Rebane's Ruminations

‘From Racism to Culturism’

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 16 October 2019.]

For some decades now, ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have become a cachet in the Left’s narrative about the sins of the Right when other such appellations fail them.  Few people using such pejoratives can give a coherent definition of these terms, nevertheless they continue to serve a useful purpose to invoke the ire of their lightly read constituents.  Longtime listeners to these commentaries who have visited my blog know that I have a long history of being accused by my leftwing readers as a racist, among other unsavory things.

The nuance that such accusers of those like me miss is that I am a culturist, and not a racist.  Instead, as the years-long archive of my writings show, I am a child, student, and defender of Western civilization.  Western civilization is united by the formidable intersection of western cultures as practiced in the various countries of what today is known as ‘the west’.  And, absent my making any discriminatory remarks about people based on their DNA or gene set, that makes me and others like me culturists and apologists for culturism.

Yuval Harari, in his chapter ‘From Racism to Culturism’, concurs with and expands on this interpretation in his most recent tome, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2019).  Yuval Noah Harari is a celebrated socio-historian and author of best-selling books on humanity, its history, worldviews, and future portents.  Perhaps some of you have read his Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind (2014) or Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). In the following, the quotes I use come from his ‘21 Lessons …’ published earlier this year.

Totalitarian regimes have always sought to fundamentally transform their nations’ cultures when coming to power.  However, such transformations never succeed.  History shows us this most recently in the recoil of such imposed transformations to their native versions in the liberated Balkans and countries conquered by the former USSR.  The existence of a rich tapestry of cultures around the world has served us well, and their measured and unforced evolution will continue to serve mankind in these tumultuous years of technology paced globalization.

Are some cultures better than others?  Cultural relativists say no, but reality says yes. Harari writes “… few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”  When people judge others of a different culture on the basis of their display of cultural attributes, then that is NOT a racist judgement or racist behavior.  Such assessments are more accurately known as culturist behavior, and the person so disposed is a culturist, not a racist.  A culturist evaluates the relative worth of another culture based on cultural attributes that may be expressed or carried out by anyone of any race, and not on the basis of an individual’s racial make-up.

Traditional racism was firmly grounded in biological theories, in modern times even incorporating DNA and genes as the basis for attributed differences in such things as intelligence and morality.  This has been shown to have little scientific basis.  In Hariri’s words, “Today, in contrast, while many individuals still make such racist assertions, they have lost all of their scientific backing and most of their political respectability—unless they are rephrased in cultural terms. Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

For political reasons, today’s progressives reject this understanding of culturism and continue to accuse culturists of being racists in order to serve their emotive narrative targeting the politically unsophisticated.  Describing another nation as a ‘s-hole country’ is definitely not a racist slur, but instead a slur on the country’s culture.  There is nothing inherent in the people of any country, no matter their racial make-up, that prevents them from practicing a more productive and enlightened culture to benefit their citizens.  In sum, “culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.”

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]  I revisit this distinction between racism and (my) culturism because now we have the left-of-center Yuval Hariri, an internationally respected scholar and author of relevant essays for the intelligent reader, who also concurs with what I have argued in these pages for many years.  Followers of Rebane Doctrine know my penchant for more precise and operational definitions, and may recall how my understanding of racist and racism was presented in ‘Who is a Racist?’ and ‘Racism and Racists Revisited’.  The caveat in all this is that with respect to the semantic accuracy of the definitions presented, we are technically all racists if we believe that the racial composition of individuals can now be determined from a detailed examination of their DNA.  To the extent we believe that this technology lets us characterize their aggregated physiological attributes, we are all racists.  But, of course, in the socio-political sense, as Hariri corroborates, that is not true.

Recalling Governor Newsom

George Rebane

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has turned out as expected, an atrocious chief executive who has now signed a spate of bills into law that is taking the state ever lower in personal freedoms, property rights, and the ability to conduct business.  One of most destructive to enterprises, both for- and non-profits, is SB5, which totally restructures the ability to work as a consultant, and for companies to hire such temporary and part time talent.  The list from gun rights to consultants is filled with more legal and regulatory chuckholes than you can count thanks to our governor working hand in glove with our socialist legislature.

Many of us believe it’s time to recall Gavin Newsom, and there is a significant groundswell militating for such an event (more here).  Nevada County Republican Chairman Bob Hren sent out the following information about where you can go to sign the recall petition.

====

There are now four locations in Grass Valley to sign this recall petition.  Do so if you have not yet signed it!  All business are open from Tuesday thru Saturday.

Mustang Firearms, 10893 Alta St.

The Range, 13235 Grass Valley Ave, GV 

The Hunter's Blind, 671 Maltmn Dr. #1, GV

Harrington & Baldwin, mining equipment supply company, 470 E. Main St., GV

And, here is a map showing petition locations and events state-wide if you have friends and relatives elsewhere that wish to sign. 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1I8qpxC6YdrOc3mfJeK_-A1k7tlVvgdIQ&ll=39.22583449859598%2C-120.95512660659625&z=11

This map may not show some of the latest locations, so check the petition website for more updates.

http://recallgavinnow.com/

 

 

Power Outage – from a very scary viewpoint

George Rebane

Mr Cedar Moss declared himself to be one of Lenin’s “useful idiots” in this morning’s (14oct19) Union (here).  There the man actually celebrates the recent power outage and looks forward to a time when these become a regular occurrence in our lives.  For him, “there is something about all this that feels very right”, and he admonishes us to just “get used to it folks.”  Why is this man such an ardent connoisseur of third-world living where regular power outages, among other shortages, are a way of life, and a world from which those who can, will risk life and limb to escape?

