Rebane's Ruminations

Two greats take their leave

George Rebane

Contemplate your god or oblivion, for it will reveal that you will never experience mortality, and at least in that sense you are indeed immortal.

Concert pianist Van Cliburn is dead at 78.  Cliburn won world fame in 1958 by taking first prize at the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the height of the cold war, a competition designed to highlight Soviet culture and musical talent.  And he did it playing nothing less than Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1 (more here).  This was also a time when I was starting to mess around with the piano at idle moments.  I was blown away by his interpretation, one that has since become a world standard. 

After Jo Ann and I started dating, his artistry remained a part of our lives for years afterward.  We were both classical music fans and shared a habit with many other UCLA couples of going up into the Bel-Air heights during evenings now and then to enjoy the city panorama.  The radio was tuned to KFAC, the LA classical music station, and as we settled in at 8pm the Gas Company Concert came on with the triumphant opening phrases of Tchaikovsky’s Number 1 – talk about motivational music.  Two hours later the program’s end was again announced, this time by the concerto’s second movement, the languid refrain from its Adagio – it was time to start getting things together to go down the hill and back into the real world.

And so it went during our undergraduate years as Sputniks launched, Camelot came to Washington, and Cuba and Berlin vied for the touchpoint for WW3.  Throughout it all Van Cliburn played his masterful rendition every weekday night for Los Angeles audiences that also included some young couples on local mountain tops in cars with foggy windows.  Thanks for the memories Van – RIP.

And yesterday we also buried Leo.  Leo was a cat to behold, given to us by friends as a frisky little ball of black fur nineteen years ago.  We lived on Saddle Peak Rd in the Santa Monica Mountains.  This was wild country where on the roads or in your driveway you could see pumas, bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, owls, eagles, hawks, deer, …, and rattlesnakes galore.  We always took in cats and had lost over 30 of them to local predators (mostly coyotes and owls) by the time Leo arrived.  Cats were our first line of defense against rattlers, territorial critters that eat the same things that cats do.  The idea was to limit their food supply to keep their population down (in ten years we reduced the annual rattler kill rate from seven to one), but the kitties paid a price for our living in God’s country by also becoming part of the food chain.

Ideologies and Governance – a structured look

Only in America could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be labeled as "extremists".

George Rebane

Hereabouts and in more distinguished forums the governance debate continues as to which types belong to the Left or the Right.  The confusion from the Left’s academics seems to be with monarchy and fascism, and that stems from their use of the wrong set of coordinates that can productively frame the discussion.  In the minds of some pundits, the attributes of a given governance type are totally absent.  But when all is said and done, the modern progressives do accept a right/left view that is approximated in the figure below.
Without stopping to quibble about the specifics of what constitutes the ‘center’ or ‘moderate’, the single dimensional spectrum above does have some curious bookends.  The leftmost one ends in ‘communism/totalitarianism’, which state of affairs is reached after passing through a region where anarchism rules.  And the rightmost ends in ‘fascism/monarchy’ after also passing through anarchism.  The better read student here will immediately point out that the Left’s anarchism is not the same as that of the Right’s.  This is indeed correct, and I’ll have more to say about that below.  However, in this fractured view, regardless of each having traversed the swamp of anarchy, both sides terminate in totalitarian forms of governance under the absolute control of a great leader.

A more accurate, useful, and historically exercised representation of ideologies and their supportive types of governance is given in the figure below (click to enlarge).  Here we use a representation common in the system sciences wherein one significant dimension/attribute is isolated as being perpendicular (orthogonal) to a plane that contains all the other dimensions/attributes.

For the discussion of ideologies and their supportive forms of governance, the dominant dimension shown in the figure is the level of government control of the land and the affairs of its people.  This ranges from a 100%, suffered under the absolute rule of a totalitarian dictator, to 0%, wherein anarchy is the order of the day and there are no visible institutions of state.  In the figure the variation in this level of control is shown by the thick red line in the plane (dimension) perpendicular to the field (multiple dimensions) of the types of government control, hence governance.

Understanding this framework immediately clarifies the debate over what labeled ideology belongs where.  I have shown the various collectivistic labels distributed on generalized trajectories of governance as they proceed leftward (orange lines) in the direction of greater government control of wealth creation/distribution, property ownership, class memberships, and behaviors (liberties) permitted to the individual.

The Status of America's K-12 Public Education

George Rebane

Education is the key to a strong democracy, economic competitiveness and a world-class standard of living. In recent decades, however, America has lost its place as a global leader in educational attainment in ways that will lead to a decline in living standards for millions of our children and the loss of trillions of dollars of economic growth.
 
So starts ‘For Each and Every Child – a Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence’ authored by a distinguished panel of mostly very progressive professionals empaneled by the Dept of Education as the federal Equity and Excellence Commission.  From their efforts we (re)learn that

-    American students are well below world student performance averages for developed countries (before 1965 we used to be in the top tier in education).
-    27 developed countries do better than America in global rankings
-    Only one in five American students perform at or above world average.
-    Mostly Asian and white kids rank average, but combining all students – predominantly with black and Hispanics – we fall below average.
-    The performance levels of our students has been “roughly flat” for the last 40 years despite the enormous increase in education spending
-    In poorly performing schools there is a preponderance of “weakly trained teachers”.
-    Funds for education are allocated differently in different school districts because in the poorer zip codes there are more students who have ‘special needs’.
-    But even well off zip codes don’t fare too well – e.g. Palo Alto students perform at the 67% world level.
-    To fix the problem we require to put in place programs that yield an “equity” in student performance so that zip code does not determine students’ academic rank.

