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.

Ruminations – 13apr13

George Rebane

A socialist believes that human nature can be legislated.

IEEE reports that ‘Robots are not killing jobs’ in an interview with Dr Henrik Christensen, Director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech.  His argument to support the proposition is to invoke the same ol’ same ol’ – technology, including robotics, is just going through the classic creative destruction, destroying some jobs while making new ones.  To bring along the recently arrived on the planet, he cites the example of the displaced typing pool employees who had the opportunity to become administrative assistants for executives.  What the good professor, and the many who have not thought much about the problem, fall prey to is the fact that the new jobs, if any, always require a bit more between the ears than the bygone jobs did.  And that makes a good fraction of any new jobs inaccessible to the laid off workers.  I illustrated this problem fully in ‘edX meets the workforce’.  From reading the interview you can tell that even Dr Christensen is not completely comfortable with his thesis.

Obama’s $100M BRAIN initiative is poorly conceived and will wind up pissing away the tax dollars poured into it.  This is the (my rephrased) position taken by Dr Don Stein, a Distinguished Professor In the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Emory University.  His argument is clear and persuasive; Obama’s BRAIN program seeks to follow in the footsteps of the Apollo Moon Landing and the Human Genome Programs, both of which had clear objectives and means of measuring progress along the way.  BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) has none of these, and is typical of the way this administration has cobbled together policy, legislation, and national initiatives.  Please read ‘The BRAIN Map Initiative Needs Rethinking’ (also picked up by Kurzweil).

Finally, we have another excellent dissertation on my favorite communist website, truthout.com (consider all hot buttons pushed).  Dr Gar Alperovitz, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland who knows not the definitions of system and systemic, writes the extensive, easy to read, and passionate (and scary) ‘The Question of Socialism (and Beyond!) Is About to Open Up in These United States’.  Among the sobering tidbits (H-bombs?) that decorate and bolster his case are –

Leading polling organizations have found converging results among younger Americans. Two recent Rasmussen surveys, for instance, discovered that Americans younger than 30 are almost equally divided as to whether capitalism or socialism is preferable. Another Pew survey found those aged 18 to 29 have a more favorable reaction to the term "socialism" by a margin of 49 to 43 percent.

Who says teachers’ unions and progressive profs have not been doing their job?  Our young have been carefully taught, and I’m afraid we have seen nothing yet.  Republicans, call your office.

The Liberal Mind on Choices and Fortune

George Rebane

Capitalism works best when corporations must woo their customers instead of government.

There is something in the liberal mindset that does not understand ‘choice’ when applied to individual responsibility.  In a recent comment stream one such reader stated –

“Do people actually choose to be poor? How many poor people would refuse a million bucks if handed to them by their daddies? Do people choose to die young because they can't afford proper healthcare? Do people choose to be hungry or watch their children starve? Do people choose to be homeless and sleep under a tarp in the snow? Do people choose to be miserable? I think not. "Individual choice" is corporate double speak for the freedom to pollute, sell us products that are unsafe, and use our children as cannon fodder to rid the world of leaders and economic systems not to their liking, all in the name of profit. Don't you get that you are being conned?”

Since the apparent answer to such ‘choose’ questions is NO, then that is sufficient reason to 1) require those not so afflicted be forced to sustain the afflicted, and 2) that there is a mysterious yet substantial connection between the notion of ‘freedom to choose’ and a nefarious catalog of corporate misbehaviors.  Before going further, I want to emphasize that such a belief and its follow-on reasoning is a common thought pattern among our liberal brethren – the above commenter is not flying solo.

Astounding as it may be, it is clear that the liberal does not consider or understand the causal sequence of mediating events/states that is usually involved between a decision to do/be or not, and the resulting state of misfortune.  They see it as a one step process – you either chose to, say, “watch your children starve”, or it was visited upon you by fate.  And since no one would really choose misfortune, it had to be the result of spontaneous and pernicious fate, or worse, the inevitable outfall of capitalism, corporatism, Christianity, greedy enterprise, free markets, and other divers trappings of social injustice.