Well, it seems that he and his believe that we in the developed countries don’t deserve to live in the “high privileged” first-world, and we should instead, through various self-flagellation practices, retreat from being a developed country, and “get at least a tiny glimpse of what so much of the world deals with everyday.”  As part of our absolution, he wants to “experience some inconvenience” on a regular basis, and advises that we “climb off our high-privileged horses and join the rest of the human race” - that “it is time we got over that one.”  In short, it is a social injustice for any culture to strive to be in the vanguard of showing how human lives can be lifted from the miseries of millennia.  The moss-bound Mosses of the world are totally ignorant of how the development of advanced (mostly western) cultures has aided in lifting all of the more backward cultures from their perpetual penury.

But what actually scares me in reading such calcified counsel from progressives like Cedar Moss, exhorting us to return to yesteryear, is that he is just the visible tip of an iceberg, the much bigger mass of which is there and invisible to the rest of us in our daily round.  Mr Moss represents possibly millions of such ignorant Americans whose lasting influence we only witness and subsequently suffer from on election days, when they elect slates of candidates like we have today in Sacramento.  Or worse, the powerful politicians we may get when we consider our futures under policies promised by the likes of AOC, Warren, and Sanders.  It is the Mosses of our country who may well bring about any of these dreadful dystopias.

The Split Pill Problem Solved

George Rebane

RR readers were introduced to the Split Pill Problem (SPP) in a passing Scattershots entry last summer.  The problem involved giving our puppy Puna her pain meds after her second knee repair surgery, and that evoked an interesting problem the solution to which turned out to have several features which generalize to and can illuminate other realworld problems.  Puna’s daily dose from the pill bottle was a half pill.  If I shook out a whole pill, I would split it and give her a half, returning the other half to the bottle.  On a day when a half pill emerged, I would just give the half.

The vet said to do that until the pill bottle was empty.  Given the random way in which whole and half pills emerged, I wondered how soon could I expect to get to a day when only half pills remained in the bottle and I would no longer have to split pills.  The solution turned out to be very interesting, which I have documented in a somewhat whimsical technical note that requires no math beyond grade school arithmetic to understand.  You can access the pdf here – Download TN1910-1_Split Pill Problem Solved

I’ll leave you with a piece of eye candy from the report that illustrates the graphical beauty of the SPP solution where it will be fully explained.  Enjoy.

Scattershots – 11oct19 (updated 13oct19)

George Rebane

Nevada City mayor Reinette Senum calls for the “dismantling” of PG&E during the windless Wednesday night protest in front of city hall.  “During the protest Senum questioned PG&E’s decision to shut off power, saying that although she supports the move in cases of extreme weather, it should proactively turn it back on when that weather doesn’t materialize.”  Whadda concept!  She got a bit lost when she advised us that “anything that we’re dependent on – water, power, banks – should be owned by the public.  PGE is already owned by the public about as much as it can be – public company and public monopoly.  But her and my bottom line is that today’s policy of power outages is not a solution to anything.  And did you notice the full page ad by the PGE workers union in today’s Union?  It basically said ‘don’t blame us for the butt stupid political decisions to turn off the power when dangerous winds don’t materialize.’ (more here)

Stupid people should not use wild rivers for recreation.  One woman who spent a night on a rock in the South Yuba from which she could have easily waded ashore, according to the incident commander, required two helicopters and a rescue team to hike in to get her off the rock.  I hope the Washington fire department at least got some training out of that woman’s idiocy.  The rest of her party were no brighter between the ears.  They drove a two-wheeler off road into the brush to their illegal campsite and got their truck stuck.  That was an extra task for the rescue team in order to get them out of there.

Sen Lizzy Warren continues to promise her intent to “remake capitalism”, and is drawing the support of big corporatists who see her socialism as the easy way for big established companies to use government to stifle competition.  It’s a good bet to make on the coming election – all upside, no downside.  An early action to endear them to a lot of people is their current amicus brief filing to SCOTUS opposing the President’s bid to rescind DACA, and maintain that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act can be used to protect LGBT workers.  None of the worthies running these enterprises remember Lenin’s observation of capitalists ‘who will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’

Government enforced green policies will grow the economy is the oft-heard progressive refrain on these pages and across the land.  More sober assessments note that, for example, subsidized EVs still make up only 1% of the car market of which 100% of them are sold at a loss to the manufacturers according to the auto industry.  No one here is saying that EVs will not be the desirable mode of personal transport when batteries finally become sufficiently capacious and cheap enough to make such vehicles for a profit that people will buy.  That day is not here yet.