All of this is really not news, and has been discussed (revealed to some) on these pages for years.  The real purpose of the commission and its report appears to be to launch a new initiative for increased federal control of funding for K-12 public schools.  While at this time not asking for money directly, the injection of performance “equity” is the key for the forced conclusion.  Equity quietly introduces a measurable figure of merit for directing additional funds and/or redistributing existing federal education funding from, say, Palo Alto to Oakland.  Of course, equity can be achieved in several ways – the salutary method is to raise all kids to an appropriate distribution of higher level performance, the other is to find that equitable performance distribution closer to what now the blacks and Hispanics are able to deliver.  Higher or lower, the correct goal in the transformed America seems to be equitable homogeneity.

With the release of this report a select group of its authors are making the media rounds.  Today’s NPR Morning Edition featured three of them (podcast here).  The report itself has some good insights, but when taken overall, there is nothing there that stands out from the same ol’ same ol’ of the last 40 years since we were ushered into the Great Society.  What caught my attention beyond (re)introducing ‘equity’ into K-12, is the commission’s recommendation for “regionalization”.  Upon closer reading, that seems to be another federal assault to remove control over matters of education from local school jurisdictions.  The report concludes with - 

The commission’s report provides a five-part framework of tightly interrelated recommendations to guide policymaking:
• Equitable School Finance systems so that a child’s critical opportunities are not a function of his or her zip code;
• Teachers, Principals and Curricula effective enough to provide children with the opportunity to thrive in a changing world;
• Early Childhood Education with an academic focus, to narrow the disparities in readiness when kids reach kindergarten;
• Mitigating Poverty’s Effects with broad access not only to early childhood education, but also to a range of support services necessary to promote student success and family engagement in school; effective measures to improve outcomes for student groups especially likely to be left behind—including English-language learners, children in Indian country or isolated rural areas, children with special education needs, and those involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems; and
• Accountability and Governance reforms to make clearer who is responsible for what, attach consequences to performance, and ensure that national commitments to equity and excellence are reflected in results on the ground, not just in speeches during campaigns.

All this is heavy stuff, and promises little profit.  To lighten your day, take a look at this video 'Romancing the Wind' of a truly uplifting hobby that invites virtuosity (be sure to have your speakers on).

When laws become lawless

George Rebane

Last Tuesday night almost 300 Nevada County residents gathered to hear a report from our Congressman Doug LaMalfa, and a presentation by Stewart Rhodes of Oathkeepers in the Grass Valley Veterans Hall presented by CABPRO.  The very stark presentation by Mr Rhodes was on the progress of government overreach and focused much on defense of the Second Amendment.  The message for Americans at the grassroots level was to resist all state efforts to actually or constructively confiscate our firearms.

I don’t want to do a rehash of what has been covered so much on RR during the almost seven years it has served as forum for the Left and Right to debate the most crucial questions that face our Republic in this new century.  But leaving the Vets Hall on a cold and blustery night again brought to mind a question that has puzzled me for some years – how should a liberal state deport itself toward its citizens when a goodly portion of them feel strongly that its government is in the process of destroying the nation?

Armen Alchian on Property Rights

George Rebane

Man reaches his fullest potential when he lives in a society whose organization is based on the seminal structure of rights – security in your person, individual liberty, private property - embodied in the Bastiat Triangle.  The exceptionalism of America was launched on such a structure of rights.

Perhaps the link most difficult to appreciate in that triangle of rights is between liberty and private property.  UCLA economist Armen Alchian (1914-2013) was celebrated by his fellow economists, and recently died before having been awarded his well-deserved Nobel (Nobelist von Hayek was one of his many supporters for this award).  He was considered a member of the ‘Chicago School’ of economics, and wrote extensively on the role of economics in providing humans a fulfilling life.  He penned a piece on property rights for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (D.R. Henderson, 2008) from which the following excerpt is taken -

One of the most fundamental requirements of a capitalist economic system—and one of the most misunderstood concepts—is a strong system of property rights. For decades social critics in the United States and throughout the Western world have complained that "property" rights too often take precedence over "human" rights, with the result that people are treated unequally and have unequal opportunities. Inequality exists in any society. But the purported conflict between property rights and human rights is a mirage. Property rights are human rights.

The definition, allocation, and protection of property rights comprise one of the most complex and difficult sets of issues that any society has to resolve, but one that must be resolved in some fashion. For the most part, social critics of "property" rights do not want to abolish those rights. Rather, they want to transfer them from private ownership to government ownership. . . .
Any restraint on private property rights shifts the balance of power from impersonal attributes toward personal attributes and toward behavior that political authorities approve. That is a fundamental reason for preference of a system of strong private property rights: private property rights protect individual liberty.

