Rebane's Ruminations

Ruminations – 28jun13

George Rebane

Texas legislature’s attempt to pass a women’s health bill was disrupted by an “unruly mob” of  liberals.  Gov Perry vows to push it through in a later session with more security present.  The bill would 1) ban abortions after 20 weeks, 2) Require abortion clinics to upgrade to “ambulatory surgical centers”, and “require (abortion) doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles”.  Given the Gosnell experience in Philadelphia, these sound like totally reasonable requirements for facilities in which women seek walk-in/walk-out abortions which sometimes go very wrong.  Opposing them makes clear that pro-abortionists who advertise themselves as ‘women’s health’ proponents don’t give a big rat’s ass about women’s health.

A couple of days ago we saw a very sad interview with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Gen Martin Dempsey who stated his requirements before committing troops to battle in the nation’s interests as determined by its civilian leadership.  The good general said that “I’d like to understand the plan to make peace before starting a war.”  As a GI I wasn’t aware that my understanding of the aftermath of battle was a prerequisite for me to follow lawful orders to get in there and fight as I was trained to do.  I don’t recall Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, MacArthur, … putting forth such demands before committing troops.  I think that was because in the old days waging peace was beyond their pay grade.

Did you see that Seattle has to remove wanted posters in buses that feature pictures of 17 terrorists wanted by the US government.  The reason being that it may hurt the feelings of Muslims riding on the bus, even though all of the wanted terrorists are not Muslims. Rep McDermott (D-WA) wants the State Dept issued posters to be taken down because they may “encourage religious and racial profiling”.  And that pretty much underlines the progressive priorities when it comes to America’s security.

Machines and Minders and Systemic Unemployment

George Rebane

Automation and advanced digital technologies are eliminating the need for people in a growing number of jobs.  We’ve survived severe technological change before but this time it might be different: are we facing a future of dismal job opportunities, stagnant income, and worsening inequality?  Are we headed for chronic unemployment?  So asks ‘How Technology is Destroying Jobs’ by David Rotman in the Jul/Aug issue of MIT Technology Review.

RR welcomes MIT’s Sloan School of Management into the discussion of what arguably is the most critical issue facing America and the developed world.  Pursuing what took them so long to raise this on their radar is out of scope here, but acknowledging the problem is a large step forward since their trumpet is a mite larger than mine.

Please understand that this longtime, no-brainer conclusion is not uniformly accepted at that august institution.  Rotman cites several economists there who are still convinced that nothing really has changed in these pre-Singularity years – all we’re having is a little slowness in the workplace expanding to catch up with technology, but nothing materially different from what happened in the 19th century, etc, etc.

The observables for this economic disruption became obvious at the Great Doubling of the world’s workforce in the mid-1990s, and were confirmed after experiencing the dotcom bubble around 2000, at which time US productivity and job growth became decoupled.  Not surprisingly, MIT professors Brynjolfsson and McAfee call this the Great Decoupling (see figure from article).
 
What our progressive brethren have missed during this decoupling is the causal contributions of technology to the polarization of the workforce, the ‘hollowing out’ of the middle class, and the resulting growth of inequality of wealth and incomes.  Their analysis has been simple – it’s the fault of the dirty capitalists and their conservative chorus – and their solutions even simpler (minded?) – increase government size and its involvement in all sectors of society, and handout more free money (aka transfer payments).  Well, as we have been saying here for years, it turns out that the problem is much bigger than saying it was all the Republicans’ fault.

Border Security for the iSheeple

George Rebane

Never accept effort for achievement.

No, we’re not going to deport 11 million illegal aliens.  But we do have to solve the illegal alien problem by allowing those already here to become legal, and preventing those still there from becoming illegal.  That requires that we put a cork into our border with Mexico, and knowing the population of inveterate liars and scumbags in Congress, we must ‘seal the border’ first before all those constructive amnesty provisions start kicking in for the 11 million.  If we don’t do that, then we’ll be like the double dummy bailing the boat without plugging the leak.  Now this is not rocket science, even the liberals understand the concept perfectly, perhaps too perfectly.

So how do we get an ‘immigration reform’ bill passed that solves the above described problem?  Let’s put the politics on the back burner for a moment and just see how progress is made in Washington.  Given the great flock of isheeple that dominate our landscape, the solution is easy – both sides volubly sign up for something called “border security”.  And then both sides get busy selling it to their constituencies.  The Repubs are saying, ‘See, we got the Dems to agree to secure the border with all kinds of high tech gizmos, lots of new fencing, and more regiments of Border Patrol boots on the ground.  Once all these spiffy things are in place, the border will be harder than ever to cross illegally, and it will never have been more secure.  OK? sign here, press hard, three copies.’

