Rebane's Ruminations

The Language of ObamaCare

George Rebane

‘Underneath every stack of government regulations lies a policeman’s gun.’  Anonymous

Here’s a short puzzle –

What will be specified in the IRS tax code, cost your family between $750 and $3,800 annually, is paid to the IRS, and for failure to pay will draw punishments of fines and jail time from a federal court, and yet is NOT a tax?

Our Fearless Liar told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that this was not a tax, but a mandated fee that people who failed to buy health insurance would be forced to pay under ObamaCare.  He didn't say that if you resist, they will kill you. 

This tax was pronounced to be “not a tax” by a hubris laden leader who is taking the country beyond his promised “fundamental transformational change”.  His sonorous lies have now become a continuous torrent that daily soothes the many who remain in the terminal thrall of hopeful change.

More truth about the Canadian one-payer healthcare system is bubbling to the surface, in spite of the full court propaganda press that the Left has mounted to extol the virtues of the healthcare heaven just north of the border.  There the rationing of all significant medical services has gotten so bad that even lower middle-class people are driving to the United States for treatments that range from timely tumor removals to surgeries that re-enable productive lives.

But perhaps the most telling and verifiable symptom of Canada’s dysfunctional system is the emergence of the ‘private option’ that Team Obama says doesn’t work in America.  From today’s WSJ –

Hoping to capitalize on patients who might otherwise go to the U.S. for speedier care, a network of technically illegal private clinics and surgical centers has sprung up in British Columbia, echoing a trend in Quebec. In October, the courts will be asked to decide whether the budding system should be sanctioned. More than 70 private health providers in British Columbia now schedule simple surgeries and tests such as MRIs with waits as short as a week or two, compared with the months it takes for a public surgical suite to become available for nonessential operations.

A former Canadian healthcare professional sums it up nicely, "What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list."

Oh yes, almost all progressives will claim that no one will actually kill you for not paying ObamaCare's opt-out tribute – that is just another bunch of libertarian hyperbole.  They will even go so far as to point out that your death at the hands of the local SWAT team came about because you used force to resist arrest, and not because you didn’t pay the mandated fee which you knew to be unconstitutional.  They will argue that your stated willingness to risk all against encroaching state tyranny was the product of a typical right-wing extremist brain that maintains insane notions about our Constitution.  All today’s proper thinkers know that the Constitution permits the government to mandate how you spend your healthcare dollars, and the subsequent use of deadly force to eliminate those who resist.

It is these compassionate, sensitive, inclusive, and soft-headed people who don’t know how government must needs work, and why our Founders wrote the Constitution, not as an enabling document for the increase of government, but as a prescription for constraining the state from trampling individual liberties.

HR 2454 and Your House

George Rebane

I keep thinking that it can’t get worse.  Today I got an email from a reader that detailed just a small part of the horrors of this bill – the part describing how the feds are going to get into our pants on how we must live in and dispose of our private residences.  It sounded like a bunch of hyper-ventilation from the Right.  But I decided to check it out anyway.

The email detailed how the federal government will require the retrofitting of all private residences in order to qualify them for resale.  It claimed that one year after becoming law, this monstrosity will require all houses to start conforming to an escalating set of energy codes before they can be sold or rented.  Houses would be regularly inspected by a new state level bureaucracy and receive a “label” that is similar to a car license plate which must be displayed for all to see.  The label will also have the energy efficiency score of your house on it.

Well, that sounds like a new full employment act for another legion of double dummies.  I could not conceive that, in addition to all the other horrors that are in HR2454 (aka Waxman-Markey), that Congress would also include such blatant provisions to remove more liberties from American citizens.  This would go beyond the slow creep of incrementalism designed to make us into a coddled, controlled, and compliant population that the socialists have been working on for decades.  HR 2454 would be a quantum leap.

So I went to the government site where the latest version of HR2454 is posted and read the relevant sections (Nothing is easy about getting to a bill in Congress.  Go to this site, and then on the left side of the page click on ‘full text on Thomas’.  From there click on the most recent HR 2454 which gets you to the hyperlinked table of contents.  Click on Sections 202, 204, and 304 to read the text.  Courage!).  And there it was, as advertised.  I read it again and then came to some new conclusions.

Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on the media have probably been co-opted by the Left.  Given the reality, for years these guys have been soft-soaping the advances of collectivists.  If they had really wanted to get the message across, they’d have had us with our pitchforks and torches out in the town squares ripping up cobblestones for barricades and singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  But they have so downplayed our loss of liberties, and what’s yet to come, that we are now numb as we listen to their daily screeds.  Don’t believe me?  Just look at yourself.  You’ll just shrug this off – ‘what can I do?’ – and go about your business, never noticing that it gets conducted within an ever tightening circle.  You probably didn’t even read the goddam sections that I pointed out.

The Progressive Mind Boggled

George Rebane

The very liberal truthout.com is definitely worth a read as we attempt to understand the sparse reasoning behind their collectivist nostrums.  The latest edition contains an article - Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy - on how to create two million “green jobs” by four economists(??) from the leftwing Political Economy Research Institute.  They claim that a “$100 billion investment” by the government will put all these additional people to work on a track to solid green.

The study reported in this article was prepared “under commission by the Center for American Progress and released by a coalition of labor and environmental groups. The authors are Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Helen Scharber of PERI.”  Now you know that if a conservative policy analysis outfit did such a study that was sponsored by any wealth creating or condoning enterprise, the left would claim that the results were prima facie biased because of the sponsorship.  There is no need here to make a counter claim against the professed PERI study, its results are simply ludicrous as they stand.

Most people know that a government can print money and put ANY NUMBER of people to work doing ANYTHING – but only for a while.  There is nothing market sustainable in the green jobs that PERI has discovered, and the inevitable result will be an economic collapse as has occurred with so many socialist and communist state-sponsored enterprises during the last century.  It is hard to imagine who else besides “a coalition of labor and environmental groups” would sponsor such studies from PERI, save perhaps Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez.

Just ask yourself one simple question – ‘The feds are already printing and spending trillions of dollars in their economic recovery programs, if the PERI study has any credibility, why stop with a $100 billion “investment”, why not take one of those new trillions and create ten million new green jobs and completely wipe out unemployment, then we would be off on a rip-roaring start to a new age of squeaky clean green?’

A Week on Obama’s Watch

George Rebane

The past week is now folded into the pages of history.  Iran pre-empted Obama’s revelation that it had another major facility for producing nuclear materials for “peaceful uses”.  In response, our National Naif assembled his counterparts from Britain and France to dutifully scribble yet one more line in the sand, while the imams in Teheran worry about getting double hernias from laughing their butts off.

Our progressives applauded this stroke of brilliant coalition building against Iran - an ability, they claim, evaded Bush2.  At the same time Israel is putting finishing touches on its plan take out as much of Iran’s WMD capability as it can with its F-15s and F-16s, while working feverishly to complete its Jericho3 long range missile that can reach all parts of Iran.  Meanwhile, the price of oil and gold yawned.  I feel safer already.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz ... !

George Rebane

The Propaganda Push & Stuff

George Rebane

Autocracies have always seen artists as another source of directed content for its mass media organs.  Stalin and Hitler took the use of such state resources to their definitive heights.  The communists in the USSR and the Nazis in Germany actually had committees that evaluated and proscribed/passed on the prose, poetry, paintings, and compositions that issued from their ‘creative’ communities.  That was for a start, and then the state began commissioning art to support its propaganda objectives and programs.

And as students of history, we know that our government was also the unabashed producer of propaganda during WW2.  It hired and commissioned film companies, graphic artists, performers, and writers to get the message out that all should put their shoulder to the wheel, sacrifice, and perform altruistically for the duration of the conflict.  But that was during a time of global emergency when national survival was in doubt.

Last week the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) got caught with its finger in the public propaganda pie attempting to set up channels and protocols for communicating specifications for works that would support the new hard left direction of the country.  Yosi Sergant, NEA’s (now demoted) Director of Communications, apologized when their cover to a conference call was blown by those pesky conservative news media types.  Before being quickly reassigned, he promised to do a much better job in the future of camouflaging such missives to their artist and media producer cohorts.

