Rebane's Ruminations

Collecting and Connecting the Dots (Addended)(updated 19jun13)

George Rebane

Head of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, goes in front of a closed doors congressional panel today.  They will quiz him about what data the NSA and other intelligence agencies can collect, have been collecting, and plan to collect on Americans.  He will tell them about the threats thwarted through the nation’s intelligence collecting systems operated by the NSA.   This is all a part of the show of concern for balancing individual privacy and the nation’s security needs that Congress is putting on for our benefit after NSA contractor Edward Snowden outlined how intelligence is developed and named Prism as one such long-running program that snoops on us.




I have no idea what all Snowden gave to Britain’s Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers that would have been news to our enemies, whether they be terrorist organizations or sovereign nation-states.  The information freely available in the public domain allows anyone who understands boxes and arrows to draw the above diagram that is one version of a high level representation of our intelligence gathering schema (click on figure for better resolution).

This level of openness is not shared by everyone in Washington.  Last Sunday on Fox News former VP Dick Cheney told Chris Wallace that even understanding what I’ve put together in the figure should not be public knowledge and would compromise our security.  I totally disagree, and feel we have little to fear from people who don’t already know that we operate such an intelligence gathering scheme – they simply aren’t smart enough to harm us.

My druthers are that Americans understand, to the level indicated in the figure, how our government collects and connects the dots on potential bad guys who mean the country harm.  With such a basic understanding we can talk reasonably about what government branches and agencies do and how they interlink.  We don’t have to know the details about what stuff passes through all the arrows.  But some of the details are important to us.

Buying Ammo in Obamastan

George Rebane

Buying ammo in a proto-autocracy is quite an experience.  This morning a friend and I arrived at 630am for the annual Father’s Day ammo sale at Miwall by the Nevada County airport.  They hand out number cards to serve you in the order of your arrival; we were 201 and 202.  The place was already overflowing with buyers and more were arriving by the minute.  Before the morning was out there would be over 1,000 people assembled on the black top in front of the Miwall warehouse.

Fortunately is was not to be a very hot day, so those waiting in the sun were just on minimum broil.  My friend and I set up our chairs in the shade, broke out our lunchboxes containing breakfasts prepared by the wives of our lives, and just cooled it for three hours talking to neighbors and arrivals from distant parts.  The conversations were uniformly about the sad and saddening state of our nation.  No one could believe that ammunition purchasing in our land has now also become a social statement.

After three hours in our chairs it was time to get into the long serpentine line between the ropes that had been set up.  For some reason, starting with the sheriff’s deputies, there was a lot of security around – many extra men in black t-shirts with belt holsters were in evidence.  Picture taking was frowned upon.  These days only security cameras can photograph your puss during such assemblies.  These videos are, of course, available to the state at their pleasure.  Recording the passing scene where people congregate is rapidly becoming a no-no for private individuals.

Then with almost one more hour in the serpentine, we were finally allowed into the warehouse with our dollies which all experienced ammo buyers always bring – the stuff is heavier than lead.  And today we were introduced to the rationing of 22s – one 500 round brick of long rifles per customer.  The other types were available, but at astronomical prices that no one had experienced before.  Yet people were coming out with their handcarts loaded with various calibers, spending literally thousands of dollars.  And there were a goodly portion of cash buyers who did not want a record of their purchases to wind up in Big Data.

It was after 11am when we loaded our heavy boxes into the truck and pulled out while still more people were arriving.  All late comers were evidently surprised, and kept asking whether they still needed a number this late in the day.  Kindly but firmly they were told, that yes, they still needed a number.  So that is how our gun rights are being constructively removed in the opening decades of the 21st century.  Welcome to the new normal in Obamastan.

A major takeaway from this morning was that we recognized so few of the hundreds of gun enthusiasts and ordinary citizens, all in a panic to stock up before … .  Easily nineteen out of twenty of these gun owners don’t participate in any public forum in which the direction of our country and public policies are discussed or debated.  These people, almost everyone wearing some cap or t-shirt extolling gun rights, the NRA, or whatnot, come out of the woodwork on days like this, then disappear again never to be seen until next year.  And listening to them grouse, there was a great temptation to inform them to get off their collective asses, and do something besides mumbling in their beer.

My friend had an idea that next year various organizations, those which also promote Second Amendment rights as part of their political outlook, should set up information booths at Miwall inviting these ammo buyers to do something in the interval besides shooting their guns and buying more ammo.  Perhaps that will happen, unless the feds either buy more billions of rounds to totally collapse the civilian market, or make it illegal to buy ammo at all without massive registrations, background checks, and fees – or both.

