Rebane's Ruminations

Border Security’s True Colors

George Rebane

For some years I have been pointing out to readers that America’s Left has a totally different outlook on the function of US borders, especially the one with Mexico.  I don’t claim to be flying solo in this interpretation, since several nationally prominent commentators of the Right have expressed their similar views and continue to do so today.  The bottom line on this observation, with loads of supporting citations, is that our Left sees the southern border as the perfect political tool for their work in the fundamental transformation of America into the peerage of socialist states preparing for the globalist future.

This objective could not have been more clear than what was reported by host Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  The program regularly presents segments promoting progressive causes and viewpoints.  Today their daily anti-Trump dump featured an interview with Gil Kerlikowske, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner under President Obama.  The entire message was of a piece in which Mr Kerlikowske strongly maintained that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at our southern border is a gratuitous political stunt to get money to build “his wall” because in reality there is no emergency at our Mexican border. (more here)

Kerlikowske then went on to outline some stats stating that the real emergency existed in 2000 when more than 1.2M crossed the southern border, and today only 400K are coming across annually, thereby making such yearly ingress of illegals most certainly not an emergency but more like business as usual.  He also pointed out that most of our drugs come in surreptitiously through legal ports of entry, and therefore we shouldn’t concern ourselves with the lesser amount of drugs coming in across fences and rivers.

The only problem he saw with today’s border operations is that there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the illegal aliens’ pleas to become permanent US residents.  During the entire course of the interview – one like so many others with leftists – there was not even a hint of hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossings being evidence of a border security problem.  The Left’s only existential and acknowledged problem is that these illegal entrants couldn’t be processed fast enough to get their permits to stay here.  In the de juris case then, these people can now be formally designated as ‘illegal immigrants’ because by allowing them (inviting them?) to readily cross our border, the US government has entered into the required, albeit de facto, two-party agreement with them as acknowledged immigrants.

So think about it.  The Democrats have stepped out with a clear pronouncement that today it should be our accepted policy that 400K unvetted illegal aliens should be able to easily cross our border and enter our broken immigration system which has been purposely maintained only to build and buttress the Dems' voting pool, and, more importantly, increase its immediate representation in Congress.

Few people understand the real reason the Dems oppose an accurate census of US citizens as required by the Constitution.  We have adopted the custom of allocating seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a state’s share of the country’s residents, NOT its citizens – although being a citizen is still a requirement for voting, but the Dems are working hard to also remove that ‘barrier to democracy’.  So grab an envelope and do the numbers.  It’s not hard to see that with concentrations of illegals in big population ‘sanctuary’ states, the number of representatives for already leftist states like California will increase.  And these seats will be filled by leftwingers, voted in by an ever-DECREASING share of franchised Democrat voters from each congressional district.  But no one understands this, the confusion abetted by the lamestream’s narrative that requiring a statement of US citizenship on the census questionnaire will unfairly inhibit the minority vote.

And these, dear readers, are the true colors of the Democrat Party in the early 21^st century, ever more visibly on display with each passing day.

Idiots (Evil?) on Parade

George Rebane

I claimed that the photo of all the congressional critters who support the Green New Deal will become iconic to both the Left and the Right, of course, for diametrically opposite reasons.  I'm not sure that all of the pictured 40 are demonstrably stupid, such as AOC; no doubt many of them intend to use the GND to fundamentally transform America.  These people I consider somewhere between cynical and just plain evil.  I'll post better images of GND supporters as they become available - these really deserve to be in RR's archive.

Ruminations - 14feb19 (updated 15feb19)

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity; the main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery - W. Churchill

George Rebane

‘Amazon Cancels HQ2 Plans in NYC’ – Now here’s a good dose of social justice for the residents of NYC delivered by local socialist politicians who couldn’t stomach the tax incentives the city promised Amazon for bringing in thousands of high-paying jobs.  Some call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Mueller’s investigation is wrapping up??? All kinds of rumors are flying around from the imminent termination of the investigation, that most of his lawyers have already been reassigned or left, there will be no final report (at least not one released to the public), to God knows what.  Has any reader found anything that looks like it's definitive and/or reliable out there on the web?

[15feb19 update]  The depth of AOC’s stupidity is yet to be fathomed.  CBS reports that the congresswoman actually believes that NYC has saved $3B, money which it now has and can spend on more teachers, fixing subways, etc, etc, instead of ‘giving away’ to Amazon.  Unbelievable!!  And what can we say about the voters who elected her? – they are at least as stupid as she.  And what can we say about the Dem congressional critters that support her? – they range somewhere between butt stupid and cynical/evil.  And what about all those across the land who are fans of AOC; talk about national dumbth.

The American AI Initiative & herding cats

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 13 February 2019.]

The entire field of artificial or machine intelligence (AI) seems to be more misunderstood by the day, and not only on Main Street, but also in the highest levels of government.  President Trump recently signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative.  The purpose of this whatever it is, is to “focus federal government resources to develop AI” in order to “increase our prosperity, enhance our national and economic security, and improve quality of life for the American people.”

Sandbox - 13feb19

[Would El Chapo's billions paying for border infrastructure satisfy Trump's "... and Mexico will pay for it."??

... and by their fruits shall they be known.  gjr]

The Illuminated Great Divide (updated 13feb19)

George Rebane

Every now and then one of our progressive commenters takes the time to offer some thought-out remarks that shine a bright light on the hopeless nature of our country’s Great Divide.  The most recent came from a leftist reader who call himself Robert Cross.  Mr Cross often takes me to task in opposing every facet of my socio-political ideology that he claims to understand.

Under ‘Progressive Pilgrims’ Progress’ we engaged in a thread that he launched with the astute lament that I blamed most of the country’s problems on progressives and their socialistic policies.  I encouraged him to read my extensive apologetics supporting such an assertion and responded in part –

"But your main takeaway should be that the overwhelming share of societal problems are directly attributable to the various expressions of hubristic collectivism - and in the US today that happens to be virulent progressivism."

This motivated Mr Cross to ‘put pen to paper’ and deliver a speech that V. Lenin could easily have made in 1917 from the back of a truck to a crowd of Russians gathered on a blustery snow-covered Moscow street.

 

Progressive Pilgrims’ Progress

George Rebane

My pal, fellow blogger, and comrade-in-arms for community connectivity and STEM education, Russ Steele wrote the following in the 11feb19 Union (here).