What surprises me is why the ever-liberal NEA feels the need to shift into higher gear in the promotion of collective causes.  The plausible explanation is that the order to do so was back-channeled to it from the White House, since Buffy Wicks, deputy director of Obama’s Office of Public Engagement (love both of those warm and fuzzy names), was in on the now infamous conference call.  In America we have always had the freedoms to push whatever message we wanted into the public mind, all that was needed was money or the sponsorship of a like-minded mass media outlet looking for content.

Obama's Early Legacy

Singularity Signposts - 22sep2009 (updated)

George Rebane

- Advanced, cheaper solar panels rival fossil-fuel electricity;
- Human made crises coming faster than we can deal with them;
- Orwellian public monitoring system developed by EU;
- Nanotube springs as energy storage devices may replace batteries;
- New omni-flu vaccine, ‘one dab'll do ya’.
- The future of human enhancement from Nick Bostrom

New breakthroughs in solar panels promise to start providing electricity at costs competing with fossil fuel powered generators (here).  The advent of such unexpected technological developments in all fields is the prime reason why we should never allow government to become the gatekeeper to innovation in any field.  Today we have governments that more than ever seek to lay their cold, dead hands on human creativity.

In the meantime, there are people who point out that worldwide man-made crises are multiplying faster than our ability to deal with them.  Here is a report on how some scientists are calling for greater global control of everything we do so that life on earth can achieve some grand social engineering goals held by certain people.  My concern is that these scientists may be the intellectual descendants of the ones that had similar aims in the 1920s and 30s.  They seem to have skipped the technical courses teaching that central control of complex systems doesn’t work very well.

As the Cap n’ Tax Worm Turns

George Rebane

First Fibber and Nobel Al are still telling everyone within earshot that Waxman-Markey is going to be a big boost to the economy as taxes and fees are slapped on every imagined and imaginable emission of CO2 into the atmosphere.  I mean, like aren’t we excited about all the green jobs coming to a neighborhood near you.  Here in Nevada County the local green cheerleader troupe already has their uniforms, and is practicing their routine.  These folks are more convinced than the tragic-comic Cargo Cult that carbon footprints can be reduced by hauling stuff sixty miles into the mountains, working on it, and then hauling it back down the mountain to the markets.

And for letting him stay four more years, Helicopter Ben will make sure that the dollars keep raining down to make all this "sustainable" once those cap n’ tax spigots are opened.

So, just as everything is shaping up for the final big push through Congress, Harvard professor, Robert Stavins, writes (here) in today’s WSJ –

… The move to greener power doesn't have to be completed immediately, and it doesn't have to be painful. The right transition plan will increase consumers' bills gradually and modestly, and allow companies to make gradual, well-timed moves. …

Well, that admission is at least a start, but I’m not sure that anything will bend the True Believers from their march to the cliff.  Even Stavins, like all the other Waxman-Markey proponents, glosses over and avoids the economic and technical facts related to curbing carbon emissions to achieve the stated goals.  Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute reminds us of the realities here.

Husband Chair

George Rebane

This is actually a little nudge toward economic recovery during hard times (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Nudge Czar).  This weekend Jo Ann and I are celebrating the evening we first met fifty years ago as sorority/fraternity pledges at UCLA.  What happened there and afterwards is another story, but yesterday we decided to go to town and check out Nevada City’s ‘Sidewalk Sale’.  I think she had it all planned, because pretty soon we wound up in one of our fine jewelry stores on Broad Street.

As she started inspecting all the great looking inventory, most of it made right there by the owner/jeweler, my mind wandered quickly - my body followed.  Soon I had gawked at ‘everything’ in the store, and was studying the wall hangings for the third time, and then looked at my watch, and then I thought about just dragging her out of the store.  I was bored.

Now, heads-up merchants know this little scenario, and have provided a cost-effective remedy that will keep the wayward husband from screwing up the likelihood of a sale.  They put in a comfortable armchair or two, and some even have within reach a few appropriate magazines – oh, you know, past issues of ‘Guns and Grenades’, ‘Popular Mechanics’, ‘Broads and Boobs’ (aka Victoria’s Secret catalog or its moral equivalent), … .  And before you know it, she comes back with ‘How does this look on me?’ or better, ‘Honey, look what I bought.’