The Dems are saying to their people (wink-wink), ‘Relax, this legislation is a velvet amnesty sieve.  Before you know it, everyone will become a citizen, and all of them will know the answer to ‘Who loves ya baby?’  The border? fuggettaboudit.  Those rightwing schmucks are totally dazzled by all that Berlin Wall technical crap in the bill.  But you know what?  it’ll take years to put in place and there is a lot of enabling legislation and appropriations between here and there.  In the meanwhile, things will be business as usual down Mexico way because those poor bastards will still be counting how many infra-red sensors they’ve installed instead of how many more of your friends and family have made it across.’

And there’s the point, both sides are in on the bamboozle with only the Dems having and working a sane plan to achieve their objectives.  For example no one cares, or should care, that the Del Rio Texas sector will install between points of entry, (quoting the bill's text):

"(I) 3 integrated fixed towers; (II) 74 fixed camera systems (with relocation capability), which include remote video surveillance systems; (III) 47 mobile surveillance systems, which include mobile video surveillance systems, agent-portable surveillance systems and mobile surveillance capability systems; (IV) 868 unattended ground sensors, including seismic, imaging and infrared; (V) 174 handheld equipment devices, including handheld thermal imaging systems and night vision goggles; (VI) 26 mobile/handheld inspection scopes and sensors for checkpoints; (VII) improved surveillance capabilities for existing aerostat; (VIII) 21 sensor repeaters; and (IX) 21 communications repeaters."

When a high level delibearative body like Congress wants to procure a complex system such as the one that is to augment what we already have on the border, they should write into law system performance requirements, and not try to design the goddam thing within the thousands of pages of garbage that will certainly be obsolete with the advance of technology by the time they get around to building it.  A smart, let alone sane, legislative body wanting to make a material contribution to this law would instead include something like –

‘Before the other provisions of this law are implemented, appropriate enhancements will be made to border security such that the demonstrated, unapprehended entry rate from Mexico is below 5,000 illegal entrants per year, and that such rates can be maintained in perpetuity.’

I have promoted the 5,000 number as a performance requirement (estimated by the Border Patrol using established methods) that for all intents and purposes defines a secure border for a nation the size of America.  Perfection is unachievable and its pursuit ruinously costly.  If you don’t like 5,000, then put in another number that reasonable people would accept as a secure border.  But let’s not continue the practice of substituting and celebrating effort expended in place of achievement at the national level.  Sadly, both sides know that this switch continues to work with the isheeple which today includes two generations of youth raised on Self-Esteem über Alles!

As a minimum, the Repubs should stick to principle, point out this error, and then go on to support the amnesty provisions of comprehensive immigration reform if they must.  But the bill should specify that such provisions should kick in only after the border has been shown to be measurably secure.

Rationale for Elephant Rides at a Fair??!! (updated 24jun13)

George Rebane

The 22jun13 Union joined the animal rights activists’ kerfuffle in their attempt to stop elephant rides being offered at this year’s Nevada County Fair, the theme of which is ‘Under the Big Top’.  I about fell off my chair when I saw the paper’s editorial position getting exercised about the Fair Board’s politely silent response to the phalanx of loud and looney leftwing activists who habitually assemble under various fine sounding banners – this time from the ‘Center for Animal Protection and Education’ (sic!).

In my 20jun13 post I celebrated the Board’s response as “a rare sparkle of sanity (witnessed) here and there in the public forum.”  However, the mavens at The Union stand fast with the hyperventilated from CAPE, and remain puzzled as to what might have been the Board’s “rationale for their decision.”  Perhaps I can help penetrate this patch of local dumbth and fill the Union-claimed void – ‘Community deserves response from fair board’ (behind paywall?).

Dear people – You see, animal rides at public exhibitions, amusement parks, circuses, and, yes, county fairs have been an American tradition going on two centuries now.  It is a part of our culture where mom and/or dad can take the little darlings and let them ride a pony, camel, donkey, elephant, ostrich, ox, or even a pig.  For most kids it will be their first time for such an exciting experience, and it will create another memory of fun time with family and friends.  And as such, a cultural tradition that serves to join the generations - the adults remember when they first had their ride on an exotic animal at a fair or circus when they were young years ago.  I could go on, but I hope you get the picture, a picture that apparently is absent from your background or was omitted in your post-Great Society educational experience. 

So please, leave it alone.  This August let’s take another chance of an elephant, maddened by years of cruel handling, escaping its constraints and charging through crowded throngs, trampling and maiming tens, maybe even hundreds of unsuspecting fairgoers before being put down by the hastily summoned local SWAT team.  Think of the thrill of relating such a possibility to your own children as you explain to them why you won’t be visiting the fair this year.

I hope this helps, and please consider these factors the next time you feel a great upwelling of social injustice in your collective craw, and hopefully before you rush out again to mend an otherwise pretty healthy world.

Let me conclude by raising my hat once more to our cartoonist and observer extraordinaire of the social scene, RL ‘Bob’ Crabb.  His nearby cartoon – filched from today’s tarnished Union – is less tangential than it appears, for it succinctly summarizes and highlights within a current local issue the greater void which so immutably divides us.  Much food for thought.