[Later]  Sorry to see FN's gay, progressive afternoon news host Shepard Smith leave the network.  He was one of the major figures in otherwise right-leaning network who was unabashedly leftwing, and thus gave proof that FN was not at all like the lamestream and Dems like to characterize it as the network for xenophobics, homophopics, and neo-Nazis.  Although,  I wish that Smith would have been given an opinion hour to compete with the likes of Hannity and Tucker Carlson, since he almost always slanted his news delivery into an opinion piece more akin to what MSNBC would offer.  Now we have Bret Baier left as the mid-road news stalwart, and Chris Wallace as their liberal senior Sunday pundit doing weekly wrap-ups.

[13oct19 update]  Millennials are fleeing big cities and moving to America’s small towns. (more here)  They’re doing it for all the right reasons, and in many ways imitating Venezuelans fleeing their cities and even their country because of how years of socialism under Chavez and Maduro has brought a once rich land to its knees.  Today one of our most prominent Democrat anti-American congress critters, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has upped here ante to make the United States into a proto-communist country with her new bill ‘A Place to Prosper Act’ (HR4508) which has become the first legislation for her overall ‘Just Society’ program.  The details of this act promise to pauper the country – that is always the way of the Left, their programs promise prosperity and deliver poverty.  Important to note is that Sen Lizzy Warren endorses AOC’s latest insanity.  (more here and here)

Outrageous Outages (updated 10oct19)

George Rebane

Our power here in western Nevada County went out at 315am.  We set our phone alarms and got up at 630am, and started the generator.  Turning on our local KNCO, we were advised to remain calm, safe, and that everything in the region was canceled for the day.  A PG&E lady came on to read some prepared pap and informed us that power “may be restored” starting tomorrow noon.  Another local politico advised us all to “be patient”.

I have been continuously checking the winds, both current and predicted, and found that there was no wind, measured and predicted, in the Sierra for the next 48 hours that exceeded 10mph.  Whatever ‘high winds’ (20-25mph) there were to be, were on the central valley floor.  In fact, the entire northwest of the US is unusually calm, save for that small Sacramento Valley floor pocket of light winds.  Here in the Nevada City region it is DEAD CALM as is seldom seen – not even a leaf moving.  You can do your own checking here.

For all intents and “public safety” purposes, there is no evidence that power needs to be shut off in these foothills.  The outage, predicted and delivered, appears purely for punitive political purposes that is endorsed by a progressive leftwing government whose longstanding MO has been to get Californians to accept more and more abusive government control over their lives without so much as a murmur.  In a state where a free and independent people dwell, government and their monopoly utilities would at this time have turned power back on while broadcasting apologies for having turned it off for no reasonable purpose.

But long ago that ceased to be California, where we have been taught to hunker down and accept everything from the most onerous and useless/stifling environmental regulations, highest gas and fuel prices in the Union, sky high taxes, piles of human shit and needles covering our city streets and sidewalks, crumbling roads and bridges, welfare/homeless/illegal alien capital of the country, broken public education system, corrupt (and unfunded) public employee pension system, historical exodus of companies and middle-class wage earners, …, and more of the same on the way.

We now have an under-educated ‘woke’ electorate who are fed a daily diet of pap from our lamestream outlets, putting the blame for their dire straits on the state’s successful businesses and the well-to-do who can still afford to live here.  These are guilty of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and according to all Democrat politicians (especially those in Sacramento and running for president) they must be squeezed much much more in order to redistribute their ill-gotten assets and achieve social justice in a fundamentally transformed America.

And now we are being conditioned to patiently accept the power distribution schedules of third-world countries as the latest new norm for our once golden state.

[10oct19 update]  California’s historic Great Blackout continues.  The people are finally getting sufficiently pissed since no one has seen any dangerous winds in NorCal that might affect public safety.  The PG&E officials are keeping a stiff upper lip and passing the bullshit. (more here)  Here in the Sierra foothills there has been no wind all night, and looking out my window at our forest, there is not a single leaf moving – dead air.  Our politically punitive punishment continues (The Federalist agrees).  Which brings us to the whole deal about the National Weather Service and NOAA.

Sandbox - 8oct19

[On the face of it I am not in favor of withdrawing US troops from Syria, especially viz the Kurds.  My own long-stated Rebane Doctrine is that the US must continue its role as the world's white hat policeman (hegemon) using responses and methods that will evolve with needs and time.  But before we continue hyper-ventilating on the withdrawal, can someone cite the exact parameters of Trump's withdrawal announcement - e.g. is it more than pulling a few tens of troops back from the 20-mile buffer zone?  gjr]

‘The Marginal Revolutionaries’

George Rebane

George Melloan, former deputy editor of WSJ’s editorial page and now syndicated columnist, has written an excellent review (here) in the 5oct19 WSJ of The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (2019) by historian Janek Wasserman.  This is an extensively researched “group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party.”  From Melloan’s review, replete with lavish quotes from the book, it is clear that Wasserman’s work corroborates Der Führer (1944), Konrad Heiden’s first-hand history of the rise of Hitler, and the international and national brands of socialism during the first half of the 20^th century.

