Rebane's Ruminations

Treasury: ‘TARP tanked’

George Rebane

AP reported that Treasury’s Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky ran some numbers, and has now informed the Administration that TARP has tanked.  The bank bailouts, started under Bush and continued by Obama, have not increased bank lending, nor have they stimulated jobs, and will “almost certainly” result in a loss to taxpayers.  And Barney Frank has already fessed up (here) that the new bank tax is exactly what I called it on the 12jan10 RR post after it was first announced (pat, pat).  The government is just trying to pile on and get a cut of the profits from continuing risky investments that they have publicly decried.  The wink-wink under the table to the banks is that ‘Go do it again.  And, like last time, we’ll cover your backside if you fail.’  Shame?  The scumbags inside the Beltway never had any, don’t have it now, and don’t hold your breath.

Anybody out there willing to make book on how history (written by anybody but the SEIU) will judge the benefits of ARRA?  ‘Do Nothing, Sooner!’  Old Ludwig’s advice to government sounds better every day.

“I am not an ideologue” ??!!

George Rebane

This guy gets more unbelievable by the hour.  Obama claims not to have an overarching ideology that informs his decisions??!!  An ideology is a coherent and cohesive set of tenets that comprise the socio-political part of a well-formed belief system.  And according to the dictionary, an ideologue is one who has such an ideology.  A reasoned ideologue is one who will modify any of his tenets when presented with compelling evidence that his current ones are wrong.  Recall Keynes’ famous reply to a reporter, ‘I change my mind when presented with new evidence, what do you do?’

Are we to believe that the community organizer got to be President without having an ideology that he uses as the basis (or utility function for you decision analysts) for making the hard decisions that are called for by his office??  What kind of BS is that to feed to the nation via yesterday's meeting with Republicans?

Does this make him doubly stupid or does it elevate him to the pantheon of gods where his decisions from Olympus come down to us in their purity, and to us mortals their basis is a mystery hidden in the mists.  He has behaved as the most ideological President since FDR, and if he now claims to have done it without benefit of a stable and defendable ideology, then what does he do, use that eight-ball with the little round window?

(Full disclosure – Dear reader, I do my best at being a reasoned ideologue.  But you knew that.)

How We Are Ruled

George Rebane

These pages, along with my Union columns, have shined a light on the government employee crisis that is already in the oven.  Every time I have reported on the abuses of government employee unions, government employee pay, and the approaching unfunded liabilities train wreck, there arose an obligatory and automatic hew and cry from the leftwing gallery.  They denounce not only the facts as presented, but also that someone would dare expose the matter to light.  Name calling and ad hominem attacks are the norm, no reasoned counters are offered.

The actual situation is worse than what I have characterized.  Steven Greenhut of reason.com has compiled a major article – ‘Class War’ - on the unadulterated crap that is now routinely shoveled down the throats of the taxpaying public.  This is not good.

H/T to Russ Steele for the heads up on Greenhut’s piece.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

George Rebane

 

Today President Obama assembled the Republican members of Congress and presented a very reasonable case for the two parties to work together to achieve the Objective Du Jour – jobs.  It was all for the good of the country, no one could deny it.  And then he popped out the “party of No” line, inviting the Republicans to do something more than just be obstructionists.

But, of course, Republicans have been giving legislative alternatives to Obama’s progressive programs all along.  The reason that many in America still swallow the Party of No line is that the MSM (save Fox) has not reported on the Republican alternatives and just focused on the No parts.

Returning to jobs – the Republicans this morning pointed out again to Obama that, according to Obama’s own models and the CBO, the Republican alternative of a broad-based tax cut to the Democrats’ $787B ARRA stimulus (Nevada County’s involvement shown in my weekly plot) would have cost half as much and created twice as many jobs.  Obama didn’t want to field that question and kept talking about working together in 2010.

For anyone with a bit of sense, the politics behind this Kumbayah ceremony is not hard to understand.  The Republicans have witnessed the bum’s rush to socialism that happened last year.  It was possible only with the Democrats’ super majorities in both houses.  The bum’s rush will resume in spades if the Democrats come out of November 2010 with their majorities intact.

So for Republicans, job one is to increase their numbers in Congress in an attempt to return the country to bi-partisan centrism.  This will not happen if they roll over and just play nice with Team Obama, at the end of which the Chief Organizer and his congressional gnomes will remind the electorate that all these benefits accrued under the now tried and true progressive management.  As they have in the past, the Democrats would, of course, return the favor were the shoe on the other foot.  That’s the reality of bipartisan politics.

Still in Shock (updated 1feb2010)

George Rebane

It took better men than me to digest Obama’s State of the Union.  All I can do is sit here and shake my head.  While having a filibuster-proof Congress and shoveling payola to his own party’s scumbags, he actually accused Republicans of obstructionism and playing politics with his grand agenda for the ‘American peepuhl’.  Readers wanting a more cogent report on what happened in the House chambers last night should visit sites like the Heritage Foundation.  Or maybe they should visit some progressive blogs (here) or the NYT.  Or better yet, wait until his words are chiseled in stone and erected in some Washington DC grotto as the beginnings of an anticipative memorial to the great man.  First Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and then Mmm, Mmm, Mmm Barack Hussein Obama.

