent sent me a piece on the California Teachers Association website in which the union highlights the politically correct sensitivities and behaviors of teachers confronting students who come to their classrooms from different cultures – ‘Are You Culturally Competent?’  It is definitely worth a read for a better understanding of what goes on behind the curtain that ails us.

The American school is one place where a student new to our country should unambiguously learn what are our customs, language norms, behavioral protocols, dress codes, etc in the course of being taught the subject matter for which he is attending class.  There is already precious little time to get the lesson into the little darlings’ heads without detours to account for what may or not be familiar or acceptable to one or another student.  The lesson behind the lesson that the foreign student should learn is that when he’s in American society, then do as Americans do.  His home and relatives, not the classroom, are the place and people to teach, practice, and perpetuate his culture of origin. 

The fundamental lesson to be learned is that we Americans respect your culture to the extent that you learn and practice America’s culture when in our public arena.  We want you to become at one with us, and not the other way around.  Diluting that effort to acculturate foreign students in our schools in order to demonstrate ‘cultural competency’ works to impede, or at least slow down, assimilation.  And this goes doubly for students who come from global cultures which have already self-declared and demonstrated themselves to be inimical to traditional American values and mores.  (As a non-English speaker from Europe, I was among the tens of thousands of foreign kids fortunate enough to have been introduced to America in public schools at a time when such progressive impediments were not in vogue.)

In sum, this is yet another illustration from the catalog of crap that burdens unionized teachers in public education to the ultimate detriment of us all.

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.

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.

Teach them to code (addended)

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 19 April 2013.]

OK, those of you out there in radio land who want to help a young person find an awesomely interesting and well-paying career, pay close attention to what follows.  The jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM areas, going unfilled number in the millions, and are growing at a rate three times that of non-STEM jobs according to the Dept of Commerce.

Our ability to fill those American jobs continues to sag because our teachers lack the skills to teach and motivate students to enter STEM fields.  We have to remember that it is the STEM fields that provide the country’s major sources of wealth and ability to remain competitive in global markets.  And by any and every measure applied, today we simply are not cutting it.  When a STEM job is created in the United States, it has a shelf life that measures in the months and not years.  If it doesn’t get filled by an American, it gets filled by a foreign national, or worse, it goes overseas.

The fundamental skill that enables rapid progress in a STEM curriculum and in the STEM job markets is the ability to program a computer, to write computer code, or simply to code in one or more of the popular programming languages.  Computers can do nothing without executing some piece of code, and today computers do everything in our society.  Put it all together, it’s not hard.

We need to encourage more pre-teens to start writing code for fun and profit.  And it is fun to see what you have conceived, typed into a text editor, and then executed to perform some interesting task or graphic display that before was just the result of a mysterious process that followed the click of a mouse.  Coding requires learning to reason and think logically, and to conceive of processes in our minds that don’t yet exist – in short, coding requires creativity on steroids.

The easiest and most practical stepping stone to writing your first code is learning the basics of using a spreadsheet program.  Why the spreadsheet?