Rebane's Ruminations

The Great Divide through Restructuring? (updated 31jul13)

George Rebane

Eight counties in northeastern Colorado are looking at the possibility of becoming the nation’s 51st state.  Like so many idyllic locales in the country, Colorado’s population corridor along the eastern slope of the Rockies has been successfully invaded by progressives immigrating from places like California where they have managed to soil their own nest.  And like in California, huge sections of Colorado now suffer taxation and regulation without representation from Denver.  So, these eight counties are exploring ways to again become free to pursue their own ideas of life, liberty, and property.

RR readers are familiar with the Great Divide debate that is growing across America as socialism’s autocracy reaches its tentacles into the last lairs of self-reliance and entrepreneurship.  (See the Great Divide category link in the right panel.)  The Colorado Eight are just the latest jurisdictions to express their yearning for a future not destined for a coerced comprehensive collectivism.  (more here, and google ‘8 counties, Colorado’)

These eight counties may be on to something that can help preserve the Union, albeit in a restructured way that allows the Great Experiment bequeathed by our Founders to continue.  To the idea of breakaway counties forming their own state (a la West Virginia), I offer that restructuring could come about in certain cases where such counties abut a neighboring state more congenial to the culture and values of such disenchanted populations.  In the case of Colorado, these eight counties might consider appealing to Wyoming, if such a realignment is mutually attractive.

Here in California most of the more sparsely populated inland counties already stand raped by regulations from Sacramento and Washington.  We have little in common with the liberal legions that dominate the coastal areas, and the two big metropolitan regions of the state.  The new state of Sierra(?) is beginning to look better by the day.

There is no guarantee that such a restructuring will work because socialism is a disease powered by ideological evangelism – ‘We know what’s best for you, or else.’  And it spreads virally, appealing to the under-educated with promises of redistribution and through co-opting public education to manufacture more of the under-educated.  But then again, we can dream …

[31jul13 update]  For completeness, this contribution to RR’s Great Divide category was meant to elicit inputs from the Left that illustrate what drives such a notion of self-governance in the America of the 21st century.  As of this writing it has done so in spades.

The Liberal Mind – Expendable Dead for More Votes

George Rebane

Through extreme cynicism (read evil) or utter stupidity, the liberal candidates for mayor in NYC are again attacking the city’s ‘Stop, Question, Frisk’ policy which has been the centerpiece of policing that has dramatically reduced crime rates in that large metropolis.  Last year SQF was material in dropping crime another 30% from the previous year.  And now the leftwing candidates are all taking turns lambasting SQF as being a bad policy based on “racial profiling”.

The best that can be said about the lot of these politicians is that each of them is profoundly innumerate; the alternative is that they know better and are just being slime bags playing to voter ignorance in order to get elected.  For openers, over 70% of NYC perpetrators are black, and only 53% of those stopped are black.  And of those stopped, fewer than 9% are frisked.

Blacks make up about one in four or 25% of the city’s population, and constitute several times that percentage in perpetrating crimes and being victims of it by their ‘own hands’.  Yet when the carefully trained NYC police practice SQF in a manner that **under represents** the proportion of blacks stopped, the slime bags take advantage of their ignorant constituencies and shout ‘racial profiling’.


The nearby graphic illustrates the situation that confronts the cop on the beat every time he starts a new watch.  The blue rectangle denotes the NYC population, the black rectangle is the black population, the tan rectangle is the city’s non-black population.  And the red rectangle represents the distribution of crime perpetrators.  So the question in the very successful application of SQF is ‘What in hell is a cop supposed to do when he suspects that a person has committed a crime or is in the process of about to commit one?’

The situation about who the criminals are is so lopsided when it comes to race, that even under-applying SQF yields good results in the sense of drastically lowering the city’s crime rate, and in the process saving numerous lives annually.  Those lives mean nothing to the sleaze bags who are willing to sacrifice anything to get elected.  If they succeed in pulling back SQF, then the lives lost will be countable and directly attributable to their demagoguery.  But we can bet the ranch that not one politically correct lamestream outlet will report on that.  Why?  Because it’s the wrong agenda; it doesn’t count if blacks kill blacks, just like it doesn’t count when Muslim fathers honor kill their daughters.