Now don’t throw a hissy fit on the anticipative part.  The man got the presidency with the anticipation that he could benefit from the first ‘earn while you learn’ program reserved for promising Chief Executives.  And that after getting a pass in the two senatorial seats that he held.  Across the pond, the Nobel committee threw in the Peace Prize on the same premise.  Maybe year two will be better.

Then again, maybe not.  We now find out that he’s also a slow learner – to think otherwise would be to accuse him of being evil.  I mean, as he stared down the Supreme Court justices, he actually made us all believe that he didn’t know the laws prohibiting foreign institutions and enterprises from contributing directly or indirectly to influence American elections.  From a careful perusal of the speech, one can conclude that his advisers told him to bet on the prospect that, in the aggregate, the American voters are dumber than he is.  Oi!

[1feb10 update] RR is always grateful for constructive criticisms and suggestions for improved content.  H/T to a regular reader who recommends the following more succinct and focused summary of the President's speech.

Steve Enos Files Brown Act Complaint

George Rebane

RR reader, critic, and former Grass Valley city councilman Steve Enos has filed a complaint against the City of Grass Valley citing violations of the Brown Act.  Steve’s email to me this morning summarized his concerns and the nature of his complaint.  With his permission, the following is extracted from his email and the copy of the filed five-page complaint Download EnosComplaint_26jan2010.

… Please feel free to post on your site about this and post my full initial complaint.

Also understand that the City and Cookson failed to disclose any of this in advance of the Council meeting. I contacted the City last week and made the initial complaint about violations by Cookson and long running violations of by (sic) City since April 2007. This should have been disclosed in the staff report for Tuesdays item and it was not. No public disclose (sic) by the City or Cookson in advance of the Council meeting, none in the staff report and no discussion or disclosure at the meeting.

Will our electeds ever understand that they work for us, the people? Will they ever understand the critical importance of a transparent government? Will they follow the Brown Act that clearly states the requirements and benefit of informing the public as they conduct the people's business? …

Steve also stated that The Union is “working on this now” and that Jeff Pelline has a post with comments on the complaint.  Having said that, I think the word is out.

‘From P-books to E-books’ to iPad

George Rebane

Today Steve Jobs of Apple brought out the long-awaited iPad.  It is the gizmo that Apple hopes will become the way we will do most of our information gathering and online communications.  Well actually, the iPad does even more as you can read from their brag sheet here.

I have been predicting the demise of the dedicated ereader since Amazon recently introduced its Kindle, and now a bunch of others have jumped into the same frying pan.  Today we see that it didn’t take long for the dedicated ereaders to be eclipsed by galloping technology, because the iPad delivers ebooks as just one of the many other things that it also lets you do.

We may think of this as all new stuff, but it really isn’t in the sense that all of the functionality of such gizmos was anticipated and described way back when.  When?  At least in the seventies when Ted Nelson was talking to everyone about something called Xanadu.  He’s the visionary who gave us the words ‘hypertext’ and ‘hypermedia’, and the descriptions of how they would work.  Too bad he was a bit eccentric, ahead of his time, and missed out on the big bucks.

At the Birth of Pork

George Rebane

Did you ever stand on the bank of a mighty river like the Missouri and contemplate its majestic and massive flow?  There it appears mighty and unstoppable in its progress to the ocean where it is swallowed up without a trace.  And then your thoughts turn to how such a behemoth starts from a hundred sources somewhere in faraway mountains. 

If you trace one of its tributaries up to the very trickle that emerges out of some crevice on a scenic mountainside, you can stay or divert that trickle with one hand.  It is these numberless trickles which unite into the mighty flow that carves the broad valleys that go on for hundreds or even thousands of miles.  And being at the start of something that big has a special feel to it, you are witnessing the birth of what will eventually become an earth changing force.

Washington DC is also at the mouth of such a mighty and unstoppable river of cash known as ‘set asides’.  This river springs from unknown sources through the working of little known forces dispersed all across the width and breadth of our land.  We also call this mighty flow of appropriated cash by its simple working name ‘pork’.  And we know that when pork passes the Potomac, it also disappears, dispersing into the ocean of local projects, uncountable, yet each one carefully fashioned or chosen to provide succor to its elected sponsor.

Standing on the steps of the Capitol, we may seek to replicate our quest for origins and ask whether we could trace the flow of pork to its very source.  This will be a harder task than tromping up some hillside following an ever narrowing creek, for we know that the headwaters of pork are also countless, unmarked, and work in quiet spurts that are hard to detect and harder to time their unannounced moments.  In plain talk, you have to be lucky to be there at the precise instant to actually witness that first little spurt, not apparent to all, that starts the flow which builds into the mighty, constant, and unstoppable flood of pork.