Planning for Green

George Rebane

The recent spate of social engineering and economic stimulus programs issuing from Washington again motivates communities that hope to get some federal funding to propose and plan local projects that may catch the eye of an appropriate czar in the current administration.  All things ‘green’ seem to garnering most favor, and now everyone claims to have a ‘plan’ on how to spend these freshly minted dollars to create jobs and launch ‘sustainable’ government funded enterprises to save energy and the world.

Russ Steele, my friend and fellow blogger (NC Media Watch), has been keen to point out some of the foibles of this green effluent flowing from the banks (double entendre intended) of the Potomac.  For this he has been taken to task by his progressive readership (as have I).  One of the prime hurdles to communications on this particular issue seems to be that few know the difference between a statement of objectives or end goals, and a description of how, when, and with what these are to be achieved – in short, a plan.

Unfortunately, in our land this ignorance starts at the very top.  Our fearless leader does not have a clue as to what a plan is, and is going around the country telling everyone that he has a plan to do this and another to do that.  And all of this is much to the chagrin of his own party's leadership who would love nothing better than to form up, fall in, and march behind the banner of anything that may remotely look like an Administration plan.

To short circuit this kind of federal leadership, perhaps we at the local level can do better when it comes to planning for such things as, say, green jobs.  In my long and checkered career, I have given many seminars on planning to communities, corporations, government agencies, and development teams.  Several years ago I wrote a short monograph on community planning in the attempt to fill an obvious gap that I saw when attending local public ‘workshops’ and participating on various committees of charitable, NGO, and county organizations.  This was published as TN0605-1: A Foundation for Community Planning by the Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation of which I am currently the Director of Research.  In part, its abstract reads -

Irving Kristol, RIP

George Rebane

Irving Kristol, the father of neo-conservatism and celebrated observer of our political progress, died yesterday at the age of 89.  His legacy has informed many of us and focused the ire of many more over six decades of public punditry and wordsmithing.  The following excerpt is from one of his regular articles - Income Inequality Without Class Conflict, Dec. 18, 1997 - that appeared in the WSJ.

It is often said that capitalism—that is, a market economy—is morally obnoxious because its "trickle-down economics" inevitably creates inequality of income and wealth. Now it is certainly true that "trickle-down economics" has that effect. It is also true, however, that if you want economic growth and greater affluence for all, there is simply no alternative to "trickle-down economics," which is just another name for growth economics.

The world has yet to see a successful version of "trickle-up economics," an egalitarian society in which the state ensures that the fruits of economic growth are universally and equally shared. The trouble with this idea—it is, of course, the socialist ideal—is that it does not produce those fruits in the first place. Economic growth is promoted by entrepreneurs and innovators, whose ambitions, when realized, create inequality. No one with any knowledge of human nature can expect such people not to want to be relatively rich, and if they are too long frustrated they will cease to be productive. Nor can the state substitute for them, because the state simply cannot engage in the "creative destruction" that is an essential aspect of innovation. The state cannot and should not be a risk-taking institution, since it is politically impossible for any state to cope with the inevitable bankruptcies associated with economic risk taking.

Zzzzzzzzzzzz ...!

George Rebane

Ruminations – 18sep2009

George Rebane

- The collateral damage from Obamacare.
- Where is Obama’s plan for healthcare?
- Michelle demonstrates low carbon, organic shopping.

When you see Obamacare costs going up in lockstep with your taxes, you start looking at your neighbors a little differently.  The fat guy is no longer just a fat guy waddling down the sidewalk.  You know he’s going to have big time medical problems that he could avoid without all those extra pounds, and you know that you will be paying for the extra burden he will put on our socialized healthcare system.  And you think ‘There oughta be a law against people getting fat like that, ‘cause it costs all of us extra.’  Well as usual, California has got you covered in that kind of thinking, and is actively looking at ways it can prohibit the consumption of sugared soft drinks in the Golden State.  Few people are aware of the collateral damage to our freedoms that all shared cost social programs do.  (At this point some liberal readers immediately conclude again that Rebane is against all government programs, and smugly point out the interstate highways system and local fire department.)  Ol’ pappy taught most of us Golden Rule #2, ‘Them that’s got the gold, makes the rules.’  And if part of that gold for Obamacare comes from us, we’ll have a tendency to start making more rules for our neighbors and back politicians who will help us do it.  And many people think that this is good.