(I insert the following thoughts into the record because, as the astute reader has gleaned over the years, I am a student of the Austrian School which most closely represents my desiderata for economic order that is beneficial to a society.  This major segment of my belief system (credo) forms the foundation of my profound differences with and opposition to collectivism and its current resurgent socialist/communist forms in America and the EU.  Some of my previous commentaries on the above can be found here and here, expanded in their comment streams)

The Austrian School was founded by economists Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek who met regularly in a little Vienna coffee house early in the 20^th century.  Their nascent revolution was marginal in the sense that during that same epoch that included the Great War (WW1) more formidable revolutionaries were also plotting and scheming in other Vienna coffee houses.  Communist regulars plotting the Marxist revolution were Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin.  Excluded from international socialists to form national socialism were Hitler who met with a variously attended group of the disaffected jobless, and after the war with a rapidly growing cohort of disaffected jobless veterans.  The Nazis and communists fought pitched battles and murdered each other in the night until Hitler’s side won, and the communists went underground in the west while Lenin et al were building the USSR in Russia.  Both forms of socialism would come to kill millions of their own citizens for various reasons that ranged from race to redundancy.

Scattershots – 4oct19 (updated 9oct19)

George Rebane

'My allegation stands true until you prove it false.'  The progressive's approach to debate and judicial process (see also Alinsky and Stalin's show trials).

An anti-American attribute of our Left is their imposition of process over performance in their planning and public policies.  The leftist always seeks to increase government’s scope of control and revenues through legislation/regulation that increases arbitrary requirements and (tax/fee) costs for civil activities, public and private.  This aspect of collectivist ideology is a reliable indicator of the, often hidden, political forces which promote a new law or regulation, i.e. process.  How it affects the performance of individuals or organizations is of secondary importance, or not at all a consideration when corporatists lobby and leftwing politicians legislate.

Gov Newsom’s signing of a new law giving California school districts more power to block charter schools and gratuitously requiring their teachers to become more credentialed (here) is a textbook illustration that supports the above generalized proposition about the Left.  Charter schools across the country have become one of the few remaining bright spots of our public education, and also the bane of leftwing teachers’ unions.  Why?  Because study after study shows that, more often than not, “test scores improve for all students when charters increase their market share.” (more here)  And that’s a no-no for Democrats, especially in dense urban areas like NYC and Boston with large minority populations.  The smarter that minority kids become, the less they tend to accept the ‘benefits’ of staying on the plantation and voting for ever more generous government handouts.

Ruminations – 3oct19 (updated 6oct19)

George Rebane

Former Union publisher Jeff Ackerman writes (here) that Californians today pay and average of $4.02/gal for gasoline while the rest of the country averages at $2.64/gal.  And the escapee to Oregon goes on to point out that all of this is self-inflicted pain that the state’s voters are way past having enough between the ears to change course as Sacramento does its best to accelerate dumb laws/regulations and spread our epidemic across the country.

Gun confiscation was again disguised at the Giffords/March for Our Lives “gun safety forum” in Las Vegas. The Dems are having problems coming together on which or whether to back such confiscation schemes as mandatory buybacks.  Even Moms Demand Action have stopped short of buybacks, which leaves Beto (of AR15/AK47 fame) and the klatch of radical socialists more isolated than ever.  Many of us hope Beto will double down on his ‘Damn right, we’ll take your guns!’

No more masks for Hong Kong protesters.  An old British colonial law is to be invoked to threaten protesters with eventual arrest when they reveal their faces to government operated face recognition software that is being installed all over China today.  Here we are considering doing the same, starting with neighborhood watch cameras for recording night time crime (and anyone else who is on the street after dark).  Soon after, we’ll be fighting daytime crime and questioning people who are recorded being out of their own neighborhoods.  Isn’t technology wonderful?

[4oct19 update]  Volker’s House testimony and release of tweets are the first real disclosures that may seriously put Trump’s tit in a wringer in the ongoing impeachment saga.  Trump is by no means the first president to seek and get foreign aid against political opponents for some horse trading.  But back then it was no big deal and a known prerogative of office.  IMHO, if the sought aid concerns a material revelation about the character of a political opponent, then I don’t oppose such information gathering.  However, I do oppose purchasing fabricated ‘evidence’ of an opponent’s bad character from foreign sources.

[6oct19 update]  Harvard on capitalism (here) - whouda thought?

Sandbox - 3oct19

[I did my best to remove some of the irrelevant and ad hominem comments from a couple of my topical commentaries.  Please continue posting your comments under the appropriate recent topical posts or in the Sandbox if I have not recently covered the topic of your interest.  Thanks. gjr]

Foreign Influence on the Rise

People are usually willing to accept the verdict of democratic elections only when all parties share the same national loyalties. - Yuval Harari, widely published historian (emphasis mine)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 October 2019.]

Let’s consider what has become an issue of great concern for most Americans and their political leaders – the impact of foreign influence in our elections.  To be sure, since time immemorial, nations, kingdoms, and all manner of jurisdictions have sought to influence the inner workings of each other to their advantage.  America has been no exception.  In modern times with facile mass communications across the globe, such influencing has become an ongoing geo-political game among today’s nations.  (more here and here)

The political analysis journal Foreign Policy tells us (here) that “ever since the Treaty of Westphalia, the idea of territorial sovereignty has been central to how most of us think about international politics and foreign policy. Although a huge amount of activity occurs across state borders, one of the chief tasks of any government is to defend the nation’s territory and make sure—to the extent it can—that outsiders are not in position to interfere in harmful ways. But for all the effort and expense devoted to keeping harmful influences out, sometimes countries wind up locking and bolting the windows while leaving the front door wide open.”

