Rebane's Ruminations

The happier place, America or Europe?

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 September 2019.]

Our national Left has loudly included in their narrative to fundamentally transform America, that the Europeans are a much happier lot than we poor polarized and poverty-stricken wretches on this side of the Pond.  The citizens of the EU are described as a people happy with their subsidies and socialism, cared for from cradle to grave with extended vacations, shorter work weeks, job security, and lavish no-cost healthcare.  What’s not to like?

Actually, the Europeans have a lot of worries, and when you talk to them on a personal level, they are ready and willing to go through the long list.  We just returned from two weeks in Europe where we had a reunion with our German families, and then went on to visit and talk with people in Switzerland, France, more Germany, and Holland.  Here’s part of the laundry list that keeps Europeans up at night.

All EU countries are struggling with low to no economic growth, due mainly to over regulation and high taxes.  The future of indigenous Europe is hampered by devastating demographics which are characterized by a growing cohort of the ever more feeble and ailing elderly.  No country is close to delivering the 2.1 births per fertile woman required for mere stability of a population.  Germany is today at 1.2 which is equivalent to Russia’s alarming shrink rate.  The richer countries’ declining workforces are made up of an ever greater fraction of mid-easterners, Africans, and southeastern Europeans from poor countries such as Rumania and Bulgaria, who do jobs that northern Europeans refuse to do.

The specific concerns of such an influx of foreign migrants are themselves legion, starting with the loss of national identity, declining common culture and values, and rising crime rates.  The growing insular communities of Muslims across the northern EU present unique problems which individual governments have yet to figure out how to even recognize and discuss in politically correct ways, let alone making policies to address them effectively.

Being part of a formally united polyglot of nations, administered from Brussels and by the European Central Bank, has emerged as a whole new set of worries for Europeans.  Those countries with effective wealth producing societies are not happy to see their wealth redistributed to southern neighbors that have a history of dysfunctional economic policies and behaviors exercised within markedly different cultures.  And the southerners resent the remedial disciplines that the northerners want to impose.  This replicates on a nation-to-nation scale what we witness here between our economic classes dependent on government provided entitlements.

While environmentally conscious, Europeans have not been able to realize their climate change nostrums, and know that they will have to continue, if not increase, their use of fossil fuels and nuclear generators to contain the growth of their already sky-high energy prices.  The uncertainty of mid-east oil supplies and the economic blackmail threatened by Russia supplying natural gas are today a growing concern with no solution in sight.

Finally, the existential fact is that the EU cannot and/or is not willing to defend itself from neighbors seeking to restore their empires or insidiously invade through emigration.  Since WW2 the continent has relied on America’s military being the shield under which free Europe was able to recover, grow, and even prosper.  Having lived for decades in the succoring shade of America, which President Trump has promised to revamp in his effort to make Europe more self-sufficient and sustainable, the EU is now completely dependent on our alliance.  Europeans today rightly worry that America is coming to the end of its willingness to spend its political capital and treasure to unconditionally defend NATO countries that even refuse to live up to their pledges to spend a minimum of 2% GDP on defense.

Contrary to leftwing propaganda that promotes our adoption of Europe’s socialism, America’s unease is politicized and manufactured at home.  And compared to Europe, this narrative has little existential basis to claim that it’s caused by factors not under our control.  In the final analysis, Americans are much more sanguine and satisfied about our ability to continue securing our quality of life than are the shrinking populations of indigenous Europeans.

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

[Addendum]  Just a couple of quick notes.  An example of the kind of anti-American propaganda about unhappy Americans is provided by our favorite (proto?) communist Umair Haque, who writes a remarkably ignorant and fallacious ‘Why Are Europeans (So Much) Happier Than Americans?’

It also turns out that Europe’s national healthcare systems have tiered death committees.  There’s the big national one that sets overall policy and rules as to who gets treated for what, and who gets left to die.  Then at regional/local levels there are the next level death committees who may impose additional restrictions on treatments that depend on the availability of resources (all national healthcare programs are underfunded and use various stratagems to minimize/eliminate services that entail minimal political cost). This does lead to some gaming as the ill attempt to move into other jurisdictions in order to have a chance at staying alive.  All this is done on the nascent (desperate?) belief that local decision making better allocates locally scarce resources.  What a concept?