Wanted by Obamacare: The young and the stupid (updated 31jul13)

George Rebane

You really can’t make up the stuff that rolls out of what passes for brains inside the Beltway.  The ads SecHHS Sebelius is making to attract young people who neither need nor want health insurance, especially of the Obamacare variety, are designed to appeal to mental profiles that range between the innocent altruistic and the terminally imbecilic.  A cognitive niche well frequented by politicians, demagogues, and other salesmen of various stripe.

But the latest batch from Team Obama to be crying bloody murder at the prospect of getting f@#&*d over by Obamacare is the National Treasury Employees Union.  This is the IRS union that will now represent the 16,000+ additional IRS numb nuts to crack the whip over the rest of us who have to comply with Obamacare’s diktats.  Those union guys know what a pile of crap our new healthcare law is, and they want no part of it.  So they are appealing to anyone who will listen at the White House for the messiah to have mercy and include them in the growing legions of leftwingers who want a pass on Obamacare.

Their arguments are all the same – ‘we paid plenty to get your butt elected.  You were bought and paid for, now deliver!’  After applying the Pelosi Principle to the unaffordable care act, everyone with a couple of neurons to rub together wants to climb on the already crowded Exemption Express.

If the Republicans can’t make hay with these kinds of political miracles coming their way, then …, oh never mind.

[31jul13 update]  The daily dose of Obamacare atrocities just grows as the revelatory Pelosi Principle is applied to those thousands of pages.  The newest is something called the 340B program for hospitals about which Dr Scott Gottlieb writes, “The 340B program was meant to help about 90 hospitals buy drugs to treat the poor. Now 1,675 hospitals qualify.”  Read ‘How Obamacare Hurts Patients’, it’ll curl your toes the wrong way.

This part of the Obamacare trainwreck is already driving the price of cancer treatment drugs through the roof and insurance coverage sky high for such drugs.  And then we come to the huge network of middle-men gamers that have suddenly appeared in the last year as this crap for law oozes across the land.

In the meantime our liberal rooting section is citing tearful anecdotes about people who have and are being helped through outlandish government subsidies, while they totally ignore the tens of thousands who will now die early cancer deaths as the 340B program kicks into high gear.  And we all (well, not the progressives) have to remember that this is one of hundreds of such buckets of legal, regulatory, administrative, additional fees, procedural, … crappola that we will be forced to wade through in the coming years, unless by some stroke of luck …

Atheists need chaplains too (updated 28jul13)

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 26 July 2013.]

New levels of social justice are being sought in our military.  The very same people who militate for separating church and state in all corners of public life are now demanding to have their fair share of padres in the armed services.  Actually, in the military men of God are called chaplains, and now (seatbelts please) atheists are demanding that the military provide them the comfort of a compassionate chaplain who shares their religion. (more here)

Did I say religion?  Yes, atheism is a religion because it satisfies the requirements of a distinct faith in the structure, organization, and origin of the cosmos and everything in it.  Let’s not confuse the atheist with the agnostic.  An agnostic is a person whose belief system is moot about the existence or absence of God, Creator, Universal Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it.  An agnostic believes that God’s existence is either unknown, or more strongly, that it is unknowable.  (more here)

This is a distinct difference from the atheists, who sometimes also call themselves humanists, and who believe strongly that there is no God.  They have had their case made by notables like physicist Stephen Hawking and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Their philosophy is the ‘turtles all the way down’ theory of cosmology.  Mankind will just keep discovering ever more esoteric layers of scientific knowledge, each of which underpins all the previous layers of our understanding.  Research without end, Amen.

But unfortunately, atheists can claim no science to back up their professions of God’s absence.  You see, science is a biped, it advances only on the principles of falsifiability and Occam’s razor.  The latter resolves questions between two competing theories which explain all the known observations and data, and then selects the simplest of the two for further exploration.  Falsifiability is the bedrock principle of science.  Every proposed theory of science must be such that it can describe tests or realworld experiments, which if it fails, would cause it to be discarded as a description of truth about our universe.

Obama’s Latest Planless Pivot on the Economy

George Rebane

The President is on the stump again in a desperate effort to divert attention from his administration’s scandals and jobless recovery.  He is pivoting on platitudes which the sheeple noddingly accept as planning.  I have often advised readers on the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective.  The President is into his fifth year giving evidence that he does not understand that difference, but there is also an alternative explanation.

His “plan” consists of specifics like ‘creating more jobs’, ‘raising middle class wages’, and ‘fixing education’.  Typical of socialist thought, his objectives all along have been to reduce inequality rather than promote growth.  And what such objectives result in are policies that seek to distribute ever more broadly wealth that has not been created by the private sector.   No administration has hurt the middle class as much as Obama’s whose policies have burdened businesses to such an extent that middle class wages have actually dropped during this so-called recovery.  (Recall, I still maintain that we are in Depression2.)