[24jun13 update]  The Nevada County Fair Board has responded to the hyperventilation in a most reasonable manner through an open letter to the community on the elephant rides dust-up.  Here it is as posted on YubaNet.

Common Core is Coming (updated 22jun13)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 21 June 2013.]

These commentaries have often visited the unfolding tragedy of what our public education has inflicted on our country and its workforce.  Among the developed nations we rank way down there in every measured category of educational achievement.  But most of us go through the daily round without giving it much thought, or are simply comfortable with the false conclusion that our kids are being properly prepared for the job market, and generally that things are going along swimmingly.  Well they aren’t.

So now the federal government has decided to get into the act of educating our children.  This should not be a surprise since the feds are getting into every act possible that affects our lives.  We have witnessed how Dodd-Frank has misfired in the financial markets, and how Obamacare is screwing up America’s healthcare to a fare thee well.  But folks, this is serious and deserves your full attention whether you’re a parent or not.  Apparently feds haven’t done enough to K-12 education through their various ‘we’re here to help’ programs and their support of the teachers’ unions.  Now they plan to establish a unified curriculum across the land called Common Core.

Ruminations - 20jun13 (updated 21jun13)

George Rebane

So much bad stuff is happening that it’s literally hopeless to keep track of it any more.  A few samples follow.

Asylum for climate change refugees.  A correspondent sends me this heads up on the latest from the idiot senator from Hawaii.  He writes, “Sen. Brian Schatz’s bill would create a sort of political asylum for global warming refugees.  Senator Brian Schatz’s (D-HI) filed an amendment for the immigration bill Wednesday that would allow stateless people in the U.S. to seek conditional lawful status if their nations have been made uninhabitable by climate change.  Who decides what is uninhabitable? Does that mean all countries without air conditioned buildings?”  You can't make this stuff up.

Speaking of the immigration bill, it looks like the Republican heartthrob Senator Marco Rubio has caved.  No more requirement for a secure border.  The new bill would keep it porous and plug the holes with ‘best efforts’ rhetoric directed at the isheeple (q.v.).  Things will really look bad when the Border Patrol agents strap on their buttons that read ‘Pardon me, but you have me confused with someone who gives a crap.’

The Dow has dropped about 550 points in the last three days.  Helicopter Ben has now told everyone in the world that his chopper will soon be running out of gas thereby quenching QE whatever its number is.  Is this a Black Swan event?  Hard to believe that it is since everyone has been anticipating it for at least six months.  As predicted here, everyone thought that they could get out whole when the time came, because they would know it ahead of time.  Well, had they known, then the markets would not have plunged as they have, and it ain’t over yet.

“Signs of ObamaCare's failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law's most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a "death panel," threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution's separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.” So say DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and ELIZABETH P. FOLEY in the 20jun13 WSJ of these un-fireable appointed bureaucrats. And the bad news on that law will get a lot worse before serious attempts to repeal it are mounted.  Attributed deaths will have to number in the thousands before progressives will take notice (if then).

But there is an outside chance that this monster may collapse on itself from the gross incompetence at HHS according to the auditing arm of the GAO.  It seems that the HHS dunces in residence have not done their homework, and are having one hell of a time setting up the infamous insurance ‘exchanges’.  In fact, no one really knows what all is supposed to happen in these new bueraucracies that will dot the national landscape – that is one of the many reasons why HHS is running Obamacare as a black ops mission that is as opaque as it can possibly be – and the band starts playing in October.  Nationwide support for Obamacare is now down to about one out of three Americans, true believers all (more here).

To feel better, just go to the lamestream and/or any of the leftwing blogs where you will be burdened with none of this.

[21jun13 update]  The kids will get to ride elephants at the Nevada County Fair.  The fair board listened politely to the protestations of local ‘animal activists’, and then refused to cancel the contract with Have Trunk Will Travel.  To me people from organizations like Center for Animal Protection and Education comprise the faction of soft-headed, politically correct busybodies that have done so much to take our nation into the cultural oblivion and proscribed property rights mess in which we now wallow.  It’s good to celebrate a rare sparkle of sanity here and there in the public forum.

The WSJ’s enthusiastic editorial policy on immigration reform continues to miss the mark.  They celebrate the CBO’s analysis that the present bill would slightly lower our deficits by supplying new workers to boost GDP.  This is supposed to represent CBO’s new approach to ‘dynamic scoring’ instead of the ‘static’ type that they usually do in which every law is evaluated as if it will act in a hermetically sealed container from which collateral effects are removed.  Well, the CBO’s analysis and the WSJ’s assessment ('Mi Casa Su Growth Casa') of it both overlook the overriding effect of technology induced systemic unemployment (much discussed in these pages).  Neither organization recognizes that the existing legal American workforce continues to have trouble selling their outdated and rapidly diminishing skillsets into job markets that today demand so much more.