Ruminations - 19feb13

George Rebane

TV weathercasters will soon need AGW certification if they want to talk about climate change on the air, according to a new initiative started by a South Carolina meteorologist.  On National Propaganda Radio this morning was a segment on climate change lamenting that it’s not getting much traction in the public mind lately.  The piece made clear that there was only science behind promoting the ‘reality’ of AGW, and just “disgruntled” troglodytes who refuse to accept truth.  Nowhere was there a hint that the debate is not over, or that there were any material weaknesses in the popularized AGW case (here).

So, to bring the public around to a more compliant stance on AGW, there is work afoot for broadcast weathercasters to get certified on climate change before they can talk about it on their weather forecasts.  Of course, certification will require that you swallow Team Gore’s version of the UN’s IPCC reports hook, line, and sinker.  As for the public, we recall the song from South Pacific, “… they must be carefully taught.”

Public debate, as often reflected in the blogs, seldom leads one away from heat to light.  In the 19feb13 WSJ’s section on healthcare you can see blaring examples of dysfunctional discussions.  For example, “Should all women over 40 get annual mammograms?” is answered YES with “catching cancer early improves odds of beating it”, and NO with “the benefits are small but the costs can be great.”  Now there’s a case of apples and oranges that is oh so common in the public round.  The winner of such debates will be determined by hyperbole, emotion, and repetition.  And some idiot legislator will then introduce a bill to get government involved at great cost to most, with resulting benefits to the fewest.

No one, it seems, can gather their wits and ask ‘what objective are we trying to achieve with mammograms?’  A quantifiable answer to that would definitely refine the responses and expose the charlatans in the ensuing discussion.  But that kind of process makes it much harder to manage the sheeple.  (For more, google ‘Principled Negotiation’ or here on RR.)

Tonight at the Grass Valley Veterans Center is the Oathkeepers presentation given by co-founder Stewart Rhodes that I reported on last Friday.

Administrivia – I’m now in the heat of finalizing the test and solution versions of TechTest2013 that always requires a lot of equations and figures (see past tests here).  The test will be given at NUHS on 23 March 2013.   Until this effort is put to bed, I may be a bit tardy in my usually pithy comment responses, and also infrequent in new postings of the high quality RR readers have come to expect ;-)

Scattershots and Asteroids

George Rebane

In my scratch file for blog topics, items on the flood of government lies are overflowing.  I was going to do an update post on the most egregious ones.  There are so many –
-    The new $9 minimum wage is going to boost the economy.  If so, why stop at $9?  Instead it will compete for the biggest job killer for the poor and minorities.  But then, Obama is making that a tough competition with all of his job killers lined up.
-    Obamacare’s expenses will kick deficits into overdrive; there is not ONE part of its advertised benefits that is turning out to be true.
-    Gun violence is growing in the land, and guns need to be confiscated - if not actually, then constructively (q.v.).  Federal crime statistics show that both violent crime and crime involving guns have both dropped over an astounding 50% in the last 20 years.  The fawning lamestream is predictably silent.
-    SecTreas nominee Jacob Lew is competing with SecDef nominee Hagel as to which is the dumbest and least informed for the job.  Lew’s $1M bonus from Citi, while it was on its ass and a ward of the state, was outrageous in itself.  But its immediate deposit in a Cayman Islands account drew crickets from the lamestream that was busy pillorying Romney for putting his own money into the same accounts.
-    Meanwhile Team Obama is occupied handpicking sequester cuts so that it would most impact ordinary Americans and then blame the Repubs.  Totally out of consideration are the legions of government double-dummies who work on the reams of new federal regulations and their enforcement to make sure that our economy remains crippled into the indefinite future.   In one of his biggest current lies, Obama publicly denies that it was he who introduced the sequester provision into last year’s budget negotiations.
-    And on and on and on.

So instead of the ongoing government lies, prevarications, and deceptions, let’s consider something much more pleasant – end of life on earth as we know it.

This past week we had two rocks from who knows where catch our attention.  Well, one (named 2012-DA12, about 150 ft diameter) was predicted and caught our attention by whizzing by within the orbit of our geo-synchronous satellites (about 22K miles), and the other put about 1,100 central Asian Russians into emergency rooms with various injuries.  That last rock arrived unannounced at 33K mph, from a radically different radiant (below) than the flyby, and exploded with an energy release that they are still trying to calculate as they figure out the damage done to buildings in the Chelyabinsk region.

All this brought to mind the 1908 Tunguska asteroid(?) explosion that leveled trees in a 20 mile radius of uninhabited Siberian forests, and is reckoned to have had a yield of 17 megatons of TNT (or about 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb).  It is safe to say that almost all humans within at least 20 miles of such an airburst would have been killed.  And, of course, no one knew it was coming, which opens an important topic area in itself.

For more on why we’re not spending enough resources looking out for the next Tunguska, or the Chelyabinsk surprise, or the DA12, see Russ Steele’s post here.  Here in the following I want to play with a little data that will allow us to calculate some odds of imminent death and destruction.  BTW, this is a good exit point for those readers who don’t do numbers.