Such desperate moves to return to freer markets is also now quietly being reinstituted by Maduro in Caracas to alleviate shortages and provide heretofore unavailable goods in order to assuage a very victimized population that has now lived under a socialist and ruinous command economy for years.

Sandbox - 18sep19

[The Union tells us that there will be demonstrations 'Striking for the Earth' at the NC and GV city halls this Friday.  These deluded citizens have no idea that their anthropomorphized Earth doesn't give a big rat's ass about ongoing climate change.  And what still eludes these sincere but factually deficient folks is that consensus science is NOT science - discovering ground truths about our universe is NOT a democratic process.  gjr]

Scattershots – 16sep19 (updated 17sep19)

George Rebane

The Trump haters led by the NYT did their best to relaunch the smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh.  The formerly prestigious newspaper continued to dig its journalistic grave by publishing a carefully constructed story of another sexual escapade the Justice was supposed to have participated in as an undergraduate, and then later had to ‘amend’ it in response to a public outcry for the truth.  Well, it turns out that in the process the NYT rolled another fake news honey wagon down the street, immediately onto which jumped about twelve leading Dem presidential candidates to start spreading its contents through the lamestream media.  Our moral high-ground progressives (witness also these pages) have decided to respond with their usual crickets.  It’s telling that even Nadler is not going to touch this one with a ten-foot ladle.

Fox News should review the grade school credentials of some of its news editors.  Tonight on Bret Bayer a map showing the latest Iran/Saudi crisis had Oman labeled as the UAE, and the entire Arabian Sea as the greatly expanded Persian Gulf.  Our criticisms of the post-Great Society disaster in educating America’s kids is confirmed daily in what we see and hear on the news.

[17sep19 update]  My main desktop computer died on Sunday morning.  And I mean died, like in DEAD – even its operating system Windows10 did not load, it just got to BIOS and went belly up.  The tech mavens at Quietech (my goto PC docs) diagnosed it as having a hardware failure that required ordering a replacement part from China which will take at least a week to arrive.  Having PCs since ‘Day One’, I have never experienced such a failure in over 40 years.  We always have a bunch of computers around the house, but losing my main brain left me somewhere between devastated and discombobulated (I think psychiatrists know the difference).  The emotional experience was/is an interesting episode, and very revealing about my dependencies.  The dearly departed and about to be resurrected is a very large and very fast Alienware laptop game computer that can juggle multi-million element matrices in a single bound (yes, I still spend time messing with such beasts).  Now Jo Ann has the only working Windows box left in the house; the rest of our laptops, pads, and phones are all Apple products – e.g. I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro which lives in the front room by a comfy couch.  My self-indulging response to all this is having another super-fast (AMD 8-core, 16 thread) Windows tower built that will be delivered with a new 32 inch high-res monitor which will join my formerly biggest 27-incher.  Both of us got addicted to two-monitor setups some years back, and having only one screen to work with is now downright stifling.  Anyway, that’s more than you wanted to know about my current emotional shock and functional deficit.

Dropout Derby - 13sep19 update

George Rebane

Last one out to date is Gillibrand.  Mr fish leaps into the lead.

California’s latest dumb to dumber (updated 14sep19)

George Rebane

The litany of inept, incompetent, ineffective, destructive, and corrupt public policies from Democrat controlled Sacramento just keep cascading over this once golden state.  The latest pair involves the statewide rent control law and the forced reclassification of consultants as employees.

“First California makes homes unaffordable, then it imposes statewide rent control” observes the 12sep19 WSJ.  California’s government imposed housing shortage is now known worldwide.  Over 700,000 wealth producing Californians have left the state since 2010, inevitably to be replaced by welfare recipients (1 in 3 live here) and succored illegals.  Rent control distorts the information which open market prices relay about supply and demand.  Here, as elsewhere, rent control will put a further damper on housing development, induce gratuitous rent increases to the new max (5% plus inflation), and reduce/remove incentives to keep rental properties properly maintained.  Today “the upshot is that an ‘affordable’ housing unit in California costs $332,000 to build and nearly $600,000 in San Francisco, according to state budget figures. Developers can’t turn a profit on low- and middle-income homes despite abundant federal and state subsidies.”