Speaking of Obamacare, few people have noticed that there is no healthcare bill from the White House.  As Obama goes around the country talking about “my healthcare bill” and “my plan”, it’s the Democrats in Congress who are now wondering what in hell is he talking about.  Actually, this tactic has served the First Fibber well as he makes his rounds pumping socialized medicine.  But with five  (yes, five) healthcare bills still running around loose in Congress, Dems like Max Baucus (gang of six fame) are now starting to wish that the President would either defecate or relinquish the receptacle.  It seems that even the dufus division in Washington has noticed that there is a big difference between grand objectives from the podium and a plan to achieve them.  But down in the hinterlands where we live, this little distinction goes completely unnoticed – ‘My plan is to make sure every community has sustainable solar power.’ – and the sheeple marvel at such wisdom while shouting down anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes.

Michelle’s little rustic outing is all over the media today.  This morning a reader emailed me the link to Washington Post’s (gasp!) story ‘Hi-Ho, the Derry-O’ of the fiasco.   Shutting down a good part of downtown Washington so that her First Nibs could get some “certified organic Tuscan kale” is quite a glimpse into our collective future.  It’s definitely worth a read.  Oh, and in that bucolic down-home scene, do you notice the two organic shoppers in black? 

Environmentalism Beyond Reason

George Rebane

Scientists tell us North America today has more trees than ever before.  This is doubly so in the west where entire mountain ranges are matted with thick forests and dense underbrush.  A little more than a century ago these same mountains were covered with copses and sparse stands of trees separated by cleared land of brush and grasses.  Smaller fires regularly thinned out the forests and dried grasslands to provide a healthy environment for the next generation of growth.  In the west, lightning was the natural source of flame, but on the plains and in the eastern part of the continent, Indians regularly set fires to husband their lands and forests for maximum productivity of edible plants, fodder, and game.

 

Environmental zealotry bordering on madness has today transformed these forests into a Disneyesque landscape of uniform vegetation that may look good from a distance, but is completely unmanageable when it comes to productivity and conservation.  Where before the land provided for people’s needs, it has now been transformed into a costly and dangerous taboo maintained by cadres of government workers implementing stacks of insane regulations and laws.

Nevada County’s Supervisor John Spencer recently made another call for sanity in the husbanding of the Sierra forests – ‘Sierra forests on one-way path to destruction’.  We should heed such counsel and again open these mountains for productive uses, recreation, and living spaces compatible with their natural order. 

The photos are from the eloquent and comprehensive essay Fire in the Sierra Nevada Forests – A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849 by George E. Gruell.   

More Now Than Ever

Ruminations – 14sep2009

George Rebane

The Missing Millions March was held in Washington DC last Saturday, a day that the ‘progressive’ MSM decided to tightly blinder its eyes and see only “sixty to seventy-five thousand” Tea Party protesters converge on the Capitol.  Actually, Washington was shut down by the throngs conservatively numbered in the 1.2 to 2 million range by European media.  The pictures told the story, but our MSM leaned over backwards to attribute those millions going down Pennsylvania Avenue as Ted Kennedy mourners while pointing to the flags at half staff.  Well, the flags were at half-staff because of 9/11 and the so-called national service day (an add-on abomination to the most important day of remembrance in our times).  And it was strange how the same left-wing lapdogs overlooked such an historic outpouring of grief to their idol when it actually happened.  From what outlets do you get your news?

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and modern prosthetics are just two of the pre-Singularity areas of technology that continue to astound.  Everyone is now making and deploying UAVs to extend their reach and save lives in war zones.  The new computer-mediated hands that are restoring near-full function to amputees are marvelous exemplars of the rapid advances in the field of machine-amplified-man.  As a registered professional engineer in control and estimation theory, and a lifelong practitioner of such arts for defense and commercial markets, I have a special awe of what is possible now and its extensions in the near future.  That same awe also overlaps an apprehension of the alternative uses of such technologies by an autocratic/tyrannical state.  Every new way of sensing, tracking, reporting, monitoring, and projecting power on the battlefield has a natural counter application by a state’s police organs to keep its civilian population in check.  But not in America, right?