A Growing Worry in the Land (updated 18feb13)

George Rebane

[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 15 February 2013.]

Today everyone knows that we are a polarized nation and becoming more so by the day.  I want to talk about the reaction of a large segment of Americans who see their country slipping away.  This perception did not start yesterday and has been some decades in the making.  But where before it was seen as an erosion that slowly ate away bit by piece at what we hold dear, since Barak Obama’s election that process has accelerated to what many now see as a runaway train headed in the wrong direction and toward a cliff.

If we ignore his campaign pronouncements, President Obama’s ‘08 election promised much.  It was a coming of age when we finally filled the last branch of government with an eloquent speaker full of big ideas who was not lily white.  But we could not discount his words because they accurately foretold of the fundamental transformation of America that he had promised.  It was only the ‘you don’t have to worry’ assurances about his new regime that we could discount and do so totally.

Wealth Creation & Distribution – A Progressive’s View

Ben Emery

[Editor:  This piece by Mr Ben Emery evolved from a thread in the comment stream to ‘Progressive Radio – the Dangerfield of the airwaves’.  There Mr Emery posted and extended response to my 909pm comment which appears below.

BenE 807pm - It reappears that you and yours believe that the amount of wealth on earth is fixed, and humans live to just redistribute that wealth in a grim zero sum contest with the winners being those who can unjustly take it from the losers. You don't see 'jobs' which can add enormously to man's aggregate wealth, in the process increasing the QoL for millions (billions?), and then taking a small fraction of that for themselves. That small fraction will still cause great inequality, and that to you is the injustice that we cannot countenance while some in the world are still suffering. It is better that no such new wealth is created, it is better that we all stay at some previous lower but more equal QoL level. That is probably what you all call 'social justice'.
Under this (to me horrible) ideology one person here, who creates nothing, should be empowered to define what is the proper level of risk and reward for another person there, one who wants to create wealth and a better life on earth for all in reach of that new creation. And if all cannot share equally in the new creation, then none should share in it.
Does this understanding provide you with an inkling of why we are so polarized, and why the likelihood of a Great Divide increases by the day?
Posted by: George Rebane | 11 February 2013 at 09:09 PM

Since wealth and its distribution was a thread somewhat afield from the topic of progressive radio, and worthy of discussion on its own merits, I invited Mr Emery to draft his comments into a response that could be published as a single piece, and serve as a dedicated forum for its discussion and debate.  With minor edits to promote clarity, that piece appears in the following.  Nothing has been removed from the original comment stream where the preamble to this post remains intact.  gjr]

Conservatives – How We Fool Ourselves

A rose by any other name ... .  W. Shakespeare

George Rebane

Polls on Americans’ ideological preferences have long reported a more or less 40% conservatives, 40% moderates, 20% liberals mix.  From this conservatives conclude that we remain a conservative, or at least a center-right nation.  Given how volatile public preferences are, I’m not so sure any more.  I’d like to see some convincing evidence of it in the voting booths across the land.  There should be more Republican victories, landslides, etc, and the libertarians should be making greater headway on the national political stage.

Gallup’s efforts at measuring political preferences (here) are summarized in the nearby figure.  But the problem with their ideological categories is that ‘moderate’ means different things to a voting Democrat than to an Independent or Republican.  This is even evident on these pages where out-and-out socialists declare themselves to be middle roaders and moderates.  Understanding such self-labeling biases explains away the election results.

A preferable, but more expensive, approach is to have respondents state preferences about ideological tenets, and from that determine their membership in one of Gallup’s five categories.  This is important not only for understanding a more accurate political breakdown of the country, but also to prevent conservative feel-good analyses like this one from the Capitol Research Center – a conservative ‘think tank’ and media watchdog.

Nevertheless, CRC is correct in its characterization of the lamestream’s performance in biased journalism, as it reports that “the media’s most insidious power is the power to ignore.”  Devoting air time and column inches to their favorite liberal agendas has been well documented.  Googling ‘liberal bias in media’ will give you a snootful for both sides of the argument.  I just want to leave you with the notion that there is no convincing evidence that conservatives and conservative ideals are gaining in these days of our country’s fundamental transformation.

State of Union 2013 got a C- or a D (updated)

George Rebane

12.9M people participated in a new Fox/Microsoft realtime opinion poll taken during President Obama’s speech.  The overall approval rating was broken down by Repub, Indep, Dem declared respondents who watched the speech.  None of the rating traces ever went above the 50% neutral line, but stayed mostly in the 25% to 35% region.  It was surprising that even the Dems couldn’t give the President a solid C at any point in his presentation.

According also to Pew Research the lowest marks were given the President when he made his case for responding to climate change with all kinds of green initiatives, after claiming how well they had worked in Europe (a competing low was on gun control).  Well, that dog didn’t hunt, and it seemed that everyone knew the experience Europe’s economies have had with green energy and green jobs.  Their answer was a clear ‘let’s not go there’.

Audacious was the proposed new initiative that called for the minimum wage being raised to above $9/hr to fulfill the requirement that someone making that should be able to support a family of four.  Even the Dems know that that will kill more jobs, and the smarter ones even know that the minimum wage was never meant to be the stasis point in a person’s career, but a temporary transit point on the low end of the economic ladder.  But for socialists, that is a good place to keep their constituents, because the elites know that the minimum wage must be supported by additional government checks to get their flocks up to a sustainable level as consumers and grateful voters.