Consultants (I used to be one in my career) form a valuable component of the state’s workforce, especially when it comes to starting and expanding businesses.  Consultants quickly bring valuable expertise at reasonable cost to businesses when the need for their specialized knowledge may be for a short term and/or when the future is too uncertain to commit to a premature hiring decision.  Consultants usually have more than one concurrent client, and that lets them and the hiring company only use as much of the consultant’s hours as is necessary to do their special work.  All these advantages go out the window when the new law (now AB5) imposes draconian conditions on who may or may not be called and hired as a consultant.  The law is one more confirmation of Sacramento’s idiocy regarding business development and operations, and also of its desperation for additional revenues – employees get taxed more - into its general fund (giving lie to all the ballyhoo about the state’s budget reserves and financial wellbeing).  In sum, socialists don’t do business right.

[13sep19 update]  It was time for another comment from one our leftwing regulars (JigW 859pm) that again confirms the assessment that those folks are intellectually handicapped beyond repair.  This comment, while not acknowledging the content of my above commentary, repeated the oft offered ‘if you don’t like California, then leave’, augmented by the observation that ‘it sucks to have a life like yours since you’re not going to convince California to change course’.  The sackhead’s attempt to include the notion of ‘logic’ in his diatribe just confirms his disabilities.  Overall, I have seen little evidence that progressive readers understand anything in my commentaries, or similar commentaries elsewhere.

More attentive longtime readers know I have maintained since the launch of RR that CA is beyond the tipping point ideologically, and that it is headed for a socio-economic train wreck as it drives out wealth producers and attracts the hordes of gimmes and illegals with its maelstrom of misguided public policies.  I’m not aware of anyone here embracing the belief that we will miraculously miss the disaster, let alone hoping that their missives will change progressive minds.  That is a notion that people like Jig aggrandize themselves with as having viewpoints that others consider important enough to seek to alter.  The man himself says it best – “If you see things differently and actually believe you are going to convince California and it's progressives to change the course, then let us in on your little secret. I can tell you right up front your plan is delusional at best. Insane more likely. Logical . . . not.”

But what is important to continue noting is the Left’s confusion of criticism as the necessary precursor to change.  I might remind those confused with RR’s tagline – Observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of Man.  This blog is my own public diary of such observations and interpretations to which I invite participation from those with the ability to think critically and conduct a civil dialogue.  As readers can tell, that invitation has been accepted by a broader audience not all having such qualifications.

I offer this invitation because I am a copernican who has no special access to goodness and truth, and is therefore prone to errors that, upon serious consideration (after all I’m supposed to be a trained scientist), may cause me to change my mind.  And to me such redirections are a (sometimes bittersweet) joy.

Although I have been graciously accused of having a unique perspective here and there, generally I find that my views are shared by a significant cohort of learned people who are also students of the human condition.  However, over the years this fact has been totally invisible to the above cited local leftwingers.  As archived in RR’s comment streams, these poorly informed worthies continue their uninterrupted braying that all my commentaries and critiques are the unique offspring of an old, miserable, and lonely mind in these foothills, the defunct offal of ideas about which no one cares – and yet they come.

[14sep19 update]  For a broader compendium of reasons to oppose AB5, please read today’s lead Union editorial, ‘Assembly Bill 5 an out-of-touch overreach’ (following publisher Don Rogers' 12sep15 column on the same issue).  This well-worded criticism of the unbelievably butt-stupid bill comes from the editorial board of our decidedly center-left newspaper.  And it further demonstrates how virulently radical are the above discussed remarks of one of our more calcified socialist ideologues, an ilk whose debating powers are constrained by ‘agree with me or begone!’

Sandbox - 12sep19

[Back from our travels, and lots of insights about what's going on in the minds of many Europeans.  gjr]

“Never forget” what?