Well folks, yesterday afternoon I was lucky enough to bear such witness.  I may have been the only one paying enough attention to detect the little sliver of fatback that popped up right there in the middle of a town hall meeting in Grass Valley.

Ex Plures Duos (updated 28jan2010)

George Rebane

For the last thirty years or so we have been awakened by NPR’s morning program.  Locally that means listening to KXJZ 90.9 from Sacramento.  The format starts with inter/national news and then California news slanted toward our part of the state.  Both news programs seem to be politically pretty vanilla.  Oh, every once in a while the particular choice of a word – e.g. ‘claimed’ instead of ‘said’ – is thrown in there to indicate political preference.  And we also note what happenings are prominent by their absence.

But the real show starts at ten after the hour.  Around here we sometimes call it 'comedy central' when set pieces on various issues and topics are covered in five and ten minute segments.  Monday mornings liberal commentator Cokie Roberts is invited for a little Q&A.  This morning she was analyzing President Obama’s recent rocky road and calmly identified as “obstructionist” last year’s Republican efforts to influence legislation, and lamented that all those wonderful programs have now been put on the slow road.  No mention was made of the Republican alternatives or the Democratic lock-out of dissent.

Then the Administration’s new emphasis on job creation was cast into a two way straightjacket – creating jobs requires government stimulus, but government stimulus increases the deficit.  An economist from the union sponsored Economic Policy Institute outlined the quandary and lamented about opinion polls showing that the foolish public wants both more jobs and lower deficits.  Given the only two arrows in this man’s quiver, it could not be done.  Again tough luck for the President.

The casual listener is left commiserating with the President, never being told that there is a third arrow – lower taxes on businesses and investment returns.  For the left this is a non-starter that does not even need to be mentioned in such discussions lest some light bulbs turn on in radio land.

Over the years the NPR listener is left with a distinct set of ground truths such as ‘it’s really the government’s money and they let you use some of it for a while’ and ‘government is the country’s wealth creating agent’ and ‘government creates the jobs that grow the economy’ and … you get the idea.

This is just one example of how America is really two countries in one.  One that has more or less fixed conservative values and mores, and another that has ‘liberal’ values and mores that are more compliant or “pragmatic” to current needs.

The Moral Economy of Scale in Murder

George Rebane

 

RR reader, critic, and contributor Steven Frisch has a well developed and worthy of debate world view.  He posted a comment to some statements I made here regarding the history of death by government and, by implication, its portents for America.  Steve took my brief explication of 20th century state sponsored/executed mass murders to task, concluding with -

Murder is murder, by anyone, in anyone’s name, in the service of any ideology, regardless of the perceived threat from opposing views. I guess I wonder why someone would contend that Hitler was a third rate killer? Why would it matter to you to point out that Stalin or Mao killed more? Does it diminish in some way the evil of Hitler? Why compare? I am not sure that a moral economy of scale exists in murder.

Murder is the unlawful taking of human life, and knowing the history of mass murders carried out by the organs and institutions of state is important.  It is important to know the several such murderous destinations and the many paths which have led to them.  But most important of all is to recognize early and identify reliably the common element or idea that launched nations on such journeys of death.

“… why would someone contend that Hitler was a third rate killer?”  Because he was, and mass murderers and mass murders are the more horrible the more ‘massive’ they are.  We organize societies in recognition of this truth.  Given fixed resources which could save either a million lives or ten million lives, to which effort would we apply them?  With one bullet left, who would not aim at the maniac ready to kill ten rather than the shooter able to kill only one?  It would be immoral to countenance preventable death, and the more so as the number of preventable deaths is ignored in our decision.

"Why would it matter to you to point out that Stalin or Mao killed more? Does it diminish in some way the evil of Hitler?"  Pointing out the magnitude of Stalin’s and Mao’s crimes relative to Hitler’s does matter.  And yes, in a relative sense, it does diminish Hitler’s atrocities.  But the heart of the matter is what drove each national leader to those acts of mass murder on scales that stagger our understanding.  Acquiring this knowledge is critical to informing our future.

Tea Party Patriots Under Cover of Night

George Rebane

Tonight we made it to a gathering of the local Tea Party Patriots (aka teabaggers) in the Grass Valley Elks Lodge.  I estimate that over three hundred of Nevada County’s rightwing extremists packed themselves into that hall.  It was advertized as a celebration of the movement’s success here and across the country – fifteen million of us out there now.  For cover, the TPP leaders had arranged for a band, no-host bar, free fat pills (aka desserts), four of the county's Supes in attendance, and they even had Congressman McClintock there to speak.  It would have fooled most people.

But everyone knew better.  What we were all there for was to collect our monthly pay-off checks from the fat cat corporations that were bankrolling the organization.  For the last year we’ve done our best to make it look like a grass roots affair.  But early on, the feds led by Speaker Pelosi and Homeland Security Administration’s Napolitano saw through the whole thing and blew the whistle on us. Now we have to come up with all kinds of silly excuses to get together so that we can get paid and be given new marching orders.

