Rebane's Ruminations

Agenda21 in Prop31's clothing (Addended)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary that was aired on 31 August 2012.]

Last Tuesday August 28th the Nevada County Board of Supervisors took up Propositions 30 and 31 that we will vote on in November.  The best I could make out at that well attended meeting was that Supervisor Nate Beason requested ‘the sense of the Board’ on these propositions.  This he would take to the Regional Council of Rural Counties, and vote accordingly as our representative on that body.

You might recall that Proposition 30 is Governor Brown’s notorious tax increase.  The Board, with Supervisor Lamphier abstaining, stated their opposition to the proposition, presumably because California’s fiscal health and the services it renders have declined with every tax increase in recent memory.

But what drew many of us to the Rood Center that morning was to witness the Board’s discussion and take on Prop31.  This proposition has some great marquee points that convinced the state’s Republican Central Committee to endorse it, even though it would make future tax cuts near impossible.  Among its highlights are the state’s change to a two-year budget cycle, and requiring all new expenditures in excess of $25M to be offset by new spending cuts and/or revenues.

However, the devious details of Prop31 are located in its deeper parts which outline new sustainability elements that must be included not only in the biennial state budget, but also in the budgets of all local jurisdictions.   The bill specifies a list of budget “elements to improve performance and accountability”, and to “promote the purposes of achieving a prosperous economy, quality environment, and community equity, by working to achieve at least the following goals: increasing employment, improving education: decreasing poverty: decreasing crime, and improving health.” 

Then it details that the adopted budget of each local jurisdiction shall explain “how the budget will promote … a prosperous economy, quality environment, and community equity.”  And these must all tie together with how the state promotes “the vitality and global competitiveness of regional economies and foster greater collaboration among local governments with regions by providing priority consideration for state-administered funds …”.  (emphasis mine)

And here’s the worry, Prop31 calls for state approved and eventually mandated plans for regional coordination of sustainable local economies in consideration of environmental impacts and “community equity”.  All of that economic and social planning has to then be worked into and explained in every underfunded budget statewide.  Oh my.

To many of us, these are all hot buttons for new government involvements in areas where they have been historically and demonstrably inept.  And these concerns all come together under the unifying aegis of the United Nations’ overarching Agenda21 for global unification that so enamors progressives and repulses conservatives.  There is a lot to Agenda21, and to learn more, just google it or visit my website.

In the end, our supervisors unanimously opposed Prop31 – three of them recognizing Agenda21 as the ‘camel’s nose under the tent’ to do exactly the opposite of what its proponents claim.  Supervisors Lamphier and Beason’s oppositions were based only on the proposition’s impact on local control.  But I was most surprised when Supervisor Beason went out of his way to state that he felt the proposition had nothing to do with promoting Agenda21.

Nevertheless, that surprising response did remind all who do make the connection, that Agenda21’s ongoing implementation is not heralded by fanfares, banners, and a marching band.  Agenda21 arrives bit by piece, wearing the label of ‘sustainable development’ under which free enterprise is quietly replaced by public/private partnerships (read government sanctioned monopolies), equal justice for individuals is replaced by collective “social justice” programs of wealth redistribution, and mounting environmental regulations become the tightening control mechanisms that restrict the uses of private property and access to public lands.

Everyone who believes in liberty and local control should take a hard look at Proposition 31, and join our Board of Supervisors in opposing it.

My name is Rebane, and I expand on this and related themes in my Union columns and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary with related links is posted.  These views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  A more complete report on the impact of Prop31 is found on the calwatchdog.com website which spells out the evils of ‘regionalization’ that is a major plank in Agenda21’s efforts to remove local control.  The nearby map indicates the Prop31 mandated revenue sharing regions.  These apparently are the dots that Supes Beason and Lamphier were not able/willing to connect.

The Big Asymmetry (Addended)

George Rebane

A recurring theme on RR has been debating the fundamental asymmetry giving rise to the polarization between conservatives embracing liberty and free market capitalism, and liberals embracing big government socialism.  The Great Divide is one foci of the debate about how to resolve this asymmetry.  The nearby graphic communicates the essence of this resolution, and drives liberals into apoplexy as these pages have witnessed.  But it doesn't have to end that way.  Just a thought.

[Addendum]  Bob Crabb’s series of ‘Yes We Con’ essays on the Republican lovefest (aka convention) in Tampa highlights the polarizing truth of my little statement above.  Now before going further, Bob is a friend and a man whose work (both graphic and lexicographic) I admire.  While doing his best to cast a gimlet eye on both parties, according my compass, Bob still steers his ship of slate a bit left of center.

This assessment is apparent in his recounting of the recent damp days in Tampa.  There Bob’s reportage again percolates the notions that the conservatives and their Republican flag bearers are basically evil in thought and deed, and out to do the little guy in along every aspect of life – his job, his health, his education, …, and, here’s where it get a bit gritty, also his opportunity to better himself, his family, or his situation.

The Left, on the other hand, is just a bunch of good-hearted, ecologically sensitive, bureaucratic bunglers with deep souls who do their best to deliver social justice within a tough and rapacious environment ruled by rule-breaking capitalism.  But they are learning, and if we give them just one more chance, they will get it right and there will be happy dancing in the streets.