OK, but THIS time ... !

Workers and Work - The Coming Crisis (updated)

[This is the full length piece the first part of which was published today in the 12sep09 Union print edition. The full length version also appears in the newspaper’s online edition.  gjr]

George Rebane

In this recession over six million jobs have disappeared so far in the last year or so.  Out of approximately 150 million American jobs that were available in early 2008, that represents about a 4% annual loss.  Because of globalization and accelerating technology, not all of these jobs are coming back when the economy recovers.  Some will go overseas, and some will disappear because smarter and more capable machines will be doing them cheaper.  At the same time a smaller number of new and different jobs will appear.  This is present day reality.

The bottom line is that fewer jobs will return, and on balance, these jobs will require smarter workers trained in new skills.  This “creative destruction” of jobs will continue into the indefinite future.  So what happens to the workers in developed countries, specifically in America?  To attempt an answer, we have to review some Econ 101 stuff.

People work to garner wealth, which is something that they conserve and also trade for things they want/need to support a given quality of life (QoL).  How is such wealth created?  In any economy (or system) like a community, country, or even Earth itself, creating wealth requires some input from outside the system.  A little bit of thought will quickly convince you that this input for all of Earth’s economies comes originally from our Sun, either in real time or delayed over variable time intervals.  Think of photovoltaic energy that arrives about eight minutes late, to wind that takes a little longer, to planted crops, to forests, to minerals and fossil fuels, to geo-thermal.  Each of these started with the original fusion burn that resulted in the sun and our solar system, and took longer intervals to become available to us.

Throughout history to the present day, wealth creation always began with tapping into such solar energy conduits and storage processes.  Somewhere along the line, those who knew how to do it and do things with it got the early and big bundles of wealth.  Those who didn’t tried then to get it by force, or worked in the lower parts of this energy chain as wealth ‘trickled’ down.  Yes, trickle down works - always has, always will.

If this concept is hard to swallow, just try to imagine a closed community that attempts to satisfy its needs by imposing “buy local”.  There’s only so far you can go with serving each other food, fixing the other guy’s plumbing, and changing the old folks’ diapers.  With nothing coming in from the outside, precious little of this work will be done.  And then what?

Over the centuries human progress has been measured by how readily (read cheaply) we could tap into this river of energy.  Hello innovation and taking risk!  The smarter among us figured out better ways to tap, and then bet their or someone else’s farm on doing it for fun and profit.  The fun part was optional, the profit part was not.

At every such juncture, more wealth poured into the economies, trickled down, and life got better for all.  Even the un- or mis-educated benefited from this, and began to live lives that a few generations before were only enjoyed by the very wealthy.  But in the process jobs were constantly eliminated and new ones created.  And at the same time a lot of the wealth began to accumulate with the smart risk takers, and also clever thieves who skimmed, as the wealth trickled through the economy.  Result, the more successful innovation occurred, the more we saw wealth/income disparity.  But remember, all during this time the pie was not fixed and kept growing.

Now enter the smart machines.  During the last couple of generations machines have started displacing humans as well as working with them in new ways.  And these machines have been crucial to tapping into the river of wealth from the Sun.  Those who could build, operate, and manage these man/machine partnerships kept cutting costs to society and getting richer in the (natural) process.

At this point humans started being squeezed into a tighter corner of well paying jobs, and then along came what is known as the Great Doubling.  You see, some years back, the people who didn’t believe in all this innovation and inequality decided to go in another direction that they claimed would create workers’ paradises with none of this risk and trickle down.  And when they thought they had things just about right, the whole damn thing collapsed on them.  The result was that in the early 1990s the 1.5 billion workers in the ‘free world’ were suddenly joined by another 1.5 billion workers who were ready to leave paradise and sell their labor in the markets opening up around the world – the Great Doubling.

Zzzzzzzzzz ...!