I expect this from the gang that can never shoot straight at the CBO, but the WSJ error continues to surprise me.  The new beneficiaries of amnesty that this immigration bill would create will be able to add significantly to the lines at the various welfare windows that the feds and state governments operate.  And we haven’t even begun to consider that the illegal alien problem will continue under the new perpetually porous borders provisions of this so-called immigration reform.

Collecting and Connecting the Dots (Addended)(updated 3jul13)

George Rebane

Head of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, goes in front of a closed doors congressional panel today.  They will quiz him about what data the NSA and other intelligence agencies can collect, have been collecting, and plan to collect on Americans.  He will tell them about the threats thwarted through the nation’s intelligence collecting systems operated by the NSA.   This is all a part of the show of concern for balancing individual privacy and the nation’s security needs that Congress is putting on for our benefit after NSA contractor Edward Snowden outlined how intelligence is developed and named Prism as one such long-running program that snoops on us.




I have no idea what all Snowden gave to Britain’s Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers that would have been news to our enemies, whether they be terrorist organizations or sovereign nation-states.  The information freely available in the public domain allows anyone who understands boxes and arrows to draw the above diagram that is one version of a high level representation of our intelligence gathering schema (click on figure for better resolution).

This level of openness is not shared by everyone in Washington.  Last Sunday on Fox News former VP Dick Cheney told Chris Wallace that even understanding what I’ve put together in the figure should not be public knowledge and would compromise our security.  I totally disagree, and feel we have little to fear from people who don’t already know that we operate such an intelligence gathering scheme – they simply aren’t smart enough to harm us.

My druthers are that Americans understand, to the level indicated in the figure, how our government collects and connects the dots on potential bad guys who mean the country harm.  With such a basic understanding we can talk reasonably about what government branches and agencies do and how they interlink.  We don’t have to know the details about what stuff passes through all the arrows.  But some of the details are important to us.

Buying Ammo in Obamastan

George Rebane

Buying ammo in a proto-autocracy is quite an experience.  This morning a friend and I arrived at 630am for the annual Father’s Day ammo sale at Miwall by the Nevada County airport.  They hand out number cards to serve you in the order of your arrival; we were 201 and 202.  The place was already overflowing with buyers and more were arriving by the minute.  Before the morning was out there would be over 1,000 people assembled on the black top in front of the Miwall warehouse.

Fortunately is was not to be a very hot day, so those waiting in the sun were just on minimum broil.  My friend and I set up our chairs in the shade, broke out our lunchboxes containing breakfasts prepared by the wives of our lives, and just cooled it for three hours talking to neighbors and arrivals from distant parts.  The conversations were uniformly about the sad and saddening state of our nation.  No one could believe that ammunition purchasing in our land has now also become a social statement.

After three hours in our chairs it was time to get into the long serpentine line between the ropes that had been set up.  For some reason, starting with the sheriff’s deputies, there was a lot of security around – many extra men in black t-shirts with belt holsters were in evidence.  Picture taking was frowned upon.  These days only security cameras can photograph your puss during such assemblies.  These videos are, of course, available to the state at their pleasure.  Recording the passing scene where people congregate is rapidly becoming a no-no for private individuals.

Then with almost one more hour in the serpentine, we were finally allowed into the warehouse with our dollies which all experienced ammo buyers always bring – the stuff is heavier than lead.  And today we were introduced to the rationing of 22s – one 500 round brick of long rifles per customer.  The other types were available, but at astronomical prices that no one had experienced before.  Yet people were coming out with their handcarts loaded with various calibers, spending literally thousands of dollars.  And there were a goodly portion of cash buyers who did not want a record of their purchases to wind up in Big Data.

It was after 11am when we loaded our heavy boxes into the truck and pulled out while still more people were arriving.  All late comers were evidently surprised, and kept asking whether they still needed a number this late in the day.  Kindly but firmly they were told, that yes, they still needed a number.  So that is how our gun rights are being constructively removed in the opening decades of the 21st century.  Welcome to the new normal in Obamastan.

A major takeaway from this morning was that we recognized so few of the hundreds of gun enthusiasts and ordinary citizens, all in a panic to stock up before … .  Easily nineteen out of twenty of these gun owners don’t participate in any public forum in which the direction of our country and public policies are discussed or debated.  These people, almost everyone wearing some cap or t-shirt extolling gun rights, the NRA, or whatnot, come out of the woodwork on days like this, then disappear again never to be seen until next year.  And listening to them grouse, there was a great temptation to inform them to get off their collective asses, and do something besides mumbling in their beer.

My friend had an idea that next year various organizations, those which also promote Second Amendment rights as part of their political outlook, should set up information booths at Miwall inviting these ammo buyers to do something in the interval besides shooting their guns and buying more ammo.  Perhaps that will happen, unless the feds either buy more billions of rounds to totally collapse the civilian market, or make it illegal to buy ammo at all without massive registrations, background checks, and fees – or both.