Russ Steele and I were there with our wives, wine glasses in hand, applauding the speakers and trying to make it all look normal when who but cartoonist Bob Crabb walks up and sits down next to me.  After exchanging a couple of panicked glances with Russ, I decided to engage Bob with some small talk seeing as how all three of us now worked for The Union.  I thought I was doing a good job, but Bob kept glancing around.  It was only a matter of time until he would spot the big fat manila envelope with the checks, and the clipboard with the sign-off sheets that were quietly passed from table to table.

If he did see it, he didn’t let on.  Bob’s a cool character, he’s been there and done that, and he knows better than to talk while the flavor lasts.  I guess we’ll know when his next cartoon appears in the newspaper.  All we can do now is hope for the best.

Our New Subsidized Economy

George Rebane

Speaking to us while still wearing his kneepads from the meeting with the feds (Pelosi and gang), Governor Schwarzenegger reminded us that California gets back only 78 cents on every dollar it sends to Washington.  Then why don't we instead just send them 22 cents and call it even?

 

Ruminations – 21jan2010 (updated)

George Rebane

• open letter to the President
• interview with Dr Anna
• [update] Glenn Beck special 

After Massachusetts, the leftwing of the progressive movement is exhorting President Obama to do better in 2010 lest we witness “the re-emergence of a vicious, feudal corporatism.”  It is instructive for all, especially those not wedded to socialism, to read the open letter to the President on truthout.org, one of the country’s most progressive websites.

The letter summarizes a litany of long simmering complaints from the far left about Obama’s performance, and a frustration that “Democrats are anything but limp windsocks, pointing whichever way the wind blows.”  Here the progressives again make it clear that they are not intrinsically part of any established political philosophy in America, but an independent and extreme ideology which declares that “we are ready to take this country in a fundamentally new direction."

Progressives are now angry and want to see some results.  They are demanding of Obama that “You are going to have to put them down - with true progressive action, not the frail rhetoric of appeasement.”  Any student of 20th century history is, of course, familiar with the nature of “true progressive action”  (see update below).

This will indeed be the most interesting year yet.  The progressives are telling us all to stand by for ram.

Today at my Thursday Rotary lunch meeting I was intercepted by Dr. Anna Haynes, one of Nevada County’s voices from the left, and a tireless worker in the vineyards of anthropogenic global warming.  As an identified and targeted AGW skeptic, she paid me the honor of questioning me on my sources for reliable reporting on climate change.   I answered her questions and we concluded another encounter that was pretty much like the two previous ones we have had – civil and colorless.  She left and I got back to my meeting.

For those not familiar with Anna, she runs NC Voices, an excellent information and access website that updates and headlines Nevada County’s information sources which include newspapers, radio stations, county/city governments, and local bloggers.  She does a workmanlike job maintaining that site in addition to writing her own NC Focus blog.

Russ Steele (NC Media Watch) and RR appear to be her favorite foils.  Both of our blogs are consigned to the off-page extreme right column that was formerly labeled ‘Read with care’, and has now been upgraded to ‘Climate Contrarians’.  If you live in the county, I recommend Anna’s labor of love to you.  It’s a good way to start your daily surfing of the local scene.  (BTW, RR pays homage to her work by featuring both NC Voices and NC Focus links in its right hand panel.)

In the interval, we may be certain that the information I gave her will be put to good use.

[update]  Tomorrow 22jan10 at 2pm PST Glenn Beck on Fox News is airing a special that illustrates the denied history of "true progressive action" taken to its logical conclusion.  It's worth turning on your DVR so that you can see and show it more than once.  Fasten your seatbelt.

We post-WW2 immigrants from Europe were blown away by how little of the war's history was known by or taught to Americans.  When we told the stories of what really happened, people stared in disbelief and walked away.  It couldn't be so because everyone knew Hitler was the biggest, baddest, and the only monster that had walked the earth.  Pointing out that Adolph was a third rate killer and quoting facts to the contrary (and this was even before the Cultural Revolution) was beyond the ability to handle by people who had been carefully taught.  Things have slowly been coming to light, but then only to people who read and think.  Perhaps as adults we are now ready to take a giant step in understanding our country's tilt during the last forty years or so. 

Repudiation

George Rebane

Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts yesterday should send a clear message to all progressives in the country, especially of the Democrat ilk.  But I doubt that it will.  The true believers will just hunker down and figure out how to recast the socialist revolution they are trying to pull off.  Fundamental transformation of the country is a long term objective and they have been working on it for over a century now.  They are a patient lot.

In the interval, the rest of us can hope that enough Democrats in Congress now see their sinecures on the line so that they will begin to distance themselves from the current rush to collectivism by way of national bankruptcy.

The people have communicated through polls, and now at least three elections, that they will countenance neither the pace nor the progressive agenda as framed by Obama and his Congressional acolytes.  That same gang of social engineers and their MSM colleagues will recast this vote as everything other than what it was – repudiation.