As a proponent of rural broadband, I often read recently published books and articles on broadband technologies.  I am currently reading Susan Crawford's book, "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It." I was surprised by the depiction of Nevada City and Grass Valley as failed communities in their quest for broadband fiber networks with quotes like these:

"Laissez-faire is not working for rural America, particularly in areas like Nevada City/Grass Valley where the local authorities are uninterested in intervening to ensure that their people have communications capacity."  "… one of the key reasons that both Greensboro and Grass Valley/Nevada City are making such slow progress toward any flavor of publicly oriented fiber is that there is no prominent public leader willing to stand behind it."

This is only two, there are more damaging quotes.  After reading this book, it is highly unlikely Nevada City would be on anyone's list as a great place to live and work.  Now that Race Communications will be building out the fiber network which Crawford used to illustrate a failed project, local authorities need to promote a more positive image. More at https://ruraleconomytechnology.com.

It’s not only that no “prominent public leader” in Nevada County has ever gone to bat for community broadband, instead it’s been exactly the opposite ever since progressives have become the dominant voice in this foothills community.  They have brought their (San Francisco) values with them, and that includes a disdain for business and entrepreneurship, and a profound ignorance of science and technology (e.g. their stance on cell towers, vaccination, consensus science, …).  So, for politicians hereabouts to get re/elected, they need to cater to the sentiments of the local liberals, more and more of whom lack any critical thinking skills, and that means to adopt ‘duck and cover’ when it comes to stepping up to promote any kind of growth that depends on the acquisition of modern broadband.

Our proregressives have now elevated to a nationally prominent level their opposition to growth – we are a modern luddite posterchild.  But hey, that don’t make no never mind since we do have the ERC and various economic development meetings now and then to keep our spirits up.

Redemption and the Virginia Three

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Mathew 7:3-5

George Rebane

“Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) said Wednesday that he dressed in blackface during college, adding yet another scandal to the tumult that now engulfs the entire executive branch of state government.  Herring, Gov. Ralph Northam and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — the state’s three top Democrats — all face wrenching questions about past behavior that threaten their careers.” reports the Washington Post. (here)

I find it distressing that our public policy, mostly implemented by the progressive Left, does not give any politician or other public figure any slack on what they might or not have done in their dim dark distant past.  This is especially significant in the case of males whose brains, we are told, do not fully mature until their mid-twenties.  Most certainly they (we) still have great dynamism going on in our noodles at around the age of twenty.

But without even accounting for that, don’t we have even a little room for redemption, any notion of remission, and only focus on what may be seen as eternal retribution?  I don’t think any of the above mentioned Democrats, currently being pilloried and asked to mount their political tumbrils, should suffer such a fate.  And that any more than did Justice Kavanaugh and other Republicans before him.  Today all three Virginians are matured and different men than they were in those days of yore (when morals and manners were not yet perfected to today’s pristine standards).  They have performed their public duties admirably as far as anyone can tell, and are now at the prime of their ‘service lives’.  So why sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness, an altar on which daily are offered the professional lives of worthy people, almost all to serve political ends and not to provide any future margin of safety to the public at large from their ongoing ministrations?

Once this persecutorial plague is loosened, where will it stop?  How many public figures, or any of us for that matter, can survive the dredging of such ludicrous liabilities?  Were I king, we would look back only on the recent and relevant parts of a person’s career, and not claim that the divers path each of us took through our youth did then mangle our minds and morals forever.  People do change, and perhaps in this area of public life we should revisit the plaintive questions posed by those oft-quoted philosophers Hillary Clinton and Rodney King.

Scattershots – 9feb19 (updated)

George Rebane

‘How a tiny country bordering Russia became one of the most tech-savvy societies in the world’ reports CNBC on Estonia’s eternal love affair with technology.  As the world’s leading country in its integration of the internet into literally every facet of Estonian life, the implementation of such cooperation between public and private sectors underpins the Rebane Doctrine commentaries on collectivization.  The bottom line has always been that the smaller and more culturally coherent a cooperating cohort, the better can collectivization be implemented in such a society.  While Estonia’s experience and those of other Scandinavian countries sing a siren song to our progressives, what they always overlook are the stark differences between a large, inhomogeneous, and culturally diverse America, and the small, culturally homogeneous countries that dot the globe.  The only way we can even attempt to replicate the idylls of small country harmonies is to create a hierarchy of ever smaller and distributed jurisdictions (as envisioned by our Founders) in our land which then can enjoy the benefits that derive from common cultures.  Sadly, our Left has taken us beyond the tipping point toward big government socialism (centrally controlled cohesion by the gun) and the tyrannies that inevitably lie beyond. (H/T to correspondent)

The current spate of cold winter weather has me tending daylong fires in our big front room fireplace.  Many RR readers know my longtime interest in the care and feeding of wood fires (here is a more complete treatment).  Getting the fire going this morning reminded me of an aspect that I have not emphasized enough – the form of the fire that you should attempt to maintain for the longest time possible.  Most people think that a robustly flaming fire provides the most heat to those sitting in front of the fireplace or around a campfire – wrong.  Bright cheery flames primarily heat the air which then convects vertically upward.  It’s the radiant heat that flows out sideways (and all other directions) that provides the desired warmth from such fires, the rest goes up the chimney.  And that radiant heat comes mainly from the red-hot coals.  So, the ideal fire is one that has finally generated enough coals, both on the coal grate and the sides of still burning wood, to provide a large red radiating area toward you and the room you are sitting in.  At this phase of the fire you want to minimize the burning rate, keep the flames sparse and small, and let the developing coals glow and radiate.  When you finally do have to add another piece of wood or two, try to add it so that large horizontal fire pockets (q.v.) remain visible from which radiation can still escape.  (Using a keeper chain is ideal for structuring such vertically 'open front' fires backed by a yule log.)  Here’s picture I took this morning of the fire having achieved its ideal heating phase.

[update]  George Kennan’s 22feb46 ‘Long Telegram’ to SecState George Marshall is one of the most prescient and useful intra-government communications in US history.  In it Kennan lays out the coming world order and the proper role of the US as hegemon to contain the already obvious post-WW2 spread of communism.  Bottom line, in order to avoid fighting WW3, be prepared to be the white hat global sheriff by always deploying small contingents of troops in critical locations all over the world, and to fight small ‘brushfire wars’ as they become necessary.  And prepare to do that indefinitely – with allies if possible, alone if necessary - as the cost of doing business to prevent the world from falling into a new age of global tyranny.  And with that Kennan nailed the foundation of our foreign policy for the last 70+ years.  I had to post this as the topic of our ongoing foreign policy came up at a recent dinner with friends.  (The original archival copy is here, with a more readable version here.)

Deciding with Minimally Known Processes

George Rebane

[Trigger warning - this post is primarily for our technically oriented readers.]