Ruminations - 14jun13 (Addended)

George Rebane

A new democultural milestone has been passed.  More whites now die than are being born in America.  Analyzing Census Bureau data, the Brookings Institution and others report that white women are now bearing 1.9 children on average, and as we all know, population stability occurs somewhere around 2.1 children to account for the death demographic that covers the range from infant mortality to old age.  This so-called “natural decrease” was previously predicted to start in 2020.  No big deal, all my life I have been in the minority in more categories than I care to count.  This just places all whites into one more minority group as our population is “browning up from the bottom.”  (more here)  Thermodynamics at work.

And another majority is firming up in this new age.  Given the multiple and growing IRS and DOJ scandals, the Pew Research Center reports that a majority of Americans – 53% - now believe that “the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms.”  (more here)  This, of course, is contrary to the opinion held by the hunky-dory segment of our political spectrum.

AmeriCorps is a bust.  That conclusion, long suspected, is now pretty much accepted by both sides of the aisle.  Author James Bovard writes, “After nearly 20 years and billions of taxpayer dollars, AmeriCorps has little to show.” (more here) The program has been another part of our feelgood government that has been kept alive by “Soviet style accounting” where effort is confused with accomplishment.  IMHO, soviet style accounting keeps most extra-constitutional government programs going.

Mental illness is incurable.  I conclude that from looking at how we selectively discriminate against people with any kind of mental malady in their history, ranging from being institutionalized to just seeing some kind of shrink with any one of a dozen sets of initials behind their name.  And the category of things a person with such a taint on the record is no longer qualified or permitted to do grows daily.  No proof beyond someone having accused you of being this or that, and the authorities investigating it is enough to condemn you for life – that stigma is indelible.  The latest proscription that government now seeks is to put such an item into the coming national gun database.  Today states have various thresholds for denying their residents the ability to buy/own firearms.  (more here)  But in whichever database, if that ‘mental history’ box is checked, your Second Amendment rights are history – you are incurable.

[Addendum] Nevada County’s marijuana code wars are ramping up again.  After posting the above, I received an email from Ms Patricia Smith, chariman of Americans for Safe Access – Nevada County, that contained a press release (Download Marijuana - PR Inititive Filing) which states that “on Monday, June 17, Americans for Safe Access - NC will be filing a Request for a Special Election to replace Ordinance 2349 with the Safe Cultivation Act of Nevada County.”  Also appended was a draft copy of the proposed Safe Cultivation Act (Download Marijuana - Patti's Initiative).  The conflicting and confusing laws and codes which define legal marijuana cultivation and use in America, California, and individual counties are fueling an unnecessary discontent that contributes more heat than light to the existing ideological incoherence already rampant in the land.  Another example of our inept politicians at work.

The Liberal Mind – Banish Bayes to Restore Crime

George Rebane

Over the years the charges of discrimination, racism, and racial profiling have flown thick and fast from our liberal cadres who oppose various policies of law enforcement.  And more specifically, the allocation of resources in such enforcement practices is always questioned when it weighs more heavily on one group vs another no matter the reason or particulars behind such allocations.  In such attacks from the Left, simplistic quotas rule the day.

A current example of this that will have national implications on our country’s crime rates is how the case of Floyd vs New York, addressing the NYPD’s ‘Stop, question, and frisk’ policy, will be resolved.

NYC’s crime rates have plummeted since the city restored some common sense policing policies returning to the officer on the beat historical prerogatives that every one of my generation understood and accommodated.  No one claims that a policeman’s ability to exercise SQF was never abused, but in the large and for generations it was put to effective use across the land.  NYC’s recent success has demonstrated that SQF’s politically correct removal from the law enforcement toolkit contributed greatly to increased murder and other crime rates over the last decades.

Today certified racist demagogues like the Rev Al Sharpton are leading the fight to have SQF repealed.  His success will cost lives in the black and Hispanic communities, and help restore crime rates to their former levels across the land.  But to that sumbich burnishing his public image trumps lowering crime and saving lives every time.  And the innumerate sheeple he agitates and herds don’t have a clue.

America, quo vadis et cui bono? (updated 20jun13)

George Rebane

Economic historian Niall Ferguson invites an answer to that question by first addressing ‘How America Lost Its Way’.  As the Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dr Ferguson is a man of some accomplishment and moment.  His new book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die publishes this Thursday.  The punchline of his message is that “it is getting ever harder to do business in the United States, and more stimulus won’t help: Our institutions need fixing.”

I bring this latest expose of America’s decline to the attention of RR readers as a matter of strong corroboration of the same message being documented regularly in these pages.  The Left’s echo chamber continues to divert the dialogue to discounting these warnings as the product of isolated sclerotic minds disconnected from the progressive push to recovery, now that the messiah is in the Oval Office, after having banished the deviltries of Bush2 and his crowd.  Ferguson argues that nothing could be further from the truth.