In the past the main paths for foreign governments to influence us was through enticing former prominent politicians with paid trips, ‘consulting’ contracts, and generous speaking fees.  Competent public relations firms would be hired to promote a candidate or cause.  There are, of course, platoons of professional lobbyists on K Street, and let’s not forget prominent DC think tanks and media journalists who can be bought and paid for with grants of special and/or exclusive access to the goings on and important people of the foreign power.  Finally, we have to include our universities that can be bought with appropriately fashioned ‘research grants’ to manufacture good reports about their benefactors.

Such well-oiled avenues of foreign influence have been focused on shaping our foreign policy to satisfy the interests of other nations.  We must always remember that the ultimate reason for messing with our elections is to influence our adoption of favorable foreign policies.  An important essay on such matters that reviewed how our own political parties become involved was published in the October 1932 issue of Foreign Affairs.  The procedural principles and political history recounted in ‘Political Factors in American Foreign Policy’ is especially apropos to today’s imbroglios between our political parties lobbing charges and counter charges of conspiratorial foreign influence on each other.

Blessed Milestones – 30 September 2019

George Rebane

The Rebane clans gathered this weekend in Nevada City to celebrate the marriage of granddaughter Fiona to Shawn.  The ceremony and festivities took place on Sunday at the Stone House, the town’s iconic restaurant and wedding venue that started life as a brewery in 1850.  This was preceded and followed by more breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for family and guests at the homes of our now local tribe.  It was truly a joyous occasion for the marriage of our third granddaughter.  This little missive contributes to the occasional summaries of the many blessings that Jo Ann and I have received over the years since we first met on 21 September 1959 as undergraduates at UCLA.  Make no mistake, enough of our road together has also had its inevitable unpaved stretches, but this is a happy recounting of a paved part.

As we gathered in the wonderfully redone venue with its large dining area, gathering rooms, bandstand and dance floor, and bar (and a very professional and competent staff of a local wedding planner and caterer), Jo Ann and I confirmed that we had the most birthdays of all the attendees.  The entire affair with all our kids, grandkids, great grandkids, more family, and friends came to be because of that chance meeting at the Pan Hellenic All-Pledge Dance at the beginning of the fall semester sixty years ago – we two are fortunate to be at the headwaters of a large causal basin of new lives, witnessing the many arrows that we have launched into the future.  The nearby photo shows us with our very involved great-grandmunchkins Lucy, Rae, Atticus, and Nell.

Our family has spread itself out over a wide spectrum of endeavors and locales.  Oldest daughter Sini and husband Roland head up our ‘Northern Tribe’.  Roland continues a long career at Microsoft Research on the bleeding edge of AI research.  Sini, a former software engineer, is a school administrator and semi-professional photographer.  Our ‘Southern Tribe’ picked up stakes last year and moved here to live in Nevada and Placer counties.  Daughter Teine closed her longtime organizing business in SoCal, and decided to start a new career in professional dispute resolution for which she is now in the middle of Pepperdine University Law School’s Masters of Dispute Resolution program, an area for which life has well-prepared her.

The grandchildren, all adults now, have dispersed themselves over much of the country.  Oldest granddaughter Claire (mother of the munchkins) lives in Denver with software engineer husband David.  One grandson Sean is an audio engineer working in Nashville for a leading audio production and processing enterprise.  Another grandson Lucas is a mountain climber and outdoor photographer working for a leading sports and camping gear company.  Another granddaughter Elizabeth is in the middle of a heavy-duty cancer research program at UCLA going for her doctorate in molecular biology and neuro science.  Another granddaughter Catherine, married last year, is a clinical trials administrator for a company in the Seattle area where she lives with her transport systems engineer husband Collin who works for a large international truck manufacturer doing autonomous vehicle development.

Fiona is studying and working in holistic health (that’s the best I can make of it).  She lives locally with her brand new hubby who is an electrician getting ready to get his contractor’s license.  Casting an eye over the lot of our ‘issue’ gives us much to be thankful for.  We look back and recall our decision to start young – we married before graduation against all advice – so that we could still be around to see the many fruits of our labors.  Thank the good Lord, it has worked out.

The Varieties of Reason in Another Attempt at Discourse

“Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”  Saul Alinsky in ‘Rules for Radicals’

George Rebane

In the effort to reflect here ‘observations and interpretations of events from the last great century of man’, illuminating the ideas and attitudes of our polarized population is part and parcel of RR posts.  Here we do a little dissection of today’s leftwing vs rightwing thought to illustrate how early 21^st century polarization is progressing.  To wit, we again have on parade in these pages a delicious example of how the liberal mind works – especially in its ability to apply standard garden variety logic to reason.  The comment stream of ‘Ruminations – 26sep19’ is an education in progressive thought and another Exhibit A on the machinations of such minds when they attempt to understand and then address a contended issue.  In this example it all started with commenter J. Barron stating –

It is blatantly obvious that if billionaires can save millions in their taxes from going to the under class, they can invest that money in something else. Jets, hot tubs, young boys . . . it's famously known as trickle up economics. Show us the proof that ain't so. Reagan would not approve.  Posted by: J. Barron | 29 September 2019 at 09:02 PM