Ideologies and Governance – a structured look

Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be labeled as "extremists".

George Rebane

Hereabouts and in more distinguished forums the governance debate continues as to which types belong to the Left or the Right.  The confusion from the Left’s academics seems to be with monarchy and fascism, and that stems from their use of the wrong set of coordinates that can productively frame the discussion.  In the minds of some pundits, the attributes of a given governance type are totally absent.  But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below.
Without stopping to quibble about the specifics of what constitutes the ‘center’ or ‘moderate’, the single dimensional spectrum above does have some curious bookends.  The leftmost one ends in ‘communism/totalitarianism’, which state of affairs is reached after passing through a region where anarchism rules.  And the rightmost ends in ‘fascism/monarchy’ after also passing through anarchism.  The better read student here will immediately point out that the Left’s anarchism is not the same as that of the Right’s.  This is indeed correct, and I’ll have more to say about that below.  However, in this fractured view, regardless of each having traversed the swamp of anarchy, both sides terminate in totalitarian forms of governance under the absolute control of a great leader.

A more accurate, useful, and historically exercised representation of ideologies and their supportive types of governance is given in the figure below (click to enlarge).  Here we use a representation common in the system sciences wherein one significant dimension/attribute is isolated as being perpendicular (orthogonal) to a plane that contains all the other dimensions/attributes.

For the discussion of ideologies and their supportive forms of governance, the dominant dimension shown in the figure is the level of government control of the land and the affairs of its people.  This ranges from a 100%, suffered under the absolute rule of a totalitarian dictator, to 0%, wherein anarchy is the order of the day and there are no visible institutions of state.  In the figure the variation in this level of control is shown by the thick red line in the plane (dimension) perpendicular to the field (multiple dimensions) of the types of government control, hence governance.

Understanding this framework immediately clarifies the debate over what labeled ideology belongs where.  I have shown the various collectivistic labels distributed on generalized trajectories of governance as they proceed leftward (orange lines) in the direction of greater government control of wealth creation/distribution, property ownership, class memberships, and behaviors (liberties) permitted to the individual.

Wealth Creation & Distribution – A Progressive’s View

Ben Emery

[Editor:  This piece by Mr Ben Emery evolved from a thread in the comment stream to ‘Progressive Radio – the Dangerfield of the airwaves’.  There Mr Emery posted and extended response to my 909pm comment which appears below.

BenE 807pm - It reappears that you and yours believe that the amount of wealth on earth is fixed, and humans live to just redistribute that wealth in a grim zero sum contest with the winners being those who can unjustly take it from the losers. You don't see 'jobs' which can add enormously to man's aggregate wealth, in the process increasing the QoL for millions (billions?), and then taking a small fraction of that for themselves. That small fraction will still cause great inequality, and that to you is the injustice that we cannot countenance while some in the world are still suffering. It is better that no such new wealth is created, it is better that we all stay at some previous lower but more equal QoL level. That is probably what you all call 'social justice'.
Under this (to me horrible) ideology one person here, who creates nothing, should be empowered to define what is the proper level of risk and reward for another person there, one who wants to create wealth and a better life on earth for all in reach of that new creation. And if all cannot share equally in the new creation, then none should share in it.
Does this understanding provide you with an inkling of why we are so polarized, and why the likelihood of a Great Divide increases by the day?
Posted by: George Rebane | 11 February 2013 at 09:09 PM

Since wealth and its distribution was a thread somewhat afield from the topic of progressive radio, and worthy of discussion on its own merits, I invited Mr Emery to draft his comments into a response that could be published as a single piece, and serve as a dedicated forum for its discussion and debate.  With minor edits to promote clarity, that piece appears in the following.  Nothing has been removed from the original comment stream where the preamble to this post remains intact.  gjr]

Progressive Radio – the Dangerfield of the airwaves

George Rebane

Peter Collins on truthout.com (my favorite socialist cum communist website) laments about progressive talk radio not getting any traction over the years.  In ‘An Insider's View of the Progressive Talk Radio Devolution’ talk show host Collins goes through a litany of liberal radio’s travails during recent years, and concludes –