We encounter ongoing minimally known processes (MKPs) continually in our daily round, and we often need to make decisions based on the likelihood of their terminating during a specific future time interval, or surviving it.  Yet few are aware of this perspective of the daily round, and fewer yet know how to obtain quantitative information from such processes, information that is important for decisions in such fields as finance, medicine, environmental risk, and other areas of science and technology.

The ongoing MKPs considered here are 1) a process about which we know only its age, or when the process started (label these MKPA); and 2) a process about which we know only its lifetime, or the length of time before such a process terminates (label these MKPL).  Both kinds of such observed and observable processes are of interest in that we want to know the probability the process will end during or survive through a specified future time interval.  A simple example of a MKPA is, say, a spring which started flowing five years ago, and today we want to know how likely it is stop sometime during the next nine months (or its complement, how likely is it to continue through the next nine months).  An example of a MKPL query is, given that such an ongoing process is known to last ten days, what is the probability that it will end or continue through the next 90 minutes.

The answers to such and even more complex questions can be calculated quickly through the use of formulas whose development is based on an ingenious application of the Copernican Principle first demonstrated on an MKPA problem by physicist J Richard Gott in 1993.  For reasons unknown, his work was discussed briefly and then quietly laid to rest.  My own involvement began with its serendipitous discover while researching approaches to solving another problem.  Since then, I have reformulated Gott’s work to expand and obviate its applicability, and expanded it to the class of MKPLs.  An interesting use of MKPLs is in allocating resources in the observation of periodic processes about which we only know their periodicity.

I have found these results useful in my own analysis of securities’ performance, and in making of healthcare decisions.  A little thinking on what processes qualify with the Copernican approach to minimally known (understood) processes continues to yield new uses.  As an important footnote to the application of this theory is in Bayesian decision making that require a reasonable prior probability to kick off the calculations as new evidence comes in.

We looked at MKPAs in a previous RR post here.  To update the elements of this theory and its resultant formulas, I have written a short technical note which you can download here - Download TN1902-1_lifetimeMKP

The Green New Deal (updated 8feb19)

A rose by any other name would smell … .  Wm Shakespeare

George Rebane

Well, the last bits of doubt about our Democratic Party have been swept away by the new House resolution describing a fundamental transformation of America (Barack Obama, call your office).  The Green New Deal, sponsored by AOC and Senator Ed Markey (whom we have met on these pages), is socialism writ large.  So large in fact that the reporter interviewing AOC on NPR this morning had a hard time keeping from audibly gulping as he asked the feather head details and sources of funding for the individual mandates of the GND.  She, of course, had no answers other than taxing the bejeezus out anybody and everybody in the land who could still create wealth after the proposed strictures derive their power from the barrel of a gun.

So what do these two socialists propose in their fundamental transformation?  You can read the resolution here, and some more expanded analysis here, here, and here; but let’s just lay out a few of them in short form for the sake of discussion.

• US carbon neutral in 10 years. “…this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.”
• Guaranteed government job for all. “… provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”
• Government control of all medium and large corporations. “Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners.”
• Vastly higher taxes. Top rates for death taxes, income tax, and payroll taxes would increase markedly.  Also proposed is the institution of a “wealth tax” on assets.
• Government take over of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacture of certain products like pharmaceuticals, etc.

Now all this is based on the fundamental socialist tenet that tax rates do not affect economic behavior.  This belief by the Left is totally immune to historical data, including what France just had to rescind, and what has made NK, Cuba, Venezuela, … what they are today, and what caused the downfall of the USSR, and the massive shifts in the economies of China, Vietnam, … .

So there you have it.  Just keep your eye on the slated 40+ Democrats who sign up to sponsor this resolution – their true colors will wave proudly.  And also see how many more Democrats will be looking at their shoes while mumbling something about not belonging to the new socialist party of America.  Our Founders are spinning in their graves.

[8feb19 update]  It appears that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be the liberal loon for all seasons.  Both sides of the aisle seem to be happy dancing at the advent of this good looking 5-star ignoramus.  The Dems claim that her GND plan is just a negotiating “anchor” point stuck into the land of the ludicrous, a strategic starting point to get people dickering with each other about where we should really wind up.  Their hope is that any surviving putrid pot of progressive public policies will still be close enough to the GND anchor, and by comparison will look good to their light thinking constituents who will then support it as a ‘compromise’ with the Right.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are convinced that AOC (along with mini-minded Markey) have handed them the penultimate political prize for 2020.  WSJ’s national correspondent Kim Strassel details the blessings in her ‘The Socialist That Could’, and offers a succinct summary of “AOC, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.”

It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.

And can you imagine the profusion of optics AOC has already provided and will provide during the next 18 months for Republican ads.  This woman has turned out to be a horn of political plenty for the Right that is scaring hell out of the Democrat leadership – “They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.”

Given all this political largesse, my concern now is for AOC’s safety.  The RNC should offer to share with the DNC some of the costs for added security for the congresswoman.  No conservative in the land wants anything to still her voice, or deter her from advocating the clear path she has set out for America.

Globalization, Globalism, Globalists, and Governance

George Rebane

RR commentaries have defined and used globalism and globalization interchangeably to mean the political and commercial progress toward a one-world government as long proposed by the United Nations and its proponents, and especially by those espousing the UN’s Agenda21 program (q.v.) promulgated by its worldwide network of ICLEIs (more here and here, and see also RR’s ‘Agenda 21’ category of commentaries).

In recent RR comment stream exchanges, a couple of our leftwing readers reminded me, correctly, that most of the public understands ‘globalization’ to refer to the trade and commerce aspect of companies rapidly expanding to do business across national borders.  Moreover, that this same cohort, which includes our commenters, doesn't connect ‘globalization’ with today’s concurrent efforts by the international collectivists to abrogate the Westphalian order of nation-states and unite humanity under a one-world government.  Merriam-Webster defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”  Clearly the focus and intent here is in the fields of commerce and not unified governance.

Yet M-W and others define ‘globalism’ as “a national policy of treating the whole world as a proper sphere for political influence”, and “the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations”. Here we definitely overlap into the area of politics and governance.  And people who are ‘globalists’ are those who share such an “attitude”, now on the track to one-world governance.  This has been the sense in which RR commentaries have interchangeably used ‘globalization’ and ‘globalism’, along with ‘globalist’.

So, in the interest of continuing our tradition of precise definitions (which so vexes the Left), I will henceforth use the following definitions in my commentaries and comments –

Globalization - the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by businesses and commercial institutions in sovereign nation-states expanding their products and services across national boundaries in conducting free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.

Globalism – the ideology that treats the whole world as a unified sphere of political influence, and promotes institutions which place the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations, with the ultimate goal of achieving a one-world government.  A globalist is a person embracing such an ideology.