This then is the middle ground in which we are invited to gather for the great journey ‘forward’.  But it turns out that the so-called middle ground today is inhabited almost entirely by expatriates from the Left who have been shocked by the realities that their more devoutly radical brethren have delivered.  They recall being true believers themselves before they saw their dreams turn into dysfunction, and then decided to quietly emigrate to a land of no clear ideology.  There they would remain in that everlasting political calm, looking at both sides, and periodically clucking their tongues at what now from their new vantage appeares as the polarized extremes.

It turns out that the problem with these middle roaders is they ended their journey a little too soon – they never reached the middle, because it was hard to completely cast off those delightful, simple, and pure certitudes that first clarified a complex world to young minds.  Some of those wonderful tenets, or at least their echoes, must surely still hold – let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water and all that.  And so they came to homestead a patch of ideologically barren turf where they sit today and sarcastically judge the quick and the dead, and issue their plaintive calls for the rest of us to join them.

What these self-declared middle roaders fail to see is that they have neither old nor new solutions to attract, let alone bind, the collectivists and the classical liberals.  There is no there there. They stopped where the ground is still slippery and still slopes to the Left.

Why it’s so damn hard to be a Democrat (updated 30aug12)

George Rebane

I have long maintained that I don’t understand why self-proclaimed ‘patriot’ Democrats are doing everything possible to torpedo this fair land, and make it into a shadow of a failed socialist state, or worse.  I’ll start with the worse.

Radical Islamists are already entrenched in the US among the non-radicalized silent majority of Muslims living here.  The DNC will sell anything or anybody for votes.  They consider that America’s Hispanics are in the bag by blatanty ignoring their La Raza, MALDEF, and Spanish language calls by Hispanic leaders for Reconquista, along with the open borders and illegal alien amnesty programs.  So now it’s time to pander to America’s Muslims.


The DNC is going to have a big Jumah (a Muslim group prayer meeting) from which Christian ministers have been specifically excluded.  TheBlaze.com has the story.  (H/T to reader)  [also see 29aug12 update]

And then, in addition to the scheduled 1jan13 Taxmageddon, the Democrats are hell bent to go forward with the ‘sequestration’ of funds that will completely redefine America’s military capability, and its ability to contain ever more aggressive nationalistic actions by Russia, Iran, and China, in addition to becoming a non-partner in Israel’s defense.  The response of already castrated Europe will be a wild card.  Look at this schema of Democrat 'balanced' spending cuts – 43% of which come out of the 11% defense budget share of total spending.


Finally, the Dems continue screaming about the ‘rich’ not paying their ‘fair share’.  Ask any progressive about what maximum fraction of the GDP should be paid to the goliath government – they won’t be able to tell you, because by their lights ‘you neither built it nor earned it; it all belongs to the people’ and the government is there to make sure they get it.



There’s a lot more, but don’t get me started.

[29aug12 update]  With considerable enthusiasm - "It looks like RR has run out of cards and has to blatantly make things up to please the crowd." - some liberal readers have pointed out in the comments that the Jumah reported on above is not an event explicitly endorsed by the national Democratic leadership, but only by 'Charlotte in 2012' the official hosting organization of the Democratic National Convention (DNC).  Googling this event reveals that this connection, no matter how indirect, has created some considerable debate on the matter.  Hard to find is any clarification from the Democratic party setting the matter straight.  TheBlaze.com stands with its story linked above.

I stand with my commentary on the Democratic Party, and want to emphasize my belief that radical Islam knows it is through the ideology-shy and intellectually bereft Democratic channels of power and public policy machinery which provide it the easiest path to subvert America to the Islamic ideal.

[30aug12 update]  I have to include the Fox News story of a Pakistani 11-year-old facing execution - "An international coalition of churches representing more than half a billion Christians will meet in Geneva next month to take up the plight of an 11-year-old Christian girl who faces execution under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws."  Now do we take these mobs demanding the little girl's death as the norm for 'moderate Muslims', since their sentiments can, are, and have been replicated in thousands of Muslim communities in the middle east (and around the world?); or are they just an isolated clutch of ragheads (q.v.) that the unfortunate Christian family had counted as their neighbors?  (H/T to Mr Tozer for bringing this to our attention in the comment stream below.)

Europe's Financial Dominoes

George Rebane

Here's a succinct picture of Europe's immediate financial concerns.  Does anyone see any stability in any of it?  (Here's a little tutorial on how to read and reason with influence factors diagrams.)

Introducing RR Glossary and Semantics – latest V6feb19

George Rebane

This post launches a new and deplorably tardy category in RR, one that will contain ready access to the definitions and extended meanings of terms, notions, and ideas discussed and debated in these pages.  I plan to make the glossary and semantics (G&S) available on two separate documents that can be downloaded as pdfs – initially we’ll start with just the Glossary.  Both will be ‘living documents’ in the sense that they will grow and be edited over time.  The new G&S category is found in the Category section presented in the right margin of RR.

