Rebane's Ruminations

Time to Soak the Cannons?

George Rebane

Today we break bread and hoist a glass with friends to celebrate the anniversaries of a number of auspicious events that happened on August 8th.  Among these was America’s signing the UN charter in 1945, and Richard Nixon resigning the Presidency in 1974.  Perhaps not so well known is the Estonian tribes’ victory over Sweden near the town of Lihula in 1220.

Lihula (translates to ‘butchers’ village’) was the Estonians’ last major victory against invaders (Swedes, Germans, Russians) from three sides who ultimately defeated the loosely knit tribes, and then took turns fighting each other as they ruled and ravaged the country for the next six centuries.   During this interval Estonian peasants rose up against their foreign masters about every 70 to 80 years only to have their rebellions be ruthlessly put down.

 

With the advent of gun powder, Estonians secretly made their own cannons for besieging the local fortresses that housed their rulers.  However, because steel was expensive and hard to fashion, Estonian cannons were made of thick oak staves banded with steel usually pilfered from the wheel rims of the ruling nobles.  Until it was time to use them, these wooden cannons were hidden deep in the forests.  There they dried until the cracks between the staves were too large to effectively fire a cannon ball.  (The photo shows a 19th century Vietnamese wooden cannon of similar design.)

To reseal them in preparation for battle, the cannons were moved in the dead of night to a nearby stream or bog, and placed into the water to soak and expand, thereby making the wooden tubes tight again.  To this day Estonians acknowledge the coming time of trouble and tribulations by asking each other, ‘Kas paneme kahurid likku?’, which translates to, ‘Should we start soaking the cannons?’

Tragedy of the Commons, Etc

George Rebane

[This bi-weekly commentary aired tonight on KVMR FM89.5.  Dr Hardin has been one of my lifelong teachers of social thought, the good fortune of which I had to run into him while still in my twenties.  I highly recommend him to your attention; today his ideas are more important than ever.  This piece is adapted from the SESF Numeracy Nuggets series.]

Garrett Hardin, the late professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara, was an ecologist and world-class thinker.  His long list of original ideas and writings pricked many sacred sentiments of the right and left.  Hardin was concerned with population growth and the kinds of decisions required in a world with too many people – kind of like the decisions we are pondering here in Nevada County.  ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, first published in 1968, is his best-known legacy.

In one version, the concept is introduced in terms of ten farmers whose cows graze on a commons or public pasture.  Each farmer has ten cows whose milk provides him with a major part of his income.  The hundred cows fill the carrying capacity of the commons in that the grass is able to grow just fast enough to keep the 100 cows well fed.  Then the spontaneous addition of one new cow by one farmer leads to a runaway addition of more cows as the other farmers also seek the added benefits of a larger herd. But soon all realize that they must keep adding cows just to maintain their shrinking income as their milk production plummets because the cows no longer have adequate food from the over-grazed commons.  

Cue the Eternal Emergency (updated 8aug2010)

George Rebane

The $787B, or was it really $868B, stimulus called ARRA has not worked.  No matter the trumpeting from the front door, this is apparent now even to the White House which is conducting backdoor discussions on how to ‘double down’ on the next stimulus that is being cooked up.  We have quietly entered into the age of planned ‘eternal emergency’ during which a never-ending stream of Keynesian dollars are borrowed or printed, and then carefully ‘invested’ with correctly voting constituencies.

We all recall the cry that went out to the sheeple in February 2009.  The inherited Bush economy was in such a dump that $787B had to be rushed through Congress that very same weekend so it could be poured over a land of upturned faces waiting for help from Washington.  Perhaps the biggest selling point was that if we didn’t do this immediately, then we would be laying off police, firefighters, and teachers across the country, and quickly turning America into a land of free-ranging criminals, unattended conflagrations, and young people even dumber than public education has managed to make them in the last thirty years.

President Obama went on record at least six times to assure us that ARRA monies would be rushed to these critical job categories to keep our civilization from collapsing.   So what happened?  Well, today $451B or over 57% of the ARRA monies remain unallocated (see Nevada County’s reflection of this above).  And now, before the November elections, the transformational trio of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are calling an extraordinary session of Congress to ram through an additional $26B that is suddenly necessary to guarantee (fasten seatbelts) that teachers!! will not be laid off in the coming school year.

In the meantime the country continues with legions of staffers at all levels of jurisdictions and non-profits (and even for-profits) spending millions of man-hours researching, writing, and evaluating ARRA proposals to get their hands on this promised largesse.  Only your imagination can tell what all these people could have done for the economy had they spent these hours in productive pursuits.  Generating and exchanging kilotons of paper and terabytes of pdf files to chase after created cash is a true and enduring example of how government creates and ‘saves’ jobs.

[8aug2010 update]  Wonder of wonders, even Democratic officials are beginning to doubt the effects of printing ever more money.  Robert Rubin, president Clinton's Sec Treasury, stated on CNN that more government stimulus would now be "counter productive".  I wonder how much past the 'productive boundary' we have actually come with all these trillions.