As someone who took substantial personal risk in syndication and station ownership, I can tell you that progressive talk has not panned out as a viable business. Clinton's 1996 deregulation of broadcasting and the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 didn't help. I do think the FCC should require some balance of viewpoints on the stations it regulates, through the license renewal process, but there is simply no interest on the part of Obama and his appointees in regulatory reform - even as the president is pilloried by right-wing radio on a daily basis. Air America's parade of management blunders produced the downward spiral that brought us to this tipping point for progressive talk radio, and most station owners, rightly or wrongly, see that failure as an indication that audiences won't support liberal talk radio.

His appeal to government diktat to limit the success of conservative radio is indicative of the overall disease that afflicts liberals’ desire to muzzle the right with the power of the government’s gun.  (It appears that the wind is blowing the other way, cf ‘Fairness Doctrine, RIP’.)  But nowhere in his recounting does the light ever go on to illuminate the real problem with liberal radio.  He and other progressive pinheads believe “that audiences won’t support liberal talk radio.”  Sure they do; but the problem is that those audiences are tiny, and correctly reflect the intellectual demographic of our nation’s Left.

To enjoy talk radio beyond the 17 slogans that drive liberal thought on the evening's sitcoms and lamestream news, you have to have a working ideology, one that is constantly weighed against the daily happenings across the nation that impact the operations of governance.  You can't promote a leftwing dialectic against the realities of the day's news, it doesn't work.  Even people with limited abilities start giggling after being subjected to that kind of 'rationale'.

Therefore, such large audiences have never existed on the Left.  Look at the idiots who represent them (I know, the Repubs have had a few notable lumps there too lately), all of whom convince their know-nothing constituencies of a few simple class warfare messages, and that about puts a bow on their participation in the national dialogue.  Collins et al don’t have a clue here, or are in understandably deep denial of that reality.

But Collins is one of their heavy thinkers, and he’s not satisfied with the Left’s victories at the polls.  Well he should be.  And there’re more of those voters on the way with new Dem 'voter rights' bills that promise to sweep the streets clean of all the residuals who can still make their mark (optional at that) on an instant registration form – no address required, thank you very much.  What would Collins say to these 2x4s with faces painted on them?  most certainly nothing that will satisfy a keen intellect that’s been honed over the years to communicate complex collectivist rationale for bigger government and a more even distribution of wealth across America.

My advice to Collins is to rejoice in the Dems having finally forged a compliant (and growing?) flock of voters that can override any assault which conservative talk radio could ever hope to marshal.  The power of “stash” is beyond intellectual debate - as long as the government checks keep coming, all is well.

Ruminations – 9feb13 (updated)

George Rebane

The prestigious national newspaper Investor’s Business Daily has now picked up the alarm about the feds’ enormous ammo and gun buys.  (RR readers were made aware of these developments months ago.)  All of the weaponry is designated for in-country use in the US, and amounts involved are enough to support the Iraq war use rate (5.5M rounds per month) to continue that level of combat for 24 years.  (H/T to reader)

MIT mavens in artificial intelligence acknowledge that AI (robots) will permanently kill jobs while increasing the nation’s productivity as they replace humans.  This has been a longstanding area of interest on RR (see Singularity Signposts) for the last several years, recently culminating in a series on the economic impact of productivity growth on unemployment given the government imposed slow growth that is planned for the remainder of this decade.  It is also heartening for me to finally hear corroboration of the thesis that such intelligent machines “could create more inequality.”  The message here has been ‘bet on it’ (here and here).

This should not be a matter of joy to anyone.  Those who can design and work with such machines will prosper, and prosper magnificently.  Those who have to compete with them will suffer the fate of ‘John Henry, the Steel Drivin’ Man’.  Congress is still in denial about this future, but it is good to at least see academics of the technical stripe pick up on this and start making public statements (example here).
 