To which I made a generic observation on Barron’s attempt to contribute to the resolution of his strong assertion about misspending of tax savings by billionaires.  I observed –

In more tempered and reasonable societies the one making an assertion is required to substantiate it with some supportive evidence. In insane societies it's the asserter who demands that his audience prove his assertion to be false, else it must be taken to be true.  Posted by: George Rebane | 29 September 2019 at 09:53 PM

In such references to ‘insane’ I use the term in its technical sense as in describing approaches and solutions to problems in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and engineering.  This exchange gave rise to an intense discussion thread into which several additional progressives contributed the fruits of their thought.  The careful reader will immediately note that none of them understood my 953pm, or they thought it better for their case to change the subject.  In either case, my critique of Barron’s 902pm was not only not addressed, but it was duly mischaracterized as something completely unsaid – a common liberal tactic displayed in these pages over the years.

Ruminations - 26sep19 (updated 28sep19)

George Rebane

'If you nominate Loony Liz, you won't get any money from us.', say heavy Dem donors to the DNC.

Dem Rep Schiff's characterization of the Ukraine telecon transcript is historically one of the most audacious stream of lies fabricated out of whole cloth and bearing no relationship to what was in the released document.  Does anyone know of a lamestream outlet that has called him out on that?  (and more Dems' lies here)

[27sep19 update] Socialist "France said it would cut taxes on individuals and businesses by €10.2B as Macron seeks to revive his economic overhaul."  Whouda thought, as our lefties have been telling us for years that tax rates don't affect economic behavior? (more here)

[28sep19 update] The recent spate of spontaneous worldwide demonstrations against AGW are really not that spontaneous nor even locally sponsored.  Turns out they're the handiwork of a bunch of progressive rich people contributing money through something called Climate Emergency Fund, that then sends the cash to the worldwide chapters of Extinction Rebellion which actually collects and organizes the know-nothings into newsworthy protests primarily picked up by lamestream outlets. (more here)  H/T to reader.

Toward the Singularity via super-intelligence

George Rebane

Knowing my relationship with Dr Judea Pearl, fellow blogger Russ Steele sent me a link to a recent interview (here) on AI with Judea.  Longtime RR readers recall pieces citing my friend, colleague, and mentor Judea Pearl as the inventor of Bayes and causal nets, and one of the true pioneers of AI and winner of the Turing Award (here and here).  I was privileged to be one of his very small group of doctoral students contributing to his research and the writing of his landmark Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (1988) introducing Bayes nets for which I was able to contribute my research in machine learning that wound up in what is known as the Rebane-Pearl algorithm (here and here).

Early on (late 1980s) our little group began to understand that the alternative ‘causal net’ that was also used in the literature for Bayes nets may not be appropriate.  To be frank, we were somewhat guilty of introducing that appellation ourselves before we recognized that our enthusiastic reach exceeded our grasp of causality as provided by our research.  In our paper on the Rebane-Pearl algorithm I introduced the concept of a ‘causal basin’ and showed (in my hand-drawn figure which somehow made it into the paper and Judea’s book) how the algo could take a dataset and divide it into several causal basins.  I recall having long discussions with Judea on the relationship of probabilistic inference and ‘true causality’ as we humans ascribe to the goings on in our environment.

A decade earlier Judea and I spent time during our family social get-togethers ensconcing ourselves with a bottle of wine to speculate on the future of intelligent machines and what computational, perceptual, and cognitive requirements they would need to achieve peerage with humans.  Over such discussions it became clear to both of us that machines would have to include the ability to handle the subjunctive and counter-factual ‘thoughts’, in addition being able to reason probabilistically a la Bayes nets.  It was Judea who came upon the idea that causality was a distinct cognitive beast that could not be tamed and understood through mere extensions of Bayes nets – a whole new calculus would be required.

Sandbox - 25sep19

[Anybody have any thoughts about a workable public policy that would sufficiently shield  PG&E so that it doesn't have to conduct its CYA power outages?  gjr]

Scattershots – 23sep19 (updated 24sep19)

George Rebane

George Boardman again flies his true colors with his Union column ‘Trump’s great economy?  Depends on where you are on the food chain’.  He hits all the Democratic Party talking points, and even elevates the top 20% of Americans into the ‘enemy of the people’ class.  Why?  Because they’re getting the largest dollar benefits from our revived economy.  He ignores the wage gains of the middle class and denigrates the historic benefits to our minorities who now have historically low unemployment rates and are leaving entitlement rolls in record numbers.  The Democrats’ fear is clearly evident in his dour assessment - if the dark-skinned among us are able to leave the Progressive Plantation, then from where will come the votes to elect enough leftwing politicians to control Congress and keep alive the country’s lurch to the left?  For a more sober assessment of the country’s economy, you may peruse articles here, here, and here.

