Rebane's Ruminations

Kamalanomics = Bidenomics on steroids

[This piece was published in the op-ed section of the 4sep24 Union as one of their Other Voices columns (here).]

George Rebane

Since ‘smarts’ and ‘poor’ don’t always correlate well, the financially burdened will again suffer the most if and when Kamalanomics kicks in and amplifies the terrible mistakes of Bidenomics.  From the Democrats’ published record Kamalanomics is a socialist-ingrained misinterpretation of economics that views wealth creation as a zero sum game in which businesses, entrepreneurs, and the wealthy are characterized as “corporate monopolists” and “oligarchs” – in short, they only take money from the middle and lower income classes which must then be forcefully redistributed by government.

As President Obama assured the country’s successful entrepreneurs who do create wealth and provide jobs for the rest of us, “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”  For our progressives it is always the wise and munificent hand of government that actually does the business building and job creation.  Absent government intervention, to our leftwing all else is “trickle-down economics” where some wealth eventually and grudgingly dribbles down an uneven playing field to those less fortunate.  And, of course, the playing field must then be continuously leveled to “grow the middle class out” through still more laws, regulations, fees and higher taxes on the wealth creators to insure that the “greedy billionaires” and “well-heeled” pay their “fair share” in amounts known only to government bureaucrats.  The inevitable result is that everyone’s cost of living goes up and quality of life diminishes.  Check the government data on the impact of Bidenomics over the last 3.5 years.

The exact opposite happened under President Trump according to the Dept of Commerce and IRS.  His deregulation measures and tax cuts resulted in very low inflation and gave rise to 70% faster real wage growth that specifically benefitted our Hispanics and blacks as compared to Obama’s eight years of government-shackled historically slow growth.  However, during Democrat administrations the prime beneficiaries of job growth are new legions of government workers who in the large add sand into the gears of the nation’s commerce and GDP growth.  Biden’s claimed recent creation of 15 million jobs overwhelmingly consists of government hires and those of the inevitable recovery from rebounding COVID job shutdowns.

Now on the road to “happiness and joy” President Harris promises to control inflation under Kamalanomics through policies such as:

• National price controls on goods and services that inevitably result in shortages, distribution disruptions, and lower quality goods and services;
• Nationalized (single payer) healthcare – unsustainable wherever practiced while reducing access and services;
• A 66% increase in corporate taxes always paid for by customers through higher prices and by workers with lower wage gains;
• Capital gains tax will increase to income tax levels (39%+) that will inhibit and distort America’s investment landscape;
• Destruction of small businesses by taxing owners for unrealized capital gains – cash they don’t have and to get they must liquidate their businesses;
• Digitizing the dollar (falsely promoted as “crypto currency”) so that our money’s future as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account will be strictly monitored and controlled by government diktat and the Federal Reserve. (Kiss gold ownership goodbye.)  For all intents and purposes private property will then be no more (recall that you own something ONLY to the extent that you can dispose of it as you wish).

Liberals don’t understand how human (e.g. investor) behavior is impacted through reducing reward while increasing and/or maintaining risk.  They believe that tax rates don’t impact risk taking.  Progressives demonstrate daily that they have no idea about the sources and levels of risk encountered in starting a business.  Moreover, liberals have no inkling that increasing taxes from their already current highs will actually decrease government revenues – Democrats believe that simply imposing higher tax rates on the private sector will automatically bring in more money.  And that lowering taxes (yes, even on the ’rich’) have never resulted in higher government revenues or increasing our quality of life.

In sum, we have already been told enough about the kind of democracy and freedom that Democrats controlling Congress and the Executive will deliver under Kamalanomics – just look at the countries with all-encompassing autocratic central governments.

Sandbox – 4sep24

[The administration’s sleazebag liars and their media minions are promoting their Big Lie du jour by claiming that under Bumblebrain’s watch grocery prices have decreased.  In reality nothing could be further from the truth; grocery prices have risen markedly under Biden, they continue to grow, but today at a slightly lower rate.  The Democrats know that their lightly read voters aren’t bright enough to pick up the difference between inflation levels and inflation rates, easily confusing the two.  The lamestream media moguls, of course, will just repeat White House lies, never clarifying anything that may jeopardize reliable votes for leftwing causes and politicians. gjr]

STEM education and careers – not for everyone

George Rebane

Our socially destructive culture has long done a number on students with the extraordinary capacity to study and make it in STEM careers.  Part of the socialist agenda for the US is to impress in the population a belief that we are fundamentally all equal, with all of us capable of anything as long as the state suppresses the bad angels of discrimination with which we, especially the whites, are burdened.  And to accomplish this we need to make sure that Billy and Jill grow up in an environment of mirror-fogging equity instead of merit-based equal opportunity in which today DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is the chosen form of politically acceptable social environment.