Citing metric after international metric, he shows the steady, alarming, and accelerating decline of the US in the last years.  We rank in the mud – the sixth worst in the world - with the likes of Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Yemen in the growth of regulatory friction that it takes to carry out a set of benchmark business practices.  And it is all due to the bureaucracies that our governments have set up.  Ferguson confirms that the recent and biggest buckets of sand into the country’s productive gears are Frank-Dodd and Obamacare, with the damage from these growing by the day.

And as we all know, the direct beneficiaries from all this bureaucracy and regulatory fog are not only the liberal politicians but also the “lawyers, not forgetting lobbyists and compliance departments. For complexity is not the friend of the little man. It is the friend of the deep pocket. It is the friend of cronyism.”  In the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index we have dropped from first place (yes, at the depth of the Great Recession) to seventh place on Obama’s watch.

In this light Ferguson asks, “What is the process at work here? Perhaps this is a victory from beyond the grave for classical Western political theory. Republics, after all, were regarded by most ancient political philosophers as condemned to decadence, or to imperial corruption. This was the lesson of Rome. Democracy was always likely to give way to oligarchy or tyranny. This was the lesson of the French Revolution. The late Mancur Olson had a modern version of such cyclical models, arguing that all political systems were bound to become the captives, over time, of special interests. The advantage enjoyed by West Germany and Japan after World War II, he suggested, was that all the rent-seeking elites of the pre-1945 period had been swept away by defeat. This was why Britain won the war but lost the peace.”

In the meantime we are busily building up our cadres of rent seekers, assured by progressive economists that our salvation lies in ever more borrowing, fiscal stimulus, higher taxes, and quantitative easing (money printing).  No one in Washington, and most certainly not in Sacramento, is facing up to the real impediments to growth and the resurgence of America.

[20jun13 update]  Niall Ferguson's The Great Degeneration is out, and it has been reviewed by no less than George Melloan in today's WSJ ('A Jeremiad To Heed').  The book report is a worthy read as is the book.  ("U.S. future obligations exceed future revenues by $200 trillion, and state and local governments face $38 trillion in unfunded obligations.")  I again feel a bittersweet vindication, for the volume is a 174 page condensation of what I have attempted to communicate in these pages over the last seven years.  Yes, and Professor Ferguson also considers less than bright the masses of voters who have inexorably brought the country to its present state, and who still see no reason to change their behavior.

‘Geislingen DP Camp Years: 1945-49’

George Rebane

As I have been assembling sketches of my childhood European experience, I found myself avoiding the considerable time we spent in the Geislingen DP camp.  So much growing up happened there that I couldn’t seem to get my arms around the story that would do justice to the life and lives then lived.  On the grand scale we found ourselves in the middle of an epic of epochal proportions.  Few in America know what went on during those post-war years in Europe, and most likely fewer today care.  But WW2 and its aftermath cast a long shadow from which we have yet to fully emerge.  Moreover, it was a time and place from which America would welcome millions of immigrants to become its new citizens, new Americans who would help to bring back the country from depression and war, and usher it into its golden age.  Having survived the war, my family was part of that DP experience and eventual exodus to the new worlds that selectively beckoned those millions of European refugees.

My procrastination came to an end a month ago as our youngest granddaughter, Catherine, emailed me that she had chosen my early life as the subject of her junior year project in high school.  She had read the previous entries in the ‘My Story’ part of RR, and, of course, heard more stories about ‘Papa’ from her mom and grandparents.  But she also noticed the big hole in the My Story timeline of the European years.

Well, one thing that grandparents will never put on the back burner is an opportunity to pass on their history, experience, and (plenty of) advice when the occasion presents itself.  Heaven knows, such opportunities are already rare enough, and here she comes to actually give that last little nudge which sent me to the keyboard, and Jo Ann scurrying to break out the old tattered Rebane family picture albums.  Type, type, type with my editor-in-chief telling me to go back and not forget to add another episode or event that would complete or further illuminate the story.

Catherine got the hot-off-the-press drafts, and wrote a excellent version of my early years in the form of a boy’s ‘diary’ that I had (never) kept, and which was interspersed with editorial expansions in a definite adult voice.  It is a well-composed piece that made an enjoyable read besides giving me a view of those early years through her eyes.  Now, for the interested reader, I offer my version - Download Geislingen DP Camp Years_v130608.

Energy Forever?

George Rebane

That the major sources of natural gas and oil are from earth’s chemical processes and not fossilized sources has been the subject of a quiet debate over the last decades.  If chemistry wins, then earth will supply humans with literally endless amounts of energy that will benefit everyone living on the planet.  And that debate is close to being resolved by research and testing that will soon be concluded.