What again struck home for me was Obama’s call for another tax hike on the ‘rich’, because the just passed one apparently fell short of getting these greedy people to pay their fair share.  The big emphasis for the new and improved fair share will be through “closing the loopholes”.

Have you noticed that ‘tax loopholes’ are now accepted by the sheeple as being something evil and underhanded that only the morally deficient wealthy find to wiggle their way through to reduce their tax bills.  Doesn’t anyone remember that those so-called loopholes were purposely fashioned by the world’s greatest deliberative body to motivate taxpayers to do this or that so the economy will benefit and the government gets its share of newly created wealth?  They didn’t get into the tax code by accident, these provisions were put there by the same dirtbags who are now decrying their use by taxpayers, most of whom are also job creators.

And finally, the President again left the country with his clear vision that wealth left in the hands of the private sector gets stuffed into vaults and mattresses where it just accumulates.  And these wealthy only use it to gleefully roll around in when no one is watching.  It is the government which must relieve them of their filthy lucre, and only the government can properly “invest” it to create jobs and move the economy forward.  How’s that been working out for us?

[update]  For some time now I've been trying to make the case that we are already in Depression2, and that history will record it as such.  Obama's fawning lamestream has been putting lipstick on his economy for some time now, but a closer look at the numbers and what's happening on the ground tells a different story.  In California the business exodus continues (see also report on Russ Steele's UV4IT http://youvotedforitblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/february-13th-2013/ ), but what I have not seen reported is the number of businesses that are quietly shutting down in the face of a still declining California economy and anticipation of new regs and cost increases now in view from Obamacare, AB32, and other government tsunamis already launched against the job creators.  In our own community another two prominent restaurants are closing doors, businesses whose fortunes are also determined by the state's overall economy.  This is not a recovery or what a promising future looks like.

Progressive Radio – the Dangerfield of the airwaves

George Rebane

Peter Collins on truthout.com (my favorite socialist cum communist website) laments about progressive talk radio not getting any traction over the years.  In ‘An Insider's View of the Progressive Talk Radio Devolution’ talk show host Collins goes through a litany of liberal radio’s travails during recent years, and concludes –

As someone who took substantial personal risk in syndication and station ownership, I can tell you that progressive talk has not panned out as a viable business. Clinton's 1996 deregulation of broadcasting and the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 didn't help. I do think the FCC should require some balance of viewpoints on the stations it regulates, through the license renewal process, but there is simply no interest on the part of Obama and his appointees in regulatory reform - even as the president is pilloried by right-wing radio on a daily basis. Air America's parade of management blunders produced the downward spiral that brought us to this tipping point for progressive talk radio, and most station owners, rightly or wrongly, see that failure as an indication that audiences won't support liberal talk radio.

His appeal to government diktat to limit the success of conservative radio is indicative of the overall disease that afflicts liberals’ desire to muzzle the right with the power of the government’s gun.  (It appears that the wind is blowing the other way, cf ‘Fairness Doctrine, RIP’.)  But nowhere in his recounting does the light ever go on to illuminate the real problem with liberal radio.  He and other progressive pinheads believe “that audiences won’t support liberal talk radio.”  Sure they do; but the problem is that those audiences are tiny, and correctly reflect the intellectual demographic of our nation’s Left.

To enjoy talk radio beyond the 17 slogans that drive liberal thought on the evening's sitcoms and lamestream news, you have to have a working ideology, one that is constantly weighed against the daily happenings across the nation that impact the operations of governance.  You can't promote a leftwing dialectic against the realities of the day's news, it doesn't work.  Even people with limited abilities start giggling after being subjected to that kind of 'rationale'.

Therefore, such large audiences have never existed on the Left.  Look at the idiots who represent them (I know, the Repubs have had a few notable lumps there too lately), all of whom convince their know-nothing constituencies of a few simple class warfare messages, and that about puts a bow on their participation in the national dialogue.  Collins et al don’t have a clue here, or are in understandably deep denial of that reality.

But Collins is one of their heavy thinkers, and he’s not satisfied with the Left’s victories at the polls.  Well he should be.  And there’re more of those voters on the way with new Dem 'voter rights' bills that promise to sweep the streets clean of all the residuals who can still make their mark (optional at that) on an instant registration form – no address required, thank you very much.  What would Collins say to these 2x4s with faces painted on them?  most certainly nothing that will satisfy a keen intellect that’s been honed over the years to communicate complex collectivist rationale for bigger government and a more even distribution of wealth across America.

My advice to Collins is to rejoice in the Dems having finally forged a compliant (and growing?) flock of voters that can override any assault which conservative talk radio could ever hope to marshal.  The power of “stash” is beyond intellectual debate - as long as the government checks keep coming, all is well.