Their content will be derived initially from culling the almost 3,000 posts that currently comprise RR over its 13-year life.  These definitions and semantics will primarily be mine.  However, I invite readers to submit contending definitions which may be included with their distinguishing labels.  The documents will of need be ‘versioned’ by date so that they can be unambiguously referenced in all future discussions and debates.

Obama's Address of National Issues (updated 31aug12)

"Y'all can't get the water to clear up, until you get the turd out of the creek."  East Tennessee wisdom.

George Rebane

A leading local leftie commented again at length on ‘Behold a Pale Horse ...’.  There he lamented that viewing and discussing the films I reported on will keep people from hearing those few Republicans who are still willing to debate Obama on important national issues “like the future of American tax policy, a national energy plan, reducing debt, national enfranchisement, economic development, trade, national security …”.  And then he goes on to blame Romney for being off issue in a display of the most convoluted logic seen for some time from a progressive pulpit.  Another timely application of the Alinsky Alternative by the Left.


Now if I correctly recall the last year or so, Obama has run like a scared rabbit from talking about his record and approach to important national issues.  He prefers to spin (aka ‘lie about’) Romney using capitalism to kill people while at Bain, Romney’s offshore investment accounts, Romney’s tax returns, …, and for good measure he has Romney accused of being a felon.

As a counter, Romney and his running mate Ryan have put forth detailed plans for the next four years and more (see Russ Steele’s report here), while Obama has avoided saying anything about what he’ll do if re-elected.

By now you’re probably wondering what in hell is the above pictured contraption, and what is it used for.  Well, a friend and correspondent sent me the picture and an accompanying explanation which I have edited slightly.  It will go a long way to clarify what we have experienced in this presidential campaign so far, and what is forthcoming a fortiori – that’s fancy talk for ‘in spades’.  All I can say is ‘Maudie, brace yourself!’

The tobacco enema was used from the 1750s to about 1810 to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient’s rectum for various medical purposes, primarily the resuscitation of drowning victims.

A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a fumigator and bellows that forced the smoke towards the rectum.  The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase “blow smoke up one’s ass” to describe all manner of bamboozling speech.

This instrument has enjoyed an even longer history of service in Washington D.C. by politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes.  Having already seen extensive use on the stump in 2008, it was again pressed into service as the main medical device needed to sell Obamacare, the President’s new healthcare program.  Most recently its application has had a widely witnessed resurgence when it was discovered to be the only effective tool in use by the Obama campaign during this election year.

[31aug12 update]  As an example of the kind of smoke Obama has been blowing up where the sun don't shine, we reprise the nearby image from a literary promo that was not purged from the record, and has been pooh-poohed by the Left ever since - 'you know, just kidding'.  Our liberal friends need to be reminded that the lamestream's crack journalists never came upon this in their extensive research into Obama's background - you know the kind that professionals always do on national candidates.  So here's the puzzle, was Obama already an accomplished smoke blower back in his Harvard days, or is that a recently acquired talent, or maybe he didn't blow smoke at all.  Any ideas?  (H/T to a reader)

‘Behold the Pale Horse’ in ‘2016’ (updated 27aug12)

George Rebane

This week with friends, Jo Ann and I attended showings of the two titled movies about the state of our country and its portents.  They are excellent albeit disturbing summaries of the notions and issues that we have been discussing on RR for the last five years.  Definitely worth seeing for those whose political outlooks range from conservative to middle roaders.  Progressives might be interested to know how well their machinations are both perceived and known.  Here’s a short summary of the films.

Another California Brainfart

George Rebane

"The sages of Sacramento have done such a splendid job of not adequately funding California's public pensions that now they want to do the same for non-government workers. Their latest brainstorm is to establish state-administered retirement plans for workers in the private economy.  This is not a joke. … ." as reported in the 22aug12 WSJ.

Wending its way under the Sacramento dome is SB1234, a bill to create another huge bureaucratic mess in California intended to extend the power of a totally inept, corrupt, and bankrupt state government over one more aspect of our lives – private sector pensions.  The idiots in our legislature are using the imminent Social Security funding shortfalls to argue that our state government, that can’t manage the proper funding of a cup of Starbucks, will now pick up the slack to provide a happy retirement for our private sector.

These capitol turkeys have done nothing but catastrophic damage to the private sector every time they touch it with their incompetent hands – check the impact of their latest AB32 green jobs disaster.  As soon as this Senate bill goes through the Assembly’s little amendments, they’re taking it to Gov Moonbeam for his siggy that is forthcoming as sure as the morning's sun.

This new law and bureaucracy are awful as witnessed by the heavy small business lobbying against it (here) since it was introduced last February.  “The legislation would require employers that don't already sponsor retirement plans to enroll their workers in state-administered "individual retirement accounts," but they are really defined-benefit pensions in disguise.”

Oh, and did I mention that union dominated CalPERS – you know, the 7.5% return boys – want to pitch in and help mismanage the new retirement portfolio?   That this is being considered may be “no joke”, but if we look at this latest abomination from another direction, it may yet be the biggest joke on the California economy concocted by our capitol cretins.