Every new regulation and tax added by government increases economic friction.  For example, the closest Obama has come to specifying something from a plan is his prescription to fix education by reducing its cost.  How does he plan to do that?  We don’t really know, but the first thing he wants Congress to do is to pass a new law requiring colleges and universities to start submitting regular reports to government on their spending, student attendance, and graduation statistics.  Brilliant!  Now these hoary bureaucracies will have to add another layer of faceless employees to satisfy this new government diktat.

The President continues to pillory his opposition with the Grand Lie that the other side has offered nothing better than what his minions have inflicted on us.  This ignores the specific proposals on tax reductions, regulatory rollbacks (including Obamacare), and tort reform that have been advanced continuously for years by the more conservative economists and institutions.  When these are brought up in Congress, the progressives immediately pronounce them DOA and then deny that any such proposals have been made.

In the meantime 100+ more cities in the country are getting ready to follow Detroit and pull the Chapter 9 trigger.  The unfunded liabilities problem, created by atrocious union pension plans that was pooh-poohed for years (even on these pages), has now become a reality.  The response to it all has been a combination of crickets and denial, while at the same time arguing that the jurisdictions have no recourse but to pay the contracted amounts – one way or another.  Progressive public policies passing in review.

The problem, as long argued on RR, is an electorate of ever more ignorant sheeple.  Obama is not laughed off the podium because the adoring faces surrounding him really believe in the fertilizer he spreads to grow their unfounded faith in the brand of hope and change he has been successfully peddling since 2008.  Our post-American president is on plan with his fundamental transformation, the major element of which is an economically weak United States which creates the pre-requisites for an international standdown and internal class warfare.

So this is how the federal tension is going to spend itself for the rest of summer until the debt limit brouhaha starts again later this year.  The bottom line is that spreading wealth rather than creating it ignores the fundamental truth that the public sector cannot distribute what the private sector does not create.

Corporate Taxes – One more time

George Rebane

A major teaching point of RR over the years has been that corporations pay no taxes.  Corporate taxes are another preferred ruse of world governments to enable them to take more out of the pockets of real taxpayers.  Now we hear that the OECD is doubling down on the bamboozle with something called the “base erosion and profit shifting” (BEPS) project.  BEPS is supposed to stop corporations from paying lower than their ‘fair share’ of taxes.  However, as the nearby chart shows, this is a smokescreen since corporations have been doing anything but paying a lower share of the GDP in taxes.

As the 23jul13 WSJ points out, what BEPS promises to do is to make corporate tax planning more complex and in the end raise corporate taxes.  The oblivians of the world will raise their voices in another chorus of huzzahs as they promote one more round of slow growth and auto-impoverishment.   In reality and “for all the huffing and puffing, there is no crisis of corporate tax collection. The deficits across the developed world are the product of slow economic growth and overspending, not tax evasion. But none of this has stopped the OECD from offering its 15-point plan to increase the cost and complexity of complying with corporate-tax rules.”

The real solution is “everyone (moving) toward lower rates and simpler tax codes, with fewer opportunities for gamesmanship and smaller rate disparities among countries”.  But socialism never takes that kind of enlightened view of economic behavior or economies – after all, it smacks of the Laffer curve.  But none of these international machinations would be possible if people wizened up and understood the nature and purpose of corporate taxes.

“Whisper it, but corporations don't pay taxes anyway. They merely collect taxes—from customers via higher prices, shareholders in lower returns, or employees in lower wages and benefits.”

Transnationalists will simply SWAT us

George Rebane

Former Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) was recently interviewed about a significant piece on 'American sovereignty and its enemies' he co-authored in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs.  In there he details the thrust and progress that US transnationalists (nee globalists) have made in bringing the America we know and love to its knees in the community of nations.  In short, Senator Kyl corroborates the oft made case in RR that the real goal of our progressives is to deliver the US as a weakened and compliant nation into the arms of a new world order based on the collectivist ideology that currently underpins the European Union.  The objective is to eradicate the sovereign nation state as a viable institution on the world scene, and replace it with an overarching global government.  I think of it as sharia without Allah (but Allah will work if it speeds up the process).