These definitions will be included in the next edition of RR’s Glossary & Semantics.

Sandbox - 6feb19

[Our leftwing commenters keep reporting that all of our border problems are nothing but rightwing propaganda, so why have the national news been reporting illegal entry numbers surging, caravans at the border trying to get in, and more caravans on the way from central America?  And how come Dems keep saying that walls don't work, and the border security authorities keep testifying and presenting data that they do?  gjr]

Scattershots – 4feb19 (updated 7feb19)

George Rebane

My heart goes out to our cartoonist Bob Crabb in his kerfuffle with a (fellow?) progressive lady who has accused him of dissing the transgender community with one of his offerings. (more here)  I know Bob, and he would be the last on the planet (if not Nevada County) to ever knowingly hurt the feelings of a class of people who are indelibly part and parcel of the same social orientation as is he.  He has now walked into the expanding "minefield" of progressive thought and talk policing, a prominent aspect of revolutionary political correctness that has become so virulent in limiting free speech that it has predictably started eating its own.  Self-consuming politically correct speech became wholesale in the USSR of the 1920s and 30s, and served as inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984, and, of course, today also for our own resurgent Left.  After such verbal assault, I hope that Bob doesn’t pull in the horns too far on his wit and wisdom.

Take a look at the kinesiology and kinetics of robots as being developed by companies like Boston Dynamics (here).  In these pre-Singularity years this is only one aspect of how human abilities are being matched and superseded by advancing technology.  Such advancement explains the divergence between the price of labor and productivity that still continues to puzzle some and enrage others.  In the US economy, labor and productivity tracked each other almost perfectly until the early 1970s.  At that point productivity maintained its growth trend, but the price of labor almost leveled off and has been increasing at a very modest rate since then.  The 1970 date is significant in that it coincides with the milestone of the introduction of commercially successful minicomputers into our economy – e.g. Digital Equipment Corp’s PDP-8.  (I immediately bought one for my R&D company, and quickly upgraded it for a PDP-11 when that became available.)  With such computing power available to ‘everyone’, US industry was off to the races, and the increases in productivity were now due mostly to invested capital instead of labor.  Ever since then, labor in the aggregate has strained in the competition to provide value in the workplace.  From my perch, this divergence was easy to predict and has been preached here for years under the larger category of systemic unemployment (see also John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man).

Union columnist Darrell Berkheimer has always come across to me and mine as our local good-hearted and well-intentioned walking monument to intellectual innocence.  In his 2feb19 column ‘Will House shirk duty to initiate impeachment?’ he attempts to make another case for ‘indict first, find evidence later’, which is now the established mode of progressive jurisprudence practiced in government, entertainment, and by the leftwing commentariat.

Millennials against capitalism.  Author Malcolm Harris in Vox – ‘Why Millennials are burned out. Capitalism’ - is the latest to write about the millennial generation and their travails in adjusting to earth.  My basketball coach back in Indiana told his charges about how performance and risk fly in tight formation.  His wisdom was corroborated by years at university and later in business where I confirmed that the greatest achievement, and most certainly every human advancement, is always brought about at the ‘edge of the envelope’ where stability is marginal and risk is highest.  This ‘law’ cuts across ALL endeavors, be they in engineering, finance, sports, or the arts.  Most of those who paid attention came to know this through schooling in the academy and/or of the hard knocks variety.  However, it is clear that this is another wisdom of the ages that is absent from today’s snowflake curricula.  Harris, himself a Millennial, explains why Marxism appeals to this generation, and how they see capitalism exploiting labor, just as Herr Karl said it would.

[5feb19 update]  “This is the flip side. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?” Andrew Cuomo.  I love it when every once in a while a progressive experiences a smiphany (a smidgen of epiphany) about the way real humans behave.  We recall that the Left has always maintained that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior, and the Laffer Curve, well, it’s just worth a laugh.  Now with NY’s very high tax rates combined with Trump’s tax cuts, the state’s rich have been doing the Sayonara Samba to greener pastures, leaving the state’s coffers $2.3B in the red.  The Empire State progressives are asking each other ‘Whoulda thought?!’  But my bet is that even with his t!t in a wringer, Cuomo has learned nothing that will stick with him for more than a week.  And, of course, the remainder of the nation’s Left will pay it no mind – the mantra ‘To increase govt revenues, just raise taxes’ is alive and well. (more here)

[7feb19 update]  We’ve all heard that gold is ‘an ancient relic’ from government elites whose job is to convince to value fiat money über alles.  Governments themselves, of course, know better and value gold as the mother’s milk that really nourishes and upholds the function of dollars to drachmas to serve as mediums of exchange, units of account, and stores of value.  This truth was again underlined with Russia’s announcement that recent confirmation of vast amounts of gold under Siberia will make its currency bulletproof against sanctions imposed by the west.  And they are right, it will because everyone really wants to know that those little pieces of paper and computer bits are really backed by something that everyone agrees has value, no matter how ancient.  (more here)

The Olympus of hubris. Former President Obama has continued to take credit for today’s booming economy, you know, the one that took off a bit after President Trump had a go at it (more here).  But on second thought ol’ Barry may have something there.  It took some mighty dedicated mismanagement to keep America’s stellar economy hobbled to less than 2% growth for all those years.  Obama did indeed keep our economic pressure cooker plugged up until someone, anyone, would come along who did not want to fundamentally transform America.  So maybe he can take some credit for finally getting out of the way, and letting good times return again.  (Of course, the Dems have their Plan B – aka the Green New Deal - ready to go to really sink the country.)

NASA now reports global cooling

George Rebane

Now here’s a report by some people from the mother temple of global warming that is guaranteed to summon the Left’s crickets.  More cool-headed scientists have been reporting on the new cooling trend that correlates with low sun-cycle activity for years now.  This has been echoed and amplified on many serious websites (e.g. Anthony Watts, Russ Steele, …, and, of course, RR) written by people who understand the science involved and not just echo ‘consensus science’. (H/T to reader)

Now ‘NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity’.  At NASA’s Langley Research Center, Dr Martin Mlynczak reports, “We see a cooling trend, … high above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.” (more here and here)

Sandbox - 2feb19

[Our favorite cartoonist RL 'Bob' Crabb and I share thoughts on the US benefitting from a multi-party (four or more) political smorgasbord.  Bob offered this good rendition, filched from the 2feb19 Union, of Howard Schultz's presidential ambitions.  There should be a lot more to say about that.  gjr]

Ruminations – 31jan19 (updated 1feb19)

George Rebane

Global warming conspiracy’s agenda is about destroying capitalism, so admits Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.  At a Brussels news conference she said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”  This revelation is not news to RR readers who have been repeatedly informed of this for over a decade.  (H/T to reader, more here)

Socialists have an endless list of bad habits, beliefs, and behaviors.  One of the worst on their list is about OPM – they never seem to get enough of it to spend, and they also don’t hold back telling other people how they should spend their own money.  Apropos to that, in the 29jan19 WSJ Jason Riley describes how “progressives are more interested in scapegoating the wealthy than they are in relieving poverty.”