Ruminations - 21aug12

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. - John Adams

George Rebane

So where’s all the wildlife? asks a visitor to a local pond and hiking trail here in Nevada County.  Our cartoonist RL ‘Bob’ Crabb drew this little funny filched from the 18aug12 issue of The Union.  And true to Bob’s perspective on the human comedy, the cartoon’s message can be twofold.  First, the guy is a (probably conservative) doofus who expects the place to be still dripping with critters after everyone has started using it as a recreation area – what would you expect?  And then he could be an ecologically sensitive individual expressing his disappointment on the transformation of the formerly uninhabited and wild area before all the humans showed up.

We expect the latter constituency to start demonstrating any day now for the restoration of Hirschman’s Pond to its pre-peopled pristine position as a natural habitat in perfect balance.  No doubt this could be accomplished by a federal grant or two in addition to some more rangers or sheriffs deputies to enforce the ‘Nature Preserve, Entry Forbidden’.  Actually this little nascent swamp was of little use to anyone but mosquitoes before the county (with aid from Ohio) made it accessible to local residents.  And what someone should teach the ecologically sensitive is that nature has many points of balance, none of them lasting too long before the critters pick a new point to balance on.  So suffer the suffering critters to leave the Pond, and enjoy those that remain in the new balance of nature that now includes you.

Singularity Signposts – More Rapid Systemic Unemployment

George Rebane

Regular readers have known for some years what portents the American factory and warehouse worker has in store for his future employment prospects.  I initially calculated that the number of un/deremployed would be about 40 million by 2020.  It has been clear for some time now that this estimate is too low.  I believe that 70 million will be closer to reality.

The Gray Lady just published a long piece about the continuing and accelerating advance of robots in the workplace replacing skilled manufacturing and inventory management (warehouse, distribution) workers at an ever rapid pace.  The 18aug12 NYT article is fairly comprehensive in detailing the plethora of tasks, formerly human performed, now taken over by ever more dexterous, efficient, and lower cost robots.  (H/T to a reader for the heads up.)

However, the nation’s leading liberal rag doesn’t pull all the factors together to point to the disastrous public education policies the nation has followed that now produce a steady stream of graduates and dropouts who are not qualified to do anything beyond signing up for the dole (and vote Democrat).

It seems that this newspaper’s editorial room is full of flacks whose prime purpose is to cover for Team Obama – especially during this election year - while still trying to report yesterday’s news which bloggers have already reported thoroughly.  And the big picture regarding the impact of this accelerating technology on the nation’s future totally eludes them.

Ancient Roman emperors pacified the nation with state supplied palliatives - bread and circuses (panem et circenses).  Given the renewed level of planned entitlements and transfer payments, coupled with the mass media’s saturated love affair with sports, talent shows, reality shows, fantasy fairytales, …, our government has no better plan than to tear a page from Caesar Octavianus’ playbook.

The Liberals’ Intellectually Baseless Ideology

George Rebane

An ideology is a structured and communicable belief system that in its best expression is composed of tenets defendable by reason.

I have always wondered why the Left appears to have no intellectual roots or basis for its scattered ideology.  The Right has its social philosophers in people like Locke, Bastiat, von Mises, von Hayek, and Friedman among others, and frequently cites their ideas and writings.

The post-WW2 Left denies any apparent intellectual roots, especially since the embarrassment of Soviet communism which they so admired in the 1920s and 30s.  Now they propose a scattering of collectivist notions and social policies that have no grounding in history, and even less in what is known about human behavior.  In short, the banners it marches under are bare of anything save the pitiful slogans that signal some particular shortages their constituents have yet to receive from the bountiful state.

But in the ideological landscape the thinning of intellectual roots is already detectable when the student enters the so-called independent or middle-of-the-road region of social thought.  People populating this region lack the ability to list, let alone define, any of the ideological tenets that inform and motivate the middle.  They also have no intellectual basis for what is clearly a faux political philosophy that panders to those who somehow want to distance themselves from ‘the extremist ideologues’.

In doing this they also distance themselves from any ability to tell people what they believe in.  Instead, they just repeat their desire to stand away from ‘the extremes’ of political thought, and consider this desire to be a sufficient belief system in which rejection substitutes for definition.  Moreover, the rejected extremes are apparently inaccessible to them, since in their declarations they never seem to get any of these disavowed tenets right.  For example, while they glibly join the Left in assigning someone to the ‘hard’ or ‘extreme Right’, they can offer no argument as to what specific conservative tenets confine a person to that ideological bookend.  Understandably, they are even more disabled in their attempts to characterize the Left for reasons considered below. 

Therefore, the self-declared middle-roaders are truly muddled in an ideological Never-never Land.  For confirmation, all you have to do is to go to the website of any avowed independent, and try to come out with a list of tenets that is coherent and unique to that part of the political spectrum.  It has yet to be done.

Having established the above, I was introduced by a reader to the thought of Professor Beverly Gage of Yale.  Historian Gage is a talented leftwing academic whose “teaching and research focus on the evolution of American political ideologies and institutions.”  To my delight, she turns out to be a kindred spirit in her assessment of the intellectual wasteland that today serves for liberal thought.

Spreading the Non-existent Wealth

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 17 August 2012.]