Ruminations – 9feb13 (updated)

George Rebane

The prestigious national newspaper Investor’s Business Daily has now picked up the alarm about the feds’ enormous ammo and gun buys.  (RR readers were made aware of these developments months ago.)  All of the weaponry is designated for in-country use in the US, and amounts involved are enough to support the Iraq war use rate (5.5M rounds per month) to continue that level of combat for 24 years.  (H/T to reader)

MIT mavens in artificial intelligence acknowledge that AI (robots) will permanently kill jobs while increasing the nation’s productivity as they replace humans.  This has been a longstanding area of interest on RR (see Singularity Signposts) for the last several years, recently culminating in a series on the economic impact of productivity growth on unemployment given the government imposed slow growth that is planned for the remainder of this decade.  It is also heartening for me to finally hear corroboration of the thesis that such intelligent machines “could create more inequality.”  The message here has been ‘bet on it’ (here and here).

This should not be a matter of joy to anyone.  Those who can design and work with such machines will prosper, and prosper magnificently.  Those who have to compete with them will suffer the fate of ‘John Henry, the Steel Drivin’ Man’.  Congress is still in denial about this future, but it is good to at least see academics of the technical stripe pick up on this and start making public statements (example here).
 

Obamacare is now an identified and almost universally recognized albatrsos hung around the nation’s neck.  As more and more of it comes to light and is implemented, the disastrous numbers continue to roll in about its impact on America’s healthcare and overall economy.  One thing is certain, EVERY benefit that this new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, starting with its cynical name, has turned out to be a bald-faced lie.  Nothing salutary of it remains except the cries of a few true believers in his second coming, and, of course, all those legions of new government workers hired to bilk their fellow citizens.

Recently even the quantitative comparisons with many European socialized healthcare systems have been cast in doubt with the revelation that it takes an extra envelope stuffed with cash passed under the table to a physician or administrator to be approved for a procedure, moved up in the que, or actually have the service performed.  These bribes are called “informal payments’ and have been the norm for decades in underfunded nationalized health systems with poorly paid workers.  As such national healthcare systems start suffering cutbacks, this practice is also spreading to the richer countries.  In any case, it’s hard to compare costs in the face of such dealings.  One is reminded of attempting to equate unemployment rates between nations practicing various levels of socialism and/or communism.  About the future of Obamacare no one should be surprised.

[update]  Burnished bullshit.  That is about the best that can be said for the YubaNet reported study by Glantz and Grana of UCSF.  The connection between the Tea Party and the tobacco industry and/or "tobacco interests" is utter nonsense and no more intimate than the celebrated fact that literally any two people on earth can be joined by no more than 'six degrees of separation' or six links on the grand sociogram of the world.  Here's their strong point from YubaNet's breathless report -

"From previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, IRS filings and other publicly available documents, the study authors traced a decades-long chain of personal, corporate and financial relationships between tobacco companies, tobacco industry lobbying and public relations firms and nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party."

Study authors Glantz and Grana are cheap-shot demogauges of the worst kind - i.e. they generate their politically motivated progressive pap on taxpayer dollars.  The connection from which they weave their egregious relationship (conspiracy?) is that the nation's tea parties have, of course, used the imagery that has come to represent the historical occasion in Boston harbor.  That imagery was apparently also used by 'tobacco interests' in promoting their industry.  And that is the thread these liberal 'scholars' use to sew together today's tea partiers and the evil tobacco industry.

That leftwing blogs like YubaNet gleefully publish and give full credence to such studies points clearly to the other layer of manure that the lamestream and liberal echo chambers have been coating the countryside with - the tea parties are history, pay no attention to the little burble they caused in 2010, everything is back under control.

Immigration Reform – The Correct Solution 2

George Rebane

I’ve been nudged to present my views on immigration reform in more detail than what I’ve already written about the illegal alien problem and my experiences as an immigrant over sixty years ago.  The preamble to this post was ‘Immigration Reform – The Correct Solution’ where I acknowledged that America will not accept the mass deportation of 11M+ illegals, no matter how they got here. Nevertheless, all effective and sustainable solutions to immigration reform  must begin with securing our border with Mexico so that the inflow of illegals is reduced to a ‘trickle’.

The following points comprise my ‘correct solution’ as it stands today, and dear reader you may (and I know that you will) consider it as a draft that together we might perhaps shape into a more polished form.  As usual, I’ll revert to a structured format that makes subsequent reference to the points presented a bit more convenient.

New Encryption App Promises Big Changes and Trouble

George Rebane

A new iPhone and iPad encryption app will come on the market this Friday 8 February that is sure to get the feds’ undies in a bundle.  It was developed by a hot new cryptography start-up called Silent Circle,  and has already been successfully tested in a number of situations worldwide.  Readers will, of course, immediately see all kinds of implications that such secure communications will promise.

In addition to all the benefits that this new technology will contribute to privacy and security, it also has a potential for mischief.  Slate reports, “But while Silent Circle’s revolutionary technology will assist many people in difficult environments, maybe even saving lives, there’s also a dark side. Law enforcement agencies will almost certainly be seriously concerned about how it could be used to aid criminals. The FBI, for instance, wants all communications providers to build in backdoors so it can secretly spy on suspects. Silent Circle is pushing hard in the exact opposite direction—it has an explicit policy that it cannot and will not comply with law enforcement eavesdropping requests. Now, having come up with a way not only to easily communicate encrypted but to send files encrypted and without a trace, the company might be setting itself up for a serious confrontation with the feds. Some governments could even try to ban the technology.”