‘Conflating Ideas Weakens Constitutional Principles’ (from RCP).  “The left’s conflation of conservatism with fascism and the right’s conflation of classical liberalism with progressive extremism combine to conceal the concrete political realities that inspired the rise of liberal democracy in the West. These conflations also suppress the multiple traditions that merged in forming the American constitutional order. And they obscure the compelling reasons for conserving this precious inheritance.”  (Trigger warning for some of our readers who have complained about big words, long sentences, and large paragraphs – this piece has them.)

American republicanism, as intended by our Founders, is dead, having succumbed over the years to poll preening politicians.  Moreover, the nation’s pundits and public demand that the pols be ever responsive to the latest polls.   And they are more than happy to comply so as to do ‘the will of the people’, and relieve themselves of having to make potentially contentious decisions about what to support and vote for – after all, getting reelected is job one.  So now we have government by randomly gyrating, soundbite propagandized, uninformed public opinion.  This is exactly the kind of chaotic direct democracy that our Constitution was written to shield us from with a republic of elected representatives.

[1feb19 update]  ‘Ownership as an endangered species’ by Rob Chrisman (1feb19 Union) is a good piece about the vicissitudes of private property in these days of leftward careening progressivism.  Mr Chrisman also writes an occasional blog – notallradishesarered.org – which saw its last of many excellent posts in June 2017.

Earthshaking News – Cancer Cured?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 30 January 2019.  An edited version of this commentary appeared in the 2feb19 Union.]

Standby for the next tranche of earthshaking news.  You know, the kind of report that promises to make a big impact on the lives of each of us.  Well, there’s another one of these that has come out, but has yet to make a big splash in the headlines, which today are probably more interested in keeping the latest Trump/Pelosi brouhaha at a boil.

Remember the earthshaking news back in 1989 when a couple of scientists claimed to have cracked the code on cold fusion (here).  Fusion energy is the holy grail of humanity’s search for a clean and virtually limitless source of power to make our civilization hum without polluting the earth with fossil fuels residues and/or fission power catastrophes.  From our high school science class most of us remember that fission power is generated by splitting atoms which releases the desired energy, along with a bunch of deadly radiation and radioactive stuff that needs to be contained and then disposed of safely.  Today fission reactors around the world power everything from electric grids to big carriers and missile submarines.  The other bad part about fission reactors is that their operation must be constantly controlled lest they go into an unstable meltdown like the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Fusion energy comes from hydrogen atoms being fused into the heavier helium atoms in an environment of extreme gravitational pressure and ten million-degree temperatures such as occur naturally in the cores of stars including our sun.  If for some reason the pressure is released or the temperature goes down, fusion stops instantly.  And the only bad byproduct of controlled fusion is some high energy neutrons that tend to corrode anything that attempts to contain the process.  Well, the cold fusion experiments ended as an embarrassing bust, and to date no one has made much progress on controlling ‘hot’ or thermonuclear fusion.  It’s turning out to be much more difficult to contain and harness on earth what goes on naturally all over the universe.  So the arrival of fusion power has yet to shake our world. (more here)

Now, get ready for today’s earth-shaker – seatbelts please.  Israeli scientists announce that they have a demonstrated a cure for cancer.  This ongoing development, to be completed “in a year’s time”, is reported in the Jerusalem Post and Forbes magazine.  The scientists work at Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd (AEBi), a pharmaceutical company located in Ness Ziona, Israel.  The reported cure is more than a bit mind-blowing since it can be targeted to attack all types of cancer cells.  And once it kills them, the cure is permanent, there will be no lurking cancer stem cells left that will later bloom into a full-blown cancer that is so common to the disease.

But that’s not all.  Using a multi-target toxin drug they named MuTaTo, AEBi reports that “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, (the process) will last … a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market.” (more here)

So there you have it – the next promise of a real earth-shaker that will save the 1 in 5 men and the 1 in 6 women who will develop cancer during their lifetimes.  MuTaTo will then go into clinical testing and the usual bureaucratic obstacle course.  You can read more about it with the links posted on my website.  But overall and so far, what’s not to like about such uplifting news?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the 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.

 

Plan to Re-elect Trump

George Rebane

The Republicans have an opportunity to implement a surefire plan to get their candidate re-elected in 2020, given that the Dems will run everyone and their cousin who understands how to spend OPM (that’s Other People’s Money for you independents and mid-roaders).  And OPM is also the active ingredient of this ingenious plan.

• The RNC launches the ‘Fund a Socialist’ website that lists the current Dem presidential candidates, their website URLs, and the money they currently have in their election war chests.
• Trump supporters review the list on a regular basis, and, according to their lights, send a couple of the most egregiously leftwing radical and poorly funded candidates $5 each.
• Trump supporters repeat step #2 every month as the list inevitably prunes itself. This automatically strengthens the surviving radicals.

Say, a couple of million or so Trump supporters sign up for this plan and carry it out as long as the list still contains viable and voluble radicals, the loonier the better, or until the Democratic National Convention.  The total cost for each participant will be about $200 give or take, and it would be money no better spent.  That would shove about $400M plus into the shorts of second tier candidates seeking to out-left each other.  Sweet.

Such inflows of small contributions to those hopeful socialists will keep the maximum number of them energized and fighting for slots in the upcoming debates, running in primaries, hogging air time, and doing everything they can to disrupt the orderly machine of Democrat elites trying to field an electable candidate.  And all of these no-names coming out of the woodwork will be convinced by their millions of small donations that they really are riding the top of the new socialist tsunami sweeping the country.

Obvious priorities are Sen Bernie and Congresswoman AOC.  Republicans must make sure that these two never lack for funds to make their message heard across the land.  That’s important because some wiser heads in the DNC are already talking about running some more electable center-leftists against them in the primaries. ;-)

Journalism continues to falter

George Rebane

Journalism is a lost trade (art?), attested to by the justifiably low esteem journalists are held in by the reading public.  Jacob Gallagher attempts to make this point in his ‘Journalism Is Faltering but ‘Content’ Is Thriving’, and in the process makes a self-referential blooper.  His main thesis is that content - like editorials, movies, TV shows, commentaries, …, the stuff for which you access media - will survive in spite of the palpable deterioration of the journalistic wrappers in which they are delivered.  For proof, one need only to read a newspaper or listen to a news program (yes, even Fox News) to see the loose logic relating propositions and the liberties taken with language – today no one seems to know the structure of an unambiguously communicating grammar or the definition of the words used. 