George Rebane

Today marks the 18^th anniversary of 9/11, the day radical Islam claimed the largest number of innocent American lives through terror as part of its global jihad against western civilization.  Since then the anti-American lamestream media has tried its damnest to propagandize an Islam-free narrative to memorialize that day of infamy.  The day is now marked by commemorative blather that describes “some people” flying “airplanes (that) took aim and brought down the World Trade Center” as if the event was a hurricane or earthquake that caused the deaths and destruction.

Ads are run that ask us to “never forget”, but stop short of saying what we are to never forget.  Had 9/11 been a natural disaster, then almost everyone not directly involved would already have forgotten what happened.  Every memorializing message that omits the real intent and cause of those killers who hijacked the airliners is in reality asking us to specifically forget the real intent and cause of that day’s terror-borne tragedy, and the resulting celebrations all across Islam.

Sandbox - 5sep19

[Apologies for the delay in providing new sand.  You all seem to have covered every imaginable issue in the last Sandbox.  And there is more to be said about it all.  Haven’t heard of more dropouts in the derby beyond Gillibrand - we’ll update scores when I get home.  Sally forth!  gjr]

Scattershots - 5sep19

Trip report.  We’re now on the Rhine heading for Koblenz to view some historical fortifications.  On this trip we landed in Munich, and drove to Bad Worishofen for a big reunion with four German families we have known and visited for decades, and ate ourselves silly at different places in the foothills of the Alps.  Very interesting was that no one wanted to talk politics very much - a staple of German conversation.  Then we drove to Basel through Austria and Switzerland to catch our Viking river longship.  The trip down the Rhine has been wonderful, especially the tour of the actual battlegrounds of the little known Colmar salient (contemporaneously fought with the Battle of the Bulge and the campaign made famous by Audie Murphy).  The daylong walking tour of Strasbourg was almost a reminder of the march up the Bataan peninsula.  We’re again traveling with friends with whom we done this before.  So far we’ve been through four countries and will add Holland before coming home.

Sandbox - 28aug19

[How come none of our liberals respond to all the illegal alien rapists and murderers who are continually getting caught and arrested?  How would they respond to a pack of progressive lies like this yayhoo dispenses in his 'Capitalism's Last Gasp'?  BTW, we're going on a little trip that promises iffy connectivity, so please be patient.  Vielen dank.  gjr] 

Nevada County – economic disaster area

George Rebane

The more that wealth gets redistributed, the less wealth there is to redistribute.

This morning’s (27aug19) lead article in The Union by reporter Cory Fisher (here) informs the reader an awful lot about our community that most of us did not know.  It turns out our county is an economic disaster area with more working people than ever going hungry and having problems making ends meet.

According to local reports, “1 out of 7 Nevada County residents” (14.3%) were “food insecure” (term of art for hungry?).  Across all US counties 13.3% were food insecure, only 11% were in such dire straits in LA County, the country’s individual rate is somewhere around 12.5% (1 of 8), and all this in a land where over one in three of us are mysteriously fat. (more here)

Then we learn that the hunger rate in our county is not only high but screaming upward.  At the Food Bank the increase has been from 800 in May, 1,000 in July, and 1,200 in August – in other words our calorie calamity is reported to be growing at about 150% annually.  We are told this is causing our non-profit food distributors financial hardship for two reasons – increase in the county’s hungry population and a reduction in charitable contributions because of Trump’s new tax law.

Somehow the truth about the tax law and its restrictions on charitable giving is completely opposite.  The standard deduction has more than doubled to $24K for joint filers and it does not limit giving at all.  All it has done is caused more people to take the standard deduction instead of itemizing deductions such as their former charitable gifts.  This little feature has induced many people to then just skip the giving, not because they have less money, but because there is no need to give to get the tax benefit. (more here) But that’s not what the article impugns.  Somebody forgot to include that character still counts, even under the new tax law.

And the overall problem of falling income making it hard for our county’s residents to make ends meet – it then appears that our workers did not share in the country’s benefit from the tax cuts that increased lower and middle class household incomes by an average of $2,000.  (More here) When you factor in the doubled tax credits for kids, the average family has even more dollars to spend.  And here is a summary of the real impact of the Trump tax cut.