Unfortunately, the realworld is fashioned on quite a different landscape where our capacities have developed differentially.  Today diversity is recognized, but in a highly qualified manner and under precisely and politically prescribed circumstances.  Diversity that leads to differential capacities to perform, especially in the cognitive areas, is not only rejected but also proscribed in some places by laws that may lead to incarceration.  Again, science confirms that in almost all dimensions that describe us we are created unique and develop unequally, and in some dimensions these differences are systemic and cannot be overcome by bending the twig according to the dictates of DEI.  

Nationally recognized scholar and political scientist, Harvard/MIT educated Dr Charles Murray, has written an illuminating essay about the extraordinary and special requirements for success in STEM education and subsequent careers.  His ‘The Roots of STEM Excellence - Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is a paramount goal.’ here in the 30aug24 WSJ will now be vilified by all the usual leftwing suspects bent on reducing America into a second-world country.  In this piece he continues reporting on research that established the human diversities we reported on in his previous work Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021) which was equally attacked and rejected by the Left. (more here)  (I wrote a Union column on it at the time which could not be printed for reasons its then publisher took great pains to explain to me over one of our lunches.)

The basic thesis Murray presents is that success in STEM requires cognitive abilities that are relatively very uncommon.  The cognitive abilities demanded are present in only the top 0.01% or one in 10,000 people – it’s just the way the cognitive cookie crumbles.  The bottom line is that just being dedicated and working hard will not cut it as it does for almost all other professional pursuits.  It’s the equivalent of not being able to make it in the NBA if you’re short or in the NFL if you’re skinny and slow.  Not everyone has what it takes to make it in any desired career – the playing field is not level, and it was ever thus.  This is diametrically contra to what is told to our K-12 students in progressive public schools.

To nail the point and outline the problem, I will quote some paragraphs from the cited essay by Charles Murray.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.

First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.

The Kamala interview that wasn’t

George Rebane

Last night CNN’s prerecorded 18-minute interview with Kamala Harris, with attendant training wheels Walz, was a giant nothing-burger – a disappointment but not a surprise.  While Kamala was asked some decent questions, she predictably dodged all of them as did her partner in perfidy.  What galled me the most was how she was allowed to bullshit her way out of the question about her manifold and desperate flip-flops on policies she championed in 2019 and her new ones with which she now apes Trump.

Her response to this line of questioning by Dana Bash was that “My values have not changed.”  And I almost gagged when Bash allowed her to skate with that.  Bash’s next question should immediately have been, ‘That may be, but the whole country has witnessed you doing 180s on your previously championed policies, and it will be your policies and not some ephemeral values that will impact the American people.  On what new evidence did you base your policy pirouettes?’ – or something in that vein.  Kamala’s lame answer again confirmed the low opinion that Democrats have of their loyal, yet demonstrably and reliably ignorant, constituencies who regularly swallow such answers with nary a qualm.

This brings me to my general complaint about the dismal state of today’s journalism that primarily includes the conservative media like Fox News.  Starting with lead political anchor Bret Baier, none of them are either smart or quick enough to follow up Democrats’ stated allegations about Republicans, wrong-headed realities, etc with ‘Sir, you’ve just stated an unsubstantiated allegation to my question ‘On what did you base your claim that …?’.  Please tell us again on what evidence do you base this and similar allegations you have made.’  Always ask for evidence when offered allegations.

Such a follow-up question will inevitably expose bullshit, and may even lead to a more productive discussion.  Instead, our stalwarts of the Fourth Estate just calmly soldier on to their next question to receive a similarly dissembled response by the progressive pundit/politician being interviewed.  And in the end, the interview has again turned into a non-interview in which the devious interviewee’s non-responses were not even exposed.  We viewers (well, some of us) expect to receive such performances on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, … .  But having to regularly consume them on outlets that attempt to champion the Right is downright nauseating.

Place your Trump/Harris bets

George Rebane – 28aug24

Suppose parties A, favoring Trump, and B, favoring Harris want to bet on the election.  And to add spice to the affair, suppose A has made known his assessed probability P_A that Trump will win, but all that B has done so far is to assure everyone that Harris has the election in the bag.  However, B has yet to reveal his assessed probability P_B that Harris will win.  How can such a bet be negotiated so that B’s real belief in Harris’ victory becomes known.  Perhaps, we can let money do the talking, and see where that takes us.