Ruminations - 5aug2010 (updated 6aug2010)

George Rebane

• Tea Party, NAACP, black activists
• NAACP, charter schools
• Obamacare – ‘the more you know …’

Recently the NAACP has raised its head to again demonstrate how irrelevant it has become in the affairs of promoting the welfare of ‘colored people’.  The latest imbroglio, where it announced a forthcoming resolution to condemn the Tea Party movement for its “potential” for embracing racism, is still ongoing.  This attempt to regain attention (and contributions, and membership) was again refuted yesterday, this time by an assemblage of black political activists and commentators who are members of the various TP organizations that make up the movement (more here)

Going from irrelevance to downright harm, the NAACP is reminding everyone of the low points it has achieved in the intervening years (since Jo Ann and I were members) by once more opposing charter schools and their funding in predominantly black communities.  Joining with the Urban League and the usually suspect public service employee unions (NEA, AFT, SEIU, …), they have declared that they are “concerned about the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities" and that "there is no evidence that charter operators are systematically more effective in creating higher student outcomes nationwide.”  This statement supports the rumor that several years ago the NAACP did in fact move its headquarters to Mars.  Even the famous conservative Reverend Al Sharpton recently told the WSJ that "I have members of my board who run charter schools, … I'm not anti-charter schools. I'm pro-good charter schools. We want what's best for our kids, even if it doesn't follow the liberal status quo."

Ol’ Harry Reid just can’t keep them lies from coming.  His latest is that the more folks out here in the national pasture learn about Obamacare, “the more they like it.”  This flies in the face of every poll taken since the damned thing was rammed down our throats.  The broadest polls today are showing that 55% of Americans want it repealed.  And many states have already launched numerous lawsuits against the feds on constitutionality issues that this hunk of midnight socialism raises.  Add to that what people are saying in elections (e.g. Missouri, see update) when given a chance to vote on it.  For a real snoot full of what’s in the bill now that we’ve passed it (thank you Nancy), please read the just released Cato Institute study authored by Mike Tanner, ‘Bad Medicine – a guide to the real costs and consequences of the new health care law’.  Seat belts and a strong adult beverage of choice are recommended.

Exit question – In the range of stupid to evil, where are these people located?

[6aug2010 update] Did anyone notice that the big three lame stream media - ABC, CBS, NBC - did not deem it worthy to report Missouri's landslide rejection (71% to 29%) of Obamacare's health insurance mandate?  Other states soon to follow.  What are your sources for news?

Today the Urban League pulled away from the NAACP and stated that it agreed with the good Rev Sharpton in supporting "good charter schools".  Is there now reason to hope for better schools for minority kids?

Fleet Update 4aug2010 (updated 5aug2010)

George Rebane

Looking at Stratfor’s weekly update of our force projection resources – overwhelmingly the carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups (each with a reinforced marine battalion) – I noticed that we now have only eleven carrier strike groups operational (click to enlarge).  Until last year we had twelve.  Of these eleven we notice that two are currently “nondeployable”.  Overall, it looks like the world is pretty much at peace with the North Korean thugocracy having again changed its mind to not “respond physically” to the recent US-South Korea naval exercises.  Also we are not bringing in any additional forces into the Arabian Sea to support an imminent strike against Iran.

 

Time to refocus our attention again on gay marriage (Prop 8 overturned), radical rightwing tea baggers, and attracting manufacturers to Nevada County.

[5aug2010 update]  Today the Pentagon announced that China has developed and is prepared to test a ‘carrier buster’ weapon system that fires a Mach 12 terminally guided missile that can take out one of our super carriers, the ship which forms the nucleus of each of the above described carrier task groups.  China knows that we have no designs on its landmass, but they do have designs on becoming the hegemon of east Asia.  What stands in their way is America’s ability to deploy the above described resources to block them, therefore the new missile.

It appears that they are aware of the new Alinsky acolytes in the White House, but just in case we will not unilaterally retire our task groups in a timely manner, China wants to give our progressives a little more ammo to speed up the process with the argument, ‘why keep them operational since China will be able to poleax them at will?’  But anyone who has worked on such complex weapon systems will tell you that there are some serious counter-measures that such a ‘carrier buster’ will have to overcome.  In the meanwhile, the Chinese continue work on their own carrier task groups.

Illegal Alien Follies

(4aug10 WSJ Letters to the Editor)

Will someone please explain to me why employers are compelled by law to demand proof of citizenship, while law enforcement officers (police) are forbidden by law to request it?

Mel VanderBrug
Bloomfield Township, Michigan

Tea Party Member ?=? Republican

George Rebane

KVMR News Director Paul Emery comments (here) that – “A recent Gallop Poll shows that 80% of Tea Party affiliates are Republicans and have voted Republican in the last three election cycles. The poll indicates that they will vote Rupublican in the next election. 12% are Democrats and only 8% are Independents. This indicates to me that the Tea Party is the same Conservative faction of the Republican Party with a different logo.”

This revisits the ongoing proposition that there is no essential difference between the Republicans and the members of the various TP affiliated organizations across the country.  However, the Republican Party leadership seems to disagree.  They evince this disagreement by their ongoing and concerted effort to get the TP affiliates to endorse the party and/or their candidates running in the various elections this fall.  Were they sanguine about the two ‘groups’ being identical or even of the same mind, they would not continue these overtures.