Again, lest the leftwing starts its usual howls, transforming toward transnationalism is not a conspiracy, but is precisely the “fundamental transformation” promised by President Obama.  Recall that I have long held that all of Obama’s actions and initiatives can be explained and also predicted simply on the basis of his seeking to be the first post-American president (here and here).  Senator Kyl puts more meat on the bones of this proposition by citing the efforts of three recent Team Obama academics – Navi Pillay (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), Howard Koh (Yale Law School), Anne-Marie Slaughter (Dean, Princeton’s School of Public Affairs).

These individuals form the vanguard of “a group of powerful legal scholars trying to make an end run around the Constitution” through changing US laws to put the country under the aegis of international bureaucracies instead of our constitutionally constituted representative government.  Formally, their movement is known as ‘legal transnationalism’, an initiative with “advocates (who) are making major strides under an Obama administration that is itself a hotbed of transnational legal thinking.”

Ruminations – 19jul13 (updated++)

George Rebane

A fundamental tenet on RR has been that as government grows in size and scope, it also grows in becoming intrinsically evil through the conduct of its mega-monied politicians and recourse proof bureaucrats.  Here are some current observations that bolster that argument.

Charities have become fiefs of big government.  How?  First, they take the money from those who would give more to charities, then they invite the charities to beg for the same funds.  But first the charities have to satisfy certain government agendas, and not the requirements of the people who would freely give.  Almost every charity of any size now expects to receive a sizeable portion of its funding from the state after submitting appropriate proposals and bona fides attesting to their politically correct disbursal of funds received.  In the 18jul13 WSJ James Pierson makes the case that “Much of the not-for-profit sector has become a junior partner in administering the welfare state.” (more here)  And that’s the point of it all, is it not?  – all benefices will henceforth flow from government to which all homage and glory belong.

Eritrea and the United States are unique in that they shamefully share what here is called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).  This piece of obamunism became law in 2010, and as most of this grandiose socialist’s other ideas, it has turned into a monster.  First, it has made living abroad for Americans an expensive accounting hell, and then it piles on by creating bad will between countries that asymmetrically enforce FATCA-type policies on their expatriates.  Professor Colleen Gaffy (Pepperdine University) demonstrates that “the core injustice in America’s tax policy is that it is based on citizenship rather than residence.  You ask what could possibly be wrong to pay taxes in two nations concurrently.   The answer (here) will surprise you.  But ultimately FATCA is a sure sign that we are now acting like a descending autocracy desperately attempting to control and milk our citizens wherever they may be found.

Agenda21 marches on.  The latest involves the “U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal to declare two million acres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains as “critical habitat” for the Sierra Nevada Yellow Legged Frog and the Yosemite Toad under the Endangered Species Act.”  And the consequence will be another constraint added to the long list that already prohibits Americans the use of their public lands.  And the telling part is that these critters aren’t even being endangered by humans, but other critters.  But that don’t make no never mind when Americans need to be herded and corralled into their sustainable smart growth stack&pack future.  Congressman Tom McClintock recently summarized an excellent appeal to sanity on the floor of the House in a short speech titled ‘The Real Endangered Species: The Sierra Nevada Hard Working Family’.

“… honor the memory of Treyvon Martin.” (updated 26jul13)

George Rebane

The memory of Treyvon Martin has now been honored by everyone from the President to the punks smashing windows and setting fires to demonstrate their outrage at the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the nation’s legal system.  In doing the latter I’m tempted to join them.

According to our legal system as exercised in Sanford, the evidence showed that Martin was a young thug trying to bash the brains out of the man who finally shot him.  Since the shooting, both the press and the police have done their best to hide Martin’s past because he was a black minor.  Well, more than a minor.  As Zimmerman’s prosecutors characterized him, that evening Martin was an ‘apprehensive child’ trying to reach safety and the warmth of his home and family while suffering a ‘child’s worst fears’ by being ‘stalked in the night’.

Since then, a bit more has come out on the background of that child pictured nearby.  The Miami-Dade police and school authorities had to jump through hoops not to arrest the young man for burglary and possession of stolen goods.  And there’s even more coming out that you will not see in the lamestream which has spent the last year calling for Zimmerman’s head, but this blog with appropriate links is as good a place to start as any. 

So the Sanford court delivered its justice, and found that even lying down, with his head being pounded into a concrete sidewalk,  Zimmerman had every right to ‘stand’ his ground, draw his weapon, and kill Martin in order to save his own life.  But in our system of jurisprudence, one that used to eschew double jeopardy, this is not the end of it.  As we discovered in the OJ Simpson case, being acquitted of murder does not end your jeopardy.  You can be re-indicted on civil charges, just as if you had committed the act of which you were found innocent, and then be adjudicated into financial oblivion.