Let’s say after some dickering, A and B agree in principle that the cash bet should result in the expected winnings of both parties be equal – what could be more fair than that?  As usual, both parties calculate their expected winnings by multiplying their cash payoffs by their belief (probability) of their candidate’s victory.  But no matter whether both use their probabilities or not, the dollar amounts of the bet are agreed on – A bets C_A that B will win with Kamala’s victory, and B bets C_B that A will win with Trump’s victory.  The relative sizes of the amounts reflect the odds of the bet.  So in principle the bet reflects the equality of expected payoffs for each party.

                                    For party A:                P_AC_B = (1 – P_A)C_A

                                    For party B:                P_BC_A = (1 – P_B)C_B

From these two relations we can immediately estimate each party’s belief probability.

To obtain the resulting odds of the bet we solve for the ratio, say, C_A/C_B from each party’s perspective.

Suppose now that A has already declared his belief at P_A = 0.2, indicating that Trump will probably not win.  Substituting this in the above equation calculates the minimum odds A will accept at C_A/C_B = 0.2/(1-0.2) = 1/4.  So A should be willing to accept any bet where C_A ≤ 4C_B. 

Since it is clear from B’s ample display of TDS in which he claims that Trump will surely lose, we can safely assume that P_B > P_A = 0.2.  So let’s say that the bet amounts were negotiated to be C_A = $100 and C_B  = $500.  This most certainly satisfies A’s required odds, and yields the pro forma estimate of P_B ≥ 500/(500+100) = 0.833.  From this we can conclude that B’s odds calculate to C_A/C_B = (1-0.833)/0.833 = 1/5, and that he will most likely not accept C_B > 5C_A.  The negotiated amounts satisfy all these conditions, so it appears that we have a satisfactory bet and in the process have ferreted out that B’s belief in Kamala’s victory is at most 5/6 since he will not give A better odds than 5:1.  Now go forth and wager prudently.

'Democrats’ Deception May Win the Presidential Election Again'

[This commentary by Gerard Baker, former editor and now editor-at-large of the WSJ, appears in the 27aug24 edition of the newspaper’s op-ed pages.  It succinctly nails a fundamental tenet of Rebane Doctrine numerously repeated in these pages over the years.  (“…, you can fool all the people all the time.”)  Since the publisher invites it to be shared on Facebook, I offer this respectfully purloined version below in its entirety; the original may be read here. gjr]

Gerard Baker

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo’s adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years.

As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation’s values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.

They campaign, to borrow the late governor’s taxonomy, in the poetry of Robert Frost. They govern in the prose of Herbert Marcuse.

Last week in Chicago we got the poetry, a Frostian pastoral of Democrats posing as regular Americans, honest toilers in a darkening landscape (of their own making, as they didn’t tell us). They propose only to enlighten with their benevolence.

I don’t mean poetry in the literal sense. With a few exceptions the quality of our political oratory is dire—and plumbed the usual depths last week. We have reached the point where even the actual poetry is prosaic, as the left’s unofficial poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, demonstrated with another of her recitations of platitudinous banalities and leaden progressive nostrums delivered in her trademark phony iambic meter.

The “poetry,” such as it was—Michelle Obama’s speech was the only moment of the week when the oratory came close to matching the ambition—was figurative, an attempt to paint colorful images of the promise of another Democratic presidency.

Its centerpiece was the semifictional self portrait of the presidential candidate herself. In her own biography-heavy, substance-light acceptance speech, Kamala Harris presented herself as that familiar image from popular story telling—“the happy warrior,” the all-American fighter for our nation’s finest objectives—the tough prosecutor who waged war on crime just as she will wage war on illegal immigration; the proud patriot, product of a classically diverse, American, immigrant family; the commander in chief, ready to face down America’s enemies abroad; the staunch friend of America’s allies—Israel, especially—unafraid to use the military’s “lethal” force in their support, as she explicitly reminded us.

This verbal illusion of American iconography was reinforced by the crowd’s chants of “USA! USA!” like ecstatic fans at the Olympics, and a waving sea of red white and blue “USA” placards.