Ruminations - 14jun13 (Addended)

George Rebane

A new democultural milestone has been passed.  More whites now die than are being born in America.  Analyzing Census Bureau data, the Brookings Institution and others report that white women are now bearing 1.9 children on average, and as we all know, population stability occurs somewhere around 2.1 children to account for the death demographic that covers the range from infant mortality to old age.  This so-called “natural decrease” was previously predicted to start in 2020.  No big deal, all my life I have been in the minority in more categories than I care to count.  This just places all whites into one more minority group as our population is “browning up from the bottom.”  (more here)  Thermodynamics at work.

And another majority is firming up in this new age.  Given the multiple and growing IRS and DOJ scandals, the Pew Research Center reports that a majority of Americans – 53% - now believe that “the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms.”  (more here)  This, of course, is contrary to the opinion held by the hunky-dory segment of our political spectrum.

AmeriCorps is a bust.  That conclusion, long suspected, is now pretty much accepted by both sides of the aisle.  Author James Bovard writes, “After nearly 20 years and billions of taxpayer dollars, AmeriCorps has little to show.” (more here) The program has been another part of our feelgood government that has been kept alive by “Soviet style accounting” where effort is confused with accomplishment.  IMHO, soviet style accounting keeps most extra-constitutional government programs going.

Mental illness is incurable.  I conclude that from looking at how we selectively discriminate against people with any kind of mental malady in their history, ranging from being institutionalized to just seeing some kind of shrink with any one of a dozen sets of initials behind their name.  And the category of things a person with such a taint on the record is no longer qualified or permitted to do grows daily.  No proof beyond someone having accused you of being this or that, and the authorities investigating it is enough to condemn you for life – that stigma is indelible.  The latest proscription that government now seeks is to put such an item into the coming national gun database.  Today states have various thresholds for denying their residents the ability to buy/own firearms.  (more here)  But in whichever database, if that ‘mental history’ box is checked, your Second Amendment rights are history – you are incurable.

[Addendum] Nevada County’s marijuana code wars are ramping up again.  After posting the above, I received an email from Ms Patricia Smith, chariman of Americans for Safe Access – Nevada County, that contained a press release (Download Marijuana - PR Inititive Filing) which states that “on Monday, June 17, Americans for Safe Access - NC will be filing a Request for a Special Election to replace Ordinance 2349 with the Safe Cultivation Act of Nevada County.”  Also appended was a draft copy of the proposed Safe Cultivation Act (Download Marijuana - Patti's Initiative).  The conflicting and confusing laws and codes which define legal marijuana cultivation and use in America, California, and individual counties are fueling an unnecessary discontent that contributes more heat than light to the existing ideological incoherence already rampant in the land.  Another example of our inept politicians at work.

The Liberal Mind – Banish Bayes to Restore Crime

George Rebane

Over the years the charges of discrimination, racism, and racial profiling have flown thick and fast from our liberal cadres who oppose various policies of law enforcement.  And more specifically, the allocation of resources in such enforcement practices is always questioned when it weighs more heavily on one group vs another no matter the reason or particulars behind such allocations.  In such attacks from the Left, simplistic quotas rule the day.

A current example of this that will have national implications on our country’s crime rates is how the case of Floyd vs New York, addressing the NYPD’s ‘Stop, question, and frisk’ policy, will be resolved.

NYC’s crime rates have plummeted since the city restored some common sense policing policies returning to the officer on the beat historical prerogatives that every one of my generation understood and accommodated.  No one claims that a policeman’s ability to exercise SQF was never abused, but in the large and for generations it was put to effective use across the land.  NYC’s recent success has demonstrated that SQF’s politically correct removal from the law enforcement toolkit contributed greatly to increased murder and other crime rates over the last decades.

Today certified racist demagogues like the Rev Al Sharpton are leading the fight to have SQF repealed.  His success will cost lives in the black and Hispanic communities, and help restore crime rates to their former levels across the land.  But to that sumbich burnishing his public image trumps lowering crime and saving lives every time.  And the innumerate sheeple he agitates and herds don’t have a clue.

America, quo vadis et cui bono?

George Rebane

Economic historian Niall Ferguson invites an answer to that question by first addressing ‘How America Lost Its Way’.  As the Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dr Ferguson is a man of some accomplishment and moment.  His new book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die publishes this Thursday.  The punchline of his message is that “it is getting ever harder to do business in the United States, and more stimulus won’t help: Our institutions need fixing.”

I bring this latest expose of America’s decline to the attention of RR readers as a matter of strong corroboration of the same message being documented regularly in these pages.  The Left’s echo chamber continues to divert the dialogue to discounting these warnings as the product of isolated sclerotic minds disconnected from the progressive push to recovery, now that the messiah is in the Oval Office, after having banished the deviltries of Bush2 and his crowd.  Ferguson argues that nothing could be further from the truth.