Obamacare is now an identified and almost universally recognized albatrsos hung around the nation’s neck.  As more and more of it comes to light and is implemented, the disastrous numbers continue to roll in about its impact on America’s healthcare and overall economy.  One thing is certain, EVERY benefit that this new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, starting with its cynical name, has turned out to be a bald-faced lie.  Nothing salutary of it remains except the cries of a few true believers in his second coming, and, of course, all those legions of new government workers hired to bilk their fellow citizens.

Recently even the quantitative comparisons with many European socialized healthcare systems have been cast in doubt with the revelation that it takes an extra envelope stuffed with cash passed under the table to a physician or administrator to be approved for a procedure, moved up in the que, or actually have the service performed.  These bribes are called “informal payments’ and have been the norm for decades in underfunded nationalized health systems with poorly paid workers.  As such national healthcare systems start suffering cutbacks, this practice is also spreading to the richer countries.  In any case, it’s hard to compare costs in the face of such dealings.  One is reminded of attempting to equate unemployment rates between nations practicing various levels of socialism and/or communism.  About the future of Obamacare no one should be surprised.

[update]  Burnished bullshit.  That is about the best that can be said for the YubaNet reported study by Glantz and Grana of UCSF.  The connection between the Tea Party and the tobacco industry and/or "tobacco interests" is utter nonsense and no more intimate than the celebrated fact that literally any two people on earth can be joined by no more than 'six degrees of separation' or six links on the grand sociogram of the world.  Here's their strong point from YubaNet's breathless report -

"From previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, IRS filings and other publicly available documents, the study authors traced a decades-long chain of personal, corporate and financial relationships between tobacco companies, tobacco industry lobbying and public relations firms and nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party."

Study authors Glantz and Grana are cheap-shot demogauges of the worst kind - i.e. they generate their politically motivated progressive pap on taxpayer dollars.  The connection from which they weave their egregious relationship (conspiracy?) is that the nation's tea parties have, of course, used the imagery that has come to represent the historical occasion in Boston harbor.  That imagery was apparently also used by 'tobacco interests' in promoting their industry.  And that is the thread these liberal 'scholars' use to sew together today's tea partiers and the evil tobacco industry.

That leftwing blogs like YubaNet gleefully publish and give full credence to such studies points clearly to the other layer of manure that the lamestream and liberal echo chambers have been coating the countryside with - the tea parties are history, pay no attention to the little burble they caused in 2010, everything is back under control.

Boy Scouts and Homosexuality

George Rebane

The latest progressive dust devil on the landscape is the campaign to force a private organization to accept its mores and values regarding homosexuals in society.  Ruminating a bit on the topic, some thoughts came to mind I have not seen discussed.

For eons pubescent boys and girls have been separated in uncountable cultures for the purpose of achieving some focused group activity, objective, or ritual.  The reason is simple, heterosexual boys and girls begin to succumb to the dictates of their burgeoning hormones, and consequently pay less/no attention to the purpose for which they have gathered as a group.  This is especially true when the gathering also involves group eating, sleeping, and performing ablutionary activities. 

It would have been unthinkable to place boys and girls together in such settings where thoughts could and would turn extra-curricular.  Young boys would fantasize about being the only male in a girls’ dorm, and in response society fixed things so that peeking in windows was about as close as such wishes could be fulfilled.  We learned long ago not to mess with hormones.

Now there are people who want to put young males into situations in which they are exposed to other sexually attractive young males, and in similar fashion for young females.  The theory being that a homosexual’s hormones can be turned on/off like a light switch, or (gasp!) maybe homosexual tendencies are only in the mind which can succumb to therapy.  In either case these arguments are a stretch, and a bridge too far for established 21st century ‘truths’.

So let’s posit that the Boy Scouts and other young people’s organizations bow to progressive pressures, and groups of boys only (and girls only) find themselves with a homosexual or two in their midsts (recall, today homosexuals have no compunction to ‘stay in the closet’ – gay pride and all that).  The homosexuals, of course, would consider it a boon, else no one would want to foist their joining such groups under duress.  And here comes the point – such fortuitous introduction of the odd sexually oriented individual into a single gendered group is discrimination pure and simple.