Negro names – Deion, Jamar, Keshawn, Lavaughn, Mashawn, Naeem, Rashon, Salim, Dericia, Kanesha, Lachelle, Moesha, Quisha, Talisha, Temima, … (more here) – are the latest and clearest expression of our African-American population’s desire to differentiate themselves and proudly declare their solidarity with their own kind.  Among other such minority initiatives to separate the races (e.g. segregated clubs, institutions, living quarters, …), such initiatives in race-based discrimination are now celebrated, laudable, and promoted behaviors among all non-white peoples.  Our leftwingers again demonstrate their selective blinders by not being able to connect the dots between such expressions and the general characteristic of humans (and other critters) that have the great propensity to dwell among their ‘own kind’ (shared culture and values) rather than having to be politically incorrect strangers in their own land.  BTW, my use of ‘Negro’ is an intentional button push guaranteed to loosen the latest charges and confirmation by the looney Left of my being a racist.  Here is a more reasoned discussion of the current status on the use of that formerly proper and much-employed label. 

Mark Zuckerberg is busy rebuilding human communities to counter their disintegration due to everything from rampant drug addiction to murderous totalitarian regimes.  At the 22jun17 inaugural Communities Summit he lamented that “for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter.  That’s a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.”  So Mark has been ‘using AI’ to build up new communities that “will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together”, and he’ll “change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on.”  What a nice guy to make such a selfless sacrifice with his business.  And while we’re patting him on the back, guess how and where these new communities will be formed?  Hint1 – it won’t involve real estate.  Hint2 – it will be an enormous new bonanza for harvesting data on people’s propensities, inclinations, and fears.  OK, here’s Hint3 – it starts with an ‘F’.

[24sep19 update]  Biden, ‘I never talked to my son about business.’  That bullshit is so far off the rails that it brings up the biggest concern about floating it in our public forum.  The Democrats know that their base and hanger-on constituents are so terminally stupid that they will actually believe that a very political father will not talk to his beloved underachieving son about a business opportunity from which he can make a load of dough for doing nothing save peddle his father’s influence.  That is really a dumb bunch of voters out there who constitute the biggest threat to our republic.  ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’  Thomas Jefferson.

On Fox News this afternoon we saw Iran’s President Rouhani eat Chris Wallace’s lunch.  It was an extremely informative interview and it will play very well back in Iran.  Rouhani was calm, erudite, and had more than an answer and a counter to Wallace’s attempts to conduct some sort of an expose on the crap that Iran has been pulling in its 40-year effort to become the mid-east hegemon.  Much to our chagrin, Wallace couldn’t lay a glove on him.  Next time we should send someone on varsity to interview smart and fast-thinking people.

Nancy Pelosi has now given her imprimatur to an “official” impeachment inquiry against President Trump.  The problem is that this only moves the peanut ahead in the above mentioned mini-minds of Democrat constituents.  Such an official inquiry is no different than what has been going on until now.  What she has failed to launch is a ‘formal’ inquiry which constitutionally allows the issuance of subpoenas and the empanelment of the congressional version of a grand jury.  And having over-the-hill John Lewis (D-GA5)) make the announcement in the well of the House lends special flavor to this three-ring circus.

The House Judiciary Committee got all worked up about getting the Ukraine telecon “whistleblower” to testify in the face of the President releasing the transcript of that conversation which was monitored by a dozen people here and in the Ukraine.  The question which no one, especially Nadler, is asking is on what information beyond the transcript did the whistleblower base his “serious and critical” complaint.  If it was nothing beyond his second hand reading of the transcript, then that means serious egg on the collective Democrats’ face.  But no one has said that he had anything beyond what everyone in the intelligence communities already knew.  Ukraine’s President Zelensky, who has consented to the transcript’s release, is going to throw some cold water on this witch hunt during his UN visit and talk with Trump.

Mayor Reinette Senum of Nevada City is a sincere and dedicated worker for the common good.  She wrote a Union column (here) discussing the ways and means of broadband connectivity – especially 5G – for western Nevada County.  Although I’m seldom in sync with Reinette, I consider her a friend and have defended her right to express and promote her initiatives, no matter how far off the rails they seem to me. She wants broadband to come to our community in a “technology-neutral way”.  Now why would anyone want that???  I thought we all want technology to come our way definitely biased to our greater benefit; forego the losers and go with the winner.  She also wants to place our wellbeing in the hands of “independent scientists and well-informed medical professionals” when it comes to local radio frequency transmissions, but not when it comes to global warming, the impact of which is OK to leave in the interpretative hands of bureaucrats and consensus science.  Nevertheless, I credit her with informing us that the California constitution contains the following - “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”  This, of course, is anathema to the A21 (now Agenda 2030) promoting governor and Democrat overwhelmed California legislature daily taking more private property away from Californians.

Where Are They Indeed?

George Rebane

There are about 2,500 galaxies (not stars) in the picture below – each of even the smallest dots is a galaxy.  Each such galaxy has about 300 billion stars, and each star has at least five planets.  Today we can see over 2,000,000,000,000 = 2 trillion such galaxies.  Fainter galaxies exist but don’t show in such photos.  This means that we can visualize only a part of our universe which itself contains 3x10^23 (a 3 with 23 zeros following it) planets.  Of these, at least 1% are in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone from their sun.  This suggests that there are about 3x10^21 planets that could potentially have an environment that supports life as we know it. (There are undoubtedly other forms of life about which we are ignorant.)  In our own galaxy there are about 11 billion of such planets.