But wait, there’s more.  With the Zimmerman case we have launched into the era of triple jeopardy.  Those ever stalwart men of God and minders of the plantation, the Revs Jackson and Sharpton, have joined with the NAACP to plan a very nasty future for George Zimmerman.  First they convince Holder’s DOJ to file criminal charges against Zimmerman for violating (seat belts please) Martin’s civil rights.  And then, whether that works or not, they will go after him in a civil lawsuit a la Simpson.  And on top of that, thanks to the lamestream’s ample coverage of the acquittal and follow-on demonstrations of rage, Zimmerman will wear a bullseye on his back for a very long time.

In the meantime, Holder is pandering to the NAACP, promising to review the nation’s stand-your-ground laws as being the newly discovered basis for the (diminishing) gun violence in the land.  Oh yes, speaking of race, did anyone give a big rat’s ass for the ongoing stream of black-on-black murders in Chicago (46 blacks killed there during the trial) and other big cities in this interval.  Or did you notice all the demonstrations against the two Georgia black teen-agers who killed a baby by shooting him in the face and wounding his mother during a robbery?  Who honored the memory of 13-month-old Antonio Santiago?

I don’t think we have to look too deeply through the progressive smoke screen to see real racism practiced daily in America.

[21jul13 update - corrected]  As President Obama continues to fan the Zimmerman trial flames evident in dozens of cities across the nation, I definitely feel that he has a deeper agenda for which the trial’s verdict can serve as fuel.  Of the many statements in his “deeply personal” speech about the event that could have used a big dose of silence, he stated, “… if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?  And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?  And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

That he introduced the potential justification of an armed Martin shooting Zimmerman for no more than following him in a neighborhood where Zimmerman was volunteering as a member of the neighborhood watch, raises more than eyebrows.   Asking us to consider the two acts as somehow being equivalent or having an “ambiguous” answer throws the entire issue of stand your ground into a cocked hat, and goes on to support the nationwide protests already rejecting the Zimmerman verdict and looking for all manner of hypotheticals to continue focusing on race and civil rights violations as being the cause of Martin’s being shot that now requires additional judicial action.

The immediate beneficiaries of the President’s hypothetical are the attorneys for Dunn, who from his car gunned down a black teenager in another car, an unarmed teenager who had no physical contact with Dunn or made no move to threaten him (here).  Dunn’s defense before the President’s remarks was tenuous if it existed at all.  After that presidential demagoguery I can see Dunn’s attorneys dropping to their knees, raising their hands in gratitude, and shouting ‘Thank you, thank you Lord!!’

The facts of the matter, that no one wants to address about Zimmerman’s actions or that of Jesse Jackson’s equivalent assessment, are that according to DoJ statistics –
•    Blacks make up 13% of the population,
•    Since 1975 blacks have committed more than half of ALL the nation’s murders;
•    And 93% of murdered blacks were killed by blacks.

Now I know that progressives have had more than a little trouble reasoning, especially when it involves elements of numeracy – that has been academically corroborated (more here and here).  I challenge a liberal to draw the Venn diagram for that situation without first going back to ding-dong school.  Of course a few rightwingers may also struggle ;-)  But if you brought the teachings of the good Reverend Bayes to bear on these statistics, then it becomes apparent that beating the drums on the Zimmerman case is an ongoing smokescreen raised by the liberal elites to hide their massive failures in social policies (economic and educational) that for the last 40 years have been promoted to help the black population.  Their effect has been exactly the opposite, beginning with the destruction of the strong black family ethic in the 1960s.

Now we holler and wail about ‘stereotyping’ and the injustice it causes.  It does no such thing when considered on an individual decision level.  As I have attempted to illuminate in these pages, stereotyping (intuiting the correct Bayesian conditional posterior probability) is one of the most powerful survival mechanisms that humans and ALL critters have evolved over the eons.  What we pejoratively label as stereotyping is fundamental to Bayesian decision making, which is demonstrably the most powerful and effective approach to dealing with problems in an uncertain environment.  And without going into the numerical weeds that surround the above quoted statistics, those numbers themselves advise an extra dose of caution when encountering a young black male on a lonely dark street, whether he be an opportunistic thug or a young neurosurgeon like Dr Ben Carson (by his own report).