Ruminations - 19jan2010

George Rebane

• Avatar – the screenplay
• Haiti and foreign aid

I was reminded of my naivete by an email from a RR reader with a link to an article that discussed the message delivered by the film Avatar.  This blockbuster raises the bar for producing movies rich in very realistic computer graphics and extends all this into 3D.  I covered some of the implications of the film’s technology in ‘Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again’.  But the Avatar storyline is something else.  It is typically simplistic Hollywood leftwing pabulum which I thought would come through in spades to everyone who saw it.  Wrong.  When our kids took us to see it over Christmas, we all talked about the anti-capitalist, anti-western culture, anti-religious (and a few more antis) propaganda content that seemed to hit the viewer squarely between his 3D glasses from almost every scene.

It turns out, of course, that not everyone picks this up, and to that extent the film delivers another powerful punch as it is shown worldwide.  Everyone comes to it with their own view of history, and most young people with no such view at all.  How diverse these realities of the past can be was again illuminated in the comment threads to my Jan column (here and here) in The Union.  Collectivism did not fall with the Wall in 1989, it just changed clothes, putting on a much brighter and colorful coat that makes it blend in better with its competition.

These pages have discussed the effects of foreign aid to poor countries, most recently in the context of post-disaster Haiti (‘Haiti – After the Dust and Tears’).  Bret Stephens in today’s WSJ writes ‘To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid’ and cites the 2006 report from the National Academy of Public Administration entitled ‘Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed’.  Foreign aid to poor countries has failed uniformly and by any measure, perpetuating misery and death.  This has been documented in Easterly’s White Man’s Burden (here), and now the cry is coming also from citizens of the recipient countries.  Perhaps most heart-rending is from Kenyan economist James Shikwati’s “For God’s sake, please just stop.”

Avatars Lauren and Bogie, Together Again

George Rebane

In the early 1980s my firm in Los Angeles had just bought and installed the most advanced computer graphics system available.  It was the second one on the west coast (the other one belonged to a big aerospace company) and we used it to create multi-media images and videos for the then new PC controlled laser discs.  Word got out (well, we helped a little) and soon we were doing post-production work for Hollywood production companies fixing stuff that went wrong in producing movies and commercials.  Working with that system, it immediately became clear to us that this was the future of movies.  But more importantly, movie stars could live forever on the screen.

I called in our intellectual property lawyers, described what we thought was possible, and asked if dead actors’ estates had ever granted rights for ‘them’ to appear in new digitized productions.  The answer was no, because such screen incarnations had never been possible or occurred to anyone.

The scheme to do it was complicated but straightforward since the actors’ faces and bodies existed on film from all angles, and we had lots of audio from them.  This would allow surrogate actors to act out the parts in a new movie, perhaps wearing special suits with lights and gridlines on them.  In post production we would then render the surrogate actors with the appropriate stars’ faces and even costumes.  The speech would be modified using the dead actors’ speech formants (analyzed speech components) to ‘superimpose and blend’ it on the surrogates’ voices.  The final product would be the real thing – Lauren and Bogie, or Lucy and Desi, or … .

All we needed then was some faster and more commodious hardware - that would eventually come along given Moore’s Law - and to write some nifty interactive computer graphics (CG) and speech processing software.  Anyway, I later checked that part out with John Hughes, founder of Rhythm and Hues which along with George Lucas were then the world’s leading CG houses.  John agreed that all of it would be possible with the new hardware and a pile of cash.  Having neither, we both went on with our lives doing other things.

Today the movie Avatar has brought together the CG technology developments of the last thirty years and demonstrated that it is indeed possible to make a new road movie starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or anyone else you care to pick.  I haven’t yet heard of the voice overlays I described above, but I bet someone is working hard on it.

And not only will dead stars live again, but still kicking actors will be able to play themselves in a much younger year.  In short, an actor need no longer progress through the aging roles of yesteryear. Tom Cruise can play a twenty something when he’s sixty something, and Sean Connery will forever return to his 007 role.  People covering the industry have already started talking about it (here) since Avatar continues to rack up piles of cash.

An aging population would flock to movies and programs that revived memories of their younger years with new material that comes to life with the same actors that inspired their youth.  There’s gold in them thar hills!

Haiti - After the Dust and Tears

[This post by Mr Steven Frisch is an expansion of the comment thread for ‘Haiti and Compassion’.  Steve is the president of the Sierra Business Council and frequently offers a more progressive perspective to RR posts.  Here he kindly accepted my invitation to post his more comprehensive thoughts on post-disaster US policy toward Haiti.  gjr]

Steven Frisch

I absolutely do not think we want Haiti to become a ward of the US.

I think the US needs to be significantly less interested in creating client states in the future and more interested in helping to build economies and governance structures that secure freedom - by that I mean economic freedom, stable governments and military security. If we can use our political capital and economic power to help build stable governments we might not have to pay the price of remaining the world’s only hegemonic power.

Ultimately we are neither our brother’s keeper nor should we think of ourselves as their betters. They must control their own destiny and decisions. We should help, then back away.