The Obama administration is notorious for its initiatives – legal and extra-legal – to enlarge and lock in a dependent constituency that will reliably deliver it votes during elections.  The latest vote buying initiatives involve expansion of major welfare programs.  And I bet you thought that we were actually rolling back welfare and controlling the spending of dollars we don’t have.

Let’s first look at the refundable child tax credit.  This program provides cash payments to low-income parents who pay no income tax.  Evidence is piling up that this cash refund program is massively abused by the country’s illegal aliens.  Before looking at some details, we see that even the ‘refund’ part of this redistribution program is cynically labeled – there is no refund possible if there was nothing paid in initially.

The way you get this cash as an illegal is to first obtain an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number from the IRS.  ITINs are easy to get and are required for anyone paying taxes who does not qualify for a Social Security Number.  The IRS makes it clear that “ITINs are for federal tax reporting only, and are not intended to serve any other purpose.”  So you file a tax return and at the same time apply for an ITIN.  On the tax return you show minimum income, and claim as many dependent children as you think you can get away with.

Ruminations – 14aug12 (updated)

George Rebane

The National Weather Service is buying tens of thousands of rounds of jacketed hollow point 40 caliber bullets as reported by infowars.com.  It is the latest government department to start packing heat, and joins a disconcerting number of other government units (e.g. Dept of Education) that have no obvious use for deadly force that are now arming themselves.  I reported on this before (here), and note that everyone is quite sanguine about a sudden increase in such huge and curious arms and ammo purchases.  What’s going on?  (H/T to a RR reader for this alert.)

[Update2] Russ Steele reports that the above report was due to a government clerical error.  See his 1:20pm comment below for details.  Unfortunately no such retractions have been issued for the other departments strapping on their guns and grenades.

And now we hear that the Dept of Homeland Security is adding to its previously reported purchase of 450 million semi-auto pistol rounds with another 750 million rounds that include several calibers including 357 magnum.  The putative purpose is to prepare for massive civil unrest in the United States.  A referenced report on all this can found here.

Europe’s major countries are all considering massive new taxes to stave off national bankruptcies – and, yes, that includes Germany.  These range from the standard increase of tax rates, to asset taxes on the variously defined ‘rich’, to one-off (or so they say) huge tax bills that would suck out an additional 10% of the countries’ GDPs.  All this is necessary because, as predicted, the bills for socialism are coming due.  The astute reader will recall my reminders over the years of the unsustainability of socialism (led by nationalized healthcare, public employee pensions, and repressive employment regulations).   Hearing of this, our leftwing readers will merely readjust their blindfolds, and up the volume on their collectivist mantras.  Nevertheless, for an excellent analysis of the European crisis, here is The Economist's fictional 'Plan B' memo to Angela Merkel on the matter.

Did everyone catch the big propaganda show for Britain’s National Health Service so prominent in the Olympics’ opening ceremony.  Here’s a bit of socialism that’s totally on life support, and bolstered only by massive borrowing and cash transfers in the nation’s budget.  These heroic efforts cannot last long, and the pound will be pounded into oblivion.  A smile (grin?) came to many faces as one TV commercial by GE featured that company contributing scores of incubators to Britain’s nationalized healthcare system that would save so many of their little babies.  I didn’t know Great Britain had now achieved third world status that requires such contributions to keep up appearances.

As an aside, you’ll recall that low/no tax GE is one of Obama’s picked winners, and the conglomerate works cheek by jowl with the administration in implementing its global economic strategy.  It would be embarrassing for the National Health Service to suffer any premature black eyes – like a high infant mortality rate – as the poster child for Obamacare.  So Government Enterprises ('We bring good things to life'), another member of the state/industrial complex, was miraculously there to fill the gap.  Who says crony capitalism doesn’t have its good side?

National Issues - connecting the factors that affect us (Addended)

George Rebane

When thinking about the upcoming election in the context of national issues and all that is going on which affects America, things get complicated pretty quickly.  An established tool for representing, sorting out, and communicating such factors and their interaction is called the Influence Factors Diagram (IFD).  An IFD is usually involved in the first steps of laying out the design of a system or process.  It is conceptually extremely simple, even corporate management and (a few) politicians can deal with it.  Lawyers hate them for their uncompromising clarity.  For the intelligent reader – the ones I fantasize who frequent these pages – reading an IFD is a slam dunk.  (I first introduced IFDs here.)

Below is an IFD that relates a number of factors comprising national issues that are critical to understanding the campaign arguments in the upcoming election.  Each factor is named and represents some measure of its level or intensity.   The arrows represent the influences that the factors have on each other.  Each arrow shows the direction of influence from influencer to the influenced.  The +/- signs indicate the type of influence.  A plus (+) sign says that the influencer contributes a tendency for the influenced factor to follow the direction of the influencing factor – increase-to-increase and decrease-to-decrease – when everything else is kept the same.  For example, ‘US National Debt’ influences ‘US Debt Service Costs’, and the plus indicates that when the debt goes up so do the country’s debt service costs, and vice-versa.

Conversely, a minus (-) sign indicates that the influenced factor tends to react in the opposite direction from that of its influencer, all things being equal.   Look at ‘Regulatory Burdens’ influence on ‘America’s capacity to generate wealth’; when regulatory burdens increase, wealth generating capacity decreases, and vice versa.