George Rebane

Debt and Deficit Deception

George Rebane

Debt or deficit, what’s the difference?  To the overwhelming majority of voters, not much.  Obama’s promise not to “add one dime to the deficit” snugly pulls the wool over the eyes of these people and almost all journalists.  RR readers know that deficits measure the annual increase in national debt in dollars per year, and the economy impacting metric is debt service cost to GDP ratio – try to find that reported anywhere.  National debt, of course, is just the total dollar sum the government pays interest on.  That interest is also the amount of our annual tribute to the feds that serves only to keep blood out of the gutters for a while longer.

According to Obama’s own numbers, his programs of hopeful change will insure that our deficits into the indefinite future will be about $1,000,000,000,000 annually which will double our current debt of almost $12,000,000,000,000 in ten years.  The astute reader will not confuse national debt with the $110,000,000,000,000+ of the nation's total unfunded liabilities.  (I love writing all these zeros; ‘trillions’ has become just another word.)

So let’s see, Obamacare can hide its unsustainability in the near-term by just shifting the accounting of the deficit.  As we quit spending several hundred billion a year on our mid-east wars, then those ‘saved’ monies can be spent on Obamacare with no increase in the projected deficits as promised.  All while our new nationalized healthcare is taking us down the well-trod European road to lower quality and fewer medical services, longer wait times, and, yes, committees that determine for what kinds of care, especially during anticipated end-of-life, the patient will qualify.

What most people understood Obama promise last Wednesday was that his brand of socialized medicine would not add one penny to our national debt.  However, that it will most certainly do, and in appalling amounts.  But out of the gate, with the wool firmly over our eyes, we will not see deficits increase beyond their already projected astronomical levels, each with an ever-increasing percent made up of Obamacare shortfalls.  And now you know.

Ruminations – 8sep2009

George Rebane

Obama continues making “Depression mistakes”.  Even selected media in Great Britain are beginning to notice (here).  Part of the problem about this wool over the country’s eyes is the myth that FDR did anything other than draw out and deepen the misery of the country during his first two terms.  WW2 was the only 'public works' program that worked.

Hereabouts there are still ill-informed folks who continue to have no clue on how the public pension process works, and no desire to get educated.  They claim, for instance, that local jurisdictions are the wrong level at which to address the problem; instead we should be taking this up at the state level.  No matter that it is the jurisdictions that set the pension multipliers, and allow/abet gaming the system through job transfers, overtime, purchasing extra time-in-job, and giving late-career raises/promotions.  Locally this has been pointed out by Mike McDaniel in his SESF report (download here) on unfunded liabilities, and, most recently, detailed in my August Union column.  The ignorance of some former community information gatekeepers about all this is still surprising.

The futility of attempting to centrally plan the operation of large scale systems, like the US of A, is well known to RR readers.  However, so-called smart people are still to blame for attempting to pull of the next version off a centrally planned state.  Here is another view of this from down under. 

Van Jones “smeared” with truth.  But even the ‘we report, you decide’ Fox News can’t shoot straight on the Van Jones resignation.  This weekend they kept asking the dumb question ‘Was the White House sufficiently thorough in their vetting of the 31 (latest count) czars who directly report to the President?’  Of course it was thorough - the White House has told us that they hired these people specifically because of their expressed socio-political philosophies, and the public stances they took on issues before being employed in the administration.  The correct question that seems to evade these hotshot journalists is ‘What objectives does the White House have for America that requires Obama’s administration to have such people in the saddle?’

Hensleys Celebrate 30th Lakeside Labor Day

 George Rebane

 

John and Sandra Hensley, longtime residents of Nevada County, threw their 30th annual Labor Day lakeside bash on the grounds of their Scotts Flat Reservoir residence.  This pot luck, music, and boating feed has become an community tradition for the Hensley family and friends.  Usually there are a couple of local bands in attendance and people who bring their tooters and twangers to make happy sounds as all settle down for some serious eating and (well, you know).  Some of the more active types even go in or out on the lake, and others do remarkably well at volleyball with their ethanol stabilized inertial platforms operating at half-mast.