Ensuring that Haiti does not become a ward of the US is going to be tricky since it is 90 miles from our shores and there are about 600,000 Haitians in the US.

In the short term, during the crisis, I would not care too much about money.  First, food, water, shelter and medical care as part of the global relief effort.

Next, we should just go in there and help rebuild. It should be an international effort, but we should just bite the bullet and set the example by guaranteeing funding in the low billions to rebuild Haiti's infrastructure and use that pledge to leverage the several billion more from the rest of the world, and do it quick. By rebuild I mean really re-build. Total infrastructure investment: roads, schools, bridges, water systems, sewage treatment, power plants, electrical grids, hospitals, churches, etc. I would have Clinton/Bush lead a private fundraising effort to backfill the guarantee.

Singularity Signposts – 17jan2010

George Rebane

Here is a flurry of recent developments and advances that serve as ever more rapidly passing milestones as we approach the Singularity.  Their relevance to everyday life is sometimes hard to see for the non-technician, but they all have an impact on how most of us will be able to earn a living and stay healthy.

 

My main worry about the latter is that the healthcare markets for these advances may disappear in the next few years.  All advances in human history trickle down from the early adopters who usually are better off than the eventual mass of users and can afford the expensive early versions.  The rest of us benefit when the new gizmo or process has demonstrated itself enough to bring in competitors or motivate the originators to continue working (i.e. risk more) to reduce costs.

1. Quantum leap in battery design (here)  Ever wonder how all those sci-fi robots can do all the fancy stuff for hours/days on end when their form factor is about that of a human?  Well, it would require them to have embedded enormously more dense (e.g. KWH/cubic foot) energy stores than exist now.  A standard lithium ion battery pack would run out in a couple of minutes.  This article describes a new technology that would increase energy densities “by orders of magnitude”, just what the Doctor (PhD that is) ordered.
2. New propulsion technologies for interstellar travel are described by this New Scientist article.
3. The race between extending lifespans through biological vs machine-augmented means is ramping up.  Here’s an article that summarizes advances in the biological arena that promise steps closer to the proverbial fountain of youth.
4. Never heard of crowdsourcing?  Well, you should because it may be a way that a lot of people will be able to earn a living in the future by combining their ability to perform simple tasks, which when integrated, will achieve complex objectives.  Crowdsourcing also has a sinister potential that an authoritarian state can use on its people.  More here.
5. Best robots of 2009 (here and here)  These are the smart mechanical critters that are taking human jobs and making the remaining workers more productive.  What will the displaced workers do?
6. Here’s a compendium of topics from the genius himself, Ray Kurzweil.  Besides being an awesome inventor, Kurzweil is the definitive futurist and in an interview shares his predictions about all things artificially intelligent and conscious heading our way.
7. China is now the second largest producer of human knowledge and is expected to surpass us by 2020 (here and here).  In the interval they are busy building up a world-class military to project power worldwide.  What will we do with all of our lawyers then?  More importantly, what will we do with all of our students who ‘don’t do math’?

Jobs Gone ... and Coming

George Rebane

[This editorial appears today (16 January 2010) in The Union’s print and online (here) opinion sections.  This is the submitted version.]

Some people around here have given up on real economic development for our county.  They see that the federal trough has been slopped and ready for all the little piggies who can recite the proper slogans.  Times are tough and everyone is hungry, so what’s there to think about?  Let’s dive in.

It appears that a growing number of our more progressive and pragmatic neighbors have concluded that Nevada County’s economic future lies in the land of grants and loans, all connected by something called green.  They believe that we will climb our way out of this recession by stepping on stacks of carefully prepared grant proposals and loan applications while chanting ‘green is good’.  On the other side await the smiling feds ready to place around our collective neck a collar inscribed ‘Ward of the State’.

ARRA for China? (updated)

George Rebane

It's been about a year down the pike since the $787 billion American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009 was passed to claim the award as the greatest Congressional bum's rush in history.  I wonder how this all strikes those holding their breath for the new green industries to be funded by such means.

   

Russ Steele on NC Media Watch reports here on wiser heads from China locating their solar equipment manufacturing plants next door in Arizona so they can avoid California's insane business environment, and still serve the equally insane mandated green energy markets in California.  And we've been thinking all along that they were going to locate here in Nevada County.  I wonder if the Chinese green companies are also going to get stimulated by Washington.  If I were they, I'd demand some of that ARRA money as a condition for buying and not selling our Treasuries.  (more here)

[update] Late this afternoon the county updated its ARRA numbers, and we more than tripled our receipts.  Note also the increases in our applied and approved amounts.  County CEO Rick Haffey's Friday memo to the Supes contains a bizarre account of caulking contractor bids (yes, this is one of the stimulated green jobs) for which a RFP (request for proposal) was published.  Only one contractor,  Steve Hull Construction, applied.  This apparently because of the number of hoops the government set up for qualifying contractors to jump through.  This is your government in peace and war, stimulating jobs within an industry that is flat on its butt.  If you like this, you're gonna love the way Obamacare is going to be administered.