Why could not a heterosexual young person sue a single gendered group for the opportunity to be equally titillated as are his/her homosexual compatriots?  Or why could not the parents of a homosexual boy, fully aware of the pubescent focus arguments, not sue to have a girls school accept their son so that he could be in an educational environment that is not distractive?

I could go on with more examples dear reader, and so could you.  The point made here is that we are again fiddling with the latch on another Pandora’s Box.

The Liberal Mind – Topical trumps Synoptic

George Rebane

The ongoing debates on current issues such as budget, deficits, gun control, healthcare, climate change, immigration reform, … highlight one of the most robust aspects of how Left and Right thinking are fundamentally different.  As witnessed by RR’s Liberal Mind category, this is a long abiding subject of interest to me, and apparently becoming so to others inhabiting the polar regions of our ideological globe.  There is something fundamental and basic to how both sides present and argue their positions on the issues.  And since RR readers fervently debate these issues, I want to introduce a couple of new terms from the technical field that, perhaps, best capture the meaning of the different approaches.

A pair of arcane terms in science and technology that have yet to follow ‘feedback’, ‘bandwidth’, ‘in the loop’, ‘cloud’, … into the common lexicon are ‘synoptic’ and ‘topical’.  Dictionaries often define synoptic as “affording or taking a general view of the principal parts of a subject”.  In science and technology synoptic denotes notions that refer to an area in the large, be it the entire history or time window of a process, the overall design of a large-scale system, the complex inter-relationships of this with all of those, or a stream/collection of data in a database.  A synoptical argument captures the large scale of the subject that may even include objectives and measures of utility.  Something synoptic is of encompassing scope.

The other end of the semantic notion of scope is topical which denotes anything of limited scope.  Again, the more common definition of topical is that “pertaining to or dealing with matters of current or local interest.”  But in the broader context I’m discussing here, things topical are limited in time and space, they are arguments, notions, appeals to the here and now, or entail some specific example(s) of a larger scheme, examples that need not be at all representative of the whole.  This last point is very important in the understanding of the proper meaning of topical.  Specific examples/incidents are sometimes also called anecdotal, and therefore a topical description of something subsumes the semantic of anecdotal examples, occasions, happenings, samples, etc.

With this understanding, I now can make a more powerful proposition regarding how the Left and the Right contend on issues in the public arena.  The Left overwhelmingly presents its support and/or promotion of ideals and issues in distinctly topical frameworks.  Whether it is healthcare or gun control, we are regaled with stories of a specific individual who is denied a critical medical procedure, or have eleven bullets pumped into their little body.

Climate Change – Another Asymmetric Dialogue

George Rebane

Bjorn Lomborg is an internationally recognized and much published environmentalist.  He even believes that AGW is a factor in climate change.  Recently he wrote an article that was critical of President Obama’s inaugural “three horsemen of the climate apocalypse” listed as the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms".  The astute reader knows that there have been no such increases in fires, droughts, and storms with which the Left likes to decorate its calls for greater government control of everything under the sun.

And Lomborg does a fine job of again summarizing the data on all this.  But that is not what I want to talk about.  The vagaries of the climate change data and its in/correct interpretations have been argued for years by qualified scientists and technically savvy bloggers (locally by Russ Steele and Anthony Watts).  What I want to reprise is how substantive reports on issues – here about the misinformation spewed by AGW True Believers – are treated in today’s polarized public debate.

Lomborg’s assertion concludes, “Fear-mongering exaggeration about effects of global warming distracts us from finding affordable and effective energy alternatives.”  As an AGW skeptic I wholeheartedly agree with that.  Unfortunately, fear-mongering is the only stock in trade that the Left has for making its collectivist policies palatable to the general public, even if it means outright misrepresentation of the record.   But more important, it is the asymmetry of how the debate is conducted that makes the fear-mongering stick.