Dems Happy Dancing in the Streets (updated 18aug12)

George Rebane

More of same + more time = more of same.

Well, if the local lefties are any indication, then there was a lot of Dems dancing in the streets last night after it cooled down a bit.  All the progressive pundits are heralding Obama’s upcoming slam dunk victory.  Might as well not spend the rest of the campaign cash on attack ads because Obama’s ‘one mo’ time!’ plan for the economy will stack up well with the Ryan plan.  It’s going be easy to tell all the Earls of Entitlement what part of their monthly checks will be nipped here and there by the Romney/Ryan team.

Romney’s VP pick of fiscal wizard Rep Paul Ryan sent shock waves over both sides of the aisle.  The socialists know that they will now have an easy message to bend the ears of their constituent legions.  And those who understand the country’s fiscal crisis know they now have a stalwart on the ticket who will keep the center-right Romney on the straight and narrow.  These are the people who have read a history book or two, and know that great empires fall from within when they no longer understand how to manage their money and their fisc.

The rest of the celebrants will never notice when the ‘people’s prosperity police’ finally march in and lay down the new law of the land.   Don’t be surprised if the next national holiday will be Regulation Recognition Day, added to celebrate all the blessings that the fresh batch of yearly regulations brings to each and every one of us.  There may even be ‘spontaneous’ parades like there were in the countries liberated by the Red Army after WW2.  A puzzlement to some was why all the marchers carrying huge banners and signs looked dour.  But we know that if you looked too dour, they sent you to a place where the benefits of collectivism were made crystal clear to you – the first of which was that if you understood, they’d let you live.  Everybody understood.

On the other side there are some thoughtful voices who recommend that Romney not point to the example of where Europe has wound up.  Most independent voters don’t know enough about what’s going on in Europe, and only picture sitting at a sidewalk café in a picturesque city, drinking wine, and listening to pleasant melodies coming from the nearby accordion player.  And most believe that America could do with more of such an atmosphere.  It’s hard to convince people about national bankruptcies and the euro getting inflated to oblivion while the listener can only hear the accordion on a balmy evening.

Nevertheless, people like Peggy Noonan are telling Romney to stay closer to home and use California as the more accessible and recognized exemplar of gross government mismanagement – everyone in the country, most certainly people declaring themselves as independents, know that California is already in the tank.  She also joins those who point out that the country no longer has ANY values – these have been carefully excised by the government educational system that has been on a post-modernism tear for the last forty years.

Post-modernism?  That’s the ideology where absolutes disappear, mores are malleable, and everything is relative.  Repartees like ‘it all depends on what you mean by is’ are offered the limp, lame, and looney to plumb and celebrate their intellectual depths.  And surveys across the land confirm that the triple-Ls dominate the landscape, and by a greater majority every year.

And then I wonder what would happen if there were a great awakening (a true miracle); if people suddenly realized that no liberal candidate or commentator has recognized, let alone offered, any kind of an economic future that does not have the country follow California down the rat hole.  That people suddenly grasp that it requires genuine entrepreneurial, capitalistic, free markets growth to pull us out of our dive.  This is the single piece that is absent from all the myopic mavens who totally miss our only way back, as they focus on their ‘but you can’t cut …’ mantras without realizing that that’s exactly what we have to do, and that is exactly what we will do.  The only remaining choice the socialists have is will we do it without or with blood in the streets.

And that is also the choice that faces us this November – can America’s Great Experiment be revived, or will we also become a one party ‘democracy’?

[17aug12 update]  Bloomberg and Washington Post/ABC News are reporting on data from voter registrations across the nation that should figure in the joyous Democrat celebrations.  My advice to our liberal neighbors is to ignore the whole thing, Obama is as good as re-elected, just have another glass of Kool-Aid.

The news today is that since 2008 the Dems have been losing registered voters at a rate of more than 10:1 than have the Republicans, and this has been most pronounced in the ‘battle ground states’.  Most of these these party-pooper voters have joined the ranks of the Independents, and further polling results show that “Romney holds a 14-point lead over Obama among independent voters nationally.”

Meanwhile, socialist columnists like Amy Goodman are celebrating Romney’s “floundering campaign” that, she says, received another blow with the selection of running mate Paul Ryan.  Given Obama’s performance against a floundering Romney, I wonder how the President will fare when the Romney/Ryan campaign really takes off as they seem to be doing even as I write.

My prediction is that Team Obama is going to duct tape shut Joe Biden’s mouth (‘y’all gonna be back in chains’), and send Congressman Chris Hollen’s (D-MD) good suit to the cleaners.  Hollen is the ONLY Democrat that has bearing and a command of numbers, and can concoct a coherent collectivist spin with them.  The rest – from Reid through Waters to Pelosi – look and talk like an assortment of clowns right out of Central Casting.  But then again, their constituents don’t do numbers.

My advice to the Repubs is stay on message re the economy, Obama’s record, and most emphatically emphasize the demonstrated damage that keeping that guy in the White House will do to America.

[18aug12 update]  The real perspective on deficits.