But the poetry last week came also in the constantly retold personal narrative that was the real theme of the convention. The winsome second gentleman telling cute stories about gawky first dates and tasty brisket like something from the pages of a 1950s yearbook; saccharine testimonies to Ms. Harris’s innate goodness from childhood friends and professional acquaintances; above all, that Giant Middle American Cliché made flesh himself—Gov., sorry Coach, Tim Walz—practically pulling the high-school football playbook out of his back pocket and urging the nation to vote for him so he could go out there one more time and win just one for the Grifter.

Is anyone fooled?

The answer, I am afraid, is yes. Every time.

President Biden is only the most recent example. The lifelong centrist Democrat who campaigned as a regular Joe promising to do his best to heal a divided and damaged country in 2020, promptly became the vessel for a Bernie Sanders policy agenda, splurged trillions in expansive government spending and championed the left’s continuing cultural reformation of America. He prepares to leave office apparently convinced he belongs in the pantheon of great social reformers next to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Barack Obama reminded us in his speech how successful his own self-portrayal was in 2008 as the unifying figure who could bring cohesion and order to a nation battered from the chaos of war and financial crisis, but who again governed, thanks to rigid internal party discipline, to implement an agenda that produced seemingly irreversible shifts in the economic and social fabric.

Above all we were reminded how far Democrats managed to move the needle in government in their direction along the political spectrum by the appearance of those two aging icons from another epoch—Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Clinton’s presidency, which ended a little more than two decades ago, now looks to most Democratic activists like an exercise in political reaction. If many of its ideas were preached on a university campus today, they would probably get the speaker canceled.

Republicans also pitch themselves in campaigns as unifying centrists but in office they have too often lacked the ambition or determination actually to govern as Republicans. It is to his credit—and a reason he is widely loathed—that Donald Trump bucked that trend.

Does anyone doubt that a Harris presidency would continue the Democratic pattern of divergent pre-election promise and postelection reality? Will a President Harris more closely resemble Candidate Harris from last week’s convention than Vice President Harris from the last four years or Candidate Harris from 2019? If you think she will, then it isn’t poetry you’ve been reading. It’s a fairy tale.

Scattershots – 25aug24 (updated 28aug24)

George Rebane

62 since ’62.  We’re happy to report that today my sweetie-pie and I celebrate having been married since 25 August 1962.  We were both then undergrads (seniors) at UCLA.  Now it’s two children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren later after a long and wonderful road with some inevitable miles unpaved.  Gott sei Dank.

Lies, more lies, and blatant lies.  Among other things, these campaigns will be remembered by all as having issue debates with little basis in reality.  The Repubs are still not weaned of their bombast and bravura when describing their own accomplishments, and the Dems are simply over the top.  Not a single one of their characterization of Trump’s and their own administrations comes anywhere near being factual when compared to the historical record published by the several federal agencies.  Voters who care are left to dig out their own takes on reality and the possible promised futures.  To this degree was it ever thus?  Not in my lifetime. (We await the debates.)

[28aug24 update]  Funny business in the polls.  Rasmussen reports (here) that the nation’s pollsters are exposing their leftward tilt by holding back recent polling data that shows Kamala’s convention bounce waning.  Their leftward lurch is such that “people are holding data or not releasing polls to leave Harris-favorable polling alive in the aggregate.  Why put a new poll out if you like the results you got last time?" 

Kamala’s Terrifying Speech

George Rebane

Kamala Harris’ speech at last night’s Democrat convention was terrifying in its unusually professional delivery and its absolutely vapid content.  That lady has surely learned to read a teleprompter.  But the scariest impact of her acceptance speech were the early returns of enthusiasm with which it was accepted by voters outside the convention center.

“The Vice President spoke with authority and admirable brevity (for) 37 minutes. … Kamala Harris introduced herself to the American public on Thursday, and her presentation was much like this week’s Democratic convention: well delivered, confident and optimistic, and mostly devoid of policy substance. Whether she can keep this up, unexplained and unexposed, for the next 12 weeks will determine whether she becomes America’s 47th President.”  This according to the 23aug24 WSJ (here).

But the real problem will be Trump and the Republican response between now and November.  Thomas Sowell’s warning is worth attending.  In his tempest fugit column (here) he admonishes “Republicans better get on the ball.  They haven’t made the case against Harris, (and) the clock is ticking.”

Instead of responding with “political jargon or snappy quips” wrapped in insults, the rebuttals should be a la Reagan, timely and in plain English.  “There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028. But there is such a thing as a country declining to the point of no return.  Four more years of disastrous Biden-Harris policies, at home and abroad, can take us past that fatal point.”