Were you asked to bet you assets on the intentions of such a black man, you would wisely vote with the Rev Jesse Jackson.  Were you instead asked to bet your ass, you would definitely make a run for it before seeking any more edifying information.  And starting with the numbers, that sad state of affairs is what underlies the entire problem of racist stereotyping.  The real crime is that the national black leadership refuses to address the existential problem of the behavior of young black men staring them in the face for the last several decades.   (I was heartened to again hear Jason Riley of WSJ eloquently agree with these conclusions.)

[26jul13 update]  Bill Whittle of PJMedia presents an excellent summary of the Trayvon Martin case in this video, and contrasts it with the reprehensible 'coverage' given in the lamestream.

Equality Questioned (updated 15jul13)

A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.  Thomas Jefferson

George Rebane

Here’s a notion that should set progressive hearts palpitating, perhaps even inducing a case or two of apoplexy.  Should citizens deemed mentally (not physically) incapable of caring for themselves be granted a full franchise in a republican democracy?

In these pages this notion has risen implicitly over the years, and most recently occurred to me again during a thread on food stamps that developed in the comment stream of ‘Mindbending Marijuana’.  There I was asked whether I supported foodstamps, the 80% hidden component that has historically been included in past farm bills, and that was recently excised from the current House version going through Congress.  I repeat an edited version of my reply.

Ruminations - 9jul13 (updated 11jul13)

George Rebane

The new sport in Washington played by Congress, unions, and big corporations is chipping away at Obamacare - causing chaos in the small business sector.  Everyone wants to hide from the crap coming off the fan, and leave the other guy fully exposed.  Already eight components of it have been delayed or canceled. And the liberals are still keeping a stiff public upper lip.  Reason aside, as always.

Meanwhile, the Big O is asking Americans not to be so “cynical about our government”.  Giving lie to that statement before inhaling, the President then promised to do a major overhaul to improve the efficiency of the federal government - a plan for "smarter government".  Seat belts please.  Abandoning any pretense of humility, he is going to make it run like the well-oiled machine that was his campaign (pick either one).  Well there’s one part that he has already integrated beyond extraction, and that is Chicago style politics, starting with the Big Lie and the Bypass Congress two-step.  The rest of the makeover will be harder, because in his campaign organization he could can those who couldn’t.

BB4 on Climate Change (updated 26jul13)

George Rebane

Breaking Bread Edition #4 on Climate Change will be recorded this Monday at the NCTV studios.  The issues discussion program will be hosted by Eric Tombs and I will be one of Eric’s guests.  Climate change is, of course, today’s more acceptable term for global warming, specifically man-made or anthropogenic GW, specifically correctable AGW, and specifically ‘We just gotta do SOMETHING!!!’ AGW.  We had a pre-taping session the other day during which the strong argument of the true believers was again presented – consensus science.  When it was pointed out that 1) there is no consensus science on AGW, and 2) consensus science should send up red flags and wailing sirens whenever it is cited, things got a little heated.

What really nudged me to post on this was Matt Ridley’s Mind and Matter column in the 6jul13 WSJ titled ‘Science is about Evidence NOT Consensus’.  (Sadly, this is Dr Ridley’s last regular column for the WSJ.  The distinguished author and member of the House of Lords is returning to his many other pursuits.  I shall miss him.)  Ridley uses climate change as his example to teach how scientific propositions should be evaluated.  RR readers are well aware of his arguments which have made not a dent in some commenters beliefs on the matter.

Well, at our BB4 meeting it became clear that ‘Consensus Über Alles’ will be the one and only redoubt from which the adherents of climate change will sally forth.  The format of BB properly prohibits participants launching ad homonyms against their opposite numbers.  It is a forum where ideas are explained, and where ideas may then contend on their own merits.  However, today this topic is so asymmetrically supported by reason that it was suggested there should be no attempt to discredit consensus science if that is all one could muster to support energetic public policies to combat AGW.  The short of it was that opinions based on warm fuzzies should weigh equally with those more formidably armed - after all, are we not all equal?  But not to worry dear reader, the proposal did not carry.

Matt Ridley’s swansong admonitions are worthy recounting as we prepare for the 2,047,619th ‘discussion’ on climate change.

…the "consensus" about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made, both of which I readily agree with. Forecasts show huge uncertainty.

…science does not respect consensus. There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA) and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false. Science, Richard Feynman once said, is "the belief in the ignorance of experts."