To further illustrate the vastness of our visible universe, consider that the above photo is a magnification of what our telescopes see when looking at a part of the entire sky surrounding Earth that is less than 1/33 of (or more than 33 times smaller than) the size of the period at the end of this sentence when held out at your arm’s length.  This means if you printed a page with a period (from Times New Roman size 12) on it, and made a hole with a very sharp needle through and exactly the size of the period, then holding it out at your arm’s length you would be able to ‘see’ over 84,000 galaxies through that pinprick, no matter in which direction you looked in the night sky.  Of course, your eye would have to have the magnifying power of a big telescope (like the Hubble) to resolve all those galaxies as shown in the above photo.  Perhaps this understanding would allow us to better contemplate the size of our visible universe and consider all the extra-terrestrial civilizations that have already existed, are now in existence, and will come to be in the interminable future.

The background to this meditation was posted as ‘A copernican answers Fermi’, and later I’ll have more to say about the portents of all this. (more here)

Dropout Derby - 21sep19 update

George Rebane

I guess DeBlasio's dropout now means that the poor citizens of NYC will have to put up with more of his great urban administrative skills.  Oh well.  With his departure our Estonian Fox and Mr fish have leaped into the lead.

 

Scattershots – 20sep19 (updated 21sep19)

George Rebane

The Daily Signal of the Heritage Foundation discovers ‘The Real Reason for Trump Derangement Syndrome’.  RR readers have been discussing and debating the real reasons for the Left’s virulent TDS ever since the 2016 election.  Yes indeed, with foot firmly planted in mouth, our president is still our champion in the “multifront pushback—politically, socially, economically, and culturally—against what might be called the elite postmodern progressive world.”

Piers Morgan, liberal commentator and journalist, is concerned about where today's liberals and progressives are going with their political correctness cum incipient Soviet communist society.  This video interview (here) on Real Clear Politics is a bit lengthy (hence complete), but the first 10 minutes makes clear that most of what we have been saying in these commentaries for some time is not only shared by conservatives and libertarians, but also by many of those leaning liberal who are alarmed by the utter insanity that now grips the Left.  Morgan summarizes it very well.

Climate hysteria is scheduled on 27 September 2019 to reach globally coordinated proportions with a “first ever international General Strike for Climate” planned by Earth Strike and its affiliated organizational members. (more here)  Their intention is to literally stop the world doing its business.  They must take to the streets to disrupt for the simple reason that their attempts at presenting their arguments for preventable manmade global warming simply don’t hold water in the public forum.  So now it is time to disrupt society in order to push their narrative before the last of their consensus science withers and dies.  Nothing they have prognosticated and presented has panned out, and their cause looks more ridiculous with each passing month.  Hence, the time has come to rout reason.

[21sep19 update] The utter stupidity of AB5 (here) has been picked up by both sides of the political divide now that it is law.  Here is what our favorite cartoonist Bob Crabb published in the 21sep19 Union.

Agenda21 to SDGs to Agenda 2030

George Rebane

RR has covered the Agenda21 story extensively over the years primarily in its role as a template for leftwing objectives that their politicians’ public policies seek to fulfill.  (see 'Agenda 21' category) This non-binding UN initiative was formalized in 1992 and signed by over 100 nations.  The US (under Bush1) became a signatory.  A21’s objectives and means of achieving them on the level of local jurisdictions was and continues to be taught to government officials and properly politically oriented NGO staffs through a global network of ICLEIs.

ICLEI or the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives was launched under the aegis of A21.  The ICLEIs almost immediately began distancing themselves from the A21 relationship as the latter’s objectives started to be highlighted by various rightwing media outlets, politicians, and conservative blogs as harbingers of global autocracy.  The goals taken in toto were an antithesis for the retention of sovereign nation-states as the fundamental structure of world order.  A21 called for an authoritarian global government whose operational goals were actually to markedly lower human population, reduce its consumption of earth’s resources, and restrict people’s access to most of earth’s land area and natural resources.

This obviously made A21 and all references to it anathema to most Americans, and made connecting A21 to the Left’s globalist narrative a no-brainer.  Hence, the Left immediately launched a nationwide denial campaign, claiming that A21 was really some hare-brained Big Brother conspiracy cooked up by the Right.  Their proof of that was showing that none of their public policies which existentially abetted A21 objectives, actually called out A21 or mentioned A21 objectives in the laws and regulations they passed and their publicized desiderata for future legislation.  In short, A21 had to be banished from the public mind.  And so it was.

Today the objectives of A21 are all alive and well, but they have had to be repackaged by the UN under the new rubric of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and wrapped into its newly introduced Agenda 2030.  The clear hope is that within such new adornments, the public will be bamboozled a bit longer as the global Left continues to fashion and form ever more restrictive boundaries through SDG-supportive public policies, all of which need an ever larger state to administer and enforce them.  And, of course, all that will cost much more than we are used to paying now, hence the new levels of mandated tribute to Leviathan will be justified as fulfilling part of humanity’s overall moral imperative in its march into the globalist 21^st century as prescribed by Agenda 2030.  The beat goes on.  (more here, here, and elsewhere – google ‘Agenda 2030’)

The happier place, America or Europe? (updated 25sep19)

George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 18 September 2019.  An edited version was printed (here) in the 21sep19 edition of The Union.]

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.

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.