Bottom line, as they anticipated the 2022 ‘red wave’, the Republicans should never again underestimate the share of our fellow Americans who will swallow hook, line, and sinker the Democrats’ socialist swill.  Donald Trump does not once more need to demonstrate how he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

America’s Downward Spiral – A Revealing Snapshot

George Rebane

Date Everything - Rebane Doctrine

In this election year which promises to be a political milestone (watershed?) two significant neo-Marxist messages from Democratic politicians blanketed the country yesterday.  Presidential candidate and VP Kamala Harris told the nation that her economic program (here) going forward would be based on government price controls in order to control inflation.  And Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA17) wrote an excellent article (here) in the 17aug24 WSJ contrasting his and VP candidate Sen JD Vance’s (R-OH) views on industrial policy.  Both progressive politicians cannot see America’s private sector making the country’s economy work without massive participation by the federal government that involves more regulatory controls, more directed subsidies, higher taxes on industry and ‘the rich’, and a heavily unionized workforce blessed with ‘living wages’ and price controls.

Rep Khanna’s piece is well written and very convincing to an audience mired in ignorance about economics, finance, human behavior, and the history of socialist governance here and abroad.  Unfortunately about two out of three Americans are so burdened as they attempt to make sense of the current daily tsunami of political punditry.  Khanna’s essay is both effective and impactive through the way he erroneously characterizes conservative thought, policies, and its ideological tenets.  He constructs excellent strawmen (i.e. lies) which are then readily demolished by his adroit wordsmithing.

One of the prime fallacies both Harris and Khanna promulgate is that government price controls actually work in managing a national economy to the benefit of its citizens.  Each presents that as an axiomatic notion of truth requiring no evidence to support it.  Central to their message to the benighted is that fixing prices does not affect supply and stifle economic growth.  The common thread from both politicians is that the Democrats have been and are the competent stewards of our economy who build factories and make jobs for main street.

No one of the Left understands any of the basic science of how nature manages complexity.  Their ideas about how complex economies work is based on a small trove of simplistic slogans and shibboleths that are demonstrably wrong.  And principles like ‘you cannot control what you cannot measure’ is also beyond their ken.  They still have no idea how primitive are our methods of collecting relevant, accurate, and timely economic data, and then using it to fashion information that would come close to supporting correct policy decisions made by a cohort of centrally controlling technicians.

As a coda to the above riff, I want to remind present day readers, most not all that interested in the view from my perch, that a prime motivation of this blog is to insert a collection of my observations into the great archive in the cloud – ‘the internet is forever’ – which may someday be dredged up by future data archeologists studying the mentality of the citizenry that allowed their great nation at its apex to go to hell in a handcart.

Scattershots – 16aug24 (updated)

George Rebane

The UK is on the threshold of totalitarianism.  To illustrate the devastating slippery slide that comes with socialism, one of Europe’s oldest democracies has now descended into prosecuting its citizens on the basis of thought control.  Not only is free speech in Great Britain’s past, but their hubristic bureaucrats promise to threaten foreigners outside their borders with extradition is they overstep the new restrictions on newly disallowed publicly expressed opinions. (here, here, and here)

‘Islam and the Future of the West’.  Islamophobia is a clearly warranted reaction to the long-standing writings and recently reinforced statements by leaders of trans-national Islam.  “Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.” (more here) According to our neo-Marxists defending your culture against the promised and ongoing Muslim onslaught is ignorant and despicable racism.

“Inflation is down!” trumpet our lamestream media outlets.  NPR even coordinates its ‘news’ items with featured programming subjects in promoting this jaundiced view of the nation’s economy.  In their coordinated support of the Democrats’ campaign talking points, the Left’s lightly-read legions are spared the difference between ‘inflation level’ and ‘inflation rate’ in the constant cacophony they consume daily.  Contrary to what they experience in their wallets, they are led to believe that prices are actually going down in this Biden/Harris economy.

[16aug24 update] Dems move to red states.  The conspiracy to soil the remaining states not embracing socialism is in full swing.  There is now an organization called MoveIndigo -  MoveIndigo encourages Democratic flight to swing districts with Republican congressmen, often in swing states. Its goal is to “reset the balance in our country” and elect a more “representative” government. That’s doublespeak, but the group has also put it plainly: “It only takes a few Democrats moving to crucial toss-up districts . . . to take control of the House”—even to have “a profound impact on the Presidential race. (more here)  None of the migrating progressives are smart enough to ask what has made their selected red state so desirable compared to the shithole state they are abandoning, and moreover, what makes these leftwing double dummies think that the arrival  of more like them will not turn their new home also into the same kind of socialist quagmire they abandoned.