(Even RR’s comment streams contain the lamentations of some readers who eschew the semantic compactness of what to them are ‘big words’, especially in previously unencountered sequences.  As reflected in the longitudinal studies on literacy available at the National Center for Educational Statistics, most of our fellow citizens would like to avoid complex concepts, instead demand simple thoughts in simple sentences, and not even too many of those strung together, thank you very much.)

And then Gallagher steps in it by claiming that “the concept of ‘content’ rose alongside social media, beginning with the launch of Facebook in 2004.”  Well no.  The man shows the deficit in his journalistic acumen, no doubt due to his inexperience and/or recently attempted education.  In fact, the notion of content was already mature at the birth of interactive multi-media products (remember PC controlled laser-disc players?) in the early 1980s, when we were developing content (the ‘payload’) ensconced in metadata along with new and delightful UIs (user interfaces or ‘wrappers’).  For broadcasts, the metric of Content Factor was also born, measuring the time fraction of content divided by the advertised duration or time slot length of the show.  (Today CFs for most entertainment programs on commercial TV are in the 0.55 to 0.75 range.)

Sandbox - 28jan19

[... and I would also draw your kind attention to the 28jan19 update of the last Ruminations.  gjr]

The Real Issue That Divides Us (updated 27jan19)

George Rebane

Conservetarians believe in global diversity and national cohesion; progressives believe in global conformity and national diversity.  The former resists global autocracy, the latter sustains global autocracy.

Nationally prominent commentator and executive WSJ editor Gerald Seib recently wrote ‘The Wall Marks a Deep Cultural Divide’ (in the 21jan19 WSJ) a piece describing attributes which divide America that focused on “character differences”.  In his piece Seib said, “One question asked whether immigration adds to the character and strength of America by increasing its diversity and bringing in new talent, or detracts from American character by putting burdens on government services and creating language barriers”, and then cited the disparate responses of the Trump and resist-Trump supporters.

While I agreed with Seib’s subsequent analysis, I felt that he did not reach deep enough to a more basic, revelatory, and explanatory level (in the sense of being able to reliably predict derivative attitudes and behaviors).

I emailed Mr Seib a brief explanation of my critique: Mr Seib - Our divide goes much deeper than can be discovered with pabulum questions about “American character”.  If these surveys were structured and administered so as to discover what kind of future world order Americans would like to see the US being a part of (i.e. Westphalian sovereign nation-states vs a peerage of jurisdictional fiefs of a global government), then the answers would be more revealing (and reliably predictive) as to the respondents’ attitudes about border security, immigration policy, cultural diversity, paths to citizenship of illegal aliens, etc, since all these are dependent on how people value culturally cohesive (vs fragmented) nations, and whether/how such a community of nations should continue to organize the world’s peoples.

Ruminations – 25jan19 (updated 29jan19)

George Rebane

Our very own Paul Emery is producing the new Dalrymple MacAlpin musical ‘Make Believe’ that premiers tonight at the Nevada Theater (more here).  Paul is arguably our county’s most prolific producer of both theatrical dramas and musicals, and also musical entertainment events at various venues in our community.  The former hippie cum community icon is also a walking teddy-bear, garnering hugs from ladies on Broad Street every hundred feet or so, and from diverse restaurant patrons when we’re having our regular lunches.  Jo Ann and I will be in the audience tomorrow night to enjoy his latest theatrical enterprise.

The 25jan19 Union ran an Other Voices column by a Mr Joe Keeble who demonstrably has bad luck when he tries to think.  In his contribution to now normative Trump bashing (a good day to do it given the Roger Stone indictment) the gentleman confuses levels with rates (the popular progressive pastime of ‘derivative diving’), and also duns the harvesting of low hanging fruit just because more of it is harder to get.  He applies all this cognitive cogitation to current border security and 'illegal immigration' happenings, real and imagined.  People with fully functioning logics can enjoy his distracted diatribe ‘Proud to be a criminal’ here.

[27jan19 update]  Pelosi ascendant.  President Trump lost big time to the Dems led by Nancy, proving again that elections have consequences.  And I don’t see where this will end since there is nothing in the current state of affairs that would induce the Dems to negotiate in any better faith during the next three weeks than what they have been doing.  They’ve already bagged the political benefit from the Dreamers, and now are focused on keeping the border as porous as possible as more migrant caravans head north.  Can someone explain how this latest decline in American sovereignty will be halted, or are we now finally on the socialist slippery slope?

[28jan19 update]  Our favorite liberal Union columnist and RR reader, George Boardman, recognizes VDH’s recent assessment of California’s decline (here), and then puts up mighty counter arguments that then auto-destruct in his closing paragraphs (here).  Expanding on whether and how California is being taken down is itself worthy of extended debate.

Governor Newsom (apropos the above) is continuing, some say accelerating, CA along the path to an inevitable socialistic abyss.  So argues T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, in his very persuasive ‘Another California Tax Grab’.  Rodgers also points out that no more silicon wafers are manufactured in Silicon Valley – way too expensive, which motivated him along with all the other chip manufacturers to locate out of state.  Comparing his data with Mr Boardman’s arguments is instructive.

America’s cybersecurity war with the world’s bad guys is not going very well.  One of my WashDC spies pointed to some scary reading that made my toes curl the wrong way.  The basic message from a Pentagon assessment report is that our enemies are countering our security measures faster than we can counter their penetrating attacks – and the situation is not getting better.  The big problem is that we don’t have enough tech talent to build and man our cybersecurity barricades.  (more here)

‘UAE Slowly Loosening Constraints on Religious Freedom’ reports the 28jan19 WSJ.  Heartening piece about some commendable progress in Islam – credit where credit is due, but the road ahead to the 21^st century is still long and filled with chuckholes.

[29jan19 update]  Trump ascendant with the Dems' core galloping leftward.  "The energy in the Democratic Party is entirely on the left, and as Hillary Clinton discovered, the nominating process is going to drive the Democratic candidates to get as nutty as necessary to please the new generation of radical bigots."  Newt Gingrich

Twilight in California – VDH nails it

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson, California farmer, premier academic, and syndicated columnist, has given a comprehensive analysis of California’s sunset – and I do mean comprehensive.  We have covered the work of VDH many times on these pages (e.g. here), and in ‘Wealth, Poverty, and Flight: The Same Old California’ he takes us through a cold shower look at ourselves from multiple viewpoints, using hard stats on which to base his points.  I was going to include this in the last Scattershots, and forgot.  Then two friends emailed me a kick in the pants, and on second thought, this outstanding essay demands a post of its very own to draw readers’ attention to it.