Haiti and Compassion

George Rebane

The devastating earthquake on Tuesday (12jan10) that pretty much leveled the Port-au-Prince region of Haiti is almost too big to get my mind around.  Thinking about the real size of that disaster must include the world’s response to it, and it promises to be colossal.

Haiti is a country that by all objective measures is pretty much worthless to anyone not living there, and worth very little to those so burdened.  This conclusion is supported by any number of references about the country.  It has no natural resources that anyone wants, what used to be the natural beauty of Hispaniola has been decimated by its people (you can make out its boundary with the Dominican Republic from space), its governments are sequentially dysfunctional, its economy is on permanent international dole, and the people are a grim lot - mostly destitute, desperate, and uneducated.  Its major export consists of contraband humans on makeshift ‘boats’ risking shark-infested waters to seek a better life elsewhere – mainly in the United States.

And now a world-scale disaster has struck that has left tens of thousands dead, and most certainly, countless more dying under the rubble even as I write.  Yet the world is rushing help of all kinds to that little cesspool of a nation.  Planeloads of supplies land on its single runway ‘international’ airport, and ships of all descriptions are being dispatched with aid to a seaport no longer able to receive them.  In thousands of homes across the world people are writing checks and sending them to various relief agencies.

For years I have puzzled about the effect of the self-soothing aid we send to the less developed people of this planet.  As some RR readers may be aware, I have come down heavily on the side of arguments pointing out the harm our so-called aid has done to keep the poor regions perpetually poor.

And then a dear friend up and went to Haiti a couple of years ago and started an orphanage (here).  Of all places, Haiti!  The pictures and stories from that effort washed away the aggregate statistics that characterized the country; now we were looking at real kids with real faces looking back at us.  They opened our hearts and we opened our wallet.

None of that affected the broader calculations that had consigned Haiti to the ‘do not resuscitate’ category.  It was human emotion, pure and simple.  I have no idea how those kids will grow up and what they will do to or in the world.  Right then and there they were kids in need, and our friend was building them an orphanage.  What were we supposed to do, read him a page from Easterly’s White Man’s Burden?  (see also ‘The Catastrophe of Compassionate Charities’) 

But all those neat conclusions seem to recede into the background when death arrives wholesale.   And so they died, leaving millions now living in pain that comes from more directions than we can count.  Undeniably, it affects all of us when a tsunami washes away a quarter million people, or a flooding river in China claims millions, or when we had fifty thousand people die within one minute or so last Tuesday.  I guess life loves life, and demands to fight back when it sees death at such scale.

Perhaps these mega-tragedies are God’s way of giving each of us an opportunity to recalibrate and reflect the good side of our humanity.  Too infrequently, we are guided by Jesus - ‘Whatever you did even unto one of the least of these, you did unto me.’  Go write a check.

Ruminations – 12jan2009

George Rebane

• Windfall profit taxes on bankers
• Green Banks fund green jobs

We are now assured that the feds will slap an extra tax on “windfall profits” that banks make from future risky investments.  These are the kinds of government induced investments that inflated the last bubble of outlandish real estate prices and sophisticated (beyond comprehension) hedge products which finally blew up and presented us with today’s recession.  As we all know, the feds (including the Fed) leaped in there to bail out the big banks.  No harm no foul.

But after a little thought, someone in the White House said, ‘Sumbich, there’s a pony in this deal if we can only cut ourselves in on the action.’  And cutting themselves in is now in the works.   To the sheeple it looks like - oh yeah, now the government is really going to get ugly as a bear’s butt on all those fat cat bankers.  But to someone with two brain cells to rub together, it is what it is – a bright green light for the bankers to get into exactly the same kind of shoot-the-moon deals that got us in trouble the last time.  The bankers are smiling all the way to their outlandish bonuses.  Why? cause Uncle Sam just said ‘Go and spin that wheel.  We’re partners now and we’ll split the profits.  And if the wind don’t blow our way, that’s OK cause there’s more bailout money where that last batch came from.  Yee Haw!!’

Meanwhile, the rest of us should strap some duct tape around our wallets.

Them folks at the Center for American Progress are something else.  Partnering with another group of financial wizards at the Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute (hold the laughter, please), they came up with something to write home about.  Together, they figured out that if the government writes a check each year for $150 billion, they could see their way to “create” and sustain 1,700,000 new jobs doing all kinds of neat green things.  They call it the “Green Bank” and, with nary a blink, claim the “Green Bank can ensure (that) the clean-energy manufacturing sector is able to overcome several challenges, including securing access to capital when prospective lenders are reluctant to provide financing to manufacturers producing clean-energy technology.”

Well no kidding, Red Ryder! (‘kidding’ is a place holder for a stronger sentiment)  It is indeed a challenge to talk someone "reluctant" and sane out of money to fund a boondoggle that pays $88,000+ annually to keep a body working on stuff for which there is no market.  So the Green Bank concept dispenses with the sane investor/lender problem, and goes directly to the government where there is no such impediment.  CAP simply reminds the feds that markets are no matter since the feds got the guns and can coerce the customers to buy whatever crap is produced from the ‘investment’, which, by the way, is also paid for by the same customers.  They pay for it twice, such a deal!