So how does this “different logo” question resolve itself?  Perhaps the following graphic can shed some light.

 

Let the big rectangle represent the set of all political principles/beliefs.  The red circle then represents such beliefs actually ‘acted out’ or implemented by the recent Republicans – this is their walk instead of their talk.  The blue circle represents the same for the recent Democrats.  The intersection of these two circles shows how much commonality there is in how the two parties actually behave.  The black circle represents the political principles/beliefs of those declaring themselves to be members of the various TP affiliates.  And yes, the overlap here is mostly with the Republicans.

New Comment Policy on Ruminations

George Rebane

Wow! What a furball we had going on ‘Who is a Racist?’, and then it moved to ‘Stan Meckler Responds’.  My post today ‘The SmartMeter Comes’ was about the advent of PG&E’s new SmartMeter™.  It appears that the brouhaha about Tea Party Patriots doings spread to this post and marbled itself with readers’ comments who wanted to talk about the SmartMeter.  The resulting mixed comment thread does not serve RR readers or any of us who wish to discuss this new development in the county, it just becomes a pain in the butt to sort through the chaff and noise that has leaked from the discussion relating to another post.

Therefore, henceforth I will ask RR commenters to stick to the topic of the post – or at least do a gentle segue to a related topic.  Further violations of this policy will simply be removed with or without notice, depending on the demands on my time at the moment.  I will leave the marbled comment stream on ‘The SmartMeter Comes’ as a living memorial to something that I should have nipped in the bud from the gitgo.  I will understand if you want to test the new policy, and will be glad to receive reminders if I lapse.  Thanks for your cooperation.

The SmartMeter™ Comes (updated)

George Rebane

The sheeple are quiet and compliant.  But this old gray fox is furious and helpless.  We just got our notice from PG&E saying they are “excited to inform (us) that we’ll soon be installing SmartMeter™ technology” in our neighborhood.  This small piece of hardware will “empower you to take greater control of your energy consumption, use less energy, and save money.”

It will do nothing of the sort.  Using our old meter, we can save or spend as much as we will from the published time-of-day rate tables.  But the SmartMeter™ will prepare the way for Big Brother to reach into our home to control every ‘chipped’ appliance that we will soon be buying, including without limitation the ability to monitor ALL electrical activity in the privacy of our homes, impose address specific brown-outs, and/or completely turn off power to our home.  All of this will be done under government imprimatur and algorithmically without a human in the loop thank you.

The green chorus is already singing its hosannas to yet another level of state control, while the rest of us mumble in our beer and do nothing.  Long ago Orwell tried to warn us of life under a technologically steroidal tyranny (here and here).  We did not listen and instead have been taught to be happy on our path to this new world.  Unfortunately, my education has been faulty.

[update]  Friend and fellow ‘knuckledragger’ (the libs love us) Russ Steele (NC MediaWatch) alerted us to the onset of this phase of Big Brother in Nevada County with his own posts on NCMW and CABPRO Report.  For more detail on the technology and additional implications, please visit here, here, and here.

Stan Meckler Responds

[Stan emailed the following piece to me.  I am posting it with his permission (encouragement actually) in response to the recent comment thread on my 18jul10 'Who is a Racist?' post.]

Stan Meckler
 
As you may not know, I do not go to the blogs.  The reason is these people who sit at home and bitch, complain, call names, and offer nothing positive to any discussion, are of no interest to me.  I have offered to met with any of them, in the light of day, but they have no interest.  Jeff PellStine and Steve Enos are just two of the many that I have tried to meet. Why won't they meet?  What are they afraid of?  Are they scared of the truth?  They should meet and show me the facts they have to prove their points.
 
As the President of the Nevada County Tea Party Patriots I am willing to meet with anybody from any group.  All they have to do is email me and we'll set it up.  I have met with the heads of the Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans, a member of Move On, and many others.  Why won't the liberal bloggers meet? 
 
We now have almost 2,000 members in Nevada County.  We have over 18 million members nationally.  We have over 2,500 chapters of Tea Party Patriots around the country and are adding 50 chapters a week.  We are the largest grassroots organization in the history of the USA.  If you want to see the survey results from Gallup, Rasmussen, ABC, CBS and the Wall Street Journal, I'll bring them with me.  The latest polls show that Liberals make up just 20% of the voters in this country.  Moderates are moving to the right at a rapid rate. What facts can you bring to the table?
 
Let's talk about Mandy Morello.  Mandy Morello is not a founder of the Tea Party Patriots.  I have been there since the beginning on April 27, 2009 and she wasn't there.  I was!  She was at an event on April 15th, 2009 as a photographer.  I know Mandy and I like her.  But, if she says she was one of the founding members, it just ain't so no matter what her blog says.
 
Am I biased in favor of my son, Mark Meckler?  You bet I am!  But, anyone that actually knows us, not the lies that are told, will tell you that we are honorable people.  Meet us and find out for yourselves.  Do you have the courage to do so?  Or, are you going to sit in the dark and continue to type hatred?