Citing metric after international metric, he shows the steady, alarming, and accelerating decline of the US in the last years.  We rank in the mud – the sixth worst in the world - with the likes of Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Yemen in the growth of regulatory friction that it takes to carry out a set of benchmark business practices.  And it is all due to the bureaucracies that our governments have set up.  Ferguson confirms that the recent and biggest buckets of sand into the country’s productive gears are Frank-Dodd and Obamacare, with the damage from these growing by the day.

And as we all know, the direct beneficiaries from all this bureaucracy and regulatory fog are not only the liberal politicians but also the “lawyers, not forgetting lobbyists and compliance departments. For complexity is not the friend of the little man. It is the friend of the deep pocket. It is the friend of cronyism.”  In the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index we have dropped from first place (yes, at the depth of the Great Recession) to seventh place on Obama’s watch.

In this light Ferguson asks, “What is the process at work here? Perhaps this is a victory from beyond the grave for classical Western political theory. Republics, after all, were regarded by most ancient political philosophers as condemned to decadence, or to imperial corruption. This was the lesson of Rome. Democracy was always likely to give way to oligarchy or tyranny. This was the lesson of the French Revolution. The late Mancur Olson had a modern version of such cyclical models, arguing that all political systems were bound to become the captives, over time, of special interests. The advantage enjoyed by West Germany and Japan after World War II, he suggested, was that all the rent-seeking elites of the pre-1945 period had been swept away by defeat. This was why Britain won the war but lost the peace.”

In the meantime we are busily building up our cadres of rent seekers, assured by progressive economists that our salvation lies in ever more borrowing, fiscal stimulus, higher taxes, and quantitative easing (money printing).  No one in Washington, and most certainly not in Sacramento, is facing up to the real impediments to growth and the resurgence of America.

It worked the first time (updated 9jun13)

Do not exhibit your sore finger for all to strike upon, and do not complain of it, for malice always pounds where it hurts most. …  Gracian #145

George Rebane
We have been told that the war on Al Qaeda and terrorism is over, and learn that the war on Americans has started.  The revelations of the last several weeks tell of it.  President Obama’s most compelling admission was his sidestep of the question put to him – Does the government’s big data maintain files on all Americans? 

To that we can add the fed’s recent and massive purchases of guns, (anti-personnel) ammo, MRAPs, …, the launch of FEMA Corps, and the reported construction of its nationwide ‘facilities’, all for the putative defense of the homeland. Now how again do you spell S-T-A-S-I?

[8jun13 update]  The Director of National Intelligence today released this "fact sheet" on PRISM.

[9jun13 update]  Now put Gen Clapper's "fact sheet" (claptrap?) and its exquisite wordsmithing in perspective with the Top Secret PRISM slides published by the Guardian, and available on Kurzweil's blog here.

Ruminations – 6jun13 (updated 7jun13)

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. ...  General Dwight David Eisenhower, 6 June 1944.

George Rebane

NPR continues its coverage of Holder, DOJ assault on journalists, and IRS political targetings.  Again they seem not to have gotten the word from their leftwing thought leaders here in Nevada County, those who tell us daily that the Obama scandals make no never mind, and are already relegated to the dustbin of history.  Perhaps our locals should send NPR an email or two for a heads up on the error of their ways.

The local supes look like they’re going to continue wasting (aka pissing away) a half a million to maintain their program of code compliance harassment or enforcement, whatever.  One supe even justified the low ROI from the program by comparing building code compliance expenditures with the sheriff’s department budget, citing that the latter also costs a lot and doesn’t return much money.  Logic like that sure explains away the financial messes in which most local jurisdictions wallow today.  I can already hear the hew and cry from our citizens if the county should stop sending its code enforcement cadres out into the hills – ‘No, please come and inspect me!  I may have overlooked some code infractions that need correcting, and fees that I still need to pay.  Puhleeeze!’  Makes all the sense in the world to equate the critical services provided by the sheriff and those of the county code compliance department (under the Community Development Agency, CDA), you think?

We the iSheeple

George Rebane

The RR category ‘We the Sheeple’ has been renamed ‘We the iSheeple’ in order to keep up with the times that require starting certain words with the lower case ‘i’.  Except for some outrageous ideas wrangled in these pages, RR has been pretty staid in its approach to format and matters of eye candy.  During the life of this commentary there has been a steady rise in the number of media reports that acknowledge, nay, confirm that we live in a land of the ill-informed, insouciant, inane, ignorant, insane, and idiotic – hence the real reason for adorning Sheeple with an i, for it gives meaning and therefore belongs there.

For the few that may care, the i that metaphorically broke this camel’s back was a couple of insane non-sequitors in the 3jun13 Union.  It seems that a band of idiots gathered recently to deny elephant rides to children attending this year’s upcoming Nevada County Fair.  These same people are the local representatives of known regional and national organizations that concern themselves with such things as ethical treatment of animals and children’s safety, and other matters that in their daily round iSheeple are not capable of handling themselves.