The so-called abiotic theory of fuels production is one of the many reasons I have remained a skeptic on the wisdom of governments force feeding hundreds of billions of dollars into alternative energy sources like wind, waves, and solar.  Another of those reasons is that with all the hullabaloo about carbon footprints and CO2, we still don’t know the earth’s ‘carbon cycle’.  A major part that is now becoming clear is that oceans absorb tremendous amounts of atmospheric CO2 which is then used by marine critters and plants in their skeletons and structures.  And which is then subducted by tectonics into the earth’s upper mantle where temperature and pressure give rise to chemical transformation of water and CO2 into oils and natural gas (90% methane).  From there it bubbles and rises into huge reservoirs that literally cover ‘cover’ the earth’s subsurface.

The work at resolving this debate has been intensifying in recent years.  Already in 2009 Science Daily reported, “Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm have managed to prove that fossils from animals and plants are not necessary for crude oil and natural gas to be generated. The findings are revolutionary since this means, on the one hand, that it will be much easier to find these sources of energy and, on the other hand, that they can be found all over the globe.” 

At more recent conferences (see WSJ) actual field test and laboratory results have been presented which point to endless supplies of abiotic natural gas and crude oil.  Supposedly 60% of pumped crude is shown to be abiotic.  Only coal remains as the unchallenged ‘pure’ fossil fuel.

What all this demonstrates is that the policies in place (with more to come) to combat the man-made global warming (AGW) hypothesis are economically and socially misguided at worst, and premature at best.  All we know for sure is that support for the belief in correctible AGW comes from politically funded ‘mob science’ that cares only for maintaining the flow of its generous grants and subsidies guaranteed by the steady output of ‘correct results’.  But then, all this has been argued here and elsewhere over the last many years.

Now what’s different is that we may soon resolve the infinite energy supply question.  And if it’s there as all evidence portends, then there will be plenty of time to develop marketable alternative sources ranging from the renewables to nuclear fusion.  In the meantime we wouldn’t have to promote corrupt public policies like California’s AB32 to create commercial catastrophes across the landscape.  Cooking, heating, generating electricity, driving, ... with abundant and clean burning gas sounds like a great future to me.

It worked the first time (updated 9jun13)

Do not exhibit your sore finger for all to strike upon, and do not complain of it, for malice always pounds where it hurts most. …  Gracian #145

George Rebane
We have been told that the war on Al Qaeda and terrorism is over, and learn that the war on Americans has started.  The revelations of the last several weeks tell of it.  President Obama’s most compelling admission was his sidestep of the question put to him – Does the government’s big data maintain files on all Americans? 

To that we can add the fed’s recent and massive purchases of guns, (anti-personnel) ammo, MRAPs, …, the launch of FEMA Corps, and the reported construction of its nationwide ‘facilities’, all for the putative defense of the homeland. Now how again do you spell S-T-A-S-I?

[8jun13 update]  The Director of National Intelligence today released this "fact sheet" on PRISM.

[9jun13 update]  Now put Gen Clapper's "fact sheet" (claptrap?) and its exquisite wordsmithing in perspective with the Top Secret PRISM slides published by the Guardian, and available on Kurzweil's blog here.

Ruminations – 6jun13 (updated 7jun13)

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. ...  General Dwight David Eisenhower, 6 June 1944.

George Rebane

NPR continues its coverage of Holder, DOJ assault on journalists, and IRS political targetings.  Again they seem not to have gotten the word from their leftwing thought leaders here in Nevada County, those who tell us daily that the Obama scandals make no never mind, and are already relegated to the dustbin of history.  Perhaps our locals should send NPR an email or two for a heads up on the error of their ways.

The local supes look like they’re going to continue wasting (aka pissing away) a half a million to maintain their program of code compliance harassment or enforcement, whatever.  One supe even justified the low ROI from the program by comparing building code compliance expenditures with the sheriff’s department budget, citing that the latter also costs a lot and doesn’t return much money.  Logic like that sure explains away the financial messes in which most local jurisdictions wallow today.  I can already hear the hew and cry from our citizens if the county should stop sending its code enforcement cadres out into the hills – ‘No, please come and inspect me!  I may have overlooked some code infractions that need correcting, and fees that I still need to pay.  Puhleeeze!’  Makes all the sense in the world to equate the critical services provided by the sheriff and those of the county code compliance department (under the Community Development Agency, CDA), you think?

We the iSheeple

George Rebane

The RR category ‘We the Sheeple’ has been renamed ‘We the iSheeple’ in order to keep up with the times that require starting certain words with the lower case ‘i’.  Except for some outrageous ideas wrangled in these pages, RR has been pretty staid in its approach to format and matters of eye candy.  During the life of this commentary there has been a steady rise in the number of media reports that acknowledge, nay, confirm that we live in a land of the ill-informed, insouciant, inane, ignorant, insane, and idiotic – hence the real reason for adorning Sheeple with an i, for it gives meaning and therefore belongs there.