So, yes, it is the evidence that persuades me whether a theory is right or wrong, and no, I could not care less what the "consensus" says.

The article is too short, but well worth the read.

[11jul13 update]  We taped BB4 last Monday (8jul13) evening at NCTV, and apparently it has already been aired, and will be again.  For the next showings please visit NCTV here.  It will soon be available for online viewing on the Breaking Bread website.

[19jul13 update] Remaining BB4 broadcast from NCTV are:

Thursday 7/18/2013, 6:00 PM, Channel 11

Sunday 7/21/2013, 5:00 PM, Channel 11

Monday 7/22/2013, 9:30 AM, Channel 11

No word yet on when it will appear on line.

[26jul13 update]  The video of BB4 is archived and can be found on this page of the NCTV website filed under 18 July programs - or you can simply search the page (Ctrl F) with 'Breaking Bread'.

 

Horrific Healthcare Update (updated)

George Rebane

We are all familiar with the ineptness and incompetence with which government operates programs that were sold with the familiar refrain ‘we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’  The news on the ability of government to do anything right, beyond its constitutional mandate of protecting the nation, just keeps getting worse.  To much of all this we have developed a tin ear, and at least half of us don’t even know what’s going on.

Fox News revisited the growing debacle of benefits for wounded veterans.  Seatbelts on?  Upon discharge from military hospitals veterans must apply for continuing benefits.  On the average, a disabled veteran must fill out 613 separate forms from 18 different (and overalapping) agencies to get the process going.  Every year these applications take 43,000,000 hours to process by government workers (I expect that at $100 per burdened hour). Today the broken system has an 833,000 claim backlog in which claims take an average of 260 days to work through, and some up to three years.

Onto such demonstrated bureaucratic incompetence our IRS has been mandated by Obamacare to administer this legislative late-term abortion.  And it’s clear that no one really knows what to do to implement the core function of the law which is comprised of the employer and individual mandates to purchase state-designated health insurance.  The approaching Obamacare “train wreck” has now become so obvious that it is necessary to grant exceptions, deferrals, and delay its implementation part by noxious part.  The employer mandate has been quietly pushed back from its legislated start of 2014 to 2015, after the mid-term elections.  The administration scumbags don’t want to saddle the entire Democratic party with the inevitable bad news that will become a torrent during an election year as application of the mandate is attempted.

Meanwhile businesses have already begun insulating themselves the best they can.  The so-called ‘49ers’ are jumping through hoops by not hiring, reducing jobs, sharing jobs, etc to keep under the 50 FTE threshold where fines get levied and extra reporting kicks in if they don’t provide government prescribed healthcare to their workers.  (All businesses must still file a new monthly report to the IRS on the hourly breakdown of each employee's work.)

But the real screamer is that the feds (Treasury Department) are neither ready nor have a clue about how to process the claims and information that will roll in from America’s 5.7 million businesses - their data management systems are not up to handling the work, and the actual processes to shuffle the reports etc are beyond their ken.  Montana senator Max Baucus, an author of this legislative cow pie, knew of what he spoke when he uttered the now famous assessment of what is coming at us down the rails.  The only thing working without a hitch is the big Lie Factory at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that has now perfected the Congressional End-run as it fundamentally transforms the nation.

[update]  To make the impact of the described train wreck more clear, we should also take a closer look at this year’s job reports that are making a thrill go down the legs of the people at National Propaganda Radio.  The up reports culminated with the Labor Dept dubious report that in June employers increased the total non-farm payrolls by 195K.   Most people just take this number as the number of regular jobs added.  But the jobs report is another squirrely statistic that comes out of the Beltway (details here http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm ).  In what we consider normal full time jobs, the 195K is reduced considerably.  Overall, June’s contribution brings the year’s total to 687K jobs added in 2013.


But all jobs are not created equal, and even less equal when the feds declare that they have lowered the full time work week to 30 hours from the usual accounting of 35 hours or more.  When we break down the year’s total new jobs, we find that only 130K full time jobs have been created this year.  The remaining 557K jobs are part time, and mostly in the hospitality industry – ‘… and would like fries with that?’  When the June job situation is examined more closely (see graphic from Zero Hedge), we find that according to the June Household Survey the full time job count actually plunged.  The positive report was made up by a sizeable part time hiring as employers attempt to minimize Obamacare damage to their businesses by attempting to game their employee counts as the fed’s wallow in indecision, misinformation, and just plain incompetence in getting this version of nationalized healthcare going.