 

Government Achieving New Lows - Addended (updated 12aug12)

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my regular Union column that was scheduled to appear the 11aug12 print and online editions of the newspaper.  Due to some administrivia at The Union, the column was published in print and online in their 18aug12 editions.  The addendum was appended on 10 August 2012.]

To remind us again what an upstanding institution government is, we sample a few from the daily tsunami of lies coming from our elected honorables.  You’ll quickly understand why these happenings weren’t prominently reported in the nation’s lamestream media, being left to secondary outlets like Fox, PJMedia, and various blogs and legislator newsletters.

Starting close to home, Sacramento, along with rogue agencies like CARB (California Air Resources Board), is upping the pace of driving our businesses either to other states or into the mud.  A prime example of one recently announced departure is XCOR Aerospace now relocating to Midland, Texas due to state taxes and senseless regulatory burdens.  Apparently the last straw was Cal EPA marching into their offices to mandate extensive paperwork required to track their use of kerosene.  XCOR is developing space systems for commercial orbital operations.

Governor Perry is personally welcoming the company to his state as part of Texas’ overall program to attract fleeing California companies.  Besides a long list of other benefits of doing business in Texas, all XCOR employees will receive an automatic 10.25% pay raise – do the math.

But driving out companies is just one ongoing travesty in California’s insane business environment.  Assemblyman Dan Logue reports that midnight legislative operations continue with very little or no voter awareness.  By 2020 CARB’s implementation of AB32’s carbon cap and tax provision will cost California $60B annually.  It will be administered by a new state owned company that will be awarded the contract without need to bid competitively.  This sleaze was quietly hidden in SB1018, one of 30 budget related bills rushed through without review in less than 48 hours.

Does Economics Deserve Federal Funding?

As Marxist despots and tribal socialists from Cuba to Greece have discovered to their huge disappointment, governments can neither create wealth nor effectively redistribute it.  They can only expropriate and watch it dissipate.  George Gilder

George Rebane

My considered opinion is NO.  Economics nobelists Gary Becker and James Heckman argue YES in their 10aug12 piece ‘Why the Dismal Science Deserves Federal Funding’.

The authors point out that “basic economic and social research … are public goods that are difficult to appropriate privately.”  And they make a good point about the paucity of basic research coming out of the private sector because of its cost and riskiness.  Some of the successes they cite about federally funded research are little off the mark, such as the DNA sequencing of the human genome competition ‘won’ by Celera Corporation.

Government research has often been carried out by private enterprises receiving federal monies, and retaining some proprietary rights upon success.  And research performed in government facilities has benefitted from the competition of parallel/similar efforts in the private sector.  But all this is not the reason for my NO.

Hockeystick Hansen Strikes Again (updated 7aug12)

"In fact, [climate change] has now driven our climate outside the range that has existed the last 10,000 years..." -- Dr. James Hansen (from NPR)

George Rebane

There’s a coordinated blitz to recover ground lost to climate change skeptics in the past couple of years.  The lost ground is uneven – in fact, in California there’s actually been a gain as the rogue CARB continues creating chaos – but there’s been enough doubt expressed by politicians across the country so that another application of bogus science is called for to shore up the politically correct belief systems that have recently shown some fraying at the edges.

And who but that intrepid NASA scientist Hockeystick Hansen himself has leaped into the very breach of the breech with a Washington Post op-ed piece, and a report purported to be published by the National Academy of Sciences (I couldn’t find it, and their search engine has no knowledge of a James Hansen.  Hmmm.).  But there’s enough in the political coverage (here and here) of ol’ Hockeystick’s re-emergence to piece together the elements of his current assault on the nation’s credibility.

RR readers have been exposed to his shenanigans in past years when he first introduced his notorious global temperature ‘hockeystick’ (here and here).  And, in addition to scores of scientists, tireless bloggers like Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and our own Russ Steele have spent years laying bare the errors and lack of science that the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) crowd assembled by the UN has been inflicting on the world’s public policies.

Well, now Dr Hansen claims that all these extreme hot weather events we’ve had in the last few years are proof positive that they are caused by AGW.  BTW, the cold weather events during the same interval are just that, ‘weather’ and not climate change.  You gotta have a PhD to tell the difference.

And this time he’s not bringing up another collection of dodgy computer models like those that created the hockeystick.  No, now he’s appealing to established statistics and recorded historical weather data – you know, bell curves and all that.  Well actually it’s hard to tell what kind of statistics he’s using because the media are guaranteed to muck up what he really did.  All we know from the reports is that he compared data from the base period of 1951-1980 with data from 1981-2010 – two thirty-year periods from a (climate) process that changes in the order of centuries.  Best to watch the NPR video to get the gist of his arguments.

Assuming he carefully tallied up weather events of various intensities for the base period, he could then make a histogram that plots weather intensity (x-axis) against the number of such incidents for each level of weather intensity (y-axis).  He then fits a bell curve (Gaussian distribution) to this histogram.  Then he does the same thing for the 1981-2010 interval data, and lays the two bell curves over each other.  And by Jove, it appears that the most recent bell curve is visibly shifted to the right of the base period bell curve.

The extreme weather events are those represented by the right tails of the two bell curves (see Hansen’s figures in the video), and the most recent 30 years shows a higher number for any intensity level of weather events.  So there you have it, slam dunk, end of story, AGW is here, let’s get that cap n’tax legislation going again.