And then we come to a local moving & storage company that now has to get rid of its perfectly good trucks and replace them with new ones prescribed by CARB, the enforcer of our state’s mega-albatross job killer AB32.  To the tune of $1.3M they will comply with this certifiably insane legislation and accede to the mandated purchase of fourteen new vehicles that purportedly will sport cleaner engines.  The result of the costly exercise will have absolutely no measurable effect on any clean air metric you care to dredge up, let alone any effect on providing a better quality of life to earth’s inhabitants.

Of course I could go on, and perusing my past posts shows that I have done so in abundance.  More than ever, and with each passing day it is beyond any lingering reasonable doubt that we have become a nation of iSheeple - the ill-informed, insouciant, inane, ignorant, insane, and idiotic.

Mugsy explains it away

George Rebane

[At police headquarters we enter the viewing room showing an interrogation already in progress with Mugsy, an accomplished bank robber.]

Detective:  So Mugsy, we had you under surveillance and saw you enter the bank packing heat and a note in your pocket that read, ‘THIS IS A HOLDUP, don’t make any noise or press the alarm.  Bring me all the money in a bag.’
Mugsy: Yeah, but I wasn’t gonna do nuttin’.
D:  What d’ya mean you wasn’t going to do nothin’?  You had the gun and the note when you were walking up to the teller window.
M:  Yeah, yeah.  But that don’t mean nuttin’, cause I wasn’t going to rob no bank.
D:  Now you don’t expect anyone to believe that.  What were you going to do if we hadn’t stopped you?
M:  Well, I was just going to hand the note to the teller, and when she brought me the money, I was planning to give it back to her, and tell her it was all just a gag.
D:  Hmm, … alright, I guess that story will hold water.  OK you’re free to go, but next time Mugsy, be careful with your jokes.  We coulda accidently shot you, know what I mean?

... in the Eye of the Beholder

"That's because we haven't yet played Cowboys and Muslims, but it's a'comin'."  (punchline to a joke about a conversation between an American Indian, a Muslim exchange student, and an old cowboy waiting at a small town airport in Montana.)

George Rebane

Readers should be clear by now that I don’t record these thoughts to endear myself to as many hearts as possible.  I saw a piece on today’s WSJ online edition that called to mind the important things that I believe our country (world?) is facing.  And it isn’t global warming or healthcare or immigration reform or … .

Instead, according to my lights the world shaking issues we are facing are 1) the approach of the Singularity, 2) the entrenchment of national dumbth, 3) the race between tyranny and the war between civilizations.  Singularity’s approach is driven by AI, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering.  It’s byproducts are universal online education, destabilizing systemic unemployment, accelerating inequities, and species threatening ‘plague’.

The country's dumbth (google it) is here and politically ineradicable.  The national commons has been established and is well on its way to being destroyed, while the attempts to maintain it will take America to the brink of revolution.

Due to the inexorable course of issues 1 and 2 our present progress toward a post-constitutional tyranny is also well established and abetted by technology.  And given our refusal to acknowledge the dominant dynamism of Islam, its colonization of infidel lands will accelerate, punctuated by ever greater incidents of terror that will have the weaker societies suing for peace at any cost – adoption of Sharia being the least of them (more here, here, and here).  Only a ‘great awakening’ in the west, of which no harbinger is evident, would preclude such a pre-Singularity future.  If the Singularity ‘wins’ this race, all bets are off by definition.

These are all issues and predictions that have decorated these pages for years now.  I see no observables that would cause me to recant any of this record.  So I was surprised to see an interview with Jaan Tallinn in the 2jun13 WSJ.  Tallinn is the inventor of Skype and co-founder of the early stage company that capitalized the technology.  He is now building a new company “MetaMed, which promises customers personalized health-care research and analysis of their medical conditions.”  (These are the kind of innovations that will wind up providing the real improvements in healthcare.)

In the interview Tallinn goes on to outline his own apprehensions about mankind’s shared future which are eerily in lockstep with what I have been trying to alert my family, friends, and RR readers.

What risks worry him? "The first one is artificial intelligence," he says. "The second is the things that technological progress might create that we're unaware of right now." … His third fear is biological risk. "There could be synthetic viruses that evolution doesn't even know how to create," says Mr. Tallinn. For all practical purposes, he suggests, evolution stopped with the advent of gene technology. "The future of the planet depends much more on technology than evolution," he adds.

When one’s notions are so frequently out of step with popularly received wisdom, it is heartening to run across yet another respected co-traveler with similar views.  Maybe it’s just an Estonian thing, but I don’t think so.