This year the entertainment included an Englishman who presents himself as ‘The Barefoot Violinist’ all decked out in a white tux sans culottes.  He is a classically trained musician who has developed a unique style of interpretations and improvisations of modern and classical pieces all performed while he dances and prances to the music he produces from his violin and the computerized accompaniment factory obligatory with today’s solo performers.  Quite a showman, and quite a show.

Jo Ann and I are grateful to be counted among John and Sandra's friends, and look forward to many more of years of saying good-bye to Nevada County summers in such beautiful surroundings and with such an eclectic group of local people.

National Propaganda Radio

George Rebane

Like all politically correct people in the country, at our house every morning we wake up to NPR news and commentary (locally KXJZ 90.9FM).  We get our snoot full of the day’s leftwing litany right from the gitgo; don’t mess with us, we’re up to date in Kansas City.  Besides, it’s always good to wake up with a laugh or shaking your head in disbelief, clears out the cobwebs.

This morning the NPR national news informed us that Van Jones had resigned because in a speech he had referred to all Republicans as “assholes”, and that because the Right had launched a “smear campaign” that he could not properly fight as an Obama administration official, without diverting the energies of the administration from its adopted direction.  Of course, NPR didn’t explicitly identify the orifice that he pointed out so colorfully, but anyone who follows national affairs will have seen the video of that Jones speech several times as this story played out last week.

However, that was not why Obama dropped him, public figures have called members of all our political parties names equivalent to and much worse without having to start mailing out a new batch of resumes.  So that was Lie #1.

Ruminations – 5sep2009 (updated)

George Rebane

Van Jones is one of the more outspoken and now visible socialist radicals (a self-declared communist) in the Obama administration.  The record of his outrageous remarks and speeches has now come to light and given rise to several members of Congress to call for his resignation, and to bring under congressional review the entire scheme of these extra-constitutional ‘czar’ appointments that are making potted plants out of most Cabinet secretaries.  However, the ‘light’ on this issue does not shine uniformly from across our vaunted journalistic industry.  As of yesterday, a search of Nexus revealed zero coverage of the growing controversy from the flagship editions of leftwing MSM outlets NBC, ABC, CBS, New York Times, and Washington Post.  Because the White House has started issuing statements on this, they are finally taking their cue and beginning to open up.  Pravda used to operate this way, and today still does.   This kind of black hole journalism is not uncommon from the left, and I’d be interested in hearing about similar behavior from the more conservative news outlets.

[update] The WSJ tonight reports that Van Jones has indeed resigned after issuing two apologies that apparently were not sufficient to have Obama waste any more of his diminishing political capital in defending this man.  We do recall, that all this went down despite that the cited MSM outlets attempted a news blackout on the story during the past week.

NPR is going to do a little educational piece on ‘stochasticity’ this weekend. (locally on KJZZ 91.5 at 3pm Sunday 6sep09)  The lay definitions of this term are all over the place and mostly incorrect or, at best, imprecise.  But the fact that a liberal media outlet is educating its listening public to something, the understanding of which is anathema to collectivization and social engineering, falls somewhere between remarkable and astounding.  But then again, maybe they don’t know what they’re doing.

Understanding stochastic processes is critical for a deeper appreciation of how social policies will/do operate in the real world.  Formally, a stochastic process is a complex process that involves at least two random processes.  These random processes may be inputs to the stochastic process, and/or they may prescribe (some of) the internal workings of the stochastic process itself.  A random process is one the output of which is known only to within a probability (distribution); the outcome of a thrown die, or a drawn card are examples of random processes since the probability distributions of each outcome are known.  However if the process is, say, throw a die AND draw card, based on the result drink a beer if you get an even number AND a face card, else drink water, then the resulting drinking behavior is a stochastic process.  The outputs of stochastic processes are uncertain and, at best, known to within only a probability distribution.  And even if known, the probability distribution may be such that it is not useful for planning/control purposes (but that's another story).

We live in a universe that surrounds us with stochastic processes, and our success in life is to a large extent due to our ability to identify and satisfactorily behave in such environments.  Statist social scientists and politicians don’t understand this, and exhibit their ignorance by continually coming out with policies that don’t account for stochasticity (and other complexifying factors).