Read the article, check out the product, and then start communicating your deepest secrets in complete confidence until the feds come knocking on your door ;-)

PS. get your checkbooks ready for when they let in new investors.

Boy Scouts and Homosexuality

George Rebane

The latest progressive dust devil on the landscape is the campaign to force a private organization to accept its mores and values regarding homosexuals in society.  Ruminating a bit on the topic, some thoughts came to mind I have not seen discussed.

For eons pubescent boys and girls have been separated in uncountable cultures for the purpose of achieving some focused group activity, objective, or ritual.  The reason is simple, heterosexual boys and girls begin to succumb to the dictates of their burgeoning hormones, and consequently pay less/no attention to the purpose for which they have gathered as a group.  This is especially true when the gathering also involves group eating, sleeping, and performing ablutionary activities. 

It would have been unthinkable to place boys and girls together in such settings where thoughts could and would turn extra-curricular.  Young boys would fantasize about being the only male in a girls’ dorm, and in response society fixed things so that peeking in windows was about as close as such wishes could be fulfilled.  We learned long ago not to mess with hormones.

Now there are people who want to put young males into situations in which they are exposed to other sexually attractive young males, and in similar fashion for young females.  The theory being that a homosexual’s hormones can be turned on/off like a light switch, or (gasp!) maybe homosexual tendencies are only in the mind which can succumb to therapy.  In either case these arguments are a stretch, and a bridge too far for established 21st century ‘truths’.

So let’s posit that the Boy Scouts and other young people’s organizations bow to progressive pressures, and groups of boys only (and girls only) find themselves with a homosexual or two in their midsts (recall, today homosexuals have no compunction to ‘stay in the closet’ – gay pride and all that).  The homosexuals, of course, would consider it a boon, else no one would want to foist their joining such groups under duress.  And here comes the point – such fortuitous introduction of the odd sexually oriented individual into a single gendered group is discrimination pure and simple.

Why could not a heterosexual young person sue a single gendered group for the opportunity to be equally titillated as are his/her homosexual compatriots?  Or why could not the parents of a homosexual boy, fully aware of the pubescent focus arguments, not sue to have a girls school accept their son so that he could be in an educational environment that is not distractive?

I could go on with more examples dear reader, and so could you.  The point made here is that we are again fiddling with the latch on another Pandora’s Box.

America killing Americans is Legal (updated 6feb13)

George Rebane

Well, it’s official.  NBC reports getting a copy of a Justice Dept white paper to the WH that states it is completely legal and constitutional for the government to kill American citizens without any due process whatsoever.  All the President has to believe is that the targeted American may pose a threat to the country.  Here is a reported excerpt -

“A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination,” the white paper reads. “In the Department’s view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban. Similarly, the use of lethal force, consistent with the laws of war, against an individual who is a legitimate military target would be lawful and would not violate the assassination ban.”

This legal justification is recent, but its surrounding legal pretext is not.  In short, what Eric Holder says here is that it has always been legal for the Executive to pre-emptively execute anyone it deems a threat, and to do that without going through any legal formalities that become a matter of public record.  These are judgments without recourse, and their ex post facto justifications are explicitly relegated to the realm of subsequent political theater.  Bang, you’re dead, you insipient terrorist you  Next case please.

[6feb13 update] OK, I waited long enough for the appropriate response.  When it was discovered that Bush2 had waterboarded 3 ragheads, the progressive purehearts and their lamestream echo chamber came unglued.  There were all kinds of calls for Bush2's head as being the Great Satan that all of Islam was telling us he was.  I mean there was some serious rending of garment and gnashing of teeth on the Left.  Now we find out that President Obama's killing of American citizens without due process, or ANY checks and balances, is all legal and hunkey-dorey, and we hear crickets on the airwaves.  And these are the people with whom we are seeking common ground?!

The Liberal Mind – Topical trumps Synoptic

George Rebane

The ongoing debates on current issues such as budget, deficits, gun control, healthcare, climate change, immigration reform, … highlight one of the most robust aspects of how Left and Right thinking are fundamentally different.  As witnessed by RR’s Liberal Mind category, this is a long abiding subject of interest to me, and apparently becoming so to others inhabiting the polar regions of our ideological globe.  There is something fundamental and basic to how both sides present and argue their positions on the issues.  And since RR readers fervently debate these issues, I want to introduce a couple of new terms from the technical field that, perhaps, best capture the meaning of the different approaches.

A pair of arcane terms in science and technology that have yet to follow ‘feedback’, ‘bandwidth’, ‘in the loop’, ‘cloud’, … into the common lexicon are ‘synoptic’ and ‘topical’.  Dictionaries often define synoptic as “affording or taking a general view of the principal parts of a subject”.  In science and technology synoptic denotes notions that refer to an area in the large, be it the entire history or time window of a process, the overall design of a large-scale system, the complex inter-relationships of this with all of those, or a stream/collection of data in a database.  A synoptical argument captures the large scale of the subject that may even include objectives and measures of utility.  Something synoptic is of encompassing scope.