Remember the Whiffenpoof Song?  OK, all together now, ‘We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way, Baa, baa, baa? …’

Harry Reid being Screwed, Blued, and Tattooed

George Rebane

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is being done dirty for his spot on assessment of candidate Barack Hussein Obama.  Obama’s candidacy was being framed in the aura of his ability to become the first ‘black’ president.  Actually, Obama is a mulatto, but in our society that makes him more black than white.  And it was in this context that old Harry made his correct and supportive remarks about the good looking, smooth talking, done nothing Senator from Illinois.

Harry said that to his benefit Obama was a “light-skinned Negro”, and that he spoke “with no Negro dialect, when he wanted to”.  Both attributes would strengthen Obama’s candidacy.  And Harry said that in an environment where such honest assessments were expected of politicos evaluating Obama’s candidacy.

Right here and now, let me go on record that I also shared those same views of Obama with my compatriots during the months leading to November 2008.  I wanted Obama to win because he was a mulatto, and I wanted him to lose because he had the belief system of a socialist.  And to Obama’s credit, he did not hide those beliefs.  We now know that he told a lot of lies, but when it came to what he had in mind for the country, the man spoke with a straight tongue.  (It’s all those people who weren’t paying attention then, who are now saying ‘Oh sh#%!'.)

But getting back to the roasting of Harry; Republican chairman Mike Steele and others are saying that Reid should be held to the same standard that sent Senator Trent Lott to the locker room.  And Democrats trying to defend Reid look like Ralph Kramden explaining his latest folly to Alice (younger readers may skip this sentence).  My take is that neither Lott nor Reid should be pilloried for their respective remarks about Strom Thurmond and Obama.

If in the corridors of governance we cannot frame a remark that is accurate and not intended to hurt in a clear, complete, and concise manner, then what have we become?  Obama is a good looking, light-skinned Negro, should we deny that?  The important point in the electioneering was that he appeared to be an electable candidate with obvious Negro ancestry.  His victory would be an historic first.  A long time ago we got over acknowledging membership in the Negroid race to be a racial slur.

And Obama does speak like the mainstream educated American that he is.  He doesn’t have the black speech artifacts that many/most African-Americans have whether they are speaking ghetto dialect or ‘California english’.  Yes, I know that the politically correct consider it racist to say that blacks and whites can reliably identify most black speakers on radio. 

Harry, and everyone else listening to Obama, correctly believed his sonorous American baritone to be in the man’s favor with the large cross-section of voters that he would face in November.  And, of course, Obama could put on a believable black accent when the audience required it, another plus for the candidate.

So what the hell is all the fuss about?!  To many of us, Harry Reid is a common sleazebag politician and a lying sumbich.  I can see a dozen legitimate ways to go after his political career, but his calling a diamond a diamond is not one of them.

Stimulus on Indefinite Hold

George Rebane

Can anyone still remember the dire consequences predicted last February when this $787 billion disaster was rushed through on a weekend?

Ruminations - 9jan2010

George Rebane

• Pat Butler’s Nevada City Advocate
• Tea Party Patriots lunch

Local cartoonist Robert Crabb’s iconic Nevada City Hall starship (nearby) gives a hint to the kwai loh as to how the city is viewed locally and with good reason.  My only nit with Crabb’s tag line is that Nevada City has already boldly gone to that nether land which swallows up regular towns without so much as a gurgle.  And continuing to amaze us all, there it operates as if the sun neither sets nor rises.

The city now has its own monthly newspaper, The Nevada City Advocate, published by Pat Butler, formerly editor of The Union.  Coming back from errands this morning, Jo Ann and I stopped at the Northridge for lunch and picked up a free copy at the door.  Perusing its coverage of local issues and broader matters left little doubt that the progressive side of the local political spectrum is well covered.  I think the newspaper reflects well the mood and values of its namesake town.

My only recommendation to Mr. Butler would be to provide more detail on the goings on in that art deco City Hall, along with an occasional peek at what is under the rug.  No matter how that coverage is brought to print, its entertainment value alone would be sure to increase circulation.  I wish him well.

The Nevada County chapter of the Tea Party Patriots held its first monthly(?) lunch at the Nevada County Contractors Association facility yesterday.  It was a very upbeat and well-attended (over 100) affair featuring Mark Meckler, an excellent speaker, talking about his recent trip to Washington on behalf of the TPP.  Mark’s report of his reception on the Hill underlined again the perception of our grassroots organization as being definitely not to the benefit of the leftwing.

TPP has leaned over backwards to make clear its non-partisan stance which is confirmed by the Republicans attempting to co-opt it (google the Tea Party Express affair), and the Democrats dithering between slandering and ignoring it (with remarkable success achieved on both counts).