For the few that may care, the i that metaphorically broke this camel’s back was a couple of insane non-sequitors in the 3jun13 Union.  It seems that a band of idiots gathered recently to deny elephant rides to children attending this year’s upcoming Nevada County Fair.  These same people are the local representatives of known regional and national organizations that concern themselves with such things as ethical treatment of animals and children’s safety, and other matters that in their daily round iSheeple are not capable of handling themselves.

And then we come to a local moving & storage company that now has to get rid of its perfectly good trucks and replace them with new ones prescribed by CARB, the enforcer of our state’s mega-albatross job killer AB32.  To the tune of $1.3M they will comply with this certifiably insane legislation and accede to the mandated purchase of fourteen new vehicles that purportedly will sport cleaner engines.  The result of the costly exercise will have absolutely no measurable effect on any clean air metric you care to dredge up, let alone any effect on providing a better quality of life to earth’s inhabitants.

Of course I could go on, and perusing my past posts shows that I have done so in abundance.  More than ever, and with each passing day it is beyond any lingering reasonable doubt that we have become a nation of iSheeple - the ill-informed, insouciant, inane, ignorant, insane, and idiotic.

Mugsy explains it away

George Rebane

[At police headquarters we enter the viewing room showing an interrogation already in progress with Mugsy, an accomplished bank robber.]

Detective:  So Mugsy, we had you under surveillance and saw you enter the bank packing heat and a note in your pocket that read, ‘THIS IS A HOLDUP, don’t make any noise or press the alarm.  Bring me all the money in a bag.’
Mugsy: Yeah, but I wasn’t gonna do nuttin’.
D:  What d’ya mean you wasn’t going to do nothin’?  You had the gun and the note when you were walking up to the teller window.
M:  Yeah, yeah.  But that don’t mean nuttin’, cause I wasn’t going to rob no bank.
D:  Now you don’t expect anyone to believe that.  What were you going to do if we hadn’t stopped you?
M:  Well, I was just going to hand the note to the teller, and when she brought me the money, I was planning to give it back to her, and tell her it was all just a gag.
D:  Hmm, … alright, I guess that story will hold water.  OK you’re free to go, but next time Mugsy, be careful with your jokes.  We coulda accidently shot you, know what I mean?

... in the Eye of the Beholder

"That's because we haven't yet played Cowboys and Muslims, but it's a'comin'."  (punchline to a joke about a conversation between an American Indian, a Muslim exchange student, and an old cowboy waiting at a small town airport in Montana.)

George Rebane

Readers should be clear by now that I don’t record these thoughts to endear myself to as many hearts as possible.  I saw a piece on today’s WSJ online edition that called to mind the important things that I believe our country (world?) is facing.  And it isn’t global warming or healthcare or immigration reform or … .

Instead, according to my lights the world shaking issues we are facing are 1) the approach of the Singularity, 2) the entrenchment of national dumbth, 3) the race between tyranny and the war between civilizations.  Singularity’s approach is driven by AI, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering.  It’s byproducts are universal online education, destabilizing systemic unemployment, accelerating inequities, and species threatening ‘plague’.

The country's dumbth (google it) is here and politically ineradicable.  The national commons has been established and is well on its way to being destroyed, while the attempts to maintain it will take America to the brink of revolution.

Due to the inexorable course of issues 1 and 2 our present progress toward a post-constitutional tyranny is also well established and abetted by technology.  And given our refusal to acknowledge the dominant dynamism of Islam, its colonization of infidel lands will accelerate, punctuated by ever greater incidents of terror that will have the weaker societies suing for peace at any cost – adoption of Sharia being the least of them (more here, here, and here).  Only a ‘great awakening’ in the west, of which no harbinger is evident, would preclude such a pre-Singularity future.  If the Singularity ‘wins’ this race, all bets are off by definition.

These are all issues and predictions that have decorated these pages for years now.  I see no observables that would cause me to recant any of this record.  So I was surprised to see an interview with Jaan Tallinn in the 2jun13 WSJ.  Tallinn is the inventor of Skype and co-founder of the early stage company that capitalized the technology.  He is now building a new company “MetaMed, which promises customers personalized health-care research and analysis of their medical conditions.”  (These are the kind of innovations that will wind up providing the real improvements in healthcare.)

In the interview Tallinn goes on to outline his own apprehensions about mankind’s shared future which are eerily in lockstep with what I have been trying to alert my family, friends, and RR readers.

What risks worry him? "The first one is artificial intelligence," he says. "The second is the things that technological progress might create that we're unaware of right now." … His third fear is biological risk. "There could be synthetic viruses that evolution doesn't even know how to create," says Mr. Tallinn. For all practical purposes, he suggests, evolution stopped with the advent of gene technology. "The future of the planet depends much more on technology than evolution," he adds.

When one’s notions are so frequently out of step with popularly received wisdom, it is heartening to run across yet another respected co-traveler with similar views.  Maybe it’s just an Estonian thing, but I don’t think so.