So, while the rest of the country is enjoying historically low unemployment, rising wages, and paying lower taxes, in Nevada County our poverty rate is estimated to have started increasing again after Trump was elected.  He even caused a bump in climate change that started more wild fires, which then raised county residents’ insurance rates that forced some of them to move.  The takeaway is clear, it’s only California’s enlightened public policies in housing, homelessness, education, fighting capitalists’ greed and global warming that have somehow kept body and soul together.

In the real world "Americans in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners buy more consumer goods and services than the national averages for people living in most of the wealthiest nations of the world, including those in Europe." (more here)  How can this be?  Well, for all of you who have consumed the media-delivered poverty rate for Americans, Cato’s ‘Reassessing the Facts about Inequality, Poverty, and Redistribution’ may shed some new light on reality.  All said and done, the piece did make me wonder why Nevada County is under the reported curse.

Dropout Derby - 23aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Moulton among the dear departed.

An Illustration of Liberal Ethics, Morals, Logic, …

George Rebane

The 22aug19 Union has a prominent column by Ms Susan Rogers, a very liberal member of the newspaper’s editorial board.  There in ‘Plenty of shame to go around’ she equates the thuggish behavior of county Democrats at Representative LaMalfa’s recent town hall, with the congressman’s socio-political ideology as expressed through his legislative work.  There is no doubt that the much-reported misbehavior of our local liberals seeking to disrupt a public meeting was something in which no American should take pride.  However, to diminish the louts at the meeting by impugning that LaMalfa shared an equal if not greater blame for the encounter is a down-home illustration of how far beyond the tipping point has progressed our national polarization.

In her column, Ms Rogers lists a litany of the congressman’s legislative actions and policy positions each of which she peremptorily labels as “shameful”.  We are not here confusing ‘shameful’ with, say, ‘erroneous’ or ‘misguided’ or even ‘ignorant’.  The woman illustrates how the liberals’ worldview puts people with whom they disagree onto a morally lower level of human beings – people who purposely behave in a manner that is shameful in our society.  And the basis on which makes such a comparison of bad public behavior at an event with a politician's longstanding ideology defies logic.

In our culture, shame is lavished on people who have purposely done something dishonorable, improper, illegal, etc.  The so accused is then supposed to respond to such a judgment by exhibiting some form of contrition in the attempt to make amends.  Attacking a politician on moral grounds for expressing his beliefs through his work, beliefs of which voters who put him in office were aware, is beyond the pale of political discourse, save the kind that is meant to further divide us.  And it does confirm our divisions since she means to put the rest of us who support congressman LaMalfa into an equivalent condition of shame.  I, for one, reject both her accusations and her hubris in ascending to heights from which she dispenses such lofty, unexamined, and perfunctory judgments.

Dropout Derby - 21aug19 update

George Rebane

And now Inslee bites the dust.

Sandbox - 20aug19

[I suppose doing the poll dance will continue as the hot topic and entertainment du jour.  At this stage of the campaign, that's much like watching 'snow' on a TV with signal loss.  gjr]

Scattershots – 20aug19 (updated 23aug19)

“nothing should be done by the state which can be better or as well done by voluntary effort”, William Ewart Gladstone (1809 – 1898)

George Rebane

I’m old enough to remember when TVs were the big new whizbang thing.  We common folks were then told of all the wonders that a live screen with sound would be bringing into our living rooms.  And then came computers, and the news was full of how businesses were doing this and that with those new-fangled number crunchers.  After that it was the internet, and we learned to expect all of its wonders, and now we read the breathless reports of AI starting to do all things good and also its (biased, gasp!) dark side.  All of those technologies quickly faded into commonplace roles in our lives.  The next big thing will be personal AGI (artificial general intelligence) companions whom we will demand and trust more than fellow humans.  And this will scare the crap out of autocratic governments – keep your eye on Sacramento and DC.