Mindbending Marijuana

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 5 July 2013.]

For years I straddled the fence on the legalization of drug use, especially seemingly benign versions like marijuana.  Then I finally got off the fence in favor of making the whole catalog of drugs legal since the war on drugs was not being won, and the collateral damage from the conflict took a horrendous toll on lives and freedoms (more here).  I cast my lot with those who counseled legalizing drugs, controlling their distribution at prices that made no one rich, and mopping up the human detritus pretty much as we already do with alcohol and illegal drug use.

The idea is to get the criminal element out of the business, and thereby greatly reduce the layers of well-funded law enforcement agencies that benefitted from the other side of that sorry business.  But that’s easier said than done since both the drug cartels and dealers agree with the feds that narcotics should remain on the wrong side of the law.  Today the promoters of marijuana use have made contentious inroads in several states to legalize both recreational and medicinal use of that dear little weed.  The resulting dust-ups have even reached the local levels such as we are witnessing here in Nevada County where one jurisdiction gives their approval for smoking pot under certain conditions, and another jurisdiction is adamant in saying ‘no way Jose’.

So far the main point of pot proponents has been that smoking it gives rise to no significant health risks and does serve to ease certain aches and pains in addition to soothing the savage breast.  But now reports have appeared in prestigious medical journals like Lancet and the Journal of Psychiatry announcing that “medical research shows a clear link between marijuana and mental illness.”  Well, I didn’t know that.

Thoughts on the Fourth

George Rebane

On this hot muggy 4th of July my thoughts turn to the road this country has traveled since the turn of the last century.  I have joined that trek for the last sixty-four years, have partaken in its happy ascent, enjoyed its lofty summit, and now protest the precipitous descent.  Nevertheless, no matter what may come, my generation has already banked the country’s good years.  Our lament is for our kids, grandkids, and, for fortunates like me, our great-grandkids.

Our main failure was raising a generation of children whom we taught to be educated, well-mannered, industrious, and to mind their own business.  They have fulfilled our expectations.  But in doing so, they invited and permitted the rule of those whose aim was to mind everyone else’s business.  And in that, we and they are reaping what has been sown.

Today we wake up in a country where there is no longer the notion of ‘this is my business, and my business alone.’  In the quest for security and facility we have put paid to a comprehensively monitored society under a government that has and knows no limits in its ability to collect, analyze, and record EVERYTHING we do.  And how much they actually do and will collect is up to the resident regime in Washington.  Because trust has been extinguished between the governing and governed – neither trusts the other – we may safely assume, that for all intents and purposes, the stored record of our behaviors is comprehensive and everlasting.

Under a growing avalanche of largely unknown and impenetrable laws, regulations, codes, … any resident regime will be able to indict and arrest any individual or any group for one or more infractions simply by the selective and arbitrary enforcement of what is already on the books.  And all the while claiming that we are still a nation of laws and not of men.  Yesterday’s liberties have become today’s latent liabilities.

RR reader and a friend of a more liberal persuasion and I discuss such matters on a regular basis.  He recalled a post-9/11 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that kicked into high gear the development and integration of technologies to make possible our practical interment in today’s post-privacy society.  The Total Information Awareness program was put under the newly established Information Awareness Office - its revealing seal is shown nearby.  Upon review, the IAO was found to be so repugnant that Congress and Bush2 shut it down in 2003 (more here).  However, all of its constituent technology toolkit programs have continued and expanded under hazier and hidden auspices.  After all, we must be kept secure, and above all secure from ourselves.

A Cultural Experience Countered

George Rebane

Last weekend Jo Ann and I attended an international gathering in San Francisco that celebrated the historical role of a culture over the last two centuries.  This event is held every five years in a different part of the world, and its nearby venue this year made attendance convenient for us.  People from all quarters of the globe gathered at the Grand Hyatt where seminars on the various functions and expressions of the culture were conducted.  The event opened at the magnificent Palace of Fine Arts with a gala performance featuring entertainments ranging from poetry to ballet.  Other prominent venues during the weekend featured folk dancing, a huge songfest with orchestra and multiple choirs, and individual performers with various ethnic offerings, both traditional and contemporary.

The whole affair was a unifying experience connecting a revered and honored past with the present, and making explicit the ties that bind the older generations to the young.  It is these young people who during such occasions see that they are a part of something bigger than themselves, something of worth that has survived centuries of assault through dedication, persistence, and courage of their ancestors.