Singularity Scattershots – 5aug12

George Rebane

The report of the latest employment numbers underlines our deep and abiding national innumeracy.  So-called balanced reports of ‘on this hand, but on the other hand’ completely miss the amassing evidence for the systemic labor problem in these pre-Singularity years.  Here there is no ‘on the other hand’ – the creation of 163,000 jobs in July is not positive in any sense as the unemployment rate notched up to 8.3%.  No one seems to understand the real news is that another approximately 70,000 new people were added to the chronically unemployed rolls, in addition to more people coming out of the woodwork to look for jobs and finding none.  Keep in mind that every year about 4.3M young people exit (not necessarily graduate) our educational system.  Almost all of them enter the workforce which now numbers about 156M, and of which only about 63% are working. Today there are over 40M Americans un- and underemployed, and that number is climbing inexorably.

In ‘New People, New Jobs’ I summarized three areas of technology that could help job creation in developed countries with legions of under-educated and dated-skills workers.  But the bugaboo of the Great Doubling is still there with the taunting refrain ‘anything you can do, we can do cheaper’.  While  pandering his supporters with other fairy tales, part of Obama’s stimulus monies to improve US infrastructure are going to Chinese companies like this one reported by ABC that is building highways and bridges in Texas, California, and other states.

And now there is a new initiative to use advanced algorithmics to farm out even more jobs overseas, and there create any new jobs that come along.  The field is called crowd-sourcing, in which a complex task is broken up into hundreds (thousands?) of simple ‘micro tasks’ which are then farmed out all over the world and managed by an intelligent control algorithm.  The algo divides the task up, parcels it out to human workers (with redundancy), checks and integrates results, parcels out more bite-sized tasks, until the job is done and the results output.

New start-ups like Crowdflower and CrowdSource are building software to operate on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online odd-job system.  Worldwide workers are paid a pittance for their efforts depending on in which country they live.  Even US workers in such efforts can get paid only $1-2 an hour.  Such workers are really not employees of any company, but simply log on and start following instructions for pay.  More here from MIT Technology Review which proclaims “foreign recruits are the newest cogs in the new crowdsourcing machine”.

Finally, if you’re all done with this frustrating veil of tears and ready to contemplate something more permanent, or at least long lasting, then consider the increasing interest in the study of human immortality (think ‘mind uploading’) and its related area, the hereafter – do not confuse the ‘hereafter’ with ‘immortality’.  The John Templeton Foundation is the latest source for funding such work, having given $5M to UC Riverside’s philosopher John Fischer “to undertake a rigorous examination of a wide range of issues related to immortality.” (more here)

Among the questions also to be considered are – “Is immortality potentially worthwhile or not? Would existence in an afterlife be repetitive or boring? Does death give meaning to life? Could we still have virtues like courage if we knew we couldn’t die? What can we learn about the meaning of our lives by thinking about immortality?”

I’ll take a cut at the first question; make me immortal and I promise to provide a thoughtful and definitive answer.

Cliff Notes on Arbitrary Law Enforcement (Addended)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 August 2012.]

One way morally malfunctioning politicians play both sides of the street and bamboozle the voters is by passing a law, ordnance, or regulation that satisfies one faction of their supporters, and then tell the other faction punished by such legislation that, wink-wink, it will not be enforced.

A prime example of this is the patchwork of marijuana laws now in effect across the country.  The federal government says growing and smoking the weed is illegal, but various state, county, and city laws are also in place that give all kinds of contradictory interpretations of what you can and can’t do.  The people are then mollified by the local jurisdictions telling them, off the record of course, what will and will not be enforced.  Thereby everyone is supposed to go home, satisfied that their cause is vindicated.

What most people don’t consider is that such seemingly benign and informal policies are actually frameworks for promoting bureaucratic fiefdoms of power and corruption.  The people who continue to practice what is now criminalized, with the understanding of the non-enforcement proviso, actually put themselves at the mercy of arbitrary enforcement by the state.  You may then later be arrested or otherwise penalized in order to fulfill some agency’s performance quota, or for not conforming to some totally unrelated and extra-legal mandate issued by a bureaucrat.

Carrier Task Groups Converging

George Rebane

Note that today's Stratfor fleet update shows that in a few days there will be three of our five deployed (eleven total) carrier task groups in place to support any US/Israeli plans with regard to contingencies having to do with Syria and Iran.  This will be a rare concentration of such forces.

American Progressivism - Epic Failure

Mike McDaniel

Any quality strategy should include a performance matrix to analyze said strategy.  The progressive strategy, jump started in 1913 (16th Amendment and Federal Reserve Act- later amended in 1977), put on steroids under Franklin D Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Lyndon B. Johnson “Great Society,” has failed Americans.  If the intention of the progressive movement was birthed by virtuous or evil hearts is a completely different debate.  Performance metrics used to grade the impact on either the individual or society as a collective shows that the progressive movement has failed (continues to fail).

This analysis will in large part ignore the desecration of individual liberty and focus on the deterioration of the quality of life of the collective due to progressive policies.