The other end of the semantic notion of scope is topical which denotes anything of limited scope.  Again, the more common definition of topical is that “pertaining to or dealing with matters of current or local interest.”  But in the broader context I’m discussing here, things topical are limited in time and space, they are arguments, notions, appeals to the here and now, or entail some specific example(s) of a larger scheme, examples that need not be at all representative of the whole.  This last point is very important in the understanding of the proper meaning of topical.  Specific examples/incidents are sometimes also called anecdotal, and therefore a topical description of something subsumes the semantic of anecdotal examples, occasions, happenings, samples, etc.

With this understanding, I now can make a more powerful proposition regarding how the Left and the Right contend on issues in the public arena.  The Left overwhelmingly presents its support and/or promotion of ideals and issues in distinctly topical frameworks.  Whether it is healthcare or gun control, we are regaled with stories of a specific individual who is denied a critical medical procedure, or have eleven bullets pumped into their little body.

Immigration Reform – The Correct Solution

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 February 2013.]

We’ve known for years that no one will deport the 11+Million illegal aliens now living in the United States.  And everyone also knows, whether they say it or not, that ultimately the overwhelming fraction of these people will stay here permanently, and one way or another become Americans.  That part about how many actually become Americans is the big rub in getting immigration reform legislation passed.

The contending sides here are the usual suspects, and as a conservetarian, I count myself in one of the corners.  We all know how America has always benefitted from immigration, and why we continue to attract and invite immigrants.  But here I’m referring to those who today are our legal immigrants, and not the illegal alien population that has long been the sticking part of immigration reform.

The word ‘immigrant’, as in the politically correct ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘undocumented immigrant’, has come to stifle reasoned debate on the subject.  For example, in reporting on Mexicans living in the US, the prestigious Pew Research Hispanic Center does not distinguish the legals from the illegals, calling the entire cohort simply immigrants.   In its charts and graphs showing Mexican influx, this charade wrongly assigns all Mexicans coming to America as having climbed over the fence.  In Pew’s lexicon, there are no Mexican illegal aliens here, even though they show hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexicans arriving yearly that now tally to over 11M “immigrants”.  These apparently add to the 52M legal Hispanic Americans of whom two out of three are of Mexican origin.  For some reason the published numbers on Hispanics are kept very murky, and the labels very confusing.

Ruminations - 1feb13

George Rebane

Global blarney.  The IPCC has quietly admitted that its four prime climate change computer models have been overestimating the world’s temperature rises (here and here).  Of course none of these kinds of reports of dubious ‘science’ make any impact on the progressives’ who claim to be champions of science and higher learning.  Their credentials here consist mainly of their decades-long opposition to creationism promoted by fundamentalists of almost all religions.  In other areas of science they turn out to be total naïfs, being ignorant themselves and promoting STEM ignorance in schools.  In the meantime the left's co-opted Scientific American keeps reporting that the “IPCC underestimated climate change”.  In America’s public policy (especially California’s AB32) climate change has given 'political science' a new meaning.  

Last Wednesday evening we attended a John Birch Society event here at the Nevada City Elks Lodge (pictured).  William Jasper was promoting his new book The United Nations EXPOSED and also gave a talk on Agenda21.  It was a well-attended gathering that additionally featured Nevada County Sheriff Keith Royal.  Present also was a contingent of liberals including RR reader and commenter Mr Doug Keachie taking pictures of everything (here).  The talk was about the brave new world being planned for us, and was given in a very professional manner using extensive quotes and citations of UN and ICLEI documents.  The program is proceeding apace, with minimal pushback, as described by my numerous posts filed under RR’s Agenda21 category.  A reason for its success is visible right here in our county when we recall the utter denial of Agenda21’s impact that is held by some of our county supervisors.

Now even the unions are starting to bitch about Obamacare – my, my, my.  As the Pelosi Principle kicked in, all kinds of Obaminations started popping out of that landmark accomplishment of this administration.  So far, every claimed benefit of this socialist program is turning out to be a lie.  This must come as a surprise to the independents and middle-roaders.  The Left is blind to it, and its lamestream continues to ignore such insignificant news.  Professor Kessler of Stanford updates us on the latest in ‘Obamacare’s Broken Promises’.

Economists, that little recognized part of our entertainment industry, have been quick to overcome the 1,100% error in their prediction of the 12Q4 growth in GDP.  Every one of them was able to quickly recover their 20-20 hindsight, and explain the now obvious but then invisible reasons why the -0.1% contraction occurred instead of their +1.0% predicted growth.  What are we to make of this? the same as always – forgive and forget.

‘Life in 2030’ is a collection of audio segments in the prestigious IEEE Spectrum on what technological advances we’ll enjoy a few years from now. These segments are titled –
-    ‘How will Robots and Humans Coexist?’
-    ‘Engineering Textiles to Keep Us Healthier and Happier’
-    ‘Solar Power from Space’
-    ‘Danish Island Tests Smart Grid’
-    ‘Self-driving Cars Heading Our Way’
-    ‘The Impact of the Invisible’