George Rebane
Piracy on the high seas – another symptom of a dysfunctional society of nation-states. Just heard SecState Clinton blather about working to develop “appropriate 21st century means of controlling piracy.” Historically pirates were the original international terrorists – not criminals - and were summarily treated that way by every legitimate government. Using Admiral Nelson’s tactic of “going straight at them”, civilized society showed them no quarter - when they were caught, they were executed. With this response policy and advancing technology, piracy essentially disappeared in the 19th century from the world’s routes of commerce. Now it’s back because politically correct nations are tying themselves in legal knots trying to figure out how to deal with pirates that is more … more what? Another sign of coming totalitarianism or Mad Max anarchy – in both systems the law abiders are punished and the scum runs free.
In this putative economic recovery lots of economic indicator numbers are being published, analyzed, and interpreted by mostly innumerate journalists. Their reports are almost all suspect because most of them can’t tell the difference between a number as an attribute attached to something, and a number being used in or derived through a mathematical computation of a realworld process that itself is being reported. To them all numbers are simply ‘math’, and therefore excusably foreign. So if such a reporter writes that ‘recent sales tax receipts are down’, that is not math. But the equivalent sentence - ‘recent sales tax receipts are down 10%’ - is considered ‘math’. And these people are supposed to be our window to the world?
The Nevada County Library privatization dust-up is in full progress. A RR reader who has been following this in The Union (here) emails a sentiment that, I suspect, many harbor but have yet to voice. “I'd likely make this business decision in 5 minutes. But then government jobs are ‘above’ business.” In any case, I invite readers to keep an eye on how all this develops through the (count them) three working committees now involved in resolving the issue. For perspective, please refer to my workforce and public sector union columns here and here.
And finally, here is a typical leftwing discounting of the recent climate change email fiasco by fraudulent scientists (a summary here and a lot more on NC Media Watch). As an educated reader, see how many dots don't connect in this pithy dismissal from the liberal website truthout.com.
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