Meritocracy is a bad thing in modern society, so points out a recent article in The (leftwing) Atlantic. (H/T to Sandbox commenter)  It causes all kinds of bad psychological problems and promotes inequality – kids from richer homes are smarter than those from poorer homes (Stop the presses!).  Therefore, they wind up working ridiculously hard in school and the workplace, and get stressed out as they dominate the 1% class.  The solution, force universities to admit a certain percentage of the dumber students.  Or maybe in the future the smarter ones must have a noise making chip implanted into their skulls to disrupt longer thinking processes, or maybe the too smart ones will just be culled by the state like shown on a Twilight Zone episode long ago (here).

A Pence/Harris VP debate next year is anticipated with some glee by our liberals.  They can just see Harris taking down VP Pence in a one-on-one encounter.  I would counsel a little trimming of such hopes because Mike Pence is not a Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris is definitely not the brightest bulb on an otherwise dimly lit Democrat tree.  Harris commands little to no basis for arguing substantive issues; all she can do is attempt to sway the lightly read with emotional anecdotes.  These the VP can easily dispatch by pointing out the aggregate impacts that such radical leftwing policies have delivered elsewhere, and now portend for the country.

Preventable man-made global warming (PMGW) ascendant. Notice the increased hysterics in the media about all the disastrous effects caused by PMGW.  Time after time the warming data is shown to be politically motivated hokum, but that makes no never mind to the fear mongers (the lamestream does not air that side).  The new level of hysteria is being ramped up by the Dems for 2020 as a back-up argument for their policies that promise to deliver the country's new socialist sunrise.  The message – capitalism causes PMGW that will kill the planet, socialism is the only hope to save mankind.  A good fraction of our electorate has been carefully cultured to uncritically embrace such arguments.

[21aug19 update]  “… the clicking of jack boots and rifle bolts.” As witnessed on RR over the years, this is the form of governance legions of leftists have convinced themselves that conservative America seeks.  They ignore that it is and has been only the goose-stepping collectivists that have constructed leviathans in which citizens are kept in line by such displays and applications of state power.  But true to Lenin and Alinsky, they were taught early to counter political opponents by loudly accusing them of one’s own worst practices.  And as history has shown, you can fool enough of the people all the time to bring down somnambulant republics.

[22aug19 update] ‘Americans Are Richer Than We Think’ write economists Phil Gramm and John Early.  The Democrats and their lamestream lapdogs have done all they can to convince America that we live in a bad economy that doesn’t benefit anyone but the rich, and (go figger) they turn around and tell us that our good economy is about to take a dive.  And all will be well again once we fundamentally transform the country and put it on a firm socialist track. Such reasoning fits well with the liberal mindset.  Gramm and Early present loads of data that debunk the leftwing's advertised misery of the middle class.

Russ Steele has an excellent idea on how to take a census of rural folks who don’t have access to broadband.  Everyone has been trying to get their hands around that problem in order to come up with good public policies that enable government and the private sector to work together in correcting this deficit.  Russ suggests that we use the upcoming census to gather this data.  The details are in his 22aug19 ‘Overwhelmed and Under-counted’ letter to The Union.

US acquiring Greenland. Trump’s recent proposal to Denmark on the reprise of this idea (first proposed under President Truman) has been peremptorily identified as looney by the Left (and a few on the Right), and offered in the lamestream as further evidence that The Donald’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.  Now I don’t particularly agree with the way that our president again introduced this proposal; it should have been done quietly at lower levels of diplomatic contact.  But on the overall concept, I think that there exist several approaches in which that piece of strategically located and resource rich real estate can benefit both us and the Danes if the US got or shared sovereignty over Greenland.  The Left in their mirth appear to have put as much thought into the matter as do hyenas before beginning their bouts of ‘laughter’.  (Here is a more sober discussion of this in Politico, and here is Sen Tom Cotton's overture last year.)

[23aug19 update]  Union publisher Don Rogers writes an enticing, yet in the end disappointing, meditation on the meaning of life in today’s paper.  In his ‘The Meaning of Life?’ he takes us on a short journey of futility while keeping hope alive, and then (trigger warning) summarily drops us off with “Life is what life does”? -86-  OK, but then why bother to lead us “befuddled pilgrims” by the nose to ‘It is what it is.’?  Actually, I’m just exposing my naivete here.  One should always temper one’s expectations when reading our beloved Union. 😉