[update]  Georgia non-citizens registered to vote.  The Heritage Oversight project interviewed residents of a large apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia asking its residents 1) were they registered to vote, and 2) were they citizens.  14% answered that they were non-citizens who were already registered to vote. (more here)  With this kind of evidence of what is most likely happening to some extent all over the land, it was a very reasonable and legitimate request to Georgia SecState Brad Raffensberger by Trump to have their vote counts checked to discover more legal votes that may favor him.  There was never any demand to “overturn” the Georgia election.  Restricting voting to America’s legal voters is trumpeted as ‘voter suppression’ by our leftwing sleazebags, and their lightly read constituents lap up this ongoing lie.

Level 2 AGI is nigh

[Roland Fernandez has worked for Microsoft Research for over 25 years where he is a senior researcher on the company’s advanced AI projects.  I am indebted to him for keeping me up to date on Artificial General Intelligence developments that are now accelerating us on the road to the Singularity.  I asked him to summarize the latest advance toward AGI that was recently announced to the research community.  He also happens to be my son-in-law and kindly submitted the following. gjr]

Roland Fernandez

OpenAI, the company that has produced ChatGPT, GPT 3, and GPT-4 (here), has defined 5 levels to track their progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI):

Level 1:  Chatbots, AI with conversational language

Level 2:  Reasoners, human-level problem solving

Level 3:  Agents, trusted systems that can initiate actions

Level 4:  Innovators, AI that can aid in invention

Level 5:  Organizations. AI that can do the work of an organization

These levels were presented in a July 9 2024 all-hands meeting (more here), where company leaders told employees that ChatGPT (based on GPT 4o) was currently at level 1, but they believed they were nearing level 2, with new model developments.

Level 2 can be defined as an AI that can reliably utilize planning and reasoning in solving multiple-step problems.  This could include skills such as performing autonomous research on the web, on behalf of the user, or working out the answers to tricky math or science questions.   The enabling technology behind this new capability is code-named Strawberry (previously leaked as “Q*”).  The company has previously stated that they consider such a reasoning skill to be critical to reaching AGI. (more here)

An X user called “@iruletheworldmo” has been flooding the AI community on X with rumors of a “Strawberry” model being released on Aug-15-2024, presumably from OpenAI.  The user has amassed 30,000 followers over the last 10 days, an unheard of achievement.

Trump’s November Chances – 11aug24 update

George Rebane

This is a lament.  From his statements and recent – post Tim Walz – behavior it looks to me that Donald Trump has really gone off the rails and is headed for a massive defeat in November.  As the record of these pages confirms and given the available choices, I have been a qualified Trump supporter ever since he became the Republican nominee in 2016.  During the entire time I have been chagrined at his tendency for bombast, bravura, and exaggeration, especially when on the campaign trail.

Today, when finally presented with an ideal pair of very vulnerable opponents, and eight years of experience under his belt in how his off-track shooting from the lip has been received, he still pays no mind to the harm he does to himself and the Republican party by continuing on the same path.  And he is doing it proudly as he has declared to his audiences that he has no intention of changing his gratuitous personal attacks on anyone that happens to cross his mind while on the podium.

So now the country’s conservatives, capitalists, and small government devotees have to suffer through daily doses of free leftwing talking points served up to the lamestream media by Trump.  Their news stories and commentaries almost write themselves from the copy spouted by our former president.  Instead of focusing on the rich trove of Democrats’ lies and policy screw-ups from the Obama and Biden/Harris administrations, Trump continues to be the petulant third grader on the playground focusing on lurid descriptions of his opponents’ real and imagined personal shortcomings.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of his campaign is that he has no strong adult advisors in his inner circle who can tell him daily when he needs zip his lip.  It’s hard for me to believe he doesn’t have a cadre or even a small clutch of such people in his inner circle.  But it is clear that he is flying blind without the aid of such critical navigators.  Were such people to exist, we would by now have seen them resigning one-by-one as Trump continued to ignore their counsel.

Given this ongoing travail, my own assessment of his probability of winning in November started with a paltry 0.45 and eked up to 0.48 (here) after the assassination attempt.  But taking into account what has happened since, my belief in his chances for regaining the White House has plummeted to 0.22, or a bit more than one in five.  This new assessment accurately represents the dour mood that the Trump campaign has me in.