California truly is the canary in our country’s mineshaft – “Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants, and a fleeing middle class.”  The Left has brought the state to its current condition of decline and decrepitude, and is now busy practicing the fine art of political taxidermy and ideological embalming to continue selling the image of what once was California.  And as VDH points out, our share of the nation’s double dummies is so high today that almost any kind of socialist bullcrap is easily peddled and readily consumed – our own county is an illustrative work-in-progress as the progressive pandemic spreads into the Sierra.

This essay is a must read, if for nothing else than to take the measure of our Left as it denies chapter and verse of what is presented, while the state continues to sink under total one-party rule that is now going into socialist overdrive.  There is no state that is more locked into the attempt to solve its every mounting problem by piling on regulations and increasing taxes.

Scattershots – 22jan19 (updated 24jan19)

George Rebane

The ignorant-to-evil needle has made a big jump toward evil in the last couple of days with the MAGA hat massacre in DC, and the shaming of Second Lady Mrs Pence.  The Catholic boys in the MAGA hats committed two sins for which the Liberal Lies machine went ballistic – they were Christians and obvious Trump supporters.  That was enough to fabricate a hateful story about their racism against American Indians and disseminate a carefully edited video to lamestream outlets who all joined in the howling for the boys’ scalps.  When the story was quickly discredited, the howlers just moved on to their next coverage of fake news.  The same thing happened with Mrs Pence who was pilloried for being provided Secret Service protection for her engagement as an arts teacher at a (gasp!) Christian grade school.  To the legions of progressive idiots that was evidence of violating the separation of church and state.  And the Left still thinks that the coming Great Divide is only a rightwing myth. 

Nevada County’s Love Walk on MLK day was strictly a one-sided affair.  For the attendees to such events, MLK’s civil rights legacy appears to have been a failure.  People attending are of a like mind that the country now is more racist than ever, and that extraordinary means need be brought to bear to restore Dr King’s dream, and this time we’ll get it right.  To boot, everyone not of this mindset is by definition a racist, and proof that today in America racism rules.  In a previous discussion of the ideological tilt of national holidays, it’s easy to see why MLK day is now firmly a leftwing holiday. (Imagine wearing your MAGA cap on the Love Walk.  To date we have not bothered to get our MAGA caps, but given what the socialist brown shirts have launched in the land, the time has come to get one and wear it.)

Wanna see quantitative economic projections on AOC’s 70% tax rate for the country? Take a look at the misery that such a confiscatory policy would heap on the middle class.  Yes, Virginia, the MIDDLE CLASS, because that’s where socialists have to go after they first cripple the economy with their tax on ‘the rich’.  The next inevitable tax, as government revenues sink, will be on the middle class, why?  Because that’s where the money is, and the poor snuffies voting for socialists haven’t a clue about their own doings in the voting booth.  And how will it be sold?  By turning up the volume on the “ravages of capitalism” narrative, of course.  (more here and here)

Racism and racist, terms progressives use constantly are among the terms no progressive wants to define.  Much to the consternation of our liberal readers, here on RR we are prone to pursue semantics, especially of the operational kind (meaning you can usefully apply them in the realworld).  Illustrating this are a couple of forays into this melee ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racialism Rising’, and, of course, see the RR Glossary.

[23jan19 update]  RR readers are aware of my longstanding thoughts on unionized public schools.  The recent LA teachers strike underlined all these concerns, and the main concern that union teachers don’t really give a care for the kids as again pointed out by Jason Riley (here) in the 23jan19 WSJ.  “When the United Auto Workers walk off the job, no one pretends the care about car buyers. … Yet striking public school teachers and their union representatives insist they are action behalf of the children.  We’re expected to believe the priorities of education workers are perfectly aligned with those of students.”  The blatant facts about school spending, students’ performance, and aggressive opposition to the spread of non-union, public charter schools tells a completely different story.  “Teachers unions are unions first, not reformers or student advocates.  Their real agenda – their only agenda – is to protect their members by any means possible.  No matter what those picket signs said, the unions weren’t helping students.  They were using them.”

[24jan19 update] “Senate Rejects Two Rival Spending Bills, Extending Shutdown” Can we now finally give up the notion that just because one party or the other has a majority in Congress (specifically the Senate), that it therefore ‘controls’ what that chamber does?  The Founders intended government’s ability to make laws to be a slow, deliberative, if not awkward process, and the Senate’s super-majority rule of 60 votes helps implement this intent.  So let’s pick up a bit on the simplistic arguments in these comment streams about which party ‘controlled’ Congress in what years so as to imply that they could have passed anything they wanted.  Sophomoric!

SecComm Wilbur Ross today picked up on my suggestion that the fed workers running out of cash should just go get a loan to tide them over.  And he was dunned for making such a practical suggestion.  The needy fed workers would not be borrowing more than their take-home pay since that is what they had planned to spend in the first place, and that amount is guaranteed to them after the shutdown ends.  That is about the best collateral, save US Treasuries, that you can give a lender who can even have you sign a paper agreeing that the govt submit the loan amount directly to the lender.  And the lenders can get extra PR brownie points by advertising that these are short-term no interest loans.  What’s not to like?  Yet it was only ol’ Wilbur who finally came up with that while the rest of Washington is just sitting around with their teeth in their mouth.  It’s almost as if both sides wanted the furloughed to go on a publicized fast.  Nah!

Sandbox - 21jan19

[Does anyone know what leverage would Trump have to get Dems to agree to border security funding were he to agree on first giving them all they want on illegal aliens in a bill that would also terminate the shutdown?  gjr]

Border Security, Barriers, and Porosity (updated)

George Rebane

No nation-state can long maintain its culture and sovereignty without the ability and will to control its borders.

“Sounds like a lack of technology rather than the porosity of a wall”, replied a commenter who had just finished celebrating the capture of illegals who had tunneled under an old, shallow, and unmanned remote section of our southern border.  He and others like him gleefully pointed that out as evidence supporting the Left’s new narrative that border barriers (walls, fences, …) are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  And then he posted the above statement which confused (i.e. “rather than”) barrier system design with a metric of its performance.  Such mistakes from the Left abound today in the media and these pages.  We can leave the question of how much these erroneous statements are forged through simple ignorance vs promoting the ‘hate Trump’ agenda.  There is little we can do to heal their TDS, however there is an outside chance that their ignorance can be alleviated (given that there is no stupidity – i.e. processing deficit – at play).

Motivated by the above general principle, border control is defined as the ability to determine the ingress and egress of people and goods across geographical boundaries which delineate the jurisdictional limits of a sovereign nation-state.  Border controls are implemented by many means, depending on the border geography, implemented border security systems, and the cost burden the nation is willing to bear to implement its border security policies which should include one or more publicly known border control performance metrics that are part of the nation’s overall border control (multi-attribute) utility function.  The most meaningful attribute is the border’s overall porosity metric.

Border porosity is a bidirectional measure of the rate of illegal crossings in either the egress or ingress directions across the national boundary.  Today we are overwhelmingly concerned with only the ingress of illegal aliens.  In practice, porosity will vary over a range of values along a long, complex border having varying physical and political attributes that come into play.  Here we have to be careful in how we apply the above definition of porosity.  Specifically, the ingress porosity metric does NOT include the accretion of illegal aliens through non-border means such as overstaying their visa permissions.  Aliens who entered legally under various immigration, tourist, and guest-worker policies, and then ‘went illegal’ are a concern for our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

So when we want to have a meaningful discussion of border security, we must start with at least the statement of an acceptable ‘mean porosity’ level that, if exceeded, alerts us to discover and fix the cause of having violated the policy threshold.  As RR readers may be aware, my own considered border porosity threshold is a quite generous annual entry of 15,000 illegal aliens who are not intercepted/captured at the border, and successfully meld into our population.  These illegals then become fugitives from our laws, and are to be brought back into our legal system by our internal alien tracking and policing systems.

Now regarding physical border barriers (in military jargon known as ‘fixed field fortifications’) – I will not waste readers’ time countering the ignorant and inane critics who suddenly maintain that such barriers are “ineffective” and “don’t work”.  (And to address the question of their ‘morality’ is for me beyond accessible levels of idiocy.)  The main purpose of such physical barriers has always been to reduce the boundary or border manning requirements wherever they are constructed.  As we are taught in the military, all unmanned fixed field fortifications can be penetrated by a determined enemy, and that goes for desperate migrants breaching unguarded segments of our southern border.  The question on what to build where depends strictly on how we must share the ‘hardware’ (walls, fences, surveillance/tracking/penetration detection systems, etc) costs with the costs of staffing our boots-on-the-ground Border Patrol, ICE, and other border interdiction units in order to maintain the acceptable porosity levels along the border.

The Left’s current narrative about whether we need walls, or slats, or fences, or whatever, and that Trump lied if he doesn’t really intend to build some ridiculously high concrete wall from the Pacific to the Gulf, is just unmitigated bullshit that diverts the national attention from border security.  This narrative panders to the nation’s Latinos, and seeks to increase the inflow of future Democrat voters who will join the ranks of those who already are working to bring America to its knees as one more compliant complement that genuflects to the brave new world of one global government.

(Now let’s see what President Trump has to say about this in his imminent speech at noon (PST) from the Oval Office.)

[update] President Trump’s short speech was full of compromises that traded multiple tranches of benefits to resident illegal aliens, including extending the DACA stays to three years, in return for the next $5.7B for border security which includes barrier systems.  He also invited the Dems to an accelerated bipartisan program to hammer out a new comprehensive immigration policy and implementing laws. (more here)  The Republican majority Senate will now draft and pass a bill that incorporates the President’s compromise proposal to terminated the partial shutdown and proceed on the road to immigration reform putatively desired by both sides.  It will be up to the Pelosi House to pass and work out with the Senate a compromise bill that the President will sign.  If Team Pelosi continues to tell the President to stuff it where the sun don’t shine, then that should remove the last shreds of doubt as to who has been stonewalling the shutdown from the gitgo.

Ruminations - 18jan19 (updated 21jan19)

Federal workers demonstrate because they don't have the money to buy food or pay the rent. Why haven't some of the nation's major lenders stepped forward to lend them money at low/no interest rates until they start getting a check again?  The money so lent would be at minimal risk since the borrowers have their government jobs and their back-pay checks as collateral of equal quality to US Treasury bonds.  Where are all these rightwing bankers who could lend Trump and the Republicans a political hand while reaping beaucoup PR rewards? ...  OK, then where are the leftwing lenders since the overwhelming share of government workers are Democrat voters?

[update]  RR contributor and blogger Russ Steele wrote and excellent Other Voices in the 18jan19 Union making the case for “upskilling” your workplace talents in the age of galloping AI.  In his ‘STEM for all’ he also pointed out what SESF has been doing in promoting and supporting STEM education in Nevada County.

Former Trump attorney Cohen’s most recent allegations about candidate Trump’s real estate dealings with Russia are making big headlines that have every Dem and all their cousins calling for more investigations, and definitely for the president’s impeachment.  But no one is lifting an eyebrow about what was just released about Bruce Ohr’s testimony last August that revealed a string of lies the FBI told Congress and on its FISA application to investigate Trump’s campaign.  And also that two of the liars have been key members of Mueller’s team continuing to investigate the president.  The magnitude of such misdirection of national attention is beyond astounding and does not portend well for our beloved republic.  (more here)

‘If Weed Is Medicine, So Is Budweiser’, so goes a convincing argument by Dr Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  He points out that MJ “is a toxin, not a medicine” per se as its adherents claim for ailments ranging from hepatitis to Parkinson’s.  Citing studies, Bach tells us that “if weed is a pain reliever, so is Budweiser.”  His message of “Legalize marijuana, but don’t pretend it’s therapeutic” come with the bottom line that MJ “belongs in the same category as alcohol an tobacco – harmful products that adults can choose to enjoy”, and they need to be regulated as such.

"Trump's Shutdown" - Here's a quiz, how is this government shutdown significantly different from Obama's shutdown, and previous ones?  And here is the answer.

[20jan19 update]  Fiber in Nevada City.  Russ Steele sent me this which might be of interest to our locals concerned about the county's economic development.  "I am reading Susan Crawford's book Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School.  There are ten references to Nevada City and John Paul's Fiber Network in her book recounting the struggle to bring fiber to Nevada City/Grass Valley.   More details on my blog:"  https://ruraleconomytechnology.com

[21jan19 update]  Gov Newsom’s early childhood education spending. Our new governor wants to spend “$2.4 billion in early childhood investments, including significant funding for health care, home visiting programs, early developmental screening, high-quality early learning and paid family leave.”  That’s all well and good with two significant caveats – 1) anyone know of any successful govt education program outside the military?  2) anyone know of any early childhood education programs that made a measurable difference by the time the child reached 3^rd grade?  But in a state that already has the largest number of poor, indigents, and welfare recipients in the Union, along with uncountable and uncounted unfunded liabilities, the governor’s budget proposal is sure to add another tranche of government employees and reliable